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Okay, first time i have posted on here in a long time so I will try to be as succinct as possible while still offering the most unbiased explanation of the situation as I can. This is my worst GM ever, and I never played a single game she ran.
The GM...lets call her Alice, tells us that she wants to run a campaign she is writing in order to flesh out some ideas for a book. A book she has been "writing" for the last six years( or so she says). That was a warning sign for me, especially since she said we were in for a treat since she would be gmpc-ing the main character. For the sake of brevity lets just say my eyes rolled so far back in my head when I heard this, that I broke the curvature of time and space, seeing the universe as it was millennia ago. She also adds that she wants us to clear our characters through her so they will fit the theme.(which I thought actually sounded reasonable at the time).
My first attempted came to me when I watched this documentary on Nostradamus(and whether or not he was in contact with angelic unicorn aliens...yay history channel). So I rolled up a human divination wizard, and setting myself up to be a prophet who would make crazy claims all the time and every so often be correct thanks to my magic. Well that apparently is a power gaming option, and doesn't fit what she wants the story to be about. Divination is banned from this point on. OK, fair, I see how it could hurt the story.
Next idea hit me when I was playing Dragon Age. I thought Templars seemed pretty interesting so I decided to roll up a character strong against magic. I wanted to go dwarf+glory of old+steel souls, but felt if divination was power gaming then this would make Alice's head explode. So I went with a human Spellbreaker Inquisitor, and the option that gives the disruptive feat.....well this was apparently worse. And I learned that "it makes it hard to want to GM when people purposely try to make broken characters"
So I remember that she made a beguiler one of the last times we played and she had gone on a tangent on how focusing on enchantment wasn't as powerful as people think. ....And I'm powergaming (I took the infernal bloodline, offered to switch to undead, she said it was worse) Tried to make a undead hunter using the vampire hunter archetype from the inquisitor...and I'm powergaming.
I give up, pick a human fighter, give him toughness(nope that is power gaming pick another feat), give him skill focus, three times; swimming, climb, survival...I am so done with this. Now I am trying to offset the penalties of heavy armor and steal the spotlight from the survivalist gmpc. So I pick Fast Crawl, Catch Off Guard, and Animal Affinity instead. She says Off the wall build are okay but I he wont let me play a character that will bring down the party....
She decides that I shouldn't get to make my own character and will have to play one of her npcs...her main characters love interest since I cant make a character correctly. In a very measured and kind way I tell her to go somewhere hot and pleasure herself. Other people in the group take my side and refuse to play. I am now a monster to her for breaking up our game, and she will never play any game with me in it. So we are going to play king maker without her.
So that was really long. Anyone have some war stories to tell?
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Banning divination was reasonable. If you think a character is too strong because of a mechanic that is fine.
Banning the spellbreaker inquisitor for "power gaming" without banning any mechanics was crossing the line.
Oh btw. It sounded like she was actually giving you the run around so that you would play her love interest. I'll give you like 3 seconds to think why she might have wanted you to play her love interest.
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You know, now that you put it like that, I feel really bad. A whole lot of things makes sense though with that in mind. Because she didn't get ocd about any other characters, plus other things I guess I sorta ignored.... I feel really stupid, I guess I should say thanks? I have so much back peddling to do right now.
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Your GM is using you to play out her personal fantasies with total disregard for your/anyone else's happiness/entertainment.
Leave, now.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I doubt the intent is as bad as the actuality.
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Your GM is using you to play out her personal fantasies with total disregard for your/anyone else's happiness/entertainment.
Leave, now.
Speaking as someone who's... not unfamiliar with this kind of thing, Ms. Pleiades is probably right. For that and all the other reasons.
(BTW, Ms. P, what was the inspiration for your username? I like it... it sounds very Desnan.) :)
Well, I did not hang around to *actually* play, but this one guy I suspect would have been my worst GM had I played the game...
I came across a couple of guys (18-22yrs old) at the LGS who were starting a Pathfinder game on Tuesdays. I asked if there was room and if I could join in.
The DM gave me a very cursory rundown as I did not have much time right then – world in upheaval, cataclysmic events, PC actions can shape the fate of the nations/world, there are "rifts" or portals and the PC's are not actually "from" this world.
I took it in stride, developed a PC, emailed the PC and backstory, got the nod, an showed up a half hour early.
The DM got more in depth with the "big picture" while I took notes on everything so I'd remember it all. Another player arrived, who said the third player will arrive at 7pm and the fourth will not be able to make it. The 2nd player is a newbie PF player, and the DM went into detail with both of us on the actual scenario.
The adventure was sounding a lot less like fantasy RPG than it was sci-fi/steampunk, where (his words) we'd be video-game characters, with jump boots to hop from airship to airship to reach the enemy mothership that we are tasked with disabling.
Oh, and did I mention the "enemy" are golem/clockwork/robot thingies with a hive mind centered on the mothership?
I told the DM and player, "This is really not what I was expecting, I was hoping for more of a standard-fantasy game setting. I have three other games I am involved in, and I think I'll concentrate on those."
"I could play tonite for the two hours, but I don't think I'd be coming back, my heart is not in this kind of thing, so instead of some passive-aggressive BS of just not showing for the next sessions, I am going to pass now before it starts and the other players get to a point where they are counting on me as a member of the group."
"I thank you for inviting me, and it was nice to meet you both."
The DM says, "Well, you were not really invited, you invited yourself. And now you are dis-inviting yourself."
And then he asked about what part is not fantasy about this, trying to pin me down on a specific and convince me to play, to which I told him this was more like a video-game, steampunk and not what I was hoping to get involved in.
DM: "Well I just feel like you are disrespecting me."
I give him a dead look in his eyes and reply back, "Really? That is where you are going to go from here? That I am disrespecting you if I decide not to play?"
DM, "Well, I had that feeling from the start that you were disrespecting me."
