"Should have drawn a bloody map." The phrase that enters a GMs mind when his view of the battlefield is completely different to that of player A, B, C and D.
D&D sessions with a group where one of the players was girlfriend of the DM....the final session coincided with their last break up. DM mercilessly trying to kill the girlfriends player character totally ruining the story.....gawd.
Mark Hyde wait...that actually happened - in the room, etc ?! LoL - that must have been...wow...incredible like "What am I witnessing ? This cannot be "real"..." -wow.
Fudging rolls, monsters targeting her iPC out of turn sometimes.....we as a group had a time out and finished with girlfriend having a cigarette and she left after that. Nothing more evntful than that lol. They broke up fully after this.
Having spouses/couples together in the same game is always detrimental, in my experience, especially when they are in the goo-goo phase of their relationship. Their RL relationship always weaves itself into the game and takes it over, leaving the other players neglected. And that is a best case scenario! :)
4:30 The Original Deus Ex was the first video game I played where you could just blow a door open. Could destroy whats on the other side too, but the option was there.
Believe it or not, the worst time I ever had GM'img a game was with one of my favorite RPG's. It was back in the 80's and I introduced my players to this brand new RPG called "Paranoia". If you're famailliar with that game, it's a comedy game where the point of it is that the player characters are all hapily living in a futuristic city, are super loyal to the computer that runs the place, the computer is super paranoid about loyalty and sends players out on missions to eliminate disloyalty even when it's other party members. It's all goofball fun. My players, who were used to a life of D&D, Gama World, and every other serious RPG, just couldn't wrap their head around a game where they were "subservient to anything" just couldn't handle this game. They couldn't get into character. Everything they did was as rebels against the computer and the society as if they were normal people who had broken into the society to destroy the computer and the government. This ended up in death after death and they just didn't enjoy it. In this game the deaths are supposed to be fun and entertaining, but they took the deaths with anger like they would in other RPG's, as if they planned on advancing the characters. They just couldn't adjust to the strangeness of this game. It flopped so hard with my group at the time, it left a crater in the floor simply because my players couldn't transition from serious RPG's to a comedy one. They weren't used to it.
Yeah, don't do that; 7 players max is just right for experienced GM's, that's why I stay away from games that have a roster of 18 players with 42 spots open.
I once played in a game that 24 players. They had three moderators and unfortunately, limited knowledge as to the dynamics of game play worked in a LARP. I had to instruct them on how the various characters were interacting... by the end of the night, I was made a moderator 'elite'. Any form of combat, they came to me for judgement calls. They were in shock that half of the long term players, who were able to pull the wool over the other moderators and lie their way through a fight. They didn't keep track of their stats... but I did... long story short, they were writing up new characters because their originals ended up dead... I was invited back for their next game. And when I would get called over to moderate the fights, they suddenly didn't want to fight anymore. They really didn't like me when I asked for their character sheet, and they all were trying to use their characters that died in the previous game. I informed the DM, those characters were confiscated, they all had to write new ones, they were not allowed to play the archetype of their former characters and had to be something they never played before. I was their storyteller/moderator for the night. They actually had a lot of fun and they didn't know how their characters worked at first... then I showed them.... and they loved it. ( vampire players who learned how to play werewolves... effectively)
I played in a game recently where the GM made a mistake in giving us an extremely powerful weapon at level 1. We were playing 'Keep on the Borderlands' converted into a Pathfinder system, and in the original adventure there was a Medusa. In 1st edition D&D a Medusa may have been a level 1 enemy, but in Pathfinder it is an extremely powerful boss monster. After 2 of our players were turned to stone the DM realised his mistake and had the Medusa give us some potions that would de-stone our petrified friends. What the DM failed to take into account was that our Wizard's sleep spell could put the Medusa to sleep, making her easily killable by the PCs. The fighter of the group decapitated the medusa so that we could use it later. This meant that the DM gave us an object that would turn almost all the enemies in the dungeon to stone, but we also had potions to save us if one the medusa's head backfired. Needless to say the rest of the dungeon was quite boring after that.
i would have roleplayed that resident evil game just like the original game. master of unlocking, get away from this door jill i'm gonna kick this door in, WESKERRRERR!!! i'd shatner the hell out of it
I have to say man, the only thing that player did, at least that you mentioned, that seemed within the realm of assholery, was him meta-gaming and killing the Albert Wesker character. Everything else just sounds like good critical thinking.
