If there's one thing I learned, it's that while there's few things more fun than a good game of tabletop RPG with friends, there's also nothing more miserable than a really bad game. Sometimes it can be the DM, sometimes one or more of the players, sometimes some combination of both, but being "trapped" in a game going downhill sucks.

On Saturday I managed to play for the first time in about a year. We started a new campaign, some old players, some new players, and me as a DM with a campaign that I was really proud of, having spent that year making it as detailed and interesting as I could.

It ended five hours later with the first Total Party Kill in my career as a DM. In an encounter that should never even have happened. All becasue one of the players got bored of playing "right" and decided to sabotage the whole thing for shits and giggles. He was dead set to alert a group of guards the team was actually strictly instructed to not engage, to the point where he actually started fighting against the team to do so. And then, being the only one to notice the guards coming, did not tell the team, so they would not escape. All to provoke a fight that got them all killed. All the work on the campaign down the drain. And the rest of the players unlikely to want to play again after this trainwreck. Sigh.

So, anyone else here with a disaster of a game to commiserate?

NEVER PLAY FRANCIS!

I guess Hero Quest doesn't count as tabletop RPG but it was my first self-made quest for it and it sucked big time. Yeah, I was something around 11 or so but I designed the quest to win - as the game master. I put traps pretty much everywhere and so the game lasted maybe less then 5 minutes and the other players lost every interest in it.
Yeah, I even suck as a quest designer...

You should the RPG I designed with friends while in high school. Now that was a total mess of a game. However, I don't count the test playthrough as a bad experience, becasue while the game was hopeless we still had tons of fun :D

Sigh, so there are griefers that will grief even without the protection of internet anonymity. Unfortunately never got into tabletop myself but at least from this point of view I'm luckily more interested in warhammer/battletech type games that are more immune to that kind of thing (I hope).

lol


erm, im not sure this counts but as manager for a large medical warehouse I let my pal/employee set up one of his new DD games in the common room, we were busily getting into it when all the major potential investors and my boss walked in to get a tour of the new facility. They paused and looked at the tabletop confused, switching glances at our WoW monitor wallpapers and various toys and nicknacks, if it wasnt for the miniature warriors we could have passed it off as a layout plan for the new area. I dragged them into the proper warehouse but i got a real tired look from my boss. :D:D:D:D:D

My first attempt at DMing Dungeons and Dragons ended in the entire party mutually deciding to do something else.

In my defense, I was only eleven or twelve at the time. All I had to work with was the Basic Set (Red Box) and an imagination that, as you should expect from a 12-year-old, was not really well developed. Plus I had gotten too into the rules themselves and cared more about setting up scenes and giving out loot than telling a story. I got a lot better in later decades. But that first try. Man.

A player who doesn't play can always wreck a game and a scenario just as well. I've known one, just one person who would even do that, "for shits and giggles". And I simply won't play with him again, I don't even care that he was the one who got me into P&P almost 25 years ago. GM'ing is an act of trust in your friends that they honor the work you've invested into preparing a story and scenario. The principle is generally understood.

In that vein, I'm not sure I've ever had the DM get the party killed in its entirety just because one player tried to sabotage the whole thing. And my best friend, the one who probably spends 40 weekends a year and quite a few weekdays P&P'ing, and has been for decades, would probably say that's just wrong. She would have found a way to dispose of that player during the confrontation while keeping the cooperative players alive. Hand of fate, guided arbitrariness, poetic justice, all in a day's work for the GM. :)

Re. disaster of a game:

I've set up a campaign with friends in 2016, the first in years, and while it's not strictly speaking a disaster, it has been going nowhere. One of those friends is a hyper active player, which is great but feels a bit like sparring, but the other one is just recording/journaling the events and I'm having a really difficult time getting her to actually do something in the game. I'd love to play with both, but I seem to be only getting one. And that sucks.

I hope you can get back in the game soon, and with far more motivating results. :|

I don't think the guy meant ill, it's just that some people just aren't suited for this type of thing. I've seen it before, just not quite as disastrous, but still. Some people just don't really get into the spirit of it, they just want to roll the dice and fight stuff and playing smart or developing the story is boring to them.

