New day, new adventure
Today, I took over my every-other-Sunday group, retooled things, and started a new campaign. Let me explain.
Three weeks ago, I got a call from a friend of mine I used to game with a decade ago. I left his group because him and two other people sort of "ganged up" on me. It was a complicated scenario, but I believe that my friend was sort of pressured and manipulated into it. I know that he has nothing but regret for what happened. Fast forward 10 years - times have changed. He has a whole new huge new group of players, and they needed a wizard for their epic level 3.5 game. I was somewhat leery about this, but I agreed to it anyway. I made this wizard character that was somewhat broken in a variety of ways, and off I went.
Two weeks ago today, the game occurred. Oh wow, what a clusterfuck. So, the GM of this game has run... zero campaigns. He's a *brand new* DM, running for the first time. And he's running an epic game, where people are 23-27th level. And he has made *modifications* to the game, because he felt like people weren't powerful enough. Things like giving people increased stats, allowing inherent bonuses to stack past +5, making all spells that do damage of 5th level and below do DOUBLE damage and an increased die size... you get the idea.
The game opened with me joining the group in a "village of elves", where I am a member of the 'first tribe'. Okay, cool. The elves offered us rewards for retrieving some items for them, as my character was not going to be around to protect the village anymore, since I was going on this mission with them. Circular logic, but alright. We were all asked what we wanted. I went through a few things, before this new GM just said, "What ability to you want? Ask anything." I said, "Alright, I want resistance to being attacked physically." He responded, "Alright, the elves will give you a headband of damage resistance 125/all."
Yeah. 125/all. That means to do any damage to me in a physical way, you have to do more than 125 points in a single hit. I already have 50 spell resistance, so I am almost untouchable there, and levels and levels of counterspelling to take care of anything that gets through... so where is the game, exactly?
THEN, he throws us into Grimtooth's Dungeon of Death, and the traps are the same, dealing piddly damage to the epic level party. We talked about this, and his response was that he was going to make the traps *much* more deadly and throw in some epic, virtually unkillable monsters. Then, he decided he had made too many mistakes, and needed to fix things. THEN, he fell in love with Pathfinder, and wanted to convert the epic level campaign to Pathfinder, but had no rules. So, he decided that the best thing was to just kill everyone's character off, and...
Do you see where this is going?
After thinking about this extensively, I called my friend up last night and said, "Look, this is screwed up. He needs help, in many ways. I offer some ways out." We discussed it, and he liked the idea a lot. Today, when I showed up to the game, I talked to him in private and convinced him that the game was about to implode, and that it needed to be salvaged. He agreed, somewhat relieved. We discussed it with the rest of the group, and basically I took over. We then took it to the larger group, as it apparently is a group of about 14 people, who are separated into different groups depending on what week it was. Some people moved around, some other campaigns were rebooted, things were shuffled, and in the end I got 6 players that I was happy with.
Yeah, I basically stepped in and became a leader of the larger group after one game session, and GM of this new group as well. I told them that we would start over at 1st, and table the epic group. People became excited, things seemed great, and we made characters. The first session, today, went extremely well - I saw levels of interaction between the players that I normally don't expect until a few months in, and peoples characters were already almost fully formed. hammergrrl even joined us, which made me very happy.
All in all, a total success. I am starting the adventure path called Curse of the Crimson Throne, an OGL Pathfinder adventure path that seems packed with awesome thus far. You can even get a "Player's Guide" to the campaign, which gives the players some additional information and options to help integrate them. It worked very well, and I was surprised with the quality of the game. I will be looking at more of these Adventure Paths, as there are apparently many of them. We'll see how long this goes, but for now... I'm running again. :)
Three weeks ago, I got a call from a friend of mine I used to game with a decade ago. I left his group because him and two other people sort of "ganged up" on me. It was a complicated scenario, but I believe that my friend was sort of pressured and manipulated into it. I know that he has nothing but regret for what happened. Fast forward 10 years - times have changed. He has a whole new huge new group of players, and they needed a wizard for their epic level 3.5 game. I was somewhat leery about this, but I agreed to it anyway. I made this wizard character that was somewhat broken in a variety of ways, and off I went.
Two weeks ago today, the game occurred. Oh wow, what a clusterfuck. So, the GM of this game has run... zero campaigns. He's a *brand new* DM, running for the first time. And he's running an epic game, where people are 23-27th level. And he has made *modifications* to the game, because he felt like people weren't powerful enough. Things like giving people increased stats, allowing inherent bonuses to stack past +5, making all spells that do damage of 5th level and below do DOUBLE damage and an increased die size... you get the idea.
The game opened with me joining the group in a "village of elves", where I am a member of the 'first tribe'. Okay, cool. The elves offered us rewards for retrieving some items for them, as my character was not going to be around to protect the village anymore, since I was going on this mission with them. Circular logic, but alright. We were all asked what we wanted. I went through a few things, before this new GM just said, "What ability to you want? Ask anything." I said, "Alright, I want resistance to being attacked physically." He responded, "Alright, the elves will give you a headband of damage resistance 125/all."
Yeah. 125/all. That means to do any damage to me in a physical way, you have to do more than 125 points in a single hit. I already have 50 spell resistance, so I am almost untouchable there, and levels and levels of counterspelling to take care of anything that gets through... so where is the game, exactly?
THEN, he throws us into Grimtooth's Dungeon of Death, and the traps are the same, dealing piddly damage to the epic level party. We talked about this, and his response was that he was going to make the traps *much* more deadly and throw in some epic, virtually unkillable monsters. Then, he decided he had made too many mistakes, and needed to fix things. THEN, he fell in love with Pathfinder, and wanted to convert the epic level campaign to Pathfinder, but had no rules. So, he decided that the best thing was to just kill everyone's character off, and...
Do you see where this is going?
After thinking about this extensively, I called my friend up last night and said, "Look, this is screwed up. He needs help, in many ways. I offer some ways out." We discussed it, and he liked the idea a lot. Today, when I showed up to the game, I talked to him in private and convinced him that the game was about to implode, and that it needed to be salvaged. He agreed, somewhat relieved. We discussed it with the rest of the group, and basically I took over. We then took it to the larger group, as it apparently is a group of about 14 people, who are separated into different groups depending on what week it was. Some people moved around, some other campaigns were rebooted, things were shuffled, and in the end I got 6 players that I was happy with.
Yeah, I basically stepped in and became a leader of the larger group after one game session, and GM of this new group as well. I told them that we would start over at 1st, and table the epic group. People became excited, things seemed great, and we made characters. The first session, today, went extremely well - I saw levels of interaction between the players that I normally don't expect until a few months in, and peoples characters were already almost fully formed. hammergrrl even joined us, which made me very happy.
All in all, a total success. I am starting the adventure path called Curse of the Crimson Throne, an OGL Pathfinder adventure path that seems packed with awesome thus far. You can even get a "Player's Guide" to the campaign, which gives the players some additional information and options to help integrate them. It worked very well, and I was surprised with the quality of the game. I will be looking at more of these Adventure Paths, as there are apparently many of them. We'll see how long this goes, but for now... I'm running again. :)