RandomLunatic
2014-06-13, 04:35 PM
…Because both of my shoulders are currently occupied by LE outsiders.
God I’m a nerd.
Slight vent warning. TL;DR version in the spoiler below if you are pressed for time.
****ty GM’s ****ty GMing drove me to quit his game. Is it worth the fallout of making things easier on his remaining players while also tweaking his nose out of joint?
So this group of guys I play with had one guy, whom I shall designate Sam in order to protect the innocent, pitched a neat campaign idea with a homebrew system. And so I was really excited when I joined.
Then the honeymoon ended and I gradually started realizing I was really upset with the way Sam was running the game.
For starters, Sam belongs to the school of DMing that is absolutely petrified that players will, if given any information at all, metagame the game into the ground. So combat that, Sam goes to positively insane lengths to keep players in the dark at all times. To give you an idea just how little Sam tells players, grab an RPG you have never played or even read before and open to the weapons table. Now cover up everything except the names of the weapons, and the prices for a small, random selection of weapons. The prices for the other weapons can be revealed by paying a small fee, but it will probably cost more than a comparable weapon with an already revealed price. The only way to reveal the stats of a weapon is to buy it, and even then, your ability to make sense of the data is limited to reading the abbreviations at the top of the table columns and guessing. This is how you buy gear in Sam’s games, and it is not even Sam at his craziest. In another campaign of his, which I was not in, he actively refused to tell players stuff their PCs not only should but needed to know, instead urging them to “figure it out!” While telling them no more than usual.
Sam is also nearly 100% resistant to player feedback. Usually he just ignores it in favor of letting The Old Guard jump down the throat of anyone making constructive criticism and call them five different kinds of dumbass. If he feels particularly verbose, he will point out that our modifications ignore the entire back end of the game (NO **** SHERLOCK, YOU BARELY LET US SEE THE FRONT!) and it would ruin everything forever. Two rounds of this was all it took to cure me of trying to improve the game at all.
Then there is his running of the sessions proper. Fights ranged in difficulty from very hard to friggin’ impossible, yet awarded almost no treasure or XP. We usually lost more than we gained. And seeing how almost every turn became a proof of Murphy’s Law, I cannot help but question if Sam was “cooking” the dice.
The part that got to me most, though, was the lying. On several occasions, while attempting to pry rulings for things I wanted to do out of Sam (which would be an excellent candidate for the 13th labor of Hercules), several times he straight up lied to me about the rule, and then when I got around to doing the thing, he sprung the correct rule on me, and adamantly refused to allow takebacks. I was very, very, pissed each time.
So I finally hit my breaking point, and decided to call in Captain Haveachat. I sent Sam an E-mail detailing the problems I was having, which is mostly a more detailed version of the things I just covered above, with less snark. I was not hopeful even as I wrote it (see “Not responsive to player input”), but Sam still managed to fall short of my expectations. Instead of trying to work things out privately, or even just a “put up or shut up” response, he publicly presented an extremely distorted version of my list to the group and wrote it off as, and I quote, “a hissy fit”. I will at least give him credit for not identifying the perpetrator.
Since he addressed a grand total of zero of the problems I had, I quit. Which finally brings me back around to my opening line. See, despite all of Sam’s efforts, I was able to reverse-engineer a non-insignificant portion of the system. I kept it under my hat because it gave me an edge, and since Sam seemed determined to screw me over at every opportunity, I needed all the edge I could get. Since I obviously no longer need it, it has occurred to me to give my notes to the other players. So I have one devil telling me to do it would make it easier for the other players and help prove a point I once made to Sam about how players knowing things is not the end of the world. The other shoulder has a devil telling me to do it because SCREW YOU SAM. SCREW. YOU.
What I lack is someone telling me to take the high road, and I am wondering if it is just because I am bad person or if Sam really sucks that badly.
God I’m a nerd.
Slight vent warning. TL;DR version in the spoiler below if you are pressed for time.
****ty GM’s ****ty GMing drove me to quit his game. Is it worth the fallout of making things easier on his remaining players while also tweaking his nose out of joint?
So this group of guys I play with had one guy, whom I shall designate Sam in order to protect the innocent, pitched a neat campaign idea with a homebrew system. And so I was really excited when I joined.
Then the honeymoon ended and I gradually started realizing I was really upset with the way Sam was running the game.
For starters, Sam belongs to the school of DMing that is absolutely petrified that players will, if given any information at all, metagame the game into the ground. So combat that, Sam goes to positively insane lengths to keep players in the dark at all times. To give you an idea just how little Sam tells players, grab an RPG you have never played or even read before and open to the weapons table. Now cover up everything except the names of the weapons, and the prices for a small, random selection of weapons. The prices for the other weapons can be revealed by paying a small fee, but it will probably cost more than a comparable weapon with an already revealed price. The only way to reveal the stats of a weapon is to buy it, and even then, your ability to make sense of the data is limited to reading the abbreviations at the top of the table columns and guessing. This is how you buy gear in Sam’s games, and it is not even Sam at his craziest. In another campaign of his, which I was not in, he actively refused to tell players stuff their PCs not only should but needed to know, instead urging them to “figure it out!” While telling them no more than usual.
Sam is also nearly 100% resistant to player feedback. Usually he just ignores it in favor of letting The Old Guard jump down the throat of anyone making constructive criticism and call them five different kinds of dumbass. If he feels particularly verbose, he will point out that our modifications ignore the entire back end of the game (NO **** SHERLOCK, YOU BARELY LET US SEE THE FRONT!) and it would ruin everything forever. Two rounds of this was all it took to cure me of trying to improve the game at all.
Then there is his running of the sessions proper. Fights ranged in difficulty from very hard to friggin’ impossible, yet awarded almost no treasure or XP. We usually lost more than we gained. And seeing how almost every turn became a proof of Murphy’s Law, I cannot help but question if Sam was “cooking” the dice.
The part that got to me most, though, was the lying. On several occasions, while attempting to pry rulings for things I wanted to do out of Sam (which would be an excellent candidate for the 13th labor of Hercules), several times he straight up lied to me about the rule, and then when I got around to doing the thing, he sprung the correct rule on me, and adamantly refused to allow takebacks. I was very, very, pissed each time.
So I finally hit my breaking point, and decided to call in Captain Haveachat. I sent Sam an E-mail detailing the problems I was having, which is mostly a more detailed version of the things I just covered above, with less snark. I was not hopeful even as I wrote it (see “Not responsive to player input”), but Sam still managed to fall short of my expectations. Instead of trying to work things out privately, or even just a “put up or shut up” response, he publicly presented an extremely distorted version of my list to the group and wrote it off as, and I quote, “a hissy fit”. I will at least give him credit for not identifying the perpetrator.
Since he addressed a grand total of zero of the problems I had, I quit. Which finally brings me back around to my opening line. See, despite all of Sam’s efforts, I was able to reverse-engineer a non-insignificant portion of the system. I kept it under my hat because it gave me an edge, and since Sam seemed determined to screw me over at every opportunity, I needed all the edge I could get. Since I obviously no longer need it, it has occurred to me to give my notes to the other players. So I have one devil telling me to do it would make it easier for the other players and help prove a point I once made to Sam about how players knowing things is not the end of the world. The other shoulder has a devil telling me to do it because SCREW YOU SAM. SCREW. YOU.
What I lack is someone telling me to take the high road, and I am wondering if it is just because I am bad person or if Sam really sucks that badly.