Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Slate King 09-06-04, 07:56 AM	In a single story campaign, our thirteenth level characters finally discovered the evil plot of the half dragon villian. This half dragon has :( (get ready for this) switched the locations of three metropolis level cities with each other. (one of them being the hometown of the group) We have traveled to a previously undiscovered continent, and encountered a group of creatures unheardof in this campaign world (dragons) and was nearly tpk'd twice (required dm intervention) to find out this evil plan. The half dragon had wanted political control over city 1 (the hometown of the pc's), so he bought storefronts in city two (similar sized but much poorer city) and switched their locations. Thus he rotated these cities across the world from each other to lower real estate prices. The primary villian is nothing more than a slum lord. :weep: This may not be too bad compared to some of the campaigns you guys have done, and it is not my worst one, but we spent nearly three months on this mission and it has occupied us since the start. (we started at 5th level) Depending on response i may give my worst. What does everyone think of this campaign, and what is the worst story you have been subject to?
Cyricist 09-06-04, 10:58 AM	Yeah that really does sound terrible. You wouldn't happen to be playing in Ravenloft without being aware of it now would you? :D My worst campaign ever was the classic Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil module. Great stuff, bad DM. Now this module contains a lot of possibilities for the PCs to (nearly) kick the bucket already, but this particular DM made it worse by e.g. putting some already tough Troglodytes in PLATEMAILS. We could only hit them on natural 20s. It was quite terrible. I quit that group and started my own :D
Kalanth 09-06-04, 11:37 AM	If it was a comedy world, that slum lord plot line would be fun. Sorry to hear how much it sucks. I ran a game that was ruined by a player. We were playing with Dragonlance, and I had a obsessed Black Robe Mage discover a way to open several rifts to the abyss and other planes with big, evil demons and devils. Through a form of pact that was not uncovered as of yet, the mage united the Demons and Devils in the plan to conquer Krynn. Two of the players were great. There was the Kagonesti Rogue that embraced the way the race changes their name based on significant things in their lives. He played very well for being new, then there was the Irda Bard who wanted no one to know that he was a bard, so he disguised himself as a female Qualinesti Elf. So these two were great. It was the third player that really made the game suck. A newbie that tried to convince us that he had been playing D&D for 15 years. Its not hard to figure that out when you have two players at the table with a combined 37 years of experience, and materials dating back to 1st ed (he tried to tell us that the spell Flame Strike had radically changed from 3rd and 2nd ed, and we proceeded to prove him wrong). Anyways, I get sidetracked. The character had convinced me to allow him to play a half-celestial character. The ECL made lvl progression for him tougher, and he *****ed, not understanding why he could not just progress with the rest. He switched his class four times before settling on the first one he chose (mystic to cleric, cleric to wizard, wizard to cleric, cleric to mystic). Worst of all, in the half celestial it says that they respect all mortal beings and help humankind when they can. He played the character as though he was better than mortal man, and that talking to them made him physically ill. It also is implied that being a celestial would make you a good guy, and his alignment reflected that, being Lawful Good. That meant little to him, as he played more Neutral Evil than Lawful Good. Finally, he insisted on working alone, at all times, even when I got the group together, he would find a way to seperate from the group (i.e. one player was poisoned by a Cancer Mage, and the only known cure was on the mainland in a city in enemy territory <typical, I know>. This player chose to head to Palanthas to study at the great library to research something that mattered to him, and was willing to let the player die <in this case, become a cancer mage> instead of help them). Yes, overall, he killed my game, and made the game suck.
