Have you ever been in a bad campaign that turned out to be brillant?

[Schopy]

Because of the thread HorrorStories Advice for strange GM-behavior unusual character building (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?571530-HorrorStories-Advice-for-strange-GM-behavior-unusual-character-building) and the opinions expressed there, i wanted to know: Have you ever been in a campaign, where your instincts yelled to run fast and far away, but which turned out to be at least ok, if not brillant in the end?

I've seen it with some combat encounters (both as a player and as a DM), where i just sat there shaking my head, thinking what a mess that encounter is going to be, that turned out to be funny and engaging! 😊 But never with a whole campaign.

Did you ever ignore one or more red flags and are glad you did?

[ImproperJustice]

Sure.
I once played for about a year in a friend’s campaign who used a homebrew system set in a world that he had made years ago.

The system was just....an awful mess. Everyone had enormous amounts of hit points made worse by hit locations and super low hit chances. Everyone just made called shots to the head for insta kills with a 1 in 20 chance because that was faster than standard combat.

And the magic system allowed spell building. Clearly past players had only focused on damage because my wife built an AoE heal spell she could spam that makes Healing Spirit and HealIng Word look like cure wounds.

Despite all that. It was a sandbox world and we stumbled on a quest so good, meaty, and deep that it was one of the best stories I have ever role played through.
As I recall, we literally repaired the relationship between the creator of that world with it’s current inhabitants, just as it was about to be devoured from within by demonic forces symbolic of the shortcomings of each race.

[Millface]

I've experienced the opposite a few times, but never this, unfortunately.

My dad played D&D while I was growing up, and his stories always enthralled me, I modeled my own DM style around his and joined his table when I was 12. I thought he was the most brilliant, wonderful DM on the planet. He always talked up the guy who used to DM for him, and we got a chance to actually have him DM a campaign. I was so excited, like this guy was a legend, he played with Gigax by invitation at a con once because Gary watched some of his play and loved it...

The dude was an overloud, overbloated jackass who constantly just wanted to shove in our faces how his world and his NPCs were so powerful and strong. He would throw a fit if players didn't remember something he said five sessions ago (he often said conflicting things, too). He wanted us to do "homework" and take pristine notes or we'd fail everything. Players who'd talk to him all week out of the game got literal Dragons and others didn't. (I don't have time to DM a game once a week and be up your butt all week for your game as well, ya know?) It was a disaster.

Looking over some of Gigax's works, he seemed like he would have been pretty similar at the table, honestly.

At this point I run far and fast whenever I see a DM that looks like they might be anything like that. Homebrewing weird and complex systems is often (definitely not always) kind of indicative of a control freak. This post has me thinking that maybe I might have missed out from that attitude, so I might have to rethink it!

[Laserlight]

I ran a Primeval Thule ("think Conan and Cthulhu") campaign, intended to be vigilantes in a city state--think something like Batman in early Renaissance Venice. The first half of the first session went well....

Then a series of poor-to-homicidally-insane decisions meant the PCs got exiled from the city. One of the things that keeps DMing interesting is that you can have a well-constructed plan for the next few sessions; whereupon your players can--without having any idea that they're doing so--not only throw your plan out the window, but also brick up the window, plaster over the brick, and change the architectural drawings to show that wall as solid. And they kept doing that. Plenty of sessions, the only prep I could do was "prepare to improvise", which I find exasperating.

The roleplay, however, had lots of intra-party conflict and some sessions were absolute comedy gold. The session where "Batman" explained to "Xena" that the reason he never made a pass at her wasn't that he was gay, it was because she was a barbarian and therefore of lower status than the hookers he visited...that was the most hysterically funny thing that's ever happened at my table.

[Waterdeep Merch]

A particularly uncreative individual wanted to run a game, started making weird character building demands up front, changed his mind and backtracked on several decisions, invited a player everyone but him loathed, and hadn't played D&D since 2e. He turned out to be really good at it, to the shock of everyone involved. His old school sensibilities turned out to be a lot of fun, the way he glossed over rules and made calls actually worked out extremely well, and he was a more thoughtful DM than I ever would have thought going into it. I'd play basically anything he runs in the future, a far cry from how close I came to cancelling the first session.

A different guy that I sometimes call an idiot to his face wanted to run a game because he was getting frustrated at games not being run the way he wanted to play them, and wanted to show us... something? He's still a newbie, so this was weird. His character building rules were, bluntly, demented and overpowered. He ignored seasoned advice from myself and several other DM's. All this coming from the player of the most hated characters I have ever seen in any game. His real-life friendships are the only reasons we haven't banned him, because he's toxic and horrible to game with, and even that's recently reached a boiling point because we've lost something like 60% of our player base from not kicking him out. We expected him to fail miserably, and we were not disappointed. That said, we had a lot of fun with him as a DM because all the players that had assembled for his game were a lot of fun, and totally committed to roleplaying (we decided to make a team of reformed/retired wuxia villains, alongside a Captain America pastiche that refused to recognize the horrible, horrible truth). We've decided that this group is now for experimental one-off games, and we never would have done it if we had flaked on that first game.