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  1. - Top - End - #61
    Dwarf in the Playground
     
    Kobold

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Macros View Post
    Well, to be fair, I had seen the reverse of this situations : players deciding to be a bit more proactive about their lack of skills in Intimidation.

    "I don't have ranks in that skill, true... I chop off his finger. Does he talk?"

    /snip:
    Oh, for sure. I make sure I at least HAVE the skill before I use it, but have people trying that all the time. My wife had 0 intimidate and tried to intimidate an NPC by stabbing him in the leg. It killed the NPC and we lost our lead. My Paladin was, at the time, calming the guy down (Diplomacy of 15 with a roll of 19 giving him 34 against a DC 20), getting him to talk but she had an idea, ran with it, and BOOM, dead NPC story driver.

    It was pretty hilarious.

  2. - Top - End - #62
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    PirateCaptain

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

    Quote Originally Posted by thematgreen View Post
    Oh, for sure. I make sure I at least HAVE the skill before I use it, but have people trying that all the time. My wife had 0 intimidate and tried to intimidate an NPC by stabbing him in the leg. It killed the NPC and we lost our lead. My Paladin was, at the time, calming the guy down (Diplomacy of 15 with a roll of 19 giving him 34 against a DC 20), getting him to talk but she had an idea, ran with it, and BOOM, dead NPC story driver.

    It was pretty hilarious.
    Intimidate is an odd duck of a skill.

    I get the idea of intimidate as a skill, of using the right words in the right tone of voice at the right time to inspire fear.

    However, it also just makes sense that you can scare people by being big and scary.
    A small, smiling man calmly describing to you the things he will do if you do not cooperate is scary. So is six foot three inches of spiked plate wearing half-orc shouting "OPEN THE DOOR OR I WILL BASH YOUR HEAD IN". So what if the Orc is socially inept, he's got a big spiky club, and is perfectly capable of smashing your head in. It's a skill asking for a massive amount of circumstance bonuses from skills that your average kick-in-the-door adventuring party is going to have.


    Personally, I would rule two uses of intimidate: Coercion and Terror.

    Terror is just about making the target scared. It's the "I have a big axe and can cut you in half" use. You can use Strength on Terror checks, and get big circumstance bonuses from how scary you look or the fact that you are covered in still steaming dragon's blood. That would be the skill to use to intimidate in combat.
    The downside of Terror is that people you target with it don't always act rationally, their only motivation is to not have you hurt them.
    If somebody has a password, and you make a Terror check, you've convinced them that you can do terrible things to them, but that dosn't mean they will give you the password. Instead, they will do whatever it takes to make you not kill them. If this means giving you a fake password that, when you use it, will cause the guards to attack, so be it. It means they will try to escape or betray you as soon as you are more than one combat round away from reducing them to a red smear.

    Coercion is cha and skill only. You don't get circumstance bonuses from being big and scary (Although you can get them otherwise). This is not just scaring them, this is making them scared of YOU.
    A successful coercion check convinces the target that you can do terrible things to them, not just in the immediate "Do what I say right now" sense, but in the general "Cross me and die" sense. If you're trying to get a password from somebody, a successful Coercion check means they give you the correct password, because they honestly want to get on your good side, as opposed to just trying to avoid pain or death right now. When you've Coerced somebody, you can generally trust them to keep doing what you say even after you are no longer holding a blade to their neck.
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  3. - Top - End - #63
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    OldWizardGuy

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

    We had a DM at one time who came very unprepared. For a session which had been planned for 3 month. So he arrives, and said that he needs some help constructing a super cool and powerful Sorcerer, so we advise him about feats and classes. We allow 3rd party so within that the Primordial Sorcerer from Quintessential Sorcerer is pretty sick. Anyways we help build this NPC only to discover that it was the sessions main antagonist. Needless to say we were pissed off. Come to think of it, it was his last session as a DM. He used to be good and had DM'ed for us for year. Around 9 or 10 years at that point.
    Quote Originally Posted by chaotic stupid View Post
    tippy's posted, thread's over now

    78% of DM's started their first campaign in a tavern. If you're one of the 22% that didn't, copy and paste this into your signature.

  4. - Top - End - #64
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    WolfInSheepsClothing

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

    Spoiler: The SW dm
    Show
    Hmm I have one where it wasn't so much the guys DMing style but rather his personality outside of being a dm. As a dm for star wars and only star wars, he wasn't bad. He was a bit obsessed with it, however also did not like gungans very much either. I remember a similar issue was brought up by someone earlier in the thread.

    Outside of the game the things he would say, made you feel, metaphorically speaking as if you just went skinny dipping in sewer scum. He would bad mouth players behind their backs, he'd vomit out racial slurs, he had an ego as well as an anger problem, surprisingly none of it came up within his game. So I guess I can't call him a bad dm. I can and do call him a rather horrible example of what humanity has to offer. As his irl issues became a bit too much for us, even the nicest, most forgiving and understanding member of our gaming group eventually became fed up with his antics and stopped talking to him a good few months after the rest of us did.


    Spoiler: The incidental Larp ST
    Show
    Another time I was invited to LARP for a large cross splat Nwod game. I really wanted to try my hand at a Werewolf the Forsaken character and I sat down with the other would be werewolf players and we were all discussing concepts. I'm about to roll up a sheet and present it to the head ST. When I am then told the werewolves have no St assigned to their particular splat, and since I knew their system best I was nominated.

