After reading this "inspiring" link I'd like to know if you ever made similar experiences? If not what was your worst experience with any kind of bad GM?

I realized I had been one.

Pretty horrible experience, that.

~J

If you run into a GM who's like the GM in the story, its time to make a switch, be it to you or someone else GM'ing or to a new group. I know its hard to find new groups. So maybe just tell the GM to play a PC.

The GM should first realize the fact that he/she is the most important factor in making sure the game is fun, and take on this responsibility!
There is a grey area between challenging the PCs and irritating them, so it is not an easy task, but if a GM is primarily concerned about his/her own enjoyment out of the game at the cost of the other players then everything will suck.
As a GM you must take this responsibility seriously, else step aside and let someone more qualified run the game.

I was this GM once, too, but for a specific reason: my players were all middle school aged munchkins, as was I. I was tired of being made to come up with stories for a group of four or five people whose PCs could, in their eyes, never be defeated under any circumstances. These guys were min/maxers before we knew of the term.

I've gotten better.

I'm not sure if I am a good or bad GM, but I know my GMing style is much more attuned to SR then something like D&D (3.5). I do sometimes go overboard on penalties, like an SR group that was playing for the first time, and neglected the security cameras in a public store front, and magic visibly wielded, with one character identifiable. That character was confronted by a NPC officer, and two others went around in case he ran. He did, and he ended up at deaths door.

I've never played SR4, always a GM.

In DnD, I once had a DM that literally created character sheets after killing his players. He pitted us against some stuff that we shouldn't be fighting, but he didn't cheat, just had questionable monster selection. I wasn't ready for being dead in my first 30 minutes of his game session. I'm a pretty lenient GM and actually enjoy making my players (no matter the game) be heroes of epic proportions.

I remember getting ready to leave and the GM asked me where I was going and that I better roll up a new character quickly so I can get back in the game.

The crime here would be if he truely just ignored all PC precautions and just spawned some guys where he wanted them, and if he's outright twisting the rules on a whim.

Shadowrun being what it is, however, it's possible to get around most defenses, especially once high grade initiates get involved. And it sounds like the players did make the critical error of splitting up.

There is also something to be said for whacking an uber-munchkin character that makes its way into your campaign, and skyscraper killer here smells of that.

In general I think of SR as a more grown up game (at least if I'm running it), and as such I've got no problem making threats that are quite capable of outright defeting the players in a head to head conflict. Clearing out a secret lab *cough*dungeon*cough* and than having time to search around for secret doors and divying up the treasure and whatnot jsut isn't how I think the game should be played.

I always worry about being that GM. I like to think that I'm fairly lenient but at the same time sometimes I really just want to kill people for being stupid. I ran a D20 Modern game where the team did ridiculously dumb things... (it was their first time playing a game to their credit). Overall I think that situation was not the best but its in the past now. Currently, I am getting interested in trying to do a oneshot for the group as just a "get this high priority person" but haven't A) made the mission yet and B) I haven't run the idea past the current GM. One of these days though I might suggest it.

Life's too short to dislike what you do in your leisure time.

If your GM is a friend and you don't like how the game is going, talk to him about it and see if he'll change, offer to run a few sessions yourself, tone things down a little bit, or whatever. Do what it takes to get everyone on the same page, and make playing games fun, like it damned well should be.

If you don't consider your GM a friend, no one's holding a gun to your head and making you waste your recreation time at his game table.

If it's really that bad, counter with even worse style. Build an organlegger with military armor. Instead of following his plot, stop to harvest every body and deliver the parts to your clinic. Keep it up as long as you can. Then quit.

Mesh

I once was a GM like that. I like to think I've gotten better over time, but I still think of myself as a Munchkin GM in recovery.

I have some simple personal rules when I play.

