So there's this World of Darkness game a friend of mine is running. I came into the game after one of the players had to quit due to work changing his schedule, so a slot opened up and my boyfriend is in the game, so I thought it'd be a great way for us to spend some time outside of the house together. I've played in four sessions so far, none of which have been very fun for me. It's a very sandbox game, so the characters are largely free to do what they want. The rundown has been like this:
1st session: The Storyteller begins the game with the following: "So you are in a hallway." The other three players know a bit of what is going on, and realize that they are in a dream world. He gave me no chance to get into character, no establishment of what I was doing. He simply started it with the four of us in a dream world, with them not knowing how I got there with them, who were actually trying to get there. I spend the next several hours being completely lost and disoriented. Out-of-Character, I was extremely tired and cranky, and it was bleeding through into my gameplay.
2nd session: Random rolls to see if the characters have to work that day. My character ended up getting stuck at her boring job (call center) while the rest of the party were all off work and free to interact with each other if they wanted to. I tried to have my character call off work, but again another random roll, and her boss wouldn't let her leave.
3rd session: Finally something to do. She gets in contact with one PC, and finally gets told what is going on, somewhat. Then it cuts to another character who chooses to spend his "screentime" flirting with some chicks in his bar and giving them free drinks. Something which the player himself is not very good at in real life, so imagine him trying to RP getting a date.
4th session: Back in the dream world. The bartender character gets the job done (getting the dreamer to give up a magic item that he stole from the PC's in the first place), but that leaves nothing for the rest of us to accomplish.
5th session: I didn't go because I felt what was the point if my character is never given a chance to do anything. I found out later, that the ST actually had stuff planned for me.
I'm already a very anxious person, and this game has been stressing me out. My boyfriend tells me that because I'm anticipating a bad time, that's why I'm not having fun. Should I attend next session, or should I just quit?
Fun is first and foremost. Has the group you've joined played together for a while? Do they hang out outside the game? How long have they known each other, how long have they known you? It might simply be a few awkward sessions as they get to know you, your style, and your motivations as a player.
If you find it interesting, give it one or two more chances. Maybe they need some time to get to know you; if the ST has planned some things for your character, why not check it out?
And if it still sucks for you, then bow out. No fun is no fun, after all.
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If it's stressing you out, you're not having fun, then quit. It's all about having fun.
This^^
Additionally it sounds as if the ST does not have actions planned for all the players, or actions that would involve all the players, for every session. That just smacks of poor planning.
Why should a player show up if their PC is going to be stuck at work all day (unless there is some tie in with an odd phone call received by the PC while at work or some such)? Not the makings of a fun session.
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Why would a shapeshifting disciple of Gaia be working in a call centre?
Don't they know those are the very epitome of being 'enslaved to the Wyrm'?
You should not have travel across town to a game, just to play out 9 to 5 drone drudgery. At the very least, you should handwave a few hours into your shift, then pick up a call from a frightened caller, have some bizarre message delivered to your phone, instead of the Wyrm-servant in the next cubicle. Some kind of plot hook, to get you moving.
Why would a shapeshifting disciple of Gaia be working in a call centre?
Don't they know those are the very epitome of being 'enslaved to the Wyrm'?
You should not have travel across town to a game, just to play out 9 to 5 drone drudgery. At the very least, you should handwave a few hours into your shift, then pick up a call from a frightened caller, have some bizarre message delivered to your phone, instead of the Wyrm-servant in the next cubicle. Some kind of plot hook, to get you moving.
I am not playing in a Werewolf game, I said a World of Darkness Game. We are all humans.
Ironskull, the group consists of myself, my boyfriend, our friend the ST, our roommate, and the ST's roommate/ex-GF he's still in love with. BTW, she has gotten several magic toys thus far and though we've all benefited from those toys, why should they all be hers? They had been playing together for about 3-4 months with another friend of ours. Then that friend's work schedule changed so he had to quit the game. I was next on the waiting list to get in when he was ready to expand the party. I'd had two different characters plotted out, the wife of my boyfriend's character, or a conspiracy theorist who was very eager to believe when things started happening to her. I went with the latter.
zylphryx, he is trying to go for a very organic plot. The entire thing is sandbox; he's just given us chances to run into what he has planned. He wanted the players to just create random people. They were just going to be living their lives, and very slowly creepy paranormal stuff starts happening to them. Problem is, me and my boyfriend both agree he's taking too long.
