Ayyy my story got featured! I still miss my poor shadow sorcerer, but I'm glad I'm not in that group anymore. Heck, maybe I'll bring her back for a different group sometime.
You should, I've wanted to bring back my half-dragon human warrior back into so many games, it's crazy! I want to see what mischief he's gotten into lately or what fine treasures he's found while stuck inside my DND folder.
It's a phenomenal character concept, I had a draconic bloodline sorc/paladin multiclass that the DM told me he was gonna let me fluctuate my fire/radiant into a hybrid that ignored resistance unless both were resisted and targeted vulnerabilities. Ever since then, if a PC wants to "specialize" in a certain way, I give them the tools
I'm still new to D&D, only being experienced with homebrew because it's what my cousin plays and he's my DM, but man does a Shadow Sorcerer sound cool. In the campaign I'm currently in I'm just a Tabaxi Fighter, but it's been really fun.
Several years ago in 3.5 while playing a rogue I encountered the Thieves Guild in a city I was passing through. Knowing their dangerous reputation I was polite and assured them I was not looking to operate on their turf, just passing through. I was killed with no chance. No battle or rolls, which wouldn't have really mattered as I was outnumbered and outgunned. The reason? I showed weakness by being polite.
first game ever. first character ever. ADnD - dm killed him 5 minutes in without a roll. he was a thief hiding in a bush on a ridge above an orc camp, over 250m away from the closest edge. (think 3 football fields, give or take a few meters) my turn came up, and so I said 'I lay as low to the ground as possible, and peer out from under the cover of the bush to see if I can see anything at all, is the camp calm, quiet, are there any arguments, etc?' 'you get shot in the eye. you're dead.' so yeah, from the far side of the camp, which was roughly another football field length across (so somewhere around the 350m mark) a one hit die, one eyed, drunken orc pinpoint shot me in the eye with a light crossbow. without even rolling. because the dm didn't like rogues. (which I'd asked before I even rolled the character if there were any limitations or preferences, and he said 'nope, roll what you like.') Honestly almost put me off playing entirely.
@@mattsmith457 actually, they did, the dm had a bit of a hissy over it and said 'ok, game's done' got up, packed his gear, and walked out of the conference room. since it was already booked, the ret of the players sat around for a few minutes, kinda looking around like 'wtf do we do now?' and the one that'd invited me said 'ok, guess I'll run it.' and passed me one of his random prerolled to use. honestly, that player stepping up at that moment kept me from not bothering to play again.
That is fishy. I mean, it would have been one thing if two orcs were having a Duel with hand crossbows, with the one facing your way rolling the *Nat1* equivalent, and the the percentile dice gets rolled, and it turns out, this thing did some sort of Robin Hood-like Ricocheting, with the DM going "Um, buddy, Odds or Evens?" and you got the wrong set, and he rolled a D20, or whatever, and it said "Heavy Hit", (and this is all done out in the open), and the damage dice say, "He's dead, Jim!" Well, at least it would have been funny, and crazy - accidently killed during an orc duel.
Probably not as big as some, but when I first started playing D&D 5e, back in August of 2019, the group's main DM, who has 20+ years of playing RPGs, and is also a wounded Marine who'd served in the Middle East (Relevant, in that he can be somewhat intimidating if he thinks that you're trying to break the rules, or if you accidentally touch him wrong - *never* touch him.), who, basically, only allowed the races and subclasses in the Player's Handbook. To be honest, part of this was because he only owned the Core Rule Books. The other part is because those who had extra books only used them for spells. He also has, as a rule that no Homebrew or Third-Party races or subclasses were allowed. But, he was aware of the other books, just never had the money to get them, as he preferred to buy from the shop we played in. Needless to say, he's got Marine Pride, and I can be as stubborn as a bull, although I know when backing down is best, if I don't want to get kicked out of a group. That being said, we'd done some mild headbutting over non-Core races and subclasses, but he'd basically have one way to end/stop the argument - "Is it Official? Prove it's Official and I'll allow it." At the time, didn't have the books, so I'd back down, if reluctantly. The headbutting came to a bit of a clash when I brought up the Celestial Warlock. This time, he went, "In my 20 years of playing, I've never even *heard* of such a thing. You've only been playing two months. Prove it's Official, and I'll allow it!" Fellow D&D Nerds, support your local library, for they can hide keys to dragon hordes. A library I like going to had what I needed - Xanathar's Guide to Everything - page 54, Celestial Warlock. Next session, I brought it to the game, only to notice that another player, who hadn't been at the last session, had their own copy. I got him to let the DM to look at the relevant page. Initially, we all laughed at the idea of serving a unicorn (unicorn knights), but then the DM got to the Level 1 abilities. Cue him staring at the wall, doing the Thousand Yard Stare. One of the others, who was on the opposite side of the table, looked at me and said "I think you broke him." It was as if Tiamat had popped in, and I'd convinced her to turn Vegan. When he finally made his Wisdom/Intelligence save, the DM gave me a look that was a mixture of Awe, Shock, and Respect. He got his own copy of Xanathar's soon after. Later, when my mother decided to join the group, we ran down the list of easy classes, came to monk (which we didn't have yet), and another player, who seemed to have a broader experience of D&D was like "Tabaxi Monk!" Cue my DM going "Tabaxi?" Luckily, I'd also gotten Volo's Guide to Monsters, and showed *that* page to him. He recovered easier that time, and as one of her magic items (we each got two) my mom's tabaxi monk got Magic Talons - a homebrewed item that let her add a d4 on top of her Martial Arts dice, basically letting her use her racial unarmed attack as part of her monk attack (we're level 6). Since then, as of October 2020, I've gotten all the player-related books, up to Theros. Annoyingly, that DM hasn't been playing with the group, due to matters dealing with current world events, (we used to play in a group of 10+, now it's more like 6, and rather infrequently) but I let him know about the books. He looks forward to checking them out, once things get settled down. Edit - December 30th, 2020 - Got Tasha's now.
Sounds like a decent dude who likes following the rules (Military background, so it kinda makes sense) and just never bothered to explore outside of the Players Handbook.
@@namAehT Yeah, hence why his "unfairness" isn't as bad as a number of bad DMs - he was at least willing to admit when he was wrong, especially when one brought proof that the Race/Subclass was indeed Official.
This one isn't nearly as bad as other stories people have (I've been blessed with an amazing D&D group). My friend was Dm'ing an Out Of The Abyss campaign and I made bread with some spores (don't even know how that's possible), I rolled a Nat 20 on it and I was like "hell ya now I can make amazing bread." and the DM said "No you can't you never learned how to make bread." (not the unfair part) our Kenku Ranger was able to learn how to make "Good Bread" from watching me make it, because of a racial ability (I think) so after that I say to the Dm "hey can I learn how to make the really good bread from Bird Noises (our Rangers name) during our next long rest?" and he said "No." he didn't even give a reason he just didn't let me.
The ranger could learn by watching someone who couldn't do it, and that person couldn't then learn it from the ranger who miraculously figured it out... I don't think the dm understands his reasoning.
Where to start... The first time I ever played DND, trying to get used to the rules and whatnots. I know rolling a 1 is a bad thing. So when I rolled a 2 on my perspective roll, I was like whoo, that was close, but the DM took my character, got him so drunk that he walked into the wrong bedroom, had a woohoo with another character - all the time me telling him this wasn't fair, but he continues - and then took my character and wandered off into another room and passed out. I was left out of the adventure and I rage-quit because if this. Note: this DM hated half dragon characters and I was a half dragon human... Oh excuse me, he hated all dragons and deemed them perfect prey to be hunted down.
I will never understand why some people can’t just set their hatred for pointless things aside. If you’re gonna fuck someone over just because you don’t like their character’s race, you shouldn’t be a DM. If you’re gonna fuck someone over just because you don’t like the person themself, again, you shouldn’t be a DM. In fact, you probably shouldn’t even play with them until you learn to set your hatred aside because you’re just gonna actively try to ruin campaigns for them and in some situations, fucking them over could fuck your whole team over.
I’m really sad hearing these stories... I was about to talk about how average a campaign I played was, because of the bad flow of story and combat, but after this video I think I should be more thankful lol
if your DM was trying to flow the story and was fair to all characters and wasn't bending or breaking game rules to suit him as a DM then you probably had a good DM.
First character was a dragonborn cleric, pretty good-mannered. Our DM’s NPCs always had the same personality: talked to the group like they were dumb and to get out of their shop. My character was asking him something, and the dwarf kept getting an attitude. I asked him why he was acting so shitty, and he explained that his family was killed by undead, and he kept talking down to me. I got sick of this in and out of character, and told the blacksmith “well with that attitude its no wonder your family is dead”. Everyone looked at me with surprise, and he had me roll initiative. He tends to be the DM that likes to instakill you, so my first action i casted death ward, and on his turn, he happened to be a lv 20 cleric... and smited me dealing over 200 damage. I was brought to 1 hp. As a legendary action, he smited me again, dealing 160 damage. Yeah... we don’t play that campaign anymore.
Spoiler for critical role in the story! My hexblade was noped out of the campaign by my dm. His country was in a state of war, and he would be able to stop it. However the party obviously wasnt interested in visiting my homeland anytime soon since we were exploring a new land at the time (understandable, someones backstory shouldn't be forced at some specific time when the party is obviously busy doing something else). Due to some good rolls I actually managed to enter my patrons realm, who basically told me I was halfassing in a far away land and I should go back to fight for my homeland, so I could become King and become the Prophet of my god. I asked if I even was allowed to refuse, to which my dm replied that I could, but my patron would probably take my powers away if I didn't do this. I'm not entirely sure what my dm was trying to set up here, a redemption arch, the loss of my powers or just the removal of my character. Anyway, since at this point my character was still loyal to his patron and I had no intentions of switching Gods like Fjord from Critical Role or something, I agreed. My dm was pretty pissed at me, saying I should never do that again because he believed I didn't discuss my character leaving the party with him. I explained to him that I never intended to do that, but he put an ultimatum in front of me and my character would never refuse his patron at this point in the story. I explained that he basically yeeted my character out of the game.
This reminds me of the time my DM remade my character without me knowing. I was trying to build a grapple ranger in 3.5, cause I was young and thought it'd be fun to use enemies as my primary weapons. I ended up getting a magic axe that let me talk to animals, which for a ranger was great when trying to get an animal companion. Instead of getting one off the bat, I had a lot of difficulty in obtaining one. As t the time I thought it was for roleplay purposes. Turns out the DM basically remade my character after I hit level 2 as a fighter, cause I was running him more as a fighter and less as a ranger. He even changed my equipment, rearranged my stats a bit and also changed the roles behind the dm screen. I didn't find out about this until a few levels later. My only hint was every now and then he said something on the lines of my spear misses, but I kept reminding him it wasn't a spear but an axe. My dad(also I the group) didn't know about this, but the rest of the table(DM's family) did. I laughed about it at the time, kind of But when I look back I get really pissed off about it.
The most unfair thing a DM has ever done to me, he actually did to the whole group (so I guess I wasn't being singled out at least). I've written this story a few times on threads like these. Feel free to use it in a future video. This happened way, WAY back in 1989 or 1990. We were playing the greatest edition of D&D ever, AD&D 2nd Edition (just kidding . . . kinda, there are some elements of 2nd edition I really do miss). The DM's name was Phung (I'm not going to bother with fake names because GOD did this guy ever suck as a DM). Phung was friends with one of the other players in my regular D&D group (Aaron I think). Anyway, Phung invited Aaron to join him for a game of AD&D set in the Greyhawk setting. Aaron extended the invitation to the rest of us. Along with Aaron there was me, Ryan, Laird, Konrad, and David. When we got there there were a bunch of other people there to play (I'm guessing Phung's regular D&D group?). Including the DM I think there was a total of 13 of us (maybe 15, it was a HUGE group). We sat around a large ping pong table, Phung at one end, five or six down each side, and Laird and me sitting side by side at the other end (BTW, ping pong tables make GREAT D&D gaming tables, especially if playing with terrain & miniatures). The session started out okay. We were all starting at 1st level. I was playing a female human barbarian that I had already rolled up and been wanting to play (I had actually wrote her up to be for The Forgotten Realms, but whatever). Laird was playing a female half-elven bard. And I honestly don't remember what anyone else was playing (hey, it's been thirty years). Given the number of players I'm pretty sure we had a fairly well rounded group with at least one of every class. Anyway, we start out by being hired as mercenaries/bounty hunters to eliminate the monstrous humanoids who had been raiding the town. We were to take the right ear of every monster we killed as proof in order to collect our bounty. To begin with, things went okay. Given the size of the party, even at level one we managed to do pretty well in combat. We fought a number of goblins, orcs, bugbears, and gnolls. The problems began when we first engaged in combat. Phung was insisting on us rolling separate initiatives. In a normal game, this would be no problem. But again, this group was HUGE. We had a number of fairly seasoned DMs in my group (Laird & David would often take turns DMing in my group, but I would run the occasional game as well) and we ALL told Phung that for a group this size that he should be using Group Initiatives. For those of you who may not know, rolling Group Initiative requires rolling just one initiative roll for the entire group and then everyone taking turns around the table either clockwise or counter clockwise. You lose the individual benefits of high DEX bonus, but it ensures that everyone at the table has a chance to play and makes book keeping so much easier on the DM. It is ESPECIALLY useful for unusually large parties like this one. Anyway, Phung refused to heed our advise and insisted on individual initiative rolls. What's more, he didn't keep track of whose initiative came when. So some players at the table were constantly missing out on their turns during combat. This part was frustrating as hell, but not really him being unfair. NOW begins the unfair part. We came to the base of a 200' high cliff with dozens of gnolls armed with bows & arrows up top. There were no clear avenues to get up the cliff without having arrows raining down on us from above. They were out of our bow range, yet because they had the high ground we were still within theirs (which does make sense as our arrows would have to work against gravity while theirs would be aided by gravity). I thought maybe we can find an unguarded part of the cliff to climb up and flank them, so I grabbed a couple of the other tanks, we went into the trees so we would be out of sight of the gnolls, and went about a mile off to one side. When we came out of the trees, the gnolls were on top of the cliff here too waiting for us. So we went back into the trees and went a couple more miles off to the side. Again, more gnolls. Rinse and repeat at least a couple more times. We traveled something like ten miles, yet apparently there are enough gnolls to guard the entire top of that cliff from where we started. So apparently there were over 10,000 gnolls guarding the top of that cliff. I remind you that there were only maybe 14 of us, at most, and we were all 1st level. Also, there are maybe 50 or 60 men, women, and children in a single gnoll tribe. SOMETHING has apparently managed to get about a thousand gnoll tribes to band together into a single army. This shit was WAY above our paygrade. So we basically said "Screw it" and went back to town to find an adventure that DOESN'T require the entire party to be a minimum of 13th level in order to have a fighting chance. And this is where things start getting REALLY unfair. No matter WHAT we tried to do, no matter WHAT our rolls were, Phung would just declare that we failed. Laird's bard tried getting some money by juggling knives on the street corner. Yet despite rolling a near perfect juggling skill check, his character made no money. The rogue tried conning the barkeep in the tavern to give him his most expensive bottle of dwarven spirits for free, yet despite having rolled a near perfect skill check for Fast Talk the barkeep refused. I was bored so I said that I wanted to start a barfight, and Phung said that the only other people in the tavern were a band of adventurers who we could tell were far more experienced than us and we would get our butts kicked if we tried fighting them. THEN WHY THE HECK AREN'T THEY OUT THERE SLAUGHTERING THE 10,000 GNOLLS THAT ARE GUARDING THE TOP OF THAT CLIFF?!?!?! Clearly at this point Phung was trying to railroad us into walking into that TPK situation, which none of us wanted to go through with. I was fed up so I just said "Fuck this bullshit! I'm out!" And I packed up my stuff and left. My entire D&D group joined me, and the session just died right then and there. I never played D&D with Phung again. He was just a terrible and petty DM. Maybe he matured and got better? I don't know. I just knew that I didn't want to play with him anymore.
The most unfair thing that happened to me in D&D happened with my first charactsr ever. I didn't know Drow were evil when I made my ranger, I just thought they looked cool and I liked the darkvision. Throughout the campaign up until her death, my ranger had to hide in the cart while travelling or face such intense racism that I literally couldn't roleplay. Her actual death came after the party encountered a circus man offering a challenge: at the centre of a large, circular rug he had placed a pedestal with a magic item on it. Anyone who had both feet on the ground when they touched the item could take it, but the rug was enchanted to teleport anyone who touched it off of itself. My ranger had the idea to roll up the rug after seeing that the bottom of the rug didn't have the same teleport effect, and as a result she was able to legally claim the magic item. As soon as she stepped out of the tent with her new item (never did get to know what it was or what it did), she was beaten and killed by an angry mob of all the other people who'd tried to claim it and failed, which included most of her party. Ever since that experience, whenever I run Drow in my homebrews, they're always misunderstood folk who people only see as evil because they live underground.
This reminds me of another story about someone who was playing a Drow Rogue that the party turned on. The reason they turned on them was because the Rogue kept wandering off, despite telling them where he was going and what he hoped to accomplish every single time and not even trying to hide it, and bad backstory reasons to be racist against Drow. Half the encounter was spent with the Drow player just taking the dodge action until the DM was forced to inform him that they weren't going to stop until someone was dead. The Rogue then fought back and wound up TPKing that party somehow. The DM then promised him to find a different group of players for them to play with, so I hope it worked out for them like I think it did for you.
@@morgantaylor84 D&D in general worked out for me, I'm DMing a new group that is a lot of fun! But to digress to my poor Drow for a second, the reason the party didn't lift a finger to help her when the crowd attacked was because... well, they'd just met her. Two sessions prior, she and her original party were helping a small Dwarf village in the side of a hill clear out some Duregar in their mine. The Duregar killed two party members, and the third held them off long enough for her to escape and go seek help. When she got back, the Dwarves were suspicious, but luckily a new travelling troupe of mercs had wandered in (the new PCs) and agreed to pay them what they'd promised us to go clear the Duregar. We returned to the mine, found them wounded, and this time finished the job. The new party agreed to take her into town so she could find the families of the previous party and tell them what had happened, but sadly (with her in the cart and unable to verify where they were going) they went to the wrong city where the festival was going on. She had no contacts here, no one knew her, which the party took as proof she'd lied. They went to the festival for a distraction and to discuss what to do about their unwanted hanger-on, and when the crowd jumped her, they figured "problem solved". The new rogue lifted the magic item from her corpse when all was said and done and the party moved on... and so did I, from that game. It was a hell of an introduction to D&D.
@@Tzryylon5 It's probably a good thing you weren't me. My immediate reaction in a similar situation was to punt the magic item in question to one of my fellow party members who weren't doing anything and just run. In my case it caused my problem to become the whole party's problem when the DM split the mob having half chase after my character and half assault the party. Needless to say when they were all wanted bandits by the town in question for the crime of several counts of self-defense and evading the law their PCs weren't too happy with mine. I simply sent them a message, via letter, telling them where to meet my PC and got up from the table and told them "Take your revenge against my PC, at least this time people are acting based on racism actually have been wronged by them" and made a new character which was another one "wronged" by my PC when in reality they were the one who caused my PC to be on the surface world in the first place through their own bullsh*t. He fit the party way better as it went on almost complete murder hobo after my former PC was "brought to justice". Edit: I admit I probably should've cut and run when my first PC left, but I wasn't as good at spotting problematic tendencies then.
As a new dm, I knew that doing a sort of racism vs an evil race (one you can play as in the regular player handbook even) wouldn’t make for much gun if characters, I rule that not all of a race are evil, just their governments
This was mine and a group of friends first time in a 5E campaign. The DM was my father. I played a tabaxi rogue, there was a tabaxi ranger, a kenku monk, a teifling warlock and a dwarf paladin. It was about our sixth session in and we had come upon an ambush, after saving Phandelvar from an invasion (we played the starter module and had become the heroes by restarting a magic forge that had been hidden within). The ambush started after we were led there by a suspicious figure, so naturally my rogue was already lagging behind the group. Combat started and on the start of the fifth round I realized combat was not going okay, and it was close to everyone being knocked out. The paladin and ranger were down already. I started using my cunning action and my tabaxi speed to dip away. Originally, I planned on staying just out of sight and following the group ambushing our group because eveyone was getting knocked out, not outright killed. Instead the DM decided it would be fun to drop more enemies on to my rogue. In an area where it was a well planned ambush. There should have been no enemies anywhere near, because when we were following the suspicious figure to the ambush sight we spot checked every time we were given a chance. So, naturally, with everyone rolling high, there shouldn't have been any enemies. Because enemies came upon me, I started running every round, using my cunning action as well. EVERY. SINGLE. ROUND. HE DROPPED ENEMIES ON THE MAP. I think by the time I finally got shot down, I had 50ish kobolds following me.
In an old AD&D (2e) campaign, I was playing a dual-classed Psionicist-Mage. I'd done this partially to nerf myself, as the most experienced player there, and knew the slower level pacing for me would prevent me from accidentally alienating the newer players. It also made me squishier and in a better position to show how roleplay instead of dice can be used to progress. However, the abilities to get into the minds of NPCs combined with an old spell that was sort of like a cross between Dimension Door and a portal gun that existed back then bothered the DM. He was big on railroad campaigns, and a psychic mage can accidentally gain information that skips entire encounters and keep the party from being tricked. I had also "portaled" us out of a dungeon cell at one point which bypassed an entire dramatic trial situation he'd written. He decided it was time to kill me. Camping in the woods at a relatively low level, he dropped a Great Cat on us when i had final watch at camp and had been deus-ex-machina'd away from the party. This thing was basically an enormous tiger with three attacks per round made perfectly to slice and dice squishy mage robes. I manage to get enough distance on it that I was able to pop half of my portal under where it was coming down on the ground leaping at me, and the other half directly above that portal, causing the Cat to accelerate to terminal velocity while failing attempts to get out of the portal chain (1d6 damage each time). Terminal velocity in 2E = 20d6 damage when I removed the lower portal, plus 1d6 for failing the save to not get caught partway as it closed. Dead kitty. The DM was frustrated. Then, we went to a river and were informed that about this time, our water supply was low. Knowing i needed to rest after the cat incident interrupted my night camping, we'd need water before we could camp again with no ill effects. He informed us our thirst was enough we would need to camp here to prevent issues going forward. He had placed a dead deer at the head of the river, and the entire party fell ill with aggressive diarrhea that weakened all of our rolls, with periodic saves to avoid damage based on Endurance (which mine, of course, was lowest). All except me, who had instead sunk a waterskin under the river and cast Purify Food and Drink with my last spell. At this point the DM's intent was so obvious immersion was broken and it had become a running joke. The campaign flopped as a result, and he didn't get to DM again.
