Signs of a shitty game

First session is a few days to a week out. You, the other players, and the GM are all in communication via a chatroom, whether your game is going to be online or irl and just partially organized online.

What are the red flags that tell you this game is going to be awful, Veeky Forums?

More then one person spends an excessive amount of time talking about their builds. Number 1 red flag, at least for most systems that uses d20 as the core mechanic.

Stealth archers.

Anyones backstory involves being a fallen god.

>Player driven world building

Now don't get me wrong. Literally every game has this to a certain degree. As a consequence of backstory, whether it's describing their hometown or whatever, there's always going to be aspects of the setting influenced by player design before the game starts.

What I'm talking about is when the GM says "players, build the setting!" and has them name all the stupid fucking towns and shit. Those games are invariably pure shit, because the GM does not give a singular shit about anything he's responsible for.

The players play pcs, but the GM plays the world. It's like one of the other players asking you to make his character for you.

>for you
For him*

>the DM didn't build a world and Exotica borders Generica
It felt good though being a first time player who had come up with a world hundreds of times bigger thinking that GMs often had franchise-scale worlds

>one of the players posts anime pictures on Veeky Forums

>one of the players posts on Veeky Forums

When the gm is clearly winging it, and has no long term goal. Throwing a game together on the fly is good for a oneshot, or even the occasional session where half your players are there and you dont want to move the main story forward. Winging it every session is usually a sign of poor modivation, and I've played too many shit games to stick around hoping the gm "snaps out of it".

DM did that in the first game I played (ForeverDM here). Taught me quickly that I never want to be a PC ever again

>"So I was inspired by this meme..."
Characters based off of shitty meme jokes are going to be funny for all of 30 seconds at most. When players make characters based around a single funny phrase or joke, it gets stale quick.

>"My character isn't actually an adult yet."
I don't trust most people to play kids properly. From my experiences, most people who play kids make it creepy real quick. I can make the rare exception, but that's only with people I've played with for a very long time.

>That moment when a player unironically asks you if he can play Sir Bearington

>Not instead playing Bear Sirrington, a massive muscled man who wears the finest clothes and drinks the finest wine but rips them off in a battle rage and decimates his foes with an heirloom greataxe

...

>I don't trust most people to play kids properly. From my experiences, most people who play kids make it creepy real quick. I can make the rare exception, but that's only with people I've played with for a very long time.
Mhmm, can't argue with this. Believe me. I really wish I could, but most of the time when someone want's to roll up a kid it's for one of two reasons:
1.) They're a Paedo and will ALWAYS try to simulate their fantasy.
2.)They miss their childhood, BIG TIME. I mean, like a cross between hardcore NEET and Michael Jackson. As you can guess, it often (if not USUALLY) overlaps with #1.

Don't get me wrong. I'm down with someone wanting to roll up a Link or a young King Arthur, but fuck man.

>Deleting your post to fix a typing error that everyone understood the meaning of anyway

I've actually never had this problem. I've played as kid PCs, had other people play as kid PCs. Once played in an entire campaign of kids.

Never seen any pedo shit or nostalgia shit.

Who allowed a BEAR into the royal wedding?!

>Sir, I assure you I was invited and my family is well respected and loyal to the...

DEAR GOD IT'S ROARING AT ME, GUARDS KILL IT QUICKLY!

>Inverse-trope PCs

Those are always awful though.

>one of the players posts on Veeky Forums
>mfw most of my real-life, in-person gaming group posts on Veeky Forums.

We're all cancerous. Our group is like a a tumor made of several types of cancer that all compete with each other. Each one inhibits the growth of the others, to the point that the tumor doesn't expand much overall and winds up being benign.

>party balance.jpg

How long term of a goal are we talking here. I tend to plan for the next few sessions and the current narrative arc, but I don't like having an overarching campaign goal because the games I run are often high-powered enough that it's not really feasible to direct the players.

