What was your worst DM ever?

[Brawny]

Originally I was just going to post a rant thread and be done with it but I figured this could be turned into a legitimate thread. I recently joined a sunday group that I left after the first session(By that, I mean, I left about 2 hours in fed up with his ****) cause of the DM. Here's the gist.

1. He started us out as 5th level with 2 new players. I'm all for starting at a higher level as long as everyone in the group is experienced.

2. He started us out in a tavern(Normally not a problem for me at least) and then proceeded to do...nothing. He let us sit there for 5 minutes waiting for something to happen. This leads into the next one.

3. At no point did he ever give background about the world of the campaign. He just presented some horrific monstrosity of a world map and that we were all in a tavern for some reason.

4. He sounded like he was 14 with the stereotypical high-pitched teenager voice and he got on my nerves pretty bad.

5. He recruited 7 people for the campaign. 1 didn't show but even with 6 it was taking forever to do combat because of the 2 new players.

6. Speaking of combat, the first 2 encounters were 1 Pseudodragon and then some probably cr1 creature that did 2d4 damage. Not to mention pseudodragons being Neutral Good and therefore having no reason to attack travelers let alone 1v7.

7. His method of stat generation? Roll and take anything above 4 and if anything is below 4 than it would be set to 4. Like this I ended up with stats like 20 19 18 18 17 16. When he told me I gave him the benefit of the doubt and figured this would be a high-power campaign with experienced players. Nope

8. The "quest-giver" as much as you can call it, was some guy that randomly walked into the tavern. According to the DM he looked like any other guy so none of us figured it was the quest-giver. After another 2-3 minutes of awkward complete silence I talked to the guy and his name was "Sengolbea" or something else equally unpronounceable. He was a royal scientist that needed bodyguards to go...somewhere. Apparently the places we needed to go were classified. I asked if there was a reward and he said something about anything we find along the way is ours. A grittier player would have just said **** it and not even taken the job but, once again, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

9. The DM spent 30 minutes pre-start talking about how he has ADHD and OCD and how he only needs 1 hour of sleep a night. One player then droned on for another 5 about how sleep deprivation has no long-term side-affects(which it doesn't, but he should have just shut up have the first sentence)

10. He never bothered giving anyone proper tokens, it was just some kind of wolf head portrait thing on roll20 with our name plates on it. Any and all npcs also had some kind of winged dragon gargoyle thing for a token.

11. I had a sneaking suspicion that the quest giver was a DMPC after the DM mentioned randomly that the guy only needed 1 hour of sleep.

12. During combat, he took about 30 seconds to do 1 turn of an enemy.

13. At one point, I intentionally did a Nature Knowledge check to see what I know about pseuodragons just to see if the DM would catch that dragons were actually in Arcana knowledge. Nope. In addition getting information from this knowledge check was like pulling teeth.

14. He had 1 other person in his group that was obviously some friend that was a GM in the group for some reason. He didn't DM. Ever. So he just exploited the fact that he could see the GM layer and stuff.

15. Never a proper battlemap, our battles took place on a blinding white grid.

16. He never gave any description about anything. Maybe I'm just biased because when I dm I give a TON of description to make the world as vivid as possible but I had to go out of my way to ask for details like "What does the lake look like?" His response? "It's clear."

Long list of things I know but enough about me.

GIANTITP, what was your worst dm ever?

[Amphetryon]

If this is your "worst DM ever," consider yourself extremely blessed; more than half of the things on your list don't even read as 'bad' from where I sit.

[Sith_Happens]

Can Marty be everyone's worst GM? I'm pretty sure just reading about him is far worse than the worst GM most of us will ever actually have.

[ellindsey]

Guy I played with briefly in college who was running the old Palladium Robotech game system. We'd spend a few hours making characters. He would then throw us into a combat situation up against overwhelming odds and we'd all be killed in the first encounter. He then would spend a long time explaining all the things we did wrong and how stupid we had been.