Told a DM I wanted to do Fighter 1/Wizard 19 so I could be a heavy armored wizard without going Gith or Dwarf and taking a feat... He said sure. Once I got to level 2 he said I couldnt do that because I would be too powerful... And that was the last session we had lol.
The most unfair thing a DM ever did to me was set a creature who was able to 1 shot my tank with normal melee attacks. I responded by blowing it the F up with a double booby trap made out of a false wall that swung down home alone style.......and a Fire Trap spell that went off like a frag grenade when it punched the wall..... Needless to say, I killed it lol.
Playing thief halfling wanted to hide behind a large turtle person bard, had me roll dice for chance to Succeed, rolled an 18 with bonuses it came to 21 and was told I failed and fell on the turtle persons shell spikes impaling myself and I had to roll for damage. This was during the first 5 min of my first campaign. Let’s just say I never played again.
I agree. My first DM'ing was difficult, but hearing these stories it's like ooh, I remember when... And now it's like, if I do anything stupid, please slap me. I want my players to have a fun and exciting adventure not a "your character died, you have no save rolls cuz I say so".
3.5e, had a fighter specialized in tripping enemies. Guisarme to start, Improved trip, combat reflexes; then a flail to switch to up close. Pretty much just stood back enough that melee would engage me, I'd trip at the 10' range as they approached, After about three battles of good crowd control, the entire world magically knew, and no one ever charged me again. Enemies from completely untouched backgrounds knew to utilize 5' steps. The last straw was when a dire bear did it. Charged, stopped at 10', then just waited the next round to 5' in. Never went back after that.
I had a DM who managed to both railroad us and also give us little to no guidance at the same time. The adventure jumped back and forth between different scenes without much explanation, of, and when he defeated the 'Undead Sorceress'. The DM revealed that, not only were we not supposed to kill this character who had clearly been set up as the villain, but that in doing so we'd gotten the 'Bad Ending'. Again, we had no was of knowing this, as even when we rolled near max on checks to discover information, we still received no clues. After this, the DM left our group and we'd not seen them since.
I was playing a Wookiee bounty hunter who was attacked by Jabs and enslaved with one con roll and he stuck me in desert by the way. And then the other players bought me because they were like we want to hire more man power. But the DM heard slave so I was a collared slave for no reason and the DMPC was making sure I was not enjoying it. I don’t talk to that guy anymore but sadly it was not because of this. And the many other times my characters were targeted as his story punching bag. Which was every game.
I'm actually in the middle of a Curse of Strahd Revamped session! It's my first game in years, and I'm super excited to hear other people running it! I can't wait to hear what other ppl do in the situations we went through!
Playing starfinder I was playing the son of a precious character I played that the DM hated. So everytime I would go for a skill check if be given a check for a skill I didnt have but not related to the check. (Example, mysicism for reading body language on an android, engineering check on finding doors and windows on blueprints.) And on top of that everyone seemed to have a hateful disposition to my character that never really did much. Edit:he only had me roll checks to the 3-5 skills I didnt have and would explain it via "I'm the DM I say its that"
to be fair engineering to properly look at blueprints kinda makes sense If a player argued he wanted to use engineering instead just to interact with a blueprint, perfectly fine. the dm should not enforce that though. Also... Starfinder allows take10 and take20 rules. basically if you take 10 minutes of time to do something you dont roll, you take a 10 as your roll. if you spend 1 hour you take a 20 as your roll+proficiency+attribute obviously.
I had a dm that killed me even when I did nothing the rogue in our group did a crit miss and his dagger flew out of his hand killed the rogue and then flew back and killed me I didn't get to roll a save or anything ( I had 18 con 15 dex and plus 2 armor and a magic full plate helm) anyways made a new character with similar stats and got killed again in a similar way after that the whole group left cause we were tired of his bs
I felt horrible when I built this bbeg battle with monsters from kobold press tome of beasts. Was all excited. And then in the battle, my paladin player tried to 5th level smite. I clarified that smite dealt radiant damage. Monster was immune. Next turn the paladin did some shroud of necrotic damage. I sheepishly replied "as your mist swirls around the void, you sense, the figure before you remains unaffected." Yup. Paladin did his two nuclear options and the monster I picked RAW just so happen to bypass both.
I once played under a DM, who took away a lot of our agency as players, gave us too strong opponents, always favorised the edgy antimate rogue in over half of a year barely get us to level 3. He was quite toxic, so I broke up contact and started a new campain with all the players except the edgy rogue. We play happily every week and it's very wholesome.
The worst thing the DM ever did for me was when I decided to play a Dragonborn Beast Barbarian, and then he threw an encounter at us, only wisdom saving throwns, no melee attacks, the creature swallowed weapons after being attack without succeeding a str save, and after 2 rounds of combat he turned my character into a clone of himself and made me run away. Then he rairoaded us through a dungeon we were put without a choice (resisting meant losing hp AND being put in the dungeon), facing the same enemy again, then facing a weird cult leader that got obliterated by a god he was a clone of with if I remember correctly 5 desintegrate spells in a single turn. Then the god proceeded to flirt with our characters (he made it a point to say he perceives us all as children). Never had another session since.
Oh, I have one. I was playing an Abjuration wizard who focused on utility over damage. We had a running joke of my character's various excuses as to why I didn't prepare Fireball that day. My character's sister had just been kidnapped. The party killed one of the BBEG's lieutenants, who gave us a crystal to teleport one of us to her location because we were worthy opponents or something. I was explicitly told that I needed to go now to save her, it was a one way trip, and only one person could go. It's my character's sister, so I'm going. Out of character, I'm thinking "This encounter was designed for me, and we just fought a boss. There's no way this is a fight, because I couldn't win a 1 on 1 fight before that boss before". I spend two weeks in between sessions making an elaborate plan to save my sister involving getting a buff from an NPC cleric to compensate for my garbage charisma while I disguise myself as the guy we just killed. I was going to simply ask whoever was on the other side to see my sister and Dimension Door away with her. When next session comes around, the Cleric basically runs off immediately before I can ask for the buff. I use the crystal, and there's a fight on the other side. My sister is in a force cage I can't Misty Step through, and the guy I'm fighting is immune to fire and cold damage (my main types of damage). I escape with 1 HP and call the DM a bastard as he gloats about how "tragic" it was.
If these DMs are part of your friends group, remove them from the group, if he says it's just a game, remind him that in this game he is being malicious to his friends intentionally. Also I'd most likely punch some of these.
mine turned my twinky scared of everything cleric boy into a werewolf to "toughen him up" . We never fought any werewolves, we were investigating a murder scene that had weird silver liquids on the floor, so i had my character investigate it and flavoured it that he gave it a sniff and dip finger into it and give it the tiniest lick and spit thing . Then was told I needed to roll a con save and failed , apparently that was enough to turn me into a full blown werewolf.
Threw CR4 CR6 CR8 enemies and even a CR14 boss at the party in a dungeon. We were all level 1 with a party of maybe 5 or 6 people, and this DM was also using "free actions" for attacks so the enemies could get 5 attacks each per turn. Naturally this made it very likely for a party member to die to any one of these enemies, even without the abuse of "free actions". The DM admitted after being called out that they did not like DnD and was claiming to be making their own game system, I don't think I would ever want to play whatever system they come up with after that experience.
I have the opposite so to speak. I was dming descent into Avernus and our newbie wanted to make a frost sorcerer so to speak. took only spells with ice damage. first few levels is fine because its in baldurs gate against cultists and stuff. But once we got into avernus... nearly every devil and demon has cold resistance. It became sort of a running joke that all enemies are resistant to his damage. "Your spell seemingly has less of an effect than you would expect, the enemy is barely touched." then he took the elemental adept feat, and every single time he used a cold spell i said aloud something like: "you see the demon smiling in anticipation of your ray of frost. Yet once the spell hit him, his face froze. literally." or "The thick fur the hellhound is wearing seemingly makes it impervious to the cold, but somehow your spell seems to penetrate the coat of fur" we still joke about it a year later
we were 4th level or so in 3.5. we were running through a deep dungeon and at the end we got a gem that'd grant us 1 wish. we were low on health, spells, and potions and just wanted out. we wished to be transported to a safe location on the surface. Turns out the gem shatters and explodes upon completing the wish, and it went with us since we were holding it. it did 10d6 damage to everyone with a reflex safe of 19 for half. even half damage was 5 times what we had in health. So we beat the dungeon but still lost. apparently we weren't supposed to use the gem because it was evil.
@@professorsponge1554 No I'm pretty sure he just lifted the idea of the gem from that module, as the tomb of horrors isn't a normal dungeon, as in there's like 2 total combats besides the end boss, but the whole dungeon is filled to the brim with instakill bullshit, often without a save, with little to no hints as to what to do on various puzzles, no consistent logic (IE walking through one fog gate will teleport you forward in the dungeon, but going through another later on will gender swap you, and then later alignment swap you if you try to go through again, and also steal literally all of your stuff, leaving you naked and back at the start of the dungeon) and all of the "loot" before the very last room with the dungeon boss will either disintegrate upon leaving the dungeon, or is trapped like the exploding wish gem used here.
@@yoshifan2334 I found the PDF and gave it a run through. I remember a lot of the traps he through at us and you're right. None of these traps sound familiar to me. When he threw puzzles at us they tended to stick in my mind, and yeah it sounds like it was just the gem. Upon further recollection the other puzzles in that dungeon he threw at us were far tamer than what's in tomb of horrors. child's play. This DM's one of my players now, and its so strange he'd only lift the gem from this. He normally doesn't do that.
The most unfair thing my 1 dm ever did to me was off my characters the body count was 2 fighters 2 wizards 1 warlock 1 sorcerer and 2 clerics. 1 of which was killed out of combat and all took place over 8 sessions. All enemies no matter where I was or what I was doing always threw everything they at me. Rolling enough nat 20s to convince antivacs moms there wrong killing me in 1 if lucky 2 turns . I chalked it up to he was brand new to dming after my ninth death I asked he said it was revenge for killing his charector 2 yrs prier. I asked him to get out of my house and not come back.
I mighta brained that guy with a bat myself, but i also have a rather viscousness towards petty idiots, i can forgive a lot, but old petty stuff just ticks me off
@@KyleSage35 he 17 me at the time 28 lol I might live where the prisons are a motel 6 with a dingy dress code but I like my freedom a bit to much to mangel a minor miniscule gray matter.
A bit late to the party, but why not... Back in my 3.5 days I was playing a warforged artificer (cliche, I know) focused primarily in utility/group enhancements. In our first mission we were sent to retrieve some amulet/necklace McGuffin from a temple by the mayor of a village who I (and the rest of the party) was getting 'I am secretly the badguy' vibes from. Fast forward through a fairly standard dungeon/ruin run and as we return to town the group and I decide that I should cast Hoard Gullet (a spell that allows you to swallow items into an extradimensional space) and store the McGuffin in it until we can determine the true nature of the Mayor during our meeting. Turns out he was evil (shocker) and tried to kill us while his daughter had 'picked the bard's pocket to get the McGuffin' in the middle of the fight without being seen (and no rolls to notice her at all were made), and when informed that it was, in fact, inside of the hoard gullet, he retconned it to her having somehow shoved her entire arm down my throat, rooted around inside of me, removed her arm with the McGuffin, all without anybody (including my character receiving a reverse cavity search) being given any rolls to notice her in any way during an actively moving fight where my character was running around from cover to cover with their crossbow and never spent a single round without changing locations. We were annoyed, but forgave him since apparently he was trying to set up a storyline/quest that was hinged on trying to stop this mayor (and his family) and their evil plot to resurrect some dead evil deity or another. Of course, this was not the only thing he did, so the game did die soon after (though I will admit it took far longer than it should since he was our friend and we didn't want to make him feel bad for us all quitting).
My DM Rolled A D100 and got a 76 and said anyone who rolls under this won't be taking part in tonights session and I was the only one who failed this I had to sit out the session.
First time playing was a one shot I did with my friend and a few randoms on roll20, we killed the BBEG only for the DM to get pissy and have a beholder come out of the wall.
I am running a homebrew with my wife, my son, and my two daughters. They were taken to a dwarvwn town elder to be questioned for strange disappearances and to get vital info and a quest. I know how my wife roll plays very well. So, when she started mouthing off the the elder, he warned her that he had many court wizards that would be her undoing. She mouthed off again, and the wizards cast silence. I told her to make a CON save and really didn't care what she rolled, she failed it. That way the elder could deliver the information that they needed without the cocky party wizard getting them all into a fight.
almost ten years ago, my very first Pen and Paper game, we played pathfinder. Played a group, had some fun, but because of irl most ppl quit. DM told me, he would run a solo adventure for me, so I could get to play my char on. I was absolutely overjoyed, since I loved the char, and loved the game in general... wanted to do more stuff... Well, I played a lvl 3 Ranger. After just some minor intros, he threw a terrasque at me. I was dead within 3 turns, despite my character being infused with a living metal armor, and having terrain bonus. He introduced the monster as being "attacked by the city guard" but when I turned up, to check it out and see if I could help, he made it focus soley on me. I ran away, but it just jumped to catch up with me and then insta killed me in a single attack. This was despite me hiding in a nearby ruined house. And he didnt accept me trying to take cover or hide anywhere as "The surroundings are just empty plains and fields" And when I was dead he straight up told me "well you werent supposed to fight the terrasque, you were just supposed to see it, to see how dangerous and corrupted the world had become." When he could have easily just had it focus on the damn townguard that was there too, and let me escape, especially considering I was a really new player and didnt even get what a terrasque was, with his description of it being "About the size of a house" not doing much to tell me, that I shouldn't go there at all, since we fought similarily sized enemies in the group before, that I basically soloed due to the living metal armor. This was at the DMs home, which was an hour of a bicycle ride away (was too young to drive a car yet) So I rode my bike for an hour to get to do some fun adventures, got insta killed and sent home. Safe to say, I never played with that DM again, and didnt play any TTRPGs for well over 2 years, since that situation turned me off entirely.
my first Vampire (WOD) game I was told to make a character and that I would be in a homered version of 'not LA' so I made a ww1 vet with 100 years of history and flavor. very carefully planned out his possessions and had them all approved by the storyteller. my first session I get of a boat at the docks with 3 trunks of my personal belongings, most of them just flavor and memorabilia of his life- far more sentimental value than in-game use though there was some in game use for all of it. I am on the docks less than 10 seconds when I am ambushed by 10 ghouls after abandoning all but one trunk (I had wisely split up my most important stuff in case something like this happened I had played with this guy before) I was "rescued" by the sheriff who aparently knew where I was but wouldn't drive an extra 30 ft to assist in the recovery of my possessions and beat me up (to the point of my having to spend blood points to regenerate) for being 'stupid when I wasn't even the one who decided where to go. later we decided to go visit one of the leaders of the city to find a patron and some direction. his hideaway was on the "bad side" of town which meant that stack of cars block streets off and there is no electricity and every person you see has an AK-47 or better so we get there and the guy had arbitrarily decided to burn down his own home so he can't talk to us and on the way out seeing the fire in the background of the rear view mirror cause one of us to frenzy (no roll) it continued like that eg the cops show up the second we fire a weapon or hit someone despite apparently half the city being completely lawless but I can't type any more of this it is just making me sad lol. anyway it took 4 years before I agreed to play that system again this time with a much better storyteller and it was one of the best games I ever played.
AL dm explicitly told me she doesnt like high ac characters, but i only had a tier 2 sorcadin with a +2 shield and a +2 platemail. so that made my ac a 24. 29 with shield spell. she promptly had us encounter dragon riding githyanki that showers us with dragonfire before initiative and casts telekinesis every turn including the first, to remove my armor. eventually i failed the str save and my ac was down to 14. we won that fight by dm fudging the dice and teaching me a valuable lesson, to never play with her again
The most unfair thing a DM ever did to me was when playing through a campaign of which I had experience in, but he wanted me as a player anyway, saying that my experience with both the campaign and being a DM would be helpful. I accepted and I solemnly swore that I would not meta-game in any way. He was fairly new as a DM but had alot of experience as a player in a campaign I ran, as well as with other DM's. I mostly play my characters as being cautious, because that's just how I like to play them. I don't normally just rush into situations without taking in the surroundings. And I thought it this campaign would suit me well as there are ALOT of dangers, puzzles and traps in it. That being said. Every time I did solve puzzle, find or avoid a trap, etc. I was accused of meta-gaming. Not taking into consideration the times when my character hadn't noticed the danger and triggered whatever happened. Not calling out the other players whenever they solved a puzzle either. It got to the point where I just wouldn't help solve the puzzles (mind you, having experience in a campaign does not mean I have memorized all the puzzles.) So when we were in the final dungeon of the campaign there were HINTS given to the players about the different puzzles on the different floors. So each time we got to a new room, the only thing I did was remind the other players about the hints... which also got me called out for meta-gaming. Long story short, I eventually left the game. The accusations was not the main reason why, but it was a contributor. Me and two other players (half the player group) left because of what the DM and the remaining players considered fun gaming. I own every D&D 5e book. I have read and watched streams of most adventures. But EVERY good player and DM should know the difference between player and character knowledge, and not to meta game. TL;DR. New DM asks me to join in a campaign of which I am familiar to play and help him out. I swear not to meta game. Get continuously called out for meta-gaming due to being cautious player. I eventually leave the group and two other players leave with me.
Was playing a game of 5e with some friends. It was a low magic item and low gold campaign so no bags of holding. After every fight my ranger would grab armor and weapons of the bandits or who ever we killed and put them in the wagon to be sold later when we made it into town. I guess he got tired of telling me what was on the bandits cause he had a level 20 dmpc halfing show up and fuck with us. After he was done messing with us he said he teleports away with your horse. I reminded him that teleport has a weight limit. He told me he was the dm so what ever he said goes and that now the entire wagon was gone. So that was all of my gold, equipment, rations, potions and everything I have been saving up for the entire campaign. I ruined his campaign by completely ignoring all plot hooks and danger from then on as my character learned that in this world its not profitable to go and adventure when someone could just teleport in and steal it away in less then a min
I really wanna get into D&D but I don't really know how or have any friends who would play. I get to live vicariously through your videos tho. Sounds like a lot of fun.
I haven't had anything too bad happen to me, but the worst thing that happened to one of my friends is as follows (told secondhand, I wasn't there in person): he was playing in a early edition campaign in high school with pre generated character sheets and he was given a paladin. the whole time he was playing that character, he was never allowed to do what he wanted because the DM would tell him it wasn't in character and what he should do instead. the example I remember is that he wanted to take a dead guy's sword he found because his current one wasn't good and this new one was better, but was told "a paladin wouldn't do that, he would bury the body with his equipment and say a prayer". that in combination with the fact that he was the only human and all the other characters were racist elves has made so to this day, he very vocally refuses to play paladins and only ever picks chaotic neutral for is alignment. messed up situation all around.
Disclaimer I wouldn't count any horror stories I was in as "unfair" those were on a whole other level. So this is my "unfair DM" story. D&D 5e through Roll20. Other characters don't really matter, other than maybe pointing out that one of the players was a friend of the DM and got to homebrew their race. I was playing a Deep Gnome Illusionist and all-in-all the first couple of sessions we had were solid. The problem arose when I started using what I set out to use. Illusions. Tried using Minor Illusion to communicate with a creature no one shared a language with through what was essentially a slide show of images. "A cantrip can't be used like that, it's too strong for a level 0 spell". Alright, I thought to myself - nothing I did was against the spell description but I won't make a fuss about it. Use Silent Image to hide the party - "you walk for... without finding anything and then! How long is the duration of Silent Image again? Yeah it expired right before you found this sorry". The final nail for me was when we got to the big city and my -2 Charisma Gnome had to roll straight Charisma Checks to see if his illusions were seen through by others. Ignoring that in the spell description is says exactly what an NPC needs to do to try and see through an illusion. Nah, let's use my dump stat to determine success instead. There was also a part of the campaign where we had to hand over all of the spell scrolls we found in a dungeon - removing all the reward we got for completing the challenges right after I talked out of character about scribing said spells into my spellbook. I did try talking to the guy a couple of times but according to him he played with a group once that tried to push the rules in their favour too much and he's extra harsh because of that. Not sure what is extra harsh about ignoring feature descriptions in favour of homebrew rulings but heck - table blew up and disbanded shorty later because of reasons regarding the homebrew race friend.
my dm decided at some point that our team had to many magic items so, he decided (between sessions) to have some bandits rob us of all but one magic item each no fight no saves no nothing just "you guys were robbed choose one magic item and remove the rest"
Ohhhhh boy I got a fun one So one day me and my friends were all sitting around, "what should we do" someone chimes in one guy, who is notorious for campaign hopping speaks up. He says, "oh i have a campaign idea if you guys want to play d&d?" We're all bored and are like "sure why not what could go wrong" Turns out a lot So we're rolling characters and for once someone else plays a tank, normally I'm the last person to make a character, working 2 jobs+ helping family+girlfriend+social life= tight schedule, so I normally get stuck playing a tank or healer or more often than not both. Hence why I was excited to roll up my first ever Half elf and first ever monk. We all finish about 45ish minutes later, we're all sitting around "You guys are on a boat in the middle of an ocean leading towards your freedom across the oppression you faced on the other continent" *in the back of my head* Kraken into stranding or wyverns. We're walking around, talking with the crew and the dm calls for a perception check, only I pass. And I see 2 wyverns flying towards the ship, me being an idiot I don't have any ranged attacks so I'm hoping one lands. Initiative is rolled i think I'm going first, only way wyverns go first is with "oh hey nat 20" ...sigh OK They go first look at the whole party, and for whatever reason takes a shot with their stinger, "okay I'm fine no big deal" "Heeyyyy nat 20" ... *dice clatters* hey I need a *rolls a 3* 5 total con save *more dice clatters* okay you take 97 points of damage (turns out he ruled that the venom, since the attack crit got doubled even though it was a save for the damage not the attack roll, and told NO ONE AND NEVER USED IT AGAIN" "Well I'm dead" "You mean down.." "No dude I am dead" I explained the instant death rules, if you hit max negative you die instantly, no saves no nothing, just poof gone "So my head gets taken off by the stinger, cool so I'm gonna roll up my new character you guys have fun" I start rolling stats, 18...18...my eyes go wide and I show my friend and he's like "you didn't" so a small thing in my group I am cursed to never get good stats, ever, so this is unprecedented. Annnd 17, 18 17 16 I'm broken I rolled up the tankiest tank I could tank with Barbarian 3, druid 2, totem warrior moon druid, with effectively like 400 hp give or take. So the party meets me and we keep going, as we keep getting into fights, only I am targeted, the enemies all would have disengage as bonus actions then run over to me and try to hit me, like really?? Okay sure We keep fighting, oh hey everybody is racist towards Goliaths too...oookayyyyy So i can't buy items like anywhere, can't rest without risk of getting jumped. And then the final nail in the coffin, after flattening the last encounter, literally, jumped up, turned into a giant turtle, and crushed a hoard of skeletons. He asks me "what can kill you" one of my party members chimes in "psychic damage f's him up" .... The next encounter just so happened to be, intellect devourers..in an open field..with no hills, mountains, anything that leads to the underdark, and low and behold they all focus me, they can't hit me to save their life, thank God and we won the fight. Every fight there after, psionics (before psions were confirmed for the game mind you) and random mental damage added onto every damn attack, he ended up abandoning that campaign a few sessions later saying we all had ruined it cuz we were "too broken for it to be fun to dm" Lol okay bud cuz it's fun to get one shot and the start of the first turn of the first combat and then get targeted for a whole damn campaign.
