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Inevitability
2014-07-24, 10:44 AM
The original thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?329243-What-was-your-worst-DM-ever) has been lying around in the archieves for quite some time now, but I think there are far more stories that should've been in it. So, to quote Brawny:



GIANTITP, what was your worst dm ever?

Mine was DM'ing a PbP game. The premise was simple. All the players start without gear on a technological advanced 'space' ship. Doesn't sound too bad, does it? Well, it was.

1. The baddies are Githyanki working for a Mind Flayer. Yes, from all the evil masterminds the DM could pick, he chose the only one Githyanki are opposed to with an unnatural hatred. A few players brought this up, to which the DM replied: "If your character doesn't have Knowledge (the planes), you shouldn't worry about it. And maybe the Githyanki aren't even working for the Illithid."

Yeah. :smallannoyed:

2. The DM had bad grammar. While DM'ing a PbP game. I once had to ask another player what his cryptic ramblings meant because I couldn't figure it out myself.

3. The DM didn't follow Rules As Written if it suited him/his plot. He'd often replace rules, forget about them, or downright deny people to do things they should be allowed to do by the rules. All without saying it beforehand.

For example, one player disabled the cell doors (some kind of magical barrier) with a Knock spell. A barrier of pure arcane energy. With a spell designed to open mundane doors.

4. The DM railroaded. Like, a lot. For example, when that Knock-player was escaping and set some more people free, everything seemed to go well. Then, suddenly, the DM posted:

"A flash of blinding white light suddenly comes from all directions. You pass out and wake up in your cells."

Sure, why not let someone break out through improper use of the rules and then throw a no-save effect at the players to stop them from breaking out?

5. I am playing a warlock with Summon Swarm as an invocation. So I summon a swarm of spiders to attack a guard. Guess what? The guard has a defensive field of lightning that automatically deals heavy damage to my swarm. No save, no attack roll, nothing.

6. Seeing my swarms barely can do anything, I try to break out by dealing enough acid damage (My bite attack deals acid damage) to the walls. Everyone knows acid damages walls regardless of hardness, right? Turns out the DM doesn't.

7. Even though I am not dealing any damage, apparently the Githyanki need to send some kind of drone towards my cell. Said drone is also capable of attacking through the barrier keeping me from escaping, but I can't attack it back. So I am basically forced to eat two shockwaves (automatic hit, of course) for heavy electrical damage. While Hiding in Plain Sight. With a +40 hide modifier. And the darkstalker feat. :smallannoyed:

8. At that point, I finally call the DM OOC out for it. I politely ask to know, if only OOC, why things that should work RAW aren't working and other things that shouldn't do. He plainly responds:

"I'm not telling you how the genetically engineered Githyanki, the hardened Dragonstone and the super-advanced drones work. I used to game with someone like you, who keeps asking how things work. Just use your abilities to break out. Sorry if there is no site for you to go to and preread the adventure from. Stop causing trouble and stop whining."

So now I am a metagamer and a whiner? At that point, I was bascially fuming. Under protest, I decided to stay in the game, although I was looking for an excuse to leave.

9. The game ended soon thereafter when the DM mentioned that he 'didn't enjoy DM'ing this way' and 'was going back to WoW for now'. Ugh. :smallannoyed:

10. He did, however, tell us what the plot was going to be. Apparently a group of cybernetic elves working together with warforged would be attacking the ship, who would bring us to a planet in a distant world. He talked about the campaign setting (full of quasi-religious elements I can't mention here) as if he'd planned it all out. The problem being, that despite living in said campaign setting, none of our characters had ever heard anything of what he told us. At all.

11. The worst part? He told us the Elves' attacking would be determined by 'a random dice roll for epic style encounter', as he phrased it. Short of not understanding what that's supposed to mean, I can't understand why someone would make the start of his campaign. 'sit in your cage until I randomly roll to let you out'.

I spend that whole campaign in the same 10 x 10 x 10 cell where each action would either have no effect or result in me being punished with the attack having no effect.

TL;DR: The DM railroaded everyone towards a certain conclusion, didn't follow the rules if it suited him, implied I was a metagamer and whiner when I asked him about this, and left the most important of his plot points depending on the dice.

(Also, if you have a catchy title, feel free to share it. I can't think of anything.)

Cronocke
2014-07-24, 11:57 AM
Your worst one is set in a prison, and ends before you're let out?

There may be a theme here, then, as I'm going to talk about...


Finally, I had thought, I was going to have fun in D&D. I had been accepted for a PbP game using gestalt rules. I could play something without spells (though the Tome of Battle's maneuvers are admittedly similar to them) and still have fun with the game. It's the sort of carrot that I couldn't (at the time) resist.

So the campaign starts up and we're all stuck in a prison cell together. Joy of joys. Oh well, this at least provides us some time to get to know our characters.

But then we're still in the prison cell. And some powerful wizard guy comes to threaten us that we have to work for him or... something.

We collectively tell him to shove off, and my character, having had enough of this nonsense, charges shoulder-first at the door of the cell to try to bust through it.

He bounces off of the door with no effect, and gets a bruise (though luckily no HP damage) for his efforts.

Two seconds later, the wizard/whatever casts an acid splash at the door. Once again, the door ignores your feeble attempts to pass it.

Oh, but make a Will save to disbelieve.

Wait, I think to myself. Ramming it wasn't enough to try to disbelieve, but casting acid splash was?

I don't say anything in the game, but in the OOC thread, someone else questions it.

A round of Will saves later, and...

... nothing. The GM vanishes off of the face of the Earth. It seems that he was the illusion all along!
... and so, this aborted game attempt spawned my favorite mystical material of all. Illusory Impenetrium! Completely impervious to all wear and tear, it's the perfect material for fashioning railroad tracks! Come take a trip on a Scripted Travel Lines train, and enjoy a safe, reliable journey on an Illusory Impenetrium track today!

(Caution: Under no circumstances should you think about Illusory Impenetrium. Thinking about Illusory Impenetrium may have the disastrous effect of derailing the train. Scripted Travel Lines bears no liability for any incidents caused by failure to believe in Illusory Impenetrium.)

Incidentally, my selfish suggestion for thread title would be something along the lines of "This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!" or "Don't think too hard about the railroad you're on!"

Inevitability
2014-07-26, 06:20 AM
I am kind of sad only one person has posted yet... :smallfrown:

Surely the playground has some stories about bad DM's?

Kesnit
2014-07-26, 07:54 AM
This wasn't in a D&D game, but this is the general RP forum, so...

My then-fiancee (now wife) and I joined a nWoD Mage game. We had played with the ST before (in a game my wife was running), and he is an enthusiastic player, but a bit of a rules-lawyer who doesn't know all the rules.

The first quest arc dealt with the Spirit Realm. My wife's PC was the only one who had Spirit Arcana, but the rest of us found a way to contribute. We solved the problem and all was well. At this point, I was cool with the game, and thought each quest arc would focus on a different Arcana. (That way, everyone would have their moment in the sun, since we had all focused on different Arcana as our highest.)

The next quest arc not only dealt with the Spirit Realm again, it specifically involved my wife's PC's backstory. About this same time, my wife and I notice that the ST is giving her a lot of attention - and not the ST-to-player kind. Needless to say, we were both creeped out, but let it slide, thinking we were imagining things. However, the attention continued until neither of us could ignore it.

Since we weren't enjoying the game anyway, we both dropped out. Since she and I were his most regular players, the game died.

Tridax
2014-07-26, 01:44 PM
Well there was that one time when we all came to the DM's house to play...

"Um, guys, I actually didn't prepare anything."

"But DM, why?"

"Eh. Too hard."

And this was after he promised us a cool story and asked questions on the roles of our characters. Suffice to say, he never DMed again.

Inevitability
2014-07-26, 02:14 PM
Well there was that one time when we all came to the DM's house to play...

"Um, guys, I actually didn't prepare anything."

"But DM, why?"

"Eh. Too hard."

And this was after he promised us a cool story and asked questions on the roles of our characters. Suffice to say, he never DMed again.

That's... that's just horrible. I feel sorry for you. :smalleek:

Sartharina
2014-07-26, 04:46 PM
I am kind of sad only one person has posted yet... :smallfrown:

Surely the playground has some stories about bad DM's?

We do. We did...

... I can't believe it's been well over a year since we were shocked by the worst DM ever, though. I can't even find the threads anymore!

Tengu_temp
2014-07-26, 05:39 PM
Most people who had terrible DM stories told them already in the first thread, and didn't have anything new that beat it since then. At least I know that's the case for me. If you want to read my worst DM story, you can find it there.

Instead, let's nitpick.



3. The DM didn't follow Rules As Written if it suited him/his plot. He'd often replace rules, forget about them, or downright deny people to do things they should be allowed to do by the rules. All without saying it beforehand.

For example, one player disabled the cell doors (some kind of magical barrier) with a Knock spell. A barrier of pure arcane energy. With a spell designed to open mundane doors.

I see nothing wrong with this. The DM is not a slave to RAW, and story is more important than rules. Telling a player "no, your ability doesn't work because I say so" is annoying, but letting them knock a magical barrier with a Knock spell? I don't have a problem with that.


5. I am playing a warlock with Summon Swarm as an invocation. So I summon a swarm of spiders to attack a guard. Guess what? The guard has a defensive field of lightning that automatically deals heavy damage to my swarm. No save, no attack roll, nothing.

If that ability was just pulled out of the blue, then it kinda sucks. But if the guard had it all along, then I see nothing wrong with it.


6. Seeing my swarms barely can do anything, I try to break out by dealing enough acid damage (My bite attack deals acid damage) to the walls. Everyone knows acid damages walls regardless of hardness, right? Turns out the DM doesn't.


I wouldn't allow this either. Trying to break out from a cell by biting the walls is one of those things that are possible by RAW but are just implausible by logic, acid or not.

Sith_Happens
2014-07-26, 08:39 PM
A round of Will saves later, and...

... nothing. The GM vanishes off of the face of the Earth. It seems that he was the illusion all along!

http://images.sodahead.com/polls/000922451/fg_nose_milk_xlarge.jpeg


... I can't believe it's been well over a year since we were shocked by the worst DM ever, though. I can't even find the threads anymore!

Thread 1 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?275152-What-am-I-supposed-to-do)
Thread 2 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?282462-The-SUE-Files-Part-II)
Thread 3 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?282462-The-SUE-Files-Part-II) (Past necro limit, do not post)
The Blog (http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/) (Use the "Blog Archive" sidebar, BlogSpot displays entries in reverse-chronological order)

Diachronos
2014-07-26, 09:12 PM
There's one friend I went to college with who had a habit of designing his campaigns after book he's read, right down to the plot. Meaning our characters would end up essentially derping around and struggling to resolve anything when the actual hero from the book would swoop in with the one thing that could actually defeat whatever monster we were fighting.
Stepford-esque cult of girls? They'd survive things like decapitation if a player did it, but once the Catholic Church's SWAT team came in they started dropping like flies.
Powerful demon disguising himself at Dragon-Con? Couldn't touch him, and we ended up needing an NPC with a magic sword to attack him.

Looking back, the first boss monster was extremely satisfying to defeat. The DM pitted us up against a cult that was feeding locals to an ancient Babylonian river god, and of course said river god would have to be immune to anything our party had access to with our powers (only fire could hurt him). DM's plan was to have backup from the organization we worked for show up with flamethrowers, but fortunately some of the party members had become good friends with the local hillbillies and got their hands on some extremely strong - and flammable - moonshine. Most of us got captured earlier, but the ones that had the moonshine were able to blow up the river god with the barrels of booze. The local sheriff who'd also been captured didn't survive, but the worst casualty the party suffered was one character's hair and eyebrows.

He also had a habit of not planning for us to do something off his predetermined path. In another campaign we came across a giant hole in the wall while exploring a ruined mansion, and spiders came out to attack us. He had to cut the session short because he hadn't planned on any of us actually going into the tunnel.

Inevitability
2014-07-27, 12:29 AM
Most people who had terrible DM stories told them already in the first thread, and didn't have anything new that beat it since then. At least I know that's the case for me. If you want to read my worst DM story, you can find it there.

Instead, let's nitpick.

I see nothing wrong with this. The DM is not a slave to RAW, and story is more important than rules. Telling a player "no, your ability doesn't work because I say so" is annoying, but letting them knock a magical barrier with a Knock spell? I don't have a problem with that.

If that ability was just pulled out of the blue, then it kinda sucks. But if the guard had it all along, then I see nothing wrong with it.

I wouldn't allow this either. Trying to break out from a cell by biting the walls is one of those things that are possible by RAW but are just implausible by logic, acid or not.

Yeah, I don't know about the electrical field but the point is that most of his houserules were unexpected. The DM already had a list of houserules, so I was assuming that the game would follow RAW for the other part. Then it turned out the DM was throwing out houserules all the way through, except he never acknowledged them as so. And my point wasn't really the improper use of knock, it was the incredible railroaded way he stopped the following escape.

And that bite attack wasn't my only source of acid. I had a 1/minute acid ray (using the bite attack while it cooled down) which also didn't get through. Bite attacks not getting through might still be understandable, but a friggin' high-pressure acid ray?

arclance
2014-07-27, 09:53 AM
The DM already had a list of houserules, so I was assuming that the game would follow RAW for the other part. Then it turned out the DM was throwing out houserules all the way through
I played with a DM like that before, it was not fun.
He never could give us a full writeup of his houserules no matter how many times we asked.
I know at least 6 people that don't play in his games anymore because we don't know if a build we make will function in his game.

Socksy
2014-07-27, 05:14 PM
Incidentally, my selfish suggestion for thread title would be something along the lines of "This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!" or "Don't think too hard about the railroad you're on!"

I love the first one of those, +1 for that.

/goes back to lurking

jedipotter
2014-07-27, 05:53 PM
Dave! The Taco Bell DM. He worked closing at Taco Bell, and as soon as he was done, he'd run a game. So from 1am to 5am he'd run a D&D game in the dinning area of Taco Bell.

Dave would have a vague dungeon or place or wilderness, some circles and squares and lines. Then the group would go from spot to spot. Each spot had a letter. So each time they group got to a spot, Dave would open the Monster Manual to that letter and pick a monster. There was not much role play, as the main goal was ''to kill a monster of each letter''.

Dave was very lacking in encounters. He is the type of DM that says ''the adult red dragon walks over and does one claw attack for it's action this round''. Worse he is ''the beholder uses it's telekinitic eye stalk to pick up a roack and throw it at you for 1-4 damage''.

And there was the famous time.....The group had found a room with a trapped floor. The theif wanted to climb walls across the room and not touch the floor. Dave said this was impossible. And to ''prove'' that someone could not climb up a wall and move sideways...he leapped up and ran over and into the wall with a very loud ''thud''. And wiggled his arms and legs for a couple seconds. And proved that...er...well he could not climb a wall at Taco Bell at 3 am.........

Zaydos
2014-07-27, 05:54 PM
The DM that decided shooting someone on a hill should give you a -4 penalty to hit (because long bows can't shoot up) and that shooting from behind cover should give you a -10 penalty because his best friend was playing a barbarian and every combat could only be solved by him. That was the single worst (also demanded page+ backstories and then didn't let us do anything but a railroad of combats).

Sith_Happens
2014-07-27, 09:31 PM
(because long bows can't shoot up)

http://www.heavyblogisheavy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Jackie-Chan.jpg

Inevitability
2014-07-28, 12:25 AM
I love the first one of those, +1 for that.

/goes back to lurking

I now feel bad. I didn't notice that paragraph before you quoted it. :smallfrown:

But hey, at least something good came of it, we now have a title!

golentan
2014-07-28, 12:37 AM
I once had a DM who claimed that because we didn't specify getting rid of rotting corpses when we said we prepared the area and made camp we basically put our bedrolls out on top of them, and didn't give us any sort of warning of this interpretation before hitting us with a horrible constitution draining illness, at which point it was "too late to retcon," killing off my character without any sort of action taken (since finding the outpost with the dead bodies was the first thing we did and afterwards I was too sick to take part in adventuring).

Zombimode
2014-07-28, 03:15 AM
[URL="http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?329243-What-was-your-worst-DM-ever"]The baddies are Githyanki working for a Mind Flayer. Yes, from all the evil masterminds the DM could pick, he chose the only one Githyanki are opposed to with an unnatural hatred. A few players brought this up, to which the DM replied: "If your character doesn't have Knowledge (the planes), you shouldn't worry about it. And maybe the Githyanki aren't even working for the Illithid."

Yeah. :smallannoyed:


Now, while the rest of your list really sounds kinda bad, this first point the DM is in the right. First, if your character doesn't have the knowledge of the history of two planar species, which correctly falls under Knowledge (The Planes), then your character has no reason to wonder about it.

Second, while Gith would not work for an Illithid under most circumstances, saying that they would no work for an Illithid period is quite narrowminded. Sure, it is unusual, but the correct response from you, the player, to something unusual should be "Wow, this is strange. I want to learn more about it!"
Not to mention the possibility that the situation actually isn't the way it presented itself to you.

Really, the possibilities are endless. Even in the short time in which I have written this posting I came up with about 10 different setups that would fit this scenario.

comicshorse
2014-07-28, 09:23 PM
My worst DM ever was usually a good GM, it's just he always insisted on having a DMPC accompany us and every now and then they would move from being a large part of the game to being the focus of the game
When they got like that you just knew it was time to stop trying and just let it all wash over you, cause you weren't going to be making a difference to anything for a bit
The example that immediately springs to mind was in a Dark Ages Vampire game, I'm playing a Toreador knight and had put a lot of XP into combat skills and disciplines. One session, for reasons far to complicated to go into, we were in Iceland and get attacked by two Gargoyles. One swoops towards my Vampire and I decide to put everything into one blow, the Gargoyle completely dodges my attack and then (with a dice pool split by dodging and attacking) scores a huge hit on me with his spear which punches straight through my characters chain and Fortitude and wipes him out in one blow.
This didn't bother me too much (hey even NPC's get lucky, right) its when next round the DMPC's ghoul (Ghouls are humans who have feed on Vampire blood and so get very minor Disciplines) maid/cook takes out the Gargoyle with one swipe of her meat cleaver that I released it wasn't going to be my session

Gamgee
2014-07-29, 08:47 AM
I don't have any GM stories, but I got some fresh player stories I'll talk about in brief.

I talked to the group about nerfing things, as well as using things from the Only War rpg instead of Deathwatch since its so hard to challenge them anymore in combat. Needing ridiculous levels of units and amounts. Even moving to the Only War system one of the players is strong enough to solo kill a Deamon Prince in two hits. This ongoing nerf to bring down the power level and make the game so there is some challenge has been going on for about a year culminating in "the big switch" the Only War set of rules. I am using some house rules to supplement some things that don't convert perfectly like psychic powers. So every single player was affected over the course of this, and I have explained in as much detail as I can muster as to why it needs to be done.

However they are beginning to complain every time we play. To the point I can't have new players try and join since its embarrassing with them doing their best to drag me into 1+ hour long "debates" that are getting perilously close to shouting matches. Average arguments lasting 20+ minutes. Long ones going for an hour or so. They complain that the game is going to slow, so I implement a policy of me making a ruling on the spot and they can look it up later.

However they have started to complain about me "out to get them" since I won't listen to anything they say for more than a minute or so before making a ruling. Player S in particular has rampant paranoia I changed to the new rules just to screw him over out of petty revenge. Despite the fact that his psychic powers were so strong they were one hit killing boss level enemies and making the game pointless. Not to mention on the table top that particular power isn't anywhere near that potent. Finally in the new versions the power got nerfed anyways. But he still won't stop bitching endlessly about it. Every time I see him he makes snide comments about my ability to nerf anything and everything.

Now S has gotten many of the other players joining him and making snide remarks at me. Also I'm only human when I do make an exception to look up a rule because its critical I am sometimes wrong and they are right ect. This is rare though composing no less than about.... 18% or so I am wrong. Which is fairly minimal considering I GM four games and three different systems. And multiple version of the 40k rpg. However S is using this as "proof" I am inept and every single time I say a rule works in x, y, or z way he or now other players stop me. Say no and look it up. Then usually I'm right. They don't apologize for wasting everyone's time at all or treating me like an *******. Only gloating when I am wrong the tiny amount of times. Now its gotten to the point they make fun of me outside of the game for how much "mistakes" and "nerfing" I do. Not in a fun I'm in on the joke way, but a ha ha this guy sucks way.

I've been this groups GM for 9+ years. It's only recently something has changed and they have decided to start treating me differently. I don't know why. Hell I buy them pizza, I sometimes cover gas if they are in need, and do a lot of other support stuff. I offer food I cook ect. I put up with them when they do break something by accident.

Now all they do is complain about my inability as a GM. Despite the fact that every single time one of them tried to run a game it blew up in their faces spectacularly.

S and another player M are starting a lot of this stuff. Finally after I GM and I'm done for the evening after a long night I'm tired. Yet player M will stop me from resting and bombard me with questions and arguments for 30+ minutes before finally leaving. I sometimes have to go to great lengths to insist he leave me alone after a game since I'm so tired after. I'm so tired because they never stop arguing. It's feeling like an arduous chore and I'm gming for a group of spoiled children. Granted two of them are immature teenagers. M being one of them. S though is a "grown" adult.

I feel this is the end to this group or at least several players. There are two good players who aren't a pain in the ****ing ass to handle. However everyone else it feels like the end. If I tell a joke they never get it or maybe they do and don't want to laugh. They've gone from treating me like a friend to more like a servant. TO the point they even try and argue with me when I tell a joke about how I am not factually right...??? What the hell does that even mean. It's a joke.... they used to laugh at them.

So... opinions? Thoughts? If I do just cut ties with the bulk of the problem players that's 3 or even 4 of my players. Group killing potential.

Edit
I consider myself an iron willed individual and have been said to have the patience of a saint. However my patience is finally at an end now that they are starting to not even treat me with some basic respect.

Edit2
If I explain the reason why I do these things they don't believe me. They think the real reason I want to do all of these things is to kill them for personal slights.... :smallconfused: I may get annoyed with my friends like anyone, but I can't think of any slight I remember with a burning vengeance. This situation though... this is a problem. So even if I try and explain myself no answer is good enough. They don't trust anything I say. I could tell them the time of day is 4pm and they wouldn't believe me. It's getting to that cartoonish level of paranoia.

Engine
2014-07-29, 09:28 AM
Bad DMing on the way!

- Playing a Witch in a PF game, the DM wasn't familiar with the class so I explained to him how hexes work. He nodded and we started playing. And...then he started asking me how many times I could use my hexes, I again explained how they work. The next session...again he asked me why I could use Sleep so many times, then I repeated that it was an hex, I could use it how many times I wanted but only once on a target. Long story short, in five session he asked me every time how hexes work and every time he seemed unconviced. After the fifth session he contacted me and said I was out of the game because he thought I was cheating. After the sixth the group disbanded.

- Again a PF game with a different DM, the characters were accompanied by an NPC who carried a mysterious wand and had a resemblance with a popular sci-fi character of a british TV serial. During the adventure, whenever the characters encountered any difficulty, the "Doctor" (the NPC asked the characters to call him so) used the mysterious wand to go on. Locked doors? Wand. Monsters? Wand. Puzzles? Wand. Anything? Wand. Me leaving the group as fast as I can? Nope, no wand for you this time.

DigoDragon
2014-07-29, 09:51 AM
"Um, guys, I actually didn't prepare anything."

I had a player in my group who would keep buying a lot of vintage or obscure gaming systems (like Space 1889) that seemed interesting to try out. He kept telling us about his ideas on adventures he'd run and we were all for giving it a try. Not once in the 9 years he was with the group did he bother to try. And it wasn't a lack of GMing experience. He was just too lazy to do the work. We ended up stealing some of his ideas now and then when he was absent for several sessions at a time.

Another former player (who I still keep in touch) has grandiose plans for a military campaign where the PCs are members of a large unit in a war. However, we're all playing enlisted soldiers in a group of about 30 NPCs. And there's only 3 PCs so far he's recruited for this idea. I have no idea how he plans on running 30 NPC simultaneously on the battle field. He too has GM experience and the one d20 Modern campaign he ran was very good. Not sure what happened.

Kalmageddon
2014-07-29, 09:55 AM
I once took part to a D&D game where the session, which lasted 3 hours, consisted exclusively of the half-orc of the group being served raw boar testicles. Every step of the meal was described in extreme detail because the GM found it hilarious and couldn't get enough of it. He was in tears because of all the laughter, we were in tears becasue of how ungodly boring and disgusting the game was.

I never played with him again.

Altair_the_Vexed
2014-07-29, 10:59 AM
GM: "Behind the door there's a 60ft x 60ft room. In the room there's a pile of treasure - gems and coins and magic items."

Player: "Cool! I loot the treaure pile!"

GM: "The dragon attacks you." *rolls dice*

Players (all): "What dragon?"

GM: "There's a dragon in the room. It's his treasure. He's hit you for XYZ damage."

Player: "Was it invisible? Hiding?"

GM: "No, you just didn't ask."

aberratio ictus
2014-07-29, 11:21 AM
*snip*

Look, there's always a time you'll just have to end the campaign. Characters being so powerful it is hard to challenge them anymore is a quite solid sign that time has come for you and your players.

My advice is - let them have a spectacular finale, let them shine, narrate an entertaining epilogue and lay their sheets down to rest.

Then simply start a new campaign with new characters, if you are so inclined.

Socksy
2014-07-29, 02:19 PM
Player: "Was it invisible? Hiding?"

GM: "No, you just didn't ask."

My father does that while DMing. Alongside his NPCs (We can expect any dwarf to be Moradin in disguise and any elf to be a 'Deltan' - (think Twilight vampires times five for speed and strength, and they look like regular grey elves, and they have like +16 to everything, and they're functionally immortal, and they're also technically dragons) - and a level 15 ranger at lowest), alongside the horribly slow plots and campaign ideas we specifically say we don't want to play, that's the reason my brother makes me DM solo campaigns for him instead of asking dad to DM for both of us.

Kid Jake
2014-07-29, 02:54 PM
My father does that while DMing. Alongside his NPCs (We can expect any dwarf to be Moradin in disguise and any elf to be a 'Deltan' - (think Twilight vampires times five for speed and strength, and they look like regular grey elves, and they have like +16 to everything, and they're functionally immortal, and they're also technically dragons) - and a level 15 ranger at lowest), alongside the horribly slow plots and campaign ideas we specifically say we don't want to play, that's the reason my brother makes me DM solo campaigns for him instead of asking dad to DM for both of us.

That makes me glad I'm a first generation nerd; if I'd learned the game like that I might've done something regrettable...like getting into NASCAR.

Sith_Happens
2014-07-29, 03:25 PM
That makes me glad I'm a first generation nerd; if I'd learned the game like that I might've done something regrettable...like getting into NASCAR.

http://images.sodahead.com/polls/000922451/fg_nose_milk_xlarge.jpeg

icefractal
2014-07-29, 03:42 PM
Stuff
Wow, that sounds like a terrible situation. I think at this point, it may be beyond salvaging; you might just have to drop the toxic players and look for new ones.

In future, I'd advise that if the characters get powerful beyond the ability of setting to challenge them, it's better to retire that campaign and start a new one than try to rebalance. For most players, once they'd been riding the lightning and smashing apart armies, they don't want to go back to a more modest level with those characters. Heck, I wouldn't, actually - better to just retire those with their badass status intact and start afresh.

Although that said, the players in question still sound like huge jerks in how they responded to it.

TeChameleon
2014-07-29, 04:38 PM
*snippage*
I'd tend to agree with the other posters so far- it sounds like a crummy situation.

Honestly, if I were in your position, I'd be quite tempted to do a 'rocks fall, everyone dies' scenario. Or possibly 'sun explodes, planet dies' scenario >.>

If you feel that there's anything left worth salvaging, what I'd do is simply finalize the campaign- have the players perform a final quest to fade into myth, ascend into godhood, whatever. And then that's it. Those characters are no longer under their control, and a new campaign begins.

Alternatively, you could start up an Exalted or Nobilis campaign, or something to that effect. All the crazy-insane powerlevels they want in a game that's designed to handle them :/

cobaltstarfire
2014-07-29, 05:31 PM
The worst GM I ever had was really fond of screwing everyone over via fiat.

For me most of the time it was making my hits miss because "Because you are a small character you miss anyway"

I don't think I ever actually hit anything the entire 2-3 nights I had played because any time I rolled high enough to hit it was decided I actually didn't hit anything at all.

Another player (our cleric) also had his character become unable to communicate with us, because the gm decided to give him some mysterious disease that made it so he basically talked in tongues. (and he would die if we couldn't figure it out and get him cured or something).

I left eventually because I felt left out and useless, I'm told by the other players after the fact that the DM was more unfair to me than even I realized (I'm a doormat by nature so I don't tend to notice), and really irritated the cleric too with the mystery disease so they all just stopped playing.


Well there's also the one I just never ended playing with, I had been interested in playing some sort of star wars, and also just making some friends in college. I wanted to play a gungan because they are a pretty cool species. But all the GM could say is "No gungans jarjar is stupid", and basically just ranted about that. I decided that if a GM is going to get that caught up on something like that and unwilling to discuss anything I didn't really want to see how he ran a game.

Sidmen
2014-07-29, 07:58 PM
Well there's also the one I just never ended playing with, I had been interested in playing some sort of star wars, and also just making some friends in college. I wanted to play a gungan because they are a pretty cool species. But all the GM could say is "No gungans jarjar is stupid", and basically just ranted about that. I decided that if a GM is going to get that caught up on something like that and unwilling to discuss anything I didn't really want to see how he ran a game.

To be fair, in Star Wars circles the Gungans have the same reputation as Kender do in Dragonlance circles. I.E. they're little more than comic relief characters that are detrimental to a serious game. You'll find few Star Wars DMs who don't at least give you a cocked eyebrow when you say you want to play one. Whether its a deserved reputation or not is up to that DM's personal experiences and animosity toward the species. I know that I discouraged people from playing Jawas, Ewoks, and Gungans when I last ran a Star Wars game (I never outright ban things).

On Topic:
I'm my own worst DM. I constantly seem to kill off my PCs after less than a month of in a particular campaign. I also lack a story to tell, but constantly leave little crumbly bits that might be plot points scattered around like cups after a kegger. I know my players lack ability to play sandboxes but constantly run them... Not sure why they put up with me...

comicshorse
2014-07-29, 08:06 PM
This guy wasn't actually GM'ing for me but still...
At my university Roleplaying club and I wander in to see a Cyberpunk game in progress. The P.C.s have just been ambushed by 3 Arasaka goons.
G.M. declares the goons are all going full auto, a burst of 30 bullets. He starts with goon one, rolls damage for first bullet. Works out that's 30 damage which penetrates the P.C.s armour jacket (doing it a point of damage) and their armour vest (ditto) but not the P.C.s skinweave. P.C. still takes a automatic point of damage.
There is a pause as the P.C. adjusts his armour ratings and health.
The G.M. then starts rolling the damage for the second bullet.
I leave, go have a leisurely lunch, chat with friends, come back two hours later and they are still running the same combat ! (though by this point the P.C.s were getting to shoot back)

cobaltstarfire
2014-07-29, 08:27 PM
To be fair, in Star Wars circles the Gungans have the same reputation as Kender do in Dragonlance circles. I.E. they're little more than comic relief characters that are detrimental to a serious game. You'll find few Star Wars DMs who don't at least give you a cocked eyebrow when you say you want to play one. Whether its a deserved reputation or not is up to that DM's personal experiences and animosity toward the species. I know that I discouraged people from playing Jawas, Ewoks, and Gungans when I last ran a Star Wars game (I never outright ban things).

On Topic:
I'm my own worst DM. I constantly seem to kill off my PCs after less than a month of in a particular campaign. I also lack a story to tell, but constantly leave little crumbly bits that might be plot points scattered around like cups after a kegger. I know my players lack ability to play sandboxes but constantly run them... Not sure why they put up with me...

I don't really care about the "reputation" of a race, if a GM can't give me a good reason for why a race is disallowed other than "I don't think you'll play a serious character" I don't really want to have anything to do with that GM.

Visivicous
2014-07-29, 10:14 PM
I don't really have any 'worst DM' stories. The closest involves a fantastic Story Teller (oWoD) that did a few things which really disappointed me. Even so, he's still the best ST/DM/GM/whatever I've ever had the pleasure of playing with.

I was playing a Native American Salubri-Antitribu in this ST's Vampire the Masquerade game. I chose a Merit which would give me a 'Spirit Mentor', the form house-ruled as a snow owl (ST let me choose). I had a great deal of fun, and RP'd a lot with my owl mentor (bonus: we were some fairly dense players, so the ST would use my mentor to gift us clues). We'd been playing several months, and I was really trying to play-up my character's spiritual side (important note: I played this character as very loyal to his friends), when the ST dragged us into some kind of hell dimension. A wicked looking wraith one shots my mentor, killing it forever, and then offered to become my new 'mentor'. I was enraged, and attacked this wraith-thing, rolling some epic damage using Vengeance of Samiel... hacking off the smallest claw the thing possessed. I was then eviscerated on the things first turn. No one could figure out why I would attack such a powerful enemy (ST gave its description extra detail, and really drove home that this thing was a badass), and figured I'd killed off my character intentionally so I could roll a new one. At the time, I thought if I showed my character's loyalty, even unto death, then I would get my mentor back. I thought it was a test of sorts (I played a fairly 'human' vampire, and viewed the wraith's offer as a lure to the 'dark side'). That was very disappointing.

Same game, I rolled up a Tremere, focusing in Path of Levinbolt (lightning magic!) and Technomancy (cyber magic!). Again, I went on many adventures, and had a heck of a good time. Several months of play later, we wind up on our home turf for some down time. I decided to use that time to craft a robot companion, using (I think) homunculus rules, and some blueprints I had stumbled across on one of our adventures. The ST had some very demanding rolls to make this happen, and it took some time (several in game months). Near the end of the campaign, I finally succeeded in creating my robot (a cybernetic looking spider thing). Had it for all of one session, in which our characters were hunted down, and slaughtered (I died outside of a dinner, and my robot companion with me - or so I thought). Disappointing, after all the time, resources, and rolls invested.

All new campaign, same players, same ST. This time I played a Gangrel, with a German Shepherd animal companion, which was also a Ghoul. ST thought this was awesome, and encouraged the theme. After just the first few sessions, I come home to my condemned/abandoned house (I lived in the secret basement), to find my faithful German Shepherd torn to little bits. Hair and viscera strewn everywhere, and this strange metal contraption sitting in the middle of a pile of organs, wearing my dog's skin as a coat. It was the freaking robot my previous character had built! It claimed to have 'absorbed the essence' of my dog, and wished to serve as my new companion.

