I will never understand these people who are like "So this DM was a jealous metagaming asshole who constantly cursed me and whose DMPCs hogged the spotlight. I hated playing with him. So I stayed in his campaign for 5 months..."
I once dealt with a bad DM but thankfully his campaign only lasted two sessions, I don't know if it actually continued because some of my classmates invited me to their campaign shortly after Their campaign is a bit lopsided but not nearly as bad as the campaign I originally suffered in
In some cases it was (at the time) too difficult and time consuming to get a new group together... Back in the day, there were a LOT of places you COULDN'T even talk about D&D. It was a big risk letting anyone know you had books or dice, let alone that you actually play... SO groups were often a little issue-laden early on and we'd "stick it out" hoping for improvements. At my Table I wholeheartedly endorse rotating the GM-screen. Campaigns get episodic, dysfuctional and wonky... BUT GM's don't burn out, and with practical experience even some of the SUCKIEST GM's improve. As Players we tend to take it a little easier on the GM in action, because we don't want abuse when we have to run a session or two... dozen. ;o)
Jeffrey The Cactus wow, how observant of you to realize that I, a profile named Texas Red, with a picture of Texas Red as my profile pic, to be named after a character named Texas red, in Marty robbin’s most popular song.
My worst DM? Me by far, I've had a few DMs in my life, and I thought it'd be fun to give it a shot. I was absolutely TERRIBLE at it, luckily I DM'd for a close group of friends who (like me) are very blunt. They told me I was shit, even though I already realized about 1/4th through my session that I was shit. Thanks to that, I found out I don't ever want to DM, and will continue to be a creative player as that is much more fun.
Dude, I'm with you. I couldn't properly describe anything and my NPC's were boring as all hell. The worst was probably when it came to a little twist I had planned. I kinda bungled the whole thing and accidentally said what the twist was out loud because I talk to myself. That was my first and, hopefully, last session as DM. I can't do world building for shit
Your not a bad DM, you just need to work on storytelling. Sometimes you have to railroad especially the first session. Once you place plot hooks, a prisoner or some sort of parchment hinting at a typical town, village, city or any place with residents. After that if you still say your a bad dm. Well I thought I could help.
Same here. I've not ever DM'ed except for this thing called Honey Heist that my brother had for his college homework. It ended with two out of the three characters going feral (because bears) and one had to book it to avoid capture. My mom and brother had fun but I think I lost 20-30 years from my life span from stress.
My character prefers his shield to his mace so I’m going to claim it does Bonk damage. I actually wrote that on his sheet. EDIT: That his mace does Bonk damage. That was ambiguously worded.
Godspeed dear friend. Being a good dm sorta boils down to not being an asshole unless absolutely necessary. Also it's a good idea to have a session 0 to see what everyone wants out of it (you included.) Lay down ground rules if you have any and give them an idea of what their characters would know about the world. But most importantly have fun!
ted valen I’ve played with this group for months now, so I know their styles, and this first session is going to affect the full campaign, as who they play in the oneshot will become NPC’s in the full campaign.
@@robopope7584 noice! I had some experiences where my new character met the old one that retired and that was fun. Plus what you're doing will help the players consider those NPCs more than just "quest giver female #123" so that's cool. I wish you the best of fun in the campaign
The best advice is to keep an open mind, be open to collaboration, and expect everything. Even the things that are impossible to expect. For example, picking locks with chicken bones. Had it happen before. It was supposed to be a torture dungeon, before they were brought before the BBEG. Their meal was a slab of raw, bloody chicken. They got creative, picked the lock, choked out a guard, got themselves a disguise, and became an inside man who gave valuable information to the party while subverting the goals the BBEG had in place. He single handedly sabotaged and as a result killed enough henchmen to delay the BBEG by two months of in game time. Also, NEVER let your party fuck with time. Always assume that they are smarter than you give them credit for, because they absolutely WILL surprise you!
I was in a pickup game for level 20 PvP. The rules were solid, the items were numerous, and we were basically allowed any build our imaginations could come up with. So I spent an hour making a character, and when the time came to start the match, the DMPC tried to use Hunters Mark in a prep round, and then refused to allow counterspell to negate it. All the players agreed that casting spells on other people in prep rounds wasnt fair. Then he argued that a potion he took before entering the arena was in effect, when we weren't allowed the same. Instead of being civil about it, he deleted his discord and banned us from his game in roll20. We didnt even get to the first turn of battle before he took his ball.and went home.
In high school I played with some guys that I had some fun with beforehand. One of them wanted to DM, we'll call him "John." He let us use our characters from a campaign that had been canceled which was nice. I immediately noticed a fatal flaw, no dice. As we started in a tavern he skipped introductions which was okay and launched into this description of a man singing in the corner. As he does so his skin began to burn off until he is a charred skeleton and we realized that the tavern has become a hellscape. Sounds kind of cool right? Just wait. We see this monstrosity come towards us and introduce itself as Orcus. It surveys the group and then looks at me. I was a half-dwarf cleric with a lawful good alignment. Orcus speaks finally: "I have no use for this." He smashes his hand down on me resulting in my instant demise then incinerated my corpse. "That is I dispose of garbage." I was in shock. "Wait I'm dead for good?" "Yep." John just looks at me. "And that means you can leave now. Just like Orcus I have no use for people who are good." He then grabbed my character sheet, ripped it to pieces, balled up the pieces, and lobbed it into a trash can. Not one person spoke up or said anything in my defense. Total time in campaign- 5 minutes. I couldn't make a new character, just a kill and kick. The worst part was that there was no warning or anything. I wasn't sure where this animosity came from. A few days later I asked one of the guys and he told me it was because, during our cancelled campaign, I had gotten experience from drawing a crude map of where we had been and he felt that was unfair. Being in a position of power can really bring out the petty side of some people. Didn't play again for more than 10 years after that since it had left such a bad taste over the game.
The elder brother of a once friend of mine. He spoke in the driest monotone, did no introduction to the game, expected the new players (me and my brother) to know everything already, did no worldbuilding, did no pre game setup, no story direction, almost no dungeons, no character names/speech, and barely seemed to care about the game. Add on the fact that three of the four players got into arguments and had a group breakdown centered around the Emo rogue who worked at the library we played at, the fact my brother and I did not know our character abilities on account of never seeing a player’s handbook, the absence of descriptions, and interest in the game it turned me off of TTRPGs for nearly four years.
Oooohhhhkay. I'm currently dealing with a DM who a) decided my character's class b) decided my character's stats c) wrote my character's backstory, decided on my traits/alignment/motivation and d) made my way of mercy monk a strength and charisma based build. Of course, being a comparatively new player, what do I know? "Monks can be str build, let me remember why I set the stats like that". Of course the last he'd met me, I'd only played one character. It's been seven months, I'm now DMing my own campaign for my brothers and am in two more campaigns (played in the same group, switching off so neither DM gets burnout). Basically, I know he just doesn't want to be wrong, and I've confirmed it with my DMs that I'm not crazy. He also is starting us all off at different levels and I've noticed I (the only girl in the campaign) seem to be getting most consideration
If they make a character for me then they can also play it for me, because I won't. Ok, Random characters? Fine. pregens? Not a problem. But when the GM starts to decide your backstory? that's a big no for me. I'lld have asked him if he would rather write a novel than play DnD.
I’ve been told that my imagination eould make me a good fig for DnD but I don’t think i would make a good DM. When I’m writing a story I’m used to being able to dictate the characters and their decisions and I get attached to that. I don’t think i would make a good dm.
My ex. We dated before he became a DM. If things didn’t go EXACTLY his way then he got really angry and quiet. Just like in our former relationship. He invited me because he knew I was into tabletop RPGS. Also was weird with his new (now ex) girlfriend. I liked her just fine, she was a sweetheart, very shy and really fun to talk to. But don’t have a player sitting in your lap the whole game that’s just weird and she was clearly uncomfortable.
During a convention, a DM on a demotration sesion, all the player shipwrecked and they are immediately caught by cannibals, and execute the characters, with out a single dice roll or opportunity to see if they can even attemp to scape.
My worst DM was my girlfriends ex, lets call him Jan. I was looking forward for the game, it was supposed to be homebrewish 5th edition. I have prepared my favourite character, human ranger, whose charisma could rival any bard. Quite lucky guy, who managed to get out of most problems. The campaign was supposed to be some that some mysterious "thing" was killing people in nearby town. Me, my now gf and friend of DM were tasked to investigate. We decided to wait out night in one of the houses in the town and I have set up bear trap right in front of the door. Of course the first zombie managed to step over it, because, according to Jan, I have set it up on completely different place. After little arguing, I continued the game and thought to myself that it was my fault, that I should have been more descriptional with the placement. Of course the zombie managed to almost kill us and when we killed it, suddenly, some sort of banshee appeared, knocked us out and we got teleported to some haunted mansion. That looked fun, even though it could be handled better. After exploring the mansion, few fights and staying out of door that there was supposedly something huge growling, we have found a chest. Me, being paranoid and in character, I just tried to poke the chest first with a sword. Nothing. Opened it with sword. Also, nothing, so it was not a mimic. So my ranger decided to take a look in the chest and touched it. "Honolulu". "What?" "You do not know? I thought you played a lot. Your character is teleported away. Make a new one." Yup. That was it. According to Jan, everything that touched the chest was teleported away. But for some reason, the sword has not teleported first. I tried to argue, wanting to play my ranger, so the DM said my character was teleported to some nice beach so far away, he can't get from there. I wanted to try it at least. Then, luckily, the other player stepped in, in character and talked with my gfs character. "Have you seen that? That has to be way out of here!" So they both touched the chest and ended up in tropical paradise. But well, it was our first and last session, because we were not in mood to make new characters for nothing. Luckily, my gf now has intetest in playing DND again, after that whole ordeal.
