I totally sucked. The suckage was immense. I stand in awe at my own suckitude.
I was really not on my game at all; I forgot to take all my maps and other prep stuff for a start — we were playing at Andrew's place, not mine, so instead of just going to another room to get the stuff I'd forgotten I had to go home again. Then, once we got going I found that I was really just not feeling the vibe, and my descriptive powers were bland and lacklustre to say the least. I managed to kill one of the party more or less accidentally in the set-up to the campaign start, and then killed half the party with trolls later on due to woolly-headed thinking about the nature of the battlefield* (it was on board a small ship). I may have to go back to using miniatures and tabletop battle-maps so that people can make meaningful tactical decisions without having to rely on my worthless brain-meats to keep track of everything.
Now, I don't actually mind too much killing characters, but I really do prefer it if it's their fault (or at least, the fault of an uncaring universe via random probability variations) and not mine. Annette really takes it personally, but then she seems to think that the GM should actually be benevolently on the side of the characters, poor naïve trusting soul that she is. I don't think that, but I don't think the GM's incompetence should have to be one of the challenges the characters have to work against.
D. Must try harder. See me after class.
* In my own defence, nobody except Andrew actually asked any questions about the battlefield or attempted any sort of tactical action, so the combat just boiled down to a dice-rolling competition — three 5th-level characters against five critters, each roughly the combat-equivalent of a 9th-level fighter. I'd say they got off lightly, really.
:( Hope you find your DM Mojo soon.
ReplyDeleteEveryone has sessions like that. It's what gives me the occasional heebie-jeebies about running convention games, the fear that one of those games might be one of those games...
ReplyDeletePersonally, I find using miniatures actually *hinders* the party and makes their safety less.
ReplyDeleteSure, they get better tactical information, but most of the time that makes it harder for them to get away or avoid things when the going gets tough.
It *is* all black and white. There *is* no question about who is what, where or how.
In the airy-fairy descriptive mode, the DM *can* allow some latitude about what, where and how, and the players can (quite fairly) cry misunderstanding of positional or contextual information. When you use figures, they can't. And they die.