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Number 6
2008-03-25, 12:45 PM
This post was originally posted elsewhere but someone told me that I was guilty of thread necromancy and I should start a new thread.

I'd like to hear about the worst games you've been in. I'll also run a thread for the best games. I have several that were equally bad:

I was running a character who was a smart ass. I figure that the other players know that my comments are IC and not personal, also all comments are directed at NPCs and PCs, not the players themselves. One woman became so angry at me that she not only killed that character, she killed the next six characters I ran in that campaign. I don't know why the DM let her.

A game run at Trinity University here in San Antonio, TX. The DM gets off on evil. He blatantly awards people for doing evil deeds and not for doing good. Soon he's got a competition going on who can be the most evil and, therefore, the GM's boy. As a month passes, they go from murder to rape to cannibiliasm to torture to child molesting (while making the parents watch) to even worse things, but I heard about this second hand. I had dropped out after one game.

A different DM. He held his games in his garage because he didn't allow people in his house. He was afraid that they would fall down or something and sue him. He yells at people, and I mean shouts, for the slightest reason. Two weeks in a row I show up late; he spends an hour yelling at me before the game can even begin. I want to drop out, but I'm the transportation for someone who wants to keep playing (God only knows why), so I hang around. Then I spill coke on the cement floor of the garage. He goes ballistic screaming at everyone, orders us all out of the garage, swears that he will never let me play again, etc. etc. I run into him in the hobby store three weeks later and he starts yelling at me all over again for the spilled coke.

BTW, this guys game was as bad as his attitude. The party was always accompanied by NPCs that were 10+ levels higher than the PCs. They would kill all the monsters and accomplish the missions while the players just watched. These NPCs were also all beautiful nymphomaniacs, too. (BTW, the most powerful player race in the game were people from the Empire of Arn. They got all kinds of special benefits that other PC races didn't. But they were "opposed" to wearing clothes...)When the party tried to sneak away without the NPCs so we could do some adventuring of our own, the NPCs tracked us down and insisted on tagging along for no apparant reason. When we tried to fire the NPCs, the GM flew into a rage, screamed at us, and docked us experience points for disrespecting the DM.

This happened two months ago. I'm GMing a game. Every time the party gets treasure, a player argues with me that I'm being too stingy. He e-mails me three or four times a week giving long convoluted arguments and qouting rules about CRs and treasure levels. He even has his wife e-mail me to argue on his behalf. When I don't reply to her post, she sends a ranting letter to all the people in the game, written all in capital letters, calling me a "male chauvenist piglet" because "I was ignoring [her] because I didn't think a woman's opinion mattered" and saying that I will not be allowed to set foot in their (where they insist that the group must hold games because hubby doesn't like to play anywhere else) house until I give her an official apology. I have not seen them since.

One DM I had was gay. I had no problem with that, but his characters kept "coming on" to my characters. They were pretty blatant and persistent. I suspected that he was using them as a cover to "come on" to me. When I gently informed him that, while I had to problems with gay people, I was straight and my character was straight, he stopped inviting me to his game.

In another game, we had a gay player. Once again, I had to problem with this. But when I mentioned to them that I couldn't come to a game on Sunday morning because I would be in church, he became very hostile. He's convinced that all religious people are gay bashing fundamentalist bigots. He kept lecturing me about how I should leave behind my "stupid superstition" and started lobbying the other players to have me ejected from the game behind my back. He eventually succeeded.

I go to one of the first gaming conventions held in Texas. In the open gaming room, I start a game for 5-6 level characters. The plot hook for the adventure was the old "friend or family member is kidnapped." I asked one player if his character has any brothers or sisters, parents, friends living in the city. He says he doesn't know. I soon find that, out of the five players present, they all know exactly what THACO, damage, spells, and magic items but they have never bothered to make up a background for the character. Most don't even have a name.

I tried a Champions game, which is a super hero game using the Fantasy Hero system. I made up a character which I thought was pretty powerful, he had a combat value of 10 and did 14 dice of damage with his attack. The other players were very good at twisting the character creation rules and exploiting loopholes, and there are a lot of loopholes in Hero. The average combat value was 20 and the average attack did 24 dice. One guy had a 20 dice area affect attack which only affected "enemies." Another was able to turn people into babies with one attack. The one who took the cake was a guy who bought all his powers at a hefty discount because they only worked "when he's touching the ground." Yet he could fly, and all of his powers worked while flying. How did he manage that? He had special shoes that were filled with dirt so he was always "touching ground".

In college, I ran a game for a new group. The players insisted that I use the optional psionics rules. They flatly refused to play unless we used them. And they used them very "imaginatively". One player insisted that he could kill a room full of bugbears in one round using "body expansion" because he would expand his body to fill the whole room and crush all of them. When I told him that he could not, he argued and would not drop it for a solid hour until I have up, gathered my books, and left.

These were the worst, but almost all of the games I tried were filled with monty haulers, munchkins, and power gamers. I actually quit RPGs for nine years becasue I was convinced that they were all nuts. I'm thinking of quitting again now becasue, at the last D&D game I went to, I pointed out to the DM that a magic user gets 1d4 HP per level but does 1d6 HP per level with a fire ball or lightning bolt, only MUs with a high Con bonus would last more than one round in a magic duel after fifth level. He became so angry that I was finding fault with the D&D rules that he ordered me to leave the game. I'm generally an easy going guy who has had no problems getting long with people except in RPGs.

Krrth
2008-03-25, 12:55 PM
I really can't comment on some of that, but I can say that those "loopholes" used in the champions game were not really loopholes (unless it was first edition). That was just out and out being stupid. The game even mentions that any disadvantage that is not a disadvantage is not worth points.

Number 6
2008-03-25, 01:18 PM
I really can't comment on some of that, but I can say that those "loopholes" used in the champions game were not really loopholes (unless it was first edition). That was just out and out being stupid. The game even mentions that any disadvantage that is not a disadvantage is not worth points.