Not an RPG, but I once played a game of WH40K against a Space Marine player who basically said that he doesn't play as standard Space Marines but as his own custom chapter which he invented (for which he had even wrote his own Codex for them). And of course they were completely overpowered and full of ridiculously unbalanced special rules (even for 40k). Also the guy himself was an arrogant know-it-all and a rules lawyer too.

Just to be clear, that wasn't my intention, that's just how the fight went. They were fighting elite guard, and I didn't cheat or force anything, I just played the guards as smart as they should be expected. It still came close, only one guard lived through it, and barely. The real problem is that because of the story, and it was clearly spelled out, as soon as they killed even one guard the story was fucked.

Long story very short - the quest they had was a secret mission from a noble who needed stuff done without the king knowing, but was still loyal and stated clearly that none of the king's men can be hurt in the process. If the team harms, not to mention kills any of them, he would himself hunt them down and the main mission would be basically forfeit. So regardless of how the fight would go, the campaign was fucked the moment that combat started. For some people it's hard to really get into it and start playing the game beyong rollin dice when told to. I've seen that to. With time they sometimes open up eventually, but some just don't have the right personality I guess. And someitmes it a matter of getting the right people together. A team that is all on the same wavelenght is a sight to behold, working off each other. But when they don't click, even if they are actually good players they can play poorly. It always works best when the team is good friends outside of the game too.

hello V. :D

Oh, I would have done that... have they lived through the fight. I actually got pretty good over the years at improvising when my players go off the plot. I never force the plot on them, I always try to basically play a sandbox with a main storyline to follow. But usually when they did unexpected things, they still followed the plot, just in an unexpected way. I'd invent new characters, whole locations and stuff on the fly to keep the game going after they surprised me, but it was always fun because the werent' sabotaging the game, they were just playing and being creative and role playing their character the way they wanted.

Worst experiences:
My first campaign (as a player): The GM's girlfriend was playing a chaotic-good character that would start fights whenever she got bored or felt that an NPC insulted her (we were playing police officers specifically hired to be less-violent). If her character got hurt or the game didn't go the way she wanted she would throw hissy fits, crying, shouting, and threatening to knock everything over.

My first campaign (as a GM) I selected all my players from my friends and it was amazing.
My 2nd campaign (as a GM) I ran it at a board game cafe and invited players after having a couple one-shot games with them. They just couldn't play the damn game without using it as a vehicle for bad behaviour:

1st: She'd start off by talking about what she heard of the sexist culture of DnD and she was really worried about starting but said I was really friendly and welcoming. Proceeded to put down the men at the table (including me) or insult the GMing of other men in the community. Frequently stopped me mid-narration to push her own cultural agenda.

2nd: She would threaten to punch, kick, or otherwise attack other players at the table if they annoyed her.

3rd: He started using his character to gently mock other characters, over time it ended up moving out of the game and he'd start mocking people. He was really sensitive to any potential insult to himself but used the game as a way to put others down (but a great tactical player).

4th: Brought this guy in to replace the previous. He started great. Then proceeded to start pushing sexism into the game and would make openly sexist comments about women in-game claiming that he was only following the internal narrative. After talking to him about it and saying it was absolutely not acceptable at my table, and just because an in-game community were conservative didn't mean they put women down. Two sessions later he was insulting women again. (This was a pro-feminist guy that got on great with the women around him though . . .)

I ended up sitting down and talking to each one about their behaviour. 1st woman quit and didn't come back, 2nd transferred, 3rd left the country, 4th apologised.
Two weeks later 4th guy is mocking women, in-game, for not being as capable as men. Outside of the game he would talk about female empowerment and other feminist crap, but the second he had an excuse . . .

I gave up and stopped GMing for them. I took one player forward who was great. I run Adventure league games as part of a DnD community, but if I ever run something more campaign-like I'll be much more careful about who I invite. There are too many people who if given a chance to play anybody, doing anything, they want to play arseholes treating the people around them badly.