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... ended earlier this week.

(Some of you might remember some troubles I had with it in my "Harsh Characters in Harsh Settings?" post)

I don't think it was awful for my players, they regularly told me they had fun during the scenarios but I reckon it wasn't the best for them either.

I tried to think about the reason why it was so bad for me and I believe I found what I should have done when I took the job of mastering this particular campaign which had already started earlier under another GM:

KILL THEM ALL

Indeed, I firmly believe that all their characters should have died and recreated or at the very least get a thorough brainwash. Allow me to explain ...

No Unity : on six characters, I had three distinct groups which did not care about, looked down on or just despised the others. In game that meant that the various groups would try solving the scenario on their own and would usually bang their heads on problems that would be easily solved by other groups.

No Motivation : on six characters, 2 had almost no will on their own, 3 had no attachment to anything and 5 had no sense of morality whatsoever (The only one who was supposed to be moral and lawful turned a blind eye to torture and murder commited by the others). The only thing that was bound to make them react was threats of bodily harm ... and even then the default response was to flee rather than to fight, even when odds were clearly in their favor.

Beyond the characters, there is a greater problem with my players : their previous GMs used to make railroading plot-hole-ridden scenarios where initiative was unwelcome and, worse, dangerous for your character's survival and that just made them ... dumb.

I think they fell into every trap or machination their enemies prepared along the campaign (all of which are perfectly avoidable / dismantable). When they actually found hints that something was fishy, they usually disregarded it in favor of "Uhuhuh our enemies are stupid".

"It doesn't make sense" would equal in their mind "The GM has made a mistake / oversight" when it should have always been "There is more to it, it will be crystal clear if we think about it or assemble more facts".

If I ever GM for this particular group again, I will make sure that their characters have reasons and desires to work with each other, have an interest in the world around them and its events and try to make them understand that I am not a rail-roading GM presenting scenarios filled with plot holes !

One scene of the last scenario is a pure concentrated extract of most of my griefs with this campaing and I will post it on this thread tomorrow.

I was wondering if anybody also had campaigns that were... distincly worse than the others and why ? From either GM and player point of view of course.

Sorry it did not work out. It seems though that both you and your players care enough to do better next time. Just make sure you both adjust to each other.
My worst campaign as a DM was not a complete failure but i am throwing it out as an example of what to avoid: it run for three years, the players started in Waterdeep, then when i was feeling a bit drained of ideas i transferred them to Ravenloft and they got out of there 7 months later and got thrown in Planescape where every session took place in another plane.
While there was a central quest, the constant change of settings deprived the game of atmosphere and as a result, i got characters with very little depth.

The worst campaign as a player... a DM decided to run a world in real time. Events were taking place whether we were there or not. There was a huge map prepared and we could more or less choose our way. But what sounds fascinating turned out to be boring half of the time as not every route had something going on, and the DM refused to move the action from one place to another. Plus in the name of realism we had to purchase horses, seek information etc in real time. A chess game was played through 12 consecutive intelligence rolls. Add some overpowering NPCs that ordered us around and looked so impressive that we felt like inisgnificant pawns from the beginning, and we nagged the DM to death to change or stop.
The good thing is that while he did not want to run this particular world differently, he did move on to run Oriental Adventures and it was quite good. So do not give up on your troupe!

Oh, absolutely right! Sometimes all it needs is a bit of a change of pace or scenery. I played with the same gang (more or less) for YEARS and we had awful games and we had MAGNIFICENT games interspersed. A great sounding concept can not work in a real game situation, and sometimes what can sound really boring can turn out to be fascinating.

One of our gang ran one of the best and one of the worst campaigns I've ever played. One of them was "The Quest", classic 2nd ed D&D (my character was Eric of Drostardy) which was epic in its epicness and really moving emotionally. The other was "Bratislavian Knights", an experimental game in a strange Roman/Gothic hybrid setting. Interesting concept, but really rough on us players who really had to be lead by the nose to follow the script and then half of us died pointlessly at the end anyway.

It's not a fault of the idea, or the GM or the players, it's situational.

Problem is figuring out when it's not working and fixing it. Usually the GM is the last to know.

The last scenario was quite exemplary of the problems I faced throughout the campaign :

The universe: post-apocalyptic underwater setting with submarines, isolated stations, pirates, lost technologies, mysterious psychic powers etc.

The campaign: the characters were members of a newly founded station struggling to survive. At the end of the campaign, the station has a good economy and a rising reputation.

The last scenario's premise: various campaign antagonists have banded together and joined a pirate crew to execute a raid on the station.

First part : the characters receive a video message from "Beta Site", the colony's algae farms located 300 km away. The small team of farmers is taken hostage and a ransom of 1 million $ in precious metals (10 tons of refined titanium) is asked for their safe release. The ransom will have to be delivered by the "Anté" , a very very very slow crawler submarine and the colony's one and only armed vehicle. They have three days to reach Beta Site.