I came to the conclusion that, while the ST could spin some incredible stories and bring a whole lot of entertainment, he loathed companion NPCs. Duly noted for the next time I play with this guy (which I hope does happen).

squiggit
2014-07-29, 11:06 PM
Well there was that one time when we all came to the DM's house to play...

"Um, guys, I actually didn't prepare anything."

"But DM, why?"

"Eh. Too hard."

And this was after he promised us a cool story and asked questions on the roles of our characters. Suffice to say, he never DMed again.

I've had that happen to me before. We entered a supposedly mystical cave where our group's Paladin found his enlightenment and all that. Throughout the entire cavern he had the paladin's player describing the scenery. I understand wanting input from the player who's connected to the area, but having him describe the whole thing? It got worse when I found out after the scene ended that he'd had another player (who couldn't make that week) stat up all the encounters for that session too. Come to think of it, the plot was just whatever any other player wrote into their character's backstory. And he tended to be the sort of GM who thought "open world campaign" meant dumping you in an empty field and giving you nothing to do.


Other bad GM experience came from a guy who thought D&D was a video game. It was a very railroady campaign, but we went along with it. Second session we run into the big bad (some sort of blackguardy zombie) who shows up and taunts us. He then proceeds to murder a friendly NPC innkeeper who was sort of our guide for this session. So then...

Me: How far away is the knight?
DM: Uh.. about 40 feet away
Me: Ok that's in range. I draw my shortbow and
DM: This is a cutscene
Me: Huh?
DM: Yeah you can't do anything during a cutscene
Me: I don't understand what you mean.
DM: Ok look, he turns (no initiative roll), fires a black ray at you (no attack roll) and kills you (no damage roll or save).
Me: What? I haven't even done anything yet.
DM: Ok. You're out of the game. I can't have someone constantly questioning me.

There wasn't a third session. Which we ended up being kind of glad about, since we discovered (when he was trying to taunt us about what we were missing out on) that we were going to find a noble prince and beseech him for help because he was the only one who was strong enough to slay the knight. It was described to us as "getting the chance to help a badass prince save the kingdom". With, of course, the final fight being a one on one duel between the prince and the villain. While we would have gotten to fight off skeletons.

Winter_Wolf
2014-07-29, 11:48 PM
My worst GM killed a campaign then without warning reneged on his promise to GM a game next week. Two games, one pissy fit. I left the country three weeks later so it didn't really matter, but he was still a punk for doing that.

runner up goes to the GM whose campaign got killed, but at least he tried to keep things moving. Right up until the godlike DMPC who went around offering the players draws from a deck of many things. Two people were actually dumb enough to do it, including the campaign serial killer. I suspect that was the catalyst for a long drawn out pissy fit. He was wound pretty tight pretty much all the time though, so it's probably for the best he never actually took the helm.

SamaelOfChaos
2014-07-30, 04:24 AM
At least you guys even got to play at all in the "Worst GM scenario". I didn't have that luxury, even though the guy was DMing me, for several hours!

He was telling this loooooong story of some zombified city and one guy running away (one of the players). A lost car, am I in it? No, not yet, wait for your turn. A horde of zombies and someone crying for help, am I that person? No, wait for your turn.

After, around 4 hours, NONE other player got to do ANYTHING because he wasn't in the game AT ALL.

There was no second session of that game. Although that wasn't the only game under that wonderful GM I had. The game with the zombies was one where he "thought everything out this time and is going to make up for his past mistakes" while DMing for our group.

Like the part where he was always one of the players while DMing... the most OP one, too, even if the character build sucked, he managed to do something to make him OP and make us suck, every single time.

It got to the point where we were going through a swamp and the team incredibly intelligent troll berserker walked behind my mage with his axe and just used my character as a swamp detector. Any time I almost fell into a swamp and died he would just gleefully fish me out and we proceeded onwards where he one shot some boss without us as much as anyone else hitting once, and afterwards, proceeded to tell us OOC how difficult he would have been and how he was supposed to transform into some huge monstriosity and slaughter us all in some epic battle.
One that never happened, because the most epic moments happened OOC... they always happened OOC. Or in the near future.

For example he once told us about this epic quest for evil sorcerer he had planned, got us actually hyped, then tossed the whole session into the bin and decided we're not doing it at all.

Sad part? To this day I can't even have a game with anyone else due to either time constrains or the fact I can't find a fun and decent DM, so that's my WHOLE exp. with PnP T_T

PS. Sorry for the rant, kinda spilling out my frustration about the matter here.

Hazuki
2014-07-30, 04:29 AM
I've got a fairly long one. I'll try to condense it as much as possible, though.

Interested in applying for a game, so I offer the GM my character concept. He insults me. No explanation, not even an answer to my question, just an insult. I ask him to give me an answer, and he gives me an explanation...that ends with another insult. Followed by a sexist comment. Okay, move on, I go with a different concept. I post my sheet, asking for thoughts...he never looks at it. I ask for help with making my character, as I was new to the mechanics, and he ignores it. Luckily, another player was around to help me out. Then the GM starts making snide comments about how our characters are too experienced, that they should have less stuff in their backgrounds...they consisted of A) A servant who got lost and ended up with some barbarians. B) A guy from a farm who has a job. And C) A former slave who recently escaped their captors. Then he proceeds to make casual comments about rape, like "Imagine, it's happening right now.", while a rape victim is present as a player (And he was aware of the fact).

Then, it's revealed that Mages have a special ability in his game. I'm the only Mage, so I'm the only one it affects. I ask him how it works, he doesn't answer besides "It detects demons". Except it doesn't just tell me about any demons nearby; it just means he gives me a line of garbled words that don't mean anything and I have to puzzle out what they mean. Over the course of the game, I would use the ability, he would do that, I would ask for a clear answer, and he would bitch about me not playing along. More on this later.

The game begins. It goes smoothly, for the most part. We go to town, attend dinner, and then we find out that some of the lore of the established (As in, by a company that sold the books) setting has been changed. I ask to know more about it, and he refuses to explain what he's changed. It's at this point that he changes the ability that he never explained, to include detecting magic in general. Okay, it's not come up in play yet, so I go along with it. So we follow this character, then my character asks why she's acting suspiciously when she's doing such shady things. The woman then calls the guards on us for asking questions, and the GM acts like it's all part of his ingenious plan. When I mention that the NPC is crazy, he tells me to stop making fun of his NPCs and that I just don't understand them.

It's at this point that his changes to the mechanics of the system come up. When we attempt to discuss it with him, he gives half-answers, or even answers completely unrelated to the question, then calls us idiots when we don't understand. Whenever I tried to bring up an issue I had with the system, he would dismiss it with another insult. After enough complaining, he relents and agrees to go back to the original system that he modified.

Then, the next in-game day rolls around and he starts complaining that we're not doing enough or following his hooks, which he then lists. Most of the hooks are things the party don't know about, or literally can't intervene in. So we do our best by trying to follow up on one of the hooks; a character's backstory. We go to a town in search of people from the character's past, and we find absolutely nothing, so we head back to the tavern and a mysterious NPC suddenly pops up. He knows everything about our character's pasts, despite us effectively being peasants, insults us, threatens us, and then the GM then insults me for having my character walk away from it.

Some time later, the characters who stayed come back and reveal that one of them is actually magical. The GM tells me to activate my magic sense (Remember that?), so I do and apparently, one of the other PCs has been magical the entire time my PC has known her, and, in all the times she's used her magic sense, she's never noticed it. Nothing happened to the character to cause this change, and when I ask him why, he says "You didn't specifically look at her before", despite it being an AoE ability. So I ask him to please explain the mechanics of the ability to me, so I'll know how to use it in the future, and make sure that I'm not unwittingly making more stupid mistakes because how my own ability works has never been explained to me. He insults me for asking and says "Deal with it."

Without a doubt, the worst GM I've ever had to deal with.

detritus
2014-07-30, 04:50 AM
I don't have any GM stories, but I got some fresh player stories I'll talk about in brief.

Now its gotten to the point they make fun of me outside of the game for how much "mistakes" and "nerfing" I do. Not in a fun I'm in on the joke way, but a ha ha this guy sucks way.

I've been this groups GM for 9+ years. It's only recently something has changed and they have decided to start treating me differently. I don't know why. Hell I buy them pizza, I sometimes cover gas if they are in need, and do a lot of other support stuff. I offer food I cook ect. I put up with them when they do break something by accident.
So... opinions? Thoughts? If I do just cut ties with the bulk of the problem players that's 3 or even 4 of my players. Group killing potential.


My opinion? Kick out the players who cause trouble - they are exploiting you completely. You feed them, buy petrol for them, ignore their damaging stuff, run a long game for them despite their attitude - and all they do is take advantage and insult you. Why on earth are you even contemplating putting up with this? Tell them they aren't welcome any more and nothing more to do with them.

aberratio ictus
2014-07-30, 04:57 AM
*snip*

Your patience never ceases to amaze me. Personally, I decided that that Fereldan play isn't worth my time the moment the GM shot down your first idea for a character.

detritus
2014-07-30, 05:01 AM
I've got a fairly long one. I'll try to condense it as much as possible, though.

{edited} He insults me. {edited}

Without a doubt, the worst GM I've ever had to deal with.

A few questions:

Did nobody else in the room notice what an idiot the guy was?
Why didn't the lot of you walk away after the first 5 minutes?
Why does the Gm have any teeth left?

aberratio ictus
2014-07-30, 05:07 AM
A few questions:

Did nobody else in the room notice what an idiot the guy was?
Why didn't the lot of you walk away after the first 5 minutes?
Why does the Gm have any teeth left?

You can find the play (and the discussions) here in the PbP section.

My personal favourite: "You want to play a priestess? Don't you think it is unfair towards the other players to play a spotlight queen?"

Spacebatsy
2014-07-30, 05:07 AM
Reading the old threads, I don’t have any horror stories, just something that became a source of frustration for me and had effect on my feelings towards certain games.

My GM had a bit of the-game-is-always-greener-on-the-other side problem. Around two sessions in he would start to hint at another game that he rather be GMing. It’s not always a big problem, if we like it we can usually drag him along for a couple of more sessions, but to my knowing he has never “finished” a campaign. The problem for me is that I like to invest in a game, emotionally and time wise, I even wrote journals for the first ones before I realized this trend. I have no issues with making new characters, but I want to be able to commit to a campaign.

However the real issue is with a Swedish game called Eon. I get edgy every time someone even mentions it. Not because he GMed it bad, but because he never actually GMed it.
Eon is a fantasy game that strives to make the effects of combat and living in the world as realistic as possible. It is famously known for the amount of time it takes to create a character, one really needs to set aside at least a day just making a character with a clear concept in mind. I have made these for so many campaigns, but never gotten further than to the introduction game wise.
The final straw was not that he had us make new characters three times in a row because he changed his mind about the setting, but his attitude towards us when doing it. This sort of smugness as if it all was a clever joke that got funnier the more frustrated we got.
I think it is his way of dealing with conflict because I’ve noticed that the harsher something is criticized the more he acts as if it’s something he intended all along to mess with us. I dont think I would have been offended if it was not for this.
On the topic: at the announcement that we should make a third character, right after the first hort session, I took him aside and complained that there was more to life than spending days rolling characters. To which he answered:

- You think you have it tough, think of [shy player], he could only take one day from [studying for an exam] so now we had to make his characters in the evenings instead.
- …He gave you a day of his study time to make a character that he had to remake?
*isn’t-it-hilarious? look* - Yes
- When he has an exam coming up? And now he has to devote his evenings to do yet another one? Can’t he use one of the old ones?
- No, it won’t fit the setting, and besides I’ve already erased them
- Wow… That’s really disrespectful…
*Even broader smile* - What’s he gonna do?

When in that mode, arguing has no effect. Even so we still got to the introductions of the first setting, and he quickly started dropping hints about how fun it would be to play Rogue Trader, and that he had this great idea. At the break I asked him:

- You’re not going to run this game are you?
- Probably not, I want to run Rogue Trader first, and then I’ll start an Eon campaign.
- Okay. You know what? I don’t think Eon is a game for me, I’ll sit that one out
- But you haven’t even played it yet!

I moved half a year later, but I’m still reluctant to Eon in particular and fantasy games in general. Yeah, I know, I’m a bit of a wimp. But I can’t stop myself thinking it will be a waste of time

Hazuki
2014-07-30, 05:11 AM
Your patience never ceases to amaze me. Personally, I decided that that Fereldan play isn't worth my time the moment the GM shot down your first idea for a character.You're my new favorite person. And far wiser than I. I know that I wouldn't be around if it weren't for the fact that I enjoy the other players.

If it weren't for the dearth of Dragon Age games, I'd have left after the second insult.


A few questions:

Did nobody else in the room notice what an idiot the guy was?
Why didn't the lot of you walk away after the first 5 minutes?
Why does the Gm have any teeth left?Apparently they did, but they don't seem to care as much. I have trouble not pointing out idiocy when I see it (Though it's hard to remain civil when he flings insults no matter how nice you try to be), which means I get the brunt of the insults, which makes it snowball for me while the other players are relatively unaffected.

Unfortunately, it's PbP. If it were physically possible, he wouldn't.


You can find the play (and the discussions) here in the PbP section.

My personal favourite: "You want to play a priestess? Don't you think it is unfair towards the other players to play a spotlight queen?"Now you're my double-favorite.

Kalmageddon
2014-07-30, 05:54 AM
You can find the play (and the discussions) here in the PbP section.

My personal favourite: "You want to play a priestess? Don't you think it is unfair towards the other players to play a spotlight queen?"

Link please, have to see it with my own eyes, although I suspect I will regret this. :smalleek:

Hazuki
2014-07-30, 06:01 AM
Link please, have to see it with my own eyes, although I suspect I will regret this. :smalleek:Here you go. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?354953-DRAGON-AGE-Homebrew-Fereldan-Frontier-(invites-only-now))

aberratio ictus
2014-07-30, 06:13 AM
You probably will regret it, though it is quite similar to a very spectacular accident on the highway. (Not that I'll admit I'm one of those who stop and look, because, I'm not. I look and keep on driving simultaneously.)

I'm quite lucky I happen to be alone in the house right now, because I'm audibly groaning at almost every single one of that GM's posts, looking over the OOC right now. Also, be prepared to have a laughing fit once he claims "I feel like there's some good lessons in conflict resolution here."

Kalmageddon
2014-07-30, 06:59 AM
To be honest, it wasn't as bad as I thought.
I've read some pages of the threads and skimmed most of the rest and I mostly agree with Hazuki's and abberratio's side of things but this seems more like a case of incompatiblity between Hazuki and the GM than outright unforgivable GMing. The OOC tension is absolutely cringeworthy and I can't begin to imagine why you both decided to keep playing together.

Edit: this story inspired me to start a discussion about delicate subjects and their role in rpgs and storytelling. Coming right up.

Edit 2: on second thought, let's not start anything. Not on this forum. I know better.

Hazuki
2014-07-30, 07:09 AM
I'd say the real GM'ing failure is his utter inability to be a leader. A good GM should be able to try to please their players, explain their points of view, serve as effective arbiters, and be able to get everybody to work together as a cohesive whole. He displays none of these qualities. He wants control and respect without earning it.

aberratio ictus
2014-07-30, 07:15 AM
I'd say with all that insensitive talk about rape, quoting (and linking) of a horribly bad sexist poem, linking to an insulting elitist article in response to a reasonable (and unrelated) question and an overall condescending and overly smug attitude - that's pretty much incompatiblity to everybody who doesn't manage to outright ignore him most of the time, what is what the other players seem to be doing. That is social incompetence on a scale that essentially is unforgivable GMing in my book.

Kalmageddon
2014-07-30, 08:08 AM
I'd say the real GM'ing failure is his utter inability to be a leader. A good GM should be able to try to please their players, explain their points of view, serve as effective arbiters, and be able to get everybody to work together as a cohesive whole. He displays none of these qualities. He wants control and respect without earning it.
Had written a long answer, if you want me to elaborate my PM box is open, but, basically, it all comes down to this: if you didn't like him why keep playing with him? Abrasive and passive-aggressive behaviour benefits no-one. Regardless of who was right and who was wrong, roleplaying is a group activity which should be enjoyed together, not despite each other, don't you think?

I'd say with all that insensitive talk about rape, quoting (and linking) of a horribly bad sexist poem, linking to an insulting elitist article in response to a reasonable (and unrelated) question and an overall condescending and overly smug attitude - that's pretty much incompatiblity to everybody who doesn't manage to outright ignore him most of the time, what is what the other players seem to be doing. That is social incompetence on a scale that essentially is unforgivable GMing in my book.
As I said, I havent read the whole thing, that would be something like 20+ pages. But from what I've seen he frequently apologized for saying something that offended somebody and tried his best to make things work.
This doesn't mean that he isn't a bad GM or that he wasn't horribly offensive and dickish. It just means that, at least, he wasn't being malicious. Intent is an important factor.

Everyone has flaws, some might be big enough to make them incompatible with a lot of people. But then again, nobody is forcing you to play with them, right? So, as I said, just leave them be. Nobody is saying you should like them, or put up with them, or help them, or pretend like everything is ok. But don't become part of the problem.

I just don't think this GM is a bad person, I think he's just misguided and not very good at communicating.
I'm not trying to play devil's advocate, I just don't like public stonings and shaming.

Hazuki
2014-07-30, 08:14 AM
Being able to ignore something doesn't make criticism of it invalid. Thank you for the recommendation, but my choices are my own, and my criticism stands no matter what choice I make.

Alberic Strein
2014-07-30, 09:40 AM
I left this morning looking at a clean thread, wondering what I could post there and how my players could have SO MUCH more to say about me than I could ever say about another DM.

I come back and... Rape? Sexism? Elitism? What in the BLAZES happened?!

It's not even about being a sorry excuse for a DM anymore...

Which does seem to be a recurrent point concerning horrible DMs.

Anyway, personal "wtf" moment excepted, and my terrible, terrible impulse to answer Hazuki that the ability to reconsider and discuss one own's choices is important, and that closing oneself to discussion is sorta weird on a forum, I'll try and think up a few examples to tell you guys.

"Yeah, I was supposed to DM today... Sorry, I got nothing."
"Yeah, the game was supposed to be at my place today... Sorry, didn't clean up."
"Yeah, the one way to kill that monster was to use that particular ability and nothing else."
"Yeah, you just got strongarmed into working for that guy with no hope of breaking free as the introduction to the campaign."

Sidenote: Do we get to talk about our worst player experiences too? Coz' I got A LOT of these.

"No really, zombies that keep moving as parts are fine, I just need you to warn me beforehand and explain everything."
"No really, how were we supposed to think of using all the wood in the room and the oil on us to make torches against the slimes that animate skeletons?"
"No really, you REALLY won't allow for a spiderman way of crossing a blockade thanks to our mundane non-rotored grappling hooks?" (not that it would have done much good anyway, where in the blazes did they get the idea there were skyscrappers to hang from?!)
"No really, that horrendously powerful NPC that kept a war going almost by himself against overwhelmingly powerful forces, who also happens to be plot-critical, and that we are supposed to manipulate into helping us, or negociate or stuff, nah, we're killing him. It's him or us."
"No really, it's very important for me to play a rape survivor who still has an abusive relationship with her absurdly powerful master which is going to have a pretty damn big impact on the game." (worse in hindsight, I, for some unfathomable reason had called my spell which allowed me to enter someone's memories without consent "mind rape". So, when her master tampered with her memories and it was my job to get inside her mind to see what had been changed... The embarassment was real. Except for the DM, who found the whole thing HILARIOUS)
"No really, my character just met yours, but she is devising ways to kill him as we speak."
"No really, this new character of mine is completely different from the last... She still wants to kill you though."
"No really, my character got K.O'd because you got manipulated/didn't protect me well enough, so let me sulk for three hours straight."

comicshorse
2014-07-30, 10:47 AM
I've had that happen to me before. We entered a supposedly mystical cave where our group's Paladin found his enlightenment and all that. Throughout the entire cavern he had the paladin's player describing the scenery. I understand wanting input from the player who's connected to the area, but having him describe the whole thing? It got worse when I found out after the scene ended that he'd had another player (who couldn't make that week) stat up all the encounters for that session too. Come to think of it, the plot was just whatever any other player wrote into their character's backstory. And he tended to be the sort of GM who thought "open world campaign" meant dumping you in an empty field and giving you nothing to do.


Y'know I not sure if that counts as a bad DM, cause I'm not sure if he was actually DM'ing that game :smallsmile:

BRC
2014-07-30, 10:55 AM
Y'know I not sure if that counts as a bad DM, cause I'm not sure if he was actually DM'ing that game :smallsmile:

...I once opened a game by sitting back and doing nothing.

Okay, so one of the PC's (An assassin type) was hired under false pretenses to kill the rest of the party. I statted up some NPC thugs for him to control and sat back and watched the carnage, and everybody knew what was supposed to happen (Once he learned that they were NOT in fact trying to summon a demon, he would help them find his employers). I wouldn't do it with every group, but it was fun.

Hazuki
2014-07-30, 11:47 AM
Anyway, personal "wtf" moment excepted, and my terrible, terrible impulse to answer Hazuki that the ability to reconsider and discuss one own's choices is important, and that closing oneself to discussion is sorta weird on a forum, I'll try and think up a few examples to tell you guys.I definitely didn't mean to close myself to discussion. ^^ In fact, me and Kalmageddon moved our discussion to PMs. I do think it would be best to do any further discussion about my experience in PMs, just so this doesn't become Hazuki's Soapbox. :smalltongue:

thematgreen
2014-07-30, 11:55 AM
I had a DM that would just "DM" the story and ignore rolls. For example, if we wanted to intimidate someone, rolled intimidate, and won, we would still lose because "The DM said so".

I'm sorry, if my spikey armored, skull necklace wearing, giant (Literally, it was a frost giant weapon) axe wielding, half orc screams in a non magically compelled, non controlled, non mind controlled, low level minions face, he SHOULD get a reaction, not a "The man yawns in your face and turns away with a smirk".

I doubt it, my character just ate your friends eye as an offering to Grummsh and your just going to be amused?

I rarely argue with the DM but we had it out over that.

And that kind of thing was a common occurence.

Macros
2014-07-30, 12:03 PM
Well, to be fair, I had seen the reverse of this situations : players deciding to be a bit more proactive about their lack of skills in Intimidation.

"I don't have ranks in that skill, true... I chop off his finger. Does he talk?"

Anyway, reading this topic makes me glade that the worse I had to deal with was people having trouble balancing an encounter. And one who's perhaps overly fond of pointless details, but it usually comes back on tracks after a couple of minutes. :smalltongue:

thematgreen
2014-07-30, 12:11 PM
Well, to be fair, I had seen the reverse of this situations : players deciding to be a bit more proactive about their lack of skills in Intimidation.

"I don't have ranks in that skill, true... I chop off his finger. Does he talk?"

/snip:

Oh, for sure. I make sure I at least HAVE the skill before I use it, but have people trying that all the time. My wife had 0 intimidate and tried to intimidate an NPC by stabbing him in the leg. It killed the NPC and we lost our lead. My Paladin was, at the time, calming the guy down (Diplomacy of 15 with a roll of 19 giving him 34 against a DC 20), getting him to talk but she had an idea, ran with it, and BOOM, dead NPC story driver.

It was pretty hilarious.

BRC
2014-07-30, 12:57 PM
Oh, for sure. I make sure I at least HAVE the skill before I use it, but have people trying that all the time. My wife had 0 intimidate and tried to intimidate an NPC by stabbing him in the leg. It killed the NPC and we lost our lead. My Paladin was, at the time, calming the guy down (Diplomacy of 15 with a roll of 19 giving him 34 against a DC 20), getting him to talk but she had an idea, ran with it, and BOOM, dead NPC story driver.

It was pretty hilarious.
Intimidate is an odd duck of a skill.

I get the idea of intimidate as a skill, of using the right words in the right tone of voice at the right time to inspire fear.

However, it also just makes sense that you can scare people by being big and scary.
A small, smiling man calmly describing to you the things he will do if you do not cooperate is scary. So is six foot three inches of spiked plate wearing half-orc shouting "OPEN THE DOOR OR I WILL BASH YOUR HEAD IN". So what if the Orc is socially inept, he's got a big spiky club, and is perfectly capable of smashing your head in. It's a skill asking for a massive amount of circumstance bonuses from skills that your average kick-in-the-door adventuring party is going to have.


Personally, I would rule two uses of intimidate: Coercion and Terror.

Terror is just about making the target scared. It's the "I have a big axe and can cut you in half" use. You can use Strength on Terror checks, and get big circumstance bonuses from how scary you look or the fact that you are covered in still steaming dragon's blood. That would be the skill to use to intimidate in combat.
The downside of Terror is that people you target with it don't always act rationally, their only motivation is to not have you hurt them.
If somebody has a password, and you make a Terror check, you've convinced them that you can do terrible things to them, but that dosn't mean they will give you the password. Instead, they will do whatever it takes to make you not kill them. If this means giving you a fake password that, when you use it, will cause the guards to attack, so be it. It means they will try to escape or betray you as soon as you are more than one combat round away from reducing them to a red smear.

Coercion is cha and skill only. You don't get circumstance bonuses from being big and scary (Although you can get them otherwise). This is not just scaring them, this is making them scared of YOU.
A successful coercion check convinces the target that you can do terrible things to them, not just in the immediate "Do what I say right now" sense, but in the general "Cross me and die" sense. If you're trying to get a password from somebody, a successful Coercion check means they give you the correct password, because they honestly want to get on your good side, as opposed to just trying to avoid pain or death right now. When you've Coerced somebody, you can generally trust them to keep doing what you say even after you are no longer holding a blade to their neck.

Melcar
2014-07-30, 02:30 PM
We had a DM at one time who came very unprepared. For a session which had been planned for 3 month. So he arrives, and said that he needs some help constructing a super cool and powerful Sorcerer, so we advise him about feats and classes. We allow 3rd party so within that the Primordial Sorcerer from Quintessential Sorcerer is pretty sick. Anyways we help build this NPC only to discover that it was the sessions main antagonist. Needless to say we were pissed off. Come to think of it, it was his last session as a DM. He used to be good and had DM'ed for us for year. Around 9 or 10 years at that point.

Fumble Jack
2014-07-30, 02:32 PM
Hmm I have one where it wasn't so much the guys DMing style but rather his personality outside of being a dm. As a dm for star wars and only star wars, he wasn't bad. He was a bit obsessed with it, however also did not like gungans very much either. I remember a similar issue was brought up by someone earlier in the thread.

Outside of the game the things he would say, made you feel, metaphorically speaking as if you just went skinny dipping in sewer scum. He would bad mouth players behind their backs, he'd vomit out racial slurs, he had an ego as well as an anger problem, surprisingly none of it came up within his game. So I guess I can't call him a bad dm. I can and do call him a rather horrible example of what humanity has to offer. As his irl issues became a bit too much for us, even the nicest, most forgiving and understanding member of our gaming group eventually became fed up with his antics and stopped talking to him a good few months after the rest of us did.


Another time I was invited to LARP for a large cross splat Nwod game. I really wanted to try my hand at a Werewolf the Forsaken character and I sat down with the other would be werewolf players and we were all discussing concepts. I'm about to roll up a sheet and present it to the head ST. When I am then told the werewolves have no St assigned to their particular splat, and since I knew their system best I was nominated.

I accepted it because, I've already intended to spend the time gaming with folks, a number of which were friends in that group anyway, I wasn't completely bothered by it. However I kept getting updated by the head ST a bit later than expected about things that would and had affected all players in the game. I was forced to ret-con scenes I'd already run. Luckily since the group of players I was in charge of were there when I was randomly nominated to ST, they didn't hold it against me and chalked up to a bit of communication failure, which it was.

Though the funny circumstance in the game, is I'd always come ready with plot hooks and some head St approved recurring villains for my group, every other player in the game was hunting for plot and at some point they all came to me...I did a feel a bit overwhelmed the first of many times this occurred. It began to happen so often the players began to call me the Head ST or rather that it was my game. I always had to correct this stance an defer them to the actual Head ST...every time...He didn't much like it that it devolved to that but in the end he was a good sport and still a good friend


Lastly and this one was more of just a bad gaming environment.
A friend of mine, whom is a player in my current 3.5 D&D game happened to have his house alone for the day and offered to host for the days session. We all accepted and one of the players was already there. We have played at his house before, which was why we agreed. Another player whom doesn't game with us as often due to distance but is always a welcome member to our group, because he dives right into a character whether support or main and we all have a good time when he comes to play, informed he'd like to join us and would roll up a temp cleric for a support role since he wouldn't be able to make it to every session.

Time comes we all arrive at my friend's place and find another friend there we'll call him F, it was his neighbor so it wasn't too surprising, except that I thought he would be at work at the time. I had not invited F to play in the game prior. I had my reasons, he can be disruptive at times as a player and it also made my gf (plays the rogue in our group) a bit uncomfortable as they had a bit of a falling out on their friendship the year before.

On the only suitable table we have for gaming at my friend's house(plays wizard in group), there is also the setup for a hookah on the table. It seems that's what Wizard, F and our other player(monk) were doing in addition to mariokart waiting for us to show up. One of the players was our ride (duskblade). So we go to get the game set up and started. I had an npc, a bard whom I was going to have left out of the session, since our temp cleric was going to cover back up healing and support. Again F is disruptive, and starts smoking the hookah and invites Monk, Wizard, Temp Cleric and Duskblade to join in. Temp cleric refuses and wants to focus on the game, so do I. Unfortunately due to how the hookah was set up, my gf and I keep getting smoke blown in our faces. Granted they do realize this and try to adjust it or blow it away from us not to much avail. My gf had to switch seats to be away from the smoke. Only F continued with the Hookah for awhile, then became disruptive showing me things on his phone.

Now as it was not my home, I would not be in the right to just ask him to leave, more so since F had been there prior to our arrival. F had never met Temp Cleric prior to this day and his chihuahua syndrome, semi napoleon complex I guess, started showing up. He pulled out his pistol to show people, left it visible in front of everyone and then put it back where he had it. The only way to get F to stop being disruptive was to allow him to play the bard I had as a temp, so that I wouldn't be guilted by F into being a hypocrite for letting Temp cleric play and to just get on with the session and get the day over with.

The sad thing is, the behavior unnerved Temp Cleric and he has yet to show up to another session, though it may be as much part due to the time it takes for him to come up and hang with us as well as what occurred.

For those of you who would ask, yes it was loaded and he did have a license to carry it.

Melcar
2014-07-30, 02:38 PM
We had a DM at one time who came very unprepared. For a session which had been planned for 3 month. So he arrives, and said that he needs some help constructing a super cool and powerful Sorcerer, so we advise him about feats and classes. We allow 3rd party so within that the Primordial Sorcerer from Quintessential Sorcerer is pretty sick. Anyways we help build this NPC only to discover that it was the sessions main antagonist. Needless to say we were pissed off. Come to think of it, it was his last session as a DM. He used to be good and had DM'ed for us for year. Around 9 or 10 years at that point.

Sith_Happens
2014-07-30, 03:04 PM
Okay, move on, I go with a different concept.

Well there's your problem.

Sartharina
2014-07-30, 03:32 PM
Well there's your problem.Actually, looking at the situation, it was a lot more complicated than that, as far as I could tell. I could easily see both side's stances. (It's easier to justify a no-experience Qun Raider that says 'screw this, I'm out of here' on his first run than the hoops it took to get a Qun Priestess outside of Qunari territory, if I understand the setting right. Maybe. It wasn't so much that the concept didn't exist in the setting as much as not existing in that part of the setting. Maybe.)

DawnQuixotic
2014-07-30, 03:34 PM
However, it also just makes sense that you can scare people by being big and scary.
A small, smiling man calmly describing to you the things he will do if you do not cooperate is scary. So is six foot three inches of spiked plate wearing half-orc shouting "OPEN THE DOOR OR I WILL BASH YOUR HEAD IN". So what if the Orc is socially inept, he's got a big spiky club, and is perfectly capable of smashing your head in. It's a skill asking for a massive amount of circumstance bonuses from skills that your average kick-in-the-door adventuring party is going to have.


My take on it is... it's a skill thing. If he has max ranks in Intimidate, taking a -1 penalty to it for the intelligence penalty isn't going to hurt it that much.

As far as big scary things failing at intimidate, I'd say either the intimidating character is so odious, that your loathing for him overcomes our terror and makes you not want to comply, or he fails so hard at the threat that it sounds ludicrous and you just laugh at him.

Alberic Strein
2014-07-30, 09:46 PM
Intimidate might as well be the bane of DMs everywhere. I have seen good DMs start to go exponentially weird after the question of intimidating someone was brought up. To the point, DMs have a tendency to make people react to intimidation like they would like to react to it in real life.

It's sad, but repeating what you just said louder, angrier, is a valid way to get things done in real life. Even more if you actually ARE scaring the person.

DMs, me included, like the casual danger dialogue though, and gutsy characters, and people who "don't afraid of nothing" and the like. Yet, threatening someone's life is a very good way to get someone to do whatever you want, and not run away and immediately call the guards. I think "scaring people" should not be a skill, it should be a matter of fact. You're huge, armed, and got class levels? They're afraid of you and want to do whatever you say unless you are in presence of an even bigger, scarier, stronger person, in which case, they are afraid of HER.

Intimidation test should be how much you manage to weaponize that fear. They ARE scared of you, that's a given. In which case, if you try to make people run away the difficulty will be very easy. If you want to make them do what you want it's going to be a skill test, much like the coercion BRC speaks about. If you fail that skill test, they will try and run away, maybe eventually call the guards, or depending on the situation and amount of fear (dm decision... Brrrr...) they should feel, stay and fight.

Basically BRC's view, except that for me "fear" is not even part of the intimidate skill.

I dislike the D&D view that people turn hostile once you intimidated them. Blackmail does not work that way. Fear neither.

caimbuel
2014-07-31, 03:08 AM
DM make whatever you want.

Players all make arcane somethings in front of DM who says nothing.

DM says ok, homebrew world and arcane is major outlawed, there is no way to hide it, killed on sight.

Played first session to be nice, after 5th lvls came after our 1st levels and almost TPK'd us 3 times with major NPC's saving the day I had such a bad taste in my mouth I politely responded "No Thank You" when asked if I was coming back.

Don't ever want to be second class to NPC's that bad again, was wondering why us PC's were even there.

Stuebi
2014-07-31, 03:14 AM
Might be that I allready posted some of these allready, if that's the case, feel free to whack me!