A friend of mine well refer to as D. A bit of background on D is that he always bitches whenever someone beats him at anything. He wasn't always like that, but it's been becoming an increasing issue over the past few years. So sometime last year D tells some friends in a Gaming Chat that he wants to make a D&D campaign and a few of us agree. Takes him like 9 months to get everything ready and then we begin. At first everything was going pretty well, but once we hit Chapter 2 of the campaign everything went south. We started getting ragdolled by things without even having a chance to fight, we're consistently being thrown against shit that's way above our ability to handle or too weak, this is causing the game to slow to the pace of a crawl and he comes up with the most bs ways to nerf us whenever we are finally able to take one of his NPCs on to "Keep the plot moving." Today I finally had it when he imposed a timer because we were "Taking too long to decide what we wanted to do." And every time the timer went off we'd lose an hour of the day followed by him basically ruining a town we had to do shit in because of his BBEG, a Lich named Narexxus, was causing a plague over the town. The reason this is bs is because we're Level 5, so stopping a Lich is far beyond our pay grade, and the reason the Lich escaped in the first place was basically because we we're tricked into doing so without any warning signs of what was going on. Then the next thing he does? All but railroads us to the Lichs lair to try and steal the item he's using to do this while we're still level fucking 5 and literally making it clear we cannot beat the Lich and we HAVE to play this stealthily to the point where he has an NPC tell the other players they shouldn't even bring their armor. Needless to say I left after this and 2 of my other 3 party members are also considering leaving. We feel like D is abusing his role as DM to try and get back at us for being better than him at Smash Bros and Yugioh and we're just not dealing with that anymore.
My partner and I did a campaign where we were hard railroaded the entire time. It was so bad that when I wanted to poke a dead body with a stick ol' dude wouldn't allow it because no sticks were in the vicinity (Middle of a forest and no sticks....) Anyways session 3 it got worse. We could no longer roll for ourselves. That's right the DM rolled our dice for us. Okay cool can't be creative and can't roll our dice now. Session 4 we disconnected from the discord party because the DM refused to connect his mic and talk. Also made me change my character's name because it was to "girly sounding and my elf didn't act that girly." What sucks is I put hours into creating that character and was so excited to play her. (forest elf ranger who was insane and talked to a skull she called fluffy. Fluffy had no special ability just an elf skull. Even painted a mini for her.)
I must be lucky....for me the worst DMs have just been people that stop showing up to sessions or just are super uninterested and make everything too easy. None of these crazy psychopathic behaviors manifested in game.
I think that every DM has some rough spots, but I can definitely think of the worst. Had a good DM with an adversarial streak who said he wanted to 'try something new' and kept throwing ideas at us for 'dnd, but no magic for the pcs' and we kept shooting it down/suggesting other systems. We ended up compromising on 'no wizards, but every other class is ok' and go ahead with it even though he's being really dodgy about the specifics of the campaign. The world ends up pretty crapsack with no real way to escape the extremely awful area we are starting in. The game alternates between being stuck in a megadungeon with no gear at all and trying to figure out why we can't stay dead (we died a lot in this game). Highlights include: A paladin losing 20 years of his lifespan going from young to middle aged and being refused any restorative magic from allied religious organization. Multiple instances where a PC was going to accomplish a goal, only to have something or someone show up out of nowhere and force us to pursue something entirely differently. A session that was run like a MOBA; which is to say dozens of creatures in initiative that we the pcs could not see or interact with. We got a turn roughly every half an hour that consisted of 'I walk over here'. My character spent most of that session unconscious due to a bad die roll. The GM splits the party up and makes the combat character handle a diplomacy heavy peace talk and makes the social character engage in an extremely deadly combat encounter - he thought this was hilarious. After many, many sessions where it seemed like he was going with whatever idea he thought would be the most amusing to him, he admitted that he hadn't had many ideas of where the plot should go after the 3rd session. Our friendship had been on the rocks for a while by that point and I took it as an excuse not to come back.
The worst DM I've ever had is a pretty good friend of mine. He's pretty cool, but just a rubbish DM. One mission, we were told to go to a warehouse and retrieve something. We didn't know what, but we were told to. We got there, and our Kobold rogue was immediately spotted with no role by the dwarf in charge of the warehouse and tied up with an unexplained magic rope. The human fighter was allowed to make a stealth check... If I threw myself into the open. I was a blind drow bard. I was essentially defenseless against the 20+ dwarfs there, so I got creative. I had cast an illusion spell on the kobold's hand that looked like a badge (a failed attempt to sneak in). I used my action to make it move across the roof and turn into a glowing radiance of a god figure descending from the heavens. He began shouting at the dwarves that they were sinners and if they continued were to be punished. This gave the human fighter a chance to sneak around and free the kobold from the ropes. As they were leaving, the dwarf leader called them out "hey, I was totally aware that this was all an illusion and that you were escaping, buy I felt sorry for you, so you can go". Note that I had gotten a natural 20 on my deception check with the illusion, so there was no way he should have been aware of that it was an illusion. The rest of the game was us constantly being undermined by NPC's who would always brush off any attack, see through any illusion, or ignore any debuff. Note that as a bard, my main things were illusions, healing and debuffs, so I had spent dozens of spells for essentially no difference. The only one who was ever allowed to actually do anything was the human fighter, because the DM liked human fighters, so he got every magic item automatically attuned to him, and was literally given free level ups at random by NPC'S because they liked him. He was level 20 by the time we were 14
I think the worst DM I had was the one that constantly made me roll checks for things when I was flavoring how my character does them. Example: Storm Sorcerer's can move 10 feet (Flying) without incurring AoO (Attack of Opportunity) before or after casting a Level 1 or higher spell so I can jump out of Melee and cast a spell. So what i did was have my character climb a wall (Climb speed is half your movement) so I got 15 feet up this pit and on the other side of it (10ft) was a ledge where the rest of the party was. I explained it as my character digging her daggers into the side of the wall and quickly climbing up to that point blunting the daggers before spinning mid air and firing a fireball down at the swarm of Lizard folk before landing on the platform. Simple enough, Climb wall, Jump fireball. However he had me roll a Athletics check on climbing the wall (In 5e you dont need to do a check) I passed with my 8 strength barely then had to do a Acrobatics check for the flavor spin, failing as I smacked into the wall and fall only for a the bard to save me with a levitate spell and needing to throw the halfling rouge to catch me and pull me like a balloon. I never talked about how I did things again, just saying 'Climbing 15, Using Class Feature 10 fly speed to platform and casting fireball down pit for feature.' Rather than painting a picture or getting invested in my character. She is a Sorcerer that was trained in Survival, she carries 3 daggers, a mess kit and cooks for the party. She wears thick clothing and where she comes from Ice Climbing requires knives/picks so she climbs how she would back home. This was just one of the things that demoralized me with this particular DM.
I had a DM who was just bluntly absolute shit at running it. We were constantly attacked wit little to no world building, also all the enemy’s were able to kill us in just a few hits. There was legit no room for resting and he constantly tried to kill us anyway possible by adding random things in normal situations, such as whilst our party was having a normal time drinking inside a bar after a huge fight, we were “suddenly” swallowed by a “huge sea worm” and taken to the bottom of the ocean. While we were on land.
One of my previous DMs took the game and especially roleplaying _very_ seriously. Whenever he was at the table, you couldn’t talk to other players out-of-character about anything in general, which was especially weird because he would frequently focus on one player at a time for entire sessions. He would also try to dissuade me to _not_ choose a character class since “it wouldn’t fit my character’s personality”, to which I shot him down. And whenever I made lighthearted jokes, he would take it dead serious, and _not_ change his mind even with clarification. For example: when my character was being mind controlled by the villains of his campaign, I was joking that my character was going around the base muttering “Must Destroy Rebels” Like a robot; everyone else at the table thought it was hilarious, but he had my character killed then-&-there on-the-spot, and he refused to reverse the decision even when we clarified I was just joking. Hell, when we were playing a Star Wars campaign, I just came up with the fact that my character knew too much about Death Star, but he “reasoned” that if so, then he would be “forced” to send the entire Imperial Military after me (which both makes no goddamn sense, and _wasn’t even in the game’s rules_ ). As for me, I like D&D and other RPGS but the roleplaying part of the game is NOT an aspect I particularly care for and is one where I constantly struggle with (and all my other DMs didn’t particularly care about roleplay). But this particular DM just did not care, even when I brought up my concern. Hell, he would _always_ give me the lowest XP out of everyone since he only rewarded based on roleplay, even though he knew I had problems. But perhaps the final nail in the coffin was when he kicked me out. He had previously promised to help me find a new group to join that would be better suited to my playstyle since I really was having a hard time in his group, but he let me play in the group for the time being. However, he one day requested me to stop playing & not return, and all that help he promised went right out the window then-&-there. I was not misbehaving and some of the other players were missing me, but he just didn’t care. I spent several months on my own trying to find a new group to join, and I don’t think I’ll ever forgive him for how he mistreated me.
I had a DM who forced our characters to eat human flesh because the dragonborn who wanted to eat flesh rolled a nat 20 on his persuasion check. He also threw a vampire at a level 4 party.