The game lasted two sessions, both of which played out the same. I think I only showed up for the second session in the hopes the first had been a fluke. It wasn't.

[Pex]

I've had several equally horrible in their own ways. One killed a character every hour (not an exaggeration). You'd lose a Con point then get back into the game. Another who dismissed my concerns of why I wasn't having fun as whining and when a new campaign started didn't have my character start with the rest of the party while they had a combat that lasted an hour and was about to start another combat without me when I left. A third was upset my cleric would cast spells that were not Cure Light Wounds. Our group had several DMs for different campaigns. Eventually in his campaigns my character could do no right. He stopped being my friend because of how I played a cleric. A fourth just had no class. Rather than talk to me there was a metagame issue, I would arrive at games only to be told it was cancelled without prior notice. I was slow in the uptake but after the third time I got the hint. A fifth kicked me out because I had no money for a cab due to bank error issues and missed a game.

[Meth In a Mine]

A fifth kicked me out because I had no money for a cab due to bank error issues and missed a game.

Jeez. What a jerk.
Anyhow, I had a DM who threw us (a bunch of level fours) into combat with a roper. My jaw hit the floor solidly, as I was looking through the monster manual not 2 hours beforehand and noticed ropers were CR 12. That was a jerk move. Then he got whiny when we fled out of its enormous (50 ft.) reach and slowly pecked it to death with acid arrows and longbows.

[RustyArmor]

I got few nice stories about one. (In fact its why I quit d&d for about five years before coming back). These are all advance 2nd ed games.

The party was walking through a cave for something. Me and one friend were sculptures/masons and during the night while we were resting for night.
Me and friend: "We look for some small rocks to carve tonight to pass time while we chat during watch."
DM: "You find none."
US: "We can't find rocks.......... in a cave?"
DM "Nope."


One time the party was on the run from a pack of savage werewolves. The one player just decides to sit down with swords across lap and wait for them, rest of us kept running. Being the DMs best friend of course, the werewolves just ran right pass him. One of the other players was like. "WTF dude?!" Which the DM retorted "They just like the thrill of the hunt." With rest of party still running I decide....
Me: "Ok my character can barely move anymore, she sits down as well and gets a spell ready, they seem to ignore him, maybe they are just illusions."
DM: "They come upon you and maul you to death you should of kept running."


We were at a tavern with what was soooo obviously the DMs past characters or just DMPCs, just how much detail and such he put into each one just made it apparent. The rest of party moves in and we start talking to each one, each player talking to a certain DMPC. The one I got was some guy in mostly dark clothing I don't remember most of the details but he had dark baggy eyes as if he lacked sleep.
Me: "I approach the guy with a warm smile and ask him if he had a rough day since he seems tired."
Dm: "He jumps out of chair in a blink of an eye and his sword is only a flash as he cuts the front of your shirt and backpack."
Me: "I cover myself and ask him what is his problem beside being a perv."
Dm: "He then does the same quick motions and slashes your throat, you are dead."
Did I mention as I laid there dying not even the dmpc who was a paladin didn't even bat an eye.



It got to point even the players can tell DM hated me for some reason and here is some stories to go with it.

One player kept seeing my stuff, even a necklace which was very noticeable. I demanded it back and got it off him as the other players agreed it was mine. Later on he did the backstab (sneak attack in 2nd) needless to say it nearly killed me, he of course did this in front of the WHOLE party, the paladin in group attacked the rogue. The paladin lost all his powers for defending me.

The DMs best friend a ranger/druid at time just decided to knock me out and steal everything I have. He taunted me whole night about it both in and out of character. As he slept I tried to take my items back without violence.
DM: "No you are not allowed to steal from other players."

Got about billion more, but most really are just run of mill foe target me often so die, get assassinated, mugged and killed in alley, etc etc.

[Airk]

Guy I played with briefly in college who was running the old Palladium Robotech game system. We'd spend a few hours making characters. He would then throw us into a combat situation up against overwhelming odds and we'd all be killed in the first encounter. He then would spend a long time explaining all the things we did wrong and how stupid we had been.

