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Avianmosquito
2017-02-04, 09:17 PM
This is a simple one. Tell us about terrible DMs and why they deserve that title. No names, please.

I'll start us off with a tale of a sympathetic villain, a railroading authoritarian DM and a rigged combat encounter. The tale starts with the assassination of the king in a country the DM never bothered to name. The party was hired by the royal family to track down the assassin and bring him back, alive if possible for a public execution. So, this whole thing was already going down in the lawful neutral bin from the start and I wasn't too happy with it but I went along.

So we started following leads and having random encounters, most interesting parts were one of our leads trying to kill us and another being a trap but overall it wasn't a bad campaign for most of it. Eventually we found the guy, hiding out in a cabin. (If he had a cabin, shouldn't there be a paper trail? Why wasn't that the FIRST place we checked?) Rather than immediately attack, I decide to talk to him. Because I'm our bard, that's kinda my thing.

He admits he killed the king, and when I ask him why, I get this little gem. Apparently the man was a member of the king's royal guard, and his son worked in the palace as a groundskeeper. The king was out on a walk of the grounds and found the young man acting erratic, lines of white powder laid out on hand mirror next to him. Gee, I wonder what he was doing, right? And the king's response was of course to fire him, because he's a reasonable... Oh, wait, nope. Threw him in jail for life. His father was understandably a bit pissed off over the whole "life in prison" thing, and tried to get the king to change his mind with no success. The boy died in prison shortly thereafter, causes unspecified, and the royal guard stabbed the king. (Go figure, you effectively murder your bodyguard's son and he kills you. It's impossible to get good help these days.)

So we let him go. "But he killed the king!", the DM says. "But he had good reason to.", replies our fighter. "But his son was a criminal!", the DM exclaims. "But he didn't hurt anybody.", says I. "Well he shouldn't have broken the law!", declares the DM. "Well it's a stupid law.", says our rogue. "But it isn't grounds for murder!", the DM states. "Yes, I believe that's the thrust of his objection.", says I. Took him a second to get that one, cheesy pun notwithstanding. "But what he did was wrong!", says the DM. "Yes, but enough about the king.", says I. I will confess at this point I may have been goading him a bit. "You can't let him go!", claims the DM. "Sure we can.", snarks our rogue. "But he's a murderer!", the DM cries. "But he was also a father, avenging his son. He doesn't deserve what they'll do to him.", decides our fighter. "But what about the king?", asks the DM. "**** 'em.", I rebut.

And then the DM throws a royal kill squad at us. Which we know is bull**** because the lack of such a thing is why they hired us in the first place. And the DM screws with the saves against the wizard's spells, with us "failing" saves we know full well it's impossible for us to fail. We realized he was doing that when he cast a fireball and our rogue failed her save on 24. It's 10+Spell level+Intelligence modifier. How the **** is a 24 not a save? That would require an intelligence modifier of 12, that means a minimum intelligence score of 34. That's bull**** and we all knew it. I called him out on it, and he just insisted the save failed. Says the wizard has a feat. Well I've looked, there's no feat that adds THAT much to the save DC. All I see is spell focus and greater spell focus, which when combined would give a +2 to the DC and then he'd only need an intelligence of 30, which is still bull****.

And of course, he keeps doing it. About three rounds in, I tell the DM if he rigs my saving throw one more goddamned time I'm going to turn him into a Pantera album cover. He tells me he doesn't listen to crap. I get up and leave, and the rest of the party follows. That was the last time we let him DM, but he was a pretty ****ty player, too. One campaign he tried to insist our cleric of Boccob take a different deity. Nevermind that our cleric was our sorceress's sister and Boccob makes sense from a roleplaying angle. Nope, not a good choice in his book. He of course was a paladin of Heironeous, and insisted she "at least" pick Pelor.

Kinda glad I'll never have to see that prick again.

tensai_oni
2017-02-05, 01:03 AM
Sounds like the DM had opinions that were simultaneously (as is often the case) very specific and very strong, let them highly influence the adventuer and was shocked that other people do not share these specific opinions with him.

I had good luck to dump most of bad GMs I had over less than one session on average, but they also tended to make pretty boring stories. So instead let's talk about something more unusual - the worst GM/arbiter in a freeform RP.

The arbiter's role is to plan out encounters for players and judge action effectiveness during them. You know, so the players can't just godmode their way out of encounters, because there are no mechanical rules. On the other hand this means the arbiter can effectively block players by going "your action fails" repeatedly - which means there usually is an agreement, written or not, that the players can expect a certain "base" level of what they're doing being effective, based on their character capabilities, relevance to the situation, and how smart/well described/cool the action was.

Not with this guy. Here's a list of what a good job he did:

1. The major (and sometimes only) criteria deciding whether you'll do awesomely or be a total load was "whether he liked you/was your friend".

2. He considered himself a smart, creative GM, but too often his encounters had only one specific thing you could do to progress/solve them (which in his mind was always a very obvious solution, probably because he's the one who came up with it), everything else would fail no matter how much sense it made. However still see point 1.

3. Seemingly arbitrarily he decided certain specific abilities were broken and if your character had them, it was his sworn duty to make sure you have a bad time and can't contribute to the game in any meaningful way. He even was aware of this tendency and proud of it, considering himself a guardian of the game against power gamers who came to ruin it. Having other abilities was fine though, even if they were just as or more powerful than what he viewed as broken. And of course, see point 1 - his friends were immune to this, and in fact after years I strongly suspect this is because he didn't want others to overshadow them.

4. Less then perfect grammar? Your character action might as well be "I do nothing" because that's what it'd boil down to. ESL be damned. He barely tolerated presence of non-American players in the game to begin with (seemingly because different timezones make it hard to schedule events in real time). We played online, obviously.

5. In case point 1 being called so many times wasn't obvious - he was a two-faced liar. He wasn't afraid of even lying to his co-GMs if it was convenient to him.

The best part is, while some people I knew were definitely on his sh*t list, I was in the in-group of people he liked. So I got to experience this guy's actions from both sides, and they were always ugly.

TheCountAlucard
2017-02-05, 01:51 AM
I'm pretty flexible, but in recent years one thing I've been a stickler for is that the rules are not the master of the gaming group - fun is. But if your idea of fun is playing by the rules, well, hey, more power to ya. But rules are not and cannot be perfect, which is why a GM needs to be reasonable when it comes to interpreting them when conflicts occur.

This GM... was not.

The Random NPC
2017-02-05, 02:52 AM
Admittedly I was not the most accommodating of players. My GM decided to start a new group and asked us what we were playing. I decided on playing a Warlock and was told I couldn't because Warlocks didn't exist in his setting. I did whine a bit and got my way but the cost was too high. "I need to rewrite my setting to include Warlocks", he said. Shouldn't be too hard I thought, but acquiesced to his desire to postpone the start of the game for a week. That week turned into two and a half months, and we eventually stopped showing up. I even offered story ideas and eventually offered to change my class, but he rejected them all. For ten weeks his excuse was, "I'm trying to fit your characters into the setting." Fortunately, I was able to get my revenge the last three weeks by passive-aggressively needling him right before the point that he would punch me and letting him cool off, only to start anew for eight hours.

2D8HP
2017-02-05, 03:00 AM
I have two seperate candidates:

For IC awfulness, I would have been about 12 years old and I went to DunDraCon. I usual played with teenagers and my best friend (his eldest brother was the DM), but at the convention, the table was all "real adults" that could vote and drive and stuff! Also they all played Magic-Users instead of the Fighters that filled my usual table (I still played a Fighter)!

It was awful! The "adventure" had a surrealistic Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Monty-Python-while-on-LSD vibe, and I mostly recall the other players and the DM smirking and playing in-character practical jokes on my PC. Not fun for me.


After high school, since the rest of my gaming circle went to college or into military service, I could no longer play with my old "gang", so I'd look at game store bulletin board ads for people to game with, causing my worst OOC game experiences.
Judging by the motorscooter I remember riding to the game and when I owned it, I was probably 18 or 19 years old (but I may been in my early 20's already), so it was likely that I was both a teenager and an "adult", snd I very briefly played "variant" D&D (that's what we called "homebrew rules" back then) with "grown-ups", but that ended because while I was sitting at the table the DM's girlfriend went behind me and put a "bedroom toy" on my shoulder.Earlier I was asked if I wanted "to meet our new ferret", and since a girl I previously knew had a couple as pets (hers just seemed mostly like cats) I said yes. Almost immediately the beast bit hard on my fortunately thick leather boot (with my foot in it!) and I had to kick it off!
I didn't play D&D for decades afterwards.

Satinavian
2017-02-05, 03:40 AM
Ok, worst DM. I had just moved and had had a hard time finding any group, that is why i didn't leave sooner.

- This guy was really really bad with rules. But played a rule heavy system. because he knew no other. And he could not admit that he was bad with rules, so he made really bad and utterly wrong rule decisions all the time and tried to hide it. (It never worked, even when he forbode everyone else to look up anything). Not only were his rulings horrible because he could never estimate he consequences of applied rules, he also forgot them regularly and applied them inconsistantly

- He had all powerful DM-PCs. Which not only were designed to outshine the party all the time, but they didn't even follow the same rulings/rules he applied to the players. Or to say it otherwise, he cheated all the time to make his DM-PCs even more glorious.

- He was utterly bad at pacing and stories. At first, he ran published modules and it was still not really done well, but then he tried his own. It somehow managed to both lack any plot and still not provide the freedom of a sandbox. Railroading all the time but the rails led nowhere. At best there was sightseeing where the PCs were "guided" to interesting places or in look distance to interesting persons but not provided any real reason to be there and no chance to interact.

- He regularly played online games while running the game. Because "he was so good at multitasking"

- Of course because he was so bad several other players suggested to take the GM position for a while. But he would have none of that and as he owned the meeting place insisted that no one else ever led the group.

- We also had a player who was not particularly bright but otherwise a nice person. Eventually he started picking on her character all the time and trying to railroad this character into embarrassing situations to make fun of the player for group entertainment. The player didn't really notice that all those bad things happened only because the DM was a jerk and wanted a good laugth and wrote it up as bad luck. But i noticed. And that was kind of the breaking point and reason to finally ditch the group.




There were other bad DMs. There was e.g. one teacher with a hobby interest in psychology who insisted on managing the feelings of the PCs because he "knew how humans would react realisticly". And that was while playing a very traditional game not too far away from D&D but low magic. But even that was far far better.

WarrentheHero
2017-02-05, 03:49 AM
I've had two awful GMs in my time:

The first one, before I say anything else, is a known cheater, constantly lying about dice rolls. All the time, both as a player and as GM. Also, he is one of those GMs that doesn't tell stories about the PCs. Rather, the games he runs are all about the NPCs, and how badass they are. For example, in one session of 5e we were playing, he used a homebrew magic system called using "weaves", wherein a "weave" was a small amount of specific magic (i.e. a single "fire weave" was like Fire bolt, and you could do something like two fire weaves and an air weave to cast magic akin to Burning Hands". It supposedly allowed for greater versatility, but seemed to me to just be a roundabout way of using the system in place.
Anyway, we were teleported to an snowy region by an NPC, who of course had a little snow on his foot. To get rid of this, he uses some air magic to blow the snow off. The GM said to us "You notice that he put damn near 30 weaves into this". As it was explained to me before all this, that should be roughly hurricane-force. Because the magic NPC has to be superduper strong, you guys.
He also had a weird fixation on one particular player of ours, and not in any sexual or romantic way either. Just always put this guy at the center, all the time. In that same "weave" adventure, the player in character was playing as a bodyguard who was literally completely subservient to another Noble character, who in turn was in charge of a dangerous "criminal" warlock (another PC). And the GM, of course, made the story revolve around the bodyguard's backstory and the tribe he came from.
To combine these two things, we once had a session where we had the opportunity to compete in an underground no-holds-barred brutal fighting tournament. We were all level 3. I fought against a character dual-wielding longswords, who HANDILY beat me in combat. Another player (bladelock) easily lost to the same guy after some healing. We later found out that the character had the Dual-Wielding feat, and our GM thought that meant he could use Dex with longswords, since DW made them like light weapons, and all light weapons have Finesse (his logic, not mine). When the Favorite Player went up, he was matched against a Minotaur. An actual Minotaur, who had normal human intelligence. And of course, the Favorite won. We ere all 3rd level, and I was optimized for combat as much as the Favorite. Granted, I was playing a Rogue and he a Fighter, but Minotaurs are like CR 3, built to be challenge to a whole party of Lvl 3s.

The other GM is a whole host of bad too. For starters, he's bland. He prefers to run pre-written adventurers, but reads right off the page, with no inflection or meaning. And all NPCs have the exact same voice- his. Additionally, every NPC is the "witty sarcastic" type, without exception, and he - I mean, the NPCs - always have to have the last word. He's unnecessarily vicious, going out of his way to kill non-combat familiars and giving us next-to-impossible encounters. He's a huge proponent of "Rule Zero: What the GM says, goes, regardless of written rules." That idea is meant to allow the Rule of Cool to allow for awesome exploits and stunning cinematics, not for saying that the Invisibility spell doesn't grant a to-hit bonus.
The GM also has no sense of balance. As I said, he'll sometime throw impossible encounters at us (such as two Winter Wolves, a powerful warrior, and like a dozen wargs against a low-level party). In addition, when running pre-written hardcover adventurers, he'll allow the players (in 5e) a free feat at 1st level, roll 4d6 stats 7 times, take best, reroll 1s, and give a whole bunch of unevenly-distributed magic items, and then have the gall to complain that he "doesn't like 5th edition because the PCs are too strong and never die, so he has to either use underpowered encounters we'll dance through, or super-difficult ones to challenge us.
He was also really bad at actually running games by the book. We literally abandoned a game of Princes of the Apocolypse because the GM didn't know how to get proceed with the plot after the first visit to Feathergale Spire (lvl 3), and the one hook he found to the next section took us to the Earth Monastary (6th level).
What really tipped me over the edge with this guy was how he tried to tell me exactly how my character would/should act. We were playing a variant of a Barovia campaign. We were investigating a werewolf epidemic, and a plague, I believe. Our investigation took us to a specific, cave, from which we had to acquire a certain kind of flower. We got all the way through the cave, and in the last chamber found an NPC we had run into a couple times. He told us some plot info, including that we needed a special powder, and then showed us where he grew the flowers (in a cave somehow). Then he asked us to kill him, because he was a werewolf and couldn't live with himself. Two characters immediately attacked him, but as far as I knew, we still needed to know how to get that powder. So I tried to stop the others from attacking this guys. For the record, I'm NG, or maybe CG, don't remember. I was literally grappling one character with my one good arm (character had a nonfunctional left arm; inspired by Artorias), and grappling the other with my legs, when they finally kill him. Turns out, you just need to crush up the flower to get the powder, but that was never stated. The other two just for whatever reason "understood" this implicitly, even though nothing linked the flower and powder, not even the names. I tried explaining that all they had to do was tell my character this and he wouldn't have interfered. They mentioned that they didn't know that I didn't know, and I responded that I said it in-character. Then, the GM said that he wanted PvP to break out there, so he intentionally let my character be in the dark, even though the problem was a GM-to-player issue, not character-to-PC one. THEN he told me that since I was good, I wasn't going to kill the guy anyway. I was incredulous, because my character had been incredibly pragmatic so far, and would have had every reason to put a werewolf out of its misery. He insisted that being Good meant that I couldn't kill any non-aggressive creature under any circumstances- that that is not how Good worked. I just left and told him not to expect me the next week.
I would get into the ways that this guys was an awful player as well, but that's not what this thread is for.


This turned into a bit more of a rant than I expected, but man I hate playing with those guys. The first I only tenuously call my friend outside of DnD, and don't play DnD with him at all anymore. The second I sort of hated anyway, but for that time he was the only person I knew who was GMing regularly for me to play in.

Hawksteel
2017-02-05, 07:25 AM
This happened to me with a very short lived palladium fantasy game I was in.

For a start the GM never prepared anything before each game instead preferring to go through my books and pick out monsters when he first arrived before each session and literally making up the game as he went along.

But by far the most frustrating thing was how he also kept changing the rules as the game went along.

For example we had a heated debate on our 4th session;as the others were fighting with their swords against a group of kobolds who were trying to raze a village, I was standing behind them using my bow to pick off the shaman and any other more dangerous foes.

Here is where the debate started;
The shaman was starting to cast a spell so I did a called shot into his eye and rolled a 20, the shaman failed to dodge.
However the GM then proceeded to take the damage off the main body instead of directly to hit points as he should have done because I rolled a critical hit.
When we started arguing he declared he'd never liked called shots (especially since I was using them so effectively) so he was just going to ignore them.

Further he then declared someone had snuck up behind me (no roll) and gotten in a free attack on me.
I shifted away from him and put an arrow in him at point blank, he rolled a ONE and dodged because according to him he had +9 to dodge so a one counted (which is not how the rules work). He then tried to drink a potion but was stopped when I kicked his nuts into his throat but lo and behold the potion had vanished.

We were becoming overwhelmed and tried to retreat down the hill to the woods but suddenly the village was no longer on a hill but on a mountain with a sheer cliff face. So we ran through a barn with them following and managed to get out and lock them in, I then used my tinder box to set it alight. However it then started raining and they escaped through the shamans magic, what magic he used we dont know.

Somehow we managed to kill them and survive but in the process they had killed all the villagers. So we decided to make the most of it by searching the entire village for provisions and anything we could use. Funnily enough the kobolds had absolutely no treasure on them and the magic shop in the village had a single healing potion.

It hadnt been raided, the GM was simply upset with our arguing with him and proceeded to punish us by denying us any treasure. And 'forgot' to give us our XPs at the end.

Needless to say we didnt play again.

Anonymouswizard
2017-02-05, 09:39 AM
I'm lucky to have had no truly horrible ones. Of the two worst I've had:

One was fine as long as you followed his plot. Generally this was okay, his combats were interesting, and although he didn't know how building characters or actions work in M&M the games were fun.

Then came the Halloween session.

First, we were at in an interesting location, an extradimensional ghost town with a strange tier in the centre. I was playing an air mage and fantasy geek who immediately started flying around this ghost town right out of a novel looking for clues and interesting stuff. I even got the idea to add a death obsession and some necromancy as a side effect of visiting. Eventually the GM complained that me and the speedster were messing around (I was looking for clues) and railroadrd us towards the tower, which turned out to be unlocked and possessing one dark Wizard. The GM then complained that he had to skip his planned speech and the combat and then began the whole set piece where the wizard was killed off. Then we died.

To explain the GM had a set of four DMPC elementally themed supervillains that controlled the world, and the eventual goal was to take them down. I should also note I had made my character post of a four person group of elemental mages named after the classical elementals (I was Sylph) just as a big 'I'm part of a better group' to the villains. But here was the first time they turned up, and immediately we were called to roll for initiative. Only one of our group got within the first five actions, and immediately these PL20+ villains proceeded to kill or heroes in one attack each just so the next session we could be rescued from the afterlife and have the villains think we were dead.

Then came the kicker, he had specifically made the villains so powerful we couldn't hurt them :smallannoyed:

The other one was actually a good GM, if you liked combat heavy games with little time to plan and no home base. The combat was fun, but everybody else wanted to stop scavenging supplies already and go to the industrial park to fortify it, set up a factory and lab, and start making it feel like we were ready to survive long term. We eventually discovered we had all round better knowledge and resources than the military in a better location from about two weeks of work and me detailing the exact experiments my scientist character was performing (it turned out you could not train zombies), and the game for a lot better once he started listening to what we wanted instead of just running what he wanted (he still got to throw his crazy zombies at us when we went out for food or rarer materials, it was better all around).

Arbane
2017-02-05, 10:52 PM
Is Trekkin here? Trekkin to the white courtesy phone, please.... (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?275152-What-am-I-supposed-to-do)


What I can't take is when the same thing happens to the setting, following a sadly predictable pattern: if I need it, it's not true. When I want to dodge airborne surveillance by meeting someone under a tree, there aren't any parks or green spaces in arcologies. When I want to introduce home aquaponics as a money-making scheme (banking on the lack of greenery being a bit irksome to people), the arcologies are lousy with parks and everyone's full up on plants. The same has been true of nearly every aspect of my character's backstory; the surest way for me never to have met an NPC is to ask if I might still have their number from such-and-so incident a decade ago. Until they turn out to be evil, and suddenly we hung out all the time and he can pick me out of a crowd instantly. Bear in mind, I got my backstory written for me. Numbers jump based on who's asking, and I specifically have to give a detailed reason for any question I ask about the setting--and I can be sure that whatever the answer, it will last until I come up with a new plan based on the implications of that answer.

Now, the other players have had this happen too, and unfortunately for most people involved I work well with all of them, so they've had it happen a lot more around me. The setting and system are both getting so twisted they're basically unplayable, and the whole thing has taken on a 1984-esque feel where we take nothing for granted because the old world gets constantly sucked down the memory hole. We can show him the chat logs where he definitely said X was true, and the response, paraphrased, is "that was when you wanted to [do A]. Now I'm ruling [X is false]."

This is the same man who claims we can't derail his adventure because there are no rails and we're free to do anything. I suppose there aren't rails because we wanted to move something by train once. :smallbiggrin:

I'm happy to say I haven't had a game anywhere nearly as bad as any of the ones listed here, there was one 3.5 campaign I was in here the PCs started out as 0-level commoners who were drow prisoners in the underdark. Out adventures started with us being rescued by NPCs, and eventually working our way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty. We spent a lot of time suffering, had a gay drow stalker (in a subplot the DM had designed for any female PCs, but inflicted on her husband's character instead. Ew. Did I mention said PC had been tortured so badly they had a split personality? Fun times.), had a lot of fights that ended with at least one PC face-down in a pool of their own blood, and lost most of our treasure when the guy keeping track of it left the group. 9_6 She also had one of those 'developed over years' worlds where I, at least, felt like our adventures couldn't possibly be important or one of the uberNPCs would be doing them instead - 'Forgotten Realms Syndrome'.

Not even close to some people's bad adventures.

Hawksteel
2017-02-06, 03:48 AM
Just remembered one more;

It was a Rifts game with some guys I met at a gaming shop (something which my city no longer has but anyways). After some major battle where we saved a village from the coalition one of the guys says his character strips naked. Next he proceeds to try to rape the young children in the village. I say try because I was so disgusted with what he was attempting to do that I shot him in the head (the character not the player) with an mdc pistol. Well the whole group turned on me, claiming it was just a bit of fun before kicking me out of the game. Which worked out well because I wanted nothing to do with any of them after that.
The game was then retconned so I never shot him. On the way out I told the shop owner what had happened. He looked ill and apparently later told them not to play there again.

Anonymouswizard
2017-02-06, 04:43 AM
Is Trekkin here? Trekkin to the white courtesy phone, please.... (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?275152-What-am-I-supposed-to-do)

Let's be fair, it's not like any of us are going to beat the Ao-Sue with our submissions, like how Drow Merde is hard to beat in the 'second worst designed game ever' thread going by the description.


I'm happy to say I haven't had a game anywhere nearly as bad as any of the ones listed here, there was one 3.5 campaign I was in here the PCs started out as 0-level commoners who were drow prisoners in the underdark. Out adventures started with us being rescued by NPCs, and eventually working our way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty. We spent a lot of time suffering, had a gay drow stalker (in a subplot the DM had designed for any female PCs, but inflicted on her husband's character instead. Ew. Did I mention said PC had been tortured so badly they had a split personality? Fun times.), had a lot of fights that ended with at least one PC face-down in a pool of their own blood, and lost most of our treasure when the guy keeping track of it left the group. 9_6 She also had one of those 'developed over years' worlds where I, at least, felt like our adventures couldn't possibly be important or one of the uberNPCs would be doing them instead - 'Forgotten Realms Syndrome'.

Not even close to some people's bad adventures.

Yeah, that sounds like a standard bad GM. I mean, I don't have a significant problem bar the uber NPCs, but when all are put together it seems to become bad through combination.

Avianmosquito
2017-02-06, 08:12 AM
Let's be fair, it's not like any of us are going to beat the Ao-Sue with our submissions, like how Drow Merde is hard to beat in the 'second worst designed game ever' thread going by the description.

Pardon me if I sound ignorant, but I don't know who either of those people are. Would you be so kind as to remedy that?

comk59
2017-02-06, 09:13 AM
Pardon me if I sound ignorant, but I don't know who either of those people are. Would you be so kind as to remedy that?

http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-sue-system-primer.html?m=1

A collected anthology for your viewing pleasure.

But, as a summary, Trekkin once played in a game run by the literal worst GM of all time. Every single thing you think of when you hear bad GM? Overpowered NPCs, Author (sorry, Authyr) Self Inserts, actively undermining the players, actually turning them against each other out of game, and more railroads than the continental United States.

Oh, and defilement of beloved Sci-Fi and Fantasy settings. Which settings you ask? ALL OF THEM.

Lalliman
2017-02-06, 09:46 AM
http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-sue-system-primer.html?m=1

A collected anthology for your viewing pleasure.
In my morbid obsession with bad DM stories, I somehow missed this one. I'll be looking into this.

But could it truly be worse than That Lanky Bugger's story (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?23784-I-think-I-just-dealt-with-the-worst-gaming-session)? The story of a DM so bad, he got arrested.

TheTeaMustFlow
2017-02-06, 09:47 AM
I don't have many horror stories myself, thankfully, but y'all might want to look here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?329243-What-was-your-worst-DM-ever) and here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?363545-What-was-your-worst-DM-ever-This-thread-is-impervious-roll-to-disbelieve!) for some proper DM nastiness.

Anonymouswizard
2017-02-06, 09:58 AM
Pardon me if I sound ignorant, but I don't know who either of those people are. Would you be so kind as to remedy that?

As has been said the Ao Sue (a.k.a. Chief Circle a.k.a. Marty) is the GM from The S.U.E. Files (S.U.E.=System that Undermines Everything), a story of why GM railroading and self insert DMPCs should never mix with a homebrew system. I'll let the blog speak for itself.


In my morbid obsession with bad DM stories, I somehow missed this one. I'll be looking into this.

But could it truly be worse than That Lanky Bugger's story (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?23784-I-think-I-just-dealt-with-the-worst-gaming-session)? The story of a DM so bad, he got arrested.

While CC didn't need to be attested the sheer stupidity is just so horrific that nobody can escape unscarred.

Avianmosquito
2017-02-06, 10:36 AM
As has been said the Ao Sue (a.k.a. Chief Circle a.k.a. Marty) is the GM from The S.U.E. Files (S.U.E.=System that Undermines Everything), a story of why GM railroading and self insert DMPCs should never mix with a homebrew system. I'll let the blog speak for itself.

That's one. Who's the other?

Hawkstar
2017-02-06, 12:54 PM
That Lanky Bugger simply had a DM that had a hate-on for his character for a really, really stupid reason (That turned violent and resulted in an arrest), had someone impersonate him in that original story, and then got stabbed by a jealous girlfriend (But the first story's the most famous one).

Still - as far as in-game goes, the S.U.E. files are the worst ever.

Bohandas
2017-02-06, 01:48 PM
Myself. The first time I played I tried to run a game without preparation, with two people who were also playig for the first time as well, and the whole thing fell apart in well under a half an hour.

Winter_Wolf
2017-02-06, 02:23 PM
Myself. The first time I played I tried to run a game without preparation, with two people who were also playig for the first time as well, and the whole thing fell apart in well under a half an hour.

Huh, that's what I was going to write about my DMing.

The other one was a guy who couldn't resist putting his DMPC Demi-God lycanthrope with a Deck of Many (terrible) Things in the game and badgering the party until someone finally took the bait and pulled the 1d4 cards and got one okay pull and three progressively crappy mandatory pulls. Finally there was mutiny and the group broke apart. Well enough, I went overseas shortly after so I didn't bother trying to find a new group after that gem.

Thinker
2017-02-06, 02:28 PM
I've been a pretty terrible GM at times. I started playing when 3.0 was released and none of my friends at the time had any experience with the hobby. Since I started playing, I've primarily been the GM of the groups I've played with. I just realized that I've been playing for 16 or 17 years and now I feel old. Anyway, here are some of my greatest hits.

When I was first starting out, I wanted to play, but no one else was confident enough to GM so I tried to have it both ways and be both player and GM. It worked about as well as you might expect - my character took the spotlight and I managed to have an entire interrogation between myself and an NPC (also me) to gather information for the group.
That GM-PC was also a lycanthrope (because I thought werewolves were cool) and didn't completely understand level adjustment at the time, thus rendering other parts of the group useless.
In that same vein, I allowed a player to play an optimized character pulled from the WotC optimization boards. Some sort of super-throwing character if I remember right that one-shotted enemies.
Not having a full understanding of all of the spells one of my players was using and allowing more than they were supposed to do (actions after dimension doors, polymorph shenanigans, etc.)
I was in school and tried to start up a DnD group, but got more interest than I expected - 11 people wanted to try it out and I didn't turn anyone down. I was already a bad GM and now I was a bad GM with too many personalities. Within the first 10 minutes, one of the players tried to pickpocket the paladin and was dispatched by another player. It was anarchy. We only ran that group once, but I assembled a smaller group later with 3 of them, which grew to 5 later (and was more manageable).
Introduced a badass boss character that the group wanted to fight right away and so instakilled one of the PCs. I would have been better off going with astral projection, visions, or something other than having them accidentally release the boss from a tomb. They thought it was supposed to be the villain of the tomb, not the villain of the campaign.
Rocks fall, everyone dies. I was frustrated and didn't know where to take the group next so I thought I'd have them captured by the authorities on trumped up charges so they'd have to clear their names. They thought it was a combat encounter and everyone died (the guards were ~2-5 while the group was level 2 iirc).


I am sure there a lot more times I've GMed badly, but these are the ones that came to mind. A few of these even produced funny and memorable scenarios - with the guards, I remember one of players talking back to the guard captain and the captain saying, "Oh, so you think you're a smart guy?" to which he replied, "No, but I think I'm a fast guy!" and high-tailed it into a field where he was run down by the captain on horseback with a lance.

Anonymouswizard
2017-02-06, 02:32 PM
That Lanky Bugger simply had a DM that had a hate-on for his character for a really, really stupid reason (That turned violent and resulted in an arrest), had someone impersonate him in that original story, and then got stabbed by a jealous girlfriend (But the first story's the most famous one).

Still - as far as in-game goes, the S.U.E. files are the worst ever.

Oh, I forgot, Drow Merde was a name used for the S.U.E. System in I think the third thread? I believe it was a codeword just on the off chance the GM was googling his system's name.


Myself. The first time I played I tried to run a game without preparation, with two people who were also playig for the first time as well, and the whole thing fell apart in well under a half an hour.

Eh, improv GMing is a skill and works best for certain systems. I could probably whip up an adventure for Fate Accelerated Edition as it was going along (although I'd want to prep major NPCs before session 2), although for Mutants & Masterminds I'd have a lot of trouble. Other people can pull up at the gaming group, have an opening scene in about 20 minutes, and then run an awesome session using only stock stats (or off the head opponents for something like Tunnels & Trolls). Then some people just need to prepare and nothing will change it.

Also, everyone's first try at preparationless GMing is rubbish, it took me a long time to learn that I just needed major NPC and generic mook stats.

Bohandas
2017-02-06, 02:36 PM
Eh, improv GMing is a skill and works best for certain systems.

Yeah, but this was D&D, not Toon or something

SethoMarkus
2017-02-06, 03:19 PM
Pales in comparison, but the "worst" DM I've had approved my character before the game started but then constantly complained my character didn't fit with the group (all of the other PCs we lone wolves, mine was simply a grumpy Dwarf, but I digress...). She later, I think after the third session, kicked me out of the group by not telling me when the future games were, all because I wouldn't buy pizza with the other players. (I was tight on money at the time and tried to explain this. I ate before going to the sessions and didn't eat while I was there.)

JNAProductions
2017-02-06, 03:24 PM
My worst isn't that bad. It was just a DM who didn't really understand what was and wasn't a proper challenge. And was kinda a jerk about it.

Basically, we were a bunch of level... 2? 3? I think 3. Characters, none of who were particularly powerful. (It was a low-op game.) So he threw a monster at us that had Energy Resistance 10 (so me, the DFA, was useless), DR 10/Cold Iron (rendering the rest of us useless), Fast Healing, and Pounce.

Suffice to say, that was no good. And the only information we had to go on was that a village had been attacked by some kind of giant bugs, so how we were to know we needed cold iron... (Not to mention, there was jack all I could do.)

That alone would've been bad, but he insisted it was our fault for not being prepared, and that it was a fine challenge.

Like I said, not THAT bad. The game withered away soon after, as expected.

Arbane
2017-02-06, 04:21 PM
I was in school and tried to start up a DnD group, but got more interest than I expected - 11 people wanted to try it out and I didn't turn anyone down. I was already a bad GM and now I was a bad GM with too many personalities. Within the first 10 minutes, one of the players tried to pickpocket the paladin and was dispatched by another player. It was anarchy. We only ran that group once, but I assembled a smaller group later with 3 of them, which grew to 5 later (and was more manageable).


