Foxhound438
2016-01-16, 07:18 PM
So a friend of mine decided to start up a campaign, and to get us started off he decided to use some pre-written adventure he found online: THE FIRES OF HEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLL
the thing starts you out by telling you to go find a thing in hell. Simple enough. However, it's not fun. it took us i think 7 session or so to finally complete it, and it was endless hours of the dm saying in the most uninteresting ways possible how uninteresting everything is. Literally. "You start day (x), and everything as far as you can see is flat ground with nothing on it." for days on end.
That's not even the worst though... the encounters... oh god, it gives me flashbacks of BCT... Not being screamed at by a DS or anything, flashbacks of barely keeping awake while some idiot lectures us for hours on stuff like the chain of command, and military housing options, and suicide prevention... For days and days and days and days and days all that happens is "some more of that same enemy you fought eighty times so far come up to you." and sure enough, the whole time it's endless hours of rolling the d20 and saying either "you hit" or "you don't hit" with no level interest or detail. The most static fights in the most bland terrain with the most unimaginative enemies you could think of... FOR HOOOUURRRRRS!!!!
Now that i'm done explaining how f***in boring this campaign has been, let me continue to tell you how it's made of bulls**t stacked on cows**t stacked on donkeys**t stacked on (etc to infinity).
The first freaking thing past waking up in hell, we go to some hell city and the guard apparently has a homebrewed weapon that deals 4d6+ something that i can't remember, and has a +10 to hit. Not having telepathy, one of the players assumed that this enemy would be defeatable. as level ones, this module throws you up against these kinds of hoops that only a hardcore metagamer would be able to accurately predict and deal with. The "intended course of railroading" was that the characters bribe the guy with gems that were given to the party at the start. Normally there would be an "easy way" and a "hard way", but here there was a "right way" and nothing else. Similar situations kept popping up everywhere we went, from 2 bone fiends asking you to show them some pass that we didn't have (after i nat 20'd an insight check when someone told us we needed a pass way back and the dm said he was lying) to the final dungeon being full to the brim with side rooms that contained treasure and literally impassable dangers, such as "you take a pile of d6's just for asking what's in that room" or "there's an ancient dragon guarding that". Literally every event in the thing was a test of "guess what i'm thinking", and a wrong guess now could f*** you later.
And now, we come to the final topic, the dm's own brand of bulls**t stacked on ()s**t.
He would give enemies surprise rounds for no reason. literally guy comes up ranting and raving and we have a conversation and SURPRISE HE GETS A FREE ROUND TO HIT YOU BECAUSE I WANT HIM TO!!! It's not even that irritating compared to some of the other stuff, but there it is. straight up "this happens because f*** you" type stuff.
If that wasn't enough, we finally got out of the bulls**t prewritten campaign part and now he can just make stuff up on a whim, and guess what? MORE GUESS WHAT IM THINKING GAME!!! 10 in-game days worth of only slightly less bland random encounters later and we find that the prominent feature on the map we wanted to go visit is permanently engulfed in "wall of fire" and there's an ancient red dragon there. So we decide to go to the next thing and sure enough, there's a really hard encounter followed by "go back to that railroad your dm didn't tell you he had planned out or you're going to be roflstomped by impossible encounters". Jesus, you'd think if he wanted us to do something specific he would give a f***ing story hook before we were 20 in-game days from where we were supposed to be. ffs, i'm half tempted to be "busy" during our d&d time until he can figure out how to be a dm.
By far the worst thing about this campaign so far... even more than weeks of bland unimaginative railroading thorough endless wastelands... EVERYTHING required multiple checks to do one thing, and EVERYTHING was decided by "roll-playing". For an example, in conversation i would say "i try to persuade him to do x" and even if i succeeded on a roll, he would have the npc stop a third of the way through whatever it was and say i had to do another check. no matter what. i would get a good roll to interrogate something and it would give a half-ass useless answer from it, and to get anything more useful i would have to do a second, third, fourth, fifth... etc check to to get anything relevant from anything, and if i failed one the dm wouldn't let me continue interrogating at all. I even succeed on a check to persuade a guy to hold up a deal we made and the dm's just like "the guy says he can but doesn't want to because he knows the guards of whateverseville won't let you hold him to it". f**king really? Multiple times were we like "let's just hide and not do this encounter we've already done five times" and if one person rolled below their passive perception, we had to fight (rather than having a group check), and if everyone rolled above it he would roll perception for every enemy there, and if ONE perception was higher than ONE stealth check... we had to fight. Not only that, but when he wanted his npc's to do something, he would just say "this guard restrains you" without offering any check against it. If i were to try that, it would be one check to stand next to it, one to reach out to it, one to grab it, one to remember how to do shove something to the ground, one to do so, one to move one arm behind its back, one to get the other behind its back, one to pull out a pair of handcuffs... you get it, and of course if i failed once it's permanent inability to restrain that creature. He would also arbitrarily chose whatever type of check you had to make based on what you're most likely to fail, like requiring an investigation check to perceive a creature in a bush, only because i have more wis than int.
tl;dr: don't run a premade adventure that's poorly written, don't run a premade adventure that's boring, don't make everything bland as bread and water, don't play the guess what i'm thinking game, and most of all don't f**king require 5 checks to do one simple thing. it's just irritating. "roll-playing" has its place, but there's certainly a wrong way to do it.
and most importantly of all, unless you're trying to get your players to not want to play with you anymore... don't run the fires of hell. anyone with any experience of decent quality gameplay will be incredibly unimpressed by it.
the thing starts you out by telling you to go find a thing in hell. Simple enough. However, it's not fun. it took us i think 7 session or so to finally complete it, and it was endless hours of the dm saying in the most uninteresting ways possible how uninteresting everything is. Literally. "You start day (x), and everything as far as you can see is flat ground with nothing on it." for days on end.