Galahad the Pure 09-06-04, 04:04 PM	I once wrote and posted a story about the worst game I ever played in. It was 5 pages long single-spaced, detailing every horrible thing the DM did. For your entertainment and delight, it can be found here: http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=259802&page=1&pp=30
Elrana 09-06-04, 08:42 PM	I once wrote and posted a story about the worst game I ever played in. It was 5 pages long single-spaced, detailing every horrible thing the DM did. For your entertainment and delight, it can be found here: http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=259802&page=1&pp=30 Hmm... I'm sure I remember that one, wasn't that the generously retitled 'nightmare thread from hell'?! :)
Vanigo 09-06-04, 10:15 PM	The worst DM I've ever seen has actually run a whole series of train-wreck campaigns. I can't figure out why anyone is willing to let him run. The only time I ever played under him was in a FR campaign. We started out in Amn, and we were required to take a typical alignment and patron diety for that area, then he designed everyone's background. The adventure started when the council decided to send us (at first level) to guard a caravan being sent through an area where hostile (and astonishingly convinced of their own racial supremacy) elves were running around. Our choices were to do this, or they'd kill us. The elves, predictably, attacked with overwhelming force and took the caravan, then for some insane reason decided not to kill us. We were immediately teleported back to the council, who said that that was what they wanted since the caravan was really a huge bomb. Now, this wasn't so bad, really, but it gets much worse. They gave us a bunch of ridiculous equipment (including a couple major artifacts) and sent us on some other escort job. On the way to the guy we were supposed to escort to the city, we were confronted by Bane. It's entirely unclear why Bane cared about us, but apparently he did. He took the artifacts and teleported us to where we were going. Somehow (I don't remember how) we ended up transported back in time and met some incredibly powerful wizard, who took more of the stuff and sent us back, at which point we learned that we had somehow succeded in our mission again. At no point did any of us actually do anything. Then we learned that the bomb hadn't gone off at the right time, it had only taken out the elven warband instead of an elven city. We were blamed for this, despite the fact that we hadn't even known what was supposed to happen. Not that out of character for a horribly corrupt government, I suppose. Their response was to send us out on another mission, to go get an incredibly powerful artifact from the ruins of some city. We can do this, or they will kill us. Of course, the city happened to be inhabited by a lich, which they knew. Now, we get to the city, and are (predictably enough) immediately taken prisoner by the lich, who tells us that he wants the artifact, and we can get it for him, or he will kill us. The artifact is buried in a not-very deep dungeon, but he is bizzarely unable to get it for himself, despite the fact that he has no fewer than seven major dieties at his beck and call. We know this, because he summoned them to rewire one character's brain and turn him into a completely different person. He decides to send us out of the city on some sort of errand for some reason, where we end up being confronted by an extraplanar werewolf, who want us to give him the artifact or he will kill us, and the Zhents, who want us to get them the artifact or they will kill us. After we get into the dungeon, we're confronted by a drow, who says we really shouldn't give the artifact to any of the various parties. She says that we should give them an exact (but nonmagical) replica of the artifact that's also in the dungeon. She doesn't say anything about what to give the other three parties, or why anyone would be fooled for long. In a refreshing change of pace, however, she does not threaten to kill us. Now, it's not long before we have both encountered the artifact and turned someone's bag of holding into a hole in time and space leading to absolute nothingness inhabited only by lovecraftian horrors. Don't ask how this happened, you don't want to know. The artifact flies through the hole under its own power, because it turns out it's sentient and really doesn't want to be used by anyone, and elects to guard the other side of the bag of holding to keep anything from escaping into the real world. (At least, we think that's what it was going to do; it was somehow too smart to talk to us.) At this point, he stops showing up. No explanation, he just isn't coming anymore. I breathe a sigh of relief. (I've left out a bunch of other stuff, like the time a character got killed and ressurected six times in thirty seconds, and the time two characters were fused into a single entity by the intersection of a mobile dead magic zone and a mobile wild magic zone, but they're not that important to the overall disaster.) He eventually comes back and starts a new campaign. He tells us to create characters at 7th level or something, and to bring equipment lists complete with weight calculations. This group never bothers with encumberance rules, so this is deemed a pain by all. When he starts the campaign, he reveals that we're in a dungeon cell stripped naked, and we don't have any of our stuff, including my spellbook. I walk out at this point. Actually, I don't so much "walk out" as "stop playing but stick around to watch the disaster." At least one character dies in the first two hours of play - not in combat, but at the hands of our incredibly powerful captors, who decided they didn't like him. It isn't the only time I've seen him kill a character with absurdly powerful NPCs in the first session. Since then I've decided never to play in his games ever. I am at a loss to explain why no one else has come to the same decision.