They recognize one of their enemy on the video : Damas, an ex-pirate they had humiliated when he was an innocent suspect in a previous scenario and who had left the station some months ago. He apparently returned to his old job...

The characters do not obey the pirates and do not load their submarine with the precious metals. They plan on just going there and kill everybody (the farmers were deemed acceptable collateral damage). As the Anté is midway, a scout sent ahead discovers a armed submarine at Beta Site.

They think and deduce (with good rolls) that a 1 million bounty isn't worth the deployment of such a large submarine and its crew (60 people) at all.

Let me just recap the elements they have:

- Their enemies include Damas, an ex-member of the station who knows its defenses, including the fact the Anté is the only armed vehicle.
- They specifically asked that the Anté, not a fast unarmed submarine, bring the ransom at a site 300km away from the station.
- Their enemies have a big submarine and the ransom they have asked would in no way cover their cost, especially if they plan fighting the Anté to have it.

So what does that mean and what should they do ?

The pirates are idiots who do not know how to count and they should continue and attack them !

(my players are all between 22 and 30 years old and 5/6 made higher studies)
...


Of course when they arrive with their oh so slow crawler, the pirate submarine is nowhere to be found... and they learn soon after that the defenseless colony is under attack.

Now, two of the group's characters can teleport people, a fact Damas ignored, and that way they could get back to the colony and participate in the fight in any case.

The final fight in the colony was mostly disappointing. The pirates had deployed incapaciting gaz and that was enough to deter most of the characters from participating (they could have looked for gas masks, held their breath, used strips of clothing, hacked into the ventilation system and put the fans on overdrive, who knows). Due to their inaction, the pirates got out with the loot.

The two teleporters got on the submarine but since they knew nothing about mechanics or sabotage, they could do mostly... nothing. The group has a demolition and submarine expert but ... they did not want to bring him along.

Finally the fight against the last boss (the now-suicidal "King" of a people they slaughtered in a previous scenario) was solved immediately by a (for once) smart solution... that kinda killed the excitement but at this point I was not going to try and salvage the suspense.

I admit I am a tiny bit bitter about the whole thing... and will likely take that as a good opportunity to meet new people ; )

Wow, I feel lucky. I have always had a lot of GOOD luck with gamers and campaigns.

Well ...

Recently I've been in a Call of Cthulhu game and a GURPs game here in Raleigh, NC. One woman in the group seems to make it her job to interfere or mess with the rest - particularly me.

In the GURPs game, we wereprisoners on an airship in 1890 and, whereas the rest of us were trying to figure a way off, she was telling us everything we want to do was too dangerous and will get us killed. In the end, I shot down the ship when i damaged an engine. She then proceeds to betray us (several times) to those we think are our enemies, leaving notes and the like. It's infuriating.

In the Call of Cthulhu game, her characters all think that the books are evil. Her first character attempted to destroy any mythos tomes we found. She drugged my character when, as commander of the WWI medical unit she was a nurse for, he asked her not to wander off and I told the Keeper that if she hadn't returned from doing "her business" in the woods in 15 minutes, I was going to go look for her. She proceeds to drug my character, go off, and get the monsters coming after us, then burn down a church. Finally, she shoots a German prisoner on parole, checks his pulse, and when she finds he isn't dead, executes him on the spot.

Her nun, in the last game session, is not as bad, but did try to confiscate the only mythos book we found for the "Vatican Library" so as to effectively take it out of the game.

It's very frustrating. I always loved role playing games because the players worked TOGETHER.

We had one of these too. He had a wargame background (Warhammer) before coming to role playing and so was playing competively. Since the campaign was Vampire: Dark Ages we did not mind initially (there is supposed to be some backstabbing and rivalry going on) but in the end we decided to kill his character before he killed the mood.

The thing is, in the end i regretted not talking to him and telling him that he should just tone down the competitiveness instead of just teaming up against him. Maybe he wouldn't listen but it was worth a try. It is very likely that the player doesn't understand what she is doing and how it affects the campaign.

Well books ARE evil in Cthulhu !

I think I will remember all my life the book which announced on its first page to contain "the legends of the sons of Hastur Hastur Hastur, whose name must never be said thrice..."

... oh sh**

Result: A summoned Great Old One and only one survivor on the entire group which afterward spent a few years in an asylum...

This gives me an idea for a different thread...
[url]
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1622[/url]

True, the books are evil and can lead to madness (unless you have a very good therapist), but they are also full of information (very important in Call of Cthulhu) and can contain spells that, while also very dangerous to cast (especially for one's sanity) can aid in investigations and against creatures, especially ones that are immune to conventional weapons.