In my ongoing quest to find a Forumposting Roleplaying game I can participate in, i've stumbled upon a few...questionable ones. You see, im not terribly familiar with a lot of settings, since i've only started the whole thing around a year back. So I'm looking for something Newcomer friendly, with nice people where I can just write a few posts per day to satisfy my inner author. (Btw, if you have something for me, feel free to pm!)

The first one was a guy who insisted that you announce everything you do. And I do mean EVERYTHING. If you didnt, your character didnt do it. This may sound weird to some of you, ofc you are playing your character, so you naturally communicate what he's doing at the time. But our DM wanted even the most mundane thing mentioned.

Prime example, me announcing that my warrior was taking a bath in the tavern we were resting at. Went into the room and said that my guy is taking a bath now. Did not mention that he took off his armor beforehand, so there's a grown man in a full platemail sitting inside a bathtub, playing with a rubber ducky.

Announced that I was charging a Bandit in the woods. Did not specifically mention that I was using the sword I had drawn beforehand, which meant I was no trying to beat an armored enemy to death with my fists.

If not for the fact that a lot of this was very funny we would've probably quit after the second or third session. Eventually however, the DM appearantly realised we were making fun of the whole thing, instead of taking it seriously, and he quit the group.


Another one allowed skilltests like flirting, intimidate etc. to be used in the group, which could basically turn your character into an absolute tool. I dunno if this is the standard, but allowing our female Ranger to roll on flirting with my character, and turn him into a submissive slave if she's successful seems a little much.

"You love her, so you naturally do whatever she wants."

Oh yeah, I forgot how affection works for a minute there.


Last but not least, the girl who tried to murder her boyfriend over the course of two sessions, because they had an argument. I gotta admit, I was kind of impressed how creative two people with realtionship-issues can get. But when you reach the point where the DM and a player yell their roll-results at each other, while Stuebi tries to Bolt trough the window, it gets awkward.

illyahr
2014-07-31, 01:07 PM
Actually, looking at the situation, it was a lot more complicated than that, as far as I could tell. I could easily see both side's stances. (It's easier to justify a no-experience Qun Raider that says 'screw this, I'm out of here' on his first run than the hoops it took to get a Qun Priestess outside of Qunari territory, if I understand the setting right. Maybe. It wasn't so much that the concept didn't exist in the setting as much as not existing in that part of the setting. Maybe.)

Depends on what they mean by Qunari. Qunari is anyone who follows the Qun. A human priestess who follows the Qun is a Qunari priestess, which qualifies for the concept. The race themselves are the Kossuth. A Kossuth priestess would be next to impossible to find outside of her homeland as they have absolutely no inclination to travel at all.

But yes, I can also see both sides to the argument. Seems more a lack of clarification than a direct confrontation but exacerbation from the idea denigration would seed further aggravation. The only mitigation for further irritation would be a cultivation of player unification. :smallcool:

Sartharina
2014-07-31, 02:04 PM
Prime example, me announcing that my warrior was taking a bath in the tavern we were resting at. Went into the room and said that my guy is taking a bath now. Did not mention that he took off his armor beforehand, so there's a grown man in a full platemail sitting inside a bathtub, playing with a rubber ducky.As bad as some of the incidents you posted previously are, this mental image is too hilarious to not be a thing.

Stuebi
2014-07-31, 03:45 PM
As bad as some of the incidents you posted previously are, this mental image is too hilarious to not be a thing.

The thing that actually amde it all the more fun was the fact that he delivered stuff like this with an absolute serious tone. I still dont know if he did that on purpose as a form of trolling, or if he actually believed that this is the way things should work.

Granted, as someone relatively new to the whole Pen & Paper-thing, I tend to just roll with a lot of stuff, assuming it's the norm. And in that case, I was having fun, so I didnt really care either way.

Darkmonger27
2014-07-31, 04:14 PM
My worst DM is actually a good friend of mine, who has a tendency to railroad.
First session, 4e, we were following a group of militia? Soldiers? Bandits? I never found out. And I'm playing a changeling, so I try to knock someone out and replace them, and figure out their purpose.
"You can't."
Why not?
"They all travel in groups."
Even when they're sleeping?
"Yep."
So eventually we race ahead of them and find a monastery that wants us to help them fend off the invaders. And I ask why, and what the reward is. The head monk? (never figured out what he was either) tells me none of your business, and then he gives me a vision of violent, horrible things he could do to me. At this point I go downstairs to get popcorn. I come back up after 2 minutes to learn my character is dead.
What?
"He died in an epic battle against the raiders."
So I make a new character?
"Nope."
Why not?
"Because you're so far away from civilization, no one would find the monastery."
We did!
And then the group went on and were killed by a demon lord (never learned which), so no loss. The entire group told him that his plot sucked, his monk was a friggen god, and it was no fair I died when getting snacks.
The campaign, obviously, never continued.

The second time he DMed was a much better game, even if we were still softly railroaded. He did interrupt an investigation of his background detail, and he did have a DMPC unstatted epic wizard, but little stuff was easier. He gave my changeling (yes I like changelings) homebrewed glammered armor, and, needless to say, changeling + glammered armor + eyebite warlock power = greater than law.

A close runner up is another DM who had such a boring maze, I took to mapping it for fun, and we were so tired when the excitement started, we called it a night and gave up on the campaign.

SamaelOfChaos
2014-07-31, 04:56 PM
Just remembered another fun tidbit that made me want to quit PNP altogether:

When I was starting out with PNP RPGs and DND I was going through a kind of depressive shy moment and those RPGs were kind of a treatment for myself to be more open and fun around people yadda yadda. SO, imagine my happy surprise when my DM threatened to lower the charisma score of my character because I'm not acting like he thinks I should:smalleek:. I was playing a 3,0 Sorcerer.

Has anything like this happened to anyone?

Marlowe
2014-08-01, 04:57 AM
Just remembered another fun tidbit that made me want to quit PNP altogether:

When I was starting out with PNP RPGs and DND I was going through a kind of depressive shy moment and those RPGs were kind of a treatment for myself to be more open and fun around people yadda yadda. SO, imagine my happy surprise when my DM threatened to lower the charisma score of my character because I'm not acting like he thinks I should:smalleek:. I was playing a 3,0 Sorcerer.

Has anything like this happened to anyone?

Not the DM. But in one game I was involved in I managed to burn another player with what ( to him) was a real verbal zinger. He proceeded to flood me with messages about I was roleplaying wrong because playing as a member of a generally non-aggressive race I was apparently not allowed to employ sarcasm.

Lost Demiurge
2014-08-01, 02:53 PM
Mm. I'm sure I've been someone's worst DM at some point. Hopefully that was years ago, but y'never know.

The worst DM I ever ran into... Well, technically he was a player for most of our time with him, about 3-4 sessions of DnD. But he did try his hand at running for us later. Anyway, he was a closet neo-nazi who wanted to try running us through a Hunter game. We had one session of prologue where NPC's told us how screwed we were. No real conflict, just a ton of foreshadowing, and we didn't do much. At the end of the session he asked for honest feedback on the game. Bit of a mistake, there. I watched him struggle to keep anger off his face as I told him ways to improve things. Wasn't even that harsh...

And though I didn't know it at the time, he was sort of creeping on the female players. All of them.

He left the group shortly thereafter. (I suspect that learning that one of our members was Jewish had something to do with that.) Ended up having legal troubles for reasons I'd rather not say, later on.

We didn't know how mucked up the guy was at the time he joined, is my only defense. Once his issues started surfacing, we were rather glad to see the back of him.

But I suppose he was the worst for out-of-game reasons, so let's see...

Ah, back in the 90s there was a guy who liked running Amber live-action games at a local con. It's a diceless system, so it was a weird conversion to LARP. He kind of ran them like dinner murder mystery parties, only without the dinner. Or any real plot. Or any real guidance. Usually it ended up with one person knowing what was really going on, and having no real reason to share it with others.

So yeah, I'd say that's 8 hours of my life between the two times I went that I'll never get back. I get it, LARP is hard to do, I have problems running live-action myself, but... Jeeze, dude. I'd never seen a boring Amber game until those convention events.

Oh hey wait, I forgot my first shadowrun GM. I was coming in a newbie, and looking to learn the system. I modeled my elven hit man after an obscure character called Lusiphur, from a little comic called Poison Elves. I did my best to cop a proper IC attitude, as that's what the fiction and the world reinforced...

He freaking hated me. Don't know if it was the snooty elf concept, or if I rubbed him the wrong way, but he started treating me badly out-of-game because of his hatred of my character, or the way I played him. Hell, one of his more jerkish long-term players picked up on it, and tried to join in on the jackery, but I ignored him, which threw him off.

I never got to do a damn thing in the game. NPC's bullied me and screwed me over at every turn. Half the time I tried to do stuff I didn't even get to roll dice, it was decided via fiat. Eventually I flipped full passive-aggressive and started reading books at the table, which annoyed him. I felt no guilt for it. Finally the game fell apart, and good riddance.

I'm okay with the guy now, for what it's worth. That was years back, and we were both younger and dumber.

Flashy
2014-08-03, 08:22 PM
This is nothing in comparison with everyone else's but a DM who insists on reducing leveling speed to 1/12th the normal progression because he only likes the early game is kind of annoying if he doesn't tell anyone this is going to be happening in advance.

TiaC
2014-08-04, 12:14 AM
So, I have two stories.

The first DM was actually a pretty decent DM, it was his house that was the problem. It should have been a Superfund site. We played in this living/dining room with a carpet that looked like it hadn't been vacuumed in a decade. However, you could barely see it under the layer of empty soda bottles, junk mail and assorted schmutz. The table was covered in a huge battlemat that never seemed to be moved. There was a large, algae-covered fishtank in the back of the room that made it really humid. The whole place smelled like unwashed human, decay and a touch of urine. There were a large number of flies every session, and dead ones could be found everywhere, including the surface we ate off of. He also had a dog who was shut in the back every session but would sometimes start to bark and whine. The first session, I got a ride home from the other new player and he said that he had cleaned mold off the fan before he felt safe turning it on. I was very happy when we moved to another player's house.



The second was more the fault of the DM's ability. It was a college game night and he asked if anyone wanted to start a game. So, three of us say yes and we quickly roll up characters. I make a Bard/Paladin of Freedom. He describes the setting (Floating islands with skyships) and it sounds cool.

Then game starts. We don't know each other, and we start in a beer garden. Then suddenly, Fihyrs attack. Fihyrs are from MM2, they are born from nightmares* die in sunlight, and are badly over CRed at CR3. We are level 7. It's a pathetic and nonsensical encounter, as the city is perfectly calm, with nothing to birth Fihyrs. We beat them, at this point we are the only people in the beer garden and then wander off together.

We look for something to do and are told that there are problems in the sewers. "Ok" we say "Let's go deal with that!" Then he says that no, that's a job for druids, you can't help. Then we are offered a job as skyship guards. The DM tries to say my character wouldn't want money for helping because he's a paladin, but I manage to get past that and on to a plot hook after around 90 minutes of us looking for one. However, then he just gives us two random and badly explained encounters, both of which see at least one player unable to contribute. When he offered a second session, I declined.


As the remnants of hundreds of people’s nightmares swirl through the ether, they somehow combine with leftover magical power and coalesce into these physical monsters. A few random dream images aren’t enough; it takes the strong emotional energy of a mass of people under duress to spawn a fihyr. The right combination of conditions is most often found in cities that are under siege, or being terrorized by monsters, or suffering from famine, civil war, or some other mass trauma.

3WhiteFox3
2014-08-04, 02:12 AM
Mine was a PF GM with some serious issues. He was very new to GMing and fairly new to playing (for reference, I've DM'ed several times the years he'd played). That would have been fine except he was completely unable to realize his weaknesses and that he wasn't a very good GM. His plots were Cliche and felt very basic. (An example: big king dude gives a bunch of 3rd level adventurers a suspiciously comprehensive list of powerful magic items and artifacts that's basically the fantasy version of a scavenger hunt.) None of his characters were very interesting. He really didn't understand concepts like WBL, CR or allowing players to have agency.

One of his fights was against a Night Hag (a CR 9 creature) at level 3, as our first encounter, and it was practically a random one at that. It just came out of nowhere, ate our horses and we had to ineffectually fight it (he explicitly said that he wanted to get one or two of our characters either dead or really close to death, for the first fight of the campaign) for several rounds (the only reason we survived that long is because he really didn't understand the rules or even basic tactics for running an interesting and challenging encounter. Anyway, eventually his OP super-beautiful, awesome Mary-Sue NPC came and saved us and dumped the plot on us in the most uninteresting way possible (she basically stumbled across us and went, why shouldn't I tell this random group of adventurer's where the powerful artifact of awesome is).

This was after a very long introduction where most of the players were bored stiff (even me and another player, who were actually really trying to immerse ourselves despite the GM's flaws, got bored pretty quickly). What's worse, he actually had the nerve to blame the other players for being bored and talking to themselves, instead of the fact that he wasn't allowing anyone to really do anything of consequence. I mean I wouldn't have been happy with them doing that in one of my games, but I would have talked to them, asking them how I could draw them in. The pacing was just awful with only one or two encounters (not just fights, but any sort of challenge) each night, and he really wasn't as clever as he thought he was. Fortunately, the game didn't last long, and I GMed for a short while after.To be fair, he was young, and the other players weren't the most mature bunch either, and he took up the GM mantle after the regular one moved. So I understand why he wasn't very good; but one of the things that you need to realize even as a new GM is that all your story (regardless how good it is) is meaningless if the players aren't having any fun.

Also, he constantly got into arguments with people with equal or greater roleplaying experience (including me). Trying to tell us that we just had to give him a chance and that his story was so awesome even without any player agency on our parts or anything interesting happening. He actually tried to tell me that 'I should understand what he was doing as a fellow GM' (I did, it was just crap and I would never pull half of the things he tried, because I know how hard it is do well) and that he was being realistic with a deep story. However, this never came across to me or the players, regardless of whether or not that was true, so regardless of how well-planned his story was, it didn't matter if no one cared.

To be fair, I've lost most of my vitriol for the game, because at least I was roleplaying (there's been no other good opportunities after the players basically just stopped coming without so much as an explanation why, and it wasn't even because they didn't like my games, they said that they did) oh well, there will be other opportunities later.

Ravens_cry
2014-08-04, 05:13 AM
While not like some of the horror stories here, I do have a DM who has some quirks that tend to bug.
One, over rapid advancement, even skipping levels on multiple occasions.
Or skipping encounters in Adventure Paths because they are too 'boring' or 'easy', leaving only the really tricky ones that often leave many PC standing there gawking. Maybe they are easy, but, especially when you have been fighting a lot of tricky encounters, it can be downright cathartic have a fight where you can just go in and wipe the floor. He tends to take the 'Story beats rules' adage a little too close to heart. Yes, it has its place but often-times it can make informed decision making difficult, nullify effort, and remove player agency.
He also has an annoying habit of telling players how they rect to something.
I am not afraid to role play things, so if a DM says I act a certain way from an effect, I often feel like he's controlling my character, which, just rankles. You tell me the status effect, and I'll give you an appropriate response based on my character, dammit.
But lastly and not leastly*, he often doesn't read things top to bottom, to the point where his name is practically a by-word for missing out how some ability or really works because of it.

*not a word, but it should be

Held
2014-08-04, 05:44 AM
The worst DM I've ever had had made a decision. His decision was that his adventure featured one way to go about it, and one way only. He told us beforehand that he "wasn't good at sandbox and tended to railroad". We went along with it─after all, railroading might not be the most exciting thing, but sometimes it can be done well. Maybe we'd have no reason to avoid the railroad.

Turns out we just didn't understand "railroad".

DM: "You come across a wooden door. The door is locked."
Rogue: "I'll lockpick the door. (roll) Aw ****, nat 1."
Fighter: "Eh, no worries. Wooden door. I'll break it down."
DM: "You can't."
Fighter: "I haven't even rolled yet."
DM: "The rogue already tried opening the door but couldn't, so you have to find another way in."
Fighter: "By breaking down the door."
DM: "No, you already attempted opening this door and that failed."

Frustrated, we carry on trying to find another method. The DM gets annoyed. Tells us we should be looking for more mundane methods instead of trying to think of things like, "Hide nearby until one of the thugs tries to open the door." Okay, we understood there'd be railroading, but creativity is being stopped here. From the encounters and challenges before this it's slowly dawned on me that the DM means that for everything that needs to be bypassed, there is exactly 1 method to go about it, and only after that fails is there a second method (that cannot fail, no rolls involved).

We finally manage to get past the door (turns out we had to knock and someone'd open it from the inside), and fight the BBEG for the adventure. Our job entailed to return him to the magistrate alive... so we try to bring him in alive, right? We first talk to him. He refuses regardless of a high Diplomacy roll, and is not open to any conversation. OK, we get it, we're meant to fight. We begin the fight. BBEG is wounded, so we go in for capturing alive... except, apparently, non-lethal attacks are actually quite lethal, and a punch to the face broke his neck because he was at -2 HP. ... Okay. We argue for a bit, but finally accept that, okay, we accidentally killed him, **** happens.

We return to town and get the city guard sic'd on us for expressly going against the magistrate's orders and killing the man, who turns out to never have been evil but the magistrate was. We basically murdered Robin Hood. Despite our best attempts not to. Our characters then get sodomised in jail, which inspires our characters with great vengeance against the magistrate. (EDIT: He'd decided we'd want vengeance. We had no choice in how our characters would feel.)

At this point we told the DM we did not want to continue the adventure. Understandably, the DM told us he did not want to continue our friendship.

Rolero
2014-08-04, 06:11 AM
I met my worst DM on my early years of roleplaying. I was a cyberpunk campaign and I was really excited about it, because until then I could only played it DMing for some friends. So I appear with a ready to go character and He doesn't allow it, telling me that they play with some house rules and additional ones for character creation. Ok, no problem I say, so, what's the deal? And he present me a book I've never seen (I had the core rule book and two of the chrome books) and explain that it contains new rules, some new classes and most importantly, a lot of new background tables.

So, completely oblivious to where I was getting into, I went for one of the new classes, the spy, and procced to roll my backgrounds. The problem with this new tables (later, I learned that most of them where invented by this DM) were that although they contained some very good things (like, extra build points, new special abilities, experimental tech...) most of the rolls were catastrophic, and of course, I only got those. I ended up begining with no possesions (nothing, not even my regular clothes), indebt to the moob, and infected with an experimental virus.

I could have tried and take this character as a challenge but He didn't live for more than two sesions. You see, the greatest enjoyment of this DM was to kill his players or put them in the most hopeless situations against imposible odds. So death came frecuently, so much indeed that one sesion I ended up rolling three diferent characters...
I would have left the group, but back then there weren't many players around, so out of options, I tried to grab the bull by its horns, by creating the most optimazed and though mercenary I could roll.
And after eight straight sesions without dying, I think I did well. But soon after that, all the players were tired of piling dead characters so the game ended.

A year later, same DM started an AD&D game, and again, out of other available players, I join the game. But knowing this DM, I tried to be as resilient as I could. My first character though wasn't lucky with its rolls so I played a dwarf warrior trying to compensate but wasn't enough and bited the dust pretty quickly. His sucesor though, got incredible rolls, so I maxed his CON, rolled a savage elf and played it as a ranger. Again, this proved to be the wise decision.
But one sesion, after pit us against an OP enemy, He was looking at me, grinning, as he rolled damage, and when I informed that I was still alive he was enraged, acusing me of cheting my hit points. After proving my innocence I decided I have had enough of this jerk and left the game. Game of course, that didn't last for much longer.

Kalmageddon
2014-08-04, 10:54 AM
Our characters then get sodomised in jail, which inspires our characters with great vengeance against the magistrate. (EDIT: He'd decided we'd want vengeance. We had no choice in how our characters would feel.)

At this point we told the DM we did not want to continue the adventure. Understandably, the DM told us he did not want to continue our friendship.

Wow... I'd say this is the part that should have earned him the dishonorable mention, not the railroading... :smalleek:
This actually reminds me of a campaign in which I never played, thank God, but got told about:

Basically, under the pretense of a normal D&D campaign, this GM decides to set the campaign in a world working on hentai logic: the solution to everything was ****ing, rape was the logical consequence of being defeated by anything, including animals and monsters several size categories bigger than the PCs, and being a wanted criminal makes you get sexually assaulted by an entire town of horny dwarves.
All of this was apparently hilarious to the GM, who couldn't get enough of it and forced the players in worst and worst situations all the time. One of the players was the girlfriend of the GM and apparently the resident Mary Sue who was immune to all of the above but never complained about it and in fact did her best to help the GM troll the players by being as obnoxious as possibile.

Held
2014-08-04, 11:24 AM
In his defence, it was (heavily) implied and not explicit. My friends regularly make jokes about not dropping soap in jail; I was furious at the time, but now I look back on it and think the DM might have just critically failed the check to distinguish jokes from serious. And D&D is serious business. Personal DM fetishes put aside, I found the railroading a critical DM failure, and the last part a failure as a person to determine what is and is not appropriate.

EDIT: I understand I'm playing devil's advocate here, but I strongly regret the way our friendship ended and don't think he was a malicious person.

Sith_Happens
2014-08-04, 01:48 PM
Understandably, the DM told us he did not want to continue our friendship.

If you mean "understandably" as in "not surprising given this guy's character" then sure, but that's the only definition by which it's understandable.

Mikeavelli
2014-08-04, 09:27 PM
This was several years ago, I still bring this guy up every so often. He grew up with 2nd Edition, but doesn't seem to have actually played a lot of the game, so a lot of suggestions from the 2nd ed DMG were taken out of context, and rigidly enforced at the expense of fun.

- He used the Plot Hook from the 2nd edition DM's guide where, as a spur for adventure, your characters own land, and it's being heavily taxed. You need to go on an adventure in order to pay your taxes. Unfortunately, we spent two sessions discussing tax laws instead of actually adventuring.

- Having above-average stats is min-maxing. Having the maximum possible skill ranks in a skill for your level is min-maxing. Multi-classing is Min-maxing. Wizards purchasing scrolls to expand their spellbook is min-maxing. An arbitrary selection of feats, spells, and classes were banned because they were min-maxing. Almost every attempt at divination was min-maxing or metagaming.

- Wealth was severely restricted, to the extent that characters would regularly "commit suicide" (willingly engage in a tactically unsound way, ensuring death) in order to bring themselves up to WBL, because that was the only way we could get new equipment. There were plenty of opportunities for this, because he would consistently throw "CR-Appropriate" encounters at us, which we couldn't defeat because we were lacking in equipment.

- RPing was enforced in bizarre, arbitrary ways. We were forced to roll saves against beneficial spells cast by Party members if the player didn't say something in-character communicating what the spell was. For those of you reading thinking that this actually sounds like a good idea? It isn't. Just trust me on this.

- Another bizarre RP enforcement: Experienced players weren't allowed to help out inexperienced players. Can we solve the current plotline by having the Cleric cast 'Find the path?" Yes? Too bad, if your character doesn't have knowledge: Religion, you can't actually make that suggestion to her. Also, Find the Path is broken min-maxing, as already discussed.

- More than once, he ran an adventure where the setup consisted of "a mysterious power-broker sends you on a quest for a valuable item" without any description of the item, where it is, what it does, or why he wants it.

"Where are we going?"
"It's far to the North, no-one knows exactly."
"Like, general area? How about a map?"
"No, you don't get a map. Stop trying to metagame."
"What. Alright, whatever, we start walking north."
....

"What does it look like?"
"You'll know it when you see it."
"No, seriously, what does it look like, because I see this rock on the ground, and it looks about right."

- The 'we start walking north' bit actually worked. We just magically found where we were supposed to go. This was after every divination failed, and every gather information attempt we made failed. Apparently, he wanted us to wander in the wilderness for a bit as an excuse for random encounters.

- We were regularly ambushed while camping for no reason. This once featured the question, "is the lookout looking to the north, or to the south?" - it turns out the lookout was looking in the wrong direction, and a group of six Hill Giants snuck up on us hidden by waist-high grass. Human waist, not giant waist.

- The guy-we're-working-for-who-obviously-betrayed-us has the audacity to be surprised when we show up, and cast Disintegrate, followed by Gust of Wind.

--------------------------------------------------------------


I actually used this guy as a personal case study on what not to do as a DM. He's the guy who made me sit back and think, "I can run a game better than this." - Followed by writing up an adventure, convincing the group to play it, and running a better game.

So, I guess I owe him that.

Visivicous
2014-08-04, 11:51 PM
I'm not sure if this counts as horrible DM, but I do feel bad about it (I was the DM, actually, Story Teller in this case). This happened around this time last year. The oWoD anniversary edition line of books had come out, and I'd spent (what is to me) a small fortune getting everything needed to play a game. We'd run several one shots to warm up, and had one fun multi-session game. My players: my best friend, his wife, his step daughter (14), and two of my brothers (15 & 17).

Now, my brothers were only visiting for the summer, and this incident took place on the very last day that we could possibly have a game. For the game, with input from my players, I had come up with a one shot where they would play low generation Sabbat 'trouble shooters', working for the 'True Black Hand'. I'd cleared all clans, and gave them freebie points befitting elders. Sure, not original, but my players thought it would be fun. I'd planned several 'missions' that tied together, that we should have been able to play through at a fast pace. Then some things happened that destroyed my mood (I was really looking forward to one final game), and I threw a fit :smalleek:. I am not proud of it, and apologized later, but I probably qualified as a terrible ST at the time. Here's the long of it:

1. I'd gotten off work, raced home to grab my gaming materials and my siblings, got some snacks, and picked up Starbucks for all of my players. I arrived at my BF's house in record time... to discover that my BF and his family were not home. After some texting back and forth, I was informed that they had forgotten about the game (I have no idea how, as we'd been discussing it over the phone and in person all week) and would be back soon. It took them about an hour :smallmad:

2. When they got there, everyone just piddled around for another hour or so. I had to corral them into the dining room (largest table in the house) one-by-one. A small nit-pick, the table was filthy, and I was the only one working on cleaning it.

3. Several weeks prior, my BF's step daughter had knocked over a full glass of milk while we were playing a game. My friend's book and some character sheets were ruined. As a result we had all agreed on a rule: No liquids on the table, place your drinks on the floor (linoleum). Since I had cleaned the table, I knew that there were no threatening beverages present. I laid out the character sheets and assorted materials, then left the room to see what was keeping my friend from joining us (turned out he was fixing his mother in-law's printer). I'd only been gone a few minutes, when I hear shouting from the dining room. My friend's step daughter had knocked over her glass of soda, and it went all over the table. Luckily, only the materials which I had printed (character sheets, character creation guides, etc.) had been ruined, and she was frantically cleaning up. I was miffed at this, but kids screw up. Then the girl's mother stated that she'd known the glass was there, but decided against reminding her kid of the 'no liquids' rule... 'because'. WTF? That got me mad. Kids make mistakes and forget things, but parents should remind them when they do. At any rate, I swallowed my anger because they were cleaning things up.

4. I went back to help my friend with the printer (as we now needed it for new character sheets). This took a good 20 minutes. Finally everything is ready, and I head back to the dining room. Where I discovered that my BF's wife and her daughter had given up on cleaning. I noticed a trail of soda coming off the table and onto my chair... where my bag of books was sitting. I quickly checked the bag (made of cloth), and sure enough, it had absorbed a lot of fluid. That’s when I lost it. I told my brothers to pack up their stuff, and we left. On our way out, my BF’s wife starts yelling at me, saying it’s not a big deal, and it’s bull crap that I decided to leave because of an accident. I then spent the rest of my night cleaning and drying my books.
Later, after I calmed down, I explained to my friend that I don’t make very much money, and I tried to explain that replacing books which I should not have purchased in the first place (used my credit card) was a big deal for me. I also tried to explain that it was not the accident, but the failure to correct the accident that had damaged my books, and that’s what pissed me off.

Kalmageddon
2014-08-05, 05:35 AM
What kind of person doesn't clean a soda spill from their own table? How can you "give up" on it? :smallconfused: Do they do that for everything in their apartment? They must have cockroaches as big as cats!

Dimers
2014-08-05, 11:19 AM
Yeah, that's more like "What was your worst host ever?" Sure, it'd be nice to act all serene an' Buddhist an' $#!+, but I'd be really pissed too if somebody had offered to host an event and then:

Forgot it was even happening;
Had to be herded into doing it once reminded, showing even more distinctly that they didn't care;
Didn't clean the space to be used, either beforehand or as soon as they arrived;
Broke agreed-upon rules about how the space is to be used;
Gave no justification for breaking said rules;
Damaged my valuable materials by their negligence and rule-breaking in their home without offer of recompense.

illyahr
2014-08-05, 12:15 PM
I'm not sure if this counts as horrible DM, but I do feel bad about it (I was the DM, actually, Story Teller in this case). This happened around this time last year. The oWoD anniversary edition line of books had come out, and I'd spent (what is to me) a small fortune getting everything needed to play a game. We'd run several one shots to warm up, and had one fun multi-session game. My players: my best friend, his wife, his step daughter (14), and two of my brothers (15 & 17).

Now, my brothers were only visiting for the summer, and this incident took place on the very last day that we could possibly have a game. For the game, with input from my players, I had come up with a one shot where they would play low generation Sabbat 'trouble shooters', working for the 'True Black Hand'. I'd cleared all clans, and gave them freebie points befitting elders. Sure, not original, but my players thought it would be fun. I'd planned several 'missions' that tied together, that we should have been able to play through at a fast pace. Then some things happened that destroyed my mood (I was really looking forward to one final game), and I threw a fit :smalleek:. I am not proud of it, and apologized later, but I probably qualified as a terrible ST at the time. Here's the long of it:

1. I'd gotten off work, raced home to grab my gaming materials and my siblings, got some snacks, and picked up Starbucks for all of my players. I arrived at my BF's house in record time... to discover that my BF and his family were not home. After some texting back and forth, I was informed that they had forgotten about the game (I have no idea how, as we'd been discussing it over the phone and in person all week) and would be back soon. It took them about an hour :smallmad:

2. When they got there, everyone just piddled around for another hour or so. I had to corral them into the dining room (largest table in the house) one-by-one. A small nit-pick, the table was filthy, and I was the only one working on cleaning it.

3. Several weeks prior, my BF's step daughter had knocked over a full glass of milk while we were playing a game. My friend's book and some character sheets were ruined. As a result we had all agreed on a rule: No liquids on the table, place your drinks on the floor (linoleum). Since I had cleaned the table, I knew that there were no threatening beverages present. I laid out the character sheets and assorted materials, then left the room to see what was keeping my friend from joining us (turned out he was fixing his mother in-law's printer). I'd only been gone a few minutes, when I hear shouting from the dining room. My friend's step daughter had knocked over her glass of soda, and it went all over the table. Luckily, only the materials which I had printed (character sheets, character creation guides, etc.) had been ruined, and she was frantically cleaning up. I was miffed at this, but kids screw up. Then the girl's mother stated that she'd known the glass was there, but decided against reminding her kid of the 'no liquids' rule... 'because'. WTF? That got me mad. Kids make mistakes and forget things, but parents should remind them when they do. At any rate, I swallowed my anger because they were cleaning things up.

4. I went back to help my friend with the printer (as we now needed it for new character sheets). This took a good 20 minutes. Finally everything is ready, and I head back to the dining room. Where I discovered that my BF's wife and her daughter had given up on cleaning. I noticed a trail of soda coming off the table and onto my chair... where my bag of books was sitting. I quickly checked the bag (made of cloth), and sure enough, it had absorbed a lot of fluid. That’s when I lost it. I told my brothers to pack up their stuff, and we left. On our way out, my BF’s wife starts yelling at me, saying it’s not a big deal, and it’s bull crap that I decided to leave because of an accident. I then spent the rest of my night cleaning and drying my books.
Later, after I calmed down, I explained to my friend that I don’t make very much money, and I tried to explain that replacing books which I should not have purchased in the first place (used my credit card) was a big deal for me. I also tried to explain that it was not the accident, but the failure to correct the accident that had damaged my books, and that’s what pissed me off.

Totally justified. Even to someone who makes a decent amount of money, a full set of oWoD books is not cheap. Not only that, they reacted as if it wasn't a big deal that a significant time/cash investment was ruined by sheer apathy.

Visivicous
2014-08-05, 07:22 PM
Wow, thanks for the support. I usually don't get angry about such things, so I still feel guilty about losing my cool. In their defense, they also have two toddlers, so things can get hectic fairly quickly.

After actually writing this up, I realized that what upset me the most, was not the damage to my books. It was that they forgot about a game that I was really looking forward to. If it had not been for that, the rest would have just been an annoyance.

In retrospect, I wish that I had been able to let go of it, forgive and forget then and there. Odds are, if I had done that, we would have had a fun game.

I still go over to their house often, to watch movies or play video games, but the worst part is, we have not had an RPG or even MTG night since.

aberratio ictus
2014-08-08, 05:52 AM
So, I guess I'll share one of my own, then.

I was playing a paladin. An old, battle-hardened veteran, very calm and thoughtful.

To the GM's credit, the world was very nicely crafted and quite awesome (even though he liked to change information he gave us on the fly once he noticed we could eventually use the background of his world to our advantage)

Mostly, things went well, the group was awesome. I hadn't planned on becoming the party leader, but ended up as one anyways, since the other characters naturally turned to mine for advice and planning.

Things started to go downhill when I found a holy chalice of my order, which had since been disbanded. Unbeknownst to me, the chalice had been cursed, which made me kill the old hermit who had been holding it in a bloodrage once I touched it. No save, no nothing. Doesn't sound too bad to you? To me it didn't either, back then. I thought it was probably going to be an awesome story element, and carrying around an old, if cursed, holy relic wasn't too bad in itself.
Later on I found out the GM only had my paladin fall because he thought the group felt too confident with my healing abilities in play. Ah, well.

I spent the rest of the game as a fighter without bonus feats (this wasn't dnd, so my character actually was able to contribute quite a bit, but still...)

Slowly but surely, over the course of a campaign, incidents started showing up that showed the DM and I had vastly different opinions about how a paladin was meant to be played. The problem was, actually, the DM thought there was only one way a paladin could be played appropriately.

Once, we met a young priestess, who needed help clearing out a holy monastery. Of course, we helped dislodging the evil cult that had used the monastery for their own ends. In the end, we succeded, and the priestess went on to perform a holy ritual to cleanse the place. She (seemingly) succeded.

When we were back on the road, the GM started scolding me for not performing the ritual myself. Myself? As a fallen paladin without any holy powers? I had had no idea I even knew how to perform such a ritual, and I had no reason to do it myself when there was a priestess here who was planning to do it herself from the beginning.
The GM replied with my ranks in knowledge (religion) (of which I had a lot), I would of course know how to do the ritual, and I should have noticed the priestess was too young and inexperienced to do it (she acted very confident, and the rest of the group agreed with my impression).
In the end, it was my fault that the priestess had been tainted by the evil influence of the place (and she would later reappear in the campaign as an evil necromancer).