    I accepted it because, I've already intended to spend the time gaming with folks, a number of which were friends in that group anyway, I wasn't completely bothered by it. However I kept getting updated by the head ST a bit later than expected about things that would and had affected all players in the game. I was forced to ret-con scenes I'd already run. Luckily since the group of players I was in charge of were there when I was randomly nominated to ST, they didn't hold it against me and chalked up to a bit of communication failure, which it was.

    Though the funny circumstance in the game, is I'd always come ready with plot hooks and some head St approved recurring villains for my group, every other player in the game was hunting for plot and at some point they all came to me...I did a feel a bit overwhelmed the first of many times this occurred. It began to happen so often the players began to call me the Head ST or rather that it was my game. I always had to correct this stance an defer them to the actual Head ST...every time...He didn't much like it that it devolved to that but in the end he was a good sport and still a good friend


    Spoiler: Bad expereience
    Show
    Lastly and this one was more of just a bad gaming environment.
    A friend of mine, whom is a player in my current 3.5 D&D game happened to have his house alone for the day and offered to host for the days session. We all accepted and one of the players was already there. We have played at his house before, which was why we agreed. Another player whom doesn't game with us as often due to distance but is always a welcome member to our group, because he dives right into a character whether support or main and we all have a good time when he comes to play, informed he'd like to join us and would roll up a temp cleric for a support role since he wouldn't be able to make it to every session.

    Time comes we all arrive at my friend's place and find another friend there we'll call him F, it was his neighbor so it wasn't too surprising, except that I thought he would be at work at the time. I had not invited F to play in the game prior. I had my reasons, he can be disruptive at times as a player and it also made my gf (plays the rogue in our group) a bit uncomfortable as they had a bit of a falling out on their friendship the year before.

    On the only suitable table we have for gaming at my friend's house(plays wizard in group), there is also the setup for a hookah on the table. It seems that's what Wizard, F and our other player(monk) were doing in addition to mariokart waiting for us to show up. One of the players was our ride (duskblade). So we go to get the game set up and started. I had an npc, a bard whom I was going to have left out of the session, since our temp cleric was going to cover back up healing and support. Again F is disruptive, and starts smoking the hookah and invites Monk, Wizard, Temp Cleric and Duskblade to join in. Temp cleric refuses and wants to focus on the game, so do I. Unfortunately due to how the hookah was set up, my gf and I keep getting smoke blown in our faces. Granted they do realize this and try to adjust it or blow it away from us not to much avail. My gf had to switch seats to be away from the smoke. Only F continued with the Hookah for awhile, then became disruptive showing me things on his phone.

    Now as it was not my home, I would not be in the right to just ask him to leave, more so since F had been there prior to our arrival. F had never met Temp Cleric prior to this day and his chihuahua syndrome, semi napoleon complex I guess, started showing up. He pulled out his pistol to show people, left it visible in front of everyone and then put it back where he had it. The only way to get F to stop being disruptive was to allow him to play the bard I had as a temp, so that I wouldn't be guilted by F into being a hypocrite for letting Temp cleric play and to just get on with the session and get the day over with.

    The sad thing is, the behavior unnerved Temp Cleric and he has yet to show up to another session, though it may be as much part due to the time it takes for him to come up and hang with us as well as what occurred.

    For those of you who would ask, yes it was loaded and he did have a license to carry it.
    Last edited by Fumble Jack; 2014-07-31 at 11:26 AM.

  5. - Top - End - #65
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    OldWizardGuy

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

    We had a DM at one time who came very unprepared. For a session which had been planned for 3 month. So he arrives, and said that he needs some help constructing a super cool and powerful Sorcerer, so we advise him about feats and classes. We allow 3rd party so within that the Primordial Sorcerer from Quintessential Sorcerer is pretty sick. Anyways we help build this NPC only to discover that it was the sessions main antagonist. Needless to say we were pissed off. Come to think of it, it was his last session as a DM. He used to be good and had DM'ed for us for year. Around 9 or 10 years at that point.
    Quote Originally Posted by chaotic stupid View Post
    tippy's posted, thread's over now

    78% of DM's started their first campaign in a tavern. If you're one of the 22% that didn't, copy and paste this into your signature.

  6. - Top - End - #66
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    Quote Originally Posted by Hazuki View Post
    Okay, move on, I go with a different concept.
    Well there's your problem.
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    That's how wizards beta test their new animals. If it survives Australia, it's a go. Which in hindsight explains a LOT about Australia.

  7. - Top - End - #67
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    Quote Originally Posted by Sith_Happens View Post
    Well there's your problem.
    Actually, looking at the situation, it was a lot more complicated than that, as far as I could tell. I could easily see both side's stances. (It's easier to justify a no-experience Qun Raider that says 'screw this, I'm out of here' on his first run than the hoops it took to get a Qun Priestess outside of Qunari territory, if I understand the setting right. Maybe. It wasn't so much that the concept didn't exist in the setting as much as not existing in that part of the setting. Maybe.)
    Last edited by Sartharina; 2014-07-30 at 03:32 PM.

  8. - Top - End - #68
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    Quote Originally Posted by BRC View Post
    However, it also just makes sense that you can scare people by being big and scary.
    A small, smiling man calmly describing to you the things he will do if you do not cooperate is scary. So is six foot three inches of spiked plate wearing half-orc shouting "OPEN THE DOOR OR I WILL BASH YOUR HEAD IN". So what if the Orc is socially inept, he's got a big spiky club, and is perfectly capable of smashing your head in. It's a skill asking for a massive amount of circumstance bonuses from skills that your average kick-in-the-door adventuring party is going to have.
    My take on it is... it's a skill thing. If he has max ranks in Intimidate, taking a -1 penalty to it for the intelligence penalty isn't going to hurt it that much.

