RPG Disaster Story: GM Torpedoes Star Wars Saga Game out of Spite

 RPG Disaster Story: GM Torpedoes Star Wars Saga Game out of Spite

 

 This story starts like a lot of RPG horror stories in that I got drawn into tabletop games over COVID lockdowns. From the first game I met some more players who introduced me to other players and eventually I was invited to join a game of Star Wars Saga Edition. Based on DND 3rd edition the game was similar to the 5th Edition rules I had already learned but a bit different and obviously with a star wars coat of paint. I thought this would be cool and the DM was a friend of a friend I had met online through several DND groups and I figured this would be worth a shot. 

The game starts out alright, we have three fairly active players and one more passive player who is just along for the ride. The game is set after Order 66 but before A New Hope and my character was a Jedi Temple Guard who had survived the clone wars and gone into hiding. The other two active players were a commando battle droid and a gendai mercenary. The first few sessions went well, the GM gave us a starting freighter and we were crew on a job to deliver contraband weapons to Corellia, ostensibly to arm the Rebellion. We manage to slip past the Imperial blockades and land on the planet, my character orchestrates a covert raid on the ruins of the Green Jedi Enclave and recovers some useful information, then the party is ordered to disable an Imperial communications hub so that our buyer could make contact and collect the goods. This is when a fifth player is introduced I'll call MainCharacter or MC. This player was a forever GM who I had played with before and was a pretty decent GM and I was participating in one of his other games as an occasional guest character. He was playing a criminal mastermind and seemed to have a well constructed character with a solid background. However things started to go off the rails quite quickly, MC refused to work with the rest of the party, ignored the mission plan we had come up with and did his own thing. Over the next few sessions he refused to participate in roleplay with the rest of the party, made snarky comments whenever anyone else succeeded at something, whined whenever he failed to do something and gloated whenever he was successful. In fact MC wouldn't roleplay at all, he was the kind of player who would say something like: "I roll persuasion to seduce the barmaid," and just roll a dice and expect a result. He absolutely refused to even attempt to describe his actions in any narrative way or describe what his character was actually saying he just wanted to roll dice, compare to his stats and succeed. It got obnoxious quickly and he as a player got particularly upset whenever anyone else would roleplay what they were saying or doing and it would work. 

After the first few sessions my character had become something of de-facto party leader as the ship we acquired to replace our wanted freighter was mine and I was instrumental in coming up with the plans that had so far led the party to success. However that did not mean I was bossing people around but rather I was acting as something of a facilitator, asking other players for input, discussing their objectives and interests and trying to engage them in the party's plans. The game was described as an open world free form campaign and the GM did very little to give us any real guidance or objectives on what to do so shortly after leaving Corellia the party decided to head towards Nar Shadaa with the aims of starting a Casino and getting involved in the criminal underworld there. To be clear despite acting as the ship captain and party leader this plan was not mine nor did it have anything to do with my character. My Jedi was interested in recovering Jedi artifacts and training a Padawan, he had no interest in starting a Casino or getting involved with Nar Shadaa criminal enterprises but the majority of the party wanted to pursue that goal so that is what my character helped to arrange. After lengthy discussions we planned to head directly into the outer rim and circle around to Nar Shadaa the long way to avoid Imperial patrols and hit a few treasure caches of Palpatine's that my character had discovered the location for during his infiltration mission. 

For three or four sessions this went well enough, MC was still obnoxious and refused to work with the party but we were making progress. We raided several caches and recovered expensive goods Palpatine had stolen during the Clone Wars that we could fence on Nar Shadaa to finance the casino the other party members wanted, my character found no Jedi artifacts but we did raid a transport ship holding force sensitives and we did manage to free one and he became my apprentice so all good so far. 

