ITT: signs you're playing in a bad campaign

This is a sign a GM wants to be a player, really, really badly.

Fuck I'm guilty of that. It's so hard not to do though.

Party Shittery;
>Existing parties looking for GMs with a long list of demands on how the campaign is ran.
>Half the players don't turn up for a session with no warning. Double points for session 1 on a pickup game.
>More than 6 players are in the party, bonus points if the GM originally set a reasonable player count as the desired.
>Players are consistantly late to sessions for no discernable reason.

GM cannot into making campaigns;
>GM shows up not having prepped maps.
>GM shows up not having prepped encounters.
>Bonus points for the above if it's session 1
>Bonus points for each minute of session time wasted by GM scrambling to prepare something last minute.
.
Alignment Shittery;
>GM says no Evil PCs, ignores people performing obviously evil acts because they wrote chaotic neutral on their sheet.
>GM says no Evil PCs, ignores people trying to murder fellow party members for minor reasons.
>The party primarily consists of Chaotic Alignments and the campaign is not about being Criminals or 'the Resistance'.

>Half the players don't turn up for a session with no warning. Double points for session 1 on a pickup game.

That's always a fun one, especially when the games turns into you and 1 or 2 other PCs as the main cast and like 4 side characters that sometimes show up but probably won't

I got ropped into GMing when I didn't want to. All the players except 2 seemed to REALLY be into D&D. I find out their schedules and base the games around 2 excited guys schedules and get friends from another circle to come play.

Downers stop showing, only a dedicated cast is left and I get back into DMing.

>Players constantly asking "Can I do X?"
>Players expecting the GM to tell them what to roll for everything or needs to allow them to do an action.
>Players asking what the other's alignment, class, background, etc. is.
>Players not giving feedback when asked, but storming off angrily later.
>Players who expect the GM to entertain them while they sit and do nothing.
>Players who ask direct questions about the plot to the GM even though they're meant to be found out if they actually did something.
>Players correcting the GM for inconsistencies even though it was meant to be inconsistent.
>Players not using knowledge checks to save their fucking life.
>Players doing the same thing over and over again.
>Players who agree on something serious, but make a silly character.
>Players not interacting with anyone in-game.
>Players who freeze when something unexpected happens.

I don't have anything for GMs because I hardly played at the other end of the table.

>>Players constantly asking "Can I do X?"
>>Players expecting the GM to tell them what to roll for everything or needs to allow them to do an action.

AAAAHHHH

Adding in
>Players never take action, they only say 'maybe I could' like they're submitting a board proposal to Congress for a debate
>We're talking 'maybe I could poke this one square with my te-foot pole

JUST DO IT YOU FUCKERS
DO SOMETHING
ANYTHING

>"Can I roll a 'charm' check? Like just to make her like me more, not seduction or anything."

What's wrong with this?

Was this all the same campaign?
Jesus user, you could pick better OP images but even you didn't deserve this.

Sounds the issue is with the "Can I roll X to do Y" attitude in general. Like. DON'T ASK TO ROLL YOU TRIPLE WALNUT. JUST TELL ME YOU TRY TO MAKE FRIENDS WITH HER. GIVE ME ONE OR TWO CONVERSATION TOPICS AND YOU'RE GOOD. YOU PROBABLY WON'T HAVE TO TOUCH DICE AT ALL. Jesus.

If you are serious about that post a link to your board.

This, so much fucking this. Or when they actually do act, it's some unreasonable off-the-sheet bullshit like "I try to meditate in order to gain darkvision" in a Hunter: The Vigil campaign

This guy speaking, I had this mostly with a group of newbies who played for a month or so. They all kept asking and being insecure even though I kept telling them: Just, do it. Don't ask for it and just do it!

They never listened, they kept asking and asking if they can open the door, ask the store clerk, grab the purse, take the wheel, etc.

I later looked at the D&D 5e rules for skill checks. I started off with 4e, so the changes shouldn't be that big, would it? No, it literally says that the DM HAS to prompt them for skill checks! You fuckers at WotC! You just solidified the worse and most bumfuck annoying trait of newbie players!

>Like. DON'T ASK TO ROLL YOU TRIPLE WALNUT. JUST TELL ME YOU TRY TO MAKE FRIENDS WITH HER. GIVE ME ONE OR TWO CONVERSATION TOPICS AND YOU'RE GOOD. YOU PROBABLY WON'T HAVE TO TOUCH DICE AT ALL. Jesus.

The issue there is that if you just bypass rolling, then having the character be good at it is kinda pointless.

>in a fight against a group of goblin DM rolls initiative for every single goblin
>DM doesn't ask the next person to act immediately after somebody finishes his turn
>DM doesn't realize it's HIS turn
>Takes ages to resolve anything in combat

I didn't really play with many GMs (forever GM myself) but when they were shit, it was always the badly-run combat that was deal-breaker for me.