An old GM of mine tried this once, in a game of... Cyberpunk, I think? Way too many players, and we were not exactly Ocean's 11. Don't think that game ever got a second session.

Professor Chimp
2017-02-07, 09:54 AM
All in all, I've had it pretty good when it comes to DM's.

Except for one, who had a very nasty tendency of throwing overly difficult encounters at us that we couldn't feasibly circumvent or mitigate while giving us very little to no resources to handle them. Like being 4 lv1 players and running into an ambush of 6 Orc Warriors who were dead set on killing and looting us. First fight of the campaign, near TPK. Or 2 levels later, getting captured by a village of wererats lead by a fullfledged werewolf Cleric. Staying was not an option since they'd kill and eat us, and escaping would require sneaking past a dozen wererats and the Cleric. None of us were sneaky characters, so obviously we got caught. We tried to make a run for it, but they caught up to us and we got obliterated in the ensuing fight. TPK.

His response? "Sucks for you, should've brought silver weapons or made sneakier characters". Except that the lycanthrope nest was never hinted at. Ever. Not when we were gathering info on the village, not while we had spent a few days there figuring out why people were disappearing. Nothing until the reveal got sprung on us. Or the fact that as DM he knew we weren't geared towards stealth but kept forcing us into situations where it was the only real option, or be face with near impossible odds.

The worst was an encounter in a later session that had us face not one, not two, but three Hellcats, as three lv5s and one lv4. In broad daylight in open air. The Wizard was naturally the first to get ganked, the rest of us had little to no way of effectively fighting them. Another TPK. "You should've run from them." Yes, outrunning three enemies faster than us on open ground. Would've worked swimmingly.

We stuck with it since he was a friend and this was also before widespread internet and finding people to play with wasn't as easy as today. He didn't fare much better as a player either, always playing the same character: a neutral evil Halfling Rogue named Link who would go out of his way to steal from and lie to his party, betraying them at every turn, justifying it with "That's just what my character is like". No, it's not, that's just you wanting to live out your puerile little fantasies of being a complete **** without risking the punch to the face you'd get really quickly if you tried it irl. You know, THAT guy.

I still play with one of the players from that early group. We both agree he will never be part of our current group or any future ones ever gain, despite having repeatedly asked about it.

Avianmosquito
2017-02-07, 11:09 AM
How about a little levity? Here's a DM that looked to be horrible, but wasn't. Not for me, at least: My ex-wife.

It was her first time as DM and it was going rough. She lost her notes, her map was terribly drawn, she was horrible at voices even for a DM, her encounters were entirely too easy and she forgot her own villain's name, made up a whole new one and tried to pretend she had it right the whole time. Now, I was married to her and I vouched for her so I was getting dirty looks from our other player the whole time like I was supposed to do something. I was trying to hint about it, but I was also trying not to offend her because, you know, she was my wife.

Then we had an encounter with a vampire. The party, I might add, was level 3 and consisted of a bard and a cleric. This was not going to fly. Like, at all. So our cleric brings up how unbalanced this is, but she refuses to change it. Tells us we're fine. Our cleric grabs a source book and starts reading vampire abilities, she says it doesn't matter. Finally, I speak up. I tell her we can't possibly fight a vampire. She says "Then don't."

So we talk to the vampire, she barely cares about her boss at all, we make a deal. Blood for shelter and safe passage, easy. We spend the night there so our cleric can prepare spells, my bard has sex with the vampire, she drains a lot of blood, lesser restoration is cast a bunch, we leave alive but with pleasant memories where ALL our second-level spells should be.

Funny thing, that vampire became a recurring character. So much so that when our next campaign in that setting was run by a different DM, my ex's vampire joined our party as our rogue. Unfortunately, that campaign was the one detailed at the beginning of this thread.

obstructor
2017-02-07, 04:23 PM
Well mine is fast:

Every encounter was a solo monster from some random book with a CR 3+ higher than the party, he would realize he was killing the party and start fudging the dice to make the monsters completely ineffective.

He was also obsessed with having min-maxed enemy parties where the entire party was crazy 3rd party classes.

You basically had to be a min-maxer to to anything in his campaigns.

Inevitability
2017-02-08, 03:15 AM
I had a GM who found some kind of homebrewed jedi class and got obsessed with it. Problem was, we were mid-campaign.

What do you think happens when we arrive in the next town? That's right, jedi guards. Every single guard there was a telekinetic, lightsaber-wielding warrior.

We left quickly.

Anonymouswizard
2017-02-08, 05:10 AM
I had a GM who found some kind of homebrewed jedi class and got obsessed with it. Problem was, we were mid-campaign.

What do you think happens when we arrive in the next town? That's right, jedi guards. Every single guard there was a telekinetic, lightsaber-wielding warrior.

We left quickly.

The town or the group?

Inevitability
2017-02-08, 09:27 AM
The town or the group?

The town. The GM is an okay player, and I took over quickly after anyway, but we figured there were better places to hang around than AnachronisticGuardVille.

Pex
2017-02-09, 02:06 AM
Two different DMs but also sometimes players in my 2E days, different groups. Vehemently disagreed with how I played my character. The first was upset my cleric would cast spells that were not Cure Light Wounds. The second was upset I played my paladin as a wholesome common man rather than a righteous warrior. Through that disagreement decided not to be my friend anymore in real life. My characters could no longer do anything right in their games.

The first was during college. Since we were all part of the gaming club I was still able to play with the rest of the group, but it was never the same between us and another who shared his disdain of my spells that are not Cure Light Wounds casting cleric. The animosity remained in real life common association. The second resulted in me having to leave a gaming group I was in for a couple of years before he even joined and we were playing board and card games before I suggested D&D less than year before the brew-ha-ha started.

I've had other DMs I didn't like in my 2E days (and one 5E), but they were the worst. I can at least say I also had DMs whom I miss terribly for all the fun we had, including during my 2E days.

Pugwampy
2017-02-09, 12:17 PM
I had a person who DM,d and i had to bite my tongue the whole game . One of the players actually just stood up and walked out his game session .

He enjoyed making encounters as impossible or as annoying as he could . His idea of victory was us looking at him stupid with our hands tied and monster choosing to walk away.

Naga at the bottom of a lake who pokes his head out to toss spells and then back in .
Invisible creatures but a having a hissy fit that one of us had scent feat.

A wizard sneaking up and shooting off a spell at us and then runs off and no way to track and get revenge .

Railroads us under the threat of quitting if we dont go to so and so place .

Gives us all a freebee magical permanent AB boost .............for our dump stats


And my favorite , Pounding us to almost no HP but just as we wish to make a run for it , heals us back up again using an NPC and repeats . He says this is actually his favorite way to do combat.

I would prefer to run away myself

NecroDancer
2017-02-10, 10:27 AM
My DM is the worst he prepares good story's and gives the party challanging fun encounters that we are able to beat with strategy. My DM likes to work with the party to build an interesting stories that we change with our actions. He encourages RP and isn't afraid to deviate from the modules we play. He always brings snacks and puts work into the NPC. His worst crime is when he ordered us our own custom made mini's to make our final encounter even more awesome. He even tells us what items we shouldn't craft because we will find them in the module! He actively encourages character development and creativity! He's mad! It's even worse when he homebrews monsters from video games we've all played and the creatures are properly balanced for our party. He even spends time to make props for us. When I play D&D I want to be railroaded by a vindictive DM who tries to control our characters though nerfing/ DMPCs, not a creative, open minded, hardworking DM who understands the rules but doesn't rules lawyer!

Worst DM hands down.

Dashuto
2017-02-10, 10:37 AM
I had multiple particular bad experiences back in my teens, but I will attempt to choose a single one.

I believe the worst DM I had was one who seemed as if he felt the goal of being a DM was to actually attempt to perform TPK's whenever possible. We were a team of level 1 adventurers railroaded into fighting a bearded demon on our first dungeon. This was not a case of "just run away" or some alternative solution being involved. Our natural first instinct was to run away after we watched a fighter go down in a single round. He got furious that were were trying to run, and promised to punish us if we did. We elected to run anyway, and then were immediately railroaded into being punished for failing our duty to investigate the dungeon. We were then forced to make our characters fight to the death against each other in a coloseum with "only one survivor" being allowed. As each character perished, he began to demand peoples character sheet. Some had drawn on their sheets and etc, and didn't want to hand them over (including me).

He flew into an actual fit at the table, and began desperately snatching for sheets, including the two players who had not yet perished. Exclaiming "No! You're DEAD! You're dead because I say you are and the characters are GONE do you understand?!" It was kind of like that segment from the Dnd Jack Chick comic. We actually had to wrestle him down, take our sheets back, and leave. He was DM'ing at someones house, so he was kicked out of their house too after we left. We didn't even stay long enough to help enforce it, we just bolted with all of our stuff.

jitzul
2017-02-10, 11:30 AM
While not nearly as bad as the other dm's in this thread my first bad dm was my first dm. It was a game on roll 20 and he invited 7 people to the game and was a passive as possible while running it. Hell it was so passive one of the others players that later became my dm in another campaign im still playing to this day ran most of the game himself. Another one did not know how to do encounters at all. We where at lvl 4 and just completed out first quest and got a lot of cool stuff. The dm wanted us to to get to lvl 5 in one session so he threw a deadly encounter at us while one of our players was out. So it was 4 lvl 4 vs a half dragon vet 2 clerics and a sorcerer. We got out butts handed to us and after the encounter the dm said "well this encounter was supposed to be easy if you had passed the stealth check and got the surprise round." Last bad dm I had I didn't even play with. Red flags raised immediately when during character creation the dm said he had a house rule where whenever you make a attack role you had to make a strength or dexterity check to see if you can hit it then make the attack role. I had a family gather the day of the game and after that was over I was told the game was a total disaster.

Knaight
2017-02-10, 11:59 AM
Still - as far as in-game goes, the S.U.E. files are the worst ever.

There's a podcast that does gaming horror stories as a regular feature, and I've definitely seen worse there (although the examples I can think of off the top of my head all involve other players).

Arbane
2017-02-10, 12:24 PM
We got out butts handed to us and after the encounter the dm said "well this encounter was supposed to be easy if you had passed the stealth check and got the surprise round." Last bad dm I had I didn't even play with. Red flags raised immediately when during character creation the dm said he had a house rule where whenever you make a attack role you had to make a strength or dexterity check to see if you can hit it then make the attack role. I had a family gather the day of the game and after that was over I was told the game was a total disaster.

GMs who think players can succeed at rolls? That's adorable.
(Stealth is especially bad for this, since all it takes is one PC blowing their roll, and it's as bad as if every player had, usually.)


There's a podcast that does gaming horror stories as a regular feature, and I've definitely seen worse there (although the examples I can think of off the top of my head all involve other players).

Which one?

Cluedrew
2017-02-10, 02:24 PM
Personally, the worst GM I have played under was much better than those here and for that I am thankful. They are also better than any of my personal efforts at being a table-top GM (hint: don't try to develop your GM skills, a new setting and a new game system all at the same time).

On SUE: There are probably worst cases than SUE, but it stands out for a couple of reasons.
It was recorded, almost in full.
How many ways that the Marty/CC was a bad GM, a bad storyteller, a bad game-designer and yes a bad person.
In how the players managed to be constructive about it.
The amount of analysis that went into why it was so bad.
Now they may be "worse" GMs (I can think of a few that might qualify) but at the same time I think the SUE file is a better read, maybe even recommended reading, for the above reasons. I mean PsycoDM and the Looping Campaign are also pretty bad, but there is a lot less to learn from those stories.

I would also like to give a shout out to the good GMs I have had. Who can take the crazy things the party throw at them (A mercenary, a naïve mystic and a reality TV show host, with camera crew, walk into a bar.), who build rich settings that make you wonder, and often even care, what is around the next corner.

NecroDancer
2017-02-10, 02:37 PM
(A mercenary, a naïve mystic and a reality TV show host, with camera crew, walk into a bar.)

Can we get the background for that?

BRC
2017-02-10, 02:54 PM
So, this guy isn't always a terrible DM, but the first time he DM'd for me was enough that I didn't join his later campaign (Which sounded like a lot of fun, although I don't know how much of that was his doing vs the players). He's a nice guy with a ton of enthusiasm for the game and none of the usual Bad-DM hangups. He dosn't view the game as an excuse to hold power over his players, he doesn't railroad, he LOVES player shenanigans, he doesn't play favorites among players, and he generally knows what it takes to have a good time around a table. He's very creative, with a ton of interesting ideas.

What he doesn't have is any sort of discretion when it comes to implementing those ideas.

We were playing Horde of the Dragon Queen. The Party was following a shipment of stolen treasure, and had reached a roadhouse.

This guy was an old friend of the GM's, who had joined the campaign in the previous session after another player had left (He'd moved away), trying to go for the "Suspicious, untrustworthy" character, but he really bungled it, giving our characters (Who were going through a lot of trouble to operate incognito as we investigated the cult), absolutely no reason to trust him. He just kind of showed up, knew who we were, and told us that the previous player's PC knew him. However, while that PLAYER was gone, his character was still around, and so we could easily ask him "Hey, do you know this suspicious gnome who just showed up?" The result was a frustrating session of us trying to find an excuse to let this guy join our party.

Whatever, it's the next session, we're at the Roadhouse. There is still a bit of frustration from the previous session, so our GM says "Look, let me show you how to play an illusionist", hands the new player (New to the group) the campaign book open to this chapter and says "Here, this is an easy chapter, just run it as it's written in the book"

The Adventure was supposed to be: We investigate the roadhouse, find that the foreman in charge is an ex-smuggler who has joined the cult, and is sneaking the treasure (Disguised as mining and construction equipment for a roadworks project) out of the roadhouse through some secret tunnels that lead to the nearby swamp, where Lizardfolk working for the cultists are carrying it deeper into the swamp.

Our GM, guest-GMing somebody else's campaign, decides that's too boring, and starts to improvise.

First, by "Treasure disguised as mining equipment", he didn't take that to mean "Crates of gems, but labeled as Shovels", he meant "Picks that are actually a bunch of tiny picks made of magic gemstones that, when you combine enough of the right color, turn into artificial dragon souls" or something. We spent a good half hour trying to comprehend how anybody was fooled by Pickaxes, that were actually a lattice of TINY pickaxes that were made of gemstones, then an hour experimenting with combining the different gems to see if that went anywhere.


Spoilers: It didn't. He didn't have anywhere this was going, he didn't even know he was GMing until like ten minutes before the session started (Enough time to read the short chapter). He had an idea for these artificial dragon-soul gem thingies, and by gosh he was going to use it. Nevermind that this was somebody else's campaign, he thought that this was a nifty idea.

He also thought us using Silence spells to ambush the cultists was too easy, so he gave one of them a pair of antimagic boots, thus adding a powerful magic item to the campaign (I can't really complain about that, since I stole those boots, and later used them in one of the most epic moments of the campaign).


Gems that combine to form artificial dragons and Antimagic Boots are not inherently bad ideas, but this wasn't his campaign to put them in. He was handed the book and told "Run what's written on these four pages". We didn't go off the rails and force improvisation. He just felt like messing around.


Another example was in a campaign he was running, where what was supposed to be "One or two solo-sessions for your character to catch up with the rest of the party" turned into a seven-session epic largely based around dealing with a DMPC orcish bard with poorly defined, but powerful, abilities.

Not in the "Unbeatable combatant" sense, but in the "If he plays this song everybody uncontrollably runs at super speed down the road to the next town, but the moment he stops all their legs stop working from the strain" type stuff. The NPC was really, really annoying too (From what I heard, I wasn't in this campaign).

And any complaints he would just kind of laugh and shrug like "Well, it's out of my hands!"

He loved introducing something unknown (Whether it was the Bard's songs, or the gems), and having the players poke and prod and experiment with it to figure out how it works. His idea of a good session is the players exploring some wacky idea he has, which he'll throw onto the table and let it take up as much time until the players get frustrated with it and have their characters wander off in search of a plot.

I don't know whether he actually thinks that every idea he comes up with is brilliant, or if he just acts on impulse and is then stuck with the concept.

Cluedrew
2017-02-10, 03:36 PM
To NecroDancer: I have posted that line three times now and you are the first person to respond to that.

Those were three of the PCs. The other two, a native who had a rocky relationship with his mother and a wild life photographer who had an overbearing (and almost abusive) boss, where not present in this scene.

Now the party didn't start together. The mercenary was looking for work at the edge of a danger zone that the other two where trying to enter (the absent ones were already in it) up in the artic. Which was getting less cold due to climate change. And in this town all the mercenaries hung out in the bar & shooting range (House Rule: not in that order), so all three ended up in the bar where the party formed.

What happened is the mystic, who had no idea what was going on but a lot of money, hired the mercenary and some NPC followers and provided them to the reality TV show host in exchange for having her crazy spiritualism covered in the first season of the show he was up here to film. Which is why he had the full camera crew with him. That pretty much set the tone for the campaign.

Blu
2017-02-10, 04:11 PM
My first DM was also the worst...
For my first time playing dnd i decided to play with a acquaintance that was going to DM a 3.5 table. Not fully knowing how the game worked i simply decided to go with wizard and after some research decided to go generalist wizard. At the start of the game the DM told i couldn't use necromancy(because it was evil or something), i didn't like it but just rolled with it.
The game started nice with a very challenging combats that were actually very fun. Then we got a quest for entering a dungeon and at the entrance there were three time traps that would age your character respectievely 5, 50, 500 years if you didn't do what some gnomish instructions said in the wall(other option were written in common behind a pannel with ridiculously high search DC), one of the character even died in the last trap(he was a human) but by his fault(we spent like 5 min explaining what to do in sign language).
After that came some challenges with very difficult traps and some pretty bad puzzles(he made them with only one possible solution, despite players trying other clever ones, wich for him were pretty obvious), when i say difficult traps, i say 12d6 damage pit if failed checks(balance, followed by reflex if failed, followed by climb to get to balance checks again) for lvl 4 characters. In anticipation for the boss battle, we got some neat magic items(i got a wand that auto empowered my spells, cleric got a armor the basically transformed him in a megazord and the fightet got a sword that could strech really far, i dont remeber the paladin) followed by some mini boss fights that the characters hade to made independently wich leveled us to 5.

That was when the campaign started to go bad. The boss? A 20 barbarian/5 cleric(didn't use any spell tho) half dragon with even freaking wings, for 4 lvl 5 characters! The battle started hard, with the fighter taking a serious hit, and for some reason the boss decided to take flight(giving characters and summons AoO's, we were using summon monster something to help in the fight) the cleric talked to the DM that creating 10 gallons of water should definitely make a flyer fall prone on the ground and after some discussion, the DM agreed. So the BBEG falls, takes fall damage, and one more round of AoO's. On his turn BBEG stands up, one more round of AoO's(at this point, he was with few HP), and attacks the nearest summoned dog. BBEG had greater cleave, so he IK the other dog, the others summons, the paladin and after that slaughter DM looks at me(my mage was more distant, throwing spells)... BBEG breath weapons my character, instakilling him to.

The cleric and fighter managed to finish off the BBEG with almost no HP left on themselfs. That session was over and in the distribution of XP DM tells since my character died, i dont get any of the XP, including those of challenges we had before entering the boss battle(was 10h+ session, so really a lot of missing XP).

If you guys liked it, it gets worse from that...

ComaVision
2017-02-10, 05:25 PM
If you guys liked it, it gets worse from that...

I'll bite, how does it get worse?

Was this his first time DMing? Sounds like a lot of inexperience mistakes.

Blu
2017-02-10, 05:43 PM
I'll bite, how does it get worse?
BBEG of the campaign is a epic wizard, characters die on a session basis and when party reaches lvl 10, we have total party wealth of 3k GP, DM puts a lvl 11 wizard NPC that casts higher level spells, while doing it he looks at me and goes: "Thats how you should play a wizard."(PS he targeted a chain lightning on a kraken and secondary targeted he's tentacles for some ludicrous damage). On the first combat that the party actually felt that it was a triumphal win, we take a CL 20 delayed fireball to the face(instakilling cleric and my mage(this was my 3rd death i think))

D+1
2017-02-10, 07:27 PM
This is a simple one. Tell us about terrible DMs and why they deserve that title. No names, please.
Bethesda. Because a fitting end to an epic campaign is not being railroaded into a scenario where my PC must die even when my follower has demonstrated immunity from radiation.
And the solution to the final puzzle that saves the world can only be obtained at the time of character creation...

marycrook
2017-02-11, 01:18 AM
Thats so great!!

Pugwampy
2017-02-11, 04:25 AM
Bethesda. Because a fitting end to an epic campaign is not being railroaded into a scenario where my PC must die even when my follower has demonstrated immunity from radiation.

He did not really die . He woke up for the expansion packs .

TeChameleon
2017-02-12, 04:07 AM
Bethesda. Because a fitting end to an epic campaign is not being railroaded into a scenario where my PC must die even when my follower has demonstrated immunity from radiation.
Blargh. I got a bit frustrated at that point, especially since my character had chugged enough Rad-X to wander around in there for a good five minutes without so much as a sunburn before going in. Kind of reduced the 'dramatic impact' of the death scene :smallconfused:

Anonymouswizard
2017-02-12, 05:43 AM
On SUE: There are probably worst cases than SUE, but it stands out for a couple of reasons.
It was recorded, almost in full.
How many ways that the Marty/CC was a bad GM, a bad storyteller, a bad game-designer and yes a bad person.
In how the players managed to be constructive about it.
The amount of analysis that went into why it was so bad.
Now they may be "worse" GMs (I can think of a few that might qualify) but at the same time I think the SUE file is a better read, maybe even recommended reading, for the above reasons. I mean PsycoDM and the Looping Campaign are also pretty bad, but there is a lot less to learn from those stories.

True, SUE is also incredibly well written and the blog is a good overview of why railroading should not be taken beyond 'I have a plot' ('all roads lead to Rome' is fine if the party isn't desperately trying to reach Paris), as well as horrific abuse of rule 0* (the SUE files is half the reason I stick to the rules so much when GMing, if the PCs can come up with a way to deal 30 damage to the villain before his first action they've won the fight if that's all the hp he has). I personally love the threads as reading material and an idea source (a campaign to take down Sues is one I plan to do with a trusted group).

* and ignoring rule -1, which is 'if it's cool the PCs can do it'. It's why I'm horrible at running Dark Heresy.


I would also like to give a shout out to the good GMs I have had. Who can take the crazy things the party throw at them (A mercenary, a naïve mystic and a reality TV show host, with camera crew, walk into a bar.), who build rich settings that make you wonder, and often even care, what is around the next corner.

Agreed, a shout out to all the good and amazing GMs, including the one I've had who managed to balance a party of four crazy PCs (it was Unknown Armies, we had two Avatars with conflicting aims and a Mechnomancer) well enough that we came back to playtest his game (and another two games after that, including the superhero one I'm currently in). He actually builds really nice settings that we love to explore rather than punch, although he doesn't have a massive number of campaign plots up his sleeve (unless the villain is not who we think it is this time).


Bethesda. Because a fitting end to an epic campaign is not being railroaded into a scenario where my PC must die even when my follower has demonstrated immunity from radiation.

Thankfully I didn't play it before getting the GotY edition and had a follower immune to radiation (Fawkes? It was the super mutant) and so while my character went comatose from being too close to the stuff happening she didn't even have to go in (although I'm not sure I had the Rad-X/Radaway to survive for even a minute, was very bad at finding that stuff).

Velaryon
2017-02-12, 09:31 PM
I have nothing on the level of some of the stories that others have posted here (let alone those that linked the SUE Files or That Lanky Bugger), but I can repost something that I've posted in an older thread on this subject.



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

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

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

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

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

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

Friv
2017-02-12, 11:08 PM
Back in university, I joined the local gaming group, and ended up part of a Vampire: the Masquerade game that was pitched as "play as the primogen (leaders) of the city, scheme against each other while facing off greater threats". I signed up as the local Tremere representative (the magic-using vampires, for those who didn't play).

The first warning bell was when I found out that two of the six players had never played any Vampire before, but I figured it was a rough start, but the GM could help them out.

The second warning bell was when the GM laid out his city, which included 75 vampires of whom 33 were elders and three were active methuselah. Essentially, rather than building a city and putting us in leadership positions, the GM had built a city and then tilted the power structure so that almost everyone was at our power level, to make it hard for us to keep control. The players who had played with him before started complaining almost immediately that he was "going to do it again", where "it" was described as doing everything in his power to strip us of as much power and ability as possible, as quickly as possible.

Things got worse when, most of the way through the first session, the Nosferatu primogen (played by one of the new players) got completely hosed because his player had missed the line in Obfuscate that said that, if you used your powers to mimic someone, security cameras could see you. The GM ruled that there were no take-backs, and if the player didn't know that neither did the centuries-old vampire who had been using those powers to control the city for decades.

By the end of the second session, the Malkavian primogen had lost his position to an NPC, and my Tremere Primogen had lost control of the Tremere chantry, putting me in the weird position of representing the clan I no longer controlled. The Brujah primogen had been ambushed and nearly killed by a trio of Anarchs who inexplicably had enough powers to fight an elder vampire head-on, the Nosferatu primogen was embroiled in a war with the city's Assamites over his mistake in the first sessions, and the Toreador primogen was under threat of losing her position, too. Only the Ventrue primogen was okay, and he'd spent all session dodging attempts by a 2000-year old member of his clan to coopt all of his social structure, with increasingly narrow success.

There was no third session. That week, both the Nosferatu and Malkavian players dropped out, and the GM decided we would take a week off to replace them. Instead, the next week the Toreador and I both independently decided we weren't coming back either, and there were no replacements.

(Come to think of it, I think it was shortly after that that the gaming club itself stopped existing. I can't be sure; as the treasurer, I was never able to attend any meetings because the club president kept scheduling them when I had classes.)

Stealth Marmot
2017-02-13, 11:55 AM
Considering that I read a thread a while ago about a DM that ended with the police being called 3 times and an arrest, I doubt anyone here will be topping that.

While I am tempted to describe a DM who completely screwed the party over with an artifact that ruined all of our characters and pretty much the whole campaign with a shrug and not a care in the world, I have a special case I want to discuss.

He was the worst DM I ever had. And he was also the best.

You see, when it comes to DMs, a terrible DM either slowly becomes terrible, or is so terrible you are gone within a few sessions. No, in this case I played in this person's game for YEARS, and he never changed, instead it just slowly dawned on me what was going on. I wasn't having fun.

To fully explain what happened, you have to understand what it was like joining his campiagn. First, it was high magic. And when I say high magic, I mean it makes Eberron look like Game of Thrones. Not only was it high magic, but we had extraordinarily high power characters. Basically, take a normal array and add 4 to every stat and you have the level we were playing at. He also let us have 2 bonus feats. OP characters right? Well, no, but we will get to that. Keep in mind that hsi character creation also took a character concept I had and made it immensely better. I loved this character, in theory, and could not wait to use him in a way that made him awesome.

See here is the thing, he had a full time job which allowed him to work less than 15 minutes a day. He spent most of that time working on his D&D campaign, so he was spending literally 30-40 hours a week on making his campaigns. He also was a theatre nerd, and a music nerd, so he had a great selection of music and some excellent acting chops. His world was extraordinarily elaborate, with excessively good fine details and tons of overarching plots, themes, and idea that were creative, thoroughly well thought out, and pristinely designed.

So what's the problem? Sounds like he had an excellent game where we could wander around and do all sorts of awesome stuff! Except...

I have never felt so not in control of a character in my life. DMs will often portray the idea of "Bigger fish" in order to prevent players from going wild, but playing in his game was a giant exercise in futility. I had no idea where we were supposed to go, what we were supposed to do, what was expected of us, and how we could so much as survive, much less win. Every action we had ended with us being caught in a flurry of things way beyond our power level, including armies and uber NPCs with seemingly limitless resources. We faced races who had actual antimagic fields surround them that literally were a racial quality. We ended up on a space ship, in a time vortex, and looking at a "Jail" called Torment which was a tower so high it could be seen from across a continent, full of creatures that were CR 20, 25, or 30 when we were at best level 14 and usually undergeared.

What's worse is that I was constantly being pulled around to look at a cool new feature of the world, and any time I did something I was chastized (IC through bad things happening to my character) for not following some sort of rules. Then he would make it so characters were able to do something based on rules....that he pretty much made up, then acted like this was a rule based on something besides his arbitrary creation.

And yet I constantly kept going to his games because I was interested in finally being able to do something, like I would finally catch a break and finally be able to do something cool. In the entire game I managed to do only one cool thing, crash an airship, but even then it was simply handed to me through arbitrary rules.

Things and people acted in ways that were illogical, and I don't mean illogical in a crazy way, but more like the way that someone who thought that entires races would act and think like hive minds would work. His governments were scarily bureaucratic while still being efficient, like a Lawful Evil master's dream. Get this, there was a Pixie Mafia. Before you laugh, it was among the scariest goddamn things in that game because remember, pixies are invisibility at will. Now imagine them as mobsters looking to collect human souls. Not only that but the game world had links to the real world, and repeating scenes where we literally would watch an anime for 3 minutes and somehow were supposed to interpret it as being related somehow.

There were no less than a dozen overarching plots going on at once, and we would have no time to do anything with ANY of them, or at least not most of them, and we saw horrible consequences of not taking care of the arcing plots. What's worse is that we would try to do things but we would be swept into things that we had no control over. Like, literally being drug through time and space on a journey, including some that took us to different dimensions we couldn't escape and it lasted for several sessions.

Put simply, both in character and out of character I was emotionally and mentally exhausted, and entirely gave up caring in both ways. My character had become so jaded that he was incapable of caring about what he did and the consequences of his actions and eventually went crazy trying to destroy the mafia I told you about. Keep in mind that this was the character I loved more than any ever in theory, but he never got to shine.

Long story short, in retrospect, I feel like he was gaslighting me. Him and I had a falling out eventually due to another game he was in as a player, and we didn't talk for a while.

I've patched things up with the guy, since I don't dislike him and he is great conversation, but I have decided I would never play any game with him ever again, as player or DM.

So when I say he was the best DM I meant that he had the capability of making an in depth world that had great themes, ideas, and characters as well as making our characters feel awesome, but he was the worst because he lead us on and all that promise blinded us to the fact that none of us were in control of anything, we simply chose from a few preprogrammed possibilities, all of which were designed to make the suffering of the people in his world and the suffering of our characters feel like it was our fault.

Edit: I should mention I had to be talked out of quitting that game TWICE by other players.

ProphetSword
2017-02-13, 06:43 PM
Met a DM online who wanted to run a game of Dark Heresy. I told him I had never played the game and knew nothing of the setting. He said that was for the best. He sent me info on how to generate a character so that I wouldn't have any background information about the world. At that point, I was fine with it. Figured we'd all be in the dark, and that could be exciting.

I go to the game (which he was hosting at his house) and the other two players are his wife and his best friend. Both of them have STACKS of source books, so it turns out I'm the only one who knows nothing about the setting. I let that slide. Once the game started, though, no background information was given to me. I know the game was science fiction, I assume...and those of you who know something about Dark Heresy probably know better than me.

My character was an assassin. I figured I would be utilizing my skills at some point in the game. Nope. The plot centered around a kidnapped girl who had disappeared from her dorm room. So, my assassin has been turned into an investigator. I rolled with it.

Three eight-hour sessions followed that were completely boring. Following vague clues from one place to another. As this was going on, whenever a decision had to be made, the other players and the DM would look to me about what to do next. Keep in mind, I'm the only one who doesn't have any information about the world, what kind of technology existed in it or how things work. I made some suggestions and they would treat me like I was an idiot.

We eventually got into a gun fight at the beginning of the fourth session, the first excitement we had. It was short lived. By the end of that session, we found the girl. But, as we did, NPCs swooped in and pretty much told us this whole thing never happened and if we spoke about it to anyone, we would be killed. We didn't get rewarded for the work either, since the whole thing, for reasons, was swept under the rug.

When I went home after the game, I told my wife I was never going back to that group. I told her I spent most of my time watching the clock and hoping the sessions would end...and when you do that with a group, you are not having fun.

The next day, the DM wrote me an email that basically said:
"I don't feel like you're invested in the game. I think maybe you should roll up a new character that you can get a grasp on and we'll start all over again."

Didn't respond and never went back.

Ninja-Radish
2017-02-14, 01:08 PM
My DM is the worst he prepares good story's and gives the party challanging fun encounters that we are able to beat with strategy. My DM likes to work with the party to build an interesting stories that we change with our actions. He encourages RP and isn't afraid to deviate from the modules we play. He always brings snacks and puts work into the NPC. His worst crime is when he ordered us our own custom made mini's to make our final encounter even more awesome. He even tells us what items we shouldn't craft because we will find them in the module! He actively encourages character development and creativity! He's mad! It's even worse when he homebrews monsters from video games we've all played and the creatures are properly balanced for our party. He even spends time to make props for us. When I play D&D I want to be railroaded by a vindictive DM who tries to control our characters though nerfing/ DMPCs, not a creative, open minded, hardworking DM who understands the rules but doesn't rules lawyer!