>GM tries to get people to join his game by talking about how good the system is, but doesn't say anything about the campaign he's planning to run.
It tells me that the GM doesn't have any idea of the plot he wants.

I have been guilty of this one.

>Sandbox campaign.
A campaign needs something to give the PCs direction. By not telling us what that is, the GM is telling me that he hopes that the players will come up with something. Sure, a sandbox campaign can work if a player does so, but it's not something that the GM can rely upon.
It's best to have some plot the players will follow if they don't come up with a better idea.

>GM doesn't say anything about something being banned until after a player decides to take it.
What other house rules is the GM going to surprise us with ?

> The game is focused on socializing and politics.

It will invariably end in either the GM thinking that he's the new G.R.R.M. , or the players showing their complete ignorance of all but the most basic of socioeconomics .

...

When the DM gets irritated that you're trying to make effective characters despite it being his choice to run 3x, and then when you end up dumbing down your build he throws 2d6 minotaurs or something the first encounter.

on that third one - I mean, that's pretty vague "Dude, nah, we aren't using kits from oriental adventures" "But I want to play a fuckin' samurai!" "Man, that doesn't fit our Old school aesthetic - and we aren't using most of the optional rules from skills and options, come on, just lay off.

"But I wanted to use the divided states from stats and options combat!!!"

"No one else did man, that's minmaxing, and frankly for the campaign we're having almost anti-fun"

Real conversation I've had, and you know what?

You are not entitled to play whatever you want however you want, banning something from the game is not necessarily a house rule, maybe it's core classes only because the DM is tired of having to look through thirteen books of tables for your god damn thac0

Also - all you 3.x, and 4 babbies are so god damned spoiled - jesus, no you cannot be a fucking dragonkin sorcerous with fairy wings - I don't give a single fuck how much backstory and lore you fucking wrote.

>Wah! my dm gets butthurt when I minmax!

Guys, I found the buttblasted DM

We've actually done it just yesterday - as an one-off thing, mind you.

We're playing in magicked-up IX century Norway and all the characters come from the same village so it made sense to us that they'd have some childhood adventures.

So we had a session where their parents took them to the Ting/ Great Blot to show them how adult affairs are handled properly. They went off to explore the forest, found a ruined farmstead, one of them got sick from eating some mushrooms, one got scared of a boar, climbed a tree, and couldn't get down.. In the end they all got into a fight with some kids from Skane and smashed someone's eye out with a rock.

The next Blot is in nine years (or next week). They'll get to go again, this time as freshly made adults, and maybe meet the Skanelanders again...

Actually I think he should have been ballsy enough to just minmax and tell his DM to eat some god damn dicks - if your DM is going to be a cunt you minmax the shit out of it, and if he's god a problem, find a different game.

If your DM says "hey, we're going to play a chill game, don't worry about minmaxing play what you think is fun" Then, play what you think is fun (Including minmaxing if that's your deal)

If the dm gets pissed about you minmaxing - minmax anyway, if the DM has a problem find a new game. Not worth it to play with people like that.

>Sandbox campaign
Totally with you fampai

Why so many GMs think that calling a game sandbox and winging it is okay, I will never know. I mean: sure, you might be okay in improv but you're going to fuck up if you don't take the game any direction.

Plus, I've heard and seen it happen a lot, in "sandbox" campaign
>Okay, so you are a band of mercenaries, you all know each other already for years.
>You start in the marketplace of [cliché city A]. What do you do?

Seriously? A sandbox game can only be called so if there is some fucking SAND in the box in the first place retard!

>Seriously? A sandbox game can only be called so if there is some fucking SAND in the box in the first place retard!

God, so much this. Why do bad GMs try to use "muh sandbox gaem" as an excuse to just have some vapid setting with absolutely nothing going on in it that the PCs don't invent for themselves?

Double dubs of truth.

Preach it!

The example your replying too is mostly about GMs who have no idea about the first thing in balancing characters and encounters.

