What has caused you to walk away from a game?

[Crake]

What actions have DMs done to make you walk away from a game, possibly one you had invested a fair amount of time into?

Personally, I had been playing in a game for 2 years, over a frankly embarrassing number of characters (i believe i got up to my 9th character, at most, other players had been through 3 characters) due to them dying in irretrievable ways, and then eventually me just becoming distanced from the game and just taking each death as an opportunity to try something new. The game was severely railroaded and controlled, I felt like we were just bystanders in the DMs story, where nothing we did had any meaningful impact, and the plot just drove itself.

All of that I could handle though, it was fine, whatever, spend an evening with friends and have fun, who cares.

Then I found out that the DM was specifically noping most of my ideas and requests for spells/whatnot, because I was "the minmaxer". This, despite the party having a druid, 2 clerics (one of which used divine metamagic) and a 30 or so strength melee brute. I mean, sure, I was playing a wizard, but in a group like that. The prime example would be when i asked for greater resistance (the +3 for 24 hours one) and the DM said no, even though it would take up one of my limited spells known, then one or two sessions later the druid asks for it, and he lets the druid have it, along with every other spell on his spell list. Other things involve gaseous creatures making it through wall of air, or not being blown away by control winds, or poisonous gasses making it through my Iot7v veil which block gasses, not being able to identify creatures on my 40 or so knowledge checks on a loremaster.

Up until recently, I had thought that it was just the DM being controlling, because he couldn't really handle much deviation from his plans, but then I find out, he was actually doing it on purpose, specifically against me.

That's my story anyway, What about you guys?

[Zanos]

I had a DM who wasn't satisfied unless the party was inches from a TPK after every encounter. He treated the game as though it was DMs vs Players, and frequently made custom mobs that were way out of an encounter level. I recall fighting zombies who inflicted a "poison" on you with every natural attack that, on a failed fort save, made you take 1d10 con damage per round for four rounds. I also recall fighting a custom demon/devil outsider thing(I couldn't tell what it was, despite my very high knowledge check) with at will 9th level SLAs while the party was character level 9. Him denying me information on monsters despite knowledge checks was frequent, and "you wouldn't have heard about it, it's never been seen before" became a stock reply to checks in the 40s. I've noticed a trend where bad DMs want to keep you away from the mechanics of their monsters.

This is the only campaign I ever played where I didn't feel particularly bad about playing a Wizard/Dweomerkeeper/Incantatrix. Other party members were two Warblades and a Swordsage.

He also wanted us to do some subplot where we gave Waterdeep(of all places) money from our adventures so they could fortify their defenses against the Shadovar who had some wacky plot to sacrifice the entire city to Shar to bring back old Netheril from the past, but with dark spooky shadow weave. I have no idea why the wealthiest city in Faerun would need our money. He also tried to bait me into terrible decisions a couple times, we found a complete but inactivated bone golem, and the DM gave me the option to reactivate it. He actually presented it, I didn't ask. He told me it would cost me experience, and when I asked how much and what the golems stats would be, he refused to tell me either thing, so I told him that I would just disintegrate the golem instead, which made him mad for some reason. I think he intended for me to activate it and for it to betray us during a major battle, or something.

He also insisted that he was running a sandbox, but I asked him OOC several times if the world would end if we didn't follow this plotline, and he responded with "yeah, probably." Sick sandbox, bro. I also don't know how he intended for a party of level 11(I think that's when we quit) characters to take on Lord Shadow, who is a level 30 something epic caster with access to Netherese shenanigans.

Of course, since the CRs on all his encounters were astronomical, we got a lot of experience. He decided this made us advance too quickly, so he halved all of our experience rewards. I, and almost everyone else, quit shortly afterwards.

[Crake]

I had a DM who wasn't satisfied unless the party was inches from a TPK after every encounter. He treated the game as though it was DMs vs Players, and frequently made custom mobs that were way out of an encounter level. I recall fighting zombies who inflicted a "poison" on you with every natural attack that, on a failed fort save, made you take 1d10 con damage per round for four rounds. I also recall fighting a custom demon/devil outsider thing(I couldn't tell what it was, despite my very high knowledge check) with at will 9th level SLAs while the party was character level 9. Him denying me information on monsters despite knowledge checks was frequent, and "you wouldn't have heard about it, it's never been seen before" became a stock reply to checks in the 40s. I've noticed a trend where bad DMs want to keep you away from the mechanics of their monsters.

This is the only campaign I ever played where I didn't feel particularly bad about playing a Wizard/Dweomerkeeper/Incantatrix. Other party members were two Warblades and a Swordsage.

He also wanted us to do some subplot where we gave Waterdeep(of all places) money from our adventures so they could fortify their defenses against the Shadovar who had some wacky plot to sacrifice the entire city to Shar to bring back old Netheril from the past, but with dark spooky shadow weave. I have no idea why the wealthiest city in Faerun would need our money. He also tried to bait me into terrible decisions a couple times, we found a complete but inactivated bone golem, and the DM gave me the option to reactivate it. He actually presented it, I didn't ask. He told me it would cost me experience, and when I asked how much and what the golems stats would be, he refused to tell me either thing, so I told him that I would just disintegrate the golem instead, which made him mad for some reason. I think he intended for me to activate it and for it to betray us during a major battle, or something.

He also insisted that he was running a sandbox, but I asked him OOC several times if the world would end if we didn't follow this plotline, and he responded with "yeah, probably." Sick sandbox, bro. I also don't know how he intended for a party of level 11(I think that's when we quit) characters to take on Lord Shadow, who is a level 30 something epic caster with access to Netherese shenanigans.

Of course, since the CRs on all his encounters were astronomical, we got a lot of experience. He decided this made us advance too quickly, so he halved all of our experience rewards. I, and almost everyone else, quit shortly afterwards.

Oh, and somehow, you manage to get through every encounter because just as the party is on the brink of a tpk, the enemies started acting retarded, and you made it out alive, even though it really should have been a tpk?

I know that feel.

Edit: For us, it was either that, or some kind of stupid deus ex machina, like (quite literally) the god of assassins comes and assassinates one of the enemies.

[ryu]

This one occasion where all use of magic was made impossible as we had to find a mundane solution to get out of a massive pit in the middle of a mountainous environment. I came up with the bright idea to combine rations with the best damn cooking skill check I could make to lure large birds in that we could train. Managed a total check of like 70 or so through tricks. First part of the plan goes perfectly fine. We even got the birds rideable and traveled skyward for a few rounds. Then a storm happened for no good reason which managed to somehow kill or cripple every bird we got putting us back at square one.

My response?

''Rocs fall. Everybody sighs.''

I then proceeded to pick up everything that was mine and left the room never to see any of them again.

[Barbarian Horde]

3.5 games
Calvinball is a game invented by Calvin in which one makes the rules up as one goes along. Rules cannot be used twice (except for the rule that rules cannot be used twice). No Calvinball game is like another. The game may involve wickets, mallets, volleyballs, and additional equipment as well as masks.

There is only one permanent rule in Calvinball: One can't play it in the same way twice. (But another sems to be that you have to wear a mask.) For example, in one game of Calvinball, the goal was to capture one's opponent's flag, whereas in a different game of Calvinball, the goal was to score points by hitting badminton shuttlecocks against trees using a croquet mallet. An apparent rule in Calvinball is that one must wear a black mask and that one isn't allowed to question the mask. Another apparent rule is that any new rule made up by each player must be accepted. A third apparent rule is that you cannot make any plays you made in a previous game.

DM did this to me because he didn't like what my spell did. He didn't like the class function. Level 2 Gave druid ring of Arcane might for 800g that increased all spell slots by 1. Scroll of invisibility sells for 5,000g. A +3 weapon only selling for 300g. NO TURN ORDER> CHAOS Group intiative roll 1d10 who ever got higher wins. Ether all the bad guys go first, or all the good guys.


Another one is when the DM gives everyone Combat Reflexs (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:EhmS4k0Kgb8J:http://dndtools.eu/feats/players-handbook-v35--6/combat-reflexes--403/%2Bcombat+feat&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=fflb&hl=en&&ct=clnk) ]with no penalty and allows you to trade hits. Every hit as long as you have the dex allows for AoO. So (Enemy)Hit, you (hit), Enemy hit, you hit, enemy hit Rinse and repeat for each person. Only stops if enemy misses or your out of attacks. You can only take an AoO equal to your dex mod. Combat take way to damn long.. Honestly who ever thought this concept was good. I will not ever agree. This is just stupid and I can't find the words to express how much I hate it. That and I play a cleric in this campaign. Keeps giving me custom items that are relics for healing that I do not want. I don't want to be the healer while everyone is melee. I tell him that I want to sell. Wont let me. I've told him im going to make my character commit suicide if wants me to commit to being a world of warcraft cleric.

DM WHO DO NOT READ THE PLAYERS HANDBOOK AND THE DUNGEON MASTERS HANDBOOK. LEARN THE RULES AND DON'T MAKE UP **** BECAUSE YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO IN A SITUATION. Specificly when I cast hold person and crush their head in but because of some bull the dm gives me I cant kill a helpless person.. Paralyzed and your mine... I don't like rules being changed because its not CONVENIENT for the DM.

[Venger]

I wanted to take a level in the shapeshifter prestige class.

The DM told me I would need to seek out a tutor.

I said that sounded fine, though it did strike me as a little odd, since up until this point, he had not imposed any fluff prereqs on feats/classes/etc.

This should have been my first warning.

We finish our day's activities and he pulls the narrative focus back and tells us individually what our characters do for the rest of the day (rest of the party builds some boats, goes and does supplies, crafts items, etc while I'm leveling up, since we were at the time using the somewhat common houserule you need at least 1 day of downtime before your lvl up and new class features take effect)

My turn in him describing what I do comes up and he says:

"[Venger], you and your tutor practice all day until eventually, you have mastered the art of changing your body from one from to another without the use of magic. This process leaves you utterly drained and when you are lying helpless, she rapes you."

In disbelief, I come back with the only appropriate response, since this is my group's chill time. It's the only time we're all off work and mostly the only time we get to hang out. I'm backed into a corner and choose not to spend the rest of the evening arguing rape politics with my DM and explaining all the reasons this is such a bad move.

"DM, what saving throw do I roll?"

"There is no saving throw. It has happened."

"But I still have all my spells. I'm a chameleon. I've got like... more spells than she has hit points, probably,"

"There is no time to use your spells."

"Some of them are immediates."

"There is no time to use your spells."

"Do I roll initiative?"

"It has happened. The next morning-"

he goes on about the weather the next morning. I'm sitting there in a state of shock. Once he's finished and gives the torch back to the players, I inform the party that we are going to go to my tutor's house and kill her. There are no objections.

We are, at this time, stuck on an island somewhere unknown (eberron game, the spheres of space moving around make navigating by stars untenable, and some fluff effect is interfering with our divination magic) my tutor apparently has it as her realm, and had initially asked the party's help repelling a colony of formians who'd been attacking her. we ground through a few random encounters with them and when we visited her castle, found that she had, for the past (???) years, had been tending to travelers who washed up on the island.

there was some variance between them, but they were all red-haired women with the ones who had been there longer being further along in their transformation.

into clones of her.

we all agreed this was creepy as hell, and I posited she had some kind of rierdran-style zombie mind control device, like the towers of rierdra going on, but since she hadn't done anything to us yet, and we had no real proof of this, that it would be unwise to start any fights with her.

the party had been repairing our boat (my boat, which I'd bought earlier on when we discovered we could travel the seas in style and I wanted to have a crew of pirates) after we had been railroaded to this island by a hurricane (again: no saves, no checks, no profession (sailor) rolls. i now realized it had been preamble to my character's rape. it had been premeditated at least since my last game session about a month prior, which made me much angrier)

due to our inability to navigate properly, she had said she would help us off the island in exchange for our help. At this point, I cared not, and said she was probably lying about that anyway. the party agreed.

my character dealt with her servants outside with glibness, teling us we'd had an audience with my tutor. they believed us and let us in. my quarrel was not with them, so I spared their lives.

my tutor asked why I was there.

really.

despite my normal inclinations, I said I wasn't in the mood to roleplay and rolled some dice.

polymorph to monstrous centipede. familiar to ironmaw. deplete dex. lower con. party dispatches summoned monsters with BFC. familiar holds, but does not kill, her servants until we can ascertain whether they're being controlled.

once her dex hits 0 and all enemies are dealt with, I dismiss the effect, retrieve my weapon, a sword infused with "bind to hell", which I'd been saving for a dracolich we were hunting. One CDG later and her soul is damned to Stygia forever.

much lootandexpee followed. her followers were indeed mind controlled stepford wives, and I offered the chance to come with us and play pirates if they wanted to leave. our wizard and I fabricated another boat and we left this terrible place, never to speak of it again.

I didn't speak to my DM for a long time.

[thethird]

I was playing a rather complex sandbox-y game at my local club. There were around 20 something players and five DMs coordinating everything. At the time I was playing a bard, skill focused and all, since the game was pretty role playing intensive. Most of my mustache twirling plots were coming along flawlessly and I ended situating myself in a position in which I was useful/helpful/necessary to all the player base and to most of the NPCs of the city. I wasn't the top dog but if anything went on I knew it, and my tavern was one of the few secure neutral grounds so it meant that most deals happened there.

Then DM1-girlfriend decided that she also wanted a piece of the pie. I don't have a problem with some pvp, even if I'm going against a cheesed psionic artificer (which only she could have) as a measly bard. Most confrontations were indirect and through politics. I could deal with that.

As the game progressed it went from pvp between two players to pvp between a player and 4 of the 5 DMs. Every Saturday, when I went to the game it would devolve into 4 hours of pulling contingencies and plans to save my character's skin. Because even if I was still running most of the city every NPC even those that I didn't knew or that were FANATICS to me hated my guts. Seriously there were 17 distinct murder attempts in one session by my own NPC family.

So after two months of that I decided it was not worth it. I was like okay. Eff this. So I called a meeting with every goddamn NPC and PC that had been put against me in my antimagic tavern. (It wasn't actually a meeting but I manipulated their plots so they would ally and attack/try to assassinate me at the same time). And a knowledge architecture and engineering (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/dungeons.htm#caveInsAndCollapsesCr8) later "Rocks fall everyone dies".