    As far as big scary things failing at intimidate, I'd say either the intimidating character is so odious, that your loathing for him overcomes our terror and makes you not want to comply, or he fails so hard at the threat that it sounds ludicrous and you just laugh at him.

  9. - Top - End - #69
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    BlueKnightGuy

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

    Intimidate might as well be the bane of DMs everywhere. I have seen good DMs start to go exponentially weird after the question of intimidating someone was brought up. To the point, DMs have a tendency to make people react to intimidation like they would like to react to it in real life.

    It's sad, but repeating what you just said louder, angrier, is a valid way to get things done in real life. Even more if you actually ARE scaring the person.

    DMs, me included, like the casual danger dialogue though, and gutsy characters, and people who "don't afraid of nothing" and the like. Yet, threatening someone's life is a very good way to get someone to do whatever you want, and not run away and immediately call the guards. I think "scaring people" should not be a skill, it should be a matter of fact. You're huge, armed, and got class levels? They're afraid of you and want to do whatever you say unless you are in presence of an even bigger, scarier, stronger person, in which case, they are afraid of HER.

    Intimidation test should be how much you manage to weaponize that fear. They ARE scared of you, that's a given. In which case, if you try to make people run away the difficulty will be very easy. If you want to make them do what you want it's going to be a skill test, much like the coercion BRC speaks about. If you fail that skill test, they will try and run away, maybe eventually call the guards, or depending on the situation and amount of fear (dm decision... Brrrr...) they should feel, stay and fight.

    Basically BRC's view, except that for me "fear" is not even part of the intimidate skill.

    I dislike the D&D view that people turn hostile once you intimidated them. Blackmail does not work that way. Fear neither.
    Last edited by Alberic Strein; 2014-07-30 at 09:49 PM.
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  10. - Top - End - #70
    Halfling in the Playground
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    DM make whatever you want.

    Players all make arcane somethings in front of DM who says nothing.

    DM says ok, homebrew world and arcane is major outlawed, there is no way to hide it, killed on sight.

    Played first session to be nice, after 5th lvls came after our 1st levels and almost TPK'd us 3 times with major NPC's saving the day I had such a bad taste in my mouth I politely responded "No Thank You" when asked if I was coming back.

    Don't ever want to be second class to NPC's that bad again, was wondering why us PC's were even there.

  11. - Top - End - #71
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    Might be that I allready posted some of these allready, if that's the case, feel free to whack me!

    In my ongoing quest to find a Forumposting Roleplaying game I can participate in, i've stumbled upon a few...questionable ones. You see, im not terribly familiar with a lot of settings, since i've only started the whole thing around a year back. So I'm looking for something Newcomer friendly, with nice people where I can just write a few posts per day to satisfy my inner author. (Btw, if you have something for me, feel free to pm!)

    The first one was a guy who insisted that you announce everything you do. And I do mean EVERYTHING. If you didnt, your character didnt do it. This may sound weird to some of you, ofc you are playing your character, so you naturally communicate what he's doing at the time. But our DM wanted even the most mundane thing mentioned.

    Prime example, me announcing that my warrior was taking a bath in the tavern we were resting at. Went into the room and said that my guy is taking a bath now. Did not mention that he took off his armor beforehand, so there's a grown man in a full platemail sitting inside a bathtub, playing with a rubber ducky.

    Announced that I was charging a Bandit in the woods. Did not specifically mention that I was using the sword I had drawn beforehand, which meant I was no trying to beat an armored enemy to death with my fists.

    If not for the fact that a lot of this was very funny we would've probably quit after the second or third session. Eventually however, the DM appearantly realised we were making fun of the whole thing, instead of taking it seriously, and he quit the group.


    Another one allowed skilltests like flirting, intimidate etc. to be used in the group, which could basically turn your character into an absolute tool. I dunno if this is the standard, but allowing our female Ranger to roll on flirting with my character, and turn him into a submissive slave if she's successful seems a little much.

    "You love her, so you naturally do whatever she wants."

    Oh yeah, I forgot how affection works for a minute there.


    Last but not least, the girl who tried to murder her boyfriend over the course of two sessions, because they had an argument. I gotta admit, I was kind of impressed how creative two people with realtionship-issues can get. But when you reach the point where the DM and a player yell their roll-results at each other, while Stuebi tries to Bolt trough the window, it gets awkward.
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  12. - Top - End - #72
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    BardGuy

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Sartharina View Post
    Actually, looking at the situation, it was a lot more complicated than that, as far as I could tell. I could easily see both side's stances. (It's easier to justify a no-experience Qun Raider that says 'screw this, I'm out of here' on his first run than the hoops it took to get a Qun Priestess outside of Qunari territory, if I understand the setting right. Maybe. It wasn't so much that the concept didn't exist in the setting as much as not existing in that part of the setting. Maybe.)
    Depends on what they mean by Qunari. Qunari is anyone who follows the Qun. A human priestess who follows the Qun is a Qunari priestess, which qualifies for the concept. The race themselves are the Kossuth. A Kossuth priestess would be next to impossible to find outside of her homeland as they have absolutely no inclination to travel at all.

