Where it all fell apart

[Typhon]

I was curious, and because I don't care to see more arguments. What was the best campaign you were involved with that just fell apart and what was the reason?

I was in one that was going well, and the campaign had already been going on for about a year. Then the DM decided he wanted to do some time travel stuff that was more about his DMPC overarching story and just kind of directed the whole group in that direction. At that point if you weren't involved with worshiping some deity or a magic user you pretty much got shorted for rp involvement. Not long after we had a female join our group, which was cool, but she became an avatar of a goddess in 3 sessions and a commander of our groups army shortly after that. I argued that I wanted to break from my original character as it didn't fit in anymore with where the campaign and group where going, but just got written off here and there. Eventually I was reduced to just shy of a cardboard cutout and blocked from becoming anything else. I hung around to see the resolution, which was rather underwhelming and very cliched. Needless to say, if I had known then the direction it was going to go I would have dropped out of it.

[SpamCreateWater]

Started with a new group - didn't know anyone. Turned out to be really cool people. An involved DM and excitable players who were there for a good time.
We decided on a fantasy theme as some had just come off a scifi campaign and weren't keen to go back to the stars.

The starting town was interesting, very cool interplay between factions and a lot of mystery. Our characters grew up and we moved on, found out there was more to the world - until this time we'd thought we were in the last habitable zone in the world.
We noticed a few odd things - but passed them off as ancient civilisations.
Got to a large city. Wow. So much to do. We didn't even get through 1% of it - barely saw 1/3 of the city - until we had to leave.
Leave where? Back. Back to one of the odd things we noticed on our trip here.

Turns out they were spaceships. And all of a sudden we were fighting for universal survival. After specifically being asked what we wanted to do and choosing not to do that.
We muddled through, but it wasn't the same. Our characters did not belong there, and after we saved the universe from one threat the campaign just fell apart.

[Dudewithknives]

Back right before 3.5 came out I started playing D&D, by coincidence the group I joined wee starting a new campaign at the time. To sum it up, the Lovecraftien mythos and deities invade the forgotten realms. To this day the most plot rich and detailed campaign I have ever been in, or even read published.

The GM was also a professional artist and a part time writer. He took very detailed notes and turned our game into a running novel complete with illustrations of key eventa.

The game was built to end 2 games after we hit level 20.

When we were level 18, on game session number 94, an argument got started between the player of the party crazy broken wizard with like 4 prestige classes and the party bard after the wizard killed him when he nuked a group of mooks we could have killed in our sleep.

The wizard player essentially went off on how his broken character was just carrying our "useless exp leeches" and how nothing in the game or anything the gm could do mattered because every fight was just a joke. Despite the fact that of the 5 players 3 of the other including mine were just as powerful. We're were role players he was a roll player.

Needless to say, in the next big fight bought it in round 2, because the gm was even better at min maxing than he was.

Wizard player blew up, and unfortunately it was his house. GM got mega pissed and the game died. The novel was trashed, a 4 year campaign died just as the last arc started.

Not only that but all the gamers that hung out there picked sides and split up, 7 of us sided with the wizard, 4 of us sided with the GM, and 5 just plain quit gaming.

[FreddyNoNose]

I was curious, and because I don't care to see more arguments. What was the best campaign you were involved with that just fell apart and what was the reason?

I was in one that was going well, and the campaign had already been going on for about a year. Then the DM decided he wanted to do some time travel stuff that was more about his DMPC overarching story and just kind of directed the whole group in that direction. At that point if you weren't involved with worshiping some deity or a magic user you pretty much got shorted for rp involvement. Not long after we had a female join our group, which was cool, but she became an avatar of a goddess in 3 sessions and a commander of our groups army shortly after that. I argued that I wanted to break from my original character as it didn't fit in anymore with where the campaign and group where going, but just got written off here and there. Eventually I was reduced to just shy of a cardboard cutout and blocked from becoming anything else. I hung around to see the resolution, which was rather underwhelming and very cliched. Needless to say, if I had known then the direction it was going to go I would have dropped out of it.

One of the best campaigns I was lucky to play in was run by the late great Craig Rickman.

