The Gaming Den

When looking for a game as a player, what are your most common or most frustrating issues? These can be barriers to joining a game, or what derails a running game.

Feel free to comment with more info or standout stories, esp if some factors prevent you from joining a game you'd otherwise join, while others derail the game.

It would be a tie between getting the system I want and the schedule I want -- both of those would be dealbreakers.

I got kicked out of a game because the GM took an authoritative tone with me during pre-campaign planning so I called him a dick. Which caused one of the players to send me messages for the next 5 hours telling me how childish I was. I ended up telling him I had to go make some soup and turned off my phone.

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I got kicked out of a game because the GM took an authoritative tone with me during pre-campaign planning so I called him a dick. Which caused one of the players to send me messages for the next 5 hours telling me how childish I was. I ended up telling him I had to go make some soup and turned off my phone.

Did...you really make soup?

I did not. I make awesome soup but not that day.

My main problem is that most people want to do voice/video, which I loathe on principle.

I need a poll that allows multiple options. I work Wednesday-Sunday, so my days off are Monday and Tuesday. This is an awful time to have a weekend. Additionally, everyone in my new area seems super hype for D&D 5E and SR5E and both are garbage fires.

True story - I ended up ordering my last DnD group at the local welding shop.

Finding a group hasn't been a problem for me; I have two ongoing campaigns with two different groups, and we've been playing for about five years for the first group and a year and a half for the other.

The problem is that apparently I'm the only person in either group who can use a goddamn calendar or think more than a week into the future. Once we finally find a day and time that works for the entire group to hold a session, and then we finish up that session and start talking about when everyone is free for the next one, everyone has completely booked their weekends for the next few weeks because they somehow forgot that (A) after you have one gaming session, you expect to, y'know, have another session sometime soon and (B) originally everyone said they wanted to play every two weeks and not once have we managed to have a session within two weeks of the previous one.

I chose the first option but honestly...finding groups period.

I have never gamed with strangers before though, rustling up players at D&D launch events and FNMs and whatever. I will have to learn to do so now. For all my gaming years my players were close friends and generally speaking my status as default GM in perpetuity was not just assumed but lauded. But I ruined that by failing at life so hard that I lost all of my friends (preemptively: no I do not want to talk about it) and therefore all of my ongoing campaigns blew up and will never be finished, at least not by the original players.

Personally, it's finding someone else to GM that I actually trust to deliver a goddamn game rather than a clusterfuck .

As a player, I find it really hard not to optimize a character to do what the concept wants to do - deliberate inefficiency is like dragging a blackboard down another, larger, blackboard. So I have to pitch characters who don't want to excel at anything, otherwise I just go ahead and do that - and that fucks the power balance up big time, so I sandbag, so in and out of character I feel held back and unable to deeply engage.

Then, inevitably, the GM fucks up planning, and throws a TPK at us - so I stop sandbagging, and that's as disruptive to the game as the TPK would have been.

But still - finding someone who can set a scene, a mood, a tone, and weave a good narrative through it all. That, IMO, is the biggest challenge. And the reason why I GM like 80% of the games I'm in.

I settled for 50 since the playtesting started for "D&D NEXT" years ago. It's all anyone plays.

Playing in a regular group of 9 with my brother, his girlfriend, a single guy, another couple, and a married couple with the husband's brother.

It's fine. We have fun.

1000% system for me