    But yes, I can also see both sides to the argument. Seems more a lack of clarification than a direct confrontation but exacerbation from the idea denigration would seed further aggravation. The only mitigation for further irritation would be a cultivation of player unification.
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  13. - Top - End - #73
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    Sartharina's Avatar

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Stuebi View Post
    Prime example, me announcing that my warrior was taking a bath in the tavern we were resting at. Went into the room and said that my guy is taking a bath now. Did not mention that he took off his armor beforehand, so there's a grown man in a full platemail sitting inside a bathtub, playing with a rubber ducky.
    As bad as some of the incidents you posted previously are, this mental image is too hilarious to not be a thing.

  14. - Top - End - #74
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    Quote Originally Posted by Sartharina View Post
    As bad as some of the incidents you posted previously are, this mental image is too hilarious to not be a thing.
    The thing that actually amde it all the more fun was the fact that he delivered stuff like this with an absolute serious tone. I still dont know if he did that on purpose as a form of trolling, or if he actually believed that this is the way things should work.

    Granted, as someone relatively new to the whole Pen & Paper-thing, I tend to just roll with a lot of stuff, assuming it's the norm. And in that case, I was having fun, so I didnt really care either way.
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  15. - Top - End - #75
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    Flumph

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

    My worst DM is actually a good friend of mine, who has a tendency to railroad.
    First session, 4e, we were following a group of militia? Soldiers? Bandits? I never found out. And I'm playing a changeling, so I try to knock someone out and replace them, and figure out their purpose.
    "You can't."
    Why not?
    "They all travel in groups."
    Even when they're sleeping?
    "Yep."
    So eventually we race ahead of them and find a monastery that wants us to help them fend off the invaders. And I ask why, and what the reward is. The head monk? (never figured out what he was either) tells me none of your business, and then he gives me a vision of violent, horrible things he could do to me. At this point I go downstairs to get popcorn. I come back up after 2 minutes to learn my character is dead.
    What?
    "He died in an epic battle against the raiders."
    So I make a new character?
    "Nope."
    Why not?
    "Because you're so far away from civilization, no one would find the monastery."
    We did!
    And then the group went on and were killed by a demon lord (never learned which), so no loss. The entire group told him that his plot sucked, his monk was a friggen god, and it was no fair I died when getting snacks.
    The campaign, obviously, never continued.

    The second time he DMed was a much better game, even if we were still softly railroaded. He did interrupt an investigation of his background detail, and he did have a DMPC unstatted epic wizard, but little stuff was easier. He gave my changeling (yes I like changelings) homebrewed glammered armor, and, needless to say, changeling + glammered armor + eyebite warlock power = greater than law.

    A close runner up is another DM who had such a boring maze, I took to mapping it for fun, and we were so tired when the excitement started, we called it a night and gave up on the campaign.

  16. - Top - End - #76
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    NecromancerGuy

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

    Just remembered another fun tidbit that made me want to quit PNP altogether:

    When I was starting out with PNP RPGs and DND I was going through a kind of depressive shy moment and those RPGs were kind of a treatment for myself to be more open and fun around people yadda yadda. SO, imagine my happy surprise when my DM threatened to lower the charisma score of my character because I'm not acting like he thinks I should. I was playing a 3,0 Sorcerer.

    Has anything like this happened to anyone?

  17. - Top - End - #77
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    Quote Originally Posted by SamaelOfChaos View Post
    Just remembered another fun tidbit that made me want to quit PNP altogether:

    When I was starting out with PNP RPGs and DND I was going through a kind of depressive shy moment and those RPGs were kind of a treatment for myself to be more open and fun around people yadda yadda. SO, imagine my happy surprise when my DM threatened to lower the charisma score of my character because I'm not acting like he thinks I should. I was playing a 3,0 Sorcerer.

    Has anything like this happened to anyone?
    Not the DM. But in one game I was involved in I managed to burn another player with what ( to him) was a real verbal zinger. He proceeded to flood me with messages about I was roleplaying wrong because playing as a member of a generally non-aggressive race I was apparently not allowed to employ sarcasm.

  18. - Top - End - #78
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    Mm. I'm sure I've been someone's worst DM at some point. Hopefully that was years ago, but y'never know.

    The worst DM I ever ran into... Well, technically he was a player for most of our time with him, about 3-4 sessions of DnD. But he did try his hand at running for us later. Anyway, he was a closet neo-nazi who wanted to try running us through a Hunter game. We had one session of prologue where NPC's told us how screwed we were. No real conflict, just a ton of foreshadowing, and we didn't do much. At the end of the session he asked for honest feedback on the game. Bit of a mistake, there. I watched him struggle to keep anger off his face as I told him ways to improve things. Wasn't even that harsh...

    And though I didn't know it at the time, he was sort of creeping on the female players. All of them.

    He left the group shortly thereafter. (I suspect that learning that one of our members was Jewish had something to do with that.) Ended up having legal troubles for reasons I'd rather not say, later on.

    We didn't know how mucked up the guy was at the time he joined, is my only defense. Once his issues started surfacing, we were rather glad to see the back of him.

    But I suppose he was the worst for out-of-game reasons, so let's see...

    Ah, back in the 90s there was a guy who liked running Amber live-action games at a local con. It's a diceless system, so it was a weird conversion to LARP. He kind of ran them like dinner murder mystery parties, only without the dinner. Or any real plot. Or any real guidance. Usually it ended up with one person knowing what was really going on, and having no real reason to share it with others.

