fergo
2015-02-10, 02:37 PM
Last night was the third session of an rpg (WFRP, if anyone’s interested) ran by my friend for me and two other guys. For the last week, since the previous (and very fun) session, he repeatedly mentioned that he was really looking forward to this session and that he had something really cool planned for us. It didn’t go exactly to plan.
Ok, ‘disastrous’ might be a little strong. Perhaps closer to “I really wanted toast for breakfast this morning but we ran out of bread,” than, “volcanic eruption,” on the universally accepted scale of disasters. But I think I’m right in saying that the session was disappointing for all of us, which I feel especially bad about because the GM seemed so excited about it beforehand, so I decided to post on here to see if anyone had any advice as to what I can learn from this session to make the future campaign more satisfying for everyone concerned.
Firstly, a small amount of background. Before this campaign, I ran my own campaign in the same setting, with the same players (plus a couple of others). The party as it stands has me (generally decent at close combat or shooting), a barbarian-type guy (good at close combat but pretty much nothing else—but is also resistant to magic, which will be relevant later), and a wizard (with almost no spells that are directly useful just yet). None of us are particularly good or evil—selfish and ruthless, perhaps, but we don’t kill people just for fun or anything like that.
I’ve pinpointed a few points that I think me and the other players were at fault, but I’ll save that for a comment so you guys (with far more RPing experience than any of us) can give feedback with as little bias as possible.
The Night Before
The last session ended with us falling asleep in a small fishing village. We were there to recover a scuppered ship on behalf of an alcoholic pirate NPC called ‘The Captain’. The mayor of the town said we could pay someone to do it for a large amount of gold (beyond our budget), but we decided to wait for a shipwright to come up from our Secret Pirate Base (TM) to do it for cheaper—we’ll still need the mayor’s cooperation to get supplies and access to the ship, though. Oh, and the GM has told us out-of-character that he intends for this ship to be the only ship we have access to this early in the game. So we have several days to kill while our shipwright arrives, and it’s time to end the session anyways—so we go to sleep.
Oh, and one more thing from the campaign so far: our GM has a nasty habit of throwing us into fights where we get our arses kicked (or at least don’t win as easily as he was expecting) and then complaining that our characters are no good in combat, and that we won’t stand a chance against some of the nastier foes he has planned for us. I chalked this up to him being new to GMing and having trouble balancing encounters against the strength of the party. However, he also tends to go on about how difficult he’s going to make our campaign and how we need to roll up back-up characters for when ours inevitably die—I’m not complaining about this per se, because it’s fun to have a real sense of danger in every combat, but coupled with the balancing issues it’s kind of worrying.
Who ya gonna call?
In classic roleplaying fashion, we wake up the next morning somewhere completely different, with strange magical rings on our fingers and with the ominous cackle of magic filling the air. So far, so good—all par for the course for a party of adventurers. I don’t know how anyone else would respond, but my instant priorities are (a) work out what’s going on and most importantly (b) get the hell out of here in one piece as soon as possible. (c), getting revenge on whoever or whatever put us in this position, is pretty far down the list right now, at least until I know we’re safe. I mean, we just woke up in some completely unfamiliar location with a magical ring we can’t remove on our fingers—we’re going to be bloody terrified. Oh yeah, and the wizard recognises the rings as the kind that will slowly turn us into mindless automatons. Lovely.
We wander around the city and talk to some people and quickly realise that we’re in a plague town we heard of last session—except everyone’s acting as if it’s just before the plague hit. To make matters worse, the barbarian is seeing things slightly differently—he’s seeing everything as slightly run down, and the people older than they look to me. Great! I’m starting to really get into the mystery of the thing.
We head to the city walls, but we physically can’t walk towards them without our rings contracting and causing us unbearable pain. We head away, find a private spot, and our wizard decides to chop off his own finger to remove the ring. Suddenly, he sees the city as it really is—tumbled-down houses, the stench of death in the air, and all of the people we talked to are zombies! Awesome!
