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Firechanter
2011-03-03, 08:48 PM
I saw there's a Darwin Award thread here, for all those anecdotes of player stupidity resulting in their character's culling from the gene pool.
How about we collect some stories of terrible DM calls? They don't necessarily have to be lethal; unfair calls, heavy railroading, idiotic houserules, arbitrary ignoring of the rules for no reason, shafting the players just because, powertrip etc will also do.

I have a bunch of these to share. -.-

I once played in a Forgotten Realms campaign where the DM started out really fine and got worse over time. He made up a lot of stupid houserules, and was not easily convinced of their stupidity. For instance:

- "A natural 1 in combat is always a Fumble." When a 1 showed, we'd either hit an ally (who sometimes was permitted a Reflex save to dodge) or drop our weapon if nobody was in range.

- at some point during the campaign, he started having us make CON rolls during night watch (we didn't have a wizard who could cast Rope Trick or somesuch), and didn't even use the D&D check mechanics. Essentially a Con-16 character had a _20%_ risk of falling asleep during a bleedin two-hour watch. I kept ranting about this, but when he let the Elf roll his stupid check, I exploded. (At least that was the last time he asked for the check.)

He also distributed the loot very unevenly; at one point one player had some 70K wealth in randomly generated items while another had just about 10K worth. And it took forever to spend the treasure we did gather. I remember having some 10000 GP around level 5, which is fine by itself, but it took all the way until level 9(!) until we got into a town that was not either deserted or a total hick with no magic supply store whatsoever. When I hit level 9, the following dialogue happened at the start of a session (we were currently in Phlan and had no time pressure):
me: "I want to buy a Wisdom ammy" (Cleric with Travel domain).
DM: "Weeeeell, you first need to see if that kind of item is available here."
me: "This is a major city! You know what, I can cast Teleport now. If it has to be, I can port all the way to Waterdeep, gonna take, I don't know, a week maybe."
DM: (in a clearly dissuading tone) "Do you want to RP that?"
me: "I don't mind, but you need to ask the other four players if they don't mind sitting around here an hour and doing nothing."

Then he finally let me have my forsaken ammy. I think it was a +4, and drained pretty much all the wealth I had gathered by that time.

He also kept confusing D&D Mithral with Middle Earth Mithril, btw. When I wanted to buy a Mithral Full Plate, he almost laughed at me, maintaining that Mithral is terribly rare. "It's exactly so rare", I said, "that a full plate suit costs some 10K" I said, but he wouldn't listen at that moment. At least I got that suit a few sessions later as quest reward.

His adventures, mostly bought modules, were mostly not bad as such. But at one time he wanted to play a campaign that was supposed to go through levels 1-10 or so. And we were level 10 already at that time. And he didn't scale the encounters. Imagine our enjoyment at killing CR 1/2 Orcs and Zombies, of course without gaining any XP for them..
A few sessions into that campaign, we had to investigate in a city. It quickly became obvious that we could do nothing to advance the plot ourselves -- essentially we might just as well twiddle thumbs until we reached the point where his book said "Day 3. An informer appears." or suchlike.

(Aftermath: at some point, we switched posts and I DMed for a while. My first task was to get the party out of this stupid campaign. The respective Regent heard the PCs report and said "Very well. We will task some novice Adventurers to retrieve this sacred MacGuffin. For you I have more important things to do now". Next step was subtly dealing out customized loot during the next two adventures to get everyone on the appropriate Wealth by Level.)

To be fair, that DM wasn't all terrible. He used a very generous generation method, and was very liberal about character development issues, so if you discovered a PrC in some book that you wanted to take, he'd let you swap out any feats or abilities necessary to gain entry. Anyway.

Okay, your turn. ^^

Vknight
2011-03-03, 09:02 PM
2ed one of my normal players is a *BEEP* as a Dm. He bascially is idiotic unfair focuing on the female players and there stories. Note there is 1Female and 3other people. Also we have his 2DMPC's.
Yes 2. Both of which are jerks.
In the Funny Stories I posted something that recently happened within the campaign.
The Druids curse is still in full effect. The army wants me dead for killing him. No Reason because they are at war with Druids. Also when we went south which was are only option we get to the Military area which was in the north and the guy calls us out for being late.
Also my characters plan is to remove the corrupt people from government. The Dm's response. The king is no longer corrupt just an idiot that basically worships the female players character.
The church wants me dead for being a Necromancer.
I started as a Illusionist but at level 2the Dm forced me to either make a new character or be a Necromancer after a near life death experience.
Also both the Druid and other DMPC (A Fighter) are Lawful Stupid and should have there alignments changed.
Also the druid dueled me, with a METAL SWORD!!
Did not lose his powers nothing.
So yeah horrible DM before even going into his railroading among other things.

He calls me a bad player, and Dm.


Yeah good friend but if this continues, (Only been 2-3sessions) I'm quiting by way of Fireball cast on the entire party well I'm out of range.

Doc Roc
2011-03-03, 09:07 PM
Yeah good friend but if this continues, (Only been 2-3sessions) I'm quiting by way of Fireball cast on the entire party well I'm out of range.

What... why would you....
Let me just cordially suggest another means of conflict mediation, or you're likely to end up the subject of one of these stories yourself, mcdude.

Cartigan
2011-03-03, 09:08 PM
I saw there's a Darwin Award thread here, for all those anecdotes of player stupidity resulting in their character's culling from the gene pool.
How about we collect some stories of terrible DM calls? They don't necessarily have to be lethal; unfair calls, heavy railroading, idiotic houserules, arbitrary ignoring of the rules for no reason, shafting the players just because, powertrip etc will also do.

I have a bunch of these to share. -.-

I once played in a Forgotten Realms campaign where the DM started out really fine and got worse over time. He made up a lot of stupid houserules, and was not easily convinced of their stupidity. For instance:

- "A natural 1 in combat is always a Fumble." When a 1 showed, we'd either hit an ally (who sometimes was permitted a Reflex save to dodge) or drop our weapon if nobody was in range.
Try playing with a DM who fails you when rolling a 1 on Skill Checks.

Jack DeCoeur
2011-03-03, 09:13 PM
I don't have any horror stories as such, but one event does spring to mind. One of my regular DMs, very competent and rules-savvy for the most part made a huge blunder one session where he pitted the level 10 party against half a dozen wraiths (or whatever is CR appropriate, it was a while ago).

Now, we had the equipment to actually damage them no problem, the issue was that he completely misread the creature entry and, mistakenly believed, even after a player asked him to double check, that the 1d6 CON drain on each attack allowed no saving throw. To this day I have no idea how we escaped without any casualties, the entire 5 man party was reduced to 1 or 2 CON each. It was brutal. Still, at least no one in our group will ever make that mistake again, with any luck at least.

Deth Muncher
2011-03-03, 09:16 PM
We hadn't quite read the rules for what being Entangled meant. Everyone thought you couldn't move until you succeeded. Actually...that's not quite true. I, the DM, knew it, but one of the other players who's more experienced said that wasn't how it worked. The blunder ended in a fairly simple battle becoming lethal for one of the party. However, this ended in me being able to drive the plot forward with it, so it was only a marginal fail.

Vknight
2011-03-03, 09:21 PM
What... why would you....
Let me just cordially suggest another means of conflict mediation, or you're likely to end up the subject of one of these stories yourself, mcdude.

Yeah I know though I doubt it on the basis that I'm a good Dm and neither he nor I would let things from other games spill over.
Also the fact the player cannot hold a grudge in any shape or form outside of forum inappropriate topics.

But yeah keeping my cool in his campaign but I'm more then likely going to quit.
Also something else I forgot.

The party leader most important Npc's and unimportant ones think its the Cleric. Note she did not come until the second session after we cleared a dungeon and saved the kings daughter. Also my guy was the leader at that point the public face with the highest charisma and a good word to people.
Now Npc's do this.

NPC: "All hail the Valkyrie!" (Her In Character Title by the Church)
Me: Um guys she did nothing I just killed the Cyclops and saved everyone in that tomb.
NPC: "Hail her glory!"
Me: *Walks away*

Also she has nothing except church standing as a Preist. I have the kings seal and the Druidic Councils Seal, along with my Masters Seal. (Wizard after all. My master is also the most powerful arcane caster(Any caster actually) on the continent.)

The others had similarly awesome backstories.

Angry Bob
2011-03-03, 09:22 PM
A few months back, we wiped to a rogue polymorphed into a hydra that kept all of her rogue abilities and a hasted wizard that used the 3.0 version instead of the 3.5 version.

On the other hand, it wasn't that bad, since we got to see the hydra do a barrel roll to evade the cleric's holy fire.

Burnheart
2011-03-03, 09:27 PM
Yeah I know though I doubt it on the basis that I'm a good Dm and neither he nor I would let things from other games spill over.
Also the fact the player cannot hold a grudge in any shape or form outside of forum inappropriate topics.

But yeah keeping my cool in his campaign but I'm more then likely going to quit.
Also something else I forgot.

The party leader most important Npc's and unimportant ones think its the Cleric. Note she did not come until the second session after we cleared a dungeon and saved the kings daughter. Also my guy was the leader at that point the public face with the highest charisma and a good word to people.
Now Npc's do this.

NPC: "All hail the Valkyrie!" (Her In Character Title by the Church)
Me: Um guys she did nothing I just killed the Cyclops and saved everyone in that tomb.
NPC: "Hail her glory!"
Me: *Walks away*

Also she has nothing except church standing as a Preist. I have the kings seal and the Druidic Councils Seal, along with my Masters Seal. (Wizard after all. My master is also the most powerful arcane caster(Any caster actually) on the continent.)

The others had similarly awesome backstories.

I am going to go out on a limb and guess your DM wants to date this female player?

Vknight
2011-03-03, 09:33 PM
Yes. The sad thing is she looks like his old girl friend the other sad thing is she is are youngest player, in 7th grade.
Note I'm the oldest as a Senior and he is a year younger then me.

And this is why I normally Dm because.
1) I'm not swayed easily like that
2) I'm fair to my players and give them each a 1 a session reroll
3) I try to get them all involved with the sotry.
4) I don't try to hook up with people5-6 years younger then me.
There is a fifth and a sixth neither of which I can or will post

gomanfox
2011-03-04, 12:52 AM
- "A natural 1 in combat is always a Fumble." When a 1 showed, we'd either hit an ally (who sometimes was permitted a Reflex save to dodge) or drop our weapon if nobody was in range.


The DM running the game I'm in right now has a similar rule. With a natural 1 on an attack roll, the player has to make a reflex save or the character hits itself. Rolling some combination of 1s and 20s after that can result in hitting yourself with a critical, or instantly killing yourself, but it's extremely unlikely to happen.

The only time I've seen this do anything though was when an NPC in one of his previous games fumbled, hit himself with a critical hit and killed himself in one strike, it was pretty funny (although kinda sucked since the NPC was going to help us in combat).

He also uses critical failures/successes on skill checks. If a character rolls a 1 on perception checks on watch, they fall asleep. If they roll a 20, they might spot something like a belt pouch with a few coins in it. I think it's interesting to have something special happen for failing or succeeding in those cases.

The only complaint I've ever had is that he can be a little harsh in the situations he puts his group in. In one of our games, in our first session, there was an NPC that wanted us dead (we didn't know at the time), that we were having tea with, and our tea cups had black lotus extract on them. Only one person drank it, but of course they died (that's a ton of CON damage). The NPC was rich and could easily afford it so it made sense, it just seemed like a bit much, especially in a group of mostly new players.

Volos
2011-03-04, 01:37 AM
I had a DM ask me to come in a couple of hours early to hatch out my character for a game he was already running. I had most of my stats down, so I just worked with fluff and double checked that my feat/item selection was approved. After two and a half hours of long work, we finished my character. I was playing a cleric focused on buff/debuff with a minor in healing. Most of the time I stayed out of sight or did my best to avoid conflict with the monsters.

So we're playing this game for the first few handful of rooms in this dungeon. Other members are a Barbarian/Frenzied Bezerker, a Rogue/Assassin, and a Wizard. We're in a completely empty room, but we find some potions. We idenfity one, and it seems to be a potion of mage armor. The Barbarian runs around nearly naked for some reason or another. So I tell him to drink it next time we get into a fight, as he was having troubles with low AC and taking tons of damage that I was getting tired of healing.