Later on, we helped a baron to defend his castle agains foreign invaders. We won, and the baron was planning on torturing the captive footsoldiers in order to find out if they were demonically tainted. When I spoke out against the torture, the GM simply replied: "Your god is fine with torture." My jaw dropped. (remember the ranks in knowledge (religion)?) He's supposed to be lawful good, I said. True, the GM replied, but he's fine with torture anyways. How would you get information from evildoers if not through torture? I had a few suggestions, but they somehow failed to convince the DM. In the end, I said I wouldn't follow this god if he was fine with torture. So, my character's inner religious struggle began, in his early fifties, and with a background of a studied theologian. (Of course, my character still was true to his values and managed to convince the baron through diplomacy. Which was, of course, a triumph for evil that day)

There was also that time my GM wanted me to strike a deal with a demon in order to save a village and the group, and when I refused, he got angry, accused my paladin of selfishness and me of bringing him to use GM fiat to save the group without need.

There's been a lot of such stories over the campaign, and it's probably futile to tell them all.

In the end, the GM obviously had enough. He brought in an old friend of his, who was playing another paladin, who was, as I was told later, only in the game to "show me how to act like a proper paladin". Which is, to me, pretty insulting in and for itself.

He was playing the most vain, self-righteous over the top holier-than-thou prick I have ever seen. Naturally, the group hated him.
The player stopped showing up after a few sessions, but the GM ran him as a DMPC afterwards.

Some time later, the holy relic of the order was stolen from the hands of one of my character's friends, and the DMPC paladin decided I had failed all that is good and holy one times to many, and proceeded to try and smite me.

Of course, the part of the group who was at the same place at that time came to my aid, but the other paladin managed to incapacitate them without any problems, since he was a far higher level than we were. In the end, he smote my fallen paladin in a dirty backalley, where he bled to death.

The rest of the players, of course, were horrified and about as angry as me, especially once the GM said if it hadn't been the paladin, he would have sent an epic level demon to kill my character, as he was fed up with my paladin disrupting the game and he had hoped things would get back to normal once I made a new character.

The game died that night, the GM of course blaming the other player's strange inability to meaningfully continue after one of their number had died.

Cronocke
2014-08-08, 06:24 AM
I had said my piece and wanted to just sit back and watch from then on, but...


...he liked to change information he gave us on the fly once he noticed we could eventually use the background of his world to our advantage...

Strike one! The whole point of giving your players setting information is so they can learn how to roleplay a character who lives there. Changing the setting so they cannot do that is a sign that the GM is bad.


Things started to go downhill when I found a holy chalice of my order, which had since been disbanded. Unbeknownst to me, the chalice had been cursed, which made me kill the old hermit who had been holding it in a bloodrage once I touched it. No save, no nothing. Doesn't sound too bad to you? To me it didn't either, back then. I thought it was probably going to be an awesome story element, and carrying around an old, if cursed, holy relic wasn't too bad in itself.
Later on I found out the GM only had my paladin fall because he thought the group felt too confident with my healing abilities in play. Ah, well.

I spent the rest of the game as a fighter without bonus feats (this wasn't dnd, so my character actually was able to contribute quite a bit, but still...)

Strike two! You always allow a save against a mind affecting effect, and you never cause a caster of any type to lose their powers just because you're unhappy with how cleverly they use it. Raise the stakes, or make healing less important compared to the other things that need doing. (Do I heal my party member right now, or do I get the innocent child out of the battle area first?)


Once, we met a young priestess, who needed help clearing out a holy monastery. Of course, we helped dislodging the evil cult that had used the monastery for their own ends. In the end, we succeded, and the priestess went on to perform a holy ritual to cleanse the place. She (seemingly) succeded.

When we were back on the road, the GM started scolding me for not performing the ritual myself. Myself? As a fallen paladin without any holy powers? I had had no idea I even knew how to perform such a ritual, and I had no reason to do it myself when there was a priestess here who was planning to do it herself from the beginning.
The GM replied with my ranks in knowledge (religion) (of which I had a lot), I would of course know how to do the ritual, and I should have noticed the priestess was too young and inexperienced to do it (she acted very confident, and the rest of the group agreed with my impression).
In the end, it was my fault that the priestess had been tainted by the evil influence of the place (and she would later reappear in the campaign as an evil necromancer).

Strike three! As a fallen paladin (and especially one the GM has no intention of restoring his powers to), it is neither your place nor your business to attempt to perform a holy ritual. Your god has abandoned you - your job is to atone, not to vaingloriously call down his power as if you have the right. Furthermore, even if you're expected to be the one to do this, the GM should prompt you to make rolls to notice things - her inexperience, her insecurity, anything other than your own pride and arrogance as a motivator.


Later on, we helped a baron to defend his castle agains foreign invaders. We won, and the baron was planning on torturing the captive footsoldiers in order to find out if they were demonically tainted. When I spoke out against the torture, the GM simply replied: "Your god is fine with torture." My jaw dropped. (remember the ranks in knowledge (religion)?) He's supposed to be lawful good, I said. True, the GM replied, but he's fine with torture anyways. How would you get information from evildoers if not through torture? I had a few suggestions, but they somehow failed to convince the DM. In the end, I said I wouldn't follow this god if he was fine with torture. So, my character's inner religious struggle began, in his early fifties, and with a background of a studied theologian. (Of course, my character still was true to his values and managed to convince the baron through diplomacy. Which was, of course, a triumph for evil that day)

Someone watched a little too much 24. *sigh, smh*


There was also that time my GM wanted me to strike a deal with a demon in order to save a village and the group, and when I refused, he got angry, accused my paladin of selfishness and me of bringing him to use GM fiat to save the group without need.

Anyone who believes a lawful good character should make deals with demons and remain lawful good is literally insane! Paladins doubly so!


In the end, the GM obviously had enough. He brought in an old friend of his, who was playing another paladin, who was, as I was told later, only in the game to "show me how to act like a proper paladin". Which is, to me, pretty insulting in and for itself.

He was playing the most vain, self-righteous over the top holier-than-thou prick I have ever seen. Naturally, the group hated him.
The player stopped showing up after a few sessions, but the GM ran him as a DMPC afterwards.

Did he also keep trying to sell the rest of the party/random NPCs his miraculous holy water, in bottles with his face on the label, as a cure-all? (For the low, low price of $givemeallyourmoney!)


Some time later, the holy relic of the order was stolen from the hands of one of my character's friends, and the DMPC paladin decided I had failed all that is good and holy one times to many, and proceeded to try and smite me.

Of course, the part of the group who was at the same place at that time came to my aid, but the other paladin managed to incapacitate them without any problems, since he was a far higher level than we were. In the end, he smote my fallen paladin in a dirty backalley, where he bled to death.

Lawful good means cold-blooded murder in an alley because your god would have wanted it. Sadly there are people who think that way in real life...


The game died that night, the GM of course blaming the other player's strange inability to meaningfully continue after one of their number had died.

Tell me you're not still friends with this person. This sort of person is someone you never want to game with if you can avoid it.

Kalmageddon
2014-08-08, 06:27 AM
So, I guess I'll share one of my own, then.

I was playing a paladin. An old, battle-hardened veteran, very calm and thoughtful.

To the GM's credit, the world was very nicely crafted and quite awesome (even though he liked to change information he gave us on the fly once he noticed we could eventually use the background of his world to our advantage)

Mostly, things went well, the group was awesome. I hadn't planned on becoming the party leader, but ended up as one anyways, since the other characters naturally turned to mine for advice and planning.

Things started to go downhill when I found a holy chalice of my order, which had since been disbanded. Unbeknownst to me, the chalice had been cursed, which made me kill the old hermit who had been holding it in a bloodrage once I touched it. No save, no nothing. Doesn't sound too bad to you? To me it didn't either, back then. I thought it was probably going to be an awesome story element, and carrying around an old, if cursed, holy relic wasn't too bad in itself.
Later on I found out the GM only had my paladin fall because he thought the group felt too confident with my healing abilities in play. Ah, well.

I spent the rest of the game as a fighter without bonus feats (this wasn't dnd, so my character actually was able to contribute quite a bit, but still...)

Slowly but surely, over the course of a campaign, incidents started showing up that showed the DM and I had vastly different opinions about how a paladin was meant to be played. The problem was, actually, the DM thought there was only one way a paladin could be played appropriately.

Once, we met a young priestess, who needed help clearing out a holy monastery. Of course, we helped dislodging the evil cult that had used the monastery for their own ends. In the end, we succeded, and the priestess went on to perform a holy ritual to cleanse the place. She (seemingly) succeded.

When we were back on the road, the GM started scolding me for not performing the ritual myself. Myself? As a fallen paladin without any holy powers? I had had no idea I even knew how to perform such a ritual, and I had no reason to do it myself when there was a priestess here who was planning to do it herself from the beginning.
The GM replied with my ranks in knowledge (religion) (of which I had a lot), I would of course know how to do the ritual, and I should have noticed the priestess was too young and inexperienced to do it (she acted very confident, and the rest of the group agreed with my impression).
In the end, it was my fault that the priestess had been tainted by the evil influence of the place (and she would later reappear in the campaign as an evil necromancer).

Later on, we helped a baron to defend his castle agains foreign invaders. We won, and the baron was planning on torturing the captive footsoldiers in order to find out if they were demonically tainted. When I spoke out against the torture, the GM simply replied: "Your god is fine with torture." My jaw dropped. (remember the ranks in knowledge (religion)?) He's supposed to be lawful good, I said. True, the GM replied, but he's fine with torture anyways. How would you get information from evildoers if not through torture? I had a few suggestions, but they somehow failed to convince the DM. In the end, I said I wouldn't follow this god if he was fine with torture. So, my character's inner religious struggle began, in his early fifties, and with a background of a studied theologian. (Of course, my character still was true to his values and managed to convince the baron through diplomacy. Which was, of course, a triumph for evil that day)

There was also that time my GM wanted me to strike a deal with a demon in order to save a village and the group, and when I refused, he got angry, accused my paladin of selfishness and me of bringing him to use GM fiat to save the group without need.

There's been a lot of such stories over the campaign, and it's probably futile to tell them all.

In the end, the GM obviously had enough. He brought in an old friend of his, who was playing another paladin, who was, as I was told later, only in the game to "show me how to act like a proper paladin". Which is, to me, pretty insulting in and for itself.

He was playing the most vain, self-righteous over the top holier-than-thou prick I have ever seen. Naturally, the group hated him.
The player stopped showing up after a few sessions, but the GM ran him as a DMPC afterwards.

Some time later, the holy relic of the order was stolen from the hands of one of my character's friends, and the DMPC paladin decided I had failed all that is good and holy one times to many, and proceeded to try and smite me.

Of course, the part of the group who was at the same place at that time came to my aid, but the other paladin managed to incapacitate them without any problems, since he was a far higher level than we were. In the end, he smote my fallen paladin in a dirty backalley, where he bled to death.

The rest of the players, of course, were horrified and about as angry as me, especially once the GM said if it hadn't been the paladin, he would have sent an epic level demon to kill my character, as he was fed up with my paladin disrupting the game and he had hoped things would get back to normal once I made a new character.

The game died that night, the GM of course blaming the other player's strange inability to meaningfully continue after one of their number had died.

Textbook example on why you don't try to solve OOC problems with in-game events.

DM Nate
2014-08-08, 10:06 AM
GM: "Behind the door there's a 60ft x 60ft room. In the room there's a pile of treasure - gems and coins and magic items."

Player: "Cool! I loot the treaure pile!"

GM: "The dragon attacks you." *rolls dice*

Players (all): "What dragon?"

GM: "There's a dragon in the room. It's his treasure. He's hit you for XYZ damage."

Player: "Was it invisible? Hiding?"

GM: "No, you just didn't ask."

There are two situations in which I will actually do this, as a DM:


None of the players bother to do Spot/Listen checks before barging in the room to loot.
A player interrupts my unfinished description of the room with "Cool! I loot stuff!"

BRC
2014-08-08, 10:25 AM
There are two situations in which I will actually do this, as a DM:


None of the players bother to do Spot/Listen checks before barging in the room to loot.
A player interrupts my unfinished description of the room with "Cool! I loot stuff!"


Do you mean explicitly make spot checks? As in saying "I make a spot check!"
Maybe if the Dragon was hiding, you could justify that, but you don't need to make spot checks to look around the room and see a dragon sitting on a pile of gold.

DM Nate
2014-08-08, 10:35 AM
Do you mean explicitly make spot checks? As in saying "I make a spot check!"
Maybe if the Dragon was hiding, you could justify that, but you don't need to make spot checks to look around the room and see a dragon sitting on a pile of gold.

If he's sitting on the pile of gold, yeah, he'll automatically be in the description.
If the pile of gold fills most of the 60x60 room, however, he could have plenty of places to hide. In that case, yeah, I expect someone to not rush in blindly.

Yora
2014-08-08, 10:38 AM
The guy who insisted that our characters would go to the Tomb of Horror in Pathfinder.

I don't think there's anything else I could say to illustrate how he ran games.

Segev
2014-08-08, 10:41 AM
To the DM-who-hated-the-paladin, he really should have been, at a minimum, asking you to roll K:Religion to let you know things your character SHOULD know BEFORE you act out of ignorance of that knowledge.

illyahr
2014-08-08, 11:04 AM
So, I guess I'll share one of my own, then.

I was playing a paladin. An old, battle-hardened veteran, very calm and thoughtful.

To the GM's credit, the world was very nicely crafted and quite awesome (even though he liked to change information he gave us on the fly once he noticed we could eventually use the background of his world to our advantage)

Mostly, things went well, the group was awesome. I hadn't planned on becoming the party leader, but ended up as one anyways, since the other characters naturally turned to mine for advice and planning.

Things started to go downhill when I found a holy chalice of my order, which had since been disbanded. Unbeknownst to me, the chalice had been cursed, which made me kill the old hermit who had been holding it in a bloodrage once I touched it. No save, no nothing. Doesn't sound too bad to you? To me it didn't either, back then. I thought it was probably going to be an awesome story element, and carrying around an old, if cursed, holy relic wasn't too bad in itself.
Later on I found out the GM only had my paladin fall because he thought the group felt too confident with my healing abilities in play. Ah, well.

I spent the rest of the game as a fighter without bonus feats (this wasn't dnd, so my character actually was able to contribute quite a bit, but still...)

Slowly but surely, over the course of a campaign, incidents started showing up that showed the DM and I had vastly different opinions about how a paladin was meant to be played. The problem was, actually, the DM thought there was only one way a paladin could be played appropriately.

Once, we met a young priestess, who needed help clearing out a holy monastery. Of course, we helped dislodging the evil cult that had used the monastery for their own ends. In the end, we succeded, and the priestess went on to perform a holy ritual to cleanse the place. She (seemingly) succeded.

When we were back on the road, the GM started scolding me for not performing the ritual myself. Myself? As a fallen paladin without any holy powers? I had had no idea I even knew how to perform such a ritual, and I had no reason to do it myself when there was a priestess here who was planning to do it herself from the beginning.
The GM replied with my ranks in knowledge (religion) (of which I had a lot), I would of course know how to do the ritual, and I should have noticed the priestess was too young and inexperienced to do it (she acted very confident, and the rest of the group agreed with my impression).
In the end, it was my fault that the priestess had been tainted by the evil influence of the place (and she would later reappear in the campaign as an evil necromancer).

Later on, we helped a baron to defend his castle agains foreign invaders. We won, and the baron was planning on torturing the captive footsoldiers in order to find out if they were demonically tainted. When I spoke out against the torture, the GM simply replied: "Your god is fine with torture." My jaw dropped. (remember the ranks in knowledge (religion)?) He's supposed to be lawful good, I said. True, the GM replied, but he's fine with torture anyways. How would you get information from evildoers if not through torture? I had a few suggestions, but they somehow failed to convince the DM. In the end, I said I wouldn't follow this god if he was fine with torture. So, my character's inner religious struggle began, in his early fifties, and with a background of a studied theologian. (Of course, my character still was true to his values and managed to convince the baron through diplomacy. Which was, of course, a triumph for evil that day)

There was also that time my GM wanted me to strike a deal with a demon in order to save a village and the group, and when I refused, he got angry, accused my paladin of selfishness and me of bringing him to use GM fiat to save the group without need.

There's been a lot of such stories over the campaign, and it's probably futile to tell them all.

In the end, the GM obviously had enough. He brought in an old friend of his, who was playing another paladin, who was, as I was told later, only in the game to "show me how to act like a proper paladin". Which is, to me, pretty insulting in and for itself.

He was playing the most vain, self-righteous over the top holier-than-thou prick I have ever seen. Naturally, the group hated him.
The player stopped showing up after a few sessions, but the GM ran him as a DMPC afterwards.

Some time later, the holy relic of the order was stolen from the hands of one of my character's friends, and the DMPC paladin decided I had failed all that is good and holy one times to many, and proceeded to try and smite me.

Of course, the part of the group who was at the same place at that time came to my aid, but the other paladin managed to incapacitate them without any problems, since he was a far higher level than we were. In the end, he smote my fallen paladin in a dirty backalley, where he bled to death.

The rest of the players, of course, were horrified and about as angry as me, especially once the GM said if it hadn't been the paladin, he would have sent an epic level demon to kill my character, as he was fed up with my paladin disrupting the game and he had hoped things would get back to normal once I made a new character.

The game died that night, the GM of course blaming the other player's strange inability to meaningfully continue after one of their number had died.

I agree with above posters. This guy was running a train wreck from the beginning. This wasn't a game to be played, this was the DM proving he was better than you. It stopped being a game the moment he told you what your character was supposed to do.

Sartharina
2014-08-08, 12:11 PM
<-snip->This sort of story makes me wish :miko: wasn't so vilified, since you practically ended up in her shoes. (Sans murdering geriatric rulers and coming up with crazy conspiracy theories. Then again, you were acting against the way the world saw Good)

Arbane
2014-08-08, 12:36 PM
This sort of story makes me wish :miko: wasn't so vilified, since you practically ended up in her shoes. (Sans murdering geriatric rulers and coming up with crazy conspiracy theories. Then again, you were acting against the way the world saw Good)

Miko sounds more like the DMPC Paladin, only this time the writer was on her side. :smallyuk:

Sartharina
2014-08-08, 12:45 PM
Miko sounds more like the DMPC Paladin, only this time the writer was on her side. :smallyuk:

Nah. Miko and DMPC paladin are on opposite sides of the spectrum (Though people keep mis-projecting DMPC paladin onto her, because DMPC Paladin is the only "Bad" paladin they know). If the Non-DMPC Paladin were more like Miko, he might have been able to smite the fallen DMPC-paladin down, by recognizing that he never actually fell.

Arbane
2014-08-08, 12:57 PM
Nah. Miko and DMPC paladin are on opposite sides of the spectrum (Though people keep mis-projecting DMPC paladin onto her, because DMPC Paladin is the only "Bad" paladin they know). If the Non-DMPC Paladin were more like Miko, he might have been able to smite the fallen DMPC-paladin down, by recognizing that he never actually fell.

Smiting by the sheer power of delusion? DM says he fell, he fell. The fact that the DM is completely full of cheese is, sadly, irrelevant to the state of affairs in the game.

aberratio ictus
2014-08-08, 12:59 PM
Tell me you're not still friends with this person. This sort of person is someone you never want to game with if you can avoid it.

No, I'm not longer friends with that GM. It didn't help that he blatantly cheated in PbP games we ran (He allegedly killed 10 Knights in full plate all by himself with an unarmoured rogue armed with a dagger, in a system where even being outnumbered three to one is a possibly deadly problem even for an armoured combatant, and where a dagger can only go through full plate if you roll max damage. Yes, he really thought we'd believe he was that lucky) and that he (which was a lot more grave for me personally) tried to "subtly" sabotage the friendship between me and a mutual friend, because he couldn't stand her being friends with me as well.


To your points: It got aggravating really fast with the background thing. Another player was playing some kind of diplomat, so when the time came to take back a city overrun by demonic troops, she tried to contact her coalition for help. GMs response: The coalition? *laughs* you're the only member of the coalition! Which was quite weird, since the GM had told her she had to buy the highest possible noble rank at character creation to be even considered as a diplomat for the coalition, an alliance of noble houses still standing strong against the demonic influence. When confronted with that, the GM only shrugged and wanted to move on.

I kind of agree with you on the saving throw thing, but on the other hand, as I said, it seemed like he was planning on having some sort of redemption sideplot planned, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt back then.

Of course, he wasn't completely happy with how I played a fallen paladin. He kept on E-mailing me descriptions of some homebrew blackguard class he'd made between sessions, and was overall dissappointed I didn't do the usual "My god has forsaken me! He's not worthy of my service!" stick and turn sinister and ethically ambiguous.

My paladin took his fall very humbly, saw the fault in his inner subtle seed of evil, and of course sought to attone. In essence, most of the play, he kept behaving like a paladin, something the GM couldn't stand. One of his frequent criticisms of my character was that "he is too sure about himself being one of the good guys". :smallconfused:

So indeed, he would have deemed it inappropriate, offensive to his god and conceited to do a holy ritual as a fallen.

The prickadin didn't try to sell miraculous holy water. He was far above that. That was another weird thing about how the GM and his friend saw paladins - my paladin was born a bastard between a minor noble and a chambermaid, had gotten basic knightly training by his father and had then be send to the order as not to tarnish his reputation any more. He'd always been more a paladin of the common people, protecting and healing the sick and injured in villages and slums.

For a "proper" paladin, so the GM, the only people that mattered were the nobility. Peasants were a renewable resource. Of course, when my character and the prickadin got into arguments about this, I was swiftly informed that my god was a god of nobility (which wasn't in the books btw and of which I hadn't been informed beforehand) so the other guy was, of course, right.

Essentially my paladin was a heretic, by then. That's also the reason I now refuse to play paladins directly associated with a certain deity, because, usually, gods are awful, awful individuals in my experience.




I agree with above posters. This guy was running a train wreck from the beginning. This wasn't a game to be played, this was the DM proving he was better than you. It stopped being a game the moment he told you what your character was supposed to do.

Well, to the GM's credit, the game was fairly awesome in the beginning. That's why we all clinged onto it for so long.
At first, our group was essentially refugees, since everything on the continent had been overrun by demons and their tainted vassals. It was a bleak setting, very well-fleshed out (until he changed things again, of course), but not without hope. My character was the last paladin left on the continent, after most orders set sails for other continents to regroup. The other players had very interesting characters, and roleplay was awesome.
Once we ran into remnants of (good) civilization things started to go downhill.
But you are right in one thing - some of the other players and I agree, when it comes down to it, all the GM wanted to do was write a book by playing. He hid the rails well, usually, but he was a railroader, and if one of us didn't behave as he expected, he'd get angry.

edit: @ Sartharina

I'm not sure if I acted against how the world saw good, but I definitely acted against how the world saw paladins.. my position might be comparable to Miko's situation when I think about it, although the character really was nothing like her.

DontEatRawHagis
2014-08-08, 03:00 PM
Textbook example on why you don't try to solve OOC problems with in-game events.

My first exposure to D&D was a guy who told the Paladin that no matter what she should always use Detect Evil. And if she did detect evil she would have to cleanse it.

This back fired in two ways.

1. The evil altar of a tentacle demon. The player saw it and said we are not strong enough. DM said you have to cast detect evil. Once she did he said she had to go in. And she proceeded to get grappled by the creature.

2. The MYsterious temple. In the same building there was another altar that looked Good. So the Paladin instinctively cast detect evil. There was no evil detected. In response the priest by the altar turned into a demon after we talked to him. Turns out he had a lead sheet. >:(

Kalmageddon
2014-08-08, 03:42 PM
My first exposure to D&D was a guy who told the Paladin that no matter what she should always use Detect Evil. And if she did detect evil she would have to cleanse it.

This back fired in two ways.

1. The evil altar of a tentacle demon. The player saw it and said we are not strong enough. DM said you have to cast detect evil. Once she did he said she had to go in. And she proceeded to get grappled by the creature.


You know, with all the terribile stories I've read here, I half expected this one to end with a tentacle hentai. I'm glad the monster just "grappled" her, that's some classy GMing right there.

Kid Jake
2014-08-08, 03:48 PM
You know, with all the terribile stories I've read here, I half expected this one to end with a tentacle hentai. I'm glad the monster just "grappled" her, that's some classy GMing right there.

I just assumed the hentaiing was implied.

Sith_Happens
2014-08-08, 04:18 PM
I just assumed the hentaiing was implied.

When is it not implied?:smallconfused:

CommandTortoise
2014-08-08, 07:43 PM
2. The MYsterious temple. In the same building there was another altar that looked Good. So the Paladin instinctively cast detect evil. There was no evil detected. In response the priest by the altar turned into a demon after we talked to him. Turns out he had a lead sheet. >:(

Wait, how did that work? Paladin comes in, he senses that she was a Paladin and whips out the lead sheet he happened to have on him before she manages to look at him, has this go completely unnoticed and drops before anyone sees the sheet but after the Paladin has finished detecting?

The Oni
2014-08-08, 11:10 PM
Dave! The Taco Bell DM. He worked closing at Taco Bell, and as soon as he was done, he'd run a game. So from 1am to 5am he'd run a D&D game in the dinning area of Taco Bell.


This guy sounds like a terrible DM but a hilarious person

Vinyl Scratch
2014-08-08, 11:38 PM
My first 3.5 game. Took place in Meatspace at Our Local Game Store (Really two towns over for me). Several years ago, 4th was a new thing.

Homebrewed setting that's supposedly been through several campaigns in every edition up to third. So many house rules. So many problems.

I should note that at the time I was just too young to drive on my own, so often I could only stick around for half the session, so a lot of my experience is in non-sequitur. Still, I stuck around for 1 or 2 years until the group split.

The first grievance was the amount of people involved. In any one week, there was around 10 characters in the party, ruled by around 7-8 players. Several of them had two from when there was less people, but were allowed to keep having two despite there no longer being a drought, why not. Obviously, rounds took forever and everything was done in individual rounds, regardless of actual combat.

The second grievance was the utter lack of planning. There was only a vague meta-plot going on, with the party just wandering, doing whatever. Sometimes we would get pushed into some event or dungeon, but that's about it. Even that fell apart after I stole a Spelljammer (Long Story). All encounters were rolled randomly, off of some franken-table of all the monster books and a ton of homebrew and converted beasts. Took bloody forever just for an encounter to begin, easily a good quarter of the session. This is every fight, every dungeon room.

Speaking of encounters, the trees are considered creatures with full stats. All the trees. They have psionics or some crap.

Which brings me to the biggest problem: House Rules. Now, not all house rules are evil, but I'd say most of these are insane and numerous.

First of all, the magic dice. The big meta-plot I mentioned earlier was that somehow the setting was coming to an end. Thus, each in game week or so, everyone that's important (like the party) is given a magic die, both an in-game and out-of-game magic item. Magic dice could be used each round to substitute any of your rolls, one per die. Naturally, you rolled randomly to see what kind you would get. They were differentiated by how many sides (1d3 to 1d100) and the material (color) of the die. The material served as a modifier to the roll. Some were normal-ish, a plus or minus a few, then there were those materials. Mitheral squared your roll, while Adamantine cubed your roll. Meanwhile, Uranium (yes) would somehow square root the roll. Uranium was also uranium, one of my characters died by nuke.

Naturally, everyone had insane HP per level, and could nova out thousands of damage. Oh, and it wasn't even nice for melee, as 'rolling' higher than normal for your weapon could break it. No problems for archers or spell casters.

There was also a rule that if you died, you rolled for a chance to summon your patron deity over (No, not Orcus...). To give a revive + a wish. With the right magic dice, you may as well have him on speed-dial.

Saying a magic word in or out of character risked drawing attention of a evil diety.

Magic classes got free xp for casting spells. Not spell characters can screw it.

Somehow I played this for over a year, until the group split and I went to the saner half.

The Random NPC
2014-08-09, 01:00 AM
Strike two! You always allow a save against a mind affecting effect, and you never cause a caster of any type to lose their powers just because you're unhappy with how cleverly they use it. Raise the stakes, or make healing less important compared to the other things that need doing. (Do I heal my party member right now, or do I get the innocent child out of the battle area first?)

Anyone who believes a lawful good character should make deals with demons and remain lawful good is literally insane! Paladins doubly so!

I generally agree with your statement, except for these two points.
First: I will admit that you should get a save in most cases, but if it will lead to an awesome story I say it's okay (I realize that paladins can have more plots that fall and atone, but it is an easy way to motivate the player).
Second: Malconvoker (dndtools.eu/classes/malconvoker/) would like a word with you (though yes, the tendency would be towards evil, and probably chaotic).

Cronocke
2014-08-09, 01:34 AM
I generally agree with your statement, except for these two points.
First: I will admit that you should get a save in most cases, but if it will lead to an awesome story I say it's okay (I realize that paladins can have more plots that fall and atone, but it is an easy way to motivate the player).

Even if you like this idea, you should get the player's permission first. "SURPRISE YOU'RE A FIGHTER BUT WORSE" is a **** move.


Second: Malconvoker (dndtools.eu/classes/malconvoker/) would like a word with you (though yes, the tendency would be towards evil, and probably chaotic).

For all the hate the Book of Nine Swords gets, the Complete books are far worse in the sorts of nonsense they allow. :smallannoyed:

The Random NPC
2014-08-09, 02:04 AM
Even if you like this idea, you should get the player's permission first. "SURPRISE YOU'RE A FIGHTER BUT WORSE" is a **** move.



For all the hate the Book of Nine Swords gets, the Complete books are far worse in the sorts of nonsense they allow. :smallannoyed:

I'll agree to that, and while I like the Complete books, there is some egregious nonsense in them.

DontEatRawHagis
2014-08-11, 10:12 AM
Wait, how did that work? Paladin comes in, he senses that she was a Paladin and whips out the lead sheet he happened to have on him before she manages to look at him, has this go completely unnoticed and drops before anyone sees the sheet but after the Paladin has finished detecting?

Metaphorical Sheet. He just hand waved it. :(

Also the DM was pissed off that we rolled low for our perception checks. And that we didn't go over the room with a fine tooth comb.

Then was ticked off when we mapped out his maze dungeon completely because the maze was just a single room with a treasure chest in the center.

Moral of the story: don't yell at your players for not exploring every inch of the map and then complain when they do so.

Visivicous
2014-08-11, 07:45 PM
Snip..horrible paladin hate

It seems to me that the fall should not have happened. I thought, in order to fall, a paladin had to be responsible for the act of evil. Mind control, possession, whatever, frees the paladin of liability. Add in the fact that no save was allowed, and it amounts to the same thing as this scenario:

DM: What are you doing?
Paladin: Eating some beans.
DM: Yeah... you fall. You've lost all paladin abilities.
Paladin: What!?! Why and how?
DM: The how is because I said. The why is, I don't like you. DM fiat, sucker.

I rechecked the description on the SRD, and this part "who willfully commits an evil act" would seem to indicate that compulsion/mind control/possession/curses that force an action, do not make a paladin fall. How can the Paladin 'willfully' do anything, if that will is usurped?

And if the fallen paladin continued to act in accordance with their original code of conduct, then their alignment would never have changed. How, then, did the DMPC paladin 'smite' the player paladin? I'd think the result would have been similar to Miko's smite attempt against Roy... fat lot of nothing. You cannot "Smite Evil" a lawful good-guy. If the attack went through, then clearly the DMPC was a Paladin of Tyranny or Slaughter.

Edit - Spelling.

Ravens_cry
2014-08-11, 09:00 PM
I have a DM, the worst DM I have though we keep playing with him as he's always willing to run games, who was of a similar opinion for dominated Paladins, to which I had several, off table heated discussions about. His thought was 'you should have made the save', to which I replied 'Anyone can roll a 1'. In AD&D, not only were mind-controlled acts still fall worthy, they were the only kind that could be Atoned for.

Milodiah
2014-08-11, 10:37 PM
There's just something about the idea of a DM rolling random encounters at the table that genuinely pisses me off.

If you're going to roll up random encounters, there's no reason to make everyone wait for you to do it. Statistics and probability work the same way regardless of whether you're doing the pre-session planning or are three hours into said session, so just do it beforehand.

Lord Torath
2014-08-11, 10:45 PM
There's just something about the idea of a DM rolling random encounters at the table that genuinely pisses me off.

If you're going to roll up random encounters, there's no reason to make everyone wait for you to do it. Statistics and probability work the same way regardless of whether you're doing the pre-session planning or are three hours into said session, so just do it beforehand.I don't know. There's just something ominously motivating about the sound of the DM rolling dice behind the screen. I certainly agree that the DM should know what encounters may occur, and have those statted up and ready, but rolling to see if a random encounter occurs during play? I have no problem with that.

And, in the interests of full disclosure, I am a DM who does that, and also have played with a DM who did that.

AMFV
2014-08-11, 11:04 PM
There's just something about the idea of a DM rolling random encounters at the table that genuinely pisses me off.

If you're going to roll up random encounters, there's no reason to make everyone wait for you to do it. Statistics and probability work the same way regardless of whether you're doing the pre-session planning or are three hours into said session, so just do it beforehand.

That isn't always possible. Frequently random encounters come into play when they players decide that rather than explore the ominous tomb you've spent six hours working on, they're going to go and explore the forest instead, and now you have nothing prepared at all. So you need to be able to think quickly and a random encounter will typically give you the time you need to figure out what direction to go.

At least that's what I most often use them for.

MReav
2014-08-11, 11:47 PM
Not me who went through this, but if you've got some time to kill, I recommend looking up "Children of the Sandler" on Youtube.

Please note, the guy will often preface things with long commentaries regarding copyright, government, work, or ponies (guy does MLP: The Mentally Advanced Series), so if that stuff isn't interesting, annotations and comments will occasionally provide links to skip that stuff.

My worst GM experience was my friend who ran a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Cinematic Unisystem campaign. I don't remember all the details, but it was a string of stupidity that ultimately culminated in us being attacked by Subways sandwich monsters, and us declaring a moratorium on him running for nearly a year.

Sartharina
2014-08-12, 01:40 AM
There's just something about the idea of a DM rolling random encounters at the table that genuinely pisses me off.

If you're going to roll up random encounters, there's no reason to make everyone wait for you to do it. Statistics and probability work the same way regardless of whether you're doing the pre-session planning or are three hours into said session, so just do it beforehand.As others have said - most Random Encounters occur when players do something unexpected/unplanned, like spontaneously make camp in a dungeon, or go somewhere else.