We are all friends outside of the game, and the ST is usually a guy who I find very calming. I've had fun moments at the game, but I usually get kinda nervous before this particular game. After I get there and game starts, if there's something to do I end up having fun, but I end up getting annoyed when things start to slow down for very stupid reasons. I want to have fun at this game, I really do. The ST is giving absolutely nothing away about what he has planned, and that is making me nervous out-of-character, which is something that I game to avoid feeling.
Removed a post. Try to not be rude and condescending to other posters please.
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zylphryx, he is trying to go for a very organic plot. The entire thing is sandbox; he's just given us chances to run into what he has planned. He wanted the players to just create random people. They were just going to be living their lives, and very slowly creepy paranormal stuff starts happening to them. Problem is, me and my boyfriend both agree he's taking too long.
that's all well and good, but playing a WoD version of "Offices and Overtime" is not exactly what gaming is all about. Gaming is supposed to be an escape from reality, not a simulation of it. Granted, for a game where the PCs are "normal folks in modern day" you should have moments of normal activities, but spending an entire game session sitting on the sidelines because you PC "had to work" is just bogus.
Also, being a Sandbox type scenario, the ST should still throw out items to intrigue the players. For the player stuck at work, it could be as simple as the odd phone call ... person being attacked and describing the assailant as something not of this world, a line of white noise which has an eerie voice occasionally coalesce amongst the sound or even a slightly odd call which gets QAed and the only voice heard is the PC's responding to questions or statements that are not present on the recording.
and yes, you and your boyfriend sound correct in your assessment. If a campaign goes multiple sessions without anything really happening, it is most likely moving too slow.
Thanks everyone. I think I will give it that one more session to see what he had planned for my character, and if it ends up not being fun, then quit.
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One more thing: If you decide to quit, explain to the gm why you do it and why the game wasn't fun to you. Try to do it calmly and without making accusations.
I experienced something similar (but not quite as bad) and, talking to the gm, found out he had, with his ambitions and expectations, maneuvered himself into a dead end and he knew that he did, but was not quite willing to admit it to himself, mainly because he thought he might just find a way out, getting more and more desperate himself from session to session.
Even if a talk won't change anything for the game at hand, it might help for future games (with or without you).
Removed a post and the reply to it. Linking to downloads of copyrighted material isn't OK.
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One more thing: If you decide to quit, explain to the gm why you do it and why the game wasn't fun to you. Try to do it calmly and without making accusations.
I experienced something similar (but not quite as bad) and, talking to the gm, found out he had, with his ambitions and expectations, maneuvered himself into a dead end and he knew that he did, but was not quite willing to admit it to himself, mainly because he thought he might just find a way out, getting more and more desperate himself from session to session.
Even if a talk won't change anything for the game at hand, it might help for future games (with or without you).
I would talk to the GM whether you decide to leave or not. This sounds like an awfully disorganized game, and moreso for a WoD game where there should usually be less random rolling for events, not more. The GM needs to get some constructive and civil feedback about getting the group to work together and cluing you in on the game.
Either way, if you stay or go, the GM has useful feedback. He or she may disregard it, but it's better that he/she has it--then you can at least say you tried, and if the GM's games go poorly in general, it may eventually hit him that s/he needs to try a different approach.
SUBJ: When to Quit an RPG
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2nd session: Random rolls to see if the characters have to work that day. My character ended up getting stuck at her boring job (call center) while the rest of the party were all off work and free to interact with each other if they wanted to. I tried to have my character call off work, but again another random roll, and her boss wouldn't let her leave.
About an hour or two into that session, when it became clear that the GM actually intended to have your character sit at your job all day doing nothing.
Actually, telling me I'm on a "waiting list" for a 4-person game would make me really wonder whether or not I wanted to be in that game to begin with. If there was no one before me and no one after me on the "list," I think I'd read into that the GM saying "We want to play... just not with you."
Of course, we only see your side here. Maybe during the game where you were told you were stuck at work all day, you were obsessively consulting Facebook at the gaming table, or ignoring the GM to work on your needlepoint. I don't know. But that second session would be the probation time for me, and the session would have been the clincher. But I've been known to hold out hope for lost causes before, usually because it was the only game in town.
Actually, telling me I'm on a "waiting list" for a 4-person game would make me really wonder whether or not I wanted to be in that game to begin with. If there was no one before me and no one after me on the "list," I think I'd read into that the GM saying "We want to play... just not with you."