Found the asshole of their group... Almost all metagaming can be chalked to "good critical thinking'. It is easy to say "reading the book with the face on it is a bad idea" or "simple mission going to a cabin in the woods, better set up multiple lines of backup so in case I fall into a secret science facility and get attacked by zombies". When you agree to the game, you agree to play the game, part of that is acting like the player in the heat of the moment.
Ah I remember my first RPG games I ever ran. I know how it is to have a bit too much influence from video games. Takes a bit to get into groove of running tabletop games.
Thanks for sharing your experiences I've learned something from this video because I realized that I have been making the same mistakes but not realizing them until now.
I think the biggest mistake I made was in a vtm game I have set in the wild west. I made the players fight what I called a tzicmize "war pig". It was essentially a man who grew up from a child being mutataed and experimented on until it was practically the fucking Hulk. It was super deformed and stuff though. Anyways one of the players was a tzicmize who had a code of honor through being a doctor and he felt bad for it along with a lawyer in the party. It was supposed to be a near mindless monster but I gave it a name and had another NPC mention it's mother. This was to make it a tradgey, sort of like putting down a rabid dog. Instead they tried their damndest to reason with "Teddy" going as far as finding his mother's name, trying to use toys to get to his still childlike heart and avoiding attacks and having to pass frenzy rolls and dodges all the while this thing was literally chucking trees at them. Then the doctor failed a Dodge roll and only barely survived because it was in horrid form which gave him armor. As it started crushing him the players started chanting the name of his mother until I decided to let them keep him by having him spare the doctor. Now they've essentially had him solve half their combat encounters by being stronger than the sherrif in bloodlines.
I have now been gaming for around 30 years..... and I would say there sometimes are rounds that go sour after a while... and sometimes there are games that simply start and you immediately feel the abyss opening.... that's just the way it is. I married the girl I found was so great that no matter what we played, it ran great for ages.... :-) Anyway, any round reaches its end at SOME point in time, and then you need to stop and at least take a break, or the round will be ruined.
Always a shame when players blame the GM for things in game that other players do... in a game of Shadowrun I played in a number of years ago our decker kept stealing extra things on runs and literally shooting party members in the back so she could get extra cash... with all the extra money she set up a Star Trek theme bar... the rest of the PCs paid gangs to undergo surgery to look like some of the notable Star Trek races and systematically wreck the bar.. and she went berserk at the GM for that... refusing to believe who was responsible even after we told what we had done and why!!! Ended up being a game ender
I once ran a D&D campaign that went a bit badly, because I focused way too much on one players character compared to the rest, which made the players feel a bit like they were just supporting characters in the story or something. Bad customer service on my part.
The Gentleman Gamer You know I must say I'm very interested in that Resident Evil game of All Flesh that you did, Gent. Did you map out the entire Spencer Mansion? Also I'd imagine seeing you roleplay as Albert Wesker would be brilliant.
Sir, I regret to inform you that you are human and thus not perfect. I ran the numbers several times to be sure and Im certain you are human. Welcome to the club...if it means anything 90% of your games from what I can tell are flawless. Don't sweat the 10%.
I enjoyed this video as all experienced GMs have been there and it's good to know we're all fallible. I don't think I've ever run an errorless game; one in which, in retrospect, I couldn't think of a way I could have made it better. But I've had the odd game where I compound those mistakes, or make one so egregious I undermine my planning. It reminds me of some advice I once received from a master bridge player. He said that even the pros make mistakes, they just make fewer and fewer.
Yeah, we've all made mistakes. For me, I learned that a primarily improvised session just doesn't work when it's centered around a mystery. I left plot holes, dangling threads, and forgot to use Chekov's gun. All cardinal suspense thriller sins.
i've been running RPG's now for around 20 years or more, in that time i've had some terrible games, espeically when i've thaught of somthing that i can introduce to the game to give it a bit of a twist, in most cases its bit me in the arse!!! the chances are that i will make even more of these mistakes. but on the bright side, there is that odd occassion when u realise u've given the party somthing that totally breaks the game and makes it easy for them and then, for no apparant reason, the players dice hate them and ur dice hate them to. the game ends with them all captured or dead or insane and u still can't get over the fact that (for example) a goblin has taken out a party of 15th level fighters
I always wanted to run a Rifts: Chaos Earth campaign with the idea of the players being stuck in Mexico when the cataclysm begins. The main quest would be this group of say 6 SAMAS pilots traveling from Mexico to Chicago (NEMAs HQ) and when they are almost there they are pushed into a Rift by a horde of monsters. Than I would bounce them through the different demention books and have then end up in the main Rifts game 300 years after the Cataclysm had occurred.