I do my best to read and understand the rules. I ask the GM how a certain line is meant to be understood, if I think there is ambigiuity. Then I sit down and play, and I count each time the GM makes a on-the-fly house rule/rules mod/whatever you wish to call it. Once it hits 10, I ask myself if the problem lies with the game system or with the GM. If it is the game system, I avoid that game system until I hear that the rules have changed for the better. If it is the GM, then I make my apologies and leave that particular game.

Sometimes it is important a good player doesn't necessarily make a good GM or vice versa.

Heh

I had a bad GM once. Oh, it wasn't the lack of understanding of rules or my other team mates treating it like another dungeon crawl from their D&D games where they loot every corpse before the target is acquired, I figured that more had to do with them being new to the game, but it was the lecture I got about that I shouldn't play a semi-paranoid character who would suggest to the team a job should be turned down if there is insufficient prep time to scout the target ... and then he places 4 camouflaged snipers in the highest positions on the target over looking the entire target area but acted like they only covered particular zones and wouldn't even allow for a surprise test, thus no defence possible and two simple actions later... Well, having my character be targeted for death like that after being scolded as a player, sucked all the fun I thought I might have learning to role play in any system with that group. Shame too, another player was someone I consider a dear friend but if you aren't having fun, I know where I am not welcome. Really tough to find anyone to game with around here as well, maybe table top just isn't for me.

Still, I hold out some hope that SR will have something like NeverWinter Nights to play with other like minded individuals some day. That is what got me interested in role playing games in the first place, those role playing servers where a few lines of dialogue, emotes, the numbers being calculated automatically, and no confusion over where your characters were in the imaginary world while having a DM do the same with NPCs went a long way. *shrug*

Word to this.

It sounds like homey from Reddit tried to bring a god-level character into a game with newbie runners and the GM, rather than having the balls to say "lol no," just dropped a cow on him. Reddit killed the rest of the team himself and, somehow, made that logically into "the GM kills everybody!" The fact that the GM popped the sniper is reasonably suspect though..

Still, there was one game. One. That hardly sets a precedent for "kills the party every time."

The GM in that case is bad for not telling the guy up front that he couldn't take his infinity-level mage and his friends delta-ware spy into a new game with starting characters.

Meh.. the worst qualities a GM can have is reluctance to communicate and petty vindictiveness when people don't do as he hasn't bothered to tell them to. Example GM does display both traits..

I have too much respect for the players' attachment to their chars to kill them off in all but the most extreme circumstances - like delibaretly sabotaging the game or repeatedly doing the same stupid stuff. I'd rather just hurt them badly. Being ID'ed, losing gear or nuyen, permanent stat damage, negative qualities, that's all a lot more interesting and consequential than "roll a new char".

I prefer not to GM. One of my favorite things in the game is to make plans. Take my objectives, gather intel, and formulate strategies. Roleplaying is fun and can require just as much plotting and scheming as infiltration.

In the past, when given a choice between no SR and GM I chose to GM. I remember sometimes being frustrated by some characters. When I lost my temper I often simply had the run finish with no difficulty or oppostion. Passive aggressive, I know. The only TPK's I ever had were by complete accident. I always felt guilty killing a character. C' est la vie.

We have an 'okay' GM and really rarely we need to use HoG or anything to survive. (Besides final of the second dota book.. That was hellish close.)
The only problem is that stuff often is too simple. His plots are rather hollow and don't go very deep. That again makes complex plans hard because for something complex you need details : (

I still hope someday i can get past my enormous difficulties in developing stories and can GM again.
I seriously would love to but i just can't write plots. Don't know how to start, don't know how to make twists etc : (

On topic of killing characters: I don't see a lot of sense in it. A players puts efford into creating one and death serves very little purpose in advancing story or making a better story. Sure it adds tension. The characters should act like they could die but they should only do so if it helps the story. (Increasing and not decreasing fun for everyone involved)

Anyway: Crash, i love your signature. Especially the last Quote.

Omg don't link to that place
It took all my willpower to close that tab again and not click any further links!

