STATUS

We had a pretty crappy session.

author=NeverSilent
Ugh, that sucks. You have my sympathy. What happened?

I'M SO GLAD YOU ASKED :V

So we have a biweekly game group, and one of the players decided he wanted to try his hand at GMing a thing after a 30 year hiatus. He's not the best player ever, but y'know, sometimes crap players are fine GMs, so we're willing to give it a shot. We get the following info:

-Set at a large airport with its own security/emergency services
-The Horror companion book for the system is involved
-We're all humans in some kind of emergency background
-We need to get any woogety stuff approved by the GM

So I get really excited and talk about maybe making a necormancer character. I hear nothing about it not being OK, so I go ahead and make that, as well as a second character just in case, this one being nonmagical but with a background giving her contact with magic.

The day of game, we show up to learn

-We're supposed to be military or police types
-We get a pre-made loadout of gear (rendering one player's character build pointless, since they designed for a double gun wielder and only one gun was allowed)
-NO SUPERNATURAL STUFF WHATSOEVER IT DOES NOT EXIST

So I'm already kind of miffed because now I have to figure out how to revise my character's background, but whatever, it's a first game, I can improvise a bit.

He starts talking about how certain abilities that aren't supernatural are unavailable, and shuts down any discussion of "Wait, what? Why?!"

Turns out the story is supposed to be woogety junk suddenly happening to the world. OK. Our characters are brought in to be basically SWAT for the supernatural. Cool, that's standard. He decides to introduce us to that concept by having our commander be in full on werewolf form with no warning, and then gets mad when my character reacts to the fukken wolfman by drawing her gun.

I'm totally checked out at this point, but make some token noise to stay involved. We go fight some zombies in a terminal, with orders to make sure there are minimal civillian casualties. SOP.

My character spends a lot of time staying back, trying to keep civvies away from the action, occasionally shooting. She ends up herding a civvie that's frozen up and not running away.

Then I get pulled aside after choosing to wait on an initiative round because she's focused on keeping her babysitting charge safe. Apparently, he's not happy about that. After a bit of discussion, he decides to have the civvie finally run off, leaving my character free to act.

So she shoots at the only thing on the field, and gets a really great damage roll.

"It doesn't affect him."

"What?!"

"The bullet goes right through."

And I'm thinking, "BITCH if you knew I wasn't gonna affect shit, why'd you get on my tits about playing defensive like I have in pretty much every game we've been in?!"

And then after the combat ends, he's all, "OK, Sooz, are you going to move your character forward to join everyone else?"

"Uh, she doesn't really have a reason to, so..."

Apparently, I was supposed to join the rest of the group to see some cutscene bit that I super did not care about.

After he wrapped up the rest of the game (which involved mildly interesting but unnecessary for my story things) he asked our opinions. I mealymouthed something about how I can't judge it fairly because I didn't know what I was making a character for going in and scooted, because he's not really the best at taking strong criticism, and all I had was a litany of "Jesus Christ, this sucked!"

tl;dr: Dude decided to make Tom Clancy vs zomzoms without really explaining what he was making, got mad at me for not playing how he wanted, pulled some bullshit. 0/10 would not play again.

Oh yeah, I've had some really frustrating sessions as a GM myself! That's why my method is now "Create setting, decide what NPCs plan to do, then let the PCs go and just roll with whatever they do!"

It helps that my PCs are generally cool and amusing, so I'm basically making a setting and then letting them do all the work being entertaining. :B

author=pianotm
Oh, man, that's no fun. GMing may be difficult, but putting super tight limits on character types and abilities in that way without pre-planning is a big no-no.

Especially if you have me as a player because I'm that dumbass that wants to do the weird gimmicks like "Support/healing plus diplomacy powers only Final Destination!" (Or, in this case, "Nice midwestern necromancer lady who's saving up to start the ultimate Designer Pets boutique.")

It took me a bit to gain our previous GM's trust because I like stupid comedy concepts but I play them super straight. :3

He could probably stand to adhere to the rulebook a little more, TBH. We're playing a pretty freeformish system, and dude gets super hung up on trying to force things into concrete details.

(Like his idea that, since we're supposed to be playing basic humans, we just get the basic physical attributes and skills, and none of the abilities that come as part and parcel with character creation. Except we're also supposed to be trained military/police types. And immediately after the first game we get a boost of four levels for... reasons? Dude just really can't separate crunch from flavor.)

Sad thing is, he should know us reasonably well- we've been playing together for like five years or some shit. Dude is just dumb, I guess.