Another thought on the player that meta-gamed and shot his commander without in-game cause, is to have his character face trail for his actions. With no evidence that his commanding officer was a traitor, and killing him without attempting to arrest him, his character could easily be given life in prison or even executed.
Do all you GM's that run games at conventions have a plan B ready for disruptive players, this could be a wandering encounter or a trap that will just kill the disruptive one ? Is that too harsh ? thinking about the time spent preparing a game and then the time wasted and session potentially ruined for everyone by one individual isn't right.
Helghast73 grudge monster in a disruptive player just means you are ALSO a disruptive player. Especially at an event you have to just take them aside, explain they are disrupting the event, and if they continue you will ask them to leave.
I do like the idea of rewarding player ingenuity, so simply blowing up the cannon regardless seems completely unfair and unsporting. Perhaps force the players to deal with several challenges to acquire such a powerful weapon? Figuring out how to use it, disarming the auto-destruct mechanism, AND dealing with limited ammunition. Perhaps the cannon was experimental, or designed to be mounted, and once removed carries only a handful of precious shots in it's capacitor. :D
Worst RPG I ran was involving a Iron Golem that was designed for nothing more than to terrorize the players and push them along. Young, inexperienced, and having just freshly come from playing Resident Evil 3, I wanted my own version of Nemesis while completely missing the whole point (2nd game I ever ran). It's one of those games that legitimately made me quit the hobby for five years.
I can see myself doing something like the mute pygmy tribe and then regretting it. hehe. I don't often think through things that I pull out of my hat at the table. I can be a disruptive player at times, but I have been working on that. I think the worst campaign that I ever ran was one that went WAY over the line in terms of subject matter. It was an AssassinX game where I told the players that if there was a line to cross that they could cross it. I ran the game "well" but I don't think I would ever run a game like that again. It was just too much in so many ways.
The worst RPG I'll run is upcoming soon (already got players, sorry). Coincidentally it will also be the best. It will be, in fact, the only RPG I've run.
Funny enough I did the worse sin of all I ran a marvel saga game for years. I am a very hands off Story teller I do not plan out more then the broadest outlines of the world and there character. But I worked a 55 hours a week at the time on a norm week but this week I had a 27 hour day and was still wiped that week I worked 74. We have limited seating at my place so I DM leaning stretched out on the floor leaning up to the hearth bench of the fire place but I fell asleep for about 30 min when it was a lot of player on player interaction in a mall The characters had a background and all were teens some abandoned other were sent to a LA boarding house named the Zavier's House it is based off of X-men Evolution. By day you went to class by night you learned to control you amazing gifts. I told them to tell me some of there fav characters and that is how we made them. The core team was made of 6 1 NPC 1 player character turned NPC and 4 core players Jack was all into speedsters but I wanted a twist which he did not like but grew to love speed demon was a thin wiry guy with the look with a red tinted leathery skin and small ram like horns. Later Speed Demon learns his powers are more temporal mechanics them running fast. Nick was a total static shock and magneto fan so Tazer he was much like static in looks but could only shock by touch, My most uninspired and quiet player Matt was a fan of night crawler and wolverine Chashar Cat was all him he was a feline character with natural claws and teleportation abilities but he had a trick of send his face for a look first or last. Cory which was jacks younger cousin which I talk to his grandmother (gaudian) before playing my personal games are R rated and he was 12 at the time. He was big into the new star wars stuff so he played I telekinetic that used psi blade Ugh yes named Jedi. the NPC was the oldest and is a former street rat and member of the morlocks. This is how I tested the waters of coming out to them he is 5'2 100bls 28w twinky little guy not flaming gay but very stereotype. His power were the most developed of the he controlled light sound and communication band control(give a little telepathy abilities as well). I know odd mix of power but boy did he know how to use it for fun he ran the LAs Underground Mutant Underground Seen Funding the Morlocks of LA. He also used his powers to energy beams, jam security systems and hack police bands. Last was Steven a pissed of guy that did a one shot to try to disrupt my game and failed badly but I keep the character. Me and Nick broke his over powered game starting us at level 19 no limit was a bad thing in D&D. I plotted out being a god setting 2. He wanted to play a female character which I have no prob with he wanted a non combat character no prob but I did give her a few tricks. She was a telepath with psychic powers (seeing the past and future of items mainly ST controlled but can be forced) also she could by touch sedate people giving her the call sign Dream Girl
I haven't played a full campaign as a player yet, and I've DM'd a few for D&D 3.5, and when a player is being smart, you simply have to be smarter, if in the game it turns out somebody's a traitor, make them not so, throw the players for a loop, for in the end you can't blame him for being smart, sure he's a complete asshole and you can blame him for that, but if he's intelligent, it's kinda hard to put that against him.