    So yeah, I'd say that's 8 hours of my life between the two times I went that I'll never get back. I get it, LARP is hard to do, I have problems running live-action myself, but... Jeeze, dude. I'd never seen a boring Amber game until those convention events.

    Oh hey wait, I forgot my first shadowrun GM. I was coming in a newbie, and looking to learn the system. I modeled my elven hit man after an obscure character called Lusiphur, from a little comic called Poison Elves. I did my best to cop a proper IC attitude, as that's what the fiction and the world reinforced...

    He freaking hated me. Don't know if it was the snooty elf concept, or if I rubbed him the wrong way, but he started treating me badly out-of-game because of his hatred of my character, or the way I played him. Hell, one of his more jerkish long-term players picked up on it, and tried to join in on the jackery, but I ignored him, which threw him off.

    I never got to do a damn thing in the game. NPC's bullied me and screwed me over at every turn. Half the time I tried to do stuff I didn't even get to roll dice, it was decided via fiat. Eventually I flipped full passive-aggressive and started reading books at the table, which annoyed him. I felt no guilt for it. Finally the game fell apart, and good riddance.

    I'm okay with the guy now, for what it's worth. That was years back, and we were both younger and dumber.
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  19. - Top - End - #79
    Bugbear in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    This is nothing in comparison with everyone else's but a DM who insists on reducing leveling speed to 1/12th the normal progression because he only likes the early game is kind of annoying if he doesn't tell anyone this is going to be happening in advance.

  20. - Top - End - #80
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    So, I have two stories.

    The first DM was actually a pretty decent DM, it was his house that was the problem. It should have been a Superfund site. We played in this living/dining room with a carpet that looked like it hadn't been vacuumed in a decade. However, you could barely see it under the layer of empty soda bottles, junk mail and assorted schmutz. The table was covered in a huge battlemat that never seemed to be moved. There was a large, algae-covered fishtank in the back of the room that made it really humid. The whole place smelled like unwashed human, decay and a touch of urine. There were a large number of flies every session, and dead ones could be found everywhere, including the surface we ate off of. He also had a dog who was shut in the back every session but would sometimes start to bark and whine. The first session, I got a ride home from the other new player and he said that he had cleaned mold off the fan before he felt safe turning it on. I was very happy when we moved to another player's house.



    The second was more the fault of the DM's ability. It was a college game night and he asked if anyone wanted to start a game. So, three of us say yes and we quickly roll up characters. I make a Bard/Paladin of Freedom. He describes the setting (Floating islands with skyships) and it sounds cool.

    Then game starts. We don't know each other, and we start in a beer garden. Then suddenly, Fihyrs attack. Fihyrs are from MM2, they are born from nightmares* die in sunlight, and are badly over CRed at CR3. We are level 7. It's a pathetic and nonsensical encounter, as the city is perfectly calm, with nothing to birth Fihyrs. We beat them, at this point we are the only people in the beer garden and then wander off together.

    We look for something to do and are told that there are problems in the sewers. "Ok" we say "Let's go deal with that!" Then he says that no, that's a job for druids, you can't help. Then we are offered a job as skyship guards. The DM tries to say my character wouldn't want money for helping because he's a paladin, but I manage to get past that and on to a plot hook after around 90 minutes of us looking for one. However, then he just gives us two random and badly explained encounters, both of which see at least one player unable to contribute. When he offered a second session, I declined.


    Spoiler: *
    Show
    As the remnants of hundreds of people’s nightmares swirl through the ether, they somehow combine with leftover magical power and coalesce into these physical monsters. A few random dream images aren’t enough; it takes the strong emotional energy of a mass of people under duress to spawn a fihyr. The right combination of conditions is most often found in cities that are under siege, or being terrorized by monsters, or suffering from famine, civil war, or some other mass trauma.

  21. - Top - End - #81
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    Mine was a PF GM with some serious issues. He was very new to GMing and fairly new to playing (for reference, I've DM'ed several times the years he'd played). That would have been fine except he was completely unable to realize his weaknesses and that he wasn't a very good GM. His plots were Cliche and felt very basic. (An example: big king dude gives a bunch of 3rd level adventurers a suspiciously comprehensive list of powerful magic items and artifacts that's basically the fantasy version of a scavenger hunt.) None of his characters were very interesting. He really didn't understand concepts like WBL, CR or allowing players to have agency.

    One of his fights was against a Night Hag (a CR 9 creature) at level 3, as our first encounter, and it was practically a random one at that. It just came out of nowhere, ate our horses and we had to ineffectually fight it (he explicitly said that he wanted to get one or two of our characters either dead or really close to death, for the first fight of the campaign) for several rounds (the only reason we survived that long is because he really didn't understand the rules or even basic tactics for running an interesting and challenging encounter. Anyway, eventually his OP super-beautiful, awesome Mary-Sue NPC came and saved us and dumped the plot on us in the most uninteresting way possible (she basically stumbled across us and went, why shouldn't I tell this random group of adventurer's where the powerful artifact of awesome is).

    This was after a very long introduction where most of the players were bored stiff (even me and another player, who were actually really trying to immerse ourselves despite the GM's flaws, got bored pretty quickly). What's worse, he actually had the nerve to blame the other players for being bored and talking to themselves, instead of the fact that he wasn't allowing anyone to really do anything of consequence. I mean I wouldn't have been happy with them doing that in one of my games, but I would have talked to them, asking them how I could draw them in. The pacing was just awful with only one or two encounters (not just fights, but any sort of challenge) each night, and he really wasn't as clever as he thought he was. Fortunately, the game didn't last long, and I GMed for a short while after.To be fair, he was young, and the other players weren't the most mature bunch either, and he took up the GM mantle after the regular one moved. So I understand why he wasn't very good; but one of the things that you need to realize even as a new GM is that all your story (regardless how good it is) is meaningless if the players aren't having any fun.

