ITT: Bad campaigns

I always wanted to play someone like this.

Do your games often involve chestbursting rat kings from inside pregnant eleven year olds?

Besides every NPC saying fck you everytime you help them. That's an interesting campaign idea. but I do understand all grim all day doesn't make for a good game. Could use some grim comedy to lighten the mood. and the rat king bit, feels a bit much. A good Bard with a lot of arcane and religious knowledge would go a long way to working through a lot of that bullshit. I mean like give the players a chance to stop the smaller evils, and work to stop the greater

No, but holy fuck is that grimdark without going grimderp. It fits neatly with the theme of the world going to hell in a macabre looking handbasket.

It doth not reek of try hard.

It really, really does.

I'm honestly going to have to disagree.

that's the fucking definition of grimderp. In what world is "swarm of rats explode through the stomach of pregnant eleven year old" not grimderp?

It's fine in Alien and it's stupid in Carnasaur. Just depends.

Neither of those feature eleven year old girls.

Chestbursters, fine. Chestbursters inside pregnant children, fuck off.

>DM goes into 12 billionth 30 minute lore bullshit speech
>Other PCs anime catgirl waifus bicker about what kind of sushi they like non-combat
>Overpowerd wizard PC on a dragon wipes out any threat with mind control powers and sorcery during combat

Literally cancer, I hate "DnD people"

Just because they're children that means their immune to the horrors of the world?

I think it does a good job of showing that nothing is sacred in that setting. It's not like every child they meet is getting railed up the ass by some demon until she explodes like a mortal kombat character.

And I think you're fifteen. Come back when you're older, edgelord.

Use your big boy words, user. Tell us why you don't like the thing.

If I knew going in it was grimdark, I would have made an opportunistic asshole or a noblebright who becomes more cynical as time goes on. It sounds more like the fun is in roleplaying living in a hellhole than actually saving people and being a Big Goddamn Hero. I can definitely understand, though. The Rat King thing is a bit much.

First, please explain how an eleven year old girl being raped by rats and killed by a chestbursting rat king isn't grimderp as fuck.

>Devils advocate here
The particulars of the delivery are lost to us; The GM could have actually delivered the scene with a tone of artful dread. The subject matter is grotesque, but so is a Jackson Pollack painting, and he's a fucking master

This actually sounded tolerable even for super dark and edgy shit until "eleven year old impregnated by rats".
I can enjoy dark fantasy as much as the next guy but that's so depressing and grim I might as well be RPing BERSERK.

We both know that's not how he did it.

Well if you were at the session why don't you tell us how it happened?

>An eleven year old was impregnated by rats and had a rat king burst through her stomach.
>impregnated by rats
>impregnated
>by rats
You are well within your rights to call the DM out on being full retard.

Honestly, getting impregnated by rats is already retarded as fuck. It's actually bothering me the longer I think about it. Wow, that's stupid. The victim being 11 is also absolutely dreadful as well, of course.

I'm also playing Devil advocate for the GM here since chestbursting 11 year olds seems like an initial turnoff to me. Everything the poster bothered to explain about he world up to that point seemed fine and even built a coherent pile of horror influence. Body horror can be very effective or it can get real bad real fast. Given that the GM seemed to be competent up to that point, I'm tempted to trust that he might have known what he was doing and he might have done it effectively in context. The complainer's post indicates he didn't want a game with strong horror elements at all so he was justified in leaving at any point, but that doesn't make the campaign bad.

It's not pleasant at all, but historically and even currently in shithole countries, children get pregnant all the time. The chestbursting rats were a bit much for me personally, but it does fit the theme. Certainly wouldn't be enough to make me leave the game. But to each his own, of course. I hope the GM clarified beforehand how grimdark (or derp) the game would be?

Except for that last bit I could probably deal with it. I'd play some sort of lawful good cleric trying to make the shitty world a better place by spreading his faith.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=xlbDHejQFV4

And this, novice GMs, is why you can't just have one tone in your game all the fucking time. It gets old.

More of a one shot than a campaign, but there was the time we were told we'd be playing ourselves, timeshifted forward ten years and given superpowers, then apparently expected to side with the nazis. (GM hated chavs. GM's superpowered self didn't timeshift, and instead took over the world and put chavs in concentration camps.)

That wasn't fun.

>bait

University RP group actually.

was in a magical realm 3.5e game for a bit. biggest thing was bondage. and tights. he was a massive dick so everyone in the group bailed and reformed it without him. went ok.