For me, it was a guy named Phung. I've only ever insta-quit one campaign/game session in my entire life. I was a teenager at the time and had only been playing D&D for a couple of years by this point. This was WAY back when 2nd Edition AD&D was top dog in the gaming world. The optional rule books (Skills & Powers, Combat & Tactics, etc, sort of the precurser to 3rd Edition) hadn't even been written yet, let alone published. A friend/acquaintance of one of the players in my regular group, a guy named Phung, had invited him to join a new AD&D campaign and extended the invitation to the rest of our group (a "Your friends are welcome to join you" kind of thing). We get there and the group he had assembled is MASSIVE. I think that there were like ten or twelve of us, not including the DM. We played on a ping pong table in Phung's basement. There were like four or five guys to a side, me and my best friend Laird on the end, and Phung the DM on the other end. I don't remember most of the PC races or classes. I do remember that I was playing a female human barbarian, and that Laird was playing a female half-elf bard. The adventure started out okay. It was pretty standard stuff for 1st level adventurers, even a group as large as this. Essentially the town had been plagued by constant attacks by evil humanoids such as goblins, gnolls, orcs, etc, so they put a bounty out on the monsters and we were to kill them and take their ears as proof in order to collect the bounty. The problems started when combat began. Initiative rules in 2nd Edition were quite different from what they are now, with different weapons having "Speed Factors" which alter your initiative roll (also, lower numbers = better initiative, and initiative was rolled on a d10). With a group THIS size, keeping track of THAT many initiative rolls is VERY difficult and some players are likely to get skipped in the confusion. A simple solution for this is to do Group Initiative (a single dice roll determines the initiative for the whole party, then the players go around the table either clockwise or counter clockwise each taking their turn). The benefits of a high DEX score are lost, but the hindrances of a slow weapon are also lost, and it eliminates any confusion for the DM and players. We explain this to Phung, but he insists on individual initiative rolls. And as predicted, players lost their turns because Phung couldn't keep track of that many player initiatives. Yet he refused to switch to Group Initiative. He then had our party come across an OBVIOUS place for an ambush. It was a narrow canyon with sheer cliff walls on either side, virtually impossible to climb. When we emerged from the cover of the trees, There were scores of gnolls upon the top of the cliffs, armed with bows, waiting to rain death down upon us. We wouldn't move forward to put ourselves within range of their arrows, and between the height of the cliffs and the distance to the base of the cliffs from the tree line, they were well out of range of our archers as well. I figured that I would try going back into the trees and moving a mile off to the side to climb the cliffs where there weren't any gnolls. So a handful of other players (mostly the stealthier types like the thieves and the rangers) joined me, but when we emerged from the trees, there were always gnolls waiting for us at the top of the cliff. We would go back into the woods, out of their view, and head farther off to the side. Another mile. Then two miles. Then three miles. Then five miles. Every time we stepped out of the woods, there were gnolls waiting for us at the top of the cliff. We must have traveled FIFTEEN MILES, but apparently the gnolls were standing shoulder to shoulder the entire way. That's something like 200 gnolls per mile. At 15 miles, that's about 3000 gnolls on top of that cliff! That's a little much for a bunch of 1st level characters! (Also, a gnoll tribe has a maximum of about 60 members, including women and children, with only about 20 combatants per tribe, so that's gnoll warriors from about 150 tribes on this side of the canyon alone). Finally we said "Screw it" and the whole party went back to the town, because ANYONE who can get THAT many gnolls to work together for a common purpose is WAY beyond our pay grade. Once back in town we tried to find some other means of making money. A different mercenary or bounty hunting job that was NOT a suicide mission. ANYTHING. DM said "no". Laird's bard tried performing for money (made a damn near perfect performance check too). The DM said "no". Just to alleviate the boredom I tried starting a bar fight. The DM said "Aside from you guys, the only other patrons in the bar look to be powerful enough to kill you all with ease". It was at that point that I just said "Fuck this shit". I packed up my books and dice and got up to leave. Then Laird followed suit, and then the rest of my regular gaming group. Then with us all leaving, everyone else decided to pack up and go as well. I never played with Phung again after that. He wasn't necessarily a bad guy, but if that was typical of his DMing style, he was a HORRIBLE DM.
I had a fellow player accuse our DM of constantly trying to outsmart and make a competition of killing us( even though The DM generally made combat in favor of us players) and then turn around and make fun of our DM when we won a fight. I felt so bad for my “bad DM”
These are my current DM's exact words about the campaign I've invested multiple weeks into with my ranger: " you wouldn't be able to do your run hide strategy, you wouldn't be able to shoot your long bow, you would be able to make half the checks you do." After I tried to adapt my character into his campaign, after I shared my backstory just to explain my character build, and after he killed me off with an unfair check, have me tortured with puzzle traps, and brought back to life with an intellect devourer in my head and used as his personal punching bag for not one, not two, but three of his encounters. he gives us ciphers that can't be deciphered, and he shuts down standard strategy. His campaign is about three empires, one focused on technology, one that's about greed, and one that's a military dictatorship. he said that the only enemies we would face were humans, and our first combat was a sky swimmer, with health in the thousands, while we were level 5, in a boat, that can only go in one direction, and if we stopped rowing, we would fall to our deaths. Easy right? Our next encounter was with 2 mind flayers and said intellect devourer, the only reason I didn't attack the intellect devourer was because one player was about to be killed by the mind flayer, I was trying to save him and got rewarded with death. I had to go through a tome where I was burned, poisoned and stabbed in the afterlife because my DM thinks puzzles are supposed to be torture. When the party fought vampires, I was immediately grappled by the guy in front of me, no stealth check to hide, no strength contest to break free, just stuck there and beaten to unconsciousness. Ironically, my easiest combat encounter was when we had to fight an ancient red dracolich. FYI, this DM calls himself "Bully DM".
So far one of my best friends (male). We were in the school D&D club and the original DM couldn't make it to the last few sessions and put my friend in charge. Everything was going good until the last session... There where 6 of us in that campaign and he made 4 of us cry me included. this was a while ago and I still haven't forgiven him completely.
Warhammer 40k Questor... a Discord RP Server takes the gold for the worst Dungeon Master I have ever had the displeasure of being under. To cover the entire story of this server and what happened there would be a small novella of content so for sanity's sake, I'll keep it brief. DM was running a save the universe campaign which took place on a planet called Cheros III... a utopian world in Warhammer 40k with absolutely nothing wrong with it located just beyond the astronomicon. This planet was ruled by a bunch of vampires who wore Halo armor, contained an inter-dimensional threat known as Ozymandious who was dropped into numerous players sessions without warning and did cause people to quit, and he also hosted unwinnable fights against giant Titans. He set my character up for a crime, framed him, and then had another Mod have my character executed just so he could host the Titan Event. He tried several times to destroy the city we were building and almost succeeded in collapsing it with tunnels killing all our characters in the process because he hated us all. He attempted to frame me as being "Ethan Allen" a person from another server... I know this because the server owner for 40k Questor actually contacted me about it, and I had to prove my innocence. He quit the server, blamed me for his event failing as being an "abuser" and tried to have the actual mods get rid of me after he had destroyed his own module and screwed me over several times already. I actually ended up showing the server owner our entire contact history to prove my innocence. He manipulated Mods into banning one of my friends because he blamed my friend for destroying his campaign that took a year to plan. No, my friend didn't destroy this campaign. This DM destroyed his own campaign by keeping players locked in a bar during the duration of his Titan [giant monster] invasion until they quit the server, and by dropping Ozymandius into people's sessions leading to the destruction of their characters entire methos and causing them to quit the server because they suddenly hated it there. This happened with like 3 different people. Oh, and he also once dragged me into DM's with another Mod and verbally abused me for an hour because I wasn't cool with having Ozymandius invade my flagship, murder my crew, and force me to abandon it. [Was playing Dark Eldar pirate] Yeah... not gonna be forgetting him anytime soon.
My favorite game was actually one where my DM made the lore and main map for the entire location but we had no mission, no map markers(we all just arrived to the area) so we made our own missions and traveled around learning more and causing chaos for the thieves we found
My story: I was about to have my first session in DnD but DM kick me out of a group because I didn't give him my characters story.... expect I did, even more I give it half hour after our session 0. He didn't even said it was too short or didn't fit in the world just I didn't give him which was a lie. Even another person in group agreed with me that something is wrong. Honesty I was expecting to be sad but I was more pissed than anything. It happened at the end of a summer and I don't really feel Iike getting into another session.
I've been super lucky with DMs, and most of them have been pretty good. The worst one I had fits a bunch of the classic 'bad DM' tropes. They ran a module and stuck slavishly to it; even when the party did something clever that should have vastly changed things from 'as written'. In another game (same DM) running his own storyline, he drove that story over the players like it was a freight train - serious rails under that one. Same game, he blatantly plot-armored a villain right in front of the group - the villain had a personal forcefield generator (this wasn't DnD) which the players wrecked... and the villain activated a second one. In the final fight, again without even trying to disguise it, he stacked health onto this same villain because (direct quote) "I want to kill at least one PC with them".
The most unfair thing my DM did to me? Not letting my keep the few months old stray black kitten I found on in an ally way with a nasty leg injury. Still pretty salty about that.