Fern 09-06-04, 11:58 PM	Okay so this one time eight or nine of us get together roll up some first level characters. Then we endured fourteen straight hours (one break, for coffee) of the DM arguing with one player about how to use Bluff, and looking up everything he did in at least one rulebook. Twice. We didn't make it to second level. We did figure out how to burn grapes and cheese though. I woulda hated to be him the next day. :devil: ~Fern
SnowbearK 09-07-04, 01:04 AM	I still shudder at this tale of my youth... I was 15. One of our group decided he'd like to try his hand at DMing...my best friend and I were tired of always having to be the DM (we never got to play side-by-side) so we said er...ok...sure... Ok, so here we are, total strangers, met in a tavern (ok, pretty standard so far), for some ungodly reason (I think it must have been an "Amsterdam" tavern and the smoke wasn't really from tobacco...) decide to band together and pillage a drow city -- except we're level 2. We stumble across a burnt-out merchant caravan (or something, it's been a while...might have been an abandoned dragon hoard) and loot it for three Sunblades, a Staff of Healing, a Staff of the Magi, a Shield +5, three suits of elven chain +5, a Defender +6, etc...etc...etc... (our eyes were rolling at this, but ok, we've all Monty Haul'd it our first couple of times DMing, so we continue on our drunk-n-stoned quest to loot Ched Nasad) Poof we're captured. Well duh, the only weapons we've got shine like the sun in a 60ft radius -- AT ALL TIMES, even in their sheaths...something we just happened to not notice until we're surrounded by drow guards after 6 days in the Underdark. We are then summarily tortured in an hour-long (REAL TIME) session by describingly gorgeous drow women in graphic detail. Long story short (since I seem to have blocked the rest of the traum...er...game, out of my memory), all of us got away but one. My best friend was sentenced to the 666th level of the Abyss (or 1st, depending on whom you ask, the point was that we'd have to go through the whole Abyss to find him, all 666 levels :rolleyes: ) with a special torture ring around a male extremity...it was spiked like sharkskin on the inside of the band and continuously emitted lemon juice. This while he is tied with thorny vines made of super-strong steel to a table that would look more in place in Madame Helga's House of Pain than anywhere else. The rest of us were missing other, similarly valuable parts. I won't even go into detail about what happened to the one female player's character. Needless to say, he was barred from DMing ever again. Eventually he was driven out/left of his own accord/forgotten to inform of game times/whatever by the rest group (depends on who you ask).
Shapedoctor 09-07-04, 01:12 AM	It was more of an adventure than a campaign. A mix of Basic D&D, AD&D, and Gamma World. My first 4 characters ever died in one evening, at least one in the dreaded... ...Hall of Random Bodily Functions It was actually hilarious, but a terrible, terrible introduction to the game.
Master Agnald 09-07-04, 02:28 AM	The worst game I've ever played was a 15th level adventure, downloaded from the WoTC website by Hobo, our good friend. Things were as follow: It was me, PC A and PC B. Tired of playing low level characters, A suggests s that we create a high level adventure, so we go and create lvl 15 characters. I won't bother with the character-creation details, suffice to say I was the fighter and A and B were the sorcs. So, there we go, a bunch of EVIL characters on a good mission to save the gnomes from an evil Rakshasa... interesting to say the least... so, we go and enter the dungeon... where, after some lurking and a wall falling apart on my character's head, we find our first enemy... Stonecrush, the special rustmonster! It wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't fought another rustmonster on another campaign a few days ago... so, I need to go and punch the **** out of that thing (almost got me killed), PC A lost his armor (and he was a SORC!!!), and PC B got killed... his HP was -30... so, we finish that thing off with a few fireballs and go back to the city to revive our friend B... that's when things got nasty... PC B wanted to get revived... but he didn't want to lose a level because of his death... so, he just sit there, crossed his arms and, in a childish way, refused to continue... needless to say, we lost almost an hour of playing because of that... so, after a long time (including a snack and some DM punching from B), he decides to go back with another character... ok, that's fine, I guess a new character'd be good, right? Yes... however it wasn't a new character... it was the same character renamed and in a different character sheet... ok, so we continue... until we find the BBeG (after we fight a troll kindly improvisated by Hobo... [sarcasm] which gave us a lot of XP [\sarcasm]). And the BBeG was the Rakshasa, disguised as a lich. However that thing had a tremendous magic immunity! And I was playing with 2 casters! Ok, so we can't cast anything against it, so I should get my sword and hack away right? wrong, that thing had a ridiculous AC, boosted by Shield and Haste... it was impossible. I swore I'd never play modules again... or let Hobo be the DM. I need to get new players...