Worst DM hands down.

That sounds truly awful, you have my sympathies. Tell you what, my group can take that DM off your hands if you want. I mean, we wouldn't want you guys to continue suffering like this. ..

NickChaisson
2017-02-16, 12:52 PM
I don't get to play a lot as I'm my groups usual DM. I can think of a few DMs that were pretty bad but one really stands out to me.


This guy was a good friend at the time (we've drifted since then) and he wanted to try DMing. So he came up with an adventure based off of a book he was writing. So we roll up some characters and get ready to play. We meet on the agreed day and he informs us that we are prisoners and have no items.

Needless to say, we werent too pleased about this, but we rolled with it. It was a big yard style prison where we had little hovels to sleep in. Guards would patrol and assault us for no reason and we couldn't escape. The DM threw down a bunch of red herring plots, like escape plans, or some guy stole my pillow thing and crap like that. They never went anywhere and they resulted in us getting beaten/punished by the guards. Non of the NPCs wanted to talk/associate with us and it was like pulling teeth to do anything.

This went on for three hours. Three hours of non-cooperative NPCs and red herring plots until two NPCs kick down the door and save us. We get various descriptions of how powerful they are and the magical swords they are using. They easily destroy the prison and take us with them. So we just ended up following these guys around. We got no weapons or armor and everyone we fought was easily twice our CR. We politely called it a night once we realized we would just be following around his DMPCs. It was honestly the worst because it was boring as hell.

I joined another one of his games a while after this one. This one was horrible for different reasons. In this game I'm playing a Satyr cleric who worships death and was trying to start some kind of death cult. iirc I was NE. There were two other players, one was a warlock (CE) and the other was a rogue wanting to go into assasin. We were in some large city and through plot stuff we found out a demonic invasion was imminent and we knew we could not stop it. So The two other party members flee and I spend a bunch of time, effort and resources evacuating as many people as I could. I got them all away, we traveled and I even set up a small island for us to live on (with homes). I created food and water everyday for people to eat and offered to heal all their wounds. All for free, asking nothing in return. I didnt even ask them to join my cult, I offered though.

You might think I was regarded as a hero, or at least a decent person. No, the people all hated me, spit on me and tried to attack me into leaving. No one was interested in my characters cult (which was fine). Apparently the DM thought I was trying to achieve divine ranks or something so he just made everyone hate me no matter what. Despite the fact that I had no intentions of doing so, he could've just talked to me about it and it would've been fine, and there was no way I could've gotten divine ranks from like 50 people.

Both of these games stand out because they were massive wastes of time. Even in bad games I can usually have some fun or me and my friends find something to do.

Lord Torath
2017-02-16, 01:45 PM
*snip*
When I play D&D I want to be railroaded by a vindictive DM who tries to control our characters though nerfing/ DMPCs, not a creative, open minded, hardworking DM who understands the rules but doesn't rules lawyer!Trekkin can totally hook you up: I Rolled a Zero (http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/p/properly-ordered-posts.html). Except he won't because he's protecting the privacy of all the involved parties.
And yes, it's been linked to previously in this very thread.

Talakael can also probably hook you up with your declared preference in DMs.

ShaneMRoth
2017-02-22, 03:49 PM
One of the worst DMs I ever saw was a dear friend of mine. As a player, he was a min-maxing power gamer, but he was manageable. But when he would serve as DM, he’d go berserk and become almost instantly drunk with power. And after reveling in that power, he would not know what to do with it.

We stayed friends through this, because his love of the game was that deep and because I didn’t take his actions personally and our friendship was founded on enough things to prevent his bad DM habits from foundering our friendship.

On more than one occasion, his villains would capture the player-characters and lock them away in escape-proof prisons. This was sort of a running trope with him, as this happened in nearly every game he ran regardless of genre.

And when I say escape-proof, I don’t mean in the dramatic sense of it was designed to be escape proof and no one had escaped from the prison... until the player characters were taken into custody.

I mean escape-proof in that the characters couldn’t escape. No matter what.

As a player, when you are put in an escape-proof prison, you get the sense that you are now in a prison-break kind of adventure, or at least a sub-plot.

So, we players would wait for the DM to give us cues as to how the prison functioned and what we notice might illustrate an exploitable weakness.

None of that happened.

So, we would try to initiate a rudimentary escape attempt.

His method of keeping the prison escape proof was simplicity itself. Everything the characters do just fails.

Players: “We fashion some rope out of sheets.”

DM: “You have no sheets and nothing else to make rope.”

Players: “Really? No sheets or blankets?”

DM: “No.”

Players: “Okay, how about out of our clothes.”

DM: “No. That doesn’t work. You only have a shirt and pajama bottoms and even if you were naked, which would be noticed, the cloth isn’t good enough to make rope.”

Players: “Okay, we try and create some makeshift lock-picks out of a fork or spoon.”

DM: “No forks, no spoons. You eat with your hands.”

Players: “We try and make a tool out of a tray or a plate.”

DM: “No plates. No trays. They just put the food in your hands at mealtime.

Players: “And for water?”

DM: “You have access to flowing drinkable water, but with no reservoir to collect it. You use your hands for cups, too.”

As players, we’re expecting him to eventually give us something to work with. All we have to do is crack his Da Vinci Code of expectations and sort out what specific methods of escape that he’s willing to respond to.

It goes on like this for a while. Basically, every method you’ve ever seen in a book or movie or TV show to break out of a prison? None of the things that might be used to make those work exist in these prisons.

He instead just shut down every avenue of narrative interest that we offered.

His prisons (across all genres) were models of efficiency and boredom. There was no abuse. No drama. No corruption. No exploitable flaws. Just a place to confine people and give them no means of escape by giving them nothing remotely interesting to do.

It was like being in a slightly less abstract version of Monopoly Jail.

After we were satisfied as players that we were out of ideas, and out of patience, we would just stop talking. The DM had the nerve to be surprised when we stopped trying.

Eventually, like after five more minutes of nothing, it would occur to the DM that he had to do something. Then, he would have some NPC break us out, or something would disrupt the prison and blow a hole in the outer wall, or our captors would just let us go.

He never picked up on the notion that if you have the characters in confinement, then you as the DM have to provide something narratively interesting for the characters to do. Problems to solve. Even if they actually couldn’t escape, it fell to the DM to provide... I don’t know... more than nothing?

He was all about the Random Encounter.

Today the Random Encounter is half a Dead Horse Trope, even in D&D. And it was a shop-worn trope by the time of these stories.

But at least in D&D, the Random Encounter has a history. Random Encounters are a D&D thing. There is a context to them. And D&D is mechanically capable of handling such encounters to this day.

This DM put random encounters into every game he tried to run. No matter what the genre, no matter the context, no matter what the scale of movement, if the characters were traveling from Hither to Yon, about half-way between, we got ambushed by something that wanted to kill us.

Two examples were Call of Cthulhu and GURPS Space.

Let that sink in for a moment. There might be game systems less suited to random encounters than Call of Cthulhu and GURPS Space, but I can’t think of those systems at the moment.

In Call of Cthulhu, this was disastrous because virtually everything in CoC is capable of TPKs unless the Investigators are prepped eight ways to Sunday for that combat encounter. And since, by definition, you couldn’t prepare for a Random Wandering Encounter, these encounters went sideways fast. And in the middle of every one of them, the DM would realize... like a dementia patient... that this wasn’t D&D and that every Investigator was a Glass Cannon (minus the Cannon part) and he would have to nerf that combat to prevent a TPK. Oh, and the notion that we could just run away or speed off without doing battle? Well, that didn’t work for his narrative. Random encounters had to be fought until one side or the other was dead, you see.

In one memorable Investigation required our Investigators to enter the Dreamlands. Once in the Dreamlands, he went full D&D on us. Including Mandatory Random Encounters.

Once, he had us encounter a Gug. And we had to fight it. To the death. With melee weapons. Mind you, this was a group of Investigators with no Melee weapon skills, because we generated Investigators from the 1920's, and we didn't have reason to believe that we'd be able to walk through downtown Arkham with battleaxes and wearing chain-mail.

Once the surviving Investigators returned from the Dreamlands, and after the dead Investigators were replaced, the DM had the nerve to be surprised that we refused to return to the Dreamlands. And since Dreamland exploration was integral to the plot, that Investigation ended that session.

In GURPS Space, our characters would get just enough resources to build a space-ship that wasn’t combat-worthy. Essentially, a Space Hyundai. We tried building ships that favored speed so that we could out-run any well armed ships. So, we’d design a Space Hyundai Veloster. And try to out-run the Space Brigands.

NOPE.

Every time we made a run from one planet to another, we’d get ambushed. And I don’t mean we notice a ship on our sensors at long range and have to out-run it. I mean, we are at point blank range with some well armed space pirate ship and it was time to engage.

We didn’t use whatever rules that GURPS Space used to provide for cloaking technology like in Star Trek. And the reason that those rules were not used was because if cloaking tech was available, then our characters would use cloaked ships to... you know... avoid Random Encounters between Planet Hither and Planet Yon. If the Space Pirates couldn’t detect us? They couldn’t ambush us. So no cloaking.

So, I had to ask, how the hell did this big slow-ass gunship sneak up on us so close. Because this wasn’t a road through a forest that was full of brush that could be used for ambush. This was the cold empty void of SPACE!!! He’d offer some crap about hiding behind a moon or something, like that didn’t give us at least 1,000 miles of visibility when the ship ducked out from behind the... 1,000 mile diameter MOON. I’d point out that before we left the gravity well of the planet that we were steering clear of any object that might hide a nasty ship. Like a moon. Well, he just hand-waved all that and we would be in combat. And we would lose, and we would go to Space Monopoly Jail. (And see the section on that.)

One time, I floated the idea that our characters could take our Space Hyundai (that was all we could afford) and paint it white and put a red cross on it and establish a cover business of shipping medical supplies (legitimate actual medical supplies, mind you). My premise was that such a ship wouldn’t be attacked on sight.

NOPE. The space pirates would just attack anything we were in. If we were hauling Space Nuns to a Space Nunnery? Dead chunks of nun floating in the icy void of SPACE!!

But the most jacked up Random Encounter of all occurred during a Spelljammer campaign.

Spelljammer was D&D, so a Random Encounter would seem to be less disruptive than in the CoC or Space examples.

That’s what I thought, too. At first.

Prior to this random encounter, one of our characters had been on the wrong end of a bad saving throw. And he was impaired. The details elude me but it was some sort of Curse, and it was bad enough to make the character barely playable. And we needed help from someone with far more spell-casting ability than we had to fix it.

And then we turn the corner, and we meet: Yeenoghu, the Demon Prince of Gnolls (and Ghouls).

Our initial reaction was, if I recall correctly, the same reaction you are having right now: “..wuh?!?...”

We hadn’t Spelljammed our way into the Abyss. Nor were we on the Planet of Gnolls. We hadn’t met one gnoll before this encounter, nor would we encounter a single gnoll after this encounter. No ghouls, either.

One minute we’re going from Hither to Yon, and midway we encounter: Yeenoghu, the Demon Prince of Gnolls (and Ghouls. And Big Lipped Alligator Moments, apparently.)

I don’t remember precisely what level our characters were at the time, but it was in the single digits and we weren’t high enough level to cast Remove Curse. So, even if one of our characters wasn’t barely playable and we were at full fighting capability, we were in no way ready to do combat with a demi-god.

We made it abundantly clear, out of character, that we weren’t even going to try to engage in combat during this encounter and we weren’t even going to touch our dice.

“If you think we’re fighting this guy, you’re out of your tree, dude. If he starts fighting us? We’re just going to stand there and let him kill us. My character isn’t in the mood to die tired right now...”

Back into character.

The player with the cursed character, made an attempt to ask if the demi-god might be willing to remove the curse, because... seriously, what other reason could the DM have had for us to encounter such an entity? This was the first (and as it turned out, the only) creature we would encounter who was in any position to get his character out of his bind.

The DM laughed as if that were the most absurd thing to ever happen at a game table. We players pointed out that the most absurd thing to ever happen at a game table was already happening: using a Gnoll demi-god as a glorified orc. I said something like, “Seriously, what are we supposed to think here?”

After a long awkward pause, as we stared at the Demon Prince of Gnolls and he stared back at us, we just... kind of... left.

“We... gotta... go now... your... majesty...”

The demi-god made some boiler-plate villain threats...

“...yeah... I... that’s a big ten-four on that... your majesty... but we...just... gotta go... now...”

And then we excused ourselves and left.

To this day, I don’t know what the hell the DM thought was supposed to happen with this encounter. Apparently, we were suppose to encounter a demi-god and then awesomeness was supposed to spontaneously ensue.

The player with the impaired character was none too happy with being left with his curse, and a session later, when it was clear that the DM wasn’t going to do squat to make his character playable again, that player quit in the middle of the session.




Back to the Space campaign for a moment.

When we weren’t being over-matched in combat we didn’t want and couldn’t win, and weren’t cooling our heels in Space Monopoly Jail, the DM found ways put us in what seemed like interesting scenarios. There was a Dead in the Water scenario, for example.

The specifics of the problem are lost to memory but we were in some derelict spaceship and we had to find a way to get the thing moving again.

As players we deliberated, consulted our character sheets and the gamebooks and came up with the best plan we could come up with that looked like it might solve the problem and get us mobile again. We announced some actions. Rolled some dice and waited for the DM to adjudicate.

The DM told us that the plan didn’t work.

And that’s all he told us. We didn’t know why our plan didn’t work. We didn’t learn anything from the failed plan because the DM gave us no feedback. The plan didn’t work, because reasons.

Back to the character sheets and game books and we came up with the second best plan based on the situation. Actions announced. Dice rolled.

Again, the DM tells us: that didn’t work. No clues. No insights. No feedback. We did two things, they didn’t work, we didn’t know why they didn’t work, and we were no closer to a solution than when we started.

By now, you could feed the lack of momentum hanging dead in the air around the game table. The players were no longer invested in the game and no one was saying anything. The DM had stonewalled us. Twice. And now we were stonewalling him. It was Space Monopoly Jail again.

He recommended that we, and I quote, “try something.”

So, the players came up with some stupid, slap-stick ass-pull of a plan. Something just this side of Wile E Coyote in a space helmet. I can’t remember if farts were involved, so high standards of journalistic integrity compel me to assume that farts were not only involved but were an integral component of the plan.

And, naturally, it worked perfectly. Because if it hadn’t the game session would have ended.

As I recall, we had two more of these mini-scenarios where we had to “think” our way out of them. I don’t remember the details. But they were all variations on one theme.

Plan One is guaranteed to fail, as the DM stonewalls us on feedback.

Plan Two is guaranteed to fail, as the DM stonewalls us on feedback, again.

All of the energy leeched away from the game table as the players begin visibly disconnecting and stonewalling the DM.

The DM implores the players to "try something”

Plan Three is some slapstick mess, like a deleted Inspector Clouseau scene from a Pink Panther movie. Involving farts, naturally. This plan works perfectly, because the alternative is for the game to grind to a halt.

In short order, the entire Space campaign ground to a halt with the DM wondering, without a trace of irony, why.

Eventually, he just stopped trying to take on the role of DM entirely, which... as you might well imagine... was for the best.

Delta
2017-02-23, 04:24 AM
There are two that come to mind, both at conventions.

First one was running a The Dark Eye game, german fantasy RPG with an insanely detailed lore. The adventure begins in a tavern (of course) when the GM declares we hear something outside and all go out to investigate, so far, so railroady. The door for some reason leads to a portal to some weird parallel dimension thingy which has absolutely nothing to do with the game world where the rest of the adventure goes like this:

GM: "You're on a snowy plain, there's absolutely nothing here but a tower up there"
We: "Well we go towards the tower"
GM: "There's a wizard at the tower telling you to go to a nearby town and talk to the miller there"
We: "We go to the town"
GM: "The miller tells you the ring you're looking for is in a cave on that mountain over there" (no, we didn't know we were looking for a ring up to that point but of course we were...)
We: "We go toward the mountain..."

It basically went on like this for 2-3 hours, doing anything but exactly what he the last NPC had told us to do basically drew blank stares followed by a "nothing happens" until we went back on course. There were no rolls, no challenges, no nothing but "Do this!" "We do this".

At some point, out of nothing a ridiculously huge wolf appears, we roll initiative to then have the wolf jump on each of us, one after the other, with no defense, we can't attack it or do anything. We wake up back in the tavern and have the ring with us, a "mysterious" NPC appears and offers us gold for it, the end.

The GM wasn't mean or sadistic or anything, it was just that bad.

The second one was a real sleazeball of a GM who ran a Shadowrun game. It was pure railroading but of the sadistic kind, the adventure opened with our characters getting into an ambush right out of the gate, almost dying and getting captured and then being forced by powerful NPCs in absolute control to do exactly as they said, with bombs implanted in our heads that would go off the second we didn't follow the plan by the second.

That alone wouldn't even have been enough to take a top spot here (lots of bad railroading on cons, unfortunately) but he constantly kept "hitting" on every female around the table, going so far as to give bonus modifiers and stuff while explicitly saying things like "Oh, you can roll again because you're a girl!" and forcing a "romance" with one of the powerful NPCs on one of their characters and then showering her with ridiculously powerful gifts and money after the adventure was over. Yeah, it was awkward.

Talked to other players at the con afterwards and found out that was a pretty standard game for that GM...

Kesnit
2017-02-24, 02:10 PM
I have two, who make the list for different reasons.

1) The DM I had been playing with took a break so he could plan his wedding. (Horrible reason to pause gaming, I know. :) ) One player decided to also take a break, so the other three of us decided to run some short campaigns while we waited to start back up. Z wanted to run a high-level campaign, so started the PCs at LVL 18. The other player rolled up a True Necromancer, focusing on minon-mancy. I put together a Hexblade with a Hellhound familiar.

The first few sessions were us defeating enemies, then having the Necro raise everything to build his army. (The enemies were rather weak, so he could build a lot of them within his HD limit.) Since this turned combat into long stretches of the Necro controlling his minions, it got boring. So the DM threw an epic undead (some kind of angel-like thing) with a few templates (including an aura of cold), as well as undead-angel’s minions. The aura of cold took out the Necro’s army in two rounds (the save was too high for any of them to make). The undead-angel-thing was too powerful to take on, so we had to focus on the minions. Did I mention I had a Hellhound familiar – which takes extra damage from cold, and could not make the save? The only way to keep my familiar from dying was cast Endure Elements on me/it. This meant I could only move at my familiar’s speed since the spell only worked if I was next to the familiar, which led to me spending 5 rounds crossing the aura of cold to get from one minion to the next (and my familiar still taking damage every time it attacked and hit).

Finally, the DM decided this encounter was too much for us and had the angel fly away. And to make up for it, he gave us two ECL 22 DMPCs to “help” with future encounters. This meant that all future encounters were the PCs sitting around while the DMPCs solved everything.

2) R has been running a D&D campaign for over 20 years. He has a well-developed world, and enough houserules to fill a large bookshelf. Every hour of travel, players had to roll for encounter, weather (ie rain, sunny), and wind speed and direction. Encounters were from his custom tables, which were not sorted by CR, so it would be possible for a party of LVL 2 PCs to run into a CR 20 encounter. (That doesn’t mean the party had to fight it. Only that the party encountered it.) Since it wasn’t always possible to tell how complicated an encounter was, it would not be uncommon for the party to take on something they could not fight. WBL only existed at character creation. Once a PC was in play, any wealth acquired was theirs. However, new PCs did not get the benefit of party wealth (unless the other PCs chose to share, or the player managed to recover gear from a previous PC). I was once in a game with a LVL 7 PC that had LVL 7 WBL. At the same time, a LVL 8 PC had a +7 weapon and +10 armor, and another LVL 7 PC had 2 +7 weapons. The DM uses a critical fumble deck that can completely destroy the playability of a PC. (One of the cards is “weapon breaks.” It can be multiple game sessions before the party reaches a town so the weapon can be repaired.)

Milo v3
2017-02-26, 08:13 PM
I've been pretty lucky. Worst I've had was a GM for a Pokemon Tabletop Adventures game, where the GM was really inexperienced and kept giving me favourable stuff and favourable outcomes and stuff because he knew me in real life. I had to keep telling him to stop it because he was making my character a mary sue and it was unfair for the rest of the players. Thankfully that game ended pretty quickly.

InvisibleBison
2017-02-26, 09:55 PM
Most of my gaming experience has been as a DM, so whenever I see threads like this one I'm always a bit worried that I'll recognize myself in them. Hasn't happened yet, fortunately.

As for bad DMs, I haven't really had any. The closest I can recall is my first DM giving an excessive amount of loot to his daughter's character. It wasn't really a problem, though, because he wasn't shortchanging any of the other players, and the extra stuff wasn't that overpowered - as I recall, he gave her 5th level barbarian a +2 frost greatsword (we were playing D&D 3.5), which was exactly twice as much wealth as she should have had but hardly problematic.

Legato Endless
2017-02-26, 10:46 PM
One of my worst was a DM who felt absolutely no pressure to keep his players engaged. If the story demanded the session be a slog, a slog it would be.

The Party is hunting through a dense jungle. We find a sunny clearing. We are attacked by a staggered hoard of Drow. In the least overwhelming way possible. At first it looks like we're just dealing with a normal encounter. We enter the open area and the enemy materializes behind us, closing off our path. We roll for initiative, and 5 turns later as we dispatch the last of the vanguard another group pops into the battlefield. As they die, another. And another. By the third cycle, we thought, okay, maybe we're supposed to flee?

"You can't flee. The dense jungle blocks everything but the path from which you came."

The Druid decides, maybe we can negotiate? He tries talking but only manages to get an arrow in the face. Maybe this isn't supposed to winnable? The Warlock drops to her knees and attempts to surrender. A Drider executes her.

"They will not tolerate you disrespecting their fighting spirit."

Um, okay, we've got nowhere to go, we can't negotiate, so I guess we fight? The cycle continues. Slowly we burn through resources, and the loss of a PC drops our efficiently down. But the DM really doesn't know what's he doing, or at least he intentionally has the drow assault groups fight in fairly tactically inept way, allowing us to keep whittling them down. After about 3.5 hours, the last of us finally gets knocked unconscious. We wake up hours later in a dungeon. The whole fight was just a prelude to getting us captured. Why couldn't he just overwhelm the party in the first two minutes? I'm not sure.

A few disjointed sessions later, the group was tasked with slaying a few Hill Giants. We killed the first group, only to come to a Cave. The DM informed us if we didn't get in there the hostages would be killed by the end of the day. The Cave was very dark. I asked for Torches as the DM had banned the light spell for being too science fiction-y at the start of the game.

"There aren't any Torches sold in this country."

"Okay, can we make some?"

"There aren't any torches in this country. You don't have the right materials."

"We're standing in a forest."

"You're unable to find anything that burns."

So, the group decides to creep into the Cave anyways, even though my human Fighter doesn't have Dark vision and wasn't aware blind fighting would be a necessary feat this early in the game. For the next 3 hours I standby, as my allies move through the earthen network dragging me behind them. I try assisting in a fight but it's completely helpless, as the DM house rules the normal penalties for fighting someone without vision aren't severe enough. I spend most of a 4 hour session sitting on the sidelines.

Lest you think this only happened to me, the one time the group split up in a town to fetch supplies, two of us were ambushed by mummies in a marketplace, where we proceeded to fight off and then flee from while the rest of the group browsed reddit or did homework for the next 4 hours. On another occasion, we found ourselves lost in a time warp that reset the last hour of events 3 times without any explanation, which we then as randomly found ourselves leaving. The DM kindly repeated NPC conversations for us, but if it contained any clues I still haven't the foggiest. If it was a puzzle, it was very opaque one whose solution was never revealed. I still don't know if he just didn't prepare anything, or if he thought if he had a cool idea he couldn't execute properly.

He's not comparable to some of the horror stories in the thread, he can occasionally make a session thrum semi-competently. But you've absolutely no guarantee when you show up if you'll actually get to do anything for a session.

GPS
2017-03-01, 11:59 AM
...On another occasion, we found ourselves lost in a time warp that reset the last hour of events 3 times without any explanation, which we then as randomly found ourselves leaving. The DM kindly repeated NPC conversations for us, but if it contained any clues I still haven't the foggiest. If it was a puzzle, it was very opaque one whose solution was never revealed. I still don't know if he just didn't prepare anything, or if he thought if he had a cool idea he couldn't execute properly.
How much are you guyd willing to bet the DM in question lifted the plot straight from The Adventure Zone?

Friv
2017-03-01, 01:23 PM
How much are you guyd willing to bet the DM in question lifted the plot straight from The Adventure Zone?

Given that the Adventure Zone plot in question is pretty much a straight lift from Majora's Mask, which is turn an adventure-fantasy version of Groundhog Day, I think there are more likely options, TBH.

kraftcheese
2017-03-03, 04:52 PM
I once played a game at a uni D&D group.

Everything seemed fine for the first game: the DM wasn't too railroady and seemed quite accomodating with character choices as long as they fitted in the Forgotten Realms setting we were playing in, everyone around the table was relatively nice (if a bit socially awkward, but that's d&d fans).

But in the second game, the DM has a friend "sitting in" on the game, and they both start making some pretty horrible jokes; no one around the table is laughing when DM compares an enemy being vaporized by Sacred Flame to "a Jew in the oven" (and a few other pretty offensive Jew jokes whenever money comes up), the other guy says "n***ers!" as an exclamation whenever someone does a bad roll (among other jokes that sound the ones a racist 12 year old in my rural hometown would make) and me and a couple of the other players are sharing uncomfortable looks through all of these "jokes".

Near the end of the dungeon we'd been slogging through, the barbarian player says his character wants to stay in the room we just defeated a couple of manticores in (a few of our PCs almost died/were revived after the fight) and guard the door we're headed into. So the DM splits us up, we play a 15 minute section in the next room and then are sent out for close to 2 HOURS so the player who stayed behind can roleplay...something.

When we come back in, we find out why DM's friend is sitting in; the DM has had the sit-in-ers level 6 character (played by the friend) and a few supporting DMPCs as backup fighting the barb, who we rush to the aid of. Our level 3 party is severely outmatched because not only are we all almost out of spell slots from our last fight, but sit-in-er's character and the other DMPCs have some kind of mind control circlets and "blood magic swords" which both make it so we can't negotiate and we they regain health with each attack they make, almost causing a TPK until the DM lets us knock the circlet and sword off one (after many, many tries).

Suffice to say, I didn't come back.

TL;DR- DM and annoying friend make racist jokes, then DM lets said friend play their level 6 character and friends wipe the floor with our level 3 party

Vizzerdrix
2017-03-04, 06:22 AM
Ill post the quick version. This was a 3.5 dm
Flanking was cheating.
Buffing the fighter was cheating.
Buying a horse befor level 10 was cheating.
Any form of flight, at any level was cheating.
Knowledge checks? Cheating.
Having the right spell at the right time was also cheating.
And those are just the tip of the iceberg.

Heck. The last thing I played with that group was a plain human fighter, and he tried to say power attack was cheese. Nothing added to it. Just powerattacking with a longsword. Everything I did or played, in any game with that group felt like a sin. In the end it was so bad I gave away all my books and swore off gaming all together. Until I met the two best dms Ive ever played with, but hat is a tail for another day.

Inevitability
2017-03-04, 07:55 AM
Ill post the quick version. This was a 3.5 dm
Flanking was cheating.
Buffing the fighter was cheating.
Buying a horse befor level 10 was cheating.
Any form of flight, at any level was cheating.
Knowledge checks? Cheating.
Having the right spell at the right time was also cheating.
And those are just the tip of the iceberg.

Heck. The last thing I played with that group was a plain human fighter, and he tried to say power attack was cheese. Nothing added to it. Just powerattacking with a longsword. Everything I did or played, in any game with that group felt like a sin. In the end it was so bad I gave away all my books and swore off gaming all together. Until I met the two best dms Ive ever played with, but hat is a tail for another day.

What did he expect you to do, sit around and hit things with sticks?

Anonymouswizard
2017-03-04, 09:06 AM
What did he expect you to do, sit around and hit things with sticks?

Please, sticks are cheating.

Yeah, I've also had GM's like this. I've had 'magic is limited to PL-3, but air magic has no special limits'. I've had arrays in Mutants and Masterminds declared to be cheating (although I have matured since then, in my current game I ruined down the arrays because nobody else really used them). I've been denied the effect of a talent in Deathwatch because it would have given the party a meltagun with no reimbursement (that annoyed me, every other talent went into play immediately but I had to wait despite being back at base. That GM also banned scouting, apparently we were actually in the Adeptus Idiotus).

GrayDeath
2017-03-04, 02:23 PM
Luckily, aside from a Con or two I have banished out of mind, I never hád truly awful or horrible DM`s.

But 1 of the best I had took strange turns for worse, and another one managed to be rather .... mechanical, so I`ll mention them in a bit more Detail.


The firs tone was my first GM, the Guy that actually got me into the Hobby in University (before that I only played Computer RPG`s, yes, I was one of THOSE ^^).

Now first you ened to know that he is a good to very good GM in general. His World Descriptions are detailed, there are (logical and lorewise fitting) consequences to any actions, he gives enough Info to make educated decisions (but never repeats them, or lets you go back, or gives you more than the required minimum of help of any kind, which in certain Games is amazingly satisfying if you achieve your goals nonetheless). he also never ever fudges rolls and only makes "****-moves" if the adventure truly requires it (we once ran a published Campaign for almost 6 years, and there were 2 instances that simply sucked...but he could not change them without changing what came after or ignoring the worlds fluff, so yeah...).

While all of this is positive, he is also a System Creator. A great one (I helped back then, with Iteration 1 and 2 and am still using dervates of them today) ... sadly also IN CAMPAIGN.

So we all had built and played our characters for quite some time...suddenly he decides Elves as they were are too OP (low Fantasy overall) and forces me to accept a nerf.
Then he changes how damage is calculated which makes armor (of which my character is the only one NOT using any) massively stronger.
Then he changes weapon stats making the Staff my character used (and incidentily the Rapier another Player favoured) much worse.

All of that without asking for a vote. Just for "feedback", and then commenting " you are still the most powerful character, so where is the problem?"
WHile that is true strictly mechanically speaking, the Worlds Setting limits my character quite strongly, while another plays a fully armored and armed full caster without penalties....sigh.

Still, overall that group contained 7 of the best years of RPG for me.


The second example is a GM that simply sucks at improvising. So he never does.

He runs selfmade adventures like adventure paths. Do A, go to B, find C, decide D, Do E, repeat.
Now I am not saying his adventures are always bad, one was even among my overall top 5, just that the WAY he runs them is very very LN. ^^

Inevitability
2017-03-04, 03:38 PM
He runs selfmade adventures like adventure paths. Do A, go to B, find C, decide D, Do E, repeat.
Now I am not saying his adventures are always bad, one was even among my overall top 5, just that the WAY he runs them is very very LN. ^^

As a LN person, I'd like to point out that boringness has nothing to do with alignment.

GrayDeath
2017-03-05, 12:47 PM
Nope.

But foreseeability has.
If you`ve played 2 Adventures with him, you can guess 90% of the WAY his other adventures will play/feel.


On a sidenote. I LIKE Rules. But only as the bones of a thing, not as the whole thing, if you catch my drift. ^^

Stealth Marmot
2017-03-06, 08:03 AM
Please, sticks are cheating.


Also, hitting is cheating.

Avianmosquito
2017-03-06, 08:15 AM
Also, hitting is cheating.

Missing is okay though.

Hawkstar
2017-03-06, 01:44 PM
Does casting spells summon Orcus to throw a tanglefoot bag at you?

Anonymouswizard
2017-03-06, 04:32 PM
Missing is okay though.

Only when it's not beneficial, otherwise it's cheating.

SuperYakob
2017-03-06, 04:49 PM
Pathfinder. First DnD game I ever played, he took a premise starting mission. However this mission was for 4 people, a fighter, rogue, wizard and cleric if I remember correctly, and there were only 2 of us, myself the fighter and a friend playing the rogue. He made you be really specific, describing nothing unless you super specifically asked for it. So "what do I see in the room" wouldn't let you see a wooden chest, because you were looking in the middle of the room and it was in the corner. Then, since there were only 2 of us, the combat was way out of our league. He also kept trying to kill me in particular- some skeletons ignored the rogue, 20' away firing arrows at them to instead hack at my unconscious body for 3 rounds. Oh, and when we entered the final room the black dragon one hit us both literally before we did anything. We walked in and he told us we died. Never even made it to level 2 characters...

Inevitability
2017-03-07, 08:00 AM
Does casting spells summon Orcus to throw a tanglefoot bag at you?

No, because tanglefoot bags are chea...

Nevermind, forgot the GM can never cheat. Of course it does.

