>when the DM gets to the first meeting >he has no shit

>>52439625
> It was all a ruse for one of the players is the true GM sending messages to the false one telling him what to do next.

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>>52439625
>>when the DM gets to the first meeting
>>he has no shit together and works on the lore as we go along
We're playing 13th Age, numbnuts. The GM can't solidify lore till every character settles on their relationships with the Icons and declares their One Unique Thing.

>>52439625
You run the game then chucklefuck.

>>52439625
Organic campaigns are better than highly linear rail slashers.

>>52439895
This. I complain I have nothing prepared, we should play one of their campaigns this week. They praise my ability to come up with engaging encounters and plot points on the fly. We compromise and I forever DM.

>>52439625
>implying that most DMs don't make up lore as they go along

The only thing that makes him a bad DM is that you noticed, anon. Even then, nobody starts out perfect.

>>52439625
For the first meeting? Fine, we probably were gonna spend that entire time deciding what kinda game we were gonna play and creating characters anyways. If its the first session after that then I could sympathize

So bad DM thread?
because I have a story ready.

I've always said that half of DMing is not letting your players know how much you're improvising... and the other half is the part where you actually improvise.

>>52439717
So does 13th Age have no set world? The whole thing with the Icons is really hard to wrap my head around

>>52440998
Share please

>>52440998
>>52441213
We had tried to run a d20 modern Predator game in modern japan, where we were PMC guys sent to guard a yakuza informant. After rescuing him, we saw a glimpse of something before it ran away. We got the guy to his estate, locked the place down, and then..... Like a month without a session. It was meant to be maybe a 2-3 session game, and he just never gets around to actually running the bloody thing.
And then tonight, when we finally tried again.
The squad took up their positions again, now with something taking out the estate power and coming for us. We fortify outside the safe room where we have the VIPs and a setup of cameras and tripwires, We get fake transmissions on the radio, a bunch of things to lure us out. Then we get heavy footsteps above us, and the reflex of the whole party is light it up. The GM then starts arguing with us over the predator being able to dodge. We hit it a few times, then half the squad moves to another hole up room while I and the computer guy stayed with the VIPs. It is at this point he just starts Fiating the thing's actions, giving it random surprise rounds despite us being prepared and having a way to see it, at once point trying to shoot one of us through like 4 walls with the plasma caster, and these arguments just collapse the game. And this isn't even mentioning players asking legitimate in universe questions and him calling those questions stupid, and when one of us was introduced, his method for bringing the guy in was to dump him in the driveway and tell him to improvise, as well as giving poor information on how to handle describing the predator and what he knows. And this guy has been the GM for like 3 different games, one of which was a fantasy vs modern game where halfway through a session he changed the forest full of spiders into one full of tigers after one guy said he hates spiders, and then(admittedly some of this is secondhand info) gave one player basically a harem of wizards. There's more.

>>52441461
then in that fantasy game he has this demon king who is just invincible and stomps into the white house and kicks ass, then threatens the world. It's hard to say what he's even trying to do whenever he runs something, Whatever he works towards just falls apart because he doesn't know the systems well enough to do things properly, and then changes his mind because he either isn't prepared or he expects one path to be followed. And one of the most annoying things he does is say he plans to run some other weird concept without developing or finishing something we already want to do.
I mainly needed ot vent because he doesn't seem to learn anything from the criticism we give. I haven't even seen what it's like for him to actually play a game, but it has to be better than what he's doing when he's in charge.

OP here, I'm not agaisnt organic campaigning.

But when the DM takes several minute breaks, doesn't remember names, and doesn't seem to have a solid plot, and keeps pausing to find out if what he said contradicts himself, it fucks with the IMMURSION.

Also, said DM said he had a plot laid out ahead of time.

>>52441461
Well, thanks for the story. Running a Predator game sounds like a fun concept, but this illustrates the problem that everyone already knows what the Predator is and what it's capable of. In universe did your characters know about predators?
It seems like he might have achieved the desired effect by having the Pred as a complication to another plot... say having conventional human assassins/ a rival pmc after the informant, and then both sides start getting picked off by a pred.

>>52441819
He kind of tried that in the first session, but it didn't really go anywhere. He had the predator observe us after a firefight, and then run away, while we retreated somewhere we could interrogate captives and get intel. It went no further than that.
As for whether we knew, it was the case that we knew of the incident in the first movie, but no details on just what happened beyond "Team went in, two made it out".

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>>52441808
If it makes you feel better OP, I once had a GM pregame his own campaign and proceed to get hammered because a guy was a little late. Then he spent most of the time playing Hearthstone while we shot the shit on the porch. Campaign lasted two dumb sessions.