That's true. This case was the GM's fault for not enforcing power limitations. But I think that it's a loophole that the players can take as many power limitations as they want. One ofthe most abused is Charges. Powers that have a number of charges are not only cheaper but they don't cost endurance to use. And it only takes a few seconds to recharge between combats.

Another infamous one is CAT Pee: Concentration, Activation Time, Persistent. You buy a power like Force Field that takes ten minutes of concentration to activate. Then you buy 0 endurence advantage. You tell the GM that each day you turn the power on first thing in the morning and keep it running all day. You can always use it, but it costs half as much. If a sneaky GM tries to attack your character while he's asleep and the power's off, you A)teleport away, B) whine that he's a "killer GM", and/or C) figure it's worth losing a battle once in a while to buy your powers at half price. (In most Champions campaigns, characters are rarely killed, especially in their secret ID or in an ambush. It's considered part of the comic book genre. Players exploit it a lot.)

Krrth
2008-03-25, 01:26 PM
We've been lucky then, as our group doesn't try to pull stuff like that. THe worst we had was a character of mine with a triggered, 0 End 6d6 Stun aid. It went off when the characters stun was reduced below 0. Once we realised just how breaking it was, we changeds it to 6 charges a day.

hawkboy772042
2008-03-25, 01:43 PM
Geez... and the worst games I ever had were when I had this player that would get angry about really petty things that I wouldn't expand in detail upon. e.g. Having to identify every single potion (the potion being explicitly labeled in Common wasn't "realistic" to him).

One time he wanted to change feats so that he could have has character qualify for a prestige class, but I really don't like the idea of being able to do that so I compromised with him by allowing him to do that with an experience point penalty. (I am aware of the retrain rules from Players Handbook II, but I don't have that book available)

In the next breath, another player wanted to prestige his CN Rogue to Assassin despite the "Evil" requirement. I said that it was fine then the previous player threw a tantrum, threatening to not come if he didn't change his alignment to "Evil". Worse yet, this guy was playing a paladin so he was going to role play his character to have a problem with the (now) evil Assassin.

I solved the problem by simply issuing the assassin the Amulet of Nondetection so that the paladin couldn't detect his evil nature. But the player of the paladin then insisted that I issue magical items to everyone in the group. I concede and procede to do just that. Later on, he has the audacity to complain that everyone was too powerful then quits after the session.

After that, most of the sessions were much funner to play and I learned a few lessons and a got a few ideas of how to deal with problematic players for next time.

(I later invited him to a more recent session and he threw a hissy fit again over something petty so I told him that he won't be invited again privately)

The only session that comes in a distant 2nd is when I let one of my friends, whom was a bad roleplayer, DM. He simply put us all in a random dungeon with no plot or explanation...

nobodylovesyou4
2008-03-25, 02:15 PM
worst game? all my gaming sessions have been pretty good, and none explicitly bad, but we did try to play vampire: the masquerade once. honestly, it should have gone better, but i insisted on owning a temple of Cthulhu. i eventually decided to quit when my right hand man assassinated me to take over. now that i think about it, that was mostly my fault ><

Aquillion
2008-03-25, 02:19 PM
I go to one of the first gaming conventions held in Texas. In the open gaming room, I start a game for 5-6 level characters. The plot hook for the adventure was the old "friend or family member is kidnapped." I asked one player if his character has any brothers or sisters, parents, friends living in the city. He says he doesn't know. I soon find that, out of the five players present, they all know exactly what THACO, damage, spells, and magic items but they have never bothered to make up a background for the character. Most don't even have a name. That one isn't that bad. At a con, it's not so weird to be playing a 'throwaway' character for a quick mindless dungeon crawl... there was just a miscommunication over what sort of game you'd be running. I mean, it isn't as though they'd have a lot of time to develop those characters anyway.

Azerian Kelimon
2008-03-25, 02:25 PM
These were the worst, but almost all of the games I tried were filled with monty haulers, munchkins, and power gamers. I actually quit RPGs for nine years becasue I was convinced that they were all nuts. I'm thinking of quitting again now becasue, at the last D&D game I went to, I pointed out to the DM that a magic user gets 1d4 HP per level but does 1d6 HP per level with a fire ball or lightning bolt, only MUs with a high Con bonus would last more than one round in a magic duel after fifth level. He became so angry that I was finding fault with the D&D rules that he ordered me to leave the game. I'm generally an easy going guy who has had no problems getting long with people except in RPGs.

Two things:

A) Why did you find that odd? It's an interesting complaint, but I think the reason is clear: Magic users do not devote even a little time to training their endurance, thus the crappy hit die.

B) Have you tried PbP'ing? Usually, people are much nicer, and you can just stop posting if the players or DM's turn out to be total loonies.

an kobold
2008-03-25, 02:57 PM
I don't really have any really horrific stories. I've never been nor seen someone get kicked out of a gaming group, etc. I have a couple of stories about different people I play with that just irk the crap out of me.

One of them devotes 0 to little time to character background and most of it to the "build." Builds that, frankly, were not that good but gorram is he smug about them. When we sit down to play, he does very little actual roleplaying, and it's sort of a running joke that you could essentially just rotate his characters in the different games we are running and nothing would change about party dynamics. There are two straws that break the camel's back for me: 1) an act of moral superiority through a feigned naivety that gets constantly mentioned, both in sessions and around the school (think of a male, more secular antagonist from Saved) 2) getting emotional over dice rolls. Don't get me wrong, if people have invested time into creating and rp'ing an interesting character and he/she dies, I find it entirely justifiable for a person to get upset. This kid, however, begins to cry and hit the table, disrupting the board, if for two rounds in a row he rolls below a ten on a d20. This keeps up until the DM allows him a reroll. Two rounds later, the same thing is happening again.

