The Worst Game I've Ever Been In

[pyat]

So, what was the worst RPG you've ever played in?

I have given this question some thought. I discounted some of the games I played in my early teens. They were definitely bad, sure. The gamemasters were unfamiliar with the rules, often poorly prepared (if at all), and curiously vengeful. The player groups were often dysfunctional. But, as I say, I discount pretty much anything before the age of 14 or 15 as more than a sort of formalized game of cops and robbers. The arguments were, in some sense, part of the social activity of gaming.

Friends have heard me speak more than a few times of a particular GM we had through late high-school and most of university. He was a rather misanthropic and angry fellow who looked scornfully at me because I didn't know what a Teddy Boy was. He ran Mage without once explaining the setting to us, trusting us to pick it up by osmosis. We ran through a lot of characters, because he did not believe in staying his hand when it came to PC death. However, I must admit that he fully understood the rules, and had arcanely plotted adventures, and always had something for us to do, even if it mostly involved sitting about and waiting for something to explode in our faces. We went BACK to his table for more, every week.

No, I fear the worst game I've been in was much more recent than that. It was run by a GM with a great enthusiasm for the setting and the game, yet who was curiously unsuited to run it. It was sort of like being invited to the home of a man who loves classic cars, to listen to him talk knowledgeably about car specs and the joys of driving a car, only to find out that he doesn't have a license. All he does is play racing games on his computer.

It was a game of Trinity, and RPG where players take on the role of psychic warriors defending humanity against various threats. Chief amongst these threats are the “Aberrants.” As far as I understood the setting, these were sort of transcended human/terrible amoral monster types, who emerged a few generations before and ended up in a war with mankind. Cthulhian super villains, you might say. That was the vibe I got.


I was running a member of the Legion, an order of psychokinetic soldiers. My wife was a member of the Æsculapian Order, mental healers. wggthegnoll was running a shape-shifting infiltrator. sassy_fae was playing a psychic with the power to control electricity. Finally, danaeris (OW) joined the game after our first adventure, as a telepathic inquisitor. A well-rounded group, one would think, ready to run through any challenge.

First session began with us being summoned to HQ, which was some kind of tower in the Caribbean. Our patron informed us that an aquatic Aberrant, some kind of shark-man-thing, was lurking in the area. We were assigned a submersible and sent to destroy the creature. After a little searching, we were attacked by the creature. Dice were rolled. The pilot (which may have been my character, I'm not sure) lined up for a shot.

“We fire a torpedo!” we said.
“You don't have any,” the GM replied.
“What sort of underwater guns do we have?” we asked. The GM smirked.
“You don't have any. You didn't ask for any,” he replied.
“They sent us out to hunt for a terrorist with superpowers, and they didn't arm our sub?” I asked.
“Nope! You didn't ask!” the GM said.

“Can we call for backup?”someone wondered. This sparked an explanation of how, in the future, radio wavelengths were so full that it was incredibly expensive to broadcast, and so... no, the submarine didn't have any means of communication. When pressed, he allowed us to have an emergency beacon that sent out an automated distress call.

So, Sharkman starts chewing up the sub. Various plans for electrifying the surface of the sub are put forward. This is when the GM informs us that we have no scuba gear, so we can't get out the sub. We didn't ask for any scuba gear, you see. So, we fled to the surface and waited for rescue.

In between sessions, we made up a list of things to ask for, and made sure the sub was armed. The second confrontation was terribly anticlimactic. I believe we just launched torpedoes at the creature's lair, and that was it.

Third session, danaeris joined the group. We started on a new adventure, this one clearly more involved than the previous “Shark Hunt” one. The GM had every supplement book, and had a clear encyclopedic knowledge of the setting. We were going to the Moon! I had high hopes for this adventure, imagining laser battles in spacesuits, or psychic duels, or general “Moon is a Harsh Mistress” sort of stuff. The premise was interesting enough and the GM was enthused. The first lesson I'd learned about gaming was that an enthusiastic GM can make otherwise humdrum games exciting. I was to find out that this GM was the exception.