This has been posted before with a little less detail. Thankyou for posting a video suitable for this post: GMs who put personal OOC reasons into IC reasons ruins the enjoyment of the game. I had a GM frag an unconscious character. (from my point of view I had received a two sentence warning that he would me making me start from the beginning, despite having spent a lot of late nights and early mornings building up a character over 2 years. My reply to his 2 sentences was 'I will not stand for this") My reply to him fragging an unconscious character - I took a deep breath and basically let rip, this coming from someone who usually didn't say boo to a goose, even caught current friends off guard. ""You know what, F*Off I quit." After 2 weeks of another GM demanding I appologised for basically standing up for myself, I followed through and walked away. Clearly I had nothing to lose by doing so. I have heard various stories over the years as to why he decided to do this (Mostly as the actions all GMs involved in the incident and the demands afterwards destroyed my trust in them or their judgement) The one that stook out the most was the GM in question didn't beleive that I was in the uk (The group was based in America and I am based in the UK). Somehow he didn't believe that I was living in the UK. To this day, when I tell people I have a temper, they don't believe me. I usually follow the statement up with. "If you come after me without dotting your Is and crossing your Ts, you had better be aware of the consequences"
I take offense to that ! Anime had nothing to do with bad DMs ! Bad DMs just want to use anime because they can't come up with something of their own ^^
Technically doesn't count as I was not a player, but it was a one shot that happened because I couldn't run a session on that day, so one of my players ran a quick game. The others seemed to enjoy it, but when I heard about it, I could only step back in mild distress. Apparently the whole one shot was just him living out his power fantasy by trying to kill the players as gruesomely and quickly as he could. It all culminated with him bringing in a PC from a former campaign as the final boss. The boss was specifically designed to be unbeatable and slaughter the players. Which was all the funnier when the players actually beat her against all odds.
Only DM I've ever had was terrible. It was me, the DM and one other guy. It was his first time DMing and he made a "custom" pirate campaign. After spending like 4 hours one night making our characters, the next week we played. Started at sea, found an island with a cave, we fought a couple monsters and that was the whole night. We never went to a town, got a quest, anything like that. We played once, That was about 10 years ago. I'm trying to get a good group of friends to play soon
Running my first campaign in a relatively modern/slightly futuristic setting and made a customized version of the Hermit background available called Otaku. Nobody took me up on it lol
Me. I tried DMing a standard dungeon crawl for my stepdad and... didn't realize that the CR for monsters did NOT mean "this is the character level that could easily defeat this monster." So I dropped a lvl 5 drow assassin... into a dungeon with SEVERAL CR 5 monsters. I was, like, 13 or something at the time, but still. The next time I DM'd was for a full party. I focused a little more on puzzles instead of combat while still having some fun enemies, but we didn't end up finishing the dungeon. I don't remember why - I think the session ended early and we just never got back to it. I haven't DM'd for anything since then, and now I'm older, wiser, and MUCH more creative, so I'm looking forward to the day that I can try DMing again.
I was in a Pathfinder Society game maybe 6 or 7 years ago. I hadn't played D&D since college so I was stoked for an authentic D&D experience. The DM provided no background information, no introduction, no maps or other visuals. He just said "This guy tells you he needs guards for a trade caravan." He sort of sleepwalked through the whole adventure. One of the other players was clearly bored & playing on her phone the whole time. I don't think he wanted to be DMing that day!
I had a DM once who: 1. Told one of the players that he could only play a gnome if his character wore a red pointy hat. 2. Ignored pretty much everything about characters' backstories (I don't mean he didn't incorporate them into the story, I mean one PC had a house big enough for the party in the city we were in and he still made us stay in an inn) 3. Kept the party in debt the entire campaign, literally as soon as we paid off one debt we suddenly had to go into debt again to pay for ship repairs (it was a nautical campaign) 4. Stole pretty much every story beat from anime 5. Had a random bandit oneshot kill a PC so said PC wouldn't upstage the NPC traveling with us (not even a DMPC, just some dude who was on the road with us) Among many other things. It's amazing how long that campaign dragged on before one player finally snapped and had his character dive into the ocean with the MacGuffin.
How are gonna have valid points like "He killed a PC so that he could be a jobber to this NPC" in addition to petty qualms like "OK by your hat is red and pointy"?
@@AnonYmous-mc5zx The red pointy hat thing was the first hint that that particular DM would only allow things to happen the way he wanted them to happen. It is admittedly minor, but it should've been a red flag.
Our DM had SEVENTEEN DMPCs that were all level 18. We were level 6. One time while we were fighting on a ship about 3 miles from the shoreline, we had one enemy left to kill. The enemy was the captain of the ship and as our Druid was about to land the killing blow, his NPC threw her spear from the beach and skewered him through the eye. That was when we abandoned that campaign.
Had us create uber powered characters that can fight and kill gods. Up to this, one was killed, the other, Athena, was turned into a servant/secretary for one of the characters. My character was named Artemis. To add something interesting to my character, since the dm failed to tell me just how powerful we could make ourselves, thought of the idea that his mother used to be a huntress of the goddess Artemis but retired to have a family. She named her son, my character, after her. I was gonna have it to where he refers to her as grandma and they have a history. Instead my character gets turned into a living quiver by her huntresses that should have known him, and she gets turned into a cloud of ichor. My characters goal was to have it end without his grandmother killed or enslaved. It was such bullshit I said fuck this and left the game because the DM appeared up for this and never bothered to say no. It almost killed my desire to ever play D&D again.
6:00 Noel might as well have had given an ultimatum 'break up with your girlfriend so I can have her or we're not friends anymore and you're banned from my group'. He wouldn't have had been any less of a bad DM, but at least he'd be a lot less fucking pretentious and petty by actually admitting what he was really after.
To be honest, I've only had three DMs, and I can't say that any of them are bad, as we're all part of the same group - Vet, One Arm, and Legally Blind - but I guess I could go through any issues. (Playing D&D5e) One Arm - Dude DMed LMoP. Nothing really wrong - in fact, any issues could be placed at my feet - had to go to the dentist a lot during those sessions, or I couldn't stay past a certain time, as my one ride would have to head home and my second ride wouldn't be able to come to the game for real world reasons. It was a good way to learn the game - played as a variant human dragon bloodline sorcerer with a Noble background (got to Level 3). As nickname indicates, Dude only has one arm. Useful for learning the rules. Legally Blind - Dude is DMing a campaign set in a world where Giants won a war against Dragons, and status is determined by size, with Reptilians on the short-end of the stick regardless. As indicated, Dude has vision issues, so O. A. tends to act as a dice roller for him, although L.B. is smart enough to point in our general directions (or rather at the fuzzy blob that is us - Dude can see "okay" in bright light) and say "Roll me a (whatever dice he calls for)" in order to keep things fair. Only issue is that he likes to send rather tricky foes after us, especially when we are short on spell slots, and he goes "Oh, this might be a deadly fight!" My Yuan-Ti Pureblood Paladin of Vengeance (level 5 at the time - now 6), Criminal Background, fell three times due to the results of this pair of succubi - we actually had to reread the rules on Death to see if I was just Knocked Out or Dead-Dead. Still, Zirila would get back up, thanks to the efforts of the Aarakocra cleric in the group, and go "Yo, let's dance another round!" - finally took the one out, and caused the other to retreat. On the plus side, this is helping us know the rules better, for when we get back to the main game. Vet - the group's Main DM. Vet gets his nickname for two reasons - he served in the Marines, specifically, over in the Middle East, and he was Wounded in Action (Simper Fi). Also, Dude has played D&D and other similar RPGs for 20+ years. The main issue I really had with him (beyond an issue where it's a bad idea to say give him a friendly slap on the back - he has back issues, and has to control his reflexes to not just grab and thus break your arm), has to deal with the fact that, when I first started playing, he honestly knew almost nothing of the supplemental books - to be fair, he only had the Core Trio at the time, and thus dealt with them - and while he knew they existed, he hadn't really read them beyond maybe a spell or two in a book that another player had. However, I'd make the mistake about talking about Non-Core races, subraces, and subclasses. He has a rule - Prove it's Official Wizards of the Coast material (book or PDF) and, once he's read it, he'll allow it, otherwise, no go. This came to a head over the Celestial Warlock - he made his challenge - "Prove it's Official!" He also pointed out his 20+ years to my then 2 months of experience. Piece of Advice - Support Your Local Libraries - they might have the info you need, and much like a young spell-caster at wizard school, I was able to find the Official Evidence. Vet looked at it, and I kid you not, he did one of those Thousand Yard Stares, as if Tiamat had suddenly appeared, and I'd convinced her to turn Vegan. Even the others at the table were surprised. O.A. (this being during his LMoP campaign) was like "Dude, I think you broke him." When he made his Wisdom/Intelligence Saving throw, Vet gave me a look that was a mixture of Shock, Awe, and Respect. He got his own Copy of Xanathar's Guide to Everything soon after, and this opened the floodgates to non-Core races and subclasses. Playing as Variant Human Champion Fighter with a Soldier background, with plans to change him over to an Eldritch Knight (got 16 strength, 15 Intelligence, but only 10 dexterity, at Level 6), as I want him to have some actual ranged capabilities and certain ranged cantrips would even out my guy's lack of bow capabilities.
Not sure if you've considered this, but carrying some javelins would give your fighter a bit more range (30/120) while still using his strength modifier. Don't let that stop you from switching to Eldritch Knight if that's what you want to do, though.
Five guys and a DM playing a year long campaign.... DM says ' Lisa is going to start playing, she will be a cleric, she doesn't really know how to play'... .. The only thing worse than a DM bringing his girlfriend into a campaign is a DM bringing a girl who isn't his girlfriend into a campaign. Lisa basically rolled a 20 on every hidden roll the DM did.