The other player is just a jerk in general. He's loud, he's arrogant, he goes out of his way for totally out of character reasons to derail the plot. Then he complains constantlyout of game about how the plot is at a stand still and nobody in character likes him, ultimately blaming the DM for whatever has gone wrong. At the table he's loud, shows up drunk, and urges the DM to hurry up so he can go to a party and get laid. Then he complains about why when a new campaign starts up he was not invited.

Ivius
2008-03-25, 02:58 PM
B) Have you tried PbP'ing? Usually, people are much nicer, and you can just stop posting if the players or DM's turn out to be total loonies.

I'll second that; I play PbP almost exclusively, and I haven't run into anything horrible so far (slightly more heavily optimized in general than PnP, though). And it's a lot easier to RP when you can write as much as you want for each post. To top it off, a lot of PbP sites have built in sheets, dice rollers, and random generators, for example Mythweavers (http://www.myth-weavers.com/forumhome.php?).

Burley
2008-03-25, 03:05 PM
Let's see: In one game, I played a Gnome [campaign specific cleric class], who was obsessed with collecting random things and storing them on his wagon (drawn by his prized horse Buttercup) because he believed that the more things he had, the more divine power he'd have. When the DM burned my wagon to the ground, along with all my game-worldly possesions and killed my horse, my character went blank and decided he needed to mourn while the rest of the party dungeoncrawled. The rest of the players (who are all my closest friends) were so angry at me for abandoning them, so, the DM gave me an awesome weapon: A Magic Greatsword that had all sorts of powers, mostly fire-based, that scaled with my character level and granted proficiency and weapon focus to it's wielder. (The weapon had been in the wagon all along, but I hadn't detected/identified it.) I ended up having NO possessions other than the sword. The rest of the group decided that the sword should go to the party's melee guy (even though he focused on axes), and tried to take my ONLY possession (6th level characters at this point). They said that my Gnome Shaper (spontaneous cleric with hefty restrictions on spells known and no turning) was too over powered. This is coming from the Centaur Ranger (DM waved +4 LA away), the Elven Sorcerer with a Dire Badger familar (from level 1 with no penalties or feats used), a Gnome Wizard with a Blessed Book (given to her at level 1...for free), a Doppleganger Rogue who somehow had a +30 or so in Bluff, Diplomacy, Sleight of Hand and somethingelse (by level 6... DM gave him some special item), and the Halfling Ranger allowed to take both the ranged and melee fighting trees and a bonus favored enemy for good roleplaying.
My naked gnome was overpowered to them...Sheesh.

I also had a DM not too long ago who was...well, not what we expected. Found him online, seemed okay at first. Promised us the exact kind of campaign we had hoped for, and it ended up being a huge political escapade. He docked our "Strong-Silent Type" fighter XP after most sessions because he "wasn't roleplaying correctly." The guy had a negatives to intelligence and charisma! He played his character very well, which included specific trained tactics in fights, like always attacking to the left, even if it meant he'd get murderized.
Same DM jumped my case when I took Weapon Finesse for my Warlock's Eldritch Glaive, insisting that I was power-gaming. Granted my character was built well, but he had already gone out of his way to throw loot-items that'd be really helpful to the other characters, but not to mine. (Not a big deal, since Warlocks can still kick butt butt-naked). Plus, I had built my Warlock around Item creation. He told me after a few months of playing that he doesn't like Item Creation, but it'd be "game-breaking" to let me retrain my Item Creation feats.

I've not had a lot of experience in gaming, but most of them have ended horribly. I won't even mention the ones I've already devoted entire threads to... :smalltongue:

Proven_Paradox
2008-03-25, 03:10 PM
The actual game before this was pretty cool. The DM talked about how he was actually aiming to kill us, but nothing in there was terribly threatening other than the final battle. (Though this is in part because I--the group's wizard--had a rope trick available after we got hit with a Waves of Fatigue spell. The penalties would have made the rest of the game considerably more difficult, and I think he was banking on us having to deal with that further into the "dungeon.") I've long sense realised that this particular DM isn't going to actually kill any of the characters, so I'm usually not too worried about the chances of mortality in these games. (I've been a DM before, and I've flubbed to keep a character alive before. I can usually tell when someone else is doing it during an in-person game.)

The part where this becomes one of my worst games is afterwards, where he tells us we gain nine levels. Over two days, at which point we move on to the next session.

I'm a wizard. With the Collegiate Wizard feat. I now have to deal with the logistics of adding over 30 spells to at least two--possibly three--spellbooks over two days. And also suddenly becoming an archmage. Forget adding any other spells to my book too. I am not pleased by this. We're also on the approximate WBL of a party of level 6. Not so much a problem for me, but I feel very sorry for our melee characters.

Terraoblivion
2008-03-25, 03:16 PM
Picking out the worst game i've had is going to be hard. For a couple of years i played in a group containing a guy who was a borderline psychopath, literally. He would passive aggressively abuse his girlfriend forcing her to drop out of college among other things and the only reason i stayed with the group was to try to ensure she had some social life apart from him and his friends.