However the GM had brought up Mustafar and Vader several times and seemed to want the party to eventually go there though we had been given no real motivation to do so. Some passengers on our first flight had been arrested and sent there but we had no real connection with them, my character absolutely had no desire to be anywhere near Vader at any time and the other party members with the sole exception of MC had no personal connection with Mustafar, Vader or the Empire and were solely interested in becoming space mafiosos. Nevertheless I, and the other two active players, were trying to aide MC in his personal character mission of defeating an Imperial officer and raided several outposts with the aim of acquiring transmissions or travel records to locate this officer and one lead did suggest Mustafar but MC did nothing with this information and the rest of the party figured we'd reach Nar Shadaa first and then decided if we could work with the Rebellion to do something about Vader's fortress there. Throughout this game so far had shown no indication of major dissatisfaction with the party's decisions or objectives or informed us that he had a particular story objective in mind. Mustafar had come up two or three times across eight sessions but the party was not given nearly sufficient motivation to do anything about it as we were relatively low level and few in number and a raid on one of the most dangerous systems in the galaxy to face off against one of the most dangerous force users in history was a singularly bad idea. Even so I had tried to roleplay with the GM to lay the groundwork for some story hooks, my character's backstory had him being born on Corellia and one of his few personal possessions was a Corellian Jedi coin, a sort of spacer passport or ID badge that Corellians often carried. When the party delivered the weapons shipment early in the campaign we met with Bail Organa and passing a galactic lore test to understand Organa and Alderaan's sympathies with the Jedi my character palmed his coin to Organa when shaking his hand and told him to contact us if he needed anything. Nothing from this ever came up later. 

This brings us to the session that nuked the game: Gamorr. 

Situated relatively close to Nar Shadaa the system of Gamorr was a last stop over for the party on our way to the Hutt controlled crime hub as we were searching for long-range Imperial patrols we could raid for information, again to aide the mission of MC not anyone else. We did discover several Imperial gozanti's in orbit around Gamorr and an outpost on the surface. The party chose to land on Gamorr and sell off a bunch of weapons we had looted from previous operations and wound up in a short firefight against basic Gamorrean NPCs that the party was more than capable of annihilating handily. After taking off the party discussed what to do and after talking with MC and the two other active players the consensus was since our surface mission had turned up nothing new that we could try to raid one of the Gozanti's and steal their navigation data and communications logs, perhaps capture the vessel entirely and this is where things start to go very, very, very wrong. 

Using our ship's scanners we identified two gozanti's in orbit around Gamorr and a star destroyer that was elsewhere in the system, only recently arrived and heading slowly towards Gamorr, likely to rendezvous with the cruisers. We decided to approach one of the gozanti's cloaked by my character's force powers and all but invisible to the enemy and move in to latch our boarding tube with the right/starboard hatch of the cruiser. The party used the ship's scanners and force powers to assess the ship and what was on board and were only told we detected a handful of Gamorrean life-signs and nothing else out of the ordinary so the decision to board was made. The GM did not have a battle map for this encounter or tokens and this was all theater of the mind and he had us approach and latch onto the left/port of the gozanti ship. NOT what the party had decided but I didn't want to fight with the GM on the issue and let it slide but as soon as we boarded and my character had to drop his cloak of our ship the GM surprise reveals that the second Gozanti was in fact in formation to the left of the ship we boarded and immediately opens fire on us. At no point had the GM described both ships flying in close formation and I absolutely do not buy the idea that this was a mistake as the GM at no point asked us which ship we were approaching or from which direction which would have been important if they had been in close formation, all of the GM's descriptions had simply stated two individual ships were orbiting Gamorr but not that they were anywhere near each other. Moreover if the party had attached to the starboard as we had said we would have been blocked from line of sight of the second ship anyway so this decision by the GM to switch which side of the ship we boarded absolutely threw the party under the bus in this situation and is the first attempt by the GM to torpedo the party but more would come. 

Reacting as a group the droid player detached our ship from the gozanti and took it into battle against the second Gozanti, which was doing more damage to it's ally ship than ours anyway but we had to do something. This left myself, our passive player and MC trapped aboard the first Gozanti and our gendai player was late to the session so his character remained aboard our ship. As soon as we started combat with the Gammorrean crew it became obvious the GM was not using the same stats as our fight on the planet surface or any remotely reasonable stats for that matter. Each Gamorrean was essentially a retired level 20 adventurer. Your standard Gamorrean Grunt in Star Wars Saga edition has a reflex defense (AC) of 15, 27 health and a +6 to their attacks. A much more dangerous Gamorrean Basher has a reflex of 18, 50 health and a +8 to their attacks. The Gamorreans we were fighting had over 100 health, 22 reflex defense and a +15 to their attacks. These were tougher NPCs than the party had ever encountered and there were dozens of them. When scanning the ship by multiple means both technological and with the force the GM had not told us that there were more than an expected number of Gamorreans on board and a Gozanti is not a big ship with a normal crew of 12. Throughout this combat encounter the party fought well more than 30 Gamorreans total, each of which had over a hundred health, making each one more powerful than any individual party member in the group. 

