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It happens! It's a small world on the internet. I found out a while back that another poster on here(Urizen) lived 2 streets away from me. Craziness.
Hey, I just hope I can help some RP'ers get it together to do some roleplaying. Spoony has been writing often on Twitter in the last months how he can't find players where he lives.
Although be careful how you approach him. He had some fans show up in full costume at his house in the past and refuse to leave. He had to call the police on them. :p Best to just send him a Twitter message or email. ^^
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Another tale from my old DM; got to thinking about the old days after catching up on this thread...this one was in a fairly short-lived evil campaign (and not because the players killed each other; we were actually doing the evil thing well). So, to change things up a bit, my friend decided to play a caster (usually goes the fighter/barbarian route, so this was a big change for him), a Red Wizard, to be more specific, and I'm thinking we started off at 5th or 6th; I know he had 3rd level spells. After a couple short adventures, the party found themselves in combat with a paladin and some of his subordinates outside an old tower.
So, combat goes on, and we actually do pretty well, considering this paladin was beefed up something fierce and most of us were heavily wounded due to his awesomeness. The DM really wanted this guy to survive, though, and I mean, he was cheating for him horribly. Once he was low on HP, we just couldn't actually kill him. He dropped unconscious, and his subordinates (which we mostly ignored, going for the head of the beast instead of the body, so to speak) started shielding him, deflecting our attacks and taking hits meant for the paladin. So, the wizard decides to start throwing AOE spells...which the subordinates likewise somehow manage to block. "They cover him completely, no damage to him" was said a couple times.
While the good guys are starting to retreat, they pass around a wall, like 10 feet tall. Due to the weather, the area was soaking wet, with large water puddles everywhere. Two subordinates and the not-quite dead paladin end their movement in a particularly large puddle. So, our wizard knows he's got them dead to rights with his lightning bolt. Everyone's wet, they're wearing metal, AND they're in a puddle. How much better could the circumstances be? If the subordinates try to take the hit, it's going to flow through everyone there; if they try to dive out of the way, paladin is dead.
But no! The wall is in the way. Okay, simple, the wizard flies up over the wall, to a height of about 100 feet, his targets in the open while the rest of the party harries them with ranged weapons. Next round he gets ready with the lightning bolt...and the DM declares he still can't hit them because the wall was in the way. We all called BS, but the DM was adamant. I even did the math on the battle mat, drew a diagram to show him that he was wrong, but it didn't matter.
Fine; the wizard flies DIRECTLY over them on the next round; these guys should have been dead already, but no, they were holding in there. He launches the lightning bolt right at the guy they're covering. It's going to hit them all, no way they can avoid damage, even if its only half. Then the DM declares "One of the knights leaps in front of it, taking the full brunt of the lightning bolt and sacrificing himself for the others." But he's soaking wet...and in metal armor...in a big puddle...just like the others. This started a big argument, and by the end of it the DM reluctantly declared the paladin and his subordinates dead, and ends the session.
The campaign continued on for a while afterward, amazingly, though my friend was so incensed that he changed his character to an orc barbarian/eye of gruumsh. Which, as the DM would later learn, was not a good thing, and actually led to his campaign ending, but better, a lot of development for stuff that would eventually find its way into my campaign world. But that's a story for another time.
To be blunt...yes. If everyone else is having fun, and you are the only one bothered, then you need to find another group, not try to change them to meet your standards of how the game should be played.
i don't know guys.. maybe im the asshat here?
I agree. Happened to me about a year ago. I joined an established group, and my play style clashed with theirs pretty hard. Everyone else was having fun, so I stepped down and left the group.
I stayed long enough to make sure it wasn't a fluke, or just a bad a session. Once it became obvious that we just had different ideas of what makes a fun game, I knew I could either stay and not enjoy myself, or quit and find something else to do.
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Null I don't think anyone is an asshat. You just have wildly different standards of play. Sometimes it is better to move on. I have left a group, and they became quiet upset so try to be diplomatic. It did not help my case, but at least you can say you tried.
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Ooh! I finally have one of these stories! It's a long one, though.
So a few terms back, I seized power in a bloody coup mild-mannered takeover of our community college gaming club. After the first session. Yeah, the old founder had a lot on her plate and did not seem ready to run (the first meeting had about twelve people in one game, and it was as nightmarish as you'd expect), so she resigned and I took over because nobody else was interested. The thing was, though, she'd already agreed to let another groupmember run her game on the off slot. Apparently, she's trying out an RPG she designed based on some manga or anime series. Cool! What better place to test out an RPG than at a group where most people aren't super attached to existing games, after all?
I spent a while wondering whether or not I should link the site she sent us. I think I will, as I can't see the harm. So, here's the site. For those who don't want to look at the site, I'll explain. We were confronted with a messy, unbalanced system too closely linked to D&D but not close-linked enough to make sense. The character sheets were four pages long and full of rulesets that didn't seem to apply. I was, to be frank, worried. And then we played in the first session.
I was playing an intelligent skeleton, which was plenty of fun just on its own (who doesn't like talking skeletons?). The first encounter had us all—individually—being approached by an old man with a quest for us. As soon as we tried to ask him what was up, he teleported us to another world. Uh-oh.
We appear by this town, now in magic land. The thief's player, wanting to be thiefy (and kind of troublesome), tries to rob a store and gets inta-teleported outside town. And now there's a magic wall blocking him from reentering. And anybody who goes out to find him is likewise stuck. Now, he kinda deserved to get put in his place, don't get me wrong, but I feel bad for excluding him from the action. So I try to help him dig a tunnel back in. We promptly run into Super Metal that keeps us from digging further. Apparently the whole town is built on it. We spend a while wondering if that's part of the mystery we have to solve. It's not.
