Doing well in adventure so far

That... Is the most shitty sort of way to run an enemy.
And that's not how memetics works. Warning a person against a meme typically strengthens them against the meme, since a portion of its information has been linked to a warning.
Also, a memetic god would be empowered by the entirety of their memeplex being implanted into minds, but see the above on how warnings help.
For more info, visit /EPG/.
Get a new GM.

To summarize, I really, really have no idea how we were supposed to miraculously glean that "learning more about the bad guys is the wrong thing to do; we should just beat everyone up" was the right answer.

Again, to quote the GM: "There were lots of way this COULD have ended quickly, but you didn't choose them. One disconnect we may be having is that I don't push my players towards the 'right' answer. I let them pick mostly whatever they want to do. And you guys got unlucky and picked the one thing that ends the world."

He's a shit gm.

You don't fucking throw a button out that fucking ends the world, and give 0 hints to your players.

The gm isn't playing against the party, he's playing with the party to provide a fun story and a challenge.

If the party ends the world without ever having the slightest clue that they were doing the wrong thing. You have failed as a gm.

So yeah, your gm needs a solid application of a cluebyfour. Cause that's dumb as fuck.

>and give 0 hints to your players.

The stupider part: Getting a hint NOT to do something makes the situation worse as now you know more.

>How do you cope with this?
Discuss with the rest of your group about whether or not they think this development is horseshit. If you're all in agreement, tell the GM, as a group, that his plot is horseshit. Remind him that this was bad and he should feel bad.

If you're alone in your opinion, leave the group if needed, as they have bad opinions.

"You should have figured it out," without GOOD hints, is a sign that your GM is completely disconnected with a player's point of view, and he might not be even capable to understand why this was a dick move.

Or the hook to the next adventure

>The adventure is over because we broke the world, and we are restarting anew.

Is it not rather inimical to an RPG to punish learning about the situation?

The next adventure where I try my hardest not to learn anything. Shit, I can't think of a better way to discourage future exploration than this.

This kind of plot only works when the NPC questgiver is the one tricking the party. Then its the party had not been around another person would have rolled into and gotten tricked anyways. But really it's all about the reveal and follow through with these kind of things

Shit dm. That is the most counter-intuitive bullshit I've ever heard. Which would be fine - if there were plenty of hints. But I don't see any mentioned here in your post, so will assume there were none. Did you know memetic entities were even a THING in your campaign?

This is call of cthulhu. and poorly done. That information should have at least been hinted at in journals or something. christ. that the REAL answer nwould have been to destroy and kill all tracing of that god. IE killing everyone involved. Then it becomes a game of assassinations on the clock but without that knowledge to murder, that plot doesn't work.

Yeah I was gonna say this. This a poorly-done fantasy CoC campaign. GM needs to get gud.

It depends on what your group did.

>Find ancient artifact
OH I STICK MY DICK IN IT AND BREAK IT
Yeah okay you should probably have researched the thing a bit.

>Encounter gatekeeper of evil god prison
Yeah okay you should probably have figured out that breaking into evil god prison was a bad idea. Perhaps bring the big guy some coffee and cakes, being a gatekeeper can be boring at times.

And so on. Soemtimes, GMs do this out of seemingly nowhere, and that is kinda lame. I'd rather just be told that something has escaped, making it out fault for no reason is just silly.

I really would like to reemphasize that we had been given absolutely no clues as to this memetic god phenomenon apart from "the enemies have been growing stronger," which requires an extremely large logical leap to connect to "growing stronger as the PCs learn about them."

And now the campaign ends with the world doomed.

Speaking of Call of Cthulhu, before the campaign, the GM offered us a choice between two plotlines: an extraplanar journey through fey lands, and a vaguely eldritch/cosmic investigation. The group unanimously decided on the former.

Once the campaign started, we were presented with an in-character choice on two major leads to follow up on. The lead we had chosen to pursue unwittingly lead us to the eldritch/cosmic investigation plotline... which is the plotline we had not agreed to in the first place. We learned of this only now.

Which begs the question: if the group unanimously wanted the fairyland plotline, then why did the GM even present that in-character choice at the beginning?

>Which begs the question: if the group unanimously wanted the fairyland plotline, then why did the GM even present that in-character choice at the beginning?

As many other anons have already pointed out, he's a shit GM. He wanted to do the eldritch shit, presented you a choice to let you think that you had any sort of chance of NOT playing badly done CoC and then pushed it on your anyway. Tell him he's a shit GM and find a new one.

Then why even offer a choice between the two storylines before the game?

Because he was a dingus.

He screwed up bad but he might improve as a GM in the future.

My guess, he assumed you would choose eldritch horror. When that went awry, he decided to try and roll with it and do it anyway. The others are right though, without giving any real clues except a massive logical stretch, it was hamhanded at best.

