Anyone else had their love of tabletops eroded by just having bad campaign after bad campaign?
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It's lately become so much harder to tell "have I stopped loving this hobby, or have I just had a streak of really bad campaigns".
Yes, except I'm the DM and trying to find non-mutant players who show up reliably is disheartening.
There is a player in my current group that nearly made me kill my campaign until I got a reality check with my other players, and realized I enjoyed seeing how everyone/their characters (even the problem player) dealt with the game world challenges, I was just getting sick of that players bullshit regarding them constantly fighting me about mechanics and having to deal with things not going their way. (They want to play a GM-less Story Game where they can talk a lot and control things, and undo bad things with the first solution they think up without having to think about how they'd carry out that solution)
(still haven't resolved the situation; I'm hoping to resolve by wrapping up the campaign and then never playing anything with open-ended rules with them ever again.
I'd have booted them/told them to shape up or ship out, but booting them involves booting their spouse. And in addition to not wanting to boot a player through no fault of their own ... I had some issues with the spouse early on in the campaign because they are usually a Lolwackyrandumb character [and they got warned before the campaign started I wasn't going to let that shit fly at my table], and after an argument and a run in with the townguard, they've actually been coloring in the lines ever since. So I am very reluctant to subject them to collective punishment)
Tuesday DnD - Mechanically fine, but the DM felt like he was always avoiding it by cancelling at the last minute or going "I'm not feeling it, let's play games instead". He also stealth-nerfed my character by putting their +3 CHA to a +1 because he felt I rolled too well (by stealth nerfed, I mean he edited my character sheet and didn't tell me). I also walked out of a session since the DM just simply wasn't listening to me and put me on the spot when poor explanation meant my character ended up in a situation where they shouldn't have been in to begin with.
Stealth nerfing/"You rolled to well" is bullshit. If you think someone is 'cheating' at TTRPG you ... well, really you need to question why they are playing with them ... you can make them roll in the open in your presence, us a validated roll tracker, or just move to point-buy. (making sure no one is over or under powered is why I do point buy for 3x/4/5.). Never roll the dice (or ask for a roll of the dice) if you aren't willing to accept the outcome.
But honestly this sounds like a DM with burn out. It sounds like he's trying to get something to happen and its not, and he needs to accept it and work with it, hand over the reigns, or end the campaign.
Thursday CoC - Call of Cthulhu in the SCP universe. Started off cool. But the DM creates giant locations that you'll be stuck in for 3 months IRL time while putting in puzzles that take literal hours to solve and rushing through the end of an arc leading to the giant thing you spent 3 months doing feeling inconsequential because in the last session you found the mcguffin and everything resolved itself.
Never really played CoC (played one game where I was filling in for someone and was generally just rolling dice for the MIA's friend, who was telling me what to do). But I read through some 'quick start' guides and remember a piece of advice that has stuck with me (to paraphrase):
Moving the plot forward should never depend on the success of an investigation. Especially if its something that the players need to advance the plot, it should succeed... eventually. If the players don't do very well at investigation, make that success costly.
I guess what I'm saying is assuming a good GM, my assumption would be that the lead up might be more important than you think. If you guys are doing good, it might just leave the only thing left to do to win is weild the Macguffin. Finding the MacGuffin and solving everything might only work because you've been solving puzzles for months. Also, as put above, finding the MacGuffin that Contains the SCP when found/used, is sort of the whole thing that SCP is about. Talk to your GM.
Friday DnD - Might be my most negative one rn. The story is incredibly complex, half of the party is integral to the plot while the other half are basically disposable and their death would affect nothing (my character falls into the latter) and every session lately has just been a sequence of interrogations as we talk to an NPC who then tells us to talk to another NPC. Pretty much every session we won't be doing anything except Insight checks for the first 2 hours, and combat encounters/dungeon crawls are becoming very rare. Most sessions lately have no combat encounters, and we'll get a dungeon once every 7-8 sessions?
