Who was the worst DM you've ever had?

[Avianmosquito]

This is a simple one. Tell us about terrible DMs and why they deserve that title. No names, please.

I'll start us off with a tale of a sympathetic villain, a railroading authoritarian DM and a rigged combat encounter. The tale starts with the assassination of the king in a country the DM never bothered to name. The party was hired by the royal family to track down the assassin and bring him back, alive if possible for a public execution. So, this whole thing was already going down in the lawful neutral bin from the start and I wasn't too happy with it but I went along.

So we started following leads and having random encounters, most interesting parts were one of our leads trying to kill us and another being a trap but overall it wasn't a bad campaign for most of it. Eventually we found the guy, hiding out in a cabin. (If he had a cabin, shouldn't there be a paper trail? Why wasn't that the FIRST place we checked?) Rather than immediately attack, I decide to talk to him. Because I'm our bard, that's kinda my thing.

He admits he killed the king, and when I ask him why, I get this little gem. Apparently the man was a member of the king's royal guard, and his son worked in the palace as a groundskeeper. The king was out on a walk of the grounds and found the young man acting erratic, lines of white powder laid out on hand mirror next to him. Gee, I wonder what he was doing, right? And the king's response was of course to fire him, because he's a reasonable... Oh, wait, nope. Threw him in jail for life. His father was understandably a bit pissed off over the whole "life in prison" thing, and tried to get the king to change his mind with no success. The boy died in prison shortly thereafter, causes unspecified, and the royal guard stabbed the king. (Go figure, you effectively murder your bodyguard's son and he kills you. It's impossible to get good help these days.)

So we let him go. "But he killed the king!", the DM says. "But he had good reason to.", replies our fighter. "But his son was a criminal!", the DM exclaims. "But he didn't hurt anybody.", says I. "Well he shouldn't have broken the law!", declares the DM. "Well it's a stupid law.", says our rogue. "But it isn't grounds for murder!", the DM states. "Yes, I believe that's the thrust of his objection.", says I. Took him a second to get that one, cheesy pun notwithstanding. "But what he did was wrong!", says the DM. "Yes, but enough about the king.", says I. I will confess at this point I may have been goading him a bit. "You can't let him go!", claims the DM. "Sure we can.", snarks our rogue. "But he's a murderer!", the DM cries. "But he was also a father, avenging his son. He doesn't deserve what they'll do to him.", decides our fighter. "But what about the king?", asks the DM. "**** 'em.", I rebut.

And then the DM throws a royal kill squad at us. Which we know is bull**** because the lack of such a thing is why they hired us in the first place. And the DM screws with the saves against the wizard's spells, with us "failing" saves we know full well it's impossible for us to fail. We realized he was doing that when he cast a fireball and our rogue failed her save on 24. It's 10+Spell level+Intelligence modifier. How the **** is a 24 not a save? That would require an intelligence modifier of 12, that means a minimum intelligence score of 34. That's bull**** and we all knew it. I called him out on it, and he just insisted the save failed. Says the wizard has a feat. Well I've looked, there's no feat that adds THAT much to the save DC. All I see is spell focus and greater spell focus, which when combined would give a +2 to the DC and then he'd only need an intelligence of 30, which is still bull****.

And of course, he keeps doing it. About three rounds in, I tell the DM if he rigs my saving throw one more goddamned time I'm going to turn him into a Pantera album cover. He tells me he doesn't listen to crap. I get up and leave, and the rest of the party follows. That was the last time we let him DM, but he was a pretty ****ty player, too. One campaign he tried to insist our cleric of Boccob take a different deity. Nevermind that our cleric was our sorceress's sister and Boccob makes sense from a roleplaying angle. Nope, not a good choice in his book. He of course was a paladin of Heironeous, and insisted she "at least" pick Pelor.

Kinda glad I'll never have to see that prick again.

[tensai_oni]

Sounds like the DM had opinions that were simultaneously (as is often the case) very specific and very strong, let them highly influence the adventuer and was shocked that other people do not share these specific opinions with him.

I had good luck to dump most of bad GMs I had over less than one session on average, but they also tended to make pretty boring stories. So instead let's talk about something more unusual - the worst GM/arbiter in a freeform RP.

The arbiter's role is to plan out encounters for players and judge action effectiveness during them. You know, so the players can't just godmode their way out of encounters, because there are no mechanical rules. On the other hand this means the arbiter can effectively block players by going "your action fails" repeatedly - which means there usually is an agreement, written or not, that the players can expect a certain "base" level of what they're doing being effective, based on their character capabilities, relevance to the situation, and how smart/well described/cool the action was.