Also - Pre-rolling takes the fun out of rolling. DMs have to have fun too. Or do your players pre-roll all their combats as well?

Visivicous
2014-08-12, 01:47 AM
My worst GM experience was my friend who ran a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Cinematic Unisystem campaign. I don't remember all the details, but it was a string of stupidity that ultimately culminated in us being attacked by Subways sandwich monsters, and us declaring a moratorium on him running for nearly a year.

Did anyone think your friend did this intentionally? Created something that horrible to get out of ever running a game?

Growing up, my brother would purposefully leave food or grease on dishes to prove that he 'was no good' at it. I was the designated dish washer quite often as a result. Your post just reminded me of that :smallfrown:.

MReav
2014-08-12, 02:04 AM
Did anyone think your friend did this intentionally? Created something that horrible to get out of ever running a game?

Growing up, my brother would purposefully leave food or grease on dishes to prove that he 'was no good' at it. I was the designated dish washer quite often as a result. Your post just reminded me of that :smallfrown:.

Well, I don't know. Since then, he's gotten a lot better.

Ravens_cry
2014-08-12, 02:12 AM
As others have said - most Random Encounters occur when players do something unexpected/unplanned, like spontaneously make camp in a dungeon, or go somewhere else.

Also - Pre-rolling takes the fun out of rolling. DMs have to have fun too. Or do your players pre-roll all their combats as well?
On the other hand, if you are going to use Random Encounters as a primary encounter method, or even a key secondary, a little pre-rolling can help give time for the gentle art of adductive reasoning, taking events and stringing them into a connected narrative.
For example, let's say you roll 4 gnolls and lizardman. Why is the lizardman fighting alongside the gnolls? Are they free or slaves? If they are slaves are they loyal or would they, if they saw the fight turn against their master, join the fight on the side of the PC? If they are free, again, how loyal are they? Would they stand to the end with their furry blood brothers or would they cut and run once things get too hot?
The possibilities are endless with abductive reasoning, a favourite tool of conspiracy theorists everywhere!
The players can help too. Plunk something incongruous in front of them and listen to them try and puzzle it out. The most interesting answer is the right answer.
Now, I am not a fan of random encounters, I find they are all too often busy work that is filler between things that matter, but with abductive reasoning, they can matter.

DontEatRawHagis
2014-08-12, 12:08 PM
I had one of mya players agree to take over my Dark Sun campaign when I left college.

He was the most experienced DMs at the table but only played Forgotten Realms. He asked if there was any way for him to planar shift the players into FR. To which I said they could travel through the Grey which is dangerous and can cause them to lose all sense of self. Or he could make it that one of the Sorcerer Kings created a portal into FR in order to take over.

Instead he sent the 3 lvl5 players up against a Tembo, I played the Tembo as written where it would kill everyone that mattered to its prey before killing him to build up to a good fight when he leveled up more. Instead the new DM killed two of the PCs and asked if the guys wanted to play Forgotten Realms instead. Needless to say they were all pissed and never played with him again.

Now I will just tell my players what I plan if I have to leave a campaign I run.

Milodiah
2014-08-12, 07:51 PM
I should specify that I'm not a fan of random encounters at all, because they are just that; randomly generated, without background or intrinsic meaning. If a DM just picks a monster or two at random and throws them at the party, then they just kill the monster and go on with their lives, no big deal. The way I see it, encounters should be something meaningful and relevant to what's going on. In my game, the bandits they may hit are being pursued by the law, are preying on the nearby settlements, have been mentioned to the PCs in the last inn they stopped at for the previous two reasons, and generally have an effect on the entire world, as small as it may be. Random encounter tables pulled from at the time of the encounter and ignored both before and after the encounter just seem to me like the DM abruptly craps them out onto the landscape exclusively to be a speedbump for the PCs and nothing else. Sometimes it's okay to put down some speedbumps here and there; I'm fine with PCs getting hit by carnivorous beasts in a dangerous forest, or with sewer creatures in a disused sewer. But more than that, especially in terms of sentient beings and people, is just absurd.


I should mention that when I worldbuild, I build worlds, everything is interwoven. Bandit camps are placed in relation to amounts of trade following certain routes between certain cities, goblin camps have been placed in relation to an evil army's slow desertion and eventual dissolution in the region, etc. etc. Not much is random, because to me random implies arbitrary and self-contained.

Kaun
2014-08-12, 08:44 PM
I should mention that when I worldbuild, I build worlds, everything is interwoven. Bandit camps are placed in relation to amounts of trade following certain routes between certain cities, goblin camps have been placed in relation to an evil army's slow desertion and eventual dissolution in the region, etc. etc. Not much is random, because to me random implies arbitrary and self-contained.

Yeah the problem i find with this approach is that everything is built to make sense to one person. Its built using the GM's rationality and their inherent logic paths.

I find random tables add more depth to a setting when used properly simply for their added colour.

People often misuse tables; "ow the players went some where un-expected. I will just roll on a random encounter table. Here PC's fight these 7 harpies and lets move on with the game." Thats just boring table use. The real trick is for the GM to have to reverse engineer the situation on the fly.

Why are 7 Harpies suddenly outside the abandoned roadhouse? What are they doing and why are they doing it? The players will often voice their confusing and suggest options about the possibly reasons to each other. Use these ideas, weave bits of them into the story. It makes the players feel smart for figuring things out and a lot of the extra work is done for you.

Random tables are an awesome tool when properly utilized. But even a shovel will look stupid and pointless if its only used in the place of an umbrella.

Sartharina
2014-08-12, 08:49 PM
Random tables are an awesome tool when properly utilized. But even a shovel will look stupid and pointless if its only used in the place of an umbrella.
I think I want to sig this.

Kaun
2014-08-12, 08:55 PM
I think I want to sig this.

Go for your life.

Milodiah
2014-08-12, 09:04 PM
Yeah the problem i find with this approach is that everything is built to make sense to one person. Its built using the GM's rationality and their inherent logic paths.

I find random tables add more depth to a setting when used properly simply for their added colour.

People often misuse tables; "ow the players went some where un-expected. I will just roll on a random encounter table. Here PC's fight these 7 harpies and lets move on with the game." Thats just boring table use. The real trick is for the GM to have to reverse engineer the situation on the fly.

Why are 7 Harpies suddenly outside the abandoned roadhouse? What are they doing and why are they doing it? The players will often voice their confusing and suggest options about the possibly reasons to each other. Use these ideas, weave bits of them into the story. It makes the players feel smart for figuring things out and a lot of the extra work is done for you.

Random tables are an awesome tool when properly utilized. But even a shovel will look stupid and pointless if its only used in the place of an umbrella.


Excellent, we're in agreement then. I've used a random generator or two, but at the same time flicked through until I've figured out exactly how the new thing fits in. Because 100% pre-placing of everything is several orders of magnitude more psychotic than even I am when it comes to world design.

Kaun
2014-08-12, 09:16 PM
Excellent, we're in agreement then. I've used a random generator or two, but at the same time flicked through until I've figured out exactly how the new thing fits in. Because 100% pre-placing of everything is several orders of magnitude more psychotic than even I am when it comes to world design.

I generally try to stop myself from flicking. Purely because some awesome stories have arisen from the sudden terror that comes with the realization that, thanks to that table, you now have to rationalize to your players why their characters have just walked out of an Inn in the middle of a desert Oasis to find two fully grown woolly Mammoths and an enraged Githzerai.

Milodiah
2014-08-12, 09:33 PM
I'll concede that the main problem I've been having lately isn't that it gives me too random of stuff, it's that the particular generator I'm using gives too little randomness.

You want an encounter for a level 2 party in the marshes? Here, try four zombie kobolds.

You want an encounter for a level 5 party in dense woods? Why not eleven zombie kobolds!

You want an encounter for a level 8 party in the prairie? Have a couple dozen zombie kobolds!

I gotta flick through just to get something interesting. Also not in the double-digits of CR1 monsters, because that's just annoying for everyone.

If it ever gave me some mammoths and a githzerai I'd be freaking overjoyed.

Sartharina
2014-08-12, 09:46 PM
Excellent, we're in agreement then. I've used a random generator or two, but at the same time flicked through until I've figured out exactly how the new thing fits in. Because 100% pre-placing of everything is several orders of magnitude more psychotic than even I am when it comes to world design.No, you don't 'figure out exactly how it fits in' - You just make it sorta-kinda fit in, and go from there. If it doesn't seem to make sense yet, it will later. You don't need everything planned out - the story can tell itself.

bulbaquil
2014-08-12, 10:02 PM
I'll concede that the main problem I've been having lately isn't that it gives me too random of stuff, it's that the particular generator I'm using gives too little randomness.

You want an encounter for a level 2 party in the marshes? Here, try four zombie kobolds.

You want an encounter for a level 5 party in dense woods? Why not eleven zombie kobolds!

You want an encounter for a level 8 party in the prairie? Have a couple dozen zombie kobolds!

I gotta flick through just to get something interesting. Also not in the double-digits of CR1 monsters, because that's just annoying for everyone.

If it ever gave me some mammoths and a githzerai I'd be freaking overjoyed.

Ugh, similar issues here. Just because 24 skunks are technically (in Pathfinder) a CR 6 encounter does not mean I should send them after my level-4 party. It's not a challenge; it's a waste of time.

Kaun
2014-08-12, 10:06 PM
Ugh, similar issues here. Just because 24 skunks are technically (in Pathfinder) a CR 6 encounter does not mean I should send them after my level-4 party. It's not a challenge; it's a waste of time.

I can't believe fate handed you a Skunkalanche and you turned it down. That encounter was never about combat.

bulbaquil
2014-08-12, 10:15 PM
I can't believe fate handed you a Skunkalanche and you turned it down. That encounter was never about combat.

Heh-heh. There are times when "wasting time" is what needs to be done... :nale:

Milodiah
2014-08-12, 10:15 PM
I can't believe fate handed you a Skunkalanche and you turned it down. That encounter was never about combat.

You open the door, only to find yourself confronted with a wall of writhing fur. The room is skunks, from floor to ceiling. Stacked one atop the other, it is a solid mass of skunks, filling the entire length, width, and height of the room. You can only guess that there could be more skunks in here than there are now, but it would require an equal number of the original skunks be displaced to a dimension beyond those of the physical world. As your olfactory nerves catch up to the maelstrom of sensation with which your eyes and ears are flooding, you perceive an odor man was not meant to know: skunk stink compressed, compacted, purified, and heated into a pure diamond of nausea. With the door now open, the sheer pressure of the mammalian ocean before you urges the skunks outward, filling the hallway in a matter of seconds.

Make a reflex save to avoid being buried alive.

Lord Torath
2014-08-12, 10:20 PM
You open the door, only to find yourself confronted with a wall of writhing fur. The room is skunks, from floor to ceiling. Stacked one atop the other, it is a solid mass of skunks, filling the entire length, width, and height of the room. You can only guess that there could be more skunks in here than there are now, but it would require an equal number of the original skunks be displaced to a dimension beyond those of the physical world. As your olfactory nerves catch up to the maelstrom of sensation with which your eyes and ears are flooding, you perceive an odor man was not meant to know: skunk stink compressed, compacted, purified, and heated into a pure diamond of nausea. With the door now open, the sheer pressure of the mammalian ocean before you urges the skunks outward, filling the hallway in a matter of seconds.

Make a reflex save to avoid being buried alive. I think I just found my new worst DM ever! :smallwink::smallbiggrin:

bulbaquil
2014-08-12, 10:26 PM
You open the door, only to find yourself confronted with a wall of writhing fur. The room is skunks, from floor to ceiling. Stacked one atop the other, it is a solid mass of skunks, filling the entire length, width, and height of the room. You can only guess that there could be more skunks in here than there are now, but it would require an equal number of the original skunks be displaced to a dimension beyond those of the physical world. As your olfactory nerves catch up to the maelstrom of sensation with which your eyes and ears are flooding, you perceive an odor man was not meant to know: skunk stink compressed, compacted, purified, and heated into a pure diamond of nausea. With the door now open, the sheer pressure of the mammalian ocean before you urges the skunks outward, filling the hallway in a matter of seconds.

Make a reflex save to avoid being buried alive.


I think I just found my new worst DM ever! :smallwink::smallbiggrin:

You kidding? This sounds like an awesome campaign! :smallbiggrin:

Hexalan
2014-08-12, 11:42 PM
Behold - the legend of Tucker's Kobolds (http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Tucker%27s_Kobolds). How innumerable hordes of powerless weaklings overwhelm powerful adventures with sheer numbers and a cunning DM.

AMFV
2014-08-12, 11:44 PM
Behold - the legend of Tucker's Kobolds (http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Tucker%27s_Kobolds). How innumerable hordes of powerless weaklings overwhelm powerful adventures with sheer numbers and a cunning DM.

And only a little bit of cheating...

Milodiah
2014-08-12, 11:48 PM
"Quantity is its own form of quality."
-Joseph Stalin

Inevitability
2014-08-13, 01:52 AM
I don't see why you should randomly decide the random encounter. I prefer to write up a list of things that make a nice challenge and are interesting and then just pick the most appropriate one when the situation calls for a random encounter.

Tanngrisnir
2014-08-13, 02:43 AM
I don't see why you should randomly decide the random encounter. I prefer to write up a list of things that make a nice challenge and are interesting and then just pick the most appropriate one when the situation calls for a random encounter.

That's what my DM does. He always has a bunch of different encounters created that make sense and fit in with the area/mood etc. Whenever we then need to roll for a random happening, he just rolls and picks one of those. It works really well, and is a great way of bringing a world to life. We're currently in a massive Outsider-controlled city, so each day we have a few random rolls on stuff. Sometimes it is just overhearing an argument between an Angel and a Devil, sometimes it's an Imp pick pocket, sometimes it's a prostitute with a proposition, sometimes it's a mugging etc. Really cool way to make places feel alive and real.

Earthwalker
2014-08-13, 03:49 AM
Random tables are an awesome tool when properly utilized. But even a shovel will look stupid and pointless if its only used in the place of an umbrella.

I can't believe you are ragging on my Shovella again, I am telling you these things are a licenase to make money. When winter rolls around people are going to want to clear thier paths and then have something to keep them dry while walking. They practically sell themselves.

Sith_Happens
2014-08-14, 12:28 AM
So someone in the 3.5 subforum linked this (http://community.wizards.com/forum/whats-player-do/threads/920121), and, well, it's a doozy.

jaydubs
2014-08-14, 01:27 AM
I'm going to start by saying this isn't a horrible DM story. The sessions we played were generally fun, there was just some favoritism that really rubbed me the wrong way. Since I was getting kind of busy IRL anyway, I stepped out of the campaign.

We were playing Edge of the Empire, one of the new Star Wars RPGs. Unlike many of the previous versions, they had decided to avoid the "play a Jedi or feel overshadowed" issue by not having any Jedi player classes. You can gain access to the force, but it's more of a "discover the force in later life" thing. And no one gets lightsaber proficiency.

Anyway, as the games go on, it becomes apparent the DM's friend has force powers. It goes on a bit longer, we find out he has lightsabers. After the session, the group brings it up, and we find out the friend has a special Jedi homebrew class (which the friend created himself of course). We ask to see it, both because we're sort of concerned about Jedi balance issues and because the game has a career system where anyone can pick up new careers. So if it's imbalanced, at least we can hop on board as well.

Nope, we can't see the custom class (it was mostly the friend answering, the DM was just trying not to upset him I think). Not only because are we not allowed to use the custom Jedi class. The balance doesn't matter because he's the only one that will get to use it.

It bugged me a lot, and I left the session after that. I don't know if it ever turned into a "watch the DM's friend play the overpowered homebrew class" game, but I didn't really feel like finding out. And, I really did have some IRL stuff going on at the time, so it worked out I guess.

Stuebi
2014-08-14, 05:33 AM
I've got another two, as told from a buddy over in the UK and one from a good friend of mine who actually got me intp P&P.

UK Buddy invites me over fairly regularly, and we tend to visit his local friendly gaming store. For the most aprt, you'll find people playing Warhammer Tabletops and Magic, but there's a basement with a few tables where you can play pretty much whatever. Buddy knows the owner, so he plays there frequently, and i've participated in quite a few games myself.

A new Edition for the Warhammer Tabletop just came out, and there was a lot of stuff going on in the store. Buddy's group had gathered up with the exception of 3 players who were wrapping up their table games up stairs. Unbeknownst to them, two of the guys that arrived later had just finished a game together, and had a rather nasty argument afterwards. And one of them was actually the on who was supposed to DM. I could probably leave it at that, as most of you can guess what followed next.

Cue a game where the DM has a specific player on "Oh no you dont."-list, and a player who's agenda consists of derailing and breaking the game as hard as possible. A few things buddy told me about:

- Not once but TWICE did the Player critically wound an important NPC while hunting, he insisted both times that it was an accident because he mistook them for game. (What, did her hair look like Antlers?)
- A Thiefguild, being part of the plot, was after the party. But would interestingly allways go for you know who when attempting murder.
- The Player in question would basically take any information from NPC's he got and do the exact opposite of what this information suggests. This was justified by paranoia, altough said guy had no problem trusting 3 other people in his party whom he just met days ago.
- Traps and environmental hazards the DM used would either directly or at least indirectly target said player. No chest is boobytrapped except the one the hunter tries to loot. Valley is really foggy, so ranged combat becomes useless (The guy is the only partymember with a bow!).

Stuff like that, over a good 4 hours. Appearantly, the game was nice enough for the others that the group did not disband. But the "subtle" rivalry was obvious enough to prompt the group to intervene. Appearantly, both of them reconsiled. But they dont play Warhammer with each other anymore.


The second one comes from a good friend, a girl who actually first got me into P&P.

She was part of a group that wanted to play a completely homebrewn-setting, made by the DM. It went reasonably well, until the fifth session came around. My friend was not really feeling well at the time, was depressed after some hardship in her private life, and thus asked the group if the session could be put of for a week. Party was dissapointed, but fine with putting the thing off for a few days. Except for the DM, who succesfully managed to make her feel bad for "Making the entire group wait just because you're a bit sad.". So the session happened anyway.

I never actually tried roleplaying while being in a sad mood. Had a few "angry" sessions before where I was a bit easier to get annoyed. But as you might imagine, sadplaying isnt fun. And it's probably hard to get properly immersed. It didnt take long for her to get scolded by the DM, for lack of roleplaying and motivation.

Eventually, she got angry. It's not like she told him that she was not feeling good and wanted to put the session off. The DM stands up. "I dont need to take this from you." Packs his stuff up and leaves. Understandably, the party is bit weirded out by this reaction. After dealing with further hissy fits, mainly him ignoring E-Mail inquiries andeven a phone call where she wanted to apologize for getting upset. Nothing.

So the group gets another guy to DM. The first one throws an even bigger fit. How dare they replace him! Sadly, a lot of the written paperwork and rules for the system were written by him. And he promptly confiscated the stuff. They switched over to a different setting, and as far as i'm informed, none of them talk to the guy anymore.

DontEatRawHagis
2014-08-16, 10:50 PM
This is the reason why I will never play in a completely original game system made by the DM:

I wanted to try 3.5e and my friends said a guy they knew was running a game later that day. I spent some time creating a character and we met at his apartment. Little did I know that my character was useless in his convoluted system. He told me to put the character sheet away and that we were just going to roleplay(Not the worst thing in the world :P) and that we were doing skills based on opposed checks against the DM.

He quickly drew up a map with about five locations on them. One was a castle, another a cave. The others aren't important because we stayed mostly in those areas.

He said it was a sandbox game so we should feel free to do what we want. I decided to go through the castle and quickly realized he was rolling on a table for every room I entered. At one point I entered the armory and he rolled randomly for the gear that was in it. This was not an issue, the dungeon is where the real issues began.

First room 5 Dragons, uberpowerful beasts. And then he rolls for their dispositions towards us. It comes up a 20(Good), they become our mounts. Every room becomes this practically, so by the time 1hr has gone by a few of us have multiple legendary animals following us and some of us are getting a bit confused and power hungry. His DMPC does a special fusion ability(seriously like out of Yugioh or some crap) and essentially summons Tiamat as his mount.

The game ended with all the players wondering if the DM was high. A couple had a good time, but we all agreed not to let him run the games. Having a fun freeform game can be great, but the random rules he was pulling on us had no structure or rhyme or reason.

DM Nate
2014-08-16, 11:15 PM
This is the reason why I will never play in a completely original game system made by the DM:

From what you explained, that DM didn't even have one.

DontEatRawHagis
2014-08-16, 11:58 PM
From what you explained, that DM didn't even have one.
Apparently he thought it was.

Inevitability
2014-08-20, 05:47 AM
During a 3.5 game the DM showed very little understanding of the rules. This little gem stands out exceptionally:

Fighter: I attack the troll for... 18 attack and 4 damage!
DM: You hit, but the wound heals immediately. Also, your sword is now stuck.
Fighter: What?
DM: Your sword is stuck. The wound regenerated while your sword was still in it, so it is enclosed in the troll.
Fighter: That's not how it works.
DM: Who's DM'ing this game, you or me?

Needless to say, no one kept playing for long.

Somensjev
2014-08-20, 06:28 AM
i don't have anything that bad, but there is the time i had a DM that seemed to have a grudge against me

DM: There's a trapdoor in the room
Rogue: I pick the lock *Rolls*
DM: *Disregards the roll* It doesn't work
Fighter (Me): I hit it with my sword *Rolls damage*
DM: You break the door, and your mercurial (broad/long)sword shatters, it's now useless
Me: I.. What?
DM: Everything that touched the trapdoor was shattering
Rogue: And i didn't notice my lock-picks becoming shrapnel in my hand?
DM: *ignores and goes on with the plot*


there were a few other moments like this, if anyone wants more then i'll spoiler them later

Sith_Happens
2014-08-20, 03:23 PM
During a 3.5 game the DM showed very little understanding of the rules. This little gem stands out exceptionally:

Fighter: I attack the troll for... 18 attack and 4 damage!
DM: You hit, but the wound heals immediately. Also, your sword is now stuck.
Fighter: What?
DM: Your sword is stuck. The wound regenerated while your sword was still in it, so it is enclosed in the troll.
Fighter: That's not how it works.
DM: Who's DM'ing this game, you or me?

Needless to say, no one kept playing for long.

Did you at least get a hero point?

Milodiah
2014-08-20, 03:57 PM
I just pictured the attack failing because the troll gets +2AC from all the other sword hilts sticking out of him :smalltongue:

Nagash
2014-08-21, 12:27 AM
During a 3.5 game the DM showed very little understanding of the rules. This little gem stands out exceptionally:

Fighter: I attack the troll for... 18 attack and 4 damage!
DM: You hit, but the wound heals immediately. Also, your sword is now stuck.
Fighter: What?
DM: Your sword is stuck. The wound regenerated while your sword was still in it, so it is enclosed in the troll.
Fighter: That's not how it works.
DM: Who's DM'ing this game, you or me?

Needless to say, no one kept playing for long.

home brewed monsters are fine and none of those people who left should ever play for anyone, again, ever

Inevitability
2014-08-21, 01:27 AM
home brewed monsters are fine and none of those people who left should ever play for anyone, again, ever

Sigh. :smallsigh:

The monster wasn't homebrewed. It. Was. A. Troll (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/troll.htm). A normal, SRD Troll the DM went to apply ridiculous rulings to that made it unable for fighters and barbarians to do anything but hitting the troll once and then throwing rocks from the sidelines.

Also, grammar.

illyahr
2014-08-21, 09:30 AM
Sigh. :smallsigh:

The monster wasn't homebrewed. It. Was. A. Troll (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/troll.htm). A normal, SRD Troll the DM went to apply ridiculous rulings to that made it unable for fighters and barbarians to do anything but hitting the troll once and then throwing rocks from the sidelines.

Also, grammar.

I see what the DM did. A troll has Regeneration, which means all damage dealt to it, except fire and acid, deal nonlethal damage. This is actually a very believable Rule 0 that I would be ok with as long as it wasn't done every time. I'd say Piercing weapons get stuck and Slashing have a chance to get stuck as the troll regenerates around it but it's not something I would get too worked up over.

As a side note: yes, fighters and barbarians basically have to sit on the sidelines when fighting trolls. That's why trolls are trolls. Unless they have something that gives their weapons fire or acid damage, they literally can't do anything to trolls.

DontEatRawHagis
2014-08-21, 10:22 AM
I see what the DM did. A troll has Regeneration, which means all damage dealt to it, except fire and acid, deal nonlethal damage. This is actually a very believable Rule 0 that I would be ok with as long as it wasn't done every time. I'd say Piercing weapons get stuck and Slashing have a chance to get stuck as the troll regenerates around it but it's not something I would get too worked up over.

As a side note: yes, fighters and barbarians basically have to sit on the sidelines when fighting trolls. That's why trolls are trolls. Unless they have something that gives their weapons fire or acid damage, they literally can't do anything to trolls.

I wiggle it around to cause internal bleeding.

BRC
2014-08-21, 10:29 AM
I see what the DM did. A troll has Regeneration, which means all damage dealt to it, except fire and acid, deal nonlethal damage. This is actually a very believable Rule 0 that I would be ok with as long as it wasn't done every time. I'd say Piercing weapons get stuck and Slashing have a chance to get stuck as the troll regenerates around it but it's not something I would get too worked up over.

As a side note: yes, fighters and barbarians basically have to sit on the sidelines when fighting trolls. That's why trolls are trolls. Unless they have something that gives their weapons fire or acid damage, they literally can't do anything to trolls.

Trolls have Regeneration 5, which is significant, but I wouldn't say it's fast enough to heal around a stab wound before somebody could pull their sword out.

DM Nate
2014-08-21, 10:40 AM
I wiggle it around to cause internal bleeding.

"Okay. Meanwhile, the troll wiggles his teeth around inside you."

Grif
2014-08-21, 10:42 AM
I thought I was a bad GM, but reading these stories is really comforting. Good to know you're not the worst at least. <_< >_>

Milodiah
2014-08-21, 11:10 AM
"The sword is stuck securely in the troll?"

"Yes."

"I borrow the Goliath's greathammer and start driving it in like a railroad spike!"


Let's see Regeneration 5 vs. "spike through really really vital internal organs"!

jaydubs
2014-08-21, 11:11 AM
Honestly, the troll thing sounds more like "it'll be fun if random bad stuff happens to the player characters" than "well-thought homebrew ability for this creature."

I've run into DMs like that, who were convinced that events randomly turning against the players made the game more interesting rather than simply annoying. And the results were usually similar to those described by Dire_Stirge - game disintegrates as players get increasingly frustrated and leave.

Let's be clear - I've had DMs who put together custom creatures, where everyone had a great time. But "your weapon is stuck, now go throw stones" doesn't sound like an ability that keeps all the players interested.

Nagash
2014-08-21, 11:20 AM
I can't believe fate handed you a Skunkalanche and you turned it down. That encounter was never about combat.

I am absolutely using the skunkalanche in my next session. Its both comedy gold and bound to get the players asking what the hell that many skunks are all doing in one place. And the most interesting theory they come up with be the true one.

Nagash
2014-08-21, 11:26 AM
Sigh. :smallsigh:

The monster wasn't homebrewed. It. Was. A. Troll (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/troll.htm). A normal, SRD Troll the DM went to apply ridiculous rulings to that made it unable for fighters and barbarians to do anything but hitting the troll once and then throwing rocks from the sidelines.

Also, grammar.

really? do you know that or are you just assuming it?

AMFV
2014-08-21, 11:46 AM
Honestly, the troll thing sounds more like "it'll be fun if random bad stuff happens to the player characters" than "well-thought homebrew ability for this creature."

I've run into DMs like that, who were convinced that events randomly turning against the players made the game more interesting rather than simply annoying. And the results were usually similar to those described by Dire_Stirge - game disintegrates as players get increasingly frustrated and leave.

Let's be clear - I've had DMs who put together custom creatures, where everyone had a great time. But "your weapon is stuck, now go throw stones" doesn't sound like an ability that keeps all the players interested.

Well notably that encounter may have been designed to showcase other players. It clearly wasn't done well, since there were a lot of people who were bothered by it. But frequently when I'm DMing I'll design specific encounters to create a chance for each player to shine (not all the time or it gets cheap, or feels cheap), but often enough that each player gets a chance to be the crazy OP one.

This was probably not the case here though.

Sartharina
2014-08-21, 11:49 AM
Trolls have Regeneration 5, which is significant, but I wouldn't say it's fast enough to heal around a stab wound before somebody could pull their sword out.It heals faster than it took damage. However, in such a situation, if I wanted to increase the terror of the encounter by giving a chance of a weapon getting stuck, I'd... throw in a lot more rules (It gets stuck if the damage die is greater than 50% and don't beat AC by more than 5, you can still attack the creature at -2 to attack and damage to pull it free, and half weapon damage die remains as "Cannot regenerate until the weapon's removed")

I also concur with the sentiment that "No, you don't know it's an SRD troll, and that it uses Troll statblock and abilities". That's metagaming, and players shouldn't have that information.

EvilAnagram
2014-08-21, 12:05 PM
Playing 4e LFR at the local game store. The DM for the week decides that I and my friend have overpowered characters, so he announces that he intends to kill them. My friend and I had taken these characters (his a berserker, mine a shielding swordmage) from level one all the way up to level nine over the course of many months, but he thinks they're OP, so they have to go.

Every single fight, the Djinn and Beholders seem to go after us. Every attack is directed at us. Every trap only targets us. And we pull off ridiculous victories because a water genasi swordmage basically dances around terrain laughing and marking everyone while Berserkers go berserk. Finally, we're fighting a dragon, and he stops pretending to justify anything anymore. He ignores rules, blatantly cheats, refuses to let us use items we've purchased, and generally acts like a prick. We still beat the dragon. He can blow me.

Mikeavelli
2014-08-21, 12:22 PM
DM: Who's DM'ing this game, you or me?



This is actually the part that bothers me. Much more than the sword getting stuck nonsense. It's not inherently a bad mechanic - I'd probably throw in a reflex save and make it consistent for every regenerating creature, but meh.

Proper DM'ing isn't just about controlling the session, it's about consistency and legitimacy. If you're going to whip out homebrew rules, they should be consistent homebrew rules that don't take your players by surprise. If you are taking the players by surprise, don't be snotty with them when they ask "why have things suddenly changed?" Just demanding the players accept your authoritai as DM is an incredibly fast way to alienate players and destroy your gaming group.



I also concur with the sentiment that "No, you don't know it's an SRD troll, and that it uses Troll statblock and abilities". That's metagaming, and players shouldn't have that information.


After you've been playing for more than a few years, and everyone in the group has a fair amount of experience with the system, you're going to know the structure of the Game. Iconic monsters like trolls have a well-known stat block, and it's silly to pretend players don't know that information.

DM Nate
2014-08-21, 12:25 PM
Playing 4e LFR at the local game store. The DM for the week decides that I and my friend have overpowered characters, so he announces that he intends to kill them. My friend and I had taken these characters (his a berserker, mine a shielding swordmage) from level one all the way up to level nine over the course of many months, but he thinks they're OP, so they have to go.

Every single fight, the Djinn and Beholders seem to go after us. Every attack is directed at us. Every trap only targets us. And we pull off ridiculous victories because a water genasi swordmage basically dances around terrain laughing and marking everyone while Berserkers go berserk. Finally, we're fighting a dragon, and he stops pretending to justify anything anymore. He ignores rules, blatantly cheats, refuses to let us use items we've purchased, and generally acts like a prick. We still beat the dragon. He can blow me.

Obviously your characters weren't OP at all.

DontEatRawHagis
2014-08-21, 12:27 PM
I got a lot of mixed praise by the other DMs when I did RPGA DMing. At one point the DMs decided they would make lvl 1 characters for LFR.

I DM'd and a one of them complained I was not DMing correctly and that I should be focusing my attacks on this player because he was setting up and healing everyone else. I had to remind him that we are in a group setting.

And if I had focused on that one guy yes I would kill him and not be as in danger, but if I did that player would be out of the game or sitting twiddling his thumbs for 1hr doing nothing.

Luckily he went back to the Epic table, and I left the group for my own personal campaigns. The new players loved me though.

Inevitability
2014-08-21, 12:31 PM
RE: Troll

No, I didn't know it was a typical troll. However, I am quite sure the DM wasn't homebrewing something, he believed that anything that regenerated was supposed to work that way.

Even if the DM was, I'd say he still qualifies as 'bad DM', because he was homebrewing a monster to make certain characters unable to fight while presenting it as a creature they know IC they should be able to fight.

And no, fighters and barbarians are not useless at all against trolls. They can still hack at it, thereby damaging it to the point where the wizard can walk up to it and kill it with a torch. The difference between fighting a troll and fighting anything else is just that someone else will have to deal the killing blow. No big deal.

Sartharina
2014-08-21, 12:42 PM
This is actually the part that bothers me. Much more than the sword getting stuck nonsense. It's not inherently a bad mechanic - I'd probably throw in a reflex save and make it consistent for every regenerating creature, but meh.

Proper DM'ing isn't just about controlling the session, it's about consistency and legitimacy. If you're going to whip out homebrew rules, they should be consistent homebrew rules that don't take your players by surprise. If you are taking the players by surprise, don't be snotty with them when they ask "why have things suddenly changed?" Just demanding the players accept your authoritai as DM is an incredibly fast way to alienate players and destroy your gaming group.Players are allowed to surprise the DM, and the DM is allowed to surprise the players. Arbitrating and interpreting the rules and the world is the DM's job, not the player's. Also, Dire Stirge's follow-up indicated he had all regenerating creatures work like this, so there IS consistency with the ruling. (And even if he'd modified it to be "All trolls regenerate like this" instead of a blanket all regeneration thing).


After you've been playing for more than a few years, and everyone in the group has a fair amount of experience with the system, you're going to know the structure of the Game. Iconic monsters like trolls have a well-known stat block, and it's silly to pretend players don't know that information.At which point, it's perfectly acceptable for the DM to change the creature so that it can still take the players by surprise. Some days, you fight the normal, run-of-the-mill Minotaur, armed with brute strength, immunity to mazes, and not much else. Another campaign might feature a Chargin' Tauren, which looks like a man with a bull's fur and head, and augments powerful charges with lightning powers.

AMFV
2014-08-21, 12:51 PM
This is actually the part that bothers me. Much more than the sword getting stuck nonsense. It's not inherently a bad mechanic - I'd probably throw in a reflex save and make it consistent for every regenerating creature, but meh.

Proper DM'ing isn't just about controlling the session, it's about consistency and legitimacy. If you're going to whip out homebrew rules, they should be consistent homebrew rules that don't take your players by surprise. If you are taking the players by surprise, don't be snotty with them when they ask "why have things suddenly changed?" Just demanding the players accept your authoritai as DM is an incredibly fast way to alienate players and destroy your gaming group.

