What are some of the worst rulings you've had to deal with in games?


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Artanthos wrote:
Anzyr wrote:
Zhayne wrote:
The use of Critical Fumbles is universally, no, omniversally a bad GM call.

This. So much this. Making the supposedly competent martial classes the ones most likely to critical fumble (since they make the most attacks) is just about the worst idea ever. If forced to participate in such a game I would play a caster that didn't roll dice. As should everyone else.

@Scavion that is truly unfortunate. Especially since that was one of the really notable changes. We need a system mastery belt ranking system. It would vastly improve the game by helping to determine people in a position to actually know the rules.

Drop it with the caster/martial BS Anzyr. Most of it just exists in your mind anyways.

My tables had critical fumbles for casters as well. I used this wonderful little set of charts in The Dragon Tree Spellbook.

You note yourself that critical fumbles penalize martials. If I play a caster that doesn't role dice, the critical fumble rule won't apply. Therefore the superior choice for the campaign. That's not a subjective statement, it's an objective one. It does not only exist in my head, it exists in the math that makes up the rules of the game. Unless you can point me to a martial build that doesn't roll dice to attack.

Shadow Lodge

Artanthos wrote:
Anzyr wrote:
Zhayne wrote:
The use of Critical Fumbles is universally, no, omniversally a bad GM call.

This. So much this. Making the supposedly competent martial classes the ones most likely to critical fumble (since they make the most attacks) is just about the worst idea ever. If forced to participate in such a game I would play a caster that didn't roll dice. As should everyone else.

@Scavion that is truly unfortunate. Especially since that was one of the really notable changes. We need a system mastery belt ranking system. It would vastly improve the game by helping to determine people in a position to actually know the rules.

Drop it with the caster/martial BS Anzyr. Most of it just exists in your mind anyways.

My tables had critical fumbles for casters as well. I used this wonderful little set of charts in The Dragon Tree Spellbook.

With you on this. If you are worried about critical fumbles needing to effect casters too it's not that hard.

Ex. you could treat AoE spells as fumbling if they roll all 1's for damage or if they nat 1 a concentration check.

Ohh god now I have this horrible image of blasting someone while they summon, nat 1'ing the check, and having the summon succeed but it turns on it's master. That is awesome.


doc the grey wrote:


With you on this. If you are worried about critical fumbles needing to effect casters too it's not that hard.

Ex. you could treat AoE spells as fumbling if they roll all 1's for damage or if they nat 1 a concentration check.

Ohh god now I have this horrible image of blasting someone while they summon, nat 1'ing the check, and having the summon succeed but it turns on it's master. That is awesome.

Hrm. The issue comes when if you are making concentration checks regularly as a caster, either something has gone horribly wrong or you're a Magus or Cleric.

What about spells that don't deal damage?


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Chengar Qordath wrote:
MrSin wrote:
Here's another one, if you roll too high you do too well and fail. That one drives me a little nuts.

Ugh, that one. It's especially annoying since it usually seems to stem from GMs getting pissy over players doing too well.

Roll too high on Intimidate? The target faints in terror or runs away screaming at the top of his lungs.

Roll too high on Diplomacy to gather information? Instead of getting useful information, you get one useful thing buried in dozens of irrelevant facts.

Roll too well on your attack? You hit the monster so hard your weapon gets stuck in it's hide.

The DMG for Kobold's Ate my Babies had a sample mini-adventure with something like that. A large portion of the rules were dedicated to explaining that since the PCs are kobolds, they will live very brief miserable lives ending in a rapid death. In the mini-adventure, there was roll a d6 to see if you could cross a road safely (no stat modifiers). If the player suggested looking before crossing, they got a +1, but if they got a 7 (i.e., 6 +1 for looking), there was an extra penalty for being too careful.

