To be fair, L5R suffered very badly from crappy pre-written adventures. Was this pre-written? TORG was pretty bad for it too, War's End is basically a series of interlinked NPC on NPC fights which the players get to watch.

Basically that question comes down to: was he railroading you down an adventure he'd written or one he'd bought?

I dunno, I've played a fair number of games with shite GMs. But I fail to remember any specific examples right now.

I believe that it was a bought scenario, no excuse for such anti-fun GMing though.
Come to think of it when that GM wrote his own scenarios they tended to involve red-headed lesbians involved in erotic acts...

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JoE
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Prince of Darkness Games
Rock N' Role-Play....

I know where ya coming from with bad GMing, but there's also the annoyance of the predictable meta-plot GM. For several years I was in a group that played once to twice per week in a variety of genres. However, every fantasy game we played revolved around collecting the pieces of the broken magical dongle which was the only thing that could defeat evil overlord X and stop him taking over the world. Every modern-day game we played revolved around the players experiencing supernatural entities - usually zombies - and having coped with them, being invited to join a secret society dedicated to fighting the supernatural (we tried refusing once, and lo and behold a second organisation turned up, told us the first organisation were really the bad guys, and that we should join THEM instead!). Every Futuristic campaign we played involved us crash landing our spaceship on an uncharted planet, discovering an ancient starship left behind by the precursers whose AI computer would instantly identify the NPC in the party as its captain, and we would then fly off and do battle with evil empire X to stop them taking over the galaxy. Note that 95% of the time the saving the galaxy, defeating evil in the name of organisation x, or defeating the warlord didn't even happen because we ran out of steam and started again with the same damn premise.

Now any one of these plots might work once, even several times if there are enough interesting twists in the plot and player character interactions, but the formula was as predictable and repetitive as a US daytime TV serial show from the 80s. All GMs out there, please try and supply a few twists and kinks in your nefarious schemes!

Ash

Yep. I've done this.

I have to almost physically stop myself having some 'grey area' NPC with a raven motif. It just seems to crop up in a number of my games. Usually called Aiken.

Similarly my D&D game rotated around defeating The Shadow God, my Buffy game rotated around stopping a Shadowy Demon and his Shadow Cult and my SF-Unisystem game rotated around the incursions of ... yes, you've guessed it - Shadow Beings from Hyperspace (in retrospect the fact that I had managed to creatively blank out B5 was horrific enough)

I may just have repressed Goth tendencies!

Neil

Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/

Heh, I feel your meta-pain! Personally I can live with tedious meta-plots they're cool compared to the game of Cthulhu where the GM won't let you die. I botched all my piloting rolls during a snowstorm in the Arctic. We were fine. The PCs were also not allowed to investigate a warehouse because the GM had "turned over the page."

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JoE
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Prince of Darkness Games
Rock N' Role-Play....

You know, GMs get a lot of criticism. But I've had just as many bad experiences with player in my games, or other players in games with me. Probably even more. There's quite a lot of skill in being a good GM, but there's quite a lot of skill in being a good player too; and these guys never get the kudos that a good GM does.

The thing is though, if he bought a scenario and it told him to run games like that, how's he to know any better? I mean, when I first read a lot of games (Trad or hippy) I'm a bit unsure exactly how I'm supposed to run them. So I tend to look at a sample adventure or an extended example of play for pointers. I mean, I have the advantage of 20 years of experience to tell me that that kind of wank is awful and not to do it, but I think it's (unfortunately) likely that someone less experienced might just think that's how that particular game was supposed to be run, and run all games accordingly.

And then you get into the whole messy shite about "playing games right" vs "playing games the way they are supposed to be played" vs "playing games the way they are written". The same way CoC is a terrible game and only works if you ignore half the rules. Try playing that as written and it fails, utterly.

But still, sounds like a pants game. Yet another reason to avoid L5R.