It depends on the style of game being run. This guy had never played with this DM before, apparently they had a different idea about what kind of game was going to be run. After all there's been a very lengthy argument recently where many people have argued that consistency of rules is not always the most important thing.

Mikeavelli
2014-08-21, 12:54 PM
From the story I'm reading, it started not because the DM was intentionally changing things up, but because the DM didn't actually know the rules, and was making stuff up, then got upset when the players were confused and started questioning him. This is different from understanding the system, and changing things to intentionally mix it up.

Good on him for at least making it consistent, but if this little snapshot is typical of his DM'ing, I'm not at all surprised the players eventually left.

AMFV
2014-08-21, 12:57 PM
From the story I'm reading, it started not because the DM was intentionally changing things up, but because the DM didn't actually know the rules, and was making stuff up, then got upset when the players were confused and started questioning him. This is different from understanding the system, and changing things to intentionally mix it up.

Good on him for at least making it consistent, but if this little snapshot is typical of his DM'ing, I'm not at all surprised the players eventually left.

Well he changed the rules, whether he had understood them originally becomes less relevant later on, because they had changed after that point.

illyahr
2014-08-21, 03:41 PM
They can still hack at it, thereby damaging it to the point where the wizard can walk up to it and kill it with a torch. The difference between fighting a troll and fighting anything else is just that someone else will have to deal the killing blow. No big deal.

Nope. Nonlethal damage builds up. Lethal damage is what reduces HP. All the melee-types can do is run up the nonlethal damage until it exceeds the troll's current HP, at which point it falls unconscious. The wizard would still have to reduce it's current HP to lethal levels to kill it. All melee-types are in a fight with a troll is a way to keep it unconscious until someone with fire or acid can whittle away it's HP.

Inevitability
2014-08-21, 03:52 PM
Nope. Nonlethal damage builds up. Lethal damage is what reduces HP. All the melee-types can do is run up the nonlethal damage until it exceeds the troll's current HP, at which point it falls unconscious. The wizard would still have to reduce it's current HP to lethal levels to kill it. All melee-types are in a fight with a troll is a way to keep it unconscious until someone with fire or acid can whittle away it's HP.

Er... No. The rules (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilities.htm#regeneration) say:


A regenerating creature that has been rendered unconscious through nonlethal damage can be killed with a coup de grace.

So basically, once Trolly McTroll is taken down by the fighter, all it takes is a little torch to kill him.

Anxe
2014-08-21, 03:54 PM
Nope. Nonlethal damage builds up. Lethal damage is what reduces HP. All the melee-types can do is run up the nonlethal damage until it exceeds the troll's current HP, at which point it falls unconscious. The wizard would still have to reduce it's current HP to lethal levels to kill it. All melee-types are in a fight with a troll is a way to keep it unconscious until someone with fire or acid can whittle away it's HP.

My group runs with the rule that any weapon can coup de grace a troll. Not sure if that's RAW or not. We figured the troll wouldn't regenerate much with its head chopped off though.

Mikeavelli
2014-08-21, 03:54 PM
Nope. Nonlethal damage builds up. Lethal damage is what reduces HP. All the melee-types can do is run up the nonlethal damage until it exceeds the troll's current HP, at which point it falls unconscious. The wizard would still have to reduce it's current HP to lethal levels to kill it. All melee-types are in a fight with a troll is a way to keep it unconscious until someone with fire or acid can whittle away it's HP.

Nope (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilities.htm#regeneration)



Certain attack forms, typically fire and acid, deal damage to the creature normally; that sort of damage doesn’t convert to nonlethal damage and so doesn’t go away. The creature’s description includes the details. A regenerating creature that has been rendered unconscious through nonlethal damage can be killed with a coup de grace. The attack cannot be of a type that automatically converts to nonlethal damage.


Just takes one full-round action, you don't have to whittle its hp away.

AMFV
2014-08-21, 04:06 PM
Nope (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilities.htm#regeneration)



Just takes one full-round action, you don't have to whittle its hp away.

You can't coup de grace with a spell.. Under most circumstances

icefractal
2014-08-21, 05:16 PM
Doesn't really matter. Once the troll is unconscious, actually killing it is a formality, as long as anyone has any source of fire/acid.

jaydubs
2014-08-21, 05:22 PM
Doesn't really matter. Once the troll is unconscious, actually killing it is a formality, as long as anyone has any source of fire/acid.

Worst case scenario, you could probably just induce some vomiting all over the unconscious troll.

AMFV
2014-08-21, 05:38 PM
Doesn't really matter. Once the troll is unconscious, actually killing it is a formality, as long as anyone has any source of fire/acid.

Not if it can regenerate before that point or has back up. If all you've got is acid splash and it's got a lot of HD you might still have to fight it a few times, or it might get back up. Or it could even fake it's death and then come back after. I mean Trolls have huge con modifiers they can hold their breath a long time.

Mikeavelli
2014-08-21, 06:20 PM
Not all spells can be used to Coup de Grace, but Acid Splash is specifically one of the ones that can be used to do so. disregard that, I was under the impression any touch attack would work. There's apparently some disagreement on whether weaponlike spells actually count as weapons for the purpose of coup de grace.

Even if that's not present, I don't think I've ever been in a party that lacked a torch.

AMFV
2014-08-21, 06:40 PM
Not all spells can be used to Coup de Grace, but Acid Splash is specifically one of the ones that can be used to do so. disregard that, I was under the impression any touch attack would work. There's apparently some disagreement on whether weaponlike spells actually count as weapons for the purpose of coup de grace.

Even if that's not present, I don't think I've ever been in a party that lacked a torch.

A torch does 1d3 damage, that makes it a maximum of 6 + twice strength mod on a crit. Since it's light. You've been doing nonlethal to the troll. It has still all of it's snazzy hitpoints or might be able to regenerate them almost as fast as you can bring them down.

A Coup De Grace isn't tantamount to an isnta-kill, it just generally is.

Hexalan
2014-08-21, 06:44 PM
A torch does 1d3 damage, that makes it a maximum of 6 + twice strength mod on a crit. Since it's light. You've been doing nonlethal to the troll. It has still all of it's snazzy hitpoints or might be able to regenerate them almost as fast as you can bring them down.

A Coup De Grace isn't tantamount to an isnta-kill, it just generally is.

What's important in a Coup de Grace isn't just the auto-crit - it's forcing the fort save vs death.

AMFV
2014-08-21, 06:51 PM
What's important in a Coup de Grace isn't just the auto-crit - it's forcing the fort save vs death.

Which Trolls happen to be very, very, very good at making.

Milodiah
2014-08-21, 06:58 PM
Fortunately unconscious trolls aren't as good at rolling saves vs. being doused in oil and set on fire.

AMFV
2014-08-21, 07:00 PM
Fortunately unconscious trolls aren't as good at rolling saves vs. being doused in oil and set on fire.

True, although to be fair that's not actually a save, and immolation doesn't actually do that much damage.

icefractal
2014-08-21, 07:02 PM
Unless the warrior in question died immediately after taking down the troll, they can simply pound on it for a few rounds and make sure it's so far into negatives it won't wake up before it finishes cooking.

What is even the point of this sidebar anyway? :smallconfused: Whether melee characters should go sit on the sidelines when a Troll shows up? If so, definitely not. We're not talking about a golem situation here (not that most casters are even stymied by a golem, for that matter).

Kornaki
2014-08-21, 07:04 PM
Not if it can regenerate before that point or has back up. If all you've got is acid splash and it's got a lot of HD you might still have to fight it a few times, or it might get back up. Or it could even fake it's death and then come back after. I mean Trolls have huge con modifiers they can hold their breath a long time.

It might get back up? Why did the fighter and barbarian stop hacking it just because it fell over?

Anxe
2014-08-21, 08:26 PM
It might get back up? Why did the fighter and barbarian stop hacking it just because it fell over?

Because of the three other trolls attacking them?

Inevitability
2014-08-22, 01:07 AM
Okay, I did not intend to start a page-long discussion over whether or not trolls are unfair for melee people and how you should deal with a troll problem in your basement.

People, please use this thread what is is meant for. Troll discussions should probably be continued in a separate thread.

JerichoPenumbra
2014-08-25, 12:14 AM
My two worst experiences:

1) Guy was running an old school-esque rpg. The party was the equivalent of 2 rogues and an enchanter (me). We walk into the room of dungeon and find a bunch of urns and a few are broken and empty. I open and look inside one and a small black ooze attacks me. We quickly determine that only fire can harm it and only one of the rogues was holding a torch. By sheer luck, he had enough unlit torches for the rest of us, we light 'em and surround the ooze. After about 3~4 rounds of us wailing on it with lit torches, barely bringing it down to half HP and us being brought down to half health as well, the DM says "Oh this is looking too easy for you guys" and had the mindless creature use tactics. It moved past us and smashed one of the other urns which also had a similar ooze in it. They both combine into a bigger ooze and to our dismay, we found out it could very reliably hit and one-shot each one each of us. TPK. :smallfurious:

2) This one was a skype game. Not that the game itself was bad, just I had other circumstances that kept me from continuing it. The guy running it had a bit of a swearing problem and even admitted that he purposely acted like **** to other people to see if they would stay committed to the game in question. He said that it was because they kept having players come in and drop and he wanted to make sure the new guys coming in would stay. I don't care how much you've been burned by people dropping from a game, acting like a jerk-off to see if people will put up with it and stay is not how you should recruit people. My circumstances kept me from staying, but with the personality I saw I don't think I would have wanted to.

DigoDragon
2014-08-26, 09:41 AM
The last Shadowrun 4e campaign I played in started out as advertised, but there's one tiny little adjustment-- the GM added a little AA company called 'KOCP' (Kaiba Omni-Consumer Products). The GM liked to act-out little dark humor commercials in the vein of the ones from Robocop during downtime. It was okay for a while since some of them were rather funny. Then the GM introduced the 'Mark I Dragon Mech'. It was an 8-foot tall robot stuffed with weapons and available for public sale. :smallconfused:

Eventually we got attacked by one in a club fight (that we weren't even a party to) and it killed one of our contacts that was trying to get us a job. It took a lot of weaponry to bring it down, but hey, we managed to collect most of it's components before we ran off. Free stuff right? Nope. All the weapons and equipment on it 'self destruct' when the robot is destroyed, making it the most useless paperweight in Seattle. We sold the metal for scrap. Later on we acquired enough money together to buy one of these dragon robots. Hey, let's buy one and have some fun with it.

Nope.

The GM wouldn't let us buy one without a huge number of restrictions (can't use it in public even though we've seen 3 of them, can't modify it or it self-destructs, can't reprogram it, etc.) Okay, whatever, we dropped the idea and moved on. We look for new work, but the GM interrupts us with news that KOCP is now a AAA megacorp. That's nice, we're not interested in knowing about that, we're looking to find work. Ah, but we can't ignore this! See, KOCP built a new drone, the Robocop! Now Lonestar was replaced by machines that we couldn't damage at all, nor reason with (The team rigger was killed by one for double parking). Then next session the GM starts by informing us that KOCP bought out Ares, Horizon, and Wuxing. Oh, and they fired a nuke at Zurich Orbital, so the corporate court has been destroyed. KOCP now owns North America and plans on reuniting it under one flag. The NAN are totally okay with this.

Wha...?

So, by the 4th session this game went from the standard gritty cuberpunk future to one really ham-fisted fanfic about some little company that took over a continent by selling death traps publicly. We only managed to get about half-way through the 4th session before we all got up and quit (we waited for the GM to use the bathroom and then we packed up and left). Haven't heard from him since.

lytokk
2014-08-26, 10:04 AM
Ya know Digo, with all your stories, quotes and the general light-heartedness I get the feeling of from your games, I have a hard time believing your group could of ever had a bad DM. And now I believe it.

Also, I love your avatar. Just throwin that out there.

Segev
2014-08-26, 10:38 AM
While I certainly do not blame you for up and leaving when it got that painfully bad (really, the DMPC was just a corporpation, here), it's a little bad to leave while the DM's using the restroom rather than telling him, "hey, this just isn't working, so we don't want to play this game anymore." I mean, I know it's awkward and feels mean, but it's still better to tell him to his face. Maybe explain why, especially if he asks.

Sith_Happens
2014-08-26, 12:36 PM
'KOCP' (Kaiba Omni-Consumer Products)

To me, the worst part of this story was the utter lack of references to trading card games.:smalltongue:

...Or maybe that was the GM's plan all along, and if you stayed he'd have finished turning Shadowrun into Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's.

Flashy
2014-08-26, 01:18 PM
To me, the worst part of this story was the utter lack of references to trading card games.:smalltongue:

...Or maybe that was the GM's plan all along, and if you stayed he'd have finished turning Shadowrun into Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's.

The corp DID have an inexplicable dragon fixation.

Were the dragon mechs white?

EDIT: Did the corp screw the rules, because they had money?

IllogicalBlox
2014-08-26, 02:16 PM
My two worst experiences:

1) Guy was running an old school-esque rpg. The party was the equivalent of 2 rogues and an enchanter (me). We walk into the room of dungeon and find a bunch of urns and a few are broken and empty. I open and look inside one and a small black ooze attacks me. We quickly determine that only fire can harm it and only one of the rogues was holding a torch. By sheer luck, he had enough unlit torches for the rest of us, we light 'em and surround the ooze. After about 3~4 rounds of us wailing on it with lit torches, barely bringing it down to half HP and us being brought down to half health as well, the DM says "Oh this is looking too easy for you guys" and had the mindless creature use tactics. It moved past us and smashed one of the other urns which also had a similar ooze in it. They both combine into a bigger ooze and to our dismay, we found out it could very reliably hit and one-shot each one each of us. TPK. :smallfurious:

2) This one was a skype game. Not that the game itself was bad, just I had other circumstances that kept me from continuing it. The guy running it had a bit of a swearing problem and even admitted that he purposely acted like **** to other people to see if they would stay committed to the game in question. He said that it was because they kept having players come in and drop and he wanted to make sure the new guys coming in would stay. I don't care how much you've been burned by people dropping from a game, acting like a jerk-off to see if people will put up with it and stay is not how you should recruit people. My circumstances kept me from staying, but with the personality I saw I don't think I would have wanted to.
Wow, I wonder why?

Sith_Happens
2014-08-26, 03:49 PM
EDIT: Did the corp screw the rules, because they had money?

All corps in Shadowrun do that.

Alberic Strein
2014-08-26, 05:42 PM
All corps in Shadowrun do that.

But did KOCP deposit a copyright for said maneuver?

blacklight101
2014-08-26, 09:02 PM
My worst, compared to some of the others, isn't awful, just kinda bad. Possibly the oft-heard tale of the uber DMPC that proceeds to railroad the party when we get a little off track in our wanderings, but still proceeding to the goal otherwise, combined with a player that was just... not meant for this type of group, to say the least. It didn't last too long after social drama OOC started to get in the game from a few (there were 7 players and the DM, it was a big game) of them and just ruin what could have been a better campaign. A couple of the people were super creative and awesome to play with and created, for us, memorable characters that my wife and I still talk about some 8 years later.

Not awful, but its too bad about losing contact with some of the players after the fact for the same OOC drama. I think it would have lasted otherwise, even with railroading, if only to hear what a couple of them could come up with to make the DM **** a brick now and then. Sometimes it was worth it just to nag him/his DMPC.

DigoDragon
2014-08-27, 07:16 AM
Ya know Digo, with all your stories, quotes and the general light-heartedness I get the feeling of from your games, I have a hard time believing your group could of ever had a bad DM. And now I believe it.
Also, I love your avatar. Just throwin that out there.

I been participating in tabletop RPGs since... 1994-95 I want to say. Under the years of fond memories and hilariousness, there are a few blemishes.

And thanks. :3



While I certainly do not blame you for up and leaving when it got that painfully bad (really, the DMPC was just a corporpation, here), it's a little bad to leave while the DM's using the restroom rather than telling him, "hey, this just isn't working, so we don't want to play this game anymore." I mean, I know it's awkward and feels mean, but it's still better to tell him to his face. Maybe explain why, especially if he asks.

This is true, and I don't recommend to anyone that they should copy that stunt because I fully admit it's a jerk-move we pulled (even if some of us didn't know that GM for very long).



To me, the worst part of this story was the utter lack of references to trading card games.:smalltongue:
...Or maybe that was the GM's plan all along, and if you stayed he'd have finished turning Shadowrun into Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's.

If that was the case, maybe it was good we quit and not tried to stick around longer. I'm terrible at children's card games. XD



The corp DID have an inexplicable dragon fixation.

Were the dragon mechs white?

They were... silver I think?



EDIT: Did the corp screw the rules, because they had money?

All corps in Shadowrun do that.

Yes, but this one had the money to screw meta rules!
That's a corp you don't mess with.

Sartharina
2014-08-27, 12:22 PM
I saw the corp as more of a BBEG than DMPC.

Sith_Happens
2014-08-27, 02:13 PM
I saw the corp as more of a BBEG than DMPC.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

Alberic Strein
2014-08-27, 04:30 PM
The two are not mutually exclusive.

I would even say that non-terrible DMs are more likely to create an accidental campaign-ender DMPC as a result of trying to come up with a cool and interesting BBEG.

DigoDragon
2014-08-28, 09:33 AM
I would even say that non-terrible DMs are more likely to create an accidental campaign-ender DMPC as a result of trying to come up with a cool and interesting BBEG.

I had an accidental DMPC like that... sorta. It was a female red dragon who disguised herself as the princess of this fairly 'lawful evil' city-state (ruled by the queen). The royalty didn't catch on that the red dragon replaced the real princess with herself (but to be fair, the real princess was just as evil, so the joke's on the PCs). After a long adventure where the dragon got stuck in her human form and working with the PCs to get unstuck. This was to make the BBEG a little sympathetic, but maybe I went too far because the two rubbed off on each-other. The dragon became a little more understanding about teamwork and doing some good for the world while the players learned... well nothing really, but half the party was totally ready to join her in the planned hostile takeover of this city-state and rule it.

That derailed the campaign pretty hard for two sessions. :smalltongue:

Sartharina
2014-08-28, 09:42 AM
I had an accidental DMPC like that... sorta. It was a female red dragon who disguised herself as the princess of this fairly 'lawful evil' city-state (ruled by the queen). The royalty didn't catch on that the red dragon replaced the real princess with herself (but to be fair, the real princess was just as evil, so the joke's on the PCs). After a long adventure where the dragon got stuck in her human form and working with the PCs to get unstuck. This was to make the BBEG a little sympathetic, but maybe I went too far because the two rubbed off on each-other. The dragon became a little more understanding about teamwork and doing some good for the world while the players learned... well nothing really, but half the party was totally ready to join her in the planned hostile takeover of this city-state and rule it.

That derailed the campaign pretty hard for two sessions. :smalltongue:

I prefer the term "City-state optimization" to "Conquest". Of course, after reading a post in another thread, I'm gonna have to have a village/town ruled by a Dragon that's trying to play Sim City (Or Tropico), except with a real city with real people.

DigoDragon
2014-08-28, 10:54 AM
I prefer the term "City-state optimization" to "Conquest". Of course, after reading a post in another thread, I'm gonna have to have a village/town ruled by a Dragon that's trying to play Sim City (Or Tropico), except with a real city with real people.

Heehee, I like that term.

Also, bonus points if the citizens know the dragon is in charge but don't care because they got that stadium they demanded. :smallcool:

Sartharina
2014-08-28, 11:15 AM
Heehee, I like that term.

Also, bonus points if the citizens know the dragon is in charge but don't care because they got that stadium they demanded. :smallcool:And he also saved them from a Wight-and-Shadowpocalypse.

Segev
2014-08-28, 03:36 PM
And he also saved them from a Wight-and-Shadowpocalypse.

Now I want a necromancer to have an artistic-sounding conversation as he looks over the ruins of a city. "Look at the play of wight and shadow in the medium of this city."

IllogicalBlox
2014-08-30, 08:57 AM
I prefer the term "City-state optimization" to "Conquest". Of course, after reading a post in another thread, I'm gonna have to have a village/town ruled by a Dragon that's trying to play Sim City (Or Tropico), except with a real city with real people.
He could build it like this: http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2010/10/14/magnasanti-the-largest-and-most-terrifying-simcity/

Visivicous
2014-09-06, 09:57 AM
The last Shadowrun 4e campaign I played in started out as advertised, but there's one tiny little adjustment-- the GM added a little AA company called 'KOCP' (Kaiba Omni-Consumer Products). The GM liked to act-out little dark humor commercials in the vein of the ones from Robocop during downtime. It was okay for a while since some of them were rather funny. Then the GM introduced the 'Mark I Dragon Mech'. It was an 8-foot tall robot stuffed with weapons and available for public sale. :smallconfused:

Eventually we got attacked by one in a club fight (that we weren't even a party to) and it killed one of our contacts that was trying to get us a job. It took a lot of weaponry to bring it down, but hey, we managed to collect most of it's components before we ran off. Free stuff right? Nope. All the weapons and equipment on it 'self destruct' when the robot is destroyed, making it the most useless paperweight in Seattle. We sold the metal for scrap. Later on we acquired enough money together to buy one of these dragon robots. Hey, let's buy one and have some fun with it.

Nope.

The GM wouldn't let us buy one without a huge number of restrictions (can't use it in public even though we've seen 3 of them, can't modify it or it self-destructs, can't reprogram it, etc.) Okay, whatever, we dropped the idea and moved on. We look for new work, but the GM interrupts us with news that KOCP is now a AAA megacorp. That's nice, we're not interested in knowing about that, we're looking to find work. Ah, but we can't ignore this! See, KOCP built a new drone, the Robocop! Now Lonestar was replaced by machines that we couldn't damage at all, nor reason with (The team rigger was killed by one for double parking). Then next session the GM starts by informing us that KOCP bought out Ares, Horizon, and Wuxing. Oh, and they fired a nuke at Zurich Orbital, so the corporate court has been destroyed. KOCP now owns North America and plans on reuniting it under one flag. The NAN are totally okay with this.

Wha...?

So, by the 4th session this game went from the standard gritty cuberpunk future to one really ham-fisted fanfic about some little company that took over a continent by selling death traps publicly. We only managed to get about half-way through the 4th session before we all got up and quit (we waited for the GM to use the bathroom and then we packed up and left). Haven't heard from him since.

I know that you wrote Shadowrun, but the first time I read your post I read 'Darksun'. It was very confusing, and now I feel that my brain has betrayed me.

Anonymouswizard
2014-09-06, 08:59 PM
Reading this thread makes me glad that my worst experience can be summed up thusly:

We had just finished a game of pathfinder, and the Person who GM'd our short-lived Deathwatch campaign stated that he was going to be running All Flesh Must be Eaten. Everyone was okay with this, as apart from not interrupting our plan to sneak into the chaos cult with "you are going in a drop pod and landing right on to of it", and having Cypher appear and disappear without allowing us to do anything but listen to him it had been fine. So after a rocky start, including a miscommunication about randomly generating character types (he's a big warhammer 40,000 player, and so meant combat roles, but what was assumed when he first stated his intention was story archetypes, with a good three of use being aspiring authors), we sat down to make characters completely based on our own ideas. Seeing as the game was going to be zombie-survival, I created a character with a broad but shallow standard in the sciences, as well as electrical engineering, in the assumption that I could use the science skills to investigate the cause of the zombie-apocalypse and engineer a cure. The party also included a medic with the highest level of coward, a mechanical engineer/historical reenactor, a combat brute, a creepy old woman, and later on martial-artist, a soldier, and a farmer. Out of those, I had one combat skill and the medic had none.

It turns out that our GM loves combat.

I had five points in resources, as there are almost no qualities for a non-combat oriented character to take. (I'd originally wanted to play an inspired to mitigate this problem, but he insisted that there was no magic). These points came to mean nothing, as I couldn't use them to begin with any sort of lab equipment, or use the $50000 to buy anything. I also could not use my 20+ skill points in sciences, electrical engineering and research for anything, possibly because he thinks I powergame (I don't, I'm just really good at maths, and even our disagreement about drawbacks was because I was interested in four of them instead of "just enough for an interesting character". Our drawbacks never came up, except for the medic's cowardness), until about six sessions in I literally said "I go out into the street, find a lone zombie, overpower it, and then tie it up and bring it back to experiment on it", forcing him to come up with answers to a number of simple experiments.

He also had this habit of attacking us with zombies if we took more than 10 minutes to plan everything, even if we were far away from the town centre and making minimal noise. At one point we got attacked because we tried to work out a way to look inside the abandoned base without entering.

He also tried to stop the two engineers in our group (me studying for my undergraduate Electronic and Electrical Engineering degree, another a professional straight Mechanical engineer) from getting to the once place in town where we could apply our knowledge (our characters had the skill points to justify it). When we finally managed to get to the manufacturing plant the mechanical engineer got to work building plastic plate armour with the 3D printer and weapons from the stocks of metal, and while my character was allowed to build transcievers, tasers and lasersights (only one of those I could even coble together), I was forbidden from building a railgun, even when four seperate players pointed out how easy they are to make to you have access to everything in an electronics warehouse, which we did. It resolved down to first "you don't have two rails of equal length", and then when I pointed out that we did, and had in fact picked them up in the very first session of the campaign as improvised weapons, devolved into "you aren't having a railgun, deal with it" (this was, despite his belief of railguns as "those awesome weapons people use in sci-fi", he could have set the damage to be 1d4 if he wanted to). This was after I had spent half the campaign barely hitting anything, due to low strength and my character not having his favoured weapon (his only combat skill until we finally got experience was melee: arming sword, and by the time we did have some I had a sword again).

He then applied our medic's cowardness so that at the beginning they could only fail on a 1 (despite having willpower 1), and at the end couldn't even stand to be in the same room as a normal zombie.

He also complained about only one player giving him backstory, whereas our standard procedure is that you don't have to provide a backstory unless the GM asks for it (which he hadn't), and I had been joking about the backstory event that would feature heavily in my character's reoccurring nightmares (a drawback that never came up) since session two.

It got to the point where the only reason I was still in the campaign being that the roleplay with the other players was fun, with us having a diverse group of characters.

TLDR: our style's clashed. As in, I said "I want to try Call of Cthulhu at some point", and he replied with "I won't let someone run it here, it doesn't have enough combat for me."

Safe to say, I'm happy that he isn't part of my uni group. I discovered my playing style when a friend let me join their Unknown Armies game, and have only played in that group during summer holidays since.

Fumble Jack
2014-09-07, 06:49 PM
Last session I ran, I have to say I was the bad Dm. Mostly due to overestimating my ability to multitask.

Now starting off, wasn't so bad. However as the game progressed, a player suggested we used the pool and continue. I agreed cause it was rather humid and in concept it seemed like a great idea it even lead to a rather interesting OOC discussion about using a beach ball like D20 and other dice.

In practice, not so great as they all were distracted as well. I was having to shout or swim from one end of the pool to the other to get player actions and try to give everyone a fair shake. I became frustrated and had to end the session early. I clearly bit off more than I could chew and realize it.

The Glyphstone
2014-09-07, 07:34 PM
Last session I ran, I have to say I was the bad Dm. Mostly due to overestimating my ability to multitask.

Now starting off, wasn't so bad. However as the game progressed, a player suggested we used the pool and continue. I agreed cause it was rather humid and in concept it seemed like a great idea it even lead to a rather interesting OOC discussion about using a beach ball like D20 and other dice.

In practice, not so great as they all were distracted as well. I was having to shout or swim from one end of the pool to the other to get player actions and try to give everyone a fair shake. I became frustrated and had to end the session early. I clearly bit off more than I could chew and realize it.

Most people would not immediate associate 'playing D&D in a pool' with 'worst DM ever'...more like 'best DM ever', so I think you get points for effort, at least.

Fumble Jack
2014-09-07, 08:29 PM
Thank you.

If I can get them a little more organized, and all together in the same scene, I might consider giving the combination another try.

The Glyphstone
2014-09-07, 08:52 PM
Nah - you'll probably get the same result before too long. You'd need waterproofed character sheets, to start with. It's Awesome But Impractical.

Beige
2014-09-08, 04:47 AM
I prefer the term "City-state optimization" to "Conquest". Of course, after reading a post in another thread, I'm gonna have to have a village/town ruled by a Dragon that's trying to play Sim City (Or Tropico), except with a real city with real people.

sounds a hoot, and is totally in character for a blue dragon too - they like everyone to know how awesome they and their lair is, and will go out of their way to ensure it :smallbiggrin:

Beige
2014-09-08, 08:42 AM
warning - ramblings

My worst DM I've ever had was my introduction to roleplaying.

The game was warhammer fantasy roleplay, just after the release of the then most recent version of the game, playing with some folks I used to play warhammer with - I thought this'd be great fun because I really liked the lore of fantasy back then, and the people I was playing with was my best friend at the time (BF), a player I'd know for years and got along with well (player A), and one of the workers at the local Games Workshop (player B) with a friend of player A who I knew to be a bit of a power gamer in arhammer, but generally fun to talk to as the DM.

We started creating characters and rolling our class - for those who don't know, warhammer fantasy roleplay has a class table with about 50 classes, all of which boil down to variations on a standard role, and your starting class is randomly generated. picking is an option, but the DM said he'd rather go with random and since none of us had much experiance with the system due to newness we decided we didn't want to trawl through so many classes looking for a good one so we agreed - and I ended up with an elf thief, BF rolled a human zealot of Sigmar - a religious fanatic dedicated god of the Empire, this will be important later - player B rolled a human rat-catcher*, and player A chose halfling as his race and was given inquisitor as his class :smallsigh:.

this naturally raised some eyebrows from the rest of us, but the DM explained that the plot he was running would go much smoother with an inquisitor in the party, and player A had expressed some interest in the class so it seemed a good match. Happy with this explanation, we agreed and as character creation had taken a while we agreed to start next week.

The first session went with no problems - it was brilliant even. We started off investigating a slaneshii cult in a small city – an entrance to their secret temple was discovered by player B's ratcatcher, which bought Player A's inquisitor and his follower (BF) to the city. I had recently been caught doing my thiefing in the city, and was given a choice of helping out as a scout or having the inquisitor excorcie his state-given right and kill me on the spot. We found the cult, did some basic sneaking, a bit of cultist bashing and interupted a ritual to summon a demon and everyone had a good laugh. We got one little eyebrow raising moment when some leather armour was obtained for our zealot from a cultist guard – a cultist of the god of pain and pleasure. I'll leave the rest to your imagination.

The second minor niggle of this tale occurred after we had defeated the cult head and stopped the ritual. We where searching the place for clues to find the larger cult – this one being too small and to well-funded to be alone – and everyone's search but player A's turned up nothing. Why is this a niggle? Because my skill used for searching was over 20 higher than his, and you roll 2d10, meaning he could not possibly have beat me. I took it in stride, however, because the halfling inquisitor had had the least to do in combat due to being a melee class with the race with worst melee stats and he'd mostly been there to use knowledge, plus plot central inquisitor buffs for finding cultists.

Session two started, and that's when things nose dived. When we arrived, we started out getting rewards from the town for stopping the cult. Well, I say we – I really mean player A's halfling got rewards for stopping the cult, but he could share them with us. They consisted of halfling sized armour, a pair of pistols only he had the skill to use, and a paltry sum of money. Oh, and the rat catcher got a new weapon as well that neither my theif nor my friend’s zealot could use. This dosen't seem so bad now, but it was the DM's grin when saying everyone had been rewarded equally that sold it for me. But me and my friend where new to this tabletop roleplaying thing, and we had been the most effecitve the previous session in a scrap, so again we just smiled a slightly forced smile and took it in stride.

Then began the plot of session two. I say plot, I mean hastily thought out excuse for a plot – we had to make a detour to kill some orcs and goblins ravaging the nearby countryside because, no joke guys, they had info on the cult; no matter we where supposed to be somewhat heroic folks who wanted the good of the empire anyway, it was tied to the plot in a way that ripped the plot in half. I'll cut him some slack for stalling for time to come up with part two of the main plot – I've done it myself from time to time – but it was the excuse link that made it feel weird, rather than say our sources where looking into it, in the meantime the city is being threatened by orks, don't suppose we could bug you to help.

So we go after the orcs, and the party decide my sneaky elf should scout ahead because I was hired as a scout and all that jazz, along with the Inquisitor – a halfling so also good at being sneaky – heading the other direction to watch patrols etc. So I look at the map we where given, found the best way there with the cover shown on it and rolled my sneak skill, trying to get close and count the number of orcs, goblins etc. I remember being really happy because I rolled a double 10, which in that system lets you add another dice so I was damn confident there was no way in hell I was getting seen.

I'm pretty sure the thread this is in tells you the result.

Not only was I spotted slightly by one goblin, or made them suspicious. No, the entire camp saw my poor little elf trying, as our DM put it (paraphrased from memory) “trying some of that assassins creed shiz of hiding behind trees, and making it obvious he sucks” Now I was confused by this – 1) how else is one supposed to sneak through a forest, and 2) the only assassins creed game out at the time where 1 and maybe 2, and they don't have trees.

So I have the entire orc/goblin war camp coming after me and I'm told it's now in combat. I'm also told that since our halfling wasn't showing off he had – in the six seconds this had apparently taken – managed to sneak into the camp, get to the centre, get the info document and re-meet up with the rest of the party two turns of movement away from me and this army. Yeah

I am an archer at the time, but I'm thinking I'm fast and I've got good movement so I should be able to pull back and save my skin. I rolled low but, you remember before when I mentioned no-one in my group could beat my searching skill? Well the same stat is used for initiative in WHFRP, and orcs have an average of 20 in it (I had 1 of maximum possible for a starting character – somewhere in the 60s/70s) so....

I move last out of everyone? In fact I rolled so poorly that I have to wait till the second round to get a turn? Something about being surprised or some other BS. At this moment I'm feeling pretty annoyed, and I can see from the faces of the other player's they're not happy with this either, but rather than cause an argument I just sigh and accept it, and of course I'm knocked unconscious right away. To the DM's credit, he didn't go through with having them kill me on the spot, instead having them prepare to charge the rest of the group even though none of them can reach – so it wasn't a complete rocking.

This huge combat takes the rest of the session, so I hang out getting a drink and reading the rulebook for character planning as we had, just before the orc camp, gained enough exp for our first advancement.

Now in this combat I get to see it's not just me he has it out for as our zealot is dropped almost instantly as well after being denied is critical hit equivalent against the orc chieftain because of his magic helmet. The Rat-catcher fares better than us, though I suspect thats more because he was afraid of annoying the games workshop employee when he almost lived in the shop at the time – he just found himself doing nothing but being allowed to take actions. Our Brave Leader, however, was taking on this entire camp single handedly – with every attack against him missing and his new shiny pistols killing enemies left and right until everyone’s bored of this shizz and thus the orcs decide to leave.