He tries to cast a spell which sets off some alarm, and we get attacked by a swarm of zombies and skeletons. There are about twenty of them, so we run away—but it emerges that they’re only chasing the wizard. I fire an arrow, and suddenly they’ll all chasing me. I duck into a house and they stop chasing, but while I’m in there I meet an NPC from last session, completely out of the blue.
To make matters short, he’s one of the pirates from our Secret Pirate Base (TM) and he attacks me. I kill him and am told that if I don’t remove my ring immediately, I’m at risk of my Willpower characteristic being halved (basically making my character an almost braindead coward). So I chop off my finger as well, which I was trying to avoid because, you know, people don’t usually chop off their fingers as if it was nothing, and it is revealed that our NPC friend was a zombie, and looks like he was recently buried.
Ok, so everything’s pretty cool so far. Being forced into chopping off my finger is pretty mean, but fair enough. So what’s next?
An Unlikely Escape
In-character, want to try and leave the city again, now all of us are short a finger and are no longer affected by the rings. Out-of-character, I’m happy to be persuaded to investigate the castle at the centre of the town, as the wizard can sense bad magical mojo from thataway. Also, we gather there may be a vampire involved in this somehow.
We walk up to the castle. There are two well-armoured skeletons on the gate. Now, remember that apart from that one time we directly attacked them, everyone in the city has interacted with us as normal: so I decide to go up and try and talk to the skeletons. They instantly attack me.
Except these aren’t normal skeletons. They’re wights (not that our characters know what the difference is). I shoot one in the face and roll pretty high, and fail to do any noticeable damage.
That’s the most successful thing to happen that fight: although we all roll pretty well, the wights manage to block every attack we make, seriously wound me, and all but kill the barbarian. So we run away, again.
So… hmm. Well, nothing wrong with tough fights, or with being forced to run away. The party being reduced to minimal fighting effectiveness because our toughest member is almost dying sucks, but we can deal with that—it’s only a game, after all. I have to admit, though, the two other players seemed a bit frustrated. They weren’t necessarily directing this at the GM, but there was a slightly tense atmosphere.
So we head back to a ruined house to recuperate and plan. I fully intend in trying to leave again the next day, which should be a fight in itself—the walls are not only defended by the rings we had been wearing, but loads of skeletal guards. Also, we almost got killed by a couple of guards—we’re definitely not up for fighting a vampire or whatever else is in that castle.
Except we never get a chance to scout out the walls, make a plan to escape, or even take a shot at finding a slightly less direct route into the castle. In the middle of the night, a trapdoor opens in the middle of the room and out pops that alcoholic NPC I mentioned earlier, the Captain. He says that there’s a tunnel running all the way out of the town, and oh yeah, it was the mayor of the fishing village that betrayed us and sent us here, as he has a deal with the vampire to leave his people in peace. Never mind what are the odds that there just happens to be a secret tunnel out of there in the very house we’re sleeping in, or that a friendly NPC just happens to pop his head out while we were there…
In one stroke, the DM has robbed the story of all mechanical tension (we’ve lost every fight so far, but that’s ok, because this NPC will save us!) and all narrative tension (what is the mystery behind this place? How did we all get here? Where can we start investigations to find out? No worries, here’s a drunk idiot who knows all of the answers to these questions, who pops up exactly when he’s needed, and also forgot to mention the risk of the mayor betraying us when he sent us to the village in the first place!).
I would assume that this is all part of the plot and there’s a nefarious in-game reason for the Captain knowing all of this stuff and just happening to be there at that time, but, firstly, the GM later revealed that he couldn’t think of any other way for us to escape and so used the Captain, and secondly, it’s obvious out-of-character that he hopes that we’ll see the Captain as almost a fourth member of the party because he keeps on mentioning how he’s a secret badass and stuff.
I mean, if he was going to come up with a deus ex machine to save us, he could have at least came up with a really cool one, not just a random guy appearing and giving us an escape route.