Not with this guy. Here's a list of what a good job he did:

1. The major (and sometimes only) criteria deciding whether you'll do awesomely or be a total load was "whether he liked you/was your friend".

2. He considered himself a smart, creative GM, but too often his encounters had only one specific thing you could do to progress/solve them (which in his mind was always a very obvious solution, probably because he's the one who came up with it), everything else would fail no matter how much sense it made. However still see point 1.

3. Seemingly arbitrarily he decided certain specific abilities were broken and if your character had them, it was his sworn duty to make sure you have a bad time and can't contribute to the game in any meaningful way. He even was aware of this tendency and proud of it, considering himself a guardian of the game against power gamers who came to ruin it. Having other abilities was fine though, even if they were just as or more powerful than what he viewed as broken. And of course, see point 1 - his friends were immune to this, and in fact after years I strongly suspect this is because he didn't want others to overshadow them.

4. Less then perfect grammar? Your character action might as well be "I do nothing" because that's what it'd boil down to. ESL be damned. He barely tolerated presence of non-American players in the game to begin with (seemingly because different timezones make it hard to schedule events in real time). We played online, obviously.

5. In case point 1 being called so many times wasn't obvious - he was a two-faced liar. He wasn't afraid of even lying to his co-GMs if it was convenient to him.

The best part is, while some people I knew were definitely on his sh*t list, I was in the in-group of people he liked. So I got to experience this guy's actions from both sides, and they were always ugly.

[TheCountAlucard]

I'm pretty flexible, but in recent years one thing I've been a stickler for is that the rules are not the master of the gaming group - fun is. But if your idea of fun is playing by the rules, well, hey, more power to ya. But rules are not and cannot be perfect, which is why a GM needs to be reasonable when it comes to interpreting them when conflicts occur.

This GM... was not.

[The Random NPC]

Admittedly I was not the most accommodating of players. My GM decided to start a new group and asked us what we were playing. I decided on playing a Warlock and was told I couldn't because Warlocks didn't exist in his setting. I did whine a bit and got my way but the cost was too high. "I need to rewrite my setting to include Warlocks", he said. Shouldn't be too hard I thought, but acquiesced to his desire to postpone the start of the game for a week. That week turned into two and a half months, and we eventually stopped showing up. I even offered story ideas and eventually offered to change my class, but he rejected them all. For ten weeks his excuse was, "I'm trying to fit your characters into the setting." Fortunately, I was able to get my revenge the last three weeks by passive-aggressively needling him right before the point that he would punch me and letting him cool off, only to start anew for eight hours.

[2D8HP]

I have two seperate candidates:

For IC awfulness, I would have been about 12 years old and I went to DunDraCon. I usual played with teenagers and my best friend (his eldest brother was the DM), but at the convention, the table was all "real adults" that could vote and drive and stuff! Also they all played Magic-Users instead of the Fighters that filled my usual table (I still played a Fighter)!

It was awful! The "adventure" had a surrealistic Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Monty-Python-while-on-LSD vibe, and I mostly recall the other players and the DM smirking and playing in-character practical jokes on my PC. Not fun for me.


After high school, since the rest of my gaming circle went to college or into military service, I could no longer play with my old "gang", so I'd look at game store bulletin board ads for people to game with, causing my worst OOC game experiences.
Judging by the motorscooter I remember riding to the game and when I owned it, I was probably 18 or 19 years old (but I may been in my early 20's already), so it was likely that I was both a teenager and an "adult", snd I very briefly played "variant" D&D (that's what we called "homebrew rules" back then) with "grown-ups", but that ended because while I was sitting at the table the DM's girlfriend went behind me and put a "bedroom toy" on my shoulder.Earlier I was asked if I wanted "to meet our new ferret", and since a girl I previously knew had a couple as pets (hers just seemed mostly like cats) I said yes. Almost immediately the beast bit hard on my fortunately thick leather boot (with my foot in it!) and I had to kick it off!
I didn't play D&D for decades afterwards.

[Satinavian]

Ok, worst DM. I had just moved and had had a hard time finding any group, that is why i didn't leave sooner.

- This guy was really really bad with rules. But played a rule heavy system. because he knew no other. And he could not admit that he was bad with rules, so he made really bad and utterly wrong rule decisions all the time and tried to hide it. (It never worked, even when he forbode everyone else to look up anything). Not only were his rulings horrible because he could never estimate he consequences of applied rules, he also forgot them regularly and applied them inconsistantly

- He had all powerful DM-PCs. Which not only were designed to outshine the party all the time, but they didn't even follow the same rulings/rules he applied to the players. Or to say it otherwise, he cheated all the time to make his DM-PCs even more glorious.