SPOILERS (sort of)

For instance, the reverse of the ressurection spell was used three times in a game I ran. First to put down the one-handed creature that was terrorizing Martin's Beach. Second, to put down his HAND, also running around and trying to kill people. Third, to destroy a monstrous conglomerate flesh THING that had escaped from the basement of a madman (actually, the investigators let is loose - oops) and was very, very dangerous.

The only other spell cast in that campaign was the reverse of the Summon Cthugha spell. Deep ones had cast it in the arctic in the hopes that Cthugha would melt the polar icecap and thereby flood a great deal of the world. The investigators aided an npc who knew the spell in order to dismiss it. One character (after losing about 20 san seeing Cthugha and his memory) gave all of his magic points during the ceremony and passed out as a result. They were able to dismiss the thing and save the world, however (hurrah).

As a friend has told me, the books in CoC are the only weapons that work against the mythos that the investigators can get their hands on. That's what makes it so frustrating to me.

My worst campaign

as a player:

A friend of mine had this idea to play some homebrewed western D&D world of his.
In short words you can describe the world as "western with magic and a little steampunk" and you could soon see that his idea was not very well planned and thought through.

We were escorting a wagon trail to a town without train connection (or so) when we where attacked by a quite large indian "war pack".
Due to a little roll luck we saw them early enough to position the wagons in a circle and get a lot of cover.
The war pack startet orbiting around the wagons and tried to shoot us with bows and guns.
Since we has pretty good cover the GM was not able to effectively hit us but we one by one shot his NPCs. Up to the point where he got upset and moved them just as far away (more than 200 meters) that we couldn't hit them well enough anymore because of the range modifier on the attack rolls.
Then he startet to describe how we could see them preparing something and how we presumed they where performing some ritual dance.

Remember: Both side - us and the war pack - where to far away from eachother to effectively target and hit with ranged weapons.
Nevertheless the GM did not have a problem to send a big "fireball" to towards our wagon camp, which was so precisely aimed that it could exactly hit us PCs _and_ strangely fast set us on fire.
My answer was something like "Well, if you're really sure about this..." with a clear undertone of irony. After that I took a little nap until the gaming session ended earlier than usual.


as a gamemaster:

The rule system was Earthdawn.
The setting a little down grown out of an old caer (the magic vaults from Earthdawn) which lost contact to everything that took the trading route to the north (east, west and south were okay).
The PC party rallied up and recieved a job from the town's mayor to investigate the problems north.
Result: They found a contaminated area surrounding the entrace to another old caer. Presumably there was a demon problem inside.

Over the time of the campaign several characters died.
Sometimes out of bad luck. Other times out of stupid player decissions.
And I can be a nasty GM when players are constantly stupid
But that was not the main problem of this group.

One of their problems was that they never listened to me when I reminded them about their karma points (to get extra dice on main roles) or when I told them the 10th time the house rule xy from one of their older PnP rounds was not applied in the current round (which was in their favor since the mentioned house rule was a disadvantage to the PCs).
another problem was that I demanded player initiative at least from time to time.
Sometimes they they were good at this but most of the time not really.
One of the outstanding player actions was when one of the female players stated that her character (a troll airpirate or warrior. i don't remember) went jogging arround the inner side of the city wall to loose some weight. Just because she couldn't "handle" the ingame social PC-NPC-interaction and I didn't agree to simply give her some enemies to slay. (side note: the player itself was on a diet at that time )

Another time they were exploring the contaminated caer and had already fought some smaller worm-like abberations. They rested in one of the abbadoned rooms from the last fight when I started to describe that they could hear something in the distance. This time it sounded bigger than the other worms.
For one short moment I thought to see a glimps of cleverness in the players minds and they would flee as it would be the wisest in the given situation. But as often they discussed far to long about their options and thus lost the option to flee and instead hid themselves in a dead end.
Okay. I said to myself the "big bad worm" is not so smart. If they stay calm everything will be good.
But the party convinced me I was wrong before about this glimps and started to buff themselves up with all magic they had available.
Bad idea.
Demons and demonic constructs in Earthdawn are often if not always attracted by magic. The more the better for them.
So instead of the PCs staying low profile they blinded the big bad enemy with their magic spotlight and in the end 3 of 4 PCs where dead.

At this point the campaign was still funny for me as the GM but this changed in the further sessions.
The PCs more and more lost themselves in discussing what they could do to proceed in the plot but only seldom clearly said what their characters really do. And instead of helping the endangered town they travelled around and even considered to completely leave the area. Only to find the contaminated area massively grown and the town under siege when they returned weeks later.
Again they discussed a lot of things but did very few.
Even me reminding them that they could do almost everything but have to decide on a few clear things to really execute them did not help.
In the end they wre upset and porjected this feeling into the game by playing jokes with me and the ingame world.