My worst DM followed what I call "extreme criticals". It meant that a crit success would make us immediately succeed in whatever we were trying to do, which a lot of DMs do run (I'm personally not a fan of it), but this guy took it a step further by making every critical failure kill you. Seriously, if you rolled to, say, pick a lock, if you rolled a 1 you would somehow stab yourself in the throat with the lockpick. Fucker also made you roll for literally anything. Pick up a cup? Roll. Talk to someone? Roll. Read a piece of paper? Roll and hope a demon doesn't reach it's hand through and fucking Kali Mah you. All with that 5% chance you will die to every little thing. He does this for every NPC too, including enemies, so if an opponent got a crit on us, we'd die instantly, and if they rolled a 1 on anything they'd die too. Seriously, I don't think any enemy or PC dropped to 0 health normally. The only good thing I can say about the one session we played, is that around halfway through an important plot NPC picked up a bucket and broke their neck, and he ended it there.
I lasted a session and a half with one DM. First session was pretty uneventful, but the second one, we made the oh so terrible mistake of attempting to investigate the river that the DM took time out to describe and put on the map screen, so we thought it'd be important. "Roll initiative." Six rounds later, they finally said that there had never been enemies present in the first place. When we actually reached the dungeon, they then proceeded to accuse me of metagaming when I cast a spell that uses several d6 of damage, or d8 instead of the target is sensitive to light. So I asked for the sake of which dice I needed to roll. "No metagaming, just roll the dice!" "Which ones?!" I left before that session was over, and they tried to guilt me an hour later because I had been the healer.
I wouldn't say I've had a bad GM but goddanm did I have an annoying player. Regardless if I was playing or running the game, the dude would rule jockey and "uhm ackshually" every single thing anyone said or tried to do. Worst part was, 9/10 he was actually just wrong about the rule he was trying to call out and we would open the core rulebook and read it out loud to prove him wrong.
The worst DM I ever had asked me what my paladin’s breast size was when I was describing her. The campaign only lasted two sessions. The guy just in general gave me bad vibes.
Most of the DMs I’ve played with have been pretty good. The two players in my group who usually took the role of DM were David and Laird. When it came to creating compelling stories and challenging adventures, they were really good. Unfortunately they both had the same shortcomings. They both bored easily. They would start an adventure/campaign, but then a few sessions in they would get bored with DMing and decide that they would rather be a player instead. So they would switch places as DM, and the first thing the new DM would say would almost always be “New campaign, new characters, and we’re starting at 1st level.” In theory, having multiple players in the group taking on the role of DM at different times is a great way to prevent DM burnout. However, when you have a bunch of players who have put a lot of time and effort into their characters and want to see them advance in level and increase in power, then it’s a good idea to maintain the same campaign with the same characters and JUST swap out the DMs every few sessions. Instead what we had was a bunch of players with stacks of barely used low level characters because almost every time they switched roles as DM they would say “New Campaign, new characters, starting at 1st level.” It didn’t happen ALL the time. They would sometimes switch roles and ask for characters of a certain level above 1st, allowing some of us to continue playing older characters and gaining XP to level them up. But it happened enough to be pretty darn annoying.
Worst dm I ever had was someone who had a dragon attack the starting town the PCs were in. I with my high Cha score combined with my quick thinking got the dragon to agree to a two week deal. If we could locate and attack one of his enemies, he would let the town live. Rather than allowing us to attempt to follow through with the deal or do something to counter the dragon using that dragons enemy, he just says “two weeks pass and you guys are preparing to defend the town from the dragon” Like bruh, that’s not what we had in mind. It’s one option, but surely not the one we chose willingly. Also, I had broken time using a home brewed potion combined with a nat 20 that caused my character to obtain limited powers from a Eldritch horror and wanted to keep that a secret from the party, but he openly talks about it to the other members and asks “do you want to use your spectral demon armor?” During that very dragon fight.
The worst DM I ever had was a combination of four terrible traits. 1: You could not play a character with middling or low intelligence or wisdom. Otherwise he would veto your ideas for being "too smart" for your character, permanently taking them off the table as an option, so someone else smarter couldn't then suggest it. 2: He had what we came to call plot anvils. Basically if we took too long making a decision the plot would move forward without our input, and we would be suffering for it. 3: He would sometimes ask only one person for an idea, and not allow anyone to discuss. 4: After everything went to crap because you either lost your time to Choice paralysis or gave a stupid answer because it was the only thing he would let you do, he would make sure some character involved chastised you for it.
My sister and i were looking for local games on craigslist and went to meet a self proclaimed DM at a game store. Some back story on my family, we have never been homeless but we have been hungry. We were in a good place at the time this occurred so we often put together bags of non perishable food with bottles of water to hand out to homeless people. The easiest way to find someone who really does need help is just see how they react to the gift of food. the real ones are always extremely thankful. We also hand out gloves and socks in the winter. To start off with this new DM could not remember what our characters were. He was trying to run the entire campaign out of a book which while not a bad thing he did NO prep. he had not ever read the book before and had nothing to hide it from us. As a result i knew what was ahead of us as i could see the map in front of me he was trying to copy off of as well as where all the traps and monsters were supposed to be. Honestly he was not the brightest crayon in the box. Then when i was already reaching the point of just wanting to leave because i was not having fun and we were constantly just waiting for him to read the book and attempt to relay to us what it said there was a person outside the building who was clearly digging in the trash for anything remotely edible. I commented that i felt bad because we didnt have any bags with us and there wasnt anything nearby we could run to to get them anything. This was when the guy we came to meet lost all respect he might have even had a chance to earn. He said all homeless people should just be put down for being worthless. We challenged him asking if he would still say that if he became homeless and of course he claimed yes. That was the end of even pretending we wanted to be around him and we just left. I would rather go to a homeless camp and feed everyone there out of my own pocket than be around that asshole again.
I had a high school friend who’s brother played D&D often. My friend thought he would be a good DM, and I wanted to try out the game. We spent a week or so creating my character after school, a fighter, then planned to play that weekend. My character was sent to a cave where I was supposed to retrieve an item for someone, where there were 30 hobgoblins hiding, apparently waiting for me and I was killed instantly. The game lasted about 20 minutes. I didn’t play for years after that.
one of the worst dm’s I’ve ever encountered was just SO terrible at social interactions in-game. They called their games combat-oriented, and it was only that way because NO NPC actually had believable reactions to our characters. It was like pulling teeth trying to get him to calm the f*** down, because all npc’s were out for blood. We go to talk to a npc elf slave (slave to humans) and she’s screaming in a corner, when us, a group of druids rangers and elves, go up and try to ask her what happened. Screaming. In. A. Corner. because we were: “not speaking her language and came on very threateningly” Us: we go up to her calmly and ask her in elven if she’s okay, and we’re here to help, if she can tell us what happened. DM: Yeah she’s screaming in a corner to go away and now you’re starting to draw a crowd Us: Um, okay, we tell her again, we’re here to help, we need to talk to her son who witnessed the incident DM: Yeah now you have 15 guards coming down the alleyway as you try to harass this woman, roll initiative. That was the first incident of the session, then we go to the forest to meet what we are sure are centaurs, because the humans are cutting down the forest and disturbing the treants. The centaurs are acting like defenders of the forest. My druid character claims she’s a friend of the forest, wildshapes into a direwolf, and bows before them. They. Shoot. Her. For 3 rounds they’re laying into her with their bows, knocking her out multiple times. He claimed that centaurs wouldn’t understand what a druid is and what a wolf bowing means (Centaurs have a pretty good wisdom score, like 12+ - they know what a bow looks like in canines. He was just being an ass) - that it was an act of surrender. So he had the centaurs keep attacking us even after we all threw down our weapons and surrendered. Then he yelled at me for essentially being spoiled and that “not everything will go my way”. This dm really just was terrible at rp and he wanted any opportunity to play a fight scene. He was one of those, “Yeah I’m the DM and what I say goes” - even when ALL of his players are telling him he’s not letting us talk to people without them freaking out. He was just SO unaware of how people act in real life. He’s my husband’s friend and I don’t want to cause a rift, but I really can’t be a player in his games anymore. They’re just not fun, and he doesn’t listen to any of the players.
I enjoy watching all these videos about D&D, especially about DMs and how they can get better at it and how to avoid being a bad DM since I will be a DM for my friend group's first game (as soon as they create their characters)! No one in my friend group has played DnD, I've only tried Pathfinder two times so it will be new and exciting experience for everyone :) Hopefully I can avoid any major mistakes by watching these videos
@@zara8607 Damn, reply to a 2 years old comment :o It went well! We've had a few sessions and we're supposed to start a premade campaign (if we ever find time). Luckily I managed to hook another friend to DnD and we are going to continue another premade campaign soon :)
A guy who ran RPGA mods (3rd ed DnD days). He never read them, always said he ran them best if he skimmed them at the last minute. Either the fights were under or over powered. The last time I sat at his table my 4th lvl party (I was the kinda dps with a ranger) encountered what turned out to be an assassin with improved invisibility. I got sneak attacked and failed my death throw. He told the party, who barely survived (thanks to out of the box thinking), they could raise me if they sold my darkwood long bow. I stood up, said nope, and walked from the table. Afterwords we had words about my unprofessionalism. Told him NOTHING had inproved invis at our lvl. His home brews were worse. Thankfully I had a buddy who could usually find a way to cheese weasel out a win on real hard fights.