Aberrants had attacked a Moonbase, slaughtering the inhabitants. Around the same time, a sort of “moon slum” had collapsed, killing thousands of people. Eyewitnesses reported seeing an Aberrant on the scene, and had seen him head toward a sort of research lab/hospital nearby. The lab was blamed for the accident, but no charges were immediately laid. We were hurried to the Moon to find out more, and determine if the Aberrants were still around. A nice combination of detective work and combat, I hoped.

What we actually got was one long ride on the Moon Bus.

We arrived and asked, first, to investigate the scene of the attack. The GM declared that we didn't have enough clout to get a police shuttle, so we rode the monorail halfway across the face of the Moon. Essentially, the GM was giving us a guided tour though the sourcebook. “You leave Moon Station One and get on the Darkside Express, switching over to another monorail at Serenity Station...” At each stop he'd give a capsule description of the settlement, but did not offer any opportunity for interaction. Finally, we reached the end of the line, where he realized the moon rail didn't reach the outpost in question. So... we were given a government shuttle anyway, and flew there. And we were allowed to keep it, and fly back. So I guess we did have enough clout.

The investigation pointed to the director of the hospital as knowing more. If I recall correctly, the clues were pointing to him as the perpetrator of the attack and disaster. From a gamist perspective, I was pretty sure he was a red herring, but also pretty sure that he would know more. We'd found out things like, poor people from the wrecked area were going to the hospital for treatment, and disappearing mysteriously. So, we went to the hospital, and asked to see the director.

We spent two full sessions in a waiting room. No, really. We roleplayed sitting in a waiting room, trying to get around an intractable secretary. It got to the point where I was no longer roleplaying the frustration my character was feeling. I said, in character and out of character, that the secretaries and security staff were clearly delaying us while the director made his getaway. Every approach we tried was stymied. Diplomacy, intimidation, telepathic probes, threatening with arrest, showing off our search warrant, etc., all were met with, “You can't see him yet.” Worse, that message was often coming from the GM, and not merely his NPCs.

I was also told in plain terms that, no, we were not intended to muscle our way in, and that would be “bad.” I personally was rooting for a gun fight or a smash and grab, or something. We were supposed to be members of an elite and well-known and feared agency. We weren't undercover. We were in uniforms with some kind of identifying tattoos and so on, and it was public knowledge that Aberrants had attacked. To my mind, it was as though a group of FBI agent showed up at a business owned by the Bin Laden family, two days after 9-11, with an arrest warrant, and were refused entrance by the parking attendant. Can you imagine that ending without a SWAT team surrounding the block and kicking in several doors? Yet, when I started asking about “calling for back up” or breaking in, the GM refused to consider these options. I want to make that clear – I tried to do these things, and the GM declined to interact with me.

wggthegnoll, whose sole power was the ability to change his appearance, and whose primary skills were infiltration and espionage, decided early on to try and sneak into the building in the guise of a doctor or employee. The GM flatly refused this plan. As in, refused to accept the action at all. Not, “Roll for it, it'll be really tough!” Not, “There are armed guards following you everywhere, you don't have the chance to try.” Not even the pretense of a logical refusal, like, “No, they have brainwave scanners that will detect your true identity.” Just a flat, out-of-game refusal. wggthegnoll did not return after that session.

During the second session, we realized what the GM wanted us to do. He wanted us to hack into the hospital computer and find more clues before proceeding. Which we did. We hacked into a public terminal in the waiting room. After several computer skill rolls, we found clues that supported our original plan of taking the hospital director into custody for questioning.

At that point, magically, we were allowed to see the director. It was a sort of scripted event. It couldn't happen before that, you see.

The director, of course, had left. He'd just got on a spaceship to Mars. And hey, that backup I'd called for in the previous session? A police taskforce suddenly showed up to secure the hospital.