But that is a joke system, so it's okay.
I did hear about a GM who house-ruled in 3e that healing someone over their max hp resulted in the healed creature exploding and being impossible to raise.
Then party cleric realized that since monsters started at max hp, they were all 1-hit-point of healing away from death! Reach Cure light wounds became the ultimate weapon: instant death, no save (save for half, but you only need one extra hp to die).
Then the GM got 'clever'. Injured commoners would come up to the party paladin, and ask for healing. Now, these were commoners with 2 maximum hp, and had been injured down to 1hp. For a high level cleric or paladin, though, healing only 1hp is not possible without cure minor wounds (which paladins don't get, and IIRC that GM might have banned it too since the party cleric ran into the same trouble). The GM (understandably) ruled that killing an innocent commoner with too strong of a healing spell/lay on hands was ground for falling.
BUT refusing the aid of an injured innocent was ALSO ruled to be grounds for falling, even if the only 'aid' you can provide is an instant death. The result was that if a commoner asked a good-aligned cleric or paladin to heal them, the cleric or paladin would instantly fall, no matter what.
The GM 'justified' the auto-falling by claiming that healing magic was overpowered (since it could instantly kill even the toughest monsters), even though it was only overpowered because of the GM's own house rule!


Anzyr wrote:
Scavion wrote:
doc the grey wrote:


With you on this. If you are worried about critical fumbles needing to effect casters too it's not that hard.

Ex. you could treat AoE spells as fumbling if they roll all 1's for damage or if they nat 1 a concentration check.

Ohh god now I have this horrible image of blasting someone while they summon, nat 1'ing the check, and having the summon succeed but it turns on it's master. That is awesome.

Hrm. The issue comes when if you are making concentration checks regularly as a caster, either something has gone horribly wrong or you're a Magus or Cleric.

What about spells that don't deal damage?

It does nothing to effect SoD/Battlefield control/Buffer/and most debuffers. What's your rule for spells fumbling when there is no roll associated with them?

Roll to target AOE spells? Buff stacking "miscibility tables"? Skill checks for charm-style spells? Spending years at low levels (1-5)? I've seen it all.

Shadow Lodge

Scavion wrote:
doc the grey wrote:


With you on this. If you are worried about critical fumbles needing to effect casters too it's not that hard.

Ex. you could treat AoE spells as fumbling if they roll all 1's for damage or if they nat 1 a concentration check.

Ohh god now I have this horrible image of blasting someone while they summon, nat 1'ing the check, and having the summon succeed but it turns on it's master. That is awesome.

Hrm. The issue comes when if you are making concentration checks regularly as a caster, either something has gone horribly wrong or you're a Magus or Cleric.

What about spells that don't deal damage?

Depends really. If you are talking about spells that have you make a roll but don't do damage (like remove disease) you just keep the nat 1 and confirm idea. As for spells that have no roll like say mage armor you could just give it a pass. It's really just an expedited and shortened spell version of donning armor and is something most gm's should expect at least a little bit if they have a caster of any kind and is oft just thrown on your fighters (whom are already dealing with their own nat 1 problems). Also the game has a lot of the spell variable factored into most creature fights so for the most part a gm should be ok assuming everyone is there to have fun and not just trying to defeat one of the other participants (i.e. player or gm not their characters).

But this is all assuming you are using unmodded core rules and spells. Balancing gets crazier the further you get away from that and ymmv.

Finally if you as a gm are really uncomfortable with casters or certain caster classes you can just ban them as a pc option until you feel you get the hang of them. Mammoth hunts with cavemen barbarians and fighters with an npc cleric who hangs back and buffs before hand is just as fun so long as everyone likes what they are playing.

But this might not be the best place to natter on about crit fumbles with magic. Best to make another board before this one gets derailed.

Liberty's Edge RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2012 Top 16

In an old second ed. game the GM decided we needed to read a particular scroll...which was in a language none of the PCs spoke and we were insufficient level for comprehend languages. No biggie we trick/persuade an NPC dragon we have encountered into reading it for us. Problem solved.

Except the GM says, "Too bad you didn't read it on your own that would have been worth XP."