>Alien

Okay, sure, but if Newt had gotten chestbursted instead of Kane people would have looked back on that film as crass and disgusting instead of the quality film we remember it as.

Context, user, Jesus Christ.

Universally the worst sorts of rp communities, so I can buy it.

That certainly doesn't sound like my type of game. I could understand the appeal for people who like grimdark, but at a certain point that sounds like it would get as boring as everything going perfectly well with nothing bad ever.

I feel like you'd have to have at least some points of bright things happening just for contrast.

>I'd play some sort of lawful good cleric

m8, what part of
>eldritch cthulhu monsters ate all the gods.
did you not understand?

Time to kill them and take his god's place. Duh.

I hope this posts ok. It looks fucked on my phone but it was fine on PC. This be me, ask me whatever.

It looks fine

I've got quite a few stories about bad campaigns, dumbass players, prick DMs etc. The most recent was a 5E where the DM claimed "spellbooks have expiration dates" and "dwarves are physically unable to get drunk" two weeks in and I walked away and joined some friends in pathfinder.

I could almost see the second one making sense, if he meant in the sense of being unable to get knocked out from drinking to much, but how does a spellbook expire? It isn't like a driver's licence or a coupon. It's basically a textbook.

>"spellbooks have expiration dates"
Now I'm imagining a goddess of magic charging late fees on spellbooks like a librarian.

I get you, mate. It sounds stressful as fuck.

I mean, I get grim stories, but unrelenting defeat sounds really draining.

Get a better group, you whiny faggot.

I have no idea what was going through his head when he said that shit, plus the party had to hunt down a dracolich but he kept saying "dragon lich" and then by the second session he gave the party five chromatic eggs one of each color and told them to "raise them to be free of evil and pure of heart" at that point I just said fuck it and quit, the campaign is still going on as far as I know, I just wonder what other stupidity I've missed. The DM in question is decent when he's a player but is just a shit DM who's too afraid to kill any party members

>but MUH MAGIC

>I think I'm going to attempt to talk to the GM about possible solutions
Good luck, because that always works.

>An eleven year old was impregnated by rats

It works more often than being a passive-aggressive shit does.

Dwarven Resilience is even a trait of theirs in 5e to give resistance to poison. It's a fine interpretation of the race.

>When every fucking NPC makes a point of letting you know how much more powerful than you they are, and how little they care about you at all

So... you've played Warhammer? Rats in loli are fucking stupid, but rest of campaign sounds cool.

Dude, don't play a good person! The whole point of these games are so you can play an asshole. Like, if you're trying to play a good person, obviously you're missing the point.

In games like these, you play Inquisitors, witch-hunters, doomed knights, tomb-robbers, mad alchemists and throat-slitters. If you want to play a good guy, you get what you deserve.

I've played almost exclusively in bad campaigns. One in every system I like.

>new World of Darkness
ST pitches a game where it begins with our death and our mysterious reappearance in a room with a big black sphere. First 30 minutes are filled with mystery and you can cut the atmosphere with a knife, it was so thick. Then the sphere opens up, gives us guns and gimpsuits, instructing us to kill a giant mechanical marionette guitarist. There was also other marionettes sans guitar, filled with goop and piloted by fanged purple chickens. Also, my character had a cocaine withdrawal fit. I was horrified, but not exactly for the reasons the GM wanted me to. That game must had about 8 people rotate through it, I left when the super edgy kid joined and he saw nothing wrong with allowing a war criminal in the party 6 sessions in.

>Vampire: the Requiem
I was promised sandbox and vampires. I got railroads so strict and confining that derailment meant "nobody is sitting on their ass doing nothing." Also the cunt kept invading on my character; his Flaws, his personality, progression, all of that needed the fucking kraut's "magic touch", the inverse of Midas touch. Eventually, things started happening, he got mad that I didn't like his attempts to retcon my character's relationships and the game collapsed 4 sessions in.

So you played Gantz?

>Stars Without Number
Faggot gave a single hour monologue about how we enter a spaceship and how it has no windows because it doesn't make any sense that spaceships would have windows blah blah blah. Then someone got shanked on the ship, my character got put on hold since I had 0 reason in-game to get invested and wasn't really allowed near the murder scene, a lot of memes were spouted and then the game ended with me doing nothing and not being allowed to do anything. 1 session is all I could stomach.

>Dark Heresy
We rolled for everything minus taking a shit. Everyone ignored the backstory of my character that had him fall into hard times and just referred to me as "the Scum." Also he allowed a man to be Kaldor Draigo's adopted son he saved after his mum got slaughtered by Daemons and got his planet Exterminatus'd. I permanently excused myself once I heard that.