- He was utterly bad at pacing and stories. At first, he ran published modules and it was still not really done well, but then he tried his own. It somehow managed to both lack any plot and still not provide the freedom of a sandbox. Railroading all the time but the rails led nowhere. At best there was sightseeing where the PCs were "guided" to interesting places or in look distance to interesting persons but not provided any real reason to be there and no chance to interact.

- He regularly played online games while running the game. Because "he was so good at multitasking"

- Of course because he was so bad several other players suggested to take the GM position for a while. But he would have none of that and as he owned the meeting place insisted that no one else ever led the group.

- We also had a player who was not particularly bright but otherwise a nice person. Eventually he started picking on her character all the time and trying to railroad this character into embarrassing situations to make fun of the player for group entertainment. The player didn't really notice that all those bad things happened only because the DM was a jerk and wanted a good laugth and wrote it up as bad luck. But i noticed. And that was kind of the breaking point and reason to finally ditch the group.




There were other bad DMs. There was e.g. one teacher with a hobby interest in psychology who insisted on managing the feelings of the PCs because he "knew how humans would react realisticly". And that was while playing a very traditional game not too far away from D&D but low magic. But even that was far far better.

[WarrentheHero]

I've had two awful GMs in my time:

The first one, before I say anything else, is a known cheater, constantly lying about dice rolls. All the time, both as a player and as GM. Also, he is one of those GMs that doesn't tell stories about the PCs. Rather, the games he runs are all about the NPCs, and how badass they are. For example, in one session of 5e we were playing, he used a homebrew magic system called using "weaves", wherein a "weave" was a small amount of specific magic (i.e. a single "fire weave" was like Fire bolt, and you could do something like two fire weaves and an air weave to cast magic akin to Burning Hands". It supposedly allowed for greater versatility, but seemed to me to just be a roundabout way of using the system in place.
Anyway, we were teleported to an snowy region by an NPC, who of course had a little snow on his foot. To get rid of this, he uses some air magic to blow the snow off. The GM said to us "You notice that he put damn near 30 weaves into this". As it was explained to me before all this, that should be roughly hurricane-force. Because the magic NPC has to be superduper strong, you guys.
He also had a weird fixation on one particular player of ours, and not in any sexual or romantic way either. Just always put this guy at the center, all the time. In that same "weave" adventure, the player in character was playing as a bodyguard who was literally completely subservient to another Noble character, who in turn was in charge of a dangerous "criminal" warlock (another PC). And the GM, of course, made the story revolve around the bodyguard's backstory and the tribe he came from.
To combine these two things, we once had a session where we had the opportunity to compete in an underground no-holds-barred brutal fighting tournament. We were all level 3. I fought against a character dual-wielding longswords, who HANDILY beat me in combat. Another player (bladelock) easily lost to the same guy after some healing. We later found out that the character had the Dual-Wielding feat, and our GM thought that meant he could use Dex with longswords, since DW made them like light weapons, and all light weapons have Finesse (his logic, not mine). When the Favorite Player went up, he was matched against a Minotaur. An actual Minotaur, who had normal human intelligence. And of course, the Favorite won. We ere all 3rd level, and I was optimized for combat as much as the Favorite. Granted, I was playing a Rogue and he a Fighter, but Minotaurs are like CR 3, built to be challenge to a whole party of Lvl 3s.