So I already told one story of an unfair GM in Pathfinder 1e (Mobs with Freedom of Movement that can also give you immunity to the STUNNED CONDITION) This is one that seemed very unfair: Pirates of the Inner Sea Giving each of us premade characters and giving us very little influence in leveling the characters paired with horrible dice rolls. Campaign always seemed to favor the Party's sorcerer and I had gone through literally 4 characters in that campaign, only one other person had to make 1 new character and that's it. This campaign apparently had plant monsters who can take 5ft steps when they can ONLY move 5ft per move action. First character: Brawler hybrid class specifically built for grappling, Enemies had Freedom of Movement Second Character: A Corsair Fighter built to fight well on ships, Died to Instant x3 auto confirm crits Third Character: Same stats as second but Max HP is lowered, Is afraid of literally every encounter Fourth Character: (This one GM allowed me FULL CONTROL of building him), Inquisitor of Besmara, Specializing in Rapiers and spell slinging, Died the most times due to enemies being literally strong enough to one-shot me every single time. So I declared that anytime he GMs again, I will refuse to play.
So I had grown up playing home brews of 3rd edition (give or take) and I had never played 5e, or played D&d since I was very young. So when I was invited to play 5e with a co-worker, I was very excited. I skimmed through D&d beyond and fell in love with the idea of playing a Tortle Druid who had formerly been a brilliant sailor. He would use his druidcraft to predict the weather. His mending would repair nets and other gear. His create or destroy water would provide the crew with fresh water, and good berry could keep them fed. Now, this was just for flavor since the campaign my coworker was going to run was not a seafaring campaign. My ex sailor would gradually get his land legs and adjust accordingly. However, when I told my coworker/DM about how excited I was about this character (since, I'd always played a Druid as a kid) He immediately told me that I'd only be able to wild shape into aquatic animals. Now, druids can start wildshaping at lvl 2, but don't get a swimspeed until lvl 4, so I asked him if I could bypass this restriction. No. I was frustrated but came back with the idea that my job as a sailor was transporting exotic animals from all over the world, so he was very familiar with many animals. To this, I swear to God he said that I could wildshape into land animals, but I'd have disadvantage on ALL my attacks. WTF??
To be fare the DM didn’t really hold any ill will towards me but it still hit hard. I have a pretty limited experience playing DnD and Pathfinder since I’m young and don’t have a group. I played some Pathfinder and Rifts with my older brothers group a few years back. The unfair story is in the Rifts campaign, I was an ice dragon that was silver and in human form was a child for some plot reason never looked at. Through some series of events I lost the ability to turn into my dragon form and was stuck as a human. So in an attempt to figure out what happened another player makes a roll, not sure on what like I said been a few years, and gets a 1. What happens my character forgets I’m even a dragon, just an incredibly strong child because of another players roll that shouldn’t have been able to affect me memory/perception of myself. I kept it together mostly at the table but when we called it quits my brother had to check in on my cause I was crying.
I've actually had 2 separate campaigns that went a little along the lines as the ones featured here. The first one was at the beginning of lockdown, the DM was a guy I went to high school with. There was a Druid, Cleric (I think?), Bard, Fighter and me- a Dragonborn Paladin. This was my first ever campaign, and I had NO idea how D&D worked. The DM refused to help me with making my character sheet, and I had never even spoken to the people I was going to be playing with. Therefore, I didn't have the most balanced character (This was 5e, and I didn't have any access to many D&D related materials). However, the other people I was playing with had experience with the game. We started at either level 2 or 3, but I know we levelled up at some point, and I remember that because upon choosing a subclass, I was informed I wasn't allowed one. No idea why, I just assumed it wasn't important. We played a lot of combat in these sessions, and looking back now do I realise how weird and unbalanced our fights were. We were against some cultists (for one reason or another, I don't believe it was ever really clarified), and we were fighting. At first, we made a strength check to see if we could muster the strength to hit our opponents. And then, dexterity to see if we actually hit. My Strength was good, but my Dexterity was not. I didn't know how AC worked at this point, I just knew armour = you don't get hit as much. Apparently not. Me, with my heavy armour, was hit with rolls that were as low as 8 (We played over discord, and the dice channel was available to all of us). Th cultists used the usual method of how you hit things. We survived the battle, but everybody was fairly pissed, except the fighter. Magic was essentially rendered useless, and so it was me and the fighter mainly taking the hits. The bard couldn't even inspire us. After we got through, beat every boss and cultist, we,, failed. Immediately. I'm not sure WHAT we failed, the story was never consistent, but we did. I remember we went to a ball (nice), and then there were robots (Homebrew ones. I had to give them a CR, I'd assume it would have been 12 or more), and then there was a nightmare realm that I was not present for. But, the ROBOTS. We were between levels 3-6 (we used experience, I often couldn't show up to sessions due to them being late starting, about 11pm, which wouldn't have been too much of a problem if I didn't have a roommate, so we were all different levels), and we all died to them. Our DM turned to us all, almost offended that we'd DARE fight them. We were given no indication that we shouldn't- in fact, we were encouraged to do so. The ball-goers knew us as adventurers, and were yelling thing like 'WHO WILL SAVE US??'. We all died. Nobody rolled a new character. We know now that he knew how to play D&D properly. He just didn't want to. It was just a general mindfuck The second campaign gone wrong was about a year after this one, with a different DM and different players. A bard-rogue Tiefling multiclass, a Tiefling sorcerer, a Halfling Bard, a Human Fighter, and me- I was playing a Changeling Monk, although that wasn't particularly important. This DM understood combat and the general rules of D&D, and we're still pretty good friends. What they didn't understand was player agency, boundaries. Their story was interesting, although a little all-over-the-place and I'd say slightly inconsistent, but not to a troubling amount. The problems didn't start rolling in until a player that the DM didn't like joined the table. There wasn't any heat between them, they just weren't the closest friends. Now, there was an NPC- a dwarf child, we'll call him Umi. Umi was an orphan, and my character kinda took him under her wing. Not to train her or get her into fights, just to take care of her. Now, IRL, we discussed beforehand that we didn't want to deal with themes like child death, sensitive stuff like that due to personal events. My brother had almost died multiple times due to medical problems when he was young, and my friends also had some negative experiences with that sort of theme, so we agreed it'd be best to avoid it. The session this new player, the Druid, joined, Umi was stabbed. He didn't die, we all made sure of it, he survived with multiple successful medical checks and healing spells, but we were all silently pissed that the DM was willing to do this. We talked to them afterward, and they said to calm down. That was the end of that. A few sessions later, the bard-rogue and the sorcerer were messing around when we were on downtime. We were walking along a path to get to a tournament or something of the sort, and the 2 thought it would be funny to scare the bard, who was revered as a coward (Just as the player wanted to play him). They decided to mess around with a few spells, mainly minor illusion, to make him see some things (I can't remember what), to freak him out. An important factor about my character is that she's blind, and that Umi was on her shoulders (She was taking her to a different orphanage I believe). On top of this, she was walking alongside the bard. The bard thought his best to cast Thunderwave. If you don't know what that is, its meant to knock enemies back and do a little bit of damage. I make a constitution save, and pass. We assumed that would be the end of it. But, the DM rolled. 'Monk. You feel a weight come off of your shoulders as Umi is sent flying.' My character was holding onto her ankles, and had a STR score of around 15. I asked to make a strength check to keep him on. The DM said no. Umi had failed his constitution save, and was not breathing. Immediately dead. By some miracle (I'm going to assume our complaints) Umi comes back. You'd think this is where it ends. Nope. We stayed in the campaign for a little while longer. Just a little while. We were on a train, headed to my characters home town for one reason or another. My character had essentially become a foster mother to Umi- by which I mean the DM was having Umi refer to her as his mother. You'd THINK with this, my character would realise that Umi was not on the train with them all. The DM had us all roll a perception check (One that I didn't roll due to being blind). Only one person succeeded, and they saw Abi get attacked. Stolen away, and vanishing. I asked the DM why my character wouldn't be aware that her literal CHILD was not accompanying us. They got me to roll an intelligence check- it was well-known that my character is not intelligent. Her INT was 7, so I had a -2. Even so, I believe I rolled a 14 or something along those lines. I was told it failed. The fellow players argued, saying my character should know. So, the DM was kind enough to retcon what happened... 'Upon getting on the train, you get separated from Abi, but the crowd pushed you onto the train'. We were all just tired of it at this point. We had the plan to get off of the train, of course. DM: 'The train starts to move. Each cart appears miles long. You can all deduct jumping out of the train would kill you immediately'. … So my character's barely smart enough to realise her child is missing, but smart enough to deduct the mortality of jumping out of a train. We plan to get to the front of the train to stop it, but the DM made this almost impossible through the most stupid means. By 'stupid', I mean my character was the only one not intimidated by a literal goose, and she had to throw it out the window for the others to be able to move. The DM had this stupid fucking reoccuring 'goose character', who had bitten off a players foot beforehand (Note: The DM made the new player change their character because he was deemed 'too silly', an that he wasn't 'taking it seriously'. The player's character was a VERY old man who was looking for his grandson. He thought, my character, a changeling woman, was his grandson, and also refused to believe she was blind because 'kids today exaggerate everything'. She was about 27. We all found this playstyle very amusing, and nobody but the DM had any issues with it). We all concluded that throwing it off of the train was a fair thing to do, given the circumstances. However, our DM had this,,, weird view of morality. Previously, we had faced off with some bandits, who intended to skin the Tieflings and take their horns. So, we fought. It's important to note that we were fighting non-lethally, and we clarified that at the beginning and end of the fight. But, the DM killed the bandits anyway, and after we refused to search them, had something fall out of one of their pockets. A little note, that read 'have a good day at work, daddy!'. I have no idea why, but it was supposed to make us feel bad. But, they did that EVERY. TIME. Remember that tournament we were supposed to go to? We were being threatened, so we had to fight. The DM made it VERY plot relevant to fight. But, afterwards, DM did their best to make us feel awful about it, telling us our opponents hopes and dreams, their life stories, their kids, stuff like that. After this train debacles, we didn't have any other sessions.
First story’s DM really had it out for the OP, not sure why. Not only make them useless in fights, but kicked them out under false circumstances just because he found a way to be useful, lied about it to everyone else involved, and then killed their character via retcon because they didn’t like how the PC managed to circumvent the proverbial neutering done to them. What did this DM have against this player?
Oh, I've got a good, recent one, though it's a meta issue, not in-game. Two sessions ago, we ended with my character getting kidnapped by a dragon. This last session, I was forced to be there the whole 3 hours as the party tried to rescue my character. I didn't do anything the whole time but sit muted, occasionally checking in to help these people who have never read any of the books and have no idea how to play. It was by far the worst experience I've had since I got into DnD.
@@topdogjr0068 I think they planned on playing a bit longer initially, but otherwise no, they just said I needed to be there, so I stayed, assuming I'd eventually do something. Which I didn't. Now to be fair it's their first campaign, so they probably just didn't account for time properly
4:55 To be fair, if this was just normal player set up at the beginning of a campaign and they got those rolls and no one else got a similarly strong roll, then I would have suggested they reroll for them. However, in the situation presented here, yeah, he's just a dick.
Since I'm gonna to be new at this, I bet it'll be like that if I start to play D&D and, because of that, I don't want to play D&D, even if I wanted to.
in the one and only campaign I have been in (so far) my party and I were all in a town that was divided by a wall wealthy on one side and poor on the other and naturally, we wanted to go to the wealthy part of the town so we walked up to the guards and asked if we could go in and they said no so me being a bard I turned on the theatrics I tried to say that we were supposed to be here saying a noble requested us and she told me that they just said no again so I said I cast hypnotic pattern and she just said no and I asked if I could attack them and she said no again she turned down everything I proposed without any chance she just said that I couldn't and gave no reason as to why and that's not the first time she has been unfair but that's one of the most frustrating I can remember but after a falling out she and I are no longer friends and the campaign ended with no conclusion but I'm running a campaign for a few friends soon and at least now I know how not to act
Probably this. Me: *sees my friend's being possessed* "I wanna grapple him and put him in a sleeper hold to gently send him into unconsciousness". DM: "roll to attack" Me: *thinking* (not a grapple check? okay) *rolls to attack*. DM: "now roll damage" Me: "right... but I did say I don't want to actually harm him, right? so I can just knock him out" DM: "ROLL DAMAGE RIGHT NOW OR I'M SKIPPING YOUR TURN!" Me: *rolls damage* DM: "you take out your sword and cut his head off, he's now dead, good job". Me: "what?! but I said I wanted to knock him out!" DM: "THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS NON-LETHAL DAMAGE IN D&D, DEAL WITH IT OR LEAVE THE GAME!".
This story has nothing to do with this video but one super funny thing just happened in my super hero campaign. The party consisted of one player ,spark, Who had lightning powers which he could use to zap people fry circuits and teleport Raiden style, another who ,while unnamed I’ve nicknamed the vibrator due to his powers, could vibrate molecules and slow them down to do all sorts of cool stuff including phasing through walls, echo a woman with bat ears and wings, and a several more that aren’t relevant. For the adventure they were sneaking into their dead bosses old lair, which just so happened to be surrounded by police and had a detective who was expecting breakins waiting isnside due to being a crime scene to recover hard drives. After a stealthily getting on the roof the party was sneaking through some cartoonishly large air vents, which had been designed by that same dead bosses fiancé and covilain Samantha when he was alive, when echo heard the sound of computers and the detective sitting in a room just outside the vent shaft. The Vibrator chose to send spark out on the other side making a little noise. The detective immediately heard and said in the tired voice of some sick of another’s childish antics “Samantha Would you please get out before I chase you out again” to which spark said “ how bout no as he jumped around the corner and shocked the detective in more ways than one. Spark took advantage of the incapacitated detective to take the hard drives when he felt his pistol, holster and all, yanked of his leg. He turned around to see a little box ,presumably mutated through the same process as the himself and his friends, and his first move was to thunder punch the box In the mouth and rip the gun out. I had him roll to stun a cardboard box 16. I told him Boxen, these are reoccurring psychotic little joke creatures and their official title is Boxen, don’t have a nervous system to stun but being made of cardboard they do ignite.and with that we have a scared burn Boxen accidentally burning down an evil lair while the party rushes out and to safety dad by teleporting, with the hard drives, and everyone else by being phased out by the vibrator. Before you all ask spark did get his pistol back. TLDR PCs accidentally burned down the base they were sneaking through using a psychotic burning box creature.
had a character 3.5 Ranger based around killing the undead. Whole party decides to become undead so I just let the party now I can't continue to adventure with them(you know my whole character concept) So I pull out a fresh character sheet and start getting ready to make a character that can continue and the Dm sends in this epic level wizard with a epic spell called Mind rape that I had no way of saving against even with a nat 20. Mind rape and now my ranger loves the undead but was not allowed to change the favored enemy bonuses
A friend got me to play 2nd edition with a few people she met online. They were going to start a campaign but someone must have backed out because I was invited at the last minute. The other three players had all rolled up characters (a cleric, a mage/thief and my friend's druid). Since there was only the three of them at their session 0 the DM had rolled up 2 fighter characters to join the party, and so when I joined the group the DM just had me take one of the two fighters and he just played the other fighter as a DM character. My fighter had a respectable 16 str and was fairly well built. The DM PC had a fantastic 18 90 Str. Since I had never played AD&D before I didn't realize just how powerful that was until we first got into combat. His fighter just plain completely upstaged mine. We were doing entirely "theater of the mind" so I couldn't use clever positioning or anything and somehow his DM character was always in the right spot at the right time whereas my character somehow was never in reach of the enemies. Even if they literally attacked him last round, he wasn't in range for melee the next round. Being upstaged in battle was bad enough but the worst was when my friend who was playing a druid in a cool RP moment decided to feed the bodies of the bandits we had just killed to the poor small water monstrosity that was trapped in the cave. I began to help her (as she didn't have the strength to throw a dead body into the water), I was picking up a couple of the dead bodies to help her feed the monster when the DM announces his character just grabs all three of the bodies and throws them in at once, after all his str was high enough to do all three whereas I could only do two. I mean come on, it is one thing to be upstaged by a DM character in combat, but in a pure RP moment? Lets just say that was the last session of AD&D I have ever played.
0:58 Yikes, what a child. Like why bother providing loot for players with special effects and then making everyone immune to them? Throwing a boss out the window?! Brilliant. Lol. I would love a player move like that as a DM. It's really exhausting playing with DMs who insist on forcing the campaign to be the exact story they want regardless of what the players actually do.
Dm gave my character that was immune to all magical and natural diseases, this disease made me lose a con stat everyday if i failed the save. my con was already low so i would die in 12 days if i didn't make any of the saves. Tried to get it cured but apparently it was incurable and i could only be saved by getting some artifact from the bbeg, we wasted a week just finding this out. I was so pissed i destroyed the artifact in front of the bbeg when we got there. I died on my own terms not to the disease :P
So I was playing in this game called "Shadows of the Demon Lord" and the DM was running this on his own discord server. It started out fine with the world, but my first hint that things weren't going to be good was when I was rolling my characters class (yes he made us roll) and I rolled a 4 on a D4. I tell my DM this is a warrior (because warrior was 4th on the list in the book) however the DM says it's based on HIS list, not the book, and I actually rolled a priest. I don't normally play casters, ever. I was allowed to reroll, but I would take a vaguely defined punishment. So I played a priest. Now the DM over time, decided to add another party into the world, and create some heavy homebrew items. My party got magical rings and the other party got magical ear rings. Basically these were all super magical and were meant to make us more powerful over time. Problem was, the DM controlled what powers were given to who, and when. THEN the DM decided to throw in the characters from his old pathfinder game into our game (which none of us were apart of) and treat them all as god tier NPCs. Then as we all are forced to get on the magical sky ship of the pathfinder gods, we all start growing stronger, some more than others. The wizard in our group got a special power where whenever he drops to 0 HP, he can stay up and heal himself up to 3 times his max HP by dealing damage through spells. One rogue had the power to pull souls back from death, AND whoever she killed, she could summon as a ghost to fight for her. Up to 12 ghosts in a single round. Our party rogue had a power where whenever he was standing on earth, he could "tunnel" (never actually leaving a physical tunnel just move through the earth) and essentially play whackamole in reverse. Becoming impossible to hit, and even jump over 200 feet in the air, and land right back in the ground without taking damage, What did I get? I got, a breath weapon. 4d6 fire damage over a cone that took 1d3 rounds to recharge. That's it. But then, things started getting toxic. The DM liked to give out powers to whoever played their character "the right way" in his eyes. And of course, if I was to have any fun, be light hearted, or enjoy myself, this was not playing my character "the right way" and the DM would make up a bullshit reason to punish/have a super powerful NPC threaten to kill me. The DM then forced the two parties to interact, one of them rolled/played an angry asshole. This character was an archer with basic strength, and I was very strong in full plate all the time. I was sitting, talking to an NPC mentally, when the asshole character picked me up, and threw me out of the chair. I try to explain (twice) how I was sitting down and how difficult this would be, but both the player and the DM interrupt me, and go with it. This leads my character to finally have enough of being hated for next to no reason, actively fearing for my life, seek the help of the only other PC who I thought was my friend, and make a wish (because he could grant those) to have the power to survive living on the boat. The DM, had planned for this, and fucked EVERYONE blaming it on me. However, I didn't know everyone got fucked with, because for the next 2 weeks, I hear nothing, from anybody. It wasn't until 1 person finally broke the silence and told me it was because they were playing without me, because my character had "broken an oath" to his god by making that wish. Here's the kicker, my character, NEVER made an oath to his god, and the system never described having to make any oaths for my class. When I told the DM this, he wrote it off as "an oath I didn't know about" and my character was essentially forced to go to a hidden kingdom to be punished/trained by the court of his god. Which then lead to another month of me barely getting any contact from the others, and being essentially stranded until the DM "found the time" to deal with me. I was essentially a pariah, with no way of being able to play the game, and was outright told by another PC, that mostly everyone wanted me dead. And the DM REFUSED to let me play a knew character. Oh, and the best part, the incident that started all this, the throwing of my character, I mentioned this to the player and the DM who both said "they didn't know I was sitting down" (because they interrupted me) and the two of them agreed to retcon that scene because "it wouldn't have happened like that" and when I protested, I was ignored. Later my DM even said I agreed to it (I did not) so now I'm constantly forced to be the asshole, a pariah of multiple parties, and was forced to play this character. Eventually, it all became so toxic and I left the group, and lost a lot of friends because of that game. TLDR: the DM was used favoritism, homebrew, and retconning, in order to create a game so toxic to my mental health I nearly killed myself
A good buddy of mine asked if I wanted to test play a campaign he was working on over roll 20. My first DnD group was starting to die off as 2 of the original six had got sent to texas for work a month after the campaign started and when they finally got to come back 2 of our other players moved up a few hours north to near the Canadian border and had to drive 50 minutes just to get to the nearest gas station.. Needless to say they didn't really have internet to video call in. This seemed like a perfect way to spend the free time of no longer playing that campaign. I was playing a dex based tempest cleric with an ac of 18ish at lvl3. Besides me we had an artificer, bard, and sorcerer. I was the only melee based build so I was always up front. My DM ruled every nat1 from a friendly ranged attack roll against a target within 10' of me auto hit me. Roll20 seemed roll nat 1s for them none stop as there was not a single encounter that I took more damage from enemy attacks than friendly fire. I then had to constantly remind him when enemy NPCs rolled a nat1 on ranged to roll damage on the npc I was in melee with because he wouldn't do it himself unless someone called it out. I understand nat 1s having consequences but to auto hit just felt ridiculous. As a dm if a player rolls a nat 1 on ranged and there's an enemy within 5 ft of them I do something similar but make them reroll to see if it can surpass the ac of their friendly PC, but even then that's only if it feel reckless like trying to shoot from directly behind said pc at an enemy directly in front of them. My players also know if they have a 90° offset or take some measure to reduce the chance of them hitting a friendly that generally a nat1 will just affect their next turn like having disadvantage or a -2 penalty
I think the worst I can think of is in the third campaign I ever played. One of my party members pushed a button and gained an effect where he couldn't sleep and if he didn't sleep for a certain number of days he would die. I and another party member went to hell to find a thing to cure him where we encountered these godlike beings. We were told to repeatedly make stealth checks against perception rolls for the creatures. I'm not sure if there was meant to be an end to this but after like 5 successes for both of us, the creature rolled a natural 20. I asked it some questions got all the answers then got killed instantly without any rolls. My friend was allowed to leave because he was a living construct. Turns out the godly creature had the thing we needed. I still play with the DM. I really like him as a person but that whole situation kinda sucked.