As it turns out, yes.

If he had let us in on that little tidbit, I might haven't joined, which would be a shame. That campaign was bad, but hilariously so.

>picture this
Walter White wearing a gimp suit, throwing purple hens around on his quest to find cocaine.

> Wrath of the Righteous

A girl singlehandedly turned the story into her elaborate NTR scenario. Fucking hell.

>Kaldor Draigo's adopted son

Mine.
I couldn't handle Shadowrun rules. Holy crap. They really don't fit my DMing style.

I think that I cut my eyes reading all that edgy shit

At that point, why does anyone even bother living in such a bleak and desolate world?

>Playing Star Wars d20
>Any equipment we could've gotten was destroyed via GM fiat.
>Anything we wanted to buy was met with resistance.

>Playing WoW d20
>Out of seven people, only me and another friend are having fun.
>Ended up leading to a mass exodus where we played smash bros in the community hall for the rest of the campaign time.

>Playing Pathfinder
>Basically four hours of listening to the GM explain how we get buttfucked by entities that were vastly superior to our own power.
>Only last two sessions

>Playing PF (again)
>Get fiat'd into failing a will save, even though I rolled a NAT 20.
>Kept getting cancelled because the GM kept having scheduling issues

>Playing PF (once more)
>Campaign ends with us basically dying and being reincarnated into a parallel world, while the real world burns to the ground.

All different GMs as well, it's no wonder I hated 3.PF for the longest time.

Dark setting allow for cool themes though.
You can see good people become bad people.
You can see good people become dead people.
And once in a blue moon, you can see good people become heroes.

Nobledark=bestdark

I'll take that over "keep spouting the meme of the week" or "kill the lich" campaigns.

Would you prefer an "establish gay marriage" campaign instead?

Warhammer is shitty but even it isn't even nearly that shitty. It also helps it's self aware and not entirely bleak

Not him but I prefer games where I actually feel as though I'm making a difference.

If the world is already seven degrees past fucked and nothing I do will unfuck the world, what's the point of even playing anymore?

An "establish gay marriage" campaign could be legitimately good, though. You could have actual political intrigue and present the players with problems they can't fix by punching. The only issue is that people here don't like the concept because it's SJW-esque and they don't want to get social justice cooties

To survive.
Even if you can't change it you can still try to survive and reproduce.

Though honestly this is a matter of Taste. Some people want a setting in which you only try to survive as good as you can, Sonne want Settings where you can meaningfully change the status Quo

This is the difference between Noble- and Grimdark.
Both are shit, but in the former you can still make a difference, however small it might be (from what I've heard this is the Souls Verse) while the latter says that you will die without making a difference unless you are already one of the best at the beginning.

Well, my attempts to be a memelord just utterly failed.

In all honestly though, I get wehre you guys are coming from. It's better to have a campaign where the objective is a long term one and with actions that have direct consequences to the world is infinate times more enjoyable than the Epic Quest of Murder™ can ever hope to be. If we're talking about utter dystopia, the good guys are outright needed in that world and playing as one can have a good feeling as you influence the narrative.

Whoops, didn't mean to Quote the first guy

Except that in the post the GM clearly meant the campaign to be grimderp... sorry, I mean 'grimdark', as everyone attempting to be good is generally fucked.

>An eleven year old was impregnated by rats and had a rat king burst through her stomach.

Yeah, that's when you leave I'll give you that.

>It doth not reek of try hard.
Methinks the lady doth protesteth too much.
>Everything the poster bothered to explain about he world up to that point seemed fine and even built a coherent pile of horror influence.
Aside from the "there are only two kinds of peasants" thing, which you conveniently ignored.

t. GM from The grimmer and darker the setting, the more compelled I feel to be the goodest nicest and most paladinnest

4E, with a dm, an autist, a buddy, and myself having any clue how the rules worked and a rotating cast of four or five dipshits that probably didn't want to be there, but autist and DM wanted to do it so they went along with it.
It was over anything but maptools, and every single turn for the moron brigade involved them picking a power at random, being told by the autist why that was a terrible idea, being outright told what to do in autist's battle plan, picking ANOTHER power at random, etc. etc.
DM was decent except for trying to overextend himself far too much- At one point we fought a retreating action against something like 60 warforged.
Each with a token.
Each with a token and a separate place in the turn order.
Each with a separate token, place in the turn order, and slightly different stats to differentiate them out.

