Since Thanksgiving is right around the corner, I felt we could put /tg/ in a holiday mood by sharing the best GM you ever had, in order to provide an example for all those running games in next two festive months.
My best GM story is simple. The guy knew had to run the game well and constantly brought new players in and taught them how to effectively play their characters. Really got into the rp aspect. Had a new voice for every NPC and sound effects for every new region we entered. Kept us fed during the sessions, which could go a bit long, sometimes 9-10 hours, but we never complained, (besides one night that ended up in a fistfight). That campaign was my favorite hands down.
Hopeful bump for fa/tg/uy posts
Apparently /tg/ has awful DMs
>>43725561
Why did you think everyone was so salty all the time? We are damaged goods.
Personally, I haven't had any spectacular GM's, but someone has to have SOMETHING?
My best GM experience was during a Hunter: The Vigil campaign.
We were a group of street-level hunters on the run from some conspiracy that lured us into ambush and sicked skinchangers on us (none of the big preestablished organisations were involved, and if they were, they weren't referred by names we knew about, plus knowing that it was going to be low-level game with characters not in the know, I purposedly did not research much about the setting).
Anyway, we arrived into a new town and decided to stay in place for a while, to try and get some resources before moving on. We'd spent about a week in the town, and we quickly noticed that we were being stalked by some strange group of people. They looked like street wagrants and tramps, and they were following us almost wherever we went. They watched our hideout, they accompanied us from a distance, never interfering, but always being pretty easy to notice. I think (it's been a while now, so I don't remember all of the details) we tried confronting them directly at one point and asking what they wanted from us, but they never gave us any answer - just laughed and moved away for the moment. The worst thing they did is one of their guys watching our hideout calling us "killers" when we were passing by.
The number of people watching our hideout was increasing day by day. And in the middle of the night before the day we were going to depart from the town we found a whole mob of these guys waiting at our front door. Tired of being stalked by this merry bunch, two of our guys went to meet them and ask again what the hell they wanted from us.
>cont.
>>43726312
Turned out these guys were actually members of local community/organisation/cult that also hunted supernatural beings. Their leader apparently received prophetic visions from their god, whatever that was, and that's how he knew we were sort of collegues. The mob that had gathered there actually was actually going to go on another hunt, and they wanted us to accompany them. We complied, because hunting unhumans is good, and because arguing with not-quite sane mob of cultists doesn't seem like the healthiest idea. At least, those were my character's reason's to join.
We departed in what looked more and more like a lynching mob. I don't remember if they were wearing any KKK-esque robes (probably no, partly because it was set in the UK, but I really don't remember), but torches were definitely involved. We walked on and we arrived to an ordinary two-storey detached house.
The cultists quickly rushed into the house taking it over, and soon we followed in. Getting up from the ground floor, we entered one of the bedrooms. Inside, we found an apparently ordinary family - father, mother, 2 kids - sitting on a bed in their pyjamas, surrounded by cultists pointing working ends of their spears/pitchforks at them. Turns out they were actually a werewolf family, living quietly among humans, not doing anyone any harm, hunting animals, and otherwise being completely normal. But of course, they were werewolves, so they had to die.
And here comes the high point, the description of what the cultists had done to them. The cultists took the children off the bed, and with knives to their throats put them to the wall. Then, by the leader's orders, they impaled the mother with their spears to the bed. He proceeded to carve her heart out of her body (with obviously not-at-all-sharp knife), ate it raw, and after savouring the taste for some time, ordered the other members to, basically, "sick 'em".
>cont.
>>43726330
And they did. The cultists tore at the rest of the family like a pack of rabid animals. They tore the mother's flesh with their teeth, put father down when he tried resisting and tore into him too. Cut the crying kids' heads off and ripped them apart, swallowing the flesh and gnawing bones, as if ravenous dogs.
Luckily, our characters weren't forced to participate, but we had to watch. One of the characters was a middle-aged family man, so he was especially affected. He literally couldn't bear to watch this and ran out of the room. My character was younger and bigoted to supernaturals, but even he was disturbed by what he saw. OOC I was quite affected as well.
