What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

[BRC]

Wait, equal numbers or worse of equal level drow, who have a +2 level adjustment? That's an overwhelming encounter there, on paper.

+2 Level Adjustment dosn't mean they're necessarily going to be substantially tougher as monsters.

That said, attacking from Ambush, with Fireball, and a flying wizard. THAT can destroy an unprepared party.

[TheCrowing1432]

Wait, equal numbers or worse of equal level drow, who have a +2 level adjustment? That's an overwhelming encounter there, on paper.

It was my first time dming and it was almost two years ago.

I actually didnt even factor in the drow level adjustment.

....If I recall corectly I think I just used a regular elf fighter stats

Ive learned a lot since then.


...But I still would never light sunrods in the Underdark.

[Galen]

Oddly enough, the Drow's +2 LA transforms to only +1 CR (Monster Manual). And how tall are the ceilings in the Underdark for Fly to make such a difference??

[TheCrowing1432]

Oddly enough, the Drow's +2 LA transforms to only +1 CR (Monster Manual). And how tall are the ceilings in the Underdark for Fly to make such a difference??

They were righting in a cavern on a bridge (which was pretty wide, 5 squares wide and some 20 squares across, so they had plenty of room to manuever)

I think i said the cavern was around 100 feet?

[BeerMug Paladin]

I made them equal level, but the wizard had fly and fireball, they...couldnt handle it.

Flying is insanely effective and I can see why so many people try to use it.

None of them had a bow and arrow? Or dispel magic?

[TheCrowing1432]

None of them had a bow and arrow? Or dispel magic?

I do not remember, it was 2 years ago.

They probably did.

[nedz]

It takes a while to work out how strong a given party is and what threats to throw against them. Looking at it on paper is one thing but ignores

• Player > Build > Class i.e. a players ability is more important than how the character is put together, though the two things are not unconnected
• The CR system is very unreliable
• New parties take a while to get their act together, even if the players are experienced
• Tactical ability of the Monsters and the nature of the encounter

and possibly a few further factors.

I don't think that one encounter makes you a bad DM, especially if it's your first. The question is: Did you learn from the experience ?

[Theomniadept]

I made them equal level, but the wizard had fly and fireball, they...couldnt handle it.

Flying is insanely effective and I can see why so many people try to use it.

Yeah, that can happen. I'm assuming the party was something like tier 4-5, like a fighter, rogue, ranger, etc.? If that's the case Wizard may as well be a banned class on the DMs end, unless you only use one wizard as the entire encounter.

[TheCrowing1432]

It takes a while to work out how strong a given party is and what threats to throw against them. Looking at it on paper is one thing but ignores

• Player > Build > Class i.e. a players ability is more important than how the character is put together, though the two things are not unconnected
• The CR system is very unreliable
• New parties take a while to get their act together, even if the players are experienced
• Tactical ability of the Monsters and the nature of the encounter

and possibly a few further factors.

I don't think that one encounter makes you a bad DM, especially if it's your first. The question is: Did you learn from the experience ?

I did learn from the experience, but figured id throw in a beginner horror story it sparked some discussion at least.

How is CR unreliable exactly?

[Necroticplague]

How is CR unreliable exactly?

Monstrous Crab, adamantine clockwork horrors, several incorporeal creatures before you could feasibly afford ghost touch weapons, the tarrasque being way over-cr'd, the system tends to out more weight on big numbers instead of potent abilities, while actual power is measured the opposite way. When a cr3 creature can garuntee a k.o. against a cr 20 creature, something needs to be changed.

[The Random NPC]

...
How is CR unreliable exactly?

It is balanced against the iconic party (Fighter, Blaster Wizard, Healbot Cleric, Rogue), and can't handle variation well.

[Arbane]

How is CR unreliable exactly?

For one thing, it doesn't handle save-or-lose critters very well. (In the game I'm currently in, which is quite good, we had three characters, two of whom blew their save vs. a Vargouille's (sp?) paralyzing scream - leaving the monk to take on the one Vargouille... and about 20 flying spitting heads. THAT was a pretty scary fight... If the dice had been a little worse against us, it'd have been a TPK right there.)

[nedz]

How is CR unreliable exactly?

As above, also it tends to over-rate fights with large numbers of mooks.

10 CR 1 monsters against 5 ECL 5 characters is rated Very Difficult — really ?

[Theomniadept]

Monstrous Crab, adamantine clockwork horrors, several incorporeal creatures before you could feasibly afford ghost touch weapons, the tarrasque being way over-cr'd, the system tends to out more weight on big numbers instead of potent abilities, while actual power is measured the opposite way. When a cr3 creature can garuntee a k.o. against a cr 20 creature, something needs to be changed.