They pull up some cool monsters, put in a bunch of them, and throw them in. These kinds of GMs are also the ones who any level of optimization and ask players to tone it down, thinking that it'll just make the encounter last longer. In reality, they're telling martials they can't have an 18 in STR while leaving the wizard with cheese options out the ass alone because "eh looks fine enough" since they have a 17 in INT (before magic items).

>You are not entitled to play whatever you want however you want, banning something from the game is not necessarily a house rule, maybe it's core classes only because the DM is tired of having to look through thirteen books of tables for your god damn thac0
True. I've got no problem with GMs who are up front about what is and isn't allowed.

If a GM says core classes only before character creation, that's fine.

If a GM waits until someone asks to play a non-core class and then declares the game to be core only, that's when it's starting to be a problem.

If the GM waits until a player has completed character creation then starts declaring parts of the character banned or doing something other than RAW, then it's a problem.

You do it like that:
>You start in the marketplace of [cliché city A]. You can:
>Check out the bounty board
>Ask a caravan master if he needs more guards
>Travel out of the city and delve in some dungeon, hoping for loot
>Explore the deep forest that locals are afrai of
>(after earning some renown) Go to the lord's house and ask if he has any job for you
>Sneak in merchant's/lord's house and try to steal shit
>Or make up some plan yourself

Watch the GM flounder as he has to pull everything out of his ass, setting everything up on the fly. Then watch the encounters being unbalanced as all hell because the GM can't into balance for the life of him.

Try to talk to the NPCs? Each and every one of them is a fucking snob who looks down on 'adventurers' and treats the party members like trash.

Or, in his panic, he just says "There is no X. What do you do instead?"

It's your own fault for assuming anyone would voluntarily use Skills and Powers.

I don't like it as a player when the world scales to my level desu. But I just solve this problem by not playing D&D.

>I don't like it as a player when the world scales to my level desu

Neither do I, really. But I also find it really fucking shitty when our GM decides "You know what? Time for a random encounter."
>proceeds to roll 3d6 dire wolves against a lvl 2 party because it's written in the
>TPK because the monsters are too fucking strong
>have to retcon it

Also
>bandits show up
>2d10, whatever
>party manages to pull a really close win, except one party member dies
>mfw the bandits do not fucking run away when they see that the adventurers fucking dropped half of them already
>mfw "what is morale"?
>mfw I have no face

>random encounter
>random
There's your problem.

>Heeey, it's a "sandbox" game.
>That means there's no fixed plot, there are no rails! Everything should be random!

This is what most GMs of those games actually believe. They just go "What should I throw at the party next, if they go in this direction."
>look up table of encounters
>roll dice
>done
I would like to play a good hexcrawl, but "sandbox" game are on my blacklist for now, for this very reason.

I get wary when a player walks in with 10+ pages of character backstory.

>I get wary when a player walks in with 10+ pages of character backstory.

This really happens?

I know. I actually managet to pull off a pretty good sandbox in Rogue Trader - but that required fucking preparation including several different maps, notes on 35 different planets, and about 20 recurring NPCs.

On the other side I once heard a DM say (and this is a direct quote) "You are attacked by 2d4 owlbears" This was my first and only time playing D&D

There's a certain art to using random encounters desu.
>party ranger spots a set of fresh wolf tracks in the mud
>roll 2 or 3 random encounters at the start of the day, decide what order they'll go in, so the randomly rolled travel merchant can warn the players "There's been talk of wolf attacks in the area lately." and then the merchant can fish out if the players are bandits or not before inviting them to his caravan
>it's getting to be night. You hear a howl in the distance. Do you set up camp or risk exhaustion to keep traveling?
Random encounters in like the DMG or something should really come with some advice on how to use them properly.

Ex-fucking-actly! A Good "sandbox" I still prefer the term hexcrawl requires, like every other -good- game, preparation. At least have notes of the general area the players are going to, some NPCs they might encounter and things they might find where they go.