[Crake]

I was playing a rather complex sandbox-y game at my local club. There were around 20 something players and five DMs coordinating everything. At the time I was playing a bard, skill focused and all, since the game was pretty role playing intensive. Most of my mustache twirling plots were coming along flawlessly and I ended situating myself in a position in which I was useful/helpful/necessary to all the player base and to most of the NPCs of the city. I wasn't the top dog but if anything went on I knew it, and my tavern was one of the few secure neutral grounds so it meant that most deals happened there.

Then DM1-girlfriend decided that she also wanted a piece of the pie. I don't have a problem with some pvp, even if I'm going against a cheesed psionic artificer (which only she could have) as a measly bard. Most confrontations were indirect and through politics. I could deal with that.

As the game progressed it went from pvp between two players to pvp between a player and 4 of the 5 DMs. Every Saturday, when I went to the game it would devolve into 4 hours of pulling contingencies and plans to save my character's skin. Because even if I was still running most of the city every NPC even those that I didn't knew or that were FANATICS to me hated my guts. Seriously there were 17 distinct murder attempts in one session by my own NPC family.

So after two months of that I decided it was not worth it. I was like okay. Eff this. So I called a meeting with every goddamn NPC and PC that had been put against me in my antimagic tavern. (It wasn't actually a meeting but I manipulated their plots so they would ally and attack/try to assassinate me at the same time). And a knowledge architecture and engineering (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/dungeons.htm#caveInsAndCollapsesCr8) later "Rocks fall everyone dies".

Wow, that really sucks, sounded like you had a pretty awesome thing going until DM1 started thinking with his ****

[prufock]

It's amazing how so many great stories come out of so many horrible experiences.

I've only quit one game, and it wasn't through any bad blood or terrible event. It was a Vampire: The Masquerade game, and I just wasn't into it. So I told the group this just wasn't my style and I would be bowing out of the campaign.

Other than that, time and other commitments sometimes get in the way, but I usually try to be up front about it. For example, my group was planning a FIGHT! system game, where we'd play high school students. My first character concept got vetoed, and I wasn't interested enough to make another one and devote the time to it, so I said as much and pulled out before the game even started.

[heavyfuel]

The DM banning my Warblade (only chance I ever had of playing one) because it was too powerful, while his best bud ran a Druid/Planar Shep with Greenbound Summons. Noped the hell out of there

[jaydubs]

There was one campaign where we (the players) collectively came to the conclusion that most of the DM's NPCs had plot protection, special homebrew powers, and were higher level than us. Add that to the fact the vast majority were attractive, female, teenage-looking, with anime avatars, and I now think back on them as his DMWaifus. We all left that DM after our attempt to murder one of them was met with a DM fiat wall.

[atemu1234]

I wanted to take a level in the shapeshifter prestige class.

The DM told me I would need to seek out a tutor.

I said that sounded fine, though it did strike me as a little odd, since up until this point, he had not imposed any fluff prereqs on feats/classes/etc.

This should have been my first warning.

We finish our day's activities and he pulls the narrative focus back and tells us individually what our characters do for the rest of the day (rest of the party builds some boats, goes and does supplies, crafts items, etc while I'm leveling up, since we were at the time using the somewhat common houserule you need at least 1 day of downtime before your lvl up and new class features take effect)

My turn in him describing what I do comes up and he says:

"[Venger], you and your tutor practice all day until eventually, you have mastered the art of changing your body from one from to another without the use of magic. This process leaves you utterly drained and when you are lying helpless, she rapes you."

In disbelief, I come back with the only appropriate response, since this is my group's chill time. It's the only time we're all off work and mostly the only time we get to hang out. I'm backed into a corner and choose not to spend the rest of the evening arguing rape politics with my DM and explaining all the reasons this is such a bad move.

"DM, what saving throw do I roll?"

"There is no saving throw. It has happened."

"But I still have all my spells. I'm a chameleon. I've got like... more spells than she has hit points, probably,"

"There is no time to use your spells."

"Some of them are immediates."

"There is no time to use your spells."

"Do I roll initiative?"

"It has happened. The next morning-"

he goes on about the weather the next morning. I'm sitting there in a state of shock. Once he's finished and gives the torch back to the players, I inform the party that we are going to go to my tutor's house and kill her. There are no objections.

We are, at this time, stuck on an island somewhere unknown (eberron game, the spheres of space moving around make navigating by stars untenable, and some fluff effect is interfering with our divination magic) my tutor apparently has it as her realm, and had initially asked the party's help repelling a colony of formians who'd been attacking her. we ground through a few random encounters with them and when we visited her castle, found that she had, for the past (???) years, had been tending to travelers who washed up on the island.

there was some variance between them, but they were all red-haired women with the ones who had been there longer being further along in their transformation.

into clones of her.

we all agreed this was creepy as hell, and I posited she had some kind of rierdran-style zombie mind control device, like the towers of rierdra going on, but since she hadn't done anything to us yet, and we had no real proof of this, that it would be unwise to start any fights with her.

the party had been repairing our boat (my boat, which I'd bought earlier on when we discovered we could travel the seas in style and I wanted to have a crew of pirates) after we had been railroaded to this island by a hurricane (again: no saves, no checks, no profession (sailor) rolls. i now realized it had been preamble to my character's rape. it had been premeditated at least since my last game session about a month prior, which made me much angrier)

due to our inability to navigate properly, she had said she would help us off the island in exchange for our help. At this point, I cared not, and said she was probably lying about that anyway. the party agreed.

my character dealt with her servants outside with glibness, teling us we'd had an audience with my tutor. they believed us and let us in. my quarrel was not with them, so I spared their lives.

my tutor asked why I was there.

really.

despite my normal inclinations, I said I wasn't in the mood to roleplay and rolled some dice.

polymorph to monstrous centipede. familiar to ironmaw. deplete dex. lower con. party dispatches summoned monsters with BFC. familiar holds, but does not kill, her servants until we can ascertain whether they're being controlled.

once her dex hits 0 and all enemies are dealt with, I dismiss the effect, retrieve my weapon, a sword infused with "bind to hell", which I'd been saving for a dracolich we were hunting. One CDG later and her soul is damned to Stygia forever.

much lootandexpee followed. her followers were indeed mind controlled stepford wives, and I offered the chance to come with us and play pirates if they wanted to leave. our wizard and I fabricated another boat and we left this terrible place, never to speak of it again.

I didn't speak to my DM for a long time.

This, quite frankly, disgusts me. What the hell was that DM thinking?

[BWR]

Never had to walk from a game. Some games fell apart on their own, some were aborted by consensus, some have been put on hold for various reasons, some games have had stupid rules or actions from players or GMs.
Nothing has been so bad I've decided to pack up and leave a game someone else was running, and if I've run anything so bad the players haven't been enjoying the game for a while I get my act together and fix it or scrap it and start something they will enjoy.
And frankly, "I'm not allowed to play the exact thing I wanted so screw you guys, I'm going home" is bad form. Suck it up and play something that won't annoy the hell out of the GM or your fellow players. If someone is playing something more broken that whatever you had banned on the grounds of being too powerful, and reasoning with your GM doesn't work, make a clone of the accepted character and show how that one is the real problem. Then you can quit if they complain.

[heavyfuel]

If someone is playing something more broken that whatever you had banned on the grounds of being too powerful, and reasoning with your GM doesn't work, make a clone of the accepted character and show how that one is the real problem. Then you can quit if they complain.

Was this directed at me? I assume it was. The problem is when you don't really have the time or patience for things like these. The time when I could play D&D for several days a week are no more, and between everyone's job, family, and social life, it requires actual effort to find time to play. If the DM doesn't want a beatstick to be versatile, then it's fine. But I'm not going to waste precious hours playing a character I dislike just to prove a point.

[BWR]

Was this directed at me? I assume it was. The problem is when you don't really have the time or patience for things like these. The time when I could play D&D for several days a week are no more, and between everyone's job, family, and social life, it requires actual effort to find time to play. If the DM doesn't want a beatstick to be versatile, then it's fine. But I'm not going to waste precious hours playing a character I dislike just to prove a point.

So is there really only one character that can possibly bring you pleasure to play? I play plenty of stuff that isn't quite what I want because spending time with my friends is more important than playing that exact class/build or more importantly, game.

[heavyfuel]

So is there really only one character that can possibly bring you pleasure to play? I play plenty of stuff that isn't quite what I want because spending time with my friends is more important than playing that exact class/build or more importantly, game.

It's not one character that brings me pleasure, but the mentality of the DM. I don't feel like playing with a DM that bans one thing because he thinks it's too OP, and then lets his bff play a TO build. It's as simple as that. Could I play something else? Sure. Would I enjoy it? Probably not, considering I'd have a freaking Planar Shep with Greenbound summons doing eveything I can do, only ten times better.

[BWR]

It's not one character that brings me pleasure, but the mentality of the DM. I don't feel like playing with a DM that bans one thing because he thinks it's too OP, and then lets his bff play a TO build. It's as simple as that. Could I play something else? Sure. Would I enjoy it? Probably not, considering I'd have a freaking Planar Shep with Greenbound summons doing eveything I can do, only ten times better.

I assume you tried arguing the case. Were all the other players ok with this? Cause in that case I'll have to agree that you did the right thing. If everyone else was not ok with this, then why didn't you do anything about it?
I'm continually amazed at the horror stories about bad DMs floating around this place. Sure some of mine have done some annoying, ill-informed or downright stupid stuff, and I'm just as guilty as any I've played under but nothing to the degree of lots of the stuff I've read about here.

[Curmudgeon]

Wealth by Level micro-management.

I was playing (as usual) a Rogue. I had maxed out Spot, and didn't ever sleep (used UMD and a wand of Ray of Resurgence to remove fatigue). Yet the DM would occasionally say that <some magic item> I had acquired had been stolen from me. When I asked *how* that was happening, I was told that it was by some überthief who struck when I'd rolled low on my Spot check (but it was actually the DM "rolling" for me). Meanwhile the Wizard in the party had no ranks in Spot but never got victimized. The Barbarian's player told me he thought the DM was adjusting WbL to not exceed the DMG table, and the more stuff I acquired the worse I'd be punished. Meanwhile the Wizard was generating extra gold via Wall of Salt and similar shenanigans, then buying scrolls and filling up spellbooks, which weren't pilfered because spellbooks were a class feature, not wealth items.

When I hit level 10 I selected Skill Mastery and picked Spot as one of my mastered skills, so I could always "take 10". The next time my character lost an item to pilfering I asked *how* it happened, and got the same answer: I'd rolled low on my Spot check. When I complained that I no longer rolled any Spot check so that wasn't possible, the DM decided that Skill Mastery only worked in combat.

Deducing that I wasn't going to be able to win here, I figured an experiment was in order. My character, who had been going out at night for a second job, went out as usual. When the Barbarian (no ranks in Spot or Listen) was on night watch, my Rogue was able to easily sneak up and remove all five of the Wizard's spellbooks without detection. He carried them away, bypassed the Fire Trap spells, doused the books in naphtha, and burned them to unrecognizable ash. My character returned in the morning as usual. The Wizard's player had a fit when he discovered he had no spellbooks. The Wizard didn't get to prepare any new spells that day, but *surprise* as we were having lunch an old classmate of his wandered by. This friend just happened to have some extra spellbooks exactly duplicating what the Wizard had lost, which the friend would hand over because of all the help the Wizard had provided with study sessions back in their student days. And because they'd learned together, the Wizard wouldn't need to make any Spellcraft checks to use these new books.

The experiment having confirmed my suspicions, I packed up my stuff and walked out the door. There's no reason to play if your actions don't matter (or only matter at the DM's say-so).

[nyjastul69]

With all the lamentable rulings and homebrew I've seen used at a table, coupled with my own regrettable rulings as a DM, I've never had cause to walk away from a table, nor has any player ever walked away from one of my tables. Maybe I'm just lucky. If I weren't so jaded I'd be surprised at how some DM's handle their game.

[Chronos]

I'd been getting frustrated with the group for a while, mostly for their tendency to jump around from campaign to campaign, never sticking with the same characters long enough to really develop them. But that, I could live with. The last straw, though, was when the DM said that for the next adventure, we'd all be playing pre-made characters assigned to us by luck of the draw, and that he thought we'd be pleased with how powerful he had made them. Mine was a half-orc monk with half of his feats wasted on useless ones.

At this point, I started to have a suspicion of what was going on, and asked the DM about it. Yup, he thought that we had a tendency to power-game, and was trying to rein it in. This despite the fact that on previous characters, I had asked him in advance about anything in the least dubious, and he'd OKed all of them. There's a much simpler solution to this problem than just forcing characters on us which suck and which we had no hand in creating. If you want me to play a crippled character, at least let me choose how it's crippled.

[AuraTwilight]

I once had a game where a GM frankly right out started telling me who my character was FOR me. She was characterized as a sweet, kind, naive healer who despite her lack of worldliness was especially insightful into issues of what it means to be good. Basically a sort of Disney Princess-type dealie.

The GM kept insisting that she had secret anger issues and an evil streak because "everyone has demons", and he had an NPC start Dominating her into basically being a cannibal-murderer despite that REAALLLLYYY being against her nature; I didn't even get a saving throw.

My boyfriend punched him in the face.

[BWR]

I once had a game where a GM frankly right out started telling me who my character was FOR me. She was characterized as a sweet, kind, naive healer who despite her lack of worldliness was especially insightful into issues of what it means to be good. Basically a sort of Disney Princess-type dealie.

The GM kept insisting that she had secret anger issues and an evil streak because "everyone has demons", and he had an NPC start Dominating her into basically being a cannibal-murderer despite that REAALLLLYYY being against her nature; I didn't even get a saving throw.

My boyfriend punched him in the face.

Actual physical violence in the face of unpleasant but frankly harmless behavior in a game?

[Sartharina]

Actual physical violence in the face of unpleasant but frankly harmless behavior in a game?Eh. It's just a bruise. People heal.

Of course... faces are a bad place to punch. Sucker punches to the gut can get the message across just as well.

[Pex]

A DM who purposely did not have my character start a new campaign with the party, ran a combat that took 30 minutes of me doing nothing and was about to start a second combat while my character was still not there.

Another DM who hated how I played a character in a game we're both players turning it into hating me personally, and my character could do no right in his game. Actually, I had two DMs like that years apart.