Me, shaking my head and leaving. I could have completely verbally destroyed him at that point, but to what point?
So... At what point have I *personally* offended you? Because that is what being disrespected means.
Was it when I listened and took copious notes while you described what the world, factions and mission was while you were describing them?
Was it when I made a decision to back out before it starts so I do not abandon the group after building undue expectations?
Was it when I thanked you for welcoming me?
Or is it that your own self-worth is personally invested in every person you meet agreeing with you?
That you do not even know what the word "disrespect" even means?
That you cannot handle even the slightest polite rejection, and have to try to put others on the defensive as a coping mechanism for your own fragile hurt feelings?
Sheeeesh…
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I think the worst thing about the OP's experience, is not the GM messing with the OP's character build. The big red flag in my view was that you were going to be playing through a novel that she is writing. That is a very bad sign. It means that she had likely decided the outcome of every obstacle and you were just doing a read through. No thanks.
The story that is created by the enitre group is so much better when character decisions matter.
I once played in a game where the GM had already decided what the entire story would be and then inserted overpowered GMPCs to keep us completely on the rails, always. I feel bad for the guy, as you could tell that he had put lots of effort into the world he had created. However, when we figured out that it really didn't matter what we chose to do, all of us checked out. We weren't trying to sabotage his game, we just were coming up with solutions that he had not considered. It quickly fizzled out. Great player, but not really a GM (at least not yet).
I appreciate all of the GMs who were willing to run a game for us over the years. However, the worst one ever was a person who had trouble getting along with the friends who had introduced him to our group. Not only was his style that of letting us spectate on his precious story in which we had no influence, but the constant bickering and arguing at the table from across the GM screen was just too much to handle. I'm an older gamer and I just can't stomach such juvenile behavior. I didn't mind the guy as a player, but he was too short-tempered to sit in the GM chair. When he failed to show up without any advance notice to our weekly game because he just wasn't in the mood, he was removed from the group.
I strongly advocate for all players to try to run a game at least once. Being a GM isn't easy, and getting that prospective of the game is important. However, not everyone can step into the role and run a successful game on their first attempt.
Like all talents, with enough practice, I think that even bad GMs can get better if they are willing to listen to feedback from the table. There are excellent books on being a better GM that are worth every GM's time regardless of their experience behind the screen. I have been running games for a long time as a GM, and I still feel that I have a ton of improving to do!
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Oh man, I hope my PCs never see this thread.
I'm running them through a novel I'm working on right now. ;)
Oh man, I hope my PCs never see this thread.
I'm running them through a novel I'm working on right now. ;)
I don't see anything wrong with running through a novel as long as that does not mean player agency is removed.
It's a good way to test your novel. If players would have behaved differently than your main character, it is important to analyse that difference. (It can also be a way to flesh out your world with real people).
I dislike novels where the MC could have said or done one common sense thing in chapter one to solve the main story arch.
One of my favorite books series was clearly an adaptation of his roleplaying group (Half-Orc Series by David Dalglish)
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Hey, writing a novel inspired by a game group is an exceptionally high complement to the group. But expecting them to follow a GM-created script to the letter takes away the player investment in the story. Players should feel that it is their story as much as anyone else's. When it begins to feel like a colour by numbers type experience, the whole group suffers.
Hard to imagine players getting excited about playing a character where everything they do has been foreordained by the GM.
Shared storytelling requires GMs to be comfortable with letting someone else take the story in a new direction.
Just my view from personal experience.
I don't see anything wrong with running through a novel as long as that does not mean player agency is removed.Oh man, I hope my PCs never see this thread.
I'm running them through a novel I'm working on right now. ;)
Have to agree with all of this. There's nothing inherently wrong with basing a campaign off an in-progress novel. It just tends to have a bad reputation because it can mess up the whole idea of campaigns being a cooperative storytelling experience. Writers are rather attached to their plots and characters, and in my experience a lot of parties will rampage through intricately constructed plots like a bull in a china shop.
Maybe they decide that your morally ambiguous wizard supporting character is actually a straight-up bad guy, and decide to try and kill her. Maybe they go chasing after a random tangential side plot and ignore the main story. Or they could always try to jump completely off the rails, like my one campaign where after the Big Bad's motive rant the party talked it over and decided to join him. Maybe they try to ride the eagles into Mordor instead of going on the epic overland journey you had planned. And so on...
In short, parties tend to play havoc with any tightly plotted story. There's nothing wrong with using an in-progress novel as the general inspiration for a campaign, but if you expect all the players to precisely follow the storyline of any book you'll have to do a lot of railroading.
The worst DM I had was definitely the worst not due to malice, but due to prize-worthy incompetence of legendary proportions. This was with this kid in music camp back in summer 1982 trying to be DM with 1st Edition AD&D. None of us who tried were good DMs (and I have my own DMing bit to relate below(*)) -- and to be fair, I have to emphasize that we weren't very good players either -- but playing under this particular DM was akin to watching one of those movies that is so bad that people watch it precisely because it is so bad.
In short order, he got up to Deities & Demigods for challenges, would bring up entries (including Greater Deities) in there as random encounters (can't remember him actually rolling dice for selection of deity entry, but it seemed random enough). He would start out with an attempt to convey how foreboding the encounter was, which he quickly botched by his showing us the page with the entry in order to try to show us the image (and in all fairness, not much of the artwork in that book is all that scary), then quickly turned to trying to figure out from the entry what the deity could actually do to us, give up, and just say something like "Nah. He just bites . . .", take a quick look again at the damage . . . "Eh. You killed him." In addition, almost from the start, he was handing out super-treasures, of which more in a moment.