Not only that, consider the Shadow and the Wraith; Shadows have a touch attack that deals 1d6 STR damage, Wraiths have a touch attack that deals 1d4 regular damage and 1d6 CON damage on a failed save - mathematically the CR 3 Shadow is way more dangerous, especially considering that it has a caveat that it literally kills people it brings to 0 STR. Also, STR damage is way more potent to debilitating a party than CON damage. Wraiths are CR 5 and have a save on their damage, but the devs were convinced CON damage was the ultimate damage, which is why there aren't a lot of routes to causing it on a reliable basis.

[TheCrowing1432]

[QUOTE=aberratio ictus;17905255 usually, gods are awful, awful individuals in my experience.
[/QUOTE]

Welcome to DND.

[Beige]

How is CR unreliable exactly?

mostly because it places emphasis on big numbers more than the abilities they feed - a critter with high strength but not much else (eg: ogre) is rated the same or higher as something with lower stats but much nastier abilities (shadow's nigh-unavoidable str damage combined with early game intangibility, wight's negative levels etc) - and on the same note, it dosen't take into account creature type for the calculation, and not all types are even close to equal.

plus there's the dedicated levels part, which is just terrible for determining CR...

[Sudokori]

Worst DM ever? Well my experience with DnD was a little limited at the time with me only playing about a dozen times before this situation took place. But the worst DM was the one that introduced me to 3.5. I have heard a lot about the newer editions of D&D so I wanted to try it out. So I found a guy online who was hosting a 3.5 campaign and needed players.Now I had only played 1st edition D&D before this so I had no idea what to do with all these new rules and options thrust upon me. I made a basic fighter and needed a lot of help actually going through the skill point system and learning what the heck feats were (did I mention I had to start at level 3?).The DM wasn't any help and often criticized my character a lot because it wasn't "optimized" and didn't have a "good back story". I tried to explain to him that between trying to learn a extra 200 pages of additional rules and combat features I didn't have the imagination to come up with a actual character concept.

Well first session my guy starts in a tavern and I would see how player NPC interaction went down (was told I would meet up with the other PCs when I left town). Now my guy wasn't told about how important diplomacy or any other skill was so I pretty much tried to put a point into everything so I naturally failed every single roll when talking to someone and ended up getting kicked out. First combat arrives, guess what happens? A random thief comes out of a back alley and wins initiative, so he goes first and gets a critical hit that pretty much almost one shots my guy. The DM doesn't really help the mood with the constant nagging about how i "****ed up" and how my guy was the most "un-optimized piece of ****" he has ever seen anyone try to play. Then when I try to roll he goes into this whole speal about modifiers or some rule crud and declared my guy was stunned or something and gets a -3 on an attack roll. At this point I think the guy just wanted to kill my guy off so he could bring in the other players (who he said had made actual characters instead a piece of crud like mine) without my guy being alive anymore. So combat ensues and I die. He then promptly declares that he was right and my guy was a piece of crap, not mentioning how I never got above a 11 on a roll. Then he Completely ignores me and starts the adventure with the other 3 people in the group and tells me to leave.

That was a few hours of my life I never got back and I have always had a grudge against 3.5 ED DMs. I still kinda hate 3.5 for that reason but it's just my opinion that 1st edition was the original and still is better without all the extra stuff. If I wanted to have a fighter that gets a +17 to hit then I would stop playing D&D and play any one of the thousands of generic online RPGs that the sole purpose is to try and make the most powerful character possible (which somehow D&D is starting to take a turn to with all the min/maxing and optimizing flying around).

[BeerMug Paladin]

Wow, that's pretty awful. Who expects someone who isn't already deeply familiar with a system to be able to handle optimization details the first time around? You're probably better for not gaming with those folks at all if that is what they're doing.

Also, there's a lot of things you only learn by playing, such as most DMs render certain skills as uber-important (spot/listen/etc.) while other skills have virtually no utility at all (appraise/any knowledge). You're not going to know those things by a straight reading of the rules, you'll just discover it once you've been playing for a while.

[ReaderAt2046]

That was a few hours of my life I never got back and I have always had a grudge against 3.5 ED DMs. I still kinda hate 3.5 for that reason but it's just my opinion that 1st edition was the original and still is better without all the extra stuff. If I wanted to have a fighter that gets a +17 to hit then I would stop playing D&D and play any one of the thousands of generic online RPGs that the sole purpose is to try and make the most powerful character possible (which somehow D&D is starting to take a turn to with all the min/maxing and optimizing flying around).

