Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Kesht 10-29-03, 11:16 PM	OMG. :mad: I don't believe it. I spent 4 hours trying to get an online campaign going, and in 30 mins, it went to pot. I mean it was a DMing NIGHTMARE. The characters tried to tell ME what was happening. I was told that as a DM, I can't roll for a player. Umm.. If I TOLD the player that his character needed a spot check out of the blue, wouldn't he get a little suspicious??? DOY! I mean, I've run games that went bad before because of PK'ing, and whiney people, but today takes the cake. I worked for hours with these players, asking them repeatedly what they wanted, what kind of game? How much RP? Their response? "What's the setting?" Ok, I begin to tell them a little about the world, what kingdom their in, etc... I ask if they want anything more specific. This goes on for a while. What happens when we start? The players begin to make up town names (not a big deal, I'm a big boy/DM and I can work with that) but when they start having villages I haven't though of yet attacked by sea creatures left and right... It kinda made me twitch. not kinda, a LOT. I was blown away... Do people honestly play D&D this way? Telling the DM what's going on in HIS world? I can understand making up some character background on the fly, but giving the player's control over monster history and wars and the like, is a little Flippin' rich. Did I freak out? No..... that would have been smart. I just sat there like a 3 year old with a technical manual, staring but not reading. I calmed myself down and tried to talk to them, tell them this isn't what I'm used to. You know, like it says in the PHB and DMG, the players take their cues from the DM. They said that they weren't going to wait for me, and that I was supposed to "guide them". WHAT? Uhh... what's the point of playing this wonderful game that allows the player to make thier own choices if I make them do what I want? Isn't that called..... RAILROADING? I may be going out on a limb here... but it would seem like people don't know what they want out of D&D. RPing and chatting in other languages is all good, but not when the DM is left completely out of it. It would seem to me that when someone spends hours trying to coordinate a group and give them what they want, that those people would be happy, and readily listen and interact with the person who is supposed to be running the game. Silly me. And that's exactly my point. I am the moron. Not these guys. They were just doing what they liked. I, on the other hand, stuck around long enough to have to put up with such wonderful phrases as, "What weapon do I start with?" and "Do I need a book or something to play D&D?" !!! These were not whispers to not drink the water or mention someone's dead relative.... These were airhorns going off in my ears. I was dumb enough to try to bail the water out of the sinking Titanic with my breakfast spoon. THE POINT??? -My fellow DM's, you are there to have fun too. Don't hang about if they treat you like a 7th grade English teacher giving a lecture. Take the HINT and move on. You'll save yourself the agony, and your significant other's ears as well. *sigh* :confused:
Vaalingrade Ashland 10-29-03, 11:28 PM	You went in expecting one thing and got another. I'm sure it must have been trying for you. But I'm not seeing it as so bad. Its just a step below using a module, IMO. What you just witnessed was comunity gaming. And its not so uncommon online or at the table. There are two types: 1) The idea is to give players more freedom in character generation While the Dm chooses the starting point, the PCs make up in full thier hometowns and circumstances surrounding thier lives before the adventure. From what I can tell, thats what the monster histories and such came from. 2) Is complete freeform, where there really is no DM, but fully PC generated plot. My guess is that this was number one. Personally, I have a little trouble giving free reign in my world, but for online play, this is pretty much the best way to do it. I prefer, however, for the Pcs to ask before setting stuff up.
PenderGrass 10-29-03, 11:30 PM	I have to say from here it is a funny story you have there.... You have more courage than I though, online D&D? "never." would be my response or - at least - 'no thanks' Your story of having gone to the edge of abyss and kicking yourself in.... well, I can only say that I hope your significant other knows how to cook some cookies and gives you some milk!!!
PenderGrass 10-29-03, 11:32 PM	Oh yeah........ does any DM out there have any 'good' online D&D experiences - some that are at least as rewarding as a face-to-face game???
Kesht 10-29-03, 11:33 PM	Thank you for your reply. I have seen, and encourage the kind of community gaming you describe. I have no problem with the characters making up hometowns and story as they go. I just got a demanding and impatient attitude from my players. As to the freeform, I can see that happening if all the people are mature enough. Wouldn't be my favorite style. And your right, it's more like #1 because it was acknowledged from the start that I was the DM. *sigh* I just can't understand why people can't be patient and wait for the DM's prompt.
Kesht 10-29-03, 11:35 PM	you know PenderGrass... I bet that if enough mature DM's got together and talked, they could put together one heck of an awesome game. *big bambi eyes* ;) *edited cause I felt like a dork using only half of PenderGrass' name. For shame!*
Vaalingrade Ashland 10-29-03, 11:41 PM	Originally posted by PenderGrass Oh yeah........ does any DM out there have any 'good' online D&D experiences - some that are at least as rewarding as a face-to-face game??? Does one I canceled due to my own laziness count? The session we had was pretty good, but the typing is murder.