Needless to say, we get into another fight. The rogue/assassin runs to hide behind a pillar, the Wizard casts invisibility, and I cast Sanctuary. Suddenly the DM takes control of the Barbarain/Frenzied Bezerker's turn. The barbarain drinks the potion and immedately starts raging and frenzying. Then he begins charging at me to try and kill me. I'm on the other side of the room, mind you. There are five foes between me and the Barbarain, and they are all threatening him. Three have hit him with arrows already. He bypasses them, taking massive amounts of damage from AoOs. He's actually almost dead, but when he gets closer to me he starts to heal due to some spell I had cast earlier that aids my allies with fast healing. Or it was feat, something like that. He then strikes at me, critting, confirming, and doing three times my health in damage. When I ask what in the nine hells just happened, the DM's only responce is that the potion was cursed.

I nearly flipped the table right into the DM's smug face.

Here is a handful of reasons none of this should have happened.

•Regardless of whether or not the potion was 'cursed', if it caused the Barbarian to Rage and Frenzy, he should have been attacking the foes between the two of us who were doing damage to him. Or atleast should have attacked them first.

•The Barbarian/Frenzied Bezerker would have got a Will Save to avoid attacking his ally while in a frenzy.

•He needed a Will save to even attack me, and with Heightened Sanctuary and my insane Wisdom, he could only succeed on a 20.

•Unless the cursed potion took control of the Barbarain's character (which the DM later said it had not) the player would have control over his character.

•I healed the Barbarian before he attacked me, 30ft before he attacked me. That should have registered me as ally to even his rage addled brain.

So after half an hour of gaming, my character was dead. The enemies finished of the rest of the party with ease, having no one to buff or heal them. An entire TPK situation came out of the DM not only having a massive blunder, but just being a terrible person in general. The only people who play with him anymore are the gamers who have been kicked from my group. They must be deperate.

NecroRick
2011-03-04, 01:43 AM
The DM running the game I'm in right now has a similar rule. With a natural 1 on an attack roll, the player has to make a reflex save or the character hits itself. Rolling some combination of 1s and 20s after that can result in hitting yourself with a critical, or instantly killing yourself, but it's extremely unlikely to happen.


I remember a friend of mine telling me about playing in one of the role-playing games set in the orient. That one had a rule that on a 20 you roll on a critical hit table, and a roll of 20 on that was instant decapitation.

Hence, if you spent long enough in combat, you were pretty much guaranteed to die. 400 rounds is average lifespan (assuming that anything that doesn't outright kill you just makes you stronger). Even a high level fighter would think twice about charging ten orcs under those rules. Killing one a round you'd get about a 13% chance of dying to decapitation. Another way of looking at it is that the orcs would roll ~3 natural 20s, so they'd be on the crit chart three times against you in that fight...

Anyway, eventually the players all gravitated towards non-violent conflict resolution for some strange reason. And the campaign tended towards low low level play (nobody got above 4th level and even that was rare if I remember his stories correctly).

Of course, that doesn't mean you can't have fun.

LordBlades
2011-03-04, 02:57 AM
There is a guy in my gaming group that's just....weird.

He's an awesome player (great roleplayer although he does tend to try and domintate most RP encounters and great optimizer) but probably the suckyest DM I've ever seen.

Whenever he DM's he turns to a 'me vs. players' mentality and he just stops being reasonable.

He's now forbidden to DM in my group after his last campaign stopped with 2 very annoying blunders in the same session.

We were low-ish level fighting a 6 armed construct and stuff starts going bad, so we decide to run. One round ends with my dwarf crusader slamming a door in the guy's face, relying on the fact that by RAW it's a move action to open a door, so I'm facing at most 1 attack. The DM then decides that since a human can open the door with 1 hand (move action) and attack with the other hand (standard action), this guy can open the door with one hand, and attack with the other 5. He refused both to apply this rule starting next battle, and to allow me to take back my previous round's actions, since he just changed a rule that directly impacted what I had done. My char died.

Later on, after we made it out of the dungeon (that construct managed to kill another char apart from mine) the party goes about resurrecting the 2 dead chars , and chooses reincarnate, since we were short on cash. The other guy gets a 100 on the percentile dice. And what does the DM give him? Something completely useless (dude was a neraph gish, and became a satyr).

RndmNumGen
2011-03-04, 03:11 AM
I think my biggest mistake to date was giving an adept my players were fighting a wand of scorching ray... when they were level 2. I ended up unintentionally 1-shotting the party sorcerer with it; he had 12 health, I rolled high and did 22 damage.

BG
2011-03-04, 03:51 AM
Here's the scene, an oWoD Vampire LARP that some friends are in. There are about 8 members of clan Tremere. 2 of them 5 dots in Occult. 3 of them have 4 dots in Occult. The remainder have 3 dots. (That's 31 total dots). In addition, they have 4 dots worth of the Occult Library background. Essentially, if it's in the Occult, these are the people who will know about it.

The Storyteller has them encounter a strange ocean spirit that offers to help them. They all check through their sources, because they all assume it's a demon. Note that this assumption is both in and out of character, because this storyteller loves demons. He tells them flat out that in all their study, they can conclude that it isn't a demon. The Tremere refuse its help anyway, because being occult experts, they know that nothing supernatural ever offers anything for free, there's always a price. Eventually, they're railroaded into accepting its help (another story entirely), and *gasp* it turns out that the spirit was a demon the whole time!

That game had a lot of stuff like that happen.

Zombimode
2011-03-04, 04:11 AM
He also distributed the loot very unevenly; at one point one player had some 70K wealth in randomly generated items while another had just about 10K worth. And it took forever to spend the treasure we did gather. I remember having some 10000 GP around level 5, which is fine by itself, but it took all the way until level 9(!) until we got into a town that was not either deserted or a total hick with no magic supply store whatsoever. When I hit level 9, the following dialogue happened at the start of a session (we were currently in Phlan and had no time pressure):
me: "I want to buy a Wisdom ammy" (Cleric with Travel domain).
DM: "Weeeeell, you first need to see if that kind of item is available here."
me: "This is a major city! You know what, I can cast Teleport now. If it has to be, I can port all the way to Waterdeep, gonna take, I don't know, a week maybe."
DM: (in a clearly dissuading tone) "Do you want to RP that?"
me: "I don't mind, but you need to ask the other four players if they don't mind sitting around here an hour and doing nothing."

Then he finally let me have my forsaken ammy. I think it was a +4, and drained pretty much all the wealth I had gathered by that time.

He also kept confusing D&D Mithral with Middle Earth Mithril, btw. When I wanted to buy a Mithral Full Plate, he almost laughed at me, maintaining that Mithral is terribly rare. "It's exactly so rare", I said, "that a full plate suit costs some 10K" I said, but he wouldn't listen at that moment. At least I got that suit a few sessions later as quest reward.

Uhm, this is not bad DM-ing. At the most it is a case of comunication failure. You and your DM just had different expectations.
You seem to think WBL as a given, MagicMart as existent. He seem to see wealth as in-game-rewards-as-they-make-sense and no MagicMart.
Both are equally valid ways to play the game.
Besides, the rarity of mithril or anything else is a setting detail. You can cite rulebooks all you want, if in the Setting of your DM mithril is ultra-rare, then it is.
Of course you can question his motives, and ask if he had considered the consequences for certain character builds.

stainboy
2011-03-04, 04:15 AM
Yes. The sad thing is she looks like his old girl friend the other sad thing is she is are youngest player, in 7th grade.
Note I'm the oldest as a Senior and he is a year younger then me.


Yeah, you might want to worry more about that four year age difference than about your friend's DMing style.

Tengu_temp
2011-03-04, 04:22 AM
Bad: One guy thought that adamantine is the same as adamantite - that it's available only in Underdark and that it crumbles to dust under sunlight.

Worse: It wasn't a normal game. It was a persistent world for NWN2, where one of the focuses was on a war between the surface and Underdark. Only Underdark had access to adamantine weapons.

Even worse: He wrote a script that checks if you have an adamantine item out in sunlight and removes it. The script was very buggy, caused a lot of lag and glitched several abilities.

Leon
2011-03-04, 04:45 AM
And what does the DM give him? Something completely useless (dude was a neraph gish, and became a satyr).

A Satyr isn't completely useless and it could have been a lot worse - i almost had a Archivist Deer and i have seen a Paladin Badger

Eldan
2011-03-04, 04:58 AM
Well, that's 3.0 reincarnate, though, isn't it? IIRC, 3.5 reincarnate only has player races on it.

Though I usually make custom lists of the same ECL as the player's race so it's about even.

LordBlades
2011-03-04, 05:02 AM
A Satyr isn't completely useless and it could have been a lot worse - i almost had a Archivist Deer and i have seen a Paladin Badger

Well, he lost his outsider type (no more dwarf ancestor alter self) in exchange for +2 dex +2 con +4 natural armor (all except con was 110% useless for an alter self/polymorph based char).

Was just DM asshattery, especially since Reincarnation guidelines for non-humanoids state new body should have the same type.

@Eldan: in 3.5, for non humanoids, you need to make a table of creatures of the same type.

Eldan
2011-03-04, 05:22 AM
True, same type as well.

But having them have different ECLs is also just a big hassle. Imagine something with LA +3 and 6 RHD reincarnated as something with only LA +2 and no RHD.

Also, can Outsiders even be reincarnated? I'm reasonably sure they can't. No body-soul dichotomy, and all that.

LordBlades
2011-03-04, 05:24 AM
True, same type as well.

But having them have different ECLs is also just a big hassle. Imagine something with LA +3 and 6 RHD reincarnated as something with only LA +2 and no RHD.

Also, can Outsiders even be reincarnated? I'm reasonably sure they can't. No body-soul dichotomy, and all that.

Native outsiders can]

From the SRD:



. An outsider with the native subtype can be raised, reincarnated, or resurrected just as other living creatures can be.

Firechanter
2011-03-04, 05:34 AM
You seem to think WBL as a given, MagicMart as existent. He seem to see wealth as in-game-rewards-as-they-make-sense and no MagicMart.

Yes I do. First of all it was a Forgotten Realms game. Secondly I do consider WBL not just a nice thing, but an integral part of D&D game balance, especially seeing that AC doesn't improve by itself. Actually I wasn't too badly affected since I was a Cleric. The Rogue was also well off because she was lucky with the item drops (Ring of Blinking by 7th level or so). But some other players were terribly under-equipped.

LordBlades
2011-03-04, 05:39 AM
Yes I do. First of all it was a Forgotten Realms game. Secondly I do consider WBL not just a nice thing, but an integral part of D&D game balance, especially seeing that AC doesn't improve by itself. Actually I wasn't too badly affected since I was a Cleric. The Rogue was also well off because she was lucky with the item drops (Ring of Blinking by 7th level or so). But some other players were terribly under-equipped.

that's the downside of random treasure. Some classes can use almost anything they find, while other classes need a very specialized set of gear.

Shademan
2011-03-04, 05:44 AM
this is just bad DM stories. here, have some DM blunders I've done:
draw maps on three pages, stat out tons of npc's. forget to drop the right clue on time, pc's never go there.

Make incredible awesome villain, forget him completely when session start and dont have him show up for any suiting session. remember him when the players have left the place.

and oh so many dumb things that happens when they go all over the place and I must improvise my ass off

Mastikator
2011-03-04, 05:59 AM
I did this:

Me: "As you open the gate you see a man inside, with blood on his clothes, he doesn't seem to notice you."
Player: "I call out to the man."
Me: "The zombie turns around, he looks pale."
Player: "So.. it's a zombie"
Me: ".... CRAP, I wasn't supposed to say THAT part... uhh, yeah, forget that last part, you don't know it's a zombie".

Firechanter
2011-03-04, 06:06 AM
Ah here's another Bad DM Story, though different game system, different DM.
First of all, in that setting there were White and Black Magicians, and also Druids, Witches, the works. What was common throughout all kinds was that iron was harmful to magic powers. So magic users of any kind could wear no metal armour or use heavy weapons because it would make them lose their powers.

We were playing a kind of PVP-Campaign with two DMs and two groups simultaneously, Goodies vs. Baddies. It was set up as a treasure hunt with horror elements, and could have been awesome. But this one (main) DM unfairly favoured the baddies all the time. For instance, there was this nice enough mercenary (a PC) who filled the archetype of walking armory. Then all of a sudden, a few weeks into the game, she turns into a real evil black magician.