I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that 5th Ed seems to have reversed that trend to a significant degree.

[DM Nate]

I hate this DM just hearing about him.

[ElenionAncalima]

The DM wasn't any help and often criticized my character a lot because it wasn't "optimized" and didn't have a "good back story". I tried to explain to him that between trying to learn a extra 200 pages of additional rules and combat features I didn't have the imagination to come up with a actual character concept.

Ugh...thats awful straight out of the gate.

[Marlowe]

Agreed. Diplomacy checks just to talk to people? Guy should not have been DM.

The funny thing is that I found 3.0/3.5 very significantly more forgiving at low levels than previous editions.

[AquaLord]

Not the worst DM ever but definitely the one with the worst moments

At the time me (and my group) had been desperate for a decent DM for a long time (I was the only decent DM in the group and had been suffering from some nasty headaches because of an accident so i couldn't DM very well at the time.) Anyway one of my friends comes back from college and says he will be starting a 3.5 campaign. The game starts and is a roller-coaster ride of player emotions (The guy was a good storyteller but a bad GAME master.) Some of these game decisions include

Quintupling the XP cost of magic items because 2 players put feats into magic item creation and that was "overpowered"

Accusing the entire group of cheating at the game and says he has been keeping a secret tally of rolls we have cheated at (Each play had at least 5 tallies after 1 session). This almost collapsed the campaign and i didn't talk to him for a week.

I ditch my magic item creator and roll up a new character because he was introducing new magic item creation house rules each week (All with the intent of making it harder for players to magic items). He accuses me of min-maxing my back-story so i could justify making an overpowered character.

Artificially increasing the DC of tasks because we had higher ranks in it (A regular stone wall is now DC 20 instead of 10 because you guys are now level 7 instead of 2)

Would get mad every time a player would use a spell to solve a puzzle/trap/general situation. Would start putting anti-magic barriers on everything so we would solve it his way

The worse thing he did was when the party needed to investigate a farm. We fight some ghouls fairly close to the entrance (The house had a large wooden fence surrounding it) and decide because they aren't answering the door that we should sneak in.
DM: Okay so as you climb over the wall you step on some poisoned pigeon glass and you all fall asleep
Me: No save?
DM: No save
Me: I'm an elf i'm immune to sleep effects
DM: It bypasses your immunity
Me: Its a poison right? i use autohypnosis to ignore the effect (rolls) 20
DM: Doesn't work
Me: Okay well i have a stored spell in my familiar and he will cast neutralize poison on me.
DM: Doesn't work
Of course this prompted an argument on how farmers have access to a poison so powerful that it literally breaks the entire world. Apparently he didn't want us sneaking into the fort because "you would kill everyone in there like a bunch of murderhobos."

[Sudokori]

The guy increased the DC of climbing a wall after you put ranks into it? Did he make a ridiculous excuse like:
"People have been hearing about a thief climbing through windows and killing people, so every climbing surface in every city has been permanently set under the effects of a grease spell"

[The Glyphstone]

The guy increased the DC of climbing a wall after you put ranks into it? Did he make a ridiculous excuse like:
"People have been hearing about a thief climbing through windows and killing people, so every climbing surface in every city has been permanently set under the effects of a grease spell"

Doesn't even sounds like he justified it. It's just the video game mentality behind things like Skyrim or Fallout, where enemy/challenge difficulty is always scaled to the player's level. In this case, the difficulty of stone walls scaled to how good they were at climbing.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Doesn't even sounds like he justified it. It's just the video game mentality behind things like Skyrim or Fallout, where enemy/challenge difficulty is always scaled to the player's level. In this case, the difficulty of stone walls scaled to how good they were at climbing.

I had a DM who ran every encounter, potential or otherwise like this. Because he thought his job was to challenge the players. He was also a munchkin player, so this does make sense.

I can't remember why, but once a party member tried sneaking into a completely random someone's room at night to steal from them (I forget why, though). Despite rolling well at sneaking around, the sleeping figure woke up, leapt out of bed with a sword (apparently which had been stored under his pillow) and delivered a surprise attack to the rogue who was in the room. The attack killed him.

The reasoning for the surprise attack was that the player character thought the random NPC was still asleep. I remember a brief argument about how that should have required a bluff roll on the unclassed NPC's part to achieve.

The player got revenge by making a wizard who heavily abused charm spells. The DM didn't understand how charm was supposed to work, so the spells just ended up being a save or dominate for the duration of the spell, with no further saves ever happening. Which was renewed repeatedly on the biggest monster the party could find. Handle animal was rolled to control creatures without a language to give commands in.