Up until the last sentance, that sounded suspiciously like an unnecessarily ACCURATE Robotech game. ;)

[Tengu_temp]

Many years ago, there was that one guy who offered me and several other people on my NWN RP server's forum to show how PbP games look like. He was all "are you ready to bring your gaming to the next level?" about it, like White Wolf. The game was so bad it drove me away from PbP for years, until I tried it again on these forums and got a much better experience.

Full story later.

Up until the last sentance, that sounded suspiciously like an unnecessarily ACCURATE Robotech game. ;)

Not enough love triangles and eighties pop songs.

[Velaryon]

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.

[ChaoticDitz]

Wow. Your group in general must have been pretty terrible (except the Paladin) if they tolerated that kind of bull from the DM for more than a couple of sessions. I mean, you ask about players, and as my recent thread shows, I'll be the first to say that 90% of them are lazy metagaming dickweeds. But even considering that, very few people consider favoritism acceptable (as they shouldn't). This is a group game, and the DM is failing utterly if he doesn't treat his players with a semblance of fairness or equality. Friend, enrmy, girlfriend, murderer-of-own-family, it doesn't matter. A DM can fail in any number of ways and still be a good DM, but OOC-based favoritism is not one of them.

All that aside, for me, the worst DM I've ever had was a guy I gamed with after my very first group fell apart and I needed someone to play with. I was still rather new to the game and needed to get used to the mechanics, so I was going for something altogether simple, the Complete Warrior spell-less variant Ranger. We all started at level 1, and things went well at first. That is, until I actually proved semi-decent with a longsword-shortsword combination. Then he suddenly decided that Rangers should only use ranged weaponry and told me I needed to change my feats (without an equivalent change in starting equipment, mind you) or else leave. I chose leave.

[Stuebi]

Not "My" DM strictly speaking, but one Im very glad I did not have to play with.

Over a period of time, a couple of my friends played a bit of "The Dark Eye" on Trade School Days (Depending on our schedule, there are 2-3 hour breaks and its a good way to kill time). I was usually playing Video Games for myself while the group was adventuring in the next room.

Now, the Players consist of 1 Girl and 2 Guys, one of which is the DM's younger Brother while the other is one of his regular classmates. One week, DM and Classmate have an argument in School, a big one. And you can tell that the air is thick when the group gathers for their game. After a while I start to notice that the volume has risen, nothing majro, but one of the players seems upset. Eventually my curiosity drives me to shut down my Game and just listen in on the RPG.

And indeed, there was a bit of tensions going on. Appearantly the DM could not let the earlier argument go, and as "luck" had it every Monster, Bandit and Noble in the Game was suddenly very eager to pay Classmate back for what he had said.

Suddenly, a lot of Monster would favor Classmate when choosing someone for an attack. Other times traps triggered only when he was walking over them, while the other two players had passed unharmed. Important NPCs or Questgivers disliked his PC for random reasons. (The Mayor now hates Elves because one stole his purse the other day!). Stuff like that. Classmate called him out on it here and there, the DM denied any bad intentions and would usually stop foir a little while after each accusation, only to start again.

This continued for I think 2-3 weeks, with 3 Session IIRC. Equipment and Levelwise, Classmate was now very obviously behind the other two. Attempts to talk to the DM had failed, he was still in complete denial of any favouritism the othere two got over Classmate. Understandably, this resulted in another argument eventually which ended DM banning Classmate from his house. The other two Players, not being comfortable with the situation quit the game too. Now, at this point I think to myself "Okay, the Group completely broke down. NOW he GOT to see that he was in the wrong."

Nope. It has been a few weeks since then, and the DM wants to hear none of it. Hes in the process of building another group and has not talked to any of his former-friends since.

The actual sad part is, im not even sure if he was doing all that conciously or not. He still insists that he was playing fairly and that Classmate was just having bad luck, even tough all 3 Players and I as a spectator agree that there was some obvious "Screw that Player!" going on.