Also, when the evil chars wanted to spy on the goodies, that was all fair game. But when the goodies tried to prevent being spied on, they were practically forbidden to do so. For instance, the morning after a horrible murder was discovered; someone had tied an NPC to a chair and practically extracted their brain with a tongue or something:
Me, to ally: "Let's go outside to talk."
DM: "It's raining outside. It would be bad RP to go out in the rain."

Then the evils decided to frame my character (I played a goodie rogue). My char had awesome magic resistance, it was practically impossible for any like-levelled spellcaster to enchant me. And yet, one day I woke up, all my stuff was gone, except for my dagger protruding from an ally's chest. This violated all the rules concerning enchantment/domination spells, starting at Spell Resistance and going through to illegal commands.

I pretty much lost interest in the campaign at that point. It had become obvious that the DM was willing to let the evils get away with anything, and barred any kind of precaution or retaliation from the goodies' side. So I and the other goodie player left, and as far as I know, the other players never continued, now that they were robbed of easy targets.

potatocubed
2011-03-04, 06:56 AM
I once instituted a house rule that it was a DC 10 Heal check to tell that someone at negative hit points was still alive.

That was un-instituted a session later after two party members were declared dead, their equipment looted, and their bodies slung through a nearby portal.

Oops. :smallredface:

Eldan
2011-03-04, 07:01 AM
Oh, come on, cubey. That's a perfect setup for either having them come back as vengeful undead or giving them a cool side quest.

Iceforge
2011-03-04, 07:16 AM
Here's the scene, an oWoD Vampire LARP that some friends are in. There are about 8 members of clan Tremere. 2 of them 5 dots in Occult. 3 of them have 4 dots in Occult. The remainder have 3 dots. (That's 31 total dots). In addition, they have 4 dots worth of the Occult Library background. Essentially, if it's in the Occult, these are the people who will know about it.

The Storyteller has them encounter a strange ocean spirit that offers to help them. They all check through their sources, because they all assume it's a demon. Note that this assumption is both in and out of character, because this storyteller loves demons. He tells them flat out that in all their study, they can conclude that it isn't a demon. The Tremere refuse its help anyway, because being occult experts, they know that nothing supernatural ever offers anything for free, there's always a price. Eventually, they're railroaded into accepting its help (another story entirely), and *gasp* it turns out that the spirit was a demon the whole time!

That game had a lot of stuff like that happen.

Just the concept "oWoD Vampire LARP" reminds me why I dont do LARPs anymore.

I only tried 1, so in all fairness, my view of them has been quite coloured by a single experience, but it was a terrible one.

The LARP was huge, loads of players and done in a "by night in the city" style, which meant we went anywhere in the city, and that aspect was actually done quite well, as we all knew to keep it down when there was lots of others around (as the storytellers said, it would break the masquerade if we didn't) and was rules about doing conflicts out in the open (no drawing our fake guns in a public parking lot in clear view to have a fake gunfight, we had to go somewhere more private)

Anyway, the LARP had 2 main storytellers and they had a group of assistants/NPC players, and then there was the friends of the storytellers (who they had LARPed and roleplayed with in general for a long time) and the rest (friends of their friends and so on)

I belonged in the group "the rest", I was invited along to the first session of the LARP by a friend, at the request of the storytellers, they had some last minut drop-outs and had some premade characters they needed some people to play, so I started up in the game by having to roleplay with a group of people I didnt know at all in advance and when I got my sheet, it clarified my character as being an *******, really, I am pretty sure it directly used that term for his personality towards the rest of his coterie.

I didnt get roleplaying experience the first time, but I could live with that, I was not comfortable to be an ******* towards people I didnt know at all the first time I meet them.

Other experience rewards was the meet-up xp and the location xp, each coterie had a location, an appartment of one of the players, usually, and seeing how the storytellers showed up at our appartment more than 1 hour earlier than the time we had been told, we hadn't finished decorating the place up, so no xp to us because we didn't decorate (we did, but they never came by to see it again)

Already that, seen in hindsight, is something I blame the storytellers for; Only one in my coterie knew them in the slightest in advance and when I later talked to my friend and got him to share details he didnt think was important and explained my point of view, their favourtism became very clear, because they, for instance, had storytellers and their NPCs come by about 10 times during the 2 days played that weekend.

But it got worse still; After the 2nd weekend of play, I requested if I could get a new character.
The reasoning was that 1 player left the coterie I was in to play in another coterie with a new character, and every single hook that interested me about the character I had been given was keyed to her character, and the rest didn't interest me in the slightest bit and the character was, in general, the manifestation of everything I did not want in a character.
They was very dissuasive about me changing (while their friend who had left the coterie had even designed her own character was just allowed to change and choose her new coterie, no problem, from how I understood it by talking to her later), and I was told I would have next to no influence on my new character, I said fine, figuring at worst, I could choose to discard it and cancel my participation in the LARP.

My new character, on paper, was severely less powerful, but the concept and everything was a lot more interesting, so I rolled with it and had a lot of fun, mostly because I was made the child of someone, not released yet, and that other player turned out to be a lot of fun, playing silly games with me as his pawn, which amused me (and frustrated my character) endlessly.

They did, however, screw me and my master (new arrival they knew a little bit) over royally, by making our characters very hardcore anti-magic, as in, we didn't belive anything supernatural or magical existed, very odd position for a vampire you might say, but we had fun with that, until they a few hours into the session introduced the idea that the only reason we young vampires was safe in this town was due to a magic barrier around the city, put up by mages, which would drive any elder vampires insane very quickly.

Such superstition cannot be useful, according to our characters, so before that weekend ended, we had taken down and broken the barrier, just to prove that it was not effective, ending in us being slaughtered the next weekend, or well, my sire was, but he showed a bit of honour, and released me just prior to his trial in the Elyssium, and as I was slavebound to him until then, I was freed for having been an unwilling participant in his games and I had just been obeying orders.

Then things took a real turn for the worse, as I know ended up in a coterie with nobody who knew the storytellers from anything else than this LARP and thats was when their allocation of time and their unfairness really started to show

Some werewolves was near the town, and for long reasons I don't care explain, my coterie went to talk with them, just talk, we drove out in cars to the forest in which the werewolves was in (having told the storytellers about this in advance as well) and then when we was out there, we send a text message to the storytellers about where we was and that we was calling on the werewolves, saying we wanted just to chat and didn't want to fight them.
After 10-15 minuts, we got a text message back, that we had all our clothes ripped, beaten to 1 health-level from dying and was told to never come bother them again and to tell the other vampires, and the next time a vampire showed himself out there, they would not show any mercy, it was added OOC that if we choose to go back there or lead anyone there, those who went there would die instantly
A fine opportunity for roleplay with a NPC or even a storyteller acting like an NPC, but we got short-changed with a text message, well, we went back to the Elyssium and told the warning to the rest who was there, a few wasn't.
Few hours later, one of the storytellers friends (my friend who got me into the game, actually) who had not been at the meeting, kidnapped one of the members from our coterie, forced him to help me go to the location in the forrest where we had found werewolves and he had a drawn shotgun, shouting for the werewolves to come out and talk with him (he was alone, bar our kidnapped coterie member, who was in his car)
The Storytellers now choose to let him wait 10 minuts (took 5 minuts to drive there), had 3 NPC's show up and a long diplomatic exchange ensured, during which he made alliance agreements with them without having any bargaining chips that we did not have and he was allowed to leave untouched, even through he wasn't able to hurt them and there was no reason the werewolves would be more inclined to like him more than us (actually, we had over 50% gangrels in our coterie, which should have given us an edge).

I quit the game after that session, when I had talked to my friend and he was even close to quiting too, once he understood just how unfairly those who didn't know the storytellers was threated, he was pretty shocked when he learned that i was on "no uncertain terms" that we had been told that if any of us ventured out there again, we would just die without even getting to roll or play out the combat, and he was not only left unharmed, but was given actual roleplaying and rewards for doing what would be instant death for us.



TL:DR Storytellers basicly only send txt messages to those who was not their friends out of game, and in same situations, spend resources when it was their friends, even when it had been made clear that their friend should have been killed on sight, and would have been killed on sight, had it been anyone else than one of their friends who had pulled that trick.

potatocubed
2011-03-04, 07:29 AM
Oh, come on, cubey. That's a perfect setup for either having them come back as vengeful undead or giving them a cool side quest.

It's true - turned out that one of the other things that they chucked through the portal in their drive to clean up was an unspeakably powerful artefact that they needed to do something else. (Which wasn't even me ret-conning - it had always been what it was.) So of course when they went to get it I had the dead party members show up to give them grief. =3

Leon
2011-03-04, 07:53 AM
Was just DM asshattery, especially since Reincarnation guidelines for non-humanoids state new body should have the same type.


Ultimately the DM says what works and what doesn't.
In the case of my Almost deer i wrangled the table back to 3.5 as the DM was using the 3.0 book and in the case of the Holy Badger Warrior the players result was a 100 - i the DM chose to roll on the 3.0 table

If the Gish wanted to be absolutely sure of what he'd come back as he shouldn't have skimped on the spell choice.


The Extremely blatant and obtuse railroading from our campaigns last game rates very highly as a serious DM blunder. We fought it every step of the way and as we overcame the barriers and restriction thrown up more and more high level spells suddenly appeared.
These include Prismatic walls and spheres, Mass Heals, Readied Disintegrates, Plot Rocks (seriously the ship we were on hit one and sank and the ship following us hit another and sank when we tried heading toward it).

This could all have been avoided by not letting us have a chance at rescuing our kidnapped party member and have us arrive at the docks to discover the ship already gone and force us to get aboard the other one - either way as its the other DM running it the main one is playing his Wizard PC who now has Teleport so we can go where we please and a vague open ended trip to south america doesn't suit us.

LordBlades
2011-03-04, 07:58 AM
Ultimately the DM says what works and what doesn't.
In the case of my Almost deer i wrangled the table back to 3.5 as the DM was using the 3.0 book and in the case of the Holy Badger Warrior the players result was a 100 - i the DM chose to roll on the 3.0 table

If the Gish wanted to be absolutely sure of what he'd come back as he shouldn't have skimped on the spell choice.




OF course, whatever the DM says goes. If he says too many stupid things, that includes the players (like in this case).

It was big, free and completely undeserved nerf for that character. The DM can say that rocks fall from the sky and kill your char no save, but that doesn't mean he should.

Totally Guy
2011-03-04, 08:07 AM
I committed a pretty crappy blunder...

The characters were Harris, a guard that had fled his city with his pregnant wife and Thel, an elf destined for darkness.

They were in an elf town and Polly the wife had gone into labour. Harris wanted to find a replacement midwife as the actual one, along with Thel had been caught up in a plot to frame some human soldiers that were visiting the town...

So Harris failed his roll and instead of a ready and willing midwife, he got a ready and willing witch. The witch placed a curse upon Polly, numbing her pain for now but manifesting itself as an aura of malevolence, dogs would bark at her, children would run and scream and worst of all... her baby would never love her.

Harris fell to his knees, "No! Take me instead!" I thought about it and thought that it'd be equally interesting to have the father as the curse victim.

So it was done.

But then, after Thel had resolved his human soldier situation, Thel came back.

Harris told him what had happened.

Thel fell to his knees, "No! Take me instead!"...

Really? The players said theat the curse was canonically transferrable and the witch was still there. So she moved the curse onto Thel.

It sucked, Thel wanted to have a badass power like that... The whole session had built up to that and then it lost all it's teeth and had no bite.

panaikhan
2011-03-04, 08:37 AM
The worst blunder I remember, was doing the treasure calculation wrong - back when people got XP for treasure...

The decimal point moved one place to the right, and everyone was rolling in money - apart from the Thief, who ended up 1XP short of levelling twice AND was rolling in money.

Iceforge
2011-03-04, 09:21 AM
OF course, whatever the DM says goes. If he says too many stupid things, that includes the players (like in this case).

It was big, free and completely undeserved nerf for that character. The DM can say that rocks fall from the sky and kill your char no save, but that doesn't mean he should.

Ultimately the point is that the player in question choose a spell giving a random body instead of an actual resurrect, and if they didn't want to take the risk associated with it, then thats tough.

The change of outsider nature was uncalled for through, as the spell should keep that unchanged as far as I understand/remember the rules?

Necro_EX
2011-03-04, 09:22 AM
Gather 'round fellows, and let me spin ye a tale.

