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Brawny
2014-02-03, 09:23 PM
Originally I was just going to post a rant thread and be done with it but I figured this could be turned into a legitimate thread. I recently joined a sunday group that I left after the first session(By that, I mean, I left about 2 hours in fed up with his ****) cause of the DM. Here's the gist.

1. He started us out as 5th level with 2 new players. I'm all for starting at a higher level as long as everyone in the group is experienced.

2. He started us out in a tavern(Normally not a problem for me at least) and then proceeded to do...nothing. He let us sit there for 5 minutes waiting for something to happen. This leads into the next one.

3. At no point did he ever give background about the world of the campaign. He just presented some horrific monstrosity of a world map and that we were all in a tavern for some reason.

4. He sounded like he was 14 with the stereotypical high-pitched teenager voice and he got on my nerves pretty bad.

5. He recruited 7 people for the campaign. 1 didn't show but even with 6 it was taking forever to do combat because of the 2 new players.

6. Speaking of combat, the first 2 encounters were 1 Pseudodragon and then some probably cr1 creature that did 2d4 damage. Not to mention pseudodragons being Neutral Good and therefore having no reason to attack travelers let alone 1v7.

7. His method of stat generation? Roll and take anything above 4 and if anything is below 4 than it would be set to 4. Like this I ended up with stats like 20 19 18 18 17 16. When he told me I gave him the benefit of the doubt and figured this would be a high-power campaign with experienced players. Nope

8. The "quest-giver" as much as you can call it, was some guy that randomly walked into the tavern. According to the DM he looked like any other guy so none of us figured it was the quest-giver. After another 2-3 minutes of awkward complete silence I talked to the guy and his name was "Sengolbea" or something else equally unpronounceable. He was a royal scientist that needed bodyguards to go...somewhere. Apparently the places we needed to go were classified. I asked if there was a reward and he said something about anything we find along the way is ours. A grittier player would have just said **** it and not even taken the job but, once again, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

9. The DM spent 30 minutes pre-start talking about how he has ADHD and OCD and how he only needs 1 hour of sleep a night. One player then droned on for another 5 about how sleep deprivation has no long-term side-affects(which it doesn't, but he should have just shut up have the first sentence)

10. He never bothered giving anyone proper tokens, it was just some kind of wolf head portrait thing on roll20 with our name plates on it. Any and all npcs also had some kind of winged dragon gargoyle thing for a token.

11. I had a sneaking suspicion that the quest giver was a DMPC after the DM mentioned randomly that the guy only needed 1 hour of sleep.

12. During combat, he took about 30 seconds to do 1 turn of an enemy.

13. At one point, I intentionally did a Nature Knowledge check to see what I know about pseuodragons just to see if the DM would catch that dragons were actually in Arcana knowledge. Nope. In addition getting information from this knowledge check was like pulling teeth.

14. He had 1 other person in his group that was obviously some friend that was a GM in the group for some reason. He didn't DM. Ever. So he just exploited the fact that he could see the GM layer and stuff.

15. Never a proper battlemap, our battles took place on a blinding white grid.

16. He never gave any description about anything. Maybe I'm just biased because when I dm I give a TON of description to make the world as vivid as possible but I had to go out of my way to ask for details like "What does the lake look like?" His response? "It's clear."

Long list of things I know but enough about me.

GIANTITP, what was your worst dm ever?

Amphetryon
2014-02-03, 09:32 PM
If this is your "worst DM ever," consider yourself extremely blessed; more than half of the things on your list don't even read as 'bad' from where I sit.

Sith_Happens
2014-02-03, 10:07 PM
Can Mar (http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/?m=1)ty (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275152) be everyone's worst GM? I'm pretty sure just reading about him is far worse than the worst GM most of us will ever actually have.

ellindsey
2014-02-03, 10:32 PM
Guy I played with briefly in college who was running the old Palladium Robotech game system. We'd spend a few hours making characters. He would then throw us into a combat situation up against overwhelming odds and we'd all be killed in the first encounter. He then would spend a long time explaining all the things we did wrong and how stupid we had been.

The game lasted two sessions, both of which played out the same. I think I only showed up for the second session in the hopes the first had been a fluke. It wasn't.

Pex
2014-02-03, 10:40 PM
I've had several equally horrible in their own ways. One killed a character every hour (not an exaggeration). You'd lose a Con point then get back into the game. Another who dismissed my concerns of why I wasn't having fun as whining and when a new campaign started didn't have my character start with the rest of the party while they had a combat that lasted an hour and was about to start another combat without me when I left. A third was upset my cleric would cast spells that were not Cure Light Wounds. Our group had several DMs for different campaigns. Eventually in his campaigns my character could do no right. He stopped being my friend because of how I played a cleric. A fourth just had no class. Rather than talk to me there was a metagame issue, I would arrive at games only to be told it was cancelled without prior notice. I was slow in the uptake but after the third time I got the hint. A fifth kicked me out because I had no money for a cab due to bank error issues and missed a game.

Meth In a Mine
2014-02-03, 11:15 PM
A fifth kicked me out because I had no money for a cab due to bank error issues and missed a game.
Jeez. What a jerk.
Anyhow, I had a DM who threw us (a bunch of level fours) into combat with a roper. My jaw hit the floor solidly, as I was looking through the monster manual not 2 hours beforehand and noticed ropers were CR 12. That was a jerk move. Then he got whiny when we fled out of its enormous (50 ft.) reach and slowly pecked it to death with acid arrows and longbows.

RustyArmor
2014-02-03, 11:27 PM
I got few nice stories about one. (In fact its why I quit d&d for about five years before coming back). These are all advance 2nd ed games.

The party was walking through a cave for something. Me and one friend were sculptures/masons and during the night while we were resting for night.
Me and friend: "We look for some small rocks to carve tonight to pass time while we chat during watch."
DM: "You find none."
US: "We can't find rocks.......... in a cave?"
DM "Nope."


One time the party was on the run from a pack of savage werewolves. The one player just decides to sit down with swords across lap and wait for them, rest of us kept running. Being the DMs best friend of course, the werewolves just ran right pass him. One of the other players was like. "WTF dude?!" Which the DM retorted "They just like the thrill of the hunt." With rest of party still running I decide....
Me: "Ok my character can barely move anymore, she sits down as well and gets a spell ready, they seem to ignore him, maybe they are just illusions."
DM: "They come upon you and maul you to death you should of kept running."


We were at a tavern with what was soooo obviously the DMs past characters or just DMPCs, just how much detail and such he put into each one just made it apparent. The rest of party moves in and we start talking to each one, each player talking to a certain DMPC. The one I got was some guy in mostly dark clothing I don't remember most of the details but he had dark baggy eyes as if he lacked sleep.
Me: "I approach the guy with a warm smile and ask him if he had a rough day since he seems tired."
Dm: "He jumps out of chair in a blink of an eye and his sword is only a flash as he cuts the front of your shirt and backpack."
Me: "I cover myself and ask him what is his problem beside being a perv."
Dm: "He then does the same quick motions and slashes your throat, you are dead."
Did I mention as I laid there dying not even the dmpc who was a paladin didn't even bat an eye.



It got to point even the players can tell DM hated me for some reason and here is some stories to go with it.

One player kept seeing my stuff, even a necklace which was very noticeable. I demanded it back and got it off him as the other players agreed it was mine. Later on he did the backstab (sneak attack in 2nd) needless to say it nearly killed me, he of course did this in front of the WHOLE party, the paladin in group attacked the rogue. The paladin lost all his powers for defending me.

The DMs best friend a ranger/druid at time just decided to knock me out and steal everything I have. He taunted me whole night about it both in and out of character. As he slept I tried to take my items back without violence.
DM: "No you are not allowed to steal from other players."

Got about billion more, but most really are just run of mill foe target me often so die, get assassinated, mugged and killed in alley, etc etc.

Airk
2014-02-03, 11:49 PM
Guy I played with briefly in college who was running the old Palladium Robotech game system. We'd spend a few hours making characters. He would then throw us into a combat situation up against overwhelming odds and we'd all be killed in the first encounter. He then would spend a long time explaining all the things we did wrong and how stupid we had been.


Up until the last sentance, that sounded suspiciously like an unnecessarily ACCURATE Robotech game. ;)

Tengu_temp
2014-02-03, 11:51 PM
Many years ago, there was that one guy who offered me and several other people on my NWN RP server's forum to show how PbP games look like. He was all "are you ready to bring your gaming to the next level?" about it, like White Wolf. The game was so bad it drove me away from PbP for years, until I tried it again on these forums and got a much better experience.

Full story later.


Up until the last sentance, that sounded suspiciously like an unnecessarily ACCURATE Robotech game. ;)

Not enough love triangles and eighties pop songs.

Velaryon
2014-02-04, 01:33 AM
What comes to mind first for me is a friend of mine. I love the guy but he is a poor DM. On the one hand, this was his first time as DM. On the other hand, he's been a player for a long time and should know better. I've also heard from others that he's DM'ed again and it was just as bad as the first time.

The campaign is set in Ravenloft. It's not a horror campaign, he just picked it because he knows a couple of the famous NPCs there by name, like Strahd and Azalin. Not that he used either one of them, that I recall.

I believe we started in a tavern. There wasn't much time or effort put into getting the group together - in fact, my enchanter never actually told any of the other PCs his name, and the DM didn't even notice this somehow.

What really killed it though, is that every encounter was solved by a DMPC that was quite obviously ripped straight out of some anime that I haven't seen. He had some kind of magical eye that gave him powers. I tried Googling it to see who it might be, only to realize that's not nearly a specific enough description apparently.

Anyway, this was an occurrence that happened more than once (in a campaign that lasted only one session!): the party gets hit with some kind of no-save ability that paralyzes all of us. DMPC is for some reason unaffected, proceeds to either unfreeze all of us with his eye power or simply win the fight himself.

The most fun I had that night was using my character's telepathy ability and high Bluff score to convince some random guy in a tavern that he was hearing voices in his head and cause him to run away screaming.

ChaoticDitz
2014-02-04, 01:46 AM
Wow. Your group in general must have been pretty terrible (except the Paladin) if they tolerated that kind of bull from the DM for more than a couple of sessions. I mean, you ask about players, and as my recent thread shows, I'll be the first to say that 90% of them are lazy metagaming dickweeds. But even considering that, very few people consider favoritism acceptable (as they shouldn't). This is a group game, and the DM is failing utterly if he doesn't treat his players with a semblance of fairness or equality. Friend, enrmy, girlfriend, murderer-of-own-family, it doesn't matter. A DM can fail in any number of ways and still be a good DM, but OOC-based favoritism is not one of them.

All that aside, for me, the worst DM I've ever had was a guy I gamed with after my very first group fell apart and I needed someone to play with. I was still rather new to the game and needed to get used to the mechanics, so I was going for something altogether simple, the Complete Warrior spell-less variant Ranger. We all started at level 1, and things went well at first. That is, until I actually proved semi-decent with a longsword-shortsword combination. Then he suddenly decided that Rangers should only use ranged weaponry and told me I needed to change my feats (without an equivalent change in starting equipment, mind you) or else leave. I chose leave.

Stuebi
2014-02-04, 02:30 AM
Not "My" DM strictly speaking, but one Im very glad I did not have to play with.

Over a period of time, a couple of my friends played a bit of "The Dark Eye" on Trade School Days (Depending on our schedule, there are 2-3 hour breaks and its a good way to kill time). I was usually playing Video Games for myself while the group was adventuring in the next room.

Now, the Players consist of 1 Girl and 2 Guys, one of which is the DM's younger Brother while the other is one of his regular classmates. One week, DM and Classmate have an argument in School, a big one. And you can tell that the air is thick when the group gathers for their game. After a while I start to notice that the volume has risen, nothing majro, but one of the players seems upset. Eventually my curiosity drives me to shut down my Game and just listen in on the RPG.

And indeed, there was a bit of tensions going on. Appearantly the DM could not let the earlier argument go, and as "luck" had it every Monster, Bandit and Noble in the Game was suddenly very eager to pay Classmate back for what he had said.

Suddenly, a lot of Monster would favor Classmate when choosing someone for an attack. Other times traps triggered only when he was walking over them, while the other two players had passed unharmed. Important NPCs or Questgivers disliked his PC for random reasons. (The Mayor now hates Elves because one stole his purse the other day!). Stuff like that. Classmate called him out on it here and there, the DM denied any bad intentions and would usually stop foir a little while after each accusation, only to start again.

This continued for I think 2-3 weeks, with 3 Session IIRC. Equipment and Levelwise, Classmate was now very obviously behind the other two. Attempts to talk to the DM had failed, he was still in complete denial of any favouritism the othere two got over Classmate. Understandably, this resulted in another argument eventually which ended DM banning Classmate from his house. The other two Players, not being comfortable with the situation quit the game too. Now, at this point I think to myself "Okay, the Group completely broke down. NOW he GOT to see that he was in the wrong."

Nope. It has been a few weeks since then, and the DM wants to hear none of it. Hes in the process of building another group and has not talked to any of his former-friends since.

The actual sad part is, im not even sure if he was doing all that conciously or not. He still insists that he was playing fairly and that Classmate was just having bad luck, even tough all 3 Players and I as a spectator agree that there was some obvious "Screw that Player!" going on.

Knaight
2014-02-04, 03:18 AM
I've never really had a terrible GM. The worst was a guy who was inexperienced, was writing a novel, and tried to set up things from the novel as a game - which failed miserably, because it was a bad set up to begin with and giving creative players hyper intelligent aliens and high technology mixes really poorly with railroading.

Hyena
2014-02-04, 04:14 AM
He had some kind of magical eye that gave him powers.
Must have been from code geass.

I will certainly write my horror story later. Believe me, it will put yours to shame.

Sith_Happens
2014-02-04, 04:20 AM
What really killed it though, is that every encounter was solved by a DMPC that was quite obviously ripped straight out of some anime that I haven't seen. He had some kind of magical eye that gave him powers. I tried Googling it to see who it might be, only to realize that's not nearly a specific enough description apparently.

Yeah, you're going to have to name some specific powers before we can even begin to narrow this down.

EDIT:


Must have been from code geass.

Or Naruto, or Fairy Tail, or Black Bultler, or Basilisk, or...

TuggyNE
2014-02-04, 04:21 AM
What really killed it though, is that every encounter was solved by a DMPC that was quite obviously ripped straight out of some anime that I haven't seen. He had some kind of magical eye that gave him powers. I tried Googling it to see who it might be, only to realize that's not nearly a specific enough description apparently.

Anyway, this was an occurrence that happened more than once (in a campaign that lasted only one session!): the party gets hit with some kind of no-save ability that paralyzes all of us. DMPC is for some reason unaffected, proceeds to either unfreeze all of us with his eye power or simply win the fight himself.

Did he scream out "SEE THE TRUTH" by any chance?

kailkay
2014-02-04, 04:54 AM
One guy in our group often takes over DMing a new campaign (we all tend to burn out on each campaign fairly quickly, probably due to lack of preparation on the DM's part. Also I'm usually the DM, so...).

We have pretty much played 3.5 for the entirety of our gaming together, but he was raised on 2nd edition, and still thinks in those terms. This has a few unfortunate side-effects.

One of them is a particularly brutal 'critical miss' he has adopted, he says, from somewhere in 2nd edition (I can't find said rule anywhere). If you roll a natural 1 on your attack, you critically miss. There is no confirmation roll the way there is for a natural 20's critical hit. It's just a straight up miss, but it's worse.

He rolls a d4. On a 1, you drop your weapon (that's okay, you can pick it up as a move action). On a 3, you hit yourself, and on a 4, you hit an ally. Brutal, high damage, whatever.

The thing is, on a 2, you break your weapon. I don't mean 'broken condition'. I mean, he says it is broken and useless in your hands. That +3 longsword which makes up 70% of your character's current WBL? Gone completely forever.

He compounds this brutality by claiming some sort of encumbrance rule that, while understandable, applies rationality in the wake of the irrationality of shattering your magical weapon: You can't take more than one regular melee weapon and one ranged weapon along with you, with the exception of a light 'sidearm'.

So, you dump all your money into enchanting your longsword, break it, and spend the rest of the dungeon trying to overcome damage resistance with your masterwork dagger, or, potentially, your +1 dagger.

When telling him that his rule was bull hockey, he said "Well, I need some way to balance out your critical hits against me!" as though he was against us in some adversarial fashion instead of telling the damned story. As though he did not also score frequent critical hits against us.

And, to top it off, I'm pretty sure none of our foes has ever broken their weapons against us.

"One you drop it, two you break it, three you hit yourself, four you hit someone else."

I hate those words. I hate them so much. They are the worst.

Krazzman
2014-02-04, 04:56 AM
The worst for me is actually a fluctuating thing.

We had a DM fall asleep while dming. (Which was funny in it's own right).
Same DM punished group by call lightning while 2 guys argued in character because the arguing was taking too long.
Also most "OP" tricks were disallowed for me but when I tried to dm they all build powerhouses or in other games they tried out pretty strong builds.
But woe me for trying to implement ToB or psionics.
Death by being eaten by a ghoul due to the DM(other one) deciding that he will now roll my fort save against paralyzing touch.

And another that is more story driven... level 4 character group (6 people) against 3 ogres and a Ogremage... with me being the only one able to see the ogre mage... generally it was quite some weird stuff there. Also he disbelieved that a Wolf can climb a 50° mountain/hill with ease...

Yeah pretty tame...

Cicciograna
2014-02-04, 05:30 AM
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SiuiS
2014-02-04, 05:43 AM
This stuff is always about bad execution, I think.

My worst DM story hinges on stuff that could have been awesome, if it wasn't all done with the express purpose of railroading and trying to prove social dominance over the other players (yes, players, not characters).

We had a game start with the lines "this is a big new world, and you can leave your mark on it! I look forward to whatever changes you all cause." It ended with "I didn't really want you to try and change the world, I meant discover all the stuff I made!".

Our first encounters were in a dungeon crawl. The DM set up goblins with wands of exploding spell fireball that were being dual wielded. He wanted to explode the two most experienced players into a pit to be eaten by carrion crawlers, in order to keep the other players in line (his justification, might I add, not mine). This ended with the players having wands of exploding burning hands!
"Oh, uh, the exploding was from a feat. You don't have it. No knock back."
Okay. How were they dual wielding without the feat?
"My game doesn't use that feat."
Oh, okay. So we'll dual wield these wands–
"You need a feat to do that."
You just said we didn't? – new player
"Oh, uh... Each wand only has two charges left."
That worked out fine.

The dungeon ends with the goblin boss – "a very tall elf-like man with huge, black armor and two long swords". Man, that's like, straight out of the description box of your old favorite PC that you would never let anyone kill!
... Oh.

So we have to sign contracts of servitude in our blood. Experienced players signed using spattered goblin blood, so we got away okay, but just barely. Good rolls, and we had the DM roll publicly else he would have fudged and thrown off the new players...

First thing we do? Fight to the death to see who is most worthy to serve! :smallsigh:
So began my very brief and very disappointing love affair with dagger spell stance. It lasted four rounds of stubbornness before I admitted it did suck as much as the other player said it would. We got out at around 1-3 HP on everyone. After a little adventuring, we decide to talk to the guy about not working for him. I mean, no way to discover a whole new world while shackled, right?
So we walk into the room in the dungeon.
"The BBEG turns to you."
Okay, I now politely and—
"Power word: kill. Roll initiative."
The other player died, and I had dimension door prepared so we got out. The party Druid got him back o. His feet through some clever fast-talk to grant lesser reincarnation as a Druid spell at lower level because it wasn't over-written in the 3.5 update, and we all fled.

Every six hours, random assassins would show up. We avoided them, but it was clear they weren't there to hurt us, just stress us out. And next town we get into the mayor apparently hates elves and so won't serve us (even though we had two elves in the party and kicked them out). Actually, it turns out he doesn't hate elves, he hates us! Because we talked back to his son. We explained the situation, apologized, and went to an inn.

The inn was barricaded and flooded with flying wizards who had greater invisibility up and were lobbing fireballs at us. Superb use of the battle grid got us mostly out without a hitch once we get back into teleport formation due to obsessive observation of enemy cycles and initiative counts. We end up in the basement of a nearby ally establishment. The DM informs us that the rogue managed to grab a sack off a flying invisible wizard somehow, and he rolls with it. It's full of money, and also a massive jewel. I panic and run to the furthest possible corner while warning my comrades, who just look at me funny (except the sorcerer, who also books it). Turns out it was a disjunction trap? And the DM advises the party to all make DC 45 saving throws or we lose the ability to cast spells forever because that's what dysfunction does. He is smug.

Luckily, everyone flipped to the spell to figure that out and deduced that he skimmed the spell and didn't read it; he was going to be insistent on Dysjunction stripping magic permanently in his games until he realized the experienced players (wizard and sorcerer) weren't in the blast and we would be throwing it back at him post-haste. We were rapidly approaching level six by this point. I finally finish the magic item I have been working on; a hat of nondetection. Just in time, too, because from now on every six hours we get targeted with Scry and Fry centered on me. Good thing i got the Dm to okay magic item creation but couldn't get his attention to explain what I was making!
We of course, get numerous events like a stray wind or passing bird knocking off my hat and then the divination assassination begins again in earnest.

At level eight we get into a dungeon the DM led us to that is three rooms, the first of which is trapped to lock us in, block teleportation, and allow 1d4 mummies into the room every 1d6 rounds until all sixty four mummies have emerged. The ranger saved us with his lazily explained multimanyrapidshot shenanigans that shouldn't have worked, let alone with his cheap custom incendiary grenade arrows he had been building with DM permission. I would hazard it was on purpose but the DM didn't know mummies were vulnerable to fire. His stated reason for the trap was to kill the sorcerer and wizard.

By level 13 the party Druid is a demigod. The party fighter has a shield of regeneration and a legion of death knights. The experienced players are wanted in every town and city and patrolled by absurd monsters. We had left the rails at this point, so we are harassed by a log.

A piece of wood? Part of a tree? A log. Turns out the log is a fallen god epic wizard/epic sorcerer's familiar who is guiding us back to the prophecy we never heard of and no one could tell us about. It was here I began to lay the seeds of my revenge.

I got a hold of a scroll of arcane Genesis. I built a prison of timeless agony. All my spare time was spent carving runes and sigils of pain, suffering, madness across it's entire surface. Any off-hand super magic item was disposed of here, fabricating adamant mazes with mystic back tracks and confusions, that were alive and shifted. Golems and constructs patrolled it's interior as guards. Legions of undead guarded the golems. Every trick I could conceive of got brought up enough for the DM to say "yeah yeah, sure, whatever" and noted meticulously on a ledger.

We got wishes. Subtle ones, only. So I wished to change my creature type. I retrained my class. I spent time devising new spells. I kept items with only single charges remaining. I cast no spell above second leek in combat; my contributions were Mage armor, shield, and magic missile. I take notes. I watch, I wait. We are 16th level.

Our enemies? Everyone who ever screwed with us. Literally. The town mayor? 20th level wizard. The innkeeper? Same. The farmer we wouldn't but turnips from who harassed us in town? Same. The librarian who stole the ranger's girlfriend? Same. And in their midst, the Tall Elf with black armor and two short swords, who was about to become a demigod incarnation of demogorgon, which is apparently the plot?
"You'll have to watch him ascend and then fight his god form"
Oh no. I have had enough of this. We can see through this scrying lens that more cultists are teleporting in. We teleport in.
"Oh no. They're plane shifting, all teleports are blocked."
Fine. Fighter! Use your cross class UMD to read this scroll on initiative count 2. Sorcerer, use this staff with greater plane shifting on initiative count one. Fighter, don't start until we get to heaven! Everyone, battle formations!

So we enter the cult mid-ritual. An anti magic field drops immediately, meaning it's melee or bust thanks to excessive use of Widen spell on the scroll prior. Unfortunately one of the cultists was the king of all red dragons. Which the DM had set up legitimately and we hadn't bothered checking for polymorph...

We win on a technicality as the party rogue determined that the BBEG's resistance to poison is, in fact, magical and not inherent. We survive 20 rounds of melee against numbers beasts because the DM rules the divine nature of the Druid (being a god) creates a bubble i the anti magic zone that the fighter uses to maintain his regeneration shield. Eventually, the rogue lines up a shot and hits the BBEG with a couple dozen doses each of int, wis, and Cha draining poisons and positoxins, flooring him instantly.

The DM starts a CUTSCENE! Gods descend, gods rise, the two fallen god brothers start to claim and maybe rehabilitate the BBEG and—

NO.

Time stop. Previously established as stopping even the gods, except the BBEG who had the epic feat to ride along; that is, only he and I were there.
I cast eternity of torture.
"He's immune to wizard magic"
I am actually not a wizard anymore, having shifted to bard/sublime chord/seeker of the lost arcane arts/ultimate magus.
"He's still immune to mortal magic"
I'm my mortal, having become a draconic get resonant image cast by multiversal principles through the last six type shifts from wishes and rituals.
"He has massive spell resistance"
Which is, by your houserules earlier, not able to protect him from this spell.
"Fine! But once the time stop wears off—"

The kicker.

I cast the epic spell eternity of utter damnation.
"WHAT?!"
I cast this epic spell I've been working on that you okayed.
"You're not epic level!"
I'm draconic, have a true dragon age limit, and old enough dragons qualify for epic.
"You're not old enough!"
I've spent months to years e'ery night for six years of game time in a different dimension, crafting and planning.
"You don't meet the skill requirements!"
Except for your houserule that lets is train really hard to go above our maximum rank limit with a high cost.

I threw every loophole, every asinine mistake, every idea he ever forced on the party despite polite discussion and even pleasing, back in his face. He ended up with his most beloved PC ending, not as an over deity, but as a nigh-lifeless husk suffering beyond humans imagination for an eternity of eternities, in nested realities, only accessible through a single jewel around the neck of the over-goddess we had unwittingly powered up this entire time and who was the only being who actively disliked the BBEG.

Two years of being prevented from the simple goal of having fun adventuring being thwarted, collapsed into a sucking wound of malice in the fabric of his games reality. We gave him anther chance later on, in a game where we switched DMs every session. That was six months of actively undoing anything someone else adjudicated so he could start a railroad before we called it off.

Mastikator
2014-02-04, 05:46 AM
Never had a bad DM, but the worse piece of DMing is probably myself a few years back when I was new to the game. I kept giving away info to the players that I wasn't supposed to.
Me: "You see a man with blood on his clothes, he doesn't seem to notice you".
Player: "I wave to the man".
Me: "The zombie starts stumbling towards you".
Player: "Oh it's a zombie? I draw my sword".
Me: ".... crap"

A game that was supposed to be horror/investigation turned into a hack and slash game. :/

Cicciograna
2014-02-04, 06:09 AM
Awesome revenge plot of awesome awesomeness

http://collectionofawesome.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/thats-the-evilest-thing-i-can-imagine-meme-dumpaday-8-thumb.jpg

starwoof
2014-02-04, 06:22 AM
too long; didn't quote

I think the only good thing about this DM is that they respected consistency enough to let this happen.

The Grue
2014-02-04, 06:52 AM
words

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lunocz3mMX1r24lq9o1_250.gif

Kalmageddon
2014-02-04, 06:57 AM
I think the worst possibile GM is the one that doesn't give you anything to talk about after the session, leaving you empty inside and bored out of your skull.
I've had such an experience, me and a friend took part in a session with 16 players and 2 GMs. I don't even remember what or even if something happened. I just remember after 6 hours I had developed a strange obsession with a paper tissue that was on the table, its texture and colour being the most interesting thing I could focus my attention at that moment.

Afterwards during our trip back home me and my friend were completly silent, no jokes about what happened, no witty remarks on how bad it was, just silence for the whole time. It was like a piece of our soul had gone away, never to return. We felt devoid of emotions and life.
I was never so bored in my entire life.

Delta
2014-02-04, 07:18 AM
By level 13 the party Druid is a demigod.

Okay I absolutely love your revenge plot but this just caught my eye, after the campaign started out the way it did you still played with this guy until level THIRTEEN? Wow. I don't think I'd ever be back to play with him again after session one.

SiuiS
2014-02-04, 08:14 AM
I think the only good thing about this DM is that they respected consistency enough to let this happen.

It was a cult of personality thing at that point. If he put a stop through cheese, shenanigans or fiat to something so pivotally built on his own rulings, then not one of those players would ever return. He could just paint me and the sorcerer as jerk optimizer munchkins who are all about the power and winning and don't care for story, but if the whole team disbanded unstudied he'd never play again.

It's been hard to let go of that antagonism since. It was so effective.


I think the worst possibile GM is the one that doesn't give you anything to talk about after the session, leaving you empty inside and bored out of your skull.
I've had such an experience, me and a friend took part in a session with 16 players and 2 GMs. I don't even remember what or even if something happened. I just remember after 6 hours I had developed a strange obsession with a paper tissue that was on the table, its texture and colour being the most interesting thing I could focus my attention at that moment.

Afterwards during our trip back home me and my friend were completly silent, no jokes about what happened, no witty remarks on how bad it was, just silence for the whole time. It was like a piece of our soul had gone away, never to return. We felt devoid of emotions and life.
I was never so bored in my entire life.

Yeah. You win. >_<
I'm so sorry D:


Okay I absolutely love your revenge plot but this just caught my eye, after the campaign started out the way it did you still played with this guy until level THIRTEEN? Wow. I don't think I'd ever be back to play with him again after session one.

Inertia. I shot myself in the foot, because my only choices were keep playing, or run a game myself. And all I could think about was optimization abuse tricks, so I couldn't even put together a game. The dark side of petty Internet-style vengeance.

And, let's be honest, a lot f that stuff is cool when it's not done vindictively! "Your hat falls off. Suddenly; ninjas! The hydra starts attacking them while they're confused, and it's a huge three way melee!" Is awesome when it's not the fifth time and the ninjas aren't 15th level rogues. The mummy trap was ingenious, and could have been part of a dungeon rather than a kill room. Having all our enemies ever, be the actual enemies was a clumsy but well meant attempt at proper narrative structure. It was the constant attempts to feel better as a person by controlling someone else's imaginary doods that was the problem. It was like someone trying to start BDSM hen pecking at a magical tea party.

lytokk
2014-02-04, 08:22 AM
Worst DM ever is a toss up between the one who couldn't finish a story, ever, and the railroading overdescriber.
The first constantly write himself into a corner, which we could tell since he'd cancel the next session, and the session after he would tell us to roll new characters, since he didn't like where the whole thing was going. More than likely the campaigns all had invisible rails and once we got off them, he couldn't figure out how to steer us back. Not a bad DM, persay, just not exceptional.

After writing that description I'm clear its the railroader. Situation came up where in able to pass some door, we all needed to sleep with "ideal" canditates for our characters. Me, playing a paladin, while not having any sort of chastity vow, still didn't feel like it would be in character to do this. I felt my character more suspected this would be a trap, so I had to tell the rest of the party to go on without me. I'm normally pretty good at going on with bad plot twists, but this one didn't sit well with me. The rest of the players agreed with me for my choice, and of course I started asking if there was any other way to get through here. DM told me to roll a will save vs charm, rolled a 19, plus my other modifiers the total was in the mid thirties. To his credit, he didn't make me fail, just made me roll another, and then another, and then another. 6 successful saves later, I gave up. This was going to happen whether I wanted it to or not. And I got tired of wasting time and wanted to get this over with. He then went on to describe the scene in graphic detail, and would have kept going on and on about it until we loudly reminded him that the host had a young daughter who was still awake and could potentially hear all of this. The whole scene, with the saves and description lasted about 45 minutes. Would have left the game but luckily he was just a temp DM while the normal DM/host took a small game playing break.

Another DM I had was a good friend of mine, his first time DMing, and was totally unprepared for what it all took, didn't know how to manage problem players, and allowed some players to get away with free level adjustments without telling other players. After a psychic warrior broke the game (first exposure to psionics for all of us save the psychic warrior), he gave up on DMing, which is bad because he had the potential to be a good DM, just needed more practice.

Delta
2014-02-04, 08:52 AM
The worst DMs I've had I met at conventions, some seriously messed up stuff there, unfortunately I'm at work so I can't go into too much detail, maybe I'd have some more stuff later on. The guy who takes the cake is probably the massive railroader who didn't even pretend to have the players do anything (he even went so far as to completely narrate our characters actions in some scenes) while simultaneously hitting on my girlfriend (or I guess rather doing what in his mind counted for "hitting on a girl", it was awkward... veeeery awkward)

The worst "campaign" I've ever been in was probably our one try at a Babylon 5 Savage Worlds campaign, the GM was completely uninterested, he began by telling everyone in one sentence "you're at Babylon 5! Let's roleplay your characters a bit!" and then went to get himself something to eat (there was no plan on his part to get something to eat for anyone else in a 10 hour session), even though none of our characters knew each other and we were in completely different sections of the station. His idea of how a military ship worked was that the captain just asked everyone on the bridge for their opinion and went with the majority (even in the middle of combat)

We didn't even show up to the second session, but another friend did and told me afterwards that they stumbled upon a wormhole and met a romulan warbird from Star Trek, chatted a bit, exchanged technologies and then went about some other business. So, yeah... never went back to that GM in particular.

Jay R
2014-02-04, 08:59 AM
The major effect this thread has had on me is incredible gratitude that I've never had a bad GM. I've had people making mistakes, one who was way too lenient, and other weaknesses, but in 39 years of role-playing, I've never dealt with anything like what the rest of you are describing.

Elkreeal
2014-02-04, 09:29 AM
The worst DM I ever had was in a 4e game;

First of all he didn't read anything from the DM books so it was never fair nor did it make any sense what so ever, I remember I was level 8, had as much gp as I ever had which was 40gold and some silver. I should have at least 2000+gold. Nothing Item wise or money wise was ever by the book, we were poor from beginning to end.

I had one magic weapon of level 10 that he said I couldn't use because I was level 8 (this was never a rule but he claimed it to be) and I didn't even find out what it was with a successful arcana check.
Other than that I had never seen magical items that were helpful in battle, nor did I own anything besides non-magical standard equipment, and was hitting 30% of the times because he was pinning us against higher level monsters. I Got a mask that gave me +8 AC that I couldn't take off, I got a ring that made me a goblin, necklace that made me a kenku, but I have a crummy rapier since forever, also because he said it wouldn't make sense for me to have a bigger weapon, when the standard for my class was a Greatsword.