[Knaight]

I've never really had a terrible GM. The worst was a guy who was inexperienced, was writing a novel, and tried to set up things from the novel as a game - which failed miserably, because it was a bad set up to begin with and giving creative players hyper intelligent aliens and high technology mixes really poorly with railroading.

[Hyena]

He had some kind of magical eye that gave him powers.

Must have been from code geass.

I will certainly write my horror story later. Believe me, it will put yours to shame.

[Sith_Happens]

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.

Yeah, you're going to have to name some specific powers before we can even begin to narrow this down.

EDIT:

Must have been from code geass.

Or Naruto, or Fairy Tail, or Black Bultler, or Basilisk, or...

[TuggyNE]

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.

Did he scream out "SEE THE TRUTH" by any chance?

[kailkay]

One guy in our group often takes over DMing a new campaign (we all tend to burn out on each campaign fairly quickly, probably due to lack of preparation on the DM's part. Also I'm usually the DM, so...).

We have pretty much played 3.5 for the entirety of our gaming together, but he was raised on 2nd edition, and still thinks in those terms. This has a few unfortunate side-effects.

One of them is a particularly brutal 'critical miss' he has adopted, he says, from somewhere in 2nd edition (I can't find said rule anywhere). If you roll a natural 1 on your attack, you critically miss. There is no confirmation roll the way there is for a natural 20's critical hit. It's just a straight up miss, but it's worse.

He rolls a d4. On a 1, you drop your weapon (that's okay, you can pick it up as a move action). On a 3, you hit yourself, and on a 4, you hit an ally. Brutal, high damage, whatever.

The thing is, on a 2, you break your weapon. I don't mean 'broken condition'. I mean, he says it is broken and useless in your hands. That +3 longsword which makes up 70% of your character's current WBL? Gone completely forever.

He compounds this brutality by claiming some sort of encumbrance rule that, while understandable, applies rationality in the wake of the irrationality of shattering your magical weapon: You can't take more than one regular melee weapon and one ranged weapon along with you, with the exception of a light 'sidearm'.

So, you dump all your money into enchanting your longsword, break it, and spend the rest of the dungeon trying to overcome damage resistance with your masterwork dagger, or, potentially, your +1 dagger.

When telling him that his rule was bull hockey, he said "Well, I need some way to balance out your critical hits against me!" as though he was against us in some adversarial fashion instead of telling the damned story. As though he did not also score frequent critical hits against us.

And, to top it off, I'm pretty sure none of our foes has ever broken their weapons against us.

"One you drop it, two you break it, three you hit yourself, four you hit someone else."

I hate those words. I hate them so much. They are the worst.

[Krazzman]

The worst for me is actually a fluctuating thing.

We had a DM fall asleep while dming. (Which was funny in it's own right).
Same DM punished group by call lightning while 2 guys argued in character because the arguing was taking too long.
Also most "OP" tricks were disallowed for me but when I tried to dm they all build powerhouses or in other games they tried out pretty strong builds.
But woe me for trying to implement ToB or psionics.
Death by being eaten by a ghoul due to the DM(other one) deciding that he will now roll my fort save against paralyzing touch.

And another that is more story driven... level 4 character group (6 people) against 3 ogres and a Ogremage... with me being the only one able to see the ogre mage... generally it was quite some weird stuff there. Also he disbelieved that a Wolf can climb a 50° mountain/hill with ease...

Yeah pretty tame...

[Cicciograna]

I am proud to introduce you to That Lanky Bugger Saga.

[SiuiS]

This stuff is always about bad execution, I think.

My worst DM story hinges on stuff that could have been awesome, if it wasn't all done with the express purpose of railroading and trying to prove social dominance over the other players (yes, players, not characters).

We had a game start with the lines "this is a big new world, and you can leave your mark on it! I look forward to whatever changes you all cause." It ended with "I didn't really want you to try and change the world, I meant discover all the stuff I made!".