I've been playing in the same campaign for four years now, and we've recently reached 7th level. It's a heavily modified campaign world, and although it has critical hit and fumble tables, we have yet to have a PC struck down from an unfortunate roll (knock on wood). Strangely, we haven't had anyone play a single-class caster, but even then, playing a caster isn't the walk in the park you might imagine it to be. Spell availability is limited, no automatic spells for gaining a level, bards keep a spellbook, sorcerers... don't ask, etc.

Magic item availability is limited, but you can instead gain and commission improved masterwork weapons and armor that have higher hit, damage, and armor bonuses.

Honestly, I love the campaign world, but I bet you'd chafe horribly at it, Anzyr. It's all good, just different styles of play.


Wrong John Silver wrote:

I've been playing in the same campaign for four years now, and we've recently reached 7th level. It's a heavily modified campaign world, and although it has critical hit and fumble tables, we have yet to have a PC struck down from an unfortunate roll (knock on wood). Strangely, we haven't had anyone play a single-class caster, but even then, playing a caster isn't the walk in the park you might imagine it to be. Spell availability is limited, etc.

Magic item availability is limited, but you can instead gain and commission improved masterwork weapons and armor that have higher hit, damage, and armor bonuses.

Honestly, I love the campaign world, but I bet you'd chafe horribly at it, Anzyr. It's all good, just different styles of play.

Nope, I would probably be fine because I'll let you in on a little secret; there's an optimized build for every campaign. In the one you describe given the above details the most optimized build is a casting class that either knows their entire list or has favored class options to expand it and doesn't use weapon-like spells (to avoid the fumble rule). Such casters can take Crafting feats and cherry pick their magic items, as I assume that gold is available. Even if crafting feats are not available, casters are much better placed in a low magic environment as they do not need them as crutches the way martials do, because they can rely on spells to replicate their effects. Nothing is more amusing then enemies without magical armor when your extended Magic Vestments lasts longer then a day.


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And you're only interested in the optimized build, right?


Gold's not easily available, just forget about WBL guidelines, and you won't be able to be guaranteed to find the spell you want--not even when you gain a level.

Martials, though, can knock down opponents on solid enough blows, like a free trip attack.


If it gets me around rules that punish an already weak class and actively deviate from the rules that allow the weak classes to compete at high levels; Yes.

Teaching lessons to improve others GMing is something I consider to be very important.

Silver Crusade

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One of my first experiences with the game: GM shifted my good-aligned PC towards evil for trying to spare the lives of goblin noncombatants, because apparently that was siding with evil.

Yeah, it was the novels that kept me in the hobby early on...


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But you're not teaching anything that way. You're just trying to enforce your own personal way of seeing the game.

Shadow Lodge

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Wrong John Silver wrote:
And you're only interested in the optimized build, right?

With him. If you are always seeking out an optimized build that you can both get immediately and removes all the challenge then why even play?


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Wrong John Silver wrote:
You're not teaching anything. You're just trying to enforce your own personal way of seeing the game.

How does the existence of build that highlights the flaws in a critical fumble/low magic setting, enforce my way of seeing the game? The flaws are already there, its not like I created them. I am merely aware of them. Not being ignorant is not the same as enforcing one's views. And as a great man once said, "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."


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Stop accusing each other of having wrongbadfun. Don't derail the thread.


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Ipslore the Red wrote:

Stop accusing each other of having wrongbadfun. Don't derail the thread.

Ya, it's a little frustrating pointing out the flaws in certain rulesets and being told that knowing about such flaws is badwrongfun. Especially when the thread is about bad rulings we've experienced.


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Anzyr wrote:
Ipslore the Red wrote:

Stop accusing each other of having wrongbadfun. Don't derail the thread.

Ya, it's a little frustrating pointing out the flaws in certain rulesets and being told that knowing about such flaws is badwrongfun. Especially when the thread is about bad rulings we've experienced.

Did I ever say you're having badwrongfun? Because you're definitely calling my not-at-all-detailed setting that I'm playing in (not set the rules for) as flawed, so you're definitely saying this system is bad.

And yes, it's wrong to tell other people they're doing things wrong when what they're doing isn't affecting you.