    Also, he constantly got into arguments with people with equal or greater roleplaying experience (including me). Trying to tell us that we just had to give him a chance and that his story was so awesome even without any player agency on our parts or anything interesting happening. He actually tried to tell me that 'I should understand what he was doing as a fellow GM' (I did, it was just crap and I would never pull half of the things he tried, because I know how hard it is do well) and that he was being realistic with a deep story. However, this never came across to me or the players, regardless of whether or not that was true, so regardless of how well-planned his story was, it didn't matter if no one cared.

    To be fair, I've lost most of my vitriol for the game, because at least I was roleplaying (there's been no other good opportunities after the players basically just stopped coming without so much as an explanation why, and it wasn't even because they didn't like my games, they said that they did) oh well, there will be other opportunities later.
    Last edited by 3WhiteFox3; 2014-08-04 at 02:20 AM.
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  22. - Top - End - #82
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    While not like some of the horror stories here, I do have a DM who has some quirks that tend to bug.
    One, over rapid advancement, even skipping levels on multiple occasions.
    Or skipping encounters in Adventure Paths because they are too 'boring' or 'easy', leaving only the really tricky ones that often leave many PC standing there gawking. Maybe they are easy, but, especially when you have been fighting a lot of tricky encounters, it can be downright cathartic have a fight where you can just go in and wipe the floor. He tends to take the 'Story beats rules' adage a little too close to heart. Yes, it has its place but often-times it can make informed decision making difficult, nullify effort, and remove player agency.
    He also has an annoying habit of telling players how they rect to something.
    I am not afraid to role play things, so if a DM says I act a certain way from an effect, I often feel like he's controlling my character, which, just rankles. You tell me the status effect, and I'll give you an appropriate response based on my character, dammit.
    But lastly and not leastly*, he often doesn't read things top to bottom, to the point where his name is practically a by-word for missing out how some ability or really works because of it.

    *not a word, but it should be
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  23. - Top - End - #83
    Barbarian in the Playground
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    The worst DM I've ever had had made a decision. His decision was that his adventure featured one way to go about it, and one way only. He told us beforehand that he "wasn't good at sandbox and tended to railroad". We went along with it─after all, railroading might not be the most exciting thing, but sometimes it can be done well. Maybe we'd have no reason to avoid the railroad.

    Turns out we just didn't understand "railroad".

    DM: "You come across a wooden door. The door is locked."
    Rogue: "I'll lockpick the door. (roll) Aw ****, nat 1."
    Fighter: "Eh, no worries. Wooden door. I'll break it down."
    DM: "You can't."
    Fighter: "I haven't even rolled yet."
    DM: "The rogue already tried opening the door but couldn't, so you have to find another way in."
    Fighter: "By breaking down the door."
    DM: "No, you already attempted opening this door and that failed."

    Frustrated, we carry on trying to find another method. The DM gets annoyed. Tells us we should be looking for more mundane methods instead of trying to think of things like, "Hide nearby until one of the thugs tries to open the door." Okay, we understood there'd be railroading, but creativity is being stopped here. From the encounters and challenges before this it's slowly dawned on me that the DM means that for everything that needs to be bypassed, there is exactly 1 method to go about it, and only after that fails is there a second method (that cannot fail, no rolls involved).

    We finally manage to get past the door (turns out we had to knock and someone'd open it from the inside), and fight the BBEG for the adventure. Our job entailed to return him to the magistrate alive... so we try to bring him in alive, right? We first talk to him. He refuses regardless of a high Diplomacy roll, and is not open to any conversation. OK, we get it, we're meant to fight. We begin the fight. BBEG is wounded, so we go in for capturing alive... except, apparently, non-lethal attacks are actually quite lethal, and a punch to the face broke his neck because he was at -2 HP. ... Okay. We argue for a bit, but finally accept that, okay, we accidentally killed him, **** happens.

    We return to town and get the city guard sic'd on us for expressly going against the magistrate's orders and killing the man, who turns out to never have been evil but the magistrate was. We basically murdered Robin Hood. Despite our best attempts not to. Our characters then get sodomised in jail, which inspires our characters with great vengeance against the magistrate. (EDIT: He'd decided we'd want vengeance. We had no choice in how our characters would feel.)

    At this point we told the DM we did not want to continue the adventure. Understandably, the DM told us he did not want to continue our friendship.
    Last edited by Held; 2014-08-04 at 05:44 AM.

  24. - Top - End - #84
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    I met my worst DM on my early years of roleplaying. I was a cyberpunk campaign and I was really excited about it, because until then I could only played it DMing for some friends. So I appear with a ready to go character and He doesn't allow it, telling me that they play with some house rules and additional ones for character creation. Ok, no problem I say, so, what's the deal? And he present me a book I've never seen (I had the core rule book and two of the chrome books) and explain that it contains new rules, some new classes and most importantly, a lot of new background tables.

    So, completely oblivious to where I was getting into, I went for one of the new classes, the spy, and procced to roll my backgrounds. The problem with this new tables (later, I learned that most of them where invented by this DM) were that although they contained some very good things (like, extra build points, new special abilities, experimental tech...) most of the rolls were catastrophic, and of course, I only got those. I ended up begining with no possesions (nothing, not even my regular clothes), indebt to the moob, and infected with an experimental virus.

