It's been two years since we last played and we're just starting to talk about playing again.
Temple of Elemental Evil, the campaign that broke a roleplaying group and prevented us from playing for over a year.
Was it that bad? No. It really wasn't. But there were some mistakes from character creation that put a big wedge into the party from the get-go and allowed personality conflicts to fester and grow.
And, because I taped all the sessions I can now look back upon everything and evaluate it all, including my own mistakes. Fascinating really.
1: I can be really mean.
No, seriously. I realized this listening to the oldest episodes. There were some encounters where I was relentless.
Now, there is, of course, a reason why. We had an unbalanced party. Each player had two characters, and one of the four players had two very unbalanced characters. So while one person was cakewalking through the adventure the other three were taking all the risk and all the damage. I felt that I had to push each encounter until all the party was challenged, even when I pushed too far.
If I were to do it again, I'd rather have it be too easy than too difficult. Still - that didn't address the problem of an unbalanced party. Even if they had good success on a consistent basis, the other 3 players would have still been frustrated that one person was more powerful and taking less risk.
2: When you feel a player is min-maxing, stop it before the end of character creation.
Unfortunately the player kept pointing to the book and saying 'the book allows me to do this!'
This was one of my failings - I had not DM'd DnD for almost 20 years. I could clearly tell any white wolf player exactly why I had every single house rule and why certain things would unbalance the game but I couldn't clearly say why the same was true in DnD.
I had a feeling that the two dwarves were unbalanced. The player had pooled his gold for both and gone out of his way to buy the heaviest armor each character could wear and that he could afford while also buying the weapons that maximized damage for the price - even if those weapons made no sense for a dwarf to use. Add in the dart specialization which allowed the fighter dwarf to make 5 attacks in one round, each attack doing considerable damage that meant that one character was doing 5 actions per round where every other character was only doing 1 action per round. Even the ranger with two weapon fighting took a considerable penalty for his off hand meaning he frequently only had one hit; whereas the dart throwing dwarf usually hit at least 4 times.
I noticed immediately on the second listen through that when the dart throwing dwarf got into combat and started felling 2-3 enemies on his turn alone... the other players tuned out. I could hear the taps on cell phones to open up apps and the sudden disinterest in the combat.
Even though it was within the rules, and even though it made the dart thrower feel special we had one character who could attack 5 times per round with a high chance of hitting versus every other character attacking once per round with only a moderate chance of hitting.
Immediately it felt unfair. Despite being 'fair' by the book, it felt unfair to the other players.
Compounding this problem was the fact that everyone else spent their gold fairly modestly, spreading it out between adventuring supplies, armor, weapons and 'pocket change' to spend until they could get a supply of gold coming in.
The dwarves pooled their money (two characters, one player) and spent it all on armor and weapons. They had rope, backpacks... and that was it. No other adventuring gear. Very little pocket change. They had just enough to pay for a night at the inn. The player was expecting the adventure to run like a video game - the first monster they bashed would certainly pop loot out of its corpse along with XP, right?
Well... wrong. There was treasure hidden in the module, but it wasn't automatic. The first session resulted in very little treasure.
Worse, the other party members were the ones in lesser armor, with more modest weapons but were providing extra coin and supplies.
This would have been OK if the best armored dwarf fighter would have agreed to be the tank. He had the highest HP, he had the best armor.
And the player refused to be at the front of the party. He wanted to live. He was the ranged fighter. He wanted to be in the back.
This is when the party divide started to happen.
The dwarf player thought "I created my build to survive the dungeon. I will not take risks."
The rest of the players thought "I spent my gold on supplies that not only helped my character, but will help the party as a whole. Why won't the character who had the best armor, and the best fighting ability lead? Why are we being selfless while he is being selfish?"
This only got worse when the wizard was jumped by a giant tick. He took enough HP damage to knock him into the negatives, without killing him. The Dwarf's immediate response was to do a healing check, even though he still had all his spells. The rest of the players were upset: why would the cleric not use his healing spells on a clearly dying character?
They pressured the cleric into healing the wizard. Now both sides were unhappy.
Move forward in time. The party is heading back and gets ambushed by brigands. Dwarf 1 is hit by a critical shot. Despite being still in the positive HP range, the cleric heals him without a thought.
The other players throw a fit.
It only got worse from there.
It was so easy to see in retrospect. It stuck out like a sore thumb. One player hadn't learned how to share with the party - he was thinking like a video game that it was every person for themselves and he was going to spend the most resources on his own characters and the other players were expecting the party to be more cohesive.
And worst, I tried to solve this by punishing the Dwarf and taking away his armor.
Bad choice on my part. That only bred anger and resentment. But I didn't know what the hell else to do at that point.
3. Don't let players make pairs of characters.
Again - we have paired characters thinking selfishly. Bad move on my part. We're never doing that again.