On topic: sounds like both sides could be responsible for that sort of overkill. But I might lack experience, haven't had that many GMs yet.

Links to tvtropes it the highest and most educated form of trolling
They become trapped, possibly during office hours and they like it.

I go too far the other way. I tone stuff down a bit too much.

This is why I like Eclipse Phase Now I almost *HAVE TO* kill them all off.

It goes to the heart of gaming, really.
Is the gm there to flesh out the game and provide balance, or just kill characters off?

I've had gms who were terrible storytellers, didn't understand pacing or scaling and didn't bother to notice players literally falling asleep at the table.
I've seen some pretty terrible players in my day as well.

I can understand a gm fudging the rolls a little for a story, but flat out cheating sucks for everybody.
Sometimes, a hugely important NPC gets fragged out of the gate and it implodes a whole storyline.

Hand of Godding that npc is different than busting out a dragon as part of a routine Lone Star patrol.

Sometimes you can get one snuck in. I'm guilty of letting that happen back in my D&D days. The usual GM wanted to take a week off, so I made an adventure. The old GM, in a great example of fast talk, asks innocuously enough if they could bring in a character from a similar campaign, it'd be cool. I say OK, and adventure wrecking followed.

I didn't go the path of this GM...but it was tempting. Of course what I probably should have done was informed him that his superman hears Lois calling, he ought to go.





Something I've found popular is granting an award for something like that. Not if they're just bieng stupid and shooting a Johnson randomly. But if they figure out a clever way to circumvent an adventure or frag someone way to early I'll toss out a quick Karma award and essentially pull a hand of god.

The reward and acknowledgemet keeps 'em smiling even as the chaingun shots start raining down.

I had a bridge dropped on my character (lizardfolk barbarian) because the GM was like that. I didn't die because that would have been "unfair."

Instead I spent the entire combat digging myself out of the rubble.

I quit that night. One of the other players did too (strength drain spider poison on the mage; never mind the fact that the spider was large enough to have its own tower with archers on its back).

Some folks need to get this tattooed on the back of their hands.

On their foreheads. Right under 'Poor Impulse Control.'

i Snow Crash

I just don't get tired of referencing it.

I'm sure that'll bite me in the ass someday.

Don't worry, I'm sure one day you'll see reason.

I doubt it. I'll be too busy waiting for my pizza.

Any game with as open a character creation and advancement system as SR requires particular GM communication. If the GM expects a street level game and streem sam .01 (essence that is) of the heavy military armor clan shows up then either the GM or the other players are probably going to have issues.

I think from the example given there isn't enough information to truly understand what went on. It could have been anything from a simple misunderstanding on exactly what was occuring up to a Killer GM vs Muchkin power struggle.

Neither side was innocent in the exchange. Subsequent comments showed that the GM, as a player in other games, did enjoy trying to destroy the party dynamic, and the GM seemed more irate that the player in question TPK'd before he could.

Add in that there were several instances of this, culminating in 'I'm making a throwaway for this' and we see that the entire group dynamic is so much manure.

I didn't read that far, my attention span is only soo long and I wasn't sure if any of the comments were actually related to the GM and player in question.

I dont need to kill the players, they kill themselves. The one my group still laughs about I was running Vampire the Dark Ages and one of my PC had a band of gypsies. Theres a old ancient hungry vampire locked up in the city somewhere trying to escape and they are tasked with preventing it from happening. Eventually an army attacks the city so the PC in question looks for a safe place for his gypsies to hide. He looks around this ruined keep they have been investigating and finds a part still in good shape that I specifically say "it looks well enforced like no one would get OUT" he asks if he thinks he can break in to which I reply "yes, but it looks really reinforced to keep anything from getting out" so of course he breaks in and leads his gypsies to safety... ie a nice snack for the ancient vampire who then woke up etc etc.