Not so much the DM but the other players never accepting my character into their clique, and the DM not doing anything about it after I told him and the players my problem with that.

[AuraTwilight]

Actual physical violence in the face of unpleasant but frankly harmless behavior in a game?

In my boyfriend's defense it was a 'last straw' sort of thing and I was pushed to crying just before due to the GM pushing buttons of mine he should've known not to press.

[Kazyan]

I tried to join a game on roll20. The DM barely understood that 3.5e and 4e were different games, doing something like 6-8 damage with each attack at level 1, and then when he actually asked for our HP totals, suddenly all damage sources were dropped to 1d3. His miniboss was using a 4e character sheet. Maps were one step above no effort whatsoever, and he didn't seem to know how to resize them. Also, simply didn't show up to the sessions half the time, with no reasons given, good ones or otherwise. By the time he called for a makeup session to make up for his absence that week, and then missed that one too, I quit.

[Sartharina]

Heh... that reminded me of a DM my brother told him about - He used a 3e PHB, a 4e DMG, and 2e Monster Manual... and somehow made it work. Except my brother was playing a munchkined tiny gnome (Lots of flaws for feats and power) meant he had to practically live in a barrel carried by the party half-orc beatstick and cast his overpowered-for-his-level spells out the bunghole.

[Gnome Alone]

I tried to join a game on roll20. The DM barely understood that 3.5e and 4e were different games, doing something like 6-8 damage with each attack at level 1, and then when he actually asked for our HP totals, suddenly all damage sources were dropped to 1d3. His miniboss was using a 4e character sheet. Maps were one step above no effort whatsoever, and he didn't seem to know how to resize them.
"Okay guys, hey hey hey, how ya doin'? So, who's playing as a dungeon, and who's playing as a dragon?"
"Uhhh..."

[BWR]

Eh. It's just a bruise. People heal.

Frankly, I'm rather disturbed by this attitude. It may not have been very damaging but resorting violence from merely verbal provocation is not a good thing, and pooh-poohing it is even worse No one protested the DM's behavior before this? No one thought to say "Stop it, final warning"? No one thought that actually leaving the table before this was the right thing to do rather than hit someone? Or even shout and rant at him for being a ****?

[aleucard]

Frankly, I'm rather disturbed by this attitude. It may not have been very damaging but resorting violence from merely verbal provocation is not a good thing, and pooh-poohing it is even worse No one protested the DM's behavior before this? No one thought to say "Stop it, final warning"? No one thought that actually leaving the table before this was the right thing to do rather than hit someone? Or even shout and rant at him for being a ****?

Agreed. I mean, yeah if the guy was that much of an absolute cretin then rattling his brain a bit may be warranted, but not with this little build-up.

To contribute something to the original topic, the only time I've ever walked away from a game is when it was more like everyone at the table walked away from it. I cried foul when one of the other players thought using an area effect sleep-item with the rest of the party, me included, in the area of effect was a good idea to do without warning, and in general the various things of the campaign were written with "roleplaying" being more important than actual coherence, reducing the game to Calvinball. He got offended. We started getting pissed off at each other, and the rest of the party just didn't think this was fun anymore.

I'd like to think that I'm not as much a rules-lawyer as that would imply, but if we were just using 3.5 rules as the sticks we put into the proverbial cotton candy machine that is freeform roleplaying, I would like being warned beforehand so I could give it a miss.

[Sliver]

Frankly, I'm rather disturbed by this attitude. It may not have been very damaging but resorting violence from merely verbal provocation is not a good thing, and pooh-poohing it is even worse No one protested the DM's behavior before this? No one thought to say "Stop it, final warning"? No one thought that actually leaving the table before this was the right thing to do rather than hit someone? Or even shout and rant at him for being a ****?


Agreed. I mean, yeah if the guy was that much of an absolute cretin then rattling his brain a bit may be warranted, but not with this little build-up.

The thread isn't that long that you shouldn't read things obviously relevant to what you're responding to... You are choosing to assume that this was just one incident. Just because there wasn't a mention in the original story, you can't assume that it it did or did not happen. I would think that causing somebody to cry should be a solid hint that you should stop.


In my boyfriend's defense it was a 'last straw' sort of thing and I was pushed to crying just before due to the GM pushing buttons of mine he should've known not to press.

[Tohsaka Rin]

I guess BWR needs some sort of context.

Imagine missing breakfast, going most of the day without food. You finally sit down to eat, then this guy you know walks over and spits in your food.

Is that exactly the same? Well, no, probably not.

But when you've worked all week, and you only get a couple of hours to play a social game with your friends (or just people you've joined up with) and someone pulls something like that...

Rape is a horrible thing.

Having someone sitting across the table from you say 'this is a good thing for the game' to such a reprehensible act, and then acting surprised when everyone recoils in horror KIND OF ruins the fun of playing pretend.

Now your session is basically ruined. You waited all week to play fun and games, and now someone spat in your lunch. Worse yet, they don't seem to understand that SEXUAL ASSAULT IS A BAD THING.

BOTH times I played as a female under the same DM, I've had my characters raped. Once by another woman, once by a bunch of men, after being beaten unconscious by them.

HOW do you NOT want to punch someone in the face after that? The session is ruined, the campaign is shot, and I haven't played another female in... Probably close to a decade, with one exception under another DM, but THAT campaign was ruined by another player... Who happened to be the terribad DM. Go figure.

Sometimes I walk away from these ruined games, but after a couple of years of this, I've started outright breaking the game by jumping the rails. Nothing like 'I kill X' or 'I burn down this village/kingdom', no no.

"I go on a different adventure, leaving those jerk NPCs behind. C'mon party!" And when the DM asks why, I explain that there's no fun to be had in his (calling this as loosely as I can) 'story'.... Which usually led to the DM rage-quitting.

....So, wait, does making the DM walk away count?

[Sartharina]

Frankly, I'm rather disturbed by this attitude. It may not have been very damaging but resorting violence from merely verbal provocation is not a good thing, and pooh-poohing it is even worse No one protested the DM's behavior before this? No one thought to say "Stop it, final warning"? No one thought that actually leaving the table before this was the right thing to do rather than hit someone? Or even shout and rant at him for being a ****?I find the attitude that all verbal provocation can be dismissed with the adjective "merely' to be far more disturbing. Physical violence does not actually hurt unless the intent of at least one party is the incapacitation/maiming of the other. Barring freak accidents, the body is built and designed to heal - the only thing that matters is the mental reaction, and in that regard, being struck for being a jackass is far less harmful than social abuse. (Also, due to how socialization works, nothing is 'merely verbal')

[Svata]

Gods-damned fumble tables. And I was the party wizard. I attempted to explain how I could load up on things that didn't need attack rolls, from Sphere of Ultimate Destruction (It was an undead-heavy campaign ) to Solid/Freezing Fogs down the the humble Magic Missile, and never risk the tables, while the TWF Swift Hunter Ranger/Scout who had trained withthe Sparring Dummmy of the Master risked chucking one of his swords 20 feet 7 times per round, and the guy nodded, agreed, and said "Yep. You're playing a wizard. That's how it works. The fumbles even out the crits." Even though you waste your current round's remaining attacks, and your entire next two rounds, as when you lost one weapon, you lost both if TWFing, and he made picking up each weapon a standard action.

[Blackhawk748]

I actually walked away from a campaign twice (ya i went back, i still dont know why) First time i played a Half Fey Sorceress, i didnt leave because of any "Super Bad DM" stuff, i left because i was freakin bored. Seriously, there was virtually no plot other than "RANDOM ADVENTURE!!!" the worst part was is that it was a Printed Campaign for Dragonlance, so i had pretty high expectations of plot. What i got was a series of random and barely connected adventures. So i left the first time.

I come back, its been like 2 months and the party has gone up like 4 levels, despite playing every week for like 8 or 9 hours. Oh boy. This time i made a Scout/Ranger/Dervish. Now my DM got a bit annoyed when i took 1 level of Lion Spirit Totem Barbarian. Now normally i dont take that, but not only am i dual wielding but i use Skirmish, so i need pounce to work. So whatever i explain that and things are fine, then he says i need to explain why i have items worth over Xgp. I stared at him for a good 10 seconds. Two members of the party are wielding flippin artifacts and one is also packing a Dragonlance, one of the named ones! So i give him a generic explination and we move on. I didnt come back after that session. The plot still consisted of "random adventure number 6" and the Bard was still horribly under WBL, and this discrepancy started at level 3.

So ya, left and never came back. As the old saying goes, "No gaming beats bad gaming"


Gods-damned fumble tables. And I was the party wizard. I attempted to explain how I could load up on things that didn't need attack rolls, from Sphere of Ultimate Destruction (It was an undead-heavy campaign ) to Solid/Freezing Fogs down the the humble Magic Missile, and never risk the tables, while the TWF Swift Hunter Ranger/Scout who had trained withthe Sparring Dummmy of the Master risked chucking one of his swords 20 feet 7 times per round, and the guy nodded, agreed, and said "Yep. You're playing a wizard. That's how it works. The fumbles even out the crits." Even though you waste your current round's remaining attacks, and your entire next two rounds, as when you lost one weapon, you lost both if TWFing, and he made picking up each weapon a standard action.

Ouch, ya i have both the decks from paizo (which are more forgiving than most of the tables) but something about my party stops us from rolling 1s, also we dont roll 20s very often either, so i dont feel bad about using them.

[heavyfuel]

I assume you tried arguing the case. Were all the other players ok with this? Cause in that case I'll have to agree that you did the right thing. If everyone else was not ok with this, then why didn't you do anything about it?


Yeah, though my arguments did focus a lot on "Planar Shep >>>>> Warblade". The other players were too inexperienced to know what was going on... I don't know if they were fine during play, because I never got to see them play, although I assume at least 2 of them were not, as they left shortly after I left.

[kaffalidjmah]

...from Sphere of Ultimate Destruction...

wait, the uber sphere doesn't require an attack bonus? I'm using the complete arcanist and it does...

Apart that, welcome to the party. I walked away only once because my master say "your PG is too OP" and decides to steal my spellbook, stored in the astral plane, in a proibition spell, with more defensive spell that i can remember, without anyone of that actually triggered. Three times. While the barbarian created an entite warclan and destroyed the argonassen (Eberron settings) killing every dragon with his bare hand, and a winged cape. What? I just spended my time researching spell, without actually using it effectively (thanks barbarian). Oh, yeah, the quest was follow the dragon propecy. Barbarian new t1 class

[SimonMoon6]

There was one DM who was running several different games, but eventually I couldn't take his play-style at all. There were many straws to break this camel's back:

(1) First, he was of the old-school mentality. He thought dungeon crawls were the height of creativity. And he thought the "DM vs players" adversarial relationship (joked at in Hackmaster) was the correct way to run a game.

(2) Second, every time I'd try to make a reasonable character (after having had a nearly game-breaking character in a previous game with a different DM), my character would get nerfed hard by this DM. Like, I tried playing a non-synergistic multi-class (rogue/cleric) going into an obscure prestige class (the name of which eludes me) which didn't advance spell-casting but did get powers chosen by the DM. And this character was specializing in using magic items (with the Magic Domain and UMD).

So... we find out later that this is a "low magic" campaign (no magic items, or very few). My ability to sneak attack was made useless by having us fight only undead and golems. And the special powers chosen by the DM (which I now realize is a terrible ability for a prestige class to give unless you *really* trust your DM) were chosen to be the worst ones possible.

Similar nerfs happened when I was using a (3.0) psion. (Wow, look at all the vermin/undead/golems who are totally immune to mind-affecting abilities!)

But everybody else got to use all their abilities just fine.

(3) At one point, there was a monster trapped behind a door. We opened the door and it attacked us. Well, it had a corrosive ability which somehow wasn't affected by resistance to acid... and this ability could eat through absolutely *anything* (since the stat block didn't say it couldn't), including all the items I was wearing or holding... and yet it was stuck behind a door the whole time! It could eat through anything but never tried eating through a door or a wall or anything! (And it wasn't meant to be a stupid (unintelligent) monster either!)

That was the last straw for me.

[Urpriest]

I don't typically walk away from games. I'm slow to change habits, and thus in general I prefer to watch the game fall apart around me before leaving when the sessions stop being scheduled. But this one time...

It wasn't that the system ("FASERIP" supposedly, but played at point values far outside what it was designed for and ignoring anything more complicated than the character generation and dice-rolling rules) was utter nonsense that basically just incentivized picking up the most general superpower possible with the highest number possible and using it for everything. It wasn't that the GM subjected my character and his minions to plot-based surveillance powers when a basic facet of the character concept was immunity to those powers. It wasn't the GM's absurd lack of taste/level of immaturity that resulted in his character having a Disney-themed wedding in-game and a large fraction of the (adult!) NPCs having teenage angst subplots. It wasn't that the GM used time travel to "give" another PC two (unasked-for) children, and that one of his NPCs was flirting with mine to an extent that kind of made me uncomfortable. It wasn't even that the GM kept thinking of me as his best friend, despite the fact that I generally found him a pretty distasteful person to interact with.

It was when he asked me for advice on cheating on his wife that I finally decided to quit the game.

[Aegis013]

It was when he asked me for advice on cheating on his wife that I finally decided to quit the game.

That's... Wow that's awful.

I've walked away from a few games, though the issue is usually with me.

One I've walked away from because the character I created and submit and was accepted was going to be mechanically neutered for the first several years of in-game time (and the concept wasn't bad or anything so I had no inclination to attempt to derail it) by a rule of our mercenary group's training school thing. Considering the cornerstone of my character was based around (mechanically too) being a paragon of lawful, breaking the rule would've simply left me permanently mechanically neutered. So I was admittedly somewhat frustrated, and rather than ask to reroll and hold up the game while I developed another concept or feel like I couldn't actually participate meaningfully in any regard other than socially, I just left.

The other two games I was just bored. One I quit during the second 8+ hour session, where it took over two hours to roleplay standing in line in front of a town and filling out paperwork to enter. I had also had an argument with another player that a spellcaster knowing they need sufficient sleep to restore their magic and saying so isn't metagaming, but they said it was. Not my atmosphere.