Count Arioch the 28th 09-07-04, 02:56 AM	You guys couldn't have killed a rakshasa, regardless of it's spells. They're largely immune to everything. 27 + class levels, DR 15/good and piercing. A cleric archer could make mince-meat out of a rakshasa, everyone else is pretty ganked. But I do agree that that adventure was bad, PC 2 should have sucked it up, it's only a game, and the DM shouldn't have thrown in something that you were required to kill, when you couldn't. (I'm not saying don't throw in stuff too powerful for the PCs in your world, go ahead. Just don't require the PCs to kill them.)
Master Agnald 09-07-04, 03:05 AM	You guys couldn't have killed a rakshasa, regardless of it's spells. They're largely immune to everything. 27 + class levels, DR 15/good and piercing. A cleric archer could make mince-meat out of a rakshasa, everyone else is pretty ganked. But I do agree that that adventure was bad, PC 2 should have sucked it up, it's only a game, and the DM shouldn't have thrown in something that you were required to kill, when you couldn't. (I'm not saying don't throw in stuff too powerful for the PCs in your world, go ahead. Just don't require the PCs to kill them.) I know... that's why next time we play I'm gonna be the DM... and I'll play the campaign I'm creating... dammit, it really sucks to have lazy DMs...
Slate King 09-07-04, 07:55 AM	Here is my worst ever. We started out in a D&D/Earthdawn game. All the villians were considered "horrors" basically an abberation/undead type creature. I was playing a paladin. The primary goal of the campaign was to travel from one city to a ruin (4 month campaign), explore the ruin and recover an artifact. The monk had a vision about it. So we begin traveling, the group was myself, the monk, a ranger (horror slayer), a rogue, and a fighter. (no non humans, clerics, fiddle faddle, or arcane casters allowed in the campaign.) After the first day the rogue left the party. (his merchant cart washed away at a river ford killing his donkey) We arrive at a fort, and enter the front gate. We fight a few dire bats and prepared to move on. I secured a room (closed all the doors) and left my mount inside. We explored the rest of the fort and found a vampire. Now at this point let's examine the situation. I am a paladin. He is a vampire. In case you haven't reached this conclusion yet let me enlighten you. I charge. I hit once, i am the recipient of a suggestion spell DC my will + 25. "sit down" I sit, stand and smite again. I get suggested again and i find myself walking out of the fort, passing my dead horse (killed by dire bats that got into the room) and waiting outside. Throughout the rest of the campaign about 50% of the enemies we encountered we could not defeat. In the end my character was conscripted by a dragon to help him get the artifact. When the party acquired the artifact, the monk broke it over his knee. At this point the DM asked us to come up with our own epilogue for our characters.
Defcon4 09-07-04, 11:16 AM	Now, this wasn't D&D, but this was the worst game iv'e ever been involved with...but the funniest. I'm not making this up: We were playing Paladium: heroes unlimited, but we were transformers, Decepticons to be specific. Soundwave, Blitzkrieg, and Cyclonus were the other players. I was Galvatron. Well, to make a long story short, via a hyperspace accident with the ship, we landed in the Marvel universe, and had our first battle with the Sentinels...yes, THE sentinels of X-Men fame. After beating them, i had Soundwave and some NPC decepticons break down the Sentinels systems so we could incorporate their adaptive systems into our own. It gets crazier. We beat up the X-Men and the Avengers. We not only beat up the Hulk by blasting him further and further upwards into the stratosphere until he loses consciousness from lack of oxygen, we then lobotomize him and connect him to the ships energy core...our new "Banner drive". I (Galvatron), kill Quasar and take his quantum bands. Soundwave kills Adam Warlock and takes the soul gem. Some of the JLA ports in via BOOM TUBE technology (Martian Manhunter among them) and we kill them and incorporate the mother boxes into our systems. At this point the GM obviously came to the conclusion that things had gotten out of hand, because the next game was the hands down most blatant railroading session i've ever taken part of. The last game was us having to "PURGE THE BANNER DRIVE!" into deep space and having him explode (imagine the music at its crescendo as a lobotomized banner explodes...explosion ring and everything), Autobot city coming after us, and an uber-ized Magneto taking us to task. Everything we did was inneffective and outright cancelled. It was a train crash from game one, but it was so much fun driving it there.
