DM troubles: When do you quit?

[shadow_archmagi]

From my experience, what kills the game for me is when the GM sees some interesting or cool character in an Anime and tries to throw it in his world not thinking about the context.

Yeaaaaaaaah, that's definitely a Red Flag.

If I'm consistently not having fun, I'm out.

That's the most important measurement

Two major things:
1. Houserules. I don't mind a few house rules, especially for the sake of balancing certain aspects of the system, or for the sake of flavor for the game. What gets me is when somebody has a list of house rules as long as my freaking arm, and it's obvious that the game should have been played under a different system altogether.

2. Character creation restrictions. Sometimes, DMs restrict books based on what they personally own or what they're familiar with. Other times, they restrict resource material because they're under some delusion that cutting splat books from their game will somehow make it more balanced. The moment I hear a DM say something to that effect, I know the game's going nowhere but downhill.

I only refuse to deal with rules that aren't written down. If the DM has twenty houserules, and he's sitting there counting on his fingers and trying to remember them all, I'm out, because I'll bet potatoes to goldmines that he's going to forget one that's going to be very meaningful to me later on and will in fact ruin my evil plans.

My group recently acquired a new player who thought that ToB was overpowered, and I had fun explaining to him how it wasn't. (Apparently he had heard about it secondhand from a group member who told him that Immortal Fortitude "Made you immune to damage, period." rather than offering a save to avoid falling into negatives and automatically ending after three successful saves.) Of course, using reason and logic only works if your DM is sane and reasonable. Of course, if you DM isn't sane and reasonable, that's another big red flag.