So stop accusing the system I'm playing under of being inferior. You don't know how it works.

(And this is the last I comment on this. Back to the rulings.)

Liberty's Edge

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My favorite was the DM that claimed that slain bat swarms buried characters standing inside them and used avalanche/buried alive rules.

Yeah. It happened.

Shadow Lodge

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Feral wrote:

My favorite was the DM that claimed that slain bat swarms buried characters standing inside them and used avalanche/buried alive rules.

Yeah. It happened.

Lmao, sorry man all I can see is the headstone.

Here lies Barry the Barbarian

Dead by Batalanche


Feral wrote:

My favorite was the DM that claimed that slain bat swarms buried characters standing inside them and used avalanche/buried alive rules.

Yeah. It happened.

Ouch! Seriously? The pain.

Oh, right! I remember one GM who would have monsters magically disappear just as it started looking like we were going to defeat them--that way, he could say that we didn't actually do so, and earned no XP.


Wrong John Silver wrote:
Feral wrote:

My favorite was the DM that claimed that slain bat swarms buried characters standing inside them and used avalanche/buried alive rules.

Yeah. It happened.

Ouch! Seriously? The pain.

Oh, right! I remember one GM who would have monsters magically disappear just as it started looking like we were going to defeat them--that way, he could say that we didn't actually do so, and earned no XP.

Aside from how ridiculous that is, you still get XP for resolving encounters, even nonlethally. It's wrong in two entirely horrible ways.

Shadow Lodge

Wrong John Silver wrote:
Feral wrote:

My favorite was the DM that claimed that slain bat swarms buried characters standing inside them and used avalanche/buried alive rules.

Yeah. It happened.

Ouch! Seriously? The pain.

Oh, right! I remember one GM who would have monsters magically disappear just as it started looking like we were going to defeat them--that way, he could say that we didn't actually do so, and earned no XP.

That's just dick. If you don't want your players to level too quickly just stop using xp and let players know when you want them to level. Never into penalizing players for good planning or lucky dice. One of my best campaigns ever came from a player 1 shotting a hydra with a short bow and killing it through con damage. It was so improbable that reality (and those that defend it's laws) were not amused. It was awesome.


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Back in 3.5, there was a bit of a misunderstanding about how the Tome of Battle rules worked, and we'd all agreed that you could initiate Strikes in place of an Attack of Opportunity. The DM was growing greatly concerned with how we were handling encounters but decided, hey, he had a great warrior-type miniboss lined up, we could all talk it over after that fight.

My Warblade limped away with three hit points and the thoroughly dismembered bodies of his friends, heading for a temple, while we reviewed the rules and discovered our horrible error.


Feral wrote:

My favorite was the DM that claimed that slain bat swarms buried characters standing inside them and used avalanche/buried alive rules.

Yeah. It happened.

Ouch...

Did he ever improve?


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Not-Pathfinder related again.

In my Mobile Suit Gundam Roleplay I had spent a lot of credits (mission currency) on making a custom Lightwave Barrier Harpoon system that turned my shield emitters into blades (because LWBs can pass through other LWBs but nothing else goes through them) - canonically the exact same thing was done in a manga and was my inspiration.

When I tried to use them in my next fight the GM ruled that LWBs could not penetrate Phase Shift or Anti-Beam armor (the terminology is not important, the important thing is that most typical weapons in the verse can penetrate one but not the other, and ALL Mobile Suits have one or the other) which effectively made them useless. I was then forced to pay additional credits to give my LWB Harpoon system Beam emitters that could damage Phase Shift armor.

Total. BS.

tl;dr I made a custom magic weapon that the DM said was as useful as a wet noodle vs everything else and made me spend more gold to make it an even more special custom magic weapon to work.


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KrispyXIV wrote:

I had 'fun' in a rifts campaign once trying to play a power armor character.

Nobody has fun playing rifts


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Anzyr wrote:
Zhayne wrote:
The use of Critical Fumbles is universally, no, omniversally a bad GM call.
This. So much this. Making the supposedly competent martial classes the ones most likely to critical fumble (since they make the most attacks) is just about the worst idea ever. If forced to participate in such a game I would play a caster that didn't roll dice. As should everyone else.

