Obviously aimed at both GMs and even some of the industry faces we have as members now, but I love for people/writers to really be brutal and recount their regrets, wrong decisions, plus plain cock-ups that THEY are responsible for when it comes to running the worst game session ever, or releasing the worst role-playing adventure module/campaign or game.

Did you notice that glaring error on the first page?
Did your FAQ run to more pages than the main rulebook?

Im looking at things that YOU could have done better.

A Little light Sunday thought...

Ugh...here's a good one.

One time, I got it into my head that a certain player, who was then playing a peaceable cleric (Bolan by name), had once been a mercenary captain before "finding the light".  I was absolutely certain that this was in the character's backstory--so certain, in fact, I didn't look to make sure.

Well, it turns out the party gets involved in a war, and end up being positioned by a jealous general to command a rearguard action.  Well, more like the rearguard of the rearguard.  Basically, they have 2 companies of men to try and hold off this victorious foe while the rest of their kingdom's forces flee.

So...lo and behold, it happens (by coincidence, actually), that the small town this rearguard action took place around housed an Oracle.  At that time, the group was fighting over who should have overall command--the Dwarven Noble felt it was his right, as his was the highest birth; our human barbarian-type thought he should by merit of his fierceness; our halfling merchant did because the King had knighted/commissioned him first, giving him the best date of rank...and so it went.  So one player suggested that they ask the Oracle.  No problem, I thought, I've got a twist for them!

So to the Oracle's Cave they go.  The halfling raises his arms in supplication.

"O mighty Oracle," he cries, "which of us in command shall give us the greatest chance of victory..or survival?"

The Oracle rumbles, then proclaims, "The Holy Man of your group--the cleric--he shall lead you to a great victory".

The other players were floored.  The quiet, unassuming cleric?  The one who had shown little interest in combat and less in strategy?  Perhaps the most shocked face was that of the cleric's player.

We took a quick break, and I drew the cleric aside, jauntily boasting of my delightful way of working in his backstory.

"But I was never a mercenary captain!" swore the cleric.  I didn't believe him.  It took looking at both our copies of his backstory and several more minutes of discussion to persuade me.

"I would appreciate it," said Zachary, now a humbled and defeated GM, "if you did not mention this to the group".

In the end, the cleric did take command, pulled a Pope Leo moment, and threatened the commander of the first regiment that approached their position with a good old divine shafting if he didn't withdraw and let them retreat.  The game being Rolemaster, he open-ended his roll twice, barely convinced the leader, but put the fear of God into his men, and the rearguard was able to withdraw at a leisurely pace.  Their nemesis who had ordered them to their deaths was stunned when 2 days later, they arrived in camp not missing a single man, the cleric being revered, beloved, and carried by 2 companies of men who, from that day forth, considered themselves "Bolan's Own".

No thanks to a certain GM.  It might be added this is the first known occurence of the cleric saving the party's GM.

Don't know if this is exactly in the spirit of the thread:

Games written: my homebrew SF game Starfarer had a nifty little resolution system. The chargen was a little rough, but it was coming along.

Where I think the game fell down is that I demanded too much out of the damage system. I devoted entirely too much detail to the topic to tracking damage, and never came away with a system that I really liked. I think my continued efforts to hammer it into shape exhausted me on the idea of writing it.

Lesson learned here was to know when to live with less than a perfect level of simulation.


On the "games ran" homefront, I was running a game of MegaTraveller in which the players were marines being orbitally inserted in special drop pods. There were a number of rolls required to land safely, and they all failed every possible roll. I decided not to fudge it. At the time, I felt so proud of myself for sticking with my guns and showing players I was such a rock hard GM.

In retrospect, I was stupid. Yeah, I let the players know their characters live in a dangerous world. But did we have fun? No, not really.

Since then, I have adopted as a principle to never put a life threatening encounter in a game unless I want a PC to die at that point... or more generally, never put a task in a game unless I as a GM can live with the consequences of success or failure.

A secondary lesson is, if there are skills crucial to the success of the game, make sure the PCs have those skills.

We published a monster book that didn't define the movement statistics that appear for every beastie.  [Huff] I mean, doesn't everybody know that 3/1/10 stands for walk/swim/fly?  

That's one glorious, rocking screwup Zachary.  A great example of the ability of players to turn an off-the-wall pig's ear into a silk purse.

My own GM confession? So many, so many. Where to start. Well how about one that's relatively fresh, about 2 years ago. Unfortunately it didn't turn out so well. The game is D&D, the PC a druid reaching 6th level.  The player is a bit of a grognad, and runs his character like a token. He's very much about collecting the shiny bobbles, and the character is really just himself thinly veiled. That's cool, he's a friend and he doesn't do this maliciously so.

Anyway he takes Leadership for the power of a second avatar.  He's done this before, but at slightly higher level. The last time I also tossed out a character that a bit of annoying personality, which as the result of his request for someone that was 7th level but would do whatever he asked. Basically someone that had a clingy, needy personality, and a somewhat lower Cha and named 'Wheezy'. He had been so revolted by the character's weak willed personality and his weezy voice even refused to take the character as a cohort telling the poor guy to piss off...repeatedly. Even when I showed him the sheet and metagame assured him of the character's physical health.

This time he sends me an email coming up with a 3 line listing of the ailments he doesn't want the character suffer from.  Well me being me took that as a challenge.  He didn't have cataplexis on the list!  So I rolled up a cleric, as requested, and a pretty kickass one at that. I rolled stats twice and used the better of the two, which I think was something like a 40 pnt set of stats. Then I named her Kata Plexis. He later said he got the reference, but didn't think I'd have to the nerve to do it. First encounter she rolled very poorly on Will, or maybe it was Fort, save and dropped on the ground for a couple initiatives. I then gave him the mechanics info on the malady so he could roll it all himself. Because it was a cleric with good stats the roll had to be pretty low to affect her.

