How does one Dem Door into a wagon wheel?

[MonkeySage]

Simply reminiscing about my first dungeon master... I worked so hard on a character, wrote a long elaborate backstory for him and fully explained his personality and how i intended to play him. First game day starts, and from the get go I can see the freshly polished rails he's setting us on; forcing us to sign contracts(mine was with lolth) and then when we're finally freed of those contracts, i end up fusing with a wagon wheel and dying... with dimension door. Also, the dm told me very explicitly that my character was coming back as an npc... I had to roll a new one, and some how work my way into the group. Next thing i know, the dungeon master uses some god ability to permakill this character as well.

This DM loved to involve deities with low level characters, throw ridiculously powerful enemies at us one on one(and usually rigged the battles in his favor).

Eventually I joined a new group, with a new DM and ended up comparing my new dm to my old one. The story was better written, and we weren't stepping on any deity's twos every other session. He set up challenging encounters that were truly satisfying to beat. Our first 3 sessions, he had set up an elaborate quest ending in a boss fight. He had set it up so that 4 people would have a hard time with that boss fight. At the time, it was just myself(elven wizard) and one other person(kobold sorcerer), both level 1. We didn't do the quest, but we pretty much had the freedom to make our own quest. We ended up encountering the boss early, and defeating him. The dm took this into consideration and rewarded us handsomely for it. The old dm's games felt like homework and he had me wondering if I was just a bad role player, and I almost quit d&d altogether because of him. The new dm's game felt like a game, and I ended up becoming a defacto leader of the group once more people joined in.

By the time the old dm invited me to one of his games again, i was hesitant. I decided to go with it, but was faced with the same problems as before. I had to roll a new character twice that night.

Has a bad DM ever made you feel like a bad role player through his own incompetence?

Also, how the heck does one dem door into a wagon wheel? XD

[(Un)Inspired]

One does not simply dem door into a wagon wheel.

[Khatoblepas]

You can't.


Conjuration

Each conjuration spell belongs to one of five subschools. Conjurations bring manifestations of objects, creatures, or some form of energy to you (the summoning subschool), actually transport creatures from another plane of existence to your plane (calling), heal (healing), transport creatures or objects over great distances (teleportation), or create objects or effects on the spot (creation). Creatures you conjure usually, but not always, obey your commands.

A creature or object brought into being or transported to your location by a conjuration spell cannot appear inside another creature or object, nor can it appear floating in an empty space. It must arrive in an open location on a surface capable of supporting it.

[Bullet06320]

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/dimensionDoor.htm (http://http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/dimensionDoor.htm)

basically sounds like the DM likes messing with characthers and killing them arbitrailily.
if the space is occupied by sumthing else, there is a default as to wat happens with dimension door written write into the spell discription

[cerin616]

Has a bad DM ever made you feel like a bad role player through his own incompetence?

Also, how the heck does one dem door into a wagon wheel? XD

the sillyness in our games always came from the players. We all took turns DMing from time to time, and it was a lot of fun. But playing in the same party as those friends was brutal at times. I have killed and been killed by my team mates countless times.

Was stabbed in the back by a partner at the end of a campaign (literally. He sneak attack killed me as I turned to face the door we were about to pen into an encounter. He wanted to steal loot and run)

Killed a weretiger-fey teammate who went chaotic evil claiming "I am unkillable" except that I was a paladin with blind fight. One magical darkness later...

[Red Fel]

I had one party that happened to die a lot, but the DM gave us plenty of access to rez, so it wasn't a huge problem.

The huge problems were (1) that he had a DMPC who would do absolutely nothing unless we were all dying, in which case he would basically mop up the entire encounter singlehandedly, and (2) that we had an entire adventure hook dedicated to a single character (played by his GF), which we were not at liberty to decline.

The former made us feel like bad players, not bad roleplayers but simply bad players, because it made us feel like we were useless. If his DMPC could simply handwave any problem away (and he could), why did we even need to be there at all? The latter made us feel like bad players for a related reason - this plot was all about one character, and we were simply along for the ride.