Every once in a while outside of gaming sessions, he would take me aside and ask me with complete sincerity and sincere puzzlement if I thought he was making things too easy, but I didn't say much, because I was afraid of causing an over-reaction in the other direction (like I said, we weren't great players either). Although I hadn't tried to push him into giving us more stuff, the invariable reaction from him in the next gaming session seemed to be to give us even more ridiculously powerful stuff or other boons. The most powerful of these items by a considerable margin (as well as the most memorable) was a special spellbook that was initially blank, but that you could use to invent up to 10 spells of up to 10th level (without needing a great amount of time and expense for spell research), making up whatever you wanted for them to do (we quickly came up with Summon Psionics, to give ourselves maximum psionic power such as it existed in 1st Edition AD&D); you could also cast the spells directly from the book without erasing them from the book (normal in AD&D 1st Edition: if you cast a spell directly from a spellbook, you consume it from the book as if using a scroll, and run a risk of also consuming the spells immediately before and/or immediately after it in the book).
The scariest moment was when he had Asmodeus temporarily capture us (introducing himself in a comically self-assured and bored-sounding voice), and foiled our attempt to use a teleportation wish to escape ("Going somewhere? . . ."), and then started to notice our special spellbook when we tried to make a move to use it -- the next couple of minutes involved the players bluffing the GM away from interest in the special spellbook (and no, I at most only incidentally mean the player characters trying to bluff Asmodeus away from taking further interest in it -- this was players bluffing DM). Sure enough, soon afterwards, our intrepid DM had a traitorous Geryon attack Asmodeus, and we watched the battle and then unloaded everything on the survivor (which one was the survivor, I can't even remember) and obliterated him.
In the late fall of that year, when we had gone on to college, one of the last letters I got from one of my friends from D&D gaming in music camp noted how much harder D&D was in college . . .
(*)Just slightly later, in the same term at the same music camp, I ran an Evil adventure with most of the same players; the party included a crazy Fighter who got additional stacking damage multipliers as he got crazier, to the point where he could be a real threat to a Greater Deity and one-shot their minions; the weakest character (and the Fighter's little brother) was a normal 1st level Magic User (what passed for Wizard back then), who had nothing special (low-level Magic Users were REALLY WEAK). The party was raiding a monastery, and decided to desecrate the altar in it, among other things, by pooping all over it. Now even in 1st Edition days (which was the only time I really had a chance to do anything anyway) I had a penchant for having dungeon "levels" be not so level, even ignoring the "maze of twisty passages" and "impossible cube" areas I developed a few years later, in college. So I had overpasses and underpasses. Well, the players later got into an underpass passage, and weren't really keeping track of where they were. They saw a trapdoor in the ceiling, opened it, and then asked about something dread falling on them (I can't remember whether they thought monsters were going to come down on them, or just a ceiling collapse). I said "Some poop falls on you". They had come up right under the altar they had visited earlier -- priceless.
Hey, Coltron, wish to repost your tale in this thread?
I like to keep all these tales together in one place for easy reference in the future. Or should I just post there and make a link here?
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I have another "back in the good old days" tale of not so much terror, but complete failure.
Me and some of my gaming pals tried out the then-new Call of Cthulu game in the 1980s. Now at that time I had not yet read any of the Lovecraftian stories and only had a vague idea of the gist of the mythos. Of my pals however, the one who claimed to be best versed in the lore volunteered to GM.
The GM created our characters for us, and I received a WWI vet with some kind of magical machine gun. It was psychically awakened by the horrors of trench warfare or some such- I honestly don't remember the GM's explanation at this point. Nor do I remember what anyone else played, as the session devolved into anarchic failure in only one session.
The other players successfully goaded the GM into throwing monster after monster at us, which my magical machine gun just kept cutting down. Again, I didn't know all that much about Cthulu, but I was pretty sure that hack-n-slash was not at all the correct playstyle for the genre. Either way, I was a pawn/spectator in the battle of wits and wills between my pals.
Eventually the GM was sufficiently exasperated by my trolling friends to throw Cthulu itself at us in toe to toe combat. My friends then engaged in spurious logic to convince the GM that the Elder Gods would appear and kill Cthulu on our behalf.
It has gone down as the most surreal experience in my long career as a gamer, which I suppose is a sort of success for the Call of Ctuhulu game, but not at all in a way that should have been appropriate.
I suppose the moral of my story is while it was hands-down the worst case of GMing I've ever seen, it required jerk players to occur. So let's remember there's two sides to every terrible GM story....
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Oh no, I totally agree with everything that's been said in this thread (and fwiw, when I say I'm running my current project as a campaign, mostly that means I'm using some of the same story hooks, dungeon setpieces, secondary characters, and villains; the novel protagonists don't appear in the campaign version except as potential NPC resources and cameos, and the PCs are totally free to crash and burn, wreak havoc on the set, and do whatever else makes their little murderhobo hearts content).
Mainly I just think it's funny that that sort of thing is an immediate red flag, because it totally stands to reason that it would be, I'd just never stopped to think about why before.
Anyway my best-worst GM story isn't actually a game I played. My brother ran a campaign when he was 14 or 15 for a bunch of his friends who were the same age, and it was just such a comical stampede of frustrations that when the PCs camped in the street because they didn't want to pay 5 sp or whatever for a room at the inn, he had a gang of bears show up out of nowhere and eat them.
So now "YOU GET EATEN BY A BUNCH OF BEARS" is our thing for a game that's going so badly that, welp, you just get eaten by a bunch of bears.
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Oh no, I totally agree with everything that's been said in this thread (and fwiw, when I say I'm running my current project as a campaign, mostly that means I'm using some of the same story hooks, dungeon setpieces, secondary characters, and villains; the novel protagonists don't appear in the campaign version except as potential NPC resources and cameos, and the PCs are totally free to crash and burn, wreak havoc on the set, and do whatever else makes their little murderhobo hearts content).
Mainly I just think it's funny that that sort of thing is an immediate red flag, because it totally stands to reason that it would be, I'd just never stopped to think about why before.