This tale is of one Mr. Haynes, the world's worst DM.

Don't believe me? Necro, that's a rather bold statement you're making, eh?

Well, just gather round, sit down, and hold on to something dear to you, you'll need it.

This story begins some time back, in the mystical year 2009. You see, I was still working at Target at this time and met this fellow whom I was working with and we soon discovered we each had a certain love for DnD. What joy!

You see, until then, I had only done play by post and it simply isn't the same. So my coworker offered to DM for a local group, which we quickly assembled. The first time we sat down to play we found we had a lack of players...only myself and one other were present, so I was sort of forced into running two characters, which I wasn't yet comfortable with.

Oh, did I mention the 96 point buy (point-for point, too. D:)?
Well, we had a 96 point buy, and Mr. Haynes does not believe in level adjustments, so I made a centaur with most of those 96 points in his strength.
Austil was a monster.

So, the adventure begins and we have a centaur fighter, a tiefling rogue, and the other player had a pixie wizard. Then Mr. Haynes decided we should each have a mental disease (now, at this point you'd think we'd quit, but oh no...) and gives the pixie MPD. The other two didn't really have anything nearly as significant.

After stumbling about the town for a while we come to the tavern because that's just how adventures start, right? Here we meet the colonel. Yes, that colonel. Turns out he's a god because Austil couldn't touch him when he was making ridiculous demands of us.

After some over-embellishment on the drinks we were served we head off to go retrieve the colonel's spices which have been stolen. The first obstacle we come across is a sign-chest-thing that has been thrice-trapped. The rogue manages to get all but that last one, which had knock-out gas in it. Good thing nothing happened after that, so we just gathered up the goods and went on after waking back up. Oh, forgot to mention we had Wendy, yes that Wendy with us.

Next obstacle in our heroes' way? More traps.
Our centaur had been taking point (considering he had 30+ CON at level 5, why not? No way he could really be hurt by things at their level...
But you see, Wendy was on his back and quickly became as a pincushion for all those arrows.

A wee bit further in and we discover a pink turtle in the woods. Mr. Haynes rolls a d4 and decides that this personality of the pixie is Martha Stewart-lesbian-pixie, who is so freaking compelled by forces unknown to clean that turtle. So she does, and it grows to the size of a mountain, nearly crushing us all.

Then we left.

Now, we're coming close to our destination, whatever our destination was. Here we came into a room (well, we were still in the woods, but I guess the trees were real close to make the walls?) with several pits. We get to about the center of this and skeletons spring forth from it. Oh no, not skeletons.

The slaughter begins.
You see, when you have something like 50 strength and all you're fighting are the standard human warrior skeletons from MM1 it's not exactly much of a fight. The centaur just begins destroying everything, and the rogue ends up falling in one of the pits somehow...The centaur leaps to attack skeletons on the other side of one of these 15-foot wide pits and somehow fails even with his massive jump. Turns out to be the same pit, so we now have a crushed tiefling who happened to be carrying plenty of alchemist's fire, which promptly singed the centaur.

Climb out of the pit to discover we've come across the boss...who is also the DMPC.

A blue-haired vampire fighter wearing a long black coat and who wields a large greatsword that's chained to his arm so that he might throw it and pull it back. Oh, did I mention the sword also steals the ability scores of whatever it slays? Because it did that, too.

After promptly destroying this foe, oh wait...no, sure didn't.
Would have done enough damage with that charge, but he had the power of being the DMPC, so he didn't even notice and promptly knocked out the centaur.

Some time later he wakes up to find we're now allies, apparently.

Yeah, you'd think we'd never let him DM again, right?
His excuse for all this?
"Well, I didn't really take it seriously because there were only two of you."

I'll post the continued horror later, I need a shower after recanting that tale.

soir8
2011-03-04, 10:07 AM
DM: There's a stone door. It looks very solid.
Me: I cast Detect Magic.
DM: The door's not magical.
Me: Take 20 on a search?
DM: Can't find a lock, handle, any traps, any way of opening the door.
Other player (frenzied berserker): I smash it down using Destructive Rage.
DM: Ok, you try to break the door down, but you can barely chip the stone.
Me: What? He's using a huge adamantine maul! It ignores hardness below 20! It should go through a non-magical stone door like butter!
DM: Are you sure?
Me: Yes!
DM: Well, I'm not buying it. This is a 3-foot thick stone door.
Me: And he has a huge magical adamantine hammer and strength 32. And look, right there! 3 feet of stone is only hardness 8! It's right there, in the rules, that he should be able to smash through this door.
DM: Yeah, well, I'm just not buying it. You'll have to find some other way in.

Eventually we opened the door buy screwing around with a nearby sundial. It made no difference whatsoever to the game, apart from leaving the door intact. And the entire building was destroyed later that day anyway.

I know ultimately the DM makes the rules, but can anyone see the point in the above bit of fiat? Apart from depriving the poor Frenzied Berserker from one of his few areas of usefulness outside of killing things (smashing things)?

Lilithgow
2011-03-04, 10:30 AM
In my first campaign, my friends and I were tasked with removing some upstart cultists. You know the kind, wear dresses, carry knives and chant about things.
So, we got down to it, cutting a swathe through them, with my cleric of St Cuthburt shouting that they were cowards for their underhand tactics and how Justice (The capital J is important) would be done.
But these were cunning cultists, see they knew they couldn't just kill people, that would have been hard so had whipped up some disease to ravage the villages and towns around them. Unsurprisingly, smashing our way through their very unclean and unscientific cave, my fellows and I contracted their plague!

So, as a 5th level Cleric, I cast remove disease.

It didn't work. Why?

Because it doesn't.

Because I was now a tiny human cleric in a birdcage.

Yeah.

WarKitty
2011-03-04, 10:30 AM
- "A natural 1 in combat is always a Fumble." When a 1 showed, we'd either hit an ally (who sometimes was permitted a Reflex save to dodge) or drop our weapon if nobody was in range.

Done this one as a DM. It seems really cool and fun until you play with it for a bit. After one session of singeing off several of my druid character's few hit points (low con) because I rolled badly in a tough fight, I got tired of the rule.


Uhm, this is not bad DM-ing. At the most it is a case of comunication failure. You and your DM just had different expectations.
You seem to think WBL as a given, MagicMart as existent. He seem to see wealth as in-game-rewards-as-they-make-sense and no MagicMart.
Both are equally valid ways to play the game.
Besides, the rarity of mithril or anything else is a setting detail. You can cite rulebooks all you want, if in the Setting of your DM mithril is ultra-rare, then it is.
Of course you can question his motives, and ask if he had considered the consequences for certain character builds.

I think many of the problems in games stem from a lack of communication before the game starts. If I'm going to do a no MagicMart game, I tell my players beforehand so they can take craft feats (PF allows substitution of skill ranks for caster levels with a feat).


DM: There's a stone door. It looks very solid.
Me: I cast Detect Magic.
DM: The door's not magical.
Me: Take 20 on a search?
DM: Can't find a lock, handle, any traps, any way of opening the door.
Other player (frenzied berserker): I smash it down using Destructive Rage.
DM: Ok, you try to break the door down, but you can barely chip the stone.
Me: What? He's using a huge adamantine maul! It ignores hardness below 20! It should go through a non-magical stone door like butter!
DM: Are you sure?
Me: Yes!
DM: Well, I'm not buying it. This is a 3-foot thick stone door.
Me: And he has a huge magical adamantine hammer and strength 32. And look, right there! 3 feet of stone is only hardness 8! It's right there, in the rules, that he should be able to smash through this door.
DM: Yeah, well, I'm just not buying it. You'll have to find some other way in.

Eventually we opened the door buy screwing around with a nearby sundial. It made no difference whatsoever to the game, apart from leaving the door intact. And the entire building was destroyed later that day anyway.

I know ultimately the DM makes the rules, but can anyone see the point in the above bit of fiat? Apart from depriving the poor Frenzied Berserker from one of his few areas of usefulness outside of killing things (smashing things)?

It's tempting. I got to admit, I pulled a few pointless fiats in my early DM'ing days because I "didn't want to make the game too easy." Including one fairly similar to this - although I was actually within the rules there, as a normal steel sword shouldn't do anything to a stone wall.

Firechanter
2011-03-04, 10:54 AM
Yeah "unbreakable doors" have been the cause of frustration and amusement alike. Like that one time (third party anecdote), when a DM in a Dark Sun game didn't want his players to just smash down a door, he made it of solid iron. Those of you who know the Dark Sun setting will immediately guess what happened... to those that don't, be informed that iron is in Dark Sun what adamantine is in a normal D&D game: extremely scarce and valuable (most weapons and armour are made of organic materials or bronze).

When the party eventually got that door open using the method prescribed by the DM, they ignored the dungeon beyond, unhinged the door and dragged it back to down. Some 1600 pounds of iron were a bigger prize than they could have gotten from some shabby dungeon monsters anway. :smallamused:

I took heed to that lesson. When one day in a Shadowrun game the GM decreed that the target property was fenced with monowire (about 1000 Nuyen per metre or so, military hardware), I quickly ran a back of the envelope calculation and said "Screw that run, we're just stealing their fence." XD (Of course we did do the run, but the GM took some notes about managing resources, so it was good for something.)

gourdcaptain
2011-03-04, 11:37 AM
He's an awesome player (great roleplayer although he does tend to try and domintate most RP encounters and great optimizer) but probably the suckyest DM I've ever seen.

Whenever he DM's he turns to a 'me vs. players' mentality and he just stops being reasonable.

I think I have that problem running D&D. My one attempt to run D&D (4e Tomb of Horrors) ended after I was too hard on the players and TPK'd them twice. And I thought it was excessive even by the standards of that (brutal by 4e standards) module. I've pretty much refrained from DM'ing since except for Paranoia (where my urges are perfectly natural and ordinary.) I'm not the worst DM I've ever played under, but I go somewhere I'm not comfortable with afterwards.

EDIT: After the 1st TPK, the rematch had a character awakening latent optimizing talents and held off the Boss from hell (A Solo Lamia and 3 bug swarms from hell somewhat lethal for its level of low paragon) for about ten rounds with a controller build. Seriously, the effectiveness of his builds before and after is like he awakened some sort of latent mutant power.

Cartigan
2011-03-04, 11:43 AM
Tomb of Horrors is "kill everyone to death" even in 4e. Or maybe that's our DM, he always makes up weird stuff on the fly. But there was some messed up stuff in the Tomb that would kill an unprepared and unwitting thrice over regardless of DM.
We managed to escape 2 TPKs out of sheer luck and the obstinacy of certain characters (which itself almost caused one of the two). Maybe 3.

WarKitty
2011-03-04, 11:53 AM
Eh, my worst one?

Not realizing how long combat takes. We were there for four hours fighting off a single pack of wolves.

I'm a little surprised they all came back.

Barbin
2011-03-04, 12:11 PM
I never had really bad DMs, but this has to take the cake. (He was a replacement DM.)

DM: You see two signs on the road: one reads " Waterfall", the other one reads "Peaceful Village", but three claw marks scar the sign. What do you do?

Ranger: I slowly move into the woods around us and inspect them.

DM: You can't, the woods are too thick and you see many red eyes looking at you.

Everyone: :smallannoyed:

McSmack
2011-03-04, 12:33 PM
Back in the day when I was throwing stock at Ye Olde Wal-Mart for a living. I ran with a coworker in her husband's game. Nice couple but the man had no concept of game balance. Got more than two levels in a given class? Get a bonus feat every two levels. Have a written character bio? Two free feats! Max HP for all! Empower/Maximize Spell-Like Ability with unlimited uses! Double WBL! It was an evil campaign so I settled on a pixie warlock. I stayed invisible the entire time, riding on top of the red dragon skeleton I'd animated. I had max ranks in Perform (ventriloquism) and bluff, so I convinced the entire party that I was a dracolich. I'd use my eldrich cone as a breath weapon. Well, they soon realized I was too powerful and decided to off my character, so they sent the rogue and the fighter in with a mace of disruption to put me down. After that I was the ghost of the dracolich and I had two new undead minions. After I killed off the rest of the party and the army of paladins he threw at me we decided to call it quits. I had to explain to him why you don't do things like that with the rules.