Spookykid
2017-03-07, 10:27 AM
Some post apocalyptic game, come across a tank in a huge field with a guy half out of the hatch looking around.
That would be nifty to own but if we snipe the guy the others will close the hatch and kill us. I'm a sniper and sneaky so let me try and stealth up to the tank. After many rolls and making it behind the tank and the guy doesn't see me, i roll to lob a grenade into the open hatch and nothing.

GM: you forgot to pull the pin

Haveatya
2017-03-07, 11:18 AM
NPC: "Hey yea, stay away from this base, that I stole from your boss."
PC: "Yea nah, can't do that mate."
NPC: "Well alright." *fires sniper round*
PC: "Oi, fine then." *fires back, critical hit, instant kill with damage*

DM: Oh it bounces off his helmet...
Player: It what? How, that is a 14.5mm bullet?!
DM: Because you can't kill him...
Player: Oh, we are playing this type of game are we.

Stealth Marmot
2017-03-07, 11:24 AM
Some post apocalyptic game, come across a tank in a huge field with a guy half out of the hatch looking around.
That would be nifty to own but if we snipe the guy the others will close the hatch and kill us. I'm a sniper and sneaky so let me try and stealth up to the tank. After many rolls and making it behind the tank and the guy doesn't see me, i roll to lob a grenade into the open hatch and nothing.

GM: you forgot to pull the pin

Me: *cracks knuckles* But you sure didn't...*Camera pans away for discretion shot*

Knaight
2017-03-07, 06:15 PM
Some post apocalyptic game, come across a tank in a huge field with a guy half out of the hatch looking around.
That would be nifty to own but if we snipe the guy the others will close the hatch and kill us. I'm a sniper and sneaky so let me try and stealth up to the tank. After many rolls and making it behind the tank and the guy doesn't see me, i roll to lob a grenade into the open hatch and nothing.

GM: you forgot to pull the pin

Ah yes. This. While I personally have avoided it, I ended up indirectly introducing freeform roleplaying to my elementary school (I GMed "The Talky Game" for my younger brother starting when I was about 7, introduced some of his friends to it at 10, and one of them ended up popular enough to spread it to the school). While I made a point of avoiding this nonsense a lot of the other people who ended up GMing didn't, and this sort of thing fits in perfectly with the 10 year olds being difficult GMs on purpose. For instance:

"You're in a small room with a door"
"I walk north"
"You walk into a wall"
"I walk south"
"You walk into a wall"
"I walk east"
"You walk into a door"
"I open the door, then walk east"
"You walk through the door" (The GM would also note that it wasn't closed here, so if you come back there's likely to be a problem in the room because of that).

I never played in any of these, but I heard stories. It was ridiculous.

Cluedrew
2017-03-07, 06:25 PM
DM: "What do you do?"
P1: "I successfully attack and destroy the tank."

Arbane
2017-03-08, 02:20 AM
Ah yes. This. While I personally have avoided it, I ended up indirectly introducing freeform roleplaying to my elementary school (I GMed "The Talky Game" for my younger brother starting when I was about 7, introduced some of his friends to it at 10, and one of them ended up popular enough to spread it to the school). While I made a point of avoiding this nonsense a lot of the other people who ended up GMing didn't, and this sort of thing fits in perfectly with the 10 year olds being difficult GMs on purpose. For instance:

"You're in a small room with a door"
"I walk north"
"You walk into a wall"
"I walk south"
"You walk into a wall"
"I walk east"
"You walk into a door"
"I open the door, then walk east"
"You walk through the door" (The GM would also note that it wasn't closed here, so if you come back there's likely to be a problem in the room because of that).

I never played in any of these, but I heard stories. It was ridiculous.

I've played Infocom text adventures, on the Apple IIe, that weren't this deliberately blockheaded.

Mutazoia
2017-03-08, 06:19 AM
Worst DM I ever had, would simply flip through the MM and pick a monster at random, roll a D10 to see how many were there, and that what was waiting for you when you walked through a door, or turned a corner, or whenever he felt like running some "combat".

Gamed with him once. Named my character Deden Fiveminutes.

Misereor
2017-03-08, 06:45 AM
This is a simple one. Tell us about terrible DMs and why they deserve that title. No names, please.

D.
He was an example of how you can have a bad DM, but stil have a good game.

The guy was terrible, but fortunately also so unintentionally hillarious, that we enjoyed playing with him.
He had a thing for godlike NPCs. Pretty much everyone we met could annihilate us with a glance, but he didn't want them to. Rather he wanted us to be angry, defiant, afraid for our characters, and to appease his standins in one way or another. Instead pretty much every encounter would have us immediately throwing ourselves in the dust, begging for mercy and praising the greatness of the NPCs, whether it was innkeeps, street sweepers, or archmages, and he just didn't know how to deal with it. We ended up in one ludicrous situation after another, where the players would be laughing their asses off, while D would be sweating profusely, making up one lame reason after another for why his overpowered creations didn't just kill us out of hand. He would devise cunning conundrums in which players had to sell their souls to save the rest of the party, and be completely stumped when they not only did so without the least worry or complaint, but actually started arguing over who would get to sell their soul. He would have ancient dragons breathe fire on our level 1 characters, and then make up wild excuses for why they "missed" when we informed him that we were dead from the 100+ points of damage we just took. He would look uncomprehendingly at us and feverishly browse his notes when we ignored his completely obvious railroading stratagems. He would call friends in the middle of sessions to ask for authentic sounding names for NPCs we just met. He would have epic battles with millions of dead, followed by the handful of survivors having a celebratory tournament with combats to the death. He would design 1st level spells that could wipe out whole groups of giants.

He was a nice enough guy, but he was just so disorganized, unbalanced, and continually stumped by everything that we did.
Some players didn't like it and left, but a few of us enjoyed the sheer bizarreness of it all. It was a pity that just when he was starting to show improvement, he unfortunately had to stop playing.

Stealth Marmot
2017-03-08, 07:26 AM
Ah yes. This. While I personally have avoided it, I ended up indirectly introducing freeform roleplaying to my elementary school (I GMed "The Talky Game" for my younger brother starting when I was about 7, introduced some of his friends to it at 10, and one of them ended up popular enough to spread it to the school). While I made a point of avoiding this nonsense a lot of the other people who ended up GMing didn't, and this sort of thing fits in perfectly with the 10 year olds being difficult GMs on purpose. For instance:

"You're in a small room with a door"
"I walk north"
"You walk into a wall"
"I walk south"
"You walk into a wall"
"I walk east"
"You walk into a door"
"I open the door, then walk east"
"You walk through the door" (The GM would also note that it wasn't closed here, so if you come back there's likely to be a problem in the room because of that).

I never played in any of these, but I heard stories. It was ridiculous.

>Get Ye Flask

Anonymouswizard
2017-03-08, 09:25 AM
>Get Ye Flask

On your joinery to the flask a random encounter appears!

*Dice roll*

You have been eaten by a friend.

Avianmosquito
2017-03-08, 09:38 AM
>Get Ye Flask

But don't forget to rest at the bonfire to refill it.

comicshorse
2017-03-08, 11:42 AM
One of the worst GM's I ever met had my quit his game over a session I wasn't even there for.

He's running a '7th Sea' campaign and I create a swashbuckling privateer who put most of his skills into being deadly with a sword. First session is rather dull but I figure he needs time. I can't make next session due to being in a different county for a family emergency but he tells me that's fine and he'll run my character as a NPC
Next session after that we meet up and I ask what happened. He explains we'd traveled underground and encountered a kingdom of subterranean creatures who'd insisted one of us fight in the arena, the conversation then goes like this
GM: So you're character volunteered
Me: Oh, fair enough. How did I do ?
GM: You lost
Me: Oh well. What happened......
GM: Not to one of their champions
Me: Oh
GM: Just one of their ordinary workers
ME: Well.......
GM: In fact it was one of their children
ME: A child ?
GM: And you didn't just lose, you were slaughtered. Never got a blow in. Had to beg for mercy
ME: Oh

I quit at the end of the session.
The rest of the PCs quit a session later after being amushed in a forest by a bunch of snakes. Who used tactics. Who won't scared of fire. And in a forest where the P.Cs couldn't climb trees to escape them

Arbane
2017-03-08, 05:22 PM
One of the worst GM's I ever met had my quit his game over a session I wasn't even there for.


That is indeed an impressive level or terribleness.

I once quit a game due to the aftermath of a session I wasn't in - I missed a week and came back to find my character was in a coma due to mishandling some magic item (it was Rolemaster, he arguably was lucky), and stayed that way for the entire session I WAS there to play in. Thrilling.

Mr Beer
2017-03-08, 05:35 PM
Some post apocalyptic game, come across a tank in a huge field with a guy half out of the hatch looking around.
That would be nifty to own but if we snipe the guy the others will close the hatch and kill us. I'm a sniper and sneaky so let me try and stealth up to the tank. After many rolls and making it behind the tank and the guy doesn't see me, i roll to lob a grenade into the open hatch and nothing.

GM: you forgot to pull the pin

I would get up and walk away at that point.

Pauly
2017-03-08, 08:13 PM
I'll forgive inexperienced zdMs.

I remember one of my friends complaining that he had a really bad DM in a historically based Italian Renaissance campaign he had just started. So I signed up to the group as it seemed like an interesting idea and maybe it could be salvaged if we could talk the DM around.

I get to the table and my friend pulls out a character sheet. He's playing a ninja. Yes historically there was a Japanese diplomatic mission to Italy in the 1500s so technically this is possible. Then about 15 minutes into the session another character, a warlock, starts openly performing magic. In renaissance Italy. At the height of the Catholic church's political power. The player then complains about the NPCs violent and hostile reaction. Anyway our mission for the session is to capture an painter and return him to our sponsor. My friend the ninja jumps out at the painter and pulls out his sword to intimidate him into coming with us, only to whine horribly when the painter turns out to be an expert duellist who proceeds to carve him up. The painter's name - Caravaggio.

The DM wasn't a great DM, however my friend to this day still calls hime the worst DM he's ever played with.

Pex
2017-03-09, 01:02 PM
I'll forgive inexperienced zdMs.

I remember one of my friends complaining that he had a really bad DM in a historically based Italian Renaissance campaign he had just started. So I signed up to the group as it seemed like an interesting idea and maybe it could be salvaged if we could talk the DM around.

I get to the table and my friend pulls out a character sheet. He's playing a ninja. Yes historically there was a Japanese diplomatic mission to Italy in the 1500s so technically this is possible. Then about 15 minutes into the session another character, a warlock, starts openly performing magic. In renaissance Italy. At the height of the Catholic church's political power. The player then complains about the NPCs violent and hostile reaction. Anyway our mission for the session is to capture an painter and return him to our sponsor. My friend the ninja jumps out at the painter and pulls out his sword to intimidate him into coming with us, only to whine horribly when the painter turns out to be an expert duellist who proceeds to carve him up. The painter's name - Caravaggio.

The DM wasn't a great DM, however my friend to this day still calls hime the worst DM he's ever played with.

Nice counterpoint.

Anonymouswizard
2017-03-09, 04:44 PM
I'll forgive inexperienced zdMs.

I remember one of my friends complaining that he had a really bad DM in a historically based Italian Renaissance campaign he had just started. So I signed up to the group as it seemed like an interesting idea and maybe it could be salvaged if we could talk the DM around.

I get to the table and my friend pulls out a character sheet. He's playing a ninja. Yes historically there was a Japanese diplomatic mission to Italy in the 1500s so technically this is possible. Then about 15 minutes into the session another character, a warlock, starts openly performing magic. In renaissance Italy. At the height of the Catholic church's political power. The player then complains about the NPCs violent and hostile reaction. Anyway our mission for the session is to capture an painter and return him to our sponsor. My friend the ninja jumps out at the painter and pulls out his sword to intimidate him into coming with us, only to whine horribly when the painter turns out to be an expert duellist who proceeds to carve him up. The painter's name - Caravaggio.

The DM wasn't a great DM, however my friend to this day still calls hime the worst DM he's ever played with.

A nice reminder that sometimes GMs can appear much worse due to your preferences differing.

(Although I'd have probably run such a game with Savage Worlds rather than D&d, to get a mixture of fast combat and less focus on magic, it still sounds like an awesome game with players who just wanted a dungeon crawl)

Velaryon
2017-03-09, 05:55 PM
"There aren't any Torches sold in this country."

"Okay, can we make some?"

"There aren't any torches in this country. You don't have the right materials."

"We're standing in a forest."

"You're unable to find anything that burns."

I am amazed you didn't leave the table right here. I most likely would have. Ye gods.

Mr Beer
2017-03-09, 09:18 PM
I am amazed you didn't leave the table right here. I most likely would have. Ye gods.

Or go straight into heavy-handed sarcasm: "Oh an asbestos forest, of course, why didn't you say so? I take some of the completely fireproof leaves and weave them into a cloak..should come in handy next time we get fireballed, because of course they are simply immune to flame."

Delta
2017-03-10, 03:33 AM
I got another one, GM so bad I stopped showing up after one session:

He was running a Savage Worlds game set in the Babylon 5 universe, we were all playing military/security characters, but since we had all made them up on our own, we were in completely different places as the game started, one was a security guard on the station, I was a marine serving on an Earthforce spaceship approaching the station, another was an intelligence officer and the last was a pilot.

The game starts with the GM telling us where we start out and then says "Okay, I gotta go get some lunch go roleplay and get to know each other", gets up and out of the room for over half an hour. Again, none of our characters knew each other and we started out in completely different places with no backdrop and nothing in common. We tried setting up a scene were my marine and the pilot met the security guy when entering the station but yeah, it didn't go very far.

The guy obviously had no idea whatsoever how a military works, things like ranks, chain of command etc. were completely foreign concepts to him even after me and another player tried to explain that no, the security chief of Babylon 5 does not have the authority to order around marines who are on shore leave on his station as a standard procedure, and an ambassador can't order around a military pilot, stuff like that.

He constantly asks us to "roleplay something" without giving us any plot hooks or whatever, but when me and the pilot then start doing what our characters came here for (booze and strippers, obviously, we were soldiers on shore leave after all), he immediately cut us off and wanted us to do more "serious" stuff (again, there was no serious stuff to be done, because there had been no plot). Sidebar: The black female security officer had to constantly endure a string of sexist, racist slurs from NPCs, even aliens.

When some action finally got going, our captain proved to be completely useless and constantly asking us what to do, even in the middle of battle. A marine, a fighter pilot, a spy and a security guard where constantly having debates on a battleship bridge in the middle of combat, and even when directly asked the GM thought it was a great idea because he wanted to "involve us more", I somewhat understand what he was trying to do but it was completely ridiculous for a military setting and none of the players or characters really wanted any part of it.

When after some hours we asked whether he planned for a food break he said no because obviously, he had had something to eat before (no, he never offered anything to any of us) and the local pizza place was closed so we'd have had to drive over to the next town to get anything and he really didn't want to break the game for that long.

The "final boss" was defeated by an NPC/deus ex machina after we fought against him ineffectively for an hour or so and he obviously thought it was the most amazing final battle of all time. Oh, and the sexist and racist jokes did not stop after they started.

Yeah, we weren't back for the next session after that, but there's still an epilogue because I talked to another player who gave it a second shot: In the second session, they happened upon a wormhole randomly, met a romulan warship from Star Trek, exchanged information, technology and weapons with them and then went on their way again...

Knaight
2017-03-10, 11:59 AM
A few disjointed sessions later, the group was tasked with slaying a few Hill Giants. We killed the first group, only to come to a Cave. The DM informed us if we didn't get in there the hostages would be killed by the end of the day. The Cave was very dark. I asked for Torches as the DM had banned the light spell for being too science fiction-y at the start of the game.

"There aren't any Torches sold in this country."

"Okay, can we make some?"

"There aren't any torches in this country. You don't have the right materials."

"We're standing in a forest."

"You're unable to find anything that burns."

"If you're in a forest, you can just say 'I pick up a stick' and don't have to ask me if there's a stick to pick up first" is my literal standard example for how I'm fine with players using implicit items in a scene that I haven't explicitly stated were there.

Lord Torath
2017-03-10, 12:57 PM
A few disjointed sessions later, the group was tasked with slaying a few Hill Giants. We killed the first group, only to come to a Cave. The DM informed us if we didn't get in there the hostages would be killed by the end of the day. The Cave was very dark. I asked for Torches as the DM had banned the light spell for being too science fiction-y at the start of the game.

"There aren't any Torches sold in this country."

"Okay, can we make some?"

"There aren't any torches in this country. You don't have the right materials."

"We're standing in a forest."

"You're unable to find anything that burns."Translation: "I've specially designed this combat to be extra nasty, and I will block any actions or precautions you try to make it any easier, no matter how reasonable they may be." :smallconfused::smallannoyed::smallmad:

Koo Rehtorb
2017-03-10, 01:00 PM
To be fair, torches require more than wood to function. Lightning a tree branch on fire is not going to do anything for you. It requires some additional flammable substance on the end for it to work as a torch.

BRC
2017-03-10, 01:06 PM
To be fair, torches require more than wood to function. Lightning a tree branch on fire is not going to do anything for you. It requires some additional flammable substance on the end for it to work as a torch.
Still, not going to be hard to find in a forest, or you could repurpose something you already have. Cloth, rope, ect.

The part that is REALLY stretching it is "No torches are sold in this country" bit. No torches? Also, presumably no candles or lanterns. Nobody needs to see in the dark. When the sun goes down people just stay exactly where they are until it comes up again.

Spellbreaker26
2017-03-10, 06:44 PM
Still, not going to be hard to find in a forest, or you could repurpose something you already have. Cloth, rope, ect.

The part that is REALLY stretching it is "No torches are sold in this country" bit. No torches? Also, presumably no candles or lanterns. Nobody needs to see in the dark. When the sun goes down people just stay exactly where they are until it comes up again.

Maybe it's a country full of people with Darkvision, Elves, Dwarves, etc.

Kantaki
2017-03-10, 07:04 PM
Still, not going to be hard to find in a forest, or you could repurpose something you already have. Cloth, rope, ect.

The part that is REALLY stretching it is "No torches are sold in this country" bit. No torches? Also, presumably no candles or lanterns. Nobody needs to see in the dark. When the sun goes down people just stay exactly where they are until it comes up again.

Why would they need torches (or candles or lanterns for that matter)?
People sleep when it is dark.
You only need light if you want to „work” in the dark.
The only „work” done in the darkness is obviously of lawbreaking nature.
That means making torches illegal prevents crime.
Making it absolutely logical.
I mean you can't just walk into a shop and buy a flashlight. Wait...:smallconfused:

And of course the forest is fireproof.
That prevents forest fires.
Breeding fireproof trees is only reasonable.
Anyone would do it if they had the capability.:smalltongue:

halfeye
2017-03-10, 07:45 PM
Why would they need torches (or candles or lanterns for that matter)?
People sleep when it is dark.
You only need light if you want to „work” in the dark.

That might work at the equator, but in the temperate and polar zones, the length of the solar day depends on the time of year. Most people allegedly sleep eight hours a day, what happes at solstice when the night is 16 hours long?

Kantaki
2017-03-10, 07:53 PM
That might work at the equator, but in the temperate and polar zones, the length of the solar day depends on the time of year. Most people allegedly sleep eight hours a day, what happes at solstice when the night is 16 hours long?

Er... aye.
The whole post was very much not serious.
And there I thougt I made this obvious.
I mean even ignoring longer nights- what about miners or sailors or other professions who usually need light for some of their work.

Pex
2017-03-10, 08:00 PM
Torches is cheating.

Pugwampy
2017-03-12, 02:51 AM
After many rolls and making it behind the tank and the guy doesn't see me, i roll to lob a grenade into the open hatch and nothing.

GM: you forgot to pull the pin

If player never said it , It never happened in my game . Thats a house rule for me .

In the heat of battle you can forget things . DM needs feedback .
I would want a player to say . "I pull the pin and toss the grenade"

Koo Rehtorb
2017-03-12, 03:15 AM
If player never said it , It never happened in my game . Thats a house rule for me .

In the heat of battle you can forget things . DM needs feedback .
I would want a player to say . "I pull the pin and toss the grenade"

Link your players to this thread please.

Pauly
2017-03-12, 03:19 AM
If player never said it , It never happened in my game . Thats a house rule for me .

In the heat of battle you can forget things . DM needs feedback .
I would want a player to say . "I pull the pin and toss the grenade"

Do you make your players say I raise my rifle to my right shoulder. I open my eyes. I put my right eye to the sight. I aim at the bad guy. I squeeze, not pull the trigger? Oris it OK for them to say I take an aimed shot at the bad guy?

Are your games full of characyers falling over because they asphxiated bcause the player didn't say "I am breathing"?

The basics of operating a weapon they are familiar with is somerhing players shouldn't have to say. I'm all for making them say they pull the pin if they are unfamiliar with grenades. But when the character is a trained soldier in a modern combat system, forgetting to pull the pin is covered by critical failure rolls.

Inevitability
2017-03-12, 03:54 AM
If player never said it , It never happened in my game . Thats a house rule for me .

In the heat of battle you can forget things . DM needs feedback .
I would want a player to say . "I pull the pin and toss the grenade"

"We travel for five days."
"You never said you were stopping to rest or eat. Somewhere halfway your trip, you all die of dehydration."

Delta
2017-03-12, 05:05 AM
If player never said it , It never happened in my game . Thats a house rule for me .

In the heat of battle you can forget things . DM needs feedback .
I would want a player to say . "I pull the pin and toss the grenade"

So do you require a player to say he disengages the safety? That he loads his weapon before going on a mission? Do you give penalties for dehydration if players don't constantly tell you how much their characters drink every day? If a player doesn't tell you how he put on pants in the morning does he run around naked all day? How about breathing?

There's a ton of stuff that happens in your game that your players never tell you, you just decide where to draw the line.

JustIgnoreMe
2017-03-12, 08:02 AM
If player never said it , It never happened in my game . Thats a house rule for me .
"I use my muscles to lift my left foot slightly, adjust my centre of gravity, slowly swing my leg forwards a footstep-length, then lower my foot to the floor and put weight on it. Then I repeat for my right, carefully using my inner-ear to maintain stability in bipedal motion. I'll continue doing that, alternating left and right, while breathing (in and out), hearing, seeing, smelling and otherwise sensing the world around me for potential threats, including tripping hazards."

"Sorry, you forgot to say you used the oxygen to metabolise carbohydrates to power your body functions. You fall into a coma and die."

Pugwampy
2017-03-12, 08:52 AM
There's a ton of stuff that happens in your game that your players never tell you, you just decide where to draw the line.

Rephrase , I draw the line in the middle of combat . Details details detail . Players should think about these things . I do not think this is unreasonable . I also lead by example anything i want declared from players I will do so myself . If I forget and they catch me out i will concede to their wisdom .

When I first play tested as an apprentice DM . My fish monster horde wielding elf bane spears wanted to climb a tree .
How can you climb a tree if you are holding spear in two hands ? My fave DM said .

I never considered that . I took that lesson to heart .



"We travel for five days."
"You never said you were stopping to rest or eat. Somewhere halfway your trip, you all die of dehydration."

You refuse to spend gold on my insta teleport or rent a griffin services ? Die you scrooge .

Nope i make note if they have enough supplies .
If they are newbies I tell em to stock up . When they set off Then i keep saying ARE YOU THERE YET < ARE YOU THERE YET < ARE YOU THERE YET ?

I keep track of time . I moan to them to stop and NOM and if they are short , i tell them to find water or drink their peewee . Hunt a wabbit or eat a player. YUM YUM YUM .

Survival skill is fun to play with . Its not really big issue not to mention encounter and XP fun . We do lots of camping in my campaign .


Link your players to this thread please
Why ? They know me much better than you do .


Are your games full of characyers falling over because they asphxiated bcause the player didn't say "I am breathing"?

Whats a characyers my precious ?


Do you make your players say I raise my rifle to my right shoulder. I open my eyes. I put my right eye to the sight. I aim at the bad guy. I squeeze, not pull the trigger? Oris it OK for them to say I take an aimed shot at the bad guy?

Yes I will accept aimed shot declaration but I would probably award bonus XP for above and beyond roleplaying in that detail .



So do you require a player to say he disengages the safety?

Yes thats reasonable . It also brings up did he ever make use of his saftey or is there an opportunity for him to shoot his foot off when he rolls dreaded 1 .


he loads his weapon before going on a mission?

Its fair to remind him of that the first few sessions and then dont and see what happens and yes bring it up at a crucial combat encounter.


Do you give penalties for dehydration if players don't constantly tell you how much their characters drink every day?

Thats out of combat and yes i do kinda keep track of food and drink and time. I assume anytime they sit to eat camping or in a whorehouse , they will take a drink after they eat . At least once per session they need a lunch break or i moan


If a player doesn't tell you how he put on pants in the morning does he run around naked all day?

Wow Awesome New house rule !!!! ..... XP bonus for running around without yer pants !!!


How about breathing?

How about farting ?



You just decide where to draw the line.

Amen brother

ALL HAIL DM THE ONE TRUE PROPHET OF THE DICE GODS

Some players dare to call me a terrorist .
I prefer to think of myself as a teacher .

If you have any complaints regarding my craft , please take it up with my 5 Dragons and 1 Tyrannosaurus lawyers .

Pugwampy
2017-03-12, 09:45 AM
"Sorry, you forgot to say you used the oxygen to metabolise carbohydrates to power your body functions. You fall into a coma and die."

Yet another breathing joke ? I think I will just ignore you .

JNAProductions
2017-03-12, 09:50 AM
If player never said it , It never happened in my game . Thats a house rule for me .

In the heat of battle you can forget things . DM needs feedback .
I would want a player to say . "I pull the pin and toss the grenade"

It should be assumed the characters are competent. If a character is, say, senile, then I can understand requiring this (or if they're under a curse or something that makes them less precise) but in general? That's far too harsh.

GraakosGraakos
2017-03-12, 09:59 AM
Rephrase , I draw the line in the middle of combat . Details details detail . Players should think about these things . I do not think this is unreasonable . I also lead by example anything i want declared from players I will do so myself . If I forget and they catch me out i will concede to their wisdom .

When I first play tested as an apprentice DM . My fish monster horde wielding elf bane spears wanted to climb a tree .
How can you climb a tree if you are holding spear in two hands ? My fave DM said .

I never considered that . I took that lesson to heart .




You refuse to spend gold on my insta teleport or rent a griffin services ? Die you scrooge .

Nope i make note if they have enough supplies .
If they are newbies I tell em to stock up . When they set off Then i keep saying ARE YOU THERE YET < ARE YOU THERE YET < ARE YOU THERE YET ?

I keep track of time . I moan to them to stop and NOM and if they are short , i tell them to find water or drink their peewee . Hunt a wabbit or eat a player. YUM YUM YUM .


You sound eleven and also terrible. I don't know why your players would come back to your games unless all the other DMs in your area were killed by some accident or explosion.

Pugwampy
2017-03-12, 10:29 AM
Has anyone been in a real fight here ?

You see red , You poop your pants without noticing . Your adrenaline and instincts take over . You are emotionally compromised , you are very much not competent . All you have is your hundreds of hours of training over and over .
Do you believe in the entire history of military ware fare that every last grenade has been tossed with the pin pulled out ?


What makes DND game exciting is all the funny detail and random factors of success and failure . You came to toss some dice to win and lose and have fun but always killing the bad guy in the end .

Do you not want to be reminded that grenades have pins in them ?
Do you not wish to Role Play a bit more than "I toss the grenade "

When DM asks if you remembered to pull the pin out , he is not trying to make your life suck , he is trying to make you see the game better , to consider funny silly things of this nature .
DM cannot read your thoughts only what you tell him . Did the player imagine pulling out a pin and then tossing the grenade . DM does not know that , he only knows what you told him or not told him.

DM has every right to ask and has every right to reject your

" UMMMM .......well yes of course i did that DUH ! "

DID YOU ? DID YOU REALLY ? Did you even remember that grenades come with pins ?

FYI I never ever hosted a WW2 game session in my life.

Boy this is fun for me .

JNAProductions
2017-03-12, 10:30 AM
Characters are not us. They've (usually) been in a poopton of fights. They're a lot more combat ready than we are.

Beans
2017-03-12, 10:35 AM
Whats a characyers my precious ?
Are you really in any position to mock others for errors in their typing?


It should be assumed the characters are competent. If a character is, say, senile, then I can understand requiring this (or if they're under a curse or something that makes them less precise) but in general? That's far too harsh.
Very much this---especially given that, oftentimes (depending on the game, etc), the characters are more competent at certain things than the players actually are. If I were in a firefight, I absolutely would be at risk of not keeping track of my ammunition or operating a hand grenade improperly.
If my character is supposed to be a soldier of some sort, while it's not impossible for them to make mistakes, they're supposed to have the benefits of training if not actual experience, and it's less verisimilitudinous for those mistakes to occur. Requiring players to continually put exacting detail into actions with which the characters should be familiar is needlessly pedantic at best.
Even holding oneself to the same standard doesn't fix it, as I can hardly see a way this policy doesn't result in normally-simple things being drawn out into an overly-fiddly slog.

JNAProductions
2017-03-12, 10:37 AM
Even holding oneself to the same standard doesn't fix it, as I can hardly see a way this policy doesn't result in normally-simple things being drawn out into an overly-fiddly slog.

Yes, that's a good point. Do you hold yourself to those same standards?

Beans
2017-03-12, 10:46 AM
Yes, that's a good point. Do you hold yourself to those same standards?

Pugwampy does claim to do so.
One wonders how far down the dull, red-tape-choked rabbit hole goes, and exactly how it was dug, and how many hours the rabbit laborers worked, and how much food and water they required, and if any of them wore pants that day.
If meticulous bookkeeping is Pugwampy's idea of "Role Playing", I hope they get college credit hours toward their accountancy major.

Kantaki
2017-03-12, 10:55 AM
Has anyone been in a real fight here ?


Now I haven't.
Can't use a weapon either.
I barely can identify the hurty end and that you point it towards the guy you want dead.

My character on the other hand has learned that stuff. That's what their levels and stuff represent.
So generally I would assume they know what they do.
I mean do you expect the player of a spellcaster to know magic? To perform the gestures or words for their spells.

Yes, sometimes the PCs forget the safety/ the pin/ make some other stupid mistake.
But that's why we use rules.
But that's what we roll for.
If that roll results in a (critical) failure then yes the character forgot to pull the pin/ made a similar mistake.
But if my character fails because I haven’t the slightest idea how to use their weapon that's just terrible.
If I wanted that I wouldn't have to roleplay.

Beans
2017-03-12, 11:03 AM
I mean do you expect the player of a spellcaster to know magic? To perform the gestures or words for their spells.
And what happens if, say, somebody's character is non-human? Do they need real-life experience in being a half-orc? What happens if someone's playing a Dragonborn (that is, the 5e race, not the Elder Scrolls figure) and wants to use their breath weapon? Does the player need to present an MLA-formatted paper (five pages minimum, single-spaced) on the mechanics of spewing electricity from their mouth?

Cazero
2017-03-12, 11:11 AM
When I first play tested as an apprentice DM . My fish monster horde wielding elf bane spears wanted to climb a tree .
How can you climb a tree if you are holding spear in two hands ? My fave DM said .
Like this. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1004.html)
Note how Roy uses both options at the same time : throwing the weapon to stick it upward and holding the weapon with one hand.

Now consider this : while your elf was probably lower level, we can also assert that he had higher DEX, lower encumberance, and better grip options. Why did your DM stopped you from climbing again?
Scratch that, I thought you had an elf.

Pugwampy
2017-03-12, 11:41 AM
I am proud to have DM,d 50 plus sessions , 2 mega campaigns , 2 separate clubs probably 20 or so different people played . I hope to DM and play 100 sessions.

I am not perfect I have my faults .
I keep a diary of everything in and out of game every session . I jot down and analyze all the the funny and interesting things that happened including complaints .

Not one person ever complained about my "annoying little details" or their annoying detailed feedback in the middle of combat . This makes the game come alive and its appreciated .

Yes this can anger an already frustrated player who keeps rolling low or getting pounded . I can and do back off if someone is having a bad dice day .

If you drama queens dont want to pull a pin from a grenade , whatever BRUH .

LORD PUG will type no more of this .

Koo Rehtorb
2017-03-12, 11:55 AM
Why ? They know me much better than you do .

So they can participate.

digiman619
2017-03-12, 12:55 PM
I am proud to have DM,d 50 plus sessions , 2 mega campaigns , 2 separate clubs probably 20 or so different people played . I hope to DM and play 100 sessions.

I am not perfect I have my faults .
I keep a diary of everything in and out of game every session . I jot down and analyze all the the funny and interesting things that happened including complaints .

Not one person ever complained about my "annoying little details" or their annoying detailed feedback in the middle of combat . This makes the game come alive and its appreciated .

Yes this can anger an already frustrated player who keeps rolling low or getting pounded . I can and do back off if someone is having a bad dice day .

If you drama queens dont want to pull a pin from a grenade , whatever BRUH .