You know what it was like? It was like playing a Sierra Software adventure game from 1986. You're walking down a path and come across a rock. But you can't climb the rock, or destroy the rock with dynamite, or cut through the trees to get around the rock. You need to find a specific tree branch five screens back to lever the rock off the path, or your little computer-self will just stand there and starve to death. Or, “Oops! You went off to slay the dragon without making sure the sword was checked and equipped in your inventory! You moron! You die automatically!”

...

Actually, thinking more about the guy who was our GM, that comparison could account for a lot of things.

Soon, I'll write about the best game I've ever been in.

Comments

[zenten.livejournal.com]

I once played in a game of Mage: Sorcerer's Crusade where my character spent the whole game session literally banging his head against the wall. That was sadly the only time I ever got to play Sorcerer's Crusade.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Were you protesting against the game, or was it just that the GM ignored you and left you in "stasis", or something?

[zenten.livejournal.com]

I was playing whatever tradition it was that becomes the cult of X. My character started out the game chained to a wall in a prison. I had heard a fight outside, but I couldn't actually see or do anything. So I bashed my head against the wall to enter into an altered state of consciousness as my focus. I said this is why I was doing it. The ST let me do that for a few minutes, had me take some bashing damage, and then told me that it wouldn't work because it wasn't a valid focus.

That's all my character was able to do the whole session. I didn't go to a second one.

[wggthegnoll.livejournal.com]

Your memory of the specific details of this game astounds me. And yes, I think it was about the worse game I'd ever played in as well. I think the storyteller would make a good aid to someone who actually knows how to run a game, but he was definitely not suited to doing it on his own.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Ooh. That's a good point. He needs to be sitting behind the real GM, like a sort of Jeeves, handing up manuals.

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

The worst game I've ever been in was a d20 Star Wars game set immediately before "A New Hope". Ok, No Jedi, oppressive empire stretching it reach, our PCs are a rag tag crew of a pilot, a scout, some wookie muscle, a force adept. In the first session, The wookie rolls a critical failure with his bowcaster on his second roll and... the GM kills the PC, outright with some sort of horrible bow related explosion. Then we meet Darth Vader and his apprentice... a 12 year old girl of absurd power, who then proceeds to lead us around on a tour of the plot points the GM wanted to highlight involving searching for Vader's lost children. Every time we get into combat or attempt to do anything useful towards hte plot. the GM PC steps in and blows it away for us. My character ended up getting swallowed by a rancor in session three. Looking at the HP left and the time it'd take anyone to cut him out, my character realized he was dead... and promptly spent a turn pulling pins on several thermal detonators and other grenades as a graceful means of me to bow out of the game...

[pyat.livejournal.com]

GM PCs usually suck. I've learned that the hard way, from both sides of the screen.

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

Friends have heard me speak more than a few times of a particular GM we had through late high-school and most of university. He was a rather misanthropic and angry fellow who looked scornfully at me because I didn't know what a Teddy Boy was. He ran Mage without once explaining the setting to us, trusting us to pick it up by osmosis. We ran through a lot of characters, because he did not believe in staying his hand when it came to PC death. However, I must admit that he fully understood the rules, and had arcanely plotted adventures, and always had something for us to do, even if it mostly involved sitting about and waiting for something to explode in our faces. We went BACK to his table for more, every week.

I hate to say this, but that sounds like -- in better hands -- that could have been a very, very good game. The kind of story that you remember twenty years later.

In my opinion, having people discover the setting -- rather than it being given to you on a silver platter -- is a Good Thing. It helps to make the setting seem really alien.

And PC death is not necessarily a bad thing. In something like Paranoia, it was a part of the fun!

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I agree on all those points!

However, we really was a jerk about it. We were supposed to be skilled mages, with a reputation of some kind, yet he refused to give us any information at all about our abilities. If we'd all been newly awakened mages, that might have been a lot of fun. As presented, it was just frustrating.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

It's STILL the kind of story he'll remember 20 years later.

[amarafox.livejournal.com]

Oh god, that sounds like a nightmare. The worst games I had were with a GM who was usually OK, but he was a bit of a power freak and would roleplay our characters for us and make all the wimmin characters get in relationships and get preggers.

