So last year one of my old high school friends mentioned to me that he had started a new gaming group with his cousins. Since then I have been running an occasional game for his group when I was in town. It is a several hour drive so I don't game with them often, just once every couple of months.

The last game I was running for them was a western zombie apocalypse game. The players were a group of bounty hunters on the run from the law and they had holed up in a small fortified frontier town. The town was beset by zombies and under quarantine, and the sheriff had taken the quarantine as an excuse to go mad with power and set up a small scale totalitarian police state. The game was going really well, the players were doing excellent and seemed to be having a lot of fun, but the game ran long and I said I would put it on hold and continue it next time.

Well, next time happened to be this weekend, and it turned out to be a disaster.

Now, keep in mind that he invited me to come visit and chose the time and place for the game, I was not forcing myself onto him.

So as I am driving to me friends house he asks me how long the game has left. I say 2-3 hours, and he says ok, but we should try and make it quick because the group is hoping to finish early and get back to their normal D&D game. I should have taken this as a bad sign and found an excuse to turn around, but I didn't. When I got into town my friend announced that he was too tired and needed to take a nap before the game, so I sat in his living room playing with my iPad for four hours (keep in mind this is after I had woken up early to drive a couple hundred miles to his house). When he finally wakes up we head over to the game several hours late.

During the game session everyone is extremely distracted. They are texting and playing on their phones and watching videos and leaving the room for snacks. Now, I am normally fine with this, I am a pretty lax GM, but are the same time they are complaining that we aren't going to have enough time for their D&D game.

Then they are all joking around the entire time. Every time they state and IC action or speak to an NPC they make at least one joke first.

Eventually the final showdown with the corrupt sheriff and his posse occurs. The party, still joking and being distracted, starts doing really weird things. I had a suspicion they were trying to get themselves killed so they could get back to their D&D game, but I am still trying to stay positive and run the game as straight as I can. They don't synergize any strategy, they don't focus fire, they waste their resources on trivial things, and one person actually runs away and hides in a corner instead of fighting. They do some really bizarre stuff, like the wimpy little intellectual character decides to stand in front of the big burly tough guy "tank" character and soak up fire for him.

Considering their tactics they actually do really well and end up winning, albeit with most of their resources expended. In the aftermath of the battle a group of heavily armed bounty hunters who had been tracking their party fight their way into the town and tell the PCs to surrender.

Now, from an OOC perspective they can do whatever they want, this isn't a railroad. They can fight, run, surrender, or do whatever else they want. This is NOT a heavy handed force the players to be captured plot, and I indeed when I ran this adventure for my previous group they decided to stand and fight and took down the bounty hunters with little problem.

The players though, decide that they don't have enough resources left to kill the bounty hunters, and so surrendering isn't an option. Each one decides to go for a different crazy last move path. One character grabs a bag of dynamite, pretends to surrender to the bounty hunters, and then sets himself on fire to blow everyone up. One decides to blow a hole in the wall of the town and let the zombie horde in (keep in mind that there are numerous civilians as well as the other PCs still in the town). One decides to commit sepeku (literally). One decides to just jump over the wall into the mass of zombies and run for it.

So we have three PCs dead by their own hand and one suicidally running through the zombies. The town is in chaos and most of the NPCs will soon join them. The guy who was running asks me if he survived. I tell him that it is unlikely as he is by himself and wounded vs. a horde of zombies (note that if the whole party had chosen this route they could have fought their way through), but it was up to him as the rest of the game was dead and would need to make new characters if we continued this anyway, maybe he survived, maybe he got eaten, maybe rocks fell and everyone died. I then break face for the first time and say "Epic end to the game. Sure glad I drove 200 miles for this."

So I pack up my stuff and tell them they can get back to their D&D game, but they decide it is too late and that they just want to call it a night.

On the drive back to my friend's house he calls me a killer DM. I, flabbergasted, respond that they killed themselves and that I did everything in my power to keep them alive. I then said that I don't understand what went wrong, the last session went to well, but tonight it seemed like everyone was just acting completely at random with no regard to their own characters (or their party or the NPCs) safety and joking about everything.

Then, my friend gave me a big speech about how the problem was with my perspective. I am used to gaming with a bunch of wierdos and crazy people. He then made reference to the many gaming horror stories that I have previously told him (and which anyone who has been following my posts on this forum will probably be aware of). He told me that I just wasn't used to gaming with NORMAL people and didn't know how to handle it. That unlike my friends they are all well adjusted and have careers and families, and that this is how NORMAL people act during a game, and that I am just not used to dealing with people who are more socially adjusted than myself.

I just sat there in silence. When we got back to his house I told him that if that was what normal people were like at the gaming table than I was glad to be such a freak. His response was "Well, don't worry about. I am pretty sure NO ONE wants you to game with us ever again."

I then decided that I didn't really want to visit anymore and decided to just drive back that night instead of staying with him. Not sure if I will be talking to him in the future.


So, that's my story. Not really sure what to think about, and I don't really have a question for the forum. I just needed to share this story with someone. Anyone have any comments or thoughts on the situation?