Anyway my best-worst GM story isn't actually a game I played. My brother ran a campaign when he was 14 or 15 for a bunch of his friends who were the same age, and it was just such a comical stampede of frustrations that when the PCs camped in the street because they didn't want to pay 5 sp or whatever for a room at the inn, he had a gang of bears show up out of nowhere and eat them.
So now "YOU GET EATEN BY A BUNCH OF BEARS" is our thing for a game that's going so badly that, welp, you just get eaten by a bunch of bears.
AKA "pulling an Elisha"
Oh man, I hope my PCs never see this thread.
I'm running them through a novel I'm working on right now. ;)
I don't see anything wrong with running through a novel as long as that does not mean player agency is removed.
It's a good way to test your novel. If players would have behaved differently than your main character, it is important to analyse that difference. (It can also be a way to flesh out your world with real people).
I dislike novels where the MC could have said or done one common sense thing in chapter one to solve the main story arch.
One of my favorite books series was clearly an adaptation of his roleplaying group (Half-Orc Series by David Dalglish)
I love his books for exactly that reason.
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So let's remember there's two sides to every terrible GM story....
Every story has two sides, but sometimes it is still 100% the fault of only one side.
Level 99 Boatman. That is all.
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The DM that wants his/her players to play as spectators in his/her epic masterpiece is exceedingly common. The sad part is that besides being overly rigid and controlling, they're often otherwise great storytellers. My recommendation: Find a DM who's flaws are the least unbearable and stick with them for life. Funny enough that's the same suggestion they give you when you're shopping for a house. =P
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Your GM is using you to play out her personal fantasies with total disregard for your/anyone else's happiness/entertainment.
Leave, now.
Speaking as someone who's... not unfamiliar with this kind of thing, Ms. Pleiades is probably right. For that and all the other reasons.
(BTW, Ms. P, what was the inspiration for your username? I like it... it sounds very Desnan.) :)
I discovered that Pleiades is another name for the Seven Sisters Constellation. From there I thought of the idea of seven characters from the same family, and from there I simply gave them the name Pleiades.
As for horrible GMs and the topic at hand, I've avoided situations as bad as those described mostly. My worst experience however was with a GM whose game took place in a world that he'd been GMing over for 30 years. He had custom calendars, deities, races, just about everything. He'd split the stats into seven categories instead of six, and added 20 extra skills while having done nothing to add the number of skill points available to characters.
The races were the worst though, because my character was a tiefling, and his "core" races were all so balls-to-the-wall crazy, with nine-foot-long monkey tails, my character's backstory as being rejected from mainstream society just felt hollow. The setting was so far from the default Pathfinder that I couldn't connect with the world at all or enjoy the voyage.
That, and he rail-roaded hard.
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My worst GM experience was a bit different from most of these. At least, the GM wasn't big on railroading or pounding us on the head with his "genius" creative worldbuilding.
Instead what we got were a lot of "clever" puzzles that tended to involved things like expecting us to remember some really minor detail he mentioned in passing two hours ago. I suppose it was technically railroading in a way, given that the game came to a dead halt until we figured out the solution he wanted. Which, since we never got any clues/hints/advice to help things along, lasted an hour and a half before we just gave up.
Plus our character sheets were 90% pointless, because he completely ignored any modifiers/stats and managed success/failure based purely on the d20 roll, and any ability that didn't require a roll got one added in anyway "to see how well you did."
Needless to say, I didn't play in game where that guy GMed again. Though I did run into him a year later, when a game he was GMing with his roommates, went so badly he got kicked out.
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The worst GM I ever had at least had the excuse of being pretty new to the game, though it was still pretty bad. But it was the special kind of bad that, while aggravating at the time, is kind of funny in hindsight. His plot was gleefully awful and he railroaded us every ten seconds.
Okay, we had a group of 6 plus the DM and he told us to just make level 5 characters and not to worry about back stories because that would be 'part of the plot'. This probably should have been a sign that we were going to get railroaded all the time, but he seemed so excited that we figured that he just had a big plot in store and we gave him the benefit of the doubt.
We came to the table with a Drow rogue going Shadowdancer at level up (me), an elf fighter, two tiefling rangers, a halfling bard, and pixie going sorcerer. Yeah, the DM let his girlfriend play a pixie because she thought it was cute. I don't think I need to explain the problem with that. So favoritism aside, the introduction was kind of interesting. We all woke up in an abandoned prison together. After some actually pretty okay RP to get the party introduced. We had good players at least.
So after being forced to flee underground through a very specific set of tunnels by packs of demons, apparently our guards, we found some equipment and worked our way down through the underground until we found the first friendly NPC ever and he seemed really excited to see us. Figuring this is actually a plot hook, we let the guy take us back to his secret hidden underground village. This ends session 1.
Next week, on the way, he starts giving a long story about how the 'blood war' between the devils and demons spread to the material plane 100 years ago and they've been warring on the surface ever since. Questions as to how the material plane is still intact, why the good aligned outsiders have done nothing, and why the gods are okay with this are ignored.
When we arrive, we're immediately given an incredibly detailed description of a giant ass statue in the center of the village detailing six people. The NPC starts giving a long winded story about how the statue is of the six ancient heroes that tried to stop an evil sorcerer that is solely responsible for bringing the blood war to the material plane. Because he somehow made pacts with both the devils and demons and then double crossed them both by opening permanent gates to Hell and the Abyss on the material plane. Okay...
The next conversation went like this:
Me: Do the statues look familiar?
DM: Kind of.
Me: Is there any water nearby?
DM: Yeah.
Me: I go look my reflection in the water.
DM: Okay.
Me: I look back at the statue. Do they look more familiar now?
DM: Kind of.
Me: Do I recognize myself on the statue! (Me getting aggravated)
DM: Yeah. (Trying not to laugh).
Me: .....