Игры
"Should have drawn a bloody map."
The phrase that enters a GMs mind when his view of the battlefield is completely different to that of player A, B, C and D.
D&D sessions with a group where one of the players was girlfriend of the DM....the final session coincided with their last break up. DM mercilessly trying to kill the girlfriends player character totally ruining the story.....gawd.
That sounds totally worth witnessing.
Actually the argument it produced made some of us cringe....
Mark Hyde wait...that actually happened - in the room, etc ?! LoL - that must have been...wow...incredible like "What am I witnessing ? This cannot be "real"..." -wow.
Fudging rolls, monsters targeting her iPC out of turn sometimes.....we as a group had a time out and finished with girlfriend having a cigarette and she left after that.
Nothing more evntful than that lol. They broke up fully after this.
Having spouses/couples together in the same game is always detrimental, in my experience, especially when they are in the goo-goo phase of their relationship. Their RL relationship always weaves itself into the game and takes it over, leaving the other players neglected. And that is a best case scenario! :)
Your face before you started speaking killed me for some reason. Just a pure expression of "alright, here we fucking go."
4:30 The Original Deus Ex was the first video game I played where you could just blow a door open. Could destroy whats on the other side too, but the option was there.
Believe it or not, the worst time I ever had GM'img a game was with one of my favorite RPG's. It was back in the 80's and I introduced my players to this brand new RPG called "Paranoia". If you're famailliar with that game, it's a comedy game where the point of it is that the player characters are all hapily living in a futuristic city, are super loyal to the computer that runs the place, the computer is super paranoid about loyalty and sends players out on missions to eliminate disloyalty even when it's other party members. It's all goofball fun. My players, who were used to a life of D&D, Gama World, and every other serious RPG, just couldn't wrap their head around a game where they were "subservient to anything" just couldn't handle this game. They couldn't get into character. Everything they did was as rebels against the computer and the society as if they were normal people who had broken into the society to destroy the computer and the government. This ended up in death after death and they just didn't enjoy it. In this game the deaths are supposed to be fun and entertaining, but they took the deaths with anger like they would in other RPG's, as if they planned on advancing the characters. They just couldn't adjust to the strangeness of this game. It flopped so hard with my group at the time, it left a crater in the floor simply because my players couldn't transition from serious RPG's to a comedy one. They weren't used to it.
I tried to run a game with ten players.
It was the hardest and worse game I have ever tried to run.
Yeah, don't do that; 7 players max is just right for experienced GM's, that's why I stay away from games that have a roster of 18 players with 42 spots open.
I once played in a game that 24 players. They had three moderators and unfortunately, limited knowledge as to the dynamics of game play worked in a LARP.
I had to instruct them on how the various characters were interacting... by the end of the night, I was made a moderator 'elite'. Any form of combat, they came to me for judgement calls.
They were in shock that half of the long term players, who were able to pull the wool over the other moderators and lie their way through a fight. They didn't keep track of their stats... but I did... long story short, they were writing up new characters because their originals ended up dead...
I was invited back for their next game. And when I would get called over to moderate the fights, they suddenly didn't want to fight anymore. They really didn't like me when I asked for their character sheet, and they all were trying to use their characters that died in the previous game.
I informed the DM, those characters were confiscated, they all had to write new ones, they were not allowed to play the archetype of their former characters and had to be something they never played before. I was their storyteller/moderator for the night. They actually had a lot of fun and they didn't know how their characters worked at first... then I showed them.... and they loved it.