This is an enemy that can be defeated via ignoring it.

And getting everyone to fucking ignore it. The best way to get people to ignore something is a distraction, and it has to be one humdinger of a distraction in this instance.

user, what you have to do is be a Bigger Badder Eviler Guyer than the DM's BBEG.

Well that's some fucking bullshit.
I'd have been pissed.

There was no opportunity to do so when the GM simply declared the country destroyed and the world doomed.

Besides; we are restarting the campaign.

user, you have your mission. Outdo the BBEG, wherever he is, whatever the game is.

Do it for the Touhous.

Show him that you have learned your lesson all too well. Kill everything you see. Murderhobo so hard that nothing in your line of sight is considered a "non-combatant." You are now on to his wily ways and will never fall for them again. Anything comes up to the party, declare that you are "on to them" and initiate combat.

It sounds like a case of quantum ogres, or the GM giving you a choice with only one real answer. No matter what you did or where you went, you were going to find out you were doing the eldritch plot after all.

Of course, the GM won't have any reason to admit that and he'll keep claiming that it all just happened to go that way.

Again, why even offer the choice of adventure before the game?

Question: Is there any way to do a storyline where the villains are supposed to win that isn't shitty?
I know having an intended outcome, especially a failure, is a dick move, just thinking about a campaign idea I had, the point being that it would lead to a second campaign but the idea I had for it is dependent on failure.

Play the villains?

I'm a batshit GM and I approve of what he was doing. Seems cool. Only difference I'd make is leave room for the existing, or new PCs to continue the adventure in its new direction.
But then my players have been talking lately about going a hundred miles backwards upside down and blindfolded to unknowingly hit the "Destroy the World" button and I'd be pretty fucked for how to continue it if they did.

>I'm a batshit GM and I approve of what he was doing.
OP's GM detected.
>Seems cool.
Yeah, let's play an adventure where you're supposed to murderhobo everything and learn as little as possible.

>Well, you managed to break off the rails in the specifically right way to destroy the world.
The wording on this fits too perfectly well with how my players operate so I feel some sympathy pains for him. Though my game tends to work in the opposite direction with murderhoboing.

Well, like the other user said, he thought he could get away with it and he expected you to pick the "right" choice the first time.

I guess there's another possibility though. His excuse is so much bullshit that I'm not sure if he's just way into memes and it was actually part of the plot all along, or if that's just an ad hoc excuse for his "rocks fall, you die" ending. It feels like he had not really expected you to be able to interrogate the guards so thoroughly, or possibly that you would interrogate them at all, and when you did that he thought you had went so off the rails that he had no choice but to end the campaign there. That's why the radio silence while he was coming up with that silly explanation.

In any case, if he's going to kill off campaigns that easily, I wouldn't expect the next one last much longer either, unless you somehow manage to follow along his rails nicely and don't do anything to rock the boat.

>he thought he could get away with it and he expected you to pick the "right" choice the first time.
Again, why offer the choice at all?

>It feels like he had not really expected you to be able to interrogate the guards so thoroughly, or possibly that you would interrogate them at all
No. What the GM apparently expected us to do from the beginning, several sessions ago, was to charge towards a seemingly obvious enemy and kill everyone there. That would have resolved the plotline immediately.

>That's why the radio silence while he was coming up with that silly explanation.
The GM had apparently hit their stamina limit for the session, only to come back later.

To clarify though, the GM actually wants to restart the campaign and actually run us through the fairyland plotline this time.

I have no idea how this will turn out, however. I certainly hope we do not encounter (hidden) meta gimmicks like "Do not learn anything at all about what is going on" again.

Sounds to me like the DM assumed that the group would never choose the fey, probably because he himself dislikes them in some way, so was presenting a non-choice, and then reused the same non-choice in a less obvious fashion when the group didn't go his way.

Essentially, it sounds like the DM has some sort of problem understanding social cues and probably lacks enough empathy to understand what the problem is.

>Again, why offer the choice at all?
Because you were supposedly playing a roleplaying game, player choice is paramount to all (except it's okay to just pull the strings behind the scenes to get the players where you want them to be).

>No. What the GM apparently expected us to do from the beginning, several sessions ago, was to charge towards a seemingly obvious enemy and kill everyone there. That would have resolved the plotline immediately.
>The GM had apparently hit their stamina limit for the session, only to come back later.
Right, what I was trying to say that he didn't expect you to do anything else besides kill the bad guys, so when you did something else it ruined his plans.

Well, that just makes it sound like he was in a loss what to do with players who didn't follow his rails, so he decided to end the campaign. He still could have made up that excuse about meme gods later on when he needed to explain why getting more information would somehow be dangerous. Really, it's so batshit insane that I'd be surprised if he had actually planned that.

I hope he's a new GM who's still learning and the next game works out better for you.