Plus he expected us to keep track of everything while he just wanted to tell stories and worry about nothing else, without even a little book keeping on his part, and took no interest in making sense, example: Cat of a wizard comes to me, asks to be pet, I pet him, floor is in chess pattern, white squares turn to holes, 3 people fall, bloodied, "oh wait the black ones turn to holes as well", long story short, I petted a cat and someone died falling, the cat or wizard weren't mad, it just happened 'cause yes.

Oh and don't get me started on the LARP'ing, what fresh new hell was that. Fake swords, stupid accents, fake potions made of who knows what, NOPE.

ElenionAncalima
2014-02-04, 09:41 AM
My worst DM made so many mistakes, I think I have to put them in categories. Me and my friends actually made it through a couple sessions just because it was such a trainwreck that it was actually funny.

Character Creation:

-He was running a pathfinder game, but he clearly wanted to be running a 3.5 game...so he allowed all items and feats from 3.5. Add in that he was relatively inexperience with Pathfinder, even as a player.

-He wanted to run a gestault game, but he decided that he also wanted to let people single class if they wanted to...so he decided to let the non-gestaults get double the levels. When we pointed out that wasn't going to be balanced, he declared that the gestaults could add BAB, skills and saves from both classes...this wasn't really a good idea to start with, but got hilariously unbalanced as soon as we leveled.

-He gave us 10x the appropriate starting wealth for level 8 characters...and yet down the road was surprised when we had items that gave us resistance to most things in the game.

-He encouraged a brand new player to make a vampire character, even though another player's character (who was already made from several early sessions) was a Pharasma following, undead hating, legalistic Oracle. When we pointed this out, he told her not to worry about it because the Oracle wouldn't figure out...plus he would make her character really strong so he couldn't hurt her...overlooking the fact that the Oracle was literally optimized to kill undead and obviously would have decimated her unless other party members helped her.

-Worst of all, the guy really talked himself up and a power gamer and optimizer. He was bragging about the NPC and monsters he had made, as well as the Rogue he had built for another player who was supposedly game breaking. Never having played with him before, me and my friends naturally used this information and optimized the crap out of our characters (I mean with Gestault, adding everything it wasn't even hard). However, it turns out that he is terrible at building characters, so our characters would tear through every encounter he threw at us...meanwhile the Rogue was getting really upset because she was doing little to nothing with character that he had promised would be the best.

...what could possibly go wrong, right?

Scheduling:

He started the game with seven players. However, one of those players lived very far away and had to sit out the first session. Her problems was that she had a kid and no babysitter. She also didn't have internet, so she couldn't skype in. His solution to this was to make everyone drive an hour and a half to her apartment, that didn't even have a table for us to play on. Naturally, one of the players dropped immediatly. Three more dropped after one trip. The other three of us felt bad about her situation, but after two more sessions we couldn't take it anymore either...we were getting back at 3 in the morning, with work the next day. However, by the time the game was back playing in the area where everyone lived, the four other players weren't even interested in playing anymore.

GMPCs

-He had a GMPC named Cassius. Cassius was succubus, "bad boy"...however, he was basically roleplayed as a cryptic jerk with a giant ego. He was also majorly creepy towards the female players. I think we were supposed to be swooning.

-We were level 8 gestault/ 16 single class. Cassius was level 60.

-Cassius had every item in the game in his many bags of holding. We were not to question this.

-He also had every skill in the game...pretty much maxed. You cannot lie to or hide from Cassius. If he lies or hides you will never catch him. You are not even allowed to roll.

-Whenever we reached a trap or a puzzle, he wouldn't even give us a chance talk about it...he would just have Cassius solve it. He also used Cassius to identify and give out the loot. This one was actually kind of frustrating, since half the players didn't know the other half, and it denied us a chance to get to know each other and work together.

-We had to wait forever every time Cassius took a turn, while he rolled tons of dice for Cassius's damage. He was very proud of putting a giant crater where the enemies were, even though almost every other player was one-shotting the enemies too. I was taking down 5 a round with the archer, by dealing 1/20 of the damage.

-In session two, he introduced Marcus...who was basically an exact replica of Cassius. There was a group facepalm. I think he thought it was because he was so awesome.

Favoritism:

As I mentioned in scheduling, there was one player that he was making everyone bend over backwards to accomodate. Unfortunatley this favoritism didn't stop with scheduling. He had built her character and was frustrated by her underperforming. As a result he kept throwing her tons of custom items, such as an amulet that let her add her level to AC and item that let her deal max sneak attack damage. In the same chest, my character got a crappy bow and every other player got nothing, whatsoever. He was also, clearly trying to develop lots of subplots for her character and her character only.

Non-Combat:

Every skill we had out of combat was a total and utter waste. If we were supposed to be able to do it, Cassius would do it. If we weren't supposed to do it, we failed.

Some examples:
-A PC with darkvision failed to percieve the vampire PC licking blood off of her hand with a perception check of over 40...because it was dark.
-We weren't able to roll knowledge for any of his creatures, because they were custom creatures and "You wouldn't know what this is".
-A PC failed a perception from the crow's nest of a ship, to percieve 5 gargantuan sea monster approaching the boat with a score of over 50.

Miscelleaneous Fun:

-He used rule 0 for literally everything. It came up four times one session. He never to enhance the game, but always because he had made a major mistake and didn't want to change it.

-Getting sick of us tearing through his encounters, he added the advanced template 5 times to the sea monsters. When we questioned why the guy's CMB was so high, we found out that for each of those template additions he had added both the quick rule and rebuild bonuses, so he had effectively added the advanced template 10 times.

-He thought it would be funny to force the dread wraith template upon the character that had taken an oath to destroy undead. First he killed him by hitting him with round after round of constitution damage, for which he got no save, and teleporting out of combat constantly so we couldn't hit him. Then he made him a dread wraith. He had to roleplay the the PC's god, just to stop him from commiting suicide. Trying to convince him that this was a good thing, he basically took away all of the penalties for being a dread wraith. In addition to making the PC impossibly overpowered, this also totally outed the vampire as a vampire, because of the dread wraith's senses.

-We found out later when he was a player in a different game that he had been using all of the third party universal archetypes (like Youxia and Weapon Chamption) for his NPCs, because he thought they didn't replace anything and he could just use them as free add ons.

Subaru Kujo
2014-02-04, 09:54 AM
One that really wouldn't show up. I mean, while he did, he gave my Fighter a monstrosity of a greataxe (+3 Large one that my half elf could wield at level 2 (to be fair, we diffused an entire ogre camp by starting a fight from cover)), but if he doesn't really show up, what's the fun in it?

Tengu_temp
2014-02-04, 10:16 AM
Full story later.


Okay, the later time is now. See the post I quoted for context.

We start with character creation. The DM provides us with extremely rudimentary knowledge about the mechanics of his homebrew system - assign some points to stats, which range from -4 to +4, with no explanation what each value means, assign some points to skills (there's no skill list - you're supposed to create one yourself), and pick a special ability. This instantly becomes a problem - do you roll dexterity or perception to fire a bow, for example? The DM refuses to answer mechanical questions, saying he keeps the mechanics hidden from the players on purpose.

The guy provides us with absolutely no setting information whatsoever. I could only presume it's supposed to be a generic, slightly dark fantasy setting, 50% DND and 50% WFRP (always a very popular system in Poland).

Everyone creates their characters. The party consists of:
1. A ranger who is sick with a strange, non-infectious disease that's slowly wrecking his body, and looking for a cure. That's me.
2. A generic elven wizard/alchemist with a pseudodragon familiar, specializing in making potions. Nice guy.
3. A generic dwarf fighter. Nothing special.
4. Female bard who's secretly a werecat. A bit of a special snowflake, but nothing too bad.
5. Slightly evil necromancer. I don't remember if this guy actually appeared in the game.
6. Dark elven witch hunter, dual-wielding scimitars. Character is made of grr edgy, angst and trying too hard. Mary Sue warning signs start to light up.
7. A squirrel that got mutated due to chaos magic and became sapient (but still incapable of human speech). WTF.
8. A female bard/courtesan/I don't even know, who's described as soooo beautiful, sooo smart, sooo graceful etc. While everyone else had mostly mundane fantasy skills, this character has abilities such as "dream-shaping" or "controlling other's thoughts through music". Character is played by the DM's girlfriend. Mary Sue warning signs go crazy.

One more thing. Remember how this was a PbP game? The DM created an initiative order and told us to post in this order. Not during the combat, always. You always had to wait for the player before you in the order before you could post yourself. In a game with 7-8 players. As you can imagine, the pace was completely, frustratingly snail-like.

The game finally starts. Everyone, except the DM's girlfriend's Mary Sue character (more on her later), is in a tavern. It's evening and raining outside. The dwarf and the dark elf immediately hate each other and draw weapons, but everyone else manages to calm the situation down. The evening passes slowly and boringly, until a peasant suddenly comes in yelling about mysterious riders attacking the village. We come out, it turns out the riders wounded a girl who's unconscious now, and got away themselves. The alchemist heals her with a potion, we leave her in a room to rest. I'm trying to use my tracking skills to find where did the riders go. No success. Apparently recent rain (it stopped raining at that point) means that finding fresh tracks of several heavily-armed horsemen is too hard for an experienced hunter. Disheartened, we return to the tavern, chat with each other while waiting for the girl to wake up or anything to happen. We're bored. The game dies soon after.

At the same time, the incredibly Mary Sue character was involved in a completely different plot. She was in some other place, interacting with other NPCs, doing some stuff none of us had any idea about - none of this was in the setting description. In this part, both her and the DM were describing the action using horribly flowery prose, and the character power-emoted like mad; for example, she described how she gets past a guard by using her wits and charm, without rolling any dice or letting the DM post the guard's reaction - it just happened. The player described the environment, the NPCs, everything herself, including writing long conversations between her character and major NPCs. It went beyond cooperative storytelling, where the players create some details of the setting; she was pretty god-moding. This plot didn't seem to have any relation to what happened to the rest of the players, was completely incomprehensible to everyone except the DM and his GF, and the game didn't go far enough for the two plotlines to meet.

When the game died and some players respectfully said it was rather disappointing (myself included), the DM started to berate them. It was their fault, because they weren't being active and imaginative enough! They were supposed to control the environment like his girlfriend did! What kind of boring, reactive player simply writes what his character does and expects the DM to pull the whole weight by describing how the environment and NPCs react to this? He was incredibly arrogant and pretentious about it, clearly showing that in his opinion, he was surrounded by plebes who couldn't understand the heights of roleplaying he and his GF reached. I decided "**** it" and stopped talking to that guy.

And that's how my first PbP game went, a long time ago. It took me years until I decided to play another one, but that one fortunately went much better. These days, PbP is how I mostly play RPGs. I played with many different people since then, but never met another DM who was this arrogant, condescending, unprepared for the game, and simply bad.

comicshorse
2014-02-04, 12:10 PM
I think the worst possibile GM is the one that doesn't give you anything to talk about after the session, leaving you empty inside and bored out of your skull.
I've had such an experience, me and a friend took part in a session with 16 players and 2 GMs. I don't even remember what or even if something happened. I just remember after 6 hours I had developed a strange obsession with a paper tissue that was on the table, its texture and colour being the most interesting thing I could focus my attention at that moment.

Afterwards during our trip back home me and my friend were completly silent, no jokes about what happened, no witty remarks on how bad it was, just silence for the whole time. It was like a piece of our soul had gone away, never to return. We felt devoid of emotions and life.
I was never so bored in my entire life.

Yep had a game like that. Call of Cthulhu set in the Vietnam war. The P.C.s find a tunnel complex and then spend the rest of the session mapping it (at the G.M.'s insistence) FOOT BY FOOT.
Absolutely, brain turning to cheese boring. Game never had a second session

Grozomah
2014-02-04, 01:10 PM
I guess I was pretty lucky, since i've never had any bad sessions. I've played a couple of short campaigns with a DM who tends to railroad hard, but after the first one we kinda started to adapt to that since, thankfully, the DM generally always respected the rules and me and especially one other player knew the game pretty well and could abuse it appropriately to keep it fun.

Examples include a mini swamp monster campaign for three players - the first player was a barbarian and nothing noteworthy, the second was a beguiler played by the party mastermind (party strategist) and I (generally the combat tactitian) rolled a water orc warblade to act as the meatshield/beatstick in one. In the asian themed campaign he was appropriatelly named Dai Baku (which roughy translates to the great dream devourer). There was a combat I particularly remembered when our swamp tribe (3 PCs + 10 friendly mooks) was attacked by a large number of enemies in canoes where i guess we were supposed to fight to our lives. It tourned out to be a slaughter. The beguiler distracted the enemies (which were around 60) while my water orc (the only one with swim speed) slipped into the water and smashed all the canoes that didn't manage to escape. Straned there they were slowly picked off by our friendlies and after a while my warblade tying up loose ends. If i remember correctly i destroyed around 6 boats and had a kill count in the low forties while remaining mostly unscratched. In the next session the enemy tribe recruited a bunch of ranseur-wielding water orc barbarians. :smallbiggrin:

Eldan
2014-02-04, 02:19 PM
I think the worst possibile GM is the one that doesn't give you anything to talk about after the session, leaving you empty inside and bored out of your skull.
I've had such an experience, me and a friend took part in a session with 16 players and 2 GMs. I don't even remember what or even if something happened. I just remember after 6 hours I had developed a strange obsession with a paper tissue that was on the table, its texture and colour being the most interesting thing I could focus my attention at that moment.

Afterwards during our trip back home me and my friend were completly silent, no jokes about what happened, no witty remarks on how bad it was, just silence for the whole time. It was like a piece of our soul had gone away, never to return. We felt devoid of emotions and life.
I was never so bored in my entire life.

I was once in a situation like that. 10 players and a GM. Want to know the hilarious part?

Two hours in, the group was split up. He started playing mostly just with the six people sitting closer to him. So, after about ten minutes of waiting, I started running a little freeform game for the three people sitting around me. We actually had fun. It took the DM half an hour to notice.

Necroticplague
2014-02-04, 04:35 PM
In a game of Shadowrun I played in before, the ST had a horrible problem with railroading and pulling stuff out his rear. He seemed to always design security so that a certain person used a certain skill to bypass a certain obstacle in a certain amount of time. If we went off script either by lucky rolls decreasing expected time or finding another way to do something, he flipped out. So if say, I used my dual nature to attack a spirit instead of a spell from the mage, he started foaming. Or if we hacked droids into quietly letting us pass instead of smashing them. His eventual "solution" was to ad-hoc the difficulty of any task that isn't the "right" way to be higher than feasibly possible, and someyimes higher than physically possible (Why no, their's nothing wrong with an automatic turret having a dice pool of 24 and 3 initiatiive passes). This became exceptionally blatant once he got the ingenious idea of having us design some of the security our allies would face (once a run started, out path often diverged so far it was like different games). I designed a complex system of matrix linkages that had a few weaknesses to exploit if he was clever, and some reasonable, if difficult checks if he wasn't. Heck, I busted out my old microeconomics notes and kept track of how much this would cost them, setting a reasonable budget based on value of what was inside. Then, we finally get into the run, and something seems a bit off. I hear the technomancer talking with the ST and realize some drastic discrepancies. Turns out he was up to the same crap as before, having spiked up the difficulty of even the "easy way".

Janus
2014-02-04, 05:41 PM
I've really only had two friends to play D&D and the like with, and we took turns DMing (which also resulted in our characters alternating between PC and DMPC). Once, the paladin (DMPC), wizard, and druid were duking it out with the BBEG (dark elven caster of some sort, I've forgotten). Thing is, the DM had underestimated just how fast that villain would die in a straight up fight, so he started giving the guy extra abilities (dodging spells without rolling, etc.). Also, he set it up so the paladin DMPC got the final shot in to kill the guy.

....okay, fine, I was that DM. :smallsigh:
Thankfully, the three of us have grown up since then. Shame that our gaming stopped when one guy decided roleplaying was against his religion (he's since reconsidered that) and the other just had to go to med school.
Hopefully we'll play again sometime soon. :smallsmile:

Isamu Dyson
2014-02-04, 05:49 PM
This stuff is always about bad execution, I think.

My worst DM story hinges on stuff that could have been awesome, if it wasn't all done with the express purpose of railroading and trying to prove social dominance over the other players (yes, players, not characters).

We had a game start with the lines "this is a big new world, and you can leave your mark on it! I look forward to whatever changes you all cause." It ended with "I didn't really want you to try and change the world, I meant discover all the stuff I made!".

Our first encounters were in a dungeon crawl. The DM set up goblins with wands of exploding spell fireball that were being dual wielded. He wanted to explode the two most experienced players into a pit to be eaten by carrion crawlers, in order to keep the other players in line (his justification, might I add, not mine). This ended with the players having wands of exploding burning hands!
"Oh, uh, the exploding was from a feat. You don't have it. No knock back."
Okay. How were they dual wielding without the feat?
"My game doesn't use that feat."
Oh, okay. So we'll dual wield these wands–
"You need a feat to do that."
You just said we didn't? – new player
"Oh, uh... Each wand only has two charges left."
That worked out fine.

The dungeon ends with the goblin boss – "a very tall elf-like man with huge, black armor and two long swords". Man, that's like, straight out of the description box of your old favorite PC that you would never let anyone kill!
... Oh.

So we have to sign contracts of servitude in our blood. Experienced players signed using spattered goblin blood, so we got away okay, but just barely. Good rolls, and we had the DM roll publicly else he would have fudged and thrown off the new players...

First thing we do? Fight to the death to see who is most worthy to serve! :smallsigh:
So began my very brief and very disappointing love affair with dagger spell stance. It lasted four rounds of stubbornness before I admitted it did suck as much as the other player said it would. We got out at around 1-3 HP on everyone. After a little adventuring, we decide to talk to the guy about not working for him. I mean, no way to discover a whole new world while shackled, right?
So we walk into the room in the dungeon.
"The BBEG turns to you."
Okay, I now politely and—
"Power word: kill. Roll initiative."
The other player died, and I had dimension door prepared so we got out. The party Druid got him back o. His feet through some clever fast-talk to grant lesser reincarnation as a Druid spell at lower level because it wasn't over-written in the 3.5 update, and we all fled.

Every six hours, random assassins would show up. We avoided them, but it was clear they weren't there to hurt us, just stress us out. And next town we get into the mayor apparently hates elves and so won't serve us (even though we had two elves in the party and kicked them out). Actually, it turns out he doesn't hate elves, he hates us! Because we talked back to his son. We explained the situation, apologized, and went to an inn.

The inn was barricaded and flooded with flying wizards who had greater invisibility up and were lobbing fireballs at us. Superb use of the battle grid got us mostly out without a hitch once we get back into teleport formation due to obsessive observation of enemy cycles and initiative counts. We end up in the basement of a nearby ally establishment. The DM informs us that the rogue managed to grab a sack off a flying invisible wizard somehow, and he rolls with it. It's full of money, and also a massive jewel. I panic and run to the furthest possible corner while warning my comrades, who just look at me funny (except the sorcerer, who also books it). Turns out it was a disjunction trap? And the DM advises the party to all make DC 45 saving throws or we lose the ability to cast spells forever because that's what dysfunction does. He is smug.

Luckily, everyone flipped to the spell to figure that out and deduced that he skimmed the spell and didn't read it; he was going to be insistent on Dysjunction stripping magic permanently in his games until he realized the experienced players (wizard and sorcerer) weren't in the blast and we would be throwing it back at him post-haste. We were rapidly approaching level six by this point. I finally finish the magic item I have been working on; a hat of nondetection. Just in time, too, because from now on every six hours we get targeted with Scry and Fry centered on me. Good thing i got the Dm to okay magic item creation but couldn't get his attention to explain what I was making!
We of course, get numerous events like a stray wind or passing bird knocking off my hat and then the divination assassination begins again in earnest.

At level eight we get into a dungeon the DM led us to that is three rooms, the first of which is trapped to lock us in, block teleportation, and allow 1d4 mummies into the room every 1d6 rounds until all sixty four mummies have emerged. The ranger saved us with his lazily explained multimanyrapidshot shenanigans that shouldn't have worked, let alone with his cheap custom incendiary grenade arrows he had been building with DM permission. I would hazard it was on purpose but the DM didn't know mummies were vulnerable to fire. His stated reason for the trap was to kill the sorcerer and wizard.

By level 13 the party Druid is a demigod. The party fighter has a shield of regeneration and a legion of death knights. The experienced players are wanted in every town and city and patrolled by absurd monsters. We had left the rails at this point, so we are harassed by a log.

A piece of wood? Part of a tree? A log. Turns out the log is a fallen god epic wizard/epic sorcerer's familiar who is guiding us back to the prophecy we never heard of and no one could tell us about. It was here I began to lay the seeds of my revenge.

I got a hold of a scroll of arcane Genesis. I built a prison of timeless agony. All my spare time was spent carving runes and sigils of pain, suffering, madness across it's entire surface. Any off-hand super magic item was disposed of here, fabricating adamant mazes with mystic back tracks and confusions, that were alive and shifted. Golems and constructs patrolled it's interior as guards. Legions of undead guarded the golems. Every trick I could conceive of got brought up enough for the DM to say "yeah yeah, sure, whatever" and noted meticulously on a ledger.

We got wishes. Subtle ones, only. So I wished to change my creature type. I retrained my class. I spent time devising new spells. I kept items with only single charges remaining. I cast no spell above second leek in combat; my contributions were Mage armor, shield, and magic missile. I take notes. I watch, I wait. We are 16th level.

Our enemies? Everyone who ever screwed with us. Literally. The town mayor? 20th level wizard. The innkeeper? Same. The farmer we wouldn't but turnips from who harassed us in town? Same. The librarian who stole the ranger's girlfriend? Same. And in their midst, the Tall Elf with black armor and two short swords, who was about to become a demigod incarnation of demogorgon, which is apparently the plot?
"You'll have to watch him ascend and then fight his god form"
Oh no. I have had enough of this. We can see through this scrying lens that more cultists are teleporting in. We teleport in.
"Oh no. They're plane shifting, all teleports are blocked."
Fine. Fighter! Use your cross class UMD to read this scroll on initiative count 2. Sorcerer, use this staff with greater plane shifting on initiative count one. Fighter, don't start until we get to heaven! Everyone, battle formations!

So we enter the cult mid-ritual. An anti magic field drops immediately, meaning it's melee or bust thanks to excessive use of Widen spell on the scroll prior. Unfortunately one of the cultists was the king of all red dragons. Which the DM had set up legitimately and we hadn't bothered checking for polymorph...

We win on a technicality as the party rogue determined that the BBEG's resistance to poison is, in fact, magical and not inherent. We survive 20 rounds of melee against numbers beasts because the DM rules the divine nature of the Druid (being a god) creates a bubble i the anti magic zone that the fighter uses to maintain his regeneration shield. Eventually, the rogue lines up a shot and hits the BBEG with a couple dozen doses each of int, wis, and Cha draining poisons and positoxins, flooring him instantly.

The DM starts a CUTSCENE! Gods descend, gods rise, the two fallen god brothers start to claim and maybe rehabilitate the BBEG and—

NO.

Time stop. Previously established as stopping even the gods, except the BBEG who had the epic feat to ride along; that is, only he and I were there.
I cast eternity of torture.
"He's immune to wizard magic"
I am actually not a wizard anymore, having shifted to bard/sublime chord/seeker of the lost arcane arts/ultimate magus.
"He's still immune to mortal magic"
I'm my mortal, having become a draconic get resonant image cast by multiversal principles through the last six type shifts from wishes and rituals.
"He has massive spell resistance"
Which is, by your houserules earlier, not able to protect him from this spell.
"Fine! But once the time stop wears off—"

The kicker.

I cast the epic spell eternity of utter damnation.
"WHAT?!"
I cast this epic spell I've been working on that you okayed.
"You're not epic level!"
I'm draconic, have a true dragon age limit, and old enough dragons qualify for epic.
"You're not old enough!"
I've spent months to years e'ery night for six years of game time in a different dimension, crafting and planning.
"You don't meet the skill requirements!"
Except for your houserule that lets is train really hard to go above our maximum rank limit with a high cost.

I threw every loophole, every asinine mistake, every idea he ever forced on the party despite polite discussion and even pleasing, back in his face. He ended up with his most beloved PC ending, not as an over deity, but as a nigh-lifeless husk suffering beyond humans imagination for an eternity of eternities, in nested realities, only accessible through a single jewel around the neck of the over-goddess we had unwittingly powered up this entire time and who was the only being who actively disliked the BBEG.

Two years of being prevented from the simple goal of having fun adventuring being thwarted, collapsed into a sucking wound of malice in the fabric of his games reality. We gave him anther chance later on, in a game where we switched DMs every session. That was six months of actively undoing anything someone else adjudicated so he could start a railroad before we called it off.

It is a wonder that you stuck with the hobby, after having suffered all that. Kudos!

Dimers
2014-02-04, 05:49 PM
This became exceptionally blatant once he got the ingenious idea of having us design some of the security our allies would face (once a run started, out path often diverged so far it was like different games). I designed a complex system of matrix linkages that had a few weaknesses to exploit if he was clever, and some reasonable, if difficult checks if he wasn't. Heck, I busted out my old microeconomics notes and kept track of how much this would cost them, setting a reasonable budget based on value of what was inside. Then, we finally get into the run, and something seems a bit off.

Ahh, the old "steal the security system itself and retire in style" run. It's like selling adamantine doors in D&D. Who needs to finish a mission when you can hire an army with the loot to do it for you?

Necroticplague
2014-02-04, 06:27 PM
Ahh, the old "steal the security system itself and retire in style" run. It's like selling adamantine doors in D&D. Who needs to finish a mission when you can hire an army with the loot to do it for you?

Actually, the reason I busted out the textbooks was to avoid that problem. His way would have, and did have that problem ("Hey, can you guys stick around for a few extra seconds while I copy this shoot-10 program?"), I used cleverness instead of raw numbers (thus saving money efficiently, like a reasonable corp might). Heck, I freaking started making indifference curves of program costs. And then he entirely ignored the point of the design by giving it big numbers. And piling on ludicrous amount of scramble everywhere so pretty much everything self-destructed (user-friendliness? What's that? At least my main network problem for a legitimate user would mostly just be a little lag from going through nested master nodes). Like I said, pull things out of thin air to cover for inability to to handle deviation.

SimonMoon6
2014-02-04, 06:37 PM
I've only ever had mildly bad DMs. But then, I don't put up with a lot. Either that, or I'm usually the DM/GM.

There was the guy who decided to have monsters whose touch can disintegrate/dissolve anything in the universe... and they were trapped behind ordinary stone doors until we unwittingly freed them.

There was the guy who introduced us to a culture where there were two opposing factions. We were supposed to pick one to support and fight the other. We really didn't go for that and afterwards, he told me that the plan was that whichever side we picked would turn out to be the wrong one.

The same guy was running a game which caused a fellow player to tear up his character sheet on the spot and walk out. It was over a dispute about how large the cab of an eighteen wheeler is. The player's PC had been "trapped" in the cab of an eighteen wheeler which had turned on its side. The PC could stand on the passenger side door but couldn't reach all the way up to touch the driver's side door. The player even went so far as to demonstrate how small the cab had to be by going out and lying in the street. The GM still wouldn't budge which led to the tearing up of the character sheet.

The same guy decided to end the campaign by having a group of overpowered bad guys fight us and kill us. But he couldn't keep his plans secret, showing me their character sheets in advance. Naturally, I planned how to beat them and we won without any casualties. He still ended the campaign a few sessions later.

And then there was the time when a DM let a newbie player run a session. He did a standard "here's the villain you can't possibly beat" routine with a dragon, followed by "Oh, look, the DMPC can save the day!" But that's nothing special. It was a bit ruined by one of the other PCs finding a way to beat the dragon, which just meant that a second more powerful dragon showed up immediately.

Those are the only terrible moments I can remember.

Meth In a Mine
2014-02-04, 07:28 PM
The major effect this thread has had on me is incredible gratitude that I've never had a bad GM. I've had people making mistakes, one who was way too lenient, and other weaknesses, but in 39 years of role-playing, I've never dealt with anything like what the rest of you are describing.
Yeah most GMs I've dealt with have had flaws, but tolerable ones (i.e. They'd mess up on the grapple rules, or doled out too much loot on accident, etc.)

However, that same GM (from the roper incident) had us at 6th level, go up against a bunch of drow. At first we thought this was a reasonable encounter, only to discover that the drow, who were 5th level rangers, with strength 12 and only +1 rapiers, somehow got off with a +16 (1d6+10/15-20/x2) attack each. And he also called them "glass cannons" although AC 25 and 40 hp each doesn't give me that feeling.

The Oni
2014-02-04, 07:52 PM
My DMs haven't been that bad. The worst I can remember was a guy who began a campaign with "A dead elf falls out of a tree."

BrokenChord
2014-02-04, 07:59 PM
doled out too much loot on accident

This is a bad experience for you?

Threadnaught
2014-02-04, 08:34 PM
Out of my group there have been four DMs.


The first did one session, I missed half of it because I was sick partway through. He ganked my caster before the other PCs in combat. :smallbiggrin:


Second DM was me. I abused my players' expectations, gave most bridges caretakers, who were all members of a certain race and lived on/under/near the bridges they guard, abused my players' expectations, let their level 2 PCs encounter and wake up the CR30ish god of destruction and abused their expectations. They both seemed to enjoy that campaign. :smallamused:

Current Campaigns, one set of players are running around my own setting with Tier 1 Characters. The other two a pair of Australians, they're using approved Homebrew Classes in Eberron, I explicitly banned them both from using official Classes. Guy I knew is using a Warrior Poet (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=235823), the other guy (whose Scottish version of a Glaswegian accent is hilarious and unintelligible) is using an Invisible Guardian (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=13605675).
I think the story of this session belongs in the funny stories thread.


Third DM, one of my players, that ******* Druid, gave in to my constant whining about always being a player and never being able o play myself.
He began the campaign with my Kobold Druid being knocked out by a "greenskin" (I'm thinking either Orc or Goblin) in some big battle at Graywall (he decided later that it was at Suthar Draal, after learning what Graywall is in Eberron), I wake up being dragged by Kitty my Riding Dog. Then I have a load of exposition given to me by some Human Artificer with 16 in all stats. My DMPC radar is on full alert.
My Druid, Dog and the Artificer fight a bunch of Rats and a Dire Rat on our way through the mountain to the Eldeen Reaches, we find some place to rest for the night and end session. Before the next session, I convince my DM to allow me a Wizard to play side by side with my Druid, say he's one of the refuges or something. Okay, he's not a refugee, I won't meet him until I get to Greenheart which is several days and at least a session or two away. So as soon as I learn that the Artificer is going to be abandoning me as soon as I can afford to hire him, and is unlikely to let me hire him anyway. I convince him to let me play as the Artificer and I decide to give the Artificer Skills that allow it to do the stuff t*D said he could and begin building my own concept on top of that.
So we're on our way to Greenheart through the Eldeen Reaches, when the forest begins to get thicker, darker and there are more and more spider webs. I ask if I see anything, suddenly I see a whole bunch of eyes glowing in the dark. Spiders. We send a pair of guards from the caravan's escort to cut open a big ol' web stopping us from advancing and I decide to look up, to see a Large Monstrous Spider, the five Small ones surrounding us decide to move in the instant it begins to descend. Party is two level 2 characters.
Next session, still don't have my Wizard yet, my Druid finds a tree leaking a sweet nectar and decided to gather some to feed himself and the refugees, with some spare to distract certain creatures, should we ever encounter any. Artificer acts all confused, because he doesn't understand the Druid's ways and the DM notes I'm talking to myself. Later on we hear a buzzing sound, which is getting louder/closer, we see some Giant Bees. My Druid, being prepared uses his prepared Create Water to create a puddle of fresh water and pours half of the nectar onto the ground for the bees to eat. They leave and he lulls me into a false sense of security, the Druid and Artificer are alerted to some commotion, they find a Ranger and Sorceress fighting a bunch of centipedes in a burned out house, centipedes dead the Ranger and Sorceress join the refugees as part of the escort.
We finally reach Greenheart and there's three Giant Fire Beetles, two Giant Bombadier Beetles and a Giant Stag Beetle, my Wizard joins the fight, surrounded by the creatures. The fights going well for my Wizard, because he has Mirror Image up first round before anything attacks, he really needs it. I'm already annoyed as the party is level 3 at this point. I hurry up and kill off the Fire Beetles first, then the Bombadier Beetles, while using BFC and movement to stay away from the CR4 enemy. Then the Stag Beetle lands a hit on my Wizard, it's a one hit kill. It would've been one hit for any character, when my Wizard is True Resurrected by a 17+th level Cleric who had just happened to be there and was feeling insanely generous.
Next session, my Wizard decides he is far too fragile to go anywhere alone, so he sticks around with my Druid and Artificer. We decide to help deal with whatever caused the CR6 encounter so my party doesn't risk getting wiped every time we take a step forward and it turns out to be two Small Fire Elementals. They don't seem to want to leave the forest of their own free will, enjoying the forest fires they cause, so we trap them with my Druid's Create Water Spells and give their location to the Druids.
We then get sent to a nearby lake where a bunch of Water Elementals give me a riddle, I try to do it through my characters, but I fail the rolls and have to work out a very complicated riddle to call their "queen" from the lake. She talks about a robed guy using a magic sword to hurt her in an attempt to force her to do something... I don't know either. I assume Caster, my characters assume Necromancer. We head out in the opposite direction from the robed guy so we can find out about the artefact he was using.
While resting for the night and before my characters can fully heal, we're attacked by a dozen wolves and the alpha a Dire Wolf. We knock out one wolf, while backing away from the pack. Unfortunately I couldn't pin down and knock out the Alpha, because that wouldn't have caused any stress at all. The entire encounter with the Wolves was actually worse than the one with the Spiders, because I had even less idea where any individual Wolf or Character was at a given time. Add to that, the fact that my Kobold, with 60 Darkvision, was attacked by a Wolf without a Spot Check or being allowed to roll Initiative, until the attack had concluded.
Later on we're walking by a forest where bandits have been attacking travellers... Suddenly, without a Spot Check or being allowed to roll initiative, there's a blur and one of my characters is attacked.