Things did not get better from there. We're given a ton more exposition (note that we haven't done anything other than get exposition for like an hour and a half at this point). We're told that the 'genius' wizard that double-crossed Hell and the Abyss is not only still alive (because no one tried to you know, kill him for this) but apparently he used to be our friend and the seventh member of our party. He gives a something like ten minute speech about why this moron is a tragic figure and we should feel bad for him for basically ending the world. I'm starting to feel like I'm not in control of my own character here. Oh, and the exposition was the entire session. That took like two and a half hours, then we had a brief encounter with a pair of devils that just ran after like two rounds.
On our next session (which is number 3 and our last thankfully) we're sent to clear out a city so the town can mine cold iron to make weapons. Okay, now we have plot and a reasonable goal. We were fooled into thinking that he was improving. So we search a huge hidden underground city and find nothing at all interesting. Two more random adventurers join us (bringing us up to 8 players) and then we fight 1 Half-Fiend Minotaur. As a boss fight. A CR 6 monster as a boss, unaltered, for a party of 8 level 5 players. Then we're given some downtime to relax. We're told it will take 2 weeks to have all our cold iron weapons forged so we have two weeks of downtime. We then have to roleplay the entire two weeks. After like two hours of this we just called it for the week. We never came back to that campaign.
I had a GM with a puzzle so hard that five other people could not figure it out after 3 irl hours through the night. We spent the next 3 hours brute forcing the reloading 10d6 fireball trapped puzzle door, and resting when ran out of healing. It took 3 days in-game. We opened the door and then abandoned the dungeon because the door was awful. We never saw level 2 of the dungeon.
My biggest pet peeve with DM's is interference with RPing your character/moving your character for you when you are there and willing. Loss of control outside mind influencing affects is a no-no.
I once jokingly said a Druid PC gets freaky with the other different raced Druid NPC while wildshaped when player was absent and the group had a laugh. I never intended to be interpreted as me GM fiating the event, just an off hand joke but that offended the player who took it very seriously. I don't control characters when players aren't there unless given permission, because it's not mine to control. I try to be more careful now. I haven't had that problem since.
Most GM problems I've had were solved through honest communication and feedback.
I've had one extremely bad GM. I have told stories of this GM on these boards many times. Some of the stories I've told about this GM have been deleted by the Paizo staff because they do not want such stories to be associated with this website. I'm not joking here. They are that bad. Like, mixing the Saw movies with an x-rated movie - and doing this to female player's characters.
if I have time later today, I'll recount some of the less-than-r-rated problems with this GM. There are many stories to tell.
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I've had one extremely bad GM. I have told stories of this GM on these boards many times. Some of the stories I've told about this GM have been deleted by the Paizo staff because they do not want such stories to be associated with this website. I'm not joking here. They are that bad. Like, mixing the Saw movies with an x-rated movie - and doing this to female player's characters.
if I have time later today, I'll recount some of the less-than-r-rated problems with this GM. There are many stories to tell.
Listening intently.
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I’m going through my posting history, and here’s a couple of the stories I’ve told about this GM on these boards. This is all one single GM with over a decade of gaming with this group. In no particular order:
In a city that's being destroyed by a big bad evil demon? Kill the demon! Congrats! Oh, but why the heck did you allow it to destroy so much of the city. You should have to pay for that. (we were run out of town).
Quite literally every single thing we did had negative consequences, and nothing we did was ever celebrated by any NPC.
As the campaign progressed, I started to notice how we couldn't even accomplish anything on our own. Deus ex machina started happening everywhere. The first time I noticed it was when we were supposed to steal a dragon's egg out from under a dragon. We knew we couldn't kill the dragon. Outside of game, I spent hours trying to come up with various plans to accomplish it, and I probably went back and forth with the other players over email hundreds of times over several weeks. When it came time to actually go in and try it, a powerful NPC showed up with the egg for us. Oh, and that NPC also had a different artifact that we were supposed to get, and we were still trying to figure out how to get it. That artifact was in the hands of a reclusive nation of elves that hated non-elves (and the GM dictated that elf was not a playable race). There went both of those adventures.
One of the other characters had a holy symbol granted to him by his god (literally, his god showed up and gave it to him). At one point he lost it, and about a year later in real life, we had the opportunity to do a side quest to retrieve it. All of us were really excited to take a break from the main campaign and do a mini quest to get our cleric's prized holy symbol back. The next gaming session, a group of representatives from a nation we were trying to ally with showed up, and they had the holy symbol with them and used it as one of their bargaining chips. There went that adventure.
So we ended up making a bargain with the nation and we got the holy symbol back. But it turned out that the representatives weren't actually representatives of the nation, but were actually devils in disguise (we had no way of knowing; this was a low magic campaign, and none of us had access to any spells or magical items that would allow us to differentiate between an outsider from a human). By making the bargain, we ended up opening a gate to Hell and allowed a bunch of devils to pour through and decimate part of the nation we desperately needed to ally with. So not only did we piss off the nation we were trying to ally with, we also pissed of our own nation and demoralized our army for ruining the deal and unleashing devils.
My character had an army of gnomes. We had to go overseas for a while, and I ordered the army to stay at home and await for me to come back. They refused. They decided to build their own ship and sail after me (we took dragons to fly there), which would take about 6 months. Because I knew this, I left orders at every city we stopped at to tell the gnomes (if they were seen) where I would be headed, so they could eventually find me. By the time that entire story arc was over, I never heard from my gnomes. I stated that I would not head back to our homeland without being able to find my gnome army and bring them home too. This was the point where the powerful NPC who happened to have both the dragon egg and the artifact met up with us. She was going to just teleport us home, and I refused. I got outvoted by the party, and we teleported. Lo and behold, there's my gnome army! What do you know! A huge storm had sunk their ship, and the survivors floated back to shore and were taken into slavery. I thought, what a great opportunity to free my gnomes from slavery! This will be a great adventure arc! We start planning how to get my gnomes free, but that game session night, we met up the the leader of the culture that enslaved my gnomes, and the leader said, "Your gnomes are free. I will send out orders to return them to you." And another problem "solved."