Okay.
So, my memory is foggy, but we later meet the old guy (we've been calling him "Beardy") by an old archway nearby another town. A zombified sorceress who's basically a slimmer, taller Ursula from The Little Mermaid appears and kidnaps Beardy before fighting us and then fleeing. Okay? We'll miss you, Beardy. My zombie friend blows up, but he gets better. Before Beardy goes, we learn the basics of our quest: The zombie lady is enslaving a town, or destroyed a town, or something. Pretty rotten.
Later highlights include:
So finally, in the final battle, we end up in a loop and encounter the pre-zombie kid again. This time, we've learned our lesson! We charge right in and fight her, defeating her after a difficult battle. She is knocked unconscious. Fun fact: Had the dragon's player showed up today, the GM later told us she would have had him turn into an evil zombie for eating the warrior earlier. O...kay. HOW HUMERUS.
Before I can tell him not to, the thief—who is very understandably frustrated with this BBEG at this point—coup de graces her. Well, that's fair. She was an evil zombie sorceress now, and it's not like anybody's indicated any sort of cure for it. Plus, if we heal her, she might teleport away again. We tried to tie her up last time and she just magically broke free. I'd hoped to try to learn more, but at this point, everyone was eager for an ending. The sorceress's head is smashed in.
The spell is broken, and the city returns to normal! We meet Beardy—King Beardy, as it turns out—but he's super mad at us. We demand to be sent home, since we did the job as best we could (we also demand to be paid, but at that point, that's pretty secondary).
He teleports us out of town.
There is now an impenetrable shield blocking us off from that town. And though none of us checked, I'm sure there would have again been Plotonium metal underneath the town, had we tried to dig again.
The GM then explained to us that there were multiple ways for this campaign to go, and we had gotten the "worst" of the quasi-victorious endings. The zombie sorceress was actually King Beardy's daughter, you see, afflicted by the disease, and we had murdered her. No wonder he was mad at us! How could we have failed to see the signs? We truly had bungled this game. Oh, woe was us. Okay. Okay. THAT'SKULL.
And if you think she was any better as a player, you'd be mistaken. After the game was over, I politely told her, "This game has some cool ideas, but I feel like it's a bit too unfinished for this group right now. If you want feedback, though, I'd be happy to send it." She said alright. We pretty much never heard from her again.
The worst part was, she never did ask for feedback. I'm left wondering if this really was a playtest at all. I honestly don't know. It never felt like one. It was a messy, unfinished system with too much from too many systems and too little actual thought put into the mechanics. But I could have forgiven that—playing as a war-weary magic-hating skeleton was fun, after all, even with a bad system—had the game given any impression of flexibility or fun. But it was the most miserable caricature of a railroad. Whereas I, as an amateur improvver, naturally say "Yes, and..." and "No, but...", all we ever got from this game was "No."
...
HEADS UP
Wow, that was a badly-written post. Wish I'd proofread it. Well, it was more a rant than anything else, so whatever.
Oh... sure, why not?
The campaign was an odd one: Red Hand of Doom, set in Eberron, with the PCs being agents of the Brelish crown, who were focused on infiltration, sabotage and tactical strikes. Well, that was the intent. It was 3.5, and the system mastery at the table varied dramatically... mostly between the GM and the rest of us (two of us were playing our first 3rd edition game; two had played a bit, but cared little for mechanics and focused on thematics; and one was a flake who and made of pure chaos). We also used a chip-system similar to hero points, but the GM got them too.
So we had a mostly-under-optimised team of 5 PCs plus 1 cohort, with somewhat random gear (smattering of Big Six items at best), having had the snot kicked out of us time and again getting, at long last, to the last fight. Noting that everything in the module had between 2 and 5 extra levels added to it (typically PC class levels).
Arguably, adding HD to the bad guys - especially when there are 6 PCs and early on we were a level too high (due to the cover of RHoD not being consistent with the entire contents) - is fair. Except we were a rogue-y party. Very heavy on skills, very light on combat ability, and often splitting up.
Certain encounters, however, were exceptionally brutal.
Wymlord Saarvith The Greenspawn Razorfiend got extra HD and Whirlwind Attack, and we fought it when 1 PC down (the sniper). So when it whirlwinded and crit two PCs in the first round, taking one to unconscious and the other to single digit hit points (who then went and rescued unconscious and drowing guy), it was a two-on-one fight in difficult terrain and against something with reach. We killed it courtesy of the Swordsage having the Death From Above ability... which the GM subsequently nerfed, feeling it was "too powerful" despite being okayed at the start of the game and the only thing stopping a TPK.
We then used pass without trace to exfiltrate, as by that point we were almost out of spell slots, and had completed our primary objectives.
Then Wyrmlord Saarvith (normally goblin Ranger 8) "fast tracked" us on the back of his black dragon, flying 60ft over the ground to render our Stealth obsolete and attacked us, several miles out. "But pass without trace!" you may exclaim... and the response from the GM: "He just flew back and forth until he found where the spell ended. You couldn't see it for the trees.".
... okay. Sure.
So Saarvith normally has a few +1 elf bane arrows and likes mounted archery. Well. Not this one. He had an +1 elf bane bow and several dozen +1 human bane arrows. We also discover, after the sniper had escaped to the side, used his wand of true strike, then finally gotten a shot off at the goblin... that the GM had added 2 barbarian levels to him so he couldn't be sniped.