According to the GM, the idea was that, since we unwittingly hopped aboard the eldritch storyline, we would resolve that plot very quickly by simply barging in and killing everyone. Then we could move on to the fairy storyline.

Instead, for several sessions, we were unknowingly walking down a road to a bad ending, a gigantic waste of time for all involved.

Nah, that's bullshit.

Best case scenario, he ignored your parties explicit wishes for campaign tone and theme, tried to run a campaign concept beyond his ability, and when it went beyond his capabilities he panicked.

If that's true, all you need is for him to admit his mistake, apologize, and he can improve.

More likely, he didn't care what you wanted out of the game, played with a concept he thought was cool and had read about elsewhere, got bored and decided to end it. If he was a player, i'd fully expect him to keep making new characters, all based on meme builds, funny Veeky Forums stories, and OPChar threads, only to get bored after a few sessions, disrupt the game, and reroll.

If that sounds even REMOTELY familiar, i would not let him DM again.

I like this tack.

>alternitively "Players GMs wish they had, but not the Players the world wish they got."

You missed and

Thank you, I shall amend it shortly.

It has been amended.

Might as well just cap the whole thread.

Look, the GM made that up. He just wants you to stop abusing suggestions all the time, and this the first thing he could think of to get you to stop.

It's not really a good thing if his first reaction is to end the campaign instead of talking about it with the player like an adult or coming up with a reason why it doesn't work.

As it is, now the player is left hoping that the GM doesn't decide to end the game because of some bullshit reason the next time he tries to play smart, and the GM is left hoping that the players won't come up with any weird ideas he's not prepared for.

>Look, the GM made that up. He just wants you to stop abusing suggestions all the time, and this the first thing he could think of to get you to stop.
He's a shit GM if that's the case. All that'd mean is the suggestions will involve memory-wipes.

My character actually has "Memory Wipe" as a separate ability.

Now that you've learned about that, clearly you must wipe the knowledge of everyone's brain clean, and finally yourself, so that the entire world may be full of people who do not think and so do not attract the attention of these outsiders.

I think that, even excluding everything else your DM did wrong, maybe you shouldn't play a character that plays with the mind like that if the DM can't handle it.

Similarly, an old DM of mine wanted to run a monster campaign, and i rolled up two characters, one of which was an Illithid. I asked if he could handle dealing with mind reading and manipulation, he wasn't sure, so i didn't play it.

Characters that can do things like that can be HARD for a dm, and they might not realize that until its too late unless you bring it up.

We never learned of this in-character. The GM, after the end of the session, explained to us that our quarries were memetic gods and that we had caused said gods to reach critical mass, with our characters none the wiser.

This would then blow up a country and doom the rest of the world.

How and why does a memetic god do those things? Why is it instantaneous? Why did the small amount of awareness granted to a small group of people do this spontaneously? Why is your DM a shit?

I really would not know.

The whole thing is dumb because if its the whole "they get stronger the more you know about them" then the only way to win is to destroy ALL information about them, then kill yourselves in a way that no one would question why you killed yourself or what you did before hand (otherwise they would look into your death and start the whole process again)

We did, in fact, encounter an NPC who was killing people in order to conceal information about those memetic gods. That was the NPC here .

We never received an explanation on that fiery entited she had entered a pact with.

Of course, her mysterious behavior was a main driving point of our investigation, so perhaps she did not think this through.

>Look, the GM made that up. He just wants you to stop abusing suggestions all the time, and this the first thing he could think of to get you to stop.
Sadly, this bullshit would hurt my brain less than a GM not having an explanation for all these points.

>Secret Gods that get more powerful the more that is known of them?
Fine. Could be done well.

>Any action made to actually understand your enemy directly and immediately leads to a critical mass destruction, rather than, say, literally anything else, which could be responded to.
I lack a "Never go full retard" image sufficiently offensive enough.

The guy who was sure the GM made up the thing about the memetic gods when he needed to come up with an excuse here.

>We did, in fact, encounter an NPC who was killing people in order to conceal information about those memetic gods. That was the NPC here .
Well, I guess the madman actually had written the memetic gods in his plot somehow. The way it ended was still basically the GM saying that he had enough, even if he says it was your fault.

>so perhaps she did not think this through
Or, if you want to be mean about it, the GM didn't think it through.

>Secret Gods that get more powerful the more that is known of them
It sounds much better when you put it like that.

See it would have been okay if (a la Planescape) you *knew* that memetic entities were real, and furthermore that there were a shitload of people who already revered him, to the point that it was already kind of a shock that he wasn't walking the world already and literally every time somebody new came to know about this figure it was a huge risk.

Doesn't sound like any of that happened. Also, how many people knew about this guy? From a worldbuilding perspective, you would need a shitload of people to believe in a memetic god to make it real. If just a handful of evil cultists in a cave could do it, that would be like the easiest doomsday weapon ever. World would never have even gotten as far as it apparently has because of all the meme gods curbstomping the place.