Our first encounters were in a dungeon crawl. The DM set up goblins with wands of exploding spell fireball that were being dual wielded. He wanted to explode the two most experienced players into a pit to be eaten by carrion crawlers, in order to keep the other players in line (his justification, might I add, not mine). This ended with the players having wands of exploding burning hands!
"Oh, uh, the exploding was from a feat. You don't have it. No knock back."
Okay. How were they dual wielding without the feat?
"My game doesn't use that feat."
Oh, okay. So we'll dual wield these wands–
"You need a feat to do that."
You just said we didn't? – new player
"Oh, uh... Each wand only has two charges left."
That worked out fine.

The dungeon ends with the goblin boss – "a very tall elf-like man with huge, black armor and two long swords". Man, that's like, straight out of the description box of your old favorite PC that you would never let anyone kill!
... Oh.

So we have to sign contracts of servitude in our blood. Experienced players signed using spattered goblin blood, so we got away okay, but just barely. Good rolls, and we had the DM roll publicly else he would have fudged and thrown off the new players...

First thing we do? Fight to the death to see who is most worthy to serve!
So began my very brief and very disappointing love affair with dagger spell stance. It lasted four rounds of stubbornness before I admitted it did suck as much as the other player said it would. We got out at around 1-3 HP on everyone. After a little adventuring, we decide to talk to the guy about not working for him. I mean, no way to discover a whole new world while shackled, right?
So we walk into the room in the dungeon.
"The BBEG turns to you."
Okay, I now politely and—
"Power word: kill. Roll initiative."
The other player died, and I had dimension door prepared so we got out. The party Druid got him back o. His feet through some clever fast-talk to grant lesser reincarnation as a Druid spell at lower level because it wasn't over-written in the 3.5 update, and we all fled.

Every six hours, random assassins would show up. We avoided them, but it was clear they weren't there to hurt us, just stress us out. And next town we get into the mayor apparently hates elves and so won't serve us (even though we had two elves in the party and kicked them out). Actually, it turns out he doesn't hate elves, he hates us! Because we talked back to his son. We explained the situation, apologized, and went to an inn.

The inn was barricaded and flooded with flying wizards who had greater invisibility up and were lobbing fireballs at us. Superb use of the battle grid got us mostly out without a hitch once we get back into teleport formation due to obsessive observation of enemy cycles and initiative counts. We end up in the basement of a nearby ally establishment. The DM informs us that the rogue managed to grab a sack off a flying invisible wizard somehow, and he rolls with it. It's full of money, and also a massive jewel. I panic and run to the furthest possible corner while warning my comrades, who just look at me funny (except the sorcerer, who also books it). Turns out it was a disjunction trap? And the DM advises the party to all make DC 45 saving throws or we lose the ability to cast spells forever because that's what dysfunction does. He is smug.

Luckily, everyone flipped to the spell to figure that out and deduced that he skimmed the spell and didn't read it; he was going to be insistent on Dysjunction stripping magic permanently in his games until he realized the experienced players (wizard and sorcerer) weren't in the blast and we would be throwing it back at him post-haste. We were rapidly approaching level six by this point. I finally finish the magic item I have been working on; a hat of nondetection. Just in time, too, because from now on every six hours we get targeted with Scry and Fry centered on me. Good thing i got the Dm to okay magic item creation but couldn't get his attention to explain what I was making!
We of course, get numerous events like a stray wind or passing bird knocking off my hat and then the divination assassination begins again in earnest.

At level eight we get into a dungeon the DM led us to that is three rooms, the first of which is trapped to lock us in, block teleportation, and allow 1d4 mummies into the room every 1d6 rounds until all sixty four mummies have emerged. The ranger saved us with his lazily explained multimanyrapidshot shenanigans that shouldn't have worked, let alone with his cheap custom incendiary grenade arrows he had been building with DM permission. I would hazard it was on purpose but the DM didn't know mummies were vulnerable to fire. His stated reason for the trap was to kill the sorcerer and wizard.