D:

[pyat.livejournal.com]

That's pretty creepy. :)

[catsarah.livejournal.com]

The worst games I've ever experienced were those where large amounts of time was spent where a game was explained and hyped and then never played, and/or those where several sessions were spent creating characters that were then never used because the GM never started the game.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, I think you and Piet are talking about the same GM!!

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Let's all go to Planescape!

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

Okay, time for my favorite Bad GM horror story.

The GM had created his own system, largely inspired by some video game or another, with elemental magic. One of the elements was sound, and I played a sound mage or Restalian (a title from, as I recall, the GM's mishearing of the word "recitative", but I digress).

At one point our group was trying to infiltrate a fortress. I told the GM that my character is going to, after listening _very_ carefully, create a soundwave that, when superimposed over the sounds the group was making, would result in complete silence.

He replied, "A Restalian wouldn't do that."

Now, sure, there are cultural mores that one doesn't violate lightly. There are things my character might get in trouble with his superiors back home for attempting.
And there are things that are simply beyond my character's power limits.

But the GM hadn't said any of that. He'd said that, in effect, my character wouldn't do this.

I replied, "Well, far be it from ME to tell YOU what MY character would do, BUT..."

The campaign, or at least my interest in it, died pretty quickly after that.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

The soundwave idea is rather clever. :)

[redregon.livejournal.com]

Bad GM... no cookie :P

i can imagine that that world would probably be quite fun in the right GM's hands.

[curtana.livejournal.com]

By virtue of the gaming circle that forthright and I used to run, I've played in a lot of pretty awful one-shots (people would take turns running one-shot scenarios in different systems - this is also the only reason I've played Kobolds Ate My Baby and HOL and Kult, among many others ;)

A few highlights:

The game (I forget the system now, but it was a modern-day espionage kind of thing) where we had a GM very like the one you describe - nothing could happen outside the narrow bounds of his script for the scenario, no matter how creative or sensible our ideas might have been. At one point we decided to contact an NPC via cell phone, only to be told that not only did none of our agents have cell phones, but it was also impossible to procure one easily - in LONDON - because it was Sunday.

A modern-day Vampire game. PCs are the primogen of the city - therefore, high-powered and (one would presume) know each other at least somewhat. We had discovered through unspecified means that there was a Sabbat infiltrator among us, and had to find out who it was before their fiendish plan was enacted. In fact, three of the six players were playing infiltrators, none of whom knew about the others. The Sabbat is very disorganized, apparently. At some point a ritual was done to determine who was lying. forthright, as one of the infiltrators, who was pretending to be a Malkavian, was trying to figure out how he might get out of this situation, when the GM passed him a note. It said "By the way, you have replaced all your blood with Malkavian blood." forthright pondered how this could possibly happen, but it did allow him to get through the ritual unscathed. A little while later, the GM passed him another note. It read "You are now afraid of cats." The session did not end well, as I recall. The person who ran it is, to my surprise, now a professional author for various games. I hope he doesn't write scenarios.

Finally, the creme de la creme. A good friend of ours ran a Kult game, for which he had not prepared in the slightest, and so had a scenario in hand that he had downloaded off the internet. (He was a sporadically brilliant GM, but very disorganized and absent-minded.) The premise of Kult, as I understand it from this scenario (I haven't actually read the book) is that there is another, sinister world alongside ours, into which people can travel. We were prison guards, one of whose prisoners had disappeared through a rift into this other world, and we were compelled to follow him, though some of us objected that this was not in our job description. We found ourselves in a long, featureless hallway lined with identical doors. Opening any of them produced little flying metal razor-things that were quite lethal, so we soon stopped opening doors and just walked. We tried walking back the way we had come, too, but this was just as pointless. Eventually, everyone was bored of walking, so the GM had mercy and let us find a door that led somewhere else - a meat locker. I said "Is there a demon butcher in here?" With shifty eyes, the GM replied "Noooo." We fought it anyway, and then made our way to the next area - a narrow beam that led over a bottomless chasm. I said "If we walk across this, things are going to fly out and attack us, aren't they." "...Yyyes." "Fine. Then my character, having no hope of escape or return to her home, jumps off the beam to commit suicide." He consulted his notes. "It says if you try to commit suicide, you just end up back at the beginning and have to start over." The fact that the author of this scenario had felt the need to put this note in gave us all the information we needed to conclude the game there, after three hours of getting nowhere. I am not in any way adequately conveying the boredom crossed with futility that this game produced in us - suicide was not an over-the-top or unreasonable response for the characters.

