What was your worst DM ever?

[Tengu_temp]

Actual games are hard to find in person. So frequently, the choice is to either put up with it while dreaming of leaving the plot a burning wreckage in retribution, or don't play at all. Plus you kinda feel obligated to finish what you start, especially if others are still enjoying it.

No game is better than bad game.

[Coidzor]

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

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

...What was wrong with the other players that they didn't want to cook him and eat him after the first few paragraphs?

[Kesnit]

I've had a few...

The DMPC

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Several years ago, the DM of the group I was in had to take some time off to plan his wedding. So 3 of the 4 remaining players decided to take some time in the DM chair.

I went first, since I had a short campaign already drawn up. And then Z took the chair...

Z wanted a high-level campaign, so told us to roll us 18th LVL characters. I made a Hexblade (and unintentionally cheated by using the wrong caster level to get myself a Hellhound familiar). The other player made a True Necromancer. The DM made a (probably legal) undead companion for the TN, plus the TN could raise dead enemies to flesh out his "army." Play begins.

The first few sessions are OK. The TN collects more zombies, I got to hit things, and all was well. Then the DMPCs appeared. Since there were only 2 PCs, the DM brought in 2 DMPCs - an epic Rogue/Assassin and another that I don't remember (also epic level). Encounters became "the DMPCs handle everything and the PCs mop up." I was already getting annoyed, and there was the encounter with the undead angel of cold/death/something. This thing was Large and had a huge Aura of Cold around it in all directions. Plus, it had undead cold minion-things that were healed by cold, though not all were in the aura. The TN and his undead army tried to take on the angel. However, since most of his army were low-level things that we had previously killed, they didn't last long. His spells didn't do much to the angel, so it was mostly the DMPCs and the undead companion that accomplished anything. Meanwhile, I was trying to take down the undead minions. I had Endure Elements as a known spell, and could cast it on myself and my Hellhound. But that required the Hellhound to stay next to me. That also required us to circle way around the general combat so we could stay out of the angel's aura (since it was stronger than my spell, and my Hellhound took extra damage from cold). I spent half the combat trying to circle around without getting myself or my familar killed.

We finally got to a city, where the Rogue/Assassin pretty much took over and the players just sat there. Thankfully, the DM's game ended soon after.

The Flirt

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My wife and I were playing in a Mage: the Awakening game with a few other players. My wife was the only one with Spirit Arcana. The first adventure involved going into the Spirit Realm and dealing with spirits. As you can guess, this meant my wife was heavily involved, and the rest of us had to just follow along because there wasn't a lot we could do. But we finally finished that and were ready to move onto the next. I figured that he had built the campaign so that each of us would have an adventure that featured our chosen Arcana.

The next adventure dealt with werewolves. My wife's PC was from a werewolf family. Werewolves in nWoD deal with spirits. Yup, another adventure that focused on my wife. After a few sessions, I was bored, the other players were not showing up, and my wife felt guilty because everything was about her. It was about this time that we realized that the ST was trying (and failing) to flirt with her.

We quit the game and never played with him again.

The World Creator

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Last fall, my wife told me she wanted to start gaming again with a group she had played with many years before. I knew the DM and his wife (another player), and had met some of the other players, so agreed. The DM has spent about 30 years developing his world. He allows almost any d20 book, including Star Wars. The Force is a real thing, and PCs have a chance to believe in The Force. (None of this is the bad stuff.)

My first PC was a Monk/Psy Warrior. He was built to be a grappler, with feats and powers all pointing to that. My wife built a Bard/Fighter (more Bard than Fighter), intending to be a back-line combatant and buffer. A few sessions went well. I didn't get to grapple since our only combat was against some Mephits, but I figured there would be time. Then there was the session where we spent the entire game session escorting a guy and his traffic cones (don't ask) to a leaking pipe. When we got there, the party sat around while the guy (and the traffic cones!) fixed the pipe. I scanned my sheet to see if there was some way I could help, but was told that trying to squeeze the pipe would not work. I considered also trying to activate my aura of cold and sit on a pipe, but was afraid (correctly) that if I did, all the traffic cones would attack me. However, the Ranger/Druid did manage to seal one of the pipes closed - and got 9000 XP for solving the problem on his own. (Had anyone been able to help him, they would have split the XP. Since no one did, he got it all.)

About this time, I realized that everyone brings something else to do during game. The DM's wife checks Facebook on her phone. My wife crochets. The Ranger/Druid playes on his 3DS. So I started taking my laptop. (I also used my laptop to hold my character sheet and look up spells and powers.) Otherwise, the game was a total bore. Rounds took forever because there were so many PCs, and no one knew what they were doing. And even if someone had a good idea, the DM didn't know the rules. (My wife dropped a Bard song at one point, and the DM spent 30 minutes telling her it didn't work the way she said it did. Turned out he was reading the wrong song.)