Our passive player was immediately knocked out and MC wound up fighting a desperate last stand on the first deck while my character retreated to the cockpit with my padawan, using the bottleneck near the lift that the interior deck map showed to prevent more than one of these nasty NPCs from attacking me at once. For three rounds this went on while our ship shot up the other Gozanti and then came back to retrieve us. My character managed to kill 5 Gamorreans on the bridge and another three in the hallway leading to the bridge using a handful of force powers and a lot of explosives. MC had downed one on the first deck before being downed himself but our gendai player had arrived by this point and as soon as our ship redocked he stormed aboard with an escort of half a dozen B2 battledroids the party had acquired. Two corridors led to the hatches along the center of the ship and after driving back the Gamorreans circling MC our gendai grappler took to grabbing and crushing one Gamorrean at a time while the battledroids set up a merciless crossfire of autofire shots down the hallways. In Saga Edition area attacks do half damage to an enemy in their area of effect so long as the attack role is 10 or higher, even if it doesn't meet the enemy's reflex defense (AC). Our droids were never going to beat a 22 reflex but they could absolutely do half damage and with 6 of them they were grinding down the gamorreans with sheer weight of fire. Another six went down in two rounds along with two more to the gendai and our droid player joined the fight and downed yet another. Already the party had killed 18 of these insanely overpowered Gamorreans, more than the Gozanti could accommodate as crew. My player held the fore elevator shaft on the bridge deck and had the hallway leading to it locked down, maximizing my defense and blocking the gamorreans attacks and my padawan using reflect grenade whenever the gamorreans tried that, even though no Gamorrean datasheets don't normally have grenades. Despite 18 Gamorreans having already been downed another 6 were in the hallway with me with 2 more having just arrived from the aft elevator and another 6 were in the hallway below on the first deck. The ship had 3 decks including a middle deck the party had yet to see and no presence on and at that point I was beginning to suspect the GM was going to keep throwing Gamorreans at us from that middle deck 2 at a time until he killed us. But that wasn't happening. Even if he did we were solidly winning the fight, we still had several more combat droids we could have deployed and our Gendai was making for the lift to join me and take the bridge deck and this seemed to absolutely infuriate the GM and that's when he went nuclear. 

At this point the party was 8 rounds into combat, just 8. With generally 6 seconds passing between each round of combat the entire encounter had taken place over 48 seconds. Now I know it's common to hand waive combat length time wise a bit but really no more than a few minutes had really passed. Our ship had picked up transmissions from the star destroyer inquiring into what was going on and had tried to wave them off but the GM told us it was headed our way. Still we all discussed the situation and agreed it would take a while for the star destroyer to get to us and we should finish up the fight, grab the astromech droid we had found aboard and flee. That's when the GM decided at the beginning of round 9 to have the star destroyer conduct an in-system hyperspace jump, appear right in front of us and blow up the gozanti with us aboard it immediately. The GM called for an agility check without explaining himself which my character passed and the droid player passed but no-one else. This meant the two of us reached escape pods and fled but everyone else was trapped aboard the wreckage. This despite location wise my padawan and I had been standing right next to the escape pods and everyone else was two decks away. 

Everyone was pretty upset and irritable at this point, the game had gone on for hours and had been a total mess and I admit I lost my temper a bit. I did not shout or curse but I did call out the GM for what happened. It was utterly ridiculous and he knew it and I was tired of the nonsense, I called out the lack of description for what we were getting into, the insanely overpowered and numerous NPCs and his sudden decision to nuke the ship and us on it. Ultimately I should not have gotten so argumentative but I was tired and irritated and after some back and forth the GM dropped out of the discord call and so did everyone else. 

