Rant on Gaming

[fishlivejournal]

No, nothing in particular brought this on....but the 7 repetitive habits of annoying GMs have really got my goat over the last 30 years:

Going "Oh, the players are going somewhere I don't like - I'll throw obstacles in their way!" and "The players are following the plot - I'll throw obstacles in their way!" and then complaining that the players don'

Comments

[kingtheseus]

Valid complaints.

I can understand their hesitancy in one of your PCs in exploring sections of the universe, because sometimes only a smoking crater remains afterwards...

I remember sometimes constructing sections of universe for you that I was happy to just write off after the first encounter.

I think I've played in a campaign much like this... at the time I blamed my inexperience as a player for all the problems...

[kingtheseus]

(My inexperience was only a part of the problem.)

[fishlivejournal]

:P As I recall, you killed Killeen every couple of sessions...and at no point would I ever blame you :P
I cannot recall an occasion of you doing any of the things I'm complaining of here - well done!

[kingtheseus]

I think there was a time or two that player characters were heading into a complicated area that I wasn't quite prepared for - I'd drop a monster of the week on them as a delaying tactic, and be prepared for the new area by the next session. It took a while before I got the balance between personal plots and external plots right.

[kingtheseus]

I’d only just remembered this… but having been on the receiving end of this as a player led me to make some important decisions on how to run a campaign… as I set out to do exactly the opposite of what I had experienced. So that experience was valuable

[fishlivejournal]

[nods] All good stuff! My only tweak would be - if you find yourself creating a Mary Sue, let the PCs kill it, preferably in an embarrassing and painful way.

Yeah, I suspect that most of us base our success on bad experiences as players :/