> 3 sessions that are 3hr+ and an in-game day has not even passed. Still in starting town and no combat has occurred.

Whats wrong with that?

I only have my player rolls if they do something vaguely challenging. Making friends with someone isn't challenging in most cases.
Sure, if the PC has a "social anxiety" or "insufferable personality" type flaw, he'll have to roll. If the girl in question has really high standards or is biased against the PC (she hates his character race, he's half covered in mud after a dungeon crawl, whatever), he'll have to roll too, and here a high-CHA PC will shine.
But if she's just a regular NPC, who cares? It's not hard to get to know someone. No rolling required. It'll probably go well unless you make a really poor choice of conversation topics. And if you're a really high-CHA PC or you talk to her about the right things, you may get some useful information too.

>I didn't really play with many GMs (forever GM myself) but when they were shit, it was always the badly-run combat that was deal-breaker for me.

Same here. I used to play with another frequent GM who couldn't design a satisfying encounter to save his life. He also had a preference between slow, crunch-heavy systems like Pathfinder or PTU.

Some highlights from when he ran the former were:
>having a boss battle abruptly end one round in because they activated a doomsday device out of nowhere
>ragequitting and ending a session early because the party killed a T-rex in one round
>springing multiple Krakens out of nowhere during sea travel, giving us no way to prepare for it and just getting endlessly grapple-fucked on a boat

>5E D&D
>Player is at level 5
>Has played legitimately through all those levels.
>What do I roll to attack again?

It's called the D20 system dipshit.

Fuck you, making multiple maps for a single session weekly is fucking tiring. Online resources are usually garbage, and it takes an hour or more to make something really thoughtful on graph paper.

>This thread triggers bad DM's

Nobody is asking for an epic novel , but a dungeon map ( drawn or taken off the net) marked with what's in each room ( even if it's just 5 orcs, 10 gold) is bare basics to be expected.

What if the DM just improvises maps because players tend to not go to the places you want them to play and having prepared map is often a waste of time which you would know if you dmd regularly

>mfw this is my only real option unless I DM for my other friends.
1) you're playing online, why not just find another group?
2) what's the problem with DMing?
3) why would you play in a shitty group? You must have better stuff to do with your time.

Well good campaigns need a mixture of prepared content and improvised content.

If all the content is improvised then the low quality and arbitrary nature of it will eventually become apparent.

If all content is pre-prepared with no flexibility then the obvious railroad the players are on will become apparent.

A mixture provides high quality prepared content with improvisation to reward player agency.

How about this.

I imagine a campaign, write down the important points, write out how plot important encounters should look like, memorize the important bits

Now my guys make their characters. If they make socially focussed characters they can hardly climb through the canyon i've built for them.

That canyon needs a bridge now. If i drew the map beforehand that shit would be fucked up.

Same with combatoriented characters. If they don't have the social skills necessary to go through an encounter that encounter might need to be different. The location might need to be different.

Your idea of drawing all the maps beforehand doesn't work. A lot of the parts of an adventure are in the GMs head and thats how it should be

Have you tried not playing DnD?

Not OP, but I'd still like to maintain some semblance of normalcy.

Why aren't you explaining the premise of your campaign before the players make characters?

I mean you're right, if you design a wilderness hexcrawl and your players all make city dwelling sleuths you're going to have trouble. Likewise if you design a city based intrigue game and your players all make druids who hate cities you're in trouble . That's why you tell them what the deal is beforehand and see if they're on board which solves all of this beforehand.

It seems really bizarre to design the campaign in isolation of the players.

Beyond that I'm just repeating myself. A good campaign needs a mixture of prepped content, which includes detailed maps if you're playing D&D, with the flexibility to improvise content on the fly.

>>GM shows up not having prepped maps.
>>GM shows up not having prepped encounters.
>>Bonus points for the above if it's session 1
>>Bonus points for each minute of session time wasted by GM scrambling to prepare something last minute.
>Needing to do any of these to be a good GM

DnD/PF faggot found

Point is you want to have an approximate idea of whats happening.

I always tell that to my players they tell me what they want and then i have my veto.

I usually veto characters that go completely against what i have planned. If lets say you have three characters and two of them are combat oriented fine - you might design an encounter thats got a lotta combat in it.

Now one of the combat oriented characters drops out and the other guy decides not to use his gun.

If you gmdb efore you'd know that players are INSANELY unpredictable.

They're also lazy and unprepared. Even good players have their moments when they do stuff that throws your plans apart.

If you DEMAND maps you obviously don't know how DMing works and how flexible you have to be as a DM with every person you come across.