LORD PUG will type no more of this .

The fact that you chose to name yourself after a small, annoying demon that is infamous for making things far more difficult then they have to be (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/fey/gremlins/gremlin-pugwampi/) is perhaps quite telling.

GraakosGraakos
2017-03-12, 01:27 PM
Has anyone been in a real fight here ?

You see red , You poop your pants without noticing . Your adrenaline and instincts take over . You are emotionally compromised , you are very much not competent . All you have is your hundreds of hours of training over and over .
Do you believe in the entire history of military ware fare that every last grenade has been tossed with the pin pulled out ?


What makes DND game exciting is all the funny detail and random factors of success and failure . You came to toss some dice to win and lose and have fun but always killing the bad guy in the end .

Do you not want to be reminded that grenades have pins in them ?
Do you not wish to Role Play a bit more than "I toss the grenade "

When DM asks if you remembered to pull the pin out , he is not trying to make your life suck , he is trying to make you see the game better , to consider funny silly things of this nature .
DM cannot read your thoughts only what you tell him . Did the player imagine pulling out a pin and then tossing the grenade . DM does not know that , he only knows what you told him or not told him.

DM has every right to ask and has every right to reject your

" UMMMM .......well yes of course i did that DUH ! "

DID YOU ? DID YOU REALLY ? Did you even remember that grenades come with pins ?

FYI I never ever hosted a WW2 game session in my life.

Boy this is fun for me .

You sound even more eleven. Hurr Durr muh accuracy is a phase a lot of roleplayers go through until they realize how stupid it is.

It's a fantasy role playing game. Yes war and fighting are terrifying. People make stupid, idiotic mistakes and kill themselves and their friends.

If your players want to do that, neat. But my players play games to be heroes, rise above their circumstances, and show competency and bravery in the face of danger.

Making any game a reality simulator is moronic in any case, because there is no rules system comprehensive enough to encompass everything that happens in a fight.

Pauly
2017-03-12, 07:36 PM
Rephrase , I draw the line in the middle of combat . Details details detail . Players should think about these things . I do not think this is unreasonable . I also lead by example anything i want declared from players I will do so myself . If I forget and they catch me out i will concede to their wisdom .

When I first play tested as an apprentice DM . My fish monster horde wielding elf bane spears wanted to climb a tree .
How can you climb a tree if you are holding spear in two hands ? My fave DM said .

I never considered that . I took that lesson to heart .

.

Because spears are 1 handed weapons that can be used in 2 hands. Because a spear is a lever that can be wedged between branches and grabbed again. Because your hands are not glued to the weapon.

Your fave DM was wrong and was being a pedantic tick.

It definitely isn't a good idea in combat and deserved some kind of dex penalty, but for the DM to say it was impossible requires willful and intentional stupidity.

Marlowe
2017-03-12, 08:18 PM
Never mind listing Spears as 2-handed weapons was moronic in the first place. Spear and shield is one of THE most common foot-soldier weapons combos throughout history, and WoTC made it illegal.

And no, I don't buy a Dory is a shortspear, thank you very much.

Legato Endless
2017-03-12, 08:21 PM
I can see a kind of logic to the original example. Like, you can't cast a spell while raging in Pathfinder. It's not precisely correct in this instance, but the DM saying, wait a minute, how are you going to do X while Y is happening is a reasonable occurrence. You can't climb a tree because (to go with something more reasonable) both your arms are full, you're bleeding out and half conscious, you're forgetting your tree phobia Durkon.

The real leap is where Pugwampy took that to mean you need to keep slavish track of details instead of contextual interference. "I strike the enemy with my sword." "The scabbard does minimal blunt damage because you forgot to tell me you unsheathed it," is a very different idea of game design.

Marlowe
2017-03-12, 08:39 PM
"...and you basically can't play a psionic character because you're not psychic yourself..."

Anonymouswizard
2017-03-12, 08:49 PM
"...and you basically can't play a psionic character because you're not psychic yourself..."

We're bringing up CC again? How long do you think it'll take to get oxygen banned and the nanoassemblers rendered unusable? I don't have enough ranks in Knowledge (bad GMs) to know how many ranks I need.

Marlowe
2017-03-12, 08:56 PM
There have been a number of posters over the years who have set these boards basically groaning with the "Player knowledge should equal character knowledge" fallacy expounded by Pugwampy as an excuse to screw over their players. CC is simply the superior example.

Beans
2017-03-12, 09:00 PM
The Trekkin-goes-to-Heckin' saga was a beautiful, dismal stroll through shining towers of loopy-DM madness and ruins of non-fun squalor. It is something to aspire to, and yet also something to avoid like the plague.

Honest Tiefling
2017-03-12, 09:09 PM
Characters are not us. They've (usually) been in a poopton of fights. They're a lot more combat ready than we are.

Now, now, he does have a point. This is why I only play demon summoners, since I typically spend my weekend summoning abominations from other dimensions so that when someone doesn't show for a game, we have someone to take over their character for them. Abarxicaros the Flayer of Angels is really warming up to us, and it's gotten the hang of a sorcerer. Horrible table manners, however.

Marlowe
2017-03-12, 09:10 PM
The "My players like me so I must be doing it right" defense is also one I've seen from quite often from people to justify their horrible ideas. Pugwumpy might be an awesome, DM who simply voiced an unpopular opinion. But his arguments are worryingly tainted and discredited by the company they've kept in the past.

Cluedrew
2017-03-12, 09:24 PM
"My players like me so I must be doing it right"Quite aside from the fact that doesn't mean you couldn't do better, my players like me despite my GMing skills not because of them. So I don't think that is much of a defence, to me there it at most means that nothing has to be fixed urgently.

On a different note: if Marty/CC said that player knowledge should equal character knowledge (I haven't gone through the files in a while) I can only imagine it is because he believed both should be zero.

Honest Tiefling
2017-03-12, 09:27 PM
On a different note: if Marty/CC said that player knowledge should equal character knowledge (I haven't gone through the files in a while) I can only imagine it is because he believed both should be zero.

Given the technical (and a little worrisome) backgrounds and knowledge of the players, I think he went in reverse and said that the characters don't know anything the players do. Even about the setting, given that trees kept disappearing and reappearing.

Hrm...That gives me an idea for a fey themed forest...

Malimar
2017-03-12, 10:07 PM
Does the player need to present an MLA-formatted paper (five pages minimum, single-spaced) on the mechanics of spewing electricity from their mouth?
Obviously not, don't be ridiculous. MLA is for the humanities; science-based topics like breath weapons call for APA style.

Beans
2017-03-12, 10:45 PM
Obviously not, don't be ridiculous. MLA is for the humanities; science-based topics like breath weapons call for APA style.
Sorry, I'm a Classics major, so my Academics (Science) is nearly as low as my Grenades (Pin-Pulling) skill.

kraftcheese
2017-03-13, 02:19 AM
I mean I get that some people enjoy granularity in their RPGs, but I just don't understand why anyone would enjoy that amount of...pedantry.

Marlowe
2017-03-13, 02:43 AM
For D&D 3.5, I think we can give an honourable mention to any DM who says anything like "I want to keep things simple/well-balanced, so core classes only"

So to keep things simple/well-balanced you're going to restrict the game to the most complicated/broken classes ever.

Milo v3
2017-03-13, 03:06 AM
For D&D 3.5, I think we can give an honourable mention to any DM who says anything like "I want to keep things simple/well-balanced, so core classes only"

So to keep things simple/well-balanced you're going to restrict the game to the most complicated/broken classes ever.
They're not anywhere near the most complicated classes. Look at the evershifting stats of incarnum classes.

Zombimode
2017-03-13, 04:02 AM
For D&D 3.5, I think we can give an honourable mention to any DM who says anything like "I want to keep things simple/well-balanced, so core classes only"

So to keep things simple/well-balanced you're going to restrict the game to the most complicated/broken classes ever.

For me that wouldn't even the biggest concern. Much more troubeling would be the choice to use a System that has it's wealth of Options and material and the resulting wealth of interactions as one of it's main Features and then set limits in place in such a drastic way.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-03-13, 04:13 AM
Personally I'd be concerned that this DM wants to run 3.5 at all. Warning sign right there.

Anonymouswizard
2017-03-13, 04:57 AM
The Trekkin-goes-to-Heckin' saga was a beautiful, dismal stroll through shining towers of loopy-DM madness and ruins of non-fun squalor. It is something to aspire to, and yet also something to avoid like the plague.

The 'Trekkin gets pushed to the point that he acts like a responsible adult' story is one where great players we should aspire to be suffering under a GM who abused the power of the DMPC* and homebrew systems, and who just didn't seem like a good person.

* It's hard not to, I've had to add rules to my works to stop a DMPC from affecting the plot to much (I wouldn't have had one, but the party needed a fighter to tank)


The "My players like me so I must be doing it right" defense is also one I've seen from quite often from people to justify their horrible ideas. Pugwumpy might be an awesome, DM who simply voiced an unpopular opinion. But his arguments are worryingly tainted and discredited by the company they've kept in the past.

I mean my players enjoy my games, although i notice stone things wrong with my GMing style (encounters are too easy, overly focused on tech, NPCs are a tad shallow). It's says something about my skills as an entertainer that i can get them to enjoy it.


For D&D 3.5, I think we can give an honourable mention to any DM who says anything like "I want to keep things simple/well-balanced, so core classes only"

So to keep things simple/well-balanced you're going to restrict the game to the most complicated/broken classes ever.

Limiting it to cure to keep things simple makes sense, you're not having to flip through five different books to find the spell the wizard is carrying this week while also looking up if the Dragonfire Adept's Invocation works in this case.

Not that core doesn't have some of the most complicated to play and broken classes, it's just that limiting to cite for a specific kind of simplicity makes sense. I have aGM who's rule is 'I decide what books we use, and there will never be more than two sourcebooks per game', which is the same basic idea but more permissive.

hifidelity2
2017-03-13, 05:45 AM
Personally I'd be concerned that this DM wants to run 3.5 at all. Warning sign right there.

Personally that's all we use in my group - why ...because we don't have (or want) any splat books

GungHo
2017-03-13, 12:58 PM
"We travel for five days."
"You never said you were stopping to rest or eat. Somewhere halfway your trip, you all die of dehydration."

This is why you don't accept DM applications from people who wrote adventures for Sierra.

Stealth Marmot
2017-03-13, 01:21 PM
This is why you don't accept DM applications from people who wrote adventures for Sierra.

Let's not forget the other end where we have DMs who expect you to come up with amazingly specific solutions that require crazy logic with basically no clues.

Legato Endless
2017-03-13, 01:36 PM
This is why you don't accept DM applications from people who wrote adventures for Sierra.

Or a MUD designed by a pedantic sadist.

Anonymouswizard
2017-03-13, 01:46 PM
Personally that's all we use in my group - why ...because we don't have (or want) any splat books

There's nothing wrong with playing D&D (or 3.5 in particular), but it is in some ways mildly disliked for some legitimate reasons (although generally linked to the reasons it's loved). Most people I've met fall into one of two camps, 'D&D is awesome' or 'I prefer other systems'.

There's also the fact that I love to run science fiction games which means that most editions of D&D are as useful to me as a copy of Galactic Patrol (I can in theory run the game just from that, although I really need a lot more).

Stealth Marmot
2017-03-13, 02:43 PM
Or a MUD designed by a pedantic sadist.

So we're working on a theme of pedantic sadists?

Arbane
2017-03-13, 07:44 PM
Still, not going to be hard to find in a forest, or you could repurpose something you already have. Cloth, rope, ect.

The part that is REALLY stretching it is "No torches are sold in this country" bit. No torches? Also, presumably no candles or lanterns. Nobody needs to see in the dark. When the sun goes down people just stay exactly where they are until it comes up again.

It's that country from the Sword of Truth books where the Evil King decided to ban fire!

(I am not making this up.)


Limiting it to cure to keep things simple makes sense, you're not having to flip through five different books to find the spell the wizard is carrying this week while also looking up if the Dragonfire Adept's Invocation works in this case.


One GM I had said that people could use any sourcebook they liked - if they bought her a copy to use.


For D&D 3.5, I think we can give an honourable mention to any DM who says anything like "I want to keep things simple/well-balanced, so core classes only"

So to keep things simple/well-balanced you're going to restrict the game to the most complicated/broken classes ever.

I actually had a GM once who said "no Tome of Battle, it's OP", and then let me play a Druid. :smallbiggrin:

(Amazingly, I STILL wasn't OP! Because it was the ever-popular-with-bad-GMs 'prison break with no gear' scenario, and even Druids have a STAGGERING number of spells that require a divine focus, and it was too low-level for wild shape. Also, the GM kept slagging on me for something I've mercifully forgotten, so I didn't bother showing up for the second session third session. (All but one of his previous players had quit for SOME REASON. In retrospect, that should've been time to head for the door.))


The real leap is where Pugwampy took that to mean you need to keep slavish track of details instead of contextual interference. "I strike the enemy with my sword." "The scabbard does minimal blunt damage because you forgot to tell me you unsheathed it," is a very different idea of game design.

There's probably a word for that particular brand of screw-you gameplay, but I don't know what it is. Something involving both extreme literal-mindedness on the GM's part and the assumption that PCs are particularly pooorly-programmed drones....


This is why you don't accept DM applications from people who wrote adventures for Sierra.

THAT'S IT! I hereby dub this dysfunctional GMing style "Sierra Screw-You Gameplay"!

(For you youngsters, Sierra On-Line made a LOT of early computer graphic adventure games. They tended to have LOTS of puzzles that would kill you if you'd failed to look under a specific unhighlighted random rock that had been twenty screens back, and similar murderous obtuseness.)

The Random NPC
2017-03-13, 09:48 PM
It's that country from the Sword of Truth books where the Evil King decided to ban fire!

(I am not making this up.)

Wait, which one was that? I only really remember the Old World, D'Hara, Westland, and the place with the Mud people.


(For you youngsters, Sierra On-Line made a LOT of early computer graphic adventure games. They tended to have LOTS of puzzles that would kill you if you'd failed to look under a specific unhighlighted random rock that had been twenty screens back, and similar murderous obtuseness.)

Don't forget, because you pet that cat 4 screens ago, the rock got kicked into a hole and now you can't get the mcguffin.

Arbane
2017-03-13, 09:53 PM
Wait, which one was that? I only really remember the Old World, D'Hara, Westland, and the place with the Mud people.


"Westland", according to TVTropes' pages for the series. Evil Overlord Darken Rahl was the genius behind that idea. (So, it was the first book?)


Let's not forget the other end where we have DMs who expect you to come up with amazingly specific solutions that require crazy logic with basically no clues.

I've heard that bad GM style referred to as 'Pixelbitching'. (After a bad puzzle in an X-Files computer game that required clicking on one patch of about 4 pixels on one screen, or else the plot could NEVER ADVANCE.)

It's even worse when that One True Solution to the question "how to beat this otherwise invincible hosebeast boss monster?" I'm not a big fan of "read the GM's mind or DIE" gameplay.

Hawksteel
2017-03-14, 02:49 AM
Boy this is fun for me .

So you're just doing this to troll. We already got that.

Cluedrew
2017-03-14, 07:15 AM
This is why you don't accept DM applications from people who wrote adventures for Sierra.Considering what they were working with, I actually have great respect for (many of) the game makers of that time. Not that I would want to approach their games without a walkthrough now but there you have it.

Lord Torath
2017-03-14, 08:03 AM
Wait, which one was that? I only really remember the Old World, D'Hara, Westland, and the place with the Mud people.
"Westland", according to TVTropes' pages for the series. Evil Overlord Darken Rahl was the genius behind that idea. (So, it was the first book?)I thought it was in the Midlands, as Darken Rahl was not openly ruling in Westland (but had an agent working for him). Maybe it was the evil queen with the small country in the Midlands who had the box Rahl wanted who passed the no-fire law.

An Amy
2017-03-14, 08:48 AM
The worst DM I had was an older gentleman who was horrible at describing things properly and always added details when they became relevant to being detrimental against us. For example: he would tell us that a door opens up into a room. In the room is a chest. Okay, so we move into the room and go to the chest. But when we step on the rug in front of the chest a trap goes off. Wait... a rug? Or when an NPC shows up in a bar fight that wasn't there before. "Where did this guy come from?" "He was sitting down." "You said there were only three people in the bar." "He was in the restroom or something." "You just said he was sitting down." He also was insistent on his wife playing in the group but she would ALWAYS get bored halfway through every session and leave the table. I felt the same way... Did four or so sessions and stopped answering his phone calls...

I was also probably a bad DM back in the day. I had this campaign going where there was the party of heroes but there were also 2 villains who were not at the table. They came up with and pretty much controlled the villains of the campaign. Their motivations and plans and such. One of the villain players came up with a trap that was really very well researched, planned and executed. It totally railroaded one of the PCs. The player that was on the receiving end of the trap rage quit. He also had a problem with me using spells from NWN that didn't exist (Hammer of the Gods) and coming up with homebrew content in general without revealing it ahead of time (such as a lost feat). He played my first epic level PC in a game though. After that he started scheduling the games that he DMed (in which I was a player) at the same time as the game of mine in that he used to play so as to compete for the same players.

ElFi
2017-03-14, 09:17 AM
This thread's been derailed in a major way, people. Let's try to get it back on topic, please.

I only have roughly a year of tabletop RPG experience, and have only been in two games (the current one and the previous one, which I GM'd), so I don't have much experience to draw on, but the worst GM I've ever had is probably myself, regrettably.

It was the first roleplaying campaign anyone at the table had ever been involved in, myself included. I had a lot of issues with encounter balance (to be fair, we were playing M&M, which offers extremely skimpy guidelines on balance, and the minmax-friendly nature of the system means a character's PL is only an extremely rough estimate of their actual danger level), and probably only mustered two or three encounters of reasonable challenge over the course of a dozen-and-a-half sessions, the rest were curbstomps that usually ended in the PC's favor. I allowed one of the players to make a PC who completely destabilized the game's tone and pacing for many, many reasons that would take an entire year's worth of posts to write about. The plot wasn't as thought-out as I would've like, and we'd sometimes spend long periods of time without combat due to exposition I needed to get in for moving forward. And in the end, from a certain point of view, a big reveal near the end of the campaign kinda invalidated a lot of the decisions the PC's had made, what with the revelation that who they believed was the game's main antagonist had actually been playing them the whole time to take down a bigger threat. None of my players called me out on this, I'm still not sure whether they didn't realize, didn't care, or some combination of both.

I won't say the campaign was a total mess, but looking back, I made a lot of GM decisions that I regret making now. Hopefully some experience as a player under the new GM will learn me for the future.

Zombimode
2017-03-14, 09:24 AM
This thread's been derailed in a major way, people. Let's try to get it back on topic, please.

I only have roughly a year of tabletop RPG experience, and have only been in two games (the current one and the previous one, which I GM'd), so I don't have much experience to draw on, but the worst GM I've ever had is probably myself, regrettably.

It was the first roleplaying campaign anyone at the table had ever been involved in, myself included. I had a lot of issues with encounter balance (to be fair, we were playing M&M, which offers extremely skimpy guidelines on balance, and the minmax-friendly nature of the system means a character's PL is only an extremely rough estimate of their actual danger level), and probably only mustered two or three encounters of reasonable challenge over the course of a dozen-and-a-half sessions, the rest were curbstomps that usually ended in the PC's favor. I allowed one of the players to make a PC who completely destabilized the game's tone and pacing for many, many reasons that would take an entire year's worth of posts to write about. The plot wasn't as thought-out as I would've like, and we'd sometimes spend long periods of time without combat due to exposition I needed to get in for moving forward. And in the end, from a certain point of view, a big reveal near the end of the campaign kinda invalidated a lot of the decisions the PC's had made, what with the revelation that who they believed was the game's main antagonist had actually been playing them the whole time to take down a bigger threat. None of my players called me out on this, I'm still not sure whether they didn't realize, didn't care, or some combination of both.

I won't say the campaign was a total mess, but looking back, I made a lot of GM decisions that I regret making now. Hopefully some experience as a player under the new GM will learn me for the future.

Nothing of that sounds like bad DMing. Just inexperience, which is totally fine. DMing is not an easy task and draws upon many abilities of the person performing. You WILL screw up. And not just at the start. DMing is a neverending learning experience.

The hallmark of a bad DM is the utter belief to be in the right which no amount of critical thinking.

messy1349
2017-03-15, 12:14 PM
haven't read the rest of the thread but must post my answer.

the worst dm i've ever had was me.

i tried dm'ing when social anxiety, stage fright, and anger issues were big issues in my life (although i'm not sure i knew it at the time).

what resulted was an embarrassing, disastrous, epic fail.

while there might've been some good ideas, the result was brutal, unfair, and worst of all, not fun.

the most embarrassing part might be that it took over ten years to realize just what a jerk i was.

if the members of that group are out there, read this, and somehow figure out who i am, you have my deepest apologies.

Stealth Marmot
2017-03-15, 07:00 PM
I've heard that bad GM style referred to as 'Pixelbitching'. (After a bad puzzle in an X-Files computer game that required clicking on one patch of about 4 pixels on one screen, or else the plot could NEVER ADVANCE.)

It's even worse when that One True Solution to the question "how to beat this otherwise invincible hosebeast boss monster?" I'm not a big fan of "read the GM's mind or DIE" gameplay.

I've heard it referred to as Sierra Logic by TvTropes.

I grew up on the ___ Quest games so yeah, those sorts of puzzles do activate my rage lever.

GAAD
2017-03-17, 08:25 AM
My worst DM wasn't incompetent. He made great adventures, amazing encounters and dungeons. He understood that the point of the game was cooperation, and I had so many awesome times with him.

But there was one large, glaring problem. His "puzzles".

Taking on a Dire Bat Swarm at level 2? That's fine, we were warned ahead of time and convinced a goblin band to help us, leading to one of my favorite sequences I've ever played.

Vast political intrigue with which we were WAY over our heads? That's fine, spending about three sessions slowly in the background figuring out who controls what and how to get on their good side made for a good change of pace.

A solid, glowing handleless door? ****.

See, this DM fashioned himself an evil mastermind. In real life. And to prove it, he created the most fiendish of traps: the Frustration Wall. They are probably the simplest puzzle out there. To get through, all you need to do is permanently sacrifice the correct aspect of your character. If he was feeling generous, the puzzle might require the sacrifice of all our money. But more likely it was the removal of a magic item, or a key weapon, or perhaps limbs or ability drain. When he was really mad at us, the price was the life of one of our characters. To get through a door.

Oh, and it gets better! See, we tended not to have the option to NOT interact with Frustration Walls, as they typically showed up right after a point of no return and before a boss fight. And of course, they WERE puzzles after all. Each one was different, and we had to deduce what the correct valuable asset to destroy was based on how the Frustration Wall interacted with the rest of the world. Every Frustration Wall could and would accept any sacrifice to them, and it would hold. But the only way to progress would be to guess correctly.

These "puzzles" are not actually the main reason I don't game with him anymore though. About a year ago, he publically announced that I was a cruel human being, cut all ties with me, and then punched me in the face. Why? Because I dared to run an adventure myself with some of "his" players. And their characters didn't suffer. I was no longer worthy. I haven't seen him since.

Arbane
2017-03-17, 05:11 PM
My worst DM wasn't incompetent. He made great adventures, amazing encounters and dungeons. He understood that the point of the game was cooperation, and I had so many awesome times with him.

But there was one large, glaring problem. His "puzzles".

Taking on a Dire Bat Swarm at level 2? That's fine, we were warned ahead of time and convinced a goblin band to help us, leading to one of my favorite sequences I've ever played.

Vast political intrigue with which we were WAY over our heads? That's fine, spending about three sessions slowly in the background figuring out who controls what and how to get on their good side made for a good change of pace.

A solid, glowing handleless door? ****.

See, this DM fashioned himself an evil mastermind. In real life. And to prove it, he created the most fiendish of traps: the Frustration Wall. They are probably the simplest puzzle out there. To get through, all you need to do is permanently sacrifice the correct aspect of your character. If he was feeling generous, the puzzle might require the sacrifice of all our money. But more likely it was the removal of a magic item, or a key weapon, or perhaps limbs or ability drain. When he was really mad at us, the price was the life of one of our characters. To get through a door.

Oh, and it gets better! See, we tended not to have the option to NOT interact with Frustration Walls, as they typically showed up right after a point of no return and before a boss fight. And of course, they WERE puzzles after all. Each one was different, and we had to deduce what the correct valuable asset to destroy was based on how the Frustration Wall interacted with the rest of the world. Every Frustration Wall could and would accept any sacrifice to them, and it would hold. But the only way to progress would be to guess correctly.

:smalleek:

My two immediate thoughts on this:

1: "How'd the boss get on the other side of this?"
2: "So, the guy from the Saw movies got his start as a GM? Figures."
(Third thought, if a GM used one of these on me: "SCREW THAT, I'm finding a way around if I need to dig through a mountainside.")




These "puzzles" are not actually the main reason I don't game with him anymore though. About a year ago, he publically announced that I was a cruel human being, cut all ties with me, and then punched me in the face. Why? Because I dared to run an adventure myself with some of "his" players. And their characters didn't suffer. I was no longer worthy. I haven't seen him since.

And that's just kind of sad.

Kish
2017-03-17, 06:46 PM
While I would never defend Terry Goodkind's personality or his politics, I do feel obligated to point out that banning fire was explicitly supposed to be a law people couldn't survive following. The king in question never meant people to follow it; he meant people who were already in his favor to simply ignore it and people who weren't to scramble to get in his favor before they froze, starved, or got caught with one of the fires they were hiding from his enforcers.

Friv
2017-03-18, 09:21 AM
See, this DM fashioned himself an evil mastermind. In real life. And to prove it, he created the most fiendish of traps: the Frustration Wall. They are probably the simplest puzzle out there. To get through, all you need to do is permanently sacrifice the correct aspect of your character. If he was feeling generous, the puzzle might require the sacrifice of all our money. But more likely it was the removal of a magic item, or a key weapon, or perhaps limbs or ability drain. When he was really mad at us, the price was the life of one of our characters. To get through a door.

So I'm morbidly curious - was there an IC justification for these ridiculous contraptions? Were they punishments sent by the gods? A high-level ritual that you didn't have access to? What was up with them?

D.M LOVECRAFT
2017-03-18, 01:28 PM
One kid I played with tried to set it in silent hill it was absolutely awful. He did not have the ability to write a good story, in all honesty, it was sad. Another bad DM I had tried to set it in the metro universe and it was awful to bad, it had some potential

noob
2017-03-18, 04:47 PM
The worst gm I ever had was myself.

GAAD
2017-03-19, 12:58 AM
So I'm morbidly curious - was there an IC justification for these ridiculous contraptions? Were they punishments sent by the gods? A high-level ritual that you didn't have access to? What was up with them?

They were part of the security system of most of the dungeons, which were the ancient ruins of a civilization that was ruled by devils. In the first adventure we "accidentally" (Choo choo! All aboard!) re-activated all of them. These dungeons' bosses were infernal constructs. Basically think Dwarven ruins from Skyrim, except more EEVIIL.

As for how Paladins dealt with having to bow to the same infernal forces we were trying to stop in order to remove their influence... "What Paladins?"

Calthropstu
2017-03-19, 01:41 AM
And the DM screws with the saves against the wizard's spells, with us "failing" saves we know full well it's impossible for us to fail. We realized he was doing that when he cast a fireball and our rogue failed her save on 24. It's 10+Spell level+Intelligence modifier. How the **** is a 24 not a save? That would require an intelligence modifier of 12, that means a minimum intelligence score of 34. That's bull**** and we all knew it. I called him out on it, and he just insisted the save failed. Says the wizard has a feat. Well I've looked, there's no feat that adds THAT much to the save DC. All I see is spell focus and greater spell focus, which when combined would give a +2 to the DC and then he'd only need an intelligence of 30, which is still bull****


There is also elemental focus and greater elemental focus.
Or a 5th level fatespinner which can add +5 to the DC once per day. All 4 feats pluse fate spinner get up to a + 9.
There is also an ioun stone for another +1. Also there are races that get bonuses to cetain spell elements. I have seen a 10th lvl character throw a 40dc spell.

I had a gm throw such a character at me once. It sucked balls, especially since it was throwing save or suck spells. As a sorcerer.

As for my worst gm?

Picture the following scenario:

You have to use DM generated characters. Not much info on them, he wants to unviel the characters through storytelling. He obviously put a lot of work into his custom world. There are 11 characters to choose from. I pick a druid.
I figure there will be a standard 6 person party with those not picked being NPCs. NOPE. 12 people crammed into a room where if 1 person has to get up, half the table has to move out of the room to let them.
Combats take FOREVER, and challenges have to be made such that at least 1/4 of the party goes down every encounter. But it gets worse.

See, the characters start as children. My character starts as a 7 year old kid. We unwittingly unleash a terrible evil our villiage was guarding... and we go into hibernation for 10 years.
Each character becomes marked by a god. And what does my mark do? GIVES ME A PERMANENT UNREMOVABLE FORM CHANGE INTO THE WEREWOLF HYBRID FORM WITH ZERO BENEFITS EXCEPT CLAW ATTACKS.
I am a 7 year old kid, aged 10 years and turned into a monster. Oh, and I HAVE to become a boar shaman... even though the primary food source of our villuage was boars and I grew up supposedly training to hunt them. Oh, and I don't get any spells until I discover them. Oh, and I don't have wild empathy. And I don't get an animal companion until he says I do.
Each character would also unlock random abilities that had no connection to their class at all. And stupid powerful ones too. The ranger got true strike 5 times per day but he didn't say true strike. It was "your character gazes off into the distance this round and does nothing." The next round she would hit on anything other than a one... and she couldn't control when it happened. In order to gain control she had to figure out what ability it was from looking through the books OOC.
It was awful. Really really awful.

Inevitability
2017-03-19, 03:33 AM
I'm amazed your GM figured out a way to make druids useless. Sure, it required stripping away their every class feature and tacking on a few penalties, but he did it!

hymer
2017-03-19, 03:53 AM
It was "your character gazes off into the distance this round and does nothing." The next round she would hit on anything other than a one... and she couldn't control when it happened. In order to gain control she had to figure out what ability it was from looking through the books OOC.

Though far from a bad DM on average, one guy did something annoying, which this reminded me of. As a paladin, my detect evil would sometimes just go off whether I wanted to use it or not. And then he had a house rule (which he'd never mentioned, like he never mentioned e.g. that immunity to disease only worked on small stuff) which meant that detect evil could knock you out if it revealed a very great evil. And won't you know it, it did, turning my character's ability into an outright liability. Thanks a bunch! :smallfurious:
He also had a wizard sneak up on us in camp. No chance to notice it. The wizard then cast fireball, and we didn't get to choose our location, so we were all caught in it. We get no save because we're surprised (which is bull hockey and never worked in the players' favour). Surprisingly, nobody got killed outright. He then tells us we've caught fire, and because of that can't do anything for three rounds. These are 2nd edition AD&D rounds of one minute each. I decide to throw myself into the nearby creek, but that won't give me control of my character back. Not long after that I took a long break from playing with him, and he seemed to learn something in the interval. But wow, that was a frustrating experience.

Another GM would likewise on occasion inform me what my character did, and since it was in the middle of a fight, there was no time to go into the existential questions this brought up. One session only.

Stealth Marmot
2017-03-20, 08:12 AM
2: "So, the guy from the Saw movies got his start as a GM? Figures."

How was this not readily apparent?

DigoDragon
2017-03-20, 10:21 AM
NOPE. The space pirates would just attack anything we were in. If we were hauling Space Nuns to a Space Nunnery? Dead chunks of nun floating in the icy void of SPACE!!

I just wanted to say this line made me laugh hard enough that I might have sprained a lung. I know the experiences themselves are painful, but when you can spin them to laugh in hindsight, it really makes all the difference. Great entry.


The current GM running a local game is pretty good, overall. He'll bend rules to make us happy and keep the energy of the campaign going, and sometimes he keeps to the rules and we gotta put our A-game into solving a really out there puzzle or survive a very difficult encounter. Still, on the whole, a good GM. Last session was one of the odd-ball ones, and the story I'll repost here from another thread:

We're playing D&D 3.5 (all of us just now hit 4th level)--The party completed a dangerous expedition into a wild magic zone for a drow noble and the Forgotten Realms legend Elminster. The noble paid us in 'contacts' we can use in the free city we're in (very nice). Elminster, recognizing we have potential to save the multi-verse, had asked us to give selflessly to this cause. To help us, we were paid by way of him giving each us something which we really have wanted for a while:


The fighter got a necklace that granted him natural armor and big bonuses to his saving throws. He can now tank better and resist most spells thrown at him.
The monk got a sash that functioned like a low-level Monk's Belt, but the bonuses on it grow as he takes more monk levels (a magic item that levels up with you)!
Wizard #1 got a lightsaber (he's a big Star Wars fan). 2d8 damage, ignores most armors, and grants proficiency if they don't know how to use swords.
Wizard #2 got a modified pearl of power (has multiple uses, though all low level spell slots. Still good though)!
The bard got a one-use Limited Wish, with a caveat that she could also wish for any one magic item up to a gp value of 6,000.