    I could have tried and take this character as a challenge but He didn't live for more than two sesions. You see, the greatest enjoyment of this DM was to kill his players or put them in the most hopeless situations against imposible odds. So death came frecuently, so much indeed that one sesion I ended up rolling three diferent characters...
    I would have left the group, but back then there weren't many players around, so out of options, I tried to grab the bull by its horns, by creating the most optimazed and though mercenary I could roll.
    And after eight straight sesions without dying, I think I did well. But soon after that, all the players were tired of piling dead characters so the game ended.

    A year later, same DM started an AD&D game, and again, out of other available players, I join the game. But knowing this DM, I tried to be as resilient as I could. My first character though wasn't lucky with its rolls so I played a dwarf warrior trying to compensate but wasn't enough and bited the dust pretty quickly. His sucesor though, got incredible rolls, so I maxed his CON, rolled a savage elf and played it as a ranger. Again, this proved to be the wise decision.
    But one sesion, after pit us against an OP enemy, He was looking at me, grinning, as he rolled damage, and when I informed that I was still alive he was enraged, acusing me of cheting my hit points. After proving my innocence I decided I have had enough of this jerk and left the game. Game of course, that didn't last for much longer.
    Last edited by Rolero; 2014-08-04 at 06:15 AM.

  25. - Top - End - #85
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    Quote Originally Posted by Held View Post
    Our characters then get sodomised in jail, which inspires our characters with great vengeance against the magistrate. (EDIT: He'd decided we'd want vengeance. We had no choice in how our characters would feel.)

    At this point we told the DM we did not want to continue the adventure. Understandably, the DM told us he did not want to continue our friendship.
    Wow... I'd say this is the part that should have earned him the dishonorable mention, not the railroading...
    This actually reminds me of a campaign in which I never played, thank God, but got told about:

    Spoiler: Rape
    Show
    Basically, under the pretense of a normal D&D campaign, this GM decides to set the campaign in a world working on hentai logic: the solution to everything was ****ing, rape was the logical consequence of being defeated by anything, including animals and monsters several size categories bigger than the PCs, and being a wanted criminal makes you get sexually assaulted by an entire town of horny dwarves.

    All of this was apparently hilarious to the GM, who couldn't get enough of it and forced the players in worst and worst situations all the time. One of the players was the girlfriend of the GM and apparently the resident Mary Sue who was immune to all of the above but never complained about it and in fact did her best to help the GM troll the players by being as obnoxious as possibile.
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  26. - Top - End - #86
    Barbarian in the Playground
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    In his defence, it was (heavily) implied and not explicit. My friends regularly make jokes about not dropping soap in jail; I was furious at the time, but now I look back on it and think the DM might have just critically failed the check to distinguish jokes from serious. And D&D is serious business. Personal DM fetishes put aside, I found the railroading a critical DM failure, and the last part a failure as a person to determine what is and is not appropriate.

    EDIT: I understand I'm playing devil's advocate here, but I strongly regret the way our friendship ended and don't think he was a malicious person.
    Last edited by Held; 2014-08-04 at 11:26 AM.

  27. - Top - End - #87
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    Quote Originally Posted by Held View Post
    Understandably, the DM told us he did not want to continue our friendship.
    If you mean "understandably" as in "not surprising given this guy's character" then sure, but that's the only definition by which it's understandable.
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  28. - Top - End - #88
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    This was several years ago, I still bring this guy up every so often. He grew up with 2nd Edition, but doesn't seem to have actually played a lot of the game, so a lot of suggestions from the 2nd ed DMG were taken out of context, and rigidly enforced at the expense of fun.

    - He used the Plot Hook from the 2nd edition DM's guide where, as a spur for adventure, your characters own land, and it's being heavily taxed. You need to go on an adventure in order to pay your taxes. Unfortunately, we spent two sessions discussing tax laws instead of actually adventuring.

    - Having above-average stats is min-maxing. Having the maximum possible skill ranks in a skill for your level is min-maxing. Multi-classing is Min-maxing. Wizards purchasing scrolls to expand their spellbook is min-maxing. An arbitrary selection of feats, spells, and classes were banned because they were min-maxing. Almost every attempt at divination was min-maxing or metagaming.

    - Wealth was severely restricted, to the extent that characters would regularly "commit suicide" (willingly engage in a tactically unsound way, ensuring death) in order to bring themselves up to WBL, because that was the only way we could get new equipment. There were plenty of opportunities for this, because he would consistently throw "CR-Appropriate" encounters at us, which we couldn't defeat because we were lacking in equipment.

    - RPing was enforced in bizarre, arbitrary ways. We were forced to roll saves against beneficial spells cast by Party members if the player didn't say something in-character communicating what the spell was. For those of you reading thinking that this actually sounds like a good idea? It isn't. Just trust me on this.

    - Another bizarre RP enforcement: Experienced players weren't allowed to help out inexperienced players. Can we solve the current plotline by having the Cleric cast 'Find the path?" Yes? Too bad, if your character doesn't have knowledge: Religion, you can't actually make that suggestion to her. Also, Find the Path is broken min-maxing, as already discussed.

    - More than once, he ran an adventure where the setup consisted of "a mysterious power-broker sends you on a quest for a valuable item" without any description of the item, where it is, what it does, or why he wants it.