I don't know that I would categorize these problems as incompetence, though. Nor do I think I would categorize your first DM's issues as incompetence. I would call them selfishness at best, and malice at worst, and I think they stem from the same source. Most DMs realize that they are the overgods of their respective game worlds, but some feel the need to remind themselves of that quite often. In your DM's case, it meant lording excessive power over the players; in mine, it meant wielding a DMPC to keep the plot on the rails, and giving in-game favors to his out-of-game significant other.

And as others have mentioned, one does not simply Dimension Door into a wagon wheel.

[Slipperychicken]

By the time the old dm invited me to one of his games again, i was hesitant. I decided to go with it, but was faced with the same problems as before. I had to roll a new character twice that night.


Try not to feel bad about it. If you don't like his game, just don't play with him, there's no shame in that. I actually once ragequit from a gaming group [the same one I'm going to give an example from], yet I still remain good friends with the GM, almost two years after the fact.



Has a bad DM ever made you feel like a bad role player through his own incompetence?

Well, this one terrible GM of mine had a homebrew pantheon of like 12+ gods whose names all sounded the same (most of them started with the "ahn" sound, followed by a consonant. Anu, Enki, Enlil, etc), were quite bland and, like the rest of the game's forgettable NPCs, all shared the GM's exact personality, accent, and mannerisms. I was in college and didn't have time to memorize this nonsense.

At one point an NPC told me to go to the temple of a specific god, so the exchange went kind of like this:

NPC: "go to the temple of [ahn-something]"
My character: "Thanks, I'll go there"
Me: "yeah, I go to the temple".
GM: "Which one?"
Me: "The one he said"
GM: "Do you remember which one?"
Me: "I'm going to the one he told me to go to"
GM: "You know this, [name]"
Me: "Uh.. Anu?"
Other player: "No, that's the goddess of women"
Me: "Right. Was it Enki?"
A different player: "Nooo... that's the goddess of nature"
[other players crack up laughing as I try to guess the god, calling me a munchkin]

[Crake]

[other players crack up laughing as I try to guess the god, calling me a munchkin]

Oh god, this is my own personal pet peeve. I was unofficially named the group munchkin in my group, simply because I'd studied the game system for years (I say studied, because for about 6 years after I leared about dnd, I never actually got to play in a game). From that point on, everything I ever said or suggested was critically analyzed for potential munchkinry, and more often than not my DM, who requires us to check with him before we pick up anything non-core, will decline my requests on spells, feats and the like. Doesn't help that I was pigeon-holed into playing the wizard after our original wizard player left the group, which people apparently forgot and thus call me a munchkin for playing a tier 1 class.

All this despite the fact that we have a divine metamagic cleric and a druid in the party, but since they're relatively new to the game, nooo, they couldn't possibly be min-maxers to any degree, right?

[pwykersotz]

My gm is pretty darned good, but I'll never forget when I first saw the ugly side of min/maxing vs roleplaying.

I had rolled a Hengeyoukai Sparrow (with LA) Sorcerer as my very first character ever. I had a beast of a time getting into character though, and frequently made newbie metagame mistakes. Since we hadn't even hit level 4 yet, I asked the DM if I could keep the levels but replace who he was. He said yes.

I spent two weeks working out a Goliath Sorcerer, carefully matching how I envisioned the character with proper racial background and personal development. By the time I was done, I was extremely excited to play this new character, expecting that to simplify matters, we would assume I had been this goliath all along.

Nope, a god turned me into a goliath. All opportunity to be someone new was instantly destroyed. I realized later that the GM was not used to people making requests like this for non-mechanical reasons, and I wasn't confident enough at the time to ask him to adjust what he did. Sadly, it took me a long time to rebuild my immersion after that.

[MonkeySage]

Start the game at level 5, give your players a wagon that could challenge the tardis for which one's bigger on the inside, and leave them to their devices... shortly before i left the game, i was practically begging the rest of our group to get rid of it. All it did was hold us back, make us dependent. The wagon had literally everything we could possibly need, library, forge, vault with over 500,000pp that we could freely access... And you just had to think of a room in order to find it. Why would we ever need to do anything with that at our disposal? So as a group we got lazy... worse, the wagon just gave the dm another tool for railroading us.