So standing crotch-deep in mud and swamp, the elf swordsage was shot to ribbons [spent a chip to be left for dead], the warforged monk got shot to negatives and fell down, and the rogue-sniper and rogue-gadgetman stood side-by-side alternately using the wand of true strike and wand of orb of force to zap the goblin (since attacking the dragon was pointless due to the goblin having a +twentysomething in Ride), while the cleric spammed everything he had to keep them both above 0hp.
Eventually, Saarvith got low on hit points and healing potions (as he flew away to drink some during the fight), and decided to flee. We got one last shot at him. It hit. The GM spent a chip for him to be 'left for dead', and thus he came back later.
In a campaign where a city lives or dies based on Victory Points earned by the PCs... many of which come from killing the Wyrmlords.
Wyrmlord Koth: You have an entire party of rogue-types, in a game you pitched to the players as wanting rogue types. So the roguey team uses clairvoyance to scout ahead, and then goes to take out Wyrmlord Koth.
Who, despite having no spot or listen of note "just feels suspicious" and so casts detect thoughts (a 2nd level slot) at the stairwell we were creeping down, and thus automatically detects us.
The Ghostlord: There's a lich in Red Hand of Doom, who's fond of bonedrinkers and incorporeal undead, all of which eat your stats. The GM put him in the Mournland were all conjuration (healing) spells do not function.
We delivered his phylactery back to his doorstep, retreated, and then used sending to let him know where it was and to kindly stop working with the crazy cultists.
It worked, but because we didn't go into an impossible situation and die horribly defeat the encounters, we missed out on an entire level's worth of XP, and only got partial Victory Points for the campaign endstate.
The Approach: So the ninja team is approaching the final dungeon. We're focused on stealth, right?
Well, a patrol of 20 hobgoblins is coming the other way. We hide. We hide well. The GM announces that "Nineteen of them use Aid Another, and the last guy takes-10. They see you". And then call in some bearded evils, who then successfully summon a bunch of lemures. Noting none of us have silver or good weapons.
So the surrounded-by-lemures characters draw weapons and fight. The ranger has Quick Draw and TWF. The GM tells him "You can't draw both weapons as a free action. You need to draw them separately, one is free, one is a move action.", and didn't want to hold up the game checking rules.
So we try going in the front door. We get mauled in the first room and retreat, leaving the warded area and teleporting away to recover.
So we do the bag of holding + bottle of air trick to load most of the party "in the bag", get the best infiltrator loaded up on invisibility, gaseous form, fly, nondetection and everything else we can think of, and sneak through the facility. We emerge behind cover in the Fane were the ritual is ongoing, and the boss is standing.
So in the Fane were four blue abishai, two erinyes (with some fighter levels added to make sure they had the extra iterative attack) and the Big Bad Half-Dragon Cleric himself.
Awesome.
The Erinyes immediately spotted us (true seeing + GM "rolled high" on Spot), and the boss immediately, "Clenches his amulet in his clawed fist and utters a few words, activating all his combat buff spells.". Yes. All of them. I asked if I can have one of those amulets - the GM just laughed.
Now, as the sniper had been replaced (after dying to a symbol of death spell the GM added to the adventure) by a psion, we could proceed to mutilate him with some degree of success, after the psion dispelled his anti-life shell. While dealing with the erinyes (who preferred their longswords and killed the monk in 2 rounds), and whose animated rope attacks were mysteriously "unbreakable".
But in the end, the High Wyrmlord died.
The ranger (formerly swordsage), whose player did not want another "I spend a chip and he's left for dead", jumped on the corpse and used a portable hole + bag of holding to have himself and the body of the wyrmlord thrown into random locations in the astral plane. The rest of us teleported out (we were all almost dead, and there were still the four abishai and two buffed-up erinyes).
"What about the ranger?" you ask?
"A githyanki destroyer swings by and kills you."
End result of the campaign: The enemy army was stopped in the end, but every NPC you ever met or saw over the last two years of gaming is dead.
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I've been really fortunate with my DMing--both myself & in others' games--but I do have one story. So a good friend of mine was/is DMing an all-dwarf 3.5 campaign set in the Forgotten Realms setting: five dwarves, level 3, off to explore a long-lost dwarven outpost being held by goblinoids.
A bit of background: the guy DMing has an incredible, encyclopedic knowledge of FR lore & 3.5 rules, does excellent world-building, and he loves building synergistic encounters. However, he didn't always put a lot of thought into whether those synergies were appropriate for the party's level. So it was with this encounter--while headed towards the outpost, we encounter a patrol of five goblins mounted on medium spiders. Nice! we say to each other, Goblins on spiders! Totally classic, let's rumble!. Alas, these were not Medium Monstrous Spiders (CR1), but "Tangle Terrors" (CR8) which fire off magical webs that have a Confusion effect. Also the goblins had class levels but it was the magic webs that did it--by the end of round two all five characters are rolling on the random behavior table until we are rescued by a patrol of NPC dwarves.
The good news is that after talking to him about it, he totally shaped up & there hasn't been a problem since. But an EL10 encounter on a Lvl3 party was a doozy.
One of my worst experiences was also one of my first.
We travel in the wayback machine to my junior high days, when I first got into fantasy lit via the Dragonlance novels. Met a guy who mentioned he and his friends were playing in a Dragonlance D&D game and invited me to join. I happily accept and bring along another friend of mine.
Turns out they are playing the modules based on the Chronicles line of novels, and the are playing the pre-gens (Tanis, Raistlin, etc.).