I made a human rough that was chaotic good and the DM said that I couldn’t use any character that Was “evil”. When I tried to participate he relented but made a stalactite fall on me and instantly kill my character. 😭
Unfair but totally earned for my own character's stupidity. (aka it wasn't a jab at me, my character in-game was an idiot and the punishment was fitting.) I made a dumb muscled barbarian for a one-shot (Don't recall which edition but I think it was 3.5e) and was faced with having to save a friend...by solving a Rubik's cube. Yeah, the friend died.
Sorry for the long post :) Essentially its about an otherwise great DM that hated one of my characters. The character was a pensive, brooding, uncharismatic pacifist druid, and the DM was so annoyed by him that he tried to have mychars consciousness replaced with another of his characters, and went to extreme lenghts to place me in a no win scenario. Several times DM told me I had to be more decisive and active even though I was playing an indecisive character who leaned on others. We had been playing in the campaign for more than a year, hopping to different parties in different parts of the world, and I had already played several characters who were fun, charismatic outgoing and decisive. But on this part of the multi pronged campaign there was a bit of a a lull in enthusiasm at the table because the elf portion of his story was getting pretty samey. We had been stuck inside a tree dungeon for 6 7 hour sessions and the fun character of this party (played by another player) was killed early on by a Beholder which made that player lose enthusiasm for this portion of the story. So when we exited this tree he had a one on one session with me that basically ended with my consciousness being abducted by my long dead evil brother that was basically an ultimatum of sorts. Through mychar's brother, he basically said "you are stupid and you are failing, let me take over your body because you know that I have the intelligence to solve this problem. However If you truly believe that you can do this then I will allow you to go back to your body in honor of the love you showed me in life." I decided to stick with the character, but several times through this session the DM broke narration to tell me that he thought I was not having fun and that he thought the character was the problem. However it was becoming clear he had a problem with the character. He even went on a diatribe about DnD being about heroic characters, and that other systems were better for exploring traits like weakness and indecisiveness and spiritual reluctance. We had a nice talk, and I decided to stick to my guns and told him that I believed that arc of the character could be fun. He insisted to change it nonetheless, but I didn't. I probably should have. So next the Dm has me become the interim leader of one of the 3 elf factions because the Queen had died. We had to stop a massive million strong invasion of orcs or let it through the elven kingdom, because they needed to cross for plot reasons. They weren't directly hostile to the elves they just wanted to go through to what they believed was their rightful home. When we decided to parlay with the army and lead them on an organized march through the woods we knew that one or both leaders of the other two elf factions were working for the BBEG. So now there were 3 faction leaders. My character, Wizard Guy, and Cleric Girl. Wizard Guy was leader of the wizard faction of the elves in an island. Cleric Girl was the leader of the dark elves, and lived in a giant city underground. My char was the leader of mainland forest elves. So when Wizard Guy offered to set up a trap to kill the orc armies' leaders I told him to go for it. Obviously this was a no go as the army without its leaders would see a million strong force run rampant through the elf lands massacring everyone. This led us to believe that he did not have the best interests of the elves at heart, and so it was very likely that he was working for the BBEG. So the idea was to travel alongside the orc leader through the land, informing him of the trap and have his forces scout ahead for magical triggers. Hopefully we would be able to ambush the attackers and prevent things from escalating. As for the non fighting population of elves, they were told to march to the north shore, a good 50 to 100 miles north of the path that the army would be taking. So then the DM tells us through Cleric Girl that mychar was evil and must be working for the BBEG because I told Wizard Guy to set a trap. It turns out the trap was a 50 mile radius Meteor Swarm that would decimate the entire forest and mychar's people with it (who were 50 MILES north of where the explosion would occur). The Moonblade dissatuned from me because it also believed that I was evil, despite having full access to my thoughts and intentions, and it lead to a super weird moment in the table. I asked the DM straight up, are you telling me that our side has nuclear explosions? Yes they are a wizard nation, he answered. There had been no record of that scale of magic ever, nor would there be for the rest of the campaign, because it was an asspull to put me in a no win scenario. (just for some context Meteor Swarm, a 9th level spell, has a 40-ft radius) After an extended and very uncomfortable silence where I was wondering how the elves did not use nuclear explosions (actually nuclear explosions are much less powerful that what the DM was creating) to destroy the orc army, I played it off with an "oh well, were fucked", and got on with the session. Turns out Wizard Guy was not evil, he was just a zealous patriot who hated orcs, so he made himself the trigger for the nuclear strike and turned himself over to the orcs. So then we had to turn ourselves over to the orcs to help them by cutting of the Wizard Guy's tonge so he could not utter the trigger. Then he made the entire diplomacy of the matter (we needed to recruit the orc army to fight the BBEG army) be determined by a single d20 persuasion roll that failed, and so the entire 20 sessions of that arc ended in failure in the weirdest anticlimax and everyone agreed that it was basically a giant waste of time. He also said to everyone at the table several times that I had made terrible decisions and that it wasn't his fault. It was a very surreal chapter of the story were I felt pretty severely gaslit and I still don't understand what the hell happened. I have a good relationship with the DM outside of the game, and never had any issues ever, so I don't think it was personal. Maybe something about the character triggerred him, or maybe he didn't think of the a scenario for what we wanted to do so he had to invent some reason to stop me from going in a certain direction but yeah it really felt like he was just trying to make the character fail. He kept saying that I was playing the game wrong so I think he wanted to make a point, but up until that moment I never saw any indication that he could be that petty. Anyway that session and the entire resolution still vexes me to this day. But I resolved to power through and finish the campaign with this character, and eventually whatever the problem was must have dissolved and we did end up finishing the campaign successfully and had fun the rest of the way.
I played a friend's campaign on a whim to be supportive, but he wanted to use an imp to essentially spoonfeed us what to do... cue me killing the imp almost immediately on sight because I was playing a Paladin. In retaliation I get cursed and have to roll a con save when resting or risk something 'bad' happening... I rolled a 11 on the first camp, instantly died and my corpse was twisted into a howling lump of horrifically tortured meat screaming the main plotline to replace the imp. I was not allowed to reroll another character because the DM insisted the quivering mass of bleeding flesh was 'still you' and he told me I had to keep rolling con saves to 'die'... despite being dead. Never returned for another session and out of spite he had the puppeted corpse of my character fall into a poop pit where it drowned in sewage and then conveniently another imp showed up to railroad the remaining players.
11:52 isn’t the way you calculate CR (Challenge Rating) is, you take the characters that will be in the fight and add up their level. The combine number is the maximum CR the monster/monsters must add up to? (I ask this because I’m interested in D&D and I honestly don’t know myself yet)
My first campaign was pathfinder and my class does not matter for this story but I was a half-construct that was trying to figure out what to do now that his creator was gone. We had just gotten into a fist fight with some store owner over something stupid but we left and expressed that we were going to go to the inn and I got a room and locked myself in my room and went to sleep even though he didn’t need to. He saw his new friends so it and thought it was something everyone should do. Cut to him waking up in a jail cell. The GM then explains that my character was stripped of his gear (my character didn’t remove said gear because he didn’t fully grasp the idea of comfort) and that was that. They later informed me that the town guard got into the room I was staying in dragged me out into the snow and across town then tossed into a cell without me waking up or even being allowed to roll to see if I wake up. So I try to play dead in my cell since I’m a half-construct that looks humanoid since he’s got a Frankenstein’s monster from the book vibe except with a lot of scars and stitches. No one comes to check on my character for over 16 hours and that includes basic things like bringing him food or water, mind you most people wouldn’t know I don’t need that stuff by looking at them. Finally the GM let’s me go but not after having the guards steal all my cash. Soon afterward we left the town and the GM had what I only could assume was his BBEG put everyone to sleep including my character who was expressly immune to sleep effects and when we awake he did a monologue change the party’s synthesist into an anti-paladin and my half-construct into a human. (For that last bit midsession new player me, was told to pick a different race and forced to hurry along so I picked something basic and simple A.K.A human.) The game died soon after that and I’ve been quick to leave games that show those signs again.
PC was leading a large army that had built up over 12 years of detailed gameplay to free a extensive nation from the yoke of humanoid enslavement; the army was incredibly detailed, funded, full of personalities gathered through pc to npc friendships, negotiations and setting up all sorts of guilds, trade, supply deals, argh...very very devoted to have done all that, possibly due to my over focus. Well, we launched the attack with all manner of wizards, clerics and special troop units doing their defined roles including pegasai mounted scout wings, griffon special attack wings and also individual heroes on dragon back for dealing with humanoid bosses who flew mutant ogre-griffon hybrids, and they'd all had plenty of prior practice with ops through liberating small towns through sieges and field battles. But this was the big one, where from the humanoids were emanating into other lands. We were outnumbered but the armies class was apparent, superb cavalry, phenomenal heavy infantry, cannon support...we had it all. And as the enemy humanoid horde approached some 6 hours march away, we were setting up some aggressive air patrols with wizards scanning with eyes and clerics scrying, druids in bird form eyeballing everything that moved and well, the whole thing was a well greased machine on so many levels...we were attacked by a huge fleet of flying saucers and blown to hell by tens of thousands of fireballs and death rays coming from their steel tentacles.
I apologize in advance for any Grammar or spelling mistakes, and also for it being long, I've been wanting to vent about this for a long time. During the first ever D&D 5e I played (we did have a very short lived 3.5 game I think? But it was like two sessions.) we were effectively on the second party since the DM had just killed 3/4ths of the party in varying degrees of Bs ways. He had a thing for setting up big damaging things to kill us and when we still had HP just saying that we bleed out. But that's not this story, this is about the party we formed after, the human Ranger who was the only survivor of the last party, a half elf warlock(me) a human warlock, and a half elf fighter, we also had a cleric NPC with is that survived with the ranger, but he bailed on us not long after. This started with us finding another NPC, a tired man in full plate armor, I forget his name but he just kinda, decided he was in the party, and all but the ranger didn't want to protest since he seemed really strong. Now the fun part about this NPC, is that he was a custom class the DM made, now I am all for homebrew, I make homebrew stuff all the time, but the issue was he made this completely overpowered, a full caster/full martial, able to cast high level magic and attack in the same turn.(I think he was level 13, note the party was all level 8 at best) After doing a small dungeons with this man he decided we would go investigate a temple that had something bad happen I forget the details of why we really went there, we fought a bunch of undead in the rain, my warlock got killed because he decided that suddenly zombies got to make opportunity attacks when spells are cast in melee range(squishy warlock) and was brought back cuz my patron decided I wasn't done yet. Once we got into this temple we had to fight a massive cult feeding people to some giant portal, and this is where things got bad, I was flying above the fight with the other warlock, the ranger was on an upstairs platform, and the fighter was in the thick of it while the NPC was fighting at the portal to stop things going inside, I specifically remember being shocked because he cast fire storm, and ice storm in the same turn and the Dm just ignored us when we brought it up, or claimed we just didn't know the rules and went on. This fight went on so long the ranger ran out of arrows and was on her way down to get into melee when we finished it, Only for the NPC to suddenly turn around and disintegrate the other warlock and quickly after the fighter as well(who he had taken on as a sort of apprentice at this point. still flying I ran to try and get the ranger to safety, only for him to get wings of his own and cut us off, I passed yet another disintegrate spell save left with like ten HP, only to be killed the next turn when he suddenly decided that I couldn't sprint down the stairs...even though I was flying. "because you can only sprint in a straight line." Is what he claimed, and again just said we didn't know the rules. The ranger was the last to go taken down in melee combat because she wasn't really build for it, and this guy had just taken us all down in about one round each.
I Remember, the First game i had ever played, i had made a Wood Elf Ranger, and i kid you not, the very next session, he introduces a 'new ally'. A Level 15 half-orc Barbarian, with extreme racism to Elves. I was level 1. i think everyone knows where this is going. soon enough, get knocked out, tied up, and tossed overboard, as my character just floats on the open sea for the entire session. (It was a pirate themed campain). I almost quit DND right then. Thankfully, I had another friend who was a DM, and he set me up with a proper campain
was once in a group and we ended up at a "house of ill repute" for the night waiting till the next day cause it was apparently the only place in town we could get a room. I say "okay i talk to someone and see if i can get a lady for my room to retire for the night" i essentially get told no so i ask "what exactly do you mean by 'ill repute' then?" DM says its a bar... so i ask if i can get alcohol, DM says no cause i pissed off the bartender by asking for a whore. so i start playing the lute i had, role performance, 18. everyone claps, asks for another, i play another for them cause why not, rolled a 3.... i get kicked out of the bar....... and then raped by a minotaur... now my character had permanent fear of minotaur's I was literally just going to go upstairs with the lady, "fade to black" then let everyone else do their thing. Edit: oh and that was just session one...
So I was playing a Divine Soul sorceress. Well-meaning but naïve girl, low wisdom. Spell kit built more around support than direct blasting, though she had a bit of that too. So, we went into some ruins and fought a whole bunch of Yuan-Ti, with magic resistance, a number with Counterspell, and a bunch of wisdom-based charms. "Ok, bad match-up. At least I survived." Then, not long afterwards, we fought a flock of harpies. With one of them disguised as a small child falling into a chasm, and of course I'm the one with a flying broomstick and absolutely not suspicious about the situation, so I end up right in the middle of a group of more magic-resistant enemies who can fly and have MORE wisdom-based charm effects. "Alright, that's kind of weird. And, yeah, it was obvious OOC that it was a trap but, again, low wisdom and over-developed need to help others." A short while after that, the same day in-game in fact, we ran into 3 weird Wildemount monsters generating anti-magic cones accompanied by a grappling monster, with my 8 freaking Strength and only slightly better Dex. At this point, I was beginning to suspect I was being deliberately targeted although I couldn't figure out why. Since then, encounters have been less obviously anti-Calliope, so I think he was just looking at cool potential monsters without thinking about how they'd interact with our party as a whole. The rest of the party was Monk/Ranger, Hexadin, and melee-focused Storm Cleric with high wisdom all around, so stacking wisdom saves seemed odd.
I became addicted to watching your vids, stopped watching you, played my first 2 campaigns, won't be able to do another most likely, for 2 to 3 months, and now I feel like watching you.
One DM made a prolonged encounter set up with only Str checks. I'm playing a Monk that doesn't have high strength, 6 Str but 20 Dex and Wis. Kinda hurt my feelings since he refused to compromise on anything, even using acrobatics to jump a gap... So yeah.
when I was much younger, i played with a DM. at the time, i was not experienced with the game or rules i just loved to play. This DM took it way to serious and was very cruel to his players. at the time, I thought this was just apart of his good storytelling. I can remember one instance in one of our campaigns that the DM switched the currency to copper instead of gold. well, we had an encounter and i got an unidentified ring from it, so i took it back to town all excited and paid the 100 cp to have it identified. the ring was mundane. I was like omg wtf at the time. later on I realized in the rules that mundane items can never be unidentified. This is why knowing the rules are so important. fuck ass DMs will try to be cruel and punish you in stupid ways. also this same DM had his girlfriend in the party and of course she always got favorable treatment. years pass and one of the players that used to play in that gaming session was talking to me and we got on the topic. he told me how that DM ruined DnD for him and he would never play it again and to this day he still hasn't. I told him that the guy was just a shit ass DM and there are way better ones out there.
OK. I've gotta say, I havnt had too many screwy DM's. But this guy has permanent residency in my head for this. Some backstory, this campaign had two DM's, the guy who started but had too move away (I grew up in an Air Force family, so alot of my friends moved away) and then the Ahole DM took over afterwards. I was playing a Neutral Evil Paladin (I had okay'd this with the original DM beforehand considering we were in a good campaign). The party had found out that my goals where too effectivly bring hell too the material plane, and they were somewhat ok with it (knowing it was a futile task). The new dm then consistently dropped "hints" that Asmodeus (lord of hell) hated me. And by hints I mean the DM just straight up told me as a player, but my character didn't know so he continued on. Until one day "can you role me a perception check?" (i got an 11 or something total, this was a fair while ago, just know that I failed the check) ok now a dex and con save 18 on the dex and a nat 20 on the con, totalling too 26. I died as Asmodeus' sword rose up from hell ad chopped me in half. Just like that. I would like too add that he never once took me too the side too ask if I could play something else, I would have been more than happy too play a new char.
Being brand new to the game, we were supposed to have a walkthrough of sorts. We were allowed to boost our characters to level five (even though all 4 of us did it incorrectly because of bad explanations) and proceeded on a campaign to stop a lizard wizard from returning from the dead. We basically traveled to 4 different places, only facing basic enemies, and gaining no experience. Then we are detected trying to enter a fortress. We were told we all had to go in together, and one person couldn't just go up and handle it. We were discovered, and the dm had a level 10 black dragon and 4 guards against 4 inexperienced players. The next session and we had experienced people who tried to join. It was all so messed up and devolved to the point the campaign was stopped. I still play and really enjoy the game despite this.
Our very first time playing d&d and our DM was brand new too. We spent hours making and naming our characters and felt attachment to them. The first room we walked into the rookie DM had 300 red dragons. Obviously we died instantly. The DM said oh I guess dragons ate really tough. OK let roll new characters. We should have known the next 25 years of playing with a " killer DM" would be interesting.
It happened this week. My Waorlock was casting Hallow in our HQ to prevent unwanted creatures from bothering us in the future. The rest of the party was there keeping an eye on me for the 24h it takes to cast the spell. Despite 2 party members having the Alert Feat and thus unable to be surprised, and everyone rolling higher initiative than the enemies... first thing anyone knows is that 12 shadows pop out of the floor, four of them surrounding me. Three of them hit, and take out nin points of strenght from my warlock, before anyone has a chance to react. (No save) Me: "That puts me at 0 strenght" DM: "Then you are dead" Me:"...oh. That's a shame." DM: "Hold on, this is a CR1/2, wth!?! Walk it back a little, make 3 Con saves DC... I dunno, 12." First retcon we ever did (as far as I remember) in 20 years of playing. I like my DM.
@@shadowscall7758 yes, i watched a video called "deadliest creatures for their CR" (challenge rating) and Shadows were on it. they are REALLY dangerous for LEVEL ONE monsters!
Ayyy my story got featured! I still miss my poor shadow sorcerer, but I'm glad I'm not in that group anymore. Heck, maybe I'll bring her back for a different group sometime.
You should, I've wanted to bring back my half-dragon human warrior back into so many games, it's crazy! I want to see what mischief he's gotten into lately or what fine treasures he's found while stuck inside my DND folder.
It's a phenomenal character concept, I had a draconic bloodline sorc/paladin multiclass that the DM told me he was gonna let me fluctuate my fire/radiant into a hybrid that ignored resistance unless both were resisted and targeted vulnerabilities. Ever since then, if a PC wants to "specialize" in a certain way, I give them the tools
That character seems sick.
I'm still new to D&D, only being experienced with homebrew because it's what my cousin plays and he's my DM, but man does a Shadow Sorcerer sound cool. In the campaign I'm currently in I'm just a Tabaxi Fighter, but it's been really fun.
Yes.
Several years ago in 3.5 while playing a rogue I encountered the Thieves Guild in a city I was passing through. Knowing their dangerous reputation I was polite and assured them I was not looking to operate on their turf, just passing through. I was killed with no chance. No battle or rolls, which wouldn't have really mattered as I was outnumbered and outgunned. The reason? I showed weakness by being polite.
That moment when a DM wants to kill off your character but can’t think of a good reason for doing so.
Socioopath alarms going off.
Thief or not, politeness goes a long way. You shouldn't have lost your character cause of that.
I would punch DM in the gut for such bullcrap. "To test his strength of beliefs, which is at the core!"
first game ever. first character ever. ADnD - dm killed him 5 minutes in without a roll. he was a thief hiding in a bush on a ridge above an orc camp, over 250m away from the closest edge. (think 3 football fields, give or take a few meters) my turn came up, and so I said 'I lay as low to the ground as possible, and peer out from under the cover of the bush to see if I can see anything at all, is the camp calm, quiet, are there any arguments, etc?' 'you get shot in the eye. you're dead.'
so yeah, from the far side of the camp, which was roughly another football field length across (so somewhere around the 350m mark) a one hit die, one eyed, drunken orc pinpoint shot me in the eye with a light crossbow. without even rolling.
because the dm didn't like rogues. (which I'd asked before I even rolled the character if there were any limitations or preferences, and he said 'nope, roll what you like.')
Honestly almost put me off playing entirely.
This is so absurd I have a hard time believing it. Did the other players not object?
@@mattsmith457 actually, they did, the dm had a bit of a hissy over it and said 'ok, game's done' got up, packed his gear, and walked out of the conference room. since it was already booked, the ret of the players sat around for a few minutes, kinda looking around like 'wtf do we do now?' and the one that'd invited me said 'ok, guess I'll run it.' and passed me one of his random prerolled to use. honestly, that player stepping up at that moment kept me from not bothering to play again.