( vampire players who learned how to play werewolves... effectively)
I played in a game recently where the GM made a mistake in giving us an extremely powerful weapon at level 1. We were playing 'Keep on the Borderlands' converted into a Pathfinder system, and in the original adventure there was a Medusa. In 1st edition D&D a Medusa may have been a level 1 enemy, but in Pathfinder it is an extremely powerful boss monster. After 2 of our players were turned to stone the DM realised his mistake and had the Medusa give us some potions that would de-stone our petrified friends. What the DM failed to take into account was that our Wizard's sleep spell could put the Medusa to sleep, making her easily killable by the PCs. The fighter of the group decapitated the medusa so that we could use it later. This meant that the DM gave us an object that would turn almost all the enemies in the dungeon to stone, but we also had potions to save us if one the medusa's head backfired. Needless to say the rest of the dungeon was quite boring after that.
i would have roleplayed that resident evil game just like the original game. master of unlocking, get away from this door jill i'm gonna kick this door in, WESKERRRERR!!! i'd shatner the hell out of it
Hindsight is 20/20. We all hoist ourselves by our own petards on occasion.
I have more games! :)
I have to say man, the only thing that player did, at least that you mentioned, that seemed within the realm of assholery, was him meta-gaming and killing the Albert Wesker character. Everything else just sounds like good critical thinking.
I would count trying to rewire a fucking wooden door as meta gaming like all hell...
@UFHoee: Huh, chalk that up as an unmentioned detail I guess.
Found the asshole of their group... Almost all metagaming can be chalked to "good critical thinking'. It is easy to say "reading the book with the face on it is a bad idea" or "simple mission going to a cabin in the woods, better set up multiple lines of backup so in case I fall into a secret science facility and get attacked by zombies". When you agree to the game, you agree to play the game, part of that is acting like the player in the heat of the moment.
Ah I remember my first RPG games I ever ran. I know how it is to have a bit too much influence from video games. Takes a bit to get into groove of running tabletop games.
Thanks for sharing your experiences I've learned something from this video because I realized that I have been making the same mistakes but not realizing them until now.
I think the biggest mistake I made was in a vtm game I have set in the wild west. I made the players fight what I called a tzicmize "war pig". It was essentially a man who grew up from a child being mutataed and experimented on until it was practically the fucking Hulk. It was super deformed and stuff though. Anyways one of the players was a tzicmize who had a code of honor through being a doctor and he felt bad for it along with a lawyer in the party. It was supposed to be a near mindless monster but I gave it a name and had another NPC mention it's mother. This was to make it a tradgey, sort of like putting down a rabid dog. Instead they tried their damndest to reason with "Teddy" going as far as finding his mother's name, trying to use toys to get to his still childlike heart and avoiding attacks and having to pass frenzy rolls and dodges all the while this thing was literally chucking trees at them. Then the doctor failed a Dodge roll and only barely survived because it was in horrid form which gave him armor. As it started crushing him the players started chanting the name of his mother until I decided to let them keep him by having him spare the doctor. Now they've essentially had him solve half their combat encounters by being stronger than the sherrif in bloodlines.
I see no mistake here.
"...like a velociraptor"
I cracked up at that.
Heh, now I really wanna hear about your first VtM game as a storyteller. Maybe you can do a video on how to NOT run VtM / WoD?
I have now been gaming for around 30 years..... and I would say there sometimes are rounds that go sour after a while... and sometimes there are games that simply start and you immediately feel the abyss opening.... that's just the way it is. I married the girl I found was so great that no matter what we played, it ran great for ages.... :-) Anyway, any round reaches its end at SOME point in time, and then you need to stop and at least take a break, or the round will be ruined.
Always a shame when players blame the GM for things in game that other players do... in a game of Shadowrun I played in a number of years ago our decker kept stealing extra things on runs and literally shooting party members in the back so she could get extra cash... with all the extra money she set up a Star Trek theme bar... the rest of the PCs paid gangs to undergo surgery to look like some of the notable Star Trek races and systematically wreck the bar.. and she went berserk at the GM for that... refusing to believe who was responsible even after we told what we had done and why!!! Ended up being a game ender
Chris Anderson sounds like a great game actually lol
😂. Sounds like you should have just made the jerk player be Wesker. He'd probably be into it.