Then there's my ranger.

He got a tiger. Not a talking tiger or some really intelligent super tiger. Just a wild, untrained animal that never once I had shown interest in. I thanked Elminster, but declined the gift as I'm not familiar with the care of a tiger, and believed it would hamper the party because most commoners don't react well to a large stripped cat walking into their tavern. Meta-wise, I specialize in ranged combat. In battle I'm on the far side of the field raining arrows upon targets. The tiger would have been more useful to the fighter since he could flank with it in melee. Also, I invested a feat into mounted archery and skill points into Ride because I had wanted a horse that would give my ranger mobility to cover the battlefield. Tigers aren't really suited as mounts in battle (or really, anywhere outside a He-Man cartoon).

Elminster scolded me for declining his gift. "What's wrong with you? It's a tiger! Everyone wants a tiger!"

Wizard #1: "I'll take the tiger."

I reiterated my points above and said that I am looking for a loyal steed to help me in battle. I could maybe make use of some barding, or a good masterwork saddle perhaps. He huffed out that no one ever declined a gift from him before. I respond by informing him "Well no 40th-level genius I know would randomly gift a wild animal without first knowing if the recipient can even use it, so I guess this is a first for both of us."

Two players did the Regular Show "OOOOooooooooohh!!" remark. The bard remarked that she could hear Bahamut adding in an 'Oh snap!' on that as well.

"Fine, if you want a horse, you can pick one up in the stable, you ungrateful fool!" And that was the end of that 'argument', as apparently the GM was flustered that I was being so demanding on him when he's handing out free magical loot to everyone. Except, you know... the tiger wasn't magical.

Or even house broken.

Did I mention my ranger just hit 4th level and was due an animal companion for free anyway? Heck, I could have bought a horse if I wanted to. But hey, I guess it's my fault for thinking I knew more than the GM on what would work best for my character build. Yay?

The monk's player has my back though, and we'll probably show up early to pull the GM aside and figure out what was up with that session ender.

noob
2017-03-20, 12:50 PM
So why do you speak of him in a thread about who was the worst dm you ever had?
Was the worst dm you ever had still good?
If so it means you had luck with your gms.

DigoDragon
2017-03-20, 01:16 PM
So why do you speak of him in a thread about who was the worst dm you ever had?
Was the worst dm you ever had still good?
If so it means you had luck with your gms.

In a way, I suppose that I generally do have good luck with GMs. Or to put another way, I've never had a consistently bad GM. Usually they're decent to pretty good with running a game, but will occasionally have "that one session" that leaves us completely flummoxed.

GungHo
2017-03-20, 02:40 PM
2: "So, the guy from the Saw movies got his start as a GM? Figures."
Yeah, so now I got the image of Dungeon Master from the cartoon riding around on a little bike.


Rise and shine, Eric. You're probably wondering where you are. I'll tell you where you might be. You might be in the room you die in. Up until now you simply sat in the shadows watching others live out their lives. But what do voyeurs see when they look into the mirror? Now, I see you as a strange mix of someone angry, yet apathetic. But mostly just pathetic. So are you going to watch yourself die today, Eric, or do something about it?

Inevitability
2017-03-20, 03:41 PM
I just wanted to say this line made me laugh hard enough that I might have sprained a lung. I know the experiences themselves are painful, but when you can spin them to laugh in hindsight, it really makes all the difference. Great entry.


The current GM running a local game is pretty good, overall. He'll bend rules to make us happy and keep the energy of the campaign going, and sometimes he keeps to the rules and we gotta put our A-game into solving a really out there puzzle or survive a very difficult encounter. Still, on the whole, a good GM. Last session was one of the odd-ball ones, and the story I'll repost here from another thread:

We're playing D&D 3.5 (all of us just now hit 4th level)--The party completed a dangerous expedition into a wild magic zone for a drow noble and the Forgotten Realms legend Elminster. The noble paid us in 'contacts' we can use in the free city we're in (very nice). Elminster, recognizing we have potential to save the multi-verse, had asked us to give selflessly to this cause. To help us, we were paid by way of him giving each us something which we really have wanted for a while:


The fighter got a necklace that granted him natural armor and big bonuses to his saving throws. He can now tank better and resist most spells thrown at him.
The monk got a sash that functioned like a low-level Monk's Belt, but the bonuses on it grow as he takes more monk levels (a magic item that levels up with you)!
Wizard #1 got a lightsaber (he's a big Star Wars fan). 2d8 damage, ignores most armors, and grants proficiency if they don't know how to use swords.
Wizard #2 got a modified pearl of power (has multiple uses, though all low level spell slots. Still good though)!
The bard got a one-use Limited Wish, with a caveat that she could also wish for any one magic item up to a gp value of 6,000.


Then there's my ranger.

He got a tiger. Not a talking tiger or some really intelligent super tiger. Just a wild, untrained animal that never once I had shown interest in. I thanked Elminster, but declined the gift as I'm not familiar with the care of a tiger, and believed it would hamper the party because most commoners don't react well to a large stripped cat walking into their tavern. Meta-wise, I specialize in ranged combat. In battle I'm on the far side of the field raining arrows upon targets. The tiger would have been more useful to the fighter since he could flank with it in melee. Also, I invested a feat into mounted archery and skill points into Ride because I had wanted a horse that would give my ranger mobility to cover the battlefield. Tigers aren't really suited as mounts in battle (or really, anywhere outside a He-Man cartoon).

Elminster scolded me for declining his gift. "What's wrong with you? It's a tiger! Everyone wants a tiger!"

Wizard #1: "I'll take the tiger."

I reiterated my points above and said that I am looking for a loyal steed to help me in battle. I could maybe make use of some barding, or a good masterwork saddle perhaps. He huffed out that no one ever declined a gift from him before. I respond by informing him "Well no 40th-level genius I know would randomly gift a wild animal without first knowing if the recipient can even use it, so I guess this is a first for both of us."

Two players did the Regular Show "OOOOooooooooohh!!" remark. The bard remarked that she could hear Bahamut adding in an 'Oh snap!' on that as well.

"Fine, if you want a horse, you can pick one up in the stable, you ungrateful fool!" And that was the end of that 'argument', as apparently the GM was flustered that I was being so demanding on him when he's handing out free magical loot to everyone. Except, you know... the tiger wasn't magical.

Or even house broken.

Did I mention my ranger just hit 4th level and was due an animal companion for free anyway? Heck, I could have bought a horse if I wanted to. But hey, I guess it's my fault for thinking I knew more than the GM on what would work best for my character build. Yay?

The monk's player has my back though, and we'll probably show up early to pull the GM aside and figure out what was up with that session ender.

What, you didn't get a saddle custom made and ride your AWESOME TIGER MOUNT into battle? :smalltongue:

Honest Tiefling
2017-03-20, 03:50 PM
Mildly surprised that given that your character is a ranger, that skinning and/or selling the tiger wasn't on the table. I mean, someone is going to want that tiger, and you could put the money towards a horse.

Bonus points if you skin the tiger right in front of Elminster.

Stealth Marmot
2017-03-20, 06:14 PM
What, you didn't get a saddle custom made and ride your AWESOME TIGER MOUNT into battle? :smalltongue:

You want to put the saddle on the UNTRAINED WILD 400 POUND ALPHA PREDATOR?

Be my guest. There is no way that could end horribly.

Arbane
2017-03-21, 11:40 AM
You want to put the saddle on the UNTRAINED WILD 400 POUND ALPHA PREDATOR?

Be my guest. There is no way that could end horribly.

You're right. 400 pounds is way too small to hold a Medium-sized rider comfortably.

Animal Empathy is a thing for Rangers...

Stealth Marmot
2017-03-21, 12:03 PM
you're right. 400 pounds is way too small to hold a medium-sized rider comfortably.


Yes. That is the problem. We'll go with that.

Kantaki
2017-03-21, 12:41 PM
You want to put the saddle on the UNTRAINED WILD 400 POUND ALPHA PREDATOR?

Be my guest. There is no way that could end horribly.

Isn't that what hirelings are for?

Besides, riding the tiger isn't the problem, dismounting is.:smallbiggrin:

GungHo
2017-03-21, 12:54 PM
Isn't that what hirelings are for?

Besides, riding the tiger isn't the problem, dismounting is.:smallbiggrin:

Ronnie James Dio told us all we need to know. You just gotta get away.

Stealth Marmot
2017-03-21, 01:00 PM
Isn't that what hirelings are for?

I see, feeding it until it's too full to be fussy.

WHAT? Chaotic Good means open creativity right?

Calthropstu
2017-03-21, 05:05 PM
You're right. 400 pounds is way too small to hold a Medium-sized rider comfortably.

Animal Empathy is a thing for Rangers...

Ahhh, but a gnome on the other hand...

*activates alter self*

Anonymouswizard
2017-03-21, 05:14 PM
I'll be honest, if I was in Digo's DM's position I'd have given him a magic bow that'll grow in power with him, or possibly his choice of animal with cool accessory. I'll agree that it doesn't really belong in this thread (sometimes good GMs slip up), but it's one of those stories where I just can't understand why the DM didn't ask for player input.

I mean he's a powerful wizard with divination magic, that's a good enough excuse for a GM to say 'hey, I'm going to have a super-powerful wizard give you guys magic items in a couple of sessions, is there anything your characters particularly want?'.

Earthwalker
2017-03-22, 04:53 AM
You want to put the saddle on the UNTRAINED WILD 400 POUND ALPHA PREDATOR?

Be my guest. There is no way that could end horribly.



"He's safe now you can let go Baloo"
Baloo - "Are you kidding there's teeth on the other end !!"

AtticSpace
2017-03-22, 10:52 AM
Worst DM I ever had was for a fairly short lived Gamma World campaign when I was in college. One of the first things that happened in this particular game was the charisma based character attempted a diplomacy roll to get us out of a situation and rolled a 20, which the DM promptly completely ignored because he intended us to fight our way out. This kicked off a tradition of the cha character being completely useless because talking to any npc never accomplished anything. We never had to gather information as the DM just kind of told us everything we needed to know out of character and he only ever planned combat as the solution to anything, we were stuck hard to the rails.

Now, I actually prefer a combat heavy game, but the DM even managed to ruin that. XP was only awarded for killing blows in combat. Whoever got the last blow on an enemy in combat got all the XP for that enemy, and this was the ONLY way to gain XP.

This brings us to really the final straw. The DM's best friend was playing a dex based roguish character who would hang by the peripheries of the battle and swoop in to kill steal at the last moment and take all the XP. The DM thought this was absolutely hilarious and usually gave his friend a bunch of bonus damage to secure the kill. His reasoning was because the enemy was "so surprised" that the dex character had jumped out of nowhere. He was lvl 3 with the rest of us still lvl 1 when the game ended. People just stopped showing up after two or three sessions.

ArcanaGuy
2017-03-24, 08:08 PM
I can't say I've had bad GMs. But I've had GMs that had questionable rulings, that's for sure. The thing is, the bads were balanced out by good points. So where one quirk of theirs was frustrating as hell, they made up for it by making the game fun in another way.

That being said, they're still fun stories to tell.

This wasn't my worst game, but it was the first time I ran into what felt like bad DMing. It was my very first time playing AD&D, I was introduced into the game with a level 5 wizard in a long-standing group which had reached level 9 or 10 by that time. So I felt very much like the sidekick, wondering how I was going to ever manage this. Not even an hour in, we turn a corner and run into an enemy wizard, who immediately casts lightning bolt on the group. Everyone goes "I save vs. Illusion!" I go, "Why ... are people thinking it's illusion? Don't Lightning Bolts have a different save?"

The DM goes, "No one say anything. No one can be told how to play their character."

I ask, "I'm a wizard, shouldn't I know this?"

"You can ask some questions."

"If I save vs. Illusion, and it's not an illusion, then I get to save vs. the Lightning Bolt, right?"

"No, if you think it's an illusion, you don't try to dodge it. You're convincing yourself it's not going to hit you - so you get no other save."

"So I'd be gambling. And I don't have the hit points. What reasons are there for thinking it's illusion?"

"No one answer that."

"I ... all right. I can't afford to get hit by a full lighting bolt. I need the save."

And, of course, I fail the save, get hit by an illusion lightning bolt, and die. It took longer to make the character than it took to get killed. THEN the DM allows everyone to explain casting times to me. That's also when I found out elves can't be raised from the dead.

So this is when I pull my first 'Bad Player' move, and just bring in a cookie-cutter clone who is my first character's cousin, come to attend his funeral. Who is a half-elf, not an elf.

He continued to give me a hard time as the game continued, until the next session, when I cast my first spell. There was a big battle with a horde of orcs in a cavern, and I said, "I cast a fireball!"

Everyone else screams, "NO!"

"Why not?"

"Because fireballs have constant volume! You'll roast us!"

I think about that a moment, then say, "Oh. In that case, I cast my fireball ..... (rapid mental calculations) heeeere."

"Noooooo!"

The DM says, "Declared actions are absolute. Nothing any of you say can change the action declared." Then he sits down with scratch paper and does volume calculations... and finds that the fireball ends inches in front of the front-line fighter's nose. Exaggerated sighs of relief and little cheers. Lots and lots of orcs die. And from that point forward, the DM wasn't nearly so strict and rigid with me.

I'll share some more stories later. :)

Stealth Marmot
2017-03-24, 08:57 PM
The DM goes, "No one say anything. No one can be told how to play their character."


This is the typoe of attitude I hate. I despise gatekeeping grognards who won't help out starting players or worse, wont let others help out starting players.

usorer
2017-03-25, 01:06 PM
The worst one I had is the one that doesn't apply rules consistently and players end up getting very confused.

hymer
2017-03-25, 01:13 PM
typoe

Ten thousand spoons. :smallbiggrin:

Stealth Marmot
2017-03-25, 04:08 PM
Ten thousand spoons. :smallbiggrin:

Funny that my typo basically says "typo" but with an e at the end making it a typo OF typo.

I'm not fixing it. I love it better this way.

ATHATH
2017-03-25, 09:33 PM
@Digo: Random thought for fluffing the acquirement of your new magic item, if your DM gives you one: The god of sick burns (some god of fire or the sun if you don't want to add a new god to the pantheon) or Shar (because she hates Mystra) gives you your new item (which will probably be something fire or anti-magic related) for your achievement of insulting a being as powerful as Elminster without getting (severely) punished. Assuming 3.5, PF, or 3.PF here, maybe something that lets you cause your arrows (even those fired in iterative attacks) to explode like fireballs, dealing your normal arrow damage in fire damage in a 30 ft. radius, with a Reflex save for half-damage equivalent your attack roll?

ATHATH
2017-03-25, 09:36 PM
You want to put the saddle on the UNTRAINED WILD 400 POUND ALPHA PREDATOR?

Be my guest. There is no way that could end horribly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afzmwAKUppU

DigoDragon
2017-03-26, 12:09 AM
I'll be honest, if I was in Digo's DM's position I'd have given him a magic bow that'll grow in power with him, or possibly his choice of animal with cool accessory. I'll agree that it doesn't really belong in this thread (sometimes good GMs slip up), but it's one of those stories where I just can't understand why the DM didn't ask for player input.

I mean he's a powerful wizard with divination magic, that's a good enough excuse for a GM to say 'hey, I'm going to have a super-powerful wizard give you guys magic items in a couple of sessions, is there anything your characters particularly want?'.

If it fits the thread better, tonight the DM spent the first half of the session being passive-aggressive against me, making remarks like "gee, what kind of ranger wouldn't take a free exotic animal?" to other players.

Then, when I talked him about it a second time during the halfway break, he admitted in front of the group that my concerns and debate points were all valid and that the tiger isn't the right choice for me. So he gives the tiger to one of the wizards, fully trained with 6 tricks, and gives that wizard the druid Animal Companion ability for free so that the wizard can command the tiger without needing to make any Handle Animal checks. Oh, and I still got nothing. Had to buy my own horse for the animal companion feat I got.


In other news, starting next Saturday I'm running my own D&D game with a different group.



@Digo: Random thought for fluffing the acquirement of your new magic item, if your DM gives you one: The god of sick burns (some god of fire or the sun if you don't want to add a new god to the pantheon) or Shar (because she hates Mystra) gives you your new item (which will probably be something fire or anti-magic related) for your achievement of insulting a being as powerful as Elminster without getting (severely) punished. Assuming 3.5, PF, or 3.PF here, maybe something that lets you cause your arrows (even those fired in iterative attacks) to explode like fireballs, dealing your normal arrow damage in fire damage in a 30 ft. radius, with a Reflex save for half-damage equivalent your attack roll?

We are playing 3.5, and a magic bow would be pretty awesome! Considering everyone else essentially got magic items around the 4000-6000 gp range and I'm still using basic equipment from around my 2nd level, I'm surprised the DM won't consider such an easy swap to just let me have a better bow.

Stealth Marmot
2017-03-26, 01:14 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afzmwakuppu

very topical!

Honest Tiefling
2017-03-26, 11:41 AM
If it fits the thread better, tonight the DM spent the first half of the session being passive-aggressive against me, making remarks like "gee, what kind of ranger wouldn't take a free exotic animal?" to other players.

Clearly, the proper response would be to say "The type who doesn't want to smell of exotic cat piss." And if the hint is still not taken, pull down your pants and start marking your territory while hissing at everyone and biting them.

Was it ever specified if the tiger was male or female? Male domestic cats mark more, but oh gods, do I never want to hear a tiger in heat.

Anonymouswizard
2017-03-26, 12:13 PM
If it fits the thread better, tonight the DM spent the first half of the session being passive-aggressive against me, making remarks like "gee, what kind of ranger wouldn't take a free exotic animal?" to other players.

:smallsigh: The one I once made. I mean she spent all her time with horses, what would she even do with a Tiger? Doesn't even know what one is, or spent most of her childhood avoiding them (didn't get to play her), a good steed to shoot from would be of actual use.

(I never played that character because I was warned that gp rewards wouldn't give me the money for a horse, and the 5e PhB decided that only small rangers should be allowed to ride their animal companions*).

*One of the few times I specifically anti-powergamed in a build, Hunter would have been insanely more useful as a mounted archer but Beastmaster just fit the character.


Then, when I talked him about it a second time during the halfway break, he admitted in front of the group that my concerns and debate points were all valid and that the tiger isn't the right choice for me. So he gives the tiger to one of the wizards, fully trained with 6 tricks, and gives that wizard the druid Animal Companion ability for free so that the wizard can command the tiger without needing to make any Handle Animal checks. Oh, and I still got nothing. Had to buy my own horse for the animal companion feat I got.

I'm still confused as to why he thought the tiger was a good idea. I mean I don't play 3.5, so tigers would likely to a useful asset to my parties, but who has the time to train a wartiger when you can just hire mercenaries.

I mean it's nice that the wizard gets the tiger trained for free, but I think this GM either doesn't like you or doesn't like rangers.


In other news, starting next Saturday I'm running my own D&D game with a different group.

Good news!


We are playing 3.5, and a magic bow would be pretty awesome! Considering everyone else essentially got magic items around the 4000-6000 gp range and I'm still using basic equipment from around my 2nd level, I'm surprised the DM won't consider such an easy swap to just let me have a better bow.

I'm surprised he didn't let you have a basic magic item like a +1 flaming bow even if he didn't give you the awesome bow of fireballs. I mean it's boring, but sometimes it's fun to have the most practical magic item in the group (as a side note, never give me the mind control magic item while letting me choose the command phrase, it'll be abused while having an easy to disguise command phrase).

DigoDragon
2017-03-26, 02:25 PM
Was it ever specified if the tiger was male or female? Male domestic cats mark more, but oh gods, do I never want to hear a tiger in heat.

It's a male tiger. The wizard named him Hobbs.



:smallsigh: The one I once made. I mean she spent all her time with horses, what would she even do with a Tiger? Doesn't even know what one is, or spent most of her childhood avoiding them (didn't get to play her), a good steed to shoot from would be of actual use.

See, that sounds pretty much like my ranger's build. I myself have a little experience around horses, so in the game I made sure to mention times that I'd go check out the horses on the market, go riding, talk to different experts on all things equine for tips on the care of horses because that was the direction I wanted my ranger to take.

The Monk's player thinks this GM has never had a player with a mount-able companion before. I am inclined to believe him. But speaking of the Monk, I talked to his player today and he had a bit of a gripe of his own with this recent session--

At one point we were on a ship as hired mercenaries to protect an ambassador. The GM explained that because we were the highest level mercs, the Monk gets to be leader for the low-level hired mercenaries accompanying us (so it's six of us PCs and six NPCs total). At night something in the water threw grappling hooks onto our ship's railing. The Monk takes command and tells two merc hirelings to guard the ambassador's door, two to cut the ropes immediately, and two to protect the ship's helm. All reasonable commands and he rolled well on Diplomacy in case checks were needed. I drew my sword to assist in rope-cutting and the other PCs declared their actions to prepare for a boarding party.

The GM declares that all our talking about how we are setting up defenses gives the enemy a surprise round.

Huh. :smallconfused:

Furthermore, not once in that fight did any of the hired mercs listen to the Monk's commands. Three of them ended up dead due to charging headlong into the enemy tridents instead of standing their ground. We did win the fight and cut the ropes, allowing our ship to get away, but the Monk's player, to paraphrase his quote here, felt like he was only in charge of two things--Jack and ****. And Jack left town.



I'm still confused as to why he thought the tiger was a good idea. I mean I don't play 3.5, so tigers would likely to a useful asset to my parties, but who has the time to train a wartiger when you can just hire mercenaries.

I mean it's nice that the wizard gets the tiger trained for free, but I think this GM either doesn't like you or doesn't like rangers.

I do have to wonder. I know the tiger would be a good minion to have in a fight, but I had my heart set on being a mounted archer, and up until recently the GM was perfectly okay with the concept. Giving all those freebies to the wizard did feel like he gave me a big middle-finger.



I'm surprised he didn't let you have a basic magic item like a +1 flaming bow even if he didn't give you the awesome bow of fireballs. I mean it's boring, but sometimes it's fun to have the most practical magic item in the group (as a side note, never give me the mind control magic item while letting me choose the command phrase, it'll be abused while having an easy to disguise command phrase).

Yes, that is a perfectly reasonable idea. I would of taken a magic quiver that never runs out of arrows. Even mundane arrows. That would be darn good utility for my character right now.

ArcanaGuy
2017-03-27, 08:09 PM
@DigoDragon

Just as a theory, based on what you've said so far, is it possible that your DM thinks you're being too boring? Going around talking about horses, it's ordinary, and he wants high fantasy? Characters which are instantly recognizable because they're so weird?

I dunno. Just the details of the situation are different, but the feeling of the situation is so familiar. I've known players and DMs like that. He thought he was doing you a favor by trying to inspire you to do something better than horses.

Not trying to defend him. Just... trying to grasp for a thread of sanity.

For myself -

Moving onto the second story, I want to remind you all that this wasn't a bad DM. But boy, when telling this story it sounds like it. At the same time, there were fun parts to the game that balanced all this out, and several things that young and naive me didn't connect together until years later, or I'd probably have been a bit more upset at the time. Still, most important thing: he kept the game fun.

It's my first time playing Vampire: the Masquerade. The DM says to us, "I don't want corrupt and evil backstabbing characters like usual. I want folks to make good characters, who want to do the right thing." Not having had any experience with corrupt and evil backstabbing characters, I made a very good character. Humanity ten, true faith, all that stuff. Plus, incredibly high fame and wealth. I'll admit, I was a bit of a lover of vampire tales growing up, so he was two hundred years old, sired during the revolutionary war for a specific purpose, lost the woman he loved to a hunter, but kept her ghoul for the centuries since in memory of her.

(cough cough Ghoul was a panther named Gwenhwyvar. I was young and stupid. You may mock me.)

The premise was, this life around, I was a stage magician. I had a vampire themed show in DC which was half skit, half magic act, where I was a vampire who used magic tricks to avoid and befuddle a pair of clumsy vampire hunters out to get me. Also, Tremere. So as the game went along, I was picking up a wide variety of thaumaturgical paths - first and foremost, making sure I could tell EVERYTHING about someone by tasting their blood.

Then there was this other player. He made a corrupt and evil backstabbing priest. Ventrue, because he heard the Prince of DC was Ventrue.

The ST fell in love with the evil priest. Everything he did, we didn't even get a roll to notice he was doing it, as he betrayed the party left and right. He used Presence like crazy, as did the npc Ventrue we ran into. One of the other players saw how the wind was changing and also went down the evil route. He had the other entertainer of the group, and was a Malkavian. He started betraying us, too.

I rapidly discovered that as a Tremere as old as the country, I wasn't getting anywhere fast. Since I was already getting several snarky comments about how my magic show was close to piercing the masquerade, I went the route of underestimation. I grabbed flush of life, I went around vampire parties declining the free blood and munching on carrot sticks and celery because "I'm a vegetarian." Once I nearly choked on a carrot, then once helped, apologized because I'd forgotten I didn't have to breath anymore. And I loved my long and glorious silk pilot's scarf from my days in The Great War. It wasn't long before half of DC thought I was Malkavian - including half the players and the ST, who'd forgotten my real clan. At one point during a discussion on Malkavian insanity, the ST turned to me and asked me what my insanity was, again. "I'm Tremere," I pointed out.

He got this bewildered look on his face. "But ... then why are you acting so strangely?"

"I don't want them to think of me as a threat."

Which leads to one of those odd little details. The day I secretly turned my silk scarf into a magic item that would allow me to reflect Presence back on any vampire who tried to use it on me, the evil priest and all the NPCs stopped using Presence.

Game continues until we reach this scene: The group is supposed to meet with a contact in a high class hotel. We show up at the room, and find it a bloodbath - blood everywhere and at least a dozen bodies, obviously vampirically drained. The ST decided we had all entered the blood-soaked room en masse, because none of us had said we were staying in the hall, and then had a cleaning lady show up in the hall, scream in horror, and run away. Those of us with Dominate couldn't mind-whammy her, those of us with Celerity weren't fast enough to catch her. We were "too surprised," says the ST. With a glint in his eye, he informs us that we're about to be hunted for breaking the masquerade. It didn't matter if we were innocent, this setup was perfect. No one would doubt it was our fault. Where would we run to?

This is when all my little oddities suddenly came into full swing.

"Run? Nonsense. You! (to another PC) You're my muscle for tonight. Go find the hotel manager - you're to tell him I'm VERY offended he's not here for the arrangement. Mention my name. A lot. I'm going to be super polite but you can be rude as you want." The PC was tired of us telling her to stop being so rude, so she was eager to jump to it.

My first phone call is to my agent, wondering where that damn camera crew is. They were supposed to be at - what room was this? Room 313 twenty minutes ago! What camera crew? FOR THE COMMERCIAL! Next call was to whatever passes for a masquerade emergency squad, needing a cleanup for 12 bodies. But not to do anything until I'm done. I'll handle the mind whammies, we just need them for the physical cleanup. Then I pick out one of the chairs - gorgeous chairs, perfect - and set it like a throne in the middle of the bloodbath, then sit down, prop one leg up on the opposite knee, and wait. Hotel manager shows up, confused as all get-out, until I Dominate him into remembering that I'm going to be performing at his hotel and had agreed to pay for clean-up if I could shoot such a perfect commercial. Then the police showed up, and they were ... surprised at me thanking them for showing up so promptly. I needed them to keep lookie-loos away from the commercial, thank you so much. Yes, I am that vampire magician. Yes, of course I'd sign autographs for their kids. The maid was properly embarrassed at not recognizing me before, but was so flattered that I was willing to use her in the commercial. I took a sip of her blood on camera, used blood magic to heal the holes as soon as my teeth were out, so it was obviously trick teeth or something - said something smarmy and witty and come see my show at the Fancypants hotel.

And the group was thrilled. I'd gone from cloudcuckoolander to secret genius Bunny-ears Lawyer. The whole hiding-in-plain-sight reason for my show had been waiting all campaign for that moment.

Of course, this is when things started going downhill.

First came a random call from my agent, telling me about a big show in the next town over that would make my career. "I'm already stupid famous, how much could one show do?" "Trust me, it's perfect!" I look at the ST. "And... this ... show in this other town is ... a good idea?" "Oh, yeah. It'll give you another dot of fame, easy." "All right, then. I agree." I hang up.

The ST gloats, "You realize that city is Sabbot and they'll kill you as soon as you show up, right? The show will be a bloodbath."

"And you didn't tell me that when I asked if it was a good idea ... why?"

"I assumed you knew."

"Fine, I call my agent back and tell him I can't do the show after all."

"Too late, he's already booked the show. If you cancel, you'll lose a dot or two of fame and a dot of resources."

"What?! In 30 seconds he confirmed the show just like that?"

And as I argued, the penalties for missing this show kept mounting up. And this, too, was a pattern. We'd ask him a question, he'd answer. Then after we chose based on his answer, he'd tell us something else.

So, facing all that, I instituted backup plan number 2. All my money goes to my ward. Who is also me. I use my blood magic to change my face. And then I fake my death. And capitalize on my guardian's death to start up a new career.

But it turns out... this had all been a setup to destroy me. My agent (part of my herd) had, for months, been the ghoul of evil player #2. Who he was also an agent (and part of his herd) for. Why was my agent someone else's agent too? Why were we *sharing herd* again? How did I not know this?

"You didn't ask. Also, I didn't want to make two npcs. Agents aren't agents for only one person."

"They are when I'm this famous and make this much money! We're not even in the same field of entertainment! And why didn't I taste this on his blood?"

"You never asked."

"And I never noticed him low on blood when I hadn't been snacking?"

"You never asked."

This was a theme. Lots of people around me who I tasted their blood ... I just didn't notice something VERY OBVIOUS was off about their blood. And seriously, sharing herd without telling the players?

And then the Sheriff, terror of DC, who everyone was scared of, and who'd been missing every time we needed him the whole game, shows up to demand I do something for him. The whole game, we'd been wanting to report shady behavior to the Sheriff, only to be told time and time again that 'No one knows how to reach him, or where he is. He just shows up sometimes to deal with Masquerade breakers." "How does he know when someone breaks the Masquerade if no one can report it to him?" "He has his ways."

Anyway. He wants me to hunt down some proof that the evil priest has been either plotting with the Prince against him or breaking the Masquerade. One of the two.

"OK. Well, when I'm done, I'll need to contact you. What's your number? Somewhere I can reach you?"

ST goes, "Uhhh.... he doesn't want to give you his number."

How do I let him know when I'm done?

"He gives you two rings. If you touch the rings together, you'll teleport to him. But if you do it without finishing the job, he'll kill you."

So, we get to a semi-finale against the prince. Who uses... Presence (Majesty) on us.

"WOOHOO!" Only time this whole game my scarf comes in handy. "He just made himself my pet!"

"Oh, I forgot about that scarf. OK, then he turns off his Presence."

"He can't turn it off! That's the whole point of the scarf!"

"I'm NOT turning the prince into your pet. He turns it off."

Ok, fine. We have a fight, and escape.

So a little while later, I end up going to the twisted priests's church to face him down for what he'd been doing to us. Instead of him, I find...

Well, see, we'd done a one-shot of Hunters Hunted. And we'd made all these hunters for ourselves, all scrambling by with almost no gear, and with different personalities. Imagine that all these different strange hunters we'd created ... were now bloodthirsty mooks with flamethrowers. Who were all immune to Dominate, somehow.

I tried talking them out of the church. "Let's not profane a house of God with battle." No dice. They all flamethrowered me.

I sigh, and use my magic to telekinetically collect the liquid fire in a huge ball of flame between me and them.

I make the will check vs fear. ST rolls for my ghoul ... last memory of the woman I loved ... which does not make the will check versus fear. ST rules my ghoul sits there dazed in terror, no matter what I can do. For several turns he tries to burn me and I throw their fire all over the place to buy my ghoul time to escape. But he just smirks as he informs me that the panther just is too terrified to run.

Finally, he informs me that the hunters all open up their coats to reveal they're all wired with suicide bombs, and they go for the triggers. Something our hunters would never have done. (Well, one of them would have. if we'd ever been able to find any explosives. Not that we ever could when we were playing them.)

"Sorry, Gwenhwyvar. Rest in Peace." And I punch my fists together.

ST looks bewildered. Half the group cheers and laughs.

"What's with the... " he mimics my gesture.

"I bring the rings together."

"What rings?"

"That the sheriff gave me instead of his phone number."

ST gets a look of shock, then starts cussing his way out of the room and back in again.

This was the end of the game. As he wrapped everything up, he graciously allowed that after the game was over, my character could finally succeed with finding a book with the old Tremere-made blood magic ritual I'd been trying to research for 2/3 of the campaign.

Oh, and without noticing I'd become enthralled to another vampire - the ST's girlfriend. Because while we were sharing blood - again, I hadn't noticed something I should have noticed.