What made it so utterly boring was that all the other players and the DM were absolutely determined to make the game turn out EXACTLY like the novels did.
DM: You encounter a group of gully dwarves...
Group (to my friend): You are playing Raistlin. You need to cast Charm Person now.
My friend: I didn't memorize that spell. Can't I just put them to sleep with my Sleep spell and we can just ignore them?
DM: Actually, you did remember that you might need to cast Charm Person so you memorized that spell instead.
Group: OK, there you go. Now cast it.
My friend: Um, sure. I cast Charm Person.
DM: You meet a friendly female gully dwarf named Bupu....
and so on. No room to improvise or do anything original really. The DM fudged all the dice rolls or sometime didn't even bother to roll any dice at all if they would result in even the slightest deviation from that occured in the novels.
Luckily I stuck it out with the group and as we all got older we all became much better roleplayers and gamers. I am still friends with some of these same guys to this day, 20+ years later.
Yes, I played with a group and DM like that doing that DL "game". Horrible. The DM kept saying "No, you dont do that".
But I quit after two games.
I had two bad DMs. Both ran super high powered games, where the rules were "guidelines' and the DMPCs were the stars and super powerful. Altho loot was plentiful and so was eps, there was this feeling of 'who cares?"
We appear by this town, now in magic land. The thief's player, wanting to be thiefy (and kind of troublesome), tries to rob a store and gets inta-teleported outside town. And now there's a magic wall blocking him from reentering. And anybody who goes out to find him is likewise stuck. Now, he kinda deserved to get put in his place, don't get me wrong, but I feel bad for excluding him from the action. So I try to help him dig a tunnel back in. We promptly run into Super Metal that keeps us from digging further. Apparently the whole town is built on it. We spend a while wondering if that's part of the mystery we have to solve. It's not. ....There is now an impenetrable shield blocking us off from that town. And though none of us checked, I'm sure there would have again been Plotonium metal underneath the town, had we tried to dig again.
Ah Plotonium. We found a city with a wall of that stuff. Couldnt climb over, too many guards. (we were supposed to just ask nicely and get in, but we had one guy that always tried to intimidate and another always bluffed). So, I said we could tunnel in but the wall was made of and has underpinnings of Plotonium metal. So, once we got in, I asked to buy a shield and armor made of that stuff. No, too rare. A 40' wall, 10+ feet deep, all around a city with a Pop of 50000 or so. !!!
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I've also had a GM who kept saying "No, you dont do that" every time we did something that was not in his script. It was for a homebrew game he dubbed "Wizards and Fighters".
In that game I rolled a wizard and after that, in the first session, he told me I couldn't use magic because he didn't know the rules. I couldn't roll another PC, either. But I got two daggers for free. So I was stucked with a dual-handed dagger wizard against enemies with DR 10/-. All of them.
It didn't make too much a difference, though. We were there only to see how his NPCs got all the glory. The time the catfolk fighter PC scored a Nat 20 and confirmed the critical, he started sweating and nearly 30 seconds after he said something along the lines of "You see how his body disappears for a second and your hit cuts the air without touching him. My NPC sees that and when the enemy reappears he stabs him to the death with his special technique. You should have asked if he was blinking before your attack, but despite that you have defeated a powerful enemy. Congratulations!
He was also the kind of GM who described the environment saying "you walk around a plain. Ask me all you want". So we have to ask him if there were trees, houses, ruins, etc. If we didn't ask him if there was a house in front of us, all we knew was that we had hit an invisible wall. And we had to ask him specifically if there was a house in front of us. Asking him if there was something there was "too lazy".
That was around 10 years ago. I think that he is still wondering why nobody wants to play his stories. By the way, he refuses to play whatever game he is no GM'ing.
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He was also the kind of GM who described the environment saying "you walk around a plain. Ask me all you want". So we have to ask him if there were trees, houses, ruins, etc. If we didn't ask him if there was a house in front of us, all we knew was that we had hit an invisible wall. And we had to ask him specifically if there was a house in front of us. Asking him if there was something there was "too lazy".
I love these guys.....I read about a group that spent like 4 sessions trying to get through a maze. When the party finally made it the GM triumphantly announces, "the walls were only 3ft high and you could have simply stepped over them if you had asked about their height...." :)
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I've also had a GM who kept saying "No, you dont do that" every time we did something that was not in his script. It was for a homebrew game he dubbed "Wizards and Fighters".
In that game I rolled a wizard and after that, in the first session, he told me I couldn't use magic because he didn't know the rules. I couldn't roll another PC, either. But I got two daggers for free. So I was stucked with a dual-handed dagger wizard against enemies with DR 10/-. All of them.
It didn't make too much a difference, though. We were there only to see how his NPCs got all the glory. The time the catfolk fighter PC scored a Nat 20 and confirmed the critical, he started sweating and nearly 30 seconds after he said something along the lines of "You see how his body disappears for a second and your hit cuts the air without touching him. My NPC sees that and when the enemy reappears he stabs him to the death with his special technique. You should have asked if he was blinking before your attack, but despite that you have defeated a powerful enemy. Congratulations!
He was also the kind of GM who described the environment saying "you walk around a plain. Ask me all you want". So we have to ask him if there were trees, houses, ruins, etc. If we didn't ask him if there was a house in front of us, all we knew was that we had hit an invisible wall. And we had to ask him specifically if there was a house in front of us. Asking him if there was something there was "too lazy".