[suplee215]

It was a very fun first 5 levels of a campaign. My character was formerly an oath of the ancients paladin entertainer who worshiped the homebrew goddess of death (a satry from previous campaigns). The characters learned that the current gods (all npcs or players from the previous campaigns) locked away the other gods, or delayed their appearance on this new world. But the old gods arrived. The pantheon of the 'native' gods killed off all the heroes of legends walking around to control the chaos as they warred with the other gods. This did not sit well with my character (who took the "inspire light in others, be the light, etc." of his tenants to tell stories of the heroes of this land) who went along with the party to look for the gods and figure out was going on. After not finding them at their abandoned castle, we ran into Loki. THe norse were taking over the land my character called home. At this point, Harley (the paladin) did not feel enough faith in the goddess of death to defend her to a pagan god and denounced her when given the choice between that and a quick death. My character saw it less as betraying his god and more like he was already betrayed. I became an Oath of Treachery paladin worshiping Loki (who I never trusted, but I knew I'll never trust a god again and at least Loki told me I shouldn't trust him). Other characters had their own storyarcs and it felt fun. Then we ran into Dionysus. Who killed 2 party members who back talked. And then a guy who is relatively new to the store and still needed help every time he ahd to make a new character, cast spell (always played a spell caster), or did anything semi complicated that wasn't just copying what someone else did insulted Dionysus again. And that was my first TPK. O well, Hartley got to go to Vahalla and fight the endless battle and drink in hall of heroes. But that could have gotten epic.

[Hrugner]

It was a sort of standard D&D game with 3.5 rules I think. The king's children all competing for the throne with a couple of characters as escorts and judges to determine who was most fit to rule in their adventures. As the game progressed and the character's abilities became more complicated, it rapidly become apparent that the DM didn't know how anything really worked past level 6. A couple who was in the game broke up and three characters left the game, both members of the couple and the girl's friend. At around this time the king's children were brought back for judgement and ruled unworthy leaving one of the judges as retainer and replacing all the judge characters with teachers. The two remaining teachers were both full caster types and ended up dominating encounters from there on out. The DM tried ending the game by putting the players up against increasingly difficult combats eventually just making monsters immune to abilities, moving them around randomly and killing players with unknown attacks with him rolling saves in secret.

It wasn't satisfying.

[Zman]

Was DMing an awesome game for a year and a half or so. It was winding down around level 10 and ended when the party had an epic confrontation with the BBEG to save the day and faced a TPK.

More accurately I could say the campaign ended when the Bard and only healer ate a disintegrate turn one and was turned to a pile of ash... the rest of the party followed him to the grave shortly thereafter. Luckily their actions prior to the conflict ultimately saved the region post humorously. I even wrote a pretty poetic eulogy that their favorite bartender spread after the fact.

I could say it is still going in a sense, as the word has continued and the new party is paying a different area of the work about four decades later.

[Mortis_Elrod]

Let me preface this with how my standard group usually loses interests in games fairly quickly and it frustrates me to no end. I should definitely get another one, but I've been trying for a few months without much success.

The best campaign we had wasn't even D&D. It was Star Wars Edge of the Empire (with a bit of F&D). It spanned almost a year before a long hiatus and when we got back to it we slapped together an ending. But since that has an ending i guess it shouldn't count. So instead let me talk about our Masks campaign.

If you've never played Masks before imagine that someone saw mutants and masterminds, and the other superhero RPGS and decided 'Thats too much. I just want a nice story" Boom Masks was made. It has the players be a new team of crime fighting teenagers, much like the Teen Titans and similar groups. Its a game about character and story development above all else. Our DM for this one (we switch alot) was our groups best comic book historian, with a good handle on the mechanics of the game (which there are barely any) and big ol universe filled with villains and heroes and various plots and subplots that we would be plunging into. Like alot of our games it started off well, and quickly became somehting we all looked forward to. We had played Mutants and Masterminds before and this was a cool chance to play our characters when they first emerged. Not all of us did this but I did, since I really really enjoyed my character before.