Makados 09-07-04, 07:41 PM	Well, this isn't a campaign, but it is a one-shot that was a complete waste of time. Me and the other PC wake up in the middle of an alley smelling like beer. We are in the middle of a city and all we can see is a weapon shop across the streer. Getting the idea that the DM wanted us to go there for some reason we went inside. I knew that the DM was a noob by this point so I asked the shopkeep if I could have a +10 sparkling corrosive burst flaming holy longsword (or something along those lines). The DM replied "sure, that'll be 400 GP". Well I only had 200 GP so that was a real bummer. I asked "Can I have a +5 orcbane short sword?" The DM replied "Sure, that'll be 400 GP" before I could even say anything, the DM says "You see a fire, there are people running around on the streets with goblins chasing them". I figure this'll be the perfect time to steal that damned uber artifact weapon that was for some reason on sale in a shop. I grab the weapon and 5 guards appear out of nowhere all of a sudden and try to arrest me. So I use my weapon to kill them. The DM doesn't even let us play out the combat. He just says "OK you kill the guards. What now?" Before I can speak, the goblins burst into the shop and attack us. Once again the DM tells us that "You kill the goblins" without letting us play out the combat. So just for kicks I decide to attack the shopkeep (who has been standing there calmly the whole time). The DM tells us that "He kills you" and then BOOTS US OUT OF THE ROOM! Some people are just sad.
eRaz0r 09-07-04, 09:19 PM	Well I've been in some doozies, I can tell you. I'll tell you about a couple .. The First, I'm ashamed to say it, I DM'ed. The party decided to play Evil characters. This is all 2nd ed, btw. Well, two of the three players said they were going to play evil characters, except one of them was CN, and then the 3rd started a LN character instead. Only the first was actually evil, and he was CE evil to the core. A Psionicist Priest of the Eldeer Elemental God. (This was a homebrew setting and they were playing lizardmen and drakes who could all m/c with psionicist. OF course 2nd ed Psionics Hb was a mess, but hey, what did I know ?) So one of the characters (the LN one) is about to have his coming of age ceremony. Being LN, it's very important to him. The other two decide to take him out for a "coming of age party" upriver. Their plan is to ensure he doesn't make the ceremony, which they do by getting him drunk and tying him up. Yes, he misses the ceremony. He was rather annoyed with them. They hitch a ride on a barge going back to their home town a day later and on the way they decide to kill everyone on it. For fun, I think. Then, to avoid any legal entanglements they hightail it into the deep swamps and start looking for ruins. Well they find one. The swamp is universally known to be cursed, and no one goes there because it's dangerous. Everyone knows this, and I remind them of it several times, but they're adamant. Inside they explore this dungeon. There's a Ghost and other assorted nastiness. Around this point the rather bored CN Berserk Lizardman decides to charge down a random corridor whirling his flail above his head and screaming. Yes CN = Mad to this player. Oh - and he can't see in the darkness either. I don't even want to get into what happened to him, but he lived... Much later, one of the characters is knocked unconcious. During his unconciousness, they cover him in bat guano. Completely. With a little space for his nostrils to poke out. He regains conciousness (eventually). In a wonderful bout of player metagaming, he reaches out to ask for a "hand up" readying his Life Drain attack on the other character who somehow "senses" he's up to no good and proceeds to knock him to negative hps again. Finally, the Priest of the Elder Elemental god decides to sacrifice this unconcious character to his deity. Things went down hill from there. In a string of other attempts at running "evil" campaigns, (which I seemed the only DM willing to attempt, BTW... I was entirely too accomodating back then), inter-party feuds continued to escalate, and player bitterness washed over the meta-gaming barrier to infect every level of the game and even the rest of our social lives. But that was years ago :) The second mess I want to mention was set in Darksun. I was a player in this one, but it was the same group ... We had what were called "Character trees" which was an idea to allow some of the experience you earned in one set of characters to flow over to another group of related characters. So we were actually running several campaigns concurrently. In any case, one of the PCs was a Mul (a half-dwarf in case you never played DarkSun) who was a Fighter/Psionicist. What was this guys problem? He claimed to not know he was a psionicist. Yeah, those powers, they were just Wild talents. Aside from that fundamentally stupid idea, he also had a yellow streak a mile wide. Due to the Teleportation powers in 2nd Edition Psionics, it was usually pretty easy to retreat from combat. Now in one of our other DS groups, I played a Mage/Psionicist who would use teleportation to regroup. In many cases I would escape immediate danger to return fire a round later from a superior position. This players character in that tree would often accuse