As for the stories involving his behavior in the game the most famous incident is simply known as "The Rose". We were playing Werewolf: The Apocalypse and were visiting a Silver Fang cairn. He decided to go into town to go pubcrawling. However, he was too lazy to try to figure out the lay-out of the mansion that formed the habitation part of the cairn and instead just jumped out the window from the second floor, landing on an expensive rose they owned. He was told in no uncertain terms that he could sleep in the shed if he didn't want to stay in the house, but instead decided to not care and climbed over the wall to go downtown. When he got there a picked a fight with a group of Hell's Angels and decided to use his supernatural powers in a very visible way before getting arrested for aggrevated assault and alerting every hunter in hundreds of miles to the presence of supernaturals in that city. We spent an entire session dealing with this and then he would complain about the ingame repercusions of these actions for the rest of the game. And it is just the most clearly remembered example of the stunts he kept pulling everytime he stopped being the center of attention of the game. Other stunts has involved a killing spree in downtown Los Angeles and managing to get an incarna to personally hate us due to insolence towards it.

nobodylovesyou4
2008-03-25, 04:18 PM
i happen to recall a gaming session very recently that was awesome for me, but sucked for one of my friends. heres how it went:

the party set-up was three players, who i will refer to by their GiTP usernames:
me, an elan psion 5/flayerspawn psychic 6 (for all intents and purposes, i was a mindlflayer).
PirateJesus, a dwarf fighter 5/dervish 6 who was FLAMING queer (even Liberace would've said "that's pretty queer")
and Leviathan_IV, an elf factotum 11 (he was the victim here).

everything went pretty well, the dungeon was setup in a very good fashion (kudos to Lord Tatarus, my DM). eventually we got to the final boss of this dungeon, which was made for 4 players who had an inkling of what we were doing. there were 3 of us, playing classes completely new to us.

Leviathan is rather new to DND, and this is the first character hes ever had that has gone well. well, when we enter the final chamber, the boss says, "Join me in the shadows!" my response is, "What does that entail, exactly?" "Well, we have good dental, free donuts on saturdays, and i wont kill you." "Uh... ill think about it." So the battle continues, and i am eventually reduced down from 41 HP to 8. I look at my character sheet, remember i am Chaotic Evil, turn to Leviathan's character, and say, "Sorry, Jack, but i come first. HOSTILE EMPATHIC TRANSFER!" I deal 33 damage to him, heal myself for 33, and join the enemy team. both of the other players ended up dying, due to my treachery. needless to say, poor leviathan was PIIIIIIISSED.

So it wasnt so much a horrible gaming experience, but it was a horrible ending.

Kurald Galain
2008-03-25, 05:21 PM
Let's see... well, I can't top the OP on this, but here are some weird stories...

* A player whose character died (and after it became clear our group was not about to go on a lengthy sidequest to resurrect him) made a new character, who was just completely annoying. The player, of course, claimed that this was in character for him (and maybe it was; this was a nice guy most of the time), but his char went out of his way to piss off the rest of the group. At a certain point we figured, "well, our characters don't know your char very well, and we're in a safe and civilized town anyway, so we have no reason and no obligation to travel with you." He proceeded by trying to sink our boat and steal our horses; I then proceeded by casting Charm Person on him. At that point the DM got a nervous breakdown and the campaign ended. I don't think the guy ever DM'ed again.

* Yes, yes, one DM and his girlfriend. I'm sure you all have heard stories like this before - she was the manipulative kind, he was a kind of doormat. This meant that her character got reflex saves to avoid melee attacks (?!) and when she got mildly damaged, not even dangerously so, the high priest of her religion 'ported in to cast heal on her. No, I'm not exaggerating.

* A character of mine once got killed by a group of highly intelligent and cleverly cooperating... zombies. Yes, brilliantly strategizing brainless monsters. No, there wasn't any priest or lich or whatnot nearby controlling them.

Skaven
2008-03-25, 05:50 PM
They said that my Gnome Shaper (spontaneous cleric with hefty restrictions on spells known and no turning) was too over powered. This is coming from the Centaur Ranger (DM waved +4 LA away), the Elven Sorcerer with a Dire Badger familar (from level 1 with no penalties or feats used), a Gnome Wizard with a Blessed Book (given to her at level 1...for free), a Doppleganger Rogue who somehow had a +30 or so in Bluff, Diplomacy, Sleight of Hand and somethingelse (by level 6... DM gave him some special item), and the Halfling Ranger allowed to take both the ranged and melee fighting trees and a bonus favored enemy for good roleplaying.
My naked gnome was overpowered to them...Sheesh.

heh, reminds me of a player in my campeign.

he's a half fiend fighter who has a +4 something greatsword. he regularly deals like, 40-50 damage per swing. He has something like 4 stats at 20+

I joined the game with a Kobold, with a 'gish' build. I think I had 4 classes and a 14 strength after enhancement. Sorc 6, fighter 1, Abjurant champion 5, Spellsword 2 I think. Anyway.. when i first roleplayed out the meeting and joining the party, he started complaining that I was overpowered.

'Smell the cheese' he commented. He kept staring at my character sheet, occasionally swiping it off me and staring at it before I took it back and asked him to stop it.

He exploded when I entered melee once and hit an enemy for 14 damage. "Sorcerers shouldn't be able to attack!" or something was his line. "It should be against the rules to have more than 2 classes!" or whatever.. anyway, I keep putting him down, but he keeps starting again when we play. The stupid thing is, he is the strongest in the party by far, has the highest AC, the highest damage output, has racial spells, large spell resistance, and keeps taking all the best gear we come across.

Yet my Kobold is overpowered.

pyrefiend
2008-03-25, 06:20 PM
This isn't actually that bad, but looking back on it, it seems a bit funny. The party was composed of a LG human knight (me), and my friends' NG elan psion. The campain stared with the two of us running away from the secret occult lair where a group of elan fanatics were tuning normal humans into elans. My knight had met up with his character in the place, when he was still human. He was tortured and turned into an elan, but I saved him and we escaped to a nearby town. It was then that my friends' character developed powers.

We met up with the other memmer of the party in that town. He was a rogue, and he was terrible at it. He followed us everywhere, and every town we went to, he stole constantly. He was always caught, but he kept being released and excused of charges. But oh, he was persistant. He even stole from a burning church that was being ransackd by demons. My knight, was, well, a knight. He wanted him to stop stealing randomly. My character never confronted him, but I followed him around when it was obvious he wanted to be alone so he could steal some old lady's purse. Eventually we gave up and told him that if he didn't want to save the world with us, he didn't have to. The rogue's player got very angry at me, and demanded the DM give him a soso theiving adventure. It deteriorated from there.

