Killing Your Campaign in 30 Easy Sessions

Another Pedantic Diatribe by Brian Randall

(As requested by Dunefar.)

So, I have referenced the 'bad' game I was in, but avoided the specifics of what exactly was wrong with it that upset me so, instead analyzing the underlying reason for the failure.

We know that it was that the GM's expectations and mine didn't match up. So why bother recording them here? Well, the truth of the matter is that some of these can apply to other players and GMs. You may see things here that you'll realize you want to keep an eye out for to avoid in your own game.

You may get an idea for how to accomplish what our GM tried, only without making it such a painful experience.

Okay. There's a lot of backstory, and the campaign that the GM tried to run garnered an awful lot of fallout. It resulted in a lot of bad things, some of which will be detailed later.

Anyway. The premise for the game is this:

It's an Alternate Reality campaign, which means the players create characters that are supposed to accurately model themselves, and see how they fare. The setting is the afterlife. Apparently, however, the afterlife is some 13 digit number of people in a big tournament, each tier of the tournament being 25 days long, and resulting in 90% of the people in the tier getting the 'tier fate'.

Tier one's tier fate is to have your soul destroyed to power the new sun.

This is a mistake right here, people. Imprisoning your players is generally something you want to avoid, and keep to a bare minimum as often as possible. People tend to play games in RPG formats with other people because of the unlimited choices and possibilities. If you're going to be stuck in something so linear, why play it with dice and papers at all?

Anyway. The populous of the tournament is divided evenly between Core Worlders (real people) and the various Mirror-Worlders (characters from fantasy novels, video games, etc.), Monsters, Aliens, Demons, and Angels.

I didn't really find the religious overtone offensive. I didn't find it interesting, either.

We each got lists of people we could pick to put on our 'watched' list, so we could see how well these random ten people (anyone, real or not) were doing, and increase the odds of running into them. In theory.

There's a major problem here, though. The players, at the start of the game, are divided evenly into two groups -- those who have played with this GM before, and those who have not. Those who have, ask if they can play their former AR selves, who have apparently saved the world before.

The GM approved.

This was a huge mistake, amounting to favoritism on the part of the GM. The players who had played before found themselves surrounded by an ungodly number of super-powered allies (including the GM himself!), and three largely ineffectual enemies. When I asked the GM if us new people would get anything like this, he asked me who I knew. I mentioned my friends in #void, and the GM put the dice away, said, "They're all dead", and moved on to speak to someone else.

In the actual tournament events themselves, I have to admit, the GM was a miracle at pacing everything so that you had to fight until your last couple of points of Body (HP, essentially), to win. Unfortunately, every single conflict was either this, or someone finding a way around the battle. There was never really any conflict we had where we could wade in and kick butt. It was always a struggle that often left a few party members dead, or the NPC allies showed up, and the enemies were reduced to ash before we could blink.

I was playing the game to have fun and do things, but I never got to do that -- I ended up having to spend all my CP on support abilities (healing, weaponsmithing, craft, inventor), because no one else in the party wanted to. And if I hadn't invested in these abilities, the entire party would have been killed before then.

Of course, I was never allowed to role-play this out, except for the healing. It was just noted down, and then the bonuses applied to the dice. This is, admittedly, a failure of the other PCs, but it resulted in me not having fun, because I wanted to be on the front lines with my friends, and was relegated to support. The GM really should have seen to it that the game was flexible enough to allow something else, but he didn't.

Anyway. I mentioned previously that the game was divided into two groups of players, those who had been, and those who hadn't. The people who had no allies started dropping out of the campaign, one by one. Almost all of them left.

Which brings me to another point of GM inflexibility. At one point, on a tournament mission, one of the players suddenly decided that he was going to go crazy, and kill the people we'd paid to help us cross a desert, to rob them blind.

Being forced into the combat, we helped out friend out, and then yelled at him for what he did. As it turns out, the GM was herding us into a scenario where we'd end up fighting the entire Demon faction in the tournament, and one of the PCs just straight out killed half of the people who were supposed to be our one single 'in' to the Angelic host to make the battle even remotely survivable.

He knew about this in Tier one, and didn't mention it until Tier five (I got this second hand), when the players unanimously decided the game had become unplayable due to the fact that the PCs just couldn't progress against the Demons.

Admittedly, there should be repercussions for a character going insane like that. But holding it against the rest of the party well enough to destroy the campaign, given that the player in question dropped out three sessions after going ballistic?

Another problem I had was the lack of a moment to ever shine. I've touched on this before, as I wasted all my CP on trying to help everyone else out. I think, that pretty much everyone who ever games, especially in a large group of players, wants at least one moment to shine, to pull something amazing off, and to really make a difference.

This was a privilege reserved for players with pre-existing allies, unfortunately.

When I tried to make an ally of my own within the game, he turned out (after the fact) to be some baby-eating-monster that the other PCs refused to associate with me because of. All of this, just to try and gain some of what the GM's favored players already had.

I had a lot of grievances, one of them being that when I aired my complaints on my blog, the GM e-mailed me in reply. The net result was that he wouldn't listen to any of my points, and then told the other players that he had to 'deal' with my complaints, but we were all ready to game (complete with rolling-up-of-sleeves motion on his part). I'll admit, he didn't throw anything worse at me as punishment for my perceived transgression. But he also didn't even try to fix what I pointed out as flaws.

I told the GM early on that I hated the tournament part of the game, and was only playing because I thought that there was something beyond the tournament. Basically, that the world was larger than just this forced regime, and we could do something without being so rigidly forced. The GM said, "Oh, just wait and see," without actually promising improvement. I told him that if things hadn't changed by tier three, I would be dropping out of the game.

I think, realistically, waiting 10 months for a campaign to get to the 'good part', and continually getting nothing, is another one of those not-so-much- fun things.

Now, looking back, and knowing what kind of person the GM is, I have to say, his game is exactly the kind of game he'd like to play in.

Unfortunately, it's far from perfect for everyone else. This is another case of player and GM expectations just not matching up. Mostly a laundry list of personal grievances, but it gives you an idea of what NOT to do.