I’m wondering what your worst experiences with a Dungeon/Game Master are?
I have had a couple, most notably with my D&D/Shadowun DM/GM. At first, things weren’t so bad, crack a joke at my expense here and there, give me a smack on the head with his dungeon mat when I wasn’t looking, childish stuff but harmless.
But then it gets worse. I live in a port city, and the DM/GM lives across the harbour from where I do. The area he lived in wasn’t the safest at night, so sometimes after Shadowrun, or if my normal drive couldn’t make it to D&D, he’s give me and the other female (who also lived on my side of the harbour) a lift. He would always drive her right to her door. He sometimes wound up leaving me on the side of the road in a section of the city I didn’t even recognize.
Then we have the straw the broke the camels back, so to speak. Throughout the year, this DM/GM would buy cakes for everyone’s birthday. Like, Dairy Queen ice cream cakes. For everyone. I’m lactose intolerant, so I couldn’t eat them. I also hadn’t had a birthday cake in… about ten or more years, and I made it clear that this was an important thing to me. I even asked him if he wouldn’t mind just getting me a regular cake, and was told “Yeah, that’s no problem, I can do that.”
Guess who never got her cake.
And then we have another DM who lives on the same side of the harbour, but in the opposite direction. We were level ten, just into a new campaign. What does he throw at us? A level 20 red dragon. Now, if we had been a bit higher level, maybe I wouldn’t have minded so much. But then said dragon demands all of our gold or he’ll kill us. He ends up killing most of the party and after we finally get out (well, those of us who were still alive), he tells us we were supposed to have haggled with the dragon. Now, if we knew at least what sort of setting we were in, cultural practices, anything about where we were and what was normal for that area, then maybe I could have let it slide. But given the circumstances, it was just overkill bordering on him lording his power over us.
I’ve never had one of those ridiculously bad GMs I sometimes read about on forums, but I’ve had some bad experiences with otherwise good GMs. One that especially has stuck in my memory was when our D&D campaign was supposed to have a game on Father’s Day and I told the GM I can’t come right away since I have a Father’s Day lunch with my dad first. He told me that they will start without me but I can come to the game when the lunch is over and that’s what I did.
All well and good … except while I was gone they had finished an event of sorts that we had started earlier, and all the other characters had gained 50000 xp and a Wish but since I wasn’t there, I didn’t get anything. In the next battle it was pretty clear my character was now completely dead weight while the 3 level higher heroes swung their +5 artifacts around. It might have not been a huge issue in a story-heavy campaign but we had a lot of combat in ours. I ended up retiring that character and being allowed to make a new one that was same level as the others, but I still felt that it was quite a stupid way to handle a few hour absence.
The group I was in (geez-30+ years ago now) got seriously passive-aggressive on me when they all decided that they didn’t want me as a member of their group anymore (and yes in some ways I admittedly deserved it-this was in the middle of what I now call my Dark Days). So, instead of politely and forthrightly just telling me not to come anymore, they took the new character that I had just rolled up and subjected him to all sorts of snide, in game abuses. One twerp kept asking me if I believed in the One True Faith (didn’t ask that of any other character, of course), and, since the game milieu (GM) never made any sort of deal about religion, there was no correct answer. When I then said the “wrong” thing, his character attacked mine.
2 people who were part of that group (and were appalled by said display) did later call me up and invited me over to their splinter group, and we had a good time for 2 or so more years (until they-Navy family-moved out of town).
God, I’ve never had a bad bad experience with a tabletop DM/GM. The things that are most often suboptimal, though (and this is down to my personal taste in many cases) have been:
[ul]
[li]DMs who clearly have favorite NPCs - often their own former PCs from other campaigns. If you’re playing a three person tabletop D&D game, clearly there will need to be a few NPCs with the PCs, if only so that there’s an actual workable party with fighting, healing, magic, and stealth capabilities. But it sucks when those NPCs get preferential treatment or become the stars of the show.[/li]
[li]DMs who can’t control the group. Every group of players needs to find some sort of equilibrium, where people are satisfied with the amount of joking/tangents/rules lawyering. Ultimately it falls to the DM to help establish (and gently enforce) that equilibrium, otherwise the game gets dominated by the one Aspergian rules rabbi, or the two dingbats throwing out movie quotes all night. (And I’ve been both of those before, so don’t think I’m a pure hater.)[/li]
[li]DMs who can’t think on their feet. When I play tabletop RPGs, it’s because I want that sense of openness and freedom, and that sometimes requires DMs to react to the players doing unexpected things. (No, I’m not going to bash down the door; I’m going to chuck the dwarf through the second story window, right into the room where my cleric is being held prisoner.) If the DM can’t handle that, or is too obviously trying to get things back onto the expected track, I start to feel like I’m playing a game on rails rather than an open world game. (Think Dragon Age: Origins vs. Skyrim. Both great games, but there’s a reason I sank 40 hours into one and 600 into the other.)[/li]
[li]DMs who are just plain crummy storytellers, so that pacing is slow, descriptions of people and places lack vividness and important detail, or things just flat-out get boring.[/li][/ul]
#1 - 8 month pregnant player did something that she was repeatedly warned (by players, not just DM) would get her character killed. Did it anyway, was killed. Stood up and yelled at husband that she was going to make him pay for killing her character. We all paused. Nicest guy at the table (not me) finally said “I don’t think I want to play a game where that kind of thing happens”. The rest of us spoke up too, saying you did it despite warnings, not sure we want to keep playing if you are allowed to do that. She came back the next session with a new character.