And the Rest is History…
So we leave, of course, after having the wizard mentally scan for dangers. We come out on the other side of the walls and see a group of people entering the city further away. Well, maybe we should have, I don’t know, investigated them or something, but we’re kind of in a hurry to leave before anyone notices we’re gone, so we head back towards the village.
So, the other players want to go straight up to the mayor and kill him. I argue that it’s too dangerous, because we’ve lost every fight we’ve had so far, have no idea how tough the mayor is, or what other guards there may be around—we should just get out of there. Besides, remember that NPC I killed that turned out to be a zombie? He was meant to be back at our Secret Pirate Base (TM), so I suggest we return there to see if everything is all right.
Everything is all right there. The DM ends the session by talking about how we’re all terrible in combat, and I snarkily reply that if that’s the case, maybe my guy should just retire and take up a less dangerous profession than adventuring, since he’s obviously not cut out for it (which is nonsense, because he’s more or less above average for a starting PC). I also snap at the DM when we’re discussing other ways to get our hands on a ship, and he interrupts my suggested plan (to use our wizard’s ability to summon lights to make it look like a ship is floundering at night time, and draw some slavers into a trap—admittedly, it was more complicated than it needed to be, but it sounded fun to me) by suggesting that we just go to a random port city and steal one (because that’s not a fantastic way to get blasted to pieces by every other ship there). I shouldn’t have got frustrated, but I don’t think it’s a DM’s place to ridicule a player’s plans unless it’s completely off the rails and stupid.
Playground... I'm genuinely feeling bad about this. I just came out of running a campaign myself and know how frustrating it is when players mess up your well-laid plans. But, apart from us getting a little frustrated by our bad luck (or our enemies' good luck) in combat, I really can't see what else we could have done to make the session go better--unless our GM had some very specific idea about what we were meant to do upon waking that we completely failed to do.
Do you feel we acted badly or out-of-character, insofar as you can tell from this account? Should we have taken a more proactive approach to investigation, instead of just trying to leave? What can I take away from this session to make the campaign more enjoyable for all of us?
Ok, ‘disastrous’ might be a little strong. Perhaps closer to “I really wanted toast for breakfast this morning but we ran out of bread,” than, “volcanic eruption,” on the universally accepted scale of disasters. But I think I’m right in saying that the session was disappointing for all of us, which I feel especially bad about because the GM seemed so excited about it beforehand, so I decided to post on here to see if anyone had any advice as to what I can learn from this session to make the future campaign more satisfying for everyone concerned.
Firstly, a small amount of background. Before this campaign, I ran my own campaign in the same setting, with the same players (plus a couple of others). The party as it stands has me (generally decent at close combat or shooting), a barbarian-type guy (good at close combat but pretty much nothing else—but is also resistant to magic, which will be relevant later), and a wizard (with almost no spells that are directly useful just yet). None of us are particularly good or evil—selfish and ruthless, perhaps, but we don’t kill people just for fun or anything like that.
I’ve pinpointed a few points that I think me and the other players were at fault, but I’ll save that for a comment so you guys (with far more RPing experience than any of us) can give feedback with as little bias as possible.
The Night Before
The last session ended with us falling asleep in a small fishing village. We were there to recover a scuppered ship on behalf of an alcoholic pirate NPC called ‘The Captain’. The mayor of the town said we could pay someone to do it for a large amount of gold (beyond our budget), but we decided to wait for a shipwright to come up from our Secret Pirate Base (TM) to do it for cheaper—we’ll still need the mayor’s cooperation to get supplies and access to the ship, though. Oh, and the GM has told us out-of-character that he intends for this ship to be the only ship we have access to this early in the game. So we have several days to kill while our shipwright arrives, and it’s time to end the session anyways—so we go to sleep.
