I quit playing in our game tonight after arguing with the other players and the DM. This is a description of our game from my point-of-view. I‘d be glad for any comments.
- We create characters at first level. One player wants to play an elf. Our DM says „no way, play something different, you always play elves“ (which is true). Nevertheless, the player wants an elf cause he loves elves. The DM says „No, in this campaign, I don‘t allow elves. There are no elves in the region where we start. Play a human“. The player wants to play a half-elf. The DM looks at the half-elf in the PHB then decides that he doesn‘t want half-elves in our game. „Play a human, play something ordinary“ he repeatedly says. „Why can‘t I play an elf?“ the player asks. „I don‘t allow any races that have better sight than humans have. It‘s much cooler this way, believe me. No elves allowed. Oh, and no half-orcs and dwarves of course. C‘mon guys, play humans.“ I throw away the sketch of the cool half-orc monk I wanted to play. „Can I play a halfling?“ I ask him. „You can of course... you can play anything you want. But believe me, everyone in my world HATES halflings so you‘ll have a hard time. And you‘ll be the only halfling you ever meet in my world, believe me. Everyone‘s a darn racist when it comes to halflings“. So I play a human. I want to play a paladin but they are forbidden. „No paladins, sorry. We start in a small village where you all come from. There are no paladins there, they just don‘t exist. Either you start there and play something ordinary or you start at the other side of the world as a paladin but never reach the others cause that‘s the only place in my world where paladins exist“ Monks? Forbidden. Sorcerers? Well they‘re also forbidden because the player that wants to play an elf wants to play a sorcerer too. I decide to play a cleric. „Yeah that‘s okay“ the DM says. „But you‘ll have to play a cleric of the one homebrewed deity I give you as no other deities are known in this region. But believe me, you‘ll have fun this way, it‘s a cool deity. Oh, and your alignment is chaotic-neutral. Why? Well, it just has to. But that‘s okay, believe me. It‘ll be fun.“
- We start the game. In the local tavern we hear some cool rumours about an invasion of bugbears and that someone in our small village was attacked. Our characters make some fun play with each other in the tavern, drinking and hanging around, there‘s some nice role-playing and everything is fine. Suddenly uber-epic npc comes inside and greets us. He‘s a shady, extremely suspicious fighter type that‘s able to cast 5th level spells. But we are meant to like him. Every other npc likes him. Epic-boy tells us that he needs to check out the neighbouring village. He asks us to follow him around, we don‘t like him but suddenly the DM says „so you part ways with Dorgal and go to the village“ and my cleric can‘t say anything as he is suddenly there. In the neoghbouring town epic-boy tells us we need to shop so we follow him to the market place. Actually we don‘t say we follow him. Instead the DM says „yeah you follow him all the way through the harbour area and to the market place“. It‘s declared done as no one shouts out and says „NO WAY, I‘M NOT DOING THIS!“ (but why should anyone?) A shop keeper starts to talk to us. „What do ye want, adventurrrrrers?“ he asks. Well, we don‘t know. We look at the DM. „What does epic-boy want, DM?“ - „AAAAAW, c‘mon guys, you all know what you need. There will be an invasion, you need weapons. Think guys, think.“ We order some weapons. Epic-boy nods knowingly (that‘s something he does all the time). We don‘t have any money to pay as the DM used houserules to define our starting gear and money. No monetary problems, however. Epic-boy pulls out a huge box full of platinum-coins he was hiding under his full-plate and pays everything we want.
- We want to visit the tavern in this town (probably because most of us remember how much fun we had in the other tavern when there was no such thing as „adventure“). „What‘s that tavern called, DM?“ - „Well, I can‘t find it in my notes, it just has some name, you know. The name sound, erm, dirty. It‘s located next to the harbour. It‘s a dangerous place. As you enter (huh?) you see shady figures everywhere, looking at you. Epic-boy speaks: It‘s dangerous here, we can‘t stay! so you leave.“ We stare irritated but epic-boy nods knowingly as we leave the tavern. „What‘s that tavern called again, DM?“ - „I told you the name, dammit! Write the names down, I don‘t want to repeat myself a thousand times.“
- After following epic-boy back to our town, then through an unbelievably boring dungeon (epic-boy kills most of the orcs by throwing fireballs at them) we head back to the village again. We wander over the mountains and meet strange monsters that are written in no monster manual whatsoever. In fights, our DM doesn‘t need any stats. Sometimes I hit the human-with-blue-ears-thingy when rolling a 14, sometimes I don‘t. The DM rolls really well at the beginning of our glorious battles. When he realizes that he‘s killing off the entire party the monsters start fudging all the time. When we drop into the minuses, we always stabilize as the DM rolls the stabilize-rolls.