Cluedrew
2017-03-27, 08:30 PM
And I loved my long and glorious silk pilot's scarf from my days in The Great War. It wasn't long before half of DC thought I was Malkavian - including half the players and the ST, who'd forgotten my real clan. At one point during a discussion on Malkavian insanity, the ST turned to me and asked me what my insanity was, again. "I'm Tremere," I pointed out.I could do analysis of everything that was wrong with this. But this is just awesome. The storyteller may have brute forced the story he wanted, but I think this shows you where the better role-player.

Also I have a hard time believing that the game was fun because of this GM so much as because of him as despite. But I wasn't there.

Arbane
2017-03-27, 11:42 PM
Moving onto the second story, I want to remind you all that this wasn't a bad DM. But boy, when telling this story it sounds like it. At the same time, there were fun parts to the game that balanced all this out, and several things that young and naive me didn't connect together until years later, or I'd probably have been a bit more upset at the time. Still, most important thing: he kept the game fun.

He sounds like a pretty terrible GM to me. Anyone who uses 'you didn't ask' as an excuse for so much arbitrary screwage is a GM who DESERVES thirty minutes of cross-examination on every conceivable detail every time you try anything.


It's my first time playing Vampire: the Masquerade. The DM says to us, "I don't want corrupt and evil backstabbing characters like usual. I want folks to make good characters, who want to do the right thing."

I've noticed a pattern to VtM stories: If the Storyteller says it's a 'low combat' campaign, every significant NPC will be a psychohosebeast who could whup Godzilla two falls out of three. If they say 'no evil characters', expect at least one baby-eating psycho PC. (And for the GM to have a serious misunderstanding of VtM's entire theme.)

Anonymouswizard
2017-03-28, 06:38 AM
To be for, a lot of players have tricky building characters to the limits the GM gives them. I was once in a 'high combat' game with only one combat PC and no healer (but we had a shrink!), we survived to the end via a mixture of combat bring lethal anyway (Unknown Armies behind it's combat chair with 'six ways to avoid a fight' or something similar), being willing to run away, and dumb luck. That GM isn't on this list because honestly he earns us and we don't get any of the 'all NPCs can curbstomp Godzilla/one player is an evil backstabber' problems.

Then again, I've also played a research scientist in a combat heavy zombie survival game, a warrior priest of Signature in an investigative campaign, and so on.

Also, you can't come up with a new agent NPC? That seems strange, here's how I do it.

So I have a reoccurring NPC for my game Jeff, who's the agent for a PC. He's a bit poorly because he likes pies, but still relatively fit, and is good at his job. Then PC2 wants/needs an agent for some reason, and I don't have one prepared! No worry, I have a set of stats I can use (thankfully I brought Jeff's sheet with me), meet Bob the agent, he talks quickly and is a fan of Broadway musicals, and just so happens to be thin because he exercises a lot.

If be surprised if most GMs don't do that, most NPCs don't need a back story unless it becomes plot important, so just pick some personality, traits and a basic Stallone if you don't want to prepare. Jane the agent cycles to work every day and reads a lot of fantasy novels in her share time.

All came up with in about 20s, about as much time as you need to use them in the session (you can fish then it later).

And sounds like a great character wasted on a bad game, I'd love it if my players came up with that rather than murdervamp 2.0 (because I want to run politics, that's why I suggested Vampire).

DigoDragon
2017-03-28, 07:25 AM
@DigoDragon
Just as a theory, based on what you've said so far, is it possible that your DM thinks you're being too boring? Going around talking about horses, it's ordinary, and he wants high fantasy? Characters which are instantly recognizable because they're so weird?

I dunno. Just the details of the situation are different, but the feeling of the situation is so familiar. I've known players and DMs like that. He thought he was doing you a favor by trying to inspire you to do something better than horses.

I suppose it's possible, but even if that was his motivation, the fact remains that I've essentially been punished for not accepting his specific choice on my character's build, rather than working with me to find a compromise we both could be happy with. If he wants me to have something unusual, we could have worked out stats on a huge stag or a zebra. They're unusual, but still workable as a mount.



(cough cough Ghoul was a panther named Gwenhwyvar. I was young and stupid. You may mock me.)

To be fair, I think we all were young and stupid once. No worries. ^^;



Which leads to one of those odd little details. The day I secretly turned my silk scarf into a magic item that would allow me to reflect Presence back on any vampire who tried to use it on me, the evil priest and all the NPCs stopped using Presence.

And the group was thrilled. I'd gone from cloudcuckoolander to secret genius Bunny-ears Lawyer. The whole hiding-in-plain-sight reason for my show had been waiting all campaign for that moment.

Nicely done! These are the awesome moments I love to see happen with players. Coming up with plans and tricks to get out of trouble. :3



"You didn't ask. Also, I didn't want to make two npcs. Agents aren't agents for only one person."

"You never asked."

"You never asked."

Ugh, that is just terrible Story Telling. :smallannoyed:



"What rings?"

"That the sheriff gave me instead of his phone number."

ST gets a look of shock, then starts cussing his way out of the room and back in again.

If he can't even keep track of the the things he hands out just to be difficult, he kind of deserves that slap in his face. :smalltongue:

arclance
2017-03-29, 01:53 PM
I've noticed a pattern to VtM stories: If the Storyteller says it's a 'low combat' campaign, every significant NPC will be a psychohosebeast who could whup Godzilla two falls out of three. If they say 'no evil characters', expect at least one baby-eating psycho PC. (And for the GM to have a serious misunderstanding of VtM's entire theme.)Yes I have noticed that as well.

I don't like games as roleplay or diplomacy heavy as VtM so I likely will never run or play a game in that system.
But if I ever do I plan to run a game were the players are supposed to be non-evil (not necessarily good mind you) and work for the Vampire of Mr. Rodgers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rogers).
This is not me being nice the Evil part is where their employer never double-crosses them or screws them over in a game of Vampire the Masquerade.
I expect they would be super paranoid about when something would go wrong for them the whole time.

GPS
2017-03-31, 11:51 PM
Man, my story isn't nearly as bad as you guys's stories. This is more of an OOC issue than an IC issue. So my DM runs a 5e game we often host at my house. This issue didn't use to bother me as much, but over time I started wondering if it was really necessary for him to shoot my cat every session. Like seriously, every session we've hosted at my house has ended with him pulling out his magnum and firing multiple rounds at my cat. First couple of times I was like, "haha, what a funny goof," but at this point I feel it's just poor form. Like, come on, I feel like I'm the person who can take a joke, but all jokes have an expiration date. I've tried talking to him about it, and he's sworn up and down he won't do it again. Lo and behold, middle of the session after we chat I see him chasing my cat, firing rounds into my floor.

As of late, I've been trying preventative measures. I started checking him for his gun when he gets to my place, but my fellow players have informed me that the second I leave to grab drinks for everyone he whips it out. Apparently he's been hiding it inside of a carved out copy of Tome of Beasts. I should have realized this earlier, as he's never pulled the book out when I'm around during a session. I also tried locking my cat in my room for the duration of the session, but this just resulted in him bringing toothpicks to unlock the cheap lock on my bedroom door. I can't really afford better locks because of my constant floor repair bills.

Honestly, I'm getting really tired of his immature behavior. It's taking a real toll on both me and my cat. She's 6 months old and really doesn't have the speed requires to run from a man shooting at her. She gets away sometimes, but that's often not the case. Don't get me wrong, he's a pretty great story teller, but I feel like the we're all getting a bit tired of his crap. I swear, if we have to cut one more session short so I can rush my cat to the Vetrinary Surgeon, I'm going to seriously consider leaving the group. I might even send forward him the invoices for the floor one of these days.

(Sorry about the long post, just had that anger slowly building for a while and needed to get it all out)
Read the date. This joke was inspired by people on these threads who start with, "my story isn't nearly as bad as the last guy," and proceed to tell the tale of a DM who murders PCs' characters for blinking

Koo Rehtorb
2017-04-01, 12:28 AM
Have you considered just letting your cat out of the house for the duration of the session? Chances are fairly decent that it will stay gone until the session is over, particularly if he's repeatedly shot it. Cats are definitely smart enough to recognize people that they don't like and try to evade them.

Milo v3
2017-04-01, 02:33 AM
I actually cannot believe that story is true... Why would you continue play games with someone who shot at your cat? Why didn't the police come from the gunshots?

hymer
2017-04-01, 03:12 AM
Why didn't the police come from the gunshots?

That particular part I don't find unbelievable, as Charles Dance is going to demonstrate for us:


https://youtu.be/yMxY0Lxo_ow

Also, check the date.

Pauly
2017-04-01, 03:48 AM
The only time I really felt hard done by the GM was partially my own fault.

A group of my friends were playing a Star Wars campaign and asked me to join the campaign. I like the series but it had been at least 10 years since I had seen the original trilogy, and what I know about the EU can be safely carved onto the back of an aspirin with an axe. Hoever the GM and the players had all the expanded universe minutely remembered.

The rest of the players had combat heavy builds, so I decided, on their suggestion, to build a more talky character and built a gambler. High on bluffing, detecting motives, and dexterity but not a combat maniac.

Whenever I tried to talk my way out of trouble the GM ruled I had failed if I forgot/didn't know details like names of planets famous for (nefarious activity du jour) or the correct name of the Imperial secret service.

I was tearing my hair out because I was helping a group of friends out and then getting punished for not being nerdly enough

hymer
2017-04-01, 05:20 AM
The only time I really felt hard done by the GM was partially my own fault.

Sounds like victim blaming to me.

Anonymouswizard
2017-04-01, 06:01 PM
The only time I really felt hard done by the GM was partially my own fault.

A group of my friends were playing a Star Wars campaign and asked me to join the campaign. I like the series but it had been at least 10 years since I had seen the original trilogy, and what I know about the EU can be safely carved onto the back of an aspirin with an axe. Hoever the GM and the players had all the expanded universe minutely remembered.

The rest of the players had combat heavy builds, so I decided, on their suggestion, to build a more talky character and built a gambler. High on bluffing, detecting motives, and dexterity but not a combat maniac.

Whenever I tried to talk my way out of trouble the GM ruled I had failed if I forgot/didn't know details like names of planets famous for (nefarious activity du jour) or the correct name of the Imperial secret service.

I was tearing my hair out because I was helping a group of friends out and then getting punished for not being nerdly enough

Assuming this isn't another joke, that's majorly ****ty GMing. It's also ****ty GMing I've seen when a GM wants to run a combat focused game.

I mean, it's not like Lensman which has 6 novels (and depending on the era you'll only really need to know up to 4 for the campaign), Star Wars has a lot of books and games to read/play. While not immediately knowing something from the movies might be problematic (but only because I know people who watch them once a year, if it's been a decade I'd personally cut you some slack), not knowing some fact only mentioned in the novels does not mean your character doesn't.

I suggest you stop blaming yourself, there's nothing much you could have down. I suggest sitting down with a novel (I recommend Galactic Patrol, it's only 91p on Kindle and it's a fun read) and just relaxing for a bit.

Stealth Marmot
2017-04-01, 07:28 PM
I mean, it's not like Lensman which has 6 novels (and depending on the era you'll only really need to know up to 4 for the campaign), Star Wars has a lot of books and games to read/play. While not immediately knowing something from the movies might be problematic (but only because I know people who watch them once a year, if it's been a decade I'd personally cut you some slack), not knowing some fact only mentioned in the novels does not mean your character doesn't.


Even if there was only 1 or 2 novels, a game should stand on its own merits. If the player doesn't know something about the world because he has never seen it before, the DM expecting him to know is nothing but a form of crappy gatekeeping, and I cannot STAND gatekeeping. This hobby has enough problems getting people playing without players actively sabotaging adding new people.

Plus, I should not HAVE to do gorram HOMEWORK to play in your game.

Pauly
2017-04-01, 08:49 PM
Assuming this isn't another joke, that's majorly ****ty GMing. It's also ****ty GMing I've seen when a GM wants to run a combat focused game.

I mean, it's not like Lensman which has 6 novels (and depending on the era you'll only really need to know up to 4 for the campaign), Star Wars has a lot of books and games to read/play. While not immediately knowing something from the movies might be problematic (but only because I know people who watch them once a year, if it's been a decade I'd personally cut you some slack), not knowing some fact only mentioned in the novels does not mean your character doesn't.

I suggest you stop blaming yourself, there's nothing much you could have down. I suggest sitting down with a novel (I recommend Galactic Patrol, it's only 91p on Kindle and it's a fun read) and just relaxing for a bit.

I'll sy it was partially my fault because I chose a talky character in an environment where I didn't know enough details. I probably should have run with a tech wizrd type or another combat build.

I can also understand the gM because everyone else was doing the full immersion, so when I broke that immersion it kind of screwed up the flow of the session. I think also that everyone else had kind of assumed I was super nerdly about Star Wars even though I had told them I wasn't

Bohandas
2017-04-02, 01:01 AM
Personally I'd be concerned that this DM wants to run 3.5 at all. Warning sign right there.

As opposed to what?

Stealth Marmot
2017-04-02, 01:37 AM
As opposed to what?

My guess is he thinks Pathfinder and/or 5e are better and anyone running 3.5 is foolish.

kraftcheese
2017-04-02, 02:46 AM
Man, my story isn't nearly as bad as you guys's stories. This is more of an OOC issue than an IC issue. So my DM runs a 5e game we often host at my house. This issue didn't use to bother me as much, but over time I started wondering if it was really necessary for him to shoot my cat every session. Like seriously, every session we've hosted at my house has ended with him pulling out his magnum and firing multiple rounds at my cat. First couple of times I was like, "haha, what a funny goof," but at this point I feel it's just poor form. Like, come on, I feel like I'm the person who can take a joke, but all jokes have an expiration date. I've tried talking to him about it, and he's sworn up and down he won't do it again. Lo and behold, middle of the session after we chat I see him chasing my cat, firing rounds into my floor.

As of late, I've been trying preventative measures. I started checking him for his gun when he gets to my place, but my fellow players have informed me that the second I leave to grab drinks for everyone he whips it out. Apparently he's been hiding it inside of a carved out copy of Tome of Beasts. I should have realized this earlier, as he's never pulled the book out when I'm around during a session. I also tried locking my cat in my room for the duration of the session, but this just resulted in him bringing toothpicks to unlock the cheap lock on my bedroom door. I can't really afford better locks because of my constant floor repair bills.

Honestly, I'm getting really tired of his immature behavior. It's taking a real toll on both me and my cat. She's 6 months old and really doesn't have the speed requires to run from a man shooting at her. She gets away sometimes, but that's often not the case. Don't get me wrong, he's a pretty great story teller, but I feel like the we're all getting a bit tired of his crap. I swear, if we have to cut one more session short so I can rush my cat to the Vetrinary Surgeon, I'm going to seriously consider leaving the group. I might even send forward him the invoices for the floor one of these days.

(Sorry about the long post, just had that anger slowly building for a while and needed to get it all out)
Read the date. This joke was inspired by people on these threads who start with, "my story isn't nearly as bad as the last guy," and proceed to tell the tale of a DM who murders PCs' characters for blinking

This has got to be a joke...I mean.....seriously...

Inevitability
2017-04-02, 03:58 AM
This has got to be a joke...I mean.....seriously...

I suggest checking the white text. You know, the one made directly visible by you quoting it.

Anonymouswizard
2017-04-02, 10:42 AM
Even if there was only 1 or 2 novels, a game should stand on its own merits. If the player doesn't know something about the world because he has never seen it before, the DM expecting him to know is nothing but a form of crappy gatekeeping, and I cannot STAND gatekeeping. This hobby has enough problems getting people playing without players actively sabotaging adding new people.

Plus, I should not HAVE to do gorram HOMEWORK to play in your game.

True, I agree with everything you've said, but if I don't know much about Lensman and want to get to know more for a deep immersion game then I have to spend less than a pound to do so, and less than four for a the ones I'll need (although you could probably get by in a deep immersion Lensman game with just Galactic Patrol and five minutes on Wikipedia, or even just the five minutes and an explaination of what the Galactic Patrol is, it's totally the sort of seeing where you might not know much more than 'the Bergenholm allows ships to go faster than light').

Of course, the GM should make allowances for players who don't know and don't want to do homework. And it can be as simple as 'we're just going to say 'Imperial Secret Service' this game instead of the actual name' if you want.


I'll sy it was partially my fault because I chose a talky character in an environment where I didn't know enough details. I probably should have run with a tech wizrd type or another combat build.

I can also understand the gM because everyone else was doing the full immersion, so when I broke that immersion it kind of screwed up the flow of the session. I think also that everyone else had kind of assumed I was super nerdly about Star Wars even though I had told them I wasn't

All of this is true, but after the first session, assuming you talked to the GM about it and he didn't recommend you change your character, then the blame less with him (and the other players for not feeding you information).


As opposed to what?


My guess is he thinks Pathfinder and/or 5e are better and anyone running 3.5 is foolish.

Honestly, there's a lot of people who just think D&D 3.X is a really bad game, and think that anything else would be more enjoyable. Generally those who like simpler rules, but not always.

Knaight
2017-04-02, 10:49 AM
Honestly, there's a lot of people who just think D&D 3.X is a really bad game, and think that anything else would be more enjoyable. Generally those who like simpler rules, but not always.

I wouldn't go that far. A lot of us really dislike D&D 3.x, but it's a group that's generally familiar with a wide variety of games. That makes finding things worse easy - I'd play D&D 3.x way before Synnibar, Senzar, anything Palladium has ever made, etc. That's without getting into the games where the primary problem isn't that they're badly designed as games but that the designers are clearly terrible people.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-04-03, 03:09 PM
Well, I think it's fairly close as to which GM I've had was the worst at GM'ing.

One decided that the characters of the party should start all over the world, and we never met each other for the short duration that it lasted.

The other GM decided he wanted to try running a game at level 20, and then didn't appreciate our ensuing really-overpowered characters destroying his world and ignoring his story. For what it's worth, we had fun doing so fighting among each other and exploding the world.

For both, it was their first, and so far only, attempt at GM'ing, and there were other factors I think that contributed to their fairly poor GM'ing skills.

Calthropstu
2017-04-03, 04:53 PM
This has got to be a joke...I mean.....seriously...

No, this obviously took place in Chinatown. The guy was hungry, and hunting cats well... that's just a thing they do there right?

Yes it's a joke. I will state this simply because this is the internet and you could be literally from anywhere. April first in the US is known as April Fool's day. It's a day where various jokes and pranks are pulled.

Quertus
2017-04-03, 05:49 PM
Tough call. I really ought to organize these stories into a central repository.

I've had plenty of GMs who confused "talky time" with role-playing. I've had several GMs who confused roll-playing with role-playing. I've had a few GMs who confused alignment with role-playing - although the most "enlightened" had a table which included gender and race, not just alignment, in determining the exact response your character must give else you weren't role-playing "correctly".

I've had plenty of railroading GMs. I've had narrativist GMs in simulationist and gamist systems. I've had GMs whose goal was to tell the best possible story. With one (or maybe two) of those GMs, I understood what they considered to make "the best story" well enough that, halfway through the first session, I could accurately predict how many and which characters would be unconscious at the end of the "climactic" final battle, because that's what would make for The Best Story.

I've also encountered plenty of GMs who showed clear favoritism for their "pet" player(s). And, of course, the occasional GM who did so with their own GMPCs.

I've had plenty of GMs who were petty and vindictive. The exact causes varied - sometimes thinking, or trying to jump the rails, or being competent, or not worshipping their self insert, or beating their pet player, or even just not reading their mind and doing exactly what they expected.

I've seen plenty of the -isms, directed at both characters and players. I've seen plenty of other GM bullying and abuse, including some GMs who seemed simply to view the game as a vehicle for such abuse; ie, the game was just a means, and abuse was the goal. Some people view the game to be the goal, or fun to be the goal, or role-playing to be the goal; for these GMs, abuse was the goal.

I've played under plenty of "gotcha" GMs. There's a reason I talk about "pants-on-heads" idiots, because, you know, you never specified where you were wearing your pants.

I've played with plenty of idiots who would decide to "fix" a system without understanding it first, whose fixes were far worse than the original system, often in the specific areas they claimed to have addressed. Like, "core 3.x D&D, for balance reasons", but worse.

I've turned in, "here's my 50-page rewrite of your house rules, edited for clarity, and content" to some GMs. Because, you know, their house rules were just that level of an incomprehensible pile of poodoo.

I've had plenty of GMs who would provide the exact opposite of requested or advertised material.

I've encountered plenty of nerf-bat-wielding GMs who would tear down the powerful in the name of game balance, but would never lift a finger to boost the weak. Some of them clearly just wanted to make sure that the "GM's pet" shines brightly compared to all the plebes. I've encountered nerf-bat-wielding GMs who would scream at the party about game balance, then first encounter TPK. Then do it again. And, in one case, then do it again.

I've had GMs so dedicated to nerfing my ability to contribute, I couldn't even pull off rotes straight out of the book in WoD Mage.

I've had GMs who would "custom tailor" encounters to be the least fun possible. I even had a GM who made sure to give every solo encounter to the player / character who would enjoy it least.

I've had GMs respond horribly for requests to earn something. Me, I don't want my character to be crowned king just because I cleared rats out of the sewers - that just doesn't feel fair or realistic. One GM went so far as to conspire with player(s) to kill my character off for asking for the chance to earn something that the GM tried to just hand me.

I've had plenty of GMs who wanted bribes, and even a few who outright expected to be paid for their time.

Never had a GM who lived out his rape fantasies in a game I was in, but they're were a few I suspected did so in other games.

I've had GMs who would take someone else's material, and ruin it. One fun example: "there's descriptions of stuff... and puzzles, which you solve... and now on to the interesting parts" (ie, the combat).

I've had GMs who would make inconsistent house rules on the fly to force their railroad. I've had GMs who would make inconsistent house rules on the fly to protect their pet player / GMPC. I've had GMs who would make inconsistent house rules on the fly for no apparent reason.

I've had GMs who seemed more interested in... other things... than the game. Forum rules likely prohibit extended conversations on the subject(s).

I've had GMs who would contact random portions of the party for impromptu sessions.

I've had GMs who couldn't remember their own game details, to disastrous effect.

Given Time, I'm sure I'd come up with a lot more examples of bad GMing practices for this list.

But the worst? Hard to say.

Wolfkingleo
2017-04-03, 10:26 PM
Wow, after reading throught all this I can say that I'm blessed with DM's, hehehe.

Anyways, my worst experience I already asked for help here in another topic, but I will resume below:

A 3.5 game in a homebrewed setting inspired by the standard Forgotten Realms scenario, our group is formed by childhood friends who really enjoy fantasy settings and the DM is a friend of ours who is also an Engineer (I would call that on item "D" below)

Everything was fine except by the increasing plotholes and, due to that, the excessive railroading...In the previous campaign I played a crazed druid that have some outbursts of madness and as a result I disrupted the game more than once (heck, I was being a true jerk) and because of that we decided to move on with another setting since the DM wasn't enjoying the plot that much, so he decided to use the "best" plot hook: Time-travel (I hate this garbage theme, but everyone else agreed on that so let's see if it works for me). Sumrising, an older version of my fighter (DMNPC) travelled back in time in order to avert a sort of cataclism so he claimed that we must follow a plot in order to prevent the "destruction that may come", and to make sure that things would run the best way, each time we met my future self I was supposed to use an magical helmet to prevent me to remember our encounters and cause a time paradox...(yep, I'm still playing D&D....with Star Trek sh** on it...it seems). It was obvious that his idea was to keep me (the player) under the leash, so I let it slip for the sake of the social...

However, since I behaved accordingly during the campaign, my future self started to show less and less until the plot changed completely and the we did not found any signs of "cataclism" (and it was never mentioned again, EVER), however another member of our group (an Female Elf Socerer that self proclaim being a prostitute despite never behaving in anything that remind of that) decided to be the Chaotic Jerk and ended up destroying public buildings and killing innocents just for the lolz, without any other members of the group together and the ENTIRE party were arrested. Fine, except that:

a) We would have to pay the fines throught odd jobs (repair the buildings destroyed by the sorcerer actions and to reanimate all the victims of such act), quests and fighting in the city arena for something that ONE member did and pissed of the DM;
b) After the group paid their debts (also have some of our magical gear confiscated to "avoid further troubles") and finished serving the sentence, even in other kingdoms with other law code we would be hailed as "hunted" mischiefs of some sort, any guard that we would go to ask for directions would grumply answer it only throught charisma tests ;
c) The sorcerer were executed for her crimes and them brought back by a Pelor cleric (throught a light price of more than 12.000 GP in equipment given to the church) with a Mark of Justice to avoid being a murder hobo (the mark activates and them the Church of Light would dispatch inquisitors to kill her and anyone associated to her, AKA "the whole party").
d) He presented some enigmas that are either out of our scope of knowledge (like the best way to set chains and boards to makes transport of an item over a puzzle easier, even thought we do not have any idea ou how to do that) and when presented an verbal enigma that I find several holes he did not accept other answers and then when he figured that he bad worded it (making it impossible to solve with his "answer") he just called it off and didn't even compensate for the fact that we reamind 1 hour trying to find "his answer" and showing why he was wrong;
e) If we tried to do something that he didn't antecipate, something very abrasive would block us in order to make us return to the "right path" (Ex: We were venturing in a snow steppe at lvl 4, instead of going throught a cemitery in the area to cross the region, we decided to circumvent it and guess what? We were blocked by a band of Mammoths in the middle of an Amok! And guess where the mammoths wouldn't try to run into us?)

In sum: We became the "ugly guys" where no one, even after we saved people from demons and alike, treated us as normal or neutral beings, we could move a bit from what was being planned and we felt that all DMNPC's could kill us in a single slash

There are other implications, but I think I made my point here...

Cheers

Arbane
2017-04-04, 02:00 AM
I feel like Trekkin may have some competition....


Oh some extra information:

DND 3.5

The only rogue in the party is a doppleganger plant by the DM. He wants to kill us.
No arcane since my wizard died. Unless the L5 pixie who lived for 30 minutes or the elf wizard who lived for half a session count...
No cleric. (I am a drood).
Magic item crafting impossible due to time constraints
Virtually no magic item buying. For example we managed to purchase a CLW wand for double price of a fully charged wand. 1 only, and it had 30 charges.
Extremely low wealth. My former wizard had 300 gp total net worth at level 6. When we finally came into wealth, nowhere to buy.
Typical encounters are EL+5.
Typically do not get an opportunity to rest. Usually have to go multiple days without sleep (yes we have fatigue and exhaustion). Environments range from alongside volcano (lava everywhere and isolated isles of rock, save each round or fall prone, plus we were all sickened the entire time from fumes. Endure elements did not help) to current zone which was guarded by endless hordes of chaos beasts plus every 10 rounds save or be polymorphed permanently into a chaos beast. We figured out how to bypass that as well as the advanced assassin vine which animated 40 foot reach of endless vines between us and it. No one could figure that out until my drood snuck in.
We were then immediately confronted by an aboleth who dominated the majority of the party. Next room had 6 double advanced cloakers that had full surprise (we only had a 30 spot check and scent did not work) chained their specials together (and their nausea had a house rule that meant you had NO actions) and they CDG a PC plus my animal companion.

If we stop to rest, the world gets that much closer to destruction. When we were level 1 and tried to camp after 1 week of non-stop encounters, the capital city which we thought would be safe for one night was overrun by endless hordes of undead as a result. And no we didn't get to rest there either.

But anyway getting back to this topic: I was just surprised to run into a 9th level spell when our party was 9th.

Current party roster:
Ranged fighter (archer). (was drow cleric till killed during capital city overrun)
Warlock. (reincarned half-elf was halfling, was goliath barbarian, was kobold sorcerer)
Dragonfire Adept. (about to pass my record for most sessions alive)
Warforged Bard (was elf wizard who was CDG by cloakers, was human fighter who was critted by twin chimeras during ambush in difficult terrain while guarding refugees while the chimeras were flying)
Drood (me with VoP). Animal Companion was CDG previous session. (used to be core wizard, surprise ambush and killed)
Monk (was True necromancer who was insta-killed last session)
Unknown (newbie rolled a pixie wizard for RP purposes, his toon was insta-killed by same trap about 30 minutes in).

Note that that is the full roster, typically we have 3-4 players per session so we are usually short. The DM however preps for full party of 6.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-04-04, 02:43 AM
This story isn't strictly about a DM, rather about a roleplayer in general. But part of it involved him GMing sometimes which I figured was enough to sneak it in this thread.

Post blatantly stolen from RPGnet (https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?369229-Necro-Creepiest-Person-You-ve-Ever-Gamed-With-Part-Deux)


Dating The Creepiest Gamer Ever

The creepiest gamer I ever met was my ex-husband. There is so much creepy overflowing in that withered little man, but I will try to limit it to game-related, or we could be here for a very long time.

Let's call him Jake. Jake and I were high school sweethearts. At first he actively hid his role-playing from me, then after I found some of his books, he briefly explained what role-playing was. He started telling me about his campaigns and characters, at first keeping it vague, and only bringing it up during related conversation. Slowly and inexorably, every conversation started to turn to role-playing. During pillow talk, long walks, midnight phone calls, he would rush through the bare minimum of non-role-playing related discussion so he could get back to the important stuff: wizards, and whether they had bagged the goddess Isis yet.

I had assumed when he told me about his campaigns, he was describing things he had done with his friends. One day he admitted to me that he hadn't played in a campaign with other people in years (“not since I thought D&D was cool,” he'd scoff), but he made campaigns to play by himself, constantly. Not just brainstorming, not rolling up characters, not imagining storylines; he was actually creating a full contingent of players, NPCs, settings, and storylines and then playing them all by himself for months on end. He wouldn't sleep, he wouldn't eat, he would just roll roll roll, and then come over to my house in the middle of the night, stand outside my window while I was sleeping, and manically describe the battle his warriors had just had. He joked his one-man campaigns were like what they say about alcoholics and drinking alone. It was funny until I found all the places he was stashing his role-playing books, how many crevices of his life were filled with character sheets. He even stuffed them into my backpack, just in case.

I was actually pretty interested in role-playing, but every time I showed the barest glimmer of enjoyment he would keep me up all night long forcing me to make characters, like I was some RPG sweatshop. Did it matter if I had to work or go to school in the morning? No, I had to stay up to register on his role-playing forums so I could read his posts about role-playing, or I really couldn't understand the full flavor of it. I'd tell him I was getting burned out he would back off for maybe a day or two. But once he had proposed marriage and figured I was good and stuck with him, he would hit me with: “Well, you tell me about your day all the time and I don't care about that, but I listen because I'm not a bitch.” Once we had reached this point in our relationship, we no longer did things together. Instead, I would come over to his house and watch him roll up characters. Eventually I would fall asleep, and he would wake me up to yell about how rude I was being, coming over to his house just to fall asleep. So I tried to stay awake, talk to him, maybe even pitch some character ideas, but in the middle of my sentences he would leave the room to go read a role-playing book somewhere else. When I found him and asked why he'd left while I was talking, he'd say that I was always chattering at him when he was obviously trying to work.

Jake exclusively played games from the most rule-heavy, fanbase-screwing, complicated, nonsensical company out there (name omitted because I know how rabidly Jake googles any mention of his favorite company). For many years, I thought that was the only gaming system available, which served to crush most of my blossoming love for role-playing. There were times when he'd drag me out to a gaming store and I'd pick up a handbook that looked interesting, only to have him snatch it away and go on a long diatribe about how that wasn't a real role-playing game, and the people who liked it were simple-minded and boring because they didn't understand what role-playing was all about. Now, if you want a real role-playing book, you should buy this one for me...

Because of the complexity of the rules, and Jake's insistence that I also utilize the dozens of tables he had created for his own personal use, I was unable for about a year to make a character on my own without his assistance. If I managed to get through all the stats but couldn't handle equipment, Jake would pat me on the head, tell me I'd for sure get it next time, then hand me a character he had made for his lonesome one-man campaign. Did I want to give them a special power? Too bad, it doesn't work with the plot. Maybe they have a mysterious figure from the past? Oh, no, definitely not, I've already figured out who his father is, and it's a secret and I can't tell you but man it is such an awesome plot twist you are going to love it.

Despite all this, I somehow managed to enjoy role-playing, in concept if not in practice, and after about a year of directed study I managed to put together a few characters on my own, come up with a detailed backstory, and a framework for a basic campaign. I had hidden this from Jake because I wanted it to be a surprise. When I finally showed it to him, he spent a few silent moments looking it over, then told me my ideas were really amateur, and obviously I didn't understand the concept, or the rules, or how to run a game, that I was more or less just scribbling on paper, but it was cute that I tried. If I wanted to try making a real character, though, he had an idea he thought I would just love, and if I wanted to work on a real campaign I could copyedit his thirty page manifesto and his additional 10 page outline and timeline for an alternate universe. In fact, I did copyedit it, and even offered to write up some fiction interludes, which would give it enough meat to be its own role-playing book. Jake was very excited about the idea, until I pitched him the story I had come up with to illustrate one of his character concepts. He dismissed it as having too much “emotional stuff” going on (the character discovered her powers and pondered if it was moral to use them). You couldn't even tell what her stats were, he said. Nobody's going to read that.