Though I agree crit fumbles are unfair to melee people, I still kinda like them though I try to make sure they are considerably rarer for PCs. I tend to play crit fumbles as on a natural one you have to make a DC 10 strength or dexterity check and if you do it's just a normal miss. This confirmation roll only applies to PCs and important NPCs; the minions just fail in horrible ways. If you fail, I usually just have it provoke an AoO or get a temporary negative condition (no cutting off your own head), but minions that botch tend to get all sorts of screwed over.

I like it as it increases the chaotic elements of battles but through skill PCs eventually just power through it... while the poor goblins just never do.


In two different online Sessions:

The "Cody" moment: This DM did 2 things that i disliked, firstly we had to pick a "trope" from the movie trope site for our character based on the alignment we had.

2nd thing is that the DM demaned that we calculated how much cash we had earned from day-to-day jobs from when the character became an adult to the year of the session.

The "I dont know the rules" moment, basically some party i was in had ruled that "Knowledge: Local" could roll on a character regardless of where they were from and depending on the roll they knew what was up with the character.

So the story there is that i went as a cleric that was mostly in travel gear and had some backstory and were traveling around, then the fighter rolled a 20 on the knowledge of my character and apparently knew of my class, my name, and my entire backstory... i quit that party when i figured out they argued 20 mins about every ruling and had like a hour bash about Grease.

Liberty's Edge

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MagusJanus wrote:
Feral wrote:

My favorite was the DM that claimed that slain bat swarms buried characters standing inside them and used avalanche/buried alive rules.

Yeah. It happened.

Ouch...

Did he ever improve?

Nope!

I have lots of other good ones from that guy or other bad DMs but I don't want to hog the thread. 'Dead bat swarms are a lethal hazard' was just one of my favorites.


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Go ahead and post them, we always want more.

Silver Crusade

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"Aberrations aren't living, therefore immune to Death Attacks and Precision Damage."

Longer Version: Back in 3.5 we went to buddy's campaign that he had been running for awhile and I had made a Rogue/Assassin, focusing on sneak attack and her Death Attack. Aside from the mooks any enemy that could survive more than one round against our party was either undead or a construct. So after a couple of sessions of contributing absolutely nothing we get into a fight with a Beholder and I'm thinking sweet, even if the death attack fails I can still gig em with SA. So I spend the 3 rounds studying it and... Nada. DM says Aberrations aren't living so my attack did zilch. Didn't even bother to mention this house rule before during one of the other sessions or ya know, when
I told him before I came to the game if I could make an assassin. So she's pretty much useless except for skill checks and ingame the party is constantly razzing her, which lead to revenge part 1 and 2.

1. The party is running on a bridge towards a castle while stone giants on the ramparts are throwing boulders. We get to the little door next to the gate and it's locked. The party is freaking out and attacking the door when one of the other players turns to me and asks if I could do anything about it? "Not that kind of rogue."
Character 1 = SQUISH!
Character 2 = SQUISH!
Character 3 = SQUISH!
Character 4 = SQUISH!
Me = Improved Evasion :3
(No one died but it was funny)

2 The party is camping for the night, my Assassin sleeping up in a tree. Despite this she is the only character that makes her Spot check and sees the Morhgs sneaking up on the group.
DM: "What do you do?"
Me: "Well they're undead so not much." I then cast invisibility on myself and go back to sleep. (No open died in this one either)


Azten wrote:

A crucial NPC, who used a longbow as his main weapon, was handed over to me to play because my character had died.

GM: he won't use melee weapons.

Yeah.. He died from an AoO because of that.

I believe that would qualify as death by terminal stupidity.


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FuelDrop wrote:
Azten wrote:

A crucial NPC, who used a longbow as his main weapon, was handed over to me to play because my character had died.

GM: he won't use melee weapons.

Yeah.. He died from an AoO because of that.