Fixxxer 10-30-03, 02:22 AM	Wow, Kesht. I'm really glad I decided not to become involved with that game. I don't think I would have been as nice about it as you were (asking for home adresses and then hunting them down and beating their assess in their own homes is considered "not nice", right?). I guess the only response is that you handled yourself well under the circumstances and it was definately a learning experience. PS: Rest assured that I'm not going to act like that during our chat tomorrow. :)
Mister Mayhem 10-30-03, 03:07 AM	Originally posted by PenderGrass Oh yeah........ does any DM out there have any 'good' online D&D experiences - some that are at least as rewarding as a face-to-face game??? I have been involved in some excellent online games (and not just in D&D), and also been in some very poor ones. The ratio is almost exactly the same as the ratio of good/bad tabletop games I have been in. If you are using play-by-post, there will always be some difficulties - either things will go very slowly, or the DM or players must do stuff for the others. For example, to make combats go faster, I will ask the PCs for their general tactics, and play through most of the combat for them, stopping to post the results only when something significant changes - a PC is almost down to zero popints, a new enemy appears, an enemy turns out to have unexpected powers etc, or another circumstance pre-set by a PC. And as DM, I do pretty much *all* the dice rolling, and if I wasn't I would insist on an online dice-rolling prog. Not because I suspect my players will cheat, but simply to prevent any suspicion of cheating by myself or a player after a series of remarkably good rolls. (An other alternative is to switch to IM for combat, but not everyone has IM, or is online at the same time, especially when "roleplaying sans Borders" ) This means the players have to trust me, but it saves a huge amount of time. And if they don't trust me, then what would be the point of playing with me anyway, since if a DM were going to cheat he wouldn't need to fudge dice rolls to do it. Since the whole point of D&D is co-operative play rather than opposition, these difficulties should not be a problem. If you want to give it a try, I have a couple of spaces left in an upcoming low level, moderately low fantasy D&D 3.5 game. If anyone is interested, PM me. Or, if a few of you Doubting Thomases want to try a game with no long term commitment in case you don't like it, I might be persuaded to start up another one just for your gang :D
Malben 10-30-03, 10:01 AM	The first game of DnD I ever played was a session run by the girlfriend of a friend of mine. The rest of the party was a collection of fighters and thieves, and the DM had herself a pet NPC -- to wit. a young gold dragon polymorphed into a human fighter, who had decided to mate with her boyfriend's PC. Don't ask me why. Don't ask me how. All I know is that my character spent his time balled up in a little quivering mass of cowardly weeping for most of the session, and because of this character, none of the other ones had so much as a scratch on him at the end of the session. I didn't play DnD again for nearly three years after this -- imagine the effect on a newbie! When I finally did play DnD once more, I played with an online group. While the first campaign had some hiccups owing to our mutual unfamiliarity with all of the rules of 3rd edition, it was still fun and comprehensible. Since then, we've traded a few players in and out of the group, and have arrived at a group of approximately 5-6 people who are regularly online for session on time, who don't do the silly crap that we all read about in the Lawful Stupid Paladin panic threads, and who don't make the DM absolutely miserable by arguing with him. To put it all shortly, my ONLY good gaming experiences have been with online campaigns. Atypical, but true nevertheless.
zioth 10-30-03, 11:23 AM	One of the main advantages of online gaming for a DM is that you can decide what kinds of players you want in your game. You don't need to ask what kind of game your players want, because players who think they'll like your game will come to you. So whatever kind of game you like best -- heavy combat, heavy role-playing, political, mystery, horror, whatever -- your players will like too, because they chose to play with you. Here's what I suggest for your next online gaming experiment: 1) Create your world. Decide the basics, like whether it'll be high or low magic, what classes/races/PrCs will be allowed, what type of campaign it'll be. 2) Write a paragraph or two about your campaign and what kinds of players you want. 3) Post the description on one of the many DM advertizing sites. I like to use www.pbem.com for play-by-email games. Yes, it will take longer to set up your game, but the game will be a lot more fun for everyone, because everyone will know what to expect. I've been running a successful email-based game for the past seven years, and it was my first try. Yes, I started out with a few characters who didn't belong, but now the kinds of players who join are people who really like the particular kind of game I run.