GeminiVeil
2011-03-04, 12:47 PM
After reading all these, I felt compelled to write my own. I think the worst blunders ever for me have happened with a particular DM, I'll call Z.
There was a game in oWoD, me and a friend were playing a Malk (the same Malk. MPD.) and it was pretty much the one of us. We try to break into this base of some kind on a mission from our Sire. We made the guy very much to be physically weak. But he had a lot of mental stuff to throw around. The first floor is mostly humans, which with our obfuscate and my Dementation, we dispatch a little too quick for Z's liking. His answer? Ok, now everything on te next floor is a robot. Obfuscate? Only on living minds. Dementation/Dominate? Yeah, same thing. And our 1 STR really isn't doing to do anything. We consider quitting this job, then, for some reason, the Rank 5 Garou who was the person who requested our Sire do this mission starts ripping up the robots, gets us to the BBEG and his pet. For some reason, he allowed someone else to make his pet, which was apparently an Abomination that not only had come to terms with his Undead state, but was clearly taking no penalties for it considering the massive array of gifts, one of which was "any mental power used against you is always Diff 10".
Z's DMPC then rips the only weapon that can hurt said pet away from someone in the room (no I don't know why they had the ultimate weapon against him in the same room as him) and proceeds to slay said pet while me and friend sit there and watch Z pretty much talk to himself for a half hour about how the game ends. :smallannoyed:
I'll make a seperate post for the DND game he ran us through.

GeminiVeil
2011-03-04, 01:03 PM
Ok, back to Z.
In the DND game he ran for us, we awoke in a Tower. No mention of how, of course. We were on the top floor, and the exit was on the bottom. There was a magical ward on every level that needed two keys or sigils to get past.
Not bad so far. But the big problems were some of the rulings he made. Like you can get more than just 2 rings if you are willing to have them attatched to various body parts. (i.e. toe rings, tongue rings, ear rings, etc.) I try not to abuse it and only get a tongue ring. Another player goes to town and looks a little like a chain mail Golem or something.
Then he informs us that in his world, Enhancement bonuses will stack as long as not from the same source. This one, I admit, I kind of go to town on since this is something my character would do. Which leads me to having a Monk that has an AC of something like 10 times his lvl. (we started at lvl 5 and ended at lvl 23-24)
Oh, but how am I buying all my equipment you might ask? Well, Z (after specifically asked not to do this to which he agreed) inserted a DMPC into the group with an ability to summon an interdimensional shop run by a Djinn. He has many rare and powerful items in his shops.
He was running the same campaign with another group. They were good character, we were evil. We were told that at the end, we could have an Epic Battle, just for laughs. That never happened.
He also seemed to have something out for my brother, killing him in almost every battle. The combined deaths of every person, including the good party, except for him, was something like 20-25. His death count? (yes, he actually kept track) Was around 75.
He overpowered his own wish spell, saying that through wishes the people of this tower were able to give it an internal substructure over the entire inside of starmetal. Which I have to admit I abused that too.
But I think the worst thing (especially since we had a new DNDer with us) was that he kept making stuff up and swearing "it is in a book somewhere, I just don't remember where." I have no problem with a DM using homebrew, often it's the best course. But when you are saying it IS the rules and not just YOUR rules, I start having a problem. So I call him on several, of course he can't find them. So I use his rule about "if you use something, show me where you got it from" against him (just cause I was ticked about the lying about it being in a book) and ask him to find it. He can't, so all 3 of us claim he can't use it. Not really expecting to get anywhere or anything. He then removes it and instead, for no real logic I can see, gives whatever character at the time like 30 bonus spells or something 'to make up the differance.'
Yeah, we don't let him DM anymore.

Hazzardevil
2011-03-04, 02:02 PM
Back in the day when I was throwing stock at Ye Olde Wal-Mart for a living. I ran with a coworker in her husband's game. Nice couple but the man had no concept of game balance. Got more than two levels in a given class? Get a bonus feat every two levels. Have a written character bio? Two free feats! Max HP for all! Empower/Maximize Spell-Like Ability with unlimited uses! Double WBL! It was an evil campaign so I settled on a pixie warlock. I stayed invisible the entire time, riding on top of the red dragon skeleton I'd animated. I had max ranks in Perform (ventriloquism) and bluff, so I convinced the entire party that I was a dracolich. I'd use my eldrich cone as a breath weapon. Well, they soon realized I was too powerful and decided to off my character, so they sent the rogue and the fighter in with a mace of disruption to put me down. After that I was the ghost of the dracolich and I had two new undead minions. After I killed off the rest of the party and the army of paladins he threw at me we decided to call it quits. I had to explain to him why you don't do things like that with the rules.

Wow, that's really cool.

In my first ever DND game, (4E this is partly because of my explicit loathing of it,) Me and a friend where just starting.
The DM, (I'll call him Bob cos that's not his name,)
Said: You see an old man in the distance,

Steve, (A friend who's playing a dwarf ranger or some other combination that makes no sense in RP terms, I'm playing an elf cleric with a rapier,):
I go over...

Bob:You go over to the old man and he tells you,
Some Kobolds stole my walking stick and I need you to get it back,

Me: But you're carrying a walking stick there!

Bob: You travel for many days and many nights to a cave, you can't take your horse in and you travel through a door. Some Kobolds leap out at you and you engage in combat,

Roll initiative,

Me: I move forward and cast,

Bob: Use,

Me: use, Searing Light,

Bob: you don't roll damage they only have 1 hp and either way they take damage,

Steve: I move back,

Bob: you Can't your standing by the wall.

Steve: I move forward and use...

(I flick trhough teh book to find the name of his power,)

Me: Dual strike,

Steve: Dual strike,

Me: So it dies,

Bob: Yes

Repeat for 5 mins,

Bob: you win,

Me: Really? no ****

Steve: what do we get?

Bob: a bottle of water, a holy symbol of bahamut and a collosol warhammer.

Me: so a bottle of water I have plenty of, a holy symbol of teh god that opposes my own and a warhammer that I couldn't hit the side of a barn wall with.

Bob: You go back to the man and give him teh stick,

Me: We didn't find a stick!

Bob: It's in his back pocket.

Steve: Harry, Kill me now,

Me: I take 20 on an attack roll to attack steve with my rapier.
I roll a d6, I took 20 so I can try to confirm,
i take 20 on that too, thats what, 20 damage? Thats more than double his HP,

I now pray to my god to kill me.

Bob: No answers,

Me: I pray to my god to create a huge pit for me to shove the old man in.

Bob: She does so,

Me: I shove the old man in and jummp down after him.

Now we are both dead.

Bob: a cleric comes along and revives you both,

Me: I do the same 10 times,

Bob: you get revived 10 times,

Me: you can't I have no con score left, I can't be raised.

After that I have never played dnd with ihm since.

Firechanter
2011-03-04, 02:08 PM
Haha. The reminds me of a communal blunder in my aforementioned D&D group. None of us, neither DM nor any player including me, had realized that ability-boosting items (like Gloves of Ogre Power) have a named bonus, i.e. Enhancement. So we happily kept stacking Gloves of Ogre Power with a Belt of Giant Strength and a Bull's Strength spell on top, and if applicable, Divine Power too. Analogous for the other abilities; Dex gloves and Cat's Grace etc.

In fact, it was only pointed out to me last year that items give a named bonus. I guess I never saw it sooner because I played too much NWN, where item bonuses are unnamed.

huttj509
2011-03-04, 02:28 PM
Yeah "unbreakable doors" have been the cause of frustration and amusement alike. Like that one time (third party anecdote), when a DM in a Dark Sun game didn't want his players to just smash down a door, he made it of solid iron. Those of you who know the Dark Sun setting will immediately guess what happened... to those that don't, be informed that iron is in Dark Sun what adamantine is in a normal D&D game: extremely scarce and valuable (most weapons and armour are made of organic materials or bronze).

When the party eventually got that door open using the method prescribed by the DM, they ignored the dungeon beyond, unhinged the door and dragged it back to down. Some 1600 pounds of iron were a bigger prize than they could have gotten from some shabby dungeon monsters anway. :smallamused:

I took heed to that lesson. When one day in a Shadowrun game the GM decreed that the target property was fenced with monowire (about 1000 Nuyen per metre or so, military hardware), I quickly ran a back of the envelope calculation and said "Screw that run, we're just stealing their fence." XD (Of course we did do the run, but the GM took some notes about managing resources, so it was good for something.)


In a similar shadowrun vein, group was on a run, and found a bunch of crates (it was a warehouse). Fine. What's in the crates? Weapons.

After the amount they made off of selling those weapons, all crates are now full of anvils. Just anvils.

There's even "Mario's 'mobbed up' pizza and anvil delivery service" as to where all the anvils come from.

DaragosKitsune
2011-03-04, 02:29 PM
Mine had to be a pack of 10 wolves against 4 first level PC's who were new to the game. It was less painful when I let them redo it after the two late players showed up.

obliged_salmon
2011-03-04, 03:46 PM
Thel fell to his knees, "No! Take me instead!"...

Really? The players said theat the curse was canonically transferrable and the witch was still there. So she moved the curse onto Thel.

It sucked, Thel wanted to have a badass power like that... The whole session had built up to that and then it lost all it's teeth and had no bite.

Yeah, can't let 'em weasel you like that. They have to EARN their victories.

As for me, I've done countless crappy things. The worst is probably in a Serenity game, the party was hired by a guy to rob a mining consortium office building. The guy came along, and when they got to the meeting where the cash was being handed over, he jumps in the door and has a five minute conversation with the people at the meeting without letting any of the party say or do anything.

Fortunately, the previous combat, where I had planned for him to take out all the security people, instead he got shot twice in the first round and fell unconscious.

You live, you learn.

Totally Guy
2011-03-04, 04:01 PM
Yeah, can't let 'em weasel you like that. They have to EARN their victories.

You live, you learn.

Damn right!

Firechanter
2011-03-04, 04:17 PM
Heh... reminds me of a Star Trek online rpg I once participated in, many years ago... one week, we have a new player, his character being the science officer or somesuch. He also offered to GM that week's session to introduce his character, which we accepted.
(Note: I was kind of "deputy GM" to the founder GM of that group. In this kind of game, the GM plays the Captain of a ship, so he can give out mssions and limit his own involvement to saying "Make it so.")

It was all a big joke. Mary Sue in purest perfection, only I didn't know the term Mary Sue back then. The mission as such wouldn't have been half bad - Borg abducted an officer and were going to assimilate her - if we had gotten to _do_ anything. But what happened was that our new officer Mac-so-and-so solved it all by himself, i.e. as GM he presented the obstacles and as PC he overcame them, no matter how much they would have been someone else's job. When "we" had recovered the missing officer she was down and out, and we wanted to take her to sickbay so at least our M.O. would get to remove the nanites that the Borg had obviously injected, in short, do something.
No, the Gary-Stu said, it's not nanites, it's poison. (Which caused the setting-savvy players to go WTF, since when do Borg use poison?) And he treated it. Perfect success, of course. End of adventure.

Needless to say, we never let that guy GM again. I don't even remember if he kept playing with us. But that was the story.

Angry Bob
2011-03-04, 05:28 PM
I also had one I did myself, fortunately it wasn't in a real game - it would have been my second time running a game and I wanted to playtest a dungeon I'd designed.

Everything went fine until the final boss, where I realized something was wrong when the boss' faceless minions had more class levels than the PCs. Needless to say, they got deleveled for the final version.

Vknight
2011-03-04, 05:29 PM
Yeah, you might want to worry more about that four year age difference than about your friend's DMing style.

Not that worried actually its a big difference now but it is the same difference as my Parents. Also she is neutral towards him so I know he won't succed. This is based on past experience.

Pisha
2011-03-04, 07:17 PM
Just the concept "oWoD Vampire LARP" reminds me why I dont do LARPs anymore.

...

TL:DR Storytellers basicly only send txt messages to those who was not their friends out of game, and in same situations, spend resources when it was their friends, even when it had been made clear that their friend should have been killed on sight, and would have been killed on sight, had it been anyone else than one of their friends who had pulled that trick.

Oh good lord sir. That is TERRIBLE. Please don't give up on larps - there are better groups! Better rules! (Like, ALL of them!)

The New Bruceski
2011-03-04, 07:59 PM
I never had really bad DMs, but this has to take the cake. (He was a replacement DM.)

DM: You see two signs on the road: one reads " Waterfall", the other one reads "Peaceful Village", but three claw marks scar the sign. What do you do?

Ranger: I slowly move into the woods around us and inspect them.

DM: You can't, the woods are too thick and you see many red eyes looking at you.