I swear, as soon as I start taking levels in Planar Shepherd, Jib Pun, Aldin Aberto Albatross and Corvin Firki are going to conquer Eberron.


The fourth and final DM, only DMed one session, like the first DM. We spent most of the time laughing and joking. t*D decided to play his favourite Class, we mocked him for it through the entire session. We haven't been able to play with that guy as DM since.

gellerche
2014-02-04, 10:03 PM
That's easy. The worst DM I ever had was the one who said:

"Hey! No Monty Python quotes in my campaign!"

ellindsey
2014-02-04, 10:38 PM
Up until the last sentance, that sounded suspiciously like an unnecessarily ACCURATE Robotech game. ;)

True. I suppose my mistake was thinking that the PCs were supposed to be the heroes of the story, rather than the helpless redshirts who get mowed down in the first episode. It's not like the GM even had a glorious DMPC set up to come in and look awesome saving/avenging us.

Pex
2014-02-05, 12:17 AM
That's easy. The worst DM I ever had was the one who said:

"Hey! No Monty Python quotes in my campaign!"

What the . . . ? That's just . . .
Gah! You win.

SiuiS
2014-02-05, 03:32 AM
Worst DM ever is a toss up between the one who couldn't finish a story, ever, and the railroading overdescriber.
The first constantly write himself into a corner, which we could tell since he'd cancel the next session, and the session after he would tell us to roll new characters, since he didn't like where the whole thing was going. More than likely the campaigns all had invisible rails and once we got off them, he couldn't figure out how to steer us back. Not a bad DM, persay, just not exceptional.

Wow.


After writing that description I'm clear its the railroader. Situation came up where in able to pass some door, we all needed to sleep with "ideal" canditates for our characters. Me, playing a paladin, while not having any sort of chastity vow, still didn't feel like it would be in character to do this. I felt my character more suspected this would be a trap, so I had to tell the rest of the party to go on without me. I'm normally pretty good at going on with bad plot twists, but this one didn't sit well with me. The rest of the players agreed with me for my choice, and of course I started asking if there was any other way to get through here. DM told me to roll a will save vs charm, rolled a 19, plus my other modifiers the total was in the mid thirties. To his credit, he didn't make me fail, just made me roll another, and then another, and then another. 6 successful saves later, I gave up. This was going to happen whether I wanted it to or not. And I got tired of wasting time and wanted to get this over with. He then went on to describe the scene in graphic detail, and would have kept going on and on about it until we loudly reminded him that the host had a young daughter who was still awake and could potentially hear all of this. The whole scene, with the saves and description lasted about 45 minutes. Would have left the game but luckily he was just a temp DM while the normal DM/host took a small game playing break.



...



...



...



Is anyone else here familiar with the fabled Satyr Orgy Convention game story? Because that sounds an awful lot like it.

I'm not gonna lie, as terrible a person as it makes me. As soon as charm spells fly so someone can share their mental masturbation with the groups and shrug off responsibility because "it's what would happen" I would kick them out (regardless of whose house it was) or kick their bones. Hard. Or maybe just leave, but some things demand an appeal to my baser nature.



There was the guy who introduced us to a culture where there were two opposing factions. We were supposed to pick one to support and fight the other. We really didn't go for that and afterwards, he told me that the plan was that whichever side we picked would turn out to be the wrong one.

That's actually not so bad, all things considered. It can definitely be done well.



The same guy decided to end the campaign by having a group of overpowered bad guys fight us and kill us. But he couldn't keep his plans secret, showing me their character sheets in advance. Naturally, I planned how to beat them and we won without any casualties. He still ended the campaign a few sessions later.

I've been planning to do something like this, actually! Just, once the players are killed, they're revived by an expensive true resurrection decades in the future as the last hope of a world fallen to dystopian horror, they allies and minions now grown to hardened, angry people by forty years of toil and horror.


Yeah most GMs I've dealt with have had flaws, but tolerable ones (i.e. They'd mess up on the grapple rules, or doled out too much loot on accident, etc.)

However, that same GM (from the roper incident) had us at 6th level, go up against a bunch of drow. At first we thought this was a reasonable encounter, only to discover that the drow, who were 5th level rangers, with strength 12 and only +1 rapiers, somehow got off with a +16 (1d6+10/15-20/x2) attack each. And he also called them "glass cannons" although AC 25 and 40 hp each doesn't give me that feeling.

Hmm.

40 HP at sixth level isn't so bad, really. AC 25 is an average roll for a good warrior (+6, +4 STR, +3 weapon, +2 misc., +15 total is "hit on 10"). If there's a large disparity between what the party can handle and what the DM forces, that's the DM not conveying tone and expectations properly.


What the . . . ? That's just . . .
Gah! You win.


I actually hate Monty python quotes. For one, the context is always lacking. For two, they aren't funny anymore. For three, a group of comedians based on improv and spontaneity routinely cut down to several stock quotes is a travesty.

BWR
2014-02-05, 04:06 AM
stuff

That's just beautiful.
*sniff*

I need a moment.

OK, here's one I only have third hand:
The Prophecy.
Set up as a 'save the world' story, the luckless PCs after some railroading got their hands on the big tome of prophecy that told them how to defeat the BBEG. It didn't just tell them how to do it, it detailed everything. Where to go, who to talk to, what to fight and kill. No matter how stupid, how pointless, it was detailed. The real kicker was this: they couldn't avoid it. Any time the players tried to do something different or think outside the box or not follow the instrucitons to the letter, the book would start vibrating ominously. If they persisted in trying to jump the rails, it would explode, killing everyone. Then they would be spontaneously resurrected, along with the book, at the spot they were supposed to be and given another shot. They couldn't get rid of the book, they couldn't run away or ignore it.


My personal experience was a friend who played with us a year or two. He was an indifferent player but his attempts at DMing were something else. After a failed attempt at his own dungeon and campaign world, he decided to run prepublished adventures. After character creation and everyone was ready to paly, he pulled the adventure out of his bag, took the plastic off and started reading it. 5 minutes of reading followed by a shortscene we react to. 5 minutes more of reading, another short scene. Ad nauseam.
This 'campaign' saw us at about level five get Staves of the Power/Magi, Robes of the Archmagi and more just about every encounter. It's the only time I've ever heard someone say "another Staff? What the hell am I going to do with this junk? Here, you take it."

But his worst attempt was the first thing he tried. A dungeon. It started off rather predicatbly. Bad design, a different monster from the MM in every room, Monty Haul treasures, nearly all of it usable only by mages (we had one wizard in the party - we all knew the DM had a man-crush on the wizard's player and this just proved it). We found a room with a mithril computer. Yes, a computer. No external power source, no sign of high tech stuff elsewhere, just a giant room-sized mithril computer. We couldn't do anything with it because it was mithril and resisted all our attempts to carve it up.
After a couple of sessions, the group commented that we were getting a lot of magic items, and it might unbalance the game. The DM took us at our word, realizing he'd gone a little overboard and the next room we entered destroyed all magic. Every bit of it, even the stuff we'd had before we started.

Magicitemless and rather peeved, we continued down and came across a room with a really, really powerful monster, something far beyond our capabilities. I can't rememberwhat exactly, but it was there, we couldn't go around it and we were young and foolish enough to be of the opinion that once you start a dungeon you finish it or die trying. The only thing we had that could affect the creature was the single Fireball spell the wizard had, but the creature was too damn powerful to be taken out by a single. So we camped outside the room. Once a day we would have one character open the door, let the wizard cast Fireball at the beastie, then quickly close it again. For some reason the monster couldn't open the door or break through it or whatever. This was a valid if cowardly tactic so the DM got upset that we didn't want to die heroically defeat the monster and he declared that a bullet killed the wizard.
We thought it was a joke at first but no, he was dead serious. A bullet, out of the blue with no shooter just came and killed the wizard. We refused to accept this, continued on our merry monster-roasting way and got to the final boss.

The BBEG was a something homemade. It looked mostly human but had a lot of really weird abilities. We took him down pretty quickly and easily, so he spontaneously manifested the ability to cast Heal on himself (the DM didn't say this but we couldread his expressions well enough). So we take him down a second time, suffering greatly in the process. He Heals again. This time, we are so beaten up and out of juice he's about to kill us. The DM realizes this and the guy suddenly dies. Supposedly he had taken enough damage to die, but by this time we knew his HP and he should have been less than half way down.

Then the giant room starts filling with acid. The door is locked and impassable, there are no secret exits and no off buttons, especially not on the throne (we made sure to check it very, very thoroughly).
So the Wizard, who by this time had gotten Dimension Door, runs off leaving us to die and the rest die drowning and dissolving in the acid. When asked if there was a way out, he said: "There was a button"
Annoyed players: "Where?"
DM: "On the throne."
Slightly angry players: "the throne. The throne we specifically said we searched very thoroughly, poking and prodding and pulling and pushing EVERYTHING to find a button"
DM: "yeah."

Since this was a guest adventure in a game run by someone else, who played his usually-a-DMPC for this event, the real DM took the game back, declared that it didn't happen and we had all the original gear we had before entering but kept the xp we had earned.

Velaryon
2014-02-05, 04:41 AM
Yeah, you're going to have to name some specific powers before we can even begin to narrow this down.

EDIT:



Or Naruto, or Fairy Tail, or Black Bultler, or Basilisk, or...

It's been several years since that game, so I can't remember any specific powers that the DMPC had from his eye. I know it wasn't Black Butler-inspired and I am familiar enough with Fairy Tail to guess it's probably not that either. Naruto would be a good bet, since at least one other time he has copied a character whole cloth from there and used it as a PC.

I know that a lot of the stories here put anything I have to shame, but while reading I've thought of a few more of my DM's over the years that I'd like to roast over the coals a bit.

How about this one...

This was another Ravenloft campaign, but at least this time it was run by someone with more than a passing familiarity with the setting. Or at least, with the characters in the setting, if not necessarily the gothic horror tone that it's supposed to have.

Before the campaign even starts, he tells me and one of the other players that it's going to end with us becoming Einherjer and fighting Levistus. Don't ask me what either of these has to do with the Land of Mists, but that was the plan. Since this is evidently not a secret plot, we share the info with the other players as well. When he finds out that one of the other players knows, the DM gets upset with that player for "ruining" his plans and he ends up scrapping the Einherjer thing.

Instead of becoming Einherjer, he decides to slap us all with the Shadow Samurai template from Creatures of Rokugan. Never mind that this is a horrible fit for a campaign theoretically set in Barovia. One problem: in order for us to gain this particular undead template, we all have to die. This is how it happens:

Strahd von Zarovich summons us to his castle to give us some kind of task (and by summoned, I mean he sent minions to retrieve us who used mass hold person on us, and then didn't allow us to even attempt a saving throw). As we are leaving the castle to begin whatever the task was, we are ambushed by a group of archers and a wizard that have been waiting for us for some reason.

Before the surprise round has even begun, the wizard has already cast mass haste on all the archers. In addition, they all have Rapid Shot and so are each shooting 3 or 4 arrows at us before we've even rolled initiative. To top it off, the wizard targets my character specifically with a fireball for the express purpose of trying to detonate the bombs my character was carrying in his backpack (which was OOC knowledge because I had been carrying them since the start of the campaign and never once used any). Needless to say, most of us were killed before we could even act, at which point we were given the Shadow Samurai template as planned and told by Ravenloft's mysterious Dark Powers that we had to destroy Levistus because... some reason.

Admittedly, we were all pretty new to the game back then, but it was still pretty awful, horribly railroaded, and mostly nonsensical.

Marlowe
2014-02-05, 05:24 AM
Yep had a game like that. Call of Cthulhu set in the Vietnam war. The P.C.s find a tunnel complex and then spend the rest of the session mapping it (at the G.M.'s insistence) FOOT BY FOOT.
Absolutely, brain turning to cheese boring. Game never had a second session

Been down one of those VC complexes. I would not go in again without a map or a guide or both.

Tengu_temp
2014-02-05, 05:55 AM
Is anyone else here familiar with the fabled Satyr Orgy Convention game story? Because that sounds an awful lot like it.


I remember that story. Wish I didn't! But I do.

SiuiS
2014-02-05, 06:01 AM
I remember that story. Wish I didn't! But I do.

I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. (/Doctor)

That story is my rubric for when an adult punching another adult in the face is okay.

lytokk
2014-02-05, 08:49 AM
Wow.

Is anyone else here familiar with the fabled Satyr Orgy Convention game story? Because that sounds an awful lot like it.

I'm not gonna lie, as terrible a person as it makes me. As soon as charm spells fly so someone can share their mental masturbation with the groups and shrug off responsibility because "it's what would happen" I would kick them out (regardless of whose house it was) or kick their bones. Hard. Or maybe just leave, but some things demand an appeal to my baser nature.



yeah, we weren't exactly happy with what hapenned. Unfortunately, all of us worked together so we didn't exactly have the luxury of kicking him. In the end, we fought his BBEG, a high level necromantic vampire. For some reason, the guy kept forgetting I was a paladin cavalier, with an artifact sword made from the finger of a god (which I found out later) which basically bypassed all damage reduction. After I smited and divine sacrificed his guy into the ground on one pass, I got my revenge, and a few million gold to fund the defense of the Talenta Plains (was an eberron game, and when I was told I could be a halfling riding a dinosaur, I took that option), and a few cursed necromantic wands which after the war I was going to make my quest to destroy them. Too bad that after the war (other dm's campaign) my guy died but not before I had all of that stockpiled in a locked dungeon. Just wish the group hadn't fallen apart at the end of the game cause honestly, that stuff is pure story gold.

AMFV
2014-02-05, 08:51 AM
I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. (/Doctor)

That story is my rubric for when an adult punching another adult in the face is okay.

Alright, I'll bite, where can this story be found, or can we get a summary of it?

geeky_monkey
2014-02-05, 09:54 AM
The worst DM I ever had was a friend of my wife (girlfriend at the time).

She’d been telling us how great she was at DMing, cos she was a ‘professional actress’ (her entire CV consists of a non-speaking role in a single sketch of a comedy show where all she had to do was smile). She claimed she created entire biographies of every single NPC, and knew ever detail of their lives.

Maybe she did. But we never discovered them. Instead we spent the entire session in a harbour building trying to find someone to give us something to do. In the intro we’d been told we’d been sent their to find a contact but none on the NPC would speak to us (we ‘weren’t important enough’ for them to acknowledge), were all non-descript (when asked what they looked like we were told “they’re just sailors, there’s nothing special about them”) and we weren’t allowed to leave the building for reasons that were never established.

We didn’t even get to roll our own dice, cos that was the DMs job. She rolled the dice maybe 5 times during the entire session. And we never got to see the results.

After maybe half an hour we decided we’d had enough and tried to force our way out the building. We got into a fight and were killed by a NPC without a single dice being rolled.

The DM then started screaming at us for ruining her adventure. Apparently we’d not asked the right questions, we pointed out we’d done nothing but ask questions for 30 minutes and she said we’d not asked the right person – she said we should have talked to the guy in the red cloak in the corner. We pointed out she’d never mentioned him and we’d asked for descriptions of the people in the room multiple times.

Then she told us we’d never rolled high enough on our spot checks to see him. The only guy in a 20ft by 10ft building who wasn’t dressed like a sailor. Who, in fact was the only person in a sparsely populated, well lit warehouse wearing red. And wasn’t hiding – he was leaning against a crate. We’d somehow failed to see him. I believe he might have even been the person who killed us when we gave up and tried to leave.

There wasn’t a second session. The friendship didn’t last much longer – pretending I couldn’t see her when she turned up at our house a week later wearing a red coat didn’t go down well.

I think she may have been harbouring a grudge.

Marlowe
2014-02-05, 10:07 AM
Alright, I'll bite, where can this story be found, or can we get a summary of it?

Summary:
It takes place at a convention some time ago. The exercise in question was to have volunteer DMs take RPG newbies through a short adventure to get them interested in the hobby. There were relatively few volunteers to actually DM these things, so this guy got in without many questions.

According to the version I read, some alarm bells rang in some people's heads when the pregenerated characters were handed out. All female. No Cleric. Generally low wisdom.

The "adventure" consisted of the PCs wandering through an enchanted forest and encountering a group of Satyrs, who promptly cast enchantments on the PCs to make them participate in a group orgy. Those PCs who made their saves were pressured by the DM to participate anyway on the grounds that "Your friends seem to be having fun".

The Dm went into lurid detail of what was going on and who was having what done to them for quite some time until the general dissatisfaction (and discomfort) got to point of people asking "Is all this going anywhere?". At which point the DM admitted that he couldn't move on because this was all he'd planned.

Someone else can probably give a better reference.

Angel Bob
2014-02-05, 10:26 AM
My group's had three DMs so far, the third of them being myself; I can't speak to my own level of skill, but I like to think I did a better job than the two friends of mine who tried before me.

The first was the guy who had the initiative to bring the group together. He was a pretty haphazard DM: he had good concepts and memorable-if-silly characters, which we still make references to, but his plots made very little sense. I won't say he railroaded, because we mostly didn't object to wandering off and doing whatever. He also let a mutual friend (soon to be the second DM) homebrew a completely broken firebender class, and gave him a 1/encounter ability to fly, which could be sustained on each turn -- meaning that he had unlimited flight -- and on top of that, he got to play a second character as well. Even at the time, when we were all completely inexperienced players, this really cheesed off me and the others. The other thing that bothered me was his dispensing of treasure: this was a 4E game, but he handled magic items as if it were an earlier edition, meaning that my character went for several levels without a magic weapon and therefore couldn't hit anything. But when he did give out treasure, he gave it out all at once, often with very little explanation; the low point of the campaign was when we ransacked a hallway in an eladrin mansion and inexplicably found a half dozen magic items hidden within suits of armor, behind bricks, and under the rugs. Of course, everything's funnier in hindsight. :smalltongue:

The second DM was a little bit better at plot, but he wasn't very good at descriptions: although we spent a good three or four levels in one town, we were never once given an image of the place, and it was roughly equivalent to the in-between stages in a video game, where buying and selling items is the only thing to do. He also gave in to the temptations of creating a DMPC, although thankfully, he never intentionally bent the rules to accommodate his awesomeness, nor did he appear very often. His first campaign died after we all got a little bored of it, and his second was an Evil campaign with me and the first DM as the players. In this campaign, he did alright: the standard "you all wake up in prison", an arena battle to win our freedom, then a strange plot where a golden-haired elf (whom we really should have suspected to be an agent of Pelor, thinking about it) sent us to defeat a mind flayer ruling over a town, only for the town to turn out to be an illusory prison for fiends, with a few random monsters guarding the gems that kept them under the spell. That was all good fun (we really enjoyed our characters!), but the next adventure was kicked off by a nearby necromancer establishing an anti-magic field that covered the entire region. Now, it's worth mentioning that three-fourths of the group was of arcane classes. We struggled through most of an encounter with some undead, forced to use desperate strategies such as sending the sorcerer to stab things in melee and having the bard and wizard drop a tree on an enemy, before we gave in to the predominant feelings of boredom and hopelessness.

It's worth noting that, as players in my campaign, these two DMs are the most competent, rules-savvy, and reasonable members of the party, and they're a joy to DM for. :smallsmile:

Threadnaught
2014-02-05, 10:49 AM
Alright, I'll bite, where can this story be found, or can we get a summary of it?

Here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1268397&postcount=51) please enjoy and if you skip to the very first post, you'll find ThatLankyBugger's first story.


I also like the story of Mike, the guy who owned a gaming store and was a ridiculous ******* outside of D&D.

Artemicion
2014-02-05, 12:23 PM
I must admit I never really had absolutely horrible experiences, just pretty clumsy one, my worst was maybe this one:

I had been DMing a DnD 3.5 campaign for quite a while with player that was new to our group. He was new to Dnd but had quite a lot of experience playing the Warhammer Fantasy Storytelling Game. The campaign had quite a lot of political intrigue and the plot was, I must admit, quite complicated.

So this guy really wanted his characters to be cool. He played an elven diviner, and he wanted so much to play a vampire that I home brewed a vampire template that would fit the campaign and not make him too powerful. Of course when outed himself to the party when he attacked a good cleric they were travelling with because he had turned some skeletons (his rational was that he felt threatened), the party Paladin took quick care of him.

His second character was also very cool, an assassin with ties to an ancient and secret organization. Anyways.

At the end of each session, he would rant at how better the Warhammer rules were. And how much he longed to be a DM again, how if he did he would create for us adventures that would be really extraordinary and magical (kind of hinting at the same time that my campaign was not that extraordinary or magical).

After some time he even offered to give me a break and DM the group for a few sessions. I had not played as a PC for sometime and kind of welcomed the break. I was also eager to see his DM skills he so ranted about.

So the next session I took one of the NPCs as my character and we let the other player take over as a DM. 3 minutes later we all had been magically teleported to the Warhammer game world 2500 years in the future. The only way to go back was to have priests of several deities scribe rules on a spooky staff.

The staff was spooky,sometimes it made us see things, and it even had its own thematic song. It hinted that there was something very wrong with it.

Our travels led us to a labyrinth that the DM had designed. First floor was a huge map with basically corridors put like a grid, with the exit on the other side. Not a maze, just a boring square thing. he felt very clever about it. He would randomly have a small group of creatures attack us, an easy fight, which he would redo again and again. Did I mention they were undead and immune to my cleric's turn undead ability?

Second level was a real maze, complicated, with no encounters (no traps, no monsters). There were keys hidden in random places, so we would have to walk ten feet and roll search to try to find the key behind a non descript stone or similar nondescript object. That was pretty tedious. When finally we got to the end of the maze, we of course met a big monster. The DM knew that in mythology there was a half man / half beast creature that lurked in labyrinths, so he made us fight... a centaur.

After the maze we got to go to a bunch of other spooky places, where we saw dead versions of ourselves telling us we would be betrayed, saw stuff that messed our characters up, etc. A lot of omens and foreshadowing.

Along the way we also fought a kraken and a hydra.

Finally, we managed to get all the runes on the staff (after having to fight our greatest fears). When the final ritual was made... we realised we had been dreaming all along. That's it. There was no other climax, the foreshadowing was never explained. And the three last sessions felt like we had been tricked or something.

I was very glad to return to the DM seat. The player returned as a PC, taking control of the NPC I had played (because he foudn it cool), then he grew bored with it a decided to play a cool psionic telepath from a dark, evil race who would try to control the other PCs all the time. Meh.

Artemicion
2014-02-05, 12:32 PM
Oh! All these talks about orgies reminded me of two pretty terrible sessions I had to go through when I was a teen.

1. My bard gets kidnapped. For some reason, he is imprisoned in a temple of Sharess (http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Sharess). I am told the only way to be free of the temple is for my character t give the acolyte an orgasm. So basically I had to describe what I did to the acolyte and he would decide if I gave her what she wanted or not.

2. My ranger gets kidnapped. He winds up in a hut, tied to his bed. It is a camp of Amazons, and it is uh "mating season". Of course, they have chosen my character to be the father of the whole next generation of Amazons. Then comes the description by the DM of what they do to my character.

Yes, this was from the same gamemaster. Terrible.

SiuiS
2014-02-05, 12:34 PM
[A] mind flayer ruling over a town, only for the town to turn out to be an illusory prison for fiends, with a few random monsters guarding the gems that kept them under the spell.

That's actually pretty cool and you can tell your friend some random person on the Internet who is probably not a face-stealing doppleganger is going to rip that off wholesale. =)

Tengu_temp
2014-02-05, 04:53 PM
2. My ranger gets kidnapped. He winds up in a hut, tied to his bed. It is a camp of Amazons, and it is uh "mating season". Of course, they have chosen my character to be the father of the whole next generation of Amazons. Then comes the description by the DM of what they do to my character.


All I can think of is this:
http://www.quickmeme.com/img/23/2387534dad134b37a0e02aa7716e5b358da544bbbcb5dc815d e6f53c50b814cb.jpg

Isamu Dyson
2014-02-05, 05:25 PM
2. My ranger gets kidnapped. He winds up in a hut, tied to his bed. It is a camp of Amazons, and it is uh "mating season". Of course, they have chosen my character to be the father of the whole next generation of Amazons. Then comes the description by the DM of what they do to my character.

If the GM was playing this up as a horrible event, I could understand that. If it was supposed to be "cool", though...

Eh. Maybe i'm being too harsh. Minus the "tied to his bed" part, this sounds like a mildly humorous episode of a TV show.

The Glyphstone
2014-02-05, 05:31 PM
Oh! All these talks about orgies reminded me of two pretty terrible sessions I had to go through when I was a teen.

2. My ranger gets kidnapped. He winds up in a hut, tied to his bed. It is a camp of Amazons, and it is uh "mating season". Of course, they have chosen my character to be the father of the whole next generation of Amazons. Then comes the description by the DM of what they do to my character.

Yes, this was from the same gamemaster. Terrible.

Death By Snu Snu was already linked, sadly.

Vedhin
2014-02-05, 06:37 PM
My "worst DM" story is a slightly confusing one. Our group had three people+DM, and it was the DM's first time DMing. Somewhat predictably, he made pretty much every classic DM mistake.

After that fiasco, he planned to run an new one. We players, having become irritated by his style, decided to get our revenge. Pretty much the only thing we had going for us was that the DM would stick to his rules no matter what (though NPCs ran on different rules).

Anyway, I made a wizard, and my fellow players made a paladin and a rogue. Our 1st level characters went into the game, ready to make him cry for mercy.

Of course, the first thing we do is irritate an epic wizard (by existing or something), and we get banished to Athas.
Of course, there were houserules in place.
On Athas, everybody had Improved Uncanny Dodge, "because it's so dangerous, they had to pay attention".
A defiling mechanic was implemented, and if I did not use it my spells would be pathetically weak. If I used it, I took massive, semi-permanent penalties, and my spell was up to normal power. NPCs were masters of defiling, so they got power boosts and meaningless penalties.
Also, Athas was even less hospitable to paladins than normal. I can't count how many times our paladin had to defuse "you fall or you fall" situations. Not to mention that our paladin had to go through all sorts of rigamarole to get their abilities, since "Athas is cut off from the gods".

Anyway, the story progressed like you might expect. Railroading, DMPC demigods, houserules springing into existence, and so forth.
The campaign actually took off towards the end (when we hit epic). The plots we had been weaving throughout it were starting to come together, so we gave a thread a final yank to close the net.
We proceeded to assassinate all of the Sorcerer-kings, unite Athas under the paladin's (somewhat reluctant) rule, and I cast out a custom epic spell: terraform.


Afterwards, we found out that partway through the second campaign, the DM had clued in to his mistakes, but noticed we were having fun with the revenge plan. Thus, he kept going along the same way he had, but with a bit more secret willingness to let us pull things off. He actually became a great DM in future campaigns, after learning from his mistakes.

Basically, the first campaign was a complete fiasco, and the second was a struggle in which only our hate kept us alive, until we managed to pull off our plan. The third and subsequent campaigns were great. Nowadays, the first campaign is a source of endless comic relief, and the second has one of the most memorable endings of any campaign I've been in.

Meth In a Mine
2014-02-05, 06:40 PM
This is a bad experience for you?
Not really, just unbalanced the game a bit because we each got a totally random piece of gear, and the barbarian found a holy avenger (which was promptly gifted to the paladin) and the wizard found a helm of brilliance. and this was at 8th level.

madtinker
2014-02-05, 07:21 PM
There are some pretty awful stories on here, and maybe I haven't played with as many kinds of people, but I have to say my worst DM ever was me.

When I DM'ed for my brothers and me (years and years ago) I made a homebrew ninja with great HD, tons of bonus feats, and more skill points than a rogue, and proceeded to "accidentally" find all the best treasure in the dungeon and keep it for myself.

I've gotten better since then. At least, I like to think so anyway.

Scow2
2014-02-05, 07:47 PM
So, Sius and Vedhin... I'm curious:

Is the pain of suffering through a terrible campaign worth the ability to go Full Henderson, or not?

MonochromeTiger
2014-02-05, 09:05 PM
So, Sius and Vedhin... I'm curious:

Is the pain of suffering through a terrible campaign worth the ability to go Full Henderson, or not?

there's actually a distinct flaw in the stories behind that joke, if the DM in question was really so bad that they would kill off a character that didn't superglue and duct tape themselves to the rails and play nice with the self insert NPCs how did they not simply instant kill the character who magically had a backstory immunity to everything thrown at them? and that's ASIDE from the clear exaggeration of details behind making the character.

seriously though if the DM is terrible and doing things to your characters without allowing any chance of getting out of it then escalating will do nothing because they'll just keep making more situations your character isn't given a chance of getting out of or simply kick you from the game.

on topic, I've never had a real terrible DM story aside from a dark heresy game getting through the first session before the DM decided they were bored, crashed roks into the spire our characters were on then ending the game.

Sal Trebov
2014-02-05, 09:06 PM
Falling into the same trend a lot of you may have noticed, Our Host decided to run an "Anything Goes" campaign that was so cool you guys! He meant it, too. 3.5, including Eberron, Iron Kingdoms... any feat, spell, item, deity if it was D20, it was in. Given the idiots I run with this alone was a bad idea, but whatever. We started at level 1, and were given no equipment. "Eventually the town you start in will have a bunch of stuff you can buy!" Said he.

So my friend, playing a fighter of some kind, realizes he needs a weapon. "I'll get a club" "The town you're starting in doesn't have any clubs for sale." "Why not?" "The economy of the town is shot to hell, they don't have anything for sale." "Well, then I go into the woods and get a stick to use as a club." "Well, ok, but it'll have a -1 to damage because it's a chunk of wood."

Granted, RAW, a stick should be an improvised weapon, but clubs have no price to reflect that you basically found a chunk of wood and gave it a nice handle so you could beat people with the other end.

So, we numbered about 10 players, all level 1, each representing basically a filthy bum with rags. The bartender in town casually mentions the pumphouse outside of town as a good place to go exploring, only he was using some craptacular accent that nobody could decipher to understand what the DM was directing us towards. The hell is a 'pompouse'? I thought. Eventually, we are introduced to the DMPC, a level 10 cleric in full plate, who leads us into the pumphouse. I'll pass over the part where he single-handedly defeats a cr 10 creature, but I will bring up the part where he intentionally splits the party. Not into two groups, I mean individually. He splits us up to have a one on one vision where some old man sitting at a table with what we want the most on it. (My clubless friend's brain exploded while he tried to find a way to say "Me at 20th level") It too WAY to long, and we axed the campaign for next week in favor of a D20 Sliders style dimension hopping campaign ran by a far more experienced DM, which was way more fun.

Vedhin
2014-02-05, 09:44 PM
So, Sius and Vedhin... I'm curious:

Is the pain of suffering through a terrible campaign worth the ability to go Full Henderson, or not?

Yes, if only because it descended into So Bad It's Good levels at times. And there's nothing like making a setting fall into tyranny and desolation ascend into justice and livability.


So Bad It's Good (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SoBadItsGood)

Kris Strife
2014-02-05, 10:21 PM
The Prophecy.
Set up as a 'save the world' story, the luckless PCs after some railroading got their hands on the big tome of prophecy that told them how to defeat the BBEG. It didn't just tell them how to do it, it detailed everything. Where to go, who to talk to, what to fight and kill. No matter how stupid, how pointless, it was detailed. The real kicker was this: they couldn't avoid it. Any time the players tried to do something different or think outside the box or not follow the instrucitons to the letter, the book would start vibrating ominously. If they persisted in trying to jump the rails, it would explode, killing everyone. Then they would be spontaneously resurrected, along with the book, at the spot they were supposed to be and given another shot. They couldn't get rid of the book, they couldn't run away or ignore it.

In all fairness, if the people who made these prophecies would do that sort of thing more often, it would make things so much easier on the poor saps who have to fulfill them. :smallbiggrin:

SiuiS
2014-02-06, 02:59 AM
If the GM was playing this up as a horrible event, I could understand that. If it was supposed to be "cool", though...

Eh. Maybe i'm being too harsh. Minus the "tied to his bed" part, this sounds like a mildly humorous episode of a TV show.

No, you're being appropriately harsh. Perhaps not enough, even. Any time playing an RPG is "you're going to sit there while I describe sex at you", something's gone wrong. You want that, there's real role playing, with slaves and Masters and everything. This is dice clatter night, where we clatter dice. Ball gags are not involved in dice clatter night.


So, Sius and Vedhin... I'm curious:

Is the pain of suffering through a terrible campaign worth the ability to go Full Henderson, or not?

No. It poisoned the well, changed how i view the reality of gaming, didn't teach him a darn thing*, split the group, gave me a reputation**, and it sounds so whacky and out there it's not even a valid story to tell people, they all think you're bull shooting. And it doesn't do anything constructive, I can't like, walk into the 'debunking tippyverse' thread or 'D&D 5th edition' thread and make use of my experiences and thoughts, because I'm just a statistical anomaly. I'm that gal who happened to get every 1 on the die possible, or whatever.

It's like the love craftsman Peeling Back the Veil. I've seen things – I still see things – gamers can't handle. It changes you. And not for the better. I chi inter, and gawp, and take comfort from the faces in the darkness, because they are at least human faces.

And I do love me some human faces.


In all fairness, if the people who made these prophecies would do that sort of thing more often, it would make things so much easier on the poor saps who have to fulfill them. :smallbiggrin:

I like to invert that. Prophecies aren't predictions in the sense of "this will happen", they are predictions in the sense of "this is how somethin can be achieved". If the world ends when seven golden calves Are slaughtered at the cardinal temples at the end of a great cycle, that means anyone can cause the world to end. The prophecy lists the appropriate triggers to make the end result happen.