Just once I got killed but because epic-boy is also a druid and we fought the baddies on a forrest clearing I suddenly resurrected through the healing energies that were flowing all over the place and came back as a different race (I rolled for a half-orc but had to reroll as the DM doesn‘t allow them, they have darkvision).
- The monsters we face have enormous challenge ratings but they're poor as beggars. After one session I tell the DM that we're already 7th level and my character has no magic items. "Oh, they're very seldom in my world". I accept. The next session however, epic-boy gives out gifts for our honourable doings. Every character gets five to ten magic items, including some DM-created thingies that don't fit into any rules system but are as powerful as artifacts. I get a +4 whip that I can use to polymorph and cast charm monster at will. The DM houserules that I have the weapon proficiency: whip after I practice using it for a few minutes.
- I get fed up with epic-boy. I try to sneak into his chamber at night. I want to do a clean coup de grace and solve our problem forever. As I reach epic-boys' door some guards come by and manage to stop me. Strange, they're the first ones I ever see in front of epic-boys chamber. Indeed I thought our characters were his guards(?). The DM doesn‘t roll a single die in the grapple with the guards and the whole fights goes really fast. Epic-boy comes out of his chamber and looks down at my poor cleric whos pinned to the floor by some statless guard. „What are you doing?“ he asks. „We‘ll, I was trying to kill you, YOU ($“§=(„$ !!!“ my cleric responds. Epic-boy stares knowingly „Oh boy, that shows that you‘re still a beginner. Don‘t make a fool of yourself. But don‘t worry. I‘ll throw you in the cells for tonight and tomorrow I‘m giving you a second chance. Watch me and learn in the future“.
- I get fed up with the game. As a true gamer, I try to solve it in-game. My character yells at the others and tells them that he feels like epic-boys' henchman. One of them whispers in my characters' ears „I know, I also don‘t trust him. But let‘s follow him around for some time until we have enough evidence against him“. My character responds: „Alright guys, me or epic-boy. Either he leaves the group or I leave. This is not the way my deity wants me to go“. They‘re against me. One of the other characters (and his player) gets all angry and says I shouldn‘t create a problem where there is none. „When you leave I‘m going to shoot you in the back with my crossbow“ he says. My character leaves. He fires with his crossbow - but misses. „Darn, he‘s lucky“ his character says. Epic-boy nods knowingly. "He'll come back" he says.
I leave the gaming table and ask myself how I spent a whole year in this group. I weap for the lost time and wish I had done something meaningful instead.
I quit playing in our game tonight after arguing with the other players and the DM. This is a description of our game from my point-of-view. I‘d be glad for any comments.
- We create characters at first level. One player wants to play an elf. Our DM says „no way, play something different, you always play elves“ (which is true). Nevertheless, the player wants an elf cause he loves elves. The DM says „No, in this campaign, I don‘t allow elves. There are no elves in the region where we start. Play a human“. The player wants to play a half-elf. The DM looks at the half-elf in the PHB then decides that he doesn‘t want half-elves in our game. „Play a human, play something ordinary“ he repeatedly says. „Why can‘t I play an elf?“ the player asks. „I don‘t allow any races that have better sight than humans have. It‘s much cooler this way, believe me. No elves allowed. Oh, and no half-orcs and dwarves of course. C‘mon guys, play humans.“ I throw away the sketch of the cool half-orc monk I wanted to play. „Can I play a halfling?“ I ask him. „You can of course... you can play anything you want. But believe me, everyone in my world HATES halflings so you‘ll have a hard time. And you‘ll be the only halfling you ever meet in my world, believe me. Everyone‘s a darn racist when it comes to halflings“. So I play a human. I want to play a paladin but they are forbidden. „No paladins, sorry. We start in a small village where you all come from. There are no paladins there, they just don‘t exist. Either you start there and play something ordinary or you start at the other side of the world as a paladin but never reach the others cause that‘s the only place in my world where paladins exist“ Monks? Forbidden. Sorcerers? Well they‘re also forbidden because the player that wants to play an elf wants to play a sorcerer too. I decide to play a cleric. „Yeah...