Everyone: :smallannoyed:

Who makes signs like that anyway? Maybe in some sort of thief or traveler code, but on a legit sign? Point them to Hope Falls and Shady Glen -- visitors welcome.

As for DM blunders, there would be the time one of our DMs kept reading the Dire Bear entry from the MM instead of normal bears. One-shotted me (the defender) and I didn't even blink because I'd been dying all game from my own stupid stuff.

For my own, it would be ages ago in 2ed when I put the party against a couple of 5th level rogues and played them like idiots. I assumed that the XP for killing a classed NPC would be equal to the XP they needed to reach that level. Of course this was back when I'd spend plane trips mapping a dungeon on an entire sheet of graph paper, and then place monsters by filling every square with goblins or orcs. I was not a good DM, but at 15-ish, who is?

Fiery Diamond
2011-03-04, 08:05 PM
Not that worried actually its a big difference now but it is the same difference as my Parents. Also she is neutral towards him so I know he won't succed. This is based on past experience.


Uh... there is a huge difference between 4 years apart when the younger person is already an adult or in the upper teens and 4 years apart when the younger person is 12 or 13.

For the record: my parents are five years apart, but I think a 17 year old trying to date a 12 year old is repulsive.

Iceforge
2011-03-04, 09:50 PM
Oh good lord sir. That is TERRIBLE. Please don't give up on larps - there are better groups! Better rules! (Like, ALL of them!)

Unfortunately not.

Im not keen on the idea of Fantasy LARPs, and unless I go for a 4˝ hour train travel each way, those same 2 people are involved in organizing every single vampire LARP.

I tried scouting for it, but except that far away, there is nothing.

I might give it a go some time again in the future, if something comes up and there are others organizing it, but not something I am actively looking for.

I dont think they are bad people nor that they didn't care, they just got involved with too many projects, resulting in when they had to do planning, they didnt have time to do enough of it and then the priority is their friends, obviously.

I just dont like being an obvious secondary character to someone elses show in such a blatantly obvious way.

Just to add, wasn't only one who felt that way, all but 1 member of my last coterie (4 out of 5, that is) left early that session, like me, and stopped participating following that incident.

I think the part that makes me unwilling to ever play under those 2 again is that they was so in denial that they had the odacity to call us unreasonable and childish for our way of acting.

Oh, the childish part because paying for the LARP was done at the end and none of us felt like giving them money after being screwed over.

I dont doubt they are nice guys, and put a lot of effort into it, I just belonged to the group of people who didn't benifit from their efforts and I think they just felt they had put so much effort into all of it, that they refused to accept that they had made any mistakes, I can see their perspective as well, just dont agree with it

Vknight
2011-03-04, 09:52 PM
Uh... there is a huge difference between 4 years apart when the younger person is already an adult or in the upper teens and 4 years apart when the younger person is 12 or 13.

For the record: my parents are five years apart, but I think a 17 year old trying to date a 12 year old is repulsive.

Not saying I approve of his methods just pointing out in 5-9years it would be acceptable.

Also I worry not because she is neutral towards him meaning one of the following.
1) She knows and does not have the heart to tell him
2) She does not know and would not care
3) She is annoyed at his antics and if they continue may leave

Also any girl that he has tried to go with before has failed because of his personal views along with family views and other things. So he will either admit get snubbed and he will then go for a new girl or stop trying to get a girlfriend for the next few weeks.

Sith_Happens
2011-03-05, 03:53 AM
Try playing with a DM who fails you when rolling a 1 on Skill Checks.

...Try a DM who forces your character to attempt to impale himself on a golem's arm because you rolled a 1 on a Knowledge: (Arcana) check. Yes, you read that right. The excuse was that "you think the golem is an illusion that can only be dispelled by impaling yourself on it," and apparently "I continue fighting the 'illusion' as before" was not a valid player response. The DM then rolled percentiles to see whether said character immediately died due to impaling himself. The character ended up *only* being stunned for three rounds.

And at the end of that encounter rules that the frenzied berserker's +3 greatsword flies out of his hands and shatters against a wall because he rolled a 1 on a leap attack.

Oh, and the reason that player was playing a frenized berserker was because when, a few sessions previously, his Scout rolled a 1 on a will save vs. Detect Thoughts, the DM decided that he lost his Dexterity bonus to AC against the Rakshasa rogue the party was fighting (because he's reading your mind so well that he knows how you're about to dodge).

Thankfully I myself am not in the campaign where the above occured, but just being there and hearing all of that makes me :smallfurious::smallfurious::smallfurious:.

PersonMan
2011-03-05, 06:02 AM
I was not a good DM, but at 15-ish, who is?

I like to think that I am.

Although, in the beginning my games were horribly unbalanced-I decided that the stat bonuses were too low, so every one point above 12 was a +1. Stats were rolled with a d20. The cap on skill ranks? Gone. So you'd have level 2 rogues with 40+ranks in Hide and Move Silently.

We hardly played, which was probably good because none of us(the rest of my group was as inexperienced as I was) knew about LA, RHD, etc.(well, we'd just drop RHD) This resulted in all sorts of craziness, mostly from me, like a half-minotaur half-mind flayer hybrid. In a party of eight, including two DMPCs. Just about the only thing that any of us really did right was the way the DM played them...

However, after I met up with some swedes(who I'd still be playing with if I hadn't moved) who played with the actual rules that changed.


Oh, and the reason that player was playing a frenized berserker was because when, a few sessions previously, his Scout rolled a 1 on a will save vs. Detect Thoughts, the DM decided that he lost his Dexterity bonus to AC against the Rakshasa rogue the party was fighting (because he's reading your mind so well that he knows how you're about to dodge).

That actually sounds reasonable, if it's mentioned at the beginning of a campaign.

Although, I'd probably say that they only lose half of their bonus, rather than the whole one.

Telasi
2011-03-05, 07:06 AM
After the 1st TPK, the rematch had a character awakening latent optimizing talents and held off the Boss from hell (A Solo Lamia and 3 bug swarms from hell somewhat lethal for its level of low paragon) for about ten rounds with a controller build. Seriously, the effectiveness of his builds before and after is like he awakened some sort of latent mutant power.

That was a good fight, even if we did lose hard.

My own greatest failure as a DM was immediately after gourdcaptain's Tomb of Horrors game. After the double TPK, I offered to run the drow campaign I'd had bouncing around my head. Big mistake in a 4e group. The players went for it, resulting in a party that consisted of one psycho, one lunatic, and four people who missed the point of playing a drow campaign in the underdark. The campaign probably could have survived the odd party, but I made the mistake of fully exploiting the drow cloud of darkness ability and the monster builder tools WotC made. The result tended to be fights drawn out by dazing and mass blind effects (I was still on a bit of a power trip from the controller mentioned above). Coupled with some questionable rulings on my part that resulted in an apparent death by drowning, a general party morality inhospitable to drow society (I swear that the priestess was CG), and general frustration, the campaign was pretty much doomed. I tried to compensate by moving the party to Skullport and changing up the enemies a bit more, but it was too little, too late.

Lessons learned: 4e is not the edition to do a campaign focused on a party of one race. Mass dazing and blindness are not fun for the players. I should not try to run 4e like I would 2e or 3.x; it gets very ugly, very quickly.

mint
2011-03-05, 07:56 AM
This turned out to have fun and awesome consequences but it was a patently bad idea.

I was playing a Sorcerer. DM ruled I could do the kobold rituals to improve my casting because it fit the setting and my character, who had a gold dragon heritage. He was a noble brat and kind of a twink.
Anyway, we were at the centre of the earth chilling with some norns and we got to ask them a question each that the DM then translated in to a campaign specific power.
Everyone asked serious, well roleplayed questions that were poignant and it was a nice bunch of moments. Then my char asked, "Will I... ever feel rich enough?"
In a vision he then saw himself with a vault of untold size, full of jewels, gold and magic. And felt, "well... no I probably won't"
The effect of my question was that whatever gold I got, it was always 10 times as valuable however I had to put half of it towards my hoard.

BG
2011-03-05, 05:02 PM
Unfortunately not.

That's too bad. My college had a relatively large gaming group, and every year there was a different LARP run by different people(it was nice having each LARP be a self-contained thing, it gave structure to the story). Most of them were really good, except for the one run by the guy who just looooooved him some infernalism.

One of my friends was playing a Tremere in the bad year, and decided to be based around bio-thaum. It's what he put most of his discipline dots and experience. Over the course of the entire LARP, he was allowed to use bio-thaum exactly twice. The first time, it told him about a vampiric drug, but his use of bio-thaum told him less about it than a straight science roll. The second time, he used it to create a two-headed guard dog that the Storyteller ruled was weaker than a regular guard dog.

That character was later killed by weresharks (yes, weresharks) because he tried to use a bio-thaum power that mimicked majesty. The Storyteller ruled that while frenzying, social and mental disciplines didn't work on the weresharks. Said Storyteller also believed that 3 weresharks were apparently an appropriate match for two 11th Gen characters.

gourdcaptain
2011-03-05, 05:29 PM
The players went for it, resulting in a party that consisted of one psycho, one lunatic, and four people who missed the point of playing a drow campaign in the underdark.

Just like how there are people incapable of playing lawful characters, there are some people who can't play evil and not feel bad about it. The guy playing the cleric was one of those. Heck, I went a bit far with the psycho and it threw me off a bit one night.


The campaign probably could have survived the odd party, but I made the mistake of fully exploiting the drow cloud of darkness ability and the monster builder tools WotC made. The result tended to be fights drawn out by dazing and mass blind effects (I was still on a bit of a power trip from the controller mentioned above).
Okay, I understand how cloud of darkness messed things up, but what did the monster builder do?


Lessons learned: 4e is not the edition to do a campaign focused on a party of one race. Mass dazing and blindness are not fun for the players. I should not try to run 4e like I would 2e or 3.x; it gets very ugly, very quickly.
I'd argue that Drow racial abilities are pretty much one of the few cases where running a party of one race is a problem (if you allow more flexible racial stats like you did). Stuff like Humans, elves, half elves, and such aren't going to mess up a campaign as much.

Vknight
2011-03-05, 05:35 PM
Drow equals things that can happen that should not leading to bad results if players are not ready or willing.

In this case it seems there may have been bad communication between players and Dm

gourdcaptain
2011-03-05, 05:58 PM
Drow equals things that can happen that should not leading to bad results if players are not ready or willing.

In this case it seems there may have been bad communication between players and Dm

Nah, in this case we're refering to Cloud of Darkness spam - someone uses cloud of darkness, denying someone else the ability to do anything effective (blinded), so they cloud of darkness to mess over the guy who clouded them... and soon you're spending three rounds a combat with everyone blind, and blocking line of sight so the archers/ranged spellcasters can't target. I have never seen a 4e game before where Blind Fight would have been incredibly valuable - if the blind fight feat available at heroic/paragon didn't appear until after the campaign was over.

Also - one of the things that probably threw the campaign off was someone who was a bit chaotic declaring single combat against a monster, I sneak over with my assassin and stab it to help him out... and then he attacks me. I defend myself, kill the PC in the process (double lucky crit, striker vs defender), and it kinda went downhill from there. I'd been going along with the party by playing the psychotic assassin who was incredibly loyal to his fellow adventurers, and when trust was broken he struck back at the one who broke it. Telasi wasn't entirely responsible for that trainwreck.

EDIT: We did also end the campaign when it became entirely obvious it wasn't working. Beats riding it to the inevitable horrible breakdown - I probably kept some friends due to that. And now Telasi runs PF in person - a game which fits his DM personality type a LOT better.

Vknight
2011-03-05, 06:26 PM
Ah that makes sense. Also that is really saddening. You always try to keep trust or the players go out of there way to kill each other.

For a GourdCaptain Perception DC: 55
Also Gourd how is that Xen-drik campaign on the forums your in going

Sine
2011-03-05, 06:51 PM
How about we collect some stories of terrible DM calls?
"Hey guys, let's play an epic campaign, that'll be fun!"

My bad.

Claudius Maximus
2011-03-05, 06:57 PM
The very first time I DMed a real game, I gave the party a bag of devouring at level one. I then threw a Balor at them, which I assumed (incorrectly, of course) they would run from. They threw the bag at the Balor, rolled a 20, and after some argument convinced me that it ate the Balor's head.