Da King
2008-03-25, 09:44 PM
The last game I played in wasn't too bad, (I did have fun) but another player that the DM (my best friend) just invited was being mean to me constantly. Now I was playing an elven rogue, and he hates elves, calling them: "namby pamby woodsy tree huggers", wherever he found that phrase. He also hates rogues for some reason, but when I asked him he wouldn't tell me why. He constantly makes rude comments towards me which I find very hurtful, and he won't stop it. When I talked to the DM about this out of game, he said the player was "just playing around" and said I do things like that all the time, which was a blatant lie. I think I'm getting sick of playing with these people, and I'm starting to question my friendship with many of them.

AslanCross
2008-03-25, 11:08 PM
...Wow. Number 6, you sure run into a lot of horrific gaming experiences.

Worst I had was sometime last year. I was running two beginner groups (rather stressful for me) through the same campaign. In one of them, I had a player who was playing a sorcerer. As of this point she had not chosen any spells and even worse, had no idea what her character could do. The group lacked a rogue, and she had cross-classed some Open Lock ranks. Now I'd given them a deadline to fill out their character sheets so we could start playing properly. She didn't comply and had a habit of filling in her ranks ad hoc while we were playing, which was more than a little frustrating.

When the group finally ran into a door that they couldn't open, she all of a sudden had ranks in Open Lock----but didn't tell the rest of the group. Thus the group's monk tried to bust open the door by breaking it.

The monk succeeded. He also succeeded in calling an entire mob of hobgoblins with the noise of the shattering door. The party got trapped in corner while the hobgoblins and their cleric kept them in. They were able to survive that, but then the sorcerer's player later said that "I deliberately didn't tell them I could open locks because I was manipulating them into going the other way." Of course, her ploy failed because they tried to go through the door anyway and got attacked in a tactically unfeasible position.
Everybody was a little miffed that they were being taken for a ride, and the ranger's player got particularly angry to the point of yelling. The sorcerer's player quit a week later due to failing grades, and so did the monk, while the rest of the party got near-TPKed against a later hobgoblin encounter. We tried to replace some of the players and keep going, but eventually my schedule couldn't take it much longer. I dissolved the group after that.

Winterwind
2008-03-26, 07:47 AM
Wow. :smalleek:
This is some really bad luck some people here had; now I'm feeling bad for hogging all the good and nice players, who care about roleplaying and are stable and amiable people in real life, too.
Which might have to do with me playing RPGs pretty much only with people I am friends with otherwise as well; if this is an option, I can only give that advice to all the people who made such bad experiences - see whether you can found a roleplaying group with your friends, with no egotistical or outright sociopathic morons in it.

The only bad experience I had with the people I usually play with was when we let a guy who was usually only an ordinary player GM for once (he was also the only one who was rather in for the fights and not for the roleplaying in the group, even though he made a decent enough impression of a stereotypical dwarf; he ultimately lost interest in roleplaying and left):
It began right at the start, when he began the adventure with the words: "You are in a forest. What do you do?". No introduction how we got into the forest, motivation, goal, nothing special to investigate, simply nothing whatsoever. Not that it mattered; a couple of seconds later, we were ambushed by a much too large number of bandits, and TPKed.
We univocally declared that this whole thing never happened, and never let the guy GM again, which worked out perfectly for all of us. :smallamused:

Otherwise, my only bad experiences were from cons:
Once, I was playing an elf mage in ShadowRun, and had the bad luck of running into a GM who was utterly convinced all elves everywhere (including ShadowRun, in spite of the official description of all races being explicitly that usual racial stereotypes do not apply) had to be gay, which spontaneously caused him to add an elf NPC specifically to hit on my character all the time. I am perfectly fine with homosexuals, but that was incredibly annoying. Much worse, though, was that his portrayal of that NPC was insultingly stereotypical and offensive. :smallmad:
Admittedly, I should have been forwarned when I got into a rules discussion with the guy where he insisted on something utterly wrong and illogical, and when I simply opened the book and pointed to the line which explicitly proved him wrong he said he "didn't need to read it, because he knew he was right". Ugh.

At the same con, and in ShadowRun as well, there was another GM who turned the whole adventure pretty much into showing off her incredibly important and powerful GMNPC. Who was some kind of android, apparently. With instant wound regeneration. And magic powers.

(I won't complain, though, some of the other games I played at that con belonged to the best I ever played :smallsmile: )

Swordguy
2008-03-26, 08:08 AM
A guy running L5R 3e at last year's GenCon told my wife "If you're not gonna **** me, I don't wanna hear you talk" when she handed him her generics.

It was her first introduction to con gaming as well (she'd had nothing but kind, understanding people in her gaming career up to then). Luckily for all involved, I was off playing Battletech at the time...getting thrown out of GenCon for beating somebody to a pulp would have sucked. Especially on the first day.

Not my worst, per se, but certainly a horrid gaming experience came on the set of Living Legends, a WW2 flick for an Independent Film Festival I was the armorer/stunt coordinator/military consultant/actor for a few years back(I swear, the more hats I wear in a show the less I get paid). We were using d20 modern rules and running our actual roles in the movie through a WW2 campaign. It also had the benefit of making my purchase of the d20 modern rules a tax write-off, since I was using them in a profession (character development for actors...). Unfortunately, there was a dispute about rules, and this genius pulled out his blank-firing Luger from inside his costume and actually SHOT the other party.

Now, granted, it was a blank gun - but it wasn't one of the nice, plugged-barrel types that we like to use onstage. It had to have muzzle flash for the camera, which meant that it had an open barrel and simply had blank rounds loaded in it (please remember - this was on set way out in the Indiana woods - so actors were carrying all their props). Blank guns don't propel a slug, but they do propel a chunk of wax used to seal the powder inside the cartridge along with a whole lot of heat, very hot unburnt powder, and air pressure. Guy who got shot had his costume set lightly on fire by the smoldering powder and had some decent flashburns on his neck.