That's not even the worst though... the encounters... oh god, it gives me flashbacks of BCT... Not being screamed at by a DS or anything, flashbacks of barely keeping awake while some idiot lectures us for hours on stuff like the chain of command, and military housing options, and suicide prevention... For days and days and days and days and days all that happens is "some more of that same enemy you fought eighty times so far come up to you." and sure enough, the whole time it's endless hours of rolling the d20 and saying either "you hit" or "you don't hit" with no level interest or detail. The most static fights in the most bland terrain with the most unimaginative enemies you could think of... FOR HOOOUURRRRRS!!!!
Now that i'm done explaining how f***in boring this campaign has been, let me continue to tell you how it's made of bulls**t stacked on cows**t stacked on donkeys**t stacked on (etc to infinity).
The first freaking thing past waking up in hell, we go to some hell city and the guard apparently has a homebrewed weapon that deals 4d6+ something that i can't remember, and has a +10 to hit. Not having telepathy, one of the players assumed that this enemy would be defeatable. as level ones, this module throws you up against these kinds of hoops that only a hardcore metagamer would be able to accurately predict and deal with. The "intended course of railroading" was that the characters bribe the guy with gems that were given to the party at the start. Normally there would be an "easy way" and a "hard way", but here there was a "right way" and nothing else. Similar situations kept popping up everywhere we went, from 2 bone fiends asking you to show them some pass that we didn't have (after i nat 20'd an insight check when someone told us we needed a pass way back and the dm said he was lying) to the final dungeon being full to the brim with side rooms that contained treasure and literally impassable dangers, such as "you take a pile of d6's just for asking what's in that room" or "there's an ancient dragon guarding that". Literally every event in the thing was a test of "guess what i'm thinking", and a wrong guess now could f*** you later.
And now, we come to the final topic, the dm's own brand of bulls**t stacked on ()s**t.
He would give enemies surprise rounds for no reason. literally guy comes up ranting and raving and we have a conversation and SURPRISE HE GETS A FREE ROUND TO HIT YOU BECAUSE I WANT HIM TO!!! It's not even that irritating compared to some of the other stuff, but there it is. straight up "this happens because f*** you" type stuff.
If that wasn't enough, we finally got out of the bulls**t prewritten campaign part and now he can just make stuff up on a whim, and guess what? MORE GUESS WHAT IM THINKING GAME!!! 10 in-game days worth of only slightly less bland random encounters later and we find that the prominent feature on the map we wanted to go visit is permanently engulfed in "wall of fire" and there's an ancient red dragon there. So we decide to go to the next thing and sure enough, there's a really hard encounter followed by "go back to that railroad your dm didn't tell you he had planned out or you're going to be roflstomped by impossible encounters". Jesus, you'd think if he wanted us to do something specific he would give a f***ing story hook before we were 20 in-game days from where we were supposed to be. ffs, i'm half tempted to be "busy" during our d&d time until he can figure out how to be a dm.
By far the worst thing about this campaign so far... even more than weeks of bland unimaginative railroading thorough endless wastelands... EVERYTHING required multiple checks to do one thing, and EVERYTHING was decided by "roll-playing". For an example, in conversation i would say "i try to persuade him to do x" and even if i succeeded on a roll, he would have the npc stop a third of the way through whatever it was and say i had to do another check. no matter what. i would get a good roll to interrogate something and it would give a half-ass useless answer from it, and to get anything more useful i would have to do a second, third, fourth, fifth... etc check to to get anything relevant from anything, and if i failed one the dm wouldn't let me continue interrogating at all. I even succeed on a check to persuade a guy to hold up a deal we made and the dm's just like "the guy says he can but doesn't want to because he knows the guards of whateverseville won't let you hold him to it". f**king really? Multiple times were we like "let's just hide and not do this encounter we've already done five times" and if one person rolled below their passive perception, we had to fight (rather than having a group check), and if everyone rolled above it he would roll perception for every enemy there, and if ONE perception was higher than ONE stealth check... we had to fight. Not only that, but when he wanted his npc's to do something, he would just say "this guard restrains you" without offering any check against it. If i were to try that, it would be one check to stand next to it, one to reach out to it, one to grab it, one to remember how to do shove something to the ground, one to do so, one to move one arm behind its back, one to get the other behind its back, one to pull out a pair of handcuffs... you get it, and of course if i failed once it's permanent inability to restrain that creature. He would also arbitrarily chose whatever type of check you had to make based on what you're most likely to fail, like requiring an investigation check to perceive a creature in a bush, only because i have more wis than int.
tl;dr: don't run a premade adventure that's poorly written, don't run a premade adventure that's boring, don't make everything bland as bread and water, don't play the guess what i'm thinking game, and most of all don't f**king require 5 checks to do one simple thing. it's just irritating. "roll-playing" has its place, but there's certainly a wrong way to do it.
and most importantly of all, unless you're trying to get your players to not want to play with you anymore... don't run the fires of hell. anyone with any experience of decent quality gameplay will be incredibly unimpressed by it.