dafrca 10-30-03, 01:09 PM	Originally posted by PenderGrass Oh yeah........ does any DM out there have any 'good' online D&D experiences - some that are at least as rewarding as a face-to-face game??? Some of my best "on line" games were when I was playing through the Comp-U-Serve game site. Now, I will admit those games were *very* role intensive and low on combat. But it was fun and seemed to work. What Kesht discribes never happened to me. In fact, in these games it seemed like I worked harder as the DM. Kesht, do not give up all hope for on line, try again. dafrca
Donnavin Snowolf 10-30-03, 02:25 PM	Originally posted by PenderGrass Oh yeah........ does any DM out there have any 'good' online D&D experiences - some that are at least as rewarding as a face-to-face game??? Some of the best, and its own these very WotC boards. Check out Garic's City in the Wizards.COMmunity. Its actually been much better than the face to face games I'm used to. As a DM for a different online D&D game (cancelled later) I had a blast. I was recruited from the players, as our current DM was overwhelmed (1 man, 9 players rarely together at once.) So I hopped onto the DM list. It is time consuming. I did make every roll for my PCs. And I have found from playing that it is simply more fun when I don't know numbers and rolls, just the results. But all those rolls are pretty nice with a generator (I still don't know where my dice went off to last year, but they haven't called or sent a postcard or anything so I'm pretty sure they aren't coming back). It did kill my gaming as a player though, so if you love your PC offer to DM, but realize that if you don't want to NPC them (meaning you can't use that screen name with the PCs name) mostly all the time its gonna slow him down. But, it was fun. I've have a sum total of all excellent experiences with online gaming. :D And as soon as our DM finishes up some stuff and has their baby ( :bounce: ) I'll have an OA game to play in.
john53704 10-30-03, 06:02 PM	I had a good table-top game group, then I moved. During the time away, I ran several online games over the course of about two years. Some went well, some were frightfully bad. My preferred format was a chat based game, with an online dice rolled, although I have also run forum based games, and attempted a play by email type game. I had the worse luck with the PBEM, but that might have just been the site I was using at the time, and the selection of players available. The forum games varied from poor to ok. I found it difficult to maintain a good pace for the game. Although, that might just be a problem matching my style to that medium. My best luck was the chat based games. Granted, there were a few troublesome players, and the occasional annoying visitor, but most of these problems were worked out in time. Ironically enough, I was only able to play in one game. It seemed like there were plenty of players – but almost no one willing to DM, so I counted myself lucky to find a game. The game ran at 4 AM Saturday morning – or prime time Australia (good thing I was working nights at the time.) So, don’t give up. You might need to try recruiting other players – or try using a different site, or chat server. But in the end the result can be very rewarding. A side benefit to the chat games – I was able to keep a log of each session. These are nice to review when I get nostalgic. Hope the next game works better for you. Another thing to consider – if you do try again, you can simply use the material you have already generated for the campaign. Just because you recruit new players does not mean you have to go back and do all your work from scratch, save yourself some sweat and toil. With new players, they will never know the difference, so use what you have. :D
hivemind[MVGC] 10-30-03, 06:55 PM	I've never experienced a good online game either. It's just not the same as sitting around the table with people. I much prefer to play Neverwinter Nights on a persistent world server with friends than try and do an online chat-type thingy.
Kesht 10-30-03, 07:19 PM	In retrospect I see that online D&D would be a lot better if I did screen my players a bit more and we established some gameplay conventions. My impatience and lack of planning only aided in making the game horrible. BTW-For the curious, I used OpenRPG. I now think that if things were done right, it could be awesome. I've posted for players on the Gamer Classifieds here, with little response. Any of you fellow DM's out there want to play for a change? ;)
JoAT 10-30-03, 08:21 PM	I've had more than a few good online gaming experiances. BUt, this could be because pretty shortly after I started gaming online, I fell in with a regular gaming group. Of course, none of the games have been d&d (BESM, Fuzion, Tristat dX, Palladium (Ugh), and some semi-freeform systems), but I'm starting up my own d&d game, complete with a Some new/Some Old roster of players... And Open RPG has to be the best on-line too I've seen for gameing... It makes me most happy...
Edymnion 10-30-03, 09:29 PM	I'm actually having more fun in an online game I'm in as a player now than I did in several face to face games. I think the problem you had most was that it was moving too fast for you to keep up with. Good fix for that, don't do live chat D&D sessions, use message board services to run your game on (I prefer the link in my sig called Roleplay Online for this), where you get full control over how things go. Nobody can post until you add them to the game, you as the DM can take over PCs whenever you want (to NPC them if they aren't there is the usual reason), and it has built in dice rollers with private rolls so you can roll things in the background without the players ever seeing it. Add to that the built in character sheets, character portraits, and even a place to upload game maps to, and its pretty darn sweet.