I was the Delinquent, a young detective with psychic weapons and teleportation. My characters name was Gumshoe, and I was infused with the spirit of Veracity, always searching for the truth. I played him very much like a Question mixed with Rorschach mixed with Nightcrawler with a slight Ghost Rider background. In the Mutants and Masterminds campaign the same character was more of a mutant with a connection to the Concept of Purple, which is where the powers came from, He was named Sleuth. M&M is a weird and broken game so i took advantage of it at the time but if I were to flesh my character out more it end up something like i did in Masks.

Anyway, as we played the game we got a few more people interested in playing. Now the DM didn't mind but we were in the middle of a big story arc so it needed to wait till after. After the arc was done my character needed to go underground, he had upset some things and the magic police were coming after him for it, he bid the team goodbye and bamfd away. So i made a new character who used to be a villain but now is a good guy, with powers over the element of Earth. In the previous story arc the team had to deal with the reckless decisions they made and the consequences. The city didn't like them much and neither did the Big League heroes. So i figured it would be cool to be a fresh perspective and show how non heroic the team was acting via the mind of a previous villain.

The part when it all fell apart was when we had 9 people all playing together (including DM) split the party, and then proceeded to argue the whole time. I know alot of build up for nothing, but thats what the campaign was too. DM was not feeling it anymore and nobody else had a story they wanted so we just stopped. And honestly we haven't played many ttrpgs since.

there goes another good character idea, wasted.

[Sindeloke]

Back in 3.5, I was DMing a very generic homebrew world, with my players running a half-elf ranger, half-dragon fighter, human sorceror, half-celestial rogue, and half-orc paladin (I had a name for the campaign but we ended up calling it "Halfsies"). It was my first time DMing and I didn't really know what I was doing, but I tried to err on the side of "let the players do fun things," and they were all pretty creative and engaged, so it mostly went pretty well. They liberated a small town from a tyrannical mayor, beat up a gnoll warlord and sent his army packing, and accidentally started a religion when their boat passed by a lizardfolk colony. We were all having a good time, and they all had goals they were working toward long-term that I was trying to slowly let them work toward.

Then there was a bad fight with some undead, a couple bad rolls, and the sorceror died. The players were too low-level to do anything about it, so she rerolled. The party had had some trouble due to lacking a dedicated healer, so she decided she would play a trickster domain kender cleric.

Y'all can probably see where this is going.

I was a noob DM with no context, so I was like "sure you can play one of these, I'll figure out where they fit in the setting as we go." And thus began my first experience with Chaotic Stupid. She stole from allies, she stole from party members, she pulled dangerous pranks on people whose good will she and the party depended on, she refused to give things back when she was caught, she never tried to eatablish any long-term goals or what I guess you'd call "bonds" now for me to work with her on, she did lolrandom nonsense in combat and got mad at me when I tried to enforce actual in-game consequences on her character because "everyone knows kender are just big kids and they wouldn't be angry."

To keep the peace in our group of friends, I just started kind of having NPCs ignore everything she did, but it sucked the life out of the game for me, along with the paladin and rogue. And the ranger, who was dating the kender player, kept getting upset with me for not roleplaying with her. Eventually it blew up into a big fight at the table and, despite the efforts of the fighter to mediate, just completely wrecked our whole social circle.

And she was a really good, cooperative player as the sorceror. One stupid 4 on a Reflex save cost me two friends.

[Ionsniper]

Ive mentioned it here a time or two but Ill give a more detailed story here. Seems like the best place to post it. It is a bit long winded but worth the read I think.

So about four years ago I was in a pretty bad spot overall and needed something to help break the abysmal situation I was in. Well as luck would have it my friend who had scoured Craigslist for a D&D game he could play had found one on the opposite end of town. An hour drive away. We mailed em and they gave us the details of the game and we rolled up characters and had em finalized before we went out there. So we drove for about an hour or more to the game one sunday and met our DM. Great guy named Steve and he was running 3.5 at the time. Anyway we run a few rounds of combat to see how much of the game we knew and Steve is suprised by how much I know despite being realtively new to the game. Im running a Red Half Dragon Human Sorcadin, and my friend is running an elf ranger. We meet the others in the group being Steves wife Misty, the home owner Sean, and the guy who posted the add named Richard. Seems they lost 2 other players due to circumstances.

