Have you ever had an ambitious RPG campaign that failed? Why did it failed? Particularly, if it wasn't because of something to do with timing or player availability, are there mistakes YOU made in the campaign that caused it to fail?

HELL YEAH!!!

I've written great campaigns for the wrong players. They weren't bad players, but they wanted to spend their free time doing XYZ in a RPG and my campaign was ABC flavored instead.

Also, I've misread the table. They said they wanted to play Star Trek, but they crap themselves whenever one player has "authority" over the others. Just having a "Captain" made them blow a fuse. Also, they didn't want science mysteries. Or drama that didn't involve blowing shit up as the solution. Oh, and they didn't want to change games because they really really wanted to play Star Trek.

Or the table who wanted to play Cthulhu...but they love their quips and banter (a few of the guys were hysterical) and their idea of a grand adventuring party is Beavis & Butthead with heavy weaponry. They wanted to play, crunch chips, yuck it up, send dick pics to the villains, and kickass without figuring shit out. AKA, they didn't want to play CoC. They wanted to play something with CoC as the monster manual. They are the people who go to haunted houses just to poke fun at how its not scary. They were a weird bunch. They were anti-immersive because of the constant banter....BUT here's the WTF. They bantered IN character. So I ran a Gamma World / Rifts for them and they were A grade awesome...and shot demons in the dick. That group had 2 doctors in it.

ALL of these problems could have been avoided with more direct questions BY ME. Sure, players should be more pro-active and self-aware of what they want in the RPGing, but let's be real. The GM does 90% of everything. It's why Org Play is popular. It's GM paint by number. GM reads text, then Players and GM roll dice, then GM hands out XP. Rinse & Repeat.

My BIGGEST problem as GM is I overprepare for one shots. I've run six month campaigns with less overall prep than I've done for some one off con events.

I ran one too many D&D 3E campaigns.  Should have seen the signs of burnout coming, and run something else--anything else.  Did the exact same thing with Fantasy Hero.  Maybe if the campaigns hadn't been ambitious, I'd have been fine, but nearly all my campaigns are ambitious.

Curiously, the only other campaign failure I've had was not ambitious.  I was changing styles from my "storyteller" phase (easy on the players, lead them around by the nose, fudging like mad, etc.) to my current style (old school, same as my original style, but minus the killer GM).  So that campaign was doomed from the get go, because I was working out how to do that.  Once the players were sufficiently acclimated, we did a hard reset:  Talk about how it would work, then new campaign, new characters.  In play, that short failed campaign was a train wreck.  But it meant the whole group stayed together, and the next campaign was a smashing success.

I haven't had campaigns fail, though I've had problems before with players or situations -- it almost always comes down to me being too lenient or permissive. Letting metagaming go on too long, or problem players or personal drama fester too long until it comes to a head.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1054481Have you ever had an ambitious RPG campaign that failed? Why did it failed? Particularly, if it wasn't because of something to do with timing or player availability, are there mistakes YOU made in the campaign that caused it to fail?

Mekton Mercenaries, using 2nd edition Mekton with the Techbook. The setup was the characters were mercenaries, and could construct their own mektons as they saw fit.
The good thing about playing with a powergamer (good, as in he'll find the flaws in a setup really quick) is he created the ultimate munchkin mekton, with 12 tiny lasers giving him a Laser Spread Of Death. It was fun to see how wonky the system could get, but it quickly escalated to whether the players or me, the GM could come up with the most broken overpowered mekton design. The campaign fell apart shortly after.
If I ran such a campaign in the future, I'd put more restrictions on mekton construction, and vet designs more carefully.

Yeah, I also had a fail with my try at a CoC campaign. It was to be with a co-GM running 2 generations of adventurers. My section was a group of WW2 GIs who get introduced to the Mythos by insidious Nazi machinations, while my buddy was going to handle their descendants using Cthulhu now. The first adventure was basically "Destroy it all, investigate nothing lest we go insane/get devoured!" and the 2nd GM was "Not quite ready - next week for sure!" I think that was around 1996 (and still not ready).