That was around 10 years ago. I think that he is still wondering why nobody wants to play his stories. By the way, he refuses to play whatever game he is no GM'ing.
Yep, that about sums it up there Talonhawke...nice and neat
I've also had a GM who kept saying "No, you dont do that" every time we did something that was not in his script. It was for a homebrew game he dubbed "Wizards and Fighters".
In that game I rolled a wizard and after that, in the first session, he told me I couldn't use magic because he didn't know the rules. I couldn't roll another PC, either. But I got two daggers for free. So I was stucked with a dual-handed dagger wizard against enemies with DR 10/-. All of them.
It didn't make too much a difference, though. We were there only to see how his NPCs got all the glory. The time the catfolk fighter PC scored a Nat 20 and confirmed the critical, he started sweating and nearly 30 seconds after he said something along the lines of "You see how his body disappears for a second and your hit cuts the air without touching him. My NPC sees that and when the enemy reappears he stabs him to the death with his special technique. You should have asked if he was blinking before your attack, but despite that you have defeated a powerful enemy. Congratulations!
He was also the kind of GM who described the environment saying "you walk around a plain. Ask me all you want". So we have to ask him if there were trees, houses, ruins, etc. If we didn't ask him if there was a house in front of us, all we knew was that we had hit an invisible wall. And we had to ask him specifically if there was a house in front of us. Asking him if there was something there was "too lazy".
That was around 10 years ago. I think that he is still wondering why nobody wants to play his stories. By the way, he refuses to play whatever game he is no GM'ing.
Did the GM in question homebrew the rules himself. Because this story gets funnier/sadder if he did.
It was a completely homebrew thing. His world, his rules... He had created it with a friend, or so he told us.
He kept saying that he could not allow us to use magic as it would be too complicated for us and if we wanted to talk our way out of anything his overpowered NPC would attack.
We could do zero roleplaying, we just listened him telling the story and rolled dice. I don't know why we stayed for 5 or 6 sessions.
I have to say this GM was a very nice person even though he was a bad GM. He wasn't interested in playing or GMing anything but his homebrew setting.
We also had this girl as a GM who, as a player, was always going offtopic to tell random stuff and would disrupt all the games. When she started GMing her own stuff we lasted two «sessions» in which nothing happened because she kept interrupting herself to talk about her life or random things. We could barely roleplay a single encounter in two sessions.
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I am gonna have an aneurysm from sheer stupidity.
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He was also the kind of GM who described the environment saying "you walk around a plain. Ask me all you want". So we have to ask him if there were trees, houses, ruins, etc. If we didn't ask him if there was a house in front of us, all we knew was that we had hit an invisible wall. And we had to ask him specifically if there was a house in front of us. Asking him if there was something there was "too lazy".I love these guys.....I read about a group that spent like 4 sessions trying to get through a maze. When the party finally made it the GM triumphantly announces, "the walls were only 3ft high and you could have simply stepped over them if you had asked about their height...." :)
Blood. There would have been blood.
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Blood. There would have been blood.He was also the kind of GM who described the environment saying "you walk around a plain. Ask me all you want". So we have to ask him if there were trees, houses, ruins, etc. If we didn't ask him if there was a house in front of us, all we knew was that we had hit an invisible wall. And we had to ask him specifically if there was a house in front of us. Asking him if there was something there was "too lazy".I love these guys.....I read about a group that spent like 4 sessions trying to get through a maze. When the party finally made it the GM triumphantly announces, "the walls were only 3ft high and you could have simply stepped over them if you had asked about their height...." :)
Yeah.
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There are some terrible stories on this thread. I'm surprised there was no public execution of some of the DMs. The worst I have is from my first campaign starting back in 1985. The DM ran his own PCs as part of the party, always giving them full XP and shares of the treasure. I didn't really know any better at the time, so I didn't think anything of it, just thinking that's how the game was played.
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Back in 1992 or so we were playing 2e Forgotten Realms. Our party was beat up and just made it back to town. We went to a temple of Lathander and offered plenty of gold for healing. The DM told us that no one in the temple was high enough level to cast any healing. No big deal, we went about our business.
Later that day we come upon two high level wizards fighting over some artifact, can't remember what, they snap it in half and it explodes. Everyone dies. We all look at the DM and he seems nervous. Then he says that all of us are Resurrected by the priests of Lathander. We ask if these are the same priests who were not high enough level to cast Cure Light Wounds an hour earlier. The DM says yes. One of the guys in the group claps his hands and says 'OK, I'll DM, you guys ready to roll up new characters?' First, and only, time I've seen a DM get fired mid game.
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Back in 1992 or so we were playing 2e Forgotten Realms. Our party was beat up and just made it back to town. We went to a temple of Lathander and offered plenty of gold for healing. The DM told us that no one in the temple was high enough level to cast any healing. No big deal, we went about our business.
Later that day we come upon two high level wizards fighting over some artifact, can't remember what, they snap it in half and it explodes. Everyone dies. We all look at the DM and he seems nervous. Then he says that all of us are Resurrected by the priests of Lathander. We ask if these are the same priests who were not high enough level to cast Cure Light Wounds an hour earlier. The DM says yes. One of the guys in the group claps his hands and says 'OK, I'll DM, you guys ready to roll up new characters?' First, and only, time I've seen a DM get fired mid game.
... did the first GM not think through the whole resurrection magic being higher level than healing magic thing or...
did the first GM not think through the whole resurrection magic being higher level than healing magic thing or...
He thought we wouldn't care since he 'gave' us our characters back.
