>Party has been split up for like a solid month and the DM has basically given up on trying to get us back together
>You can see from the DM's face and sighs that he's just tired of running 3 separate adventures at the same time and constantly flipping from one character to another
>His face when one of the characters accidentally ends up on a ship sailing to another continent
Post your DMs fuck up stories
How about the players cooperate a little more on the story and staying together part? It's not just the GM's job.
>DMs fuck up
sounds more like his players are fucking up to me
>player strays far enough away from the party he ends up on a different continent
>not directing gamer thrones here
>"your character has been retired by your own active choice. what is your new character so I can introduce it at a future fitting scene"
both DM and players aren't fit for whatever is going on there. 3 games is a lot but not impossible if hes got notes and a brain; espesh if even 1 of them is out of a booklet.
Kraken destroys the boat on the way, character dies, reroll.
The first rule of DMing should be "make all of the PCs' goals take them to the same place."
This is when the DM has all the players magically transported to a coliseum to fight for a skeleton king's amusement.
>playing Vampire the Requiem
>newbie ST actually lets me resolve entire scenes by talking for more than 5 minutes
>he made the villain of the week the extremely unpopular Carthian leader
>point out we can vote him off
>we do so
>win the chapter on session 1
>get awarded 30 goddamn xp for 1 session
>mfw my starter character could suddenly summon an extremely murderous anarchist riot with a phone call
>The first rule of DMing should be "make all of the PCs' goals take them to the same place."
bzzzt, wrong.
>>His face when one of the characters accidentally ends up on a ship sailing to another continent
How does this happen without the GM letting it happen ?
No. The first rule of DMing is "keep the game functioning." Which means the second rule of DMing is "ignore people who wander off until they wander back."
My rule is focus stays with the main group. If someone else splits off, they tell me what they're trying to do. After I'm done with the main group, roll a single attribute check to see how well they did on their side-mission, narrate it out, and play from there. If they want the focus, stay where the focus is.
Some GMs have boundary issues and are willing to put up with may more shit than others. Some have no boundaries and are willing to put up with anything.
...
I used to have a lot of trouble with that, mostly with one specific player, but it happened numerous times in my early campaigns. Then one day he wandered the fuck off and did his standard "I have no reason to go do that" thing, and I just said, "Okay, you leave and live happily ever after. Roll a new character." That put an end to that shit immediately. I've had a couple times where people literally did just retire their characters rather than play with the team, in one instance even in the middle of the first session, but they made new ones that were willing to work with the group, and it hasn't been a problem since.
>"ignore people who wander off until they wander back."
This.
When I GM, and sime faggot wanders off, he gets 10 minutes to explain what he intends to do, and then we figure out how long that will take in terms of in game time. He is then no longer part of the game until his character returns. We dont roleplay what he does, we dont handle combat, we just have a small description of why he suddenly left for a prolonged amount of time by himself.
If he doesn't come back, or goes off to another fucking continent, I will tell him to stop being a faggot, or leave the game, as he wont be part of the remaining story.
It is not my responsibility as a GM to ensure your character wants to stick with the group. I have no control over that, the only one that decided what the motivations and goals of your character is, is yourself.
Unless of course we have downtime, but then the session is usually split up, with enough time to go through the downtime activities for each character.
Have you tried not railroading your players?
If you want your game to be that predictable, write a fucking book. People play these games to see different outcomes of events.
Put me down as someone who had a character fuck right off to retirement so I could roll a new one that matched where the actual game was headed.
NARP.
I'm gonna be a first time DM soon and I'm worried about improv. My players are first timers too and I worry I'll just mess it up and all my characters will just sound the same generic because I can't have time to think about how it'd go.
My recent fuck
>DMing
>figure the party was either going to venture into the Underdark or go chase a dragon based off of last session
>one particular player is missing who has a connection to said dragon
>group doesn't want to do either without him since the dragon is plot heavy for him
>They don't want to do Underdark because the group rolled on some Veeky Forums bullshit for character's fetish and MIA player's paladin had a thing for Drow
>the paladin has never met a drow so they want to see how he plays it out and decide to hold off on it
>so I throw together a dungeon last minute while they dick around
>I had some deactivated shield guardians in this planar gate room
>planned on having the lore being that the dude that built this place liked hunting fucking giants so he'd grab a shield guardian to go hunting and these are just the spares he's had over the years
>party is terrified of them at first are about to start running out of the room
>artificer realizes what they are
>finds the amulets
>the party has eight fucking shield guardians
Run a module user or a simple dungeon crawl then go from there. I'm sure you'll do fine. Just take a couple hours of prep time and brace yourself for the wild ride
I can't divert the entire game to be focused only on me REEEEE stop railroading me REEEEEE
>rail roading
Nice assumption faggot. It is an open world game where they constantly have a huge task list they can dig into.
The PCS need to stick together for the game to work, you autistic sperg lord.