Soon after, I realized that my PC was just not going to work. Reasonable combat (i.e. that can be done in a way other than DM fiat) is very rare - in 8 sessions, we had 1 combat that the party could deal with. (The above mentioned Mephits.) My next idea was to make a Spellfire Wielder from Magic of Faerun. (My wife was going to play a Warlock and be my Spellfire battery.) The DM said he didn't allow any of the "of Faerun" books (which is the first either of us had heard him say a book wasn't allowed), but that was OK. So I rolled up a Rogue/Druid/Daggerspell Shaper. (My wife rolled up a Rogue.)

The next session, we went into a dungeon. Quick encounter with some undead that was too easily solved by the Paladin's young Red Dragon mount. We went through a narrow passage and came into a long hall with pipes running through it and a tentacle monster that would 1-shot any PC at the far end. When we tried casting, the material of the pipes sucked up all the magical energy. 1.5 sessions later, we discovered how to defeat the tentacle monster - another DM fiat (there was a way to drop the ceiling on the monster).

2 sessions later, we have gotten back to town with our loot. My wife (getting very annoyed because her PC - who was not built poorly - was useless the way the DM was running the game), killed off the Rogue and built a fae-kissed Warlock. We had a lot of money, so the party bought a brothel that we intended to become our in-town base and another source of income. (The following session, the DM told us that the guy who sold us the brothel was not the owner. The actual owner was one of the women working there.) My wife spent a week laying out the redesigned floorplan for the brothel, making sure all the PCs had space to call their own and there was room for expansion.

The following session, a new player arrived. He had a PC built, so the DM allowed him to join the game. (Normally, new players have to watch a session to see how the game works. Honestly, I didn't care that the new guy played.) However, when the new guy showed up at the brothel, the DM declared that none of us were (a) anywhere near the front door, so didn't see him come in, and (b) didn't roll well enough on our listen checks to hear him. It took about 45 minutes real time before he managed to hook up with anyone in the party. Then we left town.

The DM has his own encounter tables, and rolls every hour for random encounters. He claims that the encounter tables are sorted by CR, but they aren't. Because the second encounter that he rolled up, he called CR 3. (There were 6 PCs of level 9 or 10.) The encounter was a psionic tree (all trees are psionic in his world) that had captured a gnome and was sucking the life force out of it. It had 6 ranged attacks/round (since all of us were attacked), and only needed a 2 to hit. Had any of us gotten into melee, the tree would kill any PC in 2-3 hits. Its saves were high enough that it only had to roll a 4 to save against the highest level spell I had. When the Warlock managed to hit the tree with an Eldritch Blast (which required a roll of 16 or higher), any damage done was automatically healed on the tree's next turn (by sucking the life force out of other trees). The tree had a move speed that far exceeded ours.

By the time the game was over, we were both fuming. (I'd been getting disgusted with the game since the tentacle monster, but kept going because my wife wanted to.) So a few days later, we e-mailed the DM with a rational, thought-out list of our concerns. We told him that we didn't want to discuss them until the next session, but wanted to give him a heads-up so he wasn't blind-sided when we broached the issue. Within 15 mintes, he was texting my wife (he didn't have my cell number), basically telling us we were wrong, that his world is perfect, and he likes the way the game runs. Also, he focused on the issues that were minor (like letting the new guy play) and ignoring the big things (like encounters are outlandish and combat is non-existent). Finally, my wife told him we'd talk to him at the next game session.

We showed up for game, and the DM's wife (who is a close friend of my wife) moderated the conversation. In the course of 2 hours, the DM proceeded to miss every point we tried to make and repeated that he has put a lot of work into his world and has run it since 2ed. Finally, we decided we were not going to get through to him and left.

[cydakk]

I used to have a GM that would have us take a session all making characters and then kill the entire party the first or second session of the campaign.

This happened many times. We used to take bets on the number of sessions until the next TPK.

[InQbait]

My bad DM story would be about a GM who ran a pathfinder game for my friends and I, and it lasted over a year. There were many players who came and went throughout it, and, admittedly, I could only attend about half the sessions or so because I had other life obligations. The fact that I missed all those sessions made some other players (but not the GM) feel the need to guilt trip me about it.

I'd say the game's biggest problem was all the over-description and RAILROADING. The GM likes to put a lot of words into his descriptions which is nice from time to time but when it becomes excessive it WASTES EVERYBODY'S TIME. The GM didn't seem to care to give our characters much choice in the matter of what we should do. The whole time, I felt like I was just going along for the ride and why was my character even here he's not important.