I feel like I bungled that explanation.


footnotes!
* we (much) later had a long, drawn out and passionate talk amongst the group (that was this guy and three players at that point) about why things were falling apart. I ended up handing him a knife and saying 'if you really think that this is all bull, and that I can't be trusted to try and help you or make a game good whatever? If I am so untrustworthy a friend, kill me now', and it made things better for one session.
** to the point that I was getting flak for games I didn't even know about, let alone didn't play. "I'm punishing you for that airship full of undead you cheesed, and those free wishes from the candle of invocation!" What?
Guy in the back raises his hand. "No, that was my warlock remember? And the other dude's ur-priest used the candle."

Sith_Happens
2014-02-06, 05:46 AM
This is dice clatter night, where we clatter dice. Ball gags are not involved in dice clatter night.

But what if we all lose our dice and have to improvise by writing numbers on our ball gags with a marker?

The Glyphstone
2014-02-06, 09:48 AM
That's just beautiful.
*sniff*

I need a moment.

OK, here's one I only have third hand:
The Prophecy.
Set up as a 'save the world' story, the luckless PCs after some railroading got their hands on the big tome of prophecy that told them how to defeat the BBEG. It didn't just tell them how to do it, it detailed everything. Where to go, who to talk to, what to fight and kill. No matter how stupid, how pointless, it was detailed. The real kicker was this: they couldn't avoid it. Any time the players tried to do something different or think outside the box or not follow the instrucitons to the letter, the book would start vibrating ominously. If they persisted in trying to jump the rails, it would explode, killing everyone. Then they would be spontaneously resurrected, along with the book, at the spot they were supposed to be and given another shot. They couldn't get rid of the book, they couldn't run away or ignore it.

.\

But did the book include when and where they opened the book to find out what to do? And if if didn't, what happened when they read the book to find out when they should read the book?

SiuiS
2014-02-06, 09:50 AM
But what if we all lose our dice and have to improvise by writing numbers on our ball gags with a marker?

You can roll the gimp, so long as ze clatters. u_u

zephyrkinetic
2014-02-06, 09:55 AM
This wasn't in a D&D game, but the only table I have gotten up and walked away from was for a Shadowrun campaign. I was playing a Rigger (think Master Artificer with primarily modern vehicles and robots), had built a mech which had lawnmower blades at a lot of the joints, for good ol'-fashioned slicing and dicing.

In an encounter, I had an enemy next to my hand.
My hand with lawnmower blades on it.
Which were spinning.

Twitching to the left would have decimated this enemy in any kind of logical scenario. He played it by the rules (and this was just a chunk minion, not an important baddie), and insisted I missed this dude.

Anyway, I mewled and left. Guy was a d-bag anyway.

Delta
2014-02-06, 10:00 AM
No, you're being appropriately harsh. Perhaps not enough, even. Any time playing an RPG is "you're going to sit there while I describe sex at you", something's gone wrong. You want that, there's real role playing, with slaves and Masters and everything. This is dice clatter night, where we clatter dice. Ball gags are not involved in dice clatter night.

Eh, if everyone around the table was fine with it, I wouldn't see any problem with that. I've witnessed some sessions that went pretty far in that direction, and it was a ton of fun for everyone involved.

The thing is that in this case, everyone around the table was not fine with it so yes it's very appropriate to be very harsh here, because that's obviously a topic you can't throw at complete strangers just like that.

And completely regardless of the topic involved, if your players ever sigh in frustration and ask you when whatever you're playing right now will finally be over, usually that's a sure sign something's definitely not going right.

BrokenChord
2014-02-06, 10:08 AM
I had a DM who decided we should try freeform for a session and tried to use an in-character romance with an NPC to actually come onto me. I don't think that actually technically counts as bad GMing, though.

Airk
2014-02-06, 10:11 AM
The campaign actually took off towards the end (when we hit epic).

It always blows my mind when I read things like this. "Let me tell you about my terrible DM experience! It was awful! It was beyond bad! There was railroading! nothing worked the way it was supposed to! There was surprise sex (not the good kind, especially if you've seen my GM!)! Dice rolls were meaningless! etc. etc. Then, when we hit epic tier, 4 years later..."

I mean, WTF, people? why do you STAY in games like this? What is the MATTER with you? It's NOT WORTH IT! You have so much to live for!

Evo_Kaer
2014-02-06, 10:55 AM
...I mean, WTF, people? why do you STAY in games like this? What is the MATTER with you? It's NOT WORTH IT! You have so much to live for!

http://i.imgur.com/bPH1ACb.gif

Sorry, I had too :D

My best guess would be: Can't/Doesn't want to find another group and noone else of it would DM. (It's kinda what drove me to DMing)

When I read all of this I can honestly say, that I've been blessed with awesome DMs. Well, in comparison that is. Some still sucked a lot, but are far from anything I've read here.

I only had one DM who I suppose didn't like me, because he ruled everything so I would have the short end of the stick. (I had "Hold the Line" which is AoO against charging opponents and an opponent charged at me with a halberd. So he just ruled I can't use the feat, because a halberd has reach, which it hasn't. It was my second character that died that day)

The other one is currentl DMing parallel with me and he just can't DM if his life depended on it. He's really creative with his settings, dungeons and quests. But sometimes he railroads so hard, I wonder how the rails can take it. Fun fact: He also railroads when he's a player. Forcing other players to follow along his path and sometimes even trying to outvoice the DM (me atm)

SiuiS
2014-02-06, 11:04 AM
Eh, if everyone around the table was fine with it, I wouldn't see any problem with that.

That's what I was leaning towards with the whole "play that way" thing. There's a difference between playing D&D with adult elements and sitting through someone else's sex fantasy 'on company dime'. I've got nothing against playing adult themed D&D.

Wasting game time on self gratification, though...

Necroticplague
2014-02-06, 11:07 AM
It always blows my mind when I read things like this. "Let me tell you about my terrible DM experience! It was awful! It was beyond bad! There was railroading! nothing worked the way it was supposed to! There was surprise sex (not the good kind, especially if you've seen my GM!)! Dice rolls were meaningless! etc. etc. Then, when we hit epic tier, 4 years later..."

I mean, WTF, people? why do you STAY in games like this? What is the MATTER with you? It's NOT WORTH IT! You have so much to live for!

Actual games are hard to find in person. So frequently, the choice is to either put up with it while dreaming of leaving the plot a burning wreckage in retribution, or don't play at all. Plus you kinda feel obligated to finish what you start, especially if others are still enjoying it.

Vedhin
2014-02-06, 11:12 AM
I mean, WTF, people? why do you STAY in games like this? What is the MATTER with you? It's NOT WORTH IT! You have so much to live for!

Well, it was pretty much the only group available, nobody else wanted to DM, and our schedules managed to align in such a way we could meet on a regular basis. Also, we were all friends and enjoyed hanging out.
Additionally, he had a couple of redeeming features. For one thing, he would stick to his rules, even if it was to his detriment. For another, he was incompetent, not malicious. His actions were intended to get us to return to the plot, not slay us for deviating.

Airk
2014-02-06, 11:13 AM
Actual games are hard to find in person. So frequently, the choice is to either put up with it while dreaming of leaving the plot a burning wreckage in retribution, or don't play at all. Plus you kinda feel obligated to finish what you start, especially if others are still enjoying it.

I find it difficult to believe that "others are still enjoying it" in most of these scenarios. Maybe there's just a communication issue here? Also, no one is advocating "dissolve the group and never play games again!" - clearly, in each of these examples, you've got 3-6 people interested in playing RPGs. They just shouldn't be playing THAT GAME with THAT DM.

BootStrapTommy
2014-02-06, 12:13 PM
If this is your "worst DM ever," consider yourself extremely blessed; more than half of the things on your list don't even read as 'bad' from where I sit.
This. This basically describes 90% of DMs. The fact that you went so far as to complain about tokens and the battlemap implies you might have an unrealistically high expectation of DMs in general.

Tengu_temp
2014-02-06, 06:49 PM
Actual games are hard to find in person. So frequently, the choice is to either put up with it while dreaming of leaving the plot a burning wreckage in retribution, or don't play at all. Plus you kinda feel obligated to finish what you start, especially if others are still enjoying it.

No game is better than bad game.

Coidzor
2014-02-06, 08:42 PM
It was a cult of personality thing at that point. If he put a stop through cheese, shenanigans or fiat to something so pivotally built on his own rulings, then not one of those players would ever return. He could just paint me and the sorcerer as jerk optimizer munchkins who are all about the power and winning and don't care for story, but if the whole team disbanded unstudied he'd never play again.

It's been hard to let go of that antagonism since. It was so effective.

...What was wrong with the other players that they didn't want to cook him and eat him after the first few paragraphs? :smallconfused:

Kesnit
2014-02-06, 08:42 PM
I've had a few...

The DMPC
Several years ago, the DM of the group I was in had to take some time off to plan his wedding. So 3 of the 4 remaining players decided to take some time in the DM chair.

I went first, since I had a short campaign already drawn up. And then Z took the chair...

Z wanted a high-level campaign, so told us to roll us 18th LVL characters. I made a Hexblade (and unintentionally cheated by using the wrong caster level to get myself a Hellhound familiar). The other player made a True Necromancer. The DM made a (probably legal) undead companion for the TN, plus the TN could raise dead enemies to flesh out his "army." Play begins.

The first few sessions are OK. The TN collects more zombies, I got to hit things, and all was well. Then the DMPCs appeared. Since there were only 2 PCs, the DM brought in 2 DMPCs - an epic Rogue/Assassin and another that I don't remember (also epic level). Encounters became "the DMPCs handle everything and the PCs mop up." I was already getting annoyed, and there was the encounter with the undead angel of cold/death/something. This thing was Large and had a huge Aura of Cold around it in all directions. Plus, it had undead cold minion-things that were healed by cold, though not all were in the aura. The TN and his undead army tried to take on the angel. However, since most of his army were low-level things that we had previously killed, they didn't last long. His spells didn't do much to the angel, so it was mostly the DMPCs and the undead companion that accomplished anything. Meanwhile, I was trying to take down the undead minions. I had Endure Elements as a known spell, and could cast it on myself and my Hellhound. But that required the Hellhound to stay next to me. That also required us to circle way around the general combat so we could stay out of the angel's aura (since it was stronger than my spell, and my Hellhound took extra damage from cold). I spent half the combat trying to circle around without getting myself or my familar killed.

We finally got to a city, where the Rogue/Assassin pretty much took over and the players just sat there. Thankfully, the DM's game ended soon after.

The Flirt
My wife and I were playing in a Mage: the Awakening game with a few other players. My wife was the only one with Spirit Arcana. The first adventure involved going into the Spirit Realm and dealing with spirits. As you can guess, this meant my wife was heavily involved, and the rest of us had to just follow along because there wasn't a lot we could do. But we finally finished that and were ready to move onto the next. I figured that he had built the campaign so that each of us would have an adventure that featured our chosen Arcana.

The next adventure dealt with werewolves. My wife's PC was from a werewolf family. Werewolves in nWoD deal with spirits. Yup, another adventure that focused on my wife. After a few sessions, I was bored, the other players were not showing up, and my wife felt guilty because everything was about her. It was about this time that we realized that the ST was trying (and failing) to flirt with her.

We quit the game and never played with him again.


The World Creator
Last fall, my wife told me she wanted to start gaming again with a group she had played with many years before. I knew the DM and his wife (another player), and had met some of the other players, so agreed. The DM has spent about 30 years developing his world. He allows almost any d20 book, including Star Wars. The Force is a real thing, and PCs have a chance to believe in The Force. (None of this is the bad stuff.)

My first PC was a Monk/Psy Warrior. He was built to be a grappler, with feats and powers all pointing to that. My wife built a Bard/Fighter (more Bard than Fighter), intending to be a back-line combatant and buffer. A few sessions went well. I didn't get to grapple since our only combat was against some Mephits, but I figured there would be time. Then there was the session where we spent the entire game session escorting a guy and his traffic cones (don't ask) to a leaking pipe. When we got there, the party sat around while the guy (and the traffic cones!) fixed the pipe. I scanned my sheet to see if there was some way I could help, but was told that trying to squeeze the pipe would not work. I considered also trying to activate my aura of cold and sit on a pipe, but was afraid (correctly) that if I did, all the traffic cones would attack me. However, the Ranger/Druid did manage to seal one of the pipes closed - and got 9000 XP for solving the problem on his own. (Had anyone been able to help him, they would have split the XP. Since no one did, he got it all.)

About this time, I realized that everyone brings something else to do during game. The DM's wife checks Facebook on her phone. My wife crochets. The Ranger/Druid playes on his 3DS. So I started taking my laptop. (I also used my laptop to hold my character sheet and look up spells and powers.) Otherwise, the game was a total bore. Rounds took forever because there were so many PCs, and no one knew what they were doing. And even if someone had a good idea, the DM didn't know the rules. (My wife dropped a Bard song at one point, and the DM spent 30 minutes telling her it didn't work the way she said it did. Turned out he was reading the wrong song.)

Soon after, I realized that my PC was just not going to work. Reasonable combat (i.e. that can be done in a way other than DM fiat) is very rare - in 8 sessions, we had 1 combat that the party could deal with. (The above mentioned Mephits.) My next idea was to make a Spellfire Wielder from Magic of Faerun. (My wife was going to play a Warlock and be my Spellfire battery.) The DM said he didn't allow any of the "of Faerun" books (which is the first either of us had heard him say a book wasn't allowed), but that was OK. So I rolled up a Rogue/Druid/Daggerspell Shaper. (My wife rolled up a Rogue.)

The next session, we went into a dungeon. Quick encounter with some undead that was too easily solved by the Paladin's young Red Dragon mount. We went through a narrow passage and came into a long hall with pipes running through it and a tentacle monster that would 1-shot any PC at the far end. When we tried casting, the material of the pipes sucked up all the magical energy. 1.5 sessions later, we discovered how to defeat the tentacle monster - another DM fiat (there was a way to drop the ceiling on the monster).

2 sessions later, we have gotten back to town with our loot. My wife (getting very annoyed because her PC - who was not built poorly - was useless the way the DM was running the game), killed off the Rogue and built a fae-kissed Warlock. We had a lot of money, so the party bought a brothel that we intended to become our in-town base and another source of income. (The following session, the DM told us that the guy who sold us the brothel was not the owner. The actual owner was one of the women working there.) My wife spent a week laying out the redesigned floorplan for the brothel, making sure all the PCs had space to call their own and there was room for expansion.

The following session, a new player arrived. He had a PC built, so the DM allowed him to join the game. (Normally, new players have to watch a session to see how the game works. Honestly, I didn't care that the new guy played.) However, when the new guy showed up at the brothel, the DM declared that none of us were (a) anywhere near the front door, so didn't see him come in, and (b) didn't roll well enough on our listen checks to hear him. It took about 45 minutes real time before he managed to hook up with anyone in the party. Then we left town.

The DM has his own encounter tables, and rolls every hour for random encounters. He claims that the encounter tables are sorted by CR, but they aren't. Because the second encounter that he rolled up, he called CR 3. (There were 6 PCs of level 9 or 10.) The encounter was a psionic tree (all trees are psionic in his world) that had captured a gnome and was sucking the life force out of it. It had 6 ranged attacks/round (since all of us were attacked), and only needed a 2 to hit. Had any of us gotten into melee, the tree would kill any PC in 2-3 hits. Its saves were high enough that it only had to roll a 4 to save against the highest level spell I had. When the Warlock managed to hit the tree with an Eldritch Blast (which required a roll of 16 or higher), any damage done was automatically healed on the tree's next turn (by sucking the life force out of other trees). The tree had a move speed that far exceeded ours.

By the time the game was over, we were both fuming. (I'd been getting disgusted with the game since the tentacle monster, but kept going because my wife wanted to.) So a few days later, we e-mailed the DM with a rational, thought-out list of our concerns. We told him that we didn't want to discuss them until the next session, but wanted to give him a heads-up so he wasn't blind-sided when we broached the issue. Within 15 mintes, he was texting my wife (he didn't have my cell number), basically telling us we were wrong, that his world is perfect, and he likes the way the game runs. Also, he focused on the issues that were minor (like letting the new guy play) and ignoring the big things (like encounters are outlandish and combat is non-existent). Finally, my wife told him we'd talk to him at the next game session.

We showed up for game, and the DM's wife (who is a close friend of my wife) moderated the conversation. In the course of 2 hours, the DM proceeded to miss every point we tried to make and repeated that he has put a lot of work into his world and has run it since 2ed. Finally, we decided we were not going to get through to him and left.

cydakk
2014-02-06, 08:44 PM
I used to have a GM that would have us take a session all making characters and then kill the entire party the first or second session of the campaign.

This happened many times. We used to take bets on the number of sessions until the next TPK.

InQbait
2014-02-07, 01:03 AM
My bad DM story would be about a GM who ran a pathfinder game for my friends and I, and it lasted over a year. There were many players who came and went throughout it, and, admittedly, I could only attend about half the sessions or so because I had other life obligations. The fact that I missed all those sessions made some other players (but not the GM) feel the need to guilt trip me about it.

I'd say the game's biggest problem was all the over-description and RAILROADING. The GM likes to put a lot of words into his descriptions which is nice from time to time but when it becomes excessive it WASTES EVERYBODY'S TIME. The GM didn't seem to care to give our characters much choice in the matter of what we should do. The whole time, I felt like I was just going along for the ride and why was my character even here he's not important.

So, supposedly the BBEG was this really powerful necromancer or something and was in command of this cult. This cult was planning to steal a bunch of divine artifacts and use them to do this ritual which would cause the BBEG to ascend to godhood. Our party was supposed to stop him. The leader of our party was a paladin, and part of a paladin order that was intent on stopping the BBEG. The person who played said paladin character was the GM's brother, and there was some definite favoritism going on there.

I remember one encounter, we were going up against 2 necromancers in the woods. Before my character has a chance to act, a spectral hand comes up and ghoul touches me while I am still sitting in a wagon. Now, my character has the HIGHEST constitution in the party, and I even gave him the Great Fortitude feat, and I think I rolled pretty high or at least OK on the save, but I still failed and was paralyzed for the ENTIRE combat. I was pretty irritated at that, but I got the GM back for that when I ran a campaign for pathfinder.

You see, I put an Apple of Eternal Sleep in one of my dungeons. The former GM's character was an elf but he made it so she was a special kind of elf who was not immune to sleep but instead got resistance to fire. Anyway, I hid this Apple of Eternal Sleep under the floorboards, but his character found it anyway and decided to take a bite of it, not knowing that it was in fact magical. One failed Will save later, the character was in perma-sleep. The other party members decided that it was going to be their next mission to find a magic scroll to remove this curse, but I told them that it would be a high-level scroll and be hard to find or get. I offered the former GM to play a Chaotic Evil vampire NPC that was actually an ally of the party, but he refused for some pretentious reason. That campaign lasted only 2 sessions.

Anyways, back to the other campaign that actually matters, the final nail in the coffin (literally?). It's concerning my character's final end. You see, my first character was an insignificant Dwarf Fighter. Early in the campaign, he had some good story behind him. Kill the goblins who murdered his father, retrieve the family axe, and so forth. Which did happen. But it was all downhill from there for that character. You see, I decided I was bored of him because I wasn't hitting worth crap anymore plus he was just really boring to play. So, I made a new character. A Chaotic Neutral Elf Cleric of some annoying goddess of Madness (the deity choice was not mine, but railroaded in by the GM). So, guess how this new character was introduced? I had in mind for my dwarf to return to his mountain home with all his riches, give his mother a hug and live out the rest of his days in happiness among his clan. But, what actually happened? He exploded. That's right, he actually exploded. And what caused this explosion? My new character! And out of this random no-apparent-reason explosion, my new character appears before the party and for some twisted reason the party actually decides to trust him despite him talking like a raving lunatic. I felt I was treated pretty unfairly concerning that.

Now, the ending was kinda weird. In fact, I don't even remember it too well, nor do I care to. What I do know is that the BBEG was defeated (of course). And yeah, that's about it.

SiuiS
2014-02-07, 02:53 AM
Exploding Dwarf Insanity priest is the best metal band ever, and I'll scrap any who says otherwise, inQBait. :smallbiggrin:


This. This basically describes 90% of DMs. The fact that you went so far as to complain about tokens and the battlemap implies you might have an unrealistically high expectation of DMs in general.

Or a really good track record!

He's talking about a digital set up, though. A table that basically automatically lets you so these things. The issue is the DM didn't hit the "map: on" switch ever because, like, effort.


No game is better than bad game.

And it takes bad game to learn that.


...What was wrong with the other players that they didn't want to cook him and eat him after the first few paragraphs? :smallconfused:

Like I said, it's all a matter of presentation. A lot of these ideas could work! Just... They didn't.

D&D is a social game. He guy tried to play on the level of rule of cool, and that's fine. It makes sense that the casters who need the rules to make sense to work got irritated more than the, say, ranger who used multishot, many shot and rapid shot with his totally cool custom design thorn-rain arrows to make twelve attacks a rounds at 1d4+1 each, or the Druid who was wild shaping into a tiger at first opportunity and mauling things.

They were aware of the issues by the end but found the power struggle entertaining.

Jay R
2014-02-07, 09:39 AM
No game is better than bad game.
And it takes bad game to learn that.

No it doesn't. It takes good other stuff. Good movies, good books, good dates, good music, good conversation, good fencing, good internet, ....

A game, like any other proposed activity, has to be just as good as what else I might be doing, or it isn't worth the opportunity cost.

SiuiS
2014-02-07, 09:51 AM
I operate under the presumption that Game, Movie, Book, Fight, Night Out, Intimacy, etc. Are all different vitamins. You need a balanced diet and when you need Game, Book or Fence won't do.

Either way however, the point is you learn to avoid bad through life experience.

Tegannie
2014-02-07, 03:14 PM
I'm lucky, I've only had a bad DM for a long-term campaign once. The main issue was that the players (at least, me and my fiance) didn't feel like an important party of the story. He seemed to have his story and the PCs were just along for the ride and nothing we did actually influenced or changed anything. :smallfurious: Not very fun when you're used to DMs who really make you feel like your character is important.

My fiance and I ended up leaving after a few months (the DM wasn't mean or a jerk, he was just new to DMing, but eventually we got bored/fustrated). Most of the other players stayed, but they never actually finished the story.

VariSami
2014-02-07, 04:38 PM
My teen-age self. I still cower from the embarrassing mistakes I did back then. Not to mention the fact that those hormone levels do not sit well with the free utilization of one's imagination to craft situations. (The GM is a player themselves, after all. Should qualify.)

Prehysterical
2014-02-08, 01:19 AM
Wow, after reading all these stories, I'm glad I've never been stuck with anything so bad. However, there is one case where I was rail-roaded so hard I could hear the train going "choo choo!"

It was during high school and I was at a friend's house. A buddy of his was DMing and I wrote up a blue slaad fighter (don't ask). Anyway, in the first combat of the game, we fight some skeletons. However, we are eventually told by the DM that the skeletons keep coming and that we can't fight them all. Doesn't even give us the chance to roll to keep fighting or to run. The whole party is smothered in skeletons.

We all wake up in a castle... as undead. Apparently, whoever sent the skeletons after us wanted us to become his undead thralls. When I pointed out to the DM that a blue slaad is an outsider and can't be raised as undead, he just looked at me and said, "Nope, you're undead." Luckily, that was the only session I attended with him as DM.

ChaoticDitz
2014-02-08, 02:38 AM
My worst DM was so much worse than the mediocrity you guys speak of. First off, he totally didn't get that Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to be about, like, delving into dungeons and fighting awesome dragons. It's a combat sim, not make-believe. Gosh, some people are so dense. It was SO annoying how much time he spent on describing the scenery and the people who were too weak to kill for XP. I mean, I get it, give the "roleplayers" an excuse to go hunt monsters, but get to the dang monster hunting already! And it makes me even more angry that he doesn't make the plot easier to see. I mean, really, plots aren't even important, but it's only a minor flaw to put one in for the sake of practicing some well-worn cliches. Seriously, though, he totally makes it too open. It's as if he wants our choices to be part of the story, which would be so stupid. I made enough choices while building my dang character, just give me the reason to kill more and stronger baddies and move on. Even worse than any of that, though; he seriously looked at my backstory and tried to get that stuff I wrote to give him my excuse to participate in his "plot" (which was already stupid enough) and tried to implement plots related to my character's past! Like I'm supposed to remember what I wrote there! And more importantly, who really cares about that kind of stuff anyway? What, so my dad slayed princesses to rescue dragons and killed innocents so they wouldn't hurt a witch or something, what does that have to do with the next treasure hoard we're heading towards? The last and possibly worst thing he did though was try to enforce some arbitrary sense of "balance" and "equality." He obviously doesn't realize that the best way for new players to get better is to be rendered obsolete by their friends, and that they'll become more outgoing when they see that everyone has to fight for spotlight. Really, some DMs just don't know what players really want.

Wraith
2014-02-08, 08:59 AM
...What was wrong with the other players that they didn't want to cook him and eat him after the first few paragraphs? :smallconfused:

Don't be silly. You only eat your victims to gain their power, and who would want that inside of them!?

.....


....Uh.... I mean..... Good point, well made. :smalleek: :smallwink:

Anyways.

My "Worst DM" comes from the opposite side of the train tracks - the wide open sandbox.

I had gone to a con with 3 of my friends, and between us we had all played Warhammer Fantasy and Dark Heresy, the sci-fi equivalent. A new.... edition? Supplement? Version? Had not long been released, called Deathwatch, which was the same rules system and the same setting, but the Epic Handbook equivalent, and a demo game was being run. We thought we'd give it a try, since we more-or-less already knew the rules and it'd be interesting to see it from a new GM before we bought it for ourselves.

The players get to be Space Marines - 8 foot tall transhumans with acidic saliva, two hearts, are immune even to the concept of fear, are welded into their futuristic Power Armour and their basic sidearm is a fully automatic rocket propelled grenade launcher.
The Deathwatch itself is the cream of the Space Marine forces - the truest heroes from among the legion of these superhuman warriors, given the best guns and armour, offered the toughest and most tortuous of training and then dispatched as small kill teams of 2-10 guys (there were 6 of us playing, altogether) to enact feats of bravery and martial superiority unimagined by mortal men. We were the Emperor's red right hand, his sword at the throat of those who would defy him, and his shield against the horrors of a grim, dark universe.

We got dropped onto an agriworld - an entire planet converted to the production of wheat - and were told "Something's up, go find out and fix it".

It was a 5 hour session.
We spent two hours wandering around, asking people if they had seen anything unusual (they hadn't), investigating suspicious ruins (they were just old buildings) and even gene-testing random members of the population for abnormal signs of mutation or corruption ("they're pretty inbred, but then it's a colony planet, what did you expect?"). We interrogated the Planetary Governor ("I called you guys in to find out what's going on because I don't know!"), our Inquisitor contact ("Well, you COULD ask for an Exterminatus on the planet and just be done with it, but that's not to say you'll definitely get one") and eventually even each other in a vain attempt to find out what was going on.

Dispersed among these two hours, we probably spent another hour just staring blankly at our character sheets and dice, trying to figure out what the heck we were supposed to do.

Other points of note include:
One of the PCs had an unusually high level of sensory abilities, smell and hearing, but couldn't use them if he was wearing his helmet. So every. Single. Dice. Roll. Made within those 3 hours was stopped and first asked, "Helmet on or helmet off?"
At one point a clue was dangled before us, which involved trying to get into the cellar of the Governor's castle. The only way we could achieve this was for one of us to strip out of our armour (somehow - Power Armour is basically welded on) and crawl, naked and unarmed, into the darkness. This took 15 minutes to find a work-around.... and it turned out to be a complete red herring.

Somehow - I don't even remember how, I think I was literally just scanning EVERYTHING IN THE VILLAGE with my equipment in order to find SOMETHING of interest to follow - we found what we were looking for, and killed it in a particularly haphazard fight ("The enemy rushes forward and knocks your Boltgun from your hand!" "I don't have a Boltgun, I'm the medic." "...Oh, I mean, HIS Boltgun from HIS hand!" "Wha...? I'm 30 feet away, around the corner and the door is closed.") that turned out to be of no risk to us at all. ("The enemy shoot you in the head! And your helmet is off!" "Goddammit, no it isn't! I'm *still* the medic!")

So it took 5 hours in a hot, stuffy room full of other hot, stuffy roleplayers to get into 1 fight, which took far too long and really shouldn't have been the climax of a campaign designed to get people into the hobby.

As we were packing away (45 minutes after the con had ended, so we missed all of the bargain tables selling up to boot :smallyuk: ), a startling moment came when the GM actually congratulated our group on such a successful mission.
Apparently he'd already run the game several times before, and we were the first - and only - to get as far as the last fight. The other groups had spent 4 or 5 hours wandering around trying to find the secret hidden door - or that there even WAS a secret hidden door - or had just massacred the village for want of something else to do.
One group, apparently, were there so long and were so nonplussed that they went back up to their spaceship and told their Inquisitor that they couldn't find anything, and it all seemed fine down there. The Inquisitor (GM) had to tell them, "Look, there really is something down there. Go back and look, and don't come back up here until you find it." I'm pretty sure they never did.

He was visibly proud of this. And we never did go on to buy the game, either. :smalleek:

Dralnu
2014-02-08, 09:22 AM
One of our players took up the mantle of DM for two attempts. He's a fantastic player and was tons of fun to be around, but when DM'ing he would clearly fudge rolls and railroad as he saw fit.

He made us fight these enemy NPCs that used real abilities but clearly made up what hit and missed. Then sucked us into a portal, no roll or anything, to take us into a different world and forced to do a very specific quest thing.

He tried his hand at a new campaign a little later. I was really excited to try out this dwarf clerifc I rolled. Again, we're given no option but to kill some bad guy in a cave. I stick my hand in a hole to grab at treasure and the entire arm gets cut off, no saving throw. We defeat the bad guy, again I get the feeling of arbitrary roll results, and again we're sucked into a portal, this time taken to a futuristic steampunk world. Our DM announces that from this point on the campaign will be using D&D modern rules and we'll need to update/change our classes. Oi.

Again, this guy is an awesome person and very fun to be around, but I wouldn't play in one of his campaigns again.

Otherwise, all my other DMs have been fantastic. Some are better storytellers than others, some are better actors, etc., but all of them did what I feel is the most important thing in DM'ing: made the players happy by putting our wants first and foremost.

Aw, now I have a warm and fuzzy feeling thinking about all my awesome DMs :smallsmile:

DigoDragon
2014-02-08, 09:44 AM
The worst DM in my group is the one that never delivers. He has some pretty good ideas for campaigns using lesser known systems and we're all for trying it out. Some of us even go off to find pdfs/srds/etc. of these systems to read up on the rules ahead of time.

And then nothing ever comes to fruition. :smallannoyed:

It's essentially wasting our time when we could have set up a game with someone who would deliver on their idea. And the insult to injury is that this guy has run several games in the past with another group he meets up with on another day of the week.

So my group assumed he just didn't like us. Though why he showed up to so many of our games, we'll never figure out.

Goodnight_Irene
2014-02-08, 10:55 AM
My worst DM was so much worse than the mediocrity you guys speak of. First off, he totally didn't get that Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to be about, like, delving into dungeons and fighting awesome dragons. It's a combat sim, not make-believe. Gosh, some people are so dense. It was SO annoying how much time he spent on describing the scenery and the people who were too weak to kill for XP. I mean, I get it, give the "roleplayers" an excuse to go hunt monsters, but get to the dang monster hunting already! And it makes me even more angry that he doesn't make the plot easier to see. I mean, really, plots aren't even important, but it's only a minor flaw to put one in for the sake of practicing some well-worn cliches. Seriously, though, he totally makes it too open. It's as if he wants our choices to be part of the story, which would be so stupid. I made enough choices while building my dang character, just give me the reason to kill more and stronger baddies and move on. Even worse than any of that, though; he seriously looked at my backstory and tried to get that stuff I wrote to give him my excuse to participate in his "plot" (which was already stupid enough) and tried to implement plots related to my character's past! Like I'm supposed to remember what I wrote there! And more importantly, who really cares about that kind of stuff anyway? What, so my dad slayed princesses to rescue dragons and killed innocents so they wouldn't hurt a witch or something, what does that have to do with the next treasure hoard we're heading towards? The last and possibly worst thing he did though was try to enforce some arbitrary sense of "balance" and "equality." He obviously doesn't realize that the best way for new players to get better is to be rendered obsolete by their friends, and that they'll become more outgoing when they see that everyone has to fight for spotlight. Really, some DMs just don't know what players really want.

oh my...

I'm new. Are you being sarcastic?

Scow2
2014-02-08, 10:59 AM
-snip-
The moral of the story is "Don't send Space Marines in to solve a problem until the Inquisition has figured it out" - unless you're going for a "There's something unusual about this Ork/Tyranid Invasion" type of investigation, with the twist/reveal being "Chaos/Eldar/Another Branch of the Inquisition are behind it"

The Glyphstone
2014-02-08, 11:46 AM
The moral of the story is "Don't send Space Marines in to solve a problem until the Inquisition has figured it out" - unless you're going for a "There's something unusual about this Ork/Tyranid Invasion" type of investigation, with the twist/reveal being "Chaos/Eldar/Another Branch of the Inquisition are behind it"

The other moral is 'don't mistake Deathwatch for Epic Dark Heresy', which both the players and DM apparently did. They're set in the same universe and use the same mechanics, but they are entirely different games with entirely different goals and playstyles. Epic Dark Heresy is an expansion book called Ascension.

Vknight
2014-02-08, 12:48 PM
Whelp these have all been eye opening


In general the worst from my experience is someone that is spiteful which ruined any fun I could have at those games.
I used to go to the local gaming shops Thursday Night Games Nights. Not anymore because of the spiteful organizer who actively disliked me and loved to punish me in games that they were Gming in which I was playing.

They further made it worse by claiming something... Not sure what but all the people there believed it as I had gotten so fed up with that person I didn't make an appearance on Thursdays for 3+ months so when I come back to see if things have changed.
Nope and now I'd say half the people there believe some rumor. Something bad enough to get me threatened by people. The store employees know it not to be true because though I was not showing up Thursdays I'd still drop by every now and then on Sundays & Mondays

So yeah spiteful people I think are the worst because that lead to me not being able too game with a large amount of people because of just how vicious that one individual was

Forrestfire
2014-02-08, 12:50 PM
oh my...