This rather dry listing of events I've provided really doesn't do this event justice, but believe me, it got rall the way through us right to the bone. The GM didn't do any acting for describing the scene, but his description was very detailed and extremely vivid. He mentioned everything - the fearful tears of the children, the parents' pleas to at least spare the kids, the leader's eery calmness and the cultists' ravening, and all the gruesome details, the cries of pain and fear, the spills of blood, the crunch of bones and sinew... It was at exactly right balance where it was affecting, gruesome, but not overdone to the point where you become just desensitized. Probably because it combined visceral horror (blood and gore, people behaving like mad animals) and psychological suspence (death of innocents. powerlessness of parents who cannot do anything to protect their children). Overall, it was amazingly done. If you evluate a scene on how strong a response it gets out of you, this one was brilliant.
So there you have it, my greates GM moment. I had other good GMs both before and after that, but none could make a scene that had illicited such a response from me.
>I had other good GMs both before and after that, but none could make a scene that had illicited such a response from me.
I had a similar sort of situation. It was a group of three players and the DM, playing a relatively basic homebrew campaign of his, since one of the other players and myself were still new to the game. We end up getting sent by a local baron to figure out why one of the villages hadn't paid their taxes. Upon entering the town, we find out a couple vamps had moved in and basically were using the town to feed. We did the obvious thing and dispatched them and came across a little girl alone and crying in a shed. She didn't say anything but immediately perked up when the party talked her and gave her some food.
I distinctly remember one of the other players rolling his eyes and mouthing the words "loli", but no one called out the DM on it. Well turns out the little girl was about to be turned by the vamps and we had saved her just in the nick of time. We let her accompany us, not really sure what to do with her since there weren't any orphanages around and the Baron didnt want her. So she carried our extra gear and we even bought her a hand crossbow to defend herself after a little while.
>>43726537
Fast forward a few months and the girl is still in the campaign. She still doesn't say too much, but we no longer make her carry our gear, as she's proven useful with a crossbow and killed more than a few monsters with it. The group actually started to accept her, asking her about her life, her deceased parents, and what she wanted us to do with her once she tired of adventuring with us. She never had an answer for the last one and we kinda got the hint that she had noone else except us and we were fine with that, cause like I said, we had grown fond of her and that crossbow. We decided to splurge and upgrade her to a bigger one and even outfit her in some nice armor after awhile.
The party was in a port city looking to buy a ship one day when the cleric of the party comes by with a posting from a job board, and in big bold letters is the word " VAMPIRES". Seems there was a nest of them and the city was offering a reward to anyone wiling to clear them out. Now we hadn't come across any more vampires since rescuing the little girl and she seemed a bit worried, but courageous as ever, nocked a bolt into her crossbow and with a wry smile told us to get our asses in gear and earn the gold.
>>43726623
We get to the den and notice the girl gets really quiet, but we press on, talking about how big of a boat the gold would buy us. As we close in on the leader of the vampires, we get ambushed from a side tunnel by three vamps, who take down the party wizard relatively easy. A few more rounds go by and my ranger isn't feeling to good either. After (barely) killing the last of the ambushers, the party decides we should probably make a hasty retreat to lick our wounds and resupply, and just in time too, since we can hear more vampires bearing down on us. We turn to leave and the girl is just standing in the tunnel, staring down at vamps. She's like that for a few more seconds before pulling out a dagger and proceeding to stab the corpses a dozen times. We try to push her back down the tunnel, but my ranger is barely to keep himself up and the cleric has the unconscious wizard draped over his shoulder, so we're having a hard time of it.
Around the tunnel come a couple of more vamps and the girl loses it either through PTSD or bloodlust, we really never knew. It tugged at our heartstrings to watch, but she was basically tore to pieces before we could even react and we had to book it away from the tunnel. Eventually we came back and slaughtered the damn things so we could bury what was left of her.
So, not exactly a heart warming tale, but our DM played it perfectly, having us travel with the girl and essentially help raise her past the tragedy of losing her parents, only for her to be ripped away like that.
>>43726312
>>43726330
>>43726344
Awesome story. Your best GM is awesome.
>but we never complained, (besides one night that ended up in a fistfight)
Is noone else curious about this in OP's post?