Anyway early into the game my other friend stops showing up saying its too far for him to drive to. I keep going for another two years playing the game with them. It was absolutely amazing. It will be the most awesome, and spectacular and amazing game I will ever have the pleasure of being apart of till the end of time. We had come into the game at around lvl 8 I think and they were pretty into the game at this time. Richard had already changed races like 2 times already. Within the first few sessions I had an ancient artifact sword I had to build up, and had a prismatic dragon mount. Steve didnt mind giving out super crazy awesome gear and there was always consequnces for every decision we made. The best sum of loot we ever got was when we had to kill a group of fully equipped "Teddy Bears" called Promedi which was a custom race he had created for the game. (The game was heavily homebrewed with races and classes and abilitie but adhered to strict 3.5 rules). Steve had been running the game world for almost 20 years before I showed up and actions that previous players had taken were still affecting the game world the day I came in. Some PC's had become NPC's by that time. It was an epic world with a real drawn out history that he kept in his head. He had really good memory when it came his world and how things interacted. Changing politics and alliances, basics stats and abilities for most of his important NPC's. It was all just in his head.

After much adventuring we finally left the small pocket plane we had been trapped in SOOOO much stronger than when we had started. I was an ancient class called a Spell Blade which hadnt been seen for a millenia, I basically used The Force (Air Psionics) to wield 8 swords at the same time, had a Prismatic Dragon mount, a sword that could permanetly kill anything, even gods, abilities with the Spell Blade class that were overpowered as all heck. He basically gave me everything that I could have wanted in a character and was well on the way to getting even more. It was a literal dream come true. He allowed you to do anything you wanted in the game within certain limits. If you wanted to create a spell to destroy all life on a planet or a plane you could, but youd have to research it and design the spell over time. There was always consequences to any actions though. For me, I played my character very humble and never asking for anything more than what I needed, I tried to play him as close to how I think I would be in a world like that. I was rewarded greatly for this and even impressed many of the higher powers in the game. Richard on the other hand was constantly abusing his allies with stupid requests that were beneath them and just making a mess of himself. While I asked for nothing and was rewarded greatly for it, he asked for everything and was eventually punished for it by ending up human and with no real gear and having not only burned the bridges but used C4 to detonate the bridges and make sure they could never be mended. Him and I had a real rivalry going on in game and I knew that one day I was going to have to kill his character. We even managed to completely change his world by creating a new god for his small pantheon. A certain NPC was supposed to die to a Death Knight mounted on a dragon, however since we intervened and backed up the paladin and kept her from dieing, her righteous act along with a secret power she had inherited led to her becoming deified in front of us. That one battle would have lasting reprecussions in the game.

By this time we took a break since 5th edition had started and played a side game to get two new people who had joined us into the game and get them leveled up. We had plans to move everything over to 5th at some point because it seemed easier to play with and more in line with the style Steve had imagined. So weve played a few weeks of 5th and the new campaign before the holidays had started to roll around. I was working retail at the time and this kinda drove our game to go on a kind of hiatus for a while. We played when we could but I wasnt really able to get off on most Sundays which is the day we played. I did manage to make it out there occasionally and talk with Steve a good bit sometimes but work always brought me back. Sadly these last few times were the last times I would get to see him and his wife Misty. Never saw any signs or warnings when I talked to either of them that was something wrong. However sometime in January both Steve and his Wife commited suicide together. Dont know the reasons why as they left no note or anything and things seemed to be going good for them at the time. He helped me get through a bad part of my life with D&D and I'll always thank him for that. He was a good close friend and I miss them both dearly. Sadly our group kinda disbanded after that. Dont really talk to any of that group much anymore. They were great friends and a Dungeon Master anyone would have been proud to call theirs. I know I am.

[Beelzebubba]

The main host divorced his wife after finding out she was cheating on him with one of his friends and co-workers. The drama was a bit too much in their house to game for a while.

Then, he started dating a new hot girl, and started board gaming with her and all her hot friends.

As disappointed as I am - that was the best group I'd had up until that point - I can't blame him at all. His first wife and friend ripped his heart out, and he really needed a break in life.