I once ran a D&D campaign that went a bit badly, because I focused way too much on one players character compared to the rest, which made the players feel a bit like they were just supporting characters in the story or something. Bad customer service on my part.
Godlike. LOVE that dice mechanic...!
I love listening to player stories.
I always count the first time I GM a game as a test run as they tend to be my worst games.
I believe Raccoon City was in the midwest region with no state specified.
Indeed it was, but this player was after a particular State and the locations of all nearby cities.
The way you described him, sounds like he was attempting to hijack the game and make himself the sole hero.
The Gentleman Gamer You know I must say I'm very interested in that Resident Evil game of All Flesh that you did, Gent. Did you map out the entire Spencer Mansion?
Also I'd imagine seeing you roleplay as Albert Wesker would be brilliant.
DeFactoLeader
I would love to see The Gentleman Gamer role play as Wesker. I think that would be a fitting role.
it was in a state of panic.
Sir, I regret to inform you that you are human and thus not perfect. I ran the numbers several times to be sure and Im certain you are human.
Welcome to the club...if it means anything 90% of your games from what I can tell are flawless. Don't sweat the 10%.
I enjoyed this video as all experienced GMs have been there and it's good to know we're all fallible. I don't think I've ever run an errorless game; one in which, in retrospect, I couldn't think of a way I could have made it better. But I've had the odd game where I compound those mistakes, or make one so egregious I undermine my planning.
It reminds me of some advice I once received from a master bridge player. He said that even the pros make mistakes, they just make fewer and fewer.
Yeah, we've all made mistakes. For me, I learned that a primarily improvised session just doesn't work when it's centered around a mystery. I left plot holes, dangling threads, and forgot to use Chekov's gun. All cardinal suspense thriller sins.
i've been running RPG's now for around 20 years or more, in that time i've had some terrible games, espeically when i've thaught of somthing that i can introduce to the game to give it a bit of a twist, in most cases its bit me in the arse!!! the chances are that i will make even more of these mistakes. but on the bright side, there is that odd occassion when u realise u've given the party somthing that totally breaks the game and makes it easy for them and then, for no apparant reason, the players dice hate them and ur dice hate them to. the game ends with them all captured or dead or insane and u still can't get over the fact that (for example) a goblin has taken out a party of 15th level fighters
I always wanted to run a Rifts: Chaos Earth campaign with the idea of the players being stuck in Mexico when the cataclysm begins. The main quest would be this group of say 6 SAMAS pilots traveling from Mexico to Chicago (NEMAs HQ) and when they are almost there they are pushed into a Rift by a horde of monsters. Than I would bounce them through the different demention books and have then end up in the main Rifts game 300 years after the Cataclysm had occurred.
One point you could've have responded with pertaining to the doors in Resident Evil/All Flesh Must Be Eaten, you have to conserve ammo early on.
Another thought on the player that meta-gamed and shot his commander without in-game cause, is to have his character face trail for his actions. With no evidence that his commanding officer was a traitor, and killing him without attempting to arrest him, his character could easily be given life in prison or even executed.
S.T.A.R.S. stand for "We Need To Make this Shit Sound as American as Possible".
Do all you GM's that run games at conventions have a plan B ready for disruptive players, this could be a wandering encounter or a trap that will just kill the disruptive one ? Is that too harsh ? thinking about the time spent preparing a game and then the time wasted and session potentially ruined for everyone by one individual isn't right.
Helghast73 grudge monster in a disruptive player just means you are ALSO a disruptive player. Especially at an event you have to just take them aside, explain they are disrupting the event, and if they continue you will ask them to leave.
Dude. Epic.
“Insufferable twat”
This had me LOLing
How would you deal with those situations now in retrospect?
I know you're not a huge D&D person but do you plan on commenting on the new PHB when it comes out?
I once put my Shadowrunners in a basic transprt helicopter over the frickin ocean and then had them shot at by apache class fighter copters.