To be fair, when he first suggested this concept to me last summer, I told him that he would end up losing players because playing a character's boring life isn't fun to most people. He ended up going with the current group because well, my boyfriend is his best friend down here, and the one girl had never been in a game before. Plus he was trying to keep it small so as to keep track of everyone once people started interacting with things. He didn't even want our roommate (the "are there any chicks here" guy) in the game, but he begged to be included and the ST caved.
I only wanted in after hearing all the stories about how much fun they were having. When I get there, I realize that most of that fun came from the guy who left's character. Apparently Dr. Marcus was full of megalomaniac antics.
Of course, we only see your side here. Maybe during the game where you were told you were stuck at work all day, you were obsessively consulting Facebook at the gaming table, or ignoring the GM to work on your needlepoint
I was actually trying to get my character away from work. In between calls, she was trying to Google everything she could on the people she'd met. She only had time to drive by one of the 3 Jim Cooper's in town's house while on lunch. She didn't remember the other two names (cause I didn't remember them and the character doesn't have eidetic memory). When she got home, someone had been caught by the little spy camera she has mounted over her door. She noticed that each time she viewed it, the guy's face changed slightly. However, it was nearing the end of the session, and there was no time for me to really do anything with this.
I don't know. But that second session would be the probation time for me, and the session would have been the clincher. But I've been known to hold out hope for lost causes before, usually because it was the only game in town.
That part actually got me angry. I actually had my character go home and go to bed, because all the other characters had had their turn, and I was finished with my little bit of research for the night. I was expecting the plot to turn to the next morning, but the bartender guy chose to use his character's night off to go out drinking, and to invite Jim Cooper (my bf's character), the mechanic/biker guy. None of us had met in character yet, other than in the dream.
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2nd session: Random rolls to see if the characters have to work that day. My character ended up getting stuck at her boring job (call center) while the rest of the party were all off work and free to interact with each other if they wanted to. I tried to have my character call off work, but again another random roll, and her boss wouldn't let her leave.
This would have been my cue to bail. I don't play RPGs to be stuck at work all day. (And how is this random? Does this ST not know what day of the week it is in his game?)
This would have been my cue to bail. I don't play RPGs to be stuck at work all day. (And how is this random? Does this ST not know what day of the week it is in his game?)
Only one of the characters has a steady job, everyone else does shift work.
If it has been a month real time and your character still hasn't integrated with the rest of the group, it might be worth bailing out. Besides it seems to just be stressing you out waiting for something awesome to happen only to have your expectations dropped from under your feet.
Oh man. I understand this phenomenon a bit too well, though I don't think the games I've left or lost interest in have been quite this boring.
I was invited to join a game about two years ago that eventually petered out as a result of poorly structured storytelling that didn't give players the opportunity to feel as though they were effecting change in the world around them. It felt like the PCs were being used as paper dolls in the GM's tea-party-like pageant - we were playing high school kids at a boarding school, but we NEVER went to class or did normal school things. It was always field trips and off-campus lunches with lackluster monster fights, and then finally dropping into a portal into Fairytale Land where each session found us wearing a new ridiculous costume and getting thrust into some improbable situation right outta Grimm. What was worse was that we all developed NPCs per the GM's request - some of them very interesting, and not just to the player who conceptualized them - but these NPCs never seemed to get any use, mainly because they were built to fit in on a boarding school campus, and we were never there!
We couldn't follow the ongoing storyline because everything that happened depended on us remembering soap-operatic-like GM-generated details about interwoven PC backgrounds, like this person's mother having an affair with this person's uncle years ago or four people being long-lost cousins connected by about three or four obscure family connections. It felt like we were just characters in a really bad screenplay or novel with no ability to do anything outside the GM's purview - he'd fudge dice rolls left and right to get the result HE wanted, and if you didn't remember some obscure family detail, he'd spend ten minutes explaining backstory in a vain attempt to refresh your memory.
Point being, basically, what everyone else here has said: if it's boring and no fun, stop going. And if you think the GM would take the criticism in the spirit it's intended, tell him why you aren't enjoying the game. He won't get better otherwise. Also bear in mind, though, that some people just can't take constructive criticism and will never change the way they do things. Only you can decide which camp this GM falls into.
SO your in a hallway in your dreams...
Well, the hallway did lead to other rooms. He was trying to simulate how sometimes when you're dreaming, you don't know how you ended up where you are. Problem is, he didn't even give me a chance to get in character before jumping into the dream.