The other GM is a whole host of bad too. For starters, he's bland. He prefers to run pre-written adventurers, but reads right off the page, with no inflection or meaning. And all NPCs have the exact same voice- his. Additionally, every NPC is the "witty sarcastic" type, without exception, and he - I mean, the NPCs - always have to have the last word. He's unnecessarily vicious, going out of his way to kill non-combat familiars and giving us next-to-impossible encounters. He's a huge proponent of "Rule Zero: What the GM says, goes, regardless of written rules." That idea is meant to allow the Rule of Cool to allow for awesome exploits and stunning cinematics, not for saying that the Invisibility spell doesn't grant a to-hit bonus.
The GM also has no sense of balance. As I said, he'll sometime throw impossible encounters at us (such as two Winter Wolves, a powerful warrior, and like a dozen wargs against a low-level party). In addition, when running pre-written hardcover adventurers, he'll allow the players (in 5e) a free feat at 1st level, roll 4d6 stats 7 times, take best, reroll 1s, and give a whole bunch of unevenly-distributed magic items, and then have the gall to complain that he "doesn't like 5th edition because the PCs are too strong and never die, so he has to either use underpowered encounters we'll dance through, or super-difficult ones to challenge us.
He was also really bad at actually running games by the book. We literally abandoned a game of Princes of the Apocolypse because the GM didn't know how to get proceed with the plot after the first visit to Feathergale Spire (lvl 3), and the one hook he found to the next section took us to the Earth Monastary (6th level).
What really tipped me over the edge with this guy was how he tried to tell me exactly how my character would/should act. We were playing a variant of a Barovia campaign. We were investigating a werewolf epidemic, and a plague, I believe. Our investigation took us to a specific, cave, from which we had to acquire a certain kind of flower. We got all the way through the cave, and in the last chamber found an NPC we had run into a couple times. He told us some plot info, including that we needed a special powder, and then showed us where he grew the flowers (in a cave somehow). Then he asked us to kill him, because he was a werewolf and couldn't live with himself. Two characters immediately attacked him, but as far as I knew, we still needed to know how to get that powder. So I tried to stop the others from attacking this guys. For the record, I'm NG, or maybe CG, don't remember. I was literally grappling one character with my one good arm (character had a nonfunctional left arm; inspired by Artorias), and grappling the other with my legs, when they finally kill him. Turns out, you just need to crush up the flower to get the powder, but that was never stated. The other two just for whatever reason "understood" this implicitly, even though nothing linked the flower and powder, not even the names. I tried explaining that all they had to do was tell my character this and he wouldn't have interfered. They mentioned that they didn't know that I didn't know, and I responded that I said it in-character. Then, the GM said that he wanted PvP to break out there, so he intentionally let my character be in the dark, even though the problem was a GM-to-player issue, not character-to-PC one. THEN he told me that since I was good, I wasn't going to kill the guy anyway. I was incredulous, because my character had been incredibly pragmatic so far, and would have had every reason to put a werewolf out of its misery. He insisted that being Good meant that I couldn't kill any non-aggressive creature under any circumstances- that that is not how Good worked. I just left and told him not to expect me the next week.
I would get into the ways that this guys was an awful player as well, but that's not what this thread is for.


This turned into a bit more of a rant than I expected, but man I hate playing with those guys. The first I only tenuously call my friend outside of DnD, and don't play DnD with him at all anymore. The second I sort of hated anyway, but for that time he was the only person I knew who was GMing regularly for me to play in.

[Hawksteel]

This happened to me with a very short lived palladium fantasy game I was in.

For a start the GM never prepared anything before each game instead preferring to go through my books and pick out monsters when he first arrived before each session and literally making up the game as he went along.

But by far the most frustrating thing was how he also kept changing the rules as the game went along.

For example we had a heated debate on our 4th session;as the others were fighting with their swords against a group of kobolds who were trying to raze a village, I was standing behind them using my bow to pick off the shaman and any other more dangerous foes.

Here is where the debate started;
The shaman was starting to cast a spell so I did a called shot into his eye and rolled a 20, the shaman failed to dodge.
However the GM then proceeded to take the damage off the main body instead of directly to hit points as he should have done because I rolled a critical hit.
When we started arguing he declared he'd never liked called shots (especially since I was using them so effectively) so he was just going to ignore them.

Further he then declared someone had snuck up behind me (no roll) and gotten in a free attack on me.
I shifted away from him and put an arrow in him at point blank, he rolled a ONE and dodged because according to him he had +9 to dodge so a one counted (which is not how the rules work). He then tried to drink a potion but was stopped when I kicked his nuts into his throat but lo and behold the potion had vanished.

We were becoming overwhelmed and tried to retreat down the hill to the woods but suddenly the village was no longer on a hill but on a mountain with a sheer cliff face. So we ran through a barn with them following and managed to get out and lock them in, I then used my tinder box to set it alight. However it then started raining and they escaped through the shamans magic, what magic he used we dont know.

Somehow we managed to kill them and survive but in the process they had killed all the villagers. So we decided to make the most of it by searching the entire village for provisions and anything we could use. Funnily enough the kobolds had absolutely no treasure on them and the magic shop in the village had a single healing potion.

It hadnt been raided, the GM was simply upset with our arguing with him and proceeded to punish us by denying us any treasure. And 'forgot' to give us our XPs at the end.

Needless to say we didnt play again.

[Anonymouswizard]

I'm lucky to have had no truly horrible ones. Of the two worst I've had:

One was fine as long as you followed his plot. Generally this was okay, his combats were interesting, and although he didn't know how building characters or actions work in M&M the games were fun.

Then came the Halloween session.

