TTRPGs & D&D

docsilence said:
Honestly, that entire situation would tell me there's at least one, and possibly several, folks at the table I don't have the hours in this lifetime to game with.
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Bingo bango.

I love tabletop gaming and wargaming a LOT. The latter I have -entirely- abandoned because of the other people that tend to engage with it. The former I've only started up again with you guys after taking like 3 years off - partly due to schedule and partly because I never had a group of people that were -worth- working INTO that schedule.

I guess it depends on how much you want to game, what that looks like for you, and if any given bad scenario is an anomaly or not. But just on the face of the text, these people don't sound like they're fun to play with and I'd be like 'honestly, this game sucks and I don't care anymore' and be gone.

Again, we're basing this on a small sample of what's been going on, but it doesn't sound like the DM is doing a very good job of leading the game, and doesn't even seem -interested- in leading the game. In fact, as Doc surmised, it seems more like he's just dumping unclear options on the table, and making up consequences very ad-hoc afterward. It's impossible to play that way for most people. Which, maybe, is why the group generally seems to be struggling to make any decisions.
 
Yeah, it really does kinda boil down to "is most of the time spend with this game/group bringing me joy or not" and it sounds a bit like a train wreck. But also I know I'm in a privileged place because I've got a wealth of logical/empathetic people who want to play and I could put a new group together in a few days if a group wasn't working out and that's not everyone's option. My other follow-up question would be "is it always that one effin' guy" and for the most part, everyone else is fun and chill, or is it a constant balancing act of emotional labor to keep everyone on the same page.

Like, I've got one group where two people are CONSTANTLY late because they have toddlers who are at peak "WHY ARE YOU PUKING TODAY" age. But the players when they aren't covered in baby vomit are wonderful to play with, so the hassle is worth the price of admission. But I had to sunset another group because nobody would ever make a decision about anything and it got boring for me to DM, and it wasn't even that I didn't want to play out of anger anymore - I was just bored.

On a totally unrelated note - I've been running a monthly game with a group adventuring in the Blighted Badlands, which canonically is a region where a magical fuckup destroyed the landscape and mercenaries are constantly working to keep aberrations from getting out of the territory and out amongst the commonfolk, and last night one player says, as they fix a problem with a portal to Shedaklah, "it's like some idiot magicians fired buckshot through reality in here" and I'm like welp, sometimes you perfectly describe what a location is like better than the DM did...
 
My tldr response here is that not all friends are D&D friends. And once again I'm so very happy to be in/running the groups I am. I should count my blessings.
altcunningham said:
Four sessions ago I asked if there was a timeline. Every player assured me there was not, "It's like Skyrim". The DM never gave an answer.
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Immediate red flag here. That is not a misunderstanding the DM should be staying quiet about. That involves base assumptions about how the game works from a meta perspective, and should be 100% clear to players at all times. When something like this is in question, it's not good enough to just let the players make assumptions.
altcunningham said:
What If destroying it just makes a copy somewhere else and then there was no point in destroying it. What If destroying it lets the bad guys know we destroyed it and then summons a bigger bad guy. What if. What if. What if.
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Is there precedent to assume any of that would happen? Like is that something known about in this game or the world? Typically when I take my friend's car and drive it off a bridge, it stays broken. What reason does anyone have to assume that wouldn't be the case here? That's not even a common fantasy trope. I'm so confused.
altcunningham said:
You have to ask her out and then you go from there. You cannot tell Gandalf, I'll just stay in the Shire because what if I fight ringwraithes and what if I get corrupted. That's just not interesting.
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Correct. You signed up to be protagonists. Someone in the group should be protagging.
 
For the record, I agree that it's reasonable to ask why you can't destroy the evil MacGuffins. And reasonable to try to destroy them. That sounds like a classic thing where the DM just didn't think through the setup long enough. Of course, the easy answer is the good ritual takes *all* the items, but the evil ritual can be performed with *any* of theirs. It would probably be better if the same items were used for both rituals, meaning you'd need to not only keep the ones you found, but also not let them, or the ones you haven't located, fall into enemy hands.

I really do just assume that's poor plotting on the DM's part and they're struggling to cover for it instead of rolling with it. Is this a new DM?
 
docsilence said:
Yeah, it really does kinda boil down to "is most of the time spend with this game/group bringing me joy or not" and it sounds a bit like a train wreck. But also I know I'm in a privileged place because I've got a wealth of logical/empathetic people who want to play and I could put a new group together in a few days if a group wasn't working out and that's not everyone's option. My other follow-up question would be "is it always that one effin' guy" and for the most part, everyone else is fun and chill, or is it a constant balancing act of emotional labor to keep everyone on the same page.
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My reading just based on Alt's description of events is definitely that all/most of the players are -some type- of difficult/unable to just play the game. It almost seems like some of them would either be better off in a non-combat 'cosy' game, OR need a straight-laced dungeon crawl where there is no question about what they SHOULD do next. There's a door. You either go through it or you stand here until the end of time or you take the characters back to town and they retire from adventuring. No other options.
This group cannot seem to handle the complexities of having choices and there definitely seems to be decision-paralysis. BUT, they're also averse to anyone breaking the paralysis. So the game the DM is running is not the game those players should be playing.