Genius was removed from the production in a hurry, and was in fact stripped of costume and props on the spot and left to walk the 2 miles back to his car.

AKA_Bait
2008-03-26, 09:33 AM
A guy running L5R 3e at last year's GenCon told my wife "If you're not gonna **** me, I don't wanna hear you talk" when she handed him her generics.

It was her first introduction to con gaming as well (she'd had nothing but kind, understanding people in her gaming career up to then). Luckily for all involved, I was off playing Battletech at the time...getting thrown out of GenCon for beating somebody to a pulp would have sucked. Especially on the first day.

Wow. Yeah. That's pretty bad. I might have laid a guy out for saying that to anyone, let alone my wife.

Honestly, that kind of behaviour (although not as bad) is one of the reasons I've generally avoided Con's. My gaming experience, at least after highschool, has tended to be with the same group of around 10 people. Whenever I go to cons I get reminded of how many a-hole gamers there are.

Hard to say what my worst game is. The game I had the least fun at was at a con (ICon), where I sat down (after being away from gaming for around 4 or 5 years) with a lonley looking DM running a GURPS game. I discovered his was the only totally empty table for a reason.

The game that caused the most trouble was the final session of a very long campagin. One of the players had their character get killed (mostly through their own stupidity), started crying, and stormed off, taking her car and driving away. This wouldn't be so bad, if her fiance (now husband) was not also playing.

Crimson Avenger
2008-03-26, 09:33 AM
I have hadn't had that many bad campaigns or players, but there have been some amusing ones.

In college, we had a newbie in a oriental campaign, who walked up to the samurai (fighter) and said, in character, "You have no honor!" He was a little confused when the fighter beat his character into sushi, and why the DM let him.

More recently...we have an eight person party, with a Frenzied Beserker....with deathless rage, an a DM that has given him an item that converts damage into subdual damage equal to his CON modifier. Anyway, we're walking along the corridor, and I spring an arrow trap that targets myself and the beserker. My AC is high enough that I take no damage, while the beserker takes 7 arrows, six of which do damage. Needless to say, he frenzies.

Roll for Init....and the sorcerer wins, and casts an enchantment on the beserker, which he fails the save, and then proudly anounces that now the beserker has to roll his saving throws twice and use the worst of the two rolls. Including his Will save to come out of frenzy. That sucks, cause he rolls his first save and succeeds! and then has to re-roll, which of course fails.

Several rounds and a few critical hits later, four of the party are bleeding to death including the cleric, the sorcerer has fled from the battle (couldn't get the beserker to fail another save...go figure), as a duelist I've taken the total defense option and am trying to move away, and the rangy ranger is considering cutting and running too.

Funny part is that when the sorcerer fled from combat after the second spell failed, he fled into the unexplored part of the dungeon, and got hung up on one of the DM's special traps, insty death.

Of eight characters, only the two of us survived, the ranger and myself.

Good times.

ColdBrew
2008-03-26, 10:25 AM
I briefly ran a 3E Shadowrun game for some friends of mine (all males). Unfortunately, one of them decided to make a character based on Ivy, complete with monowhip and poisoned lipstick. Now this was a fairly mature group, but we just could not handle it when he'd threaten other PCs, in his most effeminate voice, with "Don't make me kiss you..."

Complete with fluttering eyelashes no less.

valadil
2008-03-26, 12:21 PM
A guy running L5R 3e at last year's GenCon told my wife "If you're not gonna **** me, I don't wanna hear you talk" when she handed him her generics.


Dayamn. I'da told the guy "I'm not gay but I'm gonna **** you all night if you talk to her like that again." Being 6'4" and 300lbs has its advantages. So does not having to respond to stuff like that on the spot, so you can actually come up with a vaguely witty threat.

OP, you have an amazing series of bad games going on. I'm impressed. I've encountered a few bad players that have dragged a good game down, but never something so all around bad.

I played with a guy who would scream "thats bs!" every time his twenty rolled below a 5, then reroll it. The GM appropriately automatically failed him whenever he did this, even if the original roll was a success.

I had a GM not allow characters to introduce themselves to each other. We didn't know the other PCs names or even sex until the second session. And this was in a party where we were supposed to all know each other.

A player in one of my games (who I couldn't drop because she was a roommate at the time) tried to ditch the first game but have me call her up when things got good so she could ditch the boring parts.

Same player was a little pushy with her rolls. When I jailed some other PCs she blurts out "I'm getting a crowbar, sneaking past the guard, breaking the bars, oh look I rolled a twenty." I'm not sure if she even rolled the twenty or if she just had it on the table. I tried to explain that attempting something and rolling a natural twenty didn't always work. Otherwise 20 of my NPCs could look at her and roll their AnnoyingPlayerSpontaneouslyCombusts skill, and even though they have no ranks in it someone will probably roll a twenty. She seemed unamused. I managed to backtrack her to the sneaking part which she should have rolled. Her response? "Alright, but I'm keeping my twenty."

Another player (who incidentally was also a roommate - maybe I need better roommates) managed to seriously irritate our group in a small GURPs game. During character creation he had a hissy fit when the DM limited his DR. Nobody else in the party had any DR and the DM didn't want to come up with combats that could damage a heavily armed character while not killing fleshy characters. The player argued that the DR was his whole character concept (even though he never told anyone that) and that the DM ruined his character. He once ditched three and a half hours of the four hour game to take a phone call from his GF. He also decided his character was a robot. The DM did not approve this or even approve of robots existing in the universe. The player brought in his laptop to do text to speech audio whenever he talked. It was kinda cute at the character's introduction, but completely broke down any actual roleplay. When someone talked to him you'd have to wait for him to type, then he'd play the voice, then we'd ask him what it said because it was incomprehensible and quiet, and then he'd finally speak. We kept asking him to stop and he kept refusing. Thankfully the game was only 4 or 5 sessions long. He wasn't invited back.

