Help my Star Wars campaign

Cafe Society
61

[quote]
Zeus on a cracker, he sounds absolutely awful as an RPGer. An attention whore who wants to min/max metagame everything, and becomes sullen and indignant when things don’t go exactly as he wants is no fun to play with at all.
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He’s a really complicated guy. Thing is, I can’t make any challenges for him. He’s too smart and just plain knows too much. It’s not always making some ueber-toy and using it; he made every evil plan, villainous powers combo, and whatnot before I was even playing. He can look at an evil plan and figure out instantly who, what, or where is the weak link. I give them a villain with a plan to steal some major artifact, he already has another, very logical, plan which avoids any such artifact or even the villain, shortcutting the entire plot.

He’s basically got 25 years of magic systems (reading, playoing, and writing) and a memory as long as your arm. He also insists that any and every character he plays is a hyper-genius child.

Sorry; that was in-game. It was also totally out of character for #1’s character, who had no reason to do so. He was simply pissed off that I didn’t give him a spreadhseet on Sensors before I had the Sith start taking gene samples. It wasn’t something the characters could stop, and it let the goons figure out real fast who was their enemy cause they knew what they were looking for. I did basically just ordain what the characters were doing by taking the current most-used plan after they argud over it for 45 minutes. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.

Nah; it’s him that has it set up, not his character. It’s pretty subtle manipulation, too. He does it by storytelling about another Paranoia game. But none of them will get any others called as traitors.

I tried. The fact is, he’s extremely persuasive. That doesn’t help with me, but he’s also as stubborn as a mule. He has his views and they do not change. He has no opinions about art, music, sports, politics (aside from not liking it), anything. I am just as stubborn. He’s passive, I’m aggresive. It comes down to whose will breaks first. I lost that round.

One problem I have is actually making that past count. Like I said, they kep sneaking off through the galaxy, and are quite willing to do anything needed to avoid a history. Bounty hunters can’t possibly track them without a tracing signal.

In Star Wars? No. I might be able to scrounge up a heavy armored squad who could avoid getting wasted by them, but it would be hard and involve rare aliens.

We have two regular games that people do.: Wednesday and Saturday. I shut it down, it just goes to someone else, with the same problems more or less.

He already is and does so all the time. Basically, noone else can GM as well as he can. He’s a very good Gm and doesn’t screw with anything, but he’s doesn’t feel like dying, ever, and takes steps to avoid it at all times.

Evercrack guy is just using a semi-public wireless network; I can’t shut it down. He pays just enough atention to make a flying or shooting check and never talks or does anything… except to mock people.

Here’s my plan:

  1. I’m going to give them one chance to save the campaign. I won’t do anything to player 1… yet, instead hoping to make him feel comfortable before I crush his character like a snail. They’ll have to agree to conference in-party, and don’t attack except as a party. And not to go off on their own and demand my time.

  2. Other than that, I’m going to tell them all to eff-off, you’ve ruined my fun, blah blah, you think more, you cool off, you pay attention, you stop manipulating and play something else and I’m not running anything again. You’re too high maintenence.

Basically, they expect me to be as good a GM as #1 right off the bat, but keep grinding through anything I do like they would i his games. I know I;m not as good a GM, but how can I learn how when they destroy everything I do in five minutes and spend most of their time mockikng me, each other, the world, me again…

62

When you run a game, you have to remember this rule: Players cannot make godlike characters unless you let them. All this crap about “his character can do anything” is because you allowed it to get to that point. It’s probably too late to salvage this campaign, but if you run another one you must learn to be a hardass about stuff like that. If a player wants to create a race that can hack any system and absorb all its data instantly, or know all the spells in the wizard’s library, or whatever, you just have to learn to say “hell no, I don’t care if it was in Update 392 on the official website, you can’t do that.”

63

That thing with turning up the music so loud so that nobody could hear you was childish. If that sort of thing happens again, I would get up and leave the room and stop the session. Let the other players deal with him.

I would pretty much recommend creating a new campaign. Explain that you’re tired of putting opponents up only for the players to eat them alive. Then, during character creation, put in a new house rule: any character who upsets game balance will be forced to make a change to prevent that.

See, I have/had (we play only rarely now) a group of very willful players. One in particular is a friend. On one occasion, he because so unreasonable that I stopped the session entirely. I will not be yelled at when I am putting the effort in to run the session. This group also completely ran over the previous DM (mostly the DM’s fault, though) and created a super-powerful group. Each member of the team had at least 1 major artifact… that we created for ourselves. We convinced him that we could ‘trade’ artifacts, and he was too lazy to do it. My bard ended up with a lute that had crazy powers… like charm person/monster at will, DC based on Perform skill, and added +10 to perform. I’d end up with 40+ DCs and I was a 16th level character! It also acted like a crazy bow (you could shoot arrows off the strings) AND the strings had spell storing in them. Mine was probably the lowest powered one. One person traded their artifact for a whole bunch of wishes and just pushed it into Wisdom for their druid. It was fun for awhile, but it did ruin the game. All the DM needed to do was say “Create your own artifacts? Fuck no!”

