Octopus Overlords

inspired by the other thread, i got to thinking about the the D&D campaigns i ran in grade/middle school. i think i lost interest when planning games using the Expert rules, which opened up non-dungeon adventures. i liked the structure of interior spaces, and felt out of my league when trying to manage the non-cardinal-direction-only spaces of outdoors. thinking back on it, my favorite part of being a GM in the first place was drawing out the dungeons on graph paper, and populating the various spaces with various beasts and creatures and traps and treasure. i could not convincingly role-play NPC interactions and dialogue, my stories sucked, i couldn't fairly handle some situations the players did that weren't covered in the rules, and generally thought non-combat stuff was boring.... basically i was doing a pen and paper Diablo hack'n'slash'n'loot type of game and even i got tired of that two-dimensional situation. i just liked laying everything out, then seeing other people go through what i just made.

sorry for letting you down, PCs!

this is also why i should have gotten more into video game level design...

My players burned Hommlet to the ground, and I did nothing to stop them.

I may have sent a sternly worded omen to the Paladin, but that was it.

This is why I switched to Paranoia RPG. My sessions involve setting up an impossible situation or two, then standing back to see what the PCs do with it. If they're good enough to escape, they end up adding their own story complications. My job as GM is just to keep the circus rolling.

I last played basic D&D back in grade school. The group was a few friends and my younger brother. It was not a great group.

First problem was that all everyone wanted to do was search for treasure. Once they found out that was a thing that they could do, that was it, forever. I could tell them there was a group of four huge orcs in the room holding weapons, and they just wanted to search for treasure. If I was smarter, I would've just said "okay, while you're searching, the orcs kill everyone. Hand in your character sheets, you'll need to start new ones. Also, you didn't find anything."

The second, and semi-related, is that they were all really selfish. The last straw was some situation where my younger brother was hanging in a pit or something. I don't remember the specifics, but getting him out would have involved some kind of risk for someone else. Rather than take the risk, the rest of the group decided to let him fall to his death. I'm pretty sure I didn't bother setting up any sessions after that.

I only GM'd two sessions ever in my extensive role playing career, and they were both duds. Just boring all around - though it's not something that I ever really had any interest in doing, so I suppose that's not surprising. It's really not easy to be a good GM.

A couple of times, I was feeling lazy about dungeon level design, so I ripped off the first levels of Doom and Heretic for my dungeon/warehouse maps. Of course, one of the guys recognized the layout, which was pretty funny in retrospect. I'm also pretty sure that, during that same campaign, I arbitrarily mixed D&D and AD&D rules, because I had no clue what I was doing anyway.

Also, just because the scenario happens outdoors, doesn't mean you can't lay it out like a dungeon.

"You've encountered a hedge maze!"

My group grew weary of the D&D restrictions, so we changed game systems, twice: first to ICE and then to Runequest. One character survived both changes -- he started D&D as a ranger, and by the time he made it to Runequest was about as evil a bastard as you'd ever care to meet. Some point, early on (perhaps still in D&D), the characters all trashed a castle for no reason except "because it was there." Several characters died picking fights with creatures/people they had no business trying to fight.

The castle lord and his contingent (wizard and priest) relentlessly stalked these characters for months, years even...and after a while there was only the ex-Ranger left from the offending group. I didn't like this character -- he had grown too powerful and was just too nasty. All of the other characters in the party were lower level or new. They explored a booby-trap filled pyramid, and those who survived to the top found the lord's party at the end of the journey. All except for the ranger were ordered to stand against the wall, and not to move. There was complete compliance. Meanwhile the lord took out a sword adorned with artifacts left behind from the ranger -- giving it some sort of life-stealing bonus against that ranger only. The ranger did not survive the epic fight -- after which the player laughed and suspected there was no way I was going to allow him to win that fight. The encounter was contrived with extreme prejudice, so he was probably right.