I've had a few games fail over the years because I wasn't selective enough in matching the players to the games. Playing a light-drama, high-action space opera game with a pair of players that wanted a gritty, bean-counting Traveller experience was a hard fail on my part. Despite a session 0 explaining what the game was to be, I didn't read them sufficiently to see that they were well intent on bending me to their way--which I had no interest in at that time.

I spent a ton of time coming up with a really cool corrupted citadel for an Earthdawn campaign complete with riddles and Zelda style puzzles and convincing factions and a really cool necromancer villain.  I failed to explain to my players that it was fantasy fucking Vietnam and not Swords and Superheroes so the campaign that had gone on 1 year blew up in 1 session as they all decided to make a last stand against overwhelming odds instead of attempting to escape.

TSR' Marvel Superheroes: I was still fairly new to DMing and made alot of mistakes with the campaign. Way way to overblown and a grandstanding DMPC. And then it clicked that this was wrong and I've never made those mistakes since.

Shadowrun 1e: I made a fairly simple mistake regarding armour in the system which turned what should have been a challenging firefight into a TPK. So I just rewound the clock and we re-did the battle properly.

So many campaigns are a bit unsatisfying and run short. Even campaigns that run for years have flaws, especially in hindsight.

I've learned to focus on the cases where I've been very successful and do more of what works. It took me 9 years from first running Wilderlands in 2006, to having a Wilderlands campaign that really worked in early 2015. I kept plugging away until I got it right.

Quote from: KingCheops;1054736...so the campaign that had gone on 1 year blew up in 1 session as they all decided to make a last stand against overwhelming odds instead of attempting to escape.

One thing I've learned for long term play is to make the campaign not dependent on any particular PCs or players. If the orcs TPK Frodo and Sam, well the Pippin/Merry and Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli parties can keep on playing.

Oh, I also had a game of Twilight 2000 2.2 (or something like that, based on Traveller TNE rules) that lasted all of two sessions before the combat rules dragged it straight to hell.

Each time you fired on auto, your weapon shot several bullets (3, 5, or even 10) and you rolled that many d20s hitting on 1-3 (or 1-4 if you were good). But wait! Whatever didn't hit kept going down range and might hit the next target, be it friend or foe. And then the next and so on until every bullet either hit something or ran out of possible targets. Then you had to figure out damage for each hit.

This was bad enough when the guy with the M249 fires twice in a turn and is throwing 20d20(!), but the game broke when the gunner on the Hummer fired the Mk 19 AGL. Now we had all of the above but add in deviation, blast radius, multiple fragmentation hits to each of the 5 shots for each of the two actions. Resolving this firing took us over an hour (and killed something like six bad guys and a Polish truck). It also killed all interest in the game.

I loved the 2e Twilight 2000 burst fire rule where you just roll a d6 per bullet, hit on a 6. Half the misses are rolled again, 6s hit any secondary targets in the fire zone. You remove dice for range, cover etc. I've used it in D&D (demigod PCs vs Arasaka Corporation power armour troopers w miniguns) to good effect.

As I recall very high fire rate MGs had the number of dice reduced, I think to 1/5, but each 6 counted as 3 hits.

Quote from: S'mon;1054799I loved the 2e Twilight 2000 burst fire rule where you just roll a d6 per bullet, hit on a 6. Half the misses are rolled again, 6s hit any secondary targets in the fire zone. You remove dice for range, cover etc. I've used it in D&D (demigod PCs vs Arasaka Corporation power armour troopers w miniguns) to good effect.

As I recall very high fire rate MGs had the number of dice reduced, I think to 1/5, but each 6 counted as 3 hits.

The one I played was > 20 years ago, so I don't recall the exact details on much of it, but I know that autofire had 1/4 (round down) your normal chance to hit but you rolled per bullet. I also know the M249 that our Army Ranger was packing fired 10 bullets per action and he could do that twice per turn. It was a dice-rolling nightmare.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1054805The one I played was > 20 years ago, so I don't recall the exact details on much of it, but I know that autofire had 1/4 (round down) your normal chance to hit but you rolled per bullet. I also know the M249 that our Army Ranger was packing fired 10 bullets per action and he could do that twice per turn. It was a dice-rolling nightmare.

Yeah those are the Traveller New Era "improved" rules.