Lack of Communication

[Mehangel]

So an acquaintance speaks up yesterday and offers to gm a couple sessions of pathfinder. We start off by asking the basics, like what level character, what classes and races can we choose etc. We find out that we will be writing up High Fantasy 1st level characters and that we can be any race or class, including from 3.5. Immediately three of the five players start writing up characters. Then I overhear something, Spheres of Power is a nogo. Okay, I get it, Spheres of Power is not on the PFSRD site, and he is not familiar with the system. Alright, well I suppose I can try out some Dreamscarred Press Content.. Then I hear it, only content published by Paizo... Okay, so I start looking through the base classes and I finally decide that I will make a 3.5 warblade, and he goes, Tome of Battle? Uh, no that ****s broken. Well fine, I dont agree that the book in general is broken, I understand that there were a couple typos and two or three maneuvers that get abused, but that isn't too different from any other book published by WotC, but I leave it be. It goes on like this well into the night as each of us have character ideas shot down for one bit of miscommunication or another.

I am not saying that the DM was in the wrong, I mean it was our fault for not asking if 3rd Party Content was allowed. I also understand that a DM needs to know or atleast understand the systems being used. So this is not a direct complaint against the DM, but rather game nights ruined due to lack of communication.

So yeah, I suppose I am curious what other games nights have been ruined due to Player-DM communication, or rather lack thereof?

[TheNivMizzet]

I was recently booted from a campaign because I asked too many questions during character creation. I would ask if I was allowed X or Y, because I know that some GMs have a problem with them such as Incantatrix and Illithid Savant, then when my first character died I made a hobgoblin and he seemed to refuse to answer questions. It had been a small problem in the first half where he would say "Read the house rules" as a response to every question. But it got to the point where he was threatening to kick me for a mistake on the character sheet (Which was only there after he changed the house rule page), and refused to tell me what the mistake was. Apparently he wasn't letting Fire Hobgoblins count as hobgoblins, so they weren't allowed flaws, as per the new house rules. But it was they way he acted, refusing to tell me what the problem was, and saying he didn't have the time to waste telling me, but spent 20 minutes telling me that.

[Aegis013]

I've had some frustrating experiences where a DM used fiat to make my abilities not work without any in game reason. But my reason for doing the thing and his reason for objecting were actually one and the same, but it wasn't cleared up until after the session, since I didn't want to slow the game down at the time (it moved slow enough already... seriously). Sadly, the end result of that ability being objected to was my character's permanent death. Since it wasn't the first time I had experienced that frustration, I brought in a joke character after that.

It was new World of Darkness, the group was a stealth/combat oriented vampire, an insane changeling, a forces mage who got even more noped on than I did, and I was a mind mage. I chose mind mage, because last time I had played under this story teller I made a bruiser and it discouraged him when I pummeled through every challenge easily, so I decided to have a utility character.

We were trying to get a fragment of a powerful ancient artifact from a pack of feral werewolves. We learned its location from a more friendly pack of werewolves, the two being at war with each other. I "offered" to the friendly pack's leader to go in together and wipe out the other pack. I figured, with my mind magic, I can coordinate them as a hive mind, plus, with our own characters, we had numerical advantage. By "offered" I mean, mind manipulated him into agreeing - by the dice, it worked with flying colors. It did nothing.

I did this because I wanted to avoid any possibility of fighting a whole pack of werewolves. I figured, we wouldn't need to roll the dice with the number of advantages we could get - forces mage shielding our guys, stealth vampire sniping any particularly unruly enemy from afar, our changeling providing magic flowers to heal our troops, all while I coordinated our werewolves perfectly to just kill or route the other guys. The DM said no because he didn't want to have to roll dice for 18 werewolves action's and bog down the game.

So instead, we went to there without the werewolf support. So I used magic to make the werewolves unable to perceive me and went into their base to just look for the macguffin unhindered. I thought it was the riskier plan since it put PCs in direct danger. Since I was away from the group, I had no input on their actions (my choice, I could've said stuff OoC). The stealth vampire had apparently brought explosives, and our forces mage could remotely detonate them, so he went around and put explosives on each of the werewolves. They eventually noticed the explosives, so he told the force mage to detonate them. Since I wasn't there and my magic wasn't selective so nobody knew where I was, I ended up caught in the blast and died from the explosion.

[nyjastul69]

I've only run into this once. When SS was first released someone wanted to run a 'monster' game. Cool! I went with a pixie rogue. It wasn't until the first battle that the DM told me that SA can only be used once per creature during an encounter. That took some of the sting out of that character. She, Ellenestrelle, my pixie, eventually had her wings torn off and got stomped to death by giants. No attack roll, no save, no nothing, just, you're dead. Everyone else died in a similar fashion. He was ending the game because we didn't stay on the rails properly. We mostly tried though.