#2 - DM’s wife playing a Wis 8 Ranger. Whenever we’d be negotiating or using other social skills, she would deliberately sabotage everything we did, giggle madly and look at us out of the corner of her eye. Very very childish behavior. When I complained to the DM later, he let me have it with both barrels, saying he was only running the game to play with her and I was welcome to leave. Got way personal and out of line in his response. I sent the response to the other players, said I’m out. To a one, they all told GM to stop the bullshit and they’d all quit if he kicked me out. I remained a player, but our relationship after that was very hostile on his part.
THE WORST EVER
I think I told this less than a month ago.
Little Tin Soldier Shop in Minneapolis back in the 1980’s, Big game with like a dozen or more players, unwilling to accept more. Three of us sitting on the side looking for another game. Kid asks to DM. One town, one road, one dungeon. Every single NPC much higher level than us and incredible bullies. Every damned one of them. Other player just gets up and walks away after we’re robbed getting a room at the Inn. IN THE INN. I play a little more, try to convince the kid this is stupid and he’s being a jerk. Finally, I give up too and go home.
A week or two later, I come back. NO ONE will play with this kid. Hell, pretty much everyone in sight is warning people not to try to play with him. He asks if I’ll play, I say no. He asks why. I detail the bullshit he pulled on me, explain that people play games to have fun, and NO ONE except him is having any fun when he’s such a complete asshole about everything.
Fortunately I’ve has a lot of fun roleplaying.
But there was one DM…
Our group had been playing together for over 20 years. We took it in turn to DM and had even produced our own book of rule and spell explanations, so we could avoid misunderstandings.
But the new DM wasn’t interested in that since ‘he knew best’. So he would spring rule changes on us in the middle of combat - and look puzzled when we objected.
Funnily enough, the final straw had nothing to do with combat.
This DM has given us a mission which involved going through a forest, then climbing to a mountain top and averting an evil Ritual there.
No problem - we loaded spells, set up a marching order and told the DM “We’ll set off through through the forest path, looking out for ambush.”
He didn’t say anything.
We looked at each other.
Was there going to be a random encounter? Would servants of the Ritual attack us this early?
After a while, the DM said “What are you doing?”
We replied “We’re going along the forest path, towards the mountain.”
Another pause while he looked at his notes. Then…
“What are you doing?”
We players exchanged puzzled looks. We repeated “We’re going along the forest path, towards the mountain.”
Again a pause, then the same question by the DM.
(You might be thinking I’ve made this up, but I assure you this was what happened!)
After a couple more pointless repetitions, one player said “I’ve had enough of this - let me know when the game starts” and left the room.
Another player started reading a book.
I asked the DM “Isn’t it clear what the party is doing? We set off through the forest. Let us know what happens next.”
He looked through his notes again, sighed and said “What are you doing?”
That was the last time he played with us. (We never did find out what was in the forest…)
The worst GM story I have is just one fellow with a gift for killing games. He’d set up a cool premise, and we’d play for a while, and then he’d put us in some kind of stupid situation where we’d get thrown into some kind of prison - whether that’s plot-captured by lizard men, or some seemingly limitless magical space, or whatever - spend a ton of time trying to figure out how to get out, and eventually just give up because no one is interested in playing anymore.
And the response, when asked what we were supposed to do, was always along the lines of “I thought you’d come up with something clever.” Thanks, buddy. :smack:
Well, I think we all have done it at one point, but The One True Way gets really tiring.
“I’ve created this situation that can only be solved by the Elf blinking his right eye in morse code while the Sorcerer casts Sleep on the statue and the Fighter hums “The Ballad of Jose Wales”. I’ve nerfed all other spells and skills.”
Which ALWAYS ends with…
“How the FUCK were we supposed to figure THAT out???”
I’m usually stuck being the GM, so I kind of consider it a treat any time it’s not me.
The one particularly bad GM I can remember was at a gaming convention. He was looking for players at a scheduled event that no one had signed up for, and so I (and a couple of my friends) said “Sure, but we don’t want something that’s just a dungeon crawl.”
“No problem,” he says, “I have another module I can use. It’s not a dungeon crawl.”
That should have been enough warning right there, but most people at conventions do use prepared adventures, so I figured why not.
Apparently, it’s not a dungeon crawl if the adventure takes place in a forest. Even if it’s a forest in which the GM will not allow you to leave the path, climb a tree or cut branches. :smack:
One of them just couldn’t handle the gig at all. He was bad at descriptions, bad at exposition, bad at planning, bad at adapting. He only ran a few sessions, but all of them had him making complaints along the lines of “you were supposed to…” or “I didn’t expect you to…” The last session he ran involved him basically killing all the characters by GM fiat.