I really haven't been involved in many bad campaigns - some that fizzled after a few sessions, yes, but not that were overtly BAD. Even the ones that were cheesy/overpowered/hack and slash were at least fun most of the time. forthright probably has some stories about bad campaigns ;)

[forthright.livejournal.com]

On the Kult game, I must add that not only was the game just as curtana described, but our characters all had completely inane names drawn from TV sitcoms. The only one I remember was my character, who was named 'Murphy Brown'. And was male.

My worst campaign ever was run by the same GM, and was a Vampire: Dark Ages game set in Britain. I entered the campaign after another player left one night mid-session, simply standing up and announcing, "I'm going to Cornwall", leaving the room, and never returning. To this day we have no idea whether he meant that his character was going to Cornwall, England, or whether the player was going to Cornwall, Ontario, but 'going to Cornwall' entered our gaming group's lexicon to mean 'to depart a campaign suddenly and without forewarning'.

The game had its moments of brilliance, mostly due to a couple of players, but it had a number of serious problems. The most serious was that it was thematically based on the films of David Lynch, and in the end, the entire campaign turned out to be all a dream. Sigh ...

But I note that curtana has missed a vital bad-gaming moment in her history, so I will let her remedy that situation right now.

[curtana.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. This was at one iteration of the small con we used to run. As one of the organizers, I always felt it was my responsibility, if I was free, to play in games that would otherwise have too few players to run. So that was how I ended up in the session of the original Tomb of Horrors run by a blind guy. He was a nice fellow, but having a blind GM raises all sorts of practical problems. Before each scene, he would listen to the description/narration on his walkman through earphones, which would take several minutes, then recite it back to us. Combats were very difficult to manage effectively. All of this is laying aside the fact that Tomb of Horrors is an awful scenario, depending on lots of random events, guessing, and requiring both extensive knowledge of the monster manual and deliberate meta-gaming to survive. Which color gem on this wall covered with gems is the one that we need to touch to move on? It probably doesn't matter, because all the other ones have fatal or near-fatal traps!

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Tomb of Horrors... run by a blind GM.

I have to admit, I hate Tomb of Horrors, and it sounds like it was a frustrating experience, but I'd play in that just to say I had!

[pyat.livejournal.com]

The campaign was a dream? OW.

I have a similar story! The misanthropic Mage GM I mentioned in my post ran a weekly game. We'd known him since the 3rd grade, and we were his only friends.

One week, just after university, my friend Bill called him to ask if we were gaming in a certain week, and got the reply, "No, I'm going to Toronto."

Later, we learned he'd moved to Toronto. And has never contacted us since. We heard he'd moved from his parents, when we called his house the following week to ask about the game.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

With shifty eyes, the GM replied "Noooo." .

This bit made me laugh. :) Thanks for the tales of game woe!

[mwbard.livejournal.com]

Worst game... not sure this counts, but certainly the worst ADVENTURE.

In the mid-80s I went into a AD&D tournament from WATSFIC in Waterloo. In the adventure you started at an inn at the bottom of the map, walked up along the road, and have to get to the lair at the top of the map. The bad guy KNOWS you're coming.

So, I say, to myself and the group, given that the bad guy KNOWS we're coming and has garrison points and ambushes and other nasty things all along the road, why don't we go up through the wilderness and AVOID all that! Smart, thinks I! And the group agrees.