After a while, Jake started running campaigns with real people (so to speak) and I was always dragged along, still determined to like role-playing despite him. His group was a collection of autistics, munchkins, and generally maladjusted misogynists who, session after session, could not fail to say "Why is she here?" or "Show us your tits, hur hur" in rapid succession. Rather than defend me, Jake would demand I sit near him so he could continually grope me throughout the session. When I told him I didn't appreciate him groping me when I'd asked him not to, he'd ask me why we were dating if he didn't get to grope me whenever he wanted, or, my personal favorite, he'd say he needed to do it so everybody else knew he was a “King Geek.”

After some time, I begged off the gaming sessions, saying I was happy to hear him talk about role-playing, happy to read his books, happy to help him make campaigns and characters, but I just didn't feel like playing anymore. We fought for hours while he called me lazy, boring, stupid, anti-social, neurotic, crazy, a quitter, etc. The arguments were non-stop, he would wake me up in the middle of the night just to tell me some zinger he had thought up about why my not role-playing was comparable to refusing to give him sex. I finally gave in and kept role-playing, until, well, until I left him.

No matter where he was, what was going on, who was talking, Jake was role-playing in some way, shape, or form. When Jake got home from class, he had no notes on the lecture, only notes on ninjas. He would wake me up in the middle of the night to make me look at a character he had just created. He would call me at work to inquire about whether I would be too tired and lazy to role-play when I got home. Sometimes I had to tell him to shut up during sex. When we walked down the street, he would sometimes jump back and forth, make odd creeping gestures, wave his hand in front of him, or lag behind me to check out surrounding scenery. He was fighting role-playing battles in his head. If we stopped on the street to talk to friends, he would pull out an imaginary laser gun and shoot at passerby for a while (thankfully, it was rare that he made the accompanying pyoo pyoo sounds, but it did happen). If he got bored with this, he would interrupt me and my friend mid-conversation in order to start talking about his latest character concept. Even at dinner with his family, if I looked under the table I would never fail to see him pulling an imaginary wakizashi out of its sheath to slay an imaginary demon. Near the end, he had even begun to do it over the table. His family would just glaze over and talk around him while he made threatening gestures at the turkey. His family never said anything to him; the closest they came was feebly joking about how astonishingly fast I was putting back the wine. During one Christmas dinner, Jake began talking rapidly about a wizard he had made with spells that killed babies. His family became increasingly more uncomfortable, yet nobody said anything. Finally, four glasses of wine in me, I managed to blurt out, “Darling, you have such stimulating dinner conversation!” as I slammed the butt of my fork on the table in a drunken temper tantrum. Still, nobody said anything to him, but it did shut him up, and I noticed after that his parents always made sure to set a bottle of wine next to my place setting.

Jake had a vast collection of books from that singular horrible role-playing company; it took up the entirety of a bookshelf I bought for him as a surprise present, but really as an attempt to get the role-playing books out of our bed. But Jake could never stand to be physically separated from his books for long. When I would force him to come to bed, he would bring a book, prop it up against my sleeping body, and take notes until I woke up and had to go work, at which point he would follow me into the bathroom, into the shower, and all the way out the door, telling me about the characters he had made while I slept. I learned pretty quickly not to complain about his obsessive reading habits or I would get subjected to a tirade about how my reading habits (history and social theory) were far worse, and my attempts to discuss the books I read banal and socially desperate.

The sheer amount of books he owned horrified all worthwhile guests, who never returned, and attracted other creepy gamers like snorting boystink flies. While at home, Jake always had a book in his lap. It didn't matter if we were watching a movie, eating dinner, had just finished sexin', if he was on the phone with his parents, if he was doing his homework at the same time. His books were an additional appendage. Once I was so foolish as to think there was an easy way to distract him from his books, and I offered him sexual acts I had heard boys were enamored of (i.e. oral sex). “Boys don't actually want that all the time,” he'd say. “That's a myth. It's really offensive that you think boys are that simple.” Although in all fairness, I should admit that it did work once, though I caught him glancing at his book out of the corner of his eye, and afterwards he picked it right back up and started reading where he left off, mentioning casually, “Now I know how much you must hate it when I bug you for sex.”

Nothing meant anything to Jake unless he could slap some stats on it. When we met new people we enjoyed, Jake would ask me later, "What character class do you think he would be?" When he tired of his usual solitary campaigns, Jake would try and stat out all his friends and family members and re-create them in his favorite role-playing setting. One of the sweetest compliments he ever gave me, which illustrates both what he thought was sweet and how rarely he complimented me, was when he statted me out and gave me a moderately high attractiveness rating (generalized terms used here
to avoid identification from the creepy googler ex-husband). "Oh, only 14?" I said, joking. "It's a 14 on paper," he told me, "but a 21 in my heart." Then he looked at me like he was waiting for me to melt. Oh god I am creeping out just thinking about it.

During one of these periods, he agonized for weeks over what level of intelligence to give his character and mine. Initially, he had given me the higher stat, then after thinking harder about it, gave himself just one point over me. "Oh, really?" I said. "And which one of us is flunking out of college, and which of us has a 4.0?" "Well, which one of us can't compute a tip? Huh? Huh? Why don't you try figuring out an equation for once?" I let it drop. Probably because I'm so dumb.

Gaming itself was an astonishing horror. Normal people fled in our wake, leaving behind only those who could stand a 24/7 stream of game talk. Any interruption for normal subjects of conversation were quickly assimilated into an idea for a new character. Let me give you an example:

Friend: So my grandma died not too long ago.
Me: Oh, man, I'm sorry. Was she sick?
Friend: No, she was just old, you know? We were expecting it.
Jake: Well, it's gotta happen sometime. I mean can you imagine if you were
immortal? It's for the best that we're not. I've thought about it and
decided that's not the superpower I'd want. Too hard to see the people you
love die.
Friend: Yeah... yeah, I guess.
Me: I think he knows how hard that is, Jake.
Jake: Yeah, definitely not immortality. What superpower would you have, if
you could have any?



Being Married to the Creepiest Gamer Ever

To add to his phenomenal qualities, Jake had become a drug addict. For a while I welcomed his new habit – for once, we could talk about something else. Now I do not say "addicted" lightly, har har, who gets addicted to that plant? No, really. This addiction ended in several arrests, a terrible hospital stay that racked up over 20k, shady friends with bad connections who hid unpleasant items in our home, and the consistent siphoning of my money to pay for his habit. I had to work full-time while I went to college full-time so I could support his habits. He'd steal my ATM card to buy drugs and books, would lambast me for ever “skimming” his stash, tell me every time I glanced at one of his books that I ought to buy them for him if I was interested in reading them, too. Jake did work, at a minimum wage delivery boy job chosen specifically because it was known as drug addict central. I can't tell you how many times I brought Jake the drugs or book he'd left at home and had to step over his managers and co-workers, passed out on the floor.

The end result of all this was that our only friends were people who could stand constant gamer talk cross-sectioned with the kind of people who were as addicted as he was. Thrilling combination! We had such parties. Our gaming sessions were frequently interrupted by the downing of a whole bottle of whiskey while Jake was in the bathroom (he had, prudently, outlawed drinking during gaming), gamers tripping on acid and flipping their **** when we went on dungeon crawls (“oh ****, guys, this is bad, real bad, we have to get out of here, right now, I'm not dealing with any trolls OH **** TROLLS THEY HAVE FACES LIKE LITTLE PEOPLE”), dealers arriving with twenty people in tow to sell in our living room, and massive smoke breaks every half an hour. The woozy alternative states made gamers easily distractable, which Jake would take out on me, dressing me down in front of all the players for “distracting” them by making jokes, dressing cute, expressing ideas, discussing my day, doing my homework, and bringing everybody beverages and pieces of cake I had baked just for that gaming session. Once I arrived for a gaming session and everybody was busy making characters, so I went to my room to do more homework and Jake burst in red-faced and horrified. “We¹re gaming, dear,” he said vilely. “It looks like everybody's just make characters.” “Well, it¹s rude for you not to be there.” “But I have a character, I don't need to make one.” “But you need to know what they're making. Stop being so antisocial and get out here. It's like pulling teeth, trying to get you to make friends.”

Once I asked him why he yelled at me more than the other gamers, and he responded, “You're my wife. I expect better out of you.”

Jake had a favorite character that he “always returned to.” He would re-create him, build him up to King **** of Munchkin Mountain, the kind of character who spent his time ****ing goddesses and killing unkillable entities of pure darkness. Then he'd get bored and re-create him again and again, ad nauseum. This character was his baby, his lifeblood. I once made what was supposed to be a ridiculous suggestion: he had re-made this character so many times and played out all possible scenarios with him that obviously the next step was to make a post-modernist campaign in which this "wizard" (generic term) crossed the boundary of imagination and met his creator, and he and Jake could have tea and discuss life and philosophy. Well, he ****ing tried, no kidding, but couldn't get the table he made to work right.

But let me get to the heart of it. One night, while very very drunk, after talking to me about his newest campaign for several hours, Jake admitted to me that he thought about his wizard so much that sometimes when he jerked off he would call out his name. I must have made a horrified face, because he quickly stuttered out that it was probably because his name was so similar to mine (it was not), and he was used to calling out my name (he never had).

Jake loved to make his own tables, ones that were twice as complicated as anything his favorite company could put out. He created highly detailed sexual orientation tables with a hundred separate and distinct options (you do not want to know what occupied the 100 slot). He created a table that described in detail the sexual compatibility of characters, again, 100 options. He created a table that illustrated all the horrifying deformities any given character could acquire. 100 options. If you're clever, you can probably find abbreviated versions of these on his favorite role-playing board – they're quite popular.

Our five-year anniversary coincided with weekly gaming. Jake argued that it would be too hard to reschedule, but promised he'd make it a worthwhile day. He demanded that all gamers arrive with an enormous quantity of drugs, which they were to give to the two of us in “celebration,” and that gaming had to end by 5 pm, rather than 8 pm, because he was going to make me a fantastic dinner. At 10 pm, the last excruciatingly high gamer left, at which point Jake set about making the dinner which promised to astound and thrill me. I worked at 7 am, so by that point I had passed out. Jake awoke me with a plate of steak and potatoes, and lambasted me for falling asleep on our anniversary, which was supposed to be a special day.

On our wedding night, Jake brought a role-playing book to read in the hotel room. I made some overtures to, you know, it's our wedding night and all, and shimmied around a little, until he pulled out a notepad and started writing up a character, telling me he just needed to do this thing and I was bothering him which was really inconsiderate because he hadn't had time to do this for like a whole day with on account of the wedding. I gave up and took a shower, and when I came back he had finally put down the role-playing book, in order to call another woman and ask her to come over and have sex with him. Skipping over what happened next, which is non-role-playing related but rest assured truly creepy, the next day we went to his parents' house to open our presents. All pictures of the event show me holding up pots and pans, towels, appliances, while next to me Jake reads his role-playing book. At one point his mother admonished him for not being involved, and his father responded, "We're just glad she married him before she found out what he was really like! Ha ha..." Awkward laughter rippled around the room. They repeated this statement with frightening consistency and increasing tones of desperation until the day I divorced him.

At one point Jake had an affair. The woman he had an affair with was a close friend of mine, and he had told her that I was totally cool with them having sex. It was more complicated than that (**** always is), but it's still a painful topic, so I'll keep it at that. She was of an inappropriate (though legal) age, and he took terrible advantage of her, treating her much the same way he treated me. She and I are still friends, maybe better friends now that we've dated the same horrible man, and she told me later that they would go and have their affair time, after which he would pull out some books and demand she make a character. She gamely tried to get involved, and though she loved role-playing and still does to this day, she could not care about his terrible books, tables, and campaigns. She has a picture of them together, in which he is gesturing vehemently at his books, and she has quite clearly fallen asleep sitting up. Despite her disinterest in his gaming system, and her quite clear interest in other systems, for Christmas he spent a ridiculous amount of money (much more than he spent on me) buying her several books she had specifically indicated that she hated, because possession of these books would enable her to play in the campaign he was about to run.




Divorcing the Creepiest Gamer Ever

Just before he had worked us so far into debt that we had to move into his parents' basement, I met another man that I thought I might want to be with instead of Jake. I told Jake all of this upfront, and told him all the things that would need to change for me to want to be with him, because I felt like I was losing my mind. He listened quietly, nodded, then told me about his new campaign idea in such a level of detail that it lasted three hours. At the end of that three hours, I reminded him that things needed to change. He agreed, and suggested we find a new group of role-players so I could have fun with other people. As he saw it, my inability to make friends was what made me feel like I was losing my mind, and caused me to be so easily swindled by any guy who came along and was “nice” or “listened to what I said.” Then he told me about a character he'd just made. I repeated everything I'd just said, astounded at his blasé reaction, and he nodded again and asked me not to interrupt him when he was talking.

Later I told him I was going to spend a day with this man to talk to him and try and sort out my feelings. He kept right on telling me about his campaign. I asked him over and over again if he was upset, if he wanted to talk, if he was okay with me going to see the guy. Yes yes, he's just fine, if I would just stop interrupting him. Suddenly, the next day, Jake announced that he had scheduled role-playing for the day I was to see the guy. I said that sounded great, it would be something for him to do while I went out. He stared at me angrily, then told me he'd scheduled it so I could play with him. He had already made me a character, and planned out the entire campaign around me, so I had to come. I told him I still planned on seeing this guy but guessed I could hang out till then, and he nodded, then told me all about the campaign. Gaming day came. I told Jake I would be leaving at such-and-such a time, and he said nothing, but immediately set about derailing the game, so that by the time I had to leave, we had just gotten started. I announced that I had to leave, I had a meeting with a friend. Jake said, “Okay, but if you leave, I'm going to hate you.” I left anyway. Jake followed me out onto the porch, enraged, shouting, “I'm going to be so mad at you if you leave in the middle of the game.” I left, and when I returned home that night I was prepared to talk about what had happened with the other man (nothing) and what I'd decided (to stay with Jake). I never got to tell him, and he never asked. Instead, I was subjected to a long diatribe about how I'd humiliated him in front of his role-playing friends and completely ruined his game. This conversation lasted until about 2 a.m., at which point he gave up trying to “talk sense” into me, and started angrily rolling dice. Have you ever heard angrily rolled dice? It is a sound you will never forget, it's so small and sad. Anyway, you can consider that whole episode a delayed or sublimated reaction to my nearly leaving him, but honestly, I don't think he cared what was happening, or even realized what it meant, until it interfered with his game. Telling him I was in love with another man was one thing. Going to see that man on game day was beyond the pale.

Miracle of all miracles, after a lifetime of playing the same system, Jake got interested in another role-playing game. He immediately asked me to roll up a character, and when I refused, saying I had spent the last seven years learning his damn horrible system and I wasn't about to learn another, he told me it wasn't fair, he had agreed to go to marriage counseling and I wouldn't agree to play in his new campaign, and relationships were about compromise, and I was a bitch. I left the house for several hours. When I returned and told him he could not call me names, he looked perplexed and said his calling me a bitch wasn't any worse than me telling him he was always forcing role-playing on me, because saying "always" was a cruel and dehumanizing insult. I insisted it was, in fact, an entirely different thing, and he told me I was dramatizing things, which I always did, because I was in emotional turmoil, whereas he wasn't angry at all. Finally, to reconcile, he suggested that perhaps if I at least read through one of his books I could prove to him I was not, in fact, a bitch.


After seven years, I told Jake I wanted a divorce on Tuesday and moved out on a Friday. Saturday was gaming day, and you better believe it was still on. Jake proceeded to murder everybody's character in slow, brutal, and deliberate fashions. When one player complained, Jake shot back that they couldn't handle the game. They postulated that perhaps he couldn't handle his wife leaving him because she didn't love him anymore. There was a long pause, then Jake rolled a d20, and they went on, never mentioning it again.

When I told Jake I wanted a divorce, he vacillated between hysterical crying and total denial. I encouraged his denial, because while hysterically crying he was prone to do things like stand at the bathroom door sobbing “Don't leave me” while I brushed my teeth, or stand at the window staring bug-eyed at me as I walked to the bus stop, or call me at work and leave messages that consisted of several minutes of crying, and then “I promised myself I wouldn't cry,” and then several more minutes of crying. Or, since we¹re being creepy here, my personal favorite, waking up at 3 a.m. to find him
standing next to my bed staring at me eerily; once he saw I was awake, he told me he had been standing there thinking of strangling me. I told him that was a scary and ****ed-up thing to tell somebody, and he told me that was okay because he felt scared and ****ed-up, and I was cruel to hold it against him. But I digress from gaming creepy. During one of his periods of denial, in which he lived in a fantasy world in which we were going to be friends or friends with benefits or just dating, he brightened considerably and said, “Do you know, this will really be best for us, because when we¹re just friends you can play in my new campaign.”


The day I left Jake, he called me several hours after I had moved everything out of his parents' basement. I was eating a celebratory dinner with a friend who had helped me move. First he asked me how moving had gone, then he told me about his day, then, after a slight pause, he began to tell me about an idea for a character he'd had while at his Narcotics Anonymous meeting. I was so conditioned to just nod and say, “uh huh” at appropriate intervals that I might have continued doing it for quite some time. Luckily, the friend I was with had an obnoxious personal habit of shouting at me whenever I was on the phone. “Tell that ******* you left him because he can never shut up!” she yelled. “Tell him nobody wants to hear about his creepy ****! Tell him he's lonely and depressed and ****ing weird!” Jake heard her yelling, and raised his voice until he was yelling character ideas into the phone. I interrupted and told him, “You know, we are divorced now. You cannot call me to tell me about role-playing.” I believe it finally sunk in for him at that moment, when he said, “Oh. Oh. We're... we're really broken up, aren't we?”

You may consider this a story of the triumph of the human spirit over enormous odds, because I still like role-playing.

Stealth Marmot
2017-04-04, 07:05 AM
Tough call. I really ought to organize these stories into a central repository.

I've had plenty of GMs who confused "talky time" with role-playing. I've had several GMs who confused roll-playing with role-playing. I've had a few GMs who confused alignment with role-playing - although the most "enlightened" had a table which included gender and race, not just alignment, in determining the exact response your character must give else you weren't role-playing "correctly".


That's sexist at the very least. Oh yeah, and all the other things. My condolences.



I've had plenty of railroading GMs. I've had narrativist GMs in simulationist and gamist systems. I've had GMs whose goal was to tell the best possible story. With one (or maybe two) of those GMs, I understood what they considered to make "the best story" well enough that, halfway through the first session, I could accurately predict how many and which characters would be unconscious at the end of the "climactic" final battle, because that's what would make for The Best Story.


It's a hard balance to strike between narrative and player freedom. Too much freedom and the game is aimless, too much narrative and the players have no agency.



I've also encountered plenty of GMs who showed clear favoritism for their "pet" player(s). And, of course, the occasional GM who did so with their own GMPCs.


It gets worse when the DM and player in question are involved.



I've had plenty of GMs who were petty and vindictive. The exact causes varied - sometimes thinking, or trying to jump the rails, or being competent, or not worshipping their self insert, or beating their pet player, or even just not reading their mind and doing exactly what they expected.


A DM should never EVER be petty. That might be one of the top sins of being a DM. You have to be fair, AND be in charge, but not be petty.



I've seen plenty of the -isms, directed at both characters and players. I've seen plenty of other GM bullying and abuse, including some GMs who seemed simply to view the game as a vehicle for such abuse; ie, the game was just a means, and abuse was the goal. Some people view the game to be the goal, or fun to be the goal, or role-playing to be the goal; for these GMs, abuse was the goal.


I mentioned one of the -isms already. They drive me crazy. I can't stand people who punch down.



I've played under plenty of "gotcha" GMs. There's a reason I talk about "pants-on-heads" idiots, because, you know, you never specified where you were wearing your pants.


These are a pet peeve of mine. I hate that some DMs (and sometimes game designers too) seem to just be out to prove that they are smarter then the players. On the other hand, I also can't stand the same from players. "It never SPECIFIES that being dead has any penalties."



I've played with plenty of idiots who would decide to "fix" a system without understanding it first, whose fixes were far worse than the original system, often in the specific areas they claimed to have addressed. Like, "core 3.x D&D, for balance reasons", but worse.

I've turned in, "here's my 50-page rewrite of your house rules, edited for clarity, and content" to some GMs. Because, you know, their house rules were just that level of an incomprehensible pile of poodoo.


These are the sorts of things you only get good at with experience. I would have a good amount of patience for these since you know, they are trying at least.



I've had plenty of GMs who would provide the exact opposite of requested or advertised material.


Not sure what you mean by this.



I've encountered plenty of nerf-bat-wielding GMs who would tear down the powerful in the name of game balance, but would never lift a finger to boost the weak. Some of them clearly just wanted to make sure that the "GM's pet" shines brightly compared to all the plebes. I've encountered nerf-bat-wielding GMs who would scream at the party about game balance, then first encounter TPK. Then do it again. And, in one case, then do it again.

I've had GMs so dedicated to nerfing my ability to contribute, I couldn't even pull off rotes straight out of the book in WoD Mage.

I've had GMs who would "custom tailor" encounters to be the least fun possible. I even had a GM who made sure to give every solo encounter to the player / character who would enjoy it least.

I've had GMs respond horribly for requests to earn something. Me, I don't want my character to be crowned king just because I cleared rats out of the sewers - that just doesn't feel fair or realistic. One GM went so far as to conspire with player(s) to kill my character off for asking for the chance to earn something that the GM tried to just hand me.


Are these all the same guy? Sounds like a pattern here.



I've had plenty of GMs who wanted bribes, and even a few who outright expected to be paid for their time.


Unless the DM just expected a ride and food, they were asking too much. DMing takes a lot of time and work, but it is NEVER supposed to be a paid job.



Never had a GM who lived out his rape fantasies in a game I was in, but they're were a few I suspected did so in other games.


JESUS! That's messed up beyond comprehension. If I knew someone who did that I wouldn't be comfortable in the same BUILDING much less in their game.



I've had GMs who would take someone else's material, and ruin it. One fun example: "there's descriptions of stuff... and puzzles, which you solve... and now on to the interesting parts" (ie, the combat).

I've had GMs who would make inconsistent house rules on the fly to force their railroad. I've had GMs who would make inconsistent house rules on the fly to protect their pet player / GMPC. I've had GMs who would make inconsistent house rules on the fly for no apparent reason.

I've had GMs who seemed more interested in... other things... than the game. Forum rules likely prohibit extended conversations on the subject(s).

I've had GMs who would contact random portions of the party for impromptu sessions.

I've had GMs who couldn't remember their own game details, to disastrous effect.

Given Time, I'm sure I'd come up with a lot more examples of bad GMing practices for this list.

But the worst? Hard to say.

Sir, you clearly do a lot of gaming but...ouch. Some of these are forgivable and just signs of new DMs, but some of these are signs of outright disturbed individuals who should probably be on some watch lists.

JNAProductions
2017-04-04, 09:36 AM
I actually saw an ad on Craigslist for a guy charging $100 for a 4 hour session of D&D.

Like, I understand something like "Hey, I'll be providing pizza and drinks, so if you could bring a few bucks to help cover costs, that'd be great," or "We'll be gaming at a FLGS, so bring a few bucks to support them," but not $25 an hour!

Anonymouswizard
2017-04-04, 09:44 AM
I feel like Trekkin may have some competition....

Well you were right, but it was the post below you that had the competition :smalleek:

Now, thanks to one brave person (from another forum)'s loss we have an idea of what bring married to Chief Circle might be like, taken to the 101st degree.

Excuse me while I alternate between feeling bad for being a bit like Jake, feeling good for knowing that I can shut up about it and have other hobbies, and feeling bad because I completely fail at attracting partners.

MesiDoomstalker
2017-04-04, 10:23 AM
This story isn't strictly about a DM, rather about a roleplayer in general. But part of it involved him GMing sometimes which I figured was enough to sneak it in this thread.

Post blatantly stolen from RPGnet (https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?369229-Necro-Creepiest-Person-You-ve-Ever-Gamed-With-Part-Deux)

What? How? Seriously? Wow. I. I can't even form sentences right now. I'm glad she's out of there though. I wonder how she managed 7 years of that?

Velaryon
2017-04-04, 02:57 PM
This story isn't strictly about a DM, rather about a roleplayer in general. But part of it involved him GMing sometimes which I figured was enough to sneak it in this thread.

Post blatantly stolen from RPGnet (https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?369229-Necro-Creepiest-Person-You-ve-Ever-Gamed-With-Part-Deux)

That... that can't be real, can it? How could anyone put up with that for two weeks, let alone seven years?

Anonymouswizard
2017-04-04, 03:08 PM
That... that can't be real, can it? How could anyone put up with that for two weeks, let alone seven years?

Honestly, people end up in situations they shouldn't be in for a long time. I personally don't understand how, I've never been in a relationship myself, but I know that it happens and can go on for years. Seven years is unusually long AFAIK, but I know it can go on for years and people will rationalise it.

Velaryon
2017-04-04, 04:08 PM
Honestly, people end up in situations they shouldn't be in for a long time. I personally don't understand how, I've never been in a relationship myself, but I know that it happens and can go on for years. Seven years is unusually long AFAIK, but I know it can go on for years and people will rationalise it.

I know that people stay in bad situations such as physical or sexual abuse for prolonged periods of time, but AFAIK there's usually something at play there such as a real or implied threat against them if they leave, or an insidious belief that they deserve the abuse.

In this case, it doesn't seem like that was the case (or if so, she didn't explain it that way as far as I can tell). Instead, I'm left wondering how she put up with this man long enough to form any sort of attachment to him in the first place.

ComaVision
2017-04-04, 05:39 PM
In this case, it doesn't seem like that was the case (or if so, she didn't explain it that way as far as I can tell). Instead, I'm left wondering how she put up with this man long enough to form any sort of attachment to him in the first place.

If you read into the thread a bit, she explains that her family and first boyfriend treated her like crap so 'Jake' was an improvement by comparison.

After reading her answers to questions, I do believe that the events as a whole happened, but there has to be some narrative embellishments. Anyone that's been around a bad break-up or divorce knows that some things tend to get exaggerated.

Beans
2017-04-04, 06:50 PM
I'm just glad she's out of that... bafflingly, excruciatingly horrid situation and hope she is surrounded with good people.

Reading that was like a compressed Chief Circle Saga, except instead of mostly being bewilderingly hilarious and tinged with bitter disappointment, it's 100% bowel-knottingly upsetting other than that she's (presumably) okay and that Jake failed to ruin TTRPGs for her.

Quertus
2017-04-05, 01:33 AM
Not sure what you mean by this.

Advertise role-playing-intensive? Get a war game. Ask for exploration? Get stuck in one city the whole campaign. That kind of thing. Happened with way too many GMs.


Are these all the same guy? Sounds like a pattern here.

It just so happens that the singular examples (one GM did the triple TPK after ranting about game balance, nerf bat in hand; one GM consistently gave solo encounters to the player / character who would last enjoy them; one GM vetoed rotes straight out of the book; one GM conspired to have my character killed after I requested the opportunity to earn something he was trying to just give me) are four separate GMs. Some of the multi-GM examples are not so exclusive.

RazorChain
2017-04-05, 05:54 AM
"If you're in a forest, you can just say 'I pick up a stick' and don't have to ask me if there's a stick to pick up first" is my literal standard example for how I'm fine with players using implicit items in a scene that I haven't explicitly stated were there.

I actually use a very specific technique when I'm playing and GMing

"I go outside and pick up the wood axe outside"

The GM has said nothing about a wood axe but it's reasonable it's outside a cottage. If you ask the GM he can deny you so make a statement instead :). Once my cleric's mace broke in a haunted mansion so I said "I go into the kitchen and pick up a heavy frying pan" and used that as a substitute for my mace. I also encourage my players to put things into the scene and I even have a meta currency for it in my game....I guess it comes from my free forming days.


As for the Original Topic....I'm the worst GM I've known...28 years ago I was a horrible, bratty 10 year old that started running games for my friends. Given that I didn't have the most mature players I still sucked. I was drunk on power, angry if they didn't do what I wanted them to do....like going into that dungeon. I routinely slaughtered the party, usually when they didn't do what I wanted them to do. I fudged the dice in their disfavor, I didn't know the rules. I made them do things in real life for XP in the game. But I got better and that is what matters. By the time I was 14 I was running a game in a local gaming store and the owner became one of my regular sit ins and loved my game and to this day we are still friends :) But I have him much to thank for widening my horizon during those pre internet years* and for giving me lots of tips.

*Got my first 2400 baud modem when I was 16

Stealth Marmot
2017-04-05, 07:33 AM
Advertise role-playing-intensive? Get a war game. Ask for exploration? Get stuck in one city the whole campaign. That kind of thing. Happened with way too many GMs.

Ah yes, when the DMs advertise what they WISH they could run rather than what they do run. Or they are Gotcha DMs.

We should make a list of 101 terrible DMs.



It just so happens that the singular examples (one GM did the triple TPK after ranting about game balance, nerf bat in hand; one GM consistently gave solo encounters to the player / character who would last enjoy them; one GM vetoed rotes straight out of the book; one GM conspired to have my character killed after I requested the opportunity to earn something he was trying to just give me) are four separate GMs. Some of the multi-GM examples are not so exclusive.

Yikes.

Jay R
2017-04-05, 08:23 AM
This thread makes me feel like the luckiest D&D player in the world. In over 40 years, I have never had a bad DM.

Oh, I've put up with many decisions I didn't like - some were judgment calls that could have gone either way, some were rules interpretations I don't agree with, some were based on knowledge my character didn't have and I only found out much later, and most I have no idea why he decided that way.

But I've never had a bad, or unfair, or stupid, or unknowledgable DM.

Cluedrew
2017-04-05, 08:40 AM
This story isn't strictly about a DM, rather about a roleplayer in general. But part of it involved him GMing sometimes which I figured was enough to sneak it in this thread.That... that is more than just a role player. I'm glad it has a happy ending, in that they managed to get out.

I have had very little in the way of bad GMs, but I think it is because I never play pick-up games. I have always known the GM and most of the players going into a game. Plus I will just sit out of a game if I think there is a good chance I will not like it. Not that they have all been great, but the worst have been merely passable.

Inevitability
2017-04-05, 09:47 AM
I actually use a very specific technique when I'm playing and GMing

"I go outside and pick up the wood axe outside"

The GM has said nothing about a wood axe but it's reasonable it's outside a cottage. If you ask the GM he can deny you so make a statement instead :).

Note that I'm all in favor of players adding elements to the world.

That said, how is the GM incapable of denying if you state it like this? Can't something like the following exchange just happen?

"I go outside and pick up the wood axe outside"
"You find no axe outside."

What's wrong with asking the GM if there's an axe?

BRC
2017-04-05, 09:53 AM
Note that I'm all in favor of players adding elements to the world.

That said, how is the GM incapable of denying if you state it like this? Can't something like the following exchange just happen?

"I go outside and pick up the wood axe outside"
"You find no axe outside."

What's wrong with asking the GM if there's an axe?

It's some uneccessary back-and-forth.

It's reasonable for there to be an axe outside the cottage (Such things being neccessary if you are burning wood for fuel)

Rather than
"I Go outside, is there an axe by the woodpile?"
"Yes, there is an Axe by the woodpile"
"Okay, I pick up the axe"

You can just say "I go outside and grab the axe from the woodpile". The GM can then either acknowledge, or say "There is no axe by the woodpile", in which case there isn't one, end of conversation.

There's nothing wrong with asking about the axe per-say, but for something mundane like that, it's usually fine to assume.

Ravian
2017-04-05, 10:56 AM
Note that I'm all in favor of players adding elements to the world.

That said, how is the GM incapable of denying if you state it like this? Can't something like the following exchange just happen?

"I go outside and pick up the wood axe outside"
"You find no axe outside."

What's wrong with asking the GM if there's an axe?

It's simply a way to encourage player interaction with the environment, which is something most GM's should want to encourage. When you tell a player that something they thought was there was missing, it's usually going to be very jarring for their vision of the scene.

If it's something that can reasonably be found in a scene, it should probably be assumed it is unless the GM can reasonably determine why it's not there, rather than simple cutting off a player's innovation in the bud.

For example, maybe there's no ax, because the farmer's secretly possessed by a demon, and as such has hidden his blood-stained ax in the cellar where he's collecting the bodies for his profane ritual. In this case, the item's absence develops the scene, rather than limits it.

"No" doesn't leave much room for interesting things to develop. That doesn't mean you have to say yes to everything, but it's often considered a significant form of railroading to just arbitrarily shoot down a plan by artificially constructing an environment to limit options.

It's like Monopoly Jail, rather than creating security measures that present obstacles to escape, the GM simply took away any form of tools or options. An obstacle is simply another challenge, Monopoly Jail simply prevents players from challenging the environment to any degree.