I have had only 1 GM in the past that wasn't me.
I've been the GM for years now.
>>43727107
If Op wants to tell us, he'll tell us himself without promptingor saempersoning, if that's the case.
In any case, if fistfight is connected to 9-10 hours long sessions, it probably because player A was stressed by that and complained, then there was player B who did not like player A and was stressed by A's complaining, and it the end it all boiled down to them flailing their arms for 10 secs, they were quickly dragged into opposite corners and not much else except for some remnant hostilities.
OP here. I don't mind telling the story if you guys want to hear, seeing as my initial thread idea didn't pan out much. I generally use it to get a few laughs whenever I join a new gaming group, so I guess that's technically festive if it makes /tg/ laugh, right?
Compared to me and my friends who were all still fairly new, the guy was a vet with about 16 years playing RPGs (I think).
He ran a game of classic 1e L5R for us, and the way the game ran I fell in love with the setting utterly (and also the system).
Then he ran Numenera, and through sheer storytelling proficiency, he managed to make me forget how much I hate that game.
Sadly he works full time now as a manager of a Games Workshop that's pretty out of the way for me, so I rarely ever get to see him these days.
Here's to you Tom, you're a pretty fucking awesome dude.
>>43727397
So as I said earlier, 99.99% of the time we had a great group. We all attend the same college together and wound up forming our party after meeting at the campus gaming club one afternoon. There were five of us, including the DM, but the story really only focuses on two guys, let's call them Mike and Andy. Now Mike and Andy weren't exactly the stereotypical gamer, they both play football for our college, live in the same frat, and generally are the life of whatever room they are in. It makes them interesting and their characters interesting. However, they tend to do a lot of stupid things together. I guess during some down time during finals week, their frat decided to host a Prank War. Not for all the frats, just for their own frat, as a way to blow off some testosterone and declare a "Prank King". Usual Shit. Well it turns out Mike and Andy both loved pranks, pranking each other and the like. What they DIDN'T like were boundaries, and would take a joke as far as they could to win the title. Things between them escalate until one day Andy decides to change Mike's resume so that instead of a link to his professional webpage, it's a link to some porn site. Some pretty low brow crazy shit, including horses, nothing a normal person would ever watch. Mike doesn't check it before some interview and ends up embarrassing himself, and of course is obviously pissed. So naturally he plans his response, escalating it even further between the two of them.
>>43727763
Mike decides that the best way to get Andy back is to fuck with his car. Now for reference, Andy has a '57 Bel-Air, sky-blue, that he cares for like a child. Mike "borrows" it in the middle of the night, spray paints it and then takes it mudding through some of the fields a little ways away from the campus, with the top down. Needless to say, that was end of the Prank War at the frat. Apparently they had already gotten into a scuffle before our session, but still both individuals chose to go, for some unknown reason. Things were tense during the session, and come to a head when Mike's rogue decides to steal all of Andy's items and chuck them down a well in the city we were staying at. As we are all laughing at this, cause we had no clue what was happening with the two, Andy chucks his soda can at Mike and the two start going at it. Now the rest of us are all pretty meek and in shock, until the DM jumps up followed by the rest of us and we separate the two and call it a night. At some point the two of them make up and get the Bel-Air fixed and our sessions go back to the normal, but we never let the two forget the time they gave us all a heart attack.
>Be my group's perpetual DM
>Know all eight regularly post on /tg/
>Hope to see some reference
>>43728437
Eight players? Jeez, how do you manage that?
>>43728591
Poorly, given that he apparently hasn't been referenced yet :^)
>>43728648
Well he can't feel too bad. Apparently out of all the fa/tg/uys around, only a couple have had an actually good DM.
>>43728437
youre a shit dm, mike
love from toby
>>43724476
The best DM I've has (out of 3) doesn't really cause any imcredible GMing stories to spring to mind, but I think that's because he was so good. Nothing he did really stood out because he let us guide the action. Hell, he didn't even write the campaign (it was a module), and all the stories I have from that campaign consist of things the players did, but he was always subtly improving our experience.
Sorry for not giving a cool story.