You can even use different NPCs in different places! That merchan NPCs you made? If the players want to be pirates instead of big heroes, they could find this merchant on a boat instead of on the market, where he offers them their wares and stuff.

But nooo! Sandbox should be totes random with no preparation required because it's steered by the fucking players.

I find it saddening, that lazy, wannabe GMs sully the name of sandbox games like this.

Or it's not hard to make a situation for a region of the sandbox and a handful of encounters that tie into it. Then the players can actually encounter something more interesting than random fights when they enter the area.

Most sandbox GM's are garbage but I got spoiled when my first GM was really good at running one.

I had it happen to me once. The player damn near ruined the game by obsessing over every little decision his character had to make, out-loud. He also had a habit of pushing his character onto everyone else, or attempting to insert them into every situation, even when this was clearly a bad idea like trying to butt the "utility/diplomacy" player out of diplomatic situations, even though he was playing an assassin who was, by his own admission, terrible at that sort of thing. I've RP'd with the guy before, he isn't normally like that, but playing a character that he'd obsessed over so much turned him into That Guy.

>Or it's not hard to make a situation for a region of the sandbox and a handful of encounters that tie into it.

You would think that, yes, but in my experience GMs that do "sandbox" games are terrible. You're better off looking for the less-known games called "hexcrawlers".

It's not only that most GMs don't do as you say, but they are also terrible at balancing encounters.
>"Oh, this Wyvern lives in mountains: my players are in the mountains... it would be so cool if they fought one"
>characters are level 3
Fucking hell

I've done it a few times while working on the tone of the character. There's a big difference between a character's backstory written in his own words, and the version of that backstory you should submit to the GM however. Or make public for that matter.

Bulletpoint that shit.

Any player who says "Wow my Character is way more interesting then yours."

So, to make the whole thread short : if any character, even the PCs, even yours, isn't a middle-aged white man with short brown hair, brown eyes, brown clothes and brown life doing a purely mercenary job just to eat brown gruel and survive into an other brown day without any passion, ideal, fantasy, desire, relationship or personality, the game is worse than Hitler.

Thats usually fine. As long as i dont get the feeling the gm made the plot for today literally five minutes before we sat down. The "preferred" method is for the gm to have about 80% of the entire plot made, but this is far too much work for just a hobby.

I strongly prefer for the gm to have a very basic but clear arching plot. Clear beginning, a clear end (even if thats not revealed to us until then), and a middle that doesnt just feel like a bunch of random events. Read: filler.

Then again, this is just me. I know plenty of people who enjoy directionless games.

I remember how I ended up GM'ing a campaign in post apoc setting...

>50 years past nuclear war, crazy AI up north, mutants down south
>remaining military forms a faction of their own and focuses on fighting crazy AI
>of course, you need resources for that
>they implement 'tax' on existing, independent settlements, taking food, ammo or drafting for raw manpower
>only settlements under protection of other bigger cities get to say 'no' and survive it
>they still get to pay 'tax' to their 'protectors', but dont risk getting sent to frontlines

So, PC's decide to start in the middle, where leftover climate is bearable. Two of them are members of a criminal faction that makes use of information and control, more than a raw violence. Two others join through plot acceptable means.

Local splinter boss NPC gives them a mission, to either get information from, or bring over to him, a fence of nearby biker gang. Prize? A fair share of stolen goods and introduction to a bigger plan, allowing them go pursue it on their own. Advice? Keep things quiet.

They arrive at independent settlement on outskirts of burned town, where fence was keeping low profile. But, shit gets complex.
>6 packced trucks of army faction arrived earlier, making a stop before continuing towards frontlines
>locals shitting themselves, when mangled corpse of one of soldier's has been discovered
>rumours of missing child also start going around
>fence getting paranoid and wanting to leave the town

mfw one of players asks me when are we going to drop sandbox and start proper campaign

If there is someone who, introducing herself, says "I'm a feminist": run and do not turn back.