They joked about putting some announcement on the cities black board to lure out some mid-size worms that had been able to sneak into the city some nights before (more or less due to the players fault ).
The announcement was roughly: "The worms won in lotto. Please report to us to recieve your prize."
Next morning the PCs went to get some breakfast when they crossed the marketplace and found a big crowd of people exitedly questioning the mayor for whom this "lotto" was and who did win now and what did they win.
The players teased the people a lot and soon found themselves confronted by an angry mob.
A couple of other unwise decisions and ruel discussions later 2 of 4 PCs had been sacrificed by the mob to a big demon worm and another PC had been killed by the town's militia.

Few weeks later I was blamed by at least one of the players for the bad campaign result ("You did send us far to strong opponents!") and soon one of the other players will start as the new GM in a new campaign.
I'm looking forward to the result ... with a little sarcasm.

I would have to know the setting to know what went wrong but... a fellow DM once gave me a very good advice, one i try to folow to the letter: do not listen only to what your players ask for. Try to also give them what they really want.
His players had complained at some point that the campaign was not very challenging or dangerous, but when he made it harder they complained he went to overkill mode to spite them. He thought about it and concluded that they did want (seemingly) strong opponents, but they wanted to always end up on top, having bested the worst he threw at them.
He said that he regretted sticking to his "you do not know what you want" line, even though if it was true, because it did not matter that they gave him mixed signals, he had to read between the lines.
It does sound like a harsh condition for the DM, but it is true that being able to read your players' minds is half the job.
Finally, maybe the setting did not fit this particular troupe. There are some players who need to have flashy magic and the chance to be badass.

One of the best campaigns I was in as a player was a pirate scenario. We had a character creation evening and then played a session or two to get familiar with ourselves and eachother and the world. What he THEN had us do was write down a list for him. Things we wanted to see, scenes we wanted to exerience, how we wanted our characters to wind up. They were to be handed to him privately with the understanding that he might not be able to get to ALL of them in the campaign, but it gave him an idea of what we wanted and expected from the story.

He planned an approximate number of session for the campaign to last and worked out an ending for his story and all our characters that more-or-less matched our requests. He also added in some fun extras that he KNEW we'd like because of how long we'd been playing together already.

We hit all our scenes and had a great time of it. My character from that campaign did make a brief cameo in YAFGC during the big pirate battle. His name was Louis Steward and he became the Greatest Swordsman in the World! Though in YAFGC his brilliance got eclipsed by Arachne.

Sounds great.

Such preparation can result in tons of work but it's always nice if honored by both sides. Gives much more deapth to story and campaign.

I think it was one of the problems in the campaign/party I described above.
When the campaign began two or three years ago I asked the players what they'd like to play?
Earthdawn or another system e.g. DnD?
Answer was Eartdawn.

My second question concerned the setting/campaign.
I offered them different options:
1) an own fantasy world based on Earthdawn rules (viking/Rohan-style with a few years of development sent on it)
2) fantasy world loosely based on the Earthdawn background
3) something else?

They convinced me to take option 3: classic Earthdawn (because it was always so good in their past groups).

OK, with the premise that I do not no the classic Earthdawn world so well (which I told the players) we started the campaign.
I prepared the a few maps and made up the main plot: demon infested caer with contaminated surroundings (area, animals, etc) threatens local town.

Next problem did not wait for long:
Me: Okay, what's your characters rough background? What ar his/her intentions and so on?
Player: Well... he/she's a <insert race here> <insert class here>

Any more details necessary?

I guess the answer is always the same: keep talking to your players and eventually, the problem will come up .

Here's one. I'm in a Call of Cthulhu game where NO ONE HAS BEEN KILLED except by player vs. player. And that sometimes doesn't even work. Here are some of the highlights:

My character being in an armored car that has had the machinegun removed, shooting at Mi-Go with a Springfield rifle while a dark young approachs from about 100 yards. After 10 or so round, the dark young had STILL not gotten to me, so I left the armored car and ran away.

I shot another pc when I thought she was the monster in the ceiling above. Both barrels of a double-barrel shotgun, doing about 40 poins of damage (average CoC characters have about 12 hp, go unconsious at 2 hp, and are dead at 0). She survived.

As we are all standing around in a strange, secret library, weapons in hand (mostly .45 automatics, Springfield rifles, and one BAR - this was during WWI), something crashes through the window. We all open fire on it ... at 1/5 our chance to hit because of 'surprise.' Of course, everyone misses. It was another investigator flung through the window by a byakhee. We ALL misssed.

It's an interesting game but the only PC deaths to date have been when one pc, driven mad, attacked another and was killed for it by that other pc.

I don't want the game to just turn into a bloodbath, but I would like to feel that my PC is in SOME danger. It is, after all, Call of Cthulhu.