Bad RPG Sessions
I’ve had bad sessions, of various games, with various people, at various ages; accidentally killing our own contacts in Twilight 2000, shooting the undercover cops in Call of Cthulhu Now, our WFRP halfling pit-fighters encountering a mysterious and powerful “invisible wall” that only allowed movement in the direction of the scenario run by someone in their first role as GM, me and my friend’s discovery, with me as GM, of just how complicated and lackluster the DC Heroes rules were, or one Star Wars scenario where we never got out of the interrogation room, or shackles, we began in. I’ll elaborate on a couple that stand out for me.
As GM:
I had just watched “The Keep” and at that time was just blown away by… I’m not sure, I guess the unusual setting and approach, a wartime horror movie, and I wanted to share my discovery, via an extremely vague, sketchy notion of a similarly themed scenario of Wushu, which I also had not read or understood NEARLY as well as I thought. Skeptical but willing, players made characters and already I was confronted with a number of questions about allowed stats and their breadth. I handwaved and mumbled through that and the PC’s began as… some group of mercenaries or fortune seekers or something that are parked and see the contingent of German trucks and transports rumble by on their way to the little (Transylvanian?) village. Due to one young player’s almost innate ability to “munchkin out” even on games he has never played, and my distractedness with mentally rehearsing the scenario and helping people make characters, this character wound up with what the other players shortly came to refer as “God Stats”, being a Scholar, Ninja, Scientist and Sniper.
After some initial shenanigans with the passing trucks, the group snuck past the German guards corralling and threatening the villagers and go into the Keep to begin exploring – except “God” started shimmying around on the ceiling in the darkness like a spider, inventing/mixing a chemical compound to create a high explosive, sabotaged then repaired a truck and was about to start translating the writing on the stone prison when all the other players called BS and started griping at the player and me, very firmly and loudly voicing their displeasure and perceptions of unfairness. I realized they were right – I was just going with what people were doing and nobody had complained until then so I never thought about anything being wrong. Being a youngster, the player got hurt feelings and insisted all his stats were totally valid as well as all the ways he’d interpreted and used them and not at all unreasonable and was all red-faced and talking in short, harsh gasps. I realized this was most definitely the end of the session and a few group meetings had to be called then and a couple times afterward to get everybody on the same page.
As Player:
Although the game of D&D3.5 overall wasn’t bad (Temple of Elemental Evil) even with me not liking the DM much, the campaign of which we’d played a good number of sessions (though still only getting to maybe 4th level) hit two decisive speedbumps for me in this same session:
1 – the DM laid out the basics for the campaign and adventures, including that we would be using miniatures and graph paper and rules concerning tactics, line-of-sight, etc. for combat and movement, someone would have to keep track of various things and keep good notes of clues, NPCs, etc., players had to keep track of individual arrows and things like that, and “if it isn’t on your sheet, you don’t have it”. Taken individually, let alone all together, any one of these could potentially have been a deal-breaker for me, but the DM and players were driving about 50 mins every week and it was the only possibility for a game in the area, and we were all mostly friends, so I decided to give it a try but did hold fast on my refusal to use or refer to the graph paper or move my miniature, as weird or petty as that may seem.
2 – my dwarven paladin attempted to roll between an ogre’s legs and attack him from behind, but got a large stack of penalties for trying something so unthinkably cinematic and ill-supported by my lack of proper Feats such as Tumbling, Acrobatics, Jumping, Athletics, etc. – I went for it anyway and rolled a 1, with the Ogre rolling a 20 on his AoO with his two-handed maul, knocking me into the next room, unconscious. It was later mentioned by another player that we were in a narrow, confined hallway and a two-handed maul, especially an ogre’s, could never possibly have been used, and so it magically became a longsword, which from then on we referred to as the mystical Pole Sword.
3 – Frustrated and bored by too much wandering around, investigating and talking to people in town rather than fighting, one player threatened the blacksmith in order to get us some horses. After being given a chance to rethink his action, the player insisted on his course and was cut to ribbons by the retired 7th level fighter-turned-blacksmith, after which time the player declared “God, FINALLY, some ACTION! Who wants pizza?” but a very tangible mutual disdain between GM and that player hung in the air, with a few other player shenanigans causing me to indirectly send the player home.
I began to get anxious and depressed and dread the coming game day as it approached each week, as well as talking to or about the GM, the game, or some of the other players and finally I was tired of constantly getting stress headaches and just feeling malcontent, like actively not enjoying it, both before, during and after a session, so I just announced I was done, and the game folded, and though it made things a little weird for a while with the others, I never regretted my decision.
As Player:
A friend’s brother had bought TOON to GM and read through it, and though I was initially under the impression he was using a predone scenario, maybe from Crawl of Katchoolo or whatever supplement he bought, it turns out he decided to run what must have been a home-rolled session, giving out pre-made characters, which were all small animals, rodents I think – I tend to be teased among friends and family because of my hairsuteness, and my character was a porcupine – for some reason I connected these two and took this as at least a backhanded jibe. We all started and were supposed to, I think, climb in a window into a kitchen and climb down from the sink to the table and chair and then floor or something, to go do something else, and after a number of horrendouly failed rolls and even damage by basically all of us, the rest of my memory is completely blank – I have no idea if we played more, for how long or how or why the session ended – I just know at the start, we were all somewhat weirded out and dubious, but grew to be critical, sarcastic and uninterested in the game.
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