Other than that there have been a lot of powergamers, non roleplayers, and warm bodies (who sucked at powergaming and don't bother roleplaying but show up just to be social). They can be annoying but for the most part they're harmless.

asphen fox
2008-03-26, 08:56 PM
...Wow. Number 6, you sure run into a lot of horrific gaming experiences.

Worst I had was sometime last year. I was running two beginner groups (rather stressful for me) through the same campaign. In one of them, I had a player who was playing a sorcerer. As of this point she had not chosen any spells and even worse, had no idea what her character could do. The group lacked a rogue, and she had cross-classed some Open Lock ranks. Now I'd given them a deadline to fill out their character sheets so we could start playing properly. She didn't comply and had a habit of filling in her ranks ad hoc while we were playing, which was more than a little frustrating.

When the group finally ran into a door that they couldn't open, she all of a sudden had ranks in Open Lock----but didn't tell the rest of the group. Thus the group's monk tried to bust open the door by breaking it.

The monk succeeded. He also succeeded in calling an entire mob of hobgoblins with the noise of the shattering door. The party got trapped in corner while the hobgoblins and their cleric kept them in. They were able to survive that, but then the sorcerer's player later said that "I deliberately didn't tell them I could open locks because I was manipulating them into going the other way." Of course, her ploy failed because they tried to go through the door anyway and got attacked in a tactically unfeasible position.
Everybody was a little miffed that they were being taken for a ride, and the ranger's player got particularly angry to the point of yelling. The sorcerer's player quit a week later due to failing grades, and so did the monk, while the rest of the party got near-TPKed against a later hobgoblin encounter. We tried to replace some of the players and keep going, but eventually my schedule couldn't take it much longer. I dissolved the group after that.

:smallbiggrin: I remember that game... Man... I so missed playing Eli and Ry. The sorcerer was so annnoying... :smallmad: I even forgot what her name is. ;)I was laughing when Kreshnak's (Hobgoblin Boss) wizard burned her familiar to a crisp :D She failed her save to boot :)) I was like, "That's what YOU get for messing our Party Up!" And the Near TPK thingy... :)) I remember casting slow just to prevent the TPK but I can't get over the Big Hobgoblin's SR... I dunno about the hobgoblin with the long chain thing though... He didn't have any. Maybe the spell hit him.... He knocked me unconscious anyways... And remember when Eidolon's Axe got shattered? :)) We were like, "Ooooohhhh... Remo (the guy who was taking over for the player who plays Eidolon) you are so dead..." and then we went out and we were supposed to tell the player and (snickering, mind you) and all of a sudden he was behind us. :)) Imagine our reactions when that happened. :))

Grug
2008-03-26, 09:34 PM
Not my story personally, but one of the GitP forum-ers has achieved legendary status in the area of bad-gaming. If he is reading this, please elaborate from my rememberence.

Basically, our protagonist was starting a new game with a group of people under a New GM, at his house. Protagonist decided to take a roleplaying hook that he lost constitution every few days unless he drank a special potion. As soon as the campaign starts, the GM does everything he can to destroy the protagonist's potions and prevent him from making new ones because it was "overpowering". Protagonist finally tells the GM he has had enough. This marks the transition from "game" to "worst". GM says that protagonist can leave if he wants, he is going to continue gaming (and eating the lasagna the protagonist made). Protagonist calmly asks him again. The GM still refuses to leave a house that's not his.

So protagonist calls the cops, saying that an unwelcome guest claims protagonist can't "make him" leave. The police come and he goes. The rest of the players roll new sheets and are having a merry old time. Then the GM comes back and knocks on the door, shouting that he forgot something and that he needs to come in. Protagonist calls the cops again and the GM gets taken to the station for the night. It seems like it's over.

But then the next night, Protagonist is posting on Giantitp (seriously, he's giving a play by play of what's happening) when he hears a crash downstairs. GM had come back, drunk, and thrown a rock through his window. This time protagonist calls the cops and GM gets ARRESTED! I'd say that takes the cake for worst gaming session.

Again, not my story. Although I do like lasagna.

MeklorIlavator
2008-03-26, 09:46 PM
That's pretty much a fair recap of Lankybugger's experience. I believe a link to it was provided in this thread.

Jonesh
2008-03-27, 06:00 PM
Oh gosh, I've nothing that really comes close to this. The only thing that was really bad was one of my first sessions of D&D. It probably would have become my first D&D campaign too. It was years ago I believe. Anyway;
We were a low level party of something like,
me: wizard. something neutral, might go evil 'cuz of background and "that 'Shar' godess has a cool alternative to mainstream magic" :smalltongue:
buddy 1: rogue. also neutral or something.
buddy 2: dwarven ranger. NE.

So we were all traveling together because of some reasons or another and at some point we were tracking kobolds 'cuz they had stole something or someone and we broke into their lair and did what PCs do best.
Now, we ended up with a kobold who surrendered and me and buddy 1 we're wrapping the fight up checking for loot and such. So buddy 2 thinks this is great time to have some more blood flowing, i.e. the poor kobold's blood. IC he shouts something and he says to the DM he's gonna cut up the poor thing with his axe.
The other three of us OOC all go "what, why?" and buddy 2 says that he's just playing his character's alignment. IC and OOC us two other players says that it is probably a good idea for the wanton slaughter to take a break, at the very least untill we had interrogated the kobold about whatever we were supposed to interrogate him about.
DM asks one final time "Are you sure?", buddy 2 says that he is and the DM narrates the end of the adventure as we were unable to find any other leads. Yeah, a he was a bit railroady that DM but it was good. He's gotten better too, since the next short story is about another adventure "under" him.