I'm new. Are you being sarcastic?

Blue is sarcasm, yes. Doesn't make that any less painful to read, though :smallyuk::smalleek:

Doomboy911
2014-02-08, 01:15 PM
Ugh I hate to say it but I'm still playing with this guy. So we'll begin with the fact that he's a show stopper. If there's a game being run that he doesn't want to play and there's a game he wants everyone else to play we'll know because the game will end and his will start up. We had recently constructed our own world for us to play in. We had been going fine and dandy every monday it was his game and thursday was my game that had to alternate with a world of darkness campaign of boredom. Suddenly he gets upset that two players are late because they give us a bit of time to chat and play Magic while they get something to eat. So he decides he's taken enough disrespect and ends the game telling us all the whole plot and ruining any chance for us to pick it up again.

Than he decides he wants to play Exalted, not run it but play it. He sets his sights on me and tries to talk me into running the game telling me about how it's a wacky game and I'm wacky dm and how we'd fit together perfectly. I am not a wacky dm funny things happen in my game but I run my game seriously there will be death and will have consequences. I don't want to run Exalted because it means I'd have to learn the white wolf system which I will do my best to never learn and furthermore it means my Superhero campaign will end. So I say no than all of the sudden he can only show up if we run Exalted.

Than after a while of no campaigns running a warhammer game gets set up by another player I have no interest in this but it gives me time to fiddle with some other ideas. He steps in invites the Dm to play in a game saying it will only take a month for us to play and invites me. I'm happy to play something for once. He's testing a module he's writing in which we all have to search for a magical artifact that will grant all our wishes. I've got a cleric who wants the lantern to destroy it so the world will not have instantaneous gratification and because it may be able to kill gods. As a cleric of Kord! I will not take such an insult lightly.

So four months go by of us playing this module that was supposed to be a month long adventure. Every single step of the way we get jerked to go into another direction to get the magic artifact. Every step of the way is dragged out to make the quest more epic. Our characters had to spend two years on a boat ride and I was denied every magical effort to speed the ride up. I had spells to teleport to plane hop all of them denied because we lacked information. We make land and find out there's a colony set up that people have been to I could've gotten the information I needed.

Than we make our way into a mountain where we're told this isn't the final leg of our friggin' journey, no we'll find some information as to where the Lantern really is. We spent a month going the wrong way in the dungeon and deal with a fat kobold only for us to go back and turn the other way to find that as level 11 players we'd have to fight a level 20 dragon because it makes for an epic adventure. Than the game ends.

He decides that his game has gone on too long and that he needs to scrap the game. He tells us all what would have happened and the changes he made to said game to make it better the next time around. When we complain that the game is going on too long he said it was because we were moving slowly.

The worst part is that he controlled how our characters felt. During the two year long boat ride I decide my cleric who also is a farmer wants to use lesser astral projection and a teleport spell to make his way home to help his family with the harvest season.

DM: No you can't.
Me:Yes I can I haven't used my spells in two years so yeah I can.
DM: No this is the most important quest you've ever been on nothing is more important than what you're doing right now.

My response No family is more important to him, he has a way back home and destroying an artifact to please his god not because the god needed pleasing but so he could make his god happy isn't going to come first.

But no my character has completely shifted his mood and has decided to stay on the longest boat ride in the history of time.

Now he's running a pirate game. On Mondays which is when the warhammer game was being run and now thanks to him the game has died.

Wraith
2014-02-08, 01:28 PM
The other moral is 'don't mistake Deathwatch for Epic Dark Heresy', which both the players and DM apparently did. They're set in the same universe and use the same mechanics, but they are entirely different games with entirely different goals and playstyles. Epic Dark Heresy is an expansion book called Ascension.

These are my exact words as we were driving home. We had played Dark Heresy before, as I said, so we immediately realised that the GM was trying to run an Inquisitorial murder mystery being investigated by Space Marines, and that it wouldn't go well.

You can run Deathwatch that way, if you're very careful, but it's far from ideal. Space Marines - particularly those in the Deathwatch - usually get called in for very specific, very definitive purposes. Not included among these purposes, is bimbling around in a field, asking farmers what they've been up to lately and passing the time by pushing the buttons on every piece of farming equipment that we could find, just in case something did.... something.

The game could have been salvaged without changing any of the plot or setting, if only that was understood - start the game by doing the intrigue and fact finding with ordinary Dark Heresy characters, have them run into and be subsequently murdered by the Monster (which WILL happen, given the difference in rules for damage and combat presented in Deathwatch), and then hand out Space Marine characters for revenge.

But no. "You come across a corridor that disappears into darkness, a strange chemical smell emanating from the far end." "I walk down it and look around. What do I find?" "The janitor's closet, and someone has spilled the detergent on the floor. Nothing appears relevant to the investigation."
:smallsigh:

AMFV
2014-02-08, 01:56 PM
No game is better than bad game.

I don't know if that's always true, just as some movies are "so bad they're good" so are some games. It really depends on how the game is bad, not how bad the game is.

Tengu_temp
2014-02-08, 02:13 PM
I don't think I ever heard of a So Bad It's Good RPG session/campaign. Except that one (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275152).

Scow2
2014-02-08, 02:24 PM
I don't think I ever heard of a So Bad It's Good RPG session/campaign. Except that one (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275152).

No. That was so bad it was soul-destroyingly horrific.
-snip-
Do we have to be your abuse counselors? What separates THIS DM from any "Bad" DM you might want to stick with is that he's not only being bad in his own games, but also disrupting yours and everyone else's as well. Get with your group and collectively ban him from the GM seat.

AMFV
2014-02-08, 02:29 PM
I don't think I ever heard of a So Bad It's Good RPG session/campaign. Except that one (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275152).

I've played in some of them to be honest, it's mostly just ridiculous to the point of being fun.

InQbait
2014-02-08, 02:40 PM
I agree with AMFV and Tengu Temp. It is better to play in a bad game than to play no game at all. Sitting on your bum and doing nothing is far more boring than participating in a so-bad-it's-good game.

Dimers
2014-02-08, 04:07 PM
I agree with AMFV and Tengu Temp. It is better to play in a bad game than to play no game at all. Sitting on your bum and doing nothing is far more boring than participating in a so-bad-it's-good game.

Tengu said the opposite of that: "No game is better than bad game."

I spent my non-playing time making builds, prepping a gameworld, reading up on theory, memorizing books, and spending time with friends in ways other than RPGs. Oh, and breathing more easily because I wasn't getting horribly stressed out every Friday night dealing with ass-hats. Sitting on my bum doing nothing would indeed have been bad, but fortunately, it's not necessary.


I don't think I ever heard of a So Bad It's Good RPG session/campaign. Except that one (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275152).

Hmmm ... ever tried "HOL"? Human Occupied Landfill, published by Black Dog. It's pretty outrageously bad, and seemed like it should be a lot of fun specifically because it was so bad. Haven't played so I don't know for sure, but it's a candidate.

Tengu_temp
2014-02-08, 06:29 PM
I agree with AMFV and Tengu Temp. It is better to play in a bad game than to play no game at all. Sitting on your bum and doing nothing is far more boring than participating in a so-bad-it's-good game.

As Dimers mentioned, this is not what I said. Games that are so bad they're good are rare. Most bad games are just bad.

Also, if your only alternative to playing an RPG is doing nothing, then I pity you. Read a book, watch a show, play a video game, do some hobby stuff! This extends to people who have only one way to pass time in general. Having broad horizons is good.



Hmmm ... ever tried "HOL"? Human Occupied Landfill, published by Black Dog. It's pretty outrageously bad, and seemed like it should be a lot of fun specifically because it was so bad. Haven't played so I don't know for sure, but it's a candidate.

That's a hilariously bad system. Whether it will be a hilariously bad game depends on the DM and players.

NowhereMan583
2014-02-08, 07:30 PM
My experiences don't hold a candle to most of this, but I'll contribute anyway.

The worst GM I've ever had was the origin of my self-imposed rule: "Don't befriend people because they play D&D; play D&D with people who are already your friends."

It was my freshman year of undergrad, and I happened to run into a guy who was toting a PHB across campus, so I struck up a conversation. I mean, I had never been able to find a gaming group in high school, so I was thrilled to meet a fellow gamer.

For pretty much the entirety of the next semester, I, my girlfriend at the time, and a friend of mine played in all of the games this GM ran, because he was the only person we knew who was running anything. I say "all" the games, because I couldn't possibly recall how many there were. One of his biggest problems as a GM was a complete inability to focus on one campaign; at any given time, we were playing something like three different campaigns on three different weeknights (because college, man... though, to be fair, the aforementioned friend did blame that gaming schedule for the fact that he failed most of his classes that semester), and he would frequently end one for some reason or other and start a new one. Of the countless campaigns we started, only one lasted until the end of the semester: a fairly directionless Scion game (most of his campaigns were White Wolf something-or-other) where we nevertheless rather liked our characters. Well, at least, I know that's why I stayed in -- the players the GM brought in with him were great optimizers but... nothing else. Their characters had basically no personality. I was never sure why they played.

Anyway, a few actual narratives:

This GM didn't tend to plan very much ahead of time. Any given new campaign would have one or two sessions planned to start it off, and he'd just improvise from there. This might have been part of why we kept coming back... each time, we were thinking, "okay, so the last campaign ended up sucking, but this one seems like so much fun..."

The Mage game got off to a great start. I was playing a character who had been a crooked accountant before his awakening. We had a pretty interesting first two sessions where we encountered some cannibalistic restaurateurs, and found this weird lizard-skull-thing that we were looking forward to learning more about.

The third session, we ended up in the Supernal Realm somehow. The entire session had us separated while he GMed us individually, clearly making it up as he went along, with everything working on dream-logic. We went along with it, because, you know, the first two sessions had been so fun... anyway, it ended with any possible plot being derailed. As I recall, over the course of things, I managed to accidentally destroy a large part of the Supernal Realm and had to build a new Watchtower. In their one-on-one sessions, the other players had equally ridiculous, over-the-top plotlines.

A couple days later, we got an e-mail from the GM saying he had to end the campaign because he hadn't really thought this part through and didn't know where to go from here. No kidding, man...



This was, for a few sessions, a pretty standard game as far as I could tell. Until the GM decided that it wasn't taking the direction he wanted it to be taking (I never got a more specific explanation of that), and instead of talking it out, he decided to kill us all off with an entirely improvised combat.

With Mecha Elvis. Because apparently, when this GM has to come up with a TPK off the cuff, his mind goes to "Elvis, but with cybernetic enhancements and a giant robot suit". So we spent an entire session in combat with Mecha Elvis. I don't remember whether we actually all died, but it was the last session of that game.

Extra weirdness: there were some Anthropology majors observing us that night. At my undergrad institution, one of the Anthropology professors would regularly assign a project where students had to find a subculture on campus of which they were not a member, observe it, and write a report. I'm pretty sure we screwed up their project, because that was not normal.



At one point, we started a Dark Heresy game, explicitly because he wanted an extra campaign that we could run in place of the "regular" campaigns if a player was missing a session.

There was an option to create a character from a primitive-tech-level world, and I went with it. Instead of interpreting it as "Bronze Age", though, I read it as "Stone Age"... and so my character was a caveman named Og. He had excellent hunting skills, not-so-great language skills, and a number of mammoth-based narratives. The GM hated him. Not sure why, exactly.

Anyway, Og survived for exactly one session. The second Dark Heresy session was played when I couldn't be here, so the GM controlled Og... and poor Og threw himself in front of a laser blast in a heroic sacrifice to defend the party.


There's more, but it's all roughly the same sort of theme.


... he told her not to worry about it because the Oracle wouldn't figure out ...

This is a facepalm all on its own.


This is dice clatter night, where we clatter dice. Ball gags are not involved in dice clatter night.

Can I sig this?

Tengu_temp
2014-02-08, 07:35 PM
Anyway, Og survived for exactly one session. The second Dark Heresy session was played when I couldn't be here, so the GM controlled Og... and poor Og threw himself in front of a laser blast in a heroic sacrifice to defend the party.


Oh wow. This is just one step above "a rock falls on his head out of nowhere and he dies, no rolls". Half a step, maybe.

SiuiS
2014-02-08, 07:38 PM
This GM didn't tend to plan very much ahead of time. Any given new campaign would have one or two sessions planned to start it off, and he'd just improvise from there. This might have been part of why we kept coming back... each time, we were thinking, "okay, so the last campaign ended up sucking, but this one seems like so much fun..."

The Mage game got off to a great start. I was playing a character who had been a crooked accountant before his awakening. We had a pretty interesting first two sessions where we encountered some cannibalistic restaurateurs, and found this weird lizard-skull-thing that we were looking forward to learning more about.

The third session, we ended up in the Supernal Realm somehow. The entire session had us separated while he GMed us individually, clearly making it up as he went along, with everything working on dream-logic. We went along with it, because, you know, the first two sessions had been so fun... anyway, it ended with any possible plot being derailed. As I recall, over the course of things, I managed to accidentally destroy a large part of the Supernal Realm and had to build a new Watchtower. In their one-on-one sessions, the other players had equally ridiculous, over-the-top plotlines.

A couple days later, we got an e-mail from the GM saying he had to end the campaign because he hadn't really thought this part through and didn't know where to go from here. No kidding, man...


Hm. Could possibly be salvaged if it turned out to be astral dreaming, but otherwise "session two, achieve the point and premise of the game" kinda leaves things in the air.


Can I sig this?

please do!

ReaderAt2046
2014-02-09, 12:47 AM
I have an example that is sort of a subversion of this. So there's this guy at my college who is a bit of an A:TLA fan and wrote a homebrew system (loosely based off of the Mistborn Adventure Game ruleset), and likes to run campaigns in it. So a couple of semesters back, I got into one of his campaigns. We were all supposed to be Fire Nation citizens, so I played a very patriotic firebender. About the third session in, the local general turned out to be a traitor working for the Water Tribes, and he accused me of being an earthbender and tried to arrest us all. My character was thus forced to resist arrest and turn against his country and God. For the rest of the campaign, the GM and the other players kept pushing my character's buttons, and the party almost killed me a couple of times.

So far, so good. Now we come to this semester's campaign (I'm a few weeks in at the moment). My character for this campaign is actually a descendant of my old one, a wise, upbeat, and honorable Fire Sage. The other members are the new Avatar (earth-based, young, and a complete Party Pony), and his other three bending tutors. So about half an hour into the first session, we get sucked into the past, and by the end of that session, my character is screaming and threatening to deep-fry the Mary Sue DMPC.
Everything in this new setting seems designed to turn my character into a screaming lunatic. To start off with, this setting is full of energybenders. Now, my character knows energybenders are eldritch abominations who can and will rip your soul out of your body, and the only rational response to finding yourself in the presence of an energybender is to immediately throw every joule of fire you can muster at it before it drags you into Hell.
Then to make matters worse, the energybenders act like a race of Mary Sues, and even lecture me for "damaging" my soul with firebending. Remember, my guy is a Fire Sage. There is no more offensive statement they could have made. And finally, the rest of the party seem totally taken in by the energybenders, perfectly willing to accept them as human and normal.
Around halfway through the third session, I've had enough. IC I storm out of the building we were in and go fuming off into the night. (The only thing that kept me from torching the village that we had landed in out of sheer frustration was a perfectly timed act of kindness from a village girl, who happened to be bringing the party dinner at just the right moment to meet me on the way and offer me some of what she had brought for the party).
OOC I pull the GM aside and tell him that my character is within an inch of giving up on the party entirely and deciding to backstab them.

Then comes the subversion, for at that point, the GM revealed that the whole point of the past few sessions, for me at any rate, had been to push me to that exact point. The GM had planned the entire arc around the premise that I would be driven to the point where I felt it my duty to backstab and betray the party. But not in any sloppy or ineffective way. No, the GM and I would work together to bring about the party's downfall. Already, the GM had laid plans to grant me power and advice, and from that moment forth, my character finally had a mission he believed in with all his heart-to kill the Avatar and purge the energybender corruption from the Avatar Spirit.

tl;dr. Mary Sue eldritch abominations turn out to be designed to promote supreme character development.

Sir Pippin Boyd
2014-02-09, 04:50 AM
'Twas many years ago this day that I ventured for the first time into college, and was so excited when I arrived to hear that they had a tabletop gaming club, claiming D&D, MTG, VtM, and more in its domain. But what I did not know is that I had found not a tabletop gaming club at all, but rather had stumbled into an alternate realm, a dark and terrifying place, ruled by an evil Archfiend. Among his many crimes, this evil creature:

1) Claimed to have been certified by Wizards of the Coast as a DM for Wizards' events
2) Had never read the players handbook
3) Believed magic is real
4) Hadn't bathed. Like, ever. Not once.
5) Oftentimes claimed that his own knowledge of how magic actually works should override the written rules of the game, since clearly WotC knew less than him about magic.

Prepare, weary travelers, for the epic that is...


The Adventures of Sir Pippin Boyd In The Plane Of Elemental Terrible Dungeon Masters
Volume 1
All names have been changed to protect the parties' privacy

To clarify before I continue, neither of the DMs I describe here were anything less than 23 years old, and if it seems for a moment I might be describing someone suffering from a lack of experience, keep in mind that they all insisted they'd been playing D&D since they were children.

The first bad DMing experience I had there was with the DM referred to earlier, though this game wasn't a game of 3.5, it was a very short lived experience in a game he was "beta-testing" which used as its main hook that it was an adaptive system that would permit the player to make any style of character "sort of like GURPS".

My concerns began at character creation, when I started with the character concept of a jedi consular from star wars and ended up with a guy whose lightsaber was weaker than a longsword (despite having a chance of accidentally decapitating myself randomly) and the powers that were randomly generated for me as a jedi were flight and fire breath. I died at the end of the first game when I was asked to roll a Will Save (the game was "roughly based" on D20) and I got a result of only 35, the highest in the party, and was spontaneously trapped permanently in a mind-labyrinth that I could never escape, then asked to roll a new character. This wouldn't be so bad except that the mind-labyrinth started with him describing the party as having been divided and he ran the game with each of the 6 players for about 45 minutes each, only to tell us at the very end that everything after the party split never really happened (mind labyrinth) and it was new-character-time. 5 hours of my life just now wasted. Game 1 TPK.


So from here on out I pretty much dismissed this guy as completely crazy and just sort of avoided him. He wasn't really active in the gaming club or anything anymore (and I later found out its because a lot of other players had similar experiences with him). Later I was invited to a 3.5 Game by another DM, that for the purposes of this post I'll call Fayden. It'd been a *really* long time since I'd seen a 3.5 game run (this was well into the reign of Pathfinder) outside of my own home, so I thought it would be fun to join. For all intents and purposes, I was told that this would be a regular 3.5 game using core, core sequels, and any of the Complete supplements. I was also advised that it was a "high power" campaign and that I should either make a good character or expect to die a lot, and told that there had been no less than 3 character deaths over as many weeks in the preceding games. We were starting at level 11, which I kind of squinted at because D&D ends at level 8 anyway, but I had a hankerin for some dungeons and dragons and figured I'd take what I could get. I thought I should wait to see what the party was playing, and then decide what to play to best maintain party balance and fill role gaps or whatever. The party were...
- A Dragonborn (adapted from 4th ed?) Cleric
- A Sorcerer that focused on evocation spells
- A "Summoner" that used a super broken homebrewed class the DM created "since Conjuration is too weak"
- A Paladin 9/BrokenSummoner 1/Druid 1
- A Monk

I opted to play a Beguiler, since the party didn't really have a proper face, but the DM shut me down, insisting that beguilers are way too powerful. Instead, he suggested, I should play a druid so its fair to the rest of the party.

After cleaning all my wut up off the floor, I bargained up to Wizard, since everyone knows those are weaker than Beguilers but more powerful than the meager, neglected Druid peasantry. I made my character pretty quickly, and basically had a 'good' wizard. He used some neat metamagic feats and mostly PHB spells, a few pearls of power, the odd wand and scroll, and couple of casting based skill tricks that never came up much.

It wasn't until after I made my character that I was informed that in the campaign setting, magic was operating strangely because of plot stuff, and certain spells had their functions altered. At first I thought this might have been in an effort to weaken overpowered spells to balance the game. Then I began to experiment, and these are the tweaks to magic that I had identified by the time I left that game:
-All fire damage from spells is acid damage instead
-All healing spells now deal negative energy instead of healing
-All harm spells still deal negative energy
-Summon spells summon a random creature from the list unless you're the super broken summoner homebrew class
-Light spells create darkness
-Darkness spells still darkness
-Dancing Lights creates a strobe light that can induce seizures
-Various other seemingly random changes to different spells
-All spells function normally when cast by druids, since they're underpowered and don't need their magic messed with

At this point I pretty much accepted that this game wasn't going to go in a positive direction, but I had a couple of friends in the group and figured that if nothing else, I would suffer through it for their sake. Oh gods if I only knew how wrong I was.

The game started with a bunch of NPCs in a big "save the world" cult sending us off to collect a checklist of necessary magic artifacts offering us no aid whatsoever except for a really obnoxious mary-sue DMPC that we opted not to bring along. Part of this checklist quest required that we journey into the depths of "The Cave Of Unbearable Arbitrary Character Restrictions" (working title). The party had apparently been confused for a while about how they were going to get in, but since I was introduced to the party this game, I was able to have the Cleric scry the entrance so I could teleport us there like we're not some silly little level 1 plebians or something.

Inside, we discovered that all magic that allows one to Scry, Teleport, communicate at great distance, or otherwise climb over the DM's +5 Adamantine Handrail was nullified by some kind of generic evileyness. Also, Clerics are for some reason unable to change which spells they prepare while inside. They can still prepare spells, they just have to be the same ones as yesterday. For some reason.

Our first combat was with a group of Duergar, because apparently we have to fight our way up the grimdark mookladder before we get to the drow, and then eventually the mind flayers. The DM got really mad at me when I commented on that aloud, mostly because that was *exactly what was going to happen*. Anyways, the first fight was a mess. I've cut the details for length, but the TL;DR is that everyone was tripping over each other, area CCs were dropped into the middle of the party BY the party, and a cleric nearly killed our paladin by trying to heal her (he forgot that heal kills people now) and I was only able to save her because I had some counterspelling feats in my build and Dispel Magic prepared.

After a painful, bloody, slow fight we finally beat the duergar and decided it was time to rest for the day. I conjured some kind of extradimensional cabin thing with one of those spells (I forget the name, you know the ones) so we can all sleep for the night. I, completely in character, begin explaining that that fight was a mess and that if we want to take on elder evils we need to clean up our game. In character, I used illusion spells to conjure up a miniature representation of the battlefield and show them some possible alternate combat stuff we could have done as a team to overall spend less time tripping over each others' balls. The DM cut me off, claiming that since I was discussing combat rules, I was metagaming and metagame discussion is banned. So we retconned that conversation and the other players were forbidden to act on any advice I'd given them, ensuring that every fight for the rest of the game would be just as much of a mess (they were).

2 random encounters later, I was getting pretty sick of random encounters, so I decided it was time to start the game moving more quickly. When a bunch of Duergar attacked us for like the Nth time, I cast Chain Hold Person on them and we proceeded to coup de grace all but one, who I dominated so that he could lead us to their stronghold. When we got to the evil lair, we were able to infiltrate it just as easily as casting Invisiblity Sphere and waltzing in, but halfway there I was suddenly killed when one of the new party members was remotely dominated by the Mind Flayer boss that compelled him to attack me. Also, my contingency that protects me from people attacking me automatically failed because Handrail-breaking magic has no power in The Cave Of Unbearable Arbitrary Character Restrictions.

Session ends there, the player that killed me was awarded bonus exp for killing me since killing mages is *really* difficult for a monk, especially when that monk isn't in control of their character and all of that caster's defenses are arbitrarily ignored. The DM pulled me aside and explained that while I was still allowed to play in his game, if I kept making overpowered characters and trying to break the game, I was going to get the boot. So I could keep playing, but it was if and only if I played a druid. I resisted the urge to laugh and complied with his request. The result was probably one of my greatest creations to date. A warforged druid with emphasis on wildshape named Maximus Rhyme. I fear he might not have liked Transformers, since he kicked me out of the game then, though I kept the character. Maximus Rhyme kicks ass.

Sorry about the length, but even all this is *after* I cut out a lot of it. Coming soon to a forum post near you is...

Volume II: The Ballad of Adam Bateman
Sir Pippin Boyd plays VtM in the Plane of Elemental Terrible Dungeon Masters

Knaight
2014-02-09, 05:09 AM
'But what I did not know is that I had found not a tabletop gaming club at all, but rather had stumbled into an alternate realm, a dark and terrifying place, ruled by an evil Archfiend. Among his many crimes, this evil creature:

1) Claimed to have been certified by Wizards of the Coast as a DM for Wizards' events
2) Had never read the players handbook
3) Believed magic is real
4) Hadn't bathed. Like, ever. Not once.
5) Oftentimes claimed that his own knowledge of how magic actually works should override the written rules of the game, since clearly WotC knew less than him about magic.

Number 4 alone is bad enough. 3 and 5 are just the icing on that terrible cake. I'm surprised you played even a session with this guy.

Sir Pippin Boyd
2014-02-09, 05:16 AM
Number 4 alone is bad enough. 3 and 5 are just the icing on that terrible cake. I'm surprised you played even a session with this guy.

Much of this is given in retrospect, and was not brought to my attention until during or after this awful experience.

EDIT: Mostly during.

TuggyNE
2014-02-09, 06:44 AM
Prepare, weary travelers, for the epic that is...

The Adventures of Sir Pippin Boyd In The Plane Of Elemental Terrible Dungeon Masters

That is indeed a horrifying yet darkly funny story. Your suffering will be remembered!

Sith_Happens
2014-02-09, 07:14 AM
"Helmet on or helmet off?"

He's a Space Marine, why would his helmet be on?:smallconfused:


One group, apparently, were there so long and were so nonplussed that they went back up to their spaceship and told their Inquisitor that they couldn't find anything, and it all seemed fine down there.

Ah, that right there was their problem. The correct thing to tell their Inquisitor was that the planet was Chaos-infested beyond hope of correction, as was whoever's idea it was to give them that mission in the first place.


Snip

Please, please tell me that at some point during that ordeal you said to the DM in question, exact words, "You keep using [the phrase 'high power']. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Prehysterical
2014-02-09, 11:26 AM
The result was probably one of my greatest creations to date. A warforged druid with emphasis on wildshape named Maximus Rhyme.

*slow clap* THAT is how you show him what's up.

Grek
2014-02-09, 01:49 PM
3rd edition D&D GM. She had the party barbarian's power attack work like a dragon's breath attack: Only once every 1d4 rounds.

Kalmageddon
2014-02-09, 02:01 PM
3rd edition D&D GM. She had the party barbarian's power attack work like a dragon's breath attack: Only once every 1d4 rounds.

For a moment I thought you were going to say "as a cone-shaped area of effect", which would have been awesome. :smallbiggrin:

Grek
2014-02-09, 02:58 PM
That would have been a much better change.

Eldan
2014-02-09, 03:06 PM
My worst GM was just boring. It was my first game of Dark Heresy. It was for everyone, actually, except for the GM, who had recruited some people at the local Warhammer store.

The game was mind-numbing. We arrive on some hive planet. People have gone missing, presumably killed. Fair enough, standard plot. After a while, we came to a building that was suspicious for some reason. I forget why. We investigated it a bit from the outside, then the game ended.

Anyway, the problem was this. No description of anything whatsoever and none of our actions did anything.

DM: "You come to the house."
Pause. Nothing else.
Me: "Yes?"
DM: "Yes."
Pause, about thirty seconds.
Me: "I look through the window."
Pause, about thirty seconds.
GM: "You don't see anything."
Me: "I walk around the house and investigate what's behind it."
Pause, about thirty seconds.
GM: "Okay, you do that."
Pause.
Me: "Aaaand?"
Pause.
GM: "Oh. You find nothing."

IT all went like that. For about two hours.

SiuiS
2014-02-09, 05:21 PM
For a moment I thought you were going to say "as a cone-shaped area of effect", which would have been awesome. :smallbiggrin:


That would have been a much better change.

That would be fantastic.


My worst GM was just boring. It was my first game of Dark Heresy. It was for everyone, actually, except for the GM, who had recruited some people at the local Warhammer store.

The game was mind-numbing. We arrive on some hive planet. People have gone missing, presumably killed. Fair enough, standard plot. After a while, we came to a building that was suspicious for some reason. I forget why. We investigated it a bit from the outside, then the game ended.

Anyway, the problem was this. No description of anything whatsoever and none of our actions did anything.

DM: "You come to the house."
Pause. Nothing else.
Me: "Yes?"
DM: "Yes."
Pause, about thirty seconds.
Me: "I look through the window."
Pause, about thirty seconds.
GM: "You don't see anything."
Me: "I walk around the house and investigate what's behind it."
Pause, about thirty seconds.
GM: "Okay, you do that."
Pause.
Me: "Aaaand?"
Pause.
GM: "Oh. You find nothing."

IT all went like that. For about two hours.

Woooow.

Venusaur
2014-02-09, 06:00 PM
When I was 15, I had a DM throw a pencil at my face and try to fight me. Neither of us had any combat experience, but I managed to win the ensuing wrestling match because I outweighed him by like 40 pounds. The fight? About the nuances of prismatic sphere and if it would affect my cleric if he dragged my PC through it. This was after his pair of epic level mystic theruges took out half the party with a poison that had "no save" until we complained about it, and the Paladin's 47 couldn't save against. They also had spell immunity Ioun stones that work against 9th level spells without readying an action. They tried to grapple my cleric/RSoP and pull me out of my prismatic sphere, and he said it affects me if I was pulled through. I disagreed, and it escalated to him attacking me.

Wraith
2014-02-10, 05:49 AM
He's a Space Marine, why would his helmet be on?:smallconfused:

Because the damage rules used in Deathwatch laugh at the ones used in normal Dark Heresy, and even for a Space Marine an Astartes-grade lascannon to the face can be an 'inconvenience'.


Ah, that right there was their problem. The correct thing to tell their Inquisitor was that the planet was Chaos-infested beyond hope of correction, as was whoever's idea it was to give them that mission in the first place.

One of the previous groups, we were told, *did* do that.

The GM said "Okay!", had the Inquisitor glass the planet and thus ended the adventure 2 and a half hours early without a player ever firing a shot. :smallsigh:

Sith_Happens
2014-02-10, 07:19 AM
One of the previous groups, we were told, *did* do that.

The GM said "Okay!", had the Inquisitor glass the planet and thus ended the adventure 2 and a half hours early without a player ever firing a shot. :smallsigh:

That's halfway to success, did they also make sure to pin whoever's idea it was to give them that mission in the first place as a traitor/heretic/disguised-Daemon/whatever?

DigoDragon
2014-02-10, 08:35 AM
No game is better than bad game.

I agree with this thought. With no game, I can use the free time to look for a decent game.



That would be fantastic.

I know right? Cone-shaped power attack would rock. Then you just apply shape-enhancing feats to get a burst effect going... :smallbiggrin:

Hyena
2014-02-11, 09:40 AM
Okay, I promised you the story about worst DM ever, that will put all the other posters to shame? Here it is. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

It was one of Those Days, when I was desperately looking for a DM. Any DM. I wanted to game so much, that anyone would do, as long as they agreed to let me play a swordsage. And then someone introduced me to Him.
It didn't bother me much that he was described as "A bit of a (untranslateble russian play of words)" - it didn't bother me so much, that I didn't even attempt to clarify what the guy was referring to.
So, the DM appeared. The first things first - we must decide on a setting. That was the moment when I began to feel that strange feeling of dread that would transform into pure terror later. The settings he was willing to DM were these:
1) Alfrica. Those, who speak russian, can read about it here. (http://fable.ru/aelfrica) In short, it borrows heavily from 2e and 1e rules, complete with drow being able to cast in heavy armor and cast certain spells at will. It also was "real world but with magic", which is, of course, unimaginable without ethnicities in place of races. It would be actually fine, if it wasn't complete with jews that get -2 to charisma. What also outraged me was the fact that franks were ordinary humans, while celts were ordinary human with one more bonus feat but a huge penalty of not being able to be paladins. I mean, come on, do you even know the word "balance"?
2) I won't describe that setting because it violates rules about discussing religion, but it involved players being warrior-missionaires of a certain real life religion and followers of other religions being always chaotic evil with Warhammer-like corruption and body horrors.
3) A world where the entire planet was poisoned with some kind of cloud that mutated and killed people. The only survivors hid in the cities that were protected by huge force fields.

Naturally, we chose the third setting, because it wasn't offensive as crap. Now, the medium of game was decided - and DM declared it was Fantasy Grounds 2. Because DM pirated it, we had to do so as well. Of course, it was filled with bugs and had a strange aversion to the russian language.
Now, the party chose classes. And - big surprise! - DM never heard of psions and thought that other rulebooks, such as Tome of Battle or Complete Champion, were third-party. The game turned out to be core-only. Now, because of my devilish diplomacy, I managed to concince DM that we will take care of the rules and subsystems ourselves and will later explain them to him as it goes, in very simple terms. He agreed. However, even despite not knowing anything about Tome of Battle, he decided to include houserules - for example, maneuvers became tricks that only hackstack, magical implants, can allow you to do. You must pay 1000*circle gp to get access to higher level of
maneuvers.

Trust me, the second half of the story will be much worse.

nedz
2014-02-11, 09:46 AM
I know right? Cone-shaped power attack would rock. Then you just apply shape-enhancing feats to get a burst effect going... :smallbiggrin:

Actually you want an analogue to the Explosive Spell feat.

Power Attack — BAM — enemies are thrown to the four winds.

obryn
2014-02-11, 10:25 AM
One quirky one, and one outright bad one.