I have many more examples from just this one campaign, and from several other campaigns with the same GM, but I'm out of time.
So, with all this, the lessons you should learn are:
1) Don't pull a deus ex machina. Ever.
2) Let your players and their characters solve their own problems. If they need help, give them a little nudge, but don't solve it for them.
3) Allow your players to experience victory with no strings attached. It can be fun sometimes to have other problems arise from a victory, but it shouldn't happen each and every time.
4) Reward your players for good deeds. Grant their characters land in a nation they help (but don't screw them over by giving them cursed lands; that same GM did that to us in a different campaign), or have the NPC's throw them a party. Have word of their good deeds spread, which may give them discounts at some merchants. Things like that.
1) Nat 1 meant you rolled on the critical miss table. You could do anything from attack the wrong enemy, attack an ally, throw your weapon, break a limb, fall down prone, get your weapon stuck in the ceiling (I lost my character's only magical weapon this way, at level 6, in a campaign which required a magical weapon to even hit the enemy, and I didn't get a new magic weapon for about 6 months in real time playing every weekend), and more.
2) Low magic campaign where the world thought the gods abandoned them. One player had a cleric. All divine spells required us to pass a saving throw to see if they worked, including all cure spells. It was ruled that if we failed, we didn't believe the magic worked, therefore it didn't. EDIT: This rule didn't apply to spells cast at our opponents, and our cleric was the only one casting divine spells, so it's not like we had to save against enemy divine spells.
3) 2nd edition game. Thief's abilities were based on percentiles, and there's no counter to them (this is RAW). If you made your hide in shadows roll, that was that - you were hidden (given reasonable circumstances). For the NPCs, if they rolled their hide in shadows, we could never find them. For my thief when I rolled it, all bad guys had a percent chance to "detect" me. This house rule was inserted because my GM got tired of not being able to have monsters find my thief.
4) 2nd edition. Backstab has the word "stab" in it, so you can only use weapons that deal piercing damage.
5) Any spell or ability that the players used in a clever way and continued to use to the character's advantage repeatedly was deemed "overpowered" and was no longer allowed in the game. Elven archers were banned for this reason. Various spells were also banned for this reason.
6) Not really a house rule, but "no math or physics" was periodically mentioned. Especially when we tried to use physics or math to show that an ability would work or something an enemy did wouldn't work. If we insisted on it, the GM would throw a tantrum and say something along the lines of, "Ok, fine. You win. You save the world. Game over. Everyone goes home. Happy?"
7) All arcane spells had somatic components. If a spell did not normally have a somatic component, the GM would design a somatic component for the spell. The player had to actually perform the somatic component with their hands in order to cast the spell. Yes, that's the player, not the character. If the player messed up, their character did not cast the spell.
8) Divine spells did not have to be prepared at the beginning of the day. So long as the cleric made his daily prayer session, he got his spell slots, but there were no prepared spells for the cleric. This may seem like a good idea, but see the next entry for why it was bad:
9) If you couldn't figure out what your character was going to do within a minute, your character lost his turn that round. Now, this is an old 1e rule that our GM house-ruled into 2e. It's not that bad for most players, but for the guy playing the cleric it was horrible. Since the cleric didn't have to prepare spells, it made the entire cleric spell list available to him (at mid level ranges, this is literally hundreds of spells). That meant that the player often had to pour through multiple books to find a spell that would be useful, and if the player couldn't do it in a minute or so (including getting the rule right, or even trying to find a spell that he remembered what it did but couldn't remember the name), he lost his turn. Our cleric player ended up using up as much time as possible before it was too late, and then made a last second decision to just melee attack the nearest monster. He attacked much more often than he cast.
I have more, but I think that's enough for now.
I have no doubt that something similar happened to my character when I left the game.
Many times I've been confused about terrain - sometimes thinking we're in an open field or a forest with lots of trees, when actually were in a short clearing or even an area with tall grass. This is due to either a poor explanation or just me mishearing what the GM said. And we were never allowed to redo an action based on a misunderstanding of the area, so tactics were always against us and nearly impossible for us to do. How far away is the wizard that just dropped from the two orcs? We never know; we'd always have to ask the GM, who would then tell us that it was either one round, two rounds, half a round, with none or so many bad guys between (for AoO against us). Then we could move and suffer the consequences of trying to heal the wizard before he died; or just make the player roll up a new character.
Maps help reduce GM shenanigans and make the battle more fair from everyone's perspective. Maps give players a bit of an advantage by allowing them to incorporate better tactics and maps let everyone know the terrain so there is no confusion. Having minis forces the GM to use at least the same combat rules as everyone else and allows the players to witness GM actions to ensure the bad guys don't get to make double moves followed by an attack or even simple mistakes like moving 35 feet and attacking instead of 30 ft and attacking. In one PFS game I witnessed, the GM miscounted the number of spaces a bad guy moved; when I pointed this out, it prevented the bad guy from reaching a character and attacking. Since the attack would have killed the character, this witness of a simple mistake saved the character from dying. And considering it was the players first time playing pathfinder, it ended up making his pathfinder experience more enjoyable (rather than dying in the first battle).
With all that said, I am absolutely sure that a good and honest GM can do this perfectly fine without maps. But even honest people make mistakes, even good people can describe a scenario incorrectly (or a player misinterpret the scenario incorrectly) which can change the tactics of the battle - typically to the PCs detriment. In cases like these, a good GM will allow their players to backtrack a little and redo an action with the correct information. If you're the type of GM that won't allow this, then use maps and minis.
Other stories that I don’t think are mentioned in the above:
She had to be in control. If she wasn’t the GM, she was playing a manipulating spellcaster focusing on charm spells and constantly using those charm spells against other characters to get them to do what she wanted us to do. If she was the GM, she would write our character backgrounds for us (which horrible things always happened to our characters), she would get really pissed if you wanted to play a different character or if you complained about not having fun at the table. She was always accusing us of powergaming, even if we weren’t.