So our halfling wakes the rest of us up, unties the somehow tied up zealot – because bondage armour ha ha – and we head back to town with the info in tow.

I was in 30 minutes of this session, my friend 40. We're a little annoyed so we go to talk to the DM afterwards. Player A comes with us because this isn't fun for him either, and he's a nice guy and doesn’t like seeing people get the short end of the stick. We talk to the DM and at first he says it was pefectly legit and we're just whining because we didn't ruin this session like the last one, but after a bit he mentions family troubles which player A – his friend – confirms, and promises it won't happen next week. So we agree to one more session...

I was a little late to session three, and when I get there I find that after some discussion the group has decided it'd be for the best if someone changes job to a priest so we have a healer, and the DM has his heart fixed on a priest of Sigmar because the priests of the war god are totally the best healers...

Now, since the DM says he has an awesome plan for it in the story, we do decide to have someone change, especially since player B would like to play a caster and he has – in his normal job change options from ratcatcher, and thus can be done straight away by the rules – the basic priest job. Besides him, we also have two characters already associated with the church and devout followers of the god in question who can also, by the rules, switch to priest from their current job. So it looks like one of them will be doing it. The DM disagrees, he feels that my elf should become a priest because elves can get a starting skill that helps magic. In fact, he insists and says it'll be ruining the campaign if we don't

I try to argue that I'm fine switching to a healer, but not a priest of sigmar – it's not a healer at all, and also Sigmar is the god of the Empire and entierly in the perview of humans of the Empire; my elf would not worship him. I tried to suggest other gods, like Shayala goddess of healing that is worshiped by both elves and humans, or even go light mage as they where better healers. This turns into a 10 minute shouting session only calmed when Player B shows more sense than the rest of us and leaves, and Player A and my friend talk the DM down into letting me be a priest of Shayala, saying she's the second most common god of the Empire and he'd still be able to run his story without spoiling it for me.

We start the session – me now a priest – and the DM hands out experience from the last session's huge orc brawl of dullness. The Zealot and Inquisitor get up to the second advancement level so are going along well, the rat-catcher is turned into a DMPC (but he'll only be used if he really needs to) and is suddenly promoted to the knight advanced job. Now to get an advanced job, you need to completely finish the previous job – all of which have at least 5 things you need...

and me? I was so bad at my job I lost exp, knocking me below getting my advancement and meaning I was stuck with magic 0 in my new priest job – so I couldn't cast the spells he needed me to have. He did let me swap out my choice of elf racial skills from a boost to initiative to the magic sensing one I mentioned before – Aetheric Attunement – but this wasn't from the kindness of his heart; this was laying yet more tracks for us.

So already pretty pissed off, I start the session. Turns out the main cult meet in the so totally not obvious giant decadent mansion of the local drug lord, and we're infiltrating it to stop them once and for all. Of course, that wasn't what the note said, what the note said was some nonsensical poem thingy – written in orcish – about meadows and temples. But we where idiots for not figuring it out, and the inquisitor got it right away after the DM sent a text and his phone buzzed. But me and my friend where morons for not figuring it out.

We infiltrate the cult alright – The zealot is wearing armour the cult love that seems to be evolving each time it's described to us, I still have my sneaking skills but by now the only thing sneaking is my suspicions they don't matter and the inquisitor is controlled by the DM's friend so... and our now oddly mexican rat-catcher turned knight on his spaniel turned riding wolf slaughters the guards outside and is not caught or even noticed, making one ask what was the point of the DM taking 10 minutes to brag about his own accomplishments.

When inside, we mingle and chat about plans and stuff with the cultists, trying to figure out their aim, and me and the inquisitor try to sow dissent and/or chaos amongst the chaos cult to make taking it down easier. The Zealer however, due to his now getting creepy how into it the Dms descriptions are armour is dragged by a bunch of cultists into a torture chamber for fun that leaves him on death's door – the ratknight is also apparently watching and making friends with the torturer

and I'm slapped with an exp penalty for not going to help him despite when I tried the DM saying I didn't know about it.

The plot kicks off for realsies with a demon summoning ritual starts and we start combat. I say start combat, I mean anything that goes near the knight or inquisitor explodes in a shower of gore, whilst me and the zealot – he teleported to us at full HP when the fight started – do what little we can to help the DM will allow. The Zealot makes an awesome show of himself, using his recent upgrades to match the knight, and I'm even allowed to make a few pretty good shots with my bow and get something done, thinking it might go back to being like session 1 – until the cult guards show up, the zealot's bondage armour prevents him from hitting them ever due to magic, and the DM decides priests can't use weapons. So we're out the rest of the fight...

The ritual fiats its way into completion, and now where trapped in demon limbo in a twisted version of the mansion, going full blown escher on us. The DM starts “hinting” there is magic here, and it would help if we could identify it – so I do what he wants and use the aetheric attunement skill to try and sense what it is and the source. The reply?

“Of course there's f-ing magic, idiot. Your in the demon realms. Why the f-k did you even change to priest anyway – you could at least show off as a thief”. Yeah, that happened – I'm now feeling he forced a class change on me for the sole purpose of insulting me.

The party continues to explore this place, all the doors leading back to the main hall until the inquisitor stumbles across a fake wall that was really a door, no really, he just beat your search score again. Passing through it we find an – apparently circular - mirrored room with a tied up deamonette in the centre, dressed like a fetish librarian – we didn't just get an over the top description of this one, this one had full on art. Three pages of it, in different poses.

We get inside and the door vanishes behind us, and the DM lets us know that if we can figure out this room, we'll seal the magic and blah blah blah. He also hands us the stats of the deamonette, showing we have no F-ing chance of lasting a single round in a fight even with the power of our unwilling marty stue of a team leader.

We search the room, and find that it is empty aside from us, the deamonette and a number of bondage toys covering the floor, and told to figure it out. We immediately assume he wants us to roleplay out a sex scene with the deamonette and the items in the room, but none of us are willing to do so due to the detail and the way he was clutching the pictures creeping us the hell out, so we try everything else we can think of. We try anything we can think of – attacking the walls, attempting to disbelieve illusions, seeing if the door had really vanished, using my Aetheirc Attunement again and getting insulted again, standing so we obscure the reflections of the demonette, and nothing happened except the DM saying it was obvious and me and my zealot friend where ruining his perfectly planned out campaign.

in the end, after we'd all had enough, my friend finally gave in and did what the DM had been hinting at us to do – it ended up with him being raped in graphic detail for 10 minutes by a demon, before the DM announces that was a stupid way to try and get out and his DMPC knight picks up the table that was totally in the room the entire time – apparently only me and the zealot must have looked and we must be blind – and places it in the corner to break up the relfections. He places a table, upright, in the corner of an apparently circular room. Then calls us idiots again, says if I'd used Aetheric Atunement I'd have know that, and tells player A he gets a bajillion exp for stopping the evil cult and we get nothing because we just stood there like idiots.

Me and my friend just leave. The DM got a lift to our gaming place with us that day, but we honestly couldn't give a ship at that time. Player A asks us not to leave, to give it one more week. He'll try talking to the DM and sorting this out, because apparently the DM is really good at that job normally and he doesn't know what's happening now, and he knew we'd both wanted to try roleplaying. We agree to give it one more chance because, if nothing else, the three of us get to sit and talk and we can just ignore the game/DM, since we're not a part of it anyway.

We get there for week four, and once again we get exp/changes/updates at the start of the “session”. The inquisitor gained enough EXP to max out his class and promote, and this time has been rewarded with magic versions of his toys from before; furthermore, the knight gained enough EXP to promote himself to the Grand Theogonist of the Empire – the head of the church of Sigmar and the second in command of the entire friggin country. And me and my friend? we got stuff too, just not nice stuff; The zealot had apparently amassed so many insanity points he now had to roll on the chart, not the normal chart but the DMs special chart, which ended up with him being obsessed with bondage, was now and always had been a devotee of slaneesh, and is now sexually attracted to small animals and all my characters.

And my first ever RP character, my first creation? He was deleted from the game because thief can't change to priest straight off and thus I was cheating and would have to make a brand new character...

so use three players, without saying anything, looked at one another...

...and we all left. Because we where sick of being ancillary accessories to someone else, or that person was sick of not actually being able to play but having marty stue forced upon him. I still get annoyed thinking about it years later, and it has made me never want to look at WHFRP again, despite that in reminiscence I liked a lot of the features of the game. :smallsigh:

Thankfully, before this destroyed my interest in this fine hobby, player A invited me to join in the Mutants and Masterminds game he was part of with another group - and it was glorious :smallamused:

the DM also apologized for the game like 6 weeks later when I met him again and offered to try once more but do it better, but by then I'd learned my lesson, and the damage was already done.

* despite what you may assume, this was one of the better starting classes - it just sounds like it should suck

Fumble Jack
2014-09-08, 09:50 AM
Nah - you'll probably get the same result before too long. You'd need waterproofed character sheets, to start with. It's Awesome But Impractical.

Point but I do remember their sheets including spells the casters have during game, mostly so I'm ready for any questions that arise during that fall towards mechanics of how things work.

Beige, why did that Dm have it out for you and the zealot? It almost seems like it's because you didn't do exactly as he wanted, which is him railroading and being petty. Worse still when he was given in to, players were insulted. Yeah I would have left. At least you didn't give up on gaming due to this guy.

Jarawara
2014-09-08, 10:09 AM
Beige,

Wow. Wow, that's just... epic. I mean, look at the bright side, now you've got this creepy-cool story to tell whenever anyone's swapping tales of bad DM's. Just... epic.

So you were forced into changing your character, insulted for changing your character, and then accused of changing your character. EPIC!!!

Did he ever explain himself. I mean, yes he apologized, but did he say what he was thinking or what motivated any of that?

JetThomasBoat
2014-09-08, 10:10 AM
I've been mostly lucky with my DMs so far, but my current DM is probably my worst. He doesn't compare to most of these, but he still finds way to annoy the crap out of me.

Okay, so...we play Pathfinder. And the first time we do, he premakes the characters for us. Which was slightly bothersome because I had 9 years of experience playing 3.X before that and the rogue and fighter he had made were already taken. But anyway, that's not really too troublesome. I go with the dwarf cleric because everyone else is new and they could probably use the heals. I had run a one shot with him before this, years before, and years before that, we had been in a friend of mine's game together for one session. In said really old session, one of my friends was playing some weird combination, I believe it was a scout/psion/elocator. He was the type to make overly complex characters, but he was by no means an optimizer because his characters were never really as effective as my fighter who bought smart magic items. But in this old game, there was an argument about how psionics work and this had a negative effect on my current GM, who we'll call T.

The negative effect in question is two fold. For one thing, it makes it so he thinks anything complex is bad and is always overly suspicious of people power gaming. Which is combined with the terrible thing of him really having a poor idea of which things are power gaming and which aren't. The other negative effect is that he seems to have this idea in his head that rules light games are better. Without really realizing that when our group is mostly in it for the combat and almost no roleplay, then having a lot of crunch is kind of important to keep things interesting. Like he had a mentor at college that would always talk to him about AD&D and stuff and he still swears by these older games that as far as I know he's almost never played and probably doesn't have the chops to run well enough.

But this rules light mentality also spreads to him absolutely hating rules arguments. I'm not a huge fan of them either, but it kind of informed my first bad session with him. Anyway, back to Pathfinder. We were doing an Rise of the Runelords and one of the early parts and the main thing that annoyed me about the session came up when we were in a glass works. I was already a bit pissed because I was rolling terribly. But then, to make matters worse, I roll bad again and dwarven stability doesn't help me keep from being tripped by a goblin. It happens, take it in stride, you know. Except apparently in the adventure, it says the goblins, if they manage to trip anyone, try to throw them in the kiln. So when this happens, he doesn't like...have them grapple me to pick me up or anything, he's just like "They pick you up and they start moving you toward the kiln".

Now, one of the differences I was completely ambivalent about between 3.X and PF was the combat maneuver system. Cause I always find it annoying when it happens and I do my best to just avoid it. So when this happens, I'm annoyed because he just ignored the grappling part (not out of trying to kill me, just out of ignorance of the game he was running) and I...I don't remember, I think I had the idea that being prone would affect my CMD or something? I dunno, but I'm trying to find the modifiers for being prone, since I had been tripped, and he ends up getting mad that I'm holding up the game.

Honestly, the reason the whole situation made me mad was not because I wasn't able to work the rules out the way they're meant to, since I didn't actually know them. I was annoyed that he didn't know the rules for the encounter he was running. He knew the goblins would try to trip me and pick me up and throw me in a fire, so it should have been his responsibility to know how to do that. Failing that, he could have house ruled it. We could have rolled opposing dice or something, just anything other than "They throw your stubby dwarf *** in a fire." without letting me know of any chance I might have to stop it.

And that's a large part of my problem with him. He always insists on running adventure paths because coming up with his own stuff is too hard for him, which is fine, but he never reads ahead well enough. And in the same game, the rogue asked for character making advice from me, since I was the senior player, and since I didn't know how tumbling worked, I suggested he use a halfling sling-staff, since he was a halfling and it does freaking 1d6 damage plus strength for small characters. The DM later was like "Naw, man, you should go with some daggers. Dual wield." I don't know if he thought it would just be cooler or if he thought I was trying to "power game" by keeping the halfling rogue who didn't know what he was doing out of melee, but whatever.

But I figured hey, the DM is learning and he'll get better. Instead, every time we play, something new happens that annoys me. In idle conversation before a D&D game, I mentioned wanting a ranged focused paladin variant and he decided that he needed to tell me "What D&D is supposed to be" and all this crap about how people are just supposed to play their characters and there doesn't have to be a variant for every little thing people want. Rather than explaining that what I meant was more that I'd love to play a holy archer kind of character idea, but I don't think smiting works for bows, instead I was annoyed and told him not to try and tell me what a game I'd been playing six years longer than him was all about.

It went better for a while after that. My only real problems with the most recent game were things that are sort of just differences in what I'm used to and what was happening. I guess I just had better DMs before that. Like I know what skeletons and zombies have for damage reduction, and I know my character might not. But I tend to get annoyed when the DM won't throw a bone and be like "Hey, bard, you notice poking the zombies with your rapier doesn't seem to be doing much" or like...having my cleric roll a knowledge religion check to see if maybe I read something about them in the past. It's not like I'm asking for him to do it right away or with every monster, but they're the most common undead monsters and if we go through a whole dungeon full of them, once or twice we might get the idea to try something different to maybe kill them more effectively, but not if he doesn't give us a clue.

And I mean in the next campaign, we were fighting undead that were unusual, like...the kind of thing where the Adventure Path they're from says that you have to do like...some story related thing to beat them? And he just wasn't really dropping the hints we needed to figure it out. And one of the more recent things is that I always end up consulting people a little on character creation, just...helping them pick spells or feats or something. I helped my friend who pretty much always plays an annoying, short tempered fighter that gets us in trouble, wanted to play a different kind of annoying short tempered fighter. So I tell him and then when we're in the second combat, the baddies keep swinging and missing the fighter's AC of 20 and when the DM finds out that's his AC, he gets all like "Come on, guys, don't be minmaxing." And I end up having to explain to him why an AC of 20 for a first level fighter with more than standard starting gold is not only not minmaxing but kind of the expected thing for me to do.

I know it's not that bad, I just...wish I had other dudes to play with.

BRC
2014-09-08, 10:29 AM
the DM also apologized for the game like 6 weeks later when I met him again and offered to try once more but do it better, but by then I'd learned my lesson, and the damage was already done.

* despite what you may assume, this was one of the better starting classes - it just sounds like it should suck

In his apology, did you get any explanation for what happened?

Because that story is just bizzare? Demanding you change things, and then insulting you for doing so? Showing blatant (unwanted) favoritism? It's like the Bad DM checklist. And he just seemed to double-down on it each session, despite being told what he was doing wrong by Player A (Who he apparently liked, so the whole "YOU'RE JUST COMPLAINING BECAUSE YOU ARE A GREEDY PLAYER!" thing couldn't come into affect).

Beige
2014-09-08, 11:10 AM
Beige, why did that Dm have it out for you and the zealot? It almost seems like it's because you didn't do exactly as he wanted, which is him railroading and being petty. Worse still when he was given in to, players were insulted. Yeah I would have left. At least you didn't give up on gaming due to this guy.

I honestly don't know. Like I said, I knew him out of the game and he was a fun guy to talk to and play against in games where each player was equal. Just when he was DMing this game he seemed to have gone a little doo-lally and power mad - heck I even saw him run a different game during said M&M campaign and he seemed more stable

I probably would have given up if not the the inquisitors player insisting I try out mutants and masterminds. glad I didn't however :smallbiggrin:


Beige,

Wow. Wow, that's just... epic. I mean, look at the bright side, now you've got this creepy-cool story to tell whenever anyone's swapping tales of bad DM's. Just... epic.

Indeed. Not the worst one in this thread, but dangit I'm throwing my hat in there! after relaying this tale, I'm almost disapointed I didn't stick around any longer to see what was going to happen next - writing it down was like watching a train wreck where you can pause and rewind :smallbiggrin:

then I remeber actually playing it, and fudge that...


So you were forced into changing your character, insulted for changing your character, and then accused of changing your character. EPIC!!!

I obviously did not respect his authoriteh enough and must be punished for it. I'm sure if I had gone the entirely non-sensical sigmar route (I think my character was older than that religion...) I may have been allowed to keep the character - who knows, I may have been the one with the nonsensical promotion to head of the church :smallbiggrin:


Did he ever explain himself. I mean, yes he apologized, but did he say what he was thinking or what motivated any of that?

In his apology, did you get any explanation for what happened?

I never got a reason, but I'm guessing it was related to the family issues he mentioned during the second session - that or he really wanted someone to explore his magic realm...

Inevitability
2014-09-08, 01:55 PM
@Beige:

Were player A and the DM of the opposite gender? Because in that case, it might as well be a case of the DM trying to get a player to like him by giving him tons of stuff IC.

Or he just had a bunch of creepy fetishes that needed to be released. :smallsigh:

Jornophelanthas
2014-09-08, 05:04 PM
It sounds like Beige's DM had the following agenda:

- Please Player A;
- Sexually humiliate Player BF's character;
- Bully Beige (out of character);
- Gain the silent approval of Player B (who is an authority figure as a game store employee).

I second the suggestion that the DM could have a crush on Player A (either romantic love or platonic idol-worship), and I will add that he could be extremely jealous of the positive attention Player A gave to Beige and BF (the new players). His attempts to paint BF as a sex slave and Beige as a terrible-person-that-ruins-games-and-that-nobody-especially-not-Player-A-should-ever-be-friends-with were probably his attempts at character assassination, to convince Player A that Beige and BF were unworthy of his (Player A's) attention.

ReaderAt2046
2014-09-09, 05:53 AM
Maybe Beige's DM was just trying to accurately reproduce the feel of the Warhammer setting? I mean, that's pretty much the setting of "get screwed over by the universe".

Kalmageddon
2014-09-09, 06:26 AM
If you want to really know someone, make him GM for your group. It's surprising what perversions, fixations and issues are revealed as soon as they run the game.

Kaerou
2014-09-09, 08:28 AM
I had an accidental DMPC like that... sorta. It was a female red dragon who disguised herself as the princess of this fairly 'lawful evil' city-state (ruled by the queen). The royalty didn't catch on that the red dragon replaced the real princess with herself (but to be fair, the real princess was just as evil, so the joke's on the PCs). After a long adventure where the dragon got stuck in her human form and working with the PCs to get unstuck. This was to make the BBEG a little sympathetic, but maybe I went too far because the two rubbed off on each-other. The dragon became a little more understanding about teamwork and doing some good for the world while the players learned... well nothing really, but half the party was totally ready to join her in the planned hostile takeover of this city-state and rule it.

That derailed the campaign pretty hard for two sessions. :smalltongue:

Joining a slowly-growing-more-sympathetic red dragon to take over a corrupt city state sounds like a super fun campaign!

Tengu_temp
2014-09-09, 06:04 PM
Maybe Beige's DM was just trying to accurately reproduce the feel of the Warhammer setting? I mean, that's pretty much the setting of "get screwed over by the universe".

Then the DM badly needs to learn the IC/OOC distinction. Also, do note that only two of the players got shafted constantly, and one occasionally. In any case, a game where the PCs constantly get screwed over and don't achieve anything substantial is simply not fun and setting appropriateness or not, a good DM should know better.

And WFRP is not as grimdark as WH40K. Still much darker than DND and other heroic fantasy, however.

aberratio ictus
2014-09-10, 02:02 AM
(I think my character was older than that religion...)

That religion is 2426 years old, so, even as an elf, most probably not. Still, it was of course a solid decision to not have your elf a priest of the patron god of imperial humans.

It's a shame your introduction to roleplaying and WFRP was so horrible. It is a very fun system, but of course, no system is so fun a bad GM can't ruin it.

Sith_Happens
2014-09-10, 04:12 AM
It's a shame your introduction to roleplaying and WFRP was so horrible. It is a very fun system, but of course, no system is so fun a bad GM can't ruin it.

Personally, I'm skeptical of any system where a starting character can have a bonus over three times the maximum possible die result.

lytokk
2014-09-11, 06:54 AM
I had put my posts in the first thread, but I'll spoiler it here just cause I remembered another story about the first DM.

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.

We were playing in a 3 person party, a wood elf fighter (me) a druid and I really forget what the other guy was playing. Second or so session level 2, night watch routine comes up. The sentry blows his spot check, we get ambushed by a dire wolf, which ends up killing my gy in the first round of combat. I decide to roll a ranger, which due to DM's ruling has to come in 1 level lower than my previous character. A little miffed, I still roll my character cause why not. 1 level isn't going to matter that much. A few sessions later, I'm still a level behind, someone new joins the party, a level higher than me, since that was the party's level. That got me more than miffed and I ended up RPing the rest of that campaign really poorly, with a lot of anger directed at the new guy, who was undeserving of it, though he was also bragging about this secret about his character he had with the DM, which I've always hated. Not as bad as a lot of the other posters on this thread, but I thought I'd mention it all.

Beige
2014-09-12, 07:09 AM
Personally, I'm skeptical of any system where a starting character can have a bonus over three times the maximum possible die result.

after looking at the book again, it's not as bad as it could be. starting score of 40 for being an elf, rolled a 19 on my 2d10 for starting stat, took +5 from my class, and my original elf skill gave me +10 as well - it's not going to happen very often

and the pay-off for this incredible speed as an elf is a far lower wounds and toughness, with base toughness 20 + 2d10 as opposed to everyone else's 30+2d10, and base wounds 1d4+1 as opposed to 1d6+2 for pretty much everyone else (when an attack hits you, it rolls against your toughness. if successful, you loose a wound. run out of wounds and your dying). I was fast and good at spotting things, but a stiff breeze was a threat to my health.

Cronocke
2014-09-13, 09:48 PM
after looking at the book again, it's not as bad as it could be. starting score of 40 for being an elf, rolled a 19 on my 2d10 for starting stat, took +5 from my class, and my original elf skill gave me +10 as well - it's not going to happen very often

and the pay-off for this incredible speed as an elf is a far lower wounds and toughness, with base toughness 20 + 2d10 as opposed to everyone else's 30+2d10, and base wounds 1d4+1 as opposed to 1d6+2 for pretty much everyone else (when an attack hits you, it rolls against your toughness. if successful, you loose a wound. run out of wounds and your dying). I was fast and good at spotting things, but a stiff breeze was a threat to my health.

... which version of the rules are you referring to, exactly? Because that's not how it worked in... any of the core rulebooks I've found. And I just double checked 1st, 2nd, and 3rd edition rules.

1st and 3rd edition don't use d% for rolling against Strength or Toughness, instead just using a number between 1 and 10. So that leaves 2nd edition, where elves are equal to or better than humans in every stat except Wounds and Fate Points - and for both, they're only 1 point lower on average. (10 Wounds instead of 11, for example.)

Also, that isn't how damage worked in 2nd edition, so... I don't know what you're referencing. Some variant/replacement rulebook?

runeghost
2014-09-14, 01:49 AM
Playing in a new fantasy game with the DM's homebrew system. Took the party three sessions to get out of the city and off on our quest. Within sight of the city, we are ambushed by halflings armed with longbows and, after it became obvious that the long-bow armed halflings weren't up to slaughtering the moderately competent party, the halflings suddenly started shooting rather potent magical arrows. "No problem" we figured, "This'll be tough, but we can still win this fight, and when we do, at least we'll be looting some valuable magic arrows."

A long (like the entire session) fight later, we've finally killed the last of the longbow-armed halfling bandits. Only to discover that the super-cool (and super-valuable) magic arrows they've been firing have been coming out of magic quivers that stop working when their wearer is killed. Or captured. Or injured. Or if the quiver is removed in any fashion. I quit at the end of the session.

Weird thing is, the DM in question is pretty good normally, I'd played with him both before and after, but he just lost it completely for that game.

Theomniadept
2014-09-14, 04:04 AM
I've had NOTHING but bad DMs. DMs who railroad terrible games with the most bland, tropey NPCs, DMs who think WBL is 100 times too high and needs to be nerfed, DMs who think a build referencing more than 2 books is broken but Wizard and Druid are balanced.

But my worst game ever? No doubt was the one I just left. I warn you this is a LOOOOOONG rant about the worst gaming group I've ever been in. I cast Wall of Text.

The party consisted of a goblin sorcerer focusing on fire magic, a catfolk sorcerer, his wife playing a catfolk archer ranger, a tiefling rogue, a human wizard, my friend as a human Dread Necromancer and myself as a halfling Paladin.

Since the group was so squishy I figured I'd pull out the Paladin 6/Beastmaster 1/Halfling Outrider 10/Wild Plains Outrider 3 build, focusing on having an ubermount. That's a lot of HP, good mobility, figured it would synergize nicely. Character had the Slow trait and flaw so I RP'd it as him having only one leg.

We start out searching for a tomb that was recently uncovered in the 'Badlands', which may as well have meant 'Desert'. Inside we find a drow who, after some trite BS, is revealed to be undead-but-not-undead-but-not-deathless. When the catfolk girl touches a sword on a sword rack she is thrown against the wall and KILLED. This fetish-fuel drow in black armor offers to bring her back to life (by stabbing her with his sword because why the hell not) if our level 1 party agrees to save the world, by reuniting the Black Knights, his order of Knights who service Gwynn (not standard D&D cosmology, so this is a TN god of fire and light). Level 1. Save the world. Yeah.

We peruse the ruins for treasures to use or sell and a giant scorpion takes my guy down to 1 HP, but it dies shortly after so it's obviously rest time. One guy rolls Heal and rolls a nat 1 - the DM is tossing rules out on the fly because "this game is going to be different than others you may have played" (I nearly had to stop myself from vomiting when I heard that trite and repetitive phrase). He decides this actually does DAMAGE to me. My character is left outside the tomb to recover and... is carried off by a giant crow. Some crap happens, the party uses this crow to carry them to me, where we are outside some asylum of some sort. As we enter a giant demon with a hammer appears. We win initiative, I toss a sling bullet on a nat 20 square at its face...for no damage. On its turn it hits myself and the rogue in a single attack (because AoE melee is totally a thing) for 30+ damage.

Already this had me worried. We are level 1, enemies are doing my HP in damage and I have bar none the highest HP. Their attack bonuses are equal to my AC. They all have DR/-. And they are ripped straight from Dark Souls (because in D&D I can totally press A to dodge). Oh boy, here it goes...

We traverse an empty asylum and end up finding - *gasp* A BLACK KNIGHT! We give him a token that he crushes in his hands, his armor and spear materializes, and he cutscenes the demon to death. Because it's so much fun listening to the DM gush about his Original Character Do Not Steal. The Black Knight proceeds to....walk back to the Tomb of Razaak (the drow knight leader who is performing the essential task of standing alone in a crypt 24/7 - not even joking about that). Apparently the knights who can save the world are just on vacation and we need to be elaborate patsies.

We go back to town and get exactly nothing for the treasures we've found (which did not include money). We're level 3 now, and we barely have level 1 WBL. On top of this, the DM has the gall to suggest we upgrade a rusty magic longsword we found, which would cost MORE than our entire party wealth combined. Yeah. We also find all prices in the DMG are completely null and void because someone who has literally never played 3.5 before decided he can alter prices to his own 'unique world'. Thus, a simple mithral chain shirt is FOUR THOUSAND GOLD. That's 4 times the godforsaken price...for lighter armor. And we don't have the WBL of 1st level. I should have bailed at the thought of another zero-wealth game, but I was foolish enough to stay.

And that's not all. The tavern we wanted to stay at tried to charge us 20 gold for one dinner. Not even including bed pricing. Note that the first dungeon we went through gave us -exactly- 100 gold and a useless rusted magical longsword. Oh yeah, we're in for -that- kind of game.

At this point I talk to the veteran gamer of the group whose first DM was Gary Gygax. He reassures me that Sean (the DM) is experienced and that he'll have a talk with him. At this point I explain why what he's doing will cause him to fall flat on his face and I call three things about the game:
1. He hates Wealth By Level because he doesn't understand it reinforces magic supremacy
2. All his NPCs may as well be 20th level and are powered by DM Fiat.
3. He thinks complicated characters are broken because he doesn't understand class tiers and that Wizard outshines everything.
Read on and you'll see I was basically 100% right. I tried to explain this to him and gave a simple scenario of how without the money for appropriate weapons a simple golem could kill the whole party. He then says that we just need to roleplay it, like my paladin grabbing an iron pole and climbign atop a building to attack the golem with it (something that would take a retarded amount of rounds to accomplish - also, how is an iron pole more effective than a sword that's made for dealing damage???), or the ranger shooting arrows at a crumbling building (again, arrows do not pierce stone, but convincing him of basic logic is impossible). Also, in regards to poison, himself and the group agreed using poison is inherently evil, despite the fact that magic can do everything poison can, even better, and it's not evil. Plus, according to that logic, tranquilizing guards like Deus Ex or Metal Gear Solid is evil, but killing them is ok. He tells me I can use poison but to not be surprised when my god dumps me and my powers. Yep, clearly a person who should be running a game.

Our great DM tells us famine is rampant because crops will not grow and despite us going to different guilds and whatnot to try and find a source of the famine or solution, all we get is 'bluh bluh there's a famine bluh bluh guild politics'. So we leave for the dwarven kingdom. Some confusion occurs because without a map (these people hated maps) we had no idea which area was where in respect to anything. We seek spiritual guidance at the one church to all the gods, and with no idea what to do whatsoever we basically putz around until we light a fire to hopefully receive guidance from Gwynn. A large white flame shoots out of his altar and we get some vague feeling of where all the knights are. Except the one in the void. Obviously because reasons.

We decide the closest ones in the dwarven kingdom should be first to be found, and we head across the land except we have no rations. I had the audacity to suggest we buy a Field Supply Box from the magic item compendium so we don't have to keep track of rations. This was vetoed because that's the name of the game; tracking rations. The goblin's player even stood up and said "This is bullsh*t"m because I suggested we use basic logic in a game.

So we wait till the DM allows the rogue to procure a bag of holding and a thousand rations which is useless given the obscenely long trips we end up taking, because magic items are obviously too powerful to have. It should be noted that to avoid having to sleep for multiple days at a time after 3 rounds of combat I suggested we buy Healing Belts. The DM decided against that because magic items would need a Use Magic Device check to use them.

Read that previous sentence again. Now again. Once more. Okay, just let that sink in. Yes, Wizards and Clerics can't use magic items that only they can make. Yup, and people think DM fiat is a good device. SO with some DM fiat the catfolk sorcerer becomes a Favored Soul so we have healing. Infinite healing. No, seriously, instead of rationed resources, all cantrips and orisons are infinite a la Pathfinder and Cure Minor Wounds also exists - infinite out of battle healing. Now all challenge is gone because either we win or we die, no in-between. However he, against my advice, decides to focus on healing. With all the crappy healing spells and Augment Healing feat, despite the fact that he has one healing spell that will be all he ever needs forever.

Along the way these blighted creatures attack us carrying some plague and a party member contracts an incurable disease (because Heal checks don't cure anything in this game but can somehow restore HP better than spells?) and we learn from the dwarves (who can't use magic because AD&D was just soooo good and original with its shoehorned rules) that they have a cure that involves a special machine that uses....elf blood. Because elves are magical. ......I can't even begin to describe how terrible this plot was to begin with and now we're being told elves have magic in their blood. You know, considering their 1/day Speak with Animals I would think gnomes are actually magical, not useless elves. But whatever, DM fetishes galore, and also the smallfolk almost don't exist in this world. We encountered 1 gnome during the entire game and I was the only halfling on the planet.

The annoying goblin character playing a compulsive and mentally challenged goblin wanders off because getting things done is for chumps. He ends up being noticed by a local crime syndicate when he wanders into the dwarven ghetto and he ends up almost being mugged. He runs to the Dwaren Defenders (who despite not having Knowledge Local function as city guides) and we end up searching for the Dwarven Roughnecks, a gang of ne'er-do-wells. We find their base and....the Dwarven Defenders march in and fight all the enemies off-screen. Oh boy, such fun and adventure. I love watching the DM play with himself.

We leave the city and end up going into an abandoned mine shaft where we find the walls and floors and chests and everything are made of of this super hard unbreakable stone. Oh yeah, forgot to mention - commissioned an adamantine lance. I wanted starmetal so I could have one specialty in demon-slaying but that got vetoed because usefulness is a roleplaying sin. Also I tried to take the 4th level Smite Evil Outsider option and literally had that taken from me. I was forced to keep the useless paladin Turn Undead which literally has no use because my build is so feat intensive I cannot take devotion feats. Then the catfolk players talk about how one time Turn Undead from a cleric saved them. In a different edition....from a cleric. I had to stop and explain exactly why this would never, ever, ever, ever, ever come into play. But DM has the final say according to uneducated terrible DMs so goodbye usefulness.

In this place we fight Babau demons and my lance needs to make reflex saves to avoid taking acid damage. And the DM says it ignores hardness. Again, stupid rulings because now, canonically, metals, stone, and even extremely hard substances all dissolve in a light vinegar bath. Yep. So we end up at the 'boss', and it's yet another Dark Souls monster. We see the black knight chained up with invicibilium (the only logical name for this stone, also it's like 50 pounds for a small pebble so we obviously can't carry any back to sell), and it's got a Skyrim lock of unpickability on it. The demon has the key, so you'd think the goal is to get the key from him - nope. I take 50 damage in 1 attack, then the favored soul does the same, and suddenly he explodes with holy energy that allows us to basically 1-round the demon. Because tactics and build and party roles are all for losers; real RPers use Deus Ex Machina, the best plot device evar.