So, supposedly the BBEG was this really powerful necromancer or something and was in command of this cult. This cult was planning to steal a bunch of divine artifacts and use them to do this ritual which would cause the BBEG to ascend to godhood. Our party was supposed to stop him. The leader of our party was a paladin, and part of a paladin order that was intent on stopping the BBEG. The person who played said paladin character was the GM's brother, and there was some definite favoritism going on there.

I remember one encounter, we were going up against 2 necromancers in the woods. Before my character has a chance to act, a spectral hand comes up and ghoul touches me while I am still sitting in a wagon. Now, my character has the HIGHEST constitution in the party, and I even gave him the Great Fortitude feat, and I think I rolled pretty high or at least OK on the save, but I still failed and was paralyzed for the ENTIRE combat. I was pretty irritated at that, but I got the GM back for that when I ran a campaign for pathfinder.

You see, I put an Apple of Eternal Sleep in one of my dungeons. The former GM's character was an elf but he made it so she was a special kind of elf who was not immune to sleep but instead got resistance to fire. Anyway, I hid this Apple of Eternal Sleep under the floorboards, but his character found it anyway and decided to take a bite of it, not knowing that it was in fact magical. One failed Will save later, the character was in perma-sleep. The other party members decided that it was going to be their next mission to find a magic scroll to remove this curse, but I told them that it would be a high-level scroll and be hard to find or get. I offered the former GM to play a Chaotic Evil vampire NPC that was actually an ally of the party, but he refused for some pretentious reason. That campaign lasted only 2 sessions.

Anyways, back to the other campaign that actually matters, the final nail in the coffin (literally?). It's concerning my character's final end. You see, my first character was an insignificant Dwarf Fighter. Early in the campaign, he had some good story behind him. Kill the goblins who murdered his father, retrieve the family axe, and so forth. Which did happen. But it was all downhill from there for that character. You see, I decided I was bored of him because I wasn't hitting worth crap anymore plus he was just really boring to play. So, I made a new character. A Chaotic Neutral Elf Cleric of some annoying goddess of Madness (the deity choice was not mine, but railroaded in by the GM). So, guess how this new character was introduced? I had in mind for my dwarf to return to his mountain home with all his riches, give his mother a hug and live out the rest of his days in happiness among his clan. But, what actually happened? He exploded. That's right, he actually exploded. And what caused this explosion? My new character! And out of this random no-apparent-reason explosion, my new character appears before the party and for some twisted reason the party actually decides to trust him despite him talking like a raving lunatic. I felt I was treated pretty unfairly concerning that.

Now, the ending was kinda weird. In fact, I don't even remember it too well, nor do I care to. What I do know is that the BBEG was defeated (of course). And yeah, that's about it.

[SiuiS]

Exploding Dwarf Insanity priest is the best metal band ever, and I'll scrap any who says otherwise, inQBait.

This. This basically describes 90% of DMs. The fact that you went so far as to complain about tokens and the battlemap implies you might have an unrealistically high expectation of DMs in general.

Or a really good track record!

He's talking about a digital set up, though. A table that basically automatically lets you so these things. The issue is the DM didn't hit the "map: on" switch ever because, like, effort.

No game is better than bad game.

And it takes bad game to learn that.

...What was wrong with the other players that they didn't want to cook him and eat him after the first few paragraphs?

Like I said, it's all a matter of presentation. A lot of these ideas could work! Just... They didn't.

D&D is a social game. He guy tried to play on the level of rule of cool, and that's fine. It makes sense that the casters who need the rules to make sense to work got irritated more than the, say, ranger who used multishot, many shot and rapid shot with his totally cool custom design thorn-rain arrows to make twelve attacks a rounds at 1d4+1 each, or the Druid who was wild shaping into a tiger at first opportunity and mauling things.

They were aware of the issues by the end but found the power struggle entertaining.

[Jay R]

No game is better than bad game.

And it takes bad game to learn that.

No it doesn't. It takes good other stuff. Good movies, good books, good dates, good music, good conversation, good fencing, good internet, ....

A game, like any other proposed activity, has to be just as good as what else I might be doing, or it isn't worth the opportunity cost.

[SiuiS]

I operate under the presumption that Game, Movie, Book, Fight, Night Out, Intimacy, etc. Are all different vitamins. You need a balanced diet and when you need Game, Book or Fence won't do.

Either way however, the point is you learn to avoid bad through life experience.

[Tegannie]

I'm lucky, I've only had a bad DM for a long-term campaign once. The main issue was that the players (at least, me and my fiance) didn't feel like an important party of the story. He seemed to have his story and the PCs were just along for the ride and nothing we did actually influenced or changed anything. Not very fun when you're used to DMs who really make you feel like your character is important.

My fiance and I ended up leaving after a few months (the DM wasn't mean or a jerk, he was just new to DMing, but eventually we got bored/fustrated). Most of the other players stayed, but they never actually finished the story.

