All Good Things…Break, Part V

On Saturday, March 11th, 2023, my D&D 5e game crashed and burned. A Total Party Kill. A wipe. There were tears. There red faces. There were raised voices. There was rage.

…the story continues from Part IV: The Aftermath and the Post-Mortems

Conclusion

So… what’s my take away here?

I certainly made several mistakes.

The biggest one: during our Session 0, I didn’t make it clear what I wanted out of the game. I listened to everyone else, but I didn’t make my own needs clear. I have a hard time self-advocating, so I’d told myself that how I run games would come out naturally over the course of the campaign without me having to explicitly state such. I thought several of my oldest players already knew what I wanted. And I thought the times I’d compromised on my own approach to gaming would be seen as rare exceptions, not the rule. After everything else, I realized I’d compromised the quality of my games so much that it was no longer obvious how much I treasured my gaming ethics.

Because of criticism of the factors that made my games some of the best people had ever played, I’d let go of the very things that made my games good. In an effort to please my players, I’d sacrificed quality. And it backfired spectacularly.

During this period, and old gaming buddy and roommate of mine from college came to visit. He’d continued with TTRPGs as well, creating a community of gamers practically whole-cloth in the city he moved to and even getting involved with organizing and running games at GenCon. During his visit, he said something that struck me. He made mention of how I’d been called the Evil GM back in college. I’d always thought it was meant in jest… certainly I was the opposite of evil? I always let the dice roll where they would and was vigilantly as unbiased and fair as possible. He continued to explain that I was the ‘Evil GM’ precisely BECAUSE I wouldn’t cheat on behalf of the players. Because I followed the rules clearly and consistently and didn’t coddle my players or lie about rolls when an encounter was going poorly, I was seen as ‘Evil’. It took 30 years for me to finally understand that.

So next campaign? The Evil GM is back. I’ll clearly state what I expect out the players and how I’ll run things. I won’t compromise quality for comfort. I won’t pretend characters are better designed than they actually are. I want the fun to be drawn from the immersiveness and verisimilitude of the game, not from smoke and mirrors.

And, most importantly, I’ll communicate more. Both during session 0 and after each session. I want to put more thought into my games, like I used to, and expect more out of my players, like I once did. I want to tell stories again.

And in the stories, sometimes, legends do die after all.