In this case, you can't fix it. The game fundamentally has to change for that group to work, it looks like (from one story, totally an outside perspective).
 
altcunningham said:
Four sessions ago I asked if there was a timeline. Every player assured me there was not, "It's like Skyrim".
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Brainrot.

Are these younger players? I'll bite my tongue on my Bethesda Softworks rant and instead ask if modern video games are detrimental to tabletop gaming.
altcunningham said:
The DM never gave an answer.
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Yeah. I agree with everyone else that the DM is being too lenient/not setting the rules of engagement.

It sounds like these players are annoying, but the DM should clamp down on anything unnecessary, i.e., it shouldn't take 20 real-time minutes to open a door.

I'll cut the DM some slack in that there's only so much you can do to guide wayward souls. That said, the DM should reinforce your style of play at every opportunity so you can progress the story.
 
That's a good point TSI makes. You can lead players to a story element but you can't make them engage with it. It also sounds like maybe you were brought in as a ringer to help propel the story, but if nobody wants to join in, you can't force them to engage and move forwad.
 
altcunningham said:
Kingdom Come 2.
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I need to start the last DLC.
I heard there's a bug where all the items you have displayed in your forge will permanently disappear when you go into the DLC, so I'm glad I didn't start it right away. Gotta put everything in storage and then I can start. Super excited. It looks really cool. Then I'll give the game a rest for probably 6 months to a year and start a fresh playthrough like I did the first game.
 
A lot of good advice here. Honestly, not much of it is new to me. It's just it's been a while since I've even been in a scenario where I have to consider. Am I having fun, because I rarely have to with other groups sometimes. So that's a good reality check.

We used to have a rule in one of our other games that lasted for almost 8 years (spin offs, etc, whole universe) That it was a pretendy fun time game. Anytime there was any sort of bigger conflict, pretendy funtime game.

Over the weekend some core memories unlocked from my initial run with this table, and I realized that this was always the pattern, just not directed at me, from this player. So many little tiny incidents just came up. And then even the past month I was able to find the hypocrisy in a few other.scenarios, from this player.

Like a mystery movie, I was able to replay key scenes in my mind with a new context and new information coming to the forefront or being highlighted, and I realized even the players I enjoy playing with are kind of checked out because they're checking work emails on their iPad or doomscrolling. I admit in any game I do write down notes and do little quick sketches, but I'm always tuned in, not tuning out.

So I think there is a lot of going through the motions that might be exacerbating this, but when I have to be selfish and ask myself, am I just having fun? Is this worth my Friday night, the answer is no, even if I'm just going to sit around my underwear posing an action figure before overdosing out a box of Oreos.

I also felt kind of... I guess gaslit? Between being told I needed to cool off and then being told I was disrespecting him is a human being. I was not mad, and I wasn't intending anything like that. But someone else at the table message me on Sunday and told me that that he has played that "as a human being" card before with her.

So yeah, pretendy fun times games and it cannot be that serious for me. I submitted my resignation this morning over breakfast, fully acknowledging it's just not a fit for what I want out of my Fridays and gametime.

No D&D is better than bad D&D.

And a new system might be better than new D&D at this point.

Thanks for the counsel.
 
A friend of mine is running a DCC game for us now. It's our first full campaign in OSR. I'm going to wait until the end to give a review, but I'm not sure it's for me.

It's a bit unforgiving, and he's uncharacteristically softened some of the rules for us. Through eight sessions, we had two encounters where characters almost died. The first would've been a TPK had he not brought in a deus ex machina. The second was during our last session. We were exploring a cave when our novice player split off from the party (something I'm generally not opposed to, but this is OSR). She drew a random encounter with a giant snake and it knocked her down to 0 HP in one turn. She rolled incredibly well on her death save (in DCC, you have to roll under your luck score; her luck score was seven, and she rolled a four); otherwise, she would've died.

My problem isn't so much the character deaths (I fully expected to die) as the amount of fun I'm having. Our GM runs two to five combat encounters per session (too much for my tastes, I'd rather trade memories for power with a forest witch). The combat is the problem. He's doing a great job with encounters, but at lower levels, you're beholden to the dice. One of my characters rolls a D20 + a D3. The other rolls a D20+1. When you have to hit a 13, 14, or 15, you're going to miss most of the time. Now, that's the case in lower-level D&D, as well, but they're much more cognizant of the power fantasy. For DCC, I suspect it's about watching your threat level increase over time. I'll see how it plays out before I give a final verdict. Once I have a level eight character (level 10 is the max), I'll know more.

I'm particular about game systems. I've run seven myself and played in two more. Of them, I've only really been happy with two: 13th Age (a Big Damn Heroes system) and Worlds Without Number (the perfect cross between heroic fantasy and OSR).
 
Honestly, DCC sounds like a bit of a slog to me. Also worth noting that I'm not really a 'traditional dungeon crawl' kind of guy.
 
Damien said:
Honestly, DCC sounds like a bit of a slog to me. Also worth noting that I'm not really a 'traditional dungeon crawl' kind of guy.
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I very much think I like the idea of an old school dungeon crawl way more than I'd actually like it. I think I'd probably get with it as a sometimes food, a small arc in a game, or a mini campaign, than spending years and years going down levels.
 
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