"Game Master! Why have you forsaken us?!"

[Tanuki Tales]

Alright, I checked back five pages on here and site searched google for five pages and didn't find this exact topic being discussed in the last six weeks. Awesome.


As you can most likely tell from the title of this thread, this is a horror story thread about DMs/GMs/STs/etc. If you've been gaming long enough (and I pity the new players who didn't get a chance to game long enough before this happened to them) you've most likely run afoul of a session, adventure, campaign (or worse, years of gaming) that was practically out of a nightmare because of the actions of the guy who's supposed to be making a fun experience for everyone.

So why not sit down and share your own while you can't tear your eyes away from reading everyone else's. They're like Pringles in that regard, except the flavor is either Empathy or Schadenfreude.


I'll start us off:


Many moons ago, back when I was a High School freshman, I wandered into the art room near the cafeteria when I had heard the school had a DnD club. Those were the golden days, back when the group was made up mostly of the then senior classmen, the juniors who had been with them this long, a few sophmores and us wide eyed newbies. Things were rad and fun and awesome; we fought giant chicken gods, had Enchantment Sorcerers deathly afraid of rabbits and best of all, Pikel the Punk Rocker Dwarf.

But then the year ended and we lost the old guard to graduation. The game was still fun, at times, but the group now lacked the more dedicated leaders who made sure that sessions didn't devolve into LARPing Solid Snake through the school library.

And then, when those juniors turned seniors were lost to us, things went straight into the realm of unspeakable horror. Only one person remained to take the DM's chair, a position he held through a combination of highest system mastery, ownership of the vast majority of the books and some browbeating and coercion and capitalization of folks who didn't realize that things were stopping being fun or who tried to ignore that as best they could (like me).

Mr. Sole DM had these relationship problems you see, with his girlfriend who was in the school's theater group. She had him completely whipped and more or less emasculated him on a constant basis, while also trying to sleep with this other guy we all knew. She had no interest in breaking things off with the DM (he was her "safe choice") and he was too attached and needy to ever break it himself.

So where does all his suppressed and latent rage and impotence get let out on?

Yup. Us.

He would run games where his power was completely absolute and he'd do things arbitrarily regardless if you incited his wrath or not.. The following are just some examples:

• We were in a bazaar of a normal city looking for some information for the quest we were on. The Cleric was inspecting a jewelery stand and picked up an interesting metal cube. It turned out that the cube sucked out the soul of the first person who touched it, was completely indestructible and gave the now empty body over to an Archdevil. No plot reason for any of this, he just thought it was funny.
• The barbarian tore through the combat encounter he had planned to be very dangerous and near fatal to the group with little harm done to the party. Next thing we know, there was an entire fortress being chucked at us from over the horizon. We managed to survive through this and that's when the Giant who threw it came moseying along.
• A new player to the group annoyed him in some innocuous manner. This got his character locked in a motel room randomly inside the dungeon we were exploring. With a Succubus and a Psuedo-Natural Donkey....
• He would play up the negative behavior of the players who we only tolerated at the table because they weren't "sitting on the couch and eating Cheetos". He thought this tended to be hilarious.
• If his girlfriend was playing at the table, which she did infrequently, she would always have the most leeway on her character concepts and he'd do everything he could to make the game run her way (though to be honest, all the DMs over the years had spoiled her. Didn't help they were all guys, that she was the only girl for most of the group's tenure and they all wanted to get with her ).

I've tried to run some games myself since graduating all those years ago, but nothing has really reached the levels of the unadulterated fun of the Pikel year.