Adrez Nesnsid 10-31-03, 06:41 PM	Originally posted by Kesht OMG. :mad: I don't believe it. I spent 4 hours trying to get an online campaign going, and in 30 mins, it went to pot. I mean it was a DMing NIGHTMARE. The characters tried to tell ME what was happening. I was told that as a DM, I can't roll for a player. Umm.. If I TOLD the player that his character needed a spot check out of the blue, wouldn't he get a little suspicious??? DOY! Theoretically you could ask the players to roll spot checks at random times when there isn't actually anything there. But on the whole you're right.
Daikona 10-31-03, 08:22 PM	Granted, my only DMing experience is that I'm assisting the game I'm surrently in. But I have never had an online game experience that was bad because it was online. I've had some that weren't enjoyable, yes. One of them was because the DM thought he was Zork or something. And he likely would have been just as fussy about not letting you do anything you didn't phrase right elsewhere. Most of them that I didn't enjoy it was just because the other people involved wanted a different kind of a game than I wanted. I'm a pretentious arty type. I like RP for the sake of RP. So when I didn't have much fun in what turned into a pure hack 'n slash game, it was the difference in game styles, not because it was online. I don't, to be honest, enjoy face to face gaming as much. Some of it is probably that it was only fairly recently I did any. Growing up I didn't know anyone else who had any interest in the game. Most of the time I was in college, I knew a few people, but they weren't letting anyone else in. So it's unfamiliar. Add to that that I'm not comfortable in close quarters with most people, and I've never once had a gaming group that every single person in it was someone I was exceptionally fond of, and not sitting around a small table together works pretty well. In terms of the DMing, I think the online works very well, at least for the game we have. It allows us to quick check things without anyone else knowing something is being checked. It makes conversations with NPCs simpler, there aren't piles of notes going back and forth. (There's one character who speaks a handful of languages that the others don't, which come up for plot reasons at times). It also allows the dreaded party splitups to not even slow things down. When it's just a matter of having 2 IRC windows open at once, there's nothing that makes it anywhere near impossible to do both at once.
ssampier 10-31-03, 08:36 PM	I don't think your experience is typical. Most RPG sessions tend to go well (even online). I played AD&D by mail and IRC and they were fun. They didn't last long, but they were fun. The benefit is that you don't have to play with a certain player for very long; an adventure at most. Back to your point, I think you are fully justified in rolling for a player. There is no "rule" that says a player must roll a spot check. Also, remember to have a general campaign background beforehand. This will enable you to say, "Your background cannot have sea monsters," et cetera. You don't have to explain why if you don't want to (be prepared for lots of arguing though--though an "ignore" will fix that). I second using online tools and putting up a campaign website (type of player's preferred, ratio of RPing to combat, house rules, brief history, etc.). All in all I think you were the recipient of some "bad apples".
Loopy 11-01-03, 12:44 AM	Ugh.... dude.... GROSS. None of my players would DARE make up anything in my campaign world. If they wanna start making up plotlines not directly created by their character and places not created by their character, then they can be the DM. It is the place of the player to guide his CHARACTER through the WORLD the DM creates.
Daikona 11-01-03, 09:27 PM	Originally posted by Loopy None of my players would DARE make up anything in my campaign world. Honestly, with that attitude, I'm amazed you have players. Not so much the idea that it's the DM's job to make plots itself. But the *attitude* in that... Really, how DARE those players think [i]your[i] little world should involve them in any way. You wouldn't have a game without players any more than they would without a DM...
Mikal 11-01-03, 10:21 PM	For the subject of online gaming, I must say that it's just as fun as old fashioned table top, better even in some aspects. Granted I've never had to use pbem types or *shudder* aim or mirc, I got lucky and found WEBrpg back in 99 and, when that went pay, openrpg, which is a dedicated rpg program. If you want to try online playing, definatly go to www.openrpg.com and download the program. It is wonderful.
Kesht 11-02-03, 12:49 AM	actually mikal, this WAS in openrpg.
Mikal 11-02-03, 01:02 AM	in that case what were their names so i know to avoid them
Loopy 11-02-03, 01:04 AM	Originally posted by Daikona Honestly, with that attitude, I'm amazed you have players. Not so much the idea that it's the DM's job to make plots itself. But the *attitude* in that... Really, how DARE those players think [i]your[i] little world should involve them in any way. You wouldn't have a game without players any more than they would without a DM... You know, it's actually impossible to take someone out of context on message boards, right? I mean... you know everybody can read my post and figure out that you're nigh on misquoting me.