Most of the time, though, I just tried to focus on non-combat games. Make it about role-playing, not even puzzle solving; the characters have to stop and actually, you know, interact with others. This will probably irritate the heck out of #1, having to actually deal with others in an adult fashion. Childish, foolish, rude, or powergaming behavior needs to be dealt with appropriately.

You’re being too true to your system. You can’t send anyone against them that they can’t kill? You’re not thinking hard enough. I started my historical campaign as low-magic, but it escalated until I had scores of Roman mages flying on beholder-driven magical flying chariots with gigantic armies, epic level mages operating tea shops, the Tarrasque getting loose, major plots of the historical figures of the day (now upgraded with magical protection… hey, if the characters are this powerful, so is everyone else, how else would Caesar survive?) going on in which they were pawns, etc. Not all the time, mind you, but just often enough that they wouldn’t fire-bomb whole cities for their amusement. They’d see an old granny picking up firewood and they’d be arguing if it was a demon, hag, god’s avatar, etc. Sure, not my original vision, but I’m not playing the foil for their amusement. Fight fire with fire. If they say it’s unrealistic, point out their own characters. It’s a game. If they don’t like it, tell them they have to re-make characters.

64

I’ve never quite figured out what the appeal of omnipotent characters is. If they want their characters to be able to do anything, why don’t they just sit around and tell each other stories instead of pretending that they’re actually playing a role-playing game?

65

I haven’t let him run wild outside of combat. That’s part of why he’s so irritated. I’m not actually certain how I can bring in more uber enemies to match them without breaking the last shreds of my reality built in. I have a party set up (from the myriad enemies they’ve left behind them), but I just don’t have a god way to get them in to kill the players.

66

Don’t kill them with combat. There are millions of ways to die. Pick one they aren’t custom built to stop.

Off the top of my head:

Poison
Natural Disaster (flood, earthquake, forest fire)
Collapsing buildings
Drowning
Asphyxiation
Microbes (that cause slow/rapid deterioration of stats until death)
Ship mechanical malfunction (hyperdrive, landing gear, life support)

Everyone has a weakness.
All that said, what you really need to do is sit everyone down at the start of the next session and say, “We’re not playing tonight.”

When they ask why, tell them that as the GM, you are not satisfied with the direction of the campaign and the characters. You are running the game because you’re there to have fun with your friends. And right now, you are not having fun. Give them the choice…

They can:

  1. Start over with a new campaign and new characters, approval of which YOU have singular authority. Characters should be built for realism, not efficiency… Three dimensional people, not two dimensional badasses. They should work with you and the others to form a coherent party that will generally get along and work with your ideas for a story. Players should come interested in playing the game, not doing other things. Interacting only when combat begins is completely unacceptable. Each player must be able to accept your decision as final, both regarding character generation and in-game results. And most of all, the game is about interacting with each other and the world you create, not powergaming.

  2. Count you out.

Smokey says: Only you can prevent twinkdom.

67

Again, he’s a thing in a mech suit. Degrade the mech suit.

As far as WiFi boy… got a WiFi router? Turn it on and set it to the same channel as the network he hooks into.

68

I’m not screwing with the business’s wifi network.

69

It would be highly doubtful the range of your wifi router would exceed your house if you have one. If you have an apartment, it might behoove you to know what your neighbors have for internet service.

70

Here’s Yet Another suggestion, which I swiped from PBS’s Spies.

Have the characters do a dead-drop or a brush-pass mission. The party must retrieve or deliver an object / message, in a high security area (think of a contemporary airport), with an unknown contact, without being noticed by security. The party is given a description of the contact, a place & time for the meeting or drop, and (for a brush-pass) a recognition and go-ahead phrase.

For an added challenge (and this is directly swiped from the show), the party must not be noticed or recognized by the contact – and the contact is a close associate who would recognize them on sight.

In short, give the players a completely new set of challenges, that involve playing characters more than rolling dice.

The last campaign I was in, I had the most fun in a session that was entirely role-playing. One of the other players, who loved combat, didn’t enjoy that session at all. So milage may vary.

71

I thought it might amuse people to know what eventualy did happen. The game more or less died. Player #2 got so infuriated at some incredibly heinously obnoxious things (let’s just say people have died for less) done by Player #3 and #5 that he left and never returned. Player #3 continued being a humongous jerk until I very nearly strangled (but that was another game, long since).

Player #1 nearly got strangled when he decided to pull off the worst terrorist attack in history in a Shadowrun game. He didn’t like the consequences of that one (Oooh, people can actually figure out what you’ve done if you anger them enough!) that he ended the game. I will never GM for him again.

On the bright side, I still play and have fun that way. I’d like to start a nice 2nd edition DnD game.