Month: September 2021

Tales From Dungeon Mastering – II – Negative Experience: A Mismatched Party

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This is another story brought about by inexperience while DM’ing. This is from around the same period as the first story (high school).

I invited everyone who wanted to play D&D to the table. There was no need to sort through players and pick people to match the campaign, right? No experience requirements. First come first serve! This time, I would be the exclusive DM. I would be the one running the show from the start. All of the problems in the multi-DM shared campaign would be resolved.

The first 5 people who wanted to come came, and that was the group.

This taught me another important lesson not just about DM’ing but also about groups of players in any setting.

Just because 5 players all want to go on a D&D adventure doesn’t mean that how they want to play the game will be compatible in the slightest. I will focus on 3 players.

Player 1 was a super hardcore roleplayer. He wanted to get into character and stay in character from the start. He didn’t want to talk about shit outside of that. He would tolerate distractions here and there, but he would get mad if it happened a lot. The game was the primary focus for him. He wanted to spend 4 hours immersed in a world.

Player 2 wanted to go on a Lord of the Rings style adventure where 5 heroes are given a clear beginning, middle, and end, and they’ll save the world and celebrate in the end. His primary goal was the adventure and the friends around the table.

Player 3 viewed D&D as a chance to hang out with friends while bullshitting over a game. He never went in character. He rarely, if ever, talked about what was happening in game. He almost always talked to everyone about completely random, unrelated things to the game.

At the time, I naively believed that the 5 players would be able to mesh and have fun. I thought that they’d be able to break through their differences and find a mutual playstyle that they all enjoyed.

No.

This campaign lasted one session. The characters were created in session 0, and they met for the first time in session 1. In session 1, player 3 was non-stop talking about South Park or other shows that were big on TV at the time. We tried to curtail the conversation and redirect it to the game multiple times, but it only lasted 1 or 2 minutes before it was back to South Park or another Comedy Central show.

The session lasted around 2 hours (of the originally planned 6), with Player 1 straight up saying he was done with this campaign. The other two players decided to call it an early night. Player 2, Player 3, and myself talked a bit after that, but it left a sour taste in my mouth.

And with that, that campaign was dead. I was able to salvage most of the ideas from that campaign for future campaigns, and I played with most of the players again, but I realized I had to be super careful with who I mixed and matched player wise. Player 2 got along with Players 1 and 3, so he could play in both. Player 1 and Player 3 didn’t get along with each other at all, so they were never part of a campaign together again.

I talked to all of the players afterwards. I tried to get the party back together after that, but I wanted to figure out what had went wrong.

Player 3 was of the mindset that “it’s just a game; [Player 1] needs to chill out and stop taking it so seriously”. If something went wrong in game, they laughed. If their character died, they had an idea for a new character. They weren’t above stealing from party members to cause chaos. They were not a person that was going out of their way to feel negative about things happening in the campaign.

Player 3’s favorite type of D&D campaign was one where there was a lot of comedic moments and silly stuff. They wanted to play silly characters with silly goals and silly powers. They liked alternative pen-and-paper systems like “Big Eyes, Small Mouth” because there was a lot of possibility to just make silly meme stuff.

Player 1 wanted to take it seriously, though. Player 1 wanted it to feel dangerous. They wanted it to feel tense. They wanted to worry about what happened, what was happening, and what was going to happen. They wanted to be on the edge of their seat. They wanted a serious adventure from start to finish.

So Player 1 and Player 3 wanted completely opposite campaigns. It was impossible to resolve that. Player 2 was fine with either. The other 2 players didn’t want to come back, so they were permanently out.

In the end, the important thing I took away from that was:

Just because everyone at the table likes playing D&D doesn’t mean they’ll like playing D&D at that table. They may not like the DM. They may not like the setting. They may not like how other players play.

Sometimes it just isn’t meant to be with a specific group. Trying to force a group to work can be far worse than just letting that group die.

Tales From Dungeon Mastering – I – Experiment: A Shared World

FuzzytotemsLeave a comment

One of my oldest D&D experiments happened when I was back in high school. A group of friends and I tried to build a campaign together, and we would each take turns DM’ing. There were 6 of us total.

So that meant there were 6 player characters, but one of those player characters would be the DM’s character every session. You would request a turn to DM and you would be put into the queue, and every DM’s adventure couldn’t require more than 2 consecutive sessions as DM (unless queue was empty). This constraint did cause some issues with transitioning between adventures.

We were all inexperienced in D&D and DM’ing as a whole. We were all pretty young as well. We didn’t really understand what went into making a great D&D campaign.

Sounds like a great idea on paper, but our inexperience with D&D quickly showed. 6 people with 6 different DM’ing philosophies running a campaign in the same world eventually led to a completely incoherent experience.

One DM was super into roleplaying. One DM hated RP and only wanted hack-and-slash. So you’d go from doing an RP heavy session where everything was resolved through communication and negotiation to a session where you appeared in a dungeon to slay monsters.

This part in itself isn’t necessarily bad on its own. The problem came from the way the transitions were handled. The players would finish a long roleplaying session of political intrigue, and the very next session would start with them in a dungeon. Due to the time constraints of 2 sessions, the DMs often felt pressures to get people right into heart of the content. This meant nothing could be a slow burn and it would be difficult to set things up in the long run.

Another DM was into low fantasy (think Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Chivalry) where magic was awe inspiring. Even simple spells were something to behold and be blown away by.

Another DM was into high fantasy anime settings, and an encounter would be like a fight in Samurai Champloo mixed with magic from .hack.

While not every single area of a D&D world will be similar in terms of magic accessibility, it was difficult to get a handle on what was powerful.

As a result, the world and the story were completely incoherent. Power scaling was out of control because some DMs wanted to be the “fun DM” and would just dump experience and items on players like crazy. Then came the biggest problem of all – The metagaming.

The problems with DMPCs is pretty well documented by other people and their experiences, but what if the DMPC would be a player next week and for the following month or longer?

This brought up a whole new suite of problems.

Some DMs would give the party their character’s dream item(s) to make their character super badass and awesome and it basically became a power fantasy expression and less of a fun world and adventure. Wow, coincidentally, the DM with the PC that uses scythes gave us a +5 Keen Scythe from a chest in a level 5 dungeon!

Then it took a really bad turn when one player metagamed super hard. He found that he could hold the current DM’s character hostage for items. Yep. That was the beginning of the very quick end of that campaign.

It started as a grand adventure about fighting orcs, saving cities, and hunting treasure. It became a game of appeasing egos and hostage situations. And if the DM punished someone for doing that, that player would just volunteer to be a DM soon and get retribution on that former-DM and restore their character.

We all remained friends, but it was over a year before we played D&D with that group again.

In retrospect, there are definitely ways that this system could have worked. We were all inexperienced, and I think we all thought we’d have the same ideas about what made a fun D&D campaign.

World building, power scaling, and player conduct would needed to have rules established out of the gate. I imagine writing a cohesive and interesting narrative from start-to-finish would be impossible, though, so it would likely need to be treated more like a serialized adventure from TV shows and less like a grand, Lord of the Rings-style adventure.

It was definitely a learning experience. Even though this could be done a lot better, I don’t know if I’d ever try it again. Maybe a shared world but the campaigns are individual to each DM?