My worst DM was one of those "D&D youtubers" and I got to play in his campaign as a patreon reward, since I joined the game late I got to make a lvl 3 character and I made a paladin and sent him a backstory and asked for his input. This was about 1 week before the session. Session arrives and I've not heard so much as a squeek from him. Then game starts and im thrown into it like a ragdoll. Into combat. Ok sure, thats fine with me. get to be a badass right away. Introduce myself to the party and proceeds with the session. Couple of sessions later we are fighting some fiendish homebrew of his and I cast Protection from Evil and Good, making it so every fiend attacks me with disadvantage, he instantly switched from me to the other PC's because " I play monsters intelligently" Sure, ok. But the straw that broke the camels back was when we were investigating a house in waterdeep, we had gotten a job to go in and steal a collection of swords without being seen or cause any damage. We walk around outside the walled-off home and look for the best place to enter, The entire thing was lined with magical statues that basically targeted anyone trying to get over the walls with Thunderwave, so when our Ranger and Fighter jumped over, there was a loud explosion. Me, the wizard and the cleric was on the other side of the house, we went over to investigate the sound, when we arrivem so did the city guard who arrested us 3 for trespassing. We werent even on the property and was just back there looking around for our now dissappeared friends. And since we had tried to go in "the wrong way" we had alerted the owner and the next day the quest would be harder, while I said we could wait a week to let the heat go down, Nope, we had to do it now. no waiting allowed. I removed myself from that campaign after and never looked back xD
I have had an awful DM who has put our game on hiatus for a number a months despite claiming we have probably two sessions left until the module is over. In the off chance we someday will finish, I'll wait to air my grievences until after.
Worst DM I ever had was an ex-friend of mine. I only made it 2 sessions before I quite right there and left. Playing 5th edition and this was her first time DMing. I made a rogue/cleric and played him like a trickster. More con-man prankster. Any action i tried was met with either aggression from the npc's or a "doesnt work" (aka, used magic to defile a statue, "doesnt work". Slept in the alley at night, guards were immediately hostile and attempted to arrest me.) The plot was railroaded from the start by teleportation and a giant dragon, who would kill us and bring us back just to show they could. (She made it very clear on several occasions that they were happy to kill us at any moment). The thing that did it for me though was during our first major encounter. Got one shotted to 0 by a random rampaging creature and was asked what my negative hp was. Reminder this was 5e. We got into a heated argument about how there ISNT negative hp, with the DM refusing to either admit it or check. When they finally did and saw there wasnt negative hp, they pulled the "I'm dm so I make the rules" line instead of just working with it. Then they said in pure anger "why do you have to be such a [Friend's name]. I LOST it. This was a friend we both hung out with and knew had some anger issues and had minor rules lawering tendencies. I told them off and left. I havent spoken nor seen them since and never plan to. I could deal with the terrible dming, but you dont use a friends name as an insult to another of your friends.
I had a DM that if you pissed him off, he would send hellhounds after the party. I personally never experienced this, but I heard from the other players in the group. The DM even confirmed that it was true. The worst part was that, me being relatively new to the game and interested in trying DMing myself, I thought it was normal. I even started making a list of monsters in certain situations to send after the party. It wasn't until I mentioned it to a friend of mine who would DM for another group I was in and he said it was pretty fucked up that I begin to question it and realized how toxic it was.
Mine was a former friend whose obsession with critical role caused him to screw up both games just because he was bored and I was running my game better than he was. Wish I was kidding he ran a Dragonlance inspired game a decade or so ago so invited me to join a version of that where I had a malformed elven ranger ready to run. He asked to convert her into a cleric so I did using what I knew of his setting selecting a variation of Sehanine Moonbow but named Kestra even had a background story to do with her. Never got used as his obsession with critical role meant he used the Dawn War Pantheon despite that having nothing to do with his original game. I reduced my character's back story to answering a call for aid from her son and he proceeded to kill off the son and refuse to let her locate his body after he repeatededly stated the npc was dead. After pointing out no mother would abandon their child he then asked me to start a new character. I should point out had he any sense he should have set his game at the hamlet that first game ended up at, but he claimed it was just an introductory game and wasn't important. Yet he involved my character's back story in his "campaign" that turned into a series of one shots that he couldn't even run properly! I ran the next game so within 15 minutes demonstrated how an "introductory game" was handled revealing my characte rhad been banished from Exandria and was recovering from temporary amnesia which she did thus her goal was finding a way home to check on her grandchild. Ian continued to take pot shots at my character since I was a newbie with 5e, however I handled that as best as I could until he decided his game should be set on Exandria too. Once that session ended I called him to confirm his act of stupidity and then quit when he confirmed after previously repeatedly stating his campaign WASN'T set on Exandria he finally decided he didn't give a damn about either game. For me it made me realise he wasn't a friend and barring an email from one of the others I have heard nothing since and feel it confirmed I did the right thing. He made similar mistakes with his Star Wars games, but back before episode 8, I didn't consider that a problem in retrospect it was a warning sign I should have paid attention to. Could be worse I could still be wasting my time thinking he was a friend after all!
I have only ever had two DMs, both have used completely homebrewed settings and modified classes and combat (so technically not DND). Funnily enough, they are both brothers, the older brother is a friend I made in college and my first DM, he preferred to more focus on the world, world-building, characters, and plot rather than on combat or gear or anything. This meant that literally, everything went off of d20s, roll to hit, roll to damage, every roll can think of was just a single d20. If you rolled high enough, 18-20, you could gain additional modifiers to your roll. Somehow I was lucky enough to end up with a +5 to my deception rolls (everyone starts with no modifiers to any rolls unless your weapons or gear gave it to you) with the deception I almost got away with lying to an actual telepath who was reading my mind during an interrogation with two other people in the room scrutinizing my words. The reason for this was that every race was supposed to be separate from each other due to highly advanced sci-fi aliens invading and occupying our fantasy world, my character was an elf with was caught in a human settlement. Shortly after my arrest, I was put into a jail cell to fight in a coliseum, everyone in the jail cell was a human so I couldn't speak to them and they to me, so I asked if I could roll to see if my character knew sign language. One nat20 later and not only does my character know all forms of sign language but the DM rolled a 19 so all the prisoners knew it as well, and just like that our party gained an army of over 100 prisoners after half of them ended burning to death. To be honest, the story felt kind of like one of the interactive telltale games combined with tabletop role play, it was still fun and it was my introduction to tabletop role-playing games. The second campaign by that DM was a mashup of DND and Warhammer fantasy, it was a brutal, unforgiving, somewhat masochistic story that invited permadeath for your character at the turn (he warned us of all this and told us not to get attached to our characters but I still did anyway, Dixonister Arnoldger survived to the last and I was quite proud).
My worst DM was my first one. Played with the group for over a year, the DM has his own character in the game that was overly OP. Before i joined one of the PCs wanted to kill the DMs character for plot reasons but the DM announced out of no where that the PC was in love with that character and couldn't do it. But my personal story is that when the party was hiding in a safe house a package was legt at the door. One character went outside, closed the door, and opened the package. My character couldn't see, smell, touch, hear, or taste anything in the package but SOMEHOW the contents made my character contract vampirism. Which i have made very clear before, my character has a seething hatred against stuff like this so my character tried to off herself only for the DM to tell me (the person that created and played the character) that my character wouldn't do that. I insisted she would, and is. DM instead announced that another PC just entered the room and is allowed to respond to my actions which logically they did restrain my character. I did not play again after that session. Don't force something on your players with no logical explanation.
My worst DM was also my first and by default only DM. It was back in middle school, I wanted to join in the fun at the school game club. Only problem was, I didn't understand how the game worked. (And no one let me borrow their dungeon manual so I could read up on it.) So, rather than teach me, they just killed my character off and said I couldn't play until a new session was going. I believed this, and managed to get into a new session just as it was starting off, once again no one explaining how the game worked. This time there were a lot less players, so the DM had to keep me around, if only so there was someone to keep an eye on the literal murder hobo. (I didn't hear that term till years later, but thinking back, there is no better description. Killed everything he met and pissed on the corpse.) THAT game ended a couple sessions later when they decided they were gonna quit DMing. Their choice, but they could have made the announcement another way besides "the scroll of anubis makes you all unkillable by killing you all." Looking back now, with 15 more years of pop culture osmosis bringing me up to speed on the game, the DM was always kinda sketchy. Always had a wizard GMPC that they never had to roll for, and almost never rolled for encounters either.
Worst one I have ran into probably was the guy DMing the first time I tried playing Curse of Strahd, who was so insanely railroady it is kind of comical. The recurring theme was that one or another super powerful npc (he all the time made not so subtle remarks about how the npc in question could easily wipe out the whole party if we pissed them off/didn't do what they said), like for example, when we ran into Morgantha in the first village (our characters were like level 3), and some of the characters were about to attack her after finding out she had a kid in a sack in her cart, the DM literally tells us ooc how she can cast power word kill so attacking her would be really bad idea. Then more than once, some npc or another told us that we needed to go to place x and do y, and then literally teleports us right at the location, to make sure we don't get side tracked along the way I guess... He also gave some ridiculously overpowered magic items to his favorite players, like for example, at 5th level, giving our party bard staff of power (and hand waving the whole thing about bards not even being able to use said item in the first place). I left the campaign soon after that.
Without a doubt, my worst DM was the one that was super lenient at the start of the game. The other players took notice, and decided to ask for more and more broken homebrew items. The DM didn't want to hurt their fun, and it ended up with a super unbalanced experience. Monsters had to be boosted to keep them challenging for ⅗ of the party, and that made it harder for me and the only other legit player to compete. And when I say broken, I mean the 4d10 glaive used by our warlock/bard, and the monk/cleric with an AC of 34 and a +20 to Wisdom saving throws. In the end, it was the players that were bad, but the DM let it happen
That second party sounds like they're just having fun, but... it's not even a TTRPG anymore. It's like when you're playing make-believe as a kid with your friends and just keep making up whatever you want to do.