By level 13 the party Druid is a demigod. The party fighter has a shield of regeneration and a legion of death knights. The experienced players are wanted in every town and city and patrolled by absurd monsters. We had left the rails at this point, so we are harassed by a log.

A piece of wood? Part of a tree? A log. Turns out the log is a fallen god epic wizard/epic sorcerer's familiar who is guiding us back to the prophecy we never heard of and no one could tell us about. It was here I began to lay the seeds of my revenge.

I got a hold of a scroll of arcane Genesis. I built a prison of timeless agony. All my spare time was spent carving runes and sigils of pain, suffering, madness across it's entire surface. Any off-hand super magic item was disposed of here, fabricating adamant mazes with mystic back tracks and confusions, that were alive and shifted. Golems and constructs patrolled it's interior as guards. Legions of undead guarded the golems. Every trick I could conceive of got brought up enough for the DM to say "yeah yeah, sure, whatever" and noted meticulously on a ledger.

We got wishes. Subtle ones, only. So I wished to change my creature type. I retrained my class. I spent time devising new spells. I kept items with only single charges remaining. I cast no spell above second leek in combat; my contributions were Mage armor, shield, and magic missile. I take notes. I watch, I wait. We are 16th level.

Our enemies? Everyone who ever screwed with us. Literally. The town mayor? 20th level wizard. The innkeeper? Same. The farmer we wouldn't but turnips from who harassed us in town? Same. The librarian who stole the ranger's girlfriend? Same. And in their midst, the Tall Elf with black armor and two short swords, who was about to become a demigod incarnation of demogorgon, which is apparently the plot?
"You'll have to watch him ascend and then fight his god form"
Oh no. I have had enough of this. We can see through this scrying lens that more cultists are teleporting in. We teleport in.
"Oh no. They're plane shifting, all teleports are blocked."
Fine. Fighter! Use your cross class UMD to read this scroll on initiative count 2. Sorcerer, use this staff with greater plane shifting on initiative count one. Fighter, don't start until we get to heaven! Everyone, battle formations!

So we enter the cult mid-ritual. An anti magic field drops immediately, meaning it's melee or bust thanks to excessive use of Widen spell on the scroll prior. Unfortunately one of the cultists was the king of all red dragons. Which the DM had set up legitimately and we hadn't bothered checking for polymorph...

We win on a technicality as the party rogue determined that the BBEG's resistance to poison is, in fact, magical and not inherent. We survive 20 rounds of melee against numbers beasts because the DM rules the divine nature of the Druid (being a god) creates a bubble i the anti magic zone that the fighter uses to maintain his regeneration shield. Eventually, the rogue lines up a shot and hits the BBEG with a couple dozen doses each of int, wis, and Cha draining poisons and positoxins, flooring him instantly.

The DM starts a CUTSCENE! Gods descend, gods rise, the two fallen god brothers start to claim and maybe rehabilitate the BBEG and—

NO.

Time stop. Previously established as stopping even the gods, except the BBEG who had the epic feat to ride along; that is, only he and I were there.
I cast eternity of torture.
"He's immune to wizard magic"
I am actually not a wizard anymore, having shifted to bard/sublime chord/seeker of the lost arcane arts/ultimate magus.
"He's still immune to mortal magic"
I'm my mortal, having become a draconic get resonant image cast by multiversal principles through the last six type shifts from wishes and rituals.
"He has massive spell resistance"
Which is, by your houserules earlier, not able to protect him from this spell.
"Fine! But once the time stop wears off—"

The kicker.

I cast the epic spell eternity of utter damnation.
"WHAT?!"
I cast this epic spell I've been working on that you okayed.
"You're not epic level!"
I'm draconic, have a true dragon age limit, and old enough dragons qualify for epic.
"You're not old enough!"
I've spent months to years e'ery night for six years of game time in a different dimension, crafting and planning.
"You don't meet the skill requirements!"
Except for your houserule that lets is train really hard to go above our maximum rank limit with a high cost.

