Anonymous
12/03/25(Wed)04:49:51 No.97105444

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Anonymous 12/03/25(Wed)04:49:51 No.97105444

Is it bad that I see ambitious, grand designs from a pick-up game's GM as a poor omen?

Completely setting aside my issue with online GMs outsourcing their duties to LLMs, I have been finding it to be a poor sign when a pick-up game's GM expresses an optimistic desire to run this super-grand, super-ambitious, epic saga for the ages. I think it is deeply unrealistic to expect that a group of people semi-randomly assembled together will miraculously have the chemistry, investment, dedication, and scheduling necessary for a game to last for years. I think that lofty ambitions and expectations transform into rapid burnout when they meet a much more prosaic reality of mismatched preferences, availability issues, and decent-but-not-fantastic roleplaying.

This goes triply in a play-by-post game, where it might take several months (if not over a year!) just to complete a very short, bare-bones adventures. This is also exacerbated by rookie mistakes like taking in more players than the GM can handle, or writing in homebrew mechanics that substantially upheave the core rules without prior experience with the system. I recently joined one such play-by-post game wherein the GM expresses a desire for a grand-scale campaign, has taken on seven players, and has presented extensive homebrew despite having zero previous experience with the system; I doubt it is going to end well.

I have much more confidence in a GM who is willing to simply say, "We will do a quick adventure together. If it works out, we will consider a longer campaign." Indeed, I have had much more success with such pick-up GMs. (This is assuming I do not just play with people I already know, which I also do.)