my character of cowardice, despite him being a fighter with 20+ Con and perhaps triple my hps, and a serious AC. Not needing much in the way of tactics, ("Grunt - smasha!") he seemed to fail to understand how many times I'd saved his behind from overwhelming odds. So in "response" to my character, he created one in this tree who, when faced with odds he didn't like would teleport - not around the corner, or over the sand dune - but back to the Inn ! He'd leave everyone else to die. Now the first time he did this was after he started a fight against a critter none of us had the weapons to damage. Firstly we're sitting there watching something bad go down that wasn't any of our business, and he steps up and gets involved, then runs away when it's obvious he can't do any damage to the thing. So I said to him, in character, that if he ever did that again, I'd never go out on a job with again. (We were a fledgling mercenary company) Guess what? Yep, we're in the next scenario and we've just taken down a couple of guards where he'd done very little actual damage and I'd taken all the hits. I'm on about 15 hps or something and he's almost completely unhurt. Then we come to a big door that was locked. "I"ll break it in" he says (I cringed and said "wait" but he didn't)... and fails his open doors roll even though he'd pumped himself with Adrenal control. So then he hits it again. There goes our stealth option. So he and I are in the open doorway and this bunch of guards are now there waiting for us. I figure we might be able to take them if we stick it out. He teleports back to the Inn. The whole party dies in the ensuing slaughter.. Fortunately, our employer was watching everything through a scrying device and decided that she couldn't keep such a loose cannon alive - so she lightning bolted him. Ahhh - those were the days!
Drizzt Clone 09-07-04, 10:27 PM	:rofl: What's he going to do next, blow up one of the cities with a frickin' "laser" from the moon? I pity you.
FreeTheSlaves 09-08-04, 03:29 AM	so I asked the shopkeep if I could have a +10 sparkling corrosive burst flaming holy longsword. ... The DM tells us that "He kills you" and then BOOTS US OUT OF THE ROOM! You sabotaged the adventure when you asked for something so utterly ridiculous. Having crippled the session so badly the DM only had one option.
Arrowhen 09-08-04, 04:12 PM	You sabotaged the adventure when you asked for something so utterly ridiculous. Having crippled the session so badly the DM only had one option. Actually, it sounds like it was the DM who crippled the session simply by taking his seat at the gaming table.
FreeTheSlaves 09-08-04, 09:20 PM	Actually, it sounds like it was the DM who crippled the session simply by taking his seat at the gaming table. Okay, if you were the DM (and assuming the campaign is supposed to not be slapstick ridiculous) how would you feel & respond when one player talks OoC in a stupid manner to some npc storekeep? I know imc that I'd stop play and talk about it... No I wouldn't, my friends would throw dice at him. Then again if the campaign is just a beer & pretzels lark of no significance, I would play along and have the npc's goof about as well. :)
PalainVII 09-09-04, 05:17 PM	my worst game had noble beginnings. as soon as we started playing it was one mistake after another. first off we had eight people playing. that was just the people that showed up that night, our total player pool was about twelve. second our dm was running his first real champaign. third he had just picked up complete warrior and wanted to try the neat things in there like jousting and such. this meant that our pcs were at a tournament, stuck in town with no adventuring, which also meant no xp or treasure. this wouldn't have been so bad,if he hadn't designed this tourny to run for two in game weeks. fourth he had created an overpowered character that he wanted to play in someone else's champaign. since he couldn't he just threw his guy (a winged wood elf of one of the most unallanced made up classes ever) into the mix. not so bad if the guy didn't win everything, along with being super connected in town so that he could get most anything. fifth we were all noobish so we played slower than any game ever perhaps. 4 hours rt=1 day gt. this is a day where we would do one event, then drink, then feast, then repeat. eventually most of us (including the dm) took our pcs on a side quest. then that just sorta stopped. all in all not a good first experience.
MattD121 09-11-04, 11:05 AM	My first group had an excellent DM but awful players. And unfortunatly the word got out that we were playing D&D and our DM, though great, was to timid to tell anyone they couldnt come. So we had some ridiculous number of adventurers (more like a regiment of soldiers). And there were only a few good players. The plots were great and amazingly complex but when theres only three people out of like 20 that know what the word "roleplaying" means it just gets stupid. The best we could manage was to listen to the DM talk and never really add any input because if anyone said something that didnt DIRECTLY solve our problem you got screamed at by the 17 people who had completely flavorless characters. Needless to say I play in a different group now. Where we might get 2 minutes into the plot or 2 years but its always fun.