    "Where are we going?"
    "It's far to the North, no-one knows exactly."
    "Like, general area? How about a map?"
    "No, you don't get a map. Stop trying to metagame."
    "What. Alright, whatever, we start walking north."
    ....

    "What does it look like?"
    "You'll know it when you see it."
    "No, seriously, what does it look like, because I see this rock on the ground, and it looks about right."

    - The 'we start walking north' bit actually worked. We just magically found where we were supposed to go. This was after every divination failed, and every gather information attempt we made failed. Apparently, he wanted us to wander in the wilderness for a bit as an excuse for random encounters.

    - We were regularly ambushed while camping for no reason. This once featured the question, "is the lookout looking to the north, or to the south?" - it turns out the lookout was looking in the wrong direction, and a group of six Hill Giants snuck up on us hidden by waist-high grass. Human waist, not giant waist.

    - The guy-we're-working-for-who-obviously-betrayed-us has the audacity to be surprised when we show up, and cast Disintegrate, followed by Gust of Wind.

    --------------------------------------------------------------


    I actually used this guy as a personal case study on what not to do as a DM. He's the guy who made me sit back and think, "I can run a game better than this." - Followed by writing up an adventure, convincing the group to play it, and running a better game.

    So, I guess I owe him that.
    Last edited by Mikeavelli; 2014-08-04 at 09:28 PM.
    If RPG's have taught me anything, it's that all social and economic problems of the world can be solved through murder.

  29. - Top - End - #89
    Pixie in the Playground
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    I'm not sure if this counts as horrible DM, but I do feel bad about it (I was the DM, actually, Story Teller in this case). This happened around this time last year. The oWoD anniversary edition line of books had come out, and I'd spent (what is to me) a small fortune getting everything needed to play a game. We'd run several one shots to warm up, and had one fun multi-session game. My players: my best friend, his wife, his step daughter (14), and two of my brothers (15 & 17).

    Now, my brothers were only visiting for the summer, and this incident took place on the very last day that we could possibly have a game. For the game, with input from my players, I had come up with a one shot where they would play low generation Sabbat 'trouble shooters', working for the 'True Black Hand'. I'd cleared all clans, and gave them freebie points befitting elders. Sure, not original, but my players thought it would be fun. I'd planned several 'missions' that tied together, that we should have been able to play through at a fast pace. Then some things happened that destroyed my mood (I was really looking forward to one final game), and I threw a fit . I am not proud of it, and apologized later, but I probably qualified as a terrible ST at the time. Here's the long of it:

    1. I'd gotten off work, raced home to grab my gaming materials and my siblings, got some snacks, and picked up Starbucks for all of my players. I arrived at my BF's house in record time... to discover that my BF and his family were not home. After some texting back and forth, I was informed that they had forgotten about the game (I have no idea how, as we'd been discussing it over the phone and in person all week) and would be back soon. It took them about an hour

    2. When they got there, everyone just piddled around for another hour or so. I had to corral them into the dining room (largest table in the house) one-by-one. A small nit-pick, the table was filthy, and I was the only one working on cleaning it.

    3. Several weeks prior, my BF's step daughter had knocked over a full glass of milk while we were playing a game. My friend's book and some character sheets were ruined. As a result we had all agreed on a rule: No liquids on the table, place your drinks on the floor (linoleum). Since I had cleaned the table, I knew that there were no threatening beverages present. I laid out the character sheets and assorted materials, then left the room to see what was keeping my friend from joining us (turned out he was fixing his mother in-law's printer). I'd only been gone a few minutes, when I hear shouting from the dining room. My friend's step daughter had knocked over her glass of soda, and it went all over the table. Luckily, only the materials which I had printed (character sheets, character creation guides, etc.) had been ruined, and she was frantically cleaning up. I was miffed at this, but kids screw up. Then the girl's mother stated that she'd known the glass was there, but decided against reminding her kid of the 'no liquids' rule... 'because'. WTF? That got me mad. Kids make mistakes and forget things, but parents should remind them when they do. At any rate, I swallowed my anger because they were cleaning things up.

    4. I went back to help my friend with the printer (as we now needed it for new character sheets). This took a good 20 minutes. Finally everything is ready, and I head back to the dining room. Where I discovered that my BF's wife and her daughter had given up on cleaning. I noticed a trail of soda coming off the table and onto my chair... where my bag of books was sitting. I quickly checked the bag (made of cloth), and sure enough, it had absorbed a lot of fluid. That’s when I lost it. I told my brothers to pack up their stuff, and we left. On our way out, my BF’s wife starts yelling at me, saying it’s not a big deal, and it’s bull crap that I decided to leave because of an accident. I then spent the rest of my night cleaning and drying my books.
    Later, after I calmed down, I explained to my friend that I don’t make very much money, and I tried to explain that replacing books which I should not have purchased in the first place (used my credit card) was a big deal for me. I also tried to explain that it was not the accident, but the failure to correct the accident that had damaged my books, and that’s what pissed me off.
    "They're chasing a rabbit around...I'm surrounded by large, unhappy dogs." - some angel

    "I counter your competence with my ineptitude..." - random idiot

  30. - Top - End - #90
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    Default Re: What was your worst DM ever? This thread is impervious - roll to disbelieve!

    What kind of person doesn't clean a soda spill from their own table? How can you "give up" on it? Do they do that for everything in their apartment? They must have cockroaches as big as cats!
    Last edited by Kalmageddon; 2014-08-05 at 05:41 AM.
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