We free the knight, we decide to head back to the capital, the invincible stone doors are closed and we have no way back. Of course, being low on rations we continue down the....hallway to the next town. No, seriously, it was just a hallway. Not interconnecting underground roads, a hallway. There we see the town is filled with zombies, but not zombies; plague victims who are taken over by the disease. We've been fighting these blighted things and I think it deserves special mention that this disease somehow buffs the creature to unholy strength. Literally, we fought a single boar and it did over 20 damage an attack and had DR of at least 10, immunity to critical hits, and also these things gain complete magic immunity. Because my monsters are totally original and better than normal monsters.

So we end up spending an entire session just barricading ourselves in the town hall (because the zombies made a hallway for us to go there) looking for nonexistent supplies (because zombies make sure to leave things neat and tidy but throw out anything that is useful) and we wait until the DMs fetish-fuel drow characters come in to save us. Because we're saving the world. They basically come along and act superior and then we leave and they help us get food by finding some 'cave crawler' and killing it. Because we totally couldn't just do that ourselves. Also, the Wizard tried to target a diseased dwarf zombie thing with Dispel Magic, and the DM decided that....a diseased zombie dwarf hit by Dispel Magic grows wings and gets larger. Also, note the following; upon contracting the disease, my paladin and the goblin are given a potion that is said to be a "more permanent solution" to the plague. Ignoring my ***king immunity to diseases, the ONE immunity that never comes up in any game ever on the face of the planet and would actually finally find some use in a game, this 'more permanent solution' is just a potion that staves off the disease for a month. We travel for weeks at a time. yep, smart DM is smart.

So we end up making it to some underground forest that's also completely petrified and also completely unbreakable so I can't even mark where we've been on the trees. God this is painful to recall. We make it to another black knight chained up and protected this time by an angel. And by an angel I mean a god. Yep, all angels have stats that are measurable to those of the actual gods from Deities and Demigods. We roll initiative and after taking 8 initiative scores the DM says she goes on something like a 40. Yep, wasted time. She one-shots party members with nonlethal damage until the goblin uses Expeditious Retreat and runs up to him giving him the token so we can watch another cutscene of the DM playing with himself.

Note that any time I ever, EVER brought up any mention of 'rules' the whole group went full anal-retentive mode and said "OMG YOU'RE WASTING GAME TIME". It's like they enjoyed being bent over by the DM for literally no reason.

Anyway, so at the top of this...temple....is a nest of griffins that takes up back to the same crappy town from before (it's called Harmony and it's the only place where civilized races and goblinoids and kobolds and such get along) but it's entirely empty due to famine. Except the DMs 20th level magic item makers. So now that Im level 5 I want to buy a saddle. Yep, guess what. It takes literally THREE ENTIRE GAME SESSIONS to get a saddle. Note that the whole time we're still taking excruciatingly painful records of rations because that's exactly what the creators of D&D had in mind - tracking rations. SO, in order to get my lance enchanted I need to spend more money than ever necessary because "dwarven equipment requires a tuning bar to be inserted". God I hate DMs who don't know the rules. In order to get this we have to talk to another fetish character, a skeleton who sits alone in the dark and somehow has tusks and horns coming out of his face. In order to get this done we need to have his Necronite (I AM ORIGINAL DM I MAKE ALL THESE SPECIAL MATERIALS AND DON'T TELL ANYONE IN THE PARTY WHAT MY HOUSERULES ARE SO IT MAKES THEM LOOK STUPID!!! I'M A GREAT DM!) which is in the DM's fetish undead city. We go there, fight more diseased monsters, wait till DM fiat allows us to progress, and we go to the blandest, most empty city ever.

Now, up till now, all NPCs speak like ***holes. They just assume you know everything they know despite the fact that the DM specifically tells us absolutely nothing and makes active effort to change any and every rule in the book because he's on a power trip. Every NPC is 100% uninterested in any of our party and has no desire to engage in any explanation of the stuff our party doesn't know (like the basic rules that should be in the PHB or set out on the table on day 1). This whole city is filled with that attitude cranked up to 11. We learn that there are unused sewers below the city (undead poop???) and we determine a black knight is down there. We go down there,....and the sewer is literally one hallway. It branches into a fork. On the path we take is a demon that holds a giant pillar as a weapon. We fight it, I smite it, it takes no damage because it's not actually a demon (Because knowing the game is so difficult), and we run from it. Specifically it attacks all of us with a single melee attack at a 25 foot reach. I had to stop the DM and explain how either that's 5 individual attacks or it's a sweep attack with a reflex save. The entire group of idiots yelled at me for deigning to question the DM. I was convinced getting bent over turned these people on.

We walk down the other hallway. It leads to a forest (I thought I spaced out and missed part of the game - nope, a sewer opened into a forest.) Inside a castle (read: tiny room) was a black knight stuck behind some magical wall. Out from under this open bridge with no cover comes a gigantic butterfly that was immune to any and all possible attacks while flying, but is vulnerable when landed. The DM literally wasted time with 8 players taking 4 turns each while this butterfly shot lasers at us. He then makes it land and we kill it because it was doing like 20 damage to ALL of us with a single laser. 4 times.

He then has the gall to say "Wow, if I didn't make that thing land, you guys would have died!" At this point I am now okay with the idea of murder. We give the knight his token, and then attempt to get the necronite back to Harmony. Little do we know the box of it is the size of a warehouse. SO we have that stupid bird from Dark Souls to carry it, us, and our cart for a couple days (how are we sleeping again? Is this bird the size of a passenger plane?), and then I lose my paladin powers for no reason. Apparently despite the fact that I tanked more HP damage per attack than any other game at this level in the history of 3.5, I keep 'running away' according to my goddess (some one-dimensional lady named Eslpeth), despite the fact that every combat I make sure I;m the last to retreat if we retreat (not like I was able to run given the fact that prior to level 5 I had 5 ft base land speed). Of course, since none of the gods have been fleshed out at this point, when asked who Elspeth is I say she's a goddess of revolution. The DM immediately says "That is NOT what she is a goddess of.", like I just committed blasphemy. Turns out she's a goddess who hates tyrants. Wait, come again? That's literally two different ways of saying the exact same thing. But, whatever, because like all his NPCs, his gods are all one-dimensional singular aspects that have no thought put in them whatsoever. Also I lose paladin powers because the DM doesn't even pay attention to his own game.

I get my 'powers' back almost instantly (are they powers if they don't do anything?) as we burn some dead bodies to prevent disease. The Dread Necromancer has this vision from the embodiment of Death that he must kill Razaak, which is not even a bad joke at this point because we blatantly know all NPCs are level 20 fetish characters who would never be allowed to die. Two players join at level 7 with full Wealth By Level and we are still operating at -barely- level 4 wealth and we're all level 8. At this point the DM is so bored of his own world we go to Razaak and he begins....swinging his sword in the air to open gray portals to the other places where the black knights are. Note that the knights we rescued and Razaak himself are literally just standing inside a room. Not even kidding, it's like they're World of Warcraft NPCs, they are standing there doing nothing.

We end up going to a knight in the Elven kingdom (everything in the world is a kingdom), who is in a dead tree. Inside there's a puzzle where 7 skulls (7 players were present at the time) of different animals, yada yada yada put skull on that represents character (my character''s concept was the most powerful dog and yet I got the horse skull, not the dog skull). Second puzzle was a room filled to the brim with butterflies flapping about. We look at the door. Intricate carvings. We look at the butterflies. All kinds of butterflies, including every species not native to this area, nothing really noticeable otherwise. Grab butterflies, touch, door, etc. etc. etc. We had to wait fro two frikkin' hours until the DM told us to look with butterflies with eye patterns and colors that matched our characters' eyes. He literally did not hint to us at all what the solution was until he told us it. Then at the end of game he said "My other players usually say things like "Wow, that was a great puzzle!"". One, who the hell let him DM a second game? Two, no, that never happened, you're just fishing for compliments when you really don't know anything about puzzles. Or roleplaying. Or tabletop. Or anything.

Ugh is this terrible memory trip over yet? Okay, so we fight some thorn demon lady, free a knight, get teleported to the human kingdom to a nondescript spot in the middle of nowhere. We can only determine 'magical energy' in the area, Detect Magic tells nothing else. So we basically cast magic and open a hole to a little library where some angel of memories has this knight chained up (these knights clearly suck at their job). The only way to free him is to change his memory of his pact with the Lawful Anal god Abaddon (Why did he pick that for a LG god's name??), and we find through trial and error that we can pull any person's memories in book form by thinking of them and making a will save as we pull a book from a bookshelf. Now, these books are in Celestial and only two party members spoke celestial. We try to write that all his current memories are in tact except the imprisonment one, that fails. We try to copy it brute-force style I bring up the spell Amanuensis, those both fail. Wizard cracks a joke and the anal angel kicks him out of his little shed. So the only party member who knows celestial other than him is the goblin who spends an entire hour IRL complaining about having to read because he doesn't like books. After screwing around getting nowhere and getting exactly no hints from the DM he tells us we have to 'will' the book to copy with the little contingency about the black knights being able to leave if called upon by Razaak. How in the ever-loving hell are we supposed to find out we can just will things to be??? That is literally the worst idea for a puzzle I've ever had the misfortune of wasting an entire game session on.

We take the knight, get teleported to the next one (can you tell the DM hasn't fleshed out a single aspect of his crappy world?) and we end up...in front of a tree. Another tree, because apparently thinking is difficult. We find some camo-colored angel who, like all the angels we've ever met, serves the god of anal clenching Abaddon and won't let the knight go even though an angel who keeps the memories of all existing creatures let his go willingly. We end up challenging her to a hunt (this guy clearly has fetishes for male drow and female angels) and we roam the vast....boring plains. With only a single day we basically wander around, find an elephant, look around more, find nothing, look around more, find nothing, and then kill and present the elephant. The angel flies in with a mammoth over her shoulder.

Afterwards we had to go to the swamp to find a black knight but we had to find another DM fiat-powered NPC to guide us who conveniently left us when combat started. The area was filled with WIIIIIIILD MAAAAAAAGIIIIIIIC and by that I mean roll to see if the spell's caster level goes up or down. We fight these three women who apparently mastered wild magic and the battle just proves the DM knows nothing about anything. They cast "Ironflesh". That's right, not Iron Body, the 8th level spell that grants DR 15/adamantine, it's his own new spell that's even better because it's DR 15/-. Which may as well make itself a 9th level spell. We're level 8. He also doesn't TELL ME that my adamantine lance is causing no damage despite the fact that it is explicitly stated that players visually are able to tell if an attack, whether through DR or energy resistance, had no effect. This is because misleading players with dishonest tactics is 100% disallowed. So, we try to dispel their armor (well the Wizard does), and he has to roll for it. During one round the DM's crappy magic witch literally 5-ft stepped away from me, cast a spell, then tumbled away, and cast ANOTHER SPELL that hit the Wizard's black tentacles spel and it simultaneously exploded with fire damage and dispelled it without a roll. We finished the worst battle ever and continued inside some building find a guy with his face cut off, and then find out his black knight powers are gone. Our presented options were to either fix him, find the one knight that abandoned them, or have a party member become a black knight. That's when I just left the game. There's no way I would sit through him forcing a player to lose their character to some crap like that. What was going to happen if one of us became a black knight? Would we also get the privilege of standing around in a tomb doing absolutely nothing like all the others?

One final note; This DM banned Tome of Battle. Apparently it's too broken. I don't care who you are or what you think; if you don't understand anything at all about the system you're playing, you do NOT get to decide what is and is not broken, especially when you can't even take a minute to read basic rules.

This is my end-all argument to the losers who treat the rules as optional. Nobody, not one person on the planet enjoys this. We were bound by a system that had completely arbitrary rules that changed at a moments notice, were hidden from us (because the DM didn't even bother learning the system in the first place and had a bug up his ass about listening to rules), and threw 'challenges' that were only beatable by DM fiat, which made us spectators to his elaborate mental masturbation sessions. As I said I've had ONLY bad DMs in the past, and this guy made them all look acceptable by comparison. Despite the fact that 3.5 is my favorite system I am unable to say I've ever been in a good 3.5 game because as I've come to learn most DMs are power-tripping d**ks who want to make completely static and terribly written, overly tropey worlds that the players are only allowed to tour, rather than interact with.

If there's one thing I'd like this tale to impart to you; DMs are not in control. DMs are the original servers, and if your server is crappy people will leave it. If you want to play by a system then you play by that system, because otherwise your game is a terrible wad of Deus Ex Machina and everyone knows it the minute it happens. If you want to houserule things you put your houserules on the table on day 1 of the game and not one day later, because otherwise you are making players spend their limited resources on things that they do not know are worthless until you spring it on them like some bad joke. Don't be like that guy, because a game where 8 different classes are able to pool their efforts and accomplish absolutely nothing is a game where nobody is having any enjoyment at all.

DM Nate
2014-09-14, 06:19 AM
*Rolls Fortitude to resist Wall of Text.*

*fails*

EDIT: I'm surprised you stayed in that "campaign" as long as you did.

Somensjev
2014-09-14, 06:29 AM
*Rolls Fortitude to resist Wall of Text.*

*fails*

at least we failed together

Strigon
2014-09-14, 07:57 AM
But my worst game ever? No doubt was the one I just left. I warn you this is a LOOOOOONG rant about the worst gaming group I've ever been in. I cast Wall of Text.


I can't even express how mind-numbingly bad that DM was.
I mean, this thread has some really messed-up DM's, but I think you win the award for flat-out worst...

Sartharina
2014-09-14, 08:25 AM
The party consisted of a goblin sorcerer focusing on fire magic, a catfolk sorcerer, his wife playing a catfolk archer ranger, a tiefling rogue, a human wizard, my friend as a human Dread Necromancer and myself as a halfling Paladin.

Since the group was so squishy I figured I'd pull out the Paladin 6/Beastmaster 1/Halfling Outrider 10/Wild Plains Outrider 3 build

One of these is not like the others. I can see why there were problems, but will read WoT later.

The Random NPC
2014-09-14, 10:33 AM
I've had NOTHING but bad DMs. DMs who railroad terrible games with the most bland, tropey NPCs, DMs who think WBL is 100 times too high and needs to be nerfed, DMs who think a build referencing more than 2 books is broken but Wizard and Druid are balanced.

But my worst game ever? No doubt was the one I just left. I warn you this is a LOOOOOONG rant about the worst gaming group I've ever been in. I cast Wall of Text.

The party consisted of a goblin sorcerer focusing on fire magic, a catfolk sorcerer, his wife playing a catfolk archer ranger, a tiefling rogue, a human wizard, my friend as a human Dread Necromancer and myself as a halfling Paladin.

Since the group was so squishy I figured I'd pull out the Paladin 6/Beastmaster 1/Halfling Outrider 10/Wild Plains Outrider 3 build, focusing on having an ubermount. That's a lot of HP, good mobility, figured it would synergize nicely. Character had the Slow trait and flaw so I RP'd it as him having only one leg.

We start out searching for a tomb that was recently uncovered in the 'Badlands', which may as well have meant 'Desert'. Inside we find a drow who, after some trite BS, is revealed to be undead-but-not-undead-but-not-deathless. When the catfolk girl touches a sword on a sword rack she is thrown against the wall and KILLED. This fetish-fuel drow in black armor offers to bring her back to life (by stabbing her with his sword because why the hell not) if our level 1 party agrees to save the world, by reuniting the Black Knights, his order of Knights who service Gwynn (not standard D&D cosmology, so this is a TN god of fire and light). Level 1. Save the world. Yeah.

We peruse the ruins for treasures to use or sell and a giant scorpion takes my guy down to 1 HP, but it dies shortly after so it's obviously rest time. One guy rolls Heal and rolls a nat 1 - the DM is tossing rules out on the fly because "this game is going to be different than others you may have played" (I nearly had to stop myself from vomiting when I heard that trite and repetitive phrase). He decides this actually does DAMAGE to me. My character is left outside the tomb to recover and... is carried off by a giant crow. Some crap happens, the party uses this crow to carry them to me, where we are outside some asylum of some sort. As we enter a giant demon with a hammer appears. We win initiative, I toss a sling bullet on a nat 20 square at its face...for no damage. On its turn it hits myself and the rogue in a single attack (because AoE melee is totally a thing) for 30+ damage.

Already this had me worried. We are level 1, enemies are doing my HP in damage and I have bar none the highest HP. Their attack bonuses are equal to my AC. They all have DR/-. And they are ripped straight from Dark Souls (because in D&D I can totally press A to dodge). Oh boy, here it goes...

We traverse an empty asylum and end up finding - *gasp* A BLACK KNIGHT! We give him a token that he crushes in his hands, his armor and spear materializes, and he cutscenes the demon to death. Because it's so much fun listening to the DM gush about his Original Character Do Not Steal. The Black Knight proceeds to....walk back to the Tomb of Razaak (the drow knight leader who is performing the essential task of standing alone in a crypt 24/7 - not even joking about that). Apparently the knights who can save the world are just on vacation and we need to be elaborate patsies.

We go back to town and get exactly nothing for the treasures we've found (which did not include money). We're level 3 now, and we barely have level 1 WBL. On top of this, the DM has the gall to suggest we upgrade a rusty magic longsword we found, which would cost MORE than our entire party wealth combined. Yeah. We also find all prices in the DMG are completely null and void because someone who has literally never played 3.5 before decided he can alter prices to his own 'unique world'. Thus, a simple mithral chain shirt is FOUR THOUSAND GOLD. That's 4 times the godforsaken price...for lighter armor. And we don't have the WBL of 1st level. I should have bailed at the thought of another zero-wealth game, but I was foolish enough to stay.

At this point I talk to the veteran gamer of the group whose first DM was Gary Gygax. He reassures me that Sean (the DM) is experienced and that he'll have a talk with him. At this point I explain why what he's doing will cause him to fall flat on his face and I call three things about the game:
1. He hates Wealth By Level because he doesn't understand it reinforces magic supremacy
2. All his NPCs may as well be 20th level and are powered by DM Fiat.
3. He thinks complicated characters are broken because he doesn't understand class tiers and that Wizard outshines everything.
Read on and you'll see I was basically 100% right. I tried to explain this to him and gave a simple scenario of how without the money for appropriate weapons a simple golem could kill the whole party. He then says that we just need to roleplay it, like my paladin grabbing an iron pole and climbign atop a building to attack the golem with it (something that would take a retarded amount of rounds to accomplish - also, how is an iron pole more effective than a sword that's made for dealing damage???), or the ranger shooting arrows at a crumbling building (again, arrows do not pierce stone, but convincing him of basic logic is impossible). Also, in regards to poison, himself and the group agreed using poison is inherently evil, despite the fact that magic can do everything poison can, even better, and it's not evil. Plus, according to that logic, tranquilizing guards like Deus Ex or Metal Gear Solid is evil, but killing them is ok. He tells me I can use poison but to not be surprised when my god dumps me and my powers. Yep, clearly a person who should be running a game.

Our great DM tells us famine is rampant because crops will not grow and despite us going to different guilds and whatnot to try and find a source of the famine or solution, all we get is 'bluh bluh there's a famine bluh bluh guild politics'. So we leave for the dwarven kingdom. Some confusion occurs because without a map (these people hated maps) we had no idea which area was where in respect to anything. We seek spiritual guidance at the one church to all the gods, and with no idea what to do whatsoever we basically putz around until we light a fire to hopefully receive guidance from Gwynn. A large white flame shoots out of his altar and we get some vague feeling of where all the knights are. Except the one in the void. Obviously because reasons.

We decide the closest ones in the dwarven kingdom should be first to be found, and we head across the land except we have no rations. I had the audacity to suggest we buy a Field Supply Box from the magic item compendium so we don't have to keep track of rations. This was vetoed because that's the name of the game; tracking rations. The goblin's player even stood up and said "This is bullsh*t"m because I suggested we use basic logic in a game.

So we wait till the DM allows the rogue to procure a bag of holding and a thousand rations which is useless given the obscenely long trips we end up taking, because magic items are obviously too powerful to have. It should be noted that to avoid having to sleep for multiple days at a time after 3 rounds of combat I suggested we buy Healing Belts. The DM decided against that because magic items would need a Use Magic Device check to use them.

Read that previous sentence again. Now again. Once more. Okay, just let that sink in. Yes, Wizards and Clerics can't use magic items that only they can make. Yup, and people think DM fiat is a good device. SO with some DM fiat the catfolk sorcerer becomes a Favored Soul so we have healing. Infinite healing. No, seriously, instead of rationed resources, all cantrips and orisons are infinite a la Pathfinder and Cure Minor Wounds also exists - infinite out of battle healing. Now all challenge is gone because either we win or we die, no in-between. However he, against my advice, decides to focus on healing. With all the crappy healing spells and Augment Healing feat, despite the fact that he has one healing spell that will be all he ever needs forever.

Along the way these blighted creatures attack us carrying some plague and a party member contracts an incurable disease (because Heal checks don't cure anything in this game but can somehow restore HP better than spells?) and we learn from the dwarves (who can't use magic because AD&D was just soooo good and original with its shoehorned rules) that they have a cure that involves a special machine that uses....elf blood. Because elves are magical. ......I can't even begin to describe how terrible this plot was to begin with and now we're being told elves have magic in their blood. You know, considering their 1/day Speak with Animals I would think gnomes are actually magical, not useless elves. But whatever, DM fetishes galore, and also the smallfolk almost don't exist in this world. We encountered 1 gnome during the entire game and I was the only halfling on the planet.

The annoying goblin character playing a compulsive and mentally challenged goblin wanders off because getting things done is for chumps. He ends up being noticed by a local crime syndicate when he wanders into the dwarven ghetto and he ends up almost being mugged. He runs to the Dwaren Defenders (who despite not having Knowledge Local function as city guides) and we end up searching for the Dwarven Roughnecks, a gang of ne'er-do-wells. We find their base and....the Dwarven Defenders march in and fight all the enemies off-screen. Oh boy, such fun and adventure. I love watching the DM play with himself.

We leave the city and end up going into an abandoned mine shaft where we find the walls and floors and chests and everything are made of of this super hard unbreakable stone. Oh yeah, forgot to mention - commissioned an adamantine lance. I wanted starmetal so I could have one specialty in demon-slaying but that got vetoed because usefulness is a roleplaying sin. Also I tried to take the 4th level Smite Evil Outsider option and literally had that taken from me. I was forced to keep the useless paladin Turn Undead which literally has no use because my build is so feat intensive I cannot take devotion feats. Then the catfolk players talk about how one time Turn Undead from a cleric saved them. In a different edition....from a cleric. I had to stop and explain exactly why this would never, ever, ever, ever, ever come into play. But DM has the final say according to uneducated terrible DMs so goodbye usefulness.

In this place we fight Babau demons and my lance needs to make reflex saves to avoid taking acid damage. And the DM says it ignores hardness. Again, stupid rulings because now, canonically, metals, stone, and even extremely hard substances all dissolve in a light vinegar bath. Yep. So we end up at the 'boss', and it's yet another Dark Souls monster. We see the black knight chained up with invicibilium (the only logical name for this stone, also it's like 50 pounds for a small pebble so we obviously can't carry any back to sell), and it's got a Skyrim lock of unpickability on it. The demon has the key, so you'd think the goal is to get the key from him - nope. I take 50 damage in 1 attack, then the favored soul does the same, and suddenly he explodes with holy energy that allows us to basically 1-round the demon. Because tactics and build and party roles are all for losers; real RPers use Deus Ex Machina, the best plot device evar.

We free the knight, we decide to head back to the capital, the invincible stone doors are closed and we have no way back. Of course, being low on rations we continue down the....hallway to the next town. No, seriously, it was just a hallway. Not interconnecting underground roads, a hallway. There we see the town is filled with zombies, but not zombies; plague victims who are taken over by the disease. We've been fighting these blighted things and I think it deserves special mention that this disease somehow buffs the creature to unholy strength. Literally, we fought a single boar and it did over 20 damage an attack and had DR of at least 10, immunity to critical hits, and also these things gain complete magic immunity. Because my monsters are totally original and better than normal monsters.

So we end up spending an entire session just barricading ourselves in the town hall (because the zombies made a hallway for us to go there) looking for nonexistent supplies (because zombies make sure to leave things neat and tidy but throw out anything that is useful) and we wait until the DMs fetish-fuel drow characters come in to save us. Because we're saving the world. They basically come along and act superior and then we leave and they help us get food by finding some 'cave crawler' and killing it. Because we totally couldn't just do that ourselves. Also, note the following; upon contracting the disease, my paladin and the goblin are given a potion that is said to be a "more permanent solution" to the plague. Ignoring my ***king immunity to diseases, the ONE immunity that never comes up in any game ever on the face of the planet and would actually finally find some use in a game, this 'more permanent solution' is just a potion that staves off the disease for a month. We travel for weeks at a time. yep, smart DM is smart.

So we end up making it to some underground forest that's also completely petrified and also completely unbreakable so I can't even mark where we've been on the trees. God this is painful to recall. We make it to another black knight chained up and protected this time by an angel. And by an angel I mean a god. Yep, all angels have stats that are measurable to those of the actual gods from Deities and Demigods. We roll initiative and after taking 8 initiative scores the DM says she goes on something like a 40. Yep, wasted time. She one-shots party members with nonlethal damage until the goblin uses Expeditious Retreat and runs up to him giving him the token so we can watch another cutscene of the DM playing with himself.

Note that any time I ever, EVER brought up any mention of 'rules' the whole group went full anal-retentive mode and said "OMG YOU'RE WASTING GAME TIME". It's like they enjoyed being bent over by the DM for literally no reason.

Anyway, so at the top of this...temple....is a nest of griffins that takes up back to the same crappy town from before (it's called Harmony and it's the only place where civilized races and goblinoids and kobolds and such get along) but it's entirely empty due to famine. Except the DMs 20th level magic item makers. So now that Im level 5 I want to buy a saddle. Yep, guess what. It takes literally THREE ENTIRE GAME SESSIONS to get a saddle. Note that the whole time we're still taking excruciatingly painful records of rations because that's exactly what the creators of D&D had in mind - tracking rations. SO, in order to get my lance enchanted I need to spend more money than ever necessary because "dwarven equipment requires a tuning bar to be inserted". God I hate DMs who don't know the rules. In order to get this we have to talk to another fetish character, a skeleton who sits alone in the dark and somehow has tusks and horns coming out of his face. In order to get this done we need to have his Necronite (I AM ORIGINAL DM I MAKE ALL THESE SPECIAL MATERIALS AND DON'T TELL ANYONE IN THE PARTY WHAT MY HOUSERULES ARE SO IT MAKES THEM LOOK STUPID!!! I'M A GREAT DM!) which is in the DM's fetish undead city. We go there, fight more diseased monsters, wait till DM fiat allows us to progress, and we go to the blandest, most empty city ever.

Now, up till now, all NPCs speak like ***holes. They just assume you know everything they know despite the fact that the DM specifically tells us absolutely nothing and makes active effort to change any and every rule in the book because he's on a power trip. Every NPC is 100% uninterested in any of our party and has no desire to engage in any explanation of the stuff our party doesn't know (like the basic rules that should be in the PHB or set out on the table on day 1). This whole city is filled with that attitude cranked up to 11. We learn that there are unused sewers below the city (undead poop???) and we determine a black knight is down there. We go down there,....and the sewer is literally one hallway. It branches into a fork. On the path we take is a demon that holds a giant pillar as a weapon. We fight it, I smite it, it takes no damage because it's not actually a demon (Because knowing the game is so difficult), and we run from it. Specifically it attacks all of us with a single melee attack at a 25 foot reach. I had to stop the DM and explain how either that's 5 individual attacks or it's a sweep attack with a reflex save. The entire group of idiots yelled at me for deigning to question the DM. I was convinced getting bent over turned these people on.

We walk down the other hallway. It leads to a forest (I thought I spaced out and missed part of the game - nope, a sewer opened into a forest.) Inside a castle (read: tiny room) was a black knight stuck behind some magical wall. Out from under this open bridge with no cover comes a gigantic butterfly that was immune to any and all possible attacks while flying, but is vulnerable when landed. The DM literally wasted time with 8 players taking 4 turns each while this butterfly shot lasers at us. He then makes it land and we kill it because it was doing like 20 damage to ALL of us with a single laser. 4 times.

He then has the gall to say "Wow, if I didn't make that thing land, you guys would have died!" At this point I am now okay with the idea of murder. We give the knight his token, and then attempt to get the necronite back to Harmony. Little do we know the box of it is the size of a warehouse. SO we have that stupid bird from Dark Souls to carry it, us, and our cart for a couple days (how are we sleeping again? Is this bird the size of a passenger plane?), and then I lose my paladin powers for no reason. Apparently despite the fact that I tanked more HP damage per attack than any other game at this level in the history of 3.5, I keep 'running away' according to my goddess (some one-dimensional lady named Eslpeth), despite the fact that every combat I make sure I;m the last to retreat if we retreat (not like I was able to run given the fact that prior to level 5 I had 5 ft base land speed). Of course, since none of the gods have been fleshed out at this point, when asked who Elspeth is I say she's a goddess of revolution. The DM immediately says "That is NOT what she is a goddess of.", like I just committed blasphemy. Turns out she's a goddess who hates tyrants. Wait, come again? That's literally two different ways of saying the exact same thing. But, whatever, because like all his NPCs, his gods are all one-dimensional singular aspects that have no thought put in them whatsoever. Also I lose paladin powers because the DM doesn't even pay attention to his own game.

I get my 'powers' back almost instantly (are they powers if they don't do anything?) as we burn some dead bodies to prevent disease. The Dread Necromancer has this vision from the embodiment of Death that he must kill Razaak, which is not even a bad joke at this point because we blatantly know all NPCs are level 20 fetish characters who would never be allowed to die. Two players join at level 7 with full Wealth By Level and we are still operating at -barely- level 4 wealth and we're all level 8. At this point the DM is so bored of his own world we go to Razaak and he begins....swinging his sword in the air to open gray portals to the other places where the black knights are. Note that the knights we rescued and Razaak himself are literally just standing inside a room. Not even kidding, it's like they're World of Warcraft NPCs, they are standing there doing nothing.

We end up going to a knight in the Elven kingdom (everything in the world is a kingdom), who is in a dead tree. Inside there's a puzzle where 7 skulls (7 players were present at the time) of different animals, yada yada yada put skull on that represents character (my character''s concept was the most powerful dog and yet I got the horse skull, not the dog skull). Second puzzle was a room filled to the brim with butterflies flapping about. We look at the door. Intricate carvings. We look at the butterflies. All kinds of butterflies, including every species not native to this area, nothing really noticeable otherwise. Grab butterflies, touch, door, etc. etc. etc. We had to wait fro two frikkin' hours until the DM told us to look with butterflies with eye patterns and colors that matched our characters' eyes. He literally did not hint to us at all what the solution was until he told us it. Then at the end of game he said "My other players usually say things like "Wow, that was a great puzzle!"". One, who the hell let him DM a second game? Two, no, that never happened, you're just fishing for compliments when you really don't know anything about puzzles. Or roleplaying. Or tabletop. Or anything.

Ugh is this terrible memory trip over yet? Okay, so we fight some thorn demon lady, free a knight, get teleported to the human kingdom to a nondescript spot in the middle of nowhere. We can only determine 'magical energy' in the area, Detect Magic tells nothing else. So we basically cast magic and open a hole to a little library where some angel of memories has this knight chained up (these knights clearly suck at their job). The only way to free him is to change his memory of his pact with the Lawful Anal god Abaddon (Why did he pick that for a LG god's name??), and we find through trial and error that we can pull any person's memories in book form by thinking of them and making a will save as we pull a book from a bookshelf. Now, these books are in Celestial and only two party members spoke celestial. We try to write that all his current memories are in tact except the imprisonment one, that fails. We try to copy it brute-force style I bring up the spell Amanuensis, those both fail. Wizard cracks a joke and the anal angel kicks him out of his little shed. So the only party member who knows celestial other than him is the goblin who spends an entire hour IRL complaining about having to read because he doesn't like books. After screwing around getting nowhere and getting exactly no hints from the DM he tells us we have to 'will' the book to copy with the little contingency about the black knights being able to leave if called upon by Razaak. How in the ever-loving hell are we supposed to find out we can just will things to be??? That is literally the worst idea for a puzzle I've ever had the misfortune of wasting an entire game session on.

We take the knight, get teleported to the next one (can you tell the DM hasn't fleshed out a single aspect of his crappy world?) and we end up...in front of a tree. Another tree, because apparently thinking is difficult. We find some camo-colored angel who, like all the angels we've ever met, serves the god of anal clenching Abaddon and won't let the knight go even though an angel who keeps the memories of all existing creatures let his go willingly. We end up challenging her to a hunt (this guy clearly has fetishes for male drow and female angels) and we roam the vast....boring plains. With only a single day we basically wander around, find an elephant, look around more, find nothing, look around more, find nothing, and then kill and present the elephant. The angel flies in with a mammoth over her shoulder. That's when I just left the game.

This is my end-all argument to the losers who treat the rules as optional. Nobody, not one person on the planet enjoys this. We were bound by a system that had completely arbitrary rules that changed at a moments notice, were hidden from us (because the DM didn't even bother learning the system in the first place and had a bug up his ass about listening to rules), and threw 'challenges' that were only beatable by DM fiat, which made us spectators to his elaborate mental masturbation sessions. As I said I've had ONLY bad DMs in the past, and this guy made them all look acceptable by comparison. Despite the fact that 3.5 is my favorite system I am unable to say I've ever been in a good 3.5 game because as I've come to learn most DMs are power-tripping d**ks who want to make completely static and terribly written, overly tropey worlds that the players are only allowed to tour, rather than interact with.

If there's one thing I'd like this tale to impart to you; DMs are not in control. DMs are the original servers, and if your server is crappy people will leave it. If you want to play by a system then you play by that system, because otherwise your game is a terrible wad of Deus Ex Machina and everyone knows it the minute it happens. If you want to houserule things you put your houserules on the table on day 1 of the game and not one day later, because otherwise you are making players spend their limited resources on things that they do not know are worthless until you spring it on them like some bad joke. Don't be like that guy, because a game where 8 different classes are able to pool their efforts and accomplish absolutely nothing is a game where nobody is having any enjoyment at all.

I only have 2 comments.
1: Not saying the DM knew this, but there really is an AoE melee attack. AFAIK, only the War Hulk has it, but it does exist.
2: You say tropey like it's a bad thing (here I assume tropey means filled with tropes). You do know that it is literally impossible to not have tropes, right? Even avoidance of a trope is itself a trope.