Another one was actually a pretty decent GM, but he would repeatedly convince himself that nobody was enjoying his games despite everyone telling him otherwise. He would also spend **hours **meticulously making villains by using regular PC character generation and then being angry that a group of level 6 characters could wipe the floor with a single level 8 villain. All attempts to explain that he had the freedom to change things to suit his storyline were met with arguments. He managed to self-sabotage every game he ran.
The vast majority of games I’ve been in have all been very enjoyable, though, since I generally only play with people I enjoy hanging out with. Both the guys mentioned above were not actual friends, and that’s what you risk when you’re roleplaying with mere acquaintances.
Also, sometimes players are just really, really stupid at figuring puzzles out. I was a player in this one and we all must’ve had a really bad day at figuring things out when we got stuck for a while in a very simple puzzle door that just needed one of us to cast Light on the lock. The GM gave us increasingly clear hints and in the end he pretty much told us what to do, clearly frustrated at our colossal stupidity.
Something like Legend of Grimrock would never work as a RPG campaign, the players would get stuck every 5 meters.
Obviously, BluenoseGamer escaped the victory candescence. So that’s good.
BTW, BluenoseGamer, the first few reported events aren’t actually RPGing experiences; they’re experiences hanging out with toxic douchebags for friends. Happens all the time in other settings.
But the TPK caused by a sadist DM? Yeah, been there, done that, once. Never went back to a game DM’d by that guy again.
He was a pretty good player in our other group. Never quite understood how a little power completely poisoned his mind while he was in charge, but he was fine as long as he was just one of us. (Come to think of it, I’ve seen some job promotions go the same way. :eek:)
This wasn’t the case in my games. This fellow, when queried, always swore he didn’t have a solution and just wanted to see what we came up with. But nothing we came up with was ever good enough.
The worst I’ve had was a DM who decided that, for a change of pace, we’d play characters that he had statted out and then randomly assigned to us. “I think you’ll be quite pleased by the high power level of these characters”, he said.
Well, the character I was given was a half-orc monk, with a terrible set of feats (one of them literally couldn’t even be used at all). I have no interest in playing a half-orc, or a monk, or a stupid character, or a nongood character, and the “high power level” turned out to mean an extra 100 GP worth of gear per character, at level 6.
I had a hunch I knew what was going on. Was this a passive-agressive response to us making characters that he viewed as too powerful in the past? Why yes, yes it was. And I’ll grant that the last character I had played with him DMing was quite powerful. But that’s why I sent him a copy of the character, along with his standard tactics, well before the game. If he had said at that time “No, that’s too powerful”, that would have been OK: I had backup plans for other ways to build the character that weren’t nearly so powerful. But he never complained until giving us those garbage characters.
Those pre-made characters were the last straw for both a friend of mine and I, and we both left the group without ever playing them. Though there were other tensions building up before that.
I very much dislike GMs who just make up the rules as they go along.
One time I started a D&D game with some guys I didn’t know. The first thing we met was a bunch of goblins. Right off the bat, one of the PCs got hit by a goblin and the player said “Can I make a Reflex save to avoid the attack?” and the GM said “Sure, why not!” So we had been playing for 5 minutes, and already the GM had decided to double the amount of rolls needed to resolve every attack. It just got worse from there.
My story along these lines: early in my DMing career, my players got trapped in a room with watertight doors and a decanter of endless water in a locked recess in the ceiling. I had what I thought was a pretty sweet workaround to the rule that magic mouth spells can’t say command words: the room had a bunch of magic mouths cast around it, and I passed out their scripts to players to read round-robin style. They said, each line by a different player:
at which point all the players said, “POOR!” which was close enough to the decanter’s command word of “Pour!” that I described the water gushing into the room, and set a real-life timer for thirty minutes to show how long it’d take for the room to fill to the ceiling and drown the players.
I figured that they’d realize all they had to do was say a word to get it to stop, and my key word was “Dry!” But of course they didn’t figure that out, and I nixed all their other attempts to break free, until finally I took mercy on them and declared that the trap door opened prematurely, washing them down into a subterranean river and making them lose a lot of magic items.
It was a great setup, IMO, but the session was ruined by my inability to accept alternate solutions to the puzzle.
He pretty much took every standard fantasy trope and cliche, threw in some steam-punk and thought it was awesome. In the hands of a better DM it might have been. But there was nothing original or non-generic about it.
On top of that, his plots were just banal. Oh the giant “Tree of Life” is now the “Tree of Death” and we have to save it? YAWN. Wasn’t that in a movie or something? “Demon boils” across the land, spitting out demons? I am pretty sure that was in a video game or two.
Then he liked to throw endless random monsters at us, just as filler. That got old fast.
Untouchable over powered NPCs? Check. Forced submission plot railroading? Check. Magic so common and available to buy that it is not magical? Check. But all of that could have been forgiven if the plot was just a little bit interesting or original.