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did the first GM not think through the whole resurrection magic being higher level than healing magic thing or...He thought we wouldn't care since he 'gave' us our characters back.
... Arbitrary character death followed by "free" raise dead, complete with a missing character level?
Yeah. Real generous.
So a few terms back, I seized power in abloody coupmild-mannered takeover of our community college gaming club. After the first session.
This...
Accurately describes what I did to the DnD club a while ago.
Anyway, my rant. Kind of short. We had to fight a monster with more than double the hp of every party member combined. (We found this out because my high damage output low defence character rolled well). This doesn't sound problematic, right?
Here's the catch: it could deal half the damage anyone dealt to it back at them, could do this to everyone at once, and got to make its normal attacks as well.
If anyone knows how to beat such a creature, please advise.
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Does killing a player character with a critical Shocking Grasp count because you didn't remember that a caster loses a held touch spell by casting a different spell?
Because I did that recently.
I've had several terrible DM experiences.
Every NPC in his homebrew campaign was ridiculously intractable, and couple this with relatively few plothooks and almost no loot, but when you try to get either you run into yet another almost-hostile NPC who acts identically to all the others. This was a planescape-style game, and all the NPC's from all the other planes acted the same way.
Was playing a TWF ninja, used invisibility to get into a flanking position on a werewolf. While I was still 50 feet away the DM said "he smells you" and had the werewolf charge and attack me. The rules for scent clearly state that the scenter only knows the direction of the scent. In the same fight, I got hasted and flanking and got ready to open up with some TWF sneak attack fury...and the DM said that it does too much damage, he'll only allow one attack to apply sneak attack damage per round. There was so much griefing from multiple players for multiple reasons that the campaign got cancelled.
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Blood. There would have been blood.He was also the kind of GM who described the environment saying "you walk around a plain. Ask me all you want". So we have to ask him if there were trees, houses, ruins, etc. If we didn't ask him if there was a house in front of us, all we knew was that we had hit an invisible wall. And we had to ask him specifically if there was a house in front of us. Asking him if there was something there was "too lazy".I love these guys.....I read about a group that spent like 4 sessions trying to get through a maze. When the party finally made it the GM triumphantly announces, "the walls were only 3ft high and you could have simply stepped over them if you had asked about their height...." :)
The problem for me is trying to decide if the blood is going to be theirs or my own. "I would choke you to death with my bare hands if I hadn't just gnawed them off to escape the manacles!"
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I've also been fortunate not to have really awful GMs, but there have been a few things GMs have done that have irritated me.
One GM who we played with for many years had a few quirks that sometimes made his games annoying, though never annoying enough that we quit playing with him - although that was probably in part because he hosted all the games at his house.
We played a superhero campaign with him as GM for a number of years. His campaign began in about 1994, and I joined in 1995 or '96. At the time the campaign began, the timeline of the real world and the game world were largely in sync. But as the campaign progressed, game-world time fell farther and farther behind the real world. I think we stopped playing that campaign in about 2006, and in the game world it was still 1995. He did that partly because he didn't want to deal with real-world events in the game. But I think all of us would have liked it if he'd let us deal with a few present-day events in our superhero campaign, or at least catch up with current technology.
He also had a bad habit of re-using villains. We used to joke that Tuesday was Break Out of Jail Day in our campaign city, because no matter how often we captured the bad guys they always came back to bother us again a few weeks later. I know that's how it works in comic books, but in a game it became tedious and made us feel ineffective. He also allowed us to level up very slowly, because he didn't want to have to re-do his villains to cope with more powerful heroes.
And one player had designed an unusual character with an extensive backstory, but the GM kept re-writing how everything worked, so the character never had the powers or history the player wanted him to have. Instead of telling the player there was a problem and working it out together the GM would just change it to make it work the way he thought it ought to work.
This isn't to say this GM was always terrible; we had some other games with him that were great fun, and most of the time this campaign was fun, too. But he had a strong railroad tendency, his NPCs tended to be very stereotyped, and he didn't like high-level campaigns so he always found a way to prevent us from reaching a power level that was outside his comfort zone. Even as a player he didn't like higher levels and would start to moan about having to level up.
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We had this GM who always told us he had an ambitious project in mind and he was planning to take us from level 1 to 20. We've been in a couple of stories with him: he cut the first at level 2 and the second at level 1. He looked completely lost in both.
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Does killing a player character with a critical Shocking Grasp count because you didn't remember that a caster loses a held touch spell by casting a different spell?
Because I did that recently.
Nah. That's a simple mistake. Like the time I started a frogamoth an extra 60' closer to the PCs, then misread the cutting your way out of its stomach rules, and TPK'd a party...
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We had one who told us how excited he was for what he was working on, told us he wanted to run a story that would get us involved with the story and world and put us with a new level of immersion and attachment. This sounded awesome until he finished with , "then I wanna see the looks on your faces as the BBEG strips it all away and kills your characters."
You've got to be kidding. Please say you're kidding.
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You've got to be kidding. Please say you're kidding.
No I wish, he still wonders why I don't let him DM.
But hey, at least he got it over with without the normal investment of time. A "express" experience, of you will.
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We had one who told us how excited he was for what he was working on, told us he wanted to run a story that would get us involved with the story and world and put us with a new level of immersion and attachment. This sounded awesome until he finished with , "then I wanna see the looks on your faces as the BBEG strips it all away and kills your characters."
*snifles* *blinks and wipes away tears*
A man after my own heart...
Now if I could just get him in one of my games, so I could mercilessly crush his character with one of my home-brew monsters...
