what is your worst experience with w dm

[Amdy_vill]

my worst experience with a dm was this guy we will call him timmy(not his real name). he was my second dm. my other had moved away. he had this thing about killing players every few games. he also tried to make grand far stretching narratives with these character. he also used a home-brew system that was 3.5 boiled down to its basics and removed most of the math. so my worst experience was playing in a game he call revolutionary war. it was loosely based on you gusted it the revolutionary war. in the first game i made 5 characters. each one dyeing from enemies he build to be 5x more powerful then use.

[2D8HP]

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.

[Waazraath]

Over the years (Decades, actually. Bloody hell.) I've had pretty good DM's. But still, some stuff stands out, in a negative way:

- The DM that after brutally slaying a quite high level party in a bloody TPK halfway an epic storyline, he announced: "well, you know, I didn't really feel like DM'ing anymore...". Without mentioning anything about this, ever, to the other players. And, come to think about it, had at least 2 other campaigns ending in an (almost) TPK.
- The DM that thought that if he cast "charm" on a player, he should dictate all that players actions
- The DM that facilitated / encouraged disruptive player behavour (like the archtypical party rogue stealing from the party and doublecrossing party NPC allies 'because I'm a rogue, but actually because I just like to troll and be in the spotlight').

[Everstar]

My college D&D group (2e) had a guest DM run an adventure. The group he normally ran typically made evil characters so he was a little surprised to find me playing a Paladin. Back in those days, my Paladin characters were incorruptible paragons of virtue and I enjoyed playing them as such.

The DM opened up the adventure by describing my character's exploits at a local brothel. Uhhh... nope. He kept trying to persuade me to roll with it and I kept trying to explain to him that my character would never do such a thing. After several minutes we agreed that I was "just visiting," whatever that means. Naturally, this had nothing to do with the actual adventure.

There were many of these moments throughout the adventure. It seemed like he had it out for my Paladin but maybe he just had no experience and tried to treat him like one of the characters of his normal players. He expressed a desire to destroy my Holy Avenger, which I had only recent received. It all culminated in a moment that we still talk about to this day.

We were battling a beholder in an ancient tower. The DM smiled at me as he slowly described the beholder turning its attention to me. I start slowly gathering up my dice. The beholder raises an eye-stalk to prepare a ray of disintegration. I gathered up my character sheet. The beholder fires the ray right the Holy A--- "I'm done!"

I left the table, went into my room, shut the door, and shouted, "You can't hurt me anymore!" The game pretty much fell apart at that point. My regular DM, who still DMs to this day, loves to tease me about this.
TL;DR
Paladin hating guest DM sends me to a brothel and tries to destroy my Holy Avenger sword causing me to flee to my room and yell at him through the door.

[Miz_Liz]

Oh boy. Oooooooh boy. Have I got a story for you. I will take a previous poster's idea and give you a long and short, because this one is a doozy.

Strike 1: I was a first time warlock, picked Archfey pact with a canonically CG/TN patron. This was specifically because I did not want to deal with the insanity that could come from dealing with an evil fiend or crazy GOO. After a few sessions I realize this character just isn't jiving, and the DM allows me to kill her off. I find out after the fact I had not made a pact with a CG archfey but in fact had been tricked into signing a contract with a CE demon. Putting aside how the mechanics would not work for that, it goes directly and completely against what I wanted for the character. I decided to shrug it off and keep playing, this new divine soul sorc seemed like fun.

Strike 2: I point out a shadow. Turns out shadow is a crazy powerful hunter spirit thing that will not stop until it has killed me. Grossly overpowered for our levels at the time, there was no way for me to get out of it alive. Myself and two of the three other players expressed concern with this and *poof!* we get Wished into another demension. She said it was because she wanted to transfer from our Faerun setting to the Critical Role Tamriel. I call bs but whatever.