[MOLOKH]

The last few years I've played I've noticed that as long as my players have an actual quest to follow, everything's going fine. The moment I give them a little bit more leeway - for istance let them choose from a bunch of options how to proceed, or put them in a big city and have them explore it and do their own thing, or have them working toward a more abstract final goal with no clear plothooks leading towards it, the game quickly grinds to a halt and becomes tedious and unproductive.

This is kind of weird, because some of my players have on multiple occasions claimed that they hate railroading and prefer to have more freedom, but the moment they get it they don't know what to do with it and just go on murderous rampages.

[Chugger]

DM began pressuring players to attack each other. It fell apart.

[Typhon]

I just want to thank everyone that has shared their stories. I would also like to express my sympathies, no matter how belated, to those who had games fall apart do to the passing of a group member. I think this has been a nice change from the more argumentative threads. So thank you all for your input.

[mephnick]

.
This is kind of weird, because some of my players have on multiple occasions claimed that they hate railroading and prefer to have more freedom, but the moment they get it they don't know what to do with it.

Players have no idea what they actually like. People will say a good story is all they care about and then will light up over combat and check out during campaign decision making. I keep track of who engages with what and then write it down for myself.

[Sigreid]

The last few years I've played I've noticed that as long as my players have an actual quest to follow, everything's going fine. The moment I give them a little bit more leeway - for istance let them choose from a bunch of options how to proceed, or put them in a big city and have them explore it and do their own thing, or have them working toward a more abstract final goal with no clear plothooks leading towards it, the game quickly grinds to a halt and becomes tedious and unproductive.

This is kind of weird, because some of my players have on multiple occasions claimed that they hate railroading and prefer to have more freedom, but the moment they get it they don't know what to do with it and just go on murderous rampages.

I've had DMs say they appreciate that while I don't always their plot lines, if I'm in the party they can rest assured that I will make something happen.

[Ionsniper]

Same with my group. I was usually the one making decisions for what the group needed to do. I wasn't even the so called leader of the group. That belonged to the angel/paladin in our group that would spend half his time on the phone. He always called his character a charismatic leader and decision maker but never actually did anything. Kinda sad. Our DM gave us as much freedom as we wanted but always reminded us that time was still going forward and the enemy advancing their plans. I just personally love freedom.

[90sMusic]

I've told this story a few times because it burns my biscuits.

I was playing Pathfinder in a campaign that had been going over a year. Good group of folks, everyone was having a good time. We had a great mix of combat and RP, some games were nothing but RP and others were nothing but combat, it was more an immersive experience from a realistic perspective than trying to squeeze everything into every session for the sake of it being there for the sake of it "being a game".

So we had done a lot of really amazing things, had become really well renowned in the area and life was just going along swimmingly really, everyone having a great time.

During one session we randomly stumbled upon some sort of magical key and through some arcana checks we learned we needed to use this with a portal ring to see where it went to. We had seen a couple of these portal rings before, and there was one in the capital city so we just went there and opened the portal.

That is when everything fell apart.

DM said that time stopped for everything in our world, except for us. We tried closing the portal, but time didn't start up again, it was all locked down. We tried leaving the area to see if we could go kill some monsters frozen in time or loot their hoards but for whatever DM fiat BS reason, we couldn't get more than 60 feet from this portal before everything started to kind of fade away into nothingness. This was a strange turn of events because we were being hardcore railroaded into going into this portal with no way out of it, which was something we had never experienced in the campaign up to this point since everything was very open ended.

So we finally gave up and went inside. Once inside, we discovered that it was a parallel dimension where everything's alignment seemed to be reversed. The city's paladins were now antipaladins, all the random citizens were evil, and it was a very dark place. We had no direction, no idea what to do except try to restart time in our own reality somehow. So we wandered around and eventually was noticed by guards since we were in the heart of the capital city and there are guards everywhere.

They weren't too difficult to defeat, but they just kept coming and coming and coming, and every fight cost resources including but not limited to hitpoints. We ended up fighting a mythic boss, barely surviving, having expended most of our resources, and we decided to try to find a place to hide and rest.