If the GM lets a girl in the game just so it's not only guys that play, then you better be wary. Especially if she starts shitting up the game. Because there might be the possibility that the GM won't kick her from the game to keep up the "quota" of women playing games or whatever. Do not accept that: if someone is shitting up the game, talk with them. If they don't change, let the GM know and talk together with him to the offender to try and smooth things out. If that guy still doesn't change, have the whole group talk with them. If that doesn't work, just don't invite that guy to the games anymore.

>Cancer Mage.jpg depicts a vermin lord...

And what did you tell that guy?

>I know plenty of people who enjoy directionless games.
What? For real?

that's just life in general
please, tailor your posts more for the Traditional Games board. It means better discussion for everyone involved.

>If there is someone who, introducing herself, says "I'm a feminist": run and do not turn back.

People define themselves by what they are interested in or what they belong to. If they are actually fucking interested in social justice campaigning then they are a complete steaming shit.

The same goes for it they introduce themselves with a political label of some kind. Just leave.

>my hand is a spider
>your argument is irrelevant

to be fair, the same can be said by people who talk about anime the first time they are invited anywhere. Since they aren't on Veeky Forums, I mean

>The same goes for it they introduce themselves with a political label of some kind. Just leave.

Willingly bearing labels of any kind is a sure sign of a bad time. Jobs are the only exception, because that's an actual title.
>Hi I'm user, Republican!
>Hi I'm user, a proud vegan!
>Hi I'm user, an avid reader!
>Hi I'm user, a card collector!
>Hi I'm user, a level 90 dreadknight main!
>Hi I'm user, an English major!

>And what did you tell that guy?
Not having anything better at the time, I told him that it will come soon enough...

It was a new group. So, I wanted to give them some open space to get to know eachother and find a middle ground for problem solving. Turned out that this player was a muderhobo specialist. And was straight up confused with amount of options open to them.

Personally, I hate railroading. And that was a first when someone called me out on sandbox being a bad thing.

>Personally, I hate railroading
You aren't the only one. Did that guy end up leaving?

I disagree.
I always build the first focus point of our world together with my players. Based on that I'll create the rest of the world, but will always be open to their input to some degree.
And I do give a singular shit about anything I'm responsible for.

No, he remained there till the group broke up.

Still, his most prominent character trait was just killing people.
At the very least, he listened to other players when they opposed his murderhobo habits.

>first round of first encounter
>suddenly someone yells OOC "alright guys move out of the way from my character because I'm going to cast an AOE spell"

Yeah, that is always very shitty on the player's part.

You know what I like to do when I am a caster though, with AoE spells that don't explode on impact? I like to target the air above the enemy, so that the spell will affect only the enemy and not my teammates.

What ruling allows you to do this? Circle shaped AOEs?

People constantly bitching about red flags, secretly judging the other players and the gm to not be as good as they are, and going mad at the first sign of something they don’t like. This is what is going to ruin games the most. You can build a functional machine out of imperfect components, but not out of purposefully contrarian ones.

The fact that I'm in them.

Sounds like someone is hopelessly naive about RPG communities.

Sounds like you never played and if you did you did with the wrong persons. Sounds like you like generalizing too much, which is actually the concept behind red flags: extreme generalization for the sake of feeling superior.

This.
Oh lord, so much this.

>for you

>defining people based on what they are as opposed to who they are

Chris Redfield is significantly different to Martin Walker.

Presumably he's in a dwarf or hobbit campaign and all of the enemies are always taller than the PCs. That's the only way that would possibly work.

Same here. It actually kind of worries me what sort of people Veeky Forums plays with, where that advice is so common.

I believe the idea is that blast AOEs are actually Volumes of Effect.

So pulling it totally out of your ass.

This is known as 'using your brain'. I suggest you try it sometime.