I believe that would qualify as death by terminal stupidity.

There's a trope for that.


Pathfinder Lost Omens Subscriber

people be like "fumble accidentally kills teammates"

I be like, "fumble does 1d4 strength damage, you pulled a muscle"

seriously I do fumbles in my campaign because the NPCs who come in usually larger quantities tend to make more. of course I use this thing.

though I had a bad player experience recently, I was another player, and they got on my case how I was Lawful good and not acting like I had a railroad for a mindset.

in our campaign we're basically doing something like hunger games or such that we're out in the wild surviving because a wizard dropped us in his demiplane(which is huge), and so far we've only encountered 2 groups, centaurs and lizard-men. After we had made friends with the centaurs, they told us that they were ran out of their original camp and lost their forge equipment from the lizardmen.

so, we end up attacking the town of some 100~ lizardmen(and women and children), and just half way through an OOC argument on my characters alignment happens for 10 minutes. I was knocking people out and otherwise not attacking people, I knew that getting as much favor with the centaurs would be good, also we needed access to metalworking(wood stuff and rocks up until now), but apparently I couldn't feel justified in retaking a town for some centaurs. My character was already taking the wilderness poorly, he was just focusing on survival.


In a 1-shot game of 3.5 I rolled up an archery-focused ranger. In our first fight, we take on a few dire boars, and one charges me and knocks me down to under half HP. On my turn, figuring offense was my only way out of this, I say that I take a 5 foot step back, only to be told that I provoke an attack of opportunity. Having played 3.5 for a while at that point (and being kind of a rules lawyer), I point out that the entire POINT of the 5 foot step is to allow characters to move without provoking an AoO, but the DM wasn't having it, and everyone was clearly irritated by my holding the game up. So, I said I'd use the withdraw action. Nope, AoO. Ask if I can pull out and drink a potion without provoking. Nope. So I take my shot with the bow, provoke an AoO, and drop to negatives before I loose the arrow.

Spent the rest of the fight looking up the rules regarding AoOs and 5 foot steps, and the withdrawal action, only to be told that at THIS table, no one stops play to reference stuff in the books. Being a rules lawyer is disruptive. Last time I played with that DM.

Another game, another DM...we were somewhere around level 7 or 8, one player had gone home early, but left his character sheet with us so we could keep him active as we adventured. We're investigating some evil disturbances and such, and go to check out a dilapidated cathedral. We walk up to the doors, open them, and are treated to the sight of a cleric or wizard (can't recall which) holding a scroll, which he uses immediately. CIRCLE OF DEATH! Miraculously, everyone made the save (they all needed to roll 14+ at BEST, besides my paladin)...except for the character of the player who had left. He died.

Same DM and game: chasing an enemy through the woods and finally catch up to her in a clearing and start fighting it out with the ogre mage and her two ogre kids, when halfway through the fight, a cloud giant walks in to support their side. No Spot or Listen checks to notice the HUGE lumbering giant crashing through the woods.

Ditto: Traveling to meet someone that had requested our presence, and arrive at a clearing with a shack at the far end. As we approach, a red dragon leaps up into the air from behind the structure, flies over to us, and lets loose a maximized breath weapon. My paladin had the highest saves and the most HP in the group, and I failed and died. The only reason half of the other characters didn't join him is that we pointed out that the DM was using the wrong template for the breath weapon cone descending upon us, and everyone else managed to be just outside of it. The DM backpedaled a bit and offered me a chance of being revived by my deity, but I shook my head and left.

Last one, different game and DM, this time Mutants & Masterminds: I was playing a hero with the Unlucky fault (or whatever they're called) and had had several mishaps over the first couple of games, all mostly narrative, and then things started going VERY poorly for me, like getting beamed in the head by a basketball for as much damage as our heaviest hitter could do, and then narratively having my arm broken by a rival, just because.