Sadly, ALL the encounters WERE along the road. And, given that this was a tournament, you got POINTS for dealing with all of the above mentioned encounters. So, by being smart and sneaky, we got NO points, and instead had escalating battles with wolf packs that got larger and larger, and attacked multiple times per night, to tell us that BEING SNEAKY IS STUPID, YOU MUST TAKE THE OBVIOUS ROAD.

GAH!

Killed my interest for tournament RPing for life.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

My own experience with tournament games has been similar. <;j user=neosis> was in one tourney at Gencon a couple of years back... it went this way:

"You open the door. There are 20 skeletons."
"We fight them."
*many rounds pass, the players kill the skeletons and go through the next door*
"You open the door. There are 20 zombies."

And so on, through the tiers of undead to Mummies. That was the semi-final game. neosis won the tourney, because no one else bothered to show up to the final!

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I'm so happy that your story did not chronicle my abortive attempt to run Spirit Of The Century for you guys...

[thebitterguy]

That one session we played was fun. And SotC chargen is also enjoyable.

I'm sure session two will be even better!

[pyat.livejournal.com]

No, that was fun, if abortive. Everything went smoothly in the first session.

[the-vulture.livejournal.com]

My major gaming irritant? The GM who has a favourite NPC that winds up dominating the game and showing up all the PCs. Dang irritating.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I nearly did that, myself, in a recent Ironclaw campaign. Only I had several favorite NPCs, some of them canon, some of them borrowed from friends.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

That's a very common one. It's usually the character the GM would be running, if he/she were a player.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

I watched a two-hour argument over momentum and matrix-style wall running in D&D once.

The rest of the game wasn't bad, though.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Who won?

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

No one.

[sassy-fae.livejournal.com]

This is pretty much how I remember the game; I have no idea how you're able to recall that much detail, it all sort of blended together for me!

"You know what it was like? It was like playing a Sierra Software adventure game from 1986. You're walking down a path and come across a rock. But you can't climb the rock, or destroy the rock with dynamite, or cut through the trees to get around the rock. You need to find a specific tree branch five screens back to lever the rock off the path, or your little computer-self will just stand there and starve to death. "

Linear vs lateral thinking. I have a lot of thoughts about that.
*sigh*

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I have no idea how you're able to recall that much detail, it all sort of blended together for me!

I... um... complained about it a lot to people online while it was in progress. ;)

[sassy-fae.livejournal.com]

LOL!

So either ingrained through conversation, or the miracle of chat logs :)

[paka.livejournal.com]

Okay, so obviously this is fodder for figuring out what works as a GM, and what doesn't work. Same for best game that you've been in. Question, though, what are the best and worst games that you ran, and why?

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I'll tackle those questions later this week, or tonight if I'm home. :)

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I played ... um ... that Steve Jackson game about angels and demons in modern Earth, I forget the name (on purpose). My angel spent the entire second (and last) session pointing a pistol at a minor thug and telling him not to move, getting one action to do so every hour.

[thebitterguy]

In Nomine.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Action! :)

[leonard-arlotte.livejournal.com]

My worst game session was once during a very long running campaign (the gameworld started in 76, and has been running continuously since, in one of the university gaming clubs, using home rules) I had a character that I had been playing for a couple years.

In the middle of the session, the GM looks up at me and says, "Your Dead. Turn in your character card."

I blink. "What? What happened?"

"You don't know."

I turned in my card and left in disgust, and didn't return to that campaign for several years.

I did find out a couple years later that what had happened is that the other players had successfully killed my character in her sleep, and made her into sausage.

Apparently they didn't like the fact that I kept hitting party members with lightning bolts, despite the fact that I would WARN people ahead of time that I THROW LIGHTNING BOLTS and that getting between me and a bad guy was a BAD IDEA.

Or maybe it was that my character showed no remorse over people who got darwin'd that way.

I since came back to that game, but eventually got disgusted with the powergaming going on, and left again. Now I play Pathfinder on Saturday nights.