@King Dead
To be fair, he has no intentions of actually doing a lot with the character because it's not that fun for him to play with it anymore. To me (again, can't read minds), this seems like a last hurrah, a way to get one more use out of the character by using his disappearance as the backdrop for a campaign. The character itself might be overpowered, but he does have a tendency to get lost in his own world and wander off doing his own thing, which is probably why he poofed in the first place.
The problem is he likes his old character, and had basically made them the Deus Ex Macguffin that will fix everything. He homebrewed a whole setting that makes his character at least partly responsible for saving the day. That tells me he's a little too invested in the fate of his old character.
I'm not going to say its impossible he's doing this correct and isn't over invested, but its like smoking meth - sure there is that one guy out of ten million who can smoke meth just that one time and just be "naw, thanks not for me" in the future, but the odds say you are not that guy, so you really just shouldn't.
That was probably the biggest issue, the design of the realm wasn't really tested out in any way. He told me after the fact that it really wasn't that dangerous at all and was balanced around our level, as long as we didn't do anything really stupid. The problems with the scenario, however, were many, and I told him about them in retrospect:
I totally get that. I think most any DM experiences that, where the players are drowning themselves in water two feet deep. Also the Random Table dropping an item/encounter towards the end when it doesn't do much good.
The whole realm was basically one giant forest maze that we didn't have a map for, so it fell to me to try and draw out a map as we went.
Unless mapping is a common theme in your games, that's sort of BS unless he called out "yo someone should probably keep a map"
Its fun to let the party discover this and start mapping without you having to tell them, and that is the GM dream. But sometimes you need to live in reality.
In some of my OSR games, I'm always at an impass. The map the players draw for themselves is always better than the map I'm using. Its got notes, and is almost an adventure record. OTOH I am also super super against needless busy work.
The psychic disturbances were generally harmless, but they really hampered exploration.
This sounds like a "needed more time in the oven" portion. because it sounds like the permaffects were supposed to be a punishment for fucking around and finding out, but seems like his dice exploded and delivered badness early.
The right way forward is to tilt the screen and just tell the party "Look there was a bad roll. This area isn't that bad, just explore and really work to find safe areas even if it means giving up on some treasure". Sounds like your GM hasn't learned when to do that yet.
The aforementioned ticking clock element. There were hints about how the storms had been getting worse, but that was about it. By the time we went back, it had exploded off-screen, leaving only a chunk floating around in the Astral Plane.
Actually, as long as there wasn't anything further to do in that realm, I'm going to give that to him. It sounds like the realm's explosion was always planned, and it didn't effect the party as it happened off screen. It sets the scope of the threat (planar collapse) and establishes there's a ticking clock in the future. So I'm going to guess there's some missing context, but 10,000 foot view its alright in principal.
And this might just be some expectations disconnect. Like I said, if the GM does keep going with this, he needs to toss everyone back on the train for a few sessions so they can learn how they're supposed to deal with these situations, and lets him limit the sidequest creep.
Agreed on all points. A mystery where everyone's saying "fuck if I know" isn't a mystery, it's just twiddling your thumbs while waiting for something to happen. Even more so when many of the NPCs are crazy and couldn't tell you anyway. There was the occasional bit of information that hinted at the overall story, but it was easy for that to get lost in the shuffle.
Lesson learned, though, no more psychic bullshit. Gonna put the kibosh on that if he even thinks about it again.
What a lot of people forget (myself included) is that D&D is an overclocked wargame. There isn't a lot of good mechanisms for "mystery" , "detective style investigation" or "psychic bullshit", you need to accept it and move on.
There was some advice I saw that rings true which is "You shouldn't try to red-herring or obfuscate the truth on mysteries. Your players will do that for you." This doesn't mean giving out the solution at the outset. But they should automatically get the needed clues to unravel what's going on as long as they got to the right place and did the needed legwork - but that doesn't mean the party should just get them. Better rolls/better plans should just make it easier & less costly to get those clues.
I.E. If there is some obscure information in the library, the party should have that information when they leave the library, even if they are all INT 3 barbarians. Where the character skills, and player planning, should come into play is how long/how costly getting that information is. A party of scholars will have that shit in 10 minutes, a party of orcs might take much longer.
in your "no way into the tower" example, I'd make sure the party knew very clearly "the thing you need is inside that tower", and make it apparent there is a way in. Then I'd see how the party does trying to find out how to get in. If they start running out of ideas, call uncle, or otherwise get frustrated, I'd call for some sort of relevant skillcheck and use that determine how much finding the entrance to the tower costs them.
You might be a bit harsh here, but I think the gist of it still holds. He's honestly not an obnoxious player or DM, I think he just got way in over his head in his homebrew and was too impatient to wait to spring it on us. If it had had some more time in the oven and he'd removed or tweaked some of the aspects, I think it could have turned out fine. Hell, he could have removed the realm's destruction entirely without our knowledge, but he said he didn't want to change things after he'd committed to them, so that's on him.
Even GM wishes the players would be able to be mind readers some times. I mean look at
@Mr. Manchester 's campaign goal; it wouldn't work unless you pretty much had a table of mind readers (and he acknowledges that).
What I'm saying is your help has already been rebuffed. This is his old character, one he liked so much he built a entire campaign around them. he is very clearly wanting you guys to do this adventure, do in a specific way (with some variability) and give his character a trip to valhalla where you guys are always talking about "Oh man remember Selfinset the Great? He was so much fun. I wish we could do something with him again". This is a very human urge.
He doesn't want you to "fix" the campaign, he wants the players to fix themselves so he can run the campaign as he envisioned.
It sounds like your GM hasn't established the needed maturity & seasoning to accept that players are grubby little gremlins who will shit all over plans, knock off parts, and then dry-hump the larger fragments. You need to not be too attached, which is they DMPC is widely considered the hallmark of failure. It usually demonstrates too much attachement.
I'd rather not put my character on a bus forever (he's my first D&D character, based off of a character I made in my childhood with my brother), so I'd like to try to resolve this so I can still use him in the future. But shelving might be easier in the long run. I'll update if we ever get back to it, but your advice is much appreciated either way.
Just bring characters to the new game. You said everyone seemed to still be having fun - just do a new campaign, same characters.