I threw every loophole, every asinine mistake, every idea he ever forced on the party despite polite discussion and even pleasing, back in his face. He ended up with his most beloved PC ending, not as an over deity, but as a nigh-lifeless husk suffering beyond humans imagination for an eternity of eternities, in nested realities, only accessible through a single jewel around the neck of the over-goddess we had unwittingly powered up this entire time and who was the only being who actively disliked the BBEG.

Two years of being prevented from the simple goal of having fun adventuring being thwarted, collapsed into a sucking wound of malice in the fabric of his games reality. We gave him anther chance later on, in a game where we switched DMs every session. That was six months of actively undoing anything someone else adjudicated so he could start a railroad before we called it off.

[Mastikator]

Never had a bad DM, but the worse piece of DMing is probably myself a few years back when I was new to the game. I kept giving away info to the players that I wasn't supposed to.
Me: "You see a man with blood on his clothes, he doesn't seem to notice you".
Player: "I wave to the man".
Me: "The zombie starts stumbling towards you".
Player: "Oh it's a zombie? I draw my sword".
Me: ".... crap"

A game that was supposed to be horror/investigation turned into a hack and slash game. :/

[Cicciograna]

Awesome revenge plot of awesome awesomeness

[starwoof]

too long; didn't quote

I think the only good thing about this DM is that they respected consistency enough to let this happen.

[The Grue]

words

[Kalmageddon]

I think the worst possibile GM is the one that doesn't give you anything to talk about after the session, leaving you empty inside and bored out of your skull.
I've had such an experience, me and a friend took part in a session with 16 players and 2 GMs. I don't even remember what or even if something happened. I just remember after 6 hours I had developed a strange obsession with a paper tissue that was on the table, its texture and colour being the most interesting thing I could focus my attention at that moment.

Afterwards during our trip back home me and my friend were completly silent, no jokes about what happened, no witty remarks on how bad it was, just silence for the whole time. It was like a piece of our soul had gone away, never to return. We felt devoid of emotions and life.
I was never so bored in my entire life.

[Delta]

By level 13 the party Druid is a demigod.

Okay I absolutely love your revenge plot but this just caught my eye, after the campaign started out the way it did you still played with this guy until level THIRTEEN? Wow. I don't think I'd ever be back to play with him again after session one.

[SiuiS]

I think the only good thing about this DM is that they respected consistency enough to let this happen.

It was a cult of personality thing at that point. If he put a stop through cheese, shenanigans or fiat to something so pivotally built on his own rulings, then not one of those players would ever return. He could just paint me and the sorcerer as jerk optimizer munchkins who are all about the power and winning and don't care for story, but if the whole team disbanded unstudied he'd never play again.

It's been hard to let go of that antagonism since. It was so effective.

I think the worst possibile GM is the one that doesn't give you anything to talk about after the session, leaving you empty inside and bored out of your skull.
I've had such an experience, me and a friend took part in a session with 16 players and 2 GMs. I don't even remember what or even if something happened. I just remember after 6 hours I had developed a strange obsession with a paper tissue that was on the table, its texture and colour being the most interesting thing I could focus my attention at that moment.

Afterwards during our trip back home me and my friend were completly silent, no jokes about what happened, no witty remarks on how bad it was, just silence for the whole time. It was like a piece of our soul had gone away, never to return. We felt devoid of emotions and life.
I was never so bored in my entire life.

Yeah. You win. >_<
I'm so sorry D:

Okay I absolutely love your revenge plot but this just caught my eye, after the campaign started out the way it did you still played with this guy until level THIRTEEN? Wow. I don't think I'd ever be back to play with him again after session one.

Inertia. I shot myself in the foot, because my only choices were keep playing, or run a game myself. And all I could think about was optimization abuse tricks, so I couldn't even put together a game. The dark side of petty Internet-style vengeance.