Since I didn't know about that one rule, they all leveled up to like 7th immediately, throwing my (terrible, railroady) campaign completely off the rails.

Evil DM Mark3
2011-03-05, 07:36 PM
Man do I ever have a tale of terrible DMship for you.

When the team received it's mission, not only was the briefing clear and carefully thought out, but it was in an easily accessible location and the goals where even obtainable in a sane manner.

He went out of his way to reward co-operation and make the challenges difficult but obtainable.

We never even got up the panic tried to murder each other to save our own asses.

I used my experimental prototype equipment several times without dieing in a senseless manner.

Did I mention we where playing Paranoia. That is kinda important.

Telasi
2011-03-05, 08:04 PM
Just like how there are people incapable of playing lawful characters, there are some people who can't play evil and not feel bad about it. The guy playing the cleric was one of those. Heck, I went a bit far with the psycho and it threw me off a bit one night.

Okay, I understand how cloud of darkness messed things up, but what did the monster builder do?

I'd argue that Drow racial abilities are pretty much one of the few cases where running a party of one race is a problem (if you allow more flexible racial stats like you did). Stuff like Humans, elves, half elves, and such aren't going to mess up a campaign as much.

Yeah, but I probably should have predicted that problem from the start.

Not so much what the builder did as what I did with it. I went a bit overboard with customizing things. Ironically, the things that were most complained about were standard monsters, but my point stands.

Fair point.

Firechanter
2011-03-05, 08:28 PM
Ah, I just remembered another instance of terrible DMing which, luckily, I didn't have to experience myself but only heard about:

The party stumbles upon a cave which they know to be the entrance to the dungeon they need to explore. They enter. A single goblin is inside, the cave is obvously his domicile. One of the PCs, a gnome iirc, immediately attacks (because the player, a rookie, thought that gnomes hated goblins with a passion and would always attack on sight) and slays the goblin with ease.
Then they search the cave, for the MacGuffin they're after, for secret doors, anything. They find nothing. They know they are at the right place and search again. Repeat. They keep turning over every pebble in that cave for two or three frickin hours - real OOC time - before they finally give up. Nothing can be found and they have to abort.

Then the session's over and the the DM reveals: there was a secret door, with a DC so high they could never find it. It could only be revealed and opened by a command word. Which only the slain goblin knew. They were not supposed to kill the gobbo.

So, the DM knew _exactly_ at the very moment that the goblin dropped that the players would never, ever progress an inch further. And yet he said nothing and let them grope about and have them waste three hours of precious game time, with absolutely no fun for any player. That's what I call a major DM ... blunder.

Any of the following would have been better:
- have the PCs find the goblins diary from which they could derive a clue about the nature of the secret door and what the command word was. (This would be what I would have done)
- simply lower the frickin DC so that the rogue could find it. (Of course this would have been a bit boring since they could just take 20)
- or if not willing to accomodate the players, call of the session then and there. "Sorry guys, hate to break it to you but you can't solve the quest anymore. I haven't prepped anything else so let's watch a DVD or something." That would not have been particularly _good_ DMing, but it would have been miles better than deliberately wasting everybody's time.

Shyftir
2011-03-05, 08:33 PM
Probably have shared this before but...

I have a friend who ran a train wreck once. (3.5)

He had this epic idea to have us plane trotting at level 10 (not horrible but a tad early.) Anyway we had about 8 people in the group (which was way too many anyway.) and we were doing okay but for this particular epic encounter he handed us another character higher level then ourselves so that's right 16 characters. (He divided the other characters into another fight going on in the sky.) Anyway me and another guy just tell him we don't want to play other characters. ends up we are fighting a Mind-flayer monk and a bunch of ridiculously durable magic-using golems. Two of the characters get hit by a maxed out mind blast (Including mine and the other effective straight up melee)

Long story short at 9:00AM the next morning the encounter finishes and I've just now come out of mind blast stunned-ness. We started the nights DnD just before midnight on a Friday.

Jarawara
2011-03-05, 09:13 PM
Many, many moons ago...

Player asks the DM, me, "So we loot the guy's body. What do we find?"

I look to the store-bought adventure, and there are little descriptive texts written there for everything. I find the entry, and read it out to him. "The man carries standard equipment for a traveler, chainmail, and a well-worn longsword. His coinpurse is empty save for a few coppers, but in a secret pocket hidden in his belt is a line of platinum ingots worth 4000 gp. These can only be found if the player says he is specifically inspecting the belt..."

I look up from the description, color draining from my face. Player smiles at me, and says: "I specifically inspect the belt."

Ahhh, crap. :smallfrown:

*~*~*

So later, we switch roles, he's trying out his hand as DM, and I'm his willing victim, er, player. I delve deep into a dark cavern, where I come across the mouldered remains of some long-dead warrior. "I poke at it with a stick, and if it doesn't move, I inspect if further."

DM looks over the adventure module, and finds the relevant text. "This body has long ago decayed into bones, and most of his gear has mouldered and rusted to uselessness with him. On the skeleton's left hand, underneath his tattered and ruined glove, is a Ring of Protection +1, which can be found only if the player removes the glove or otherwise disassembles the skeleton's hand..."

He looks up, shocked.

I say: "Welcome to DMing!" :smalltongue::smallbiggrin:

Vknight
2011-03-05, 10:49 PM
Any of the following would have been better:
- have the PCs find the goblins diary from which they could derive a clue about the nature of the secret door and what the command word was. (This would be what I would have done)
- simply lower the frickin DC so that the rogue could find it. (Of course this would have been a bit boring since they could just take 20)
- or if not willing to accomodate the players, call of the session then and there. "Sorry guys, hate to break it to you but you can't solve the quest anymore. I haven't prepped anything else so let's watch a DVD or something." That would not have been particularly _good_ DMing, but it would have been miles better than deliberately wasting everybody's time.

Ah it's ok Chanter could be worse. And thats exactlly what I good Dm should have done implament one of these plans

The New Bruceski
2011-03-05, 11:43 PM
Man do I ever have a tale of terrible DMship for you.

When the team received it's mission, not only was the briefing clear and carefully thought out, but it was in an easily accessible location and the goals where even obtainable in a sane manner.

He went out of his way to reward co-operation and make the challenges difficult but obtainable.

We never even got up the panic tried to murder each other to save our own asses.

I used my experimental prototype equipment several times without dieing in a senseless manner.

Did I mention we where playing Paranoia. That is kinda important.

Worst. Paranoia game. EVER.

BG
2011-03-06, 12:05 AM
This one didn't happen to me, but to a couple of people I knew. There were a bunch of players who were interested in playing oWoD Mage. The group was too big for one chronicle, so someone had the idea of having two simultaneous chronicles running at the same time, one with Tradition Mages, one Technocracy. The idea was that the Storytellers could both keep each other updated, and maybe even build to a crossover. A bit advanced, but not a horrible idea.

Unfortunately, the guy running the Tradition Mages had never run Mage before. He seemed to think that 8-10 XP per game session was a good idea, and he was never willing to give his players paradox for vulgar magic. He never told this to the Technocracy Storyteller, he just told him what his mages had been doing. When there finally was a crossover, the Tradition Mages outclassed the Technocrats by an order of quite a lot. (Technocrat arete: 3, Tradition arete: 5).

Vknight
2011-03-06, 12:10 AM
Ok that is pretty bad but could have been worse.

navar100
2011-03-06, 12:22 AM
Two different DMs, 2E games.

First DM: The party had to travel a great distance over land. I forget the reason why, but that's not important. There would be some roleplay and a little combat along the way. We knew we were heading towards a dangerous forest we had to walk through. The DM was very excited about this and boasted how dangerous it was. He had all these encounters set up to make our lives miserable. We finally reached the edge of the forest, dreading to go in. I, playing a druid, casted Giant Insect. (Giant Vermin in 3E.) At my level for that spell in 2E, I was able to greatly increase in size a number of bees everyone could use as flying mounts. We flew over the dangerous forest avoiding all the nasty stuff the DM had planned. To say he was pissed off is an understatement. From then on, in any further game I dared to cast Giant Insect, it never worked properly. The insects were never cooperative without me bullying them constantly for every little thing. Some insects would disobey orders and just run away. I finally got the hint and never casted the spell again.

Second DM: New campaign just started. The DM did not have my character start with the rest of the party. While I just sat there for an hour or so, everyone else got to roleplay and have a combat. When the combat was finally over, I figured then my character would show up, but no. A little more roleplay later and a second combat began. I quit.

BallsInABowl
2011-03-06, 12:38 AM
I've seen a story posted on dozens of websites, about a DM who put his player up against a minimally described monster, the Gazebo. That poor player tried everything he could think of, but he could not manage to harm the Gazebo in any way. Never was he offered a knowledge check, nor any physical description besides the size and location of the Gazebo. No wonder his Paladin died that day!

Daftendirekt
2011-03-06, 12:41 AM
I've seen a story posted on dozens of websites, about a DM who put his player up against a minimally described monster, the Gazebo. That poor player tried everything he could think of, but he could not manage to harm the Gazebo in any way. Never was he offered a knowledge check, nor any physical description besides the size and location of the Gazebo. No wonder his Paladin died that day!

That's a player fail for not knowing what a gazebo is.

BobVosh
2011-03-06, 12:46 AM
That's a player fail for not knowing what a gazebo is.

Also not asking for more info, also the version I have read had him interrupt the DM a few times.

My blunders as a DM tend to all be the same: My casters cast buffs, sometimes before combat, and I don't write them down. I don't use the bonuses. Then I remember just about the time they have 15 hp. I don't know why I attempt fights with buffs.

navar100
2011-03-06, 01:02 AM
I did two blunders early in my DMing.

The first was running a convention D&D game that purposely did not have combat. If roleplaying somehow led to one, fine, but in general the plot and encounters wouldn't call for one. I thought it would be interesting to have a non-combat adventure. The players didn't like it. Non-combat adventuring is fine to happen in a home regular campaign, but at a convention you need the combat.

The second is a dungeon crawl adventure for a campaign that had too many puzzles the players got annoyed. I still use that adventure now, but I have altered it to remove some of the puzzles and allow for more roleplay and combat. It runs well now.

Vknight
2011-03-06, 01:17 AM
Puzzles often lead to players puzzleing over what to do because how come I can't figure this out with a d20 roll?

PollyOliver
2011-03-06, 01:22 AM
Puzzles often lead to players puzzleing over what to do because how come I can't figure this out with a d20 roll?

Yeah, the problem comes in when a person of normal intelligence is playing a wizard with INT 22. The character should be able to solve the puzzle, even if the player can't, but at the same time there's no fun in rolling a d20 to solve a riddle.

I've found that what tends to work well is clues in exchange for knowledge/INT/WIS checks. Puzzles tend to become more solvable, even for people who suck at them, when the archivist gets a 40 on his knowledge check and gets handed a note that says "you notice that x seems strange".

Vknight
2011-03-06, 01:24 AM
Also you could have notes which the higher the character int and wis mod are total the higher leveled note you give them which has more clues.
Then they figure it out from there.

BG
2011-03-06, 01:44 AM
Puzzles often lead to players puzzleing over what to do because how come I can't figure this out with a d20 roll?

While I understand that puzzles are an established part of D&D, and have been since the beginning, I'm of two minds about them.

On the one hand, they can add some nice spice to your dungeon crawl so that it isn't just hitting goblins with sharp things.

On the other hand, some players (myself included) are just not very good at traditional puzzles. I'm fantastic at being able to figure out a diplomatic compromise that satisfies all parties, but if you give me a door and a series of levers, I'm probably not going to do well. Additionally, if I'm playing someone with 18 int, I'm playing someone who is significantly smarter than I myself actually am.

All of that being said, I do generally think it's a DM blunder to not allow your players to come up with some kind of work-around, even if that work-around is bashing down the door with an axe.

edit:
I'm not saying players should just be able to buy something adamantine and never have to worry about puzzles again. There can be ramifications, such as losing the element of surprise, dealing with traps, or being under a time limit.

edit2:
ninja'd on the Int issue.

PollyOliver
2011-03-06, 02:04 AM
On the other hand, some players (myself included) are just not very good at traditional puzzles. I'm fantastic at being able to figure out a diplomatic compromise that satisfies all parties, but if you give me a door and a series of levers, I'm probably not going to do well. Additionally, if I'm playing someone with 18 int, I'm playing someone who is significantly smarter than I myself actually am.