@@eldardrakeson At least it had a happy ending
@@mattsmith457 yeah. I actually kinda became a dm almost out of spite of that guy.. to 'never' be a dm like that.
That is fishy. I mean, it would have been one thing if two orcs were having a Duel with hand crossbows, with the one facing your way rolling the *Nat1* equivalent, and the the percentile dice gets rolled, and it turns out, this thing did some sort of Robin Hood-like Ricocheting, with the DM going "Um, buddy, Odds or Evens?" and you got the wrong set, and he rolled a D20, or whatever, and it said "Heavy Hit", (and this is all done out in the open), and the damage dice say, "He's dead, Jim!" Well, at least it would have been funny, and crazy - accidently killed during an orc duel.
Probably not as big as some, but when I first started playing D&D 5e, back in August of 2019, the group's main DM, who has 20+ years of playing RPGs, and is also a wounded Marine who'd served in the Middle East (Relevant, in that he can be somewhat intimidating if he thinks that you're trying to break the rules, or if you accidentally touch him wrong - *never* touch him.), who, basically, only allowed the races and subclasses in the Player's Handbook. To be honest, part of this was because he only owned the Core Rule Books. The other part is because those who had extra books only used them for spells. He also has, as a rule that no Homebrew or Third-Party races or subclasses were allowed. But, he was aware of the other books, just never had the money to get them, as he preferred to buy from the shop we played in. Needless to say, he's got Marine Pride, and I can be as stubborn as a bull, although I know when backing down is best, if I don't want to get kicked out of a group. That being said, we'd done some mild headbutting over non-Core races and subclasses, but he'd basically have one way to end/stop the argument - "Is it Official? Prove it's Official and I'll allow it." At the time, didn't have the books, so I'd back down, if reluctantly.
The headbutting came to a bit of a clash when I brought up the Celestial Warlock. This time, he went, "In my 20 years of playing, I've never even *heard* of such a thing. You've only been playing two months. Prove it's Official, and I'll allow it!"
Fellow D&D Nerds, support your local library, for they can hide keys to dragon hordes. A library I like going to had what I needed - Xanathar's Guide to Everything - page 54, Celestial Warlock.
Next session, I brought it to the game, only to notice that another player, who hadn't been at the last session, had their own copy. I got him to let the DM to look at the relevant page. Initially, we all laughed at the idea of serving a unicorn (unicorn knights), but then the DM got to the Level 1 abilities. Cue him staring at the wall, doing the Thousand Yard Stare. One of the others, who was on the opposite side of the table, looked at me and said "I think you broke him." It was as if Tiamat had popped in, and I'd convinced her to turn Vegan. When he finally made his Wisdom/Intelligence save, the DM gave me a look that was a mixture of Awe, Shock, and Respect. He got his own copy of Xanathar's soon after.
Later, when my mother decided to join the group, we ran down the list of easy classes, came to monk (which we didn't have yet), and another player, who seemed to have a broader experience of D&D was like "Tabaxi Monk!" Cue my DM going "Tabaxi?" Luckily, I'd also gotten Volo's Guide to Monsters, and showed *that* page to him. He recovered easier that time, and as one of her magic items (we each got two) my mom's tabaxi monk got Magic Talons - a homebrewed item that let her add a d4 on top of her Martial Arts dice, basically letting her use her racial unarmed attack as part of her monk attack (we're level 6).
Since then, as of October 2020, I've gotten all the player-related books, up to Theros. Annoyingly, that DM hasn't been playing with the group, due to matters dealing with current world events, (we used to play in a group of 10+, now it's more like 6, and rather infrequently) but I let him know about the books. He looks forward to checking them out, once things get settled down.
Edit - December 30th, 2020 - Got Tasha's now.
Sounds like a decent dude who likes following the rules (Military background, so it kinda makes sense) and just never bothered to explore outside of the Players Handbook.
@@namAehT Yeah, hence why his "unfairness" isn't as bad as a number of bad DMs - he was at least willing to admit when he was wrong, especially when one brought proof that the Race/Subclass was indeed Official.
This one isn't nearly as bad as other stories people have (I've been blessed with an amazing D&D group). My friend was Dm'ing an Out Of The Abyss campaign and I made bread with some spores (don't even know how that's possible), I rolled a Nat 20 on it and I was like "hell ya now I can make amazing bread." and the DM said "No you can't you never learned how to make bread." (not the unfair part) our Kenku Ranger was able to learn how to make "Good Bread" from watching me make it, because of a racial ability (I think) so after that I say to the Dm "hey can I learn how to make the really good bread from Bird Noises (our Rangers name) during our next long rest?" and he said "No." he didn't even give a reason he just didn't let me.
That does stink.
The ranger could learn by watching someone who couldn't do it, and that person couldn't then learn it from the ranger who miraculously figured it out... I don't think the dm understands his reasoning.
Where to start...
The first time I ever played DND, trying to get used to the rules and whatnots. I know rolling a 1 is a bad thing. So when I rolled a 2 on my perspective roll, I was like whoo, that was close, but the DM took my character, got him so drunk that he walked into the wrong bedroom, had a woohoo with another character - all the time me telling him this wasn't fair, but he continues - and then took my character and wandered off into another room and passed out. I was left out of the adventure and I rage-quit because if this.
Note: this DM hated half dragon characters and I was a half dragon human... Oh excuse me, he hated all dragons and deemed them perfect prey to be hunted down.
I will never understand why some people can’t just set their hatred for pointless things aside. If you’re gonna fuck someone over just because you don’t like their character’s race, you shouldn’t be a DM. If you’re gonna fuck someone over just because you don’t like the person themself, again, you shouldn’t be a DM. In fact, you probably shouldn’t even play with them until you learn to set your hatred aside because you’re just gonna actively try to ruin campaigns for them and in some situations, fucking them over could fuck your whole team over.
I’m really sad hearing these stories... I was about to talk about how average a campaign I played was, because of the bad flow of story and combat, but after this video I think I should be more thankful lol
if your DM was trying to flow the story and was fair to all characters and wasn't bending or breaking game rules to suit him as a DM then you probably had a good DM.
@@immortalgaiden he never said the dm was bad just that the story was lackluster, which is pretty fair not everyone is a natural storyteller
First character was a dragonborn cleric, pretty good-mannered. Our DM’s NPCs always had the same personality: talked to the group like they were dumb and to get out of their shop. My character was asking him something, and the dwarf kept getting an attitude. I asked him why he was acting so shitty, and he explained that his family was killed by undead, and he kept talking down to me. I got sick of this in and out of character, and told the blacksmith “well with that attitude its no wonder your family is dead”. Everyone looked at me with surprise, and he had me roll initiative. He tends to be the DM that likes to instakill you, so my first action i casted death ward, and on his turn, he happened to be a lv 20 cleric... and smited me dealing over 200 damage. I was brought to 1 hp. As a legendary action, he smited me again, dealing 160 damage. Yeah... we don’t play that campaign anymore.
Well to be fair, what kinda shitty Cleric are you if you can't save and/or resurrect your family at level 20.
@@dannybeane2069rekt
Spoiler for critical role in the story!
My hexblade was noped out of the campaign by my dm. His country was in a state of war, and he would be able to stop it. However the party obviously wasnt interested in visiting my homeland anytime soon since we were exploring a new land at the time (understandable, someones backstory shouldn't be forced at some specific time when the party is obviously busy doing something else). Due to some good rolls I actually managed to enter my patrons realm, who basically told me I was halfassing in a far away land and I should go back to fight for my homeland, so I could become King and become the Prophet of my god. I asked if I even was allowed to refuse, to which my dm replied that I could, but my patron would probably take my powers away if I didn't do this. I'm not entirely sure what my dm was trying to set up here, a redemption arch, the loss of my powers or just the removal of my character. Anyway, since at this point my character was still loyal to his patron and I had no intentions of switching Gods like Fjord from Critical Role or something, I agreed. My dm was pretty pissed at me, saying I should never do that again because he believed I didn't discuss my character leaving the party with him. I explained to him that I never intended to do that, but he put an ultimatum in front of me and my character would never refuse his patron at this point in the story. I explained that he basically yeeted my character out of the game.
Thanks for the spoiler I didn’t knew fjord switched gods maybe a warning would be nice
@@topdogjr0068 Oh I'm really sorry, editing right now! Stupid of me to forget...
@@larsjuh13vk thanks sorry if that sounded rude or mean I over reacted hope you can sort out your dm
This reminds me of the time my DM remade my character without me knowing. I was trying to build a grapple ranger in 3.5, cause I was young and thought it'd be fun to use enemies as my primary weapons. I ended up getting a magic axe that let me talk to animals, which for a ranger was great when trying to get an animal companion. Instead of getting one off the bat, I had a lot of difficulty in obtaining one. As t the time I thought it was for roleplay purposes. Turns out the DM basically remade my character after I hit level 2 as a fighter, cause I was running him more as a fighter and less as a ranger.
He even changed my equipment, rearranged my stats a bit and also changed the roles behind the dm screen. I didn't find out about this until a few levels later. My only hint was every now and then he said something on the lines of my spear misses, but I kept reminding him it wasn't a spear but an axe.
My dad(also I the group) didn't know about this, but the rest of the table(DM's family) did.
I laughed about it at the time, kind of But when I look back I get really pissed off about it.
The most unfair thing a DM has ever done to me, he actually did to the whole group (so I guess I wasn't being singled out at least). I've written this story a few times on threads like these. Feel free to use it in a future video.
This happened way, WAY back in 1989 or 1990. We were playing the greatest edition of D&D ever, AD&D 2nd Edition (just kidding . . . kinda, there are some elements of 2nd edition I really do miss). The DM's name was Phung (I'm not going to bother with fake names because GOD did this guy ever suck as a DM). Phung was friends with one of the other players in my regular D&D group (Aaron I think). Anyway, Phung invited Aaron to join him for a game of AD&D set in the Greyhawk setting. Aaron extended the invitation to the rest of us. Along with Aaron there was me, Ryan, Laird, Konrad, and David. When we got there there were a bunch of other people there to play (I'm guessing Phung's regular D&D group?). Including the DM I think there was a total of 13 of us (maybe 15, it was a HUGE group). We sat around a large ping pong table, Phung at one end, five or six down each side, and Laird and me sitting side by side at the other end (BTW, ping pong tables make GREAT D&D gaming tables, especially if playing with terrain & miniatures).
The session started out okay. We were all starting at 1st level. I was playing a female human barbarian that I had already rolled up and been wanting to play (I had actually wrote her up to be for The Forgotten Realms, but whatever). Laird was playing a female half-elven bard. And I honestly don't remember what anyone else was playing (hey, it's been thirty years). Given the number of players I'm pretty sure we had a fairly well rounded group with at least one of every class. Anyway, we start out by being hired as mercenaries/bounty hunters to eliminate the monstrous humanoids who had been raiding the town. We were to take the right ear of every monster we killed as proof in order to collect our bounty. To begin with, things went okay. Given the size of the party, even at level one we managed to do pretty well in combat. We fought a number of goblins, orcs, bugbears, and gnolls.
The problems began when we first engaged in combat. Phung was insisting on us rolling separate initiatives. In a normal game, this would be no problem. But again, this group was HUGE. We had a number of fairly seasoned DMs in my group (Laird & David would often take turns DMing in my group, but I would run the occasional game as well) and we ALL told Phung that for a group this size that he should be using Group Initiatives. For those of you who may not know, rolling Group Initiative requires rolling just one initiative roll for the entire group and then everyone taking turns around the table either clockwise or counter clockwise. You lose the individual benefits of high DEX bonus, but it ensures that everyone at the table has a chance to play and makes book keeping so much easier on the DM. It is ESPECIALLY useful for unusually large parties like this one. Anyway, Phung refused to heed our advise and insisted on individual initiative rolls. What's more, he didn't keep track of whose initiative came when. So some players at the table were constantly missing out on their turns during combat. This part was frustrating as hell, but not really him being unfair.
NOW begins the unfair part. We came to the base of a 200' high cliff with dozens of gnolls armed with bows & arrows up top. There were no clear avenues to get up the cliff without having arrows raining down on us from above. They were out of our bow range, yet because they had the high ground we were still within theirs (which does make sense as our arrows would have to work against gravity while theirs would be aided by gravity). I thought maybe we can find an unguarded part of the cliff to climb up and flank them, so I grabbed a couple of the other tanks, we went into the trees so we would be out of sight of the gnolls, and went about a mile off to one side. When we came out of the trees, the gnolls were on top of the cliff here too waiting for us. So we went back into the trees and went a couple more miles off to the side. Again, more gnolls. Rinse and repeat at least a couple more times. We traveled something like ten miles, yet apparently there are enough gnolls to guard the entire top of that cliff from where we started. So apparently there were over 10,000 gnolls guarding the top of that cliff. I remind you that there were only maybe 14 of us, at most, and we were all 1st level. Also, there are maybe 50 or 60 men, women, and children in a single gnoll tribe. SOMETHING has apparently managed to get about a thousand gnoll tribes to band together into a single army. This shit was WAY above our paygrade. So we basically said "Screw it" and went back to town to find an adventure that DOESN'T require the entire party to be a minimum of 13th level in order to have a fighting chance.
And this is where things start getting REALLY unfair. No matter WHAT we tried to do, no matter WHAT our rolls were, Phung would just declare that we failed. Laird's bard tried getting some money by juggling knives on the street corner. Yet despite rolling a near perfect juggling skill check, his character made no money. The rogue tried conning the barkeep in the tavern to give him his most expensive bottle of dwarven spirits for free, yet despite having rolled a near perfect skill check for Fast Talk the barkeep refused. I was bored so I said that I wanted to start a barfight, and Phung said that the only other people in the tavern were a band of adventurers who we could tell were far more experienced than us and we would get our butts kicked if we tried fighting them. THEN WHY THE HECK AREN'T THEY OUT THERE SLAUGHTERING THE 10,000 GNOLLS THAT ARE GUARDING THE TOP OF THAT CLIFF?!?!?!
Clearly at this point Phung was trying to railroad us into walking into that TPK situation, which none of us wanted to go through with. I was fed up so I just said "Fuck this bullshit! I'm out!" And I packed up my stuff and left. My entire D&D group joined me, and the session just died right then and there. I never played D&D with Phung again. He was just a terrible and petty DM. Maybe he matured and got better? I don't know. I just knew that I didn't want to play with him anymore.
The most unfair thing that happened to me in D&D happened with my first charactsr ever.
I didn't know Drow were evil when I made my ranger, I just thought they looked cool and I liked the darkvision. Throughout the campaign up until her death, my ranger had to hide in the cart while travelling or face such intense racism that I literally couldn't roleplay.
Her actual death came after the party encountered a circus man offering a challenge: at the centre of a large, circular rug he had placed a pedestal with a magic item on it. Anyone who had both feet on the ground when they touched the item could take it, but the rug was enchanted to teleport anyone who touched it off of itself. My ranger had the idea to roll up the rug after seeing that the bottom of the rug didn't have the same teleport effect, and as a result she was able to legally claim the magic item.
As soon as she stepped out of the tent with her new item (never did get to know what it was or what it did), she was beaten and killed by an angry mob of all the other people who'd tried to claim it and failed, which included most of her party.
Ever since that experience, whenever I run Drow in my homebrews, they're always misunderstood folk who people only see as evil because they live underground.
This reminds me of another story about someone who was playing a Drow Rogue that the party turned on. The reason they turned on them was because the Rogue kept wandering off, despite telling them where he was going and what he hoped to accomplish every single time and not even trying to hide it, and bad backstory reasons to be racist against Drow. Half the encounter was spent with the Drow player just taking the dodge action until the DM was forced to inform him that they weren't going to stop until someone was dead.
The Rogue then fought back and wound up TPKing that party somehow. The DM then promised him to find a different group of players for them to play with, so I hope it worked out for them like I think it did for you.
@@morgantaylor84 D&D in general worked out for me, I'm DMing a new group that is a lot of fun!
But to digress to my poor Drow for a second, the reason the party didn't lift a finger to help her when the crowd attacked was because... well, they'd just met her.
Two sessions prior, she and her original party were helping a small Dwarf village in the side of a hill clear out some Duregar in their mine. The Duregar killed two party members, and the third held them off long enough for her to escape and go seek help.
When she got back, the Dwarves were suspicious, but luckily a new travelling troupe of mercs had wandered in (the new PCs) and agreed to pay them what they'd promised us to go clear the Duregar. We returned to the mine, found them wounded, and this time finished the job.
The new party agreed to take her into town so she could find the families of the previous party and tell them what had happened, but sadly (with her in the cart and unable to verify where they were going) they went to the wrong city where the festival was going on. She had no contacts here, no one knew her, which the party took as proof she'd lied.
They went to the festival for a distraction and to discuss what to do about their unwanted hanger-on, and when the crowd jumped her, they figured "problem solved". The new rogue lifted the magic item from her corpse when all was said and done and the party moved on... and so did I, from that game.
It was a hell of an introduction to D&D.
@@Tzryylon5 It's probably a good thing you weren't me. My immediate reaction in a similar situation was to punt the magic item in question to one of my fellow party members who weren't doing anything and just run. In my case it caused my problem to become the whole party's problem when the DM split the mob having half chase after my character and half assault the party. Needless to say when they were all wanted bandits by the town in question for the crime of several counts of self-defense and evading the law their PCs weren't too happy with mine.
I simply sent them a message, via letter, telling them where to meet my PC and got up from the table and told them "Take your revenge against my PC, at least this time people are acting based on racism actually have been wronged by them" and made a new character which was another one "wronged" by my PC when in reality they were the one who caused my PC to be on the surface world in the first place through their own bullsh*t. He fit the party way better as it went on almost complete murder hobo after my former PC was "brought to justice".
Edit: I admit I probably should've cut and run when my first PC left, but I wasn't as good at spotting problematic tendencies then.
I hate it if DMs put too much focus on racism. I don't like dealing with it
As a new dm, I knew that doing a sort of racism vs an evil race (one you can play as in the regular player handbook even) wouldn’t make for much gun if characters, I rule that not all of a race are evil, just their governments
This was mine and a group of friends first time in a 5E campaign. The DM was my father. I played a tabaxi rogue, there was a tabaxi ranger, a kenku monk, a teifling warlock and a dwarf paladin. It was about our sixth session in and we had come upon an ambush, after saving Phandelvar from an invasion (we played the starter module and had become the heroes by restarting a magic forge that had been hidden within). The ambush started after we were led there by a suspicious figure, so naturally my rogue was already lagging behind the group. Combat started and on the start of the fifth round I realized combat was not going okay, and it was close to everyone being knocked out. The paladin and ranger were down already. I started using my cunning action and my tabaxi speed to dip away. Originally, I planned on staying just out of sight and following the group ambushing our group because eveyone was getting knocked out, not outright killed. Instead the DM decided it would be fun to drop more enemies on to my rogue. In an area where it was a well planned ambush. There should have been no enemies anywhere near, because when we were following the suspicious figure to the ambush sight we spot checked every time we were given a chance. So, naturally, with everyone rolling high, there shouldn't have been any enemies. Because enemies came upon me, I started running every round, using my cunning action as well. EVERY. SINGLE. ROUND. HE DROPPED ENEMIES ON THE MAP. I think by the time I finally got shot down, I had 50ish kobolds following me.
In an old AD&D (2e) campaign, I was playing a dual-classed Psionicist-Mage. I'd done this partially to nerf myself, as the most experienced player there, and knew the slower level pacing for me would prevent me from accidentally alienating the newer players. It also made me squishier and in a better position to show how roleplay instead of dice can be used to progress.
However, the abilities to get into the minds of NPCs combined with an old spell that was sort of like a cross between Dimension Door and a portal gun that existed back then bothered the DM. He was big on railroad campaigns, and a psychic mage can accidentally gain information that skips entire encounters and keep the party from being tricked. I had also "portaled" us out of a dungeon cell at one point which bypassed an entire dramatic trial situation he'd written. He decided it was time to kill me.
Camping in the woods at a relatively low level, he dropped a Great Cat on us when i had final watch at camp and had been deus-ex-machina'd away from the party. This thing was basically an enormous tiger with three attacks per round made perfectly to slice and dice squishy mage robes. I manage to get enough distance on it that I was able to pop half of my portal under where it was coming down on the ground leaping at me, and the other half directly above that portal, causing the Cat to accelerate to terminal velocity while failing attempts to get out of the portal chain (1d6 damage each time). Terminal velocity in 2E = 20d6 damage when I removed the lower portal, plus 1d6 for failing the save to not get caught partway as it closed. Dead kitty. The DM was frustrated.
Then, we went to a river and were informed that about this time, our water supply was low. Knowing i needed to rest after the cat incident interrupted my night camping, we'd need water before we could camp again with no ill effects. He informed us our thirst was enough we would need to camp here to prevent issues going forward. He had placed a dead deer at the head of the river, and the entire party fell ill with aggressive diarrhea that weakened all of our rolls, with periodic saves to avoid damage based on Endurance (which mine, of course, was lowest). All except me, who had instead sunk a waterskin under the river and cast Purify Food and Drink with my last spell.
At this point the DM's intent was so obvious immersion was broken and it had become a running joke. The campaign flopped as a result, and he didn't get to DM again.
31 october + curse of strahd.
Oh yeah, it's all coming together
Strahd's a Vampire Bro, right?
@@JaelinBezel yep
@@goatlystudio6076 Call the Dawnguard. Call the Hellsing Organization. Call Abraham Lincoln. If they don't pick up, be sure to leave a message.
@@JaelinBezel they don't pick up...
@@goatlystudio6076 A Light Cleric would probably be handy though.
Told a DM I wanted to do Fighter 1/Wizard 19 so I could be a heavy armored wizard without going Gith or Dwarf and taking a feat... He said sure. Once I got to level 2 he said I couldnt do that because I would be too powerful...
And that was the last session we had lol.
I nearly lost it when I saw my story got done from the comments from the part one of this video. Never expected it to get read
The most unfair thing a DM ever did to me was set a creature who was able to 1 shot my tank with normal melee attacks. I responded by blowing it the F up with a double booby trap made out of a false wall that swung down home alone style.......and a Fire Trap spell that went off like a frag grenade when it punched the wall..... Needless to say, I killed it lol.
Playing thief halfling wanted to hide behind a large turtle person bard, had me roll dice for chance to Succeed, rolled an 18 with bonuses it came to 21 and was told I failed and fell on the turtle persons shell spikes impaling myself and I had to roll for damage. This was during the first 5 min of my first campaign. Let’s just say I never played again.
Videos like this make me feel a lot better about my DMing
I agree. My first DM'ing was difficult, but hearing these stories it's like ooh, I remember when... And now it's like, if I do anything stupid, please slap me. I want my players to have a fun and exciting adventure not a "your character died, you have no save rolls cuz I say so".
@@bl4q1c3 Ditto
Yeah make me glad I don't have that bad of a dm he has a few quirks like how he dose leveling or at least used to
Honestly it makes me happy my DM a good friend is hosting my first campaign
3.5e, had a fighter specialized in tripping enemies. Guisarme to start, Improved trip, combat reflexes; then a flail to switch to up close.
Pretty much just stood back enough that melee would engage me, I'd trip at the 10' range as they approached,
After about three battles of good crowd control, the entire world magically knew, and no one ever charged me again. Enemies from completely untouched backgrounds knew to utilize 5' steps. The last straw was when a dire bear did it. Charged, stopped at 10', then just waited the next round to 5' in.
Never went back after that.
I had a DM who managed to both railroad us and also give us little to no guidance at the same time. The adventure jumped back and forth between different scenes without much explanation, of, and when he defeated the 'Undead Sorceress'. The DM revealed that, not only were we not supposed to kill this character who had clearly been set up as the villain, but that in doing so we'd gotten the 'Bad Ending'. Again, we had no was of knowing this, as even when we rolled near max on checks to discover information, we still received no clues. After this, the DM left our group and we'd not seen them since.
I was playing a Wookiee bounty hunter who was attacked by Jabs and enslaved with one con roll and he stuck me in desert by the way. And then the other players bought me because they were like we want to hire more man power. But the DM heard slave so I was a collared slave for no reason and the DMPC was making sure I was not enjoying it. I don’t talk to that guy anymore but sadly it was not because of this. And the many other times my characters were targeted as his story punching bag. Which was every game.
Love you vids Rip, Brian, and Dave.
All the love Argo!
Come say hello over on my channel one of these days
Brian Vaughn
I just subbed!
@@SaraphDarklaw Sara! Well howdy damn hello and welcome to the fun-zone!
Darklaw has got to be villain name if I ever saw one 😋
@@Vargavinter83 your name is already a villain name Dreadwold
I'm actually in the middle of a Curse of Strahd Revamped session! It's my first game in years, and I'm super excited to hear other people running it! I can't wait to hear what other ppl do in the situations we went through!
Playing starfinder I was playing the son of a precious character I played that the DM hated. So everytime I would go for a skill check if be given a check for a skill I didnt have but not related to the check. (Example, mysicism for reading body language on an android, engineering check on finding doors and windows on blueprints.) And on top of that everyone seemed to have a hateful disposition to my character that never really did much.
Edit:he only had me roll checks to the 3-5 skills I didnt have and would explain it via "I'm the DM I say its that"
to be fair engineering to properly look at blueprints kinda makes sense
If a player argued he wanted to use engineering instead just to interact with a blueprint, perfectly fine. the dm should not enforce that though.
Also... Starfinder allows take10 and take20 rules. basically if you take 10 minutes of time to do something you dont roll, you take a 10 as your roll.
if you spend 1 hour you take a 20 as your roll+proficiency+attribute obviously.
I had a dm that killed me even when I did nothing the rogue in our group did a crit miss and his dagger flew out of his hand killed the rogue and then flew back and killed me I didn't get to roll a save or anything ( I had 18 con 15 dex and plus 2 armor and a magic full plate helm) anyways made a new character with similar stats and got killed again in a similar way after that the whole group left cause we were tired of his bs
I felt horrible when I built this bbeg battle with monsters from kobold press tome of beasts. Was all excited. And then in the battle, my paladin player tried to 5th level smite. I clarified that smite dealt radiant damage. Monster was immune. Next turn the paladin did some shroud of necrotic damage. I sheepishly replied "as your mist swirls around the void, you sense, the figure before you remains unaffected." Yup. Paladin did his two nuclear options and the monster I picked RAW just so happen to bypass both.
At least you had the decency to be sheepish; there are GMs who do it on purpose and then gloat.
I once played under a DM, who took away a lot of our agency as players, gave us too strong opponents, always favorised the edgy antimate rogue in over half of a year barely get us to level 3. He was quite toxic, so I broke up contact and started a new campain with all the players except the edgy rogue. We play happily every week and it's very wholesome.
The worst thing the DM ever did for me was when I decided to play a Dragonborn Beast Barbarian, and then he threw an encounter at us, only wisdom saving throwns, no melee attacks, the creature swallowed weapons after being attack without succeeding a str save, and after 2 rounds of combat he turned my character into a clone of himself and made me run away. Then he rairoaded us through a dungeon we were put without a choice (resisting meant losing hp AND being put in the dungeon), facing the same enemy again, then facing a weird cult leader that got obliterated by a god he was a clone of with if I remember correctly 5 desintegrate spells in a single turn. Then the god proceeded to flirt with our characters (he made it a point to say he perceives us all as children). Never had another session since.
Good grief, that's quite a barrel of yikes!
Oh, I have one. I was playing an Abjuration wizard who focused on utility over damage. We had a running joke of my character's various excuses as to why I didn't prepare Fireball that day. My character's sister had just been kidnapped. The party killed one of the BBEG's lieutenants, who gave us a crystal to teleport one of us to her location because we were worthy opponents or something. I was explicitly told that I needed to go now to save her, it was a one way trip, and only one person could go. It's my character's sister, so I'm going.
Out of character, I'm thinking "This encounter was designed for me, and we just fought a boss. There's no way this is a fight, because I couldn't win a 1 on 1 fight before that boss before". I spend two weeks in between sessions making an elaborate plan to save my sister involving getting a buff from an NPC cleric to compensate for my garbage charisma while I disguise myself as the guy we just killed. I was going to simply ask whoever was on the other side to see my sister and Dimension Door away with her. When next session comes around, the Cleric basically runs off immediately before I can ask for the buff. I use the crystal, and there's a fight on the other side. My sister is in a force cage I can't Misty Step through, and the guy I'm fighting is immune to fire and cold damage (my main types of damage). I escape with 1 HP and call the DM a bastard as he gloats about how "tragic" it was.
Yeah, definitely a prize arsehole, that guy. That should've been your character's time to shine.
If these DMs are part of your friends group, remove them from the group, if he says it's just a game, remind him that in this game he is being malicious to his friends intentionally. Also I'd most likely punch some of these.
mine turned my twinky scared of everything cleric boy into a werewolf to "toughen him up" . We never fought any werewolves, we were investigating a murder scene that had weird silver liquids on the floor, so i had my character investigate it and flavoured it that he gave it a sniff and dip finger into it and give it the tiniest lick and spit thing . Then was told I needed to roll a con save and failed , apparently that was enough to turn me into a full blown werewolf.
Threw CR4 CR6 CR8 enemies and even a CR14 boss at the party in a dungeon. We were all level 1 with a party of maybe 5 or 6 people, and this DM was also using "free actions" for attacks so the enemies could get 5 attacks each per turn. Naturally this made it very likely for a party member to die to any one of these enemies, even without the abuse of "free actions". The DM admitted after being called out that they did not like DnD and was claiming to be making their own game system, I don't think I would ever want to play whatever system they come up with after that experience.
I have the opposite so to speak.
I was dming descent into Avernus and our newbie wanted to make a frost sorcerer so to speak. took only spells with ice damage. first few levels is fine because its in baldurs gate against cultists and stuff.
But once we got into avernus... nearly every devil and demon has cold resistance. It became sort of a running joke that all enemies are resistant to his damage. "Your spell seemingly has less of an effect than you would expect, the enemy is barely touched."
then he took the elemental adept feat, and every single time he used a cold spell i said aloud something like: "you see the demon smiling in anticipation of your ray of frost. Yet once the spell hit him, his face froze. literally." or "The thick fur the hellhound is wearing seemingly makes it impervious to the cold, but somehow your spell seems to penetrate the coat of fur"
we still joke about it a year later
we were 4th level or so in 3.5. we were running through a deep dungeon and at the end we got a gem that'd grant us 1 wish. we were low on health, spells, and potions and just wanted out. we wished to be transported to a safe location on the surface. Turns out the gem shatters and explodes upon completing the wish, and it went with us since we were holding it. it did 10d6 damage to everyone with a reflex safe of 19 for half. even half damage was 5 times what we had in health. So we beat the dungeon but still lost.
apparently we weren't supposed to use the gem because it was evil.
Oh great it’s the tomb of horrors wish gem. Get out while you still can if the DM is pulling from that abomination for “dungeon loot”
@@yoshifan2334 Oh so that's what he took it from. If he did run the tomb, he didn't run it right because I only remember tough encounters.
@@professorsponge1554 No I'm pretty sure he just lifted the idea of the gem from that module, as the tomb of horrors isn't a normal dungeon, as in there's like 2 total combats besides the end boss, but the whole dungeon is filled to the brim with instakill bullshit, often without a save, with little to no hints as to what to do on various puzzles, no consistent logic (IE walking through one fog gate will teleport you forward in the dungeon, but going through another later on will gender swap you, and then later alignment swap you if you try to go through again, and also steal literally all of your stuff, leaving you naked and back at the start of the dungeon) and all of the "loot" before the very last room with the dungeon boss will either disintegrate upon leaving the dungeon, or is trapped like the exploding wish gem used here.
@@yoshifan2334 Could be. I'm sure if I could get my hands on a PDF I might be able to remember it more clearly this was at least 15 years ago.
@@yoshifan2334 I found the PDF and gave it a run through. I remember a lot of the traps he through at us and you're right. None of these traps sound familiar to me. When he threw puzzles at us they tended to stick in my mind, and yeah it sounds like it was just the gem. Upon further recollection the other puzzles in that dungeon he threw at us were far tamer than what's in tomb of horrors. child's play. This DM's one of my players now, and its so strange he'd only lift the gem from this. He normally doesn't do that.
The most unfair thing my 1 dm ever did to me was off my characters the body count was 2 fighters 2 wizards 1 warlock 1 sorcerer and 2 clerics. 1 of which was killed out of combat and all took place over 8 sessions. All enemies no matter where I was or what I was doing always threw everything they at me. Rolling enough nat 20s to convince antivacs moms there wrong killing me in 1 if lucky 2 turns . I chalked it up to he was brand new to dming after my ninth death I asked he said it was revenge for killing his charector 2 yrs prier. I asked him to get out of my house and not come back.
I mighta brained that guy with a bat myself, but i also have a rather viscousness towards petty idiots, i can forgive a lot, but old petty stuff just ticks me off
@@KyleSage35 he 17 me at the time 28 lol I might live where the prisons are a motel 6 with a dingy dress code but I like my freedom a bit to much to mangel a minor miniscule gray matter.
A bit late to the party, but why not...
Back in my 3.5 days I was playing a warforged artificer (cliche, I know) focused primarily in utility/group enhancements. In our first mission we were sent to retrieve some amulet/necklace McGuffin from a temple by the mayor of a village who I (and the rest of the party) was getting 'I am secretly the badguy' vibes from. Fast forward through a fairly standard dungeon/ruin run and as we return to town the group and I decide that I should cast Hoard Gullet (a spell that allows you to swallow items into an extradimensional space) and store the McGuffin in it until we can determine the true nature of the Mayor during our meeting.
Turns out he was evil (shocker) and tried to kill us while his daughter had 'picked the bard's pocket to get the McGuffin' in the middle of the fight without being seen (and no rolls to notice her at all were made), and when informed that it was, in fact, inside of the hoard gullet, he retconned it to her having somehow shoved her entire arm down my throat, rooted around inside of me, removed her arm with the McGuffin, all without anybody (including my character receiving a reverse cavity search) being given any rolls to notice her in any way during an actively moving fight where my character was running around from cover to cover with their crossbow and never spent a single round without changing locations.
We were annoyed, but forgave him since apparently he was trying to set up a storyline/quest that was hinged on trying to stop this mayor (and his family) and their evil plot to resurrect some dead evil deity or another.
Of course, this was not the only thing he did, so the game did die soon after (though I will admit it took far longer than it should since he was our friend and we didn't want to make him feel bad for us all quitting).
My DM Rolled A D100 and got a 76 and said anyone who rolls under this won't be taking part in tonights session and I was the only one who failed this I had to sit out the session.
WTAF???
First time playing was a one shot I did with my friend and a few randoms on roll20, we killed the BBEG only for the DM to get pissy and have a beholder come out of the wall.
I am running a homebrew with my wife, my son, and my two daughters. They were taken to a dwarvwn town elder to be questioned for strange disappearances and to get vital info and a quest. I know how my wife roll plays very well. So, when she started mouthing off the the elder, he warned her that he had many court wizards that would be her undoing. She mouthed off again, and the wizards cast silence. I told her to make a CON save and really didn't care what she rolled, she failed it. That way the elder could deliver the information that they needed without the cocky party wizard getting them all into a fight.
I always watch these to see if one of my old groups post me but looks like I’m good again.
almost ten years ago, my very first Pen and Paper game, we played pathfinder. Played a group, had some fun, but because of irl most ppl quit. DM told me, he would run a solo adventure for me, so I could get to play my char on. I was absolutely overjoyed, since I loved the char, and loved the game in general... wanted to do more stuff...
Well, I played a lvl 3 Ranger. After just some minor intros, he threw a terrasque at me. I was dead within 3 turns, despite my character being infused with a living metal armor, and having terrain bonus.
He introduced the monster as being "attacked by the city guard" but when I turned up, to check it out and see if I could help, he made it focus soley on me. I ran away, but it just jumped to catch up with me and then insta killed me in a single attack.
This was despite me hiding in a nearby ruined house. And he didnt accept me trying to take cover or hide anywhere as "The surroundings are just empty plains and fields"
And when I was dead he straight up told me "well you werent supposed to fight the terrasque, you were just supposed to see it, to see how dangerous and corrupted the world had become."
When he could have easily just had it focus on the damn townguard that was there too, and let me escape, especially considering I was a really new player and didnt even get what a terrasque was, with his description of it being "About the size of a house" not doing much to tell me, that I shouldn't go there at all, since we fought similarily sized enemies in the group before, that I basically soloed due to the living metal armor.
This was at the DMs home, which was an hour of a bicycle ride away (was too young to drive a car yet) So I rode my bike for an hour to get to do some fun adventures, got insta killed and sent home.
Safe to say, I never played with that DM again, and didnt play any TTRPGs for well over 2 years, since that situation turned me off entirely.
my first Vampire (WOD) game I was told to make a character and that I would be in a homered version of 'not LA' so I made a ww1 vet with 100 years of history and flavor. very carefully planned out his possessions and had them all approved by the storyteller. my first session I get of a boat at the docks with 3 trunks of my personal belongings, most of them just flavor and memorabilia of his life- far more sentimental value than in-game use though there was some in game use for all of it. I am on the docks less than 10 seconds when I am ambushed by 10 ghouls after abandoning all but one trunk (I had wisely split up my most important stuff in case something like this happened I had played with this guy before) I was "rescued" by the sheriff who aparently knew where I was but wouldn't drive an extra 30 ft to assist in the recovery of my possessions and beat me up (to the point of my having to spend blood points to regenerate) for being 'stupid when I wasn't even the one who decided where to go. later we decided to go visit one of the leaders of the city to find a patron and some direction. his hideaway was on the "bad side" of town which meant that stack of cars block streets off and there is no electricity and every person you see has an AK-47 or better so we get there and the guy had arbitrarily decided to burn down his own home so he can't talk to us and on the way out seeing the fire in the background of the rear view mirror cause one of us to frenzy (no roll) it continued like that eg the cops show up the second we fire a weapon or hit someone despite apparently half the city being completely lawless but I can't type any more of this it is just making me sad lol. anyway it took 4 years before I agreed to play that system again this time with a much better storyteller and it was one of the best games I ever played.
AL dm explicitly told me she doesnt like high ac characters, but i only had a tier 2 sorcadin with a +2 shield and a +2 platemail. so that made my ac a 24. 29 with shield spell. she promptly had us encounter dragon riding githyanki that showers us with dragonfire before initiative and casts telekinesis every turn including the first, to remove my armor. eventually i failed the str save and my ac was down to 14. we won that fight by dm fudging the dice and teaching me a valuable lesson, to never play with her again
The most unfair thing a DM ever did to me was when playing through a campaign of which I had experience in, but he wanted me as a player anyway, saying that my experience with both the campaign and being a DM would be helpful. I accepted and I solemnly swore that I would not meta-game in any way. He was fairly new as a DM but had alot of experience as a player in a campaign I ran, as well as with other DM's. I mostly play my characters as being cautious, because that's just how I like to play them. I don't normally just rush into situations without taking in the surroundings. And I thought it this campaign would suit me well as there are ALOT of dangers, puzzles and traps in it. That being said. Every time I did solve puzzle, find or avoid a trap, etc. I was accused of meta-gaming. Not taking into consideration the times when my character hadn't noticed the danger and triggered whatever happened. Not calling out the other players whenever they solved a puzzle either.
It got to the point where I just wouldn't help solve the puzzles (mind you, having experience in a campaign does not mean I have memorized all the puzzles.)
So when we were in the final dungeon of the campaign there were HINTS given to the players about the different puzzles on the different floors. So each time we got to a new room, the only thing I did was remind the other players about the hints... which also got me called out for meta-gaming.
Long story short, I eventually left the game. The accusations was not the main reason why, but it was a contributor. Me and two other players (half the player group) left because of what the DM and the remaining players considered fun gaming.
I own every D&D 5e book. I have read and watched streams of most adventures. But EVERY good player and DM should know the difference between player and character knowledge, and not to meta game.
TL;DR. New DM asks me to join in a campaign of which I am familiar to play and help him out. I swear not to meta game. Get continuously called out for meta-gaming due to being cautious player. I eventually leave the group and two other players leave with me.
Was playing a game of 5e with some friends. It was a low magic item and low gold campaign so no bags of holding. After every fight my ranger would grab armor and weapons of the bandits or who ever we killed and put them in the wagon to be sold later when we made it into town. I guess he got tired of telling me what was on the bandits cause he had a level 20 dmpc halfing show up and fuck with us. After he was done messing with us he said he teleports away with your horse. I reminded him that teleport has a weight limit. He told me he was the dm so what ever he said goes and that now the entire wagon was gone. So that was all of my gold, equipment, rations, potions and everything I have been saving up for the entire campaign. I ruined his campaign by completely ignoring all plot hooks and danger from then on as my character learned that in this world its not profitable to go and adventure when someone could just teleport in and steal it away in less then a min
I really wanna get into D&D but I don't really know how or have any friends who would play. I get to live vicariously through your videos tho. Sounds like a lot of fun.
If you want to find a group do you have Reddit?
@@topdogjr0068 yea im on reddit a bit
@@outlawkaz6715 cool then go to the sub Reddit search box and type in r,lfg it’s a really good player and dm finder
@@outlawkaz6715 and a tip on that sub Reddit use sort by newest post to get to the new posts before everyone else
@@topdogjr0068 thanks ill check it out
I haven't had anything too bad happen to me, but the worst thing that happened to one of my friends is as follows (told secondhand, I wasn't there in person): he was playing in a early edition campaign in high school with pre generated character sheets and he was given a paladin. the whole time he was playing that character, he was never allowed to do what he wanted because the DM would tell him it wasn't in character and what he should do instead. the example I remember is that he wanted to take a dead guy's sword he found because his current one wasn't good and this new one was better, but was told "a paladin wouldn't do that, he would bury the body with his equipment and say a prayer". that in combination with the fact that he was the only human and all the other characters were racist elves has made so to this day, he very vocally refuses to play paladins and only ever picks chaotic neutral for is alignment. messed up situation all around.
Disclaimer I wouldn't count any horror stories I was in as "unfair" those were on a whole other level. So this is my "unfair DM" story.
D&D 5e through Roll20. Other characters don't really matter, other than maybe pointing out that one of the players was a friend of the DM and got to homebrew their race.
I was playing a Deep Gnome Illusionist and all-in-all the first couple of sessions we had were solid. The problem arose when I started using what I set out to use. Illusions. Tried using Minor Illusion to communicate with a creature no one shared a language with through what was essentially a slide show of images. "A cantrip can't be used like that, it's too strong for a level 0 spell". Alright, I thought to myself - nothing I did was against the spell description but I won't make a fuss about it. Use Silent Image to hide the party - "you walk for... without finding anything and then! How long is the duration of Silent Image again? Yeah it expired right before you found this sorry". The final nail for me was when we got to the big city and my -2 Charisma Gnome had to roll straight Charisma Checks to see if his illusions were seen through by others. Ignoring that in the spell description is says exactly what an NPC needs to do to try and see through an illusion. Nah, let's use my dump stat to determine success instead.
There was also a part of the campaign where we had to hand over all of the spell scrolls we found in a dungeon - removing all the reward we got for completing the challenges right after I talked out of character about scribing said spells into my spellbook.
I did try talking to the guy a couple of times but according to him he played with a group once that tried to push the rules in their favour too much and he's extra harsh because of that. Not sure what is extra harsh about ignoring feature descriptions in favour of homebrew rulings but heck - table blew up and disbanded shorty later because of reasons regarding the homebrew race friend.
my dm decided at some point that our team had to many magic items
so, he decided (between sessions) to have some bandits rob us of all but one magic item each
no fight no saves no nothing just "you guys were robbed choose one magic item and remove the rest"
Ohhhhh boy I got a fun one
So one day me and my friends were all sitting around, "what should we do" someone chimes in one guy, who is notorious for campaign hopping speaks up. He says, "oh i have a campaign idea if you guys want to play d&d?"
We're all bored and are like "sure why not what could go wrong"
Turns out a lot
So we're rolling characters and for once someone else plays a tank, normally I'm the last person to make a character, working 2 jobs+ helping family+girlfriend+social life= tight schedule, so I normally get stuck playing a tank or healer or more often than not both. Hence why I was excited to roll up my first ever Half elf and first ever monk.
We all finish about 45ish minutes later, we're all sitting around
"You guys are on a boat in the middle of an ocean leading towards your freedom across the oppression you faced on the other continent"
*in the back of my head*
Kraken into stranding or wyverns.
We're walking around, talking with the crew and the dm calls for a perception check, only I pass. And I see 2 wyverns flying towards the ship, me being an idiot I don't have any ranged attacks so I'm hoping one lands.
Initiative is rolled i think I'm going first, only way wyverns go first is with "oh hey nat 20"
...sigh OK
They go first look at the whole party, and for whatever reason takes a shot with their stinger, "okay I'm fine no big deal"
"Heeyyyy nat 20"
...
*dice clatters* hey I need a
*rolls a 3* 5 total con save
*more dice clatters* okay you take 97 points of damage (turns out he ruled that the venom, since the attack crit got doubled even though it was a save for the damage not the attack roll, and told NO ONE AND NEVER USED IT AGAIN"
"Well I'm dead"
"You mean down.."
"No dude I am dead"
I explained the instant death rules, if you hit max negative you die instantly, no saves no nothing, just poof gone
"So my head gets taken off by the stinger, cool so I'm gonna roll up my new character you guys have fun"
I start rolling stats, 18...18...my eyes go wide and I show my friend and he's like "you didn't" so a small thing in my group I am cursed to never get good stats, ever, so this is unprecedented.
Annnd 17, 18 17 16 I'm broken
I rolled up the tankiest tank I could tank with
Barbarian 3, druid 2, totem warrior moon druid, with effectively like 400 hp give or take.
So the party meets me and we keep going, as we keep getting into fights, only I am targeted, the enemies all would have disengage as bonus actions then run over to me and try to hit me, like really?? Okay sure
We keep fighting, oh hey everybody is racist towards Goliaths too...oookayyyyy
So i can't buy items like anywhere, can't rest without risk of getting jumped. And then the final nail in the coffin, after flattening the last encounter, literally, jumped up, turned into a giant turtle, and crushed a hoard of skeletons. He asks me "what can kill you" one of my party members chimes in "psychic damage f's him up"
....
The next encounter just so happened to be, intellect devourers..in an open field..with no hills, mountains, anything that leads to the underdark, and low and behold they all focus me, they can't hit me to save their life, thank God and we won the fight. Every fight there after, psionics (before psions were confirmed for the game mind you) and random mental damage added onto every damn attack, he ended up abandoning that campaign a few sessions later saying we all had ruined it cuz we were "too broken for it to be fun to dm"
Lol okay bud cuz it's fun to get one shot and the start of the first turn of the first combat and then get targeted for a whole damn campaign.
So I already told one story of an unfair GM in Pathfinder 1e (Mobs with Freedom of Movement that can also give you immunity to the STUNNED CONDITION)
This is one that seemed very unfair:
Pirates of the Inner Sea
Giving each of us premade characters and giving us very little influence in leveling the characters paired with horrible dice rolls. Campaign always seemed to favor the Party's sorcerer and I had gone through literally 4 characters in that campaign, only one other person had to make 1 new character and that's it. This campaign apparently had plant monsters who can take 5ft steps when they can ONLY move 5ft per move action.
First character: Brawler hybrid class specifically built for grappling, Enemies had Freedom of Movement
Second Character: A Corsair Fighter built to fight well on ships, Died to Instant x3 auto confirm crits
Third Character: Same stats as second but Max HP is lowered, Is afraid of literally every encounter
Fourth Character: (This one GM allowed me FULL CONTROL of building him), Inquisitor of Besmara, Specializing in Rapiers and spell slinging, Died the most times due to enemies being literally strong enough to one-shot me every single time. So I declared that anytime he GMs again, I will refuse to play.
Smart move, better to just walk away before the rage sets in
my dm just dipped.
we had planned it for 3 months.
we didn't even get to play.
there was just no dm.
I like the fact that @MrRipper likes Pathfinder 1st. :)
So I had grown up playing home brews of 3rd edition (give or take) and I had never played 5e, or played D&d since I was very young. So when I was invited to play 5e with a co-worker, I was very excited. I skimmed through D&d beyond and fell in love with the idea of playing a Tortle Druid who had formerly been a brilliant sailor. He would use his druidcraft to predict the weather. His mending would repair nets and other gear. His create or destroy water would provide the crew with fresh water, and good berry could keep them fed. Now, this was just for flavor since the campaign my coworker was going to run was not a seafaring campaign. My ex sailor would gradually get his land legs and adjust accordingly. However, when I told my coworker/DM about how excited I was about this character (since, I'd always played a Druid as a kid) He immediately told me that I'd only be able to wild shape into aquatic animals. Now, druids can start wildshaping at lvl 2, but don't get a swimspeed until lvl 4, so I asked him if I could bypass this restriction. No. I was frustrated but came back with the idea that my job as a sailor was transporting exotic animals from all over the world, so he was very familiar with many animals. To this, I swear to God he said that I could wildshape into land animals, but I'd have disadvantage on ALL my attacks.
WTF??
To be fare the DM didn’t really hold any ill will towards me but it still hit hard. I have a pretty limited experience playing DnD and Pathfinder since I’m young and don’t have a group. I played some Pathfinder and Rifts with my older brothers group a few years back. The unfair story is in the Rifts campaign, I was an ice dragon that was silver and in human form was a child for some plot reason never looked at. Through some series of events I lost the ability to turn into my dragon form and was stuck as a human. So in an attempt to figure out what happened another player makes a roll, not sure on what like I said been a few years, and gets a 1. What happens my character forgets I’m even a dragon, just an incredibly strong child because of another players roll that shouldn’t have been able to affect me memory/perception of myself. I kept it together mostly at the table but when we called it quits my brother had to check in on my cause I was crying.
Bruh
What?
How did someone Perception of your character alters their memory?
I've actually had 2 separate campaigns that went a little along the lines as the ones featured here.
The first one was at the beginning of lockdown, the DM was a guy I went to high school with. There was a Druid, Cleric (I think?), Bard, Fighter and me- a Dragonborn Paladin. This was my first ever campaign, and I had NO idea how D&D worked. The DM refused to help me with making my character sheet, and I had never even spoken to the people I was going to be playing with. Therefore, I didn't have the most balanced character (This was 5e, and I didn't have any access to many D&D related materials). However, the other people I was playing with had experience with the game. We started at either level 2 or 3, but I know we levelled up at some point, and I remember that because upon choosing a subclass, I was informed I wasn't allowed one. No idea why, I just assumed it wasn't important. We played a lot of combat in these sessions, and looking back now do I realise how weird and unbalanced our fights were. We were against some cultists (for one reason or another, I don't believe it was ever really clarified), and we were fighting. At first, we made a strength check to see if we could muster the strength to hit our opponents. And then, dexterity to see if we actually hit. My Strength was good, but my Dexterity was not. I didn't know how AC worked at this point, I just knew armour = you don't get hit as much. Apparently not. Me, with my heavy armour, was hit with rolls that were as low as 8 (We played over discord, and the dice channel was available to all of us). Th cultists used the usual method of how you hit things. We survived the battle, but everybody was fairly pissed, except the fighter. Magic was essentially rendered useless, and so it was me and the fighter mainly taking the hits. The bard couldn't even inspire us. After we got through, beat every boss and cultist, we,, failed. Immediately. I'm not sure WHAT we failed, the story was never consistent, but we did. I remember we went to a ball (nice), and then there were robots (Homebrew ones. I had to give them a CR, I'd assume it would have been 12 or more), and then there was a nightmare realm that I was not present for. But, the ROBOTS. We were between levels 3-6 (we used experience, I often couldn't show up to sessions due to them being late starting, about 11pm, which wouldn't have been too much of a problem if I didn't have a roommate, so we were all different levels), and we all died to them. Our DM turned to us all, almost offended that we'd DARE fight them. We were given no indication that we shouldn't- in fact, we were encouraged to do so. The ball-goers knew us as adventurers, and were yelling thing like 'WHO WILL SAVE US??'. We all died. Nobody rolled a new character. We know now that he knew how to play D&D properly. He just didn't want to. It was just a general mindfuck
The second campaign gone wrong was about a year after this one, with a different DM and different players. A bard-rogue Tiefling multiclass, a Tiefling sorcerer, a Halfling Bard, a Human Fighter, and me- I was playing a Changeling Monk, although that wasn't particularly important. This DM understood combat and the general rules of D&D, and we're still pretty good friends. What they didn't understand was player agency, boundaries. Their story was interesting, although a little all-over-the-place and I'd say slightly inconsistent, but not to a troubling amount. The problems didn't start rolling in until a player that the DM didn't like joined the table. There wasn't any heat between them, they just weren't the closest friends. Now, there was an NPC- a dwarf child, we'll call him Umi. Umi was an orphan, and my character kinda took him under her wing. Not to train her or get her into fights, just to take care of her. Now, IRL, we discussed beforehand that we didn't want to deal with themes like child death, sensitive stuff like that due to personal events. My brother had almost died multiple times due to medical problems when he was young, and my friends also had some negative experiences with that sort of theme, so we agreed it'd be best to avoid it.
The session this new player, the Druid, joined, Umi was stabbed. He didn't die, we all made sure of it, he survived with multiple successful medical checks and healing spells, but we were all silently pissed that the DM was willing to do this. We talked to them afterward, and they said to calm down. That was the end of that. A few sessions later, the bard-rogue and the sorcerer were messing around when we were on downtime. We were walking along a path to get to a tournament or something of the sort, and the 2 thought it would be funny to scare the bard, who was revered as a coward (Just as the player wanted to play him). They decided to mess around with a few spells, mainly minor illusion, to make him see some things (I can't remember what), to freak him out. An important factor about my character is that she's blind, and that Umi was on her shoulders (She was taking her to a different orphanage I believe). On top of this, she was walking alongside the bard. The bard thought his best to cast Thunderwave. If you don't know what that is, its meant to knock enemies back and do a little bit of damage. I make a constitution save, and pass. We assumed that would be the end of it. But, the DM rolled.
'Monk. You feel a weight come off of your shoulders as Umi is sent flying.'
My character was holding onto her ankles, and had a STR score of around 15. I asked to make a strength check to keep him on. The DM said no. Umi had failed his constitution save, and was not breathing. Immediately dead. By some miracle (I'm going to assume our complaints) Umi comes back. You'd think this is where it ends.
Nope. We stayed in the campaign for a little while longer. Just a little while. We were on a train, headed to my characters home town for one reason or another. My character had essentially become a foster mother to Umi- by which I mean the DM was having Umi refer to her as his mother. You'd THINK with this, my character would realise that Umi was not on the train with them all. The DM had us all roll a perception check (One that I didn't roll due to being blind). Only one person succeeded, and they saw Abi get attacked. Stolen away, and vanishing. I asked the DM why my character wouldn't be aware that her literal CHILD was not accompanying us. They got me to roll an intelligence check- it was well-known that my character is not intelligent. Her INT was 7, so I had a -2. Even so, I believe I rolled a 14 or something along those lines. I was told it failed. The fellow players argued, saying my character should know. So, the DM was kind enough to retcon what happened...
'Upon getting on the train, you get separated from Abi, but the crowd pushed you onto the train'.
We were all just tired of it at this point. We had the plan to get off of the train, of course.
DM: 'The train starts to move. Each cart appears miles long. You can all deduct jumping out of the train would kill you immediately'.
… So my character's barely smart enough to realise her child is missing, but smart enough to deduct the mortality of jumping out of a train. We plan to get to the front of the train to stop it, but the DM made this almost impossible through the most stupid means. By 'stupid', I mean my character was the only one not intimidated by a literal goose, and she had to throw it out the window for the others to be able to move. The DM had this stupid fucking reoccuring 'goose character', who had bitten off a players foot beforehand (Note: The DM made the new player change their character because he was deemed 'too silly', an that he wasn't 'taking it seriously'. The player's character was a VERY old man who was looking for his grandson. He thought, my character, a changeling woman, was his grandson, and also refused to believe she was blind because 'kids today exaggerate everything'. She was about 27. We all found this playstyle very amusing, and nobody but the DM had any issues with it). We all concluded that throwing it off of the train was a fair thing to do, given the circumstances. However, our DM had this,,, weird view of morality. Previously, we had faced off with some bandits, who intended to skin the Tieflings and take their horns. So, we fought. It's important to note that we were fighting non-lethally, and we clarified that at the beginning and end of the fight. But, the DM killed the bandits anyway, and after we refused to search them, had something fall out of one of their pockets. A little note, that read 'have a good day at work, daddy!'. I have no idea why, but it was supposed to make us feel bad. But, they did that EVERY. TIME. Remember that tournament we were supposed to go to? We were being threatened, so we had to fight. The DM made it VERY plot relevant to fight. But, afterwards, DM did their best to make us feel awful about it, telling us our opponents hopes and dreams, their life stories, their kids, stuff like that.
After this train debacles, we didn't have any other sessions.
First story’s DM really had it out for the OP, not sure why. Not only make them useless in fights, but kicked them out under false circumstances just because he found a way to be useful, lied about it to everyone else involved, and then killed their character via retcon because they didn’t like how the PC managed to circumvent the proverbial neutering done to them. What did this DM have against this player?
Oh, I've got a good, recent one, though it's a meta issue, not in-game. Two sessions ago, we ended with my character getting kidnapped by a dragon. This last session, I was forced to be there the whole 3 hours as the party tried to rescue my character. I didn't do anything the whole time but sit muted, occasionally checking in to help these people who have never read any of the books and have no idea how to play. It was by far the worst experience I've had since I got into DnD.
Why did you have to stay? Did the dm give a reason on why you had to stay?
@@topdogjr0068 I think they planned on playing a bit longer initially, but otherwise no, they just said I needed to be there, so I stayed, assuming I'd eventually do something. Which I didn't.
Now to be fair it's their first campaign, so they probably just didn't account for time properly
4:55 To be fair, if this was just normal player set up at the beginning of a campaign and they got those rolls and no one else got a similarly strong roll, then I would have suggested they reroll for them. However, in the situation presented here, yeah, he's just a dick.
My DM regularly lets us wait ONE WEEK until the next session. So unfair.
Since I'm gonna to be new at this, I bet it'll be like that if I start to play D&D and, because of that, I don't want to play D&D, even if I wanted to.
in the one and only campaign I have been in (so far) my party and I were all in a town that was divided by a wall wealthy on one side and poor on the other and naturally, we wanted to go to the wealthy part of the town so we walked up to the guards and asked if we could go in and they said no so me being a bard I turned on the theatrics I tried to say that we were supposed to be here saying a noble requested us and she told me that they just said no again so I said I cast hypnotic pattern and she just said no and I asked if I could attack them and she said no again she turned down everything I proposed without any chance she just said that I couldn't and gave no reason as to why and that's not the first time she has been unfair but that's one of the most frustrating I can remember but after a falling out she and I are no longer friends and the campaign ended with no conclusion but I'm running a campaign for a few friends soon and at least now I know how not to act
Probably this.
Me: *sees my friend's being possessed* "I wanna grapple him and put him in a sleeper hold to gently send him into unconsciousness".
DM: "roll to attack"
Me: *thinking* (not a grapple check? okay) *rolls to attack*.
DM: "now roll damage"
Me: "right... but I did say I don't want to actually harm him, right? so I can just knock him out"
DM: "ROLL DAMAGE RIGHT NOW OR I'M SKIPPING YOUR TURN!"
Me: *rolls damage*
DM: "you take out your sword and cut his head off, he's now dead, good job".
Me: "what?! but I said I wanted to knock him out!"
DM: "THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS NON-LETHAL DAMAGE IN D&D, DEAL WITH IT OR LEAVE THE GAME!".
I sincerely hope you left.
@@BlueTressym I did, he pulled nonsense like that all the time.
This story has nothing to do with this video but one super funny thing just happened in my super hero campaign. The party consisted of one player ,spark, Who had lightning powers which he could use to zap people fry circuits and teleport Raiden style, another who ,while unnamed I’ve nicknamed the vibrator due to his powers, could vibrate molecules and slow them down to do all sorts of cool stuff including phasing through walls, echo a woman with bat ears and wings, and a several more that aren’t relevant. For the adventure they were sneaking into their dead bosses old lair, which just so happened to be surrounded by police and had a detective who was expecting breakins waiting isnside due to being a crime scene to recover hard drives. After a stealthily getting on the roof the party was sneaking through some cartoonishly large air vents, which had been designed by that same dead bosses fiancé and covilain Samantha when he was alive, when echo heard the sound of computers and the detective sitting in a room just outside the vent shaft. The Vibrator chose to send spark out on the other side making a little noise. The detective immediately heard and said in the tired voice of some sick of another’s childish antics “Samantha Would you please get out before I chase you out again” to which spark said “ how bout no as he jumped around the corner and shocked the detective in more ways than one. Spark took advantage of the incapacitated detective to take the hard drives when he felt his pistol, holster and all, yanked of his leg. He turned around to see a little box ,presumably mutated through the same process as the himself and his friends, and his first move was to thunder punch the box In the mouth and rip the gun out. I had him roll to stun a cardboard box 16. I told him Boxen, these are reoccurring psychotic little joke creatures and their official title is Boxen, don’t have a nervous system to stun but being made of cardboard they do ignite.and with that we have a scared burn Boxen accidentally burning down an evil lair while the party rushes out and to safety dad by teleporting, with the hard drives, and everyone else by being phased out by the vibrator. Before you all ask spark did get his pistol back. TLDR PCs accidentally burned down the base they were sneaking through using a psychotic burning box creature.
had a character 3.5 Ranger based around killing the undead. Whole party decides to become undead so I just let the party now I can't continue to adventure with them(you know my whole character concept) So I pull out a fresh character sheet and start getting ready to make a character that can continue and the Dm sends in this epic level wizard with a epic spell called Mind rape that I had no way of saving against even with a nat 20. Mind rape and now my ranger loves the undead but was not allowed to change the favored enemy bonuses
2:50 I was half-expecting some good ol' goblin-rape added as a cherry on top. Guess DM just didn't have the time.
I don't wanna think of what the players in my first campaign would say if asked this question
A friend got me to play 2nd edition with a few people she met online. They were going to start a campaign but someone must have backed out because I was invited at the last minute. The other three players had all rolled up characters (a cleric, a mage/thief and my friend's druid). Since there was only the three of them at their session 0 the DM had rolled up 2 fighter characters to join the party, and so when I joined the group the DM just had me take one of the two fighters and he just played the other fighter as a DM character. My fighter had a respectable 16 str and was fairly well built. The DM PC had a fantastic 18 90 Str. Since I had never played AD&D before I didn't realize just how powerful that was until we first got into combat. His fighter just plain completely upstaged mine. We were doing entirely "theater of the mind" so I couldn't use clever positioning or anything and somehow his DM character was always in the right spot at the right time whereas my character somehow was never in reach of the enemies. Even if they literally attacked him last round, he wasn't in range for melee the next round. Being upstaged in battle was bad enough but the worst was when my friend who was playing a druid in a cool RP moment decided to feed the bodies of the bandits we had just killed to the poor small water monstrosity that was trapped in the cave. I began to help her (as she didn't have the strength to throw a dead body into the water), I was picking up a couple of the dead bodies to help her feed the monster when the DM announces his character just grabs all three of the bodies and throws them in at once, after all his str was high enough to do all three whereas I could only do two. I mean come on, it is one thing to be upstaged by a DM character in combat, but in a pure RP moment? Lets just say that was the last session of AD&D I have ever played.
0:58 Yikes, what a child. Like why bother providing loot for players with special effects and then making everyone immune to them?
Throwing a boss out the window?! Brilliant. Lol. I would love a player move like that as a DM.
It's really exhausting playing with DMs who insist on forcing the campaign to be the exact story they want regardless of what the players actually do.
Dm gave my character that was immune to all magical and natural diseases, this disease made me lose a con stat everyday if i failed the save. my con was already low so i would die in 12 days if i didn't make any of the saves. Tried to get it cured but apparently it was incurable and i could only be saved by getting some artifact from the bbeg, we wasted a week just finding this out. I was so pissed i destroyed the artifact in front of the bbeg when we got there. I died on my own terms not to the disease :P
So I was playing in this game called "Shadows of the Demon Lord" and the DM was running this on his own discord server. It started out fine with the world, but my first hint that things weren't going to be good was when I was rolling my characters class (yes he made us roll) and I rolled a 4 on a D4. I tell my DM this is a warrior (because warrior was 4th on the list in the book) however the DM says it's based on HIS list, not the book, and I actually rolled a priest. I don't normally play casters, ever. I was allowed to reroll, but I would take a vaguely defined punishment. So I played a priest.
Now the DM over time, decided to add another party into the world, and create some heavy homebrew items. My party got magical rings and the other party got magical ear rings. Basically these were all super magical and were meant to make us more powerful over time. Problem was, the DM controlled what powers were given to who, and when. THEN the DM decided to throw in the characters from his old pathfinder game into our game (which none of us were apart of) and treat them all as god tier NPCs.
Then as we all are forced to get on the magical sky ship of the pathfinder gods, we all start growing stronger, some more than others. The wizard in our group got a special power where whenever he drops to 0 HP, he can stay up and heal himself up to 3 times his max HP by dealing damage through spells. One rogue had the power to pull souls back from death, AND whoever she killed, she could summon as a ghost to fight for her. Up to 12 ghosts in a single round. Our party rogue had a power where whenever he was standing on earth, he could "tunnel" (never actually leaving a physical tunnel just move through the earth) and essentially play whackamole in reverse. Becoming impossible to hit, and even jump over 200 feet in the air, and land right back in the ground without taking damage, What did I get? I got, a breath weapon. 4d6 fire damage over a cone that took 1d3 rounds to recharge. That's it.
But then, things started getting toxic. The DM liked to give out powers to whoever played their character "the right way" in his eyes. And of course, if I was to have any fun, be light hearted, or enjoy myself, this was not playing my character "the right way" and the DM would make up a bullshit reason to punish/have a super powerful NPC threaten to kill me.
The DM then forced the two parties to interact, one of them rolled/played an angry asshole. This character was an archer with basic strength, and I was very strong in full plate all the time. I was sitting, talking to an NPC mentally, when the asshole character picked me up, and threw me out of the chair. I try to explain (twice) how I was sitting down and how difficult this would be, but both the player and the DM interrupt me, and go with it.
This leads my character to finally have enough of being hated for next to no reason, actively fearing for my life, seek the help of the only other PC who I thought was my friend, and make a wish (because he could grant those) to have the power to survive living on the boat. The DM, had planned for this, and fucked EVERYONE blaming it on me.
However, I didn't know everyone got fucked with, because for the next 2 weeks, I hear nothing, from anybody. It wasn't until 1 person finally broke the silence and told me it was because they were playing without me, because my character had "broken an oath" to his god by making that wish. Here's the kicker, my character, NEVER made an oath to his god, and the system never described having to make any oaths for my class. When I told the DM this, he wrote it off as "an oath I didn't know about" and my character was essentially forced to go to a hidden kingdom to be punished/trained by the court of his god. Which then lead to another month of me barely getting any contact from the others, and being essentially stranded until the DM "found the time" to deal with me.
I was essentially a pariah, with no way of being able to play the game, and was outright told by another PC, that mostly everyone wanted me dead. And the DM REFUSED to let me play a knew character. Oh, and the best part, the incident that started all this, the throwing of my character, I mentioned this to the player and the DM who both said "they didn't know I was sitting down" (because they interrupted me) and the two of them agreed to retcon that scene because "it wouldn't have happened like that" and when I protested, I was ignored. Later my DM even said I agreed to it (I did not) so now I'm constantly forced to be the asshole, a pariah of multiple parties, and was forced to play this character. Eventually, it all became so toxic and I left the group, and lost a lot of friends because of that game.
TLDR: the DM was used favoritism, homebrew, and retconning, in order to create a game so toxic to my mental health I nearly killed myself
These dms make me wish banishing smite was real
In a single sentence: "You can drop (clever idea I had the party backed), or I can drop the session."
A good buddy of mine asked if I wanted to test play a campaign he was working on over roll 20. My first DnD group was starting to die off as 2 of the original six had got sent to texas for work a month after the campaign started and when they finally got to come back 2 of our other players moved up a few hours north to near the Canadian border and had to drive 50 minutes just to get to the nearest gas station.. Needless to say they didn't really have internet to video call in. This seemed like a perfect way to spend the free time of no longer playing that campaign. I was playing a dex based tempest cleric with an ac of 18ish at lvl3. Besides me we had an artificer, bard, and sorcerer. I was the only melee based build so I was always up front. My DM ruled every nat1 from a friendly ranged attack roll against a target within 10' of me auto hit me. Roll20 seemed roll nat 1s for them none stop as there was not a single encounter that I took more damage from enemy attacks than friendly fire. I then had to constantly remind him when enemy NPCs rolled a nat1 on ranged to roll damage on the npc I was in melee with because he wouldn't do it himself unless someone called it out. I understand nat 1s having consequences but to auto hit just felt ridiculous. As a dm if a player rolls a nat 1 on ranged and there's an enemy within 5 ft of them I do something similar but make them reroll to see if it can surpass the ac of their friendly PC, but even then that's only if it feel reckless like trying to shoot from directly behind said pc at an enemy directly in front of them. My players also know if they have a 90° offset or take some measure to reduce the chance of them hitting a friendly that generally a nat1 will just affect their next turn like having disadvantage or a -2 penalty
I think the worst I can think of is in the third campaign I ever played. One of my party members pushed a button and gained an effect where he couldn't sleep and if he didn't sleep for a certain number of days he would die. I and another party member went to hell to find a thing to cure him where we encountered these godlike beings. We were told to repeatedly make stealth checks against perception rolls for the creatures. I'm not sure if there was meant to be an end to this but after like 5 successes for both of us, the creature rolled a natural 20. I asked it some questions got all the answers then got killed instantly without any rolls. My friend was allowed to leave because he was a living construct. Turns out the godly creature had the thing we needed. I still play with the DM. I really like him as a person but that whole situation kinda sucked.
I made a human rough that was chaotic good and the DM said that I couldn’t use any character that Was “evil”. When I tried to participate he relented but made a stalactite fall on me and instantly kill my character. 😭
No save or anything. It just happened!
chaotic good doesn't necessarily mean evil tho
Playing with Only Lawful Good characters is boring af
That's utterly absurd. How TF did they get 'Evil' from Chaotic GOOD???
Unfair but totally earned for my own character's stupidity. (aka it wasn't a jab at me, my character in-game was an idiot and the punishment was fitting.) I made a dumb muscled barbarian for a one-shot (Don't recall which edition but I think it was 3.5e) and was faced with having to save a friend...by solving a Rubik's cube.
Yeah, the friend died.
Sorry for the long post :)
Essentially its about an otherwise great DM that hated one of my characters. The character was a pensive, brooding, uncharismatic pacifist druid, and the DM was so annoyed by him that he tried to have mychars consciousness replaced with another of his characters, and went to extreme lenghts to place me in a no win scenario. Several times DM told me I had to be more decisive and active even though I was playing an indecisive character who leaned on others.
We had been playing in the campaign for more than a year, hopping to different parties in different parts of the world, and I had already played several characters who were fun, charismatic outgoing and decisive. But on this part of the multi pronged campaign there was a bit of a a lull in enthusiasm at the table because the elf portion of his story was getting pretty samey. We had been stuck inside a tree dungeon for 6 7 hour sessions and the fun character of this party (played by another player) was killed early on by a Beholder which made that player lose enthusiasm for this portion of the story.
So when we exited this tree he had a one on one session with me that basically ended with my consciousness being abducted by my long dead evil brother that was basically an ultimatum of sorts. Through mychar's brother, he basically said "you are stupid and you are failing, let me take over your body because you know that I have the intelligence to solve this problem. However If you truly believe that you can do this then I will allow you to go back to your body in honor of the love you showed me in life." I decided to stick with the character, but several times through this session the DM broke narration to tell me that he thought I was not having fun and that he thought the character was the problem.
However it was becoming clear he had a problem with the character. He even went on a diatribe about DnD being about heroic characters, and that other systems were better for exploring traits like weakness and indecisiveness and spiritual reluctance. We had a nice talk, and I decided to stick to my guns and told him that I believed that arc of the character could be fun. He insisted to change it nonetheless, but I didn't. I probably should have.
So next the Dm has me become the interim leader of one of the 3 elf factions because the Queen had died. We had to stop a massive million strong invasion of orcs or let it through the elven kingdom, because they needed to cross for plot reasons. They weren't directly hostile to the elves they just wanted to go through to what they believed was their rightful home. When we decided to parlay with the army and lead them on an organized march through the woods we knew that one or both leaders of the other two elf factions were working for the BBEG.
So now there were 3 faction leaders. My character, Wizard Guy, and Cleric Girl. Wizard Guy was leader of the wizard faction of the elves in an island. Cleric Girl was the leader of the dark elves, and lived in a giant city underground. My char was the leader of mainland forest elves.
So when Wizard Guy offered to set up a trap to kill the orc armies' leaders I told him to go for it. Obviously this was a no go as the army without its leaders would see a million strong force run rampant through the elf lands massacring everyone. This led us to believe that he did not have the best interests of the elves at heart, and so it was very likely that he was working for the BBEG.
So the idea was to travel alongside the orc leader through the land, informing him of the trap and have his forces scout ahead for magical triggers. Hopefully we would be able to ambush the attackers and prevent things from escalating.
As for the non fighting population of elves, they were told to march to the north shore, a good 50 to 100 miles north of the path that the army would be taking.
So then the DM tells us through Cleric Girl that mychar was evil and must be working for the BBEG because I told Wizard Guy to set a trap. It turns out the trap was a 50 mile radius Meteor Swarm that would decimate the entire forest and mychar's people with it (who were 50 MILES north of where the explosion would occur). The Moonblade dissatuned from me because it also believed that I was evil, despite having full access to my thoughts and intentions, and it lead to a super weird moment in the table. I asked the DM straight up, are you telling me that our side has nuclear explosions? Yes they are a wizard nation, he answered. There had been no record of that scale of magic ever, nor would there be for the rest of the campaign, because it was an asspull to put me in a no win scenario. (just for some context Meteor Swarm, a 9th level spell, has a 40-ft radius)
After an extended and very uncomfortable silence where I was wondering how the elves did not use nuclear explosions (actually nuclear explosions are much less powerful that what the DM was creating) to destroy the orc army, I played it off with an "oh well, were fucked", and got on with the session. Turns out Wizard Guy was not evil, he was just a zealous patriot who hated orcs, so he made himself the trigger for the nuclear strike and turned himself over to the orcs. So then we had to turn ourselves over to the orcs to help them by cutting of the Wizard Guy's tonge so he could not utter the trigger.
Then he made the entire diplomacy of the matter (we needed to recruit the orc army to fight the BBEG army) be determined by a single d20 persuasion roll that failed, and so the entire 20 sessions of that arc ended in failure in the weirdest anticlimax and everyone agreed that it was basically a giant waste of time. He also said to everyone at the table several times that I had made terrible decisions and that it wasn't his fault.
It was a very surreal chapter of the story were I felt pretty severely gaslit and I still don't understand what the hell happened. I have a good relationship with the DM outside of the game, and never had any issues ever, so I don't think it was personal. Maybe something about the character triggerred him, or maybe he didn't think of the a scenario for what we wanted to do so he had to invent some reason to stop me from going in a certain direction but yeah it really felt like he was just trying to make the character fail. He kept saying that I was playing the game wrong so I think he wanted to make a point, but up until that moment I never saw any indication that he could be that petty.
Anyway that session and the entire resolution still vexes me to this day. But I resolved to power through and finish the campaign with this character, and eventually whatever the problem was must have dissolved and we did end up finishing the campaign successfully and had fun the rest of the way.
I played a friend's campaign on a whim to be supportive, but he wanted to use an imp to essentially spoonfeed us what to do... cue me killing the imp almost immediately on sight because I was playing a Paladin.
In retaliation I get cursed and have to roll a con save when resting or risk something 'bad' happening...
I rolled a 11 on the first camp, instantly died and my corpse was twisted into a howling lump of horrifically tortured meat screaming the main plotline to replace the imp. I was not allowed to reroll another character because the DM insisted the quivering mass of bleeding flesh was 'still you' and he told me I had to keep rolling con saves to 'die'... despite being dead.
Never returned for another session and out of spite he had the puppeted corpse of my character fall into a poop pit where it drowned in sewage and then conveniently another imp showed up to railroad the remaining players.
11:52 isn’t the way you calculate CR (Challenge Rating) is, you take the characters that will be in the fight and add up their level. The combine number is the maximum CR the monster/monsters must add up to?
(I ask this because I’m interested in D&D and I honestly don’t know myself yet)
Depends on editions and stuff, as certain creatures are real strong or weak for their CR.
THE LAST ONE SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE MY LAST CAMPAIGN EEEEEWWWW so relatable...
My first campaign was pathfinder and my class does not matter for this story but I was a half-construct that was trying to figure out what to do now that his creator was gone. We had just gotten into a fist fight with some store owner over something stupid but we left and expressed that we were going to go to the inn and I got a room and locked myself in my room and went to sleep even though he didn’t need to. He saw his new friends so it and thought it was something everyone should do. Cut to him waking up in a jail cell. The GM then explains that my character was stripped of his gear (my character didn’t remove said gear because he didn’t fully grasp the idea of comfort) and that was that. They later informed me that the town guard got into the room I was staying in dragged me out into the snow and across town then tossed into a cell without me waking up or even being allowed to roll to see if I wake up. So I try to play dead in my cell since I’m a half-construct that looks humanoid since he’s got a Frankenstein’s monster from the book vibe except with a lot of scars and stitches. No one comes to check on my character for over 16 hours and that includes basic things like bringing him food or water, mind you most people wouldn’t know I don’t need that stuff by looking at them. Finally the GM let’s me go but not after having the guards steal all my cash. Soon afterward we left the town and the GM had what I only could assume was his BBEG put everyone to sleep including my character who was expressly immune to sleep effects and when we awake he did a monologue change the party’s synthesist into an anti-paladin and my half-construct into a human. (For that last bit midsession new player me, was told to pick a different race and forced to hurry along so I picked something basic and simple A.K.A human.) The game died soon after that and I’ve been quick to leave games that show those signs again.
I am taking notes on the what not to do's for my first campaign that I MAY DM though I SHOULD play a game or 2 first.
PC was leading a large army that had built up over 12 years of detailed gameplay to free a extensive nation from the yoke of humanoid enslavement; the army was incredibly detailed, funded, full of personalities gathered through pc to npc friendships, negotiations and setting up all sorts of guilds, trade, supply deals, argh...very very devoted to have done all that, possibly due to my over focus. Well, we launched the attack with all manner of wizards, clerics and special troop units doing their defined roles including pegasai mounted scout wings, griffon special attack wings and also individual heroes on dragon back for dealing with humanoid bosses who flew mutant ogre-griffon hybrids, and they'd all had plenty of prior practice with ops through liberating small towns through sieges and field battles. But this was the big one, where from the humanoids were emanating into other lands. We were outnumbered but the armies class was apparent, superb cavalry, phenomenal heavy infantry, cannon support...we had it all. And as the enemy humanoid horde approached some 6 hours march away, we were setting up some aggressive air patrols with wizards scanning with eyes and clerics scrying, druids in bird form eyeballing everything that moved and well, the whole thing was a well greased machine on so many levels...we were attacked by a huge fleet of flying saucers and blown to hell by tens of thousands of fireballs and death rays coming from their steel tentacles.
I apologize in advance for any Grammar or spelling mistakes, and also for it being long, I've been wanting to vent about this for a long time.
During the first ever D&D 5e I played (we did have a very short lived 3.5 game I think? But it was like two sessions.) we were effectively on the second party since the DM had just killed 3/4ths of the party in varying degrees of Bs ways. He had a thing for setting up big damaging things to kill us and when we still had HP just saying that we bleed out. But that's not this story, this is about the party we formed after, the human Ranger who was the only survivor of the last party, a half elf warlock(me) a human warlock, and a half elf fighter, we also had a cleric NPC with is that survived with the ranger, but he bailed on us not long after. This started with us finding another NPC, a tired man in full plate armor, I forget his name but he just kinda, decided he was in the party, and all but the ranger didn't want to protest since he seemed really strong. Now the fun part about this NPC, is that he was a custom class the DM made, now I am all for homebrew, I make homebrew stuff all the time, but the issue was he made this completely overpowered, a full caster/full martial, able to cast high level magic and attack in the same turn.(I think he was level 13, note the party was all level 8 at best) After doing a small dungeons with this man he decided we would go investigate a temple that had something bad happen I forget the details of why we really went there, we fought a bunch of undead in the rain, my warlock got killed because he decided that suddenly zombies got to make opportunity attacks when spells are cast in melee range(squishy warlock) and was brought back cuz my patron decided I wasn't done yet. Once we got into this temple we had to fight a massive cult feeding people to some giant portal, and this is where things got bad, I was flying above the fight with the other warlock, the ranger was on an upstairs platform, and the fighter was in the thick of it while the NPC was fighting at the portal to stop things going inside, I specifically remember being shocked because he cast fire storm, and ice storm in the same turn and the Dm just ignored us when we brought it up, or claimed we just didn't know the rules and went on. This fight went on so long the ranger ran out of arrows and was on her way down to get into melee when we finished it, Only for the NPC to suddenly turn around and disintegrate the other warlock and quickly after the fighter as well(who he had taken on as a sort of apprentice at this point. still flying I ran to try and get the ranger to safety, only for him to get wings of his own and cut us off, I passed yet another disintegrate spell save left with like ten HP, only to be killed the next turn when he suddenly decided that I couldn't sprint down the stairs...even though I was flying. "because you can only sprint in a straight line." Is what he claimed, and again just said we didn't know the rules. The ranger was the last to go taken down in melee combat because she wasn't really build for it, and this guy had just taken us all down in about one round each.
I Remember, the First game i had ever played, i had made a Wood Elf Ranger, and i kid you not, the very next session, he introduces a 'new ally'. A Level 15 half-orc Barbarian, with extreme racism to Elves. I was level 1. i think everyone knows where this is going. soon enough, get knocked out, tied up, and tossed overboard, as my character just floats on the open sea for the entire session. (It was a pirate themed campain). I almost quit DND right then. Thankfully, I had another friend who was a DM, and he set me up with a proper campain
was once in a group and we ended up at a "house of ill repute" for the night waiting till the next day cause it was apparently the only place in town we could get a room. I say "okay i talk to someone and see if i can get a lady for my room to retire for the night" i essentially get told no so i ask "what exactly do you mean by 'ill repute' then?" DM says its a bar... so i ask if i can get alcohol, DM says no cause i pissed off the bartender by asking for a whore. so i start playing the lute i had, role performance, 18. everyone claps, asks for another, i play another for them cause why not, rolled a 3.... i get kicked out of the bar....... and then raped by a minotaur... now my character had permanent fear of minotaur's
I was literally just going to go upstairs with the lady, "fade to black" then let everyone else do their thing.
Edit: oh and that was just session one...
Taking notes do I don't screw with my party.
Must do it. Two live under my same roof 😆😅
So I was playing a Divine Soul sorceress. Well-meaning but naïve girl, low wisdom. Spell kit built more around support than direct blasting, though she had a bit of that too. So, we went into some ruins and fought a whole bunch of Yuan-Ti, with magic resistance, a number with Counterspell, and a bunch of wisdom-based charms. "Ok, bad match-up. At least I survived." Then, not long afterwards, we fought a flock of harpies. With one of them disguised as a small child falling into a chasm, and of course I'm the one with a flying broomstick and absolutely not suspicious about the situation, so I end up right in the middle of a group of more magic-resistant enemies who can fly and have MORE wisdom-based charm effects. "Alright, that's kind of weird. And, yeah, it was obvious OOC that it was a trap but, again, low wisdom and over-developed need to help others." A short while after that, the same day in-game in fact, we ran into 3 weird Wildemount monsters generating anti-magic cones accompanied by a grappling monster, with my 8 freaking Strength and only slightly better Dex. At this point, I was beginning to suspect I was being deliberately targeted although I couldn't figure out why. Since then, encounters have been less obviously anti-Calliope, so I think he was just looking at cool potential monsters without thinking about how they'd interact with our party as a whole. The rest of the party was Monk/Ranger, Hexadin, and melee-focused Storm Cleric with high wisdom all around, so stacking wisdom saves seemed odd.
I became addicted to watching your vids, stopped watching you, played my first 2 campaigns, won't be able to do another most likely, for 2 to 3 months, and now I feel like watching you.
One DM made a prolonged encounter set up with only Str checks. I'm playing a Monk that doesn't have high strength, 6 Str but 20 Dex and Wis. Kinda hurt my feelings since he refused to compromise on anything, even using acrobatics to jump a gap... So yeah.
when I was much younger, i played with a DM. at the time, i was not experienced with the game or rules i just loved to play. This DM took it way to serious and was very cruel to his players. at the time, I thought this was just apart of his good storytelling. I can remember one instance in one of our campaigns that the DM switched the currency to copper instead of gold. well, we had an encounter and i got an unidentified ring from it, so i took it back to town all excited and paid the 100 cp to have it identified. the ring was mundane. I was like omg wtf at the time. later on I realized in the rules that mundane items can never be unidentified. This is why knowing the rules are so important. fuck ass DMs will try to be cruel and punish you in stupid ways. also this same DM had his girlfriend in the party and of course she always got favorable treatment. years pass and one of the players that used to play in that gaming session was talking to me and we got on the topic. he told me how that DM ruined DnD for him and he would never play it again and to this day he still hasn't. I told him that the guy was just a shit ass DM and there are way better ones out there.
OK. I've gotta say, I havnt had too many screwy DM's. But this guy has permanent residency in my head for this. Some backstory, this campaign had two DM's, the guy who started but had too move away (I grew up in an Air Force family, so alot of my friends moved away) and then the Ahole DM took over afterwards.
I was playing a Neutral Evil Paladin (I had okay'd this with the original DM beforehand considering we were in a good campaign). The party had found out that my goals where too effectivly bring hell too the material plane, and they were somewhat ok with it (knowing it was a futile task). The new dm then consistently dropped "hints" that Asmodeus (lord of hell) hated me. And by hints I mean the DM just straight up told me as a player, but my character didn't know so he continued on. Until one day "can you role me a perception check?" (i got an 11 or something total, this was a fair while ago, just know that I failed the check) ok now a dex and con save 18 on the dex and a nat 20 on the con, totalling too 26. I died as Asmodeus' sword rose up from hell ad chopped me in half. Just like that.
I would like too add that he never once took me too the side too ask if I could play something else, I would have been more than happy too play a new char.
Being brand new to the game, we were supposed to have a walkthrough of sorts. We were allowed to boost our characters to level five (even though all 4 of us did it incorrectly because of bad explanations) and proceeded on a campaign to stop a lizard wizard from returning from the dead. We basically traveled to 4 different places, only facing basic enemies, and gaining no experience. Then we are detected trying to enter a fortress. We were told we all had to go in together, and one person couldn't just go up and handle it. We were discovered, and the dm had a level 10 black dragon and 4 guards against 4 inexperienced players. The next session and we had experienced people who tried to join. It was all so messed up and devolved to the point the campaign was stopped. I still play and really enjoy the game despite this.
Our very first time playing d&d and our DM was brand new too. We spent hours making and naming our characters and felt attachment to them.
The first room we walked into the rookie DM had 300 red dragons.
Obviously we died instantly. The DM said oh I guess dragons ate really tough. OK let roll new characters.
We should have known the next 25 years of playing with a " killer DM" would be interesting.
It happened this week.
My Waorlock was casting Hallow in our HQ to prevent unwanted creatures from bothering us in the future.
The rest of the party was there keeping an eye on me for the 24h it takes to cast the spell.
Despite 2 party members having the Alert Feat and thus unable to be surprised, and everyone rolling higher initiative than the enemies... first thing anyone knows is that 12 shadows pop out of the floor, four of them surrounding me. Three of them hit, and take out nin points of strenght from my warlock, before anyone has a chance to react. (No save)
Me: "That puts me at 0 strenght"
DM: "Then you are dead"
Me:"...oh. That's a shame."
DM: "Hold on, this is a CR1/2, wth!?! Walk it back a little, make 3 Con saves DC... I dunno, 12."
First retcon we ever did (as far as I remember) in 20 years of playing. I like my DM.
Shadows are one of those creatures that can punch way beyond their CR and DMs need to be careful deploying those if they use their special abilities.
@@shadowscall7758 yes, i watched a video called "deadliest creatures for their CR" (challenge rating) and Shadows were on it. they are REALLY dangerous for LEVEL ONE monsters!
This is why I love that my dm roles dice to decide who to attack
So I'm wanting to get into D&D, what kind of stuff should I look into getting or doing to start?