Heheh. I don't like that they brought their prime runners into the game, but I also don't like the methods used to remove them - or subsequent tactics on the GM's part.

warning wall of rant.

my group had a bad gm that we tolerated just because we used his tool shed for our games in high school.
it started off well enough he had his character run along ours as a decker. he started getting very competitive where his decker had to be useful in about all situations and he became upset if anyone outsmarted him or defeated a challenge of his easier than he expected.eventually he started changing various rules on the fly without asking for the thoughts of the players. he even went as far as to change the stats and gear of npcs during the scenarios or combat. he got very upset when any of us killed the opposition but stressed how the opposition wanted to kill us. he would blame us or the book for the rewards that he gave us that made us better.(biggest example was 2.5 kilos of orichalcum) in the end he made an attempt to kill all of us in the last session.he split us up, he killed the mundane demo expert with an invisible mage, i didnt fall into the trap, the gun adept was captured and blew himself and his captors up but hand of god his way out,the sword adept escaped. after we finished our mission he tells us all our contacts have been killed. and some kind of god came down to fight us casting force 20 slay spells, the sword adepts described his hog as his goddess coming to smite the enemy. it all may sound epic but it was nothing more than railroading. one player left early because he was tired of the gms bs the rest of us stayed until the gm was pissed and told us to leave.

a few years later he decides that he wants to run d20 modern. doesnt want the players to have copies of the rules. gets quite pissed when he finds out we had them. tells us that atleast one character will die per session doesnt let us choose how to build our characters imposes several artificial limits and removes all our equipment at the begining of play without warning us and to top it all off he payed off another player to try to pick a fight with me at the table so he could claim i was to violent to play or some such. in the end teamwork and outsmarting the gm had us survive the first session then we decided to never play with him as a gm again. which apparently extended into playing anything with him at all.

The thing is, there weren't several instances, only that one first game where his custom magic tradition (MUNCHKIN ALERT) Prime got the "rocks fall" treatment. He claims that there were several instances, but so far that was the only play session. He's still talking about making his 2nd character, so there hasn't been a 2nd game yet. Because of that, I don't trust reddit's opinion regarding "he was upset that he didn't get to kill the whole team." Maybe he was upset because Old Super-munch killed all the other players in a tantrum.

Like I said, the only indication provided that this is a pattern of behavior is with the sniper's death in addition to the two Primes.

Even the "he ruled that Fireballs are essentially FAE bombs" statement is suspect. Both fireballs and FAEs have a consistent damage value everywhere inside their AoE. The only difference is that FAEs have blast effects which continue outside of their primary uniform AoE. I wouldn't see how that would come into play with killing the sniper. Did someone detonate a fireball high in the air above him and have the resultant DV at -2/m kill the guy outside of the AoE? That seems like a really stupid way to insta-kill someone by fiat, which is how Reddit describes the action..



Eww. Control freak. Invite that kid over for a game of Therapy: the Reckoning...

Just schedule a game time, and instead pull an intervention. Dude needs to recognize his issues.

I really try hard not to be That GM, but at the same time, how do you deal with it when your players make terrible decisions and expect the run to go off without a hitch?

Honestly I'd have the players pay the consequences for their terrible decisions. Maybe take it a little easy on them the first time, and hope they're quick learners.

Had a player keep bragging about the "Robo Cop" style gun holster in his fake leg, and it did not matter where the party was; the leg got hacked and the holster with a heavily tricked out heavy pistol within it was pretty much permanently sealed in.

I built an interpretation of Robocop as a starting character once. I even had a backstory that made sense. For the most part.