I had given him a monkeys paw puzzle. I was expecting him to try figure out a cure for it to polish the diamond in the rough. I didn't have a specific one in mind, I was willing to go whereever he headed with it.  He thought I was just maliciously fucking with him. He didn't even consider trying to cure Kata's ailment. Instead he proceeded to full out metagame/rules lawyer to get the Kata killed without implicating his PC (to avoid the book penalties for a future replacement). He failed, but came really close once. It was only a last ditch of the Kata's bleeding self-stopping on the percentile roll single HP short of death that thwarted it him getting Kata killed. By his PC's actions or not would have been a judgement call too close for me to have been comfortable in making.

In short I really pooched up on both tx and rx, and horribly mispredicted what this particular player's response would be, and didn't act quick enough to try fix it up.  Not that I suspect that trying to correct the miscommunication would have helped much at the time. The player had fixed his view very, very firmly in his head nearly instantly.

Bitterness ensued. It is mostly patched up now and the communication gap filled, but that took a long time and I can tell from his body language when the subject comes up that it still bothers him.

The worst RPG book I ever personally worked on was an In Nomine supplement called Heaven & Hell. If you look at the roster of writers (and editor) on that book it looks like a gauranteed win (myself, Kenneth Hite, Steve Kenson, John Tynes, etc) ... But in fact, most of the good people in the credits were ushered in at the last minute to try to salvage a weak manuscript. We did what we could, but the final result was ... not bad, exactly, but very firmly mediocre.

That's my greatest professional shame, but it doesn't really have the self-blame you're looking for. Hrm. Basically, that'll mean Cumberland projects. Those are the only ones where I have final say.

Points in Space 2, then. It has taken on the (false) appearance of vaporware simply because I overestimated my graphic skills when I put it on my roster. I also grossly overestimated my ability to catch up with myself on that score, and I've spent years now using it as a learning project for vector-drawing. I'm normally a bit more disciplined when it comes to evaluating what I am and am not capable of, and on that score I dropped the ball (and since then, it's simply been swamped by higher-priority stuff ... nowadays, I have 150% of the necessary graphics skills, but 5% of the available time to dedicate to that particular project, so it continues to develop glacially). That's entirely my fault.

In terms of GMing ... I ran a GURPS time travel run with virtually no prep (which I can manage for some genres but I never prefer)  ... and I also took it upon myself to spin this insanely complex multiple-loops-of-causality plotline as I went, constantly complicating it to cover my ass and make it look like the PCs just hadn't figured it out yet. It collapsed in on itself, as it deserved to, because I didn't just fess up when I should have to being ill-prepared for the evening.

There's too much of myself in one of the NPCs in Marauders and one of the other NPCs is much too close to a real-world person.  Sheer inexperience as a writer.

GMing-wise, I had a superhero campaign set in a tweaked Aberrant universe using SAS as the system.  About three sessions in I realised that I hated the system and I hadn't prepped anywhere enough material, neither was I going to have any time to give the campaign the preparation it deserved so I wrapped it up quickly.  Players enjoyed it though...

1.  All the parts of my MUSH admining career that involved dealing with the human issues instead of just the technical ones.  I make a great code wizard and builder, but an awful newbie helper, RP admin, and character app wiz.

Sounds like I ought to be able to do that stuff well if I can GM, doesn't it?  No such luck.  When I put a gaming group together I get to a point where I've shaken out the munchkins and the powergamers and all.

This never happens on a MUSH.  Get through politely disposing of the character app for the psionic shapeshifting 12,000-year-old half-elf half-dragon half-vampire?  Think you're done now?  Hah!  If you walk into the castle, you're going to see the game's most incorrigible twink, the guy with the 9' sword, roleplaying riding his 30-hand-high black titanium-hoofed fire-breathing horse down the castle tower staircase.  And after that, the champion language butcher will want you to link a room he's just built, describing a pugnant meadow with relatively seven foot tall trees.

I mean ... the SAN loss ... :shudder:

It takes patience to deal with this.  A lot of patience.

Occasions on which people have commented on my great patience are sort of not leaping to mind.

2.  The very worst GMing mistake I ever made was not investigating the cause of a row that broke out between a couple of players in my first campaign. I hastily blamed one player for some apparently unprovoked nastiness that he said to another in public chat and threw him out of the game.  A couple of days later the player he said the stuff too, crowing over getting him thrown out, actually showed me the conversation that had gone on in private messages.

She'd started hassling him and provoked the response.  And I hadn't investigated, because she was a lot closer me than he was, and it simply hadn't occurred to me that I hadn't seen the whole exchange.  I'd judged partially and hastily.  I ended up apologizing profusely to him, and showing her the door because I also finally recognized some destructive patterns in the way she was behaving with other players.

Horrible practice all around on my part.  It made me a lot more careful about trying to turn up the whole story before I act.

I would be torn between the "HinterWelt Enterpises" on the spine of Shades of Earth and an inaccurate Britannia map I commissioned and did not check for Roma. I have always regretted those mistakes deeply.

Bill

Quote from: HinterWeltI would be torn between the "HinterWelt Enterpises" on the spine of Shades of Earth and an inaccurate Britannia map I commissioned and did not check for Roma. I have always regretted those mistakes deeply.

Bill

Coulda been worse, Bill.  There coulda been another "s" towards the end of "Enterpises".

One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was I accidently dropped a whole half a chapter off of a book.

No shit. It just trailed off in mid-sentence.

And I didn't notice for about a month.

D'OH!