L5R is ace, your GM was doing it wrong. As someone else said though, did he know any better? Is it a new GM struggling to get to grips with the job, or an old hand who’s deliberately trying to Lord it over his players? The former needs help and guidance, the latter needs kicking in the nyuts. Then some help and guidance.

I played a fantastic game of WFRP, where the GM had worked out all the NPCs in detail, each personality was different and had a voice and motivation, the world was rich and colourful with the right balance of perilous adventure and pitch black humour. It was great. He then offered to run a campaign, which I was dubious about, but he promised it’d be like the first sampler he’d run every week, so I signed up.

It was sh!t. The reason, we concluded initially, was that the “official” campaign we were playtesting was donkey w@nk. However, after a couple of weeks, I wanted to know why the GM wasn’t changing it. My time is precious and I don’t want to spend it going through the motions with a clue dispenser and watching nothing happen very, very slowly. The (pre)published adventure is rubbish? Fncking change it then.

I guess this is one of those unwritten rules (or skills) the Stökesmeister was on about. Spotting flaws, inconsistencies and general b0ll0cks in published material and making it good.

One of the key skills of the GM is to keep the players involved, give them the choices and subsequent repercussions. The whole “something happens and you can’t stop it but have to sit here and watch it” phenomenon makes me mad. Scene setting, flavour, delivery of information through NPCs and set pieces is fine. Stitching up players when they can’t affect what’s happening or boring them with your oh-so witty monologue / Storytelling isn’t. I’m looking at you WW Con GMs.

I had quite an interesting one happen to me (as GM) a few years ago.

I was running a crossover WoD game which started during the crusades. The players were trying to track some Settites and had pretty much figured out that said Settites were holed up in a fortress in the desert, a few days travel from the city.

To cut a long story short, they players decided to trek off into the desert to find the fort and kill the Settites. The main combat characters in the party were a pair of Vampires, who obviously needed to keep out of the sun during the daytime. So they decided to wrap themselves up in carpets before sun-up. Which kept them safe, but also out of the action. Two days into their journey, they are beset by ghouls, who's sole intention is to steal the carpets which they know the Vampires are hidden in. (They actually know because they have a spy in the market where said carpets are bought, it's all very above board actually from my POV). Without their Vampire death bastards to help them out, the PCs are left with a mortal, a Mummy and a single Werewolf. The encounter was played out openly, with the dice rolled unhidden by everyone. They manage to beat away the ghouls, but only after they grab one of the carpets.

The ghouls are on horseback, and manage to get away while the PCs are tending to their wounded.

From my POV, things worked out pretty well. the players were going towards the Settite HQ anyway, they now had an extra reason to go there. Plus, there had been a little action, which everyone had enjoyed.

Later, one of the players expressed that he'd felt a little railroaded there,and that there was no way that the encounter could have gone differently. He was used to that kind of thing and didn't really mind. I was a bit surprised by the whole thing. I hadn't really railroaded them and the encounter had just played out in the way that it had. But, looking at it from his POV, yeah, I can see how it might have looked like that.

Of course, these days I'd run things differently and probably have the players know the Settites had sent out a raiding party, but you know how these things are.

I hear where you are coming from with the games of players=audience. I once went along to a try out session of what was supposed to be a Space 1889 game. Now I love Space 1889, I've run it many times at cons, bought the supplements, listened to the audio adventures and so forth, so I was really exciting.

And it took about 10 minutes for the GM to kill that excitement, because right from the start it was clear that this might as well have *been* an audio adventure, with us as the listeners and not the players, for all the impact we could have made on the game. It was so bad that one of the players literally fell asleep for the whole session, while the rest of us survived on the meager fare of making exasperated glances at each other and trying desperately to have some impact on the story.

Needless to say we didn't go back.

But that is really about it for me, outside con settings where I have had a few similar experiences. Most GM's I have known, even the bad ones, have not been bad enough that I'd want to bad mouth them, even anonymously.

Of course maybe that's because I run far more than I play. Other people's stories about me may be different :)

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