Oh, and one more thing from the campaign so far: our GM has a nasty habit of throwing us into fights where we get our arses kicked (or at least don’t win as easily as he was expecting) and then complaining that our characters are no good in combat, and that we won’t stand a chance against some of the nastier foes he has planned for us. I chalked this up to him being new to GMing and having trouble balancing encounters against the strength of the party. However, he also tends to go on about how difficult he’s going to make our campaign and how we need to roll up back-up characters for when ours inevitably die—I’m not complaining about this per se, because it’s fun to have a real sense of danger in every combat, but coupled with the balancing issues it’s kind of worrying.
Who ya gonna call?
In classic roleplaying fashion, we wake up the next morning somewhere completely different, with strange magical rings on our fingers and with the ominous cackle of magic filling the air. So far, so good—all par for the course for a party of adventurers. I don’t know how anyone else would respond, but my instant priorities are (a) work out what’s going on and most importantly (b) get the hell out of here in one piece as soon as possible. (c), getting revenge on whoever or whatever put us in this position, is pretty far down the list right now, at least until I know we’re safe. I mean, we just woke up in some completely unfamiliar location with a magical ring we can’t remove on our fingers—we’re going to be bloody terrified. Oh yeah, and the wizard recognises the rings as the kind that will slowly turn us into mindless automatons. Lovely.
We wander around the city and talk to some people and quickly realise that we’re in a plague town we heard of last session—except everyone’s acting as if it’s just before the plague hit. To make matters worse, the barbarian is seeing things slightly differently—he’s seeing everything as slightly run down, and the people older than they look to me. Great! I’m starting to really get into the mystery of the thing.
We head to the city walls, but we physically can’t walk towards them without our rings contracting and causing us unbearable pain. We head away, find a private spot, and our wizard decides to chop off his own finger to remove the ring. Suddenly, he sees the city as it really is—tumbled-down houses, the stench of death in the air, and all of the people we talked to are zombies! Awesome!
He tries to cast a spell which sets off some alarm, and we get attacked by a swarm of zombies and skeletons. There are about twenty of them, so we run away—but it emerges that they’re only chasing the wizard. I fire an arrow, and suddenly they’ll all chasing me. I duck into a house and they stop chasing, but while I’m in there I meet an NPC from last session, completely out of the blue.
To make matters short, he’s one of the pirates from our Secret Pirate Base (TM) and he attacks me. I kill him and am told that if I don’t remove my ring immediately, I’m at risk of my Willpower characteristic being halved (basically making my character an almost braindead coward). So I chop off my finger as well, which I was trying to avoid because, you know, people don’t usually chop off their fingers as if it was nothing, and it is revealed that our NPC friend was a zombie, and looks like he was recently buried.
Ok, so everything’s pretty cool so far. Being forced into chopping off my finger is pretty mean, but fair enough. So what’s next?
An Unlikely Escape
In-character, want to try and leave the city again, now all of us are short a finger and are no longer affected by the rings. Out-of-character, I’m happy to be persuaded to investigate the castle at the centre of the town, as the wizard can sense bad magical mojo from thataway. Also, we gather there may be a vampire involved in this somehow.
We walk up to the castle. There are two well-armoured skeletons on the gate. Now, remember that apart from that one time we directly attacked them, everyone in the city has interacted with us as normal: so I decide to go up and try and talk to the skeletons. They instantly attack me.
Except these aren’t normal skeletons. They’re wights (not that our characters know what the difference is). I shoot one in the face and roll pretty high, and fail to do any noticeable damage.
That’s the most successful thing to happen that fight: although we all roll pretty well, the wights manage to block every attack we make, seriously wound me, and all but kill the barbarian. So we run away, again.
So… hmm. Well, nothing wrong with tough fights, or with being forced to run away. The party being reduced to minimal fighting effectiveness because our toughest member is almost dying sucks, but we can deal with that—it’s only a game, after all. I have to admit, though, the two other players seemed a bit frustrated. They weren’t necessarily directing this at the GM, but there was a slightly tense atmosphere.