I played a thief once, and I could never use backstab (that’s what it was called back in 2nd ed) because I could never sneak up on someone, even though I had 100% move silently and hide in shadows. Even against low level bad guys. If you wanted to attack a sleeping person, you still had to roll an attack roll – and since there was no such thing as touch AC back then, they didn’t lose their dex bonus. There was a profound hatred of 3rd edition, so any rules that felt like third edition were banned.
She was the epitome of “thinking from the gut.” Any use of math to prove your point was automatically dismissed. Character ideas were banned. Rules of the game were changed. Plans failed. No matter what – if you used math to prove your point, you were wrong. Don’t like it? Fine, “Game over, you all win, bad guys lose. Go home.”
She used GMPCs all the time. And they were always super powerful. One of them was even her PC from another game that eventually became a god - which she still GMPC'd in a game where we were 1st-4th level characters (and that particular game took 3 years playing every weekend to get from 1st to 4th level. Talk about a slow progression!).
Pretty much every negative stereotype of a Grignard old school player could be used to accurately describe her.
Why did I stay for so long? Well, I’ve answered that before. Here’s what I said back then:
And remember: this is the light "not x-rated" stuff she did when she GM'd.
{. . .}
Anyway my best-worst GM story isn't actually a game I played. My brother ran a campaign when he was 14 or 15 for a bunch of his friends who were the same age, and it was just such a comical stampede of frustrations that when the PCs camped in the street because they didn't want to pay 5 sp or whatever for a room at the inn, he had a gang of bears show up out of nowhere and eat them.So now "YOU GET EATEN BY A BUNCH OF BEARS" is our thing for a game that's going so badly that, welp, you just get eaten by a bunch of bears.
Well, I guess I should bring up the story of the worst GM I heard of back in the old days (and actually had a smattering of correspondence with online), but never actually met/played with, because he was a professor at Georgia Tech and apparently -- strangely enough -- a fairly popular DM there (Late 1970s/early 1980s, so 1st Edition AD&D), and I knew (and in some cases even played some D&D with) several people who knew of him -- he was a legendary EEEeeeviiiillll DM, which makes his popularity all the more puzzling(*). He liked to have random encounters such as a carnivorous ape coming into the party's camp at night, pick up some random character, and rip the poor character in half. This DM expected the corresponding player to hand in the character sheet, which he would rip in half. Another DM got him back when he was a player, by polymorphing his character into a small Black Dragon after he got separated from the rest of the party without his realizing that he'd been polymorphed, and then having the rest of the party encounter him when he was next to a big Black Dragon, and the rest of the party unloaded EVERYTHING on the Dragons, with the puzzlement about the big Black Dragon going down in round 1 only tipping him off to what had happened as he went down to the followup barrage in round 2.
(*)Although if his players had previously subjected themselves to a DM like the comically incompetent DM I posted about above, then this actually makes some sense.
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Just thought of some more from that same GM:
If you had to make a new character for any reason (character died, got bored of the character, anything), then the highest level you could come into the game was level 2 - no matter what level the party was. It got really bad when we were level 8 plus with squires that were level 4 or 5, and the new PC was level 1 or 2.
One campaign had the primary town we were in as an "adventurers retirement town" where every NPC was a retired adventurer. All of them were level 10+. Barkeep? Level 18 fighter. Barmaid? Level 12 sorcerer. Shopkeep? Level 15 rogue. And on and on.
I was once told that I couldn't have the wizard familiar I wanted, because only raven or cat familiars were realistic. My wizard's familiar wasn't realistic, so I couldn't have it. Yeah, she complained about the realism of a magical familiar in a game of imagination - and banned options from the game because the fantasy magical animal wasn't realistic enough.
I’m going through my posting history, and here’s a couple of the stories I’ve told about this GM on these boards. This is all one single GM with over a decade of gaming with this group. In no particular order:
** spoiler omitted **
** spoiler omitted **...
Wow.
You have my respect for leaving such a dysfunctional environment. I sincerely hope that you get to enjoy the hobby with less toxic personalities in the future.
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Well bookrat, you win the internet... in the worst way possible. Yeah, that sounds like a winner GM.
My only "terrible GM" story was you're classic "Killer DM" in 2nd Ed (His policy was that you must have at least one back-up PC ready before every game).
My gaming experience with that GM ended when he produced a loaded .45 during a game, and proceeded to wave it around the room. Never went back to that house, didn't want to see "Killer DM" take on a whole new meaning.
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I don't like to think of anyone I've played with as a "worst DM". As much as I've had bad games with a couple, I've had good games as well. Or at least games with good elements.
Well, except one. I was invited to a game (campaign in progress) in the last days of AD&D. High stat characters, rolled 5d6, drop two lowest, reroll 1 & 2. I took advantage of the high stats to play a Paladin. Once the game starts, I'm told I have three crystal spheres, everybody started with them. They're basically pokeballs that can be used to trap a creature with Int 3 or lower, and allowing you to summon it as a servant. One of the party members had used a sphere to trap another party member while they were affected by feeblemind. Also, we visited a church where we were offered a choice between cake or death. It was that kind of game.
Eventually we ended up facing a lesser aspect of some Warhammer chaos god, which was completely immune to our attacks, but became vulnerable after his mirrors were broken. With the mix of pokemon, Eddie Izzard, and Conan/Warhammer elements, you might be thinking this was a silly game. Oh no, it was suddenly serious after the fight. When another player and I looted rings from the chaos aspect, and decided to check if they were magical by putting them on (since magical rings resize). This so annoyed the DM that he shouted "fine, they're both cursed!".
I didn't return for another session.
Well bookrat, you win the internet... in the worst way possible. Yeah, that sounds like a winner GM.
My only "terrible GM" story was you're classic "Killer DM" in 2nd Ed (His policy was that you must have at least one back-up PC ready before every game).