[VariSami]

My teen-age self. I still cower from the embarrassing mistakes I did back then. Not to mention the fact that those hormone levels do not sit well with the free utilization of one's imagination to craft situations. (The GM is a player themselves, after all. Should qualify.)

[Prehysterical]

Wow, after reading all these stories, I'm glad I've never been stuck with anything so bad. However, there is one case where I was rail-roaded so hard I could hear the train going "choo choo!"

It was during high school and I was at a friend's house. A buddy of his was DMing and I wrote up a blue slaad fighter (don't ask). Anyway, in the first combat of the game, we fight some skeletons. However, we are eventually told by the DM that the skeletons keep coming and that we can't fight them all. Doesn't even give us the chance to roll to keep fighting or to run. The whole party is smothered in skeletons.

We all wake up in a castle... as undead. Apparently, whoever sent the skeletons after us wanted us to become his undead thralls. When I pointed out to the DM that a blue slaad is an outsider and can't be raised as undead, he just looked at me and said, "Nope, you're undead." Luckily, that was the only session I attended with him as DM.

[ChaoticDitz]

My worst DM was so much worse than the mediocrity you guys speak of. First off, he totally didn't get that Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to be about, like, delving into dungeons and fighting awesome dragons. It's a combat sim, not make-believe. Gosh, some people are so dense. It was SO annoying how much time he spent on describing the scenery and the people who were too weak to kill for XP. I mean, I get it, give the "roleplayers" an excuse to go hunt monsters, but get to the dang monster hunting already! And it makes me even more angry that he doesn't make the plot easier to see. I mean, really, plots aren't even important, but it's only a minor flaw to put one in for the sake of practicing some well-worn cliches. Seriously, though, he totally makes it too open. It's as if he wants our choices to be part of the story, which would be so stupid. I made enough choices while building my dang character, just give me the reason to kill more and stronger baddies and move on. Even worse than any of that, though; he seriously looked at my backstory and tried to get that stuff I wrote to give him my excuse to participate in his "plot" (which was already stupid enough) and tried to implement plots related to my character's past! Like I'm supposed to remember what I wrote there! And more importantly, who really cares about that kind of stuff anyway? What, so my dad slayed princesses to rescue dragons and killed innocents so they wouldn't hurt a witch or something, what does that have to do with the next treasure hoard we're heading towards? The last and possibly worst thing he did though was try to enforce some arbitrary sense of "balance" and "equality." He obviously doesn't realize that the best way for new players to get better is to be rendered obsolete by their friends, and that they'll become more outgoing when they see that everyone has to fight for spotlight. Really, some DMs just don't know what players really want.

[Wraith]

...What was wrong with the other players that they didn't want to cook him and eat him after the first few paragraphs?

Don't be silly. You only eat your victims to gain their power, and who would want that inside of them!?

.....


....Uh.... I mean..... Good point, well made.

Anyways.

My "Worst DM" comes from the opposite side of the train tracks - the wide open sandbox.

I had gone to a con with 3 of my friends, and between us we had all played Warhammer Fantasy and Dark Heresy, the sci-fi equivalent. A new.... edition? Supplement? Version? Had not long been released, called Deathwatch, which was the same rules system and the same setting, but the Epic Handbook equivalent, and a demo game was being run. We thought we'd give it a try, since we more-or-less already knew the rules and it'd be interesting to see it from a new GM before we bought it for ourselves.

The players get to be Space Marines - 8 foot tall transhumans with acidic saliva, two hearts, are immune even to the concept of fear, are welded into their futuristic Power Armour and their basic sidearm is a fully automatic rocket propelled grenade launcher.
The Deathwatch itself is the cream of the Space Marine forces - the truest heroes from among the legion of these superhuman warriors, given the best guns and armour, offered the toughest and most tortuous of training and then dispatched as small kill teams of 2-10 guys (there were 6 of us playing, altogether) to enact feats of bravery and martial superiority unimagined by mortal men. We were the Emperor's red right hand, his sword at the throat of those who would defy him, and his shield against the horrors of a grim, dark universe.

We got dropped onto an agriworld - an entire planet converted to the production of wheat - and were told "Something's up, go find out and fix it".

It was a 5 hour session.
We spent two hours wandering around, asking people if they had seen anything unusual (they hadn't), investigating suspicious ruins (they were just old buildings) and even gene-testing random members of the population for abnormal signs of mutation or corruption ("they're pretty inbred, but then it's a colony planet, what did you expect?"). We interrogated the Planetary Governor ("I called you guys in to find out what's going on because I don't know!"), our Inquisitor contact ("Well, you COULD ask for an Exterminatus on the planet and just be done with it, but that's not to say you'll definitely get one") and eventually even each other in a vain attempt to find out what was going on.