The other was an 9 hour or so session. I was the third person to walk, on the first session. I was bored. It was a mercenary group thing, when we went to town there was an entry fee and I was broke. I left after the only two characters who could afford to enter had been shopping for almost five hours with the rest of us sitting and waiting. Same reason drop out #2 left, but he left earlier. Dropout #1 was playing an amnesiac fae, which cost him nearly every build resource, since magic was considered "not real" due to how rare it was. Any time he tried to use magic he couldn't remember how, nothing worked, etc and was told the drawbacks for magic were several orders of magnitude worse than the book claimed by the GM who was the only one with the relevant book and wouldn't let us see it long enough to learn anything. He also gave us absolutely awful character building suggestions, now that I've actually read some of the material. Game was Riddle of Steel I believe, with tons of unannounced house rules. I didn't have the patience for it.

[atemu1234]

It was when he asked me for advice on cheating on his wife that I finally decided to quit the game.

I'm kind of the same; I can stand a lot in-game, as a player or as DM, but when out of game is bad, I start walking.

Also, if someone asked me for advice on how to cheat on his wife, I'd reply with one word:

"Don't."

[Urpriest]

I'm kind of the same; I can stand a lot in-game, as a player or as DM, but when out of game is bad, I start walking.

Also, if someone asked me for advice on how to cheat on his wife, I'd reply with one word:

"Don't."

I think my advice was more along the lines of "Talk to her." But yeah, essentially the same drift.

[chihawk]

I've only walked out of one group in all the years I've been playing, and it's because the "house" rules weren't written down anywhere, and when I started making a list was told that wasn't allowed. I don't care if a group uses house rules, but they have to be available for me and anyone else to see.

[charlesk]

I think my advice was more along the lines of "Talk to her." But yeah, essentially the same drift.

Being snarky, I'd have responded along the same vein with "you no longer have a wife -- you have an ex-wife who just doesn't know it yet."

I've posted about some bad experiences over in the 5e board (not with the DM, other players) but hoo-boy, some of the stuff here has me feeling grateful, lol.

[Crake]

A DM who purposely did not have my character start a new campaign with the party, ran a combat that took 30 minutes of me doing nothing and was about to start a second combat while my character was still not there.

The same DM in question in my OP did this with another player in the same game, except it wasnt 30 minutes, it was an entire 4-5 hour session, the end of which he was still not brought back. We had to spend half the session arguing with a cleric who was trying to overcharge us triple the cost of a resurrection (which we couldn't afford) after which we decided to just move on, expecting the DM to figure something out, because we were trapped on some demiplanes and had no means of our own to resurrect him. End of the session rolled around and he was still dead. I'm surprised that player hasn't left yet, he's been on the short end of the stick so many times. Last I heard, his character (a radiant servant of pelor, specialising in turning undead) failed to turn some ghasts because "lolth didn't want the to be able to be turned". It wasnt that they got some bonuses against turning, or he got some penalties, it just didnt work. From what I hear though, he's pretty fed up now.

[Faily]

I've never up and left in the middle of a session, but I have walked away from a campaign, mostly due to similar reasons as in mentioned in the OP.

GM very early on gave the starting characters an encounter with the Good Gods of Dragonlance, pointing out that they were marked for a great destiny and were chosen by the Good Gods to assist in the "grand design" of current events.

Now that I personally think is a very cool setup that lead to very cool heroics and epics. It's the kind of stuff D&D should be all about right?

Well, that feeling kinda felt lost on me when I my fifth character died, mostly due to the GM also having a very "players vs GM"-attitude, and from time to time sending encounters our way that were meant to kill at least on PC if possible, because... people need to die, I believe the reason was?

When he asked me over a text message what my next character was going to be, I just said I had no interest anymore in the game, because whatever he was running was not what I thought originally we would be playing and I quickly grow tired of throwing one more character down the drain after I take the time of making them interesting in both fluff and crunch for myself.

[Sith_Happens]

The DM barely understood that 3.5e and 4e were different games

That... is impressive.

----------

From an older thread:


So here I am at the eighteenth session of what had been to that point a great campaign with a fun group and a good-but-not-stellar DM. My Wizard/War Weaver (BUFFS FOR THE BUFF GOD! BFC FOR THE BFC THRONE!) had just had enough downtime to scribe a ton of new spells that I was looking forward to using, the plot was building up to the climax, everything seemed to be going well.

Cue game start. The party needs to get to an ancient temple/dungeon and, depending on whether the BBEG beat us there, either secure it against his entry or undo whatever Evil Plot things he did to the place. Since time was of the essence, I explain to the party that I could create enough Phantom Steeds to get us there in one day instead of five, though due to it being a large party this would take most of my upper-level spell slots. No problem though, because once we're there I can map the place out with a buffed-up Arcane Eye, then we'd rest for the night and enter the temple in the morning with our prepared casters (which, counting the two Rangers, was most of the party) that much more prepared for what's to come. The party agrees that this is a good plan, which is pleasantly surprising because myself and the Cleric's player were normally the only ones not inclined to rush headlong into everything, which was a major reason why we'd ended up barely scraping through the previous temple.

Now, I blame myself for this next part for forgetting the First Law of RPG Travel: You always arrive exactly when the DM wants you to. Specifically, we get to the temple just in time to see the BBEG walk in. Crap. So suddenly we're rushing headlong into the place as usual, but this time with me already down half of my 4th level spells and all but one of my 3rd-levels. Because these things always get worse, what does the BBEG sick on us in the first room before proceeding deeper into the building? A Greater Earth Elemental, the one thing the party was least built to handle (our best damage-dealers being either precision damage users, dual-wielders, or both). Naturally, the ensuing fight consumes most of what combat-useful spells I did have.

So here I am at the beginning of a dungeon and already with almost no spells left. Naturally, I decide that we'd all be better off if I stayed behind. At which point the DM tells me I'll need to separate myself from the table. Knowing that that's not at all an unusual thing for a group to do, I comply. Of course, due to OOC boredom I eventually change my mind and send my familiar to check on the party, then run and catch up with them upon being told that they hadn't left behind any still-functioning obstacles. I figure if nothing else, I still have a Dimension Door I could use to get us the hell out of dodge if necessary.

After a more or less unremarkable trek through the rest of the dungeon, we reach a Solar sentry guarding the teleport mechanism into the last room, where we'd find whatever it was we ultimately needed to deal with. Before engaging said mechanism for us, the Solar requires each of our characters to state what we'd be willing to sacrifice to see our quest succeed (which, if something it could physically take then and there, it would) and what our ultimate goal in life was. Come my turn and, due to playing an altruistic Lawful Good Wizard who would want to give up something meaningful but values things only in direct proportion to his practical need for them, I can't think of a sacrifice. When it becomes clear I have a bad case of role-player's block the DM has the Solar express some very mild disappointment at my character's lack of sacrifice and move on to the "life goals" question. At which point I get to expound upon my character's desire to use magic to make the world a better place, but the emotional damage from being put on the spot and failing to deliver had already been done.

Once everyone finishes their turn at Deep RPingTM, the next step is obviously for the Solar to teleport us into the last room as promised... Just in time to catch the BBEG on his way out. Noticing our sudden arrival and it not being our first encounter with him, he stops to do the evil gloating thing... Partway through which the DM asks me to make a Fortitude save. Seeing as the BBEG is still much higher level than us at this point in the campaign and I'm playing a Wizard, I naturally fail. At which point the DM describes, without anyone having rolled initiative at any point, the BBEG launching a ghostly chain at my character which impales him, annihilates his body, and pulls his soul back into the BBEG's gauntlet hookshot-style, trapping it there.

Needless to say, I'm both startled and extremely miffed at this sudden development, and politely ask the DM to stay for a bit after the session ended so I could speak with him. When I ask him what's up with the thinly-veiled Rocks Fall, he explains that he wanted to up both the drama and the BBEG's threat level by having him kill someone off, and my character was the natural choice due to having shown himself the biggest threat to the BBEG of any party member during our first encounter with him (which was supposed to be a "the BBEG roughs you up and leaves you nearly dead" fight but instead ended with him teleporting away to lick his wounds after I overestimated his defenses and assumed he could handle being shown just how crazy Polymorph + War Weaver can be).

By the end of that conversation and its follow-ups over Facebook the DM admits that he'd made a huge mistake, but insists for continuity's sake that I still make a new character. Halfway through doing so I realize that I'm just not feeling it anymore, explain the circumstances to the group in the most polite way I can, and excuse myself from the campaign.
TL;DR: My involvement in a long and otherwise high-quality campaign comes to a sudden end when I end up spending the better part of a session being less than useless, get Stuffed in the Fridge at the end, and find myself lacking the will to reroll in the hope that it was just a fluke (which, according to the other players who stayed to the campaign's end, it was).

More of a tragic misunderstanding than anything else, but still technically qualifies.

[montoya]

This had been an going issue with a player turned DM. It began when we all got together to start (we are all friends) a new campaign after a 3 month hiatus. With another DMing a fairly generic yet interesting campaign. The player who eventually takes over as DM (drow bard) has a history of fudging skill rolls a new piece of equipment here and there etc etc, this was somewhat overlooked since we play at his house by the group as it (started out) wasn't much of a problem. Well he manages to ruin a high level fight the DM had planned by cheesing out bard abilities (which he couldn't) He basically merged the enthrall spell with the fascinate ability and even though you can't use either during hostilities he does (he argued that they weren't "hostile" yet, and quite demanding about it) the fight was over before it began...Me and the DM looked at each other with such disgust. I knew it was going to be a baaaaad campaign when he takes over in a month.

A month later he takes over and it really begins. By this point his wizard he got bored of playing had the clone spell at level 12 and of course had multiple clones of himself and the group (2d4 months for one clone mind you and its an 8th level spell) claimed he knew every single spell in the players handbook and his boots of levitation allowed him to fly 1000 feet in the air at 100mph. Mind you this was his "retired" PC. Now for his current bard now DM PC. He was a 15th level drow bard/virtuoso/lasher, technically 13 for EL adjustment but that seemed to go out the window eventually. His AC was 28 for normal ac 28 for flat footed and 28 for touch. And like any good DM his character had near epic level items in all slots. By this point many were done and simply disgusted. Especially since he had a major attitude when you questioned anything about it. Then his encounters were absurd to the point of blatant DM vs party (except for his drow) where he made dwarves with the death knight template that showed up invisible, cast fireball at will twice per round armed with overpowered ramhammers amongst literally 50 zombies 3 clerics and random devils he would throw in because we were winning. They of course got a surprise round on the group (a fight that lasted months real time) immediately sundered the wizards staff of light and the clerics holy symbol. Oh and we all had horrible disfigurements from a "cloud of warp poison" we walked through. I think its in either fiend folio, BoVD, or Libris Mortis. We were all required to make five yes FIVE fortitude saves (even though its a contact poison and requires 2 saves at max) so of course we all failed since the DCs were ridiculously high. I made 4 of 5 and my Duskblade was rewarded with tenticle arms that were only allowed to be removed by wish AND miracle which no one had) His drow of course "rolled" long legs increasing his speed, while everyone else was severely hampered by the effects.

At this point me and 2 other had enough and took turns not showing up. Eventually he moved an hour away thankfully most of the books were mine so i took them back and we player without him. Though we are still friends we have been playing for 2 years and he still doesn't know. Everytime he mentions finishing the fight we cringe.

It actually made me think less of him as a person during his "DM run". With the way he got mad at people arguing his BS. At one point a fight almost broke out with another player.

[hamishspence]

Physical violence does not actually hurt unless the intent of at least one party is the incapacitation/maiming of the other. Barring freak accidents, the body is built and designed to heal - the only thing that matters is the mental reaction, and in that regard, being struck for being a jackass is far less harmful than social abuse.

This is a vast oversimplification - physical violence that doesn't incapacitate can still hurt - a lot.

[Curmudgeon]

Physical violence does not actually hurt unless the intent of at least one party is the incapacitation/maiming of the other. Barring freak accidents, the body is built and designed to heal ...
I would guess you're not speaking from experience. Unfortunately, I can't make the same claim.

Years ago I was taking in a movie to relax after final exams. A guy a couple rows ahead of me lit up a cigarette shortly after the film started. I got up, tapped him on the shoulder, and asked if he would please put that out as it wasn't allowed in the theater. (It hadn't been legal to smoke in a movie theater at any time in this guy's lifetime, I would guess.) He tossed it down on the floor and I stepped on it to put it out. I got on with watching the movie and thought that was it.

As I was bent over unlocking my bicycle afterward I heard someone call out unintelligibly behind me. I turned and got punched in the face by the smoker. I was stunned for a few seconds while the guy took off, vaulted the chain link fence at the edge of the parking lot, and ran across the railroad tracks.

A helpful theater patron got me to an emergency room where they straightened out my broken nose and cauterized the insides to stop the bleeding.

For years after that I got nosebleeds any time I bumped my nose, sneezed hard, or simply breathed dry air. I had the cauterization treatment repeated several times with only temporary improvement. Eventually I underwent surgery to fix the deviated septum, and I don't have chronic nosebleeds any more. I did lose maybe 15% of my sense of smell when the surgeon cut out nearby tissue to get things to line up. And I've still got a bump on the side of my nose where it was broken.

2-3 years after I got punched by the nicotine addict (and before the surgery), a similar incident occurred. A guy lit up halfway through a movie (different theater). That time I walked along the next row until I was behind the smoker, grabbed his hair, and forcibly tilted his head back to gain eye contact where I was looming over him. I was polite when I asked him to put out the cigarette, and I even thanked him for his compliance with state law. I figured it was overall safer to establish physical dominance immediately rather than risk more years of physical trauma from another sneak attack, while the likelihood of being arrested for assault instead was low and worthwhile to reduce my physical danger.

The body tries to heal itself. However, it doesn't always do so fully. Evolutionary selection results in a "good enough" healing mechanism to survive and perpetuate the species. Lasting low-level physical trauma and a bit of paranoia about the behavior of recreational drug (nicotine and other) consumers is beyond what the body remedies on its own.

[Urpriest]

2-3 years after I got punched by the nicotine addict (and before the surgery), a similar incident occurred. A guy lit up halfway through a movie (different theater). That time I walked along the next row until I was behind the smoker, grabbed his hair, and forcibly tilted his head back to gain eye contact where I was looming over him. I was polite when I asked him to put out the cigarette, and I even thanked him for his compliance with state law. I figured it was overall safer to establish physical dominance immediately rather than risk more years of physical trauma from another sneak attack, while the likelihood of being arrested for assault instead was low and worthwhile to reduce my physical danger.

