My worst D&D session
This past Saturday I sat through a session of D&D that was the least fun I've ever had. It was fine the first half of the four hour session, but the second half was dismally unfun and my entire drive home afterwards I was near tears because of how unfun it was. We're playing a pre-made campaign, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, I'm having a lot of fun with my character (an Echo Knight Fighter), and the DM is great at what he does. But as I've been thinking about why I had such a bad reaction to the second half of the session, I've been realizing some things about myself and about the campaign.
First, the campaign feels more like an open world sandbox rather than a specific story we're supposed to be following. The motivation the three of us player characters should have doesn't feel strong enough to get us to actually do what we're doing, so instead (to me) it feels like we're just off having an adventure with no real driving force. Just a sort of "let's explore and help other people" type of thing. Not only that, but we keep running into "side quests" that pull us off in different directions. So because it feels like a sandbox to me, when the story we're supposed to be following presents itself, it feels like a railroad rather than a natural progression.
Basically what happened in the session was, near the beginning my character was a bit brusque with some bullywugs because we had places to be and things to do, no time for meetings with the king, and later when we actually went to see the king, expecting a normal welcome from the king we had installed last time, instead we got a "they were mean to us, throw them in jail!" welcome, and we were not strong enough to not TPK (total party kill). So we got railroaded into jail, and that's where we ended the night.
Second, one of the main reasons I play games, any game in general, is because I have a specific power fantasy that games fulfill for me, and this power fantasy directs how I play. It's a true power fantasy, where my desire is to be strong. The strongest, really. Stronger than everyone and everything else. To be able to tank my way through massive amounts of damage and hit back hard. To obliterate everything in my path. Which sounds absurdly violent, but really it's all about weakness. I hate feeling weak. I hate struggling, I hate failing, and if I'm the strongest then I don't have to feel that. When I play games, I will actively try to become overpowered so that fights are easier without any risk of failure.
So at the end of the night when we were surrounded by bullywugs and a DM telling us out of character "you cannot survive this fight, you need to swallow your pride and go to jail", I felt weak and humiliated and frustrated. And I know my character is not me, but when I play, I inhabit the character so it felt like me.
I engage with media like movies and books and games to escape. I feel bad emotions enough in real life, I don't want to experience them in my entertainment too. And now I'm nervous about what happens next, and anxious about how the next session will go. I want to be the Big Damn Hero, and it feels like that's not in the cards for this campaign.
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