Strike 3: We had all been told that the DM and her husband, a PC, were totally cool with whatever happened in game. It was a game, after all. So as the story progressed it came about that my character fell in love with this PC. Turns out he has some crazy curse on him that doesn't allow anyone near him (Killed me twice. Thankfully we have a cleric who is on top of it.) Story stuff happens, we find out his dead ex is not actually dead and an incredibly powerful caster. She's the one keeping people away from him. He runs off to be with her again. We go to his home town to try and get him away from what we believe is an emotionally controlling evil entity, and all he wants to do is be with her. There's nothing we can do about it.

Strike 4 (I'm too forgiving): The three players decide we have had enough of this preferential treatment, ridiculous antagonist (Turns out his ex is a dragon) and us not being able to do anything right in the eyes of this character. We decide if we can't convince him she's evil, we kill her or (more likely because dragon) die trying. Even that is taken from us as we don't die and the other PC kills her dejectedly. We decide this story arc is over and we can move on.

Strike 5: Turns out the city loved dragon lady because she helped them out ("she's just possessive of her things, that's the way dragons are") and now we have to face an inquisition which is basically the DM belittling us and saying how bad we are for killing the character until we admit we were wrong. This is now the fourth session in a row I've been brought to tears, by the way. But hey, we've been banished from the city, so this is all over now right?

Strike 6: Nope! New player comes on board, other PC and DM's friend. Now she's giving the two of them preferential treatment. I'm still being made to feel guilty for killing what I had every reason to believe was an evil entity. They continue to be the central characters, I continue to be berated for every decision I make. Myself and the two other PCs finally decide to say we're done and walk out. We them come back in to explain our issues, and the DM somehow manages to convince the other two that it was all our fault for not being involved enough. It was also especially my fault because I didn't come back to talk. I didn't come back because I was hyperventilating from crying because I had never been so insulted in my entire life. The two kept playing, I was done.

And to be honest, as long as this is, it's still skipping over a lot of details. I was constantly humiliated and made the problem. Looking back I probably stayed at least four sessions longer than I should have.

tldr, sadistic DM who does not like playing with other women gave her husband obscenely preferential treatment and the two in tandem basically emotionally abused me.

[Dualswinger]

due To personal reasons, I couldn’t bring myself to game at my flgs, but the dm wanted to instead of the public space we were currently using.

So rather than talk to me about it, they trapped my wizard in an anti magic field with “unbreakable” windows and ended the session on a cliffhanger. When I mentioned post session on IM how I was looking forward to my character finding a way out, I was informed that he just didn’t want me to game with them anymore, my character was dead and I shouldn’t bother turning up on the following weeks because they were all moving to game at the flgs.

[Pex]

Must resist splurging.

For those who know me. :smallyuk:

[MxKit]

The DM who "confessed his love" for me when I was fifteen. (He was a grown man, old enough to be my dad, and had known me for four years.)

In a way less creepy and more everyday badness... Well, I haven't actually had many bad DMs. I think the only missteps that really stood out were two 5e DMs that weren't actually bad DMs:

One let me into an already established party but told me they needed a healer, that they needed a Life Cleric specifically, and encouraged me to choose a spell list that was mostly healing-related. He actually a really good DM in a lot of ways, a great balance of combat and political intrigue, really good at encouraging equal spotlight time at the table between characters, but my character was just a slog to actually play in combat, and it was my first time actually playing D&D and didn't know how to fix any of it myself at the time.

The other was a first-time DM who obviously hadn't done much prepwork, obviously railroaded us through the beginning parts of Lost Mine of Phandelver (we actually bypassed the game at first and went into town to ask about our actual mission; he was pretty obviously at a loss and just told us the townsfolk didn't know what we were talking about and had no info for us), then killed half our characters in the goblin cave because he'd added a bunch of enemies because he thought it'd be too easy for us otherwise. The game fell apart at that point. That I think was just jitters and first-time bad planning, though; he was too new a DM for me to say "bad DM."