Hello, A.

We'll have to have the talk one day, you know? :)

The people I knew who constanty remained passive were too embarrassed to play. I think the people I knew who tried to sabotage had the same kind of problem, just the extroverted variant. P&P'ing needs people to cooperate in something that is, after all, pretty silly. You have to get over yourself. And the first person who needs to do so is the GM, and damn, it's a huge and valiant leap.

One of my favorite GM's - dammit, haven't seen him in nine years or so - always made great sessions at a con, and there was always, always this one girl who was the first to put her name on the list with this particular GM, then sat through the whole session saying one or two sentences. And it was OK. We were like eight to ten people, and she evidently enjoyed herself gloriously, because each year she came back and was the first at the table, again and again and again (until the university deemed the con to be nothing they'd hold in their holy halls ever again). These sessions never could have thrived if there was even one saboteur. And if the same girl was in a group with just two players... something would have to change.

i'm always here

You don't have to tell me. I only started DMing because our previous DM lost interest in playing any more (he got married and that was that) and no one else was going to step up. To be fair, it's a huge time commitment to do it right. I dreaded being the DM. I'm terrible at public speaking, I hate being the centre of attention. It was damn hard to start DMing, but the others, to their credit, were patient and helpful and I think I turned out to be pretty good in the end. But I still sometimes find it hard, especially when it comes to portraying NPCs. It's hard not to feel silly doing it sometimes.

Nine times out of ten when playing tabletop games, whether it be DnD or Pathfinder or RISUS or any other system I can get my hands on, I will inevitably end up DMing. This has happened for a variety of reasons, from loss of interest on the OG DM's part to disagreements in the group on the type of game to be played, but it usually happens.

My first time, though?

I was hanging out with a former friend of mine. Heck, I don't even remember his name any more, so let's call him Fred. Fred was the DM for the group I was playing in at the time, and was, shall we say, a bit unstable. Anger issues were only the tip of the iceberg: he insisted on all elements of his game fitting exactly into the Forgotten Realms canon (when only one of us players had read any of the books,) and had reset the entire campaign at least 3 times since I'd joined by Dallas-ing the whole thing.

So. One night we're sitting there, chillin', you know how it goes. He's skyping with a friend of his on his laptop, and the two of them decide they want to play some DnD. I'm up for it too, but neither of them feel like DMing. I offer to, and after a brief "are you sure?" they agreed.

I had no clue I was being set up.

I started things off with a very simple premise: their characters awake in a mysterious world, nothing like their homeland. Our players are a Human Druid (played by the friend-of-my-friend, who we'll call "Gene,") and a half-elf Paladin. I describe where they awaken, "in the middle of a forest grove, surrounded by tall trees."

Gene immediately asks, "is there a druid who protects this grove?"

"No."

"I hereby claim this grove for myself, and shall not leave it lest evil befall it and yaddayaddayadda," something like that.

"But what about playing?"

"Too bad; you suck and gave me a grove. How ya gonna fix it?"

So, I ignored him. Fred, at least, decided to leave the grove, and I had him find a village just outside of it.

"I ask the villagers if they are worshippers of (insert Forgotten Realms god here.)"

"Umm... no? This isn't--"

"I try to convert them."

*roll*

"You can't; they don't understand what you're--"

"I slaughter the heretics!"

So, yeah. Needless to say, some people are just assholes by nature.

That was about 9 years ago. Since then I've DMed a lot, and played a lot too (though not as much as I'd like.) I've dealt with amateur players and DMs, rulemongers, trolls, the lot. And none of them, NONE of them, have made the game worse than the two jerks who thought it'd be a stone gas to ruin my first session ever.

As a player I have been in some bad sessions. Even one where I left in the middle of the game. It was with a DM that was totally railroading the play up to invisible walls (magic force fields) guiding us where we were supposed to be. He had his script and it was impossible to investigate anything else. After several attempts to actually play and interact with the world (and to stay in character) I just left.

As a DM I also had a few total party wipeouts, but they were logical at the point. Bad, but not so bad that the players were angry over it. One was a Shadowrun team totally screwing up and at some point I had no choice but to let the dice fall as they would...
another actually made for a memorable scene. It was in a Call of Cthulhu game where one of the characters totally lost it (and the player to some extent too) and started sacrificing another character to The King in Yellow. The others watched in horror, then shot the crazy one ... but paranoia had already set in and in the end they ended up madly killing one another because everyone thought the others were crazy and corrupted by the Mythos... it was a totally brilliant ending to a terrifying campaign, which wasn't planned, but could have come directly out of a Lovecraftian novel.