Hey, dude - you pleasantly remind me of the actor who played Arthur Dent in the original TV series of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
If you enjoy my work, please check out my current Kickstarter for They Came from Beyond the Grave!, an RPG of 1970s horror! kck.st/2OGbDvU
I do like the idea of rewarding player ingenuity, so simply blowing up the cannon regardless seems completely unfair and unsporting. Perhaps force the players to deal with several challenges to acquire such a powerful weapon? Figuring out how to use it, disarming the auto-destruct mechanism, AND dealing with limited ammunition. Perhaps the cannon was experimental, or designed to be mounted, and once removed carries only a handful of precious shots in it's capacitor. :D
Worst RPG I ran was involving a Iron Golem that was designed for nothing more than to terrorize the players and push them along. Young, inexperienced, and having just freshly come from playing Resident Evil 3, I wanted my own version of Nemesis while completely missing the whole point (2nd game I ever ran). It's one of those games that legitimately made me quit the hobby for five years.
Oh dear
I can see myself doing something like the mute pygmy tribe and then regretting it. hehe. I don't often think through things that I pull out of my hat at the table. I can be a disruptive player at times, but I have been working on that. I think the worst campaign that I ever ran was one that went WAY over the line in terms of subject matter. It was an AssassinX game where I told the players that if there was a line to cross that they could cross it. I ran the game "well" but I don't think I would ever run a game like that again. It was just too much in so many ways.
This guy sounds like a meta-gamer due to shooting wesker.
5:99
Well, did you all speak pygmy?
Also, I thought the Gentlemen gamer was a member of the Harbinger of Skulls, why do you have a Malkavian Antitribu brooch?
What's the worst WoD game you have ran?
The worst RPG I'll run is upcoming soon (already got players, sorry). Coincidentally it will also be the best. It will be, in fact, the only RPG I've run.
I feel like there is another side to this story you didn't tell, I doubt it was flattering either.
Funny enough I did the worse sin of all I ran a marvel saga game for years. I am a very hands off Story teller I do not plan out more then the broadest outlines of the world and there character. But I worked a 55 hours a week at the time on a norm week but this week I had a 27 hour day and was still wiped that week I worked 74. We have limited seating at my place so I DM leaning stretched out on the floor leaning up to the hearth bench of the fire place but I fell asleep for about 30 min when it was a lot of player on player interaction in a mall
The characters had a background and all were teens some abandoned other were sent to a LA boarding house named the Zavier's House it is based off of X-men Evolution. By day you went to class by night you learned to control you amazing gifts. I told them to tell me some of there fav characters and that is how we made them.
The core team was made of 6 1 NPC 1 player character turned NPC and 4 core players Jack was all into speedsters but I wanted a twist which he did not like but grew to love speed demon was a thin wiry guy with the look with a red tinted leathery skin and small ram like horns. Later Speed Demon learns his powers are more temporal mechanics them running fast. Nick was a total static shock and magneto fan so Tazer he was much like static in looks but could only shock by touch, My most uninspired and quiet player Matt was a fan of night crawler and wolverine Chashar Cat was all him he was a feline character with natural claws and teleportation abilities but he had a trick of send his face for a look first or last. Cory which was jacks younger cousin which I talk to his grandmother (gaudian) before playing my personal games are R rated and he was 12 at the time. He was big into the new star wars stuff so he played I telekinetic that used psi blade Ugh yes named Jedi. the NPC was the oldest and is a former street rat and member of the morlocks. This is how I tested the waters of coming out to them he is 5'2 100bls 28w twinky little guy not flaming gay but very stereotype. His power were the most developed of the he controlled light sound and communication band control(give a little telepathy abilities as well). I know odd mix of power but boy did he know how to use it for fun he ran the LAs Underground Mutant Underground Seen Funding the Morlocks of LA. He also used his powers to energy beams, jam security systems and hack police bands.
Last was Steven a pissed of guy that did a one shot to try to disrupt my game and failed badly but I keep the character. Me and Nick broke his over powered game starting us at level 19 no limit was a bad thing in D&D. I plotted out being a god setting 2. He wanted to play a female character which I have no prob with he wanted a non combat character no prob but I did give her a few tricks. She was a telepath with psychic powers (seeing the past and future of items mainly ST controlled but can be forced) also she could by touch sedate people giving her the call sign Dream Girl
I haven't played a full campaign as a player yet, and I've DM'd a few for D&D 3.5, and when a player is being smart, you simply have to be smarter, if in the game it turns out somebody's a traitor, make them not so, throw the players for a loop, for in the end you can't blame him for being smart, sure he's a complete asshole and you can blame him for that, but if he's intelligent, it's kinda hard to put that against him.
Have a like just for saying Albert Wesker the way you did :)