The wizard ended up riding around town on a t-rex through the middle of town and enslaving half the important NPCs. I did my own munchkinning with the warlock class to become virtually invulnerable to weapons and flew around everywhere sniping enemies from a distance which could not be charmed. Between me and the wizard, we kept the other players alive. I think the DM couldn't figure out how he could provide an appropriate challenge to the party after that.

[Alberic Strein]

Snip

Gah. Even though the DM asked for it and proved unable to even check the rules when things started going sour, I still feel for that guy. In MRQII, so no helpful tier system etc, I once lost a player as he had created a very strong character while another created a very weak one. I don't particularly like how damage plays out in MRQII (I don't particularly like MRQII to be precise) so I hadn't chosen how much damage the fire trap would do. Of course, both triggered it. If the damage had been chosen to be a fair challenge to the guy, then the other PC would die, unable to soak such damage. The problem got worse when the player of the strong (maybe not optimized, but strong) character chose to stand his ground and take the hit, while the other one ducked for cover. Looking at the situation, I felt justified to have two separate damage rolls, since that on one hand trying to dodge and duck for cover would be better than just plain defending one's ground, and on the other I felt that no, you don't stand in the middle of a firetrap unharmed.

That peculiar incident plus some zombies which wouldn't die when you killed them, their severed body parts would fall and need to be destroyed independently... Which are legit MRQII monsters by the way, only from a official supplement on necromancy he didn't know about. Caused him to leave the campaign he thought, maybe rightly so, that he knew the rules better than me and since he didn't know such monsters then I was obviously out to get him and he thus left the campaign.

The fact that he was the only male player might have played a role.

Well, anyway, I probably was his worst DM so it's still pretty relevant to the thread.

Ps: If only fallout2 had stronger of weaker fights depending on your level... No wait actually, scratch that, level sensitive encounters are not a really good idea

[Illogictree]

OK, this one's pretty tame, but this is my worst GM experience.

So my IRL pal who got me into the RPG scene tells me he has an online acquaintance looking to start a new Pathfinder game over Instant Messenger. It's set in Faerun and supposedly based on the setup for one of the early (pre-Drizzt) novels, but that's not important now. Anyway, I chat with this GM over IM and we get to work putting together a character. He seems like a good guy and does his best to help me out with my character concept, but he has some odd houserules - an idiosyncratic method of rolling stats that I've never seen elsewhere, and rolling for starting feat(s) are the two that come to mind. But anyway, I'm happy with how my character turned out, though it's not quite what I had in mind when I started.

Anyway, the group meets up on IM as planned - me, my IRL friend, a third guy, and the GM. We play a great 2 sessions on 2 separate days, then...

Our GM disappears.

Doesn't respond on IM, doesn't answer any e-mails, nothing.

TWO WEEKS LATER...

I finally hear back from him. "Oh, sorry, the new Call of Duty game came out and I was playing that instead."

"OK, so are we going to start the game up again?"

"Nah, [guy #3] got promoted at his job and doesn't have any time to play any more. Sorry."

And I haven't heard from him since.

It was too bad, I really liked that character too.

My second-worst GM experience was again with Pathfinder; though that one was just down to the GM being inexperienced. It doesn't really bear repeating.

[Rallicus]

Guy who ran a 4e module (Keep on the Shadowfell) and we rolled up 3rd edition characters. TPK in the first encounter, but he retconned it a bit. Barbarian proceeded to suplex an old lady cause... I honestly have no idea, which caused the DM to throw the book down and rage quit.

Fortunately, he's my best friend and has saved my life on two separate occasions. His family also took me in when I had nowhere to go, and we're pretty much like brothers.

If the worst thing I can say about him is that he's the worst DM I've ever had, then I think that's pretty minuscule in the grand scheme of things.

[Theomniadept]

snop

I remember a DM I had like that. We had one good session of rolling up characters, I intended to play a fear-based Hexblade with Multiple Personality Disorder who believed his multiple personalities were actually his shadow beast and imp familiar (The shadow beast thing wasn't alive so it could be manipulated and I had an idea through story that the Imp obtained through Obtain Familiar was actually just an opportunistic
imp that was actively fooling the guy into thinking he was another personality) and the other players all had their guys made up and had some good ideas too. I think we had a paladin, a ranger, a duskblade, myself - a bunch of guys dabbling in swords and magic which would have been cool since we all had our niches (my guy used a scythe, paladin used greatswords, ranger used a bow, duskblade used elven thin and light blades).

DM sets up first scenario and ends the first session. Next week no game. Next week no game. Turns out he got addicted to World of Warcraft and couldn't even do his job for the campus newspaper. Yep. It was a good session though.