A few days ago, a friend of mine, who is a new DM and wants to start up a D&D 4E game, came to me seeking advice about how to run a successful campaign. I thought back to my experiences as a novice GM, the mistakes I made and the games I botched, and told him to be receptive to constructive criticisms (rare as they are), adjust his style to fix the problems that he sees, and keep trying, even if the results initially discouraged him.
You see, he asked me for advice because I've been running a pretty well-received campaign for nearly two years now, but it wasn't always so easy for me. If I had gone with the feeling I had after the first time I ran a game, I probably would have quit roleplaying all together. It was a disaster of epic proportions, but it taught me a lot about how to run a game, so I think it's worth relating here. If you'd like to skip the story and get right to my question, scroll down until you see the red text.
I started playing old WoD Mage when I was fourteen or so, having been dragged into it by my friend Erik, whom I've mentioned in my thread about his notorious Birthday Game. After playing a few sessions with him (which were sort of abysmal) and a few others with another friend of ours named Chuck (which were really fun, albeit rehashed episodes of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer), I decided it was time to strike off on my own and take a turn behind the screen. I got my mom to drive me down to the local comic and game shop to buy a Storyteller's Screen and some D10s, and I got rolling on my very own plot.
The planning that I put into this game went something like this: "The game will begin with the characters sitting around a table at a speakeasy in gangster-era Chicago, having drinks. They have no memory of how they got there or who they are. Suddenly, the place is raided by police, and a gun battle erupts. Beyond that, well, I'll drop some hints that they're really time travelers from the future who have to somehow find their way back...somehow...and...IT'LL BE GREAT!"
Armed with that, I invited a group of friends over and had them roll up some characters. There was Erik, whom you already know, Chris and Bill, who are nice guys, if a little crazy when they get together, and Joe, the worst possible person I could have invited. Joe couldn't follow the plot of Road Trip because of his short attention span. He saw The Blair Witch Project seven times in theaters because he couldn't figure out its complexities.
The problems with the session began during chargen, when Chris decided that he couldn't come up with an original name for his character without help. So he asked me to come up with one. This was basically how our conversation went:
Me: Why don't you call him...Douglas MacDougal?
Chris: No, I don't like that name. It's a stupid name.
Me: What's stupid about it?
Chris: MacDougal is too boring...I want to be called Douglas Mac
Bougal.
He then wrote the following on his character sheet:
Name: Douglas MacBougal
^
l
Not a "D"
The fact that this seemed to irritate me pleased him immensely. Eventually, after about forty-five minutes of living chargen Hell, the game began.
Before I brought in the cops for the shootout, I asked the players what they wanted to do, now that they've found themselves sitting in this speakeasy. Once again, Chris pipes up.
Chris: I want to conceal my submachine gun.
Me: Well, it says on the chart that it cannot be concealed. How do you plan to do that?
Chris: I use my magic to make it look like a lap dog!
Me: Ummm, okay. You're in the middle of a crowded room, remember. You'll draw some Paradox for this.
Chris: Douglas MacBougal doesn't care!
He rolled and failed.
Me: Okay then. You end up with something that looks disturbingly like the deflated skin of a stuffed dog with the muzzle of a Tommy gun sticking out of its mouth. Take two points of Paradox.
He then picked up my dog, a Westie, and began to aim her around the table, as if she were a gun and he was about to open fire.
By this time, Joe's focus had meandered away from the game; he had begun writing The Gospel According to Pancake on the back of his character sheet, an imaginative take on The Bible that involved a divine flapjack suffering for the sins of man. He shared this with the rest of the group, much to my dismay.
The rest of the game wasn't really memorable. It took about an hour to get through two rounds of combat because nobody was paying attention, and I eventually decided to call the entire thing off due to pure frustration. Still, I took something valuable out of the ashes of my first attempt. I learned to think about group chemistry before I went and invited everyone I thought would be interested. I learned that beginning a game in the middle of a scene with no explanation of what happened before it can put the players off, and I learned that I needed to give the players a clearer idea of who they were and what their objectives were. And with that, I took my first steps toward not being a sucky GM.
Lazy people, continue reading here.So I was thinking about all this, and I got to wondering...do any of you have stories like this? Tales of failures that inspired you to try again, imploded games that helped you to grow as a storyteller? If so, what did you learn from them? What about the experience(s) made you want to try again? And what advice would you give to a neophyte GM?
Just curious.