Wow! What took you so long? I think the character generation session would have been a good time to walk. Are games scarce in your area? I can only assume there was enough fun despite the crippling house rules this DM imposed for you to have stayed so long.
Yeah, that's a negative experience. Playing a bad game like that is definitely worse than no gaming.
I have to agree with Steve. Wow. Just wow. Were you hard up for a game? Sheesh. Ouch. Bad DM, really really bad DM. NPCs should never upstage the PCs...wow...
Please tell me you at least got free pizza out of this.
Please tell me you at least got free pizza out of this.
Free pizza nothin', I'd want at least a case of homebrew.
There was no free pizza but coke and chips most of the time. I really don't know why it took me so long to stop playing in this party... I wish I had realized this much earlier. The sad thing is that most of the other players are newbies to D&D and generally can't compare this game to proper D&D led by a competent DM. Ah well, who cares.
Well, don't just stand there... Start your own game and show those new-commers how it's done!
Ultradan
Well, don't just stand there... Start your own game and show those new-commers how it's done!
Ultradan
Yep... that's a pretty standard begining for many DMs. I pretty much started to DM because I didn't like the homebrew rules, monty haul, power gaming, dragon-giving, epic-boy loving styles of several DMs when I was "just a player."
But I love playing, and I miss having a character.
Man, I feel bad for having complained about my group! My problems are so small compared to this. I sincerely feel sorry for you.
Hope you'll soon find a good new group (with you either as player or DM).
Bocklin
If the rest of the players are new, think about how enthused they would be if you brought them into a game and said,"Listen, are you ready for this? ...You might want to sit down. Good. I'm willing to let you not ONLY play an elf, or a dwarf, or a halfling, but I'm ALSO willing to let you play any class in the player's handbook you want and worship any deity from the PHB you're interested in. AND THAT'S NOT ALL! Your party...and you're still sitting down, right? Your party gets to be the stars of the show!"
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It's hard to say what to do with that guy, because I don't know if he's your bestest buddy or just some gamer to you.
A tight friend needs a lecture about what a pain railroading and deux ex machina-npcing is. Ask him what he needs you players for if his npc's have everything in hand any dang way. Tell him to write a short story and you'll read it; same difference. Usually these lectures can lead to a lot of heartbreak anyway, but if he's a good buddy he'll be wondering why noone wants to play with him if you try to sweep it all under the carpet. Avoidance often leads to more problems than facing stuff head-on
Some gamer dude? Write it off, cut your losses, whatever. Maybe he'll learn, maybe he won't, not your problem, you can't be responsible for his development as a human being or game player, only he can. Good excuse for you to tighten up what game you have and start ticking everybody off with what an ogrish dm you are (just kidding).
I remember struggling through some very similar games. the problem? my at the time best friend was DM'ing. I eventually stopped playing in his games and stopped hanging out with him at all - it was just too frustrating dealing with his random ass ego trip on a constant basis.
I'm now (2 years later) comfortably ensconsed in a gaming group with which I have relatively few problems, DM'ing one campaign and playing in another.
You can fnd or create other games. staying somewhere that you're really not allowed to have any options and have to put up with an egomainiacal dm just isn't any fun. good call on dropping that group.
Ah, sounds like a textbook case of "Player becomes the DM but is still stuck in the Player mindset". He's still thinking like he was when he was in the role of a player, and isn't seeing things from the DM's position. This is why he runs a character of his own, doesn't know monster stats and only has races and deities that he likes - that's what a player would do.