I had a dm who got mad new players to D&D didn't stay in character for 6+ hours with constant acting. I was still very new to D&D so I decided to play a bright eyed Tielfing fighter. Hearing stories of heroes and dragons and deciding he wanted to make his home town known by becoming a legend or going on a grand quest. It seemed fitting because we were adventurers being paid to solve a issue regarding a family curse from a noble family. Had the dm admit to sending 100 goblins at us because we didn't talk to a shop keeper long enough. Also I have a horrible memory. My friends know this, my family knows this. Bad enough memory I will forget names people mention 5 times sometimes. Forget numbers mentioned. Forget if I leave the sink filled after dishes and walk away for 5 seconds, etc. He got mad I couldn't remember a shop keepers name
The worst, and currently only (though im about to start a new campaign with my brother as DM for a DnD game), i've ever had is my father in multiple Pathfinder campaigns. He forced me and my brother to always be in character whenever we spoke even if we explicitly told him we aren't in character. Also turned everything I did against me. They rarely lasted longer than one session.
How about a DM who ALWAYS tell the players that they have ample time to do stuff, but also ALWAYS put them under absurd time crush to accomplish world saving mission after world saving mission. Things like : You have ample time, but you have 7 days to go there and finish your mission. There being located at about 10 days of forced march and the mission expected to take about 10 more days. Most player would welcome a world saving mission or adventure, but, to have ALL OF THEM being world saving ? Having a time crush can be good, but definitively NOT all of the time. Especially when the characters have personal, DM determined (read imposed), side quests involving creating a set of 8 new spells, all of level 3+, the creation of some magic item by a non-magic wielding warrior, or something similar.
LMAOOOO needed to vent about this -- my worst DM is the best DM RIPPPP because he is good with his DM stuff like storytelling, NPCs, giving a story for our characters etc. HOWEVER, the DM as an individual isnt stable. He would fight with people, guilt-trip, be snarky, overall not a nice person off-game. He is a great DM but a HORRIBLE player. Would talk shit about other DMs and players. Worst incident was when he started bullying this player for having a half-orc and half-elf character. Our rogue recently left his campaign because he doesnt want to take anymore of the toxicity. I just hope I can find a DM that isnt mean nor a bad DM. I only stay in his campaign because I loved my character, the fellow players, and the storytelling. But I wouldnt be surprised if this campaign combust into flames because of his clownery smh EDIT - The half-orc half-elf character is NOT in this DM's campaign so the guy has no authority to dictate what is allowed. We were all players to another DM but the poor guy would get criticized EVERY FKING SESSION by this jerk. The incident was the last straw and he is thankfully no longer in that campaign.
I don't have a worst DM, but rather a worst kind of DM. Clearly unexperienced, clearly railroad-y, clearly unprepared for what's going to happen, uber-powerful entities happen to be present for session 1, the game falls apart after a couple of sessions tops. I don't know whether the worst one was the guy who decided to heavily homebrew a good chunk of the mechanics without any idea on how to actually implement the rules, run a party of 8 players and then gave up after session 1, or the guy who railroaded us into winning a tournament by saying "your opponent cheated" every time one of us lost a fight.
I played a game under a friend's dad once, there was constant conflict between party and DM (most of them were family) and he was so strict on the rules that anything creative was out of the question entirely. Want something with the exact statistics of a dagger but it isn't technically a dagger? Nope. It's not in the books.
Not DnD specifically but rather a roleplay, and let's just say the DM should never never be allowed to DM or even RP. DM was new to RPing and asked some friends to help start an RP. DM forces a scenario to happen, gets criticized, and hides away, stalling the RP. DM constantly to threaten to kill off the RP for every little mistake that's made and ultimately kicks out one of the players. DM disappears again due to actual family issues that meant he was without a computer for a while, or so the story goes. DM eventually lets RP die on its own and all the players go their separate ways. This was my first and last RP ever. This was nearly eight years ago and things have changed for me, but I don't let myself RP again because of what the DM turned into and I don't want to witness that transformation again. I was the DM.
My worst dungeon master was easily my first one. My first time playing DND and I love magic based characters so I was playing as a High Elf Wizard. My character never got to take part in anything. At all. When it came to combat, everything would die before I got a chance to attack, or I'd be completely useless due to everything either resisting my damage (I was going with an Ice/Fire themed character, so only used spells related to that). Not to mention the DM also gave me some dice that either had some back luck with them, or were weighted cause for some reason I always rolled Nat 1s on them.
I will never understand these people who are like "So this DM was a jealous metagaming asshole who constantly cursed me and whose DMPCs hogged the spotlight. I hated playing with him. So I stayed in his campaign for 5 months..."
I know right? And even so they say "well, it's my friend", well if it's your friend talk about it!
I once dealt with a bad DM but thankfully his campaign only lasted two sessions, I don't know if it actually continued because some of my classmates invited me to their campaign shortly after
Their campaign is a bit lopsided but not nearly as bad as the campaign I originally suffered in
In some cases it was (at the time) too difficult and time consuming to get a new group together... Back in the day, there were a LOT of places you COULDN'T even talk about D&D. It was a big risk letting anyone know you had books or dice, let alone that you actually play... SO groups were often a little issue-laden early on and we'd "stick it out" hoping for improvements. At my Table I wholeheartedly endorse rotating the GM-screen. Campaigns get episodic, dysfuctional and wonky... BUT GM's don't burn out, and with practical experience even some of the SUCKIEST GM's improve. As Players we tend to take it a little easier on the GM in action, because we don't want abuse when we have to run a session or two... dozen. ;o)
i would've left after the first time i get bullshitilly cursed
always remember, no D&D is better than bad D&D
Until you're in that situation you really don't understand.
By default my father. He’s the only dm I’ve had. He’s pretty good.
I wish my family was into dnd
Wholesome AF
Ah yes, the infamous rake the yard and take out the trash session.
Btw im assuming your name is a reference to the outlaw named Texas Red?
Jeffrey The Cactus wow, how observant of you to realize that I, a profile named Texas Red, with a picture of Texas Red as my profile pic, to be named after a character named Texas red, in Marty robbin’s most popular song.
My worst DM? Me by far, I've had a few DMs in my life, and I thought it'd be fun to give it a shot. I was absolutely TERRIBLE at it, luckily I DM'd for a close group of friends who (like me) are very blunt. They told me I was shit, even though I already realized about 1/4th through my session that I was shit. Thanks to that, I found out I don't ever want to DM, and will continue to be a creative player as that is much more fun.
Men, i cringe so hard when i remember my teenager sessions, damn i was a fucking retarded
I dont do dnd, so i dont even know what a shit dm is. But your story is so heartwarming. ^u^
Dude, I'm with you. I couldn't properly describe anything and my NPC's were boring as all hell. The worst was probably when it came to a little twist I had planned. I kinda bungled the whole thing and accidentally said what the twist was out loud because I talk to myself. That was my first and, hopefully, last session as DM. I can't do world building for shit
Your not a bad DM, you just need to work on storytelling. Sometimes you have to railroad especially the first session. Once you place plot hooks, a prisoner or some sort of parchment hinting at a typical town, village, city or any place with residents. After that if you still say your a bad dm. Well I thought I could help.
Same here. I've not ever DM'ed except for this thing called Honey Heist that my brother had for his college homework. It ended with two out of the three characters going feral (because bears) and one had to book it to avoid capture. My mom and brother had fun but I think I lost 20-30 years from my life span from stress.
Imagine rolling a nat20 and bludgeoning an enemy with a shoe until they’re dead
That mus be one huge insect
My character prefers his shield to his mace so I’m going to claim it does Bonk damage. I actually wrote that on his sheet.
EDIT: That his mace does Bonk damage. That was ambiguously worded.
@@JaelinBezel pog
@@Albert_Bruhno What do pogs have to do with anything?
@@JaelinBezel idk
8:00 someone should have just, made a character with the wish spell, and just wished for this campaign to end.
DM: You all die of rapid aging shortly after activating the wish effectively ending the campaign. 😂
I’m watching this so I can learn what to avoid for my first session as a DM next Thursday
Godspeed dear friend. Being a good dm sorta boils down to not being an asshole unless absolutely necessary. Also it's a good idea to have a session 0 to see what everyone wants out of it (you included.) Lay down ground rules if you have any and give them an idea of what their characters would know about the world. But most importantly have fun!
ted valen I’ve played with this group for months now, so I know their styles, and this first session is going to affect the full campaign, as who they play in the oneshot will become NPC’s in the full campaign.
Architect INTJ good move
@@robopope7584 noice! I had some experiences where my new character met the old one that retired and that was fun. Plus what you're doing will help the players consider those NPCs more than just "quest giver female #123" so that's cool. I wish you the best of fun in the campaign
The best advice is to keep an open mind, be open to collaboration, and expect everything. Even the things that are impossible to expect. For example, picking locks with chicken bones. Had it happen before. It was supposed to be a torture dungeon, before they were brought before the BBEG. Their meal was a slab of raw, bloody chicken. They got creative, picked the lock, choked out a guard, got themselves a disguise, and became an inside man who gave valuable information to the party while subverting the goals the BBEG had in place. He single handedly sabotaged and as a result killed enough henchmen to delay the BBEG by two months of in game time. Also, NEVER let your party fuck with time. Always assume that they are smarter than you give them credit for, because they absolutely WILL surprise you!
I was in a pickup game for level 20 PvP. The rules were solid, the items were numerous, and we were basically allowed any build our imaginations could come up with. So I spent an hour making a character, and when the time came to start the match, the DMPC tried to use Hunters Mark in a prep round, and then refused to allow counterspell to negate it. All the players agreed that casting spells on other people in prep rounds wasnt fair. Then he argued that a potion he took before entering the arena was in effect, when we weren't allowed the same. Instead of being civil about it, he deleted his discord and banned us from his game in roll20. We didnt even get to the first turn of battle before he took his ball.and went home.