My gaming experience with that GM ended when he produced a loaded .45 during a game, and proceeded to wave it around the room. Never went back to that house, didn't want to see "Killer DM" take on a whole new meaning.
Why was he waving a loaded gun around? Was this a "hey I have a new toy, but I am an idiot who does not know anything about gun safety" thing, or an attempt at real life intimidation?
DM let one player keep a character from an old campaign with an incredibly broken pair of magic gauntlets. He also let said character keep his levels from the last campaign, but made all new characters start at lvl one. Broken gauntlet dude dragged us along on his cringe inducing rise to godship, complete with horribly improvised political speeches forced into effectiveness via high diplomacy rolls, because he was impossible to mutiny against given how many advantages he had. The DM just kind of gave him free reign while he ruined the campaign and everyone sat on the sidelines texting.
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I've had one extremely bad GM. I have told stories of this GM on these boards many times. Some of the stories I've told about this GM have been deleted by the Paizo staff because they do not want such stories to be associated with this website. I'm not joking here. They are that bad. Like, mixing the Saw movies with an x-rated movie - and doing this to female player's characters.
if I have time later today, I'll recount some of the less-than-r-rated problems with this GM. There are many stories to tell.
Yeah, we had a horrible dm of that bent. Our poor fragile spellcaster was seized by female ogres, and...
We rescued him, but he was never the same.
The worst thing though, was the sadistic glee on the dm's face. His game collapsed.
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I don't like to think of anyone I've played with as a "worst DM". As much as I've had bad games with a couple, I've had good games as well. Or at least games with good elements.
Well, except one. I was invited to a game (campaign in progress) in the last days of AD&D. High stat characters, rolled 5d6, drop two lowest, reroll 1 & 2. I took advantage of the high stats to play a Paladin. Once the game starts, I'm told I have three crystal spheres, everybody started with them. They're basically pokeballs that can be used to trap a creature with Int 3 or lower, and allowing you to summon it as a servant. One of the party members had used a sphere to trap another party member while they were affected by feeblemind. Also, we visited a church where we were offered a choice between cake or death. It was that kind of game.
Eventually we ended up facing a lesser aspect of some Warhammer chaos god, which was completely immune to our attacks, but became vulnerable after his mirrors were broken. With the mix of pokemon, Eddie Izzard, and Conan/Warhammer elements, you might be thinking this was a silly game. Oh no, it was suddenly serious after the fight. When another player and I looted rings from the chaos aspect, and decided to check if they were magical by putting them on (since magical rings resize). This so annoyed the DM that he shouted "fine, they're both cursed!".
I didn't return for another session.
I feel bad, but feebleminding another character and then pokeballing them made me laugh heartily.
Well bookrat, you win the internet... in the worst way possible. Yeah, that sounds like a winner GM.
My only "terrible GM" story was you're classic "Killer DM" in 2nd Ed (His policy was that you must have at least one back-up PC ready before every game).
My gaming experience with that GM ended when he produced a loaded .45 during a game, and proceeded to wave it around the room. Never went back to that house, didn't want to see "Killer DM" take on a whole new meaning.
Where is that dm that had his game interrupted by a Peruvian death squad when you need him?
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I once had a DM dictate that players were not allowed to leave the house with their character sheets. Character sheets were required to stay with the DM and were handed out each gaming session.Having run games for a group of players that would frequently forget character sheets when they turned up to play I've actually found this to be a very good house rule to enforce.
Initially I would ask for a backup gm's copy of the character sheet which I would keep relatively up to date. I'd update vital stats but not equipment. If the player forgot their character sheet they'd use the gm's copy for the session.
This eventually devloved/evolved into "whoever's running the game keeps the sheets so they don't get lost".
Please note that this game only applies to one or two particular groups. One that features some forgetful players. In the other group we swap out systems every few months so whoever runs the game keeps the character sheets inbetween sessions.
It's not a bad house rule when sued in a friendly and supportive way. When sued in a tyrannical manner it's a definite problem.
I can see that. That's a very constructive way of doing this. My old GM would do this because she liked to erase equipment from character sheets as a way of saying, "a thief stole that from you and you didn't notice." We had a standing rule that if it wasn't written on your character sheet, then you didn't have it - no matter if you or everyone remembering that you acquired it.
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I’m going through my posting history, and here’s a couple of the stories I’ve told about this GM on these boards. This is all one single GM with over a decade of gaming with this group. In no particular order:
** spoiler omitted **
** spoiler omitted **...
Wow.
You have my respect for leaving such a dysfunctional environment. I sincerely hope that you get to enjoy the hobby with less toxic personalities in the future.
I left that group about five years ago. Since then, I've been in a couple of different groups. My current group I found by advertising online and got really lucky with some good people. Some have left and we've added some new. I introduced my then-fiancé-now-wife to the game. My current group as is have been gaming together for 3-4 years now. Things are going really well, both in terms of gaming and in life in general.
I must say Bookrat, this sounds even more like the problem gm I experienced than the one Coltron mentioned in his original post. Tell me, did she have a bad habit of shouting down people's bright ideas only to "have the idea herself" later and conveniently forget she was claiming credit for someone else's creativity? If so then I would truly suspect we are writing about the same woman. No need to go naming names, obviously.
That particular personality quirk doesn't sound familiar with this person.
If a GM told me he wanted my character sheet I would just make a copy and take it home. The GM might need a copy to plan adventures around, but it is still my character.
I left that group about five years ago. Since then, I've been in a couple of different groups. My current group I found by advertising online and got really lucky with some good people. Some have left and we've added some new. I introduced my then-fiancé-now-wife to the game. My current group as is have been gaming together for 3-4 years now. Things are going really well, both in terms of gaming and in life in general.
I'm relieved to hear that. The hobby is damaged by such experiences in that they can drive good people away.
Glad that you have moved on to a healthier environment!