My Dad was a hell of a GM. In both good ways and bad. His worlds were very much alive. He was able to craft story elements on the fly that seemed like they had been prepared in advance. And he never retconned. Several times we caused massive havoc that should have completely derailed any campaign. Yet every time it seemed as if he had already anticipated that and planned for it. In his D&D world, during the course of one campaign we managed to create a magmic lake in the middle of a glacier, destroy a wizards tower creating another magmic lake, destroy the legendary (in his world) tower of the Mad Mathmetician, literally set the upper atmosphere on fire, destroy a temple to a god of time, create a new diety, cause temporal anomalies to randomly float about (fallout of the temple), cause an interdimensional explosion, and cause a paradox that led to us having two of the amulet we were collecting parts for. I feel the need to state that almost all of that destruction was accidental. Mostly. The really cool thing about all that stuff was that later, with other characters, or in later stories, those events had repercussions. We had to deal with the fallout of our semi-apocalyptic actions. Almost all his games were like that. With story and scope and consequences. However he did have a bad side. He had a habit of using opponents that were way, way outside our weight class. He could also be stingy as hell at times. Then other times he was Monty Haul. He had a habit of sending NPC's that were also way better than us along. That could get old. Except that even with those NPC's it was hard to hate them because of how well played they were. My Dad could role-play a conversation between three people without missing a beat and it made sense. He ran some of the worst, and most of the best games I have ever played. The only game he sucked at running was SR. He was a decent player in SR but his plots made no sense within the idiom. I would still trade almost all by books just to play one more session with him, even Shadowrun.

The biggest dick GM thing I've ever done was one game of WtA, and I couldn't remember if said power took a Gnosis roll, or cost a point of Gnosis. And I said this, to see if any of the other players did (who have played and ran WtA for several years now).

Except the player who was using the power. A player who typically sat back in the group, reading her book of the week or playing her PSP. Or sighing heavily, for no other reason than because we were playing some silly game, instead of, I don't know, paying attention to her. So when she snapped off with "If you had the book maybe you'd know."

Granted, I did forget the book that night. But, as mentioned, there was a great collective knowledge of WtA sitting right there, and we are talking a 3 second pause to ponder on the mechanic. Needless to say she got even more pissy (and stopped coming after the session, too) when I said "You know what? Lose the Action." turned to the next in Initiative without missing a beat.

Dick? Hell yeah. Do it again? Double Hell yeah.

Jaellot, you are hereby promoted from "dick" to "unrepentant dick".

~J

You openly laugh at their plans. This should clue them in before they execute said plan.

I have a GM who calls for an intelligence roll whenever someone gets a really bad idea.

Do they let anyone who is in on the discussion do it as well?

That's perfect for those situations where the PC is brilliant and the Player is a sock full of rocks. What do you do when the dim barbarian comes up with a plan worthy of Rube Goldberg?

Everybody looks at him funny. ;P

Oh man. Reminds me of when (D&D game, custom world) I suggested to an (insane) king that. I need to start in a different place.

The king imprisoned the army because he considered them to be a burden on society and we, the heroes, were trying to get his army to go attack someplace. Face was having no luck.

So I decided to fight crazy with crazy and suggested that if he thought that all the "bums" were a problem that he should just have them killed. The king loved that idea.

Man, best moment of that game. Everyone was like "holy shit" and I said, "What? He doesn't want them, we do, 'fighting a war' tends to kill a few people, right? Fight crazy with crazy."

My players aren't terribly stupid, most of the time. Of course the guy who plays the mage is the one who knows how to play a face, and the face-player understands how to play a mage. And the sniper tends to be the only one exposed to enemy attack.

I don't really have to punish players when they're being stupid. I have an idea of what's in the world and what's happening. What kind of gear the enemy has. In advance I tune it so that the party has a reasonable chance of success, and after that I just make the NPCs do what seems to make sense. Sometimes that means they kick a PC when he's down, but often enough it means the NPCs do something suboptimal because they're panicking.

If the players are doing something stupid, they'll reap the consequences of that. I know how my world works, and I don't have to invent any additional punishments; the results of their stupid plan is fair punishment already.

Also, my players can usually tell by my evil grin or overly innocent wide-eyed smile that they're setting themselves up.