First off the real NFL refs are back! And I guess I'll use that as a lame connection to my Friday Question.
Referees, Judges, GMs, DMs, CKs, TKs...whatever you prefer to call the man or woman behind the screen. Have you ever played with a temporary or not so regular GM and found they were annoying beyond comprehension? What did they do that was so annoying?
Back in the day when we used to carry around folders filled with characters we made in case a D&D game would break out. So pick up games were what you survived on. Campaigns were not much other than a couple of adventures strung together. So a friend and I spend the night at this new guy's home who recently joined our D&D circle. He'd been quiet most of the session so we thought it might be fun to get together and pull an all nighter. This guy starts to lay out the rules and all of a sudden we were in the presence of the notorious Chaotic Evil DM. No matter what you did it was wrong. Rules changed to favor the people we were fighting.
Each time he would kill one of our characters he wanted our character sheet. This is before easy access to copier, there were no real home computers and carbon paper was priceless. So giving up your character was a huge deal. Luckily he was little so I didn't give him mine. But for the next couple hours he killed off nearly every character I had. I had a mid level paladin that got struck by a kobold sling stone and killed. And his laugh...everytime he'd kill a character he would, not laugh, giggle. He'd giggle as if he drowned his neighbor's puppy.
Anyway share annoying habits of your referees.
PDF
It's a fine line, but what bugs me the most is when a GM (I shan't name names) repeatedly fudges dice to save characters.
ReplyDeleteAt first, I didn't think he was doing it. But after playing a campaign for a long time and encountering one big baddie after another, I realized that our ENTIRE party had survived without a single death. He likes to threaten, "be careful or you will die", but his practice has created an affability about danger that shouldn't exist.
Thankfully, I've never run into a DM like the one you describe, Tim.
ReplyDeleteI didn't run into that myself, but I have heard stories about a GM at cons here who has the player explain every single little thing they do. I'm not kidding, if you say you get on the subwayto get somewhere, the guy will try to get you for not buying a ticket. Or ther was this time when the party came to a river plus bridge and they said "we cross the river". "You're dead." "Wait, what?" "You didn't say you use the bridge. You've drowned." People have started saying "I breathe in, I breathe out" when playing with that GM. Although I have no idea why they don't simply walk out.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I did coe across was a GM who had a huge database of characters on his laptop. And he's take five or ten minutes right in the middle of a session to look certain characters up. Which of course did wonders for the flow of the game.
I've had the same experience as Digital Orc. Finally, when I had a character that should have died for maybe the 4th or 5th time, I told him I was either going to roll up a new character or find a new game. He got a little better after that.
ReplyDeleteI've had DMs like Digital Orc before and they are surprisingly irritating. Noone really wants to die off but when you deserve to get killed off, it should happen. Otherwise it's like modern day kids' sports where they don't keep score so that "noone loses". Lame!
ReplyDeleteMy worst was one that had a problem I have since found to be a major bugbear of lots of players and GMs. The dude who loved his PC so much, that they made them a kick ass hard NPC in the game that they were running, and would be there constantly to 'help out' the lower level PCs. And by help out, I mean win all the fights, and sleep with all the opposite gendered NPCs. *SIGH*
ReplyDelete