Oh, and then there was the time when some saboteurs in Star Wars succeeded in sabotaging the anti-matter containment of a Super-Stardestroyer ... and then decided it was a good idea to hang around close by to 'watch the fireworks'...

From my experience with video games (Zelda: Ocarina of Time comes to mind), this sort of thing, where one misstep is an automatic failure, this does not sound like a fun setup.

Also, having the story be potentially ruinable by such a mistake is a sign that the story isn't as robust as it should be. Either build in some backup in case the main plot fails, change the story to one that cant be foiled so easily, or dispense with the story entirely and just do tabletop dungeon crawling (make sure you are using a system in which combat is fun if you do this).

Not really a "mistake", it was made very clear and everyone realised what they're doing. To be clear, it wasn't a closed environment, they were traversing a whole huge island covered with forest. If it wasn't for that sabotage, keeping away from the patrols would not have been hard at all. The guy who sabotaged us didn't just alert the guards in the next room or something. He actually put on a big magical light show to attract soldiers from a smaller island! And even then I rolled a check to give them a chance of the guards not noticing, but it was a crit success. Anyway, it was just introduced because a)it was logical for the story and setting, and b)it was meant to prevent exatly that kind of "lets fight everyone for exp and loot" kind of gameplay from a dungeoncrawl and force them to be a bit clever about choosing their way, and keep them to the wilderness for a while (we've spent most of the previous campaing in cities).

That actually describes pretty well my very worst session ever. I really wanted to play instead of DMing for once, so I let another guy DM, he was a great player so I thought he'd do great. But it was exactly how you describe it. Plot railroad and no freedom at all. When we were close to actually getting out of situations he didn't intend for us to get out of, he'd just pull things out of his ass and straight up cheat to keep it the way he planned. There was no point to playing smart, using your skills or equipment well - where we were supposed to win, we would win, and where we were supposed to fail we would fail and that was that. Unforutnetely I could not leave as we were playing at my place :D

Hmm... The game i used to play was named "Les Chroniques de Linaïs" in French.

Edit :

Ohhhk i did read "Your FIRST tabletop RPG experiences" ... Linais was great!

I only played a few times growing up. Small towns in Maine are more interested in historic battles and we had folks playing miniature gaming. Lots of civil war stuff. We actually took over a good chunk of the high school library one week. :)

warhammer 40k books got wrecked from a water pipe that busted over our heads in the game store, put it this way, we lost 500 dollars worth of books lol.

When ex #3 ran, all my gaming stuff went with her and probably into a dumpster.

Been able to replace some of it and *cough* have a lot of it in digital format but it's not the same.

I chose the term "sabotage" instead of "mistake", and I guess every interactive story without fixed decision points is fairly open to sabotage. The other term here that's worth debating may be "robust", but not only as opposed to "frail", but also as opposed to "filigree", "delicate" and especially: "sophisticated".

I strongly believe that the more complex and detailed a narrative is, and the more emotional depth it possesses, the easier can an interactive element destroy the story in its totality, jenga style. In P&Ps as well as in video games. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't risk it anyway. :|

In any case, all that puts a whole lot of responsibility on the GM, and he may not deserve all of it. In P&Ps, you're basically trying to tell a story together, co-operatively. The responsibility for maintaining narrative coherence, then, doesn't just lie with the GM. The players share that responsibility.

Out of game we were doing a B5 campaign set in the 3100s. It was a large fleet battles with ships from the various IA nations and the Rangers fighting in three main fronts. Several of the players errors leading to a trio of very valuable EA Destroyers being lost though no PCs were killed. The player commanding the destroyer group blames the GM even though several players including him made mistakes leading to what happened. (He didn't order or even ask the craft screening his force to redeploy when a new enemy force arrived on his flank because they were Ranger ships and he was Earthforce and they didn't redeploy because they were still engaged with a much weaker enemy force, and they thought he would request they shift targets if he thought hey needed to do so. Eventually things get so bad the player commanding the destroyer is banned from the group and three other players quit.

In game we were doing a high level star wars game. During a diplomatic meeting a traitor slips a bomb in while a massive hostile fleet attacks the meeting. My Imperial Remanent Moff, who had been serving the Empire for 50+ years at this point, dives onto the bomb. He was basically a surrogate father to the reigning Empress. In response to his death she led the Imperial fleet on a counterattack in his name that led to her death and more then ninety percent of the Imperial Starfleet being destroyed. So my character's death basically became the death knell of the government he had served for his entire adult life.