First, we were at in an interesting location, an extradimensional ghost town with a strange tier in the centre. I was playing an air mage and fantasy geek who immediately started flying around this ghost town right out of a novel looking for clues and interesting stuff. I even got the idea to add a death obsession and some necromancy as a side effect of visiting. Eventually the GM complained that me and the speedster were messing around (I was looking for clues) and railroadrd us towards the tower, which turned out to be unlocked and possessing one dark Wizard. The GM then complained that he had to skip his planned speech and the combat and then began the whole set piece where the wizard was killed off. Then we died.

To explain the GM had a set of four DMPC elementally themed supervillains that controlled the world, and the eventual goal was to take them down. I should also note I had made my character post of a four person group of elemental mages named after the classical elementals (I was Sylph) just as a big 'I'm part of a better group' to the villains. But here was the first time they turned up, and immediately we were called to roll for initiative. Only one of our group got within the first five actions, and immediately these PL20+ villains proceeded to kill or heroes in one attack each just so the next session we could be rescued from the afterlife and have the villains think we were dead.

Then came the kicker, he had specifically made the villains so powerful we couldn't hurt them

The other one was actually a good GM, if you liked combat heavy games with little time to plan and no home base. The combat was fun, but everybody else wanted to stop scavenging supplies already and go to the industrial park to fortify it, set up a factory and lab, and start making it feel like we were ready to survive long term. We eventually discovered we had all round better knowledge and resources than the military in a better location from about two weeks of work and me detailing the exact experiments my scientist character was performing (it turned out you could not train zombies), and the game for a lot better once he started listening to what we wanted instead of just running what he wanted (he still got to throw his crazy zombies at us when we went out for food or rarer materials, it was better all around).

[Arbane]

Is Trekkin here? Trekkin to the white courtesy phone, please....

What I can't take is when the same thing happens to the setting, following a sadly predictable pattern: if I need it, it's not true. When I want to dodge airborne surveillance by meeting someone under a tree, there aren't any parks or green spaces in arcologies. When I want to introduce home aquaponics as a money-making scheme (banking on the lack of greenery being a bit irksome to people), the arcologies are lousy with parks and everyone's full up on plants. The same has been true of nearly every aspect of my character's backstory; the surest way for me never to have met an NPC is to ask if I might still have their number from such-and-so incident a decade ago. Until they turn out to be evil, and suddenly we hung out all the time and he can pick me out of a crowd instantly. Bear in mind, I got my backstory written for me. Numbers jump based on who's asking, and I specifically have to give a detailed reason for any question I ask about the setting--and I can be sure that whatever the answer, it will last until I come up with a new plan based on the implications of that answer.

Now, the other players have had this happen too, and unfortunately for most people involved I work well with all of them, so they've had it happen a lot more around me. The setting and system are both getting so twisted they're basically unplayable, and the whole thing has taken on a 1984-esque feel where we take nothing for granted because the old world gets constantly sucked down the memory hole. We can show him the chat logs where he definitely said X was true, and the response, paraphrased, is "that was when you wanted to [do A]. Now I'm ruling [X is false]."

This is the same man who claims we can't derail his adventure because there are no rails and we're free to do anything. I suppose there aren't rails because we wanted to move something by train once.

I'm happy to say I haven't had a game anywhere nearly as bad as any of the ones listed here, there was one 3.5 campaign I was in here the PCs started out as 0-level commoners who were drow prisoners in the underdark. Out adventures started with us being rescued by NPCs, and eventually working our way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty. We spent a lot of time suffering, had a gay drow stalker (in a subplot the DM had designed for any female PCs, but inflicted on her husband's character instead. Ew. Did I mention said PC had been tortured so badly they had a split personality? Fun times.), had a lot of fights that ended with at least one PC face-down in a pool of their own blood, and lost most of our treasure when the guy keeping track of it left the group. 9_6 She also had one of those 'developed over years' worlds where I, at least, felt like our adventures couldn't possibly be important or one of the uberNPCs would be doing them instead - 'Forgotten Realms Syndrome'.

Not even close to some people's bad adventures.

[Hawksteel]

Just remembered one more;

It was a Rifts game with some guys I met at a gaming shop (something which my city no longer has but anyways). After some major battle where we saved a village from the coalition one of the guys says his character strips naked. Next he proceeds to try to rape the young children in the village. I say try because I was so disgusted with what he was attempting to do that I shot him in the head (the character not the player) with an mdc pistol. Well the whole group turned on me, claiming it was just a bit of fun before kicking me out of the game. Which worked out well because I wanted nothing to do with any of them after that.
The game was then retconned so I never shot him. On the way out I told the shop owner what had happened. He looked ill and apparently later told them not to play there again.

[Anonymouswizard]

Is Trekkin here? Trekkin to the white courtesy phone, please....