Dispersed among these two hours, we probably spent another hour just staring blankly at our character sheets and dice, trying to figure out what the heck we were supposed to do.

Other points of note include:

• One of the PCs had an unusually high level of sensory abilities, smell and hearing, but couldn't use them if he was wearing his helmet. So every. Single. Dice. Roll. Made within those 3 hours was stopped and first asked, "Helmet on or helmet off?"
• At one point a clue was dangled before us, which involved trying to get into the cellar of the Governor's castle. The only way we could achieve this was for one of us to strip out of our armour (somehow - Power Armour is basically welded on) and crawl, naked and unarmed, into the darkness. This took 15 minutes to find a work-around.... and it turned out to be a complete red herring.

Somehow - I don't even remember how, I think I was literally just scanning EVERYTHING IN THE VILLAGE with my equipment in order to find SOMETHING of interest to follow - we found what we were looking for, and killed it in a particularly haphazard fight ("The enemy rushes forward and knocks your Boltgun from your hand!" "I don't have a Boltgun, I'm the medic." "...Oh, I mean, HIS Boltgun from HIS hand!" "Wha...? I'm 30 feet away, around the corner and the door is closed.") that turned out to be of no risk to us at all. ("The enemy shoot you in the head! And your helmet is off!" "Goddammit, no it isn't! I'm *still* the medic!")

So it took 5 hours in a hot, stuffy room full of other hot, stuffy roleplayers to get into 1 fight, which took far too long and really shouldn't have been the climax of a campaign designed to get people into the hobby.

As we were packing away (45 minutes after the con had ended, so we missed all of the bargain tables selling up to boot ), a startling moment came when the GM actually congratulated our group on such a successful mission.
Apparently he'd already run the game several times before, and we were the first - and only - to get as far as the last fight. The other groups had spent 4 or 5 hours wandering around trying to find the secret hidden door - or that there even WAS a secret hidden door - or had just massacred the village for want of something else to do.
One group, apparently, were there so long and were so nonplussed that they went back up to their spaceship and told their Inquisitor that they couldn't find anything, and it all seemed fine down there. The Inquisitor (GM) had to tell them, "Look, there really is something down there. Go back and look, and don't come back up here until you find it." I'm pretty sure they never did.

He was visibly proud of this. And we never did go on to buy the game, either.

[Dralnu]

One of our players took up the mantle of DM for two attempts. He's a fantastic player and was tons of fun to be around, but when DM'ing he would clearly fudge rolls and railroad as he saw fit.

He made us fight these enemy NPCs that used real abilities but clearly made up what hit and missed. Then sucked us into a portal, no roll or anything, to take us into a different world and forced to do a very specific quest thing.

He tried his hand at a new campaign a little later. I was really excited to try out this dwarf clerifc I rolled. Again, we're given no option but to kill some bad guy in a cave. I stick my hand in a hole to grab at treasure and the entire arm gets cut off, no saving throw. We defeat the bad guy, again I get the feeling of arbitrary roll results, and again we're sucked into a portal, this time taken to a futuristic steampunk world. Our DM announces that from this point on the campaign will be using D&D modern rules and we'll need to update/change our classes. Oi.

Again, this guy is an awesome person and very fun to be around, but I wouldn't play in one of his campaigns again.

Otherwise, all my other DMs have been fantastic. Some are better storytellers than others, some are better actors, etc., but all of them did what I feel is the most important thing in DM'ing: made the players happy by putting our wants first and foremost.

Aw, now I have a warm and fuzzy feeling thinking about all my awesome DMs

[DigoDragon]

The worst DM in my group is the one that never delivers. He has some pretty good ideas for campaigns using lesser known systems and we're all for trying it out. Some of us even go off to find pdfs/srds/etc. of these systems to read up on the rules ahead of time.

And then nothing ever comes to fruition.

It's essentially wasting our time when we could have set up a game with someone who would deliver on their idea. And the insult to injury is that this guy has run several games in the past with another group he meets up with on another day of the week.

So my group assumed he just didn't like us. Though why he showed up to so many of our games, we'll never figure out.

[Goodnight_Irene]