Huh. Somehow this explains a lot.

Tippy is a defense contractor, and Curmudgeon is Ender Wiggin.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Sartharina
Eh. It's just a bruise. People heal.

I have a feeling you'd be a lot less dismissive if you were the person who'd been hit.


Originally Posted by Sartharina
Physical violence does not actually hurt unless the intent of at least one party is the incapacitation/maiming of the other.

And this is so absurd it's almost trolling. Beating people to cause pain without leaving permanent damage is a well-known tactic of many abusers.

Again, you very clearly have no experience with this yourself.

[Hand_of_Vecna]

I figured it was overall safer to establish physical dominance immediately rather than risk more years of physical trauma from another sneak attack, while the likelihood of being arrested for assault instead was low and worthwhile to reduce my physical danger.

You may have gone a bit too far in your execution, but I am glad you learned the lesson I was thinking of while reading the earlier portion. If someone is a big enough douche to do something like smoke in a theater you need to be sure you can take them in a fight and more importantly convince them that you can win a fight before starting a verbal altercation with them. You can't trust someone like that not to escalate.


And this is so absurd it's almost trolling. Beating people to cause pain without leaving permanent damage is a well-known tactic of many abusers.

Again, you very clearly have no experience with this yourself.

Or it could be the opinion of someone who's both been in a physical altercations and been driven to tears by verbal abuse and prefers the former. Punching a (possibly former) friend =/= abuse.

There are in fact times when physical violence is the most correct response to an offense. This is usually after using stern words to demand an apology and being insulted further.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Seriously, nobody's right on the violence thing. It's subjective.

I've never been physically abused by anyone but I -did- grow up in an area where I wasn't sheltered from the very notion of physical violence. Me and my friends fist-fight for fun.

The simple fact here is that different people have different tolerances and outlooks on physical violence.

Can we please get back to the topic at hand?


I'd like to contribute but I've never walked away from a game. Had a few naturally fall apart but never walked away.

[atemu1234]

Rape is a horrible thing.

Having someone sitting across the table from you say 'this is a good thing for the game' to such a reprehensible act, and then acting surprised when everyone recoils in horror KIND OF ruins the fun of playing pretend.

Now your session is basically ruined. You waited all week to play fun and games, and now someone spat in your lunch. Worse yet, they don't seem to understand that SEXUAL ASSAULT IS A BAD THING.

BOTH times I played as a female under the same DM, I've had my characters raped. Once by another woman, once by a bunch of men, after being beaten unconscious by them.

HOW do you NOT want to punch someone in the face after that? The session is ruined, the campaign is shot, and I haven't played another female in... Probably close to a decade, with one exception under another DM, but THAT campaign was ruined by another player... Who happened to be the terribad DM. Go figure.

Sometimes I walk away from these ruined games, but after a couple of years of this, I've started outright breaking the game by jumping the rails. Nothing like 'I kill X' or 'I burn down this village/kingdom', no no.

"I go on a different adventure, leaving those jerk NPCs behind. C'mon party!" And when the DM asks why, I explain that there's no fun to be had in his (calling this as loosely as I can) 'story'.... Which usually led to the DM rage-quitting.

....So, wait, does making the DM walk away count?

That DM deserved as much as he got. As much of a fan of dark drama as I am, I thoroughly avoid plot points that make players uncomfortable. If I even think an idea of mine would make someone sitting at the table uncomfortable, I ask them beforehand. It's a common courtesy.

[Hand_of_Vecna]

Seriously, nobody's right on the violence thing.

It's subjective. Can we please get back to the topic at hand?

Agreed and Agreed.
Here's a relevant story from my own experience that was ended at the demand apology stage.

I was at a game with my then SO, now this game had had a number of major offenses against most people's sensibilities. There had been repeated incidents of unwritten house rules. Some artifact had effectively “turned off” magic this wasn't part of the game's pitch and the PC's included a Wizard, a Beguiler and a Ranger that wasn't offered a chance to take a spell-less option, and 3 mundanes.

Then we had a game where the DM decided he wanted to spend an entire session describing junk, because I went to a flea market. I went there with a specific goal. I'd asked about psionic items because I was a Wild Talent and was told that they were often made of cheap materials and tended to attract dirt, so they could often be sold as junk. He felt he then needed to describe everything everywhere, when I realized what was going on I stopped and he then started prodding everyone into looking for things themselves and went into the same routine of describing every object in every stall.

My SO's turn came around and she started looking at instruments and had to ask about different instruments because he seemed to keep describing only two of most items; one that was beat-up, soiled of poorly made enough that it seemed useless and one with so many artistic flourishes that it was out of our price range. After finally finding something affordable and useable he asked her if she has Perform:Fiddle. She told him she had Perform: Stringed Instrument. He then started berating her at length for believing that these instruments were so different that they required separate skills.

“Name, don't talk to her like she's an idiot, because she's following the rules in the ****ing Player's Handbook!”

“Well, it works that way in my game.”

“If you had a problem with that skill the time was when you inspected her character sheet. And you're making up another houserule that you said you didn't have many of and rules aside you don't play any instruments and you're lecturing someone who does about what learning to play an instrument is like, who the hell do you think you are?”

At some point during this I also slammed a PHB open to the perform skill in front of him. I'd been opening it up to show him politely, before he opened up the douche-nozzle to full blast.

He apologized and made a house rule, but gave her all the performs she wanted at max ranks. This got us to sit through the remainder of the session and avoided a physical conflict, but we decided not to return. We agreed that we didn't need to be gaming somewhere where such an outburst was called for and the fact that he wrote down a house rule and made an exception effectively meant that he was maintaining that he was right and had effectively been bullied into giving the angry guy's girl free stuff.

[sakuuya]

I've left two unrelated games because one character got to control the actions of the rest of the party via PvP. Once (in a homebrew sci-fi game) a character modified the party's ship to orbitally bombard us if we went against his plans. It didn't happen to me, but it did happen to someone else in our party. I only lasted one session with those guys.

The other time, a new player joined a campaign that had been running for a few months, and his wizard immediately used a multi-target dominate spell on the party that was from "some book [he] can't remember" and didn't allow a save. No one, including the DM, ever saw his character sheet. I put up with this one for a while because I liked the rest of the party, but the only time I called him out his blatant cheating (when he brought an ECL 21 character to a level 10 oneshot game), he accused me of not knowing the rules and being jealous of his character-building skills. That's when I walked out.

[heavyfuel]

a multi-target dominate spell on the party that was from "some book [he] can't remember" and didn't allow a save.

Technically possible with Irresistible Chain-ed Dominate Person. A 12th level spell, but can be reduced by any number of means... Of course, if the DM allowed for something like this, you probably should walk away.

[Telonius]

I've only left one game, and that was after two sessions of observation and a brief character intro. It was a combination of logistics (no car at the time, and it was really out of the way for public transit), group dynamics (they'd been playing together for years, and didn't seem completely accepting of new people/ideas), and play style (much more of an old-school 1st-ed feel than I was used to). It just wasn't what I was looking for, and we parted ways without any hard feelings.

[sakuuya]

Technically possible with Irresistible Chain-ed Dominate Person. A 12th level spell, but can be reduced by any number of means... Of course, if the DM allowed for something like this, you probably should walk away.

He was only 5th level, so he couldn't even cast regular ol' dominate person without shenanigans, let alone get all of Irresistable Spell's prereqs and Chain Spell. It may have been from a scroll, but he didn't make a check to cast it. I'm gonna stick with "he was a dirty cheater."

[Crake]

He was only 5th level, so he couldn't even cast regular ol' dominate person without shenanigans, let alone get all of Irresistable Spell's prereqs and Chain Spell. It may have been from a scroll, but he didn't make a check to cast it. I'm gonna stick with "he was a dirty cheater."

Dirty cheater sounds about right. I'm a little surprised the DM didn't ask him to explain himself right then and there, and the fact that the DM never saw his character sheet? I can't help but put a little bit of the blame on the DM simply for enabling such actions

[sakuuya]

Dirty cheater sounds about right. I'm a little surprised the DM didn't ask him to explain himself right then and there, and the fact that the DM never saw his character sheet? I can't help but put a little bit of the blame on the DM simply for enabling such actions

Yeah, the DM was way too nice/permissive. It was fine before this guy showed up, because no one tried to take advantage of the DM's permissiveness, but it was an environment that was easily disruptable because it relied so much on no one being a jerk.

[heavyfuel]

Yup, dirty cheater does sound about right...

[ILM]

The first one I quit because I was basically the slightly challenged, completely useless Robin to the DM's best buddy's character, and the godlike DMPC. Most of the sessions were spent reading comics and distractedly listening to all the awesome things the DMPC+buddy were doing to become even more awesome. I quit when I got to the end of his Berserk manga collection.

The second one I quit because the DM couldn't keep a schedule. He'd cancel games 15 minutes after they were supposed to start, or show up extra late, and routinely extended games way past the time we had agreed in advance to adjourn. Basically, he expected all of us to have about as little of a life as he did. In fairness, he was a superb storyteller (on the other hand, rules were not his thing and were certainly not supposed to get in the way of 'cinematic events').

The third one I quit because the plot sucked and the execution was subpar. I was the DM.

[torrasque666]

Yeah, the DM was way too nice/permissive. It was fine before this guy showed up, because no one tried to take advantage of the DM's permissiveness, but it was an environment that was easily disruptable because it relied so much on no one being a jerk.

I had a situation like that. Fortunately, I was junior DM(basically, guy in charge of character sheets and new applicants due to DM's schedule) and a bit of a rules lawyer. I was able to call he guy in my group out on a lot of shady stuff due to relatively vague wordings that could be taken either way. Eventually it got to the point that the guy just left on his own and said that he'd come back if I left. DM likes me, didn't like him. He just didn't want to confront him.

Personally, I have never left a game due to bad people. It was usually schedule conflicts.

[Zombulian]

I wanted to take a level in the shapeshifter prestige class.

The DM told me I would need to seek out a tutor.

I said that sounded fine, though it did strike me as a little odd, since up until this point, he had not imposed any fluff prereqs on feats/classes/etc.

This should have been my first warning.

We finish our day's activities and he pulls the narrative focus back and tells us individually what our characters do for the rest of the day (rest of the party builds some boats, goes and does supplies, crafts items, etc while I'm leveling up, since we were at the time using the somewhat common houserule you need at least 1 day of downtime before your lvl up and new class features take effect)

My turn in him describing what I do comes up and he says:

"[Venger], you and your tutor practice all day until eventually, you have mastered the art of changing your body from one from to another without the use of magic. This process leaves you utterly drained and when you are lying helpless, she rapes you."

In disbelief, I come back with the only appropriate response, since this is my group's chill time. It's the only time we're all off work and mostly the only time we get to hang out. I'm backed into a corner and choose not to spend the rest of the evening arguing rape politics with my DM and explaining all the reasons this is such a bad move.

"DM, what saving throw do I roll?"

"There is no saving throw. It has happened."

"But I still have all my spells. I'm a chameleon. I've got like... more spells than she has hit points, probably,"

"There is no time to use your spells."

"Some of them are immediates."

"There is no time to use your spells."

"Do I roll initiative?"

"It has happened. The next morning-"

he goes on about the weather the next morning. I'm sitting there in a state of shock. Once he's finished and gives the torch back to the players, I inform the party that we are going to go to my tutor's house and kill her. There are no objections.

We are, at this time, stuck on an island somewhere unknown (eberron game, the spheres of space moving around make navigating by stars untenable, and some fluff effect is interfering with our divination magic) my tutor apparently has it as her realm, and had initially asked the party's help repelling a colony of formians who'd been attacking her. we ground through a few random encounters with them and when we visited her castle, found that she had, for the past (???) years, had been tending to travelers who washed up on the island.

there was some variance between them, but they were all red-haired women with the ones who had been there longer being further along in their transformation.

into clones of her.

we all agreed this was creepy as hell, and I posited she had some kind of rierdran-style zombie mind control device, like the towers of rierdra going on, but since she hadn't done anything to us yet, and we had no real proof of this, that it would be unwise to start any fights with her.

the party had been repairing our boat (my boat, which I'd bought earlier on when we discovered we could travel the seas in style and I wanted to have a crew of pirates) after we had been railroaded to this island by a hurricane (again: no saves, no checks, no profession (sailor) rolls. i now realized it had been preamble to my character's rape. it had been premeditated at least since my last game session about a month prior, which made me much angrier)

due to our inability to navigate properly, she had said she would help us off the island in exchange for our help. At this point, I cared not, and said she was probably lying about that anyway. the party agreed.

my character dealt with her servants outside with glibness, teling us we'd had an audience with my tutor. they believed us and let us in. my quarrel was not with them, so I spared their lives.

my tutor asked why I was there.

really.

despite my normal inclinations, I said I wasn't in the mood to roleplay and rolled some dice.

polymorph to monstrous centipede. familiar to ironmaw. deplete dex. lower con. party dispatches summoned monsters with BFC. familiar holds, but does not kill, her servants until we can ascertain whether they're being controlled.

once her dex hits 0 and all enemies are dealt with, I dismiss the effect, retrieve my weapon, a sword infused with "bind to hell", which I'd been saving for a dracolich we were hunting. One CDG later and her soul is damned to Stygia forever.

much lootandexpee followed. her followers were indeed mind controlled stepford wives, and I offered the chance to come with us and play pirates if they wanted to leave. our wizard and I fabricated another boat and we left this terrible place, never to speak of it again.

I didn't speak to my DM for a long time.

Honestly I think that was the best sequence of events that could ever come from that. Your DM is a weirdo-jerk, but at least he let you take vengeance instead of it being a situation where you can't do anything about it and you just live with it.

[thematgreen]

As a DM I walked away from DMing for awhile due to one of the worst players I have ever encountered.

The game had
My wife, who is fairly expierence, but isn't invested.
Brother in Law - New Player
Friend 1 - New player
Jerk - Expierenced

Throughout the game Jerk would just get up and walk out when I was giving information to the group. He would refuse to contribute becasue he was tired, he would mock the other players.

The final day and the day I told him he wasn't welcome back went as such.

Jerk kills the Bro in Laws contact NPC by accident and then laughes about it. I have to quickly make another NPC to give necessary information.

Jerk walks out during an in depth fight because "I needed to get my food and it's not like I was going to do anything"

Jerk refuses to cast any heal spells on anyone because "They can pay if they want to heal".