That is when the bull**** really kicked into high gear. The DM kept making up excuses as to why we couldn't rest or sleep or whatever. Then when we kept coming up with new ideas to get around the crap he was trying to pull on us, he just straight up told us that he wasn't going to let us rest or sleep while we were in that world. So he basically just abused his position to try to screw us over. We still had no idea what to do to fix our own reality and we were heavily injured, low on spell slots, and so on.

Now during this whole stint in this alternate dimension, we all had this running theory that maybe if someone died in this world, they might also die in our world too, so we were trying not to go full blown murder-spree. We finally decided we needed help and the best idea we could come up with was to talk to the nega versions of ourselves from this backwards reality. Our reasoning was basically that they should come to the same conclusion that we did about dying in one reality causing the death of the corresponding person in the other reality, and putting ourselves in the shoes of our evil selves we sat around thinking about it and agreed that even if we were evil, we wouldn't risk hurting our alternate selves for fear it would kill us and it would be better to just send them back to their own reality to ensure there were no complications.

So using logic and our knowledge of ourselves and how our characters think and act, we were pretty confident our otherselves would help us, but to be 100% certain we cast a divination spell of some sort (i forget the name of the spells in pathfinder) that let us ask a yes or no question that would yield an accurate and truthful result. We asked if the versions of us from this reality would attack us or try to harm us, the spell said no. So at this point we felt confident enough to go make contact.

So we went to our own group house and went in to meet ourselves. Every one of us was a monster version of ourselves. Mine was a succubus, one of them was a skeleton, one was a werewolf, I forget the other. At any rate, these *******s immediately wanted to attack us and capture us. To make matters worse, they had the same class levels and powers/abilities we did because they were copies of us, but they were at full hitpoints and full spell slots because they hadn't been fighting all day long AND they had additional features and powers and resistances because they were monsters. We stood absolutely no chance at beating them, so we tried running away instead and of course we didn't get far because they had all of our abilities and were calling more guards to come after us constantly as well.

So anyway, they finally killed one of us, then captured the rest of us and executed us all the next day and that was the end of the party.

Everyone was super pissed because we were railroaded into this unwinnable situation and the DM abused his position to screw us over every step of the way. He just said we couldn't rest, for no reason, because he didn't want us to recover hitpoints or spell slots. He gave us false information from that divination spell, despite the fact it should've been true. He made our alternate selves decide that killing us was completely fine and not dangerous or risky at all, something we all felt strongly against. Logically they should've come to the same conclusion we did about the risks to killing our other selves, alignment shouldn't reduce or alter their intelligence. And making us fight them with their full abilities and us in our weakened state, we were doomed to failure.

Then after we all died, he blamed US for it, saying it was all our fault for making bad decisions.

Everyone was pissed but we decided to roll up new characters to continue since we had already sank over a year into the game. But the DM told us he was making new rules suddenly for new characters. He was drastically reducing our ability scores, making a bunch of houserules to make magic weaker, removing all of our mythic abilities and potential, etc. Then he said that because our characters died in that other place, we were erased from existence entirely. So no one had any memory of us, all of our accomplishments in the world were accredited to other people, and so on.

So we were all understandably upset and after fighting with the DM and trying to figure out why he was wanting to **** us so badly all of the sudden, he FINALLY admitted that he intentionally put us in a no-win scenario and forced us into a party wipe because he wanted us all the play weaker characters. He wanted us all to start over at low level, with new restricting rules, losing a lot of our features, and so on just because he felt it would be "easier" on him. But instead of talking to any of us about it, he just decided to completely destroy the campaign we'd all been playing for more than a year and then blame us for dying.

We said he should retcon that last session since he was being pissy or whatever was wrong with him that caused all of that chaos introduced into the game, but he practically became violent at the idea of doing that. Every single person there left that game and as far as I know, nobody ever talked to that guy again.

About 4 months later, I saw where he was looking for more players in one of his games and someone wrote on the signup sheet with a black marker that said something along the lines of "all your players left because you are an *******". So apparently he just went out and got at least one other group, and screwed them over too.

It is such a shame too, we had such a great time in that game until the DM just arbitrarily lost his mind. It's like he had a mental breakdown or something and just decided he wanted to burn all his bridges, ruin all his friendships, and apparently he is still alienating people to this day.