And, let's be honest, a lot f that stuff is cool when it's not done vindictively! "Your hat falls off. Suddenly; ninjas! The hydra starts attacking them while they're confused, and it's a huge three way melee!" Is awesome when it's not the fifth time and the ninjas aren't 15th level rogues. The mummy trap was ingenious, and could have been part of a dungeon rather than a kill room. Having all our enemies ever, be the actual enemies was a clumsy but well meant attempt at proper narrative structure. It was the constant attempts to feel better as a person by controlling someone else's imaginary doods that was the problem. It was like someone trying to start BDSM hen pecking at a magical tea party.

[lytokk]

Worst DM ever is a toss up between the one who couldn't finish a story, ever, and the railroading overdescriber.
The first constantly write himself into a corner, which we could tell since he'd cancel the next session, and the session after he would tell us to roll new characters, since he didn't like where the whole thing was going. More than likely the campaigns all had invisible rails and once we got off them, he couldn't figure out how to steer us back. Not a bad DM, persay, just not exceptional.

After writing that description I'm clear its the railroader. Situation came up where in able to pass some door, we all needed to sleep with "ideal" canditates for our characters. Me, playing a paladin, while not having any sort of chastity vow, still didn't feel like it would be in character to do this. I felt my character more suspected this would be a trap, so I had to tell the rest of the party to go on without me. I'm normally pretty good at going on with bad plot twists, but this one didn't sit well with me. The rest of the players agreed with me for my choice, and of course I started asking if there was any other way to get through here. DM told me to roll a will save vs charm, rolled a 19, plus my other modifiers the total was in the mid thirties. To his credit, he didn't make me fail, just made me roll another, and then another, and then another. 6 successful saves later, I gave up. This was going to happen whether I wanted it to or not. And I got tired of wasting time and wanted to get this over with. He then went on to describe the scene in graphic detail, and would have kept going on and on about it until we loudly reminded him that the host had a young daughter who was still awake and could potentially hear all of this. The whole scene, with the saves and description lasted about 45 minutes. Would have left the game but luckily he was just a temp DM while the normal DM/host took a small game playing break.

Another DM I had was a good friend of mine, his first time DMing, and was totally unprepared for what it all took, didn't know how to manage problem players, and allowed some players to get away with free level adjustments without telling other players. After a psychic warrior broke the game (first exposure to psionics for all of us save the psychic warrior), he gave up on DMing, which is bad because he had the potential to be a good DM, just needed more practice.

[Delta]

The worst DMs I've had I met at conventions, some seriously messed up stuff there, unfortunately I'm at work so I can't go into too much detail, maybe I'd have some more stuff later on. The guy who takes the cake is probably the massive railroader who didn't even pretend to have the players do anything (he even went so far as to completely narrate our characters actions in some scenes) while simultaneously hitting on my girlfriend (or I guess rather doing what in his mind counted for "hitting on a girl", it was awkward... veeeery awkward)

The worst "campaign" I've ever been in was probably our one try at a Babylon 5 Savage Worlds campaign, the GM was completely uninterested, he began by telling everyone in one sentence "you're at Babylon 5! Let's roleplay your characters a bit!" and then went to get himself something to eat (there was no plan on his part to get something to eat for anyone else in a 10 hour session), even though none of our characters knew each other and we were in completely different sections of the station. His idea of how a military ship worked was that the captain just asked everyone on the bridge for their opinion and went with the majority (even in the middle of combat)

We didn't even show up to the second session, but another friend did and told me afterwards that they stumbled upon a wormhole and met a romulan warbird from Star Trek, chatted a bit, exchanged technologies and then went about some other business. So, yeah... never went back to that GM in particular.

[Jay R]

The major effect this thread has had on me is incredible gratitude that I've never had a bad GM. I've had people making mistakes, one who was way too lenient, and other weaknesses, but in 39 years of role-playing, I've never dealt with anything like what the rest of you are describing.