Jerk has his face in his hands and isn't talking. Friend and Bro in Law are formulating a plan to take out a mine full of assassins. Suddenly Jerk starts snickering at their ideas. Wife calls him out on it and he says "Oh, I wasn't laughing, I was trying to stay awake".

Throughout ever session he was just a dud and a jerk and made it unfun for everyone involved.

At that point I rush the end and tell everyone it's time to go home. I send Jerk an e-mail telling him he was rude to both his hosts (My wife and I) and to our other guests and wasn't welcome back.

I haven't DM'd, other than a one time thing, since.

[thematgreen]

My wife almost quit a Shadowrun game when her character, a total hand to hand badass spy kind of lady, was forcibly raped by a guy she should have been able to to take apart with one hand because "Oh, he has cybernetics".

It ended on a positive note because the DM had to deal with my assassin getting the guy to come out to collect on a good deal on weapons. I shot the guy in the neck, chopped off his head with a samurai sword, and sent it in a box to my wifes character.

The DM was unhappy with that resolution to his NPC's life.

[atemu1234]

My wife almost quit a Shadowrun game when her character, a total hand to hand badass spy kind of lady, was forcibly raped by a guy she should have been able to to take apart with one hand because "Oh, he has cybernetics".

It ended on a positive note because the DM had to deal with my assassin getting the guy to come out to collect on a good deal on weapons. I shot the guy in the neck, chopped off his head with a samurai sword, and sent it in a box to my wifes character.

The DM was unhappy with that resolution to his NPC's life.

At that point, it's perfectly acceptable to kill that character. What did he expect you to do, send him flowers?

[Arbane]

I've walked out on two I can think of. One was a decent group, but it was HUGE (like 7 players), and the group (all guys) was a bit too frat-boy-ish for my taste.

The second one was a D&D 5th ed group playing "Hoard of the Dragon Queen".

SPOILERS FOR FIRST ADVENTURE AHEAD

Step one is for a group of low-HP 1st level characters to get through a town full of kobolds (who had a nasty gang-up special ability), dragon-cultists, and winged kobolds (who are 3 hit dice). Okay, you can sneak! ....Yeah, no, you need to escort NPC peasants, too. Somehow, we got to the castle with no fatalities, but we're out of healing.

Then the adult Blue dragon attacked.

I'll just quote the rant I made to blow of steam after that session:

My immediate reaction when the dragon attacked was "I get it. We all die now, then roll up the REAL heroes who will vow vengeance in our names, right?"

This stupid module apparently had 20 playtesters. Not ONE of whom apparently noticed that if your party can't hit the dragon at least once a round (Which we ceased be able to do when it vaporized our sorcerer), the fight either turns into a TPK if the dragon isn't played like a moron - or a slog if the GM (like mine) seems reluctant to have the dragon slaughter the mewling commoners who've mildly annoyed it.

Seriously, King Ghidorah Junior there can one-shot any level 1 PC it actually notices, and with the archer unconscious due to kobolds (Do NOT let these little bastards run up to anyone not wearing heavy armor - their allies will gank them mercilessly), our Wizard buried under fallen masonry (could've been worse, they could have ended up like the Sorcerer), and the Sorcerer with decent spell-range reduced to a cloud of charged particles by a 10d12 lightning-blast for actually managing to do damage to the dragon, leaving the STR-based Paladin and the healer Cleric trying desperately to do any damage to it whatsoever. And thanks to disadvantage (from range and its Fear Aura), they had at most a one in a hundred chance to hit this abomination against the CR system. The fact that it has literal Plot Armor giving it Immunity to NPCs didn't help.

And the final fecal cherry on the BS sundae? We got a whopping 50 whole XP for surviving this kaiju attack. We got more from the kobolds and the cultists!

:smallfurious:

(Apparently, the dragon is SUPPOSED to only annihilate NPCs. Our DM did not figure this out.)

So, yeah, that went real well. The DM realized people were unhappy, and did a rewind (yes, he used 'it was all a dream'.... BLARGH), introduced some bigshot NPC lich wizard plot device guy who had us go on a quest which got us... a Holy Sword of Bahamut for the paladin. (It also got the group's cleric killed by a wight, but OH WELL.) Which would be fine, but.... THE DRAGON NEVER LANDS. WHAT GOOD WAS THIS GOING TO DO?

So, I said I couldn't make it next session. The group was good, but I was not impressed by their GM's skills.

[ComaVision]

Honestly I think that was the best sequence of events that could ever come from that. Your DM is a weirdo-jerk, but at least he let you take vengeance instead of it being a situation where you can't do anything about it and you just live with it.

Honestly, I don't understand why people get so upset on the boards about rape in D&D. Having no save is bad DMing (in pretty much any situation) but he didn't throw any fiat to stop you from avenging your honour.

According to the judicial system, murder is worse than rape but nobody bats an eye to that happening in game. If you have a PC's family member murdered, it's a plot hook and engaging but if rape is involved the DM is a weirdo fetishist?

For the record, there has never been rape in any game I have DMed.

[Aegis013]

The third one I quit because the plot sucked and the execution was subpar. I was the DM.

I appreciate your straightforward honesty, though I bet you could do better with a bit of practice. DMing is a skill after all, built up by using it; your capability to recognize your own lack of awesomeness suggests a willingness to learn and adapt which likely the most important traits for DMing. Keep your head up and try again if you want to.


Honestly, I don't understand why people get so upset on the boards about rape in D&D.

People have different sensibilities? Do you similarly not understand why one person might not like broccoli while another might find it delicious? Except to be more accurate it was if the smell of broccoli alone was repulsive enough to trigger a violent gag reflex in the first person. Such a reaction might result in another person becoming very uncomfortable if you say "My character takes out some nice raw broccoli and eats it noisily" in a similar manner, so much so that you probably should just avoid mentioning broccoli in your games, because that person might struggle to have fun if such a thing comes up.

No offense to broccoli.

[ComaVision]

People have different sensibilities? Do you similarly not understand why one person might not like broccoli while another might find it delicious? Except to be more accurate it was if the smell of broccoli alone was repulsive enough to trigger a violent gag reflex in the first person. Such a reaction might result in another person becoming very uncomfortable if you say "My character takes out some nice raw broccoli and eats it noisily" in a similar manner, so much so that you probably should just avoid mentioning broccoli in your games, because that person might struggle to have fun if such a thing comes up.

No offense to broccoli.

So your answer is "rape just bothers some people a lot."

Not much of an answer really, and I don't see why you had to be condescending about it. If there was some confusion, I'm not trying to be controversial. I'm geniunely interested in the reason for the stark contrast.

[thematgreen]

At that point, it's perfectly acceptable to kill that character. What did he expect you to do, send him flowers?

I have no idea. I think it was also shocking that my character was played as a Robin Hood style character, rather than the selfish mercenary that seems to be how most Shadowrun characters are. I owned territory, made good inroads with the surrounding gangs and provided neutral territory for the corporations to meet. I could fight, since i was a street samurai, I just rarely killed like that.

[Aegis013]

So your answer is "rape just bothers some people a lot."

Not much of an answer really, and I don't see why you had to be condescending about it. If there was some confusion, I'm not trying to be controversial. I'm geniunely interested in the reason for the stark contrast.

Apologies for coming across as condescending, honestly, I misinterpreted your intent and thought you were trying to be controversial or baiting an argument.

Yes, my answer is rape bothers people a lot, enough to cause a violent gag reflex in some people, or similar, which tends to inhibit the enjoyment of the group. It's generally better to just avoid the thing excepting situations where the group has agreed that it is ok within the context of their game before hand, something not frequently done in my experience.

[Kelb_Panthera]

So your answer is "rape just bothers some people a lot."

Not much of an answer really, and I don't see why you had to be condescending about it. If there was some confusion, I'm not trying to be controversial. I'm geniunely interested in the reason for the stark contrast.

It's a difference of aftermath.

Murder removes the victim from the lives of those around them in a very permanent way. The survivors have to deal with that emotionally draining loss but then it's over and done with.

Rape removes the victim from the lives of those around them in a much more ragged but less permanent way. The survivors have to deal with not only the loss of their loved one (the experience almost invariably changes the victim in such a way that, at least initially, they simply are not the same person they were before) but also the emotional trauma the victim has undergone as (s)he goes down the long road to recovery and eventually becoming something like (s)he was before this horrible event in her life.

Then there's the victim herself.

It's immensely easier to murder someone quickly, quietly, and cleanly than it is to rape them in the same manner. There are easily a dozen or more ways to do it, many of them without you even being present at the time. To rape someone quickly and quietly can really only be done, barring magic, by drugging them or otherwise knocking them unconscious and doing the deed before they come around. It can't be done cleanly at all and the perpetrator must be present. Rape is, ultimately, a much more intimate affair for the victim.

Finally, there's the necessary mindset of the perpetrator.

Someone who kills another sapient being (moving slightly away from murder here) may do so for any of a number of reasons including, most notably, self-defense. It's at least possible for it to be justifiable. Rape, on the other hand, is universally committed as a means to make the perpetrator feel more powerful; to convince himself or reinforce his sense of power over his victims, barring truly bizarre circumstances. Rape -requires- an inherently more monstrous mind-set.

Cognizance of these differences makes rape seem, to some, to be a dramatically more monstrous crime.

And all of that is without even touching the possibility of a rape baby.

[ellindsey]

The most recent game I walked away from wasn't due to anything really awful like rape, but simply because I didn't like the style of the game. It was a modern-day superhero game where all the players were villains working for a master supervillain NPC. This NPC was smarter and more powerful and more skilled than any of the PCs, and ordered us around on various criminal jobs, mostly committed against other criminal groups. It was a fun campaign for a while, but it became increasingly obvious that none of us players had any actual agency whatsoever or any real purpose in being in the game since the GMPC could do anything we could do better than we could. After a failed attempt to play a skillmonkey, I took my leave of that game.

[Faily]

Also going to point out rape and sexual assault is much more likely to have happened to the players at your table, than murder.

According to the National Violence Against Women Survey, 1 in 6 U.S. women and 1 in 33 U.S. men has experienced an attempted or completed rape in her or his lifetime. To take an extreme leap, if your group consisted of 6 women, chances are one of them will have experienced a sexual assault.

Rape or the threat of it is a more visible thing in daily life. It's not something you want to happen to your get-away-from-real-life character (most of the time, there are exceptions to some people of course), with whom you get to have fun with for a few hours once in a while. That the character died heroicly fighting a horde of kobolds though is something people are comfortable with, because it's the kind of epic we often feel is an element of games like D&D, which is a hero-game.

Just going to point out that some people are ok with such themes as rape in their group, which is totally fine, as long as everyone have given their consent and agreed it's not something that will make them uncomfortable. No one is there to be uncomfortable or have a bad time, gamers are there to have a good time.

[charlesk]

Death is basically "par for the course" in a game like D&D. Rape is not. You (basically) can't avoid killing things in D&D but you can certainly avoid sexual assault (and all sex entirely, really.)

You're making a rather direct and unusual and strong point by having that happen to a character. It's a very nasty thing to do to someone that is completely unnecessary.

Or put another way: killing a character is "just business" -- rape is "personal".

[Sith_Happens]

Not much of an answer really, and I don't see why you had to be condescending about it. If there was some confusion, I'm not trying to be controversial. I'm geniunely interested in the reason for the stark contrast.

One word: Context.

If your character gets murdered, well, you've been playing a game fundamentally about trying to not die in the face of many things that want you dead, you just so happened to fail. Furthermore, not only is dying generally something that's over as soon as it starts, but it probably happened in the heat of a pitched combat during which you heroically resisted your murderer's assault for as long as you could. Consequent typical reaction: "Meh, **** happens, guess it's time to either start working on a new character or wait for a rez."

If your character gets raped, on the other hand, that's (hopefully) not something that happens every session. And it's not happening during the familiar rush of gameplay either. The actual conflict is already over, you've already been beaten, but now you're being brutalized and humiliated. Possibly most important, even if your DM is tactful enough to fade to black your mind is going to fill in the blanks, so it's also not (in your perception) over quickly. Wound, meet salt. Consequent typical reaction: "HOLY ****."

Incidentally, if you do some searching you'll find people on this forum having the exact same complaints and arguments over instances of PCs being tortured, for the exact same reasons.

[ellindsey]

Also going to point out rape and sexual assault is much more likely to have happened to the players at your table, than murder.


Very much true. I know that at least two of the players in my current Pathfinder game are rape victims. Because of them (and discussions I had with the entire group before starting the campaign) my campaign will have no rape in it whatsoever. Being eaten by a dragon, turned to stone by magic, having your brain eaten by a mind flayer, etc... are all things that none of my players have personally experienced, so there are no triggers to avoid there, but having their characters raped would be too close to trauma that they have personally experienced.

[Nightcanon]

So your answer is "rape just bothers some people a lot."

Not much of an answer really, and I don't see why you had to be condescending about it. If there was some confusion, I'm not trying to be controversial. I'm geniunely interested in the reason for the stark contrast.
According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Study (CDC 2011), lifetime risk of rape in the US is around 1 in 5 for women and 1 in 71 for men. It's likely that you know a woman who has been raped, even if you aren't aware of the fact. Of course, there's a lot non-sexual violence out there as well, and as you say there's a lot of murder in D&D, but fighting is (as in movies) somewhat stylised and abstracted, plus you can further distance yourself from it by restricting yourself to being the 'good guys' (only fighting evil, all evil humanoids encountered are adult members of raiding parties etc) if you wish.

[atemu1234]

Also going to point out rape and sexual assault is much more likely to have happened to the players at your table, than murder.

According to the National Violence Against Women Survey, 1 in 6 U.S. women and 1 in 33 U.S. men has experienced an attempted or completed rape in her or his lifetime. To take an extreme leap, if your group consisted of 6 women, chances are one of them will have experienced a sexual assault.

Rape or the threat of it is a more visible thing in daily life. It's not something you want to happen to your get-away-from-real-life character (most of the time, there are exceptions to some people of course), with whom you get to have fun with for a few hours once in a while. That the character died heroicly fighting a horde of kobolds though is something people are comfortable with, because it's the kind of epic we often feel is an element of games like D&D, which is a hero-game.