Quirky DM. We were playing 2nd edition back when it was current. A friend and I joined an ongoing campaign. The DM was on top of things, but he had more than a little OCD going on. I mean, really - this guy was a control freak.

First off, we had to calculate XP down to the hundredth. Yes, I actually had to write down (for example) 652.73 xp. Second, he rolled all dice but damage rolls behind his screen - attacks, saves, etc. Third, he kept track of all our money. Fourth, he really, really used the 2e spell components stuff - as a Wizard, I had to track how many little paper cones, bags of (special!) sand, etc. I carried. He even had price lists, and see above re: keeping track of our money. Most critically? He kept track of our hit points. Like, I didn't know how many I had left. But on the upside, all this organization meant he ran a pretty tight game, and we had some fun with it for a while. Even convinced him to quit with the XP-to-hundredths thing.

-----

Second DM was outright bad. It was me and one other player. It was Spelljammer, kind of, but ... well, there's sandbox play and there's "flailing desperately in search of even rumors of cool things to do" play. This was the latter. After doing nothing, we decided we'd be pirates.

And then - no joke - he completely co-opted the plot of the 1st book in Weis & Hickman's Death Gate Cycle. Dragon Wing, maybe? Yeah, we basically met that ship and those guys.

I quit at that point. I felt bad, but it was boring and way too ridiculous. No gaming is better than bad gaming.

Big Fau
2014-02-11, 02:28 PM
3rd edition D&D GM. She had the party barbarian's power attack work like a dragon's breath attack: Only once every 1d4 rounds.

I believe I topped that a while ago with the DM who house ruled the Fighter (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=15890156&postcount=322) to be borderline weaker than the NPC Warrior.


Actually you want an analogue to the Explosive Spell feat.

Power Attack — BAM — enemies are thrown to the four winds.

That would be the Knockback feat, from RoS.

Delwugor
2014-02-11, 02:49 PM
Not the worst GM, nor even a bad one, but he qualifies for the most frustrating I've gamed with.

He would put together real good campaigns, with interesting open ended plots and hooks, allowed for plenty of good role-playing of characters. The group would be having a great time and then every single time would put us in an overwhelming battle with no way of escaping. The end result was that every one of his campaigns ended in a TPK, we never understood why.
His last time was particularly frustrating as the campaign was turning out to be the best we'd been in, and the TPK happened on a small side quest battle with no plot relevance.

Coidzor
2014-02-11, 03:14 PM
Not the worst GM, nor even a bad one, but he qualifies for the most frustrating I've gamed with.

He would put together real good campaigns, with interesting open ended plots and hooks, allowed for plenty of good role-playing of characters. The group would be having a great time and then every single time would put us in an overwhelming battle with no way of escaping. The end result was that every one of his campaigns ended in a TPK, we never understood why.
His last time was particularly frustrating as the campaign was turning out to be the best we'd been in, and the TPK happened on a small side quest battle with no plot relevance.

That... is a lot of dedication to stringing people along only to deny them. :smalleek::smallconfused:

Delwugor
2014-02-11, 04:41 PM
That... is a lot of dedication to stringing people along only to deny them. :smalleek::smallconfused:
I never thought it was intentional, just that he would want to force really tough fights every once in a while, and go overboard. Like I said, just frustrating from an otherwise good GM.
After the last TPK we told him that he spent 6 months of effort and then threw it all away for nothing. We stopped allowing him to GM for a couple of years after that, we switched off GM duties periodically.

Should qualify that the last time he GM'd, we were persuaded to let him run a Mutants and Masterminds game. On the condition that it was non-lethal, he ran it but I was the only one really interested in supers.

FabulousFizban
2014-02-11, 05:06 PM
OP it really just sounds like you had an inexperienced DM who is bad at translating his thoughts into words and creating set dressing. Granted, descriptive story-telling ability is THE skill a DM needz, but that comes with practice.

Sal Trebov
2014-02-11, 06:05 PM
My teen-age self. I still cower from the embarrassing mistakes I did back then. Not to mention the fact that those hormone levels do not sit well with the free utilization of one's imagination to craft situations. (The GM is a player themselves, after all. Should qualify.)

Wow. I'd have to agree with this for my own 12 year old DMing self. Little railroading runt that I was.

The good news is that you realize how awful you were, and (hopefully!) endeavor to not repeat the same mistakes.

Kalmageddon
2014-02-12, 05:17 AM
I never thought it was intentional, just that he would want to force really tough fights every once in a while, and go overboard. Like I said, just frustrating from an otherwise good GM.
After the last TPK we told him that he spent 6 months of effort and then threw it all away for nothing. We stopped allowing him to GM for a couple of years after that, we switched off GM duties periodically.

Should qualify that the last time he GM'd, we were persuaded to let him run a Mutants and Masterminds game. On the condition that it was non-lethal, he ran it but I was the only one really interested in supers.

Isn't it possible that he was trying to convey the message "in my games fighting should be a last resort"? Or did he actually baited you in apparently accessible combat scenarios only to suddendly increase the difficulty during the fight, when you couldn't escape?

The Grue
2014-02-12, 06:00 AM
No it doesn't. It takes good other stuff. Good movies, good books, good dates, good music, good conversation, good fencing, good internet, ....

A game, like any other proposed activity, has to be just as good as what else I might be doing, or it isn't worth the opportunity cost.

Well said. As an aside, the concept of "opportunity cost" seems to be something that a lot of people have trouble grasping.

geeky_monkey
2014-02-12, 06:50 AM
Not the worst GM, nor even a bad one, but he qualifies for the most frustrating I've gamed with.

He would put together real good campaigns, with interesting open ended plots and hooks, allowed for plenty of good role-playing of characters. The group would be having a great time and then every single time would put us in an overwhelming battle with no way of escaping. The end result was that every one of his campaigns ended in a TPK, we never understood why.
His last time was particularly frustrating as the campaign was turning out to be the best we'd been in, and the TPK happened on a small side quest battle with no plot relevance.

Urgh, that's the worst way for a great campaign to end.

I still remember a campaign that ended over a decade ago with a TPK caused by a pointless random encounter and some terrible dice rolls.

We tried to finish the story with new characters, but it just wasn't the same. I still remember the disapointment (both from players and the DM) that we'd never find out exactly what the BBEG who'd been manipulating us for months was up to.

Stuebi
2014-02-12, 10:40 AM
I have another one, the Dude is actually a pretty nice guy. But Thor knows what happens to him once he sits down at the table, its like he flips his insanity switch once he starts to DM.

You see, he has a habit of _demanding_ that you announce and declare every action your character takes. And I mean _EVERYTHING_. If you dont explicitly state that your character removes his armor before going to bed, or before taking a bath, he sleeps/washes himself in full gear. If you dont specifically state that you sheathe/pull your weapon before doing certain things, your character will act regardless of the current state.

We had a negotation with some Bandits fail, because the rogue didnt state that he sheathed his dagger before attempting to shake the Bandits hand, which meant said Bandit thought he was making an attack, and promptly attacked us with all his mates. After I announced an attack on a Minotaur, the DM gleefully informed me that I hadnt pulled my Sword, and thus was basically flailing around my fists against a Beast almost twice the size of my PC.

Eventually, the sessions turned into a particularly childish form of Kindergarten-Arguments, where Players would try to turn the logic on him. "You didnt say that the Guy actually prepared an arrow." "You never said you picked up the shield!"

Needless to say, it was incredibly silly. And I think the only reason the group held out so long with that guy as a DM, is that his stunts were at least somewhat entertaining. The "Taking a bath in full platemail." is actually pretty funny, if you imagine said Warrior to be so devoted to his armor that he even snuggles with it while asleep. And, while pretty hazardous, the idea of said warrior trying to powerbomb a Minotaur trough a table because he forgot that he owns a sword, etc.

But the arguments and constant paranoia eventually got annoying. Everyone would inquire for around 10 minutes while camping, just to make sure they actually had pulled their pants down to take a wee. I think I actually played trough Mark of the Ninja twice (The second time being NG+) while we played. Yes, it got THAT tedious. :smallbiggrin:

RustyArmor
2014-02-12, 02:48 PM
Oh gods one of the DMs I played with did same thing with me, and of course only to me. It was the second DM we had, since other DM was total ----- to me I guess he felt he had to as well. If I bought anything it was crumbled and tattered because I didn't say "I study **** and make sure its good quality." I ran into doors because I didn't say. "I open door" even when walking in with friends. It got to point each round would be me reciting "I follow rest of party without bumping into any of them, my weapon is put away but within reach to draw it if have to, my backpack is secured with everything closed and buckled where its suppose to be, I hold my bladder, I remember to breath this round, ........."

Knaight
2014-02-12, 06:50 PM
You see, he has a habit of _demanding_ that you announce and declare every action your character takes. And I mean _EVERYTHING_. If you dont explicitly state that your character removes his armor before going to bed, or before taking a bath, he sleeps/washes himself in full gear. If you dont specifically state that you sheathe/pull your weapon before doing certain things, your character will act regardless of the current state.

This is familiar.

When I was a kid, I knew about D&D because my mother played it in college. It sounded interesting, but I didn't have any rule books, just some idea of roleplaying - and not a particularly good one - along with a vague idea of what a DM was. I also shared a room with my younger brother, and while there was a light's out policy we were both night owls. So, we came up with a free form style where one person is basically the GM, and the other is the player, and played that a whole bunch when we should have been sleeping. It was called "The Talky Game".

It eventually spread, through me, to a number of my brother's friends. One of them renamed it "Um", which was undoubtedly progress. Another was reasonably popular. As such, it spread like wildfire through my elementary school (after I'd left, my popularity wasn't conducive to spreading anything). Sadly, the quality of these games tended to be low, and the bad GM stories filtered up to me.

The thing you listed? It was a particular running motif of these bad GMs. There was a whole lot that pretty much played out as such:
"I walk out the door"
"Which direction"
"North"
"You walk into a wall"
"East"
"You walk into a closed door"
"I open the door"
"You pull on the door, but it doesn't do anything"
"I turn the handle, then open the door"
"The handle turns, then you pull and nothing happens"
"I turn the handle, then pull the door open while it is still turned"
"Alright, you get outside. Now what?"

Fortunately, I never experienced any of these games - Partly because anyone gaming with me had probably been introduced through me and I didn't pull that crap, and partly because I played very little Um past 5th grade or so. That said, it sounded awful.

Stuebi
2014-02-13, 01:03 AM
Oh gods one of the DMs I played with did same thing with me, and of course only to me. It was the second DM we had, since other DM was total ----- to me I guess he felt he had to as well. If I bought anything it was crumbled and tattered because I didn't say "I study **** and make sure its good quality." I ran into doors because I didn't say. "I open door" even when walking in with friends. It got to point each round would be me reciting "I follow rest of party without bumping into any of them, my weapon is put away but within reach to draw it if have to, my backpack is secured with everything closed and buckled where its suppose to be, I hold my bladder, I remember to breath this round, ........."

Well, that sucks. Our DM was at least consequent enough to do it to everyone. Also, they "buy everything crumbled and tattered". I Find it amazing that some DMs actually assume that your PC is a drooling moron, except of course you state otherwise, all the time.

Delta
2014-02-13, 06:02 AM
You see, he has a habit of _demanding_ that you announce and declare every action your character takes. And I mean _EVERYTHING_. If you dont explicitly state that your character removes his armor before going to bed, or before taking a bath, he sleeps/washes himself in full gear. If you dont specifically state that you sheathe/pull your weapon before doing certain things, your character will act regardless of the current state.

Wow, in a way, this almost takes the cake for me. I mean, there are "worse" DMs in this thread, but most of them are so hilariously terribad that it's almost funny, this is just sad and stupid. I think I wouldn't last half a session in a game like this before trying to get all players together and give the DM a "stop this BS or we're done" speech.

Arkhosia
2014-02-13, 07:03 AM
Oh gods one of the DMs I played with did same thing with me, and of course only to me. It was the second DM we had, since other DM was total ----- to me I guess he felt he had to as well. If I bought anything it was crumbled and tattered because I didn't say "I study **** and make sure its good quality." I ran into doors because I didn't say. "I open door" even when walking in with friends. It got to point each round would be me reciting "I follow rest of party without bumping into any of them, my weapon is put away but within reach to draw it if have to, my backpack is secured with everything closed and buckled where its suppose to be, I hold my bladder, I remember to breath this round, ........."

How long did it take for him to get kicked out?

geeky_monkey
2014-02-13, 07:20 AM
I once had a DM who did the same thing - everything we bought was poor quality unless we spent 5 minutes asking about every facet of the object. If we overlooked one tiny detail then that would be damaged and it was our fault for not checking carefully enough.

We got him back in the end - we pooled all our money and bought a castle. The DM said we didn't have enough and we showed him our GP total - which was massive as we'd been paying all the NPC shopkeepers with shiny buttons (which we'd bought a big bag of in game). It wasn't our fault that they'd not been checking them carefully enough!

obryn
2014-02-13, 09:03 AM
The thing you listed? It was a particular running motif of these bad GMs. There was a whole lot that pretty much played out as such:
"I walk out the door"
"Which direction"
"North"
"You walk into a wall"
"East"
"You walk into a closed door"
"I open the door"
"You pull on the door, but it doesn't do anything"
"I turn the handle, then open the door"
"The handle turns, then you pull and nothing happens"
"I turn the handle, then pull the door open while it is still turned"
"Alright, you get outside. Now what?"
It's like they learned how to DM from playing Zork.

GungHo
2014-02-13, 10:28 AM
The thing you listed? It was a particular running motif of these bad GMs. There was a whole lot that pretty much played out as such:
"I walk out the door"
"Which direction"
"North"
"You walk into a wall"
"East"
"You walk into a closed door"
"I open the door"
"You pull on the door, but it doesn't do anything"
"I turn the handle, then open the door"
"The handle turns, then you pull and nothing happens"
"I turn the handle, then pull the door open while it is still turned"
"Alright, you get outside. Now what?"

I'd likely modify this person's lifestyle.


It's like they learned how to DM from playing Zork.
Indeed.

MonochromeTiger
2014-02-13, 10:35 AM
I'd likely modify this person's lifestyle.

you can try, but you'd have to describe every minute detail of doing so, including any actions you do without actively thinking of them such as breathing or interpreting what you see to be what it is.

RustyArmor
2014-02-13, 11:27 AM
How long did it take for him to get kicked out?

Funny enough most loved him as DM, he was nice OOC and had decent story lines. Granted his favorite players got crazy items .... the one player had a sword that cut through anything like it was air, the other had a dagger that he can throw and mentally control, three of the other players got items as well, I recall one being a pike or some type of polearm .... forgot what others were and what they all did though. Me and another player were pretty much just "there". I just think the other DM targeted me so much so he just felt he had to do the same thing. Because out of the game he was fine to me.

But between the both of them I gave up the game, so unsure how long he really stayed as DM. It was few years later the one player asked me back saying those two were long gone.

Rising Chaos
2014-02-13, 12:14 PM
Dear god these stories give me a lot more confidence in how I GM. I've been concerned for a bit as my last Dark Heresy and Black Crusade games ended in the party TPKing themselves while I looked on horrified.

I suppose I've been blessed so far as most of my DM's have been pretty good. A little bland with nothing but combat but nothing to really complain about. The one thing that comes to mind is in one of my older 3.5 irl games.
We were supposed to be going through a dungeon, pretty standard fare but what I found odd was that our fighter managed to spring every trap and all the monsters would only fight him, going so far as to incur AoO from us to do so.
I found out later that the fighter and the DM had both been trying to ask out a girl, turns out that the fighter had gone for it first and succeeded, so our DM decided to spite him with the entire dungeon. It's a little disappointing for someone to influence their game like that but I can understand the reasoning for it.

Anyhow, that's my two cents. :p

ReaderAt2046
2014-02-13, 12:32 PM
The DM starts a CUTSCENE! Gods descend, gods rise, the two fallen god brothers start to claim and maybe rehabilitate the BBEG and—

NO.

Time stop. Previously established as stopping even the gods, except the BBEG who had the epic feat to ride along; that is, only he and I were there.
I cast eternity of torture.
"He's immune to wizard magic"
I am actually not a wizard anymore, having shifted to bard/sublime chord/seeker of the lost arcane arts/ultimate magus.
"He's still immune to mortal magic"
I'm my mortal, having become a draconic get resonant image cast by multiversal principles through the last six type shifts from wishes and rituals.
"He has massive spell resistance"
Which is, by your houserules earlier, not able to protect him from this spell.
"Fine! But once the time stop wears off—"

The kicker.

I cast the epic spell eternity of utter damnation.
"WHAT?!"
I cast this epic spell I've been working on that you okayed.
"You're not epic level!"
I'm draconic, have a true dragon age limit, and old enough dragons qualify for epic.
"You're not old enough!"
I've spent months to years e'ery night for six years of game time in a different dimension, crafting and planning.
"You don't meet the skill requirements!"
Except for your houserule that lets is train really hard to go above our maximum rank limit with a high cost.

I threw every loophole, every asinine mistake, every idea he ever forced on the party despite polite discussion and even pleasing, back in his face. He ended up with his most beloved PC ending, not as an over deity, but as a nigh-lifeless husk suffering beyond humans imagination for an eternity of eternities, in nested realities, only accessible through a single jewel around the neck of the over-goddess we had unwittingly powered up this entire time and who was the only being who actively disliked the BBEG.


You're lucky he let you get away with that instead of simply retconning reality so that even immortal magic wouldn't work on him, or your spells simply failed for no reason, or he just broke out of the eternity of epic torture immediately, or any of a dozen things he could have done to stop you.

Knaight
2014-02-13, 01:40 PM
I'd likely modify this person's lifestyle.

It's not "this person". It's at least a half dozen people - that particular style of bad GMing spread like a virus through the school.

SiuiS
2014-02-13, 03:57 PM
That would be the Knockback feat, from RoS.

While you're busy taking knock back, I'm gonna take enervating breath. Or hell, widen breath and ensuring breath. I will power attack everything forever.


I never thought it was intentional, just that he would want to force really tough fights every once in a while, and go overboard. Like I said, just frustrating from an otherwise good GM.
After the last TPK we told him that he spent 6 months of effort and then threw it all away for nothing. We stopped allowing him to GM for a couple of years after that, we switched off GM duties periodically.

Should qualify that the last time he GM'd, we were persuaded to let him run a Mutants and Masterminds game. On the condition that it was non-lethal, he ran it but I was the only one really interested in supers.

This exact thing is why we play 'wizard'.

"Oh man you're all gonna die!"
"It's a good thing I have a contingency for this... Literally."


I once had a DM who did the same thing - everything we bought was poor quality unless we spent 5 minutes asking about every facet of the object. If we overlooked one tiny detail then that would be damaged and it was our fault for not checking carefully enough.

We got him back in the end - we pooled all our money and bought a castle. The DM said we didn't have enough and we showed him our GP total - which was massive as we'd been paying all the NPC shopkeepers with shiny buttons (which we'd bought a big bag of in game). It wasn't our fault that they'd not been checking them carefully enough!

Oh man that is fantastic!


you can try, but you'd have to describe every minute detail of doing so, including any actions you do without actively thinking of them such as breathing or interpreting what you see to be what it is.

Fine.

I will suddenly and repeatedly apply balistic stress to alter and rearrange the integrity of his facial anatomy as regards the skeletal and skeletomuscular systems through applied kinetics at direct and oblique angles.


You're lucky he let you get away with that instead of simply retconning reality so that even immortal magic wouldn't work on him, or your spells simply failed for no reason, or he just broke out of the eternity of epic torture immediately, or any of a dozen things he could have done to stop you.

It was social engineering. He could have stopped it, but an entire table – and literally the only game in town as out FLGS had closed shop and was not reopened yet – would have walked. Someone does something awesome and you stop it because you didn't do it? Nope.

Coidzor
2014-02-13, 04:07 PM
Memetically viral bad DMing?

Oy Gevalt.

MonochromeTiger
2014-02-13, 04:08 PM
Fine.

I will suddenly and repeatedly apply balistic stress to alter and rearrange the integrity of his facial anatomy as regards the skeletal and skeletomuscular systems through applied kinetics at direct and oblique angles.

well played but you forgot to describe inhaling and exhaling, sighting your ballistic weapon of choice, and every muscular action and reaction including involuntary twitches from both you and him, you have failed to modify his lifestyle and instead severely messed up his (likely empty anyway) skull.



It was social engineering. He could have stopped it, but an entire table – and literally the only game in town as out FLGS had closed shop and was not reopened yet – would have walked. Someone does something awesome and you stop it because you didn't do it? Nope.

..um...wow, it takes that much duress for him to admit someone aside from him made a good move and "killed" his "I think I can be a cool bad guy, look at my black armor, it makes me so evil! why are you laughing? WHY DOES NO ONE FEAR ME?!?!" DMPC? wait, how did you get the bad reputation you mentioned if he was the one that risked everyone walking out of what may have been the only game in town..heck I would've offered you a smore roasted over the burning bestiary entries, character sheets, and setting notes that DM used.

Cikomyr
2014-02-13, 04:12 PM
The worst DM I had was not as bad as the ones displayed here, but I still had a solid WTF moment going.

The overall plot of the game (set in Dragonlance) was to recover the artifact of each gods to restore their powers on Krynn. Straightforward enough. One of the relic happens to be a chess set that used to be located near a Solamnian Knight's stronghold.

So far so good. We go there, we investigate, and we discover that the pieces disappeared about 200 years ago.

So, I assume they've been stolen, and being the savvy/thief guy, I tell the GM I start trying to find rumors of collectors, or other sages who would suspect who might have stolent the relics two hundred years ago, or might have acquired them since.

The GM just brushed off all these tries, and told me the answer was "obvious". I rest there really puzzled, and start asking if maybe we could infiltrate the Knight Stronghold, as it's possible they would have locked down the relics without telling anyone, but she again brush me off telling me "Knights don't act that way".


I eventually give up, and tell her I have no idea what she expects us to do. (btw, other ideas also have been brushed off). Until she blurts out "You just need to time travel at the time of the theft and steal the pieces yourselves"


:smallconfused: :smallannoyed: :smallmad: :smallfurious:

WHAT THE ****?! That's the "OBVIOUS ANSWER"? WE ARE LEVEL EIGHT CHARACTER AND YOU EXPECT US TO PULL OFF TIME TRAVEL?!?!

BWR
2014-02-13, 04:23 PM
The worst DM I had was not as bad as the ones displayed here, but I still had a solid WTF moment going.

The overall plot of the game (set in Dragonlance) was to recover the artifact of each gods to restore their powers on Krynn. Straightforward enough. One of the relic happens to be a chess set that used to be located near a Solamnian Knight's stronghold.

So far so good. We go there, we investigate, and we discover that the pieces disappeared about 200 years ago.

So, I assume they've been stolen, and being the savvy/thief guy, I tell the GM I start trying to find rumors of collectors, or other sages who would suspect who might have stolent the relics two hundred years ago, or might have acquired them since.

The GM just brushed off all these tries, and told me the answer was "obvious". I rest there really puzzled, and start asking if maybe we could infiltrate the Knight Stronghold, as it's possible they would have locked down the relics without telling anyone, but she again brush me off telling me "Knights don't act that way".


I eventually give up, and tell her I have no idea what she expects us to do. (btw, other ideas also have been brushed off). Until she blurts out "You just need to time travel at the time of the theft and steal the pieces yourselves"


:smallconfused: :smallannoyed: :smallmad: :smallfurious:

WHAT THE ****?! That's the "OBVIOUS ANSWER"? WE ARE LEVEL EIGHT CHARACTER AND YOU EXPECT US TO PULL OFF TIME TRAVEL?!?!

Actually, that is obvious. Just employ some metagame knowledge and get hold of the Device of Time Journeying.

Duh!

(at least I assume that was her plan)

MonochromeTiger
2014-02-13, 04:30 PM
Actually, that is obvious. Just employ some metagame knowledge and get hold of the Device of Time Journeying.

Duh!

(at least I assume that was her plan)

no no no, clearly her plan was for them to gain access to unlimited duration and speed flying then fly (counter to the rotation of the world) several billion times at ludicrous speed while mentally playing chess on the chess board and singing free bird in every dead language to ever exist (with all instruments done vocally with 100% accuracy) so that time reverses. this process takes the next 100 sessions and also quickly de-ages the characters so that they fade from existence before reaching 200 years in the past but then their ancestor, who is running from a nigh indestructible robot assassin their descendents sent as a message, magics them back into existence so they can grab the chess pieces then use the time machine (also sent by their descendants) to get back to present day. how is that not obvious?

Firechanter
2014-02-13, 05:49 PM
Ah, I love these venting threads. So let's see, what can I contribute? I had my fair share of bad GMs over time, I guess. Well first off, I'd have to discriminate between Online games and good old Tabletop P&P.

It's not easy to make a call, but I think the actually factually worst experience I've ever had was when an acquaintance invited me and my then-girlfriend to join their long-running Runequest game. I had never played RQ before so I didn't really know what I was up to, but never mind.

First we meet the other players, about three of them iirc. Two are rather quiet, shy types (one playing a healer, I forget the other one), but the third one was all the louder, and played a Barbarian. All of them had been playing regularly for about two years, so their characters had quite a few XP under their belts.

Okay. So then we get to roll characters. As soon as we're done with that, we begin. Wait, what? We start at "Level 1", from scratch, no advancements whatsoever?

During the first hour or so it becomes clear that our new characters are totally, completely redundant. Not just like "BMX Bandit compared to Angel Summoner", but like "BMX Bandit without his BMX vs three Angel Summoners". Or to put it that way: our respective primary skills were still a few points worse than the lowest tertiary skills of the regular players. So there was absolutely no way we were able to contribute to the game.

That didn't really matter so much during this session, as it was mostly pure roleplay, and I didn't cause a fuss there but planned to talk to the GM about that afterwards.

But that wasn't everything. It also turns out that the Barbarian player _totally_ controlled the entire game. Whatever he said, happened. The other two regular characters just went along with everything -- and all the NPCs behaved like mindless puppets. The DM did absolutely nothing to keep the PCs in check.

The story so far was kinda like: "PCs come aboard a ship, kill the captain [feed him to the sharks or whatever] and the Barbarian pronounces himself new captain." None of the crew expressed any problem with this whatsoever. They all obey and are totally dandy with serving the murderers of their original captain.

But it goes on! During our session here, the party sailed to this ship's port of call. The home of the entire crew, including the murdered captain. They arrive there, and there is simply _no_ inquiry about the missing captain at all. The inhabitants of the port don't ask, and none of the crew bothers telling anyone. "So this ship that we sent out on a mission comes back with the same crew, but instead of its captain some hobos that we never heard of? Yeah whatevs."

And then the players -- well no, actually: the Barbarian, because nobody else made themselves heard -- decided that they should _take over the place_. It worked so nicely with the ship, so why not grab the entire harbour town? Everyone is a puppet, after all!

The rest of the session is kinda haze; I guess they made plans how to do it, but anyway all the time the DM did not raise one word of objection or point out any flaws in their plans.

On the subway ride home, I briefly talked to the DM about both issues. He dismissed my concerns about our new characters being useless, but admitted that he had no idea how he might keep the Barb player in check. The next day I wrote him a long and detailed, but totally calm and non-inflammatory email about my issues with this group, informing him of our decision not to play with him again.
To which he replied, thanking me for writing about my concerns, but again dismissing them just as he did after the game. It also turns out that he had previously tried to recruit a number of new players, but none of them ever called back after the first session. Well surprise! And instead of reflecting on _why_ that might be, considering that I told him exactly, he just said something like he doesn't consider those points a problem.

So yes, I guess that qualifies as the worst DM I met. But I have some runner-ups, maybe I can tell you about these later.

Cikomyr
2014-02-13, 06:02 PM
Actually, that is obvious. Just employ some metagame knowledge and get hold of the Device of Time Journeying.

Duh!

(at least I assume that was her plan)

Actually, not even. We just managed to find a local sage who cast Time Travel on us

MonochromeTiger
2014-02-13, 06:14 PM
Actually, not even. We just managed to find a local sage who cast Time Travel on us

local sage...capable of time travel.. and no one considered that some random sage with the ability to cause people to TRAVEL THROUGH TIME could potentially be used to solve every problem ever? lost your keys? TIME TRAVEL to the last time you used them and watch where they're put. the setting's deities lost their power in the world? TIME TRAVEL to before they did and warn them of whatever historical event caused it so that they can use their deity powers to stop it from happening. favorite show canceled? TIME TRAVEL to the time the writing staff, director, and producer were in a meeting and slap all of them for ending your favorite show.

Cikomyr
2014-02-13, 06:15 PM
local sage...capable of time travel.. and no one considered that some random sage with the ability to cause people to TRAVEL THROUGH TIME could potentially be used to solve every problem ever? lost your keys? TIME TRAVEL to the last time you used them and watch where they're put. the setting's deities lost their power in the world? TIME TRAVEL to before they did and warn them of whatever historical event caused it so that they can use their deity powers to stop it from happening. favorite show canceled? TIME TRAVEL to the time the writing staff, director, and producer were in a meeting and slap all of them for ending your favorite show.

Hence why I am telling this into "Worst GM Ever"

It's not so much that she was a bad GAME MASTER, she was just horrible storymaker.

Iamyourking
2014-02-13, 08:11 PM
At least it was a setting where time travel exists and has specific rules about how you can't change the past.

Cikomyr
2014-02-13, 08:16 PM
At least it was a setting where time travel exists and has specific rules about how you can't change the past.

Yhea, but there still wasn't any clues that would have pointed out to the solution being "use freakkin' time travel". Worst is the GM's demeanor for trying to find an alternative solution. She treated me like I was totally out of line for not following her story.

MonochromeTiger
2014-02-13, 08:18 PM
Yhea, but there still wasn't any clues that would have pointed out to the solution being "use freakkin' time travel". Worst is the GM's demeanor for trying to find an alternative solution. She treated me like I was totally out of line for not following her story.

that's a common reaction for railroading DMs when their players don't keep their hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times with the safety harness securely attached and the tray table in the upright position.

ReaderAt2046
2014-02-14, 06:38 AM
It was social engineering. He could have stopped it, but an entire table – and literally the only game in town as out FLGS had closed shop and was not reopened yet – would have walked. Someone does something awesome and you stop it because you didn't do it? Nope.

Never (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275152) stopped (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=282462)Marty. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=305986)

Arkhosia
2014-02-14, 09:09 AM
Never (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275152) stopped (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=282462)Marty. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=305986)

OHGODDELETETHELINKNOWMAN,SPARETHEMFROMEXPOSURETOTH EFARREALM!:smalleek:
:smalltongue:

Perseus
2014-02-14, 09:53 AM
I've never really had a terrible GM. The worst was a guy who was inexperienced, was writing a novel, and tried to set up things from the novel as a game - which failed miserably, because it was a bad set up to begin with and giving creative players hyper intelligent aliens and high technology mixes really poorly with railroading.

Hot damn I've had that happen to me too... The guy said yes to Magic of Incarnum and said everyone was powerful PCs... Which I brought a face slasher warforged totemist/grappler.

No one else was optimized at all and half the people were new players...

Couple sessions in the DM says something along the lines of "sorry but my story can't work with your broken character, you're out".

I was already thinking about leaving cause the DM was horrible and didn't use the rules half the time (grapple check was a dex check and soulmelds didn't help) and he didn't know MoI (he said he did). But being invited and lied too plus the clusterhell of a game it was a bit crappy to be told that I'm the problem when I did everything the DM said or passed everything by him before joining.

Turns out the other players loved my character and wanted me to stay in but I got kicked because my character overshadowed the DMPC and he was complaining about that.

ElenionAncalima
2014-02-14, 10:32 AM
I once had a DM who did the same thing - everything we bought was poor quality unless we spent 5 minutes asking about every facet of the object. If we overlooked one tiny detail then that would be damaged and it was our fault for not checking carefully enough.

We got him back in the end - we pooled all our money and bought a castle. The DM said we didn't have enough and we showed him our GP total - which was massive as we'd been paying all the NPC shopkeepers with shiny buttons (which we'd bought a big bag of in game). It wasn't our fault that they'd not been checking them carefully enough!

Very Nice. Hopefully he got the idea.

Knaight
2014-02-14, 11:27 AM
Hot damn I've had that happen to me too... The guy said yes to Magic of Incarnum and said everyone was powerful PCs... Which I brought a face slasher warforged totemist/grappler.

No one else was optimized at all and half the people were new players...

Couple sessions in the DM says something along the lines of "sorry but my story can't work with your broken character, you're out".

I just inadvertently broke the plot by triangulating a signal. I figured it was the sort of thing a super intelligent and technologically advanced alien would do to find a signalling station that was reasonably far off, and apparently that was not anywhere near the intended plan.

Threadnaught
2014-02-14, 09:25 PM
It poisoned the well, changed how i view the reality of gaming, didn't teach him a darn thing*, split the group, gave me a reputation

I want the player from that story in one of my games. That was badass.

Lanaya
2014-02-15, 03:28 AM
Well mine is put to shame by all the other stories in this thread, but thinking about it still pisses me off to this day. It was at one of those living campaign things, where you show up to the store and generally play with a different party and DM each time, so thankfully I only endured him once. I made a swordsage who I thought was just the coolest thing ever, and during the pre-adventure discussion Jerk DM mentioned that he hates ToB and it's all overpowered weaboo crap and said with glee that swordsages tend to die in his games. So that's not a good start, especially since it's a living campaign - my swordsage was a starting character, but faithfully playing your favourite character for dozens of sessions with great DMs, getting up to level 10 or so and then happening to get a DM who decides to kill your character out of spite would really suck.

So I've sort of already spoiled what happens, but yeah, he killed my character out of spite. We had to use a rope to climb across a mountain stream with a convenient waterfall nearby, so if you fell in the river you would fall down the waterfall. Well, shockingly enough I failed my checks, and Jerk DM's eyes light up in glee as he describes my grip failing and nobody else being close enough to save me. He then declares that I'm washed down the river and fall down the waterfall and die.