You can't plan everything beforehand

A) Your players will fuck up your plans 100%
B) Railroading usually upsets players and they like to go off the rails
C) You have to adjust encounters and places on the fly depending on the moods of your players and the way they actually play their characters

>Have a mission to betray guy who's ferrying us to a destination. No arguments, Asmodeus says so.
>Start getting close to the destination, combats have happened and it's clear the captain of the ship has more levels than us in harder hitting classes
>Few days in advance, ask the party if we should slowly poison him with some Mercury the Alchemist has over the course of a few days
>GM says no due to mercury not working like that
>Don't bother arguing, ask if anyone else has any ideas
>Silence
>Make the point that the Captain will fuck our shit and probably can act in surprise rounds
>Still silence
>Not two minutes pass
>"Soooo how are we gonna kill the captain"
How fucking hard is it to pay attention for a few hours at most once a week

>you might design an encounter thats got a lotta combat in it.

I don't design encounters around the players characters I design encounters around the world and what makes sense in it.

If I'm mapping out a dungeon that represents a goblin encampment in a cave to use a simple example , I'll have mobs of goblins , a leader , some goblin traps , a group of captured humans being tortured . Etc. I prep this beforehand so I can put thought into it, make it detailed and interesting to actually play and so when we are playing it I have it as a reference and I'm not desperately trying to think of what's going to happen next.

>You can't plan everything beforehand

Drawing one map isn't planning everything beforehand, it's literally just a dungeon.

Drawing a dungeon isn't 'railroading' the players don't have to visit it.

While adjusting things on the fly a little is normal, by the sounds of it what you're doing is the actual railroading where it doesn't matter what the players choose to do in game as you'll just make things up as they go along.

For me this creates an incredibly arbitrary and pointless game akin to a random.dice generator.

Im not playing DnD so i don't think we're speaking the same language here

I play CoC so if i don't design the encounters and locations towards the characters they fuckin die and the games over

>You can't poison people with poison.
Sounds like you have a railroad GM.

Have you tried not playing CoC?

Not all mercury is poisonous, there is more mercury in breastmilk than in vaccines. It's a kind that the body doesn't process and just pee out.

But still, the type of mercury that an alchemist has would most definitely be the lethal kind.

>>It is online via discord and roll20

Wait a minute...
>my roll20 skype games range from acceptable to great
>my roll20 discord games are always bad or attract the worst shitters
You're on to something here and it's pissing me off.

Not if it's pure mercury. Mercury's only dangerous in the ionised form, because then it can get picked up by the body's systems.

> encounter you're supposed to be in
> critical hit
> kills your full health character

We all do. Being forever GM is wanting to be a player, but not knowing anyone to take your place.

Even so, mercury poisoning isn't exactly a fast process. People live with it for years before the kidney failure eventually gets them. At best I'd give the guy some penalties to represent the symptoms.

I was under the impression that mercury poisoning was more of a slow burn neurological thing, not something you could just pour into someones drink without them noticing and have them disabled in a few days time.

>GM's friend joined in total for at least half a session out of the three so far
>Is party Wizard
>Know for a fact he was online last time, just didn't care

Stop playing a Wizard with low Con while standing in front of the line.

It's exactly what I do. I tell them what style of campaign it's going to be and what skills would be useful. As my players are intelligent, they'll listen to my advices.

I would never have the silly idea to let them create random characters only to find out the party doesn't fit the campaign.

>GM has extensive homebrew rules for the negative effects of menstruation on the ability scores of female characters
>in a non-magical realm system

The idea is they describe what they do then you tell them what, if anything, to roll.

"I look through the drawers in the dresser and under all the furniture" gives you much more to work with as a DM than "I roll a search check".

>ragequitting and ending a session early because the party killed a T-rex in one round
Was your DM autistic?

Angry thread maker

His first (you) reveals what's true:

Frogs Blown the Fuck Out.

...

That is their intention, but it's not that. They ask in this insecure way. CAN I do this? Well, for the 100th fucking time, yes you can do that, so just DO IT. The fact that they are so insecure about it and asking it keeps them from feeling like adventurers who are within an adventure. They keep themselves out of their own immersion by looking at the DM and seeing him as a nanny instead of someone who should react to what they are doing, not the other way around.

Otherwise, it's not that incredibly hard to understand that when you tell a lie, you need to roll a Deception check. (or Bluff or whatever) Because you need to do this EVERY OTHER TIME YOU DID THAT. Instead, they keep waiting for the DM to literally tell them what to do. It's tiring, it's time wasting, it bogs the game down and breaks immersion and autonomy. With a little sense, they know that you don't roll Performance if you want to recall historical lore. You don't roll Arcana to push a boulder. You don't roll Persuasion to discern what the price value of a certain item is.

I mean, i did that but it was because no one else was willing to roleplay interactions.

Jesus, man, just buy a usb flash drive, most are close to $1.10/gb or less