My worst DM was so much worse than the mediocrity you guys speak of. First off, he totally didn't get that Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to be about, like, delving into dungeons and fighting awesome dragons. It's a combat sim, not make-believe. Gosh, some people are so dense. It was SO annoying how much time he spent on describing the scenery and the people who were too weak to kill for XP. I mean, I get it, give the "roleplayers" an excuse to go hunt monsters, but get to the dang monster hunting already! And it makes me even more angry that he doesn't make the plot easier to see. I mean, really, plots aren't even important, but it's only a minor flaw to put one in for the sake of practicing some well-worn cliches. Seriously, though, he totally makes it too open. It's as if he wants our choices to be part of the story, which would be so stupid. I made enough choices while building my dang character, just give me the reason to kill more and stronger baddies and move on. Even worse than any of that, though; he seriously looked at my backstory and tried to get that stuff I wrote to give him my excuse to participate in his "plot" (which was already stupid enough) and tried to implement plots related to my character's past! Like I'm supposed to remember what I wrote there! And more importantly, who really cares about that kind of stuff anyway? What, so my dad slayed princesses to rescue dragons and killed innocents so they wouldn't hurt a witch or something, what does that have to do with the next treasure hoard we're heading towards? The last and possibly worst thing he did though was try to enforce some arbitrary sense of "balance" and "equality." He obviously doesn't realize that the best way for new players to get better is to be rendered obsolete by their friends, and that they'll become more outgoing when they see that everyone has to fight for spotlight. Really, some DMs just don't know what players really want.

oh my...

I'm new. Are you being sarcastic?

[Scow2]

-snip-

The moral of the story is "Don't send Space Marines in to solve a problem until the Inquisition has figured it out" - unless you're going for a "There's something unusual about this Ork/Tyranid Invasion" type of investigation, with the twist/reveal being "Chaos/Eldar/Another Branch of the Inquisition are behind it"

[The Glyphstone]

The moral of the story is "Don't send Space Marines in to solve a problem until the Inquisition has figured it out" - unless you're going for a "There's something unusual about this Ork/Tyranid Invasion" type of investigation, with the twist/reveal being "Chaos/Eldar/Another Branch of the Inquisition are behind it"

The other moral is 'don't mistake Deathwatch for Epic Dark Heresy', which both the players and DM apparently did. They're set in the same universe and use the same mechanics, but they are entirely different games with entirely different goals and playstyles. Epic Dark Heresy is an expansion book called Ascension.

[Vknight]

Whelp these have all been eye opening


In general the worst from my experience is someone that is spiteful which ruined any fun I could have at those games.
I used to go to the local gaming shops Thursday Night Games Nights. Not anymore because of the spiteful organizer who actively disliked me and loved to punish me in games that they were Gming in which I was playing.

They further made it worse by claiming something... Not sure what but all the people there believed it as I had gotten so fed up with that person I didn't make an appearance on Thursdays for 3+ months so when I come back to see if things have changed.
Nope and now I'd say half the people there believe some rumor. Something bad enough to get me threatened by people. The store employees know it not to be true because though I was not showing up Thursdays I'd still drop by every now and then on Sundays & Mondays

So yeah spiteful people I think are the worst because that lead to me not being able too game with a large amount of people because of just how vicious that one individual was

[Forrestfire]

oh my...

I'm new. Are you being sarcastic?

Blue is sarcasm, yes. Doesn't make that any less painful to read, though

[Doomboy911]

Ugh I hate to say it but I'm still playing with this guy. So we'll begin with the fact that he's a show stopper. If there's a game being run that he doesn't want to play and there's a game he wants everyone else to play we'll know because the game will end and his will start up. We had recently constructed our own world for us to play in. We had been going fine and dandy every monday it was his game and thursday was my game that had to alternate with a world of darkness campaign of boredom. Suddenly he gets upset that two players are late because they give us a bit of time to chat and play Magic while they get something to eat. So he decides he's taken enough disrespect and ends the game telling us all the whole plot and ruining any chance for us to pick it up again.

Than he decides he wants to play Exalted, not run it but play it. He sets his sights on me and tries to talk me into running the game telling me about how it's a wacky game and I'm wacky dm and how we'd fit together perfectly. I am not a wacky dm funny things happen in my game but I run my game seriously there will be death and will have consequences. I don't want to run Exalted because it means I'd have to learn the white wolf system which I will do my best to never learn and furthermore it means my Superhero campaign will end. So I say no than all of the sudden he can only show up if we run Exalted.

Than after a while of no campaigns running a warhammer game gets set up by another player I have no interest in this but it gives me time to fiddle with some other ideas. He steps in invites the Dm to play in a game saying it will only take a month for us to play and invites me. I'm happy to play something for once. He's testing a module he's writing in which we all have to search for a magical artifact that will grant all our wishes. I've got a cleric who wants the lantern to destroy it so the world will not have instantaneous gratification and because it may be able to kill gods. As a cleric of Kord! I will not take such an insult lightly.

So four months go by of us playing this module that was supposed to be a month long adventure. Every single step of the way we get jerked to go into another direction to get the magic artifact. Every step of the way is dragged out to make the quest more epic. Our characters had to spend two years on a boat ride and I was denied every magical effort to speed the ride up. I had spells to teleport to plane hop all of them denied because we lacked information. We make land and find out there's a colony set up that people have been to I could've gotten the information I needed.