This smells of bad GMing/Favoritist GMing but I will say this:
When I write my plots, like a good GM I shamelessly steal. And I steal from 1001 Nights, specifically the layering of story arcs. You should have a 'this is happening now' arc that covers the immediate situation, a 'this is why this matters' enveloping arc that covers what the players are doing in the current location, and then an over arcing 'this is why you are doing this' arc. No arcs should ever end at the same time until the campaign is over.
I make sure everyone's got something at stake in the Overarcing plot. I make sure they've got some reason for the enveloping plot. But while I try to make sure everyone is involved the target of the immediate plot is likely going to rotate, and while I try to get it fair and balanced, its not going to be. The players with the most
usable backstories (or campaign actions) are going to get more spot light. Usable doesn't mean the amount of
ink pixels spilled - are there ties and motivations I can use in there? Is there enough wiggle room to add or remove things? When I ask for details about something in your backstory, or suggest alternations to tie in with the game world, what is the response?
I also use 'excitement' about a backstory as a gauge of player interest. Especially outside of combat, I'm giving engaged players more time and focus because they want it and use it. This leads into more plothooks being targeted at more engaged players.
I know that often times when I'm playing, I'm fine sitting back and watching how things play out and just going with he flow. I am fine with my backstory not featuring in the plot, I'm more invested in the adventure. "We're going into the dungeon because its a dungeon" "we are killing these orcs because they are orcs and not yet killed" work for me a lot of times for motivation as a player, and I wouldn't enjoy a campaign where I'm forced to come up with two bonds and rivalry for each member of the party or some gay shit like that.
So when I get a really bare backstory, and attempts to follow up get short responses (or when I get some monkey cheese memefest) my assumption is that player doesn't want their backstory to feature and is fine being a supporting character or just waiting for combat.
So I guess the thing there is to consider what can you control.
- Talk to the GM about how you can be more involved in the plot. Be positive. Don't say things like "You're spending a lot of time on the Knife-Ear's dead, gay son plot"; that encourages a defensive response because you are criticizing something and they will likely feel a need to correct your perceptions to reestablish common ground before working on a solution. Instead say things "I liked how the Shopkeeper was an exile from the Dwarf's clan, I'd like to have that sort of thing happen for my character. Is there anything we can do to work those sorts of things in for me?"; this tells the GM what you liked and what you are wanting to see happen and invites to the GM to say if they feel something is missing from your character/backstory that stops it from getting more screen time. A decent GM likes players to be engaged, and you're already doing the heavy lifting by telling them what makes you interested in a game.
Also only use examples from that campaign or other games the GM has run - never, ever compare your GM to another GM.
- See if there is stuff - like shopping/stocking - that can be completed off-table, especially if it just involves one or two characters. I love it when I can get some player-specific NPC interactions knocked out in a 1-on-1 instead of taking everyone's time at the table. I try (and usually fail) to save table time by getting people do book keeping before we sit down to play.
- Another thing you can do is work with the party to find a quest line and complete it, without getting high and wandering off or distracted chasing squirrels.
My players spent a month of sessions in town talking to side quest & background infodump NPCs. After the first town session they had a big blinking neon "PRIMARY QUEST OBJECTIVE THIS WAY" sign, so my assumption as GM was if they are still dicking about in town talking to NPCs it was because they wanted to dick around town talking to NPCs. One of the players was complaining about it, and I told them "If you want to leave town, get the party together and leave. You've got at least 5 things to do or investigate at this point, pick one and go do it". (Hell I wanted them to leave and actually do something other than trigger the another redundant quest path.)
Fuck that was longer than I anticipated.
So tl;dr:
- Tuesday GM is burning out. talk to them about it.
- Nothing specific for Thursday GM other than never play anything set in the autism hive that is SCP.
- Friday GM, try to have a positive conversation with the GM about getting your character more involved - the GM may believe your current level of involvement is where you want it. Talk to the party + GM to see if there a way to speed up the town sessions and get to the next dungeon. If they are dragging for you, they are probably dragging for others.
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