Wasn't there some shitty horror movie just released with this premise?

After looking it up, yeah, it's called The Bye Bye Man. The GM here probably watched this movie, thought it was a brilliant idea, and based a campaign based around it without thinking it through.

I'm a second player from that game and I must say that while the game was fun and interesting, that "memetic gods" reveal was extremely anticlimatic and just plain stupid. It all looks like a rather extreme cause of misaligned expectations. That GM thought we would just kill our enemies swiftly and move on to our preferred storyline but when we didn't do that, he never said anything and gave us no hints that we are basically doing everything wrong. Hell, we were sure we are doing everything RIGHT.

This is a new system we are playing (Strike!) and one of its selling points is its combat engine. Maybe that storyline was left as an option if we wanted to just focus on tactical combat for a while but again, that was not clear at the least.

Apparently, knowledge of these memetic gods was limited to a small group of cults, the NPCs our characters were investigating, and our PCs.

We had no idea that such memetic entities even existed.

This is a possibility.

This whole fucking bullshit fiasco is a MONSTROUS slaughtering of the concept of memetic entities and this GM needs to get his shit together.

Why?

That is a shit game. You don't place "no roll you lose" conditions on a part of the game that should not be uncovered but still exists. Even Ctulhu games do it better - knowledge is dangerous to the character but can actually save the world/town.

In case you absolutely want to do it you either should still leave a way out or to give players an option of "training montage" to try and murderhobo Big Evil. Even if they are gods.

Play orc - Grokk the Barbarian. Fight anything that resists, fuck everything that moves, eat everything else.

Memetic gods won't have a chance.

Yeah. Murder the whole world. Than evil gods won't have anywhere to return.

Play the villains or a horror story. Only say that it is a horror story with very little chances of players getting out alive, well or sane.

>just the threat of a memetic god has driven user's character to madness
nice

I can say how it will turn out with fey. You'll say the wrong phrase at the wrong time and fey will buttfuck the whole party for eternity after this.

Considering that 4-6 characters knowing that something X maybe exists (not even any particulars about them) is enough to empower Big Evil to destroy the world that is a pretty sane response.

This world is shit and it should be destroyed. Let's at least do it with style and guts decorating the walls.

You GM is an asshole, find a new one.

Learn to GM yourself and quit bitching, snowflake,,,,

Nothing personal, child.

So your GM gave you a problem to solve, and the only way to not fail it was to already know the solution, a solution that only the GM could've known?

The only way to not fail was to know the solution without your CHARACTER knowing the solution. As knowing the situation would make the situation worse.

How could the players find this out without the characters finding out information?

Presumably via the use of the GM and a half-brick in a sock.

High level meta-gaming.

Beat GM with hammers until he tells them plot of the game?

Needles should work too.

How would you do the GM's gimmick RIGHT?

By making it obvious. Maybe even let some NPC explain it to them.

You DON'T. The idea of a memetic villain is like having a fork in the road where both paths lead to a cliff. The concept is intrinsically disappointing no matter what you or the players do.

Path 1: The players destroy your meme god properly. They have no idea what is going on, and the concept gets completely wasted because it doesn't enhance the plot in any way.

Path 2: The players figure out what's happening and bad end. The plot is still wasted in a different way.

The entire premise is basically the narrative playing russian roulette with six bullets.

I'm glad none of the DMs in my group are that shit.

Don't end the world when the PCs figure it out (which you should expect on them doing). Instead, their goal is to eliminate the cults along with anyone else involved, and then seal away their own knowledge of the god.

The gods needs supporters. Not just people who know about it a little but people who know pretty much all aspects of it. It also shouldn't have that much of its own power but instead mostly work as a mental virus.

So let's say a cultist can learn names of god, his deeds and titles. It involves not only simple recitation but also rituals for an initiate to reach needed mental state. Infection is possible without rituals but takes more time. The more rituals cultist does the more powerful he becomes by taking knowledge from other infected. God also starts whispering in his ears.

And by the end of all the rituals and getting all the knowledge cultist "dies" and becomes part of the god. And god gets a new body to act through on the material plane.

Characters should be clued pretty fast on what is exactly happening. At the very least at the moment god starts whispering to them. So they could choose to try and get more knowledge about him including his weak points but risk succumbing to mental virus or to just power through hoping to slice and dice all his cultists.

Make it so the god doesn't need 6 fucking people to reach full power. Instead, his cultists are spreading through the country/world and slowly making more and more people know and believe in the meme god so you can have the party go around trying to stop them.
Also, throw some hints before the reveal like some dude who was investigating the cultists's god and suddenly destroyed all the info he had, went nuts and killed people while claiming "they know" or shouting vague shit that implied that learning more about the meme god is a bad idea.