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I wrote about this topic on my blog several years ago, and I might as well copy it here:
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I hadn't been planning on blogging about my worst gaming experience as a player, but it just happened yesterday so I figure--why not? This game was so ludicrously mis-directed that it crossed over, right in front of my eyes, from being just plain bad to being hilariously bad, like when you're watching a really sucky, low-budget film on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and realize that experiencing utterly extraordinary ineptitude can somehow evoke a peculiar transcendent humour that is similar in effect but different in source than mere comedy. It also makes me extremely grateful to have the regular gaming group I have; I know that every single one of them can direct games a hundred times better than what happened yesterday.
I should preface this by saying that I don't get to actually play all that often, so I'm always grateful for the opportunity. I always try to give directors the benefit of the doubt, especially in the first sessions of a campaign because it can take a little while to get everyone on the same page and for the adventuring fun to begin. Directors might be nervous, learning new rules, or simply inexperienced and a little leeway from players is important so that they have time to get the hang of it.
But still . . .
This particular game was the first in a proposed campaign using D&D 3.5 rules. Except for a friend I brought along as a fellow player, the others were strangers found via the Internet. The director had a friend who was "co-directing" the game, basically by playing a high-level Cleric as an NPC/PC. I'm set to play a swashbuckling fighter, my friend to run a Wu Jen (an exotic wizard-type), and a third person is to run a druid. Everyone assembles for the first time at a mall food court (a bit of an odd location for a game, but it was equidistant for all concerned and didn't particularly bother me). After introductions are made, we get out our dice, character sheets, pencils, miniatures. and we're ready to roll.
"So what happens is," the director begins. "you're all in a city. Not the capital city. There's a tall building, and on top of it are like three level 15 fighters, a couple of level 10 wizards, some high level clerics. One of the high-level clerics gives you [referring to his friend, playing the NPC] an item, and you're supposed to take it to the Elves. And you guys [referring to the rest of us] are supposed to go to the top of the building." Neither this city, the capital city, the building, or anything else has a name. But that's okay--benefit of the doubt!
Now, none of us players know why our characters are supposed to go to the top of the building, or why we're being told the levels of the people up there (something our characters definitely don't know). But we're all in this to have fun, and shrug. "Okay," I say. "Are there stairs?" "Yes." "I climb the stairs."
"So what happens is," the director continues, "you're all on top of the building. And then a shadow approaches. And the shadow casts Darkness, and you see a figure, and then all the high-level characters are dead. And then the figure is there. And then you realize the figure is looking through the bodies for the item."
We sensibly decide to run away and reach street-level. We briefly talk about whether we should hide out in an alleyway or abandoned warehouse, but then the director speaks up again "the priesthood has safehouses. Okay, so you're at the safehouse. The priest takes a look at the item." The tracks of this railroad are being laid down, but sometimes that's necessary at the very beginning--I am patient.
At this point, we have no idea what the item is, who the assassin is, or why we (the PCs) are even here. The director does not role-play NPCs--he simply tells us what they say and "what happens next." In character, I suggest we destroy the item, on the logic that if the assassin keeps tracking us, a trail of bodies could be left in our wake. "It's an Epic item!" the director interjects. "But my character doesn't know that," I respond. The item is then put safely in a bag of holding and tucked into the NPC's armor. Give new directors leeway! I remind myself.
The next in-game day, there's some stuff about zombies hanging about outside the temple. After inquiries are made, the director contradictorily tells us that the zombies are there because of something his friend did in a previous adventure and because the NPC cleric "accidentally left the item out last night." We now learn that this item is broken pieces of a seal to keep some super-evil big bad (never named) in prison, and we have to get it to "the Elves" so they can fix it.
We leave through the back door of the temple and hit the road, seeing the city in flames behind us. "How far away are we from the Elves?" one of us asks. "A couple of weeks," is the reply. We travel along the road for "about a week" and find a grove. "A figure suddenly looms behind you," says the director. The druid PC turns around to encounter another druid. They role-play for a minute or two, and then the director says "And what happens is, this guy was your mentor." The druid PC looks surprised, but shrugs it off and asks for his new/old mentor's name. The director pauses for several seconds and comes out with "Ashton."
The next day we leave the grove and travel on for a couple of more days. "How far to the Elves?" we ask. "A couple of weeks," is the response. This seems a bit odd, but I smile and we continue on. I take a brief break and go to the bathroom. On the way back, I realize only an hour and a half has passed and the game is scheduled to go on for four more hours. I literally shuffle my feet on the way back, so as to make more time tick away.
A "powerful, mysterious old man" suddenly appears in the back of our wagon. He interacts with the director's friend, as he's apparently a pet NPC from their prior games together. I ask the old man if he can really appear and disappear at will and travel from place to place in the blink of an eye. He assents. I therefore ask him if he can take the item to the Elves (world-threatening problem solved and I'll get home in time for an afternoon nap!)
The director is very taken aback, and at a loss to answer. Eventually, we learn that "the Rules" prevent the old man from taking the item, but that he can help us with information. He talks a lot, but we get no information.
After we travel for "several days," we're followed in our forest camp by bandits belonging to the "the Duke" (later, "the Baron") who are after "the item." In what could be an interesting bit of role-playing, the PCs begin to debate whether we should attack the bandits or wait to see if they make the first move--all to naught, however, as the director quickly interjects "The bandits attack!"
The director handles this combat with no notes or references whatsoever--obviously simply deciding on whether we hit or get hit by whim and a rough sense of whether we rolled "high" or "low." He often asks us, mysteriously, to roll a die. Which die? one of the players ask. For what? asks another. The director clearly doesn't know. He has his friend roll a Knowledge: History check and the result is a modified 4; the director gives him "information" anyway.