However, I understand the rules of D&D, and point out that falling damage caps at 20d6, while my character had around 30 HP. It's not great odds, but if he rolled a lot of 1s I would live. Rather than just grab 20d6, roll them all and say "yep, you're dead" Jerk DM decides that he WILL NOT TOLERATE THIS. Because otherwise he might, by a million-to-one chance, accidentally not kill someone for having the cheek to roll up a martial adept. So he told me that actually, there are a series of rocks jutting out from the waterfall, and I fall a neat 200 feet, hit one, take 20d6 damage, then bounce off, fall 200 feet, hit the next for 20d6, bounce off and fall 200 feet, etc etc. I point out that a series of convenient rocks jutting out of the waterfall would give me an excellent way to save myself, by grabbing onto one as I fell past, or falling onto one and then hanging on rather than bouncing off immediately. But nope! He informs me that I landed on my head on the first rock and was therefore stunned and incapable of doing this. Doesn't bother rolling to see how I landed, obviously, because that might allow a swordsage to live. Doesn't take into account that being stunned from taking damage doesn't ever happen in D&D 3.5 under any circumstances either, or give any sort of save. I have no idea how a **** like that got permission to run games, but thankfully I stopped going to that store shortly afterwards.

Whew. Feels good to let that all out.

Raine_Sage
2014-02-15, 04:04 AM
Mine was a game my brother invited me too as a sort of "Glad you're back from college" present.

One of his friends was DMing and since I was invited last minute the only things I knew was we were starting at level 1 and that we were using a homebrewed combat system for 4ed that was supposed to make things move faster.

This system turned out to be something called the "ticks" system which I understand is used in a few other games but was rather clumsily shoehorned into 4ed. Basically instead of a character using their standard/move/minor all in the same turn each action took a certain number of "ticks" to pull off with the aim being an attempt to simulate actual second by second combat.

So to move that was one tick, an attack was around four or five ticks, anything the GM deemed "powerful" was 7 ticks. There was a calendar where we kept track of the ticks, and when we reached the number a player's marker was on they could use that move. If this all sounds needlessly complex that's because it was. I'm honestly not explaining it very well so let me just highlight a very obvious problem with the system.

It takes one tick to move one square on the grid. It takes five ticks to pull off an attack. For a total of six ticks. You're not allowed to move while you're waiting for your attack ticks to count down. So a Melee character spends one tick to move into range. However they need to wait five ticks before they can swing their sword and there's no option for them to move and attack as one action. So if the monster moves before you do it can move 5 squares out of range before you can even swing your sword. Sure they eat an opp attack but an opp attack is kind of small potatoes when you're playing a bard with daggers and your aim was to try and debuff them not deal damage.

And the numbers for ticks were completely arbitrary. You could only move one square per tick, but shifting was four ticks, and despite being at-will powers several of my attacks had been deemed worthy of a seven tick penalty (as had several other players who had at-wills that did things like slow or grant combat advantage).

It was the opposite of a fast game. We started at 8. By 2 AM two of the party members who had gotten held up did not even make it out of the hallway. It took four hours for PCs to navigate a hallway. That's how mindbogglingly slow everything was. We didn't even finish the encounter. No one was getting anything done so we collectively went "Screw it" and left. We all later told the DM, very plainly, that the system sucked and we weren't going to continue the campaign if we had to sit through that again.

The most surprising part was that he didn't see anything wrong with how the session went. Despite unanimous agreement from the players that pulling teeth would have been more enjoyable he insisted that "It would be better once he got the bugs ironed out" and "It was still faster than normal 4ed combat."

The last one always gets me. It took four hours to kill one goblin. For all it's faults I've never had 4th edition combat that lasted over 3 hours when using the normal rules. I've certainly never spent 4 hours just trying to get my PC up a flight of stairs.

SiuiS
2014-02-15, 06:50 AM
well played but you forgot to describe inhaling and exhaling, sighting your ballistic weapon of choice, and every muscular action and reaction including involuntary twitches from both you and him, you have failed to modify his lifestyle and instead severely messed up his (likely empty anyway) skull.

True. I've used that sentence enough before that I got sloppy; I normally involve colorful deacriptions of skeletal levers and pistons powered by chemical reactions on the muscular scale through coordinated binocular vision and targeting, etc., but I guess now I'm just thinking of his head exploding really hard XD



..um...wow, it takes that much duress for him to admit someone aside from him made a good move and "killed" his "I think I can be a cool bad guy, look at my black armor, it makes me so evil! why are you laughing? WHY DOES NO ONE FEAR ME?!?!" DMPC? wait, how did you get the bad reputation you mentioned if he was the one that risked everyone walking out of what may have been the only game in town..heck I would've offered you a smore roasted over the burning bestiary entries, character sheets, and setting notes that DM used.

The DM introduced other players over the years to his games, kids who didn't know any better, and tell them bitter stories of how stuff was ruined by players being jerks. And when the old players were asked loaded questions, such as "did X really stop the entire end story in order to cast one big spell to cut that part of the story off?" They would just laugh and say "yeah, that was great" and confirm the bias.


Actually, not even. We just managed to find a local sage who cast Time Travel on us

What


Never (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275152) stopped (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=282462)Marty. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=305986)

You know, I've read that, and I see a lot of posts from the players saying "we don't wanna talk about it" and a lot of readers saying "woah-Ho! That's so amazingly terrible! Look how bad this is!" But I've not really come across any of the bad stuff. You have any specific posts if ridonkulity?

Fable Wright
2014-02-15, 07:45 AM
You know, I've read that, and I see a lot of posts from the players saying "we don't wanna talk about it" and a lot of readers saying "woah-Ho! That's so amazingly terrible! Look how bad this is!" But I've not really come across any of the bad stuff. You have any specific posts if ridonkulity?

Sure. Pick one (http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/p/properly-ordered-posts.html).

DSmaster21
2014-02-18, 04:09 PM
PF

Spoiled For length
Not my worst dm but for his first session ever a friend sent 4 spectres (CR 7 each) to fight:

A negative channeling CN cleric 3 (me) who of course was quite useless since I haven't gotten command undead as a feat yet,
A Universalist Wizard 3 who focused on item crafting and had like 5 pearl of powers that he hoarded and his faithful dire rat familiar, and
A power attacking greatsword wielding Barbarian 3

We won and that leveled us but ouch did it suck. It was supposed to be a random encounter on the way to a dungeon crawl so I had stocked up on cure light wounds which I burned almost half of upon figuring out that they were undead.

[Didn't help we had been seperated from the other half of our team (Though we both had maps so we were all good for the whole not getting lost thing)] Also it was night and I failed at keeping watch so the others had no gear. yep.

And when I asked afterword what we had just gotten destroyed by he said spectres and I get pissed at him and he says "I have to follow the random encounter tables or it would be cheating". I had spent the past couple weeks prepping him for this and teaching him my (admittedly not perfect) skills and tricks. I even sent him to this very site and showed him many threads.

Then he decided that my half-team had suffered enough so he sent hordes of undead and hags and a lamia led by a lich* to attack the other four. Then as they begin to be routed he uses dm fiat to say my group hears cries for help. So my group sets off and he says "I'll tell you when you arrive" and he continues the fight. Two rounds later we arrive and just barely win. [The lich fled once all his minions went down]**&***

And this is why I made sure my friend DM let me and help everyone improve their characters.

*I will admit he did try to do a good job of this He used over 50 skeles and zombies but he did it in waves so the good cleric managed to blow those up. However he had only 4 waves [Wave 1: 10 Zombies, Wave 2: 10 Skeles, Wave 3: 5 of each, Wave 4: 10 of each, 2 hags don't remember which kind (they died before I got there), and a Lich
**What angers me about this is that I declared my first action to be to jump out of the tree I was sitting on, screaming for help (DM "They can't hear you you are miles apart) and try to use my only prepared cure light wounds to save our wizard who had -2 HP after the spectral surprise round.***
***So my half-team can evidently run miles in 12 seconds.

imaloony
2014-02-19, 12:08 AM
Now, I'd like to first mention that I don't hold anything against this particular GM. He was a nice guy, but he was a passable GM at the best of times, and utterly boring for the rest of it. He's also not the worst GM ever, I doubt story would crack the top 30 in this thread, but it was still pretty annoying at the time.

Our first encounter with him was some 3.5 one-shot in which the question one player posed of "Can I be a Lizardman Cavalier with a Velociraptor for a mount" was stunningly responded to with "Yes". We were 1st level characters taking out CR 8 creatures in part because he had no sense of balance and also in part because I don't think he actually was familiar enough with to combat and rules in general to be DMing.

Most of the rest of the session with him GMing were Warhammer RPGs. In the past I talked a lot about these sessions (Not that anyone remembers), but never much about him as a GM. Firstly, he did EVERYTHING by the book. To the letter. He had no sense of improv, and it got to the point in the Deathwatch Campaign where he announced that the campaign was over because there were no more missions in the books for us to do.

The real train-wreck was the Dark Heresy campaign. Firstly, we went through one mission where we had to track down some abomination/demon/things on a planet. At one point, we end up battling something in the street and cause a big scene, so the town guard shows up and is understandable pretty pissed. I pull the Captain of the Guard aside and subtly mention that we're members of the Inquisition and that he should just let us do our job. To my satisfaction, he orders his men back. I was rather pleased with that bit of role playing. UNTIL we made it to the final area, where we found the abomination/demon/things (I really hardly remember what they even were). Notice the "s" at the end of that description, because there were three of them. These things paralyzed us, reduced our attack rolls, and generally mowed us down with very little difficulty. I make a comment to the GM about the difficulty of the encounter.
GM: "Well, there was only going to be one of them, but you told the guards that the Inquisition was on the planet."
Me: "Okay, but how does that translate to a triple boss battle?"
GM: "They were alerted to your presence and had time to prepare"
Me: "I told ONE GUARD. How did it escalate that quickly?"
GM :"It's in the book."
He then informs us that the Demons overran the planet and as such the Imperium of Man decided to glass the planet rather than solve the problem with, oh, I don't know, ONE SPACE MARINE (God bless the Space Nazi's). He ended up sort of reversing this decision, but we still ended up failing the mission.

Another time, we had been through a rough end-mission battle and one of the players had lost a leg. We quickly deduced that said player didn't have enough money for even the crappiest available cybernetic replacement, and there was no way that the Inquisition was going to shell out any money for a grunt like us (Because reasons). As such, we came up with a simple solution:
Group: "We fashion [Player] a peg-leg."
GM: "You can't do that."
Me: "Why not?"
GM: "There are no stats in the book for a peg-leg, it has to be a Cybernetic replacement."
Me: "Okay, but we should still be able to do it. It can't be THAT difficult to strap a hunk of driftwood to his stump. It won't be effective, but he'll at least be able to hobble around."
GM: "Yeah, but the book doesn't have stats for that, so you can't do it."
The player was forced to roll up a new character because the GM was unwilling to house-rule a peg-leg. Yeah.

He teased us several times with a Rogue Trader campaing (Which was the only 40K RPG I was actually interested in playing) and a Call of Cathulu Campaign (Which I spent a lot of time building a character for), neither of which ended up happening. It may have been for the best, because I don't think he had the ability to pull either off, but it was just a pain in the rear to have dedicated so much time to preparing for the campaign just for it to never happen. He DID end up running a Black Crusade campaign, but I politely bowed out, in part because of his lack of skill as a GM, in part because I couldn't stand one of the players, and in part because I had slowly learned that I hated the 40K RPG universe.

Living_Dead_Guy
2014-02-19, 05:23 AM
In my time I've railroaded. I decided to make a conscious effort not to but the results were worse. For example, in a game some friends wanted to play, a druid sat in the woods waiting to notice the huge column of smoke rising from the village not three miles distant. I didn't want to tell her that she noticed it because I felt that would be taking control of her character. So I left it to the dice, unfortunately even with a 10 DC she didn’t notice for the entire 4 hour session...... Being side tracked by 8 other players I didn't even notice as she just sat in silence.

I didn't DM for 2 years I felt so bad.


The Worst DM I've had!
A friend of mine has been the resident DM for near 25 years. In fact I've only seen him play one. His settings are wonderful the plots are engaging, he takes character background into consideration and tries to interweave character and player goals into the campaign. He has five faults.

First he home rules critical misses into any system he's playing. Not just critical misses on attacks but also for skills, saves, ability rolls. This has killed more of my characters then I can remember. It got to the point were I would do anything I could to not roll dice as I would have a 1 in 20 chance of dieing.

Secondly, he used save or die traps, and not sparingly. The damn things were everywhere. This slowed game play as we would poke and inspect every 5 foot square, not just the floor but surrounding wall and ceilings, looking for holes for arrows, reverse gravity, pitting in the stone from acid or fire. Well you get the idea. Then we would roll less the the perception DC and die anyway.

Third, he would suddenly rule that a game mechanic didn't work. A fireball would be cast and the rogue couldn't use evasion as there was nothing to hide behind. It was frustrating beyond belief. When I tried to tell him that it may not make sense to him, it was there for mechanical balance (rogues have lower HP and AC but they make up for this by taking less damage from AOE's) and that had I known that this house rule was in effect I would have A.) chosen a different class. B.) chosen different actions. He just gave me a blank stare and then went on as if nothing of importance had happened.

Fourthly, I died a lot. I don't mind having characters die but I enjoy Rping them a bit before they meet their ultimate demise. To give you an idea of how many characters I went through. I played with him for about 12 years we played anywhere from 2 to 4 sessions a week. I had 1 character in all that time last more then one session and he died in the second session. So that would be at least 1247 deaths. I got into the habit of bringing at least 3 characters to each session though so that number is really low. In one epic 72 hour session I went through 14 characters. By the end I was just recycling previous characters with new names.

Lastly he played favorites. His best friend never died a single time that I know of, had more items then the rest of the part combined, and frequently disappeared only to be seen when we got to the BBEG who as already dead and looted.

The Final Straw
The final straw was when we entered the layer of a baby white wyrmling. After several encounters we came to a large under ice lake. I look down and see a sword that looks to be made entirely of black stone and glowing with blue runes as well as tons of gold strewn across the bottom. Seeing as my sword had broken in the last encounter I was thinking maybe he was going to be nice and furnish me with one, but all of the coins made me hesitant, thinking maybe it was a trap.

So I took a small cup from my pack and scooped some out making sure I didn't touch any liquid which I wasn't going to assume was water. He asked what kind of material the cup was made out of, with an inner grimace I replied steel and he promptly told me that my hand felt bitterly cold and was now stuck to the cup and took enough damage to almost kill me. After 20 minutes of carefully cutting my hand off the cup (Taking 20 so I didn't roll dice....) I decided that I was going to get that sword no matter what.

So I healed myself back to full and tied three grappling hooks to a fifty foot length of rope and fed it into the lake..... it didn't reach the bottom even though we were at the edge. So I gathered all of the parties rope (except the DM's best friend as he wouldn't lend me any)tied them off to make one long rope and fed it into the lake slowly. With almost 600 ft of rope he couldn't say it didn't reach the bottom. So after playing the line a bit I snag it on the sword. He tells me I can only roll to pick it up once. If it falls, it will be to far out to try and snag.

I think fair enough and pick up the dice to roll, he tells me I'll need a 100. I roll and up pops 100. I almost did a dance every one was cheering. Then he tells me its slipping and I need to roll again and that it needs to be another 100 so I roll and 100 pops up again. I've never seen everyone at the table so animated.

The sword is now laying there on the ground but I'm not stupid enough to pick it up. After all if a piece of metal froze to my hand after only being submerged for a second or two I can only imagine what this will do. So the party builds a fire and places the sword near it waiting for it to warm up. After a couple of hours I decide its time.

Everyone at the table is silent waiting to see what happens. I wrap my hand in my shirt just in case its still cold and then grasp the hilt....... and then die, without a save or explination. The DM's best friend walks over picks it up say hmmm and puts it on his back.

I left and never gamed again, I can take dieing to failed rolls but when I start to die from successes I have to call it quits..

Delta
2014-02-19, 05:35 AM
[COLOR="Blue"]In my time I've railroaded. I decided to make a conscious effort not to but the results were worse. For example, in a game some friends wanted to play, a druid sat in the woods waiting to notice the huge column of smoke rising from the village not three miles distant. I didn't want to tell her that she noticed it because I felt that would be taking control of her character. So I left it to the dice, unfortunately even with a 10 DC she didn’t notice for the entire 4 hour session...... Being side tracked by 8 other players I didn't even notice as she just sat in silence.

For the record, I guess you realized this by now but I just feel the need to point out, determining that some task is so easy that you automatically succeed at it (like noticing a huge column of smoke only a couple miles away) is of course NOT railroading.

SiuiS
2014-02-19, 05:35 AM
Is that supposed to be solid blue?

Living_Dead_Guy
2014-02-19, 05:36 AM
I realized it but not fast enough to save that game. I'm a whole lot better now though.

Yea blue is my favorite color.....

SiuiS
2014-02-19, 05:37 AM
It's also usually sarcasm, but this seemed like only partial sarcasm and partly an actual story. I was getting conflicting signals. :smallsmile:

Living_Dead_Guy
2014-02-19, 05:42 AM
Unfortunately its all entirely true.

It's why I will never use save or die traps, will fudge dice if to many crits happen on a single character, and always ask for feedback after every session. I feel the game should be about the story, character interactions and having fun. None of those things have ever been fun for me.

Firechanter
2014-02-19, 07:21 AM
Oh my goodness! That's really atrocious.

I just don't understand WHY you have put up with this crap for YEARS. I probably would have tossed some dice in that DM's face after maybe the 2nd or 3rd session, tops, and never play with him again.

SimonMoon6
2014-02-19, 01:43 PM
Our first encounter with him was some 3.5 one-shot in which the question one player posed of "Can I be a Lizardman Cavalier with a Velociraptor for a mount" was stunningly responded to with "Yes".

This reminds me of the first significant D&D game I ever ran. It was first edition. The new book at the time was Unearthed Arcana with all its cool new classes (barbarian, cavalier) and races (dark elf). And Dragon magazine had just published errata that I dutifully cut out and taped into my book, including a chart that said which race/class combinations were possible.

One player wanted to be a dark elf. Okay, fine. He had checked to see which multi-class possibilities were allowed on the chart (with the various classes abbreviated to their initial letter). There was one column labeled "CMT" which the chart indicated was permitted for a dark elf. So, that's what this player played: a cavalier/magic-user/thief.

Yeah, yeah, nowadays I realize that column was for CLERIC/magic-user/thief. But, oh well...

One of the other players joked that he imagined this character jousting somebody and then picking their pocket as they rode by.

Jon_Dahl
2014-02-19, 02:16 PM
A good friend of mine is creative, brilliant and knows everything about RPGs, but sometimes he's extremely bored and GMs games without giving a damn about others.

Last summer we had a campaign to forget. He wanted to run Ars Magica. We actually had a very good turn-out for that game, something like four regular players and a couple of irregulars. The first two sessions we created characters and everything was a mess. With your help (I'm looking at you BWR, Tyrrell and Andrewmorreton) I was able to plan my character in advance, but what was my reward? I had to just sit there and do nothing for hours while others created their characters and it all kept disintegrating time after time.

Then we played a little bit. We talked with some NPCs and then planned how to decorate a house. Then the GM said that he doesn't want to run the game anymore because the rules suck. And that was it.

obryn
2014-02-19, 02:44 PM
Unfortunately its all entirely true.

It's why I will never use save or die traps, will fudge dice if to many crits happen on a single character, and always ask for feedback after every session. I feel the game should be about the story, character interactions and having fun. None of those things have ever been fun for me.
I'm with everyone else. I would have bailed in a hurry. That's the kind of abusive DM these horror stories are made of.

imaloony
2014-02-19, 04:16 PM
Now, I never had a lot of HORRIBLE DMs, but I've had my longest running DM make a few hilarious hiccups.

I would like to initially state that this particular DM is NOT a bad DM. He's actually fantastic. He's a veteran who's been playing for decades and his attitude towards story progression is "There's a main plot if you guys want direction. If not..." *Rolls out an ENORMOUS hand-drawn map* "...this is my world. If you want to run to the far corners looking for adventure, knock yourself out. I've got encounters and tons of areas littering this map that you guys can find, explore, and complete." And he was true to his word, as just traveling from point A to point B we find tons of dungeons and distractions to keep us having fun, and he always seems on the ball. He loves for us to make an impact on his world (One guy, because the conditions and the dice rolls were correct, literally added a GOD to the world. No it wasn't him, he created a faith powerful enough to will one into existence). We're on the second campaign with the guy, the first having been a multi-year epic that only recently ended, and we still see ripples in the new campaign which is set 70-80 years later (That religion the guy created is still around and stronger than ever).

So, with all that being said, this guy was human, and with such a huge world and huge party (at times there we 12+ characters running around) even he was prone to making mistakes. [For context, this was campaign was AD&D]

In that first campaign I was playing two characters (Several people were. It was a mistake, but we were new at the time; sue us): an Elven Ranger and a Human Cleric of Isis. We return after one quest to find the town we were supposed to return to under attack. The streets were crawling with undead, and there were lots of Giants sieging the town with boulder throws.
We approach and observe from a distance to find the best place to move in for the attack, and we find a church is currently under attack from some Death Knights.
My cleric sees this and is torn between sticking to the plan or smiting some ****in' undead. I leave the in-character decision to a dice roll (I do this a lot when I'm struggling on a tough decision) and the roll says "UNDEAD SMASHING TIME." So I charge in, the group only momentarily hesitating before charging in with me. I smash one of the Death Knights with my Mace of Disruption and prepare for the counter attack.
At this point, the DM looks at his notes and says "Whoops."
Me: "Whoops what?"
DM: "Those... those are the wrong Death Knights. I was supposed to put different undead there."
Me: "So, what does that mean?"
DM: *Rolling* "It means that the Death Knight just turned around and cut your arm off"
Yeah, he stuck an encounter way too tough for us in at a very bad time. I talked to him later about it, and apparently he was trying to find a way to bail us out of his mistake in-game without having to resort to anything ridiculous. It's at this point he remembers that there's a high-level NPC Paladin inside the church, which he realizes he can send our way to give us the edge we need to make it out of the fight.
And then the Hill Giant threw a boulder, rolled a nat-20 on his attack roll, and the boulder flew through the church and caught the Paladin in the forehead.
Well ****. We were looking pretty boned at that point, until our Barbarian calls his god (Thor) and gets a stupidly good roll on his percentile dice. Thor shows up and teleports us away before the Death Knights can wipe us.
Granted, he was pretty good about helping us recover from that mistake on his part; several bad "Disarmed" puns later, I found someone who reattached my arm.

The other time was very recently in our new campaign. We had only played a few sessions and while we had a decent amount of money, it wasn't anthing crazy. This is important because at the end of the last campaign we had enough money to make Oprah blush due to some generous treasure drops. The DM was attempting to be more conservative this time.
So we headed to the Underdark, and pretty early in we fought some pretty tough enemies, but managed to defeat them. The DM begins rolling loot, looking at the treasure table for this particular enemy. I hear him mutter "Treasure Table W? Which is that one...?" And then he facepalms once he flips to that table.
EACH of these monsters had a fortune worth of money, jewelry, and gems with something stupid like 80-100% chance of having each of those piles of treasure. On top of that, EACH of these things (I think there were 5 or 6) had a 60% chance to drop a magic item from EACH category other than Potions and Scrolls.
He's recently been saying that after that encounter he might need to have Burt the Bandit and Herb the Highwayman pay us a visit to bring our wealth down to a more manageable amount.

Bullvine
2014-02-19, 10:31 PM
A lot of bad experiences but I have 3 in mind.

1. First 4e D&D experience, DM purposefully nerfed my monk character by removing the full discipline feature. Reasoning was, and I quote, "All other classes only get one action per their powers, you will follow suit." So for things like encounter powers I had to choose whether to use the attack or movement options and that decision was locked. Needless to say I died quite frequently from not having full access to what the class can do.

2. Another DM from my usual group was upset that I wouldn't play one of the "standard" core races or use a class in the classic stereotype. It was at the time the Heroes of Shadow came out so I whipped up a vryloka barbarian. The race was no issue for the rest of the group, and after seeing this the DM finally dropped that issue. Though through the time we played he further kept making statements such as "Your suppose to be a barbarian, why are you [insert any action I did] instead of [insert supposed action that was to be done]!". After explaining multiple times why I did what I did, it still was the same thing. Barbarians are this, not this. You should do this, not that.

3. As with #2, I had a DM get upset at our session 0 due to that I had expressed interest as playing the vampire class from 4e. None stop complaining about how vampires are monsters, not a class. Didn't even make the thing, just said it looked interesting to try out, and still got a lecture of how D&D is suppose to be.

NotAnAardvark
2014-02-19, 11:32 PM
1. First 4e D&D experience, DM purposefully nerfed my monk character by removing the full discipline feature. Reasoning was, and I quote, "All other classes only get one action per their powers, you will follow suit." So for things like encounter powers I had to choose whether to use the attack or movement options and that decision was locked. Needless to say I died quite frequently from not having full access to what the class can do.


I never understood why everyone nerfs monks. In ever friggin' game. Monks are mediocre or worse and then every bad DM on the planet house rules them worse and then the devs behind the game nerf them even more in errata to follow suit.

Covent
2014-02-20, 12:57 AM
I have two stories of "worst DM".

1.) The first story was in 2nd edition. So we all got together and were informed that we would be playing in the forgotten realms and could make whatever we liked as long as it was a standard Race or class. No monsters or such as PCs.

We all put together humans except one guy who played an elf. No problems. Our party was Fighter, Mage, Thief and I played a Cleric.

All pretty standard. I did ask for a concession and will admit it however. I asked for and was allowed to play a Cleric of Light and Good who did not worship any particular god just the forces of Light and Good and their purifying and redeeming qualities.

We put together the rules for this from the books, and I got Faerie fire and a light spell.

I had decent strength A 14 and was a battle cleric/Redeemer of the light.

All seemed good.

Then at first session we all got started on a boat traveling from a port to another. Honestly the details were vague.

I figured out why later...

10 minutes into the session we were informed that a "Strange and Eerie" mist sprang up around the ship.

We tried to do various actions but were informed that the mist knocked us all out, no save, no dice just *Bam* out.

When we woke up we were informed that we were in a stone cell with no doors or windows, just blank stone walls.

All of us were wearing masks that were made of stone and were impossible to remove.

The DM with a big smile announced "Welcome to Ravenloft!"

The next two hours were the DM describing the terrible things that happened to us. The fighter was turned into a wasted husk, the thief had his hands crippled, the mage was driven insane by his own magic turning into centipedes inside his boy, and I was told that I was completely cut off from my magic and could not refresh spells or have any effect to help the others as my spells were stripped from me.

We were dragged into and out of a "Shimmer" in the air which let our captors torture us.

Finally after all of this we were allowed out of our cells and told that this asylum was going to "Cure" us of the "Madness" of hope and belief. We were all good...

In the corridors of the asylum we met madmen and our "Strange, Pale" captors, no-one helpful or useful and we had no gear.

This wrapped up the first session.

Our second session was us gardening during the day while watched by Hairy and growling humans. No NPC interaction, no story just gardening.

Third Session...

Fed up we all tried to do something/anything to sneak out or figure out how to leave. All attempts fail as we are told that the masks prevent escape and will kill us if we try, no dice just dead.

I honestly kind of lost it, and just stormed up to the front gate. The guards laughed and told me to go back inside while mocking me.

Enraged my Cleric called up his innate Faire Fire and surrounded himsef in it while stating "No Darkness can defeat the Light! We are leaving and your shallow shadow cannot stop us!"

I then reached up and tried to rip off my mask. DM frowns and says "Bend bars/Lift Gates at -3%"

Now with a 14 strength I only had a 7% chance anyway but thought "Whatever, I have to do something this is in character for my cleric."

I rolled the dice and the whole group whooped when my roll came up a 02%!

The DM Tried to wiggle out but finally backed off as the whole table grumbled and stated that my mask crumbled in my hands and fell off my face.

I led the party out of the asylum, and we all were charged up to go find some adventure.

Five minutes later before we even got out form under the trees shading the asylum, we were caught by the guards who were all high level were-wolves and killed with no rolls just "They catch you and kill you".

The DM was surprised when we declined his offer to let us play other inmates, and reenter the asylum.

We all left and never came back. I started GM'ing White Wolf games the next week and honestly that guy never played with any of us again.

This was when I was 14 and I did not play D&D again until I was 27.

2.) Next: The great white wolf larp debacle... (Will post this later)

Arbane
2014-02-20, 04:31 AM
Finally after all of this we were allowed out of our cells and told that this asylum was going to "Cure" us of the "Madness" of hope and belief. We were all good...

In the corridors of the asylum we met madmen and our "Strange, Pale" captors, no-one helpful or useful and we had no gear.

This wrapped up the first session.

:smalleek:

WHY do some GMs do stuff like this? I just don't get it....


Our second session

I think I found your problem. This next bit:


We all left and never came back. I started GM'ing White Wolf games the next week and honestly that guy never played with any of us again.

Should've been how the FIRST session ended. About an hour in. :smallmad:

Delta
2014-02-20, 05:25 AM
:smalleek:

WHY do some GMs do stuff like this? I just don't get it....

Some guys are just clueless. I know a guy, he's not that bad, he's just clueless (talked about him in one of the "problem player" threads already a couple weeks ago), when he was the GM, his adventures were usually pretty railroady but he left us room for roleplaying and had some fun NPCs and as I mostly played with him on conventions it was a couple of hours of fun, not the most memorable adventures but hey, just look at the rest of this thread and I'm not complaining.

But one time, he really outdid himself, we were playing rebel pilots in Star Wars, our squadron was led into a trap and captured, I mean, that was the adventure hook, so that's okay in my book. But then, the next 3-4 hours were "you are captured. you are interrogated. you go back to your cells." literally every single one of the 7 PCs had an interrogation scene and several scenes in their cell (we were all in solitary so no interaction between the characters whatsoever) which didn't really matter because it's not like we had a ton of campaign background to betray or anything. We had literally no chance whatsoever of doing anything useful until there was a power outage and some double agent got us out of our cells and the real adventure, taking over the prison space station and defending the station against imperial reinforcements, started.

I talked to him about it afterwards and he was literally unable to understand what the problem was when I explained to him that giving the players absolutely nothing to do for 3-4 hours was a bad idea. He always went back to "But that's how getting captured works!" while I tried to make the point "Yeah but it's a game and just getting told literally what to do for hours and hours with no possibility of doing anything meaningful is not fun for anyone". Some people just don't get that.

Meth In a Mine
2014-02-20, 09:54 AM
This system turned out to be something called the "ticks" system which I understand is used in a few other games but was rather clumsily shoehorned into 4ed. Basically instead of a character using their standard/move/minor all in the same turn each action took a certain number of "ticks" to pull off with the aim being an attempt to simulate actual second by second combat.

So to move that was one tick, an attack was around four or five ticks, anything the GM deemed "powerful" was 7 ticks. There was a calendar where we kept track of the ticks, and when we reached the number a player's marker was on they could use that move. If this all sounds needlessly complex that's because it was. I'm honestly not explaining it very well so let me just highlight a very obvious problem with the system.

I admit that would tick me off too. :smallbiggrin:

Juzer
2014-02-20, 10:27 AM
10 minutes into the session we were informed that a "Strange and Eerie" mist

...it happened the same to me, just a couple of months ago in Forgotten Realms 3.5

"we're going to play in Calimshan", said the DM
I made a Beguiler, wasting also skill points and feats to cover with a couple daily heals the absence of a proper cleric or paladin

we spent a whole hour just to encounter ourselves in-game, and to get a job about undead-killing with a group of paladins and clerics: awesome, thought I, because I liked for once the idea to get support and to join a in-game proper well organized adventure party (not again "you 1-level PGs have to same the world")

first night at an inn in the land: mist surrounds us, unavoidable and lethal
it kill all paladins and clerics but somehow knocks us just conscious
we wake up in Ravenloft, with equipment, background and stuff for Calimshan

Ravenloft with no damn divine caster in party, and off course with lots of mindless undeads against which the Beguiler is just useless

if only we could have played for a couple of level in Calimshan AND THEN teleport forcefully us to Ravenloft...

obryn
2014-02-20, 10:28 AM
I never understood why everyone nerfs monks. In ever friggin' game. Monks are mediocre or worse and then every bad DM on the planet house rules them worse and then the devs behind the game nerf them even more in errata to follow suit.
The 4e Monk is actually a really solid class, with a healthy mix of damage and control effects. If, you know, you let them do the stuff their class should let them do.

geeky_monkey
2014-02-20, 12:09 PM
Very Nice. Hopefully he got the idea.

If only. He threw a massive hissy fit and accused us of cheating, then sat in a huff while the rest of us ignored him and played Carcassone.

I moved away a few months later - last I heard he'd tried DMing a few times and hadn't changed so they'd stopped gaming with him (he refused to play in anyone else's games as he 'was a better DM'). No great loss.

SiuiS
2014-02-20, 12:46 PM
Now, I never had a lot of HORRIBLE DMs, but I've had my longest running DM make a few hilarious hiccups.

I would like to initially state that this particular DM is NOT a bad DM. He's actually fantastic. He's a veteran who's been playing for decades and his attitude towards story progression is "There's a main plot if you guys want direction. If not..." *Rolls out an ENORMOUS hand-drawn map* "...this is my world. If you want to run to the far corners looking for adventure, knock yourself out. I've got encounters and tons of areas littering this map that you guys can find, explore, and complete." And he was true to his word, as just traveling from point A to point B we find tons of dungeons and distractions to keep us having fun, and he always seems on the ball. He loves for us to make an impact on his world (One guy, because the conditions and the dice rolls were correct, literally added a GOD to the world. No it wasn't him, he created a faith powerful enough to will one into existence). We're on the second campaign with the guy, the first having been a multi-year epic that only recently ended, and we still see ripples in the new campaign which is set 70-80 years later (That religion the guy created is still around and stronger than ever).