In 3.5 the divine mind's aura class feature has no activation action. So by the rules the auras are always active, even when you sleep. The first time the party got into a situation where we would need to be super alert at night I tried to change my aura to the perception bonus and go to sleep. Really? Then how do I turn my aura back on?


yeti1069 wrote:


Spent the rest of the fight looking up the rules regarding AoOs and 5 foot steps, and the withdrawal action, only to be told that at THIS table, no one stops play to reference stuff in the books. Being a rules lawyer is disruptive. Last time I played with that DM.

Wow, not only playing the game wrong, but actively preventing a player from looking up said rules which could prove him wrong even when said player can't even play anymore?

That's about as low as you can go. Y'know, short of RocksFallEveryoneDies

Silver Crusade

CommandoDude wrote:
yeti1069 wrote:


Spent the rest of the fight looking up the rules regarding AoOs and 5 foot steps, and the withdrawal action, only to be told that at THIS table, no one stops play to reference stuff in the books. Being a rules lawyer is disruptive. Last time I played with that DM.

Wow, not only playing the game wrong, but actively preventing a player from looking up said rules which could prove him wrong even when said player can't even play anymore?

That's about as low as you can go. Y'know, short of RocksFallEveryoneDies

An actual Rockfallseveryonedies would have been preferreble to this. This was purely Small Name, Big Ego. "I AM GOD! DO NOT QUESTION ME!"


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A PF game I joined recently was being GMed by the boyfriend of one of the players. No inherent problem there - my regular game is run by the husband of a player. However... the girlfriend (playing a low-INT female barbarian who spoke like an ikkle gurl all the time... yeah) was a couple of levels ahead of us and was the PC that all the important NPCs entrusted the plot to.

Now I could roll my eyes and tolerate that for a game. But then... 'we'll let John GM for a change because he's been wanting to for a while. We'll use the same characters.'

John was an experienced gamer of the bad sort. He had Ideas! He'd spent years meticulously drawing out a city state using professional design software, including minor architectural details and all-fleshed-out NPC inhabitants. It was all cross-referenced and we were going to be immersed in it. Oh yes. He had a laptop of Doom with his game world in it, and would navigate it as we explored. No journey was a simple street, it was a tour-guided immersion experience of the worst sort.

John was also a GM who liked to play out social interactions without using dice. Your character background, experience, skills and stats meant nothing, he made decisions of how your PC interacted by how you, the player, interacted with him. Even seductions.

John decided that the party were travelling by ship when they were shipwrecked. They had all their gear taken and were being held prisoner by the local crime gang. Then the gang wanted them to go adventuring for them in return for letting the PCs have their own gear back, a bit at a time.

John's 'adventure' was a murder mystery. It was an excuse for his ultra-detailed city to be the star of the game. We had no real clues, we had no gear, we had no real motivation, we had no chance to use our PC skills. Every new location was described in embarrassing detail, including the style of decorative carvings, whether or not it was relevant.

My only battle was in avoiding strangling the GM to demonstrate what my PC was doing to the NPC.

I didn't last the session.


Not so much a ruling as much as idiocy of the entire group.

We played 1 pp= 5 gp for some years before wising up!


insaneogeddon wrote:

Not so much a ruling as much as idiocy of the entire group.

We played 1 pp= 5 gp for some years before wising up!

I never knew it was different now. :o


insaneogeddon wrote:

Not so much a ruling as much as idiocy of the entire group.

We played 1 pp= 5 gp for some years before wising up!

Well, as long as you're consistent, it shouldn't be that big of a deal. Heck, back in 1e, there were 20 silver to the gold, 10 silver to the electrum, and thus 1 platinum to 10 electrum wasn't all that bad.


Ravingdork wrote:

I go to a local con called SwampCon once a year to roleplay and meet other like-minded dorks.

Last year, a trio of "long-time, professional GMs" held a seminar to a room filled with nearly 150 people. They then began to give "expert advice" on how to deal with problem players, all of which ultimately amounted to "make an in-game example out of him" by "dropping a grand-piano on his head" or some such things. Ironically, many of the side-line stories they told of their own adventures made it clear that they themselves were likely problem players.

Worst GMing advice EVAR!!!