Than we make our way into a mountain where we're told this isn't the final leg of our friggin' journey, no we'll find some information as to where the Lantern really is. We spent a month going the wrong way in the dungeon and deal with a fat kobold only for us to go back and turn the other way to find that as level 11 players we'd have to fight a level 20 dragon because it makes for an epic adventure. Than the game ends.

He decides that his game has gone on too long and that he needs to scrap the game. He tells us all what would have happened and the changes he made to said game to make it better the next time around. When we complain that the game is going on too long he said it was because we were moving slowly.

The worst part is that he controlled how our characters felt. During the two year long boat ride I decide my cleric who also is a farmer wants to use lesser astral projection and a teleport spell to make his way home to help his family with the harvest season.

DM: No you can't.
Me:Yes I can I haven't used my spells in two years so yeah I can.
DM: No this is the most important quest you've ever been on nothing is more important than what you're doing right now.

My response No family is more important to him, he has a way back home and destroying an artifact to please his god not because the god needed pleasing but so he could make his god happy isn't going to come first.

But no my character has completely shifted his mood and has decided to stay on the longest boat ride in the history of time.

Now he's running a pirate game. On Mondays which is when the warhammer game was being run and now thanks to him the game has died.

[Wraith]

The other moral is 'don't mistake Deathwatch for Epic Dark Heresy', which both the players and DM apparently did. They're set in the same universe and use the same mechanics, but they are entirely different games with entirely different goals and playstyles. Epic Dark Heresy is an expansion book called Ascension.

These are my exact words as we were driving home. We had played Dark Heresy before, as I said, so we immediately realised that the GM was trying to run an Inquisitorial murder mystery being investigated by Space Marines, and that it wouldn't go well.

You can run Deathwatch that way, if you're very careful, but it's far from ideal. Space Marines - particularly those in the Deathwatch - usually get called in for very specific, very definitive purposes. Not included among these purposes, is bimbling around in a field, asking farmers what they've been up to lately and passing the time by pushing the buttons on every piece of farming equipment that we could find, just in case something did.... something.

The game could have been salvaged without changing any of the plot or setting, if only that was understood - start the game by doing the intrigue and fact finding with ordinary Dark Heresy characters, have them run into and be subsequently murdered by the Monster (which WILL happen, given the difference in rules for damage and combat presented in Deathwatch), and then hand out Space Marine characters for revenge.

But no. "You come across a corridor that disappears into darkness, a strange chemical smell emanating from the far end." "I walk down it and look around. What do I find?" "The janitor's closet, and someone has spilled the detergent on the floor. Nothing appears relevant to the investigation."

[AMFV]

No game is better than bad game.

I don't know if that's always true, just as some movies are "so bad they're good" so are some games. It really depends on how the game is bad, not how bad the game is.

[Tengu_temp]

I don't think I ever heard of a So Bad It's Good RPG session/campaign. Except that one.

[Scow2]

I don't think I ever heard of a So Bad It's Good RPG session/campaign. Except that one.

No. That was so bad it was soul-destroyingly horrific.

-snip-

Do we have to be your abuse counselors? What separates THIS DM from any "Bad" DM you might want to stick with is that he's not only being bad in his own games, but also disrupting yours and everyone else's as well. Get with your group and collectively ban him from the GM seat.

[AMFV]

I don't think I ever heard of a So Bad It's Good RPG session/campaign. Except that one.

I've played in some of them to be honest, it's mostly just ridiculous to the point of being fun.

[InQbait]

I agree with AMFV and Tengu Temp. It is better to play in a bad game than to play no game at all. Sitting on your bum and doing nothing is far more boring than participating in a so-bad-it's-good game.

[Dimers]

I agree with AMFV and Tengu Temp. It is better to play in a bad game than to play no game at all. Sitting on your bum and doing nothing is far more boring than participating in a so-bad-it's-good game.

Tengu said the opposite of that: "No game is better than bad game."

I spent my non-playing time making builds, prepping a gameworld, reading up on theory, memorizing books, and spending time with friends in ways other than RPGs. Oh, and breathing more easily because I wasn't getting horribly stressed out every Friday night dealing with ass-hats. Sitting on my bum doing nothing would indeed have been bad, but fortunately, it's not necessary.

I don't think I ever heard of a So Bad It's Good RPG session/campaign. Except that one.

Hmmm ... ever tried "HOL"? Human Occupied Landfill, published by Black Dog. It's pretty outrageously bad, and seemed like it should be a lot of fun specifically because it was so bad. Haven't played so I don't know for sure, but it's a candidate.

[Tengu_temp]

I agree with AMFV and Tengu Temp. It is better to play in a bad game than to play no game at all. Sitting on your bum and doing nothing is far more boring than participating in a so-bad-it's-good game.

As Dimers mentioned, this is not what I said. Games that are so bad they're good are rare. Most bad games are just bad.