So, with all that being said, this guy was human, and with such a huge world and huge party (at times there we 12+ characters running around) even he was prone to making mistakes. [For context, this was campaign was AD&D]

In that first campaign I was playing two characters (Several people were. It was a mistake, but we were new at the time; sue us): an Elven Ranger and a Human Cleric of Isis. We return after one quest to find the town we were supposed to return to under attack. The streets were crawling with undead, and there were lots of Giants sieging the town with boulder throws.
We approach and observe from a distance to find the best place to move in for the attack, and we find a church is currently under attack from some Death Knights.
My cleric sees this and is torn between sticking to the plan or smiting some ****in' undead. I leave the in-character decision to a dice roll (I do this a lot when I'm struggling on a tough decision) and the roll says "UNDEAD SMASHING TIME." So I charge in, the group only momentarily hesitating before charging in with me. I smash one of the Death Knights with my Mace of Disruption and prepare for the counter attack.
At this point, the DM looks at his notes and says "Whoops."
Me: "Whoops what?"
DM: "Those... those are the wrong Death Knights. I was supposed to put different undead there."
Me: "So, what does that mean?"
DM: *Rolling* "It means that the Death Knight just turned around and cut your arm off"
Yeah, he stuck an encounter way too tough for us in at a very bad time. I talked to him later about it, and apparently he was trying to find a way to bail us out of his mistake in-game without having to resort to anything ridiculous. It's at this point he remembers that there's a high-level NPC Paladin inside the church, which he realizes he can send our way to give us the edge we need to make it out of the fight.
And then the Hill Giant threw a boulder, rolled a nat-20 on his attack roll, and the boulder flew through the church and caught the Paladin in the forehead.
Well ****. We were looking pretty boned at that point, until our Barbarian calls his god (Thor) and gets a stupidly good roll on his percentile dice. Thor shows up and teleports us away before the Death Knights can wipe us.
Granted, he was pretty good about helping us recover from that mistake on his part; several bad "Disarmed" puns later, I found someone who reattached my arm.

The other time was very recently in our new campaign. We had only played a few sessions and while we had a decent amount of money, it wasn't anthing crazy. This is important because at the end of the last campaign we had enough money to make Oprah blush due to some generous treasure drops. The DM was attempting to be more conservative this time.
So we headed to the Underdark, and pretty early in we fought some pretty tough enemies, but managed to defeat them. The DM begins rolling loot, looking at the treasure table for this particular enemy. I hear him mutter "Treasure Table W? Which is that one...?" And then he facepalms once he flips to that table.
EACH of these monsters had a fortune worth of money, jewelry, and gems with something stupid like 80-100% chance of having each of those piles of treasure. On top of that, EACH of these things (I think there were 5 or 6) had a 60% chance to drop a magic item from EACH category other than Potions and Scrolls.
He's recently been saying that after that encounter he might need to have Burt the Bandit and Herb the Highwayman pay us a visit to bring our wealth down to a more manageable amount.

Fantastic! I miss those maps. I'll have to pull out some large paper...


:smalleek:

WHY do some GMs do stuff like this? I just don't get it....



I think I found your problem. This next bit:



Should've been how the FIRST session ended. About an hour in. :smallmad:

Nah, that could have been pretty cool. It's not the idea, but the execution, that sucked.

Mystia
2014-02-20, 01:09 PM
The first one I've ever had. Thankfully, no other one has been that bad.
Allow me to tell a tale of an wondrous episode with our DM.

D&D 3.5, Forgotten Realms, the party was around 8th level. Many silly things had already happened, but this is one of the worst.
So, in his setting, the Dalelands were unified under the rule of a terrible Tyrant, who had a personal vendetta against the party for no reason at all, and always sent armies against us at once. I'm not lying. The only thing we ever did was killing a thief who attacked us in an Inn, and, suddenly, from there and on, the whole population was hostile towards us. Right.
So, after honoring the reputation of adventurer's destroying inns, and after many close calls with the town's army, we manage to flee, flying away on summoned giant owls. We landed on a swamp nearby, and managed to survive the night, narrowly avoiding a black dragon.
We tread carefully our way through the swamp, eventually catching sight of a small, riverside village. As careful as I was, I stayed behind, not before making myself invisible and hiding, while the party proceeded in, disguised.
There, just as they are able to begin to be accepted by the population, the village's constable eyes the party, and immediately rips their disguise, recognizing them as criminals in the spot. At the same time, there was a team of trackers with hounds trying to catch me in the woods. Luckily, I hid myself under the murky water, for I had Water Breathing.
The constable then goes on to demand surrender, for he was "The Daleland's #1 Knight"; which he proved to the party by revealing a "#1" he had tattooed on his wrist. Obviously not believing that, the party's fighter drew his rapier and attacked him at once. (he had Quick Draw)
Then, the DM told him to make a fortitude check. He rolled a 14. The DM frowned and shook his head, describing how the "1# Knight" immediately beheaded the fighter, killing him. We were awestruck.
The rest of the party instantly surrendered. being captured and taken away.
That was it. No further explanation.

That whole campaign was built up on that kind of silly outrageous stuff. And, sigh, we weren't playing a joke game or anything. Certainly, none of us were laughing. No wonder we pulled a 'mutiny' on him, eventually.

Edit: typos.

Atmo
2014-02-20, 03:44 PM
The only thing we ever did was killing a thief who attacked us in an Inn, and, suddenly, from there and on, the whole population was hostile towards us. Right.
Skyrim's chickens? Also, nice name. :smallwink:

Meth In a Mine
2014-02-20, 07:40 PM
The first one I've ever had. Thankfully, no other one has been that bad.
Allow me to tell a tale of an wondrous episode with our DM.

D&D 3.5, Forgotten Realms, the party was around 8th level. Many silly things had already happened, but this is one of the worst.
So, in his setting, the Dalelands were unified under the rule of a terrible Tyrant, who had a personal vendetta against the party for no reason at all, and always sent armies against us at once. I'm not lying. The only thing we ever did was killing a thief who attacked us in an Inn, and, suddenly, from there and on, the whole population was hostile towards us. Right.
So, after honoring the reputation of adventurer's destroying inns, and after many close calls with the town's army, we manage to flee, flying away on summoned giant owls. We landed on a swamp nearby, and managed to survive the night, narrowly avoiding a black dragon.
We tread carefully our way through the swamp, eventually catching sight of a small, riverside village. As careful as I was, I stayed behind, not before making myself invisible and hiding, while the party proceeded in, disguised.
There, just as they are able to begin to be accepted by the population, the village's constable eyes the party, and immediately rips their disguise, recognizing them as criminals in the spot. At the same time, there was a team of trackers with hounds trying to catch me in the woods. Luckily, I hid myself under the murky water, for I had Water Breathing.
The constable then goes on to demand surrender, for he was "The Daleland's #1 Knight"; which he proved to the party by revealing a "#1" he had tattooed on his wrist. Obviously not believing that, the party's fighter drew his rapier and attacked him at once. (he had Quick Draw)
Then, the DM told him to make a fortitude check. He rolled a 14. The DM frowned and shook his head, describing how the "1# Knight" immediately beheaded the fighter, killing him. We were awestruck.
The rest of the party instantly surrendered. being captured and taken away.
That was it. No further explanation.

That whole campaign was built up on that kind of silly outrageous stuff. And, sigh, we weren't playing a joke game or anything. Certainly, none of us were laughing. No wonder we pulled a 'mutiny' on him, eventually.

Edit: typos.

buh-HUH?!

I would love to know what this mutiny was.

TriForce
2014-02-20, 11:16 PM
so, a little tale of 3.5 frustration from me:

First things first, our party consist of 3 VERY experienced players, me and 2 others, a DM who claimed to be reasonably experienced, and 2 people who played only once or twice before.

before character creation, we were told that most of the campaign, if not all of it, will be held in a MASSIVE city of the DM's design, as in, taking weeks to get from one side to another, and that roleplay and politics would be important. the city was divided in several groups, who hold different parts of the city, and there is a counsil of the heads of each faction that ruled the city as a whole.

this was definatly a different type of game then we are used to, since i usually play the classic roaming adventurer thing, but i wanted to try it out since it seemed fun.

then came the problems...

problem 1: the supermonks, lvl 1

the part was charged with guarding a warehouse, filled with wagons of expensive beer and the horses that were going to pull them to their destination the next morning. all of a sudden, a group of people charge in, one of them disintegrates the door, and they make it clear they are going to steal the whole lot.
now our party was low lvl, like lvl 2 or something, obviously not made for combat, especially not with anything that can throw a disintigrate. so my character ( a ranger) tries to outsmart them. he manages to hide near the stables part of the warehouse, silently opens the gate a bit, and then throws a thunderstone to scare the hell out of the horses. with the gate open, and the door out of the warehouse gone, he was trying to make the horses flee far away, denieing the thieves of a way to transport the beer long enough for reinforcements to arrive in the form of the city guard.

yeah... that didnt happen. the henchmen of the mage, who we got told afterwards, were all lvl1 monks, stopped the horses... by just standing in front of them and bracing themselves. no rolls, no other explaination, they just grabbed the horses and stopped them midrun.


Problem 2: the encounters

now, you might have noticed, the above was in no way a suitable encounter for our group, not in the least because we didnt really build for combat, this was a trend that kept on going, EVERY encounter was the same story, the DM put something against us that was obviously stronger then we were, and when we fought it he would just downgrade it midcombat to make it JUST easy enough for us to win. creatures would suddenly forget abilities they used 1 minute ago, switch to different people for no reason, etc. also, some encounters were just stupid. we stumbled upon a cult of drow, who were isolated from the rest of the world for about 200/300 years. we started diplomatic, but due to a stupid action from one of the newer guys we managed to piss em all off royally. one of our characters was a half-vampire (dont ask, related to problem 3) and had damage reduction/silver. appearantly ALL the drow, who were isolated for 200 years, had just met us 10 minutes ago, had no reason to think we would be hostile, and couldnt possibly have known one of us had that type of damage reduction, ALL had silver arrows, and not just normal ones either, these silver arrows did full damage (no -1 penalty) and dissapeared after the fight was over, so we couldnt use them ourselves. same goes for any monster we fight, they ALL did full damage, no matter what they were

we talked with the DM about this, stating a fair fight would be much more fun then a impossible fight we always would win anyway, no matter what. we actually talked with him 3 times about it, each time he would say he would do his best to change it, and then he promptly ignored it and did it worse then before

problem 3: the encounters 2: encountereder

notice how ive been talking about encounters a lot? and i specifically said that it was a politics heavy campaign? congratz, you are smarter then my DM was. yeah, this was a really encounter heavy campaign, and we were in no way prepared for it. my character was the only one who was able to stand his ground for at least a round or 2. there were attempts to do the political thing by us, for example, my character tried to undermine the status and authority of our "questgiver", a vampire who was pretty obviously the DM's pet, by exposing his plans and activities to the counsil. it was a plan he spends about 6-7 sessions preparing and executing in secret, making sure to shift the blame for all of it to a faction that already was at war with the vampire. the DM didnt realize wat i was doing until i made the final step, so he couldnt exactly stop me, but it changed NOTHING. the vampire still had as much power as before, AND he ofc knew exactly what happened and who did it. my character got captured and got interrogated by every lie detection spell the dm could think of. my character wasnt stupid, so he would just awnser half-truths and loopholes. after that, the vampire just killed my character. i protested, saying there was no way he could have known, and the DM's responce was just "hes smart, he knows" when i asked how i possibly could have gotten out of that situation, he said "well you could have just confessed"
the thing was, this whole plot to dispose of the vampire was because i wanted to get the guy out of the campaign, he had mary sue written all over him, and the last time any of us went slightly against him, he changed the character to a half-vampire under his DMNPC's thrall.... yeah... i didnt wanted to play a character under the DM's control, and my character figured his excuses would get him out of there, so he was obviously never going to confess. other players had similar experiences, anything they tried to do was shut down completely.


problem 4: the favored player

and ofc, since all bad things come in too many, there was also a player in the groups who DID get to do anything he wanted (inclusing killing other players) , who DID get absurd bonuses on anything, and who never had any complaints

at a certain point, he and one of the new players (who was a friend of him) insulted one of the other experienced players with some pretty severe personal attacks, and i decided that it was hopeless. before that i fooled myself by telling myself i might teach him how to be a better DM, but that was the last straw. i quit, the other 2 experienced players quit, and last i heard, he is still desperatly asking anyone who wants to hear it to play in his campaign

Mystia
2014-02-21, 09:56 AM
Skyrim's chickens? Also, nice name. :smallwink:

If that thief happened to be a disguised chicken, I think that'd explain everything :smallbiggrin:
And why yes, thank you very much :smallwink:


buh-HUH?!

I would love to know what this mutiny was.

It wasn't anything too extreme since we're very easygoing, but might have been a bit rude :smalltongue:
Basically, one day, we played in the DM's absence (he went out on a trip), since we had the character sheets and other friend of ours had read the DMG and made the suggestion. It was honestly great, he somehow managed to even make a coherent story out of everything.
Next week, DM returns, and we explain what happened to him. He throws a fit, goes "Rock Falls, Everyone Dies, make new characters". We exchange glances, 'New DM' ignores him, and says we'll be continuing nonetheless. 'Old one' gets his stuff and leaves, never to DM again.
I.. feel kinda sorry for that day, since he looked quite sad and I think he wanted us to go after him, but no one moved a muscle.
Quite childish of.. everyone, eh?

Oh, I remembered other couple episodes, will be resuming them below, if anyone has the time:

1 - This one hails from a session I missed, so this may be backhand information, but my friends are very descriptive.
From what I've heard, they were fighting a Beholder at it's lair for some reason. At the beginning of the fight, everyone was stuck in spike traps, save for the Barbarian and the DMPC (...yeah). So, the Barbarian says he'll buy time for everyone to get free, and the DMPC says that he'll cast a spell, but needs the party to force the beholder to close it's center eye.
Basically, the DM had no idea of how antimagic fields worked, or how Beholders worked at all. I've been told the whole battle was simply the Barbarian somehow managing to make around 5-6 saves per round, while the Beholder blasted away all of its ray at him. Every round. Once the barbarian finally failed his save and was disintegrated, DMPC pulled some Mary Sue off and one-shotted the Beholder.

2 - This one is a bit of the heavy railroading he used to do. Party was travelling through the desert, had just fought off a band of gnolls, when we sight a fortress in the distance. No one wanted to go there, since we knew everything wanted to kill us. Nonetheless, one armored woman left it on horseback along with two guards and halted us. She said "You're trespassing, so I'll kill you". I was a sorcerer, thus, having the highest charisma, went for diplomacy, (also rolling a 20). I just explained we were weary travelers who had just fought off a monster raid, and would not bother her, rather, we would turn around and move in the other direction ASAP.
Hoowever, she was having none of that and ordered her men to attack. The first round she gets, she casually rides by with her horse and HKs the cleric. "She has a vorpal sword", the DM said (nevermind rolling the dice, of course). Somehow we survived that fight, but not before someone else died. Ah, turns out her sword was cursed, of course, so it was useless, we couldn't even pick it up.

Edit: as always, typos. I really should start to read over before clicking submit.

Friv
2014-02-21, 11:30 AM
It takes one tick to move one square on the grid. It takes five ticks to pull off an attack. For a total of six ticks. You're not allowed to move while you're waiting for your attack ticks to count down. So a Melee character spends one tick to move into range. However they need to wait five ticks before they can swing their sword and there's no option for them to move and attack as one action. So if the monster moves before you do it can move 5 squares out of range before you can even swing your sword. Sure they eat an opp attack but an opp attack is kind of small potatoes when you're playing a bard with daggers and your aim was to try and debuff them not deal damage.

Ngg.

That's the opposite of how a tick system is supposed to work. As much as it ever does, the tick cost to do things is meant to be a cooldown after you take an action, not a delay until you can take an action (so in the above example, you would move for one tick, then attack the monster, then not move for five ticks because attacks have a five-tick cooldown). (Also if you can only move OR attack, movement had better be pretty solid, which obviously that game was not.)

I mean, the rest of it is bad, but that's just the worst.

Ionbound
2014-02-21, 04:47 PM
My worst DM ever was in a Planescape PbP that never actually got off the ground. The reason why was probably because he had this set of house-rules that made playing a wizard damn near impossible. Stuff like "Summon Monster I-IX has an X% chance to summon something random, from a celestial chipmunk to a Balor. This is uncontrolled and immediately attacks the summoner".

obryn
2014-02-21, 04:51 PM
Ngg.

That's the opposite of how a tick system is supposed to work. As much as it ever does, the tick cost to do things is meant to be a cooldown after you take an action, not a delay until you can take an action (so in the above example, you would move for one tick, then attack the monster, then not move for five ticks because attacks have a five-tick cooldown). (Also if you can only move OR attack, movement had better be pretty solid, which obviously that game was not.)

I mean, the rest of it is bad, but that's just the worst.
Yeah. For an example of a mostly-working tick system, see Feng Shui. And it can fall apart around the edges a bit, too.

I would never in a million years import that into D&D.

Arkhosia
2014-02-21, 04:52 PM
My worst DM ever was in a Planescape PbP that never actually got off the ground. The reason why was probably because he had this set of house-rules that made playing a wizard damn near impossible. Stuff like "Summon Monster I-IX has an X% chance to summon something random, from a celestial chipmunk to a Balor. This is uncontrolled and immediately attacks the summoner".

So, basically "magic is unpredictable and wild, and will probably kill you randomly"?

Ionbound
2014-02-21, 05:07 PM
So, basically "magic is unpredictable and wild, and will probably kill you randomly"?

That may have been the intent, but it ended up more along the lines of, "If your party has a wizard, I can TPK you at any time." There weren't any tables or probability for what gets summoned accidentally, so it was straight up to GM fiat, and there were a bunch of other rules I can't remember off the top of my head along the same lines.

The Glyphstone
2014-02-21, 05:54 PM
That may have been the intent, but it ended up more along the lines of, "If your party has a wizard, I can TPK you at any time." There weren't any tables or probability for what gets summoned accidentally, so it was straight up to GM fiat, and there were a bunch of other rules I can't remember off the top of my head along the same lines.

What were the other houserules? I'm curious, because this one seems easy to get around - Summon Monster spells tend to be kinda bad, so you can just not use them. Did he have one to screw each school specialization in a similar manner?

Ionbound
2014-02-21, 07:06 PM
I'm sorry, the thread was a several months ago, and I can't remember most of them. That was the one that stuck in my head the most, but there was a really long spoiler full of them. I remember Teleport and Greater Teleport got screwed in a similar fashion, and I think Planar Travel spells did as well. I honestly can't remember most of it, though.

The Glyphstone
2014-02-21, 07:49 PM
I'm sorry, the thread was a several months ago, and I can't remember most of them. That was the one that stuck in my head the most, but there was a really long spoiler full of them. I remember Teleport and Greater Teleport got screwed in a similar fashion, and I think Planar Travel spells did as well. I honestly can't remember most of it, though.

Ah well. Doesn't sound like it would be a fun story anyways, just forcing you to relive your misery.

Raine_Sage
2014-02-21, 11:05 PM
Ngg.

That's the opposite of how a tick system is supposed to work. As much as it ever does, the tick cost to do things is meant to be a cooldown after you take an action, not a delay until you can take an action (so in the above example, you would move for one tick, then attack the monster, then not move for five ticks because attacks have a five-tick cooldown). (Also if you can only move OR attack, movement had better be pretty solid, which obviously that game was not.)

I mean, the rest of it is bad, but that's just the worst.

Now see that makes sense. It might still have been unwieldy shoehorned into 4ed but at least combat would have been bearable.
I have no idea why this guy was trying to reinvent the wheel or why he was so utterly oblivious to criticism but everyone was definitely "busy" when he tried to entice us back.

NightDM
2014-02-21, 11:11 PM
My worst DM is a good friend of mine and actually a player in my group as we switch - or used to switch - DMing roles. I should mention this was in d&d 3.5.

Anyhoo, after I had run a few long term campaigns in which he played, he took up the mantle of DMing again.

We start the campaign and about 3 or 4 sessions in, he brings out an old character of his, and it's clear as day that this is a DMPC. What's worst is that I was playing a secretive, knowledgeable type character (my class was Archivist but I was interested in mainly the fluff not high OP), and low and behold this particular character of his is exactly that-a secretive, knowledgeable character.

So, he tries to force the DMPC on us by having our group bring him with us on our quest to some forgotten ruined empire (where I desperately wanted to explore and use all the knowledge skills I had picked up).

Well, we told him no, both in character and out of character. Our in character reasons were we didn't trust the guy and out of character we explained to him that this felt like a DMPC (especially being his old character), and what's worst is that he was clearly filling the role I, as player, was in.

At first it seemed the DM understood us and didn't have a problem with that, as the NPC didn't come with us. Well, I was wrong...

We end up running in to him in these ruins, where he's taken on powerful mercs as guards and to top it off suddenly has the epic level template Psuedonatural... we were about level 12, and I know this guy was at least level 17. And naturally this guy hates our guts and wants to kill us. Luckily we made our escape but the campaign quickly died out after that and I was back in the DM Chair :smallfrown:

It was just such a let down, because the world he created was pretty cool, and it was really nice to play.

Ratter
2017-12-19, 10:14 AM
I threw every loophole, every asinine mistake, every idea he ever forced on the party despite polite discussion and even pleasing, back in his face. He ended up with his most beloved PC ending, not as an over deity, but as a nigh-lifeless husk suffering beyond humans imagination for an eternity of eternities, in nested realities, only accessible through a single jewel around the neck of the over-goddess we had unwittingly powered up this entire time and who was the only being who actively disliked the BBEG.

Sounds like you had fun

AceOfFools
2017-12-19, 12:20 PM
The drug dealer.

That was literally how he met my buddy, selling him pot, and eventually harder stuff.

Then there was the time my buddy had to stop the drug dealer from providing his crush with large enough qualities of alcohol that she would be easier to seduce (I wasn't there for that part).

For a while, he shaved his checks, but not his neck, so as to cultivate the largest, most disgusting neckbeard he could.

He wasn't terrible at the table, although he was pretty one-note with every story being about a horror mage or cabal that practiced mutilation based magic and had hordes of creepy monster things (mostly variations on undead or body horror). He didn't get creppy with descriptions, but he did get pretty damn repetitive. At least the descriptions were cool the first time.

(For the record, my buddy turned out fine, never letting his habits overwhelm his life, although we did eventually drift apart when we moved to different parts of the country).

Loxagn
2017-12-21, 03:29 PM
Played once in an eberron campaign. I rolled a fighter and, with DM permission, used the firearms from Dragon to build a sort of sharpshooter frontiersman-type. Early on the DM gave him a chunk of loot that amounted to something like 38K(!) gp at level 5, and then he sunk the vast majority of it into upgrading his rifle and making it badass.
Suddenly this level 5 character had a +1 Distance Collision weapon that did 1d12+12/x3 or something damage per shot at a distance of about 300 feet with no penalty and since he had a horse could outrun anything that got near. The DM became increasingly frustrated because he kept taking down her encounters before any of the other party members were even able to act. It's worth noting at this point that no encounters we ran into did anything more tactically complex than charge straight for the party from a long distance out, usually well outside charging range for the paladin or even casting range for the wizard. Just random monsters approaching us from long range on flat, wide open plains with no cover.
Could not understand why my character kept doing so well, and started doing things to 'reel me back in'. Ankhegs burrowed up out of nowhere and ate my horse, random townsfolk started suddenly deciding my 'demon weapons' weren't welcome, that sort of thing.
It all came to a head when my character rolled a 1 on an attack roll and she announced that she was introducing a new 'fumble table' for firearms, without so much as mentioning this to me beforehand. One roll later, it was ruled that my character's rifle had exploded in his face and was completely destroyed, no hope of recovery. Oh, and this made all the powder on my character go up as well, which subsequently destroyed all my character's backup weapons and left him dying in the mud and missing an eye.
When I asked what the point of continuing to play the character was since he was now literally useless with no weapons and maimed for life her response was 'I dunno, maybe next time you won't try to powergame so much'.

DigoDragon
2018-01-14, 12:04 PM
I found myself returning as my Ranger/Rogue PC in a 3.5 campaign where we play as ourselves thrown into a D&D world. It's like the old D&D cartoon series, only we get less loot than the kids did per adventure. :smalltongue: Anyway, we're around 9th level but WAY behind the curve on the WBL chart. At one point I was trying to sell some fancy magical reagents to a witch so I can try and get enough money to afford my first +1 bow ever. Instead, she gives me a paintbrush that has a one time use--I can draw any one creature (from the MMI book) of up to 12 HD under my control. Any creature. This is where my 20+ years of DMing experience rubbed it's hands together and realized I could fix the WBL problem in one fell swoop--

The Noble Djinn.

It's a 10 HD creature so it's under the cap. I can draw one captured and get three wishes out of it. All I have to do is spend the three wishes on valuable goods (Wish specifically calls out that it can create something up to 25,000 gp in value) and then we sell the items for cash and writs at the imperial treasury in the capital city. The party should now be able to close the gap in our WBL! While I could use the wishes to really break the game, the idea isn't to escalate the problem. The idea is to solve our lack of magical equipment problem and put us on even ground against the opponents we face that are our CR rating. It's a clever way of doing it the GM apparently didn't think of.

The other players like the idea and are in on the plan. We also agreed that if the GM doesn't play along with this, we walk. No game is better than a bad game, right?

Quertus
2018-01-14, 01:54 PM
I've had so many bad GMs, it's hard to say which was worst. Here's a few example traits:

The drunkard.

The "too high to remember the adventure" (in retrospect, it might have been prescription meds).

The rape fetishist.

Forgets to give key elements of the campaign.

Accidentally gives away key elements of the campaign.

Reads the block of text straight from the module... especially funny when it is for the GM.

So "narrative driven", that halfway through the first session, I can already predict the ending, down to exactly how many and which PCs will still be conscious when the BBEG dies (because that's what would make the "best story").

Great setup, then games never last more than a few sessions.

No ability to predict the players, or to handle the unexpected.

Whoever yells first, acts first.

McGuffin or go home.

Pet player or go home.

Carefully designed solo encounters engineered to be fun for any player/character at the table except the one experiencing it.

Tables of situations & alignment to determine proper role-playing.

Tables of situations & alignment to determine proper role-playing II, the return of tables of situations & alignment to determine proper role-playing.

Tables of situations & alignment to determine proper role-playing III, this time with race and gender, too! (yes, these were the different people).

The gods came down to force the 1st level PCs into the adventure (with so many sequels that I've lost count).

Marty Stu, DMPC (again, so many sequels, but how about Artifact-wielding king DMPC, first level PCs?).

The rails, they're everywhere.

You took an attack action in combat? You power gaming munchkin monster!

Low wealth campaign.

GM keeps the character sheet (imagine that from a drop in game PoV).

Tarrasque at level 9, that sounds reasonable, right?

Epic level module, 1st level characters.

Gives the party cool things with no thought to game balance.

Gives only their favorite player cool & powerful things.

XP by whim.

No concept of spotlight / contribution balance.

No concept of separation of player & character knowledge.

No concept that characters could have had a life before their game (especially "funny" for higher level PCs, or a drop in game).

Rewrote the module to make it worse.

Rewrote the system to make it worse.

Constantly changes the rules.

Constantly changes the rules to keep the game on the rails.

Changes the rules to protect their DMPC or BBEG.

Changes the rules to make their pet player über.

Encounter 1, TPK. Encounter 2, TPK. Encounter 3, TPK (happily, I missed this one).

Rants and rails about game balance and munchkins; first encounter, TPK.

Now, mind you, not all of these GMs were horrible, and I think no more than 2 got beaten up for sessions I was in.

Florian
2018-01-15, 08:39 AM
Overall, that's a tough one.

Not exactly a "gm horror story", but I played with a guy that had a very complex and well-thought-out campaign world build, with multiple factions and allegiances, "deep secrets" and "hidden truths", offering us the world as a sandbox to explore, with some well-placed hooks.

Sounds great, right, so why post it here?

The wall of "secrets" and "truths" was designed impenetrable and the only thing we managed each session was creating more enemies, reducing the number of hooks (because logic dictates that people won't work with us anymore) and reducing our agency and option to act in a meaningful way.

So, I´m an experienced L5R player/gm and I don't have a problem with failing, even take delight in doing so, what really makes it "worst" is that at each of our after-session-talks, he railed on and on about what faction we made into enemies, which NPC we pissed off, how stupid we acted but only got angry when we asked how we should actually have gotten by the knowledge that we should have acted upon, when he doesn't provide a means to get at it.

DigoDragon
2018-01-15, 08:51 AM
Forgets to give key elements of the campaign.

No ability to predict the players, or to handle the unexpected.

The previously mentioned GM has both these issues, but the latter is extra sad because I've outright spelled out what kind of build my character is and he still doesn't get it. :smalltongue:

(the former is hilarious in some says. Like how the Monk has kept track of how much time passes whenever we travel between two specific cities. Despite the same speed we move, it's never the same amount of time, and we're talking differences of weeks).



The wall of "secrets" and "truths" was designed impenetrable and the only thing we managed each session was creating more enemies, reducing the number of hooks (because logic dictates that people won't work with us anymore) and reducing our agency and option to act in a meaningful way.

Yeah, that does suck. There's no point for a GM to put a secret in a game that has no way for the PCs to figure it out.

Quertus
2018-01-15, 12:28 PM
The previously mentioned GM has both these issues, but the latter is extra sad because I've outright spelled out what kind of build my character is and he still doesn't get it. :smalltongue:

(the former is hilarious in some says. Like how the Monk has kept track of how much time passes whenever we travel between two specific cities. Despite the same speed we move, it's never the same amount of time, and we're talking differences of weeks).

Yeah, that does suck. There's no point for a GM to put a secret in a game that has no way for the PCs to figure it out.

I mean, Wish is a thing in every edition of D&D, right? If the players care enough, they'll grind until they can cast Wish to learn the secrets of the universe, right? /snark

Personally, I put secrets in my games all the time, for the sole (duel?) purpose of simulationism, providing consistent underlying mechanics, and/or motivations for my NPCs. If the PCs have the desire and means to investigate, all the better, but that's not why it's there.

Knowing how a build works is different from assuming all PCs will react exactly one specific way to an encounter, and acting like a deer caught in headlights when one or more PCs has a personality, and reacts differently than the GM expected. And, in at least one case, ending the game because the GM couldn't cope with the concept of the PCs not following the one and only path that they had imagined.

I've never taken a trip with travel time measured in weeks, but that level of discrepancy sounds a bit unrealistic to me.

Friv
2018-01-15, 12:31 PM
I found myself returning as my Ranger/Rogue PC in a 3.5 campaign where we play as ourselves thrown into a D&D world. It's like the old D&D cartoon series, only we get less loot than the kids did per adventure. :smalltongue: Anyway, we're around 9th level but WAY behind the curve on the WBL chart. At one point I was trying to sell some fancy magical reagents to a witch so I can try and get enough money to afford my first +1 bow ever. Instead, she gives me a paintbrush that has a one time use--I can draw any one creature (from the MMI book) of up to 12 HD under my control. Any creature. This is where my 20+ years of DMing experience rubbed it's hands together and realized I could fix the WBL problem in one fell swoop--

The Noble Djinn.

It's a 10 HD creature so it's under the cap. I can draw one captured and get three wishes out of it. All I have to do is spend the three wishes on valuable goods (Wish specifically calls out that it can create something up to 25,000 gp in value) and then we sell the items for cash and writs at the imperial treasury in the capital city. The party should now be able to close the gap in our WBL! While I could use the wishes to really break the game, the idea isn't to escalate the problem. The idea is to solve our lack of magical equipment problem and put us on even ground against the opponents we face that are our CR rating. It's a clever way of doing it the GM apparently didn't think of.

The other players like the idea and are in on the plan. We also agreed that if the GM doesn't play along with this, we walk. No game is better than a bad game, right?

Does this story have a conclusion, or was that the point when it all worked out?

DigoDragon
2018-01-15, 01:38 PM
I mean, Wish is a thing in every edition of D&D, right? If the players care enough, they'll grind until they can cast Wish to learn the secrets of the universe, right? /snark

Sure, if the players don't spend their wishes on making themselves rich. ;)



I've never taken a trip with travel time measured in weeks, but that level of discrepancy sounds a bit unrealistic to me.

The way I understood it, the planet we're on is like earth, but four times bigger. So he made distances to different places four times as long (no, this makes no logical sense as towns would want to be within easy travel time of each other in order to regularly trade). So let's take two cities in his world, the port city (we'll call A) and the capital (we'll call B):

The first time we made the trek, the travel time from A to B was calculated at 6-7 weeks. We only lasted halfway before the GM had a dragon come by and teleport the rest of the way. Second time we wanted to make the trek, we were told we wouldn't get from A to B in time for our important meeting, because it takes 4 weeks travel (we got teleported). The most recent endeavor from B to A, we haven't left yet, but were quoted a 2-3 week travel time and that we need more food to make it. The monk can only conclude that the planet is shrinking because the core is filled with teleport magic and we keep using it up.



Does this story have a conclusion, or was that the point when it all worked out?

It is ongoing! Our next meet up for this campaign is in two weeks-ish. The other players are now starting to back down from supporting me because they're worried this could break the game. They are talking to the GM about giving out better loot to the players for our adventuring acts of heroism. I dunno. I've been telling the GM of the loot problem months ago. If he improves himself and does a better job, then okay, but if not, then I'm walking.

Tinkerer
2018-01-15, 02:15 PM
The drunkard.

Forgets to give key elements of the campaign.

Great setup, then games never last more than a few sessions.

McGuffin or go home.

The gods came down to force the 1st level PCs into the adventure (with so many sequels that I've lost count).

Low wealth campaign.

GM keeps the character sheet (imagine that from a drop in game PoV).

Tarrasque at level 9, that sounds reasonable, right?

very snipped

I've done all of these and I wouldn't say that any of them have gone over terribly poorly, except for the game not lasting more than a few sessions one and the forgetting to give a key element (that was back when I was a youngin, now I use a better tracking system). Tarrasque at level 9 (well the equivalent of the Tarrasque at the equivalent of level 9) is actually one of my favorite adventures for encouraging players to think outside the box. Of course if one were using it as an encounter rather than an adventure it would be a different story.