So we head back to a ruined house to recuperate and plan. I fully intend in trying to leave again the next day, which should be a fight in itself—the walls are not only defended by the rings we had been wearing, but loads of skeletal guards. Also, we almost got killed by a couple of guards—we’re definitely not up for fighting a vampire or whatever else is in that castle.
Except we never get a chance to scout out the walls, make a plan to escape, or even take a shot at finding a slightly less direct route into the castle. In the middle of the night, a trapdoor opens in the middle of the room and out pops that alcoholic NPC I mentioned earlier, the Captain. He says that there’s a tunnel running all the way out of the town, and oh yeah, it was the mayor of the fishing village that betrayed us and sent us here, as he has a deal with the vampire to leave his people in peace. Never mind what are the odds that there just happens to be a secret tunnel out of there in the very house we’re sleeping in, or that a friendly NPC just happens to pop his head out while we were there…
In one stroke, the DM has robbed the story of all mechanical tension (we’ve lost every fight so far, but that’s ok, because this NPC will save us!) and all narrative tension (what is the mystery behind this place? How did we all get here? Where can we start investigations to find out? No worries, here’s a drunk idiot who knows all of the answers to these questions, who pops up exactly when he’s needed, and also forgot to mention the risk of the mayor betraying us when he sent us to the village in the first place!).
I would assume that this is all part of the plot and there’s a nefarious in-game reason for the Captain knowing all of this stuff and just happening to be there at that time, but, firstly, the GM later revealed that he couldn’t think of any other way for us to escape and so used the Captain, and secondly, it’s obvious out-of-character that he hopes that we’ll see the Captain as almost a fourth member of the party because he keeps on mentioning how he’s a secret badass and stuff.
I mean, if he was going to come up with a deus ex machine to save us, he could have at least came up with a really cool one, not just a random guy appearing and giving us an escape route.
And the Rest is History…
So we leave, of course, after having the wizard mentally scan for dangers. We come out on the other side of the walls and see a group of people entering the city further away. Well, maybe we should have, I don’t know, investigated them or something, but we’re kind of in a hurry to leave before anyone notices we’re gone, so we head back towards the village.
So, the other players want to go straight up to the mayor and kill him. I argue that it’s too dangerous, because we’ve lost every fight we’ve had so far, have no idea how tough the mayor is, or what other guards there may be around—we should just get out of there. Besides, remember that NPC I killed that turned out to be a zombie? He was meant to be back at our Secret Pirate Base (TM), so I suggest we return there to see if everything is all right.
Everything is all right there. The DM ends the session by talking about how we’re all terrible in combat, and I snarkily reply that if that’s the case, maybe my guy should just retire and take up a less dangerous profession than adventuring, since he’s obviously not cut out for it (which is nonsense, because he’s more or less above average for a starting PC). I also snap at the DM when we’re discussing other ways to get our hands on a ship, and he interrupts my suggested plan (to use our wizard’s ability to summon lights to make it look like a ship is floundering at night time, and draw some slavers into a trap—admittedly, it was more complicated than it needed to be, but it sounded fun to me) by suggesting that we just go to a random port city and steal one (because that’s not a fantastic way to get blasted to pieces by every other ship there). I shouldn’t have got frustrated, but I don’t think it’s a DM’s place to ridicule a player’s plans unless it’s completely off the rails and stupid.
Playground... I'm genuinely feeling bad about this. I just came out of running a campaign myself and know how frustrating it is when players mess up your well-laid plans. But, apart from us getting a little frustrated by our bad luck (or our enemies' good luck) in combat, I really can't see what else we could have done to make the session go better--unless our GM had some very specific idea about what we were meant to do upon waking that we completely failed to do.
Do you feel we acted badly or out-of-character, insofar as you can tell from this account? Should we have taken a more proactive approach to investigation, instead of just trying to leave? What can I take away from this session to make the campaign more enjoyable for all of us?