Any two moron brigade turns took as long as the entire set of warforged turns.

This was after six fucking witnessed months of them playing, and an indeterminate amount before that.

Nobledark is fine.

nobledark also doesn't generally involve being relentlessly shat on, and features at least a chance to be, you know, noble.

It's always seemed weird to me that nobledark stuff is so rare in fantasy when Tolkien himself was extremely nobledark. It's like people actively avoid ripping off any of the good parts of the setting

Fair enough. I'd say the right motifs are there for a good nobledark campaign but the DM tries to force it into grimderp instead. That would make the game a lot less engaging to play.

>I'd say the right motifs are there for a good nobledark campaign but the DM tries to force it into grimderp instead.
What motifs? user didn't mention any, let alone any that would be conducive towards pivoting the game towards a more "noble" atmosphere.

Do you know what a "motif" is?

I was thinking that the plague would be a motif in this narrative, just like everyone good dying horribly would be a motif in that narrative.

Then again I was always shit at English and if you like to rant and explain it to me be my guest.
I used to pay for that shit.

I signed up for a Call of Cthulhu campaign. The premise was that we were all working at Miskatonic University, so all but one guy turned in academic character types. Last guy was a /k/ommando playing a /k/ommando.
The actual game turned out to be an expedition in the south-american jungles, where nobody in the party but the /k/ommando had any applicable skill. Moreover, we were using the d20 rules, which is already bad enough on its own, but also the DM introduced some house rules to make the game more realistic, such as infections from wounds. Finally, one of the other players decided that it would be fun to slip drugs unwittingly to my character, and the DM ran with it, eating through my sanity like it was candy floss.
I spent the following five or six sessions in a nightmare of degrading health and sanity. Thankfully the game derailed on the trip back from the jungle and I've never played with them again.

The plague evokes comparisons to Christian apocalypse beliefs even before the dead gods were known and to historical plague times. The user futility if the players' before the forces that oppose or care not for humanity provokes a sense if cosmic horror. The knight errant's entails set an example for a clear and dark narrative tone and give precedence for gore stuff.
There was never a hint of noble in the story.

Or, what if the laws of magic were subject to routine patches/updates?

>we'd be playing ourselves

That's always an immediate red flag for me.

"Motifs" are reoccurring elements that tend to tie themselves to themes of a work, not necessarily plot elements. One example that's comparable to this one: "fire," in The Road, is a motif. It's tied indistinctly to life, perseverance, vitality, the value associated with life, the spirit, whatever.
The plague, in this example, isn't so much a motif as it is a pervasive plot element. I don't even know if you could call it a reoccurring one, because it never goes away in the first place. "People dying horribly" isn't really a motif either, it's too literal and too broad.

Vocabulary aside, though, I'm agreeing with the thrust of what was getting at. It doesn't seem like anything about this setting is particularly conducive towards making things noble at all, especially considering that you can do noble things in happy, bright settings as well.

One thing that bugs me: what about the plague has anything to do with Christianity? I don't follow you at all there. Revelation mentions plagues, sure, but it also mentions war and pestilence and stars falling from the sky and stuff like that. And if it did evoke Christian narratives, that would counter your main point that there's nothing vaguely noble about the setting, so I don't even know why you'd make that claim in the first place.

Actually happened in a few D&D settings. God of magic dies or someone else takes the mantle, the rules get adjusted.

While that would be hilarious as a setting piece, how would you do it mechanically? Random patch effects table?

I kind of want to do that for the other laws of reality too.

>It's a brand new day
>Wake up, stretch and get ready for whatever it holds for you
>As you step out the door you realize it's raining paper
>Snag one and take a look at it
>Patch Notes 925.01.000245b

That actually sounds kinda good as long as you ignore the impregnation thing, that's just stupid. But I can really imagine the world as some pest-ridden dark medieval themed hell with Bosch-tier dreams.

.... Masque of the Red Death?

First thing that came to mind.

DM encouraged us to write up backstories, histories, family relations, etc. and roleplay.

He also ran a very lethal game. In one particular instance, he sent a party of level 3 PCs up against a fucking banshee. After a few sessions we asked about the high mortality rate and he said (near as I can remember) "It's my job to kill the PCs. If I don't kill at least one of you every fight then I'm not doing my job." I cannot for the life of me fathom why he wanted so much characterization for someone who, on average, will only survive three combats.

Have you considered that he is actually retarded?

>It's my job to kill the PCs