You should notice that many of those who spit so many negative judgements on charager concepts usually say something like "i would never let anyone do X" or "if someone was to do X than I would leave", and this means they have never seen it actually happen, but are just drawn around by their prejudices and preconceptions based usually on the stuff they read here, or on reddit, or elsewhere in the internet.

Found the pleb that can't think outside of the box. Or think at all for that matter.

Unless you're doing some stranger in a strange land stuff, not having a general idea of the world you're in.

If we are talking DnD 5, each spell specifies the area it hits, so there is no way to pull anything out of any hole.
Side note, fireballs are spheres.

Sandbox games are a thing, user.

If you have to look through 13 books for one piece of information, you're an incompetent fuck and shouldn't be dming in the first place.

Not him, but I'm fairly sure that if someone uses two-three multiclasses from different splatbooks, you might have to look up the things that you gain from taking multiple classes in other books.

Which can be a real drag.

Here's the thing with those though, I don't think they are. Any decent GM will be able to go with the flow of their players, obviously. But I have yet to HEAR of a GM that can run a decent session without some kind of plan.

As someone who has GM'd a few successful "sandbox" games, I'm really just giving my players a wide berth. I know what characters their going to meet, if I have time it may be one of several options. If players need to infiltrate a facility I'll know how they can get in, again, if I have time it'll be one of a few options.

But ultimately, I've at least thought of most outcomes, and if something comes up that I didn't plan for, I do what every good gm does and I roll with it till we're back on track. And if I do my job right, the player will think I'm some kind of improv genius, but really I just have way to much free time. Is that a sandbox or just what a GM is supposed to do?

Yep. Especially in 3e, you can get prestige classes that take feats that are neither in the book containing the class nor the PHB, but are in some tertiary source.

If I wanted to consult a table to see which table I need to consult, I'd be playing Rolemaster.

>Sounds like you never played and if you did you did with the wrong persons.

You do realize that the very acknowledgement of there *being* "wrong persons" devalues your entire point, since red flags are all about developing an understanding of preemptive *signs* of the "wrong people" to begin with, right?

No, not at all. "Wrong" persons can in most cases be talked out of their misery and helped becoming better player- or even better persons if the problem is far heavier. Or they can just be fucks that will try to actively to ruin a game, the point is, there is no way to tell with a system of red flags at the beginning of the game. That would just mean being full of prejudice and self righteousness, of being actively trying to call some people guilty of ruining something before it even starts. This is the worst kind of players really, those who freak out at the sight of "anime characters", "kid characters" and so on.

Also if it's 3.X or 4e then you're looking at even a single class like a wizard having options in close to 6 books and any number of those dragon magazines.
Not even counting setting specific books, or multiclassing

>No, not at all.

Yes, absolutely. Contrary to your beliefs, people are quite intelligent enough to notice trends and tendencies and how they affect situations.

Merely by virtue of having your own "red flag," where you notice people who "freak out" about things they deem a bad sign in a game, you are acknowledging this most basic truth, no matter how vehemently you try to deny it and proclaim yourself some enlightened being above "prejudice."

You are a hypocrite.

I am nit enlightned, i can just see that people may have different tastes and may be looking for rp experiences that are not the same i like. I sure won't call them red flags until they actually try to actively get in the way of the game.

However, in 4e you can actually fit everything on your sheet, since
1.) being a cleric/druid/wizard with downtime does not mean you have automatic access to, oh, 500+ spells that you can switch out every day from 10 different splats.
and 2.) The power structure displays everything in condensed clear forms so they actually fit with all the info on your sheet.

Admittedly, it'd be pita without the character creator.

>>"Oh, this Wyvern lives in mountains: my players are in the mountains... it would be so cool if they fought one"
>>characters are level 3
Even then he could have the encounter being about fleeing the beast, or anything that isn't "your group and [random monster] fight to death."
Random tables can be used I think, but they too need to be rethought and not just be a braindead roll mindlessly applied.