My friend is starting to get frustrated, and we've already determined we won't be back for another session--we talk about whether this has reached the "I just got a phone call and my wife is sick" point, but decide to see it through.
During this fight, I learn that my PC "used to be a guardsman." This doesn't make any sense considering the background I wrote and e-mailed the director, but that's okay. I'm beginning to smile at the sheer randomness of it all, and start passing the time by people-watching others in the mall and thinking about snack options.
More days on the road pass, and we reach a swamp. The ritual "how far are the Elves now?" arises. "A couple of weeks," is the reply, which set me off laughing--I have reached the MST3K point. Even the director's friend looks at him with a "Dude, what the hell are you doing?" look.
At about the four-hour mark, we are given our first choice: we can continue on the trail through the swamp and reach the Elves in about "a week" or take a shortcut through the forest. The player running the druid asks about the different trails, and receives a bewildering and contradictory response. All things being equal, we decide to take "the shortcut" because the Wu Jen is told he senses Orcs approaching from the North and the shortcut is South.
We head South and are told "you see a green wall in front of you." "Like, trees?" I ask. "No," replies the director. "Well, what's the wall made out of?" asks another player. "Flesh!" responds the director. Here, I'm envisioning a grotesque Living Wall monster I vaguely remember. Further questioning pins the director down on the fact that the "wall" is actually a metaphor for fifty Orcs who are heading our way--we are thus trapped between two Orc armies. The Wu Jen wonders why he would have known about the Orcs from the North and not the Orcs from the South, but to no avail.
I think this could be fun in a "battle-to-the-death" sort of way, so I suggest that the druid (who can shapechange into an eagle) take the item and fly away to the Elves while the rest of us hold off the Orcs. The Director doesn't like this idea, so suddenly each of the Orcs has a bow-and-arrow and aims it at the sky. The druid, however, has a Windwall spell to protect us against arrows. The Director decides that the Orcs have a Level 15 shaman (?) who casts Dispel Magic on the Windwall. I jokingly threaten to slit my own throat rather than be taken alive by orcs. But now the Director tells the Wu Jen that he recognizes someone among the Orcs, a fellow "emissary from the Emperor" and that the Orcs actually want to help us. If the Orcs want to help us, why did they threaten us with a rain of arrows and dispel our protective magic? But okay.
How do they want to help us? They want to give us food and water (we haven't had to keep track of such things, and between hunting and Create Food and Water we would have been okay, but fine). We hurry our way through this senseless encounter and reach the forest.
My friend checks his cellphone and realizes he "needs to leave in half an hour." I can't blame him for it. The group comes to a river that has an illusion cast on it, so it's twice as wide as it looks and there are some aquatic trolls lurking in the depths. This obstacle proves mildly interesting, but with some clever spellcraft, we cross the river.
Then we encounter Ents. We ask the Ents how far away are the Elves. "About a week," we're told. The director's friend is clearly frustrated: "But that's what you said before we took the shortcut, and we took the shortcut!"
And on this high note, the session ended. Will a disparate group of characters, assembled in an unnamed place and with no known motivation to travel together, succeed in delivering an unnamed item (necessary to deter an unnamed evil) to "the Elves" after travelling for several weeks on a treadmill? Alas, we'll simply never know . . .
The best explanation I can think of for ineptitude at this level of awesomeness is a complete and total lack of preparation at every stage of directing: (1) A failure to prepare a story or (better yet!) some story options; (2) A failure to prepare some NPCs; (3) A failure to prepare some encounters; (4) A failure to prepare by understanding the basic rules of the game; (5) A failure to prepare by creating a setting. Add to this extreme railroading, no attention to detail, no ability or demonstrated interest in role-playing, running combat by whim, and you have the perfect formula for My Worst Gaming Experience Ever (as a player).
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holy fracking crap...GM permissions revoked permanently for whom ever that was, and wherever they are now.
I believe that is the first instance of absolute anti-GMing I have seen documented, further study is deemed extremely hazardous to researcher sanity.
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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We had one who told us how excited he was for what he was working on, told us he wanted to run a story that would get us involved with the story and world and put us with a new level of immersion and attachment. This sounded awesome until he finished with , "then I wanna see the looks on your faces as the BBEG strips it all away and kills your characters."
You know...I'm not actually sure this is a "worst GM." Sure, I wouldn't want to play in such a game, but there are people out there who might, and he's warning the players up front. A grim campaign that crushes your hopes and dreams isn't for everyone, but there are enough dark horror settings out there that some must like it.
Giving you such a warning before you even start is the mark of a good GM, IMO.
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I wrote about this topic on my blog several years ago, and I might as well copy it here:
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Horrible, horrible things.
I think I would have made an announcement that I had a prior appointment to go to and that it should only take "a couple of weeks".
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I once had 'that GM' who thought Sneak Attack as written was Overpowered.
There's a tiny sweet spot for SA when they get 3 dice. It can be powerful. Then it's gone.
Surprising how many newish DMs' complain about sneak attack ruing their game.
LOL Vanykrye!
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Had some guys in an old roleplaying club I used to belong to whose idea of roleplaying was trying to avoid the GM to force a TPK. They never lasted more than a session against him and then they made new level 1 characters and started a new story. There was no plot, just the GM throwing random enemies at the players until they horribly died.
They tried to get me into one of their games but I refused. Not the way I like to play.