ALmsot makes me want to host my own panel next year where I can counteract some of the damage they've done by teaching people about the fun social experience of roleplaying and about how you really should treat your GM and fellow players as like-minded, intelligent adults who (like you) are simply hoping to have a good time.

MagusJanus wrote:
After that, they asked me to stop playing Zelda games :P
UNREASONABLE!!!

Swamp con at UF? Thats where We played we be goblins.

Sovereign Court

I have one that we can file under "bad player reactions" -

I was GMing a long-running Star Wars (D6) campaign back in high school. I had my regular group of 4 plus two guests, friends-of-friends, I think. The group had stowed away on an Imperial shuttle to get on board a Star Destroyer. Everything had gone right, but rather than leave on the shuttle the two new guys decided to commandeer a TIE bomber and attempt to attack the Star Destroyer head-on.

They died a puzzling, horrible death while the rest of the group was inconvenienced but made it back alive.

They stormed out of my friend's house muttering something about cutting my car's brake line.


Wow. After only couple of game sessions I'm guilty for almost half of these, though some of them were avoided by sending the ideas to discussion before game.

Chengar Qordath wrote:
Roll too high on Diplomacy to gather information? Instead of getting useful information, you get one useful thing buried in dozens of irrelevant facts.

What! This is how I like to do things. I also divide the actual story for parts and share them with different players. Though I also give them little clues what is important.

Well last time I surprised my players with revorked initiative system, which had it's own game board and allowed players to react faster or slover depending on their actions. That was simple, but too unbalanced and one player really mastered and basically turned himself to machinegun, while another lost couple of turns as he waited with readyed action. But they did soon learned that they were captured on pocket universe, so it stayed quirk of that place.

My player complain lot, but they also thanks that my games are most interesting.

What I hate most at player, is when you are helping your melee fighting friend with ranged or reach weapon, any attack missed by 1-4 will automatically hit your friend, no matter of his AC or facing. Well, then we got our fighter holding alone against 2 boss-enemies, who had so high AC that I could only hit with natural 20. I then said that I use my friend for targeting, who I would hit at 19-20, so any result of 15-18 would hit one of bosses. Then the GM decided that any result not hitting my friend was total miss, even when the bosses were flanking him.


Oh man, I have a few.

There are probably a hundred times when I got shafted by DM rulings in AD&D 1E just because I was the DM's little brother and he would make all my characters for me, even when I didn't want him to. I mean, all the classes and races we played were made up by ourselves or him, so he got to use his powers to make mine, and the other player my age, the weakest or most useless two of the group consistently.

The best example was when the other youngest player was missing for a session, and my brother had me play as both my and the other kid's characters. These siege towers were slowly lumbering towards our city, but getting very close. Out of desperation, I had Sam's extremely strong character try to slow one down by pushing it from the other side until we could think of a way to stop them.

My brother informs me that the siege tower continues in its path and runs the character over, rolls a random handful of dice and declares Sam's character dead. Did I make a dumb move? Yes. Should I have gotten some leniency for playing with an unfamiliar character, or for being seven years old? I think so. Man, if only we had known how saving throws worked!

TL;DR My older brother always picked on me with his DM powers, to the point where he killed off absent friends' characters to make the players mad at me.


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More recently, and more legitimately, I played a Pathfinder campaign over the course of a school year with some random guys that got together online. The GM was really great at narration and at making us feel like the things the party did were significant and badass and like we were the ones carrying the story (most times). The problem was that we had one player that liked being a caster, and the GM had a number of preconceived notions and house rules from previous games that just did not work out well.

From a Minor Image of a stone wall not providing concealment because it is a Glamer in our first session, this player and this GM would argue about rules, the GM would nerf various spells and strategies, the player would get mad and argue against it. Every. F&$@ing. Week.

After the glamer houserule the poor guy had to rework his whole character. That continued on-and-off for the whole game, including a character death with no dice rolls. I liked that GM and that campaign in a lot of ways, but I cannot stand it when a GM would rather hold a character back by changing rules than by working within them.

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