In the aftermath of this disaster session I reached out to every other member of the party individually including MC to ask their thoughts on what happened and if I was in the wrong for arguing with the GM at the end. Passive player didn't really care which wasn't a surprise but both the droid and gendai player agreed that the session was nuts, the GM had actively sabotaged us and while perhaps I should have voiced my grievances privately later they agreed with my complaints entirely. The only player who agreed with the GM was MainCharacter which highly surprised me, I had played in games he had GMed and he had never behaved in such a manner or undermined the party like this game's GM had but he still attributed the situation entirely to bad luck and criticized me for complaining. 

A few days later I was kicked from the game discord and I found out I had also been removed from MC's game without notice or explanation. When I reached out he gave a totally absurd rational that my behavior in the Star Wars game had been concerning even though, again, I had not shouted, insulted anyone or done anything but call out the GM for what was clearly an active sabotage and railroad of the game. I decided at that point to cut my losses, quit the discords I was still in with MC and decided not to deal with this toxicity anymore. 

Nevertheless the game did not end there. Having reached out to the rest of the party immediately after the disaster session I was still in regular contact with droid player and gendai player, both of whom gave me regular updates of how the game progressed after I was removed. Both players also discussed dropping the game but wound up sticking it out largely out of curiosity to see how the trainwreck would end. 

From what I was told in the next session the GM blamed everything that had happened on me, claimed that I had been trying to be the main character and dominate the plot, he also claimed I had talked with him privately after the session and insulted and derided the other players. However I had never talked to the GM after the session nor had I said anything negative about the other players, something both droid and gendai player pointed out. Droid and gendai player also both called out the GM over his claim that I had been trying to be the main character, both pointing out that the party's current objectives and activities had nothing to do with my character or his goals and objectives and that every decision the party had made had been unanimous and heavily discussed. Despite the embarrassment of being called out on his attempt to lie and blame me the GM moved on with the game and the reality of the situation became apparent almost immediately. Without me as a player there to request the input of other players and involve them in decisions MC was able to fulfill his role and became the MainCharacter of the game. Every session after that became wholly dominated by MC, he had to have the last say in every discussion, he had to make every decision, he had to be central to every plan and every action. The party did sell our loot and buy a casino in the session after I was booted but that was the last gasp of any plot point that didn't revolve around MC. 

I did not receive a comprehensive play by play as the game limped on for a few more months. I was told that multiple sessions were cancelled because players didn't show up, sessions broke down as long minutes would pass with no-one saying or doing anything. When MC ran out of steam nobody else in the party wanted or was willing to speak up or try to get involved lest they be thrown under the bus like my character had been so essentially the game became a one on one dialogue between MC and the GM with the rest of the party basically spectating. The GM eventually was forced to realize the game was dying and rushed an ending where the party chased MC's nemesis to Mustafar and had a combat encounter against Darth Vader that ended in two rounds after the gendai crushed him in a bear hug. Curtains down, campaign over. 

Despite the disaster game droid player, gendai player and myself remained in communication and discussed what happened several times. Our general conclusion was thus: the GM and MC were friends from other games and GM was trying to ensure MC could dominate the game and I was an obstacle to that. This is because I would frequently call attention to other players and make sure they were involved and included in what was happening and wouldn't make decisions without discussing them with the party and obtaining a general consensus on what we were doing. We also all agreed that the GM had a story he wanted to tell but had no ability to organically get the party to do what he wanted and decided to get petty and torpedo the game rather than, you know, talking to us about it. At any point the GM could have simply told us what he wanted us to do, the story he had in mind and what he wanted us to work towards and all of us would have been accommodating of that, but he didn't. The game was sold as open ended and free form and we were just treating it as such. 

Unfortunately in the couple years since this game I have lost touch with the gendai player but the droid player was motivated to start his own game and start GMing after this experience, figuring that there was no way he could do a worse job than the GM from this game. So far he has run a number of games that I have participated in and greatly enjoyed and at no point has he had to railroad the party or blow us up with a Star Destroyer to get his way!

Ultimately what I learned from this is that rather than getting upset and trying to get the GM to see reason I should have just walked away when the game became toxic. I also should have seen the warning signs with MC earlier as I had played one short campaign with him before and he had acted in much the same way. The friends I had met and played with that included the GM of this game and MC I distanced myself from entirely and no longer engage with any of them. It's somewhat sad as I don't think they were all bad people or anything but too many of that group were far too toxic and nobody was willing to call them out on their behavior or hold them accountable and I realized that I couldn't remain in that social group without it negatively impacting my well being.