Let's be fair, it's not like any of us are going to beat the Ao-Sue with our submissions, like how Drow Merde is hard to beat in the 'second worst designed game ever' thread going by the description.

I'm happy to say I haven't had a game anywhere nearly as bad as any of the ones listed here, there was one 3.5 campaign I was in here the PCs started out as 0-level commoners who were drow prisoners in the underdark. Out adventures started with us being rescued by NPCs, and eventually working our way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty. We spent a lot of time suffering, had a gay drow stalker (in a subplot the DM had designed for any female PCs, but inflicted on her husband's character instead. Ew. Did I mention said PC had been tortured so badly they had a split personality? Fun times.), had a lot of fights that ended with at least one PC face-down in a pool of their own blood, and lost most of our treasure when the guy keeping track of it left the group. 9_6 She also had one of those 'developed over years' worlds where I, at least, felt like our adventures couldn't possibly be important or one of the uberNPCs would be doing them instead - 'Forgotten Realms Syndrome'.

Not even close to some people's bad adventures.

Yeah, that sounds like a standard bad GM. I mean, I don't have a significant problem bar the uber NPCs, but when all are put together it seems to become bad through combination.

[Avianmosquito]

Let's be fair, it's not like any of us are going to beat the Ao-Sue with our submissions, like how Drow Merde is hard to beat in the 'second worst designed game ever' thread going by the description.

Pardon me if I sound ignorant, but I don't know who either of those people are. Would you be so kind as to remedy that?

[comk59]

Pardon me if I sound ignorant, but I don't know who either of those people are. Would you be so kind as to remedy that?

http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/201...rimer.html?m=1

A collected anthology for your viewing pleasure.

But, as a summary, Trekkin once played in a game run by the literal worst GM of all time. Every single thing you think of when you hear bad GM? Overpowered NPCs, Author (sorry, Authyr) Self Inserts, actively undermining the players, actually turning them against each other out of game, and more railroads than the continental United States.

Oh, and defilement of beloved Sci-Fi and Fantasy settings. Which settings you ask? ALL OF THEM.

[Lalliman]

http://irolledazero.blogspot.com/201...rimer.html?m=1

A collected anthology for your viewing pleasure.

In my morbid obsession with bad DM stories, I somehow missed this one. I'll be looking into this.

But could it truly be worse than That Lanky Bugger's story? The story of a DM so bad, he got arrested.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

I don't have many horror stories myself, thankfully, but y'all might want to look here and here for some proper DM nastiness.

[Anonymouswizard]

Pardon me if I sound ignorant, but I don't know who either of those people are. Would you be so kind as to remedy that?

As has been said the Ao Sue (a.k.a. Chief Circle a.k.a. Marty) is the GM from The S.U.E. Files (S.U.E.=System that Undermines Everything), a story of why GM railroading and self insert DMPCs should never mix with a homebrew system. I'll let the blog speak for itself.

In my morbid obsession with bad DM stories, I somehow missed this one. I'll be looking into this.

But could it truly be worse than That Lanky Bugger's story? The story of a DM so bad, he got arrested.

While CC didn't need to be attested the sheer stupidity is just so horrific that nobody can escape unscarred.

[Avianmosquito]

As has been said the Ao Sue (a.k.a. Chief Circle a.k.a. Marty) is the GM from The S.U.E. Files (S.U.E.=System that Undermines Everything), a story of why GM railroading and self insert DMPCs should never mix with a homebrew system. I'll let the blog speak for itself.

That's one. Who's the other?

[Hawkstar]

That Lanky Bugger simply had a DM that had a hate-on for his character for a really, really stupid reason (That turned violent and resulted in an arrest), had someone impersonate him in that original story, and then got stabbed by a jealous girlfriend (But the first story's the most famous one).

Still - as far as in-game goes, the S.U.E. files are the worst ever.

[Bohandas]

Myself. The first time I played I tried to run a game without preparation, with two people who were also playig for the first time as well, and the whole thing fell apart in well under a half an hour.

[Winter_Wolf]

Myself. The first time I played I tried to run a game without preparation, with two people who were also playig for the first time as well, and the whole thing fell apart in well under a half an hour.

Huh, that's what I was going to write about my DMing.

The other one was a guy who couldn't resist putting his DMPC Demi-God lycanthrope with a Deck of Many (terrible) Things in the game and badgering the party until someone finally took the bait and pulled the 1d4 cards and got one okay pull and three progressively crappy mandatory pulls. Finally there was mutiny and the group broke apart. Well enough, I went overseas shortly after so I didn't bother trying to find a new group after that gem.