I once ran a campaign where the only races were human and planetouched - of course, humans were the only race without a level adjustment. I later realised that people really liked having the option of playing from a variety of races, and that a lot of the time the DM really has to bend to the players' choices instead of the other way around, if it makes for a more fun game.
Wow- sounds like an “epic” case of NPC showboating, (nods knowingly ;) I have seen several new GMs make this mistake. They make a game and forget that their job is to help tell the player’s story, not their own. When the purpose of the party is reduced to being witnesses to the glory of “insert name of cheesy NPC” you have a problem. As far as the cause of this you may have hit the nail on the head Jonathon. What helps me as a GM is to remember that all NPCs in my worlds, regardless of power level, are just there for the characters to befriend, ignore, or make enemies of as they see fit. Also, any rules that apply to the players apply to the NPCs, monsters, whatever. If I don’t give my players any breaks, then my NPCs don’t get any either.
I’ve never been impressed with super-NPCs. It doesn’t take any thought, sacrifice, or effort to grab a character sheet, give attributes of 1000 apiece and copy/paste the equipment section of the PHB to the back of it. Presto, the world has one more combat monster with stats higher then the gods most clerics worship and all the flavor of cardboard. The NPCs that have always impressed me are the ones with breadth and depth of personality. Sorry for the rant, but this is a big pet peeve of mine. I really feel for ya talon.
I think it was hilarious that you tried to gut epic-boy in his sleep, too bad it didn’t work. Reminds me of a story from one of my gaming friends. It was a slightly futuristic setting where tanks had been replaced by power armor suits similar to arm suits out of Ghost in the Shell. The player group were to be a small unit of suit pilots. Anyway, my friend decided to play a guy of Greek decent and take a suit decked out with missiles, rockets, and other artillery as opposed to the mostly close range suits of the rest of the party. In this particular army, members of a platoon were given card designations depending on their roll. The GM tried to talk my friend out of this character because long range combatants are all “gay” and therefor given the queen designation and everyone calls them queeny or such. My friend decided to play this character anyway and became one of the most beloved and colorful characters of the group.
Enter uber-man, the unit leader, who was better and cooler then anyone in the party could ever be. Over the course of their adventures they ended up in city that had seen heavy urban fighting. While on assignment they were approached by a large imposing power suit. Uber-man takes attack position. When the players take up position to assist, he states solemnly, “back off men, you can’t help me here”. He then unleashes a huge (purple I think) blast from his power suit’s machine gun which destroys a whole city block, all this in a setting with rockets being considered fairly powerful. Uber-man and the imposing power suit then engage in a battle more reminiscent of Dragon Ball Z then slightly futuristic earth. My friend, having had enough of sitting around jumps his suit right in front of the enemy and unloads every weapon he has in its face. Missed the things AC unfortunately, and was cored like an apple the following round, but I applaud him for trying. Anyways, sorry to here about your trouble, good luck finding some better games.
If the rest of the players are new, think about how enthused they would be if you brought them into a game and said,"Listen, are you ready for this? ...You might want to sit down. Good. I'm willing to let you not ONLY play an elf, or a dwarf, or a halfling, but I'm ALSO willing to let you play any class in the player's handbook you want and worship any deity from the PHB you're interested in. AND THAT'S NOT ALL! Your party...and you're still sitting down, right? Your party gets to be the stars of the show!"
*floored*
:-D
TK
But seriously, to add my 2cp: Part of the problem might just be the system this DM began playing with. It always seemed to me that 2nd edition was very strict when it came to playing 'demihumans,' and had very few rules for doing anything nonstandard.
Over time, using just the 2nd edition rules forced many DMs to either bend or break; that is to say, they either bend the rules, and end up writing tomes and tomes of house rules (in some cases rules that are never playtested, and suffer from either a severe case of monty haul or the opposite), or break and just ignore the rules completely, which could sometimes be even worse (again, depending on the actual talent of the DM). And even though now we have the 3.5 ruleset, many old school gamers still have that 1st and 2nd edition mindset, and it's a hard one to break.
Myself, I started with 2nd edition, and I notice some striking differences in the way I think about the game than my friend who started with 3.5.