Also, if your only alternative to playing an RPG is doing nothing, then I pity you. Read a book, watch a show, play a video game, do some hobby stuff! This extends to people who have only one way to pass time in general. Having broad horizons is good.

Hmmm ... ever tried "HOL"? Human Occupied Landfill, published by Black Dog. It's pretty outrageously bad, and seemed like it should be a lot of fun specifically because it was so bad. Haven't played so I don't know for sure, but it's a candidate.

That's a hilariously bad system. Whether it will be a hilariously bad game depends on the DM and players.

[NowhereMan583]

My experiences don't hold a candle to most of this, but I'll contribute anyway.

The worst GM I've ever had was the origin of my self-imposed rule: "Don't befriend people because they play D&D; play D&D with people who are already your friends."

It was my freshman year of undergrad, and I happened to run into a guy who was toting a PHB across campus, so I struck up a conversation. I mean, I had never been able to find a gaming group in high school, so I was thrilled to meet a fellow gamer.

For pretty much the entirety of the next semester, I, my girlfriend at the time, and a friend of mine played in all of the games this GM ran, because he was the only person we knew who was running anything. I say "all" the games, because I couldn't possibly recall how many there were. One of his biggest problems as a GM was a complete inability to focus on one campaign; at any given time, we were playing something like three different campaigns on three different weeknights (because college, man... though, to be fair, the aforementioned friend did blame that gaming schedule for the fact that he failed most of his classes that semester), and he would frequently end one for some reason or other and start a new one. Of the countless campaigns we started, only one lasted until the end of the semester: a fairly directionless Scion game (most of his campaigns were White Wolf something-or-other) where we nevertheless rather liked our characters. Well, at least, I know that's why I stayed in -- the players the GM brought in with him were great optimizers but... nothing else. Their characters had basically no personality. I was never sure why they played.

Anyway, a few actual narratives:

Spoiler: Why the Mage game ended

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This GM didn't tend to plan very much ahead of time. Any given new campaign would have one or two sessions planned to start it off, and he'd just improvise from there. This might have been part of why we kept coming back... each time, we were thinking, "okay, so the last campaign ended up sucking, but this one seems like so much fun..."

The Mage game got off to a great start. I was playing a character who had been a crooked accountant before his awakening. We had a pretty interesting first two sessions where we encountered some cannibalistic restaurateurs, and found this weird lizard-skull-thing that we were looking forward to learning more about.

The third session, we ended up in the Supernal Realm somehow. The entire session had us separated while he GMed us individually, clearly making it up as he went along, with everything working on dream-logic. We went along with it, because, you know, the first two sessions had been so fun... anyway, it ended with any possible plot being derailed. As I recall, over the course of things, I managed to accidentally destroy a large part of the Supernal Realm and had to build a new Watchtower. In their one-on-one sessions, the other players had equally ridiculous, over-the-top plotlines.

A couple days later, we got an e-mail from the GM saying he had to end the campaign because he hadn't really thought this part through and didn't know where to go from here. No kidding, man...

Spoiler: Why the Mutants & Masterminds game ended

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This was, for a few sessions, a pretty standard game as far as I could tell. Until the GM decided that it wasn't taking the direction he wanted it to be taking (I never got a more specific explanation of that), and instead of talking it out, he decided to kill us all off with an entirely improvised combat.

With Mecha Elvis. Because apparently, when this GM has to come up with a TPK off the cuff, his mind goes to "Elvis, but with cybernetic enhancements and a giant robot suit". So we spent an entire session in combat with Mecha Elvis. I don't remember whether we actually all died, but it was the last session of that game.

Extra weirdness: there were some Anthropology majors observing us that night. At my undergrad institution, one of the Anthropology professors would regularly assign a project where students had to find a subculture on campus of which they were not a member, observe it, and write a report. I'm pretty sure we screwed up their project, because that was not normal.

Spoiler: Alas, Poor Og

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At one point, we started a Dark Heresy game, explicitly because he wanted an extra campaign that we could run in place of the "regular" campaigns if a player was missing a session.

There was an option to create a character from a primitive-tech-level world, and I went with it. Instead of interpreting it as "Bronze Age", though, I read it as "Stone Age"... and so my character was a caveman named Og. He had excellent hunting skills, not-so-great language skills, and a number of mammoth-based narratives. The GM hated him. Not sure why, exactly.

Anyway, Og survived for exactly one session. The second Dark Heresy session was played when I couldn't be here, so the GM controlled Og... and poor Og threw himself in front of a laser blast in a heroic sacrifice to defend the party.

There's more, but it's all roughly the same sort of theme.

... he told her not to worry about it because the Oracle wouldn't figure out ...

This is a facepalm all on its own.

This is dice clatter night, where we clatter dice. Ball gags are not involved in dice clatter night.

Can I sig this?