[Thinker]

I've been a pretty terrible GM at times. I started playing when 3.0 was released and none of my friends at the time had any experience with the hobby. Since I started playing, I've primarily been the GM of the groups I've played with. I just realized that I've been playing for 16 or 17 years and now I feel old. Anyway, here are some of my greatest hits.

• When I was first starting out, I wanted to play, but no one else was confident enough to GM so I tried to have it both ways and be both player and GM. It worked about as well as you might expect - my character took the spotlight and I managed to have an entire interrogation between myself and an NPC (also me) to gather information for the group.
• That GM-PC was also a lycanthrope (because I thought werewolves were cool) and didn't completely understand level adjustment at the time, thus rendering other parts of the group useless.
• In that same vein, I allowed a player to play an optimized character pulled from the WotC optimization boards. Some sort of super-throwing character if I remember right that one-shotted enemies.
• Not having a full understanding of all of the spells one of my players was using and allowing more than they were supposed to do (actions after dimension doors, polymorph shenanigans, etc.)
• I was in school and tried to start up a DnD group, but got more interest than I expected - 11 people wanted to try it out and I didn't turn anyone down. I was already a bad GM and now I was a bad GM with too many personalities. Within the first 10 minutes, one of the players tried to pickpocket the paladin and was dispatched by another player. It was anarchy. We only ran that group once, but I assembled a smaller group later with 3 of them, which grew to 5 later (and was more manageable).
• Introduced a badass boss character that the group wanted to fight right away and so instakilled one of the PCs. I would have been better off going with astral projection, visions, or something other than having them accidentally release the boss from a tomb. They thought it was supposed to be the villain of the tomb, not the villain of the campaign.
• Rocks fall, everyone dies. I was frustrated and didn't know where to take the group next so I thought I'd have them captured by the authorities on trumped up charges so they'd have to clear their names. They thought it was a combat encounter and everyone died (the guards were ~2-5 while the group was level 2 iirc).

I am sure there a lot more times I've GMed badly, but these are the ones that came to mind. A few of these even produced funny and memorable scenarios - with the guards, I remember one of players talking back to the guard captain and the captain saying, "Oh, so you think you're a smart guy?" to which he replied, "No, but I think I'm a fast guy!" and high-tailed it into a field where he was run down by the captain on horseback with a lance.

[Anonymouswizard]

That Lanky Bugger simply had a DM that had a hate-on for his character for a really, really stupid reason (That turned violent and resulted in an arrest), had someone impersonate him in that original story, and then got stabbed by a jealous girlfriend (But the first story's the most famous one).

Still - as far as in-game goes, the S.U.E. files are the worst ever.

Oh, I forgot, Drow Merde was a name used for the S.U.E. System in I think the third thread? I believe it was a codeword just on the off chance the GM was googling his system's name.

Myself. The first time I played I tried to run a game without preparation, with two people who were also playig for the first time as well, and the whole thing fell apart in well under a half an hour.

Eh, improv GMing is a skill and works best for certain systems. I could probably whip up an adventure for Fate Accelerated Edition as it was going along (although I'd want to prep major NPCs before session 2), although for Mutants & Masterminds I'd have a lot of trouble. Other people can pull up at the gaming group, have an opening scene in about 20 minutes, and then run an awesome session using only stock stats (or off the head opponents for something like Tunnels & Trolls). Then some people just need to prepare and nothing will change it.

Also, everyone's first try at preparationless GMing is rubbish, it took me a long time to learn that I just needed major NPC and generic mook stats.

[Bohandas]

Eh, improv GMing is a skill and works best for certain systems.

Yeah, but this was D&D, not Toon or something

[SethoMarkus]

Pales in comparison, but the "worst" DM I've had approved my character before the game started but then constantly complained my character didn't fit with the group (all of the other PCs we lone wolves, mine was simply a grumpy Dwarf, but I digress...). She later, I think after the third session, kicked me out of the group by not telling me when the future games were, all because I wouldn't buy pizza with the other players. (I was tight on money at the time and tried to explain this. I ate before going to the sessions and didn't eat while I was there.)

[JNAProductions]

My worst isn't that bad. It was just a DM who didn't really understand what was and wasn't a proper challenge. And was kinda a jerk about it.

Basically, we were a bunch of level... 2? 3? I think 3. Characters, none of who were particularly powerful. (It was a low-op game.) So he threw a monster at us that had Energy Resistance 10 (so me, the DFA, was useless), DR 10/Cold Iron (rendering the rest of us useless), Fast Healing, and Pounce.

Suffice to say, that was no good. And the only information we had to go on was that a village had been attacked by some kind of giant bugs, so how we were to know we needed cold iron... (Not to mention, there was jack all I could do.)