First red flag was a DMPC in a PvP game
We've been talking about bad dms for longer than expected.
In order to appreciate the good, you must take a look at the bog of bad
In high school I played with some guys that I had some fun with beforehand. One of them wanted to DM, we'll call him "John." He let us use our characters from a campaign that had been canceled which was nice. I immediately noticed a fatal flaw, no dice. As we started in a tavern he skipped introductions which was okay and launched into this description of a man singing in the corner. As he does so his skin began to burn off until he is a charred skeleton and we realized that the tavern has become a hellscape. Sounds kind of cool right? Just wait. We see this monstrosity come towards us and introduce itself as Orcus. It surveys the group and then looks at me. I was a half-dwarf cleric with a lawful good alignment. Orcus speaks finally:
"I have no use for this." He smashes his hand down on me resulting in my instant demise then incinerated my corpse. "That is I dispose of garbage."
I was in shock.
"Wait I'm dead for good?"
"Yep." John just looks at me. "And that means you can leave now. Just like Orcus I have no use for people who are good." He then grabbed my character sheet, ripped it to pieces, balled up the pieces, and lobbed it into a trash can. Not one person spoke up or said anything in my defense.
Total time in campaign- 5 minutes.
I couldn't make a new character, just a kill and kick. The worst part was that there was no warning or anything. I wasn't sure where this animosity came from.
A few days later I asked one of the guys and he told me it was because, during our cancelled campaign, I had gotten experience from drawing a crude map of where we had been and he felt that was unfair.
Being in a position of power can really bring out the petty side of some people. Didn't play again for more than 10 years after that since it had left such a bad taste over the game.
Wow
As an adult I would get up cut ties and curse his mother but in high school I think I would try to punch his face
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just sayin it’s not always that awful, try again
That totally sucks. That dm was an insecure hack. I encourage you to give the game another try with people you know you can trust.
That… that is just fucking wrong.
My worst DM is life
He always fudges rolls so that I roll 1s or 2s and always puts me in horrible situations I have no way of getting out of
Mood
Have you tried alcohol?
Or lie and say you have a 20
Same
Get so many high DC will saves it's just not fair
For the first story: best way to rub it in DM's nose was to do more pda with gf.
The elder brother of a once friend of mine. He spoke in the driest monotone, did no introduction to the game, expected the new players (me and my brother) to know everything already, did no worldbuilding, did no pre game setup, no story direction, almost no dungeons, no character names/speech, and barely seemed to care about the game.
Add on the fact that three of the four players got into arguments and had a group breakdown centered around the Emo rogue who worked at the library we played at, the fact my brother and I did not know our character abilities on account of never seeing a player’s handbook, the absence of descriptions, and interest in the game it turned me off of TTRPGs for nearly four years.
So what the hell did the DM actually do?
@@TheCrazyTalkKidexisted
Oooohhhhkay. I'm currently dealing with a DM who a) decided my character's class b) decided my character's stats c) wrote my character's backstory, decided on my traits/alignment/motivation and d) made my way of mercy monk a strength and charisma based build.
Of course, being a comparatively new player, what do I know? "Monks can be str build, let me remember why I set the stats like that". Of course the last he'd met me, I'd only played one character. It's been seven months, I'm now DMing my own campaign for my brothers and am in two more campaigns (played in the same group, switching off so neither DM gets burnout). Basically, I know he just doesn't want to be wrong, and I've confirmed it with my DMs that I'm not crazy.
He also is starting us all off at different levels and I've noticed I (the only girl in the campaign) seem to be getting most consideration
I really, really want to say *SIIIIIIMP* but I shouldn't
@@Wampao 😂😂 I mean perhaps, I don't want to cast judgement on anybody but I have been asked a few times if I'm single
If they make a character for me then they can also play it for me, because I won't. Ok, Random characters? Fine. pregens? Not a problem. But when the GM starts to decide your backstory? that's a big no for me. I'lld have asked him if he would rather write a novel than play DnD.
I’ve been told that my imagination eould make me a good fig for DnD but I don’t think i would make a good DM. When I’m writing a story I’m used to being able to dictate the characters and their decisions and I get attached to that. I don’t think i would make a good dm.
My ex. We dated before he became a DM. If things didn’t go EXACTLY his way then he got really angry and quiet. Just like in our former relationship.
He invited me because he knew I was into tabletop RPGS. Also was weird with his new (now ex) girlfriend. I liked her just fine, she was a sweetheart, very shy and really fun to talk to. But don’t have a player sitting in your lap the whole game that’s just weird and she was clearly uncomfortable.
During a convention, a DM on a demotration sesion, all the player shipwrecked and they are immediately caught by cannibals, and execute the characters, with out a single dice roll or opportunity to see if they can even attemp to scape.
My worst DM was my girlfriends ex, lets call him Jan.
I was looking forward for the game, it was supposed to be homebrewish 5th edition. I have prepared my favourite character, human ranger, whose charisma could rival any bard. Quite lucky guy, who managed to get out of most problems.
The campaign was supposed to be some that some mysterious "thing" was killing people in nearby town. Me, my now gf and friend of DM were tasked to investigate.
We decided to wait out night in one of the houses in the town and I have set up bear trap right in front of the door.
Of course the first zombie managed to step over it, because, according to Jan, I have set it up on completely different place. After little arguing, I continued the game and thought to myself that it was my fault, that I should have been more descriptional with the placement.
Of course the zombie managed to almost kill us and when we killed it, suddenly, some sort of banshee appeared, knocked us out and we got teleported to some haunted mansion.
That looked fun, even though it could be handled better.
After exploring the mansion, few fights and staying out of door that there was supposedly something huge growling, we have found a chest. Me, being paranoid and in character, I just tried to poke the chest first with a sword.
Nothing.
Opened it with sword.
Also, nothing, so it was not a mimic.
So my ranger decided to take a look in the chest and touched it.
"Honolulu".
"What?"
"You do not know? I thought you played a lot. Your character is teleported away. Make a new one."
Yup. That was it. According to Jan, everything that touched the chest was teleported away. But for some reason, the sword has not teleported first.
I tried to argue, wanting to play my ranger, so the DM said my character was teleported to some nice beach so far away, he can't get from there.
I wanted to try it at least.
Then, luckily, the other player stepped in, in character and talked with my gfs character.
"Have you seen that? That has to be way out of here!"
So they both touched the chest and ended up in tropical paradise.
But well, it was our first and last session, because we were not in mood to make new characters for nothing. Luckily, my gf now has intetest in playing DND again, after that whole ordeal.
I fucking love how her own magic mimic fires back to her as it leads to a win situation for you and a potencial end
Your friend is a gem. They saw what was up and wasn’t going to let you get shafted, and came up with a perfect reason to follow you.
A friend of mine well refer to as D. A bit of background on D is that he always bitches whenever someone beats him at anything. He wasn't always like that, but it's been becoming an increasing issue over the past few years. So sometime last year D tells some friends in a Gaming Chat that he wants to make a D&D campaign and a few of us agree. Takes him like 9 months to get everything ready and then we begin. At first everything was going pretty well, but once we hit Chapter 2 of the campaign everything went south. We started getting ragdolled by things without even having a chance to fight, we're consistently being thrown against shit that's way above our ability to handle or too weak, this is causing the game to slow to the pace of a crawl and he comes up with the most bs ways to nerf us whenever we are finally able to take one of his NPCs on to "Keep the plot moving." Today I finally had it when he imposed a timer because we were "Taking too long to decide what we wanted to do." And every time the timer went off we'd lose an hour of the day followed by him basically ruining a town we had to do shit in because of his BBEG, a Lich named Narexxus, was causing a plague over the town. The reason this is bs is because we're Level 5, so stopping a Lich is far beyond our pay grade, and the reason the Lich escaped in the first place was basically because we we're tricked into doing so without any warning signs of what was going on. Then the next thing he does? All but railroads us to the Lichs lair to try and steal the item he's using to do this while we're still level fucking 5 and literally making it clear we cannot beat the Lich and we HAVE to play this stealthily to the point where he has an NPC tell the other players they shouldn't even bring their armor. Needless to say I left after this and 2 of my other 3 party members are also considering leaving. We feel like D is abusing his role as DM to try and get back at us for being better than him at Smash Bros and Yugioh and we're just not dealing with that anymore.
My partner and I did a campaign where we were hard railroaded the entire time. It was so bad that when I wanted to poke a dead body with a stick ol' dude wouldn't allow it because no sticks were in the vicinity (Middle of a forest and no sticks....) Anyways session 3 it got worse. We could no longer roll for ourselves. That's right the DM rolled our dice for us. Okay cool can't be creative and can't roll our dice now. Session 4 we disconnected from the discord party because the DM refused to connect his mic and talk. Also made me change my character's name because it was to "girly sounding and my elf didn't act that girly." What sucks is I put hours into creating that character and was so excited to play her. (forest elf ranger who was insane and talked to a skull she called fluffy. Fluffy had no special ability just an elf skull. Even painted a mini for her.)
I must be lucky....for me the worst DMs have just been people that stop showing up to sessions or just are super uninterested and make everything too easy. None of these crazy psychopathic behaviors manifested in game.
I think that every DM has some rough spots, but I can definitely think of the worst. Had a good DM with an adversarial streak who said he wanted to 'try something new' and kept throwing ideas at us for 'dnd, but no magic for the pcs' and we kept shooting it down/suggesting other systems. We ended up compromising on 'no wizards, but every other class is ok' and go ahead with it even though he's being really dodgy about the specