Let me just say this, by way of opening: I am a colossal hypocrite. I've been posting all these stories of my friends' and others' horrifying DMing, and neglecting the elephant skeleton in the walk-in closet, so to mix metaphors.
I once co-GMed, and then solo GMed, a Deadlands game, both Weird and Wasted West. In fairness to me, the fellow with whom I was GMing came up with a lot of the more offensive parts and stupid decisions. In fairness to him, I came up with much dumber decisions than he ever did. Now one of the players has posted his campaign journal...and reading it quite predictably makes me facepalm constantly at how asinine we were being.
Anyway, nine perpetually stressed-out engineers play a campaign devised by a biologist and a mathematician during a 48-hour post-exams celebratory Red Bull haze, where we started with "Hey, what if Teddy Roosevelt was born a decade sooner so he could be a Texas Ranger pulling the party together as a massive Indy Ploy?" and kind of went all kinds of crazy from there. What could possibly go wrong?
The answer is a lot. But then again, I had "help", and it was the first long, storied campaign I ever ran. And lots more excuses. Bah. A lot went wrong, but honestly the behind-the-scenes stuff, should I ever get around to writing about it, was hilarious in hindsight.
Spoilers :(, and to be fair, deadlands is meant to be silly and deadly at the same time, so a bunch of stupid decisions isn't that bad.
ReplyDeleteAlso speaking from the perspective of most of the players that didn't drop out due to workloads or in one case having the party basically not like them [1] until they left (the Sue GM in this thread), we all quite enjoyed the game, so you did something right.
[1]:in our defense our character's basically should have killed him, but interparty murder was not allowed, which while understandably, mad things difficult since there was no way to end a serious threat to the group, my first game, if you were a complete asshole to the detriment of everyone else in the party you would be ditched/murdered ic, and it would be fun OOC
My first group an odd group from what I have observed sadly. Kids these days and their crap about expected encounter levels being fair and what not are clearly spoiled, I loved the fact that adventuring was actually risky, made things thrilling, made you think creatively, and not just rules nitpicking or character optimization creatively, I mean using seemingly useless items awesomely.
To each their own, I am just an young old man :P.
I don't know that you'll ever see this, ME, Myself and I, but you can't be that old. Just a year ago I ran a campaign that saw a character who wanted an artifact ballista (oh, this was in the new Exalted btw), beg his party to help him move it, only to see the archer character use it to fire another character (whose weapon was a polearm, as the reasoning for why they could be a makeshift bolt), which I figured meant they should combine rolls, to hit a kraken/leviathan type monster, in the eye because it was more cinematic/fun that way. We all welcomed the ridiculousness once it started, and all enjoyed its outcome. Then they had to run because no, not every encounter is going to be one you can murder at leisure.
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