Sometimes, for some people, it takes a while to realize, 'hey, why not just let them play something THEY want to play, rather than what the "rules" dictate they must.'
I think, if WotC does move to a 4th edition, that should be scribed on the cover.
Reminds me of a story from one of my gaming friends. It was a slightly futuristic setting where tanks had been replaced by power armor suits...
Yeah. Greekin! I kinda' miss him. The game was pretty cheese-ball but as with most of our groups the quality of the characters really made up for it.
As the story goes I had created my missile boat. The missile pods had eaten up most of my points to make my LAU with (Limbed Assault Unit, by the way) so I dumped the rest into armor. While the rest of the group were these zippy guys with lots of flashy coolness, my guy was a big plodding sumo-wrestler looking unit with huge towers of missiles and ultrathick armor...got nicknamed Queen of Hearts *groan*
So yeah, the all black super-armors start falling from the sky and clearly have us all outmatched in every way. We are relatively clumsy Battletech style armor and these guys are like anime supermecha doing triple handsprings out of the way of our fully automatic fire.
Royal Straight--our leader--has been doing the same things and cleaning them up. Then in the boss battle versus the really REALLY tough black ninja armor he orders us all to retreat because only he can handle this. I step forward face to face with the black shiny guy and roll initiative. I win, and as his gun arm is coming up, I grab it and press it flat against my LAU's superthick chest armor figuring I'll hold it still for a round so the rest of the group can just kill him.
Even with its super stats it only beat my flatfooted AC by like 2 or something. Granted the resulting damage vaporized the top half of my LAU and knocked me down to -6 HP (I demanded to take whatever damage blew through my armorsuit's HP and have my character take it himself--the GM was trying to have my character get thrown clear or some crap in the attempt at a divine intervention auto-save). So I'm in the wreckage, a piece of twisted metal through my guts pinning me to my seat, fumbling to light my last cigar, tunnel vision closing in, when the teams finally cut me out of my cockpit. Had to retire the character he was so messed up. The glory thing though is that if that black super NPC had just rolled 3 lower on his to hit roll, I would have had im'! Har-har-har!
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RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2012 Top 16
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Man a year of that kind of gaming garbage would seriously stink.
Long ago one of our gaming groups tried (what was a the time this new game) Cyberpunk. The GM ran this game for maybe 3 sessions. (I liked you're Epic Boy some I'm going to swipe it...)
He decided that his uber powerful double agent NPC would hire us. This guy who was supposed to be a solo (fighter archetype) knew all the right people so that when our fixer (information broker archetype) went out to find out some stuff he wandered into the conversation the rest of us had been sitting in on for about twenty minutes. Big baddies show up and our epic boy swats them aside mowing through them with a assortment of integrated weapons that would have been more at home on a tank than hidden inside a person. We're then told to run...we take a 10-minute break while our GM rolls dice to see how well Epic Boy is doing. Finally the game gets rolling again and Epic Boy is in our flat with an Epic Netrunner in tow despite the fact that our party had one of those too. Our GM then points out that the shower is running and suddenly Epic Boy's, Epic Girlfriend Assassin comes out in a skimpy towel with a big ole revolver on a gun belt that she overdramatically drops on the table.
What the...? Anyway we ditch Epic Boy and he vows to be our enemy and within weeks (in-game) and minutes (real time) we're dead or as good as dead except that Trauma Team a heavily armed ambulance service resurects our characters except that Epic Boy's Epic Netrunner has gutted our accounts so we have no way to pay for the miracle that TT has performed on our behalf. We are forced to go to work for them. The GM narrates 18 months of city hot zone pickups and summarily tells us we're the best people doing runs in the city. He then sends us out on a "simple run." Now our GM has in his head exactly what each of our characters is supposed to do round by round--but has never shared this with us.
TPK.
It took 3 rounds tops, because: "You've done this hundreds of times, but this time you did it your way instead of following procedures. Besides, if you had stuck around with Epic Boy this never would have happened."
He didn't run anything for a very long time...and the next time it didn't last fifteen minutes.
Epic Vampire Boy? Um you know I forgot, I have to get home and finish my chores...