Just going to point out that some people are ok with such themes as rape in their group, which is totally fine, as long as everyone have given their consent and agreed it's not something that will make them uncomfortable. No one is there to be uncomfortable or have a bad time, gamers are there to have a good time.

I'm fairly certain this conversation will get scrubbed, if this thread does not get locked altogether (probably both). But I'd just like to point out that sometimes dark themes are okay, if they are agreed upon by a group. If it makes someone uncomfortable or strikes too close to home, then it shouldn't happen. Period.

[frogglesmash]

Honestly, I don't understand why people get so upset on the boards about rape in D&D. Having no save is bad DMing (in pretty much any situation) but he didn't throw any fiat to stop you from avenging your honour.

According to the judicial system, murder is worse than rape but nobody bats an eye to that happening in game. If you have a PC's family member murdered, it's a plot hook and engaging but if rape is involved the DM is a weirdo fetishist?

For the record, there has never been rape in any game I have DMed.


One problem with rape in d&d is that, unlike murder and to a lesser extent, torture, it's unexpected. Murder, while a horrible crime, is central to d&d's ruleset, almost every rule in d&d is concerned with murder and thus it is both expected and accepted.
There is also the issue of how rape is viewed in western society. We tend to view rape as an act that not only violates our basic human rights but removes the victim's "personhood," and is viewed by many as an act that sullies the victim. It could even be considered worse than acts such as torture due to the fact that while both rape and torture may leave deep psychological scarring rape more, often than not, makes it very difficult for the victim to build and maintain close relationships.
So if you're the DM and you want a PC to get raped they should a) be consulted and b) be allowed to attempt to resist.

[Arbane]

Also, there's the fact that a LOT of the time it seems like the GM is using the game as an excuse to vent their misogyny to the world. (And we wonder why this hobby is so unpopular with women... :smallfurious: )

[Fumble Jack]

In my own case, Rules Lawyers. They not only caused me to walk away from the game but also to not want to play 3.5 for a good 5-6 years. On the bright side I found a better group since then & have returned to enjoying 3.5 once again.

[thematgreen]

1. It would be nice if all this rape talk was taken to it's own thread. It has nothing to do with the discussion intended by the topic creator and it's disruptive.

2. I walked away from a homebrew superhero game where we all got one superpower and the required secondary powers to support it, but the DM had the "Superman" but had no weaknesses to play with us. If we didn't defeat an encounter the way he wanted then "ShadowHawk" would swoop in and beat it for us. To the point that in the final showdown of a part of the campaign we had set up this tactic where I would control the mooks while strong guy would throw acid chick above the bad guy and she would drop onto him as acid. Suddenly ShadowHawk swoops in and says something like "I just discovered that Mertron is immune to acid! I'll have to take him down, you handle his henchmen!" and then proceeded top one shot Mertron.

I was sad to leave because the game it'self was a blast. You could have any power. My characters power was to start singing and dancing and everyone around him would start to join in, like in a musical or Disney movie, making him easily the best distractor. We had a guy who could shoot spiders of different types from his hands, a guy who was super strong and had the favored tactic of grabbing enemies and using them as weapons to beat other enemies to death, and a chick who turned into acid.

If the GM hadn't included his godmode character it would have been one of the better games I have played.


The GMs character was like a player who says: Oh, I rolled all 20's for my stats and my guy has all the feats because that's his super power, oh and he gets 50 skill points per level and is trained in every skill. He can also cast every spell as an SLA with no limit.

[Almagesto]

I am usually the DM, so there's hardly any chance for me to walk away from a game. However, there are two instances when that actually happenned in my group.

(1) First is the one time one of my players decided to quit a game. After carefully crafting yet another version of a good-at-heart drow, my friend ended up with a character whose ECL placed him above the party - that began at 3rd level. So, he decided not to roll a new character and instead play with a fighter NPC I had lying around.

The first five weeks of the campaign (twice a week 6 hrs meetings, if I recall correctly - it was college) he played with that NPC, until finally the party found his PC. Now, the PC was only surfacing from the Underdark and this meant his eyes were only just adjusting to sunlight. The party quickly decided he was a "good" drow and invited him to join them in a quest to find out what caused fruit to give strange powers to the townsfolk.

Now, as you might have guessed, we were playing through the Sunless Citadel. Since the party was 5th level, it was a heavily modified version of it. The quest assumed the characters arrived at the citadel days after a first party cleared most of the dungeon but failed to overcome the (oops, almost made a spoiler there...) BBEG. Anyway, the citadel, as some may recall, lies deep inside a ravine. When the party arrived to the ravine, there was still attached to it a very sturdy set of rope stairs. Now, instead of using the aforementioned steps and completely bypassing a climb check, my friend decides it is time to showcase his drow. He states he will be climbing down the ravine using a pair of daggers (we were short on scimitars in that campaign) for support. He then proceeded to make his climb check for a roll of 1. Obviously I'm not a bad guy as a DM, so I decided he fell some feet before getting a good grip on the wall. I adviced him, "the stairs are right next to you, just get a hold of them; next time you may fall further down". He, of course, decides to ignore me and rolled yet another 1 in his climb check. He fell 30 feet and - even with the rule that the first 10 ft only deal non-lethal damage - died. He stood up and left, no words spoken. He returned to the game the next session and kept on roleplaying the fighter.

(2) Now, the only other time someone has left the table in my group was me leaving in the middle of a session I was DMing. Why? New guy came into our group and completely ignored the words role and playing. He straight up killed EVERYTHING that moved and failed to acknowledge either the other players' or my hints at what could've been a good HP Lovecraft meets DnD story. I got so fed up with him that I decided it was time to take a break. After 10 minutes of break, my friends and I decided to adjourn for the night - rocks fell and everyone died. We never invited him to play with us again.

[Squark]

The only game I've walked from, I did so for scheduling reasons. It wasn't worth five boring hours waiting on campus and another hour and a half bus ride just to play for 1 hour in a game with people who had very different playstyles. Two players cancelling at the last minute was the last straw. Of the other two groups I've played with, one gradually disintegrated due to difficulty meeting (I ran into the main other person who coordinated it recently, though. It was nice talking with him), and the other ended when the GM graduated. I might have walked out on that other one, though, if the lunatic wookiee duo didn't reign in there stupidity.

[(Un)Inspired]

I adviced him, "the stairs are right next to you, just get a hold of them; next time you may fall further down". He, of course, decides to ignore me and rolled yet another 1 in his climb check. He fell 30 feet and - even with the rule that the first 10 ft only deal non-lethal damage - died. He stood up and left, no words spoken. He returned to the game the next session and kept on roleplaying the fighter.


That's pretty hilarious. Did he really just turn and wall away without saying another word?

[Almagesto]

That's pretty hilarious. Did he really just turn and wall away without saying another word?

True story. He's usually a good sport, but I guess the disappointment of having to wait so long for a character that died within 15 minutes of play (not a single one of which was commited to battle) was too much for him to handle.

[SiuiS]

I wanted to take a level in the shapeshifter prestige class.

The DM told me I would need to seek out a tutor.

I said that sounded fine, though it did strike me as a little odd, since up until this point, he had not imposed any fluff prereqs on feats/classes/etc.

This should have been my first warning.

We finish our day's activities and he pulls the narrative focus back and tells us individually what our characters do for the rest of the day (rest of the party builds some boats, goes and does supplies, crafts items, etc while I'm leveling up, since we were at the time using the somewhat common houserule you need at least 1 day of downtime before your lvl up and new class features take effect)

My turn in him describing what I do comes up and he says:

"[Venger], you and your tutor practice all day until eventually, you have mastered the art of changing your body from one from to another without the use of magic. This process leaves you utterly drained and when you are lying helpless, she rapes you."

That's when you stop the game, lock eyes, slowly move everything to the side and say "we need to talk about why you thought this was a good idea." In a quiet voice.


I once had a game where a GM frankly right out started telling me who my character was FOR me. She was characterized as a sweet, kind, naive healer who despite her lack of worldliness was especially insightful into issues of what it means to be good. Basically a sort of Disney Princess-type dealie.

The GM kept insisting that she had secret anger issues and an evil streak because "everyone has demons", and he had an NPC start Dominating her into basically being a cannibal-murderer despite that REAALLLLYYY being against her nature; I didn't even get a saving throw.

My boyfriend punched him in the face.

Ah, good. Some positive resolution.


Actual physical violence in the face of unpleasant but frankly harmless behavior in a game?

Yep. Sometimes it's necessary. That's a long conversation wherein we both will admit that there's a lot of compressed detail left out for brevity and we both roughly agree or see the point. But the end result is that the world is a lot nicer when everyone remembers that civility exists because violence is one angry primate neural flex away, not despite that.


Frankly, I'm rather disturbed by this attitude. It may not have been very damaging but resorting violence from merely verbal provocation is not a good thing, and pooh-poohing it is even worse No one protested the DM's behavior before this? No one thought to say "Stop it, final warning"? No one thought that actually leaving the table before this was the right thing to do rather than hit someone? Or even shout and rant at him for being a ****?

That I agree with though. You don't just lash out. You need to clarify the situation, and distill down the information. If it becomes apparent that this response is the only or best one, then you do it. As a last resort and as a hard line when you need to take a hard line.

I get the impression this was a "across multiple sessions" thing, with the DM driving it over time against obvious distress, and anything less than the grosse physical output was ignored or rationalized. But if it's like, no you can't play a diplomancer *drop kick*, that's bad.

[Venger]

That's when you stop the game, lock eyes, slowly move everything to the side and say "we need to talk about why you thought this was a good idea." In a quiet voice.

This was regrettably not possible. I was VOIPing in via webcam, as I normally did with this game.

[SiuiS]

I find the attitude that all verbal provocation can be dismissed with the adjective "merely' to be far more disturbing. Physical violence does not actually hurt unless the intent of at least one party is the incapacitation/maiming of the other. Barring freak accidents, the body is built and designed to heal - the only thing that matters is the mental reaction, and in that regard, being struck for being a jackass is far less harmful than social abuse. (Also, due to how socialization works, nothing is 'merely verbal')

Indeed. Any violence can leave it's mark. The point of physical violence is because the shock with relatively lower harm than ripping someone apart spiritually and psychologically causes reflection with less damage.

I the other hand, I have a single broken bone (left pinkie) that gives me enough grief to send me into deep bots of anxiety and depression. Mileage and variance.


This is a vast oversimplification - physical violence that doesn't incapacitate can still hurt - a lot.

Hurt and harm. Hurting them is the point. Harming them, that's off limits.


I have a feeling you'd be a lot less dismissive if you were the person who'd been hit.

And this is so absurd it's almost trolling. Beating people to cause pain without leaving permanent damage is a well-known tactic of many abusers.

Again, you very clearly have no experience with this yourself.

Eh. I think it's easy to generalize the idea of one good shot that you feel someone earned and a history of chronic abuse because they are both "I hit them that one time and they deserved it". Context and continuation are the issue there. And reciprocation. I've been hit for being That Girl and I deserved it. I was livif but I let it go, folded it into my understanding of the situation, and moved on.

I've also been hit without deserving it, and yeah. That sucks. It's entirely possible I only find this acceptable because it's the lifestyle I grew into. But even when breaking someone's jaw for saying "yo mama" is okay, we understand the difference between settling a dispute and abuse.


Seriously, nobody's right on the violence thing. It's subjective.

I've never been physically abused by anyone but I -did- grow up in an area where I wasn't sheltered from the very notion of physical violence. Me and my friends fist-fight for fun.

The simple fact here is that different people have different tolerances and outlooks on physical violence.

Well put.


I've left two unrelated games because one character got to control the actions of the rest of the party via PvP. Once (in a homebrew sci-fi game) a character modified the party's ship to orbitally bombard us if we went against his plans. It didn't happen to me, but it did happen to someone else in our party. I only lasted one session with those guys.

The other time, a new player joined a campaign that had been running for a few months, and his wizard immediately used a multi-target dominate spell on the party that was from "some book [he] can't remember" and didn't allow a save. No one, including the DM, ever saw his character sheet. I put up with this one for a while because I liked the rest of the party, but the only time I called him out his blatant cheating (when he brought an ECL 21 character to a level 10 oneshot game), he accused me of not knowing the rules and being jealous of his character-building skills. That's when I walked out.

Oh, hey. I had a game like that. A normally really crummy DM – the one who sicced several stone collosi on my level 8 warlock fighter because 10d6 damage a round with multiple attacks was too much OP – wanted to have a friend run an epic game. I checked everyone else's characters and me and a pal made ones to suit – werewolf war shapers at each others' throats for dominion of the pack. He was a combat brute werewolf lord barbarian, I was a Druid with both ACFs from the SRD for barbarian and monk abilities, along with a rogue 5 assassin 15 and a thrallherd with an airship. The DM's best friend had a tricked out OP character who revered bane and got a bunch of campaign specific bonuses in a (surprise!) forgotten realms game instead of the usual generic Greyhawk we all prepped for. The DM asked us questions about our preparation ("you use divination spells e'ery day to make sure nothing surprises you, right?", and "you can hit DCs in the sixties routinely, right?") so we slightly adjusted out wealth in the background to keep up with permission, and moved on.

Well, turns out this guy's friend had somehow snuck up on everyone in their sleep (including the "never sleeps at all" character) and used Mind Rape to make them all unfailingly loyal to him because that's how party unity is achieved on his games. After a brief argument he won (because sleeping characters are always willing :smallannoyed:) I just started keeping track of this PCs behavior. Because, canonically, we were wolf archetypes. If he wasn't strong enough, courageous enough and powerful and ruthless enough, then by Odin we would not follow him not suffer him to live.

We finally get to the first plot point, and I approach him. I decide to test his mettle in a friendly way (being a morphic werewolf) and basically sick his shoulder to get into a tussle. His invisible enthralled klurichir rolls a natural 20 on the attack roll and cuts off my head!

"I grow fangs out of my neck stump and tear it a new one", I say.

"No, you're dead. It has a Vorpal bite." But, I'm immune to critical hits.
"Vorpal happens on crits, but isn't a crit. You lost your head and you're dead." But in functionally an ooze. I have no head to lose.
"No. You do. You're dead." I made it clear twenty minutes ago my brain cluster was in my thorax with central processig units dispersed redundantly across my limbs. I have every organ I need. He bit off my appendix. I'm fine.
"Book says Vorpal kills you. You're dead."

Literally no one but his friend wanted to continue at that point, as I walked away.



According to the judicial system, murder is worse than rape but nobody bats an eye to that happening in game. If you have a PC's family member murdered, it's a plot hook and engaging but if rape is involved the DM is a weirdo fetishist?

For the record, there has never been rape in any game I have DMed.

Judicial systems are not moral systems. They specifically cannot be.


This was regrettably not possible. I was VOIPing in via webcam, as I normally did with this game.

I'm sorry.



*


Oh, I may have another. Depends on how tonight goes.

This DM is new, and trying so hard to go by the books and verisimilitude it hurts the game. Like, we have a barbarian who keeps getting left out, and I said quote reasonably at one point "focus on him, we can just move forward with our same stuff", and he nods, looks at the barbarian, and then... Has the Druid attacked by a boar for a ten minute slugfest.

He's got plans, and they're good, but he can't execute. Every time we have a session plan it gets side-tracked (by him!). We were supposed to storm a fortress. That never happened. Instead we started it next session – but since it was only planned to be as long as the end of a session, he added other stuff in before hand. That also got cut due to extension, and picked up next session, but wait! More padding.

So every time he says something will happen, it takes three days, not one. And on each new day, something else happens that takes three days, not one. He's fractalating his plot into repeated nested iteratives, to the point that I kept the session going three hours just to finish it. And after, well, he texted me saying he would like to revisit the last combat, didn't feel it was fair because we were rushed (:smallannoyed:). He suggests we hash it out via text message, but in the intervening week has studiously failed to reply to my repeated attempts. I told him eventually that when our next session starts this is done one way or another. Either the enemy is dead or I am, bymut I'm giving it absolutely no more screen time. As I'm not DM, I may end up dead, and I'll just walk to the book section of the store and browse while they play, maybe leave early.

We'll see. I'm aware I'm being a jerk it we're losing the two newest players because the ones he's more friends with are getting better quality screen time. They're the ones who don't need it.

[Rater202]

I the other hand, I have a single broken bone (left pinkie) that gives me enough grief to send me into deep bots of anxiety and depression. Mileage and variance.

*offers feel better hugs*

[Solaris]

That's when you stop the game, lock eyes, slowly move everything to the side and say "we need to talk about why you thought this was a good idea." In a quiet voice.



Ah, good. Some positive resolution.



Yep. Sometimes it's necessary. That's a long conversation wherein we both will admit that there's a lot of compressed detail left out for brevity and we both roughly agree or see the point. But the end result is that the world is a lot nicer when everyone remembers that civility exists because violence is one angry primate neural flex away, not despite that.



That I agree with though. You don't just lash out. You need to clarify the situation, and distill down the information. If it becomes apparent that this response is the only or best one, then you do it. As a last resort and as a hard line when you need to take a hard line.

I get the impression this was a "across multiple sessions" thing, with the DM driving it over time against obvious distress, and anything less than the grosse physical output was ignored or rationalized. But if it's like, no you can't play a diplomancer *drop kick*, that's bad.

I like the way you think.

[NeoPhoenix0]

so a level 8 character that has been in the campaign since level on with less than 3000 gold in items and actual gold... still there.

accused at power gaming a manster of many forms by looking for optimal forms (forms used: tiger, dire eagle, leopard, a wierd setting specific giant thing that we actually met and killed, vulture cuase it was the desert at one point, eagle, and a badger, pretty sure i was a dwarf and a human at one point to blend in in the city)... still there.

a couple random personal insults... still there (i passed it off on the heat of the moment)

insults and and generally is a **** to this one friend... i can't find a trace of his name on my computer or online accounts right now.

also timed this one campaign to offer my friends an alternative and watched his campaign shatter into a billion pieces.

[thematgreen]

so a level 8 character that has been in the campaign since level on with less than 3000 gold in items and actual gold... still there.

accused at power gaming a manster of many forms by looking for optimal forms (forms used: tiger, dire eagle, leopard, a wierd setting specific giant thing that we actually met and killed, vulture cuase it was the desert at one point, eagle, and a badger, pretty sure i was a dwarf and a human at one point to blend in in the city)... still there.

a couple random personal insults... still there (i passed it off on the heat of the moment)

insults and and generally is a **** to this one friend... i can't find a trace of his name on my computer or online accounts right now.

also timed this one campaign to offer my friends an alternative and watched his campaign shatter into a billion pieces.

I'm actually really interested in what you posted, but...I'm sorry...what?

I recognize the words you used, but not in the way you used them. I actually want to know what you wre saying.

[NeoPhoenix0]

I'm actually really interested in what you posted, but...I'm sorry...what?

I recognize the words you used, but not in the way you used them. I actually want to know what you wre saying.

Basically, i had a DM that gave out barely any gold or gear so i had a total of less that 3k gp at level 8, i was accused of powergaming with a druid that stopped getting new spells at level 5 and only used Master of Many Forms to turn into some animals that made sense for me to know about, and a giant that he used against us. He even insulted me at one point and i didn't leave because i just passed it off on the heat of the moment, and i didn't really care what he said anyway.

I finally left the group when he was a jerk to one of my friends. A number of weeks latter i offer the friends i still had in the group a game and that old campaign shattered.

[Gnoman]

The only game I ever walked away from (which, granted, was the only game I've ever been a player in rather than GMing) wasn't due to bad players or generally bad DMing. The trouble was that I was playing a wizard that had invested heavily in crafting skills (her backstory was an exiled remnant of a destroyed noble house with the secret goal of building an army to retake her family's former holdings), and the campaign had no downtime. I don't mean just that there wasn't time to work on crafting or such, but that in six sessions I was able to prepare spells twice. At level 1. The rest of the party was doing fine with it, but it simply didn't work for me. Not really a horror story of the sort most of these are, of course.

[LentilNinja]

I've walked away on a few occasions, but the ones that I recall are:

#1: Being called a powergamer because I stated "when I'm making a character, I make them the best I can in terms of their story". I wasn't the kind of player who'd pick races or classes that would make me rewrite the character.

#2: ROLEplaying Charisma based characters in a group who barely roleplayed at all. My characters were seen as arrogant and full of themselves when they never even got the chance to be roleplayed (even the one I played that I purposely made good aligned to try avoid that problem).

#3: Being starved of levels because the group thought going into a double digit game would be too complicated. It wouldn't have been for the players, and I tried to explain why they'd enjoy it more but nobody gave the notion a chance.

Oh, and I'd like to just point out that each one was a completely different group. Seems hard to find a good one these days, and I don't have as much fun doing online ones.

[lytokk]

I've never walked away from a game, but the one I'm currently a player in fills me with no desire to help schedule the next session. The DM has a couple stylistic differences than I do, and its just leading to both me and my wife not really enjoying the game. That and he can't maintain focus, like at all. He says I'm too uptight. I just want to keep the story moving and stop detouring every 5 minutes. But he's also a player in my game so I'm trying to show him how I feel a DM should behave, and the responsibilities of a DM for an enjoyable game.

[thematgreen]

My wife created a homebrew campaign that was very low magic and money.

Examples:

A +1 longsword was a pretty big deal

Bandits only had a couple of gold on them, regular leather armor, and their bases were filled with things like food, non magical weapons, wtc.

People would react like a real person would. We had a contact for the badguys we were trying to get info from. He owned a bar that was popular with the citizens of the city. Our resident wizard tried to make a magical attack on him, something like daze, and so the bartender bad guy called the guards and had him arrested.

I thought it was a blast if you wanted a high roleplay campaign and could settle for not having much wealth by level or magical items.


We had a husband and wife and their daughter playing and since we weren't getting shinies and leveling up after every session they just started not showing up to any of the sessions.

Their loss, once I adjusted to the new playstyle (And got my wife to understand how some abilities worked) it was a blast. I played a rogue/investigator with one level of Wizard (conjuration specialist) for the at will 5 ft teleport. Made breaking into places to look for clues very easy.

[dascarletm]

I appreciate your straightforward honesty, though I bet you could do better with a bit of practice. DMing is a skill after all, built up by using it; your capability to recognize your own lack of awesomeness suggests a willingness to learn and adapt which likely the most important traits for DMing. Keep your head up and try again if you want to.



People have different sensibilities? Do you similarly not understand why one person might not like broccoli while another might find it delicious? Except to be more accurate it was if the smell of broccoli alone was repulsive enough to trigger a violent gag reflex in the first person. Such a reaction might result in another person becoming very uncomfortable if you say "My character takes out some nice raw broccoli and eats it noisily" in a similar manner, so much so that you probably should just avoid mentioning broccoli in your games, because that person might struggle to have fun if such a thing comes up.

No offense to broccoli.

Careful you are walking the line of the Tobleroni Fallacy.:smallwink:

[Aegis013]

Careful you are walking the line of the Tobleroni Fallacy.:smallwink:

I think you mean I'm drawing the line. Using broccoli. :smallcool:

[bjoern]

Well, I've never walked away from a table but my group (we've been gaming about 20 years together) has shelved/abandoned campaigns all the time. Either one or two of us gets bored with the character we made, or get really antsy about a new build we have been working on.

The longest campaign we have ever had lasted 2 years IRL and we went from level 1 to 14.

The closest that we ever came to a disgruntled end to a campaign was when our party began to get above the power scale of our DMs world and it was frustrating for him because some encounters that should have been hard were over before the first round was over. The DM also has some other stuff he was dealing with IRL so I'm sure that played a part in it also.

[Coventry]

I was preparing to take over as DM for a bunch of co-workers, and was working through the initial character ideas.

One player wanted to play a Kender like Tasselhoff. I had read the books, too, and knew that Tas was a good hearted soul. He also never knew what was in his bags until he looked.

I proposed to the player that *I*, as DM control the kleptomania. The player would never know what was in her bags at any given time, until she (or someone else) looked. I was planning to have a mix of random items, some plot-useful items and some "well you just left an inn, so it makes sense that you have a monogrammed towel in there, today" stuff.

On the first night we were going to play, I was introducing the idea and characters. I said something like, "and she is playing a Kender." The person whose house we were at shut me down cold. He didn't even let me explain the mechanics before loudly objecting to having a party member that was going to steal from other party members. It was his house ... my game died.

[Aegis013]

"and she is playing a Kender."

I might have reacted pretty negatively to such too, though I don't know I'd take it that far. If I trusted both the DM and the player, I'd wait and see. If not, I'd voice my concerns immediately, because that's something I, too, wouldn't want to deal with. Dependent on what you said we might proceed or I might nix my entire character on the spot and start rebuilding to ensure this doesn't cause my any problems (VoP Totemist/Warlock maybe?). I don't think I'd kick you out of the house if I was hosting, though.

If the only explanation you have was that you controlled the kleptomania instead of the player, I'd still want to change my character to an item independent set-up. If I was assured nothing of importance would be taken from the PCs, I might give it a try for a couple sessions.

Kender are not group friendly things to play. I've read a ton of Dragonlance books too (even a bunch not written by Hickman and Weiss), but I wanted to Tas to go away and the story to move elsewhere.

[Coventry]

First Edition, by the way.


If I was assured nothing of importance would be taken from the PCs

That was my intent. I learned a lesson, that day.

Several years later, a different friend decided to play a Kender. I went around and got concurrence from everyone else before I let her even start to build Shaughny "Stickyfingers" Keyless. The rest all said they were cool with it, so I did not use the "I'll run the kleptomania" option. It all worked out.

[CGNefarious]

There are really only a few instances where I've walked aways from a game.

The first was a with a new DM, a friend of ours who wanted to try it out. He had an ok grasp of the rules, but literally just threw random creatures out there for us to fight. I don't really remember if there was much of a story, but that wasn't really the problem. The problem can when after quite a few drinks he lost his sense of humor. Our rogue pointed out to him that he was misunderstanding some rule and the DM just kind of freaked out, snatched the rogue's laptop, then started trying to beat him with it. We had to restrain him, make him calm down, and then eventually go chase him down as he took of out the back door and started running around post (we were all in the military at the time) barefoot and highly intoxicated. This is also when we realized he had a drinking problem and he started turning into a giant ***. We never played with him again.

Another time was my only experience with Roll20. I was contacted by a guy looking for an extra player for his group. He said his game was very roleplay heavy (which I like) and that it also very mechanics and combat oriented (which I also enjoy). He said his party needed a caster and that if I was able to I should optimize him as the party could use the power. I would be starting at level 9 and I could start with wealth by level, but no single magic item of over 2000gp. OK, weird wealth rules, but I assumed he just wanted to control what items I had through in game distribution. No biggie. I created my sorcerer and showed up for the first game. Started off in a tavern and began trying to RP how I would join the party. The DM almost immediately told me, "Just go with them. The campaign will end if you don't." OK, let's get into it. We go to this cave/dungeon of sorts. There is a suspicious looking pirate guarding a door and a giant chess board. I forget the reasoning I wasn't supposed to just force the pirate to open the door, but we had to play chess using our characters as pawns. Three of us vs the DM, but only one of the players got to actually make the calls. My guy was the first sacrificial pawn, dropping me immediately to zero. Had my imp familiar heal me using a wand of CLW and had to sit there and watch this chess game go on until the DM got bored. Then we continue on through a gauntlet of the most bizarre assortment of enemies I've seen in a single dungeon. I'm pretty sure he just picked things that looked cool and he wanted to use to fight us. All single enemy encounters in relatively small rooms. It didn't take long before I realized that no one in this game actually knew any of the rules. Movement plus full-attack. DR applying to spells. Spell resistance equalling complete magical immunity. And the enemy's at will abilities used as free actions that can interrupt other players' turns. Despite all this the combats went by pretty quickly as I was a 9th level caster and could end things rather swiftly (for the most part). So zero roleplaying, easy combat, and absolutely no adhesion to the rules. It was not what I was looking for in a game at all, and definitely not what was advertised to me. After the game I informed the DM that I would not be participating in any further sessions.

The last was a very large group. Our DM was really big on lore and had an entire story mapped out that we were to follow. That alone might have been fine, but he also had very little creativity and uninteresting combats. So a fixed story where our actions had little affect on anything, very little character development, all the improv was very noticeable since it was so terrible, and the combat situations were kind of dull. I didn't really leave this one as much as it eventually just fizzled out.

Other than that I've had some pretty good experiences with DnD. I've only been playing for about five years now, but I've made a lot of good friends through it.