That alone would've been bad, but he insisted it was our fault for not being prepared, and that it was a fine challenge.

Like I said, not THAT bad. The game withered away soon after, as expected.

[Arbane]

[*] I was in school and tried to start up a DnD group, but got more interest than I expected - 11 people wanted to try it out and I didn't turn anyone down. I was already a bad GM and now I was a bad GM with too many personalities. Within the first 10 minutes, one of the players tried to pickpocket the paladin and was dispatched by another player. It was anarchy. We only ran that group once, but I assembled a smaller group later with 3 of them, which grew to 5 later (and was more manageable).

An old GM of mine tried this once, in a game of... Cyberpunk, I think? Way too many players, and we were not exactly Ocean's 11. Don't think that game ever got a second session.

[Professor Chimp]

All in all, I've had it pretty good when it comes to DM's.

Except for one, who had a very nasty tendency of throwing overly difficult encounters at us that we couldn't feasibly circumvent or mitigate while giving us very little to no resources to handle them. Like being 4 lv1 players and running into an ambush of 6 Orc Warriors who were dead set on killing and looting us. First fight of the campaign, near TPK. Or 2 levels later, getting captured by a village of wererats lead by a fullfledged werewolf Cleric. Staying was not an option since they'd kill and eat us, and escaping would require sneaking past a dozen wererats and the Cleric. None of us were sneaky characters, so obviously we got caught. We tried to make a run for it, but they caught up to us and we got obliterated in the ensuing fight. TPK.

His response? "Sucks for you, should've brought silver weapons or made sneakier characters". Except that the lycanthrope nest was never hinted at. Ever. Not when we were gathering info on the village, not while we had spent a few days there figuring out why people were disappearing. Nothing until the reveal got sprung on us. Or the fact that as DM he knew we weren't geared towards stealth but kept forcing us into situations where it was the only real option, or be face with near impossible odds.

The worst was an encounter in a later session that had us face not one, not two, but three Hellcats, as three lv5s and one lv4. In broad daylight in open air. The Wizard was naturally the first to get ganked, the rest of us had little to no way of effectively fighting them. Another TPK. "You should've run from them." Yes, outrunning three enemies faster than us on open ground. Would've worked swimmingly.

We stuck with it since he was a friend and this was also before widespread internet and finding people to play with wasn't as easy as today. He didn't fare much better as a player either, always playing the same character: a neutral evil Halfling Rogue named Link who would go out of his way to steal from and lie to his party, betraying them at every turn, justifying it with "That's just what my character is like". No, it's not, that's just you wanting to live out your puerile little fantasies of being a complete **** without risking the punch to the face you'd get really quickly if you tried it irl. You know, THAT guy.

I still play with one of the players from that early group. We both agree he will never be part of our current group or any future ones ever gain, despite having repeatedly asked about it.

[Avianmosquito]

How about a little levity? Here's a DM that looked to be horrible, but wasn't. Not for me, at least: My ex-wife.

It was her first time as DM and it was going rough. She lost her notes, her map was terribly drawn, she was horrible at voices even for a DM, her encounters were entirely too easy and she forgot her own villain's name, made up a whole new one and tried to pretend she had it right the whole time. Now, I was married to her and I vouched for her so I was getting dirty looks from our other player the whole time like I was supposed to do something. I was trying to hint about it, but I was also trying not to offend her because, you know, she was my wife.

Then we had an encounter with a vampire. The party, I might add, was level 3 and consisted of a bard and a cleric. This was not going to fly. Like, at all. So our cleric brings up how unbalanced this is, but she refuses to change it. Tells us we're fine. Our cleric grabs a source book and starts reading vampire abilities, she says it doesn't matter. Finally, I speak up. I tell her we can't possibly fight a vampire. She says "Then don't."

So we talk to the vampire, she barely cares about her boss at all, we make a deal. Blood for shelter and safe passage, easy. We spend the night there so our cleric can prepare spells, my bard has sex with the vampire, she drains a lot of blood, lesser restoration is cast a bunch, we leave alive but with pleasant memories where ALL our second-level spells should be.

Funny thing, that vampire became a recurring character. So much so that when our next campaign in that setting was run by a different DM, my ex's vampire joined our party as our rogue. Unfortunately, that campaign was the one detailed at the beginning of this thread.

[obstructor]

Well mine is fast:

Every encounter was a solo monster from some random book with a CR 3+ higher than the party, he would realize he was killing the party and start fudging the dice to make the monsters completely ineffective.

He was also obsessed with having min-maxed enemy parties where the entire party was crazy 3rd party classes.

You basically had to be a min-maxer to to anything in his campaigns.