I think we were the same team of players, but probably at least 1-2 years later (I've bad chronological memory or something) so we were gearing up to start an adventure, the hook was that we were all tribal shifters on the edge of the Demon Wastes. So we took, what an hour or two, rolled up some our characters... And the bad thing about this bad game, is that we didn't get much farther than that. It started well with some kind of mutant attack and a fun battle and when we're kind of doing the post-battle talk, the DM looked at his notes and said something to the effect of "You know what? This adventure is pretty much linear, NPC says go there you do that etc. Let's just play some board games instead."
I thought the beginning was good and my character was promising... Hell, this was back when we rolled for stats and I rolled good and also rolled an 18. I put it in dex for some min-max goodness though (shifters get +2 dex) and since I had already decided on a ranged specc'd ranger, it was obvious.

And that's me, blathering away.

Hal
2008-03-27, 06:47 PM
I can't top anything written in this thread. Heck, I've been fortunate enough to play with good players. My worst session was due to my own negligence as a new DM, letting items too powerful fall into PC hands.

I had the leader of the mob challenge my guys to a one-on-one duel with whoever in the mob they wanted. Of course, the dwarven fighter in the party picks the other dwarf in the mob, which was what I anticipated. He was a barbarian, and I'd tricked him out to be nasty in combat. He's got the other player on the ropes, when the player whips out a magic item I gave them in the second session (we were at this point 10 or so weeks in).

The item was a horn that stuns people in a 15 ft. cone when it's blown. New DMs shouldn't create magic items, because we don't know enough to properly limit the powers of such items. Consequently, since there was no limit on how often the horn could be used, the PC just kept blowing the horn at the shell-shocked barbarian while he healed himself up.

Now, I was so stunned at this sudden turn around that I didn't realize I was letting the fighter take 3 or 4 actions each round. It didn't matter. He knocked the barbarian down and then chopped the guys' head off (which was completely unexpected). So, exactly as the players initially suspected anyhow, I had the rest of the mob join in the fight. I'd planned for such a contingency, at least, and had another member of the mob be a Werebear. Nobody has a silvered weapon, so I figured the werebear would make quick work of them (not fatal, of course).

Ah, but then the players march up the NPC I let them control during combat . . . and roll a natural 20 on the first attack roll. At this point, I recall with horror that I gave this guy a vorpal blade on a whim, not thinking it would activate often enough to make a difference. Nope. First attack, and they chop the werebear's head off. While I sat in the corner and cried, the players mopped up the rest of the mob.

Okay, okay, no big deal. So that wasn't a challenge for them . . . I had something nastier waiting out in the next part of their journey. They leave the town and head for the wilderness, where I have a red dragon waiting to ambush them. The dragon is tricked out, again, to be as nasty as possible while still an appropriate CR. Should the party be at risk of dying, he was simply going to swoop in, grab magic items, and scoot off to his lair.

After a couple of rounds of fighting, the fighter drops his flaming war axe and goes chasing after the dragon with a bow. The dragon takes this opportunity to drop down and grab the axe that was left behind. I thought this would be uncomplicated, but I didn't realize that the same NPC was in charging range. The dragon is still on the ground when the NPC charges . . . and rolls a natural 20. Shoop . . . off goes the dragon's head. What was supposed to be their most challenging fight up to that point ended up being the fastest fight of any of our games.

The players cheered and cheered. I think I had a look something along the lines of being told my dog had been run over.

So, yeah. I haven't had to deal with bad sessions due to nasty players or DMs, but mainly due to my own blundering as a new DM.

Lessons learned, eh?

kjones
2008-03-27, 07:52 PM
Hal, I can relate. I once spent about four hours putting together a group of powerful NPCs (called the Slaughterhouse Five, I was so proud of that) that were supposed to become recurring villains a la the Linear Guild. The party fought them, and completely annihilated them in about four rounds, less than fifteen minutes of combat.

I almost cried.

Not a particularly bad game, though. The worst game I've ever played in (aside from the games I ran for my brother when I was eight; in retrospect they were pitiful, but they were fun at the time) was probably also one that I ran. It was a convention game, and at the time I was obsessed with Spycraft. Decent game, but character creation takes forever (and I wasn't prepared enough to make pregens), and the plot was hackneyed, railroaded, and just flat-out stupid, in addition to dragging on for way too long. What was supposed to be a quick one-off ended up going on for 4+ hours.

When the players finally completed the mission, they all but got up and ran away from the table. I'm sure they were all asking themselves, "What the hell was I thinking, getting in on a game run by a 15-year-old?"

The worst part was that two of the players were a mother and daughter; the daughter was almost completely new to RPGs, and she just sat there looking bored out of her mind the entire time. I'm afraid that I may have turned her off the hobby forever.

So, if you played Spycraft at NorEasCon 2004 and are reading this... I'm sorry!

(The details of the game itself have been lost to time; I believe this is for the best. If I recall correctly, it involved a chase between the spies in a car and a satellite dish on wheels. Oh god the pain. *reaches back in time to smack 15-year-old self*)

F.L.
2008-03-27, 07:54 PM
Once, when I was much younger, my sister asked to play D&D. At that point, I deliberately railroaded the cleric she made into contracting werewolf lycanthropy (attack by a werewolf shortly before a full moon, I crunched the numbers to get good odds to take 1/2 her HP). She doesn't play D&D anymore, obviously, though I don't think it was her style anyway. I like to think I'm better at the DM thing now, of course.

But then, in the current group I'm running, they're being followed around by a helpful Mercane who is selling +1 to +3 weapons to them at bargain prices. What they don't know is that the 'mercane' is actually a disguised Ultraloth who sells soul trapping weapons to good and neutral adventurers to get a steady supply of evil souls to trade to demons and devils. I do hope they try to threaten it to get a greater discount...