All of that being said, I do generally think it's a DM blunder to not allow your players to come up with some kind of work-around, even if that work-around is bashing down the door with an axe.

I definitely believe in workarounds, and fortunately my group's most frequent DM does also.

What happens to us is generally that the players who are actually good at puzzles tend to play characters who, if not actually as dumb as rocks, aren't all that far off--average at best, really. Meanwhile, the rest of us in the group are all running around with starting INT 20 playing warblades and factotums and wizards and whatnot, and can't solve riddles to save our lives. The DM slips us notes, and the players with dumb-as-a-post characters decide how out of character it would be to solve the puzzle in the first ten seconds. As a result we get puzzles and riddles quite rarely now.

Edited to add my own DM story:

My worst failure was the first time I DM'd, and was the result of seriously overestimating the PCs. I play in a group that tends to optimize, and so I figured when I saw "wizard, cloistered cleric, factotum, crusader", I'd have to be a little tough to give them any sort of challenge.

Unfortunately, they all decided to keep things very low-key because it was my first session Dm'ing. The wizard was a blaster, the cleric was a healer, the factotum basically just disarmed traps and stabbed things, and the crusader just bonked things on the head and healed people.

The game started at level 5, and the first encounter would have been a TPK if not for some quick thinking on the party's part and the heroic crusader holding a doorway so the others could escape (and dying in the process).

Afterward we figured out the power level we were looking for, though, so I guess it worked out.

Vknight
2011-03-06, 02:24 AM
Not the bad Polly could have gone worse just a simple enough mistake.

BG
2011-03-06, 02:52 AM
My biggest personal DM blunder isn't a specific incident, so much as an entire campaign worth of failure.

One year at college, I started a really impromptu, free form superhero game. Literally, just me sitting around with a friend and saying, "Come up with a modern character". I then described that character gaining superpowers. I ended up doing this with a few other people, and soon I had a systemless superhero game going. It was really awesome. Each time I went out, I just kind of winged it, and the players were all had a lot of great ideas. It was kind of like Jazz. One of them, by his own accord, ended up leaving the group to become a supervillain that they all had to fight. Even though I was making it up as I went, there were enough plot threads that I was able to grab and tie together for a really satisfying conclusion.

Next year, I decided to try that again, this time focusing on a lower power level in a near-future setting. I quickly learned that while I've read enough comics to come up with superhero stories on the fly, a complicated noir mystery is not something I can just wing. The whole thing just didn't work from start to finish, partially because some of the new players weren't as good, but mostly because I thought I could just fly by the seat of my pants and have it turn out good again.

Derthric
2011-03-06, 04:26 AM
I have a couple of blunders I have made, and a few horror stories of others(note mine are only blunders.......really.....its not a matter of perspective).

I was running a 3.5 campaign in a homebrew setting for a friend and his roommates, and we were at a climactic battle to save this wealthy minor city from being steamrolled by a standard issue evil army (I am a bit unimaginative in my enemy crafting). So while I had planned out a series of encounters built around the Heroes of Battle book using the Victory Points and strategic locations around the battlefield, my players simply point out the archery volley rules. Queue piles and piles of undead mooks, orcs and Undead. But I figured the higher leveled stuff should be fine, turns out you can kill anything with masses of peasants pointing shortbows so long as their commander isn't mentally disabled.

Now my friend from that game would go on to DM a Birthright game that used a weird mix of 3.5 for character level actions and the Birthright 2nd ed rules for our Domains. It was going okay, we had a lot of fun challenges but were plugging away, then we found the 3.5 converstion rules YAY! Or not. We lacked the new skills introduced for ruling Domains and Domain stats such as court levels and relationship levels didn't exist to be transferred over. So those went down as 0's. When I protested that not having a court specifically gave our rivals extra actions per season. Now we had 2 immediate rivals in a succession crisis in our domain who had more turns than us, and they were puppets of another 2 Domains that got turns, as well as a Goblin King that was on our frontier with turns and a 3rd Rival Domain occupying part of our claimed lands, oh and an a crazed Anti-Human Elf-lord right on our borders as well. All of which spent every turn trying to tear down our Efforts, never turned on each other(even though the two with puppets were long rivals of each other) and the 3rd Power was surrounded by enemies and the Elf-lord unleashed a plague on all of humanity, that for some reason only targeted our lands. They all threw wave after wave of Armies at us. But the court we played as swallowed hard and fought on, we used character actions and events to balance things out and that made it more fun, which is what we thought he was going for, but no.

One day he proclaimed he was tired of the game, it happens and we could understand, but it wasn't because of repetition or anything in game or with the players. It was because he had run through it all in his head and decided we could never succeed and therefore there was no point. He gave up on us and the campaign and that to me was the worst thing a DM could ever do.

I have one other story.

In a PbP game based on Master of Orion that was played Prior to the third Games release(Ironically the game we made up rules for in less than a week and played for 2 months on their forums was better than the crap they would later tell us was MoO3). The rules weren't that complicated and focused on Empire building, Roleplaying our Empire's Leadership and Roleplaying our interaction in the Orion(read Galactic) Senate. There were two DM's for it, the first worked in story lines and played as the New Orions running the senate and split the math duties with another DM who was in charge of double checking our empires stats so we weren't making up new resources. Well unfortunately we lost the 1st DM to sickness and the other took over, the problem was that the 2nd DM was also a player and in fact my enemy over a contested sector of space right at the heart of my empire. And in fact this occurred right after I had won a series of battles in which I maintained my blockade of his Colony world there. The first full turn under his watch my ships went from formidable to paper thin. Now all of this was to be handled by set combat rules of calculating strength of the fleets and losses, however he proclaimed that the other DM had been unfairly limiting losses before. Specifically stating that I should have lost more of my fleet in previous battles than I did and stated that my crews and ships were battleworn and thus weaker. So the first battle under his watch I lost half my strength but my fleet was still better than his.

Then in the Second battle he oversaw he didn't count my reinforcements, stating that my ships would have taken too long to get there even though movements were 1 sector per turn at 6EDT/midnight GMT and were instantaneous to that point so long as you declared the move in your turn. And what was worse was that another empire's fleet had arrived that turn as well, that player had declared they were going to put themselves between our two fleets and prevent further fighting. I played into it hoping that this would get me the Settlement I wanted(a DMZ Declaration and hard territorial limits) and stated that my ships were ordered to not engage the third player's ships unless fired upon first. However the DM pointed out that I was the aggressor Blockading his colony so they acted as peacekeepers and Defended his fleet when they went to break the "illegal" Blockade and the combined forces wiped out my entire force. The other player pointed out that this was never his intention and that the combat should be rerolled as either a 3 way fight or his forces stopping the DM's. This was ignored.

I was teetering on quitting after only 2 days of this guy as DM but this other player's actions made me stick around plus my allies, whom I was assisting wanted me to stay. The third player had his empire give me economic reparations to replace my fleet and signed a treaty recognizing my claims and we grew closer diplomatically because of it. The DM proclaimed this was unpopular with the other player's people and he faced unrest and rumors of a coup coming, all of this despite the fact that the other players race were an Insectoid Hive Mind. It didn't last a week after that with people loosing interest as only storylines effecting him came up and then the actual game came out and well that killed any Master of Orion interest any of us had.

Firechanter
2011-03-06, 05:00 AM
Thanks for sharing this jewel with us, Derthric. Sounds like that DM was playing Calvinball.

BTW, concerning those Problems With Puzzles. If you have player/character constellations as described above, one way to handle it is to have a player who's good at that stuff come up with a solution and attribute it to a character who should be good at it in-game.
So essentially, the player of the Barbarian tells the player of the Wizard what needs to be done, or momentarily takes over the Wizard if that goes better.

Derthric
2011-03-06, 05:15 AM
Thanks for sharing this jewel with us, Derthric. Sounds like that DM was playing Calvinball.


Though I have truly fond memories of that game and I just spent the past hour trying to find the rules I copied down somewhere, the Constitutional Alliance of the Psilon lives!



BTW, concerning those Problems With Puzzles. If you have player/character constellations as described above, one way to handle it is to have a player who's good at that stuff come up with a solution and attribute it to a character who should be good at it in-game.
So essentially, the player of the Barbarian tells the player of the Wizard what needs to be done, or momentarily takes over the Wizard if that goes better.

This reminds me of a scene in Southpark where a Scientist based on jeff goldblum is trying to figure out something and relates some gibberish the boys say to a series of random ideas that leads to the actual solution. I mean maybe somewhere deep down that barbarian' train of wacky thoughts holds the key.

huttj509
2011-03-06, 06:14 AM
This reminds me of a scene in Southpark where a Scientist based on jeff goldblum is trying to figure out something and relates some gibberish the boys say to a series of random ideas that leads to the actual solution. I mean maybe somewhere deep down that barbarian' train of wacky thoughts holds the key.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-12-02

But yeah, one standard issue with riddles is that they often wind up as "solve it or sit there, or go home". DMs should avoid planning plot dead ends, and be amenable to alternate solutions. If your court intrigue hinges on a player spotting a suspicious character, and making the connection to the poisoning attempt, what happens if he doesn't make the connection? What if he sees the suspicious character and attacks before the poisoning? What if he's off in the spare room flirting with the maid and doesn't see the supicious character in the first place?

This gets more obvious if you're in a dungeon where the path is blocked by a wall. Maybe there's a riddle, maybe a puzzle, but the path is blocked, invincible, no ways around, until you figure it out or give up on the dungeon and go home. Lord of the Rings at Moria is actually a good example of what NOT to do. In a book you can say "time passes", but in play, nobody wants to sit around for hours while one character keeps trying phrases that don't work, until the DM finally slips another character the answer. If Moria was what they tried first, and they could decide to go to the mountain pass instead? Maybe it's harsh weather, but passable, fine. It's more difficult for not solving the riddle, but it doesn't stop them completely.

Now combat can often wind up a plot dead end (literally), but at least the characters can try to do something to prevent it becoming so (this is similar to why "oh, you go left? You all die no save no SR" tends to be a bad thing).

One GM blunder I recall is when the DM didn't have anything prepared for the day. So we were teleported to a maze. Fine. But this maze had no exit, I think even no monsters, no way out, just something to keep us wandering for a few IRL hours when he could have said "sorry, I didn't get anything prepared," and we would have said "ok" and wandered over to the nintendo, having much more fun than "I turn left" over, and over, and over.

Edit: Corrected a typo..."sole it or sit there", yay for fish!

MickJay
2011-03-06, 09:52 AM
I was in an online (msn) game of nWoD hunter once. The ST made two mistakes: first, he didn't want to set a fixed day and time when we'd be playing, for some reason preferring a looser "when we'll all have time to play" schedule, which led to games being every 2-3 weeks or so. Amazingly enough, despite this, the game was still somehow working out, even though this was a pure investigation-style sort of game, and we'd have to recap previous sessions heavily, since everyone would forget most of the clues we found previously.

The real blunder came later, when the ST decided that since we're not playing very often, the players must have got bored of the game, and decided to kill it - while I was trying to convince him that this is far from true, he just told me "who done it", and also told the meta-plot that was supposed to link a number of investigations he had planned for the future. When he finally decided to speak about the game with other players, it became clear that pretty much everyone was still enjoying the game and wanted to continue (which, of course, was now impossible with the whole plot revealed).

In retrospect, it was getting clear that the ST was at the time getting tired of the game (especially since he had two other campaign projects in development), but what would have been a much better solution would be to run a final session to wrap up the current investigation (since we were very close to solving it), and just putting the game on hiatus... and that's something on which everyone, ST included, later agreed. Three conclusions to be drawn here:

1. always set up clear game times
2. do not make assumptions about what players are thinking of your game, ask them
3. if you're tired of the game you're running, wrap the current story up, but don't reveal the big plot in case you'll feel like using it at a later date

navar100
2011-03-06, 11:07 PM
Puzzles often lead to players puzzleing over what to do because how come I can't figure this out with a d20 roll?

I learned that lesson. I'm running a different dungeon crawl now that has some riddles, but I allow d20 rolls at appropriate times to reflect in character knowledge the player couldn't possibly know. If it's something the player knew but just forgot because it was a while ago, the DC is lower. The players are appreciative of that, but they are figuring most of the stuff out on their own.
As long as they get the main gist but not getting the complete picture, it's an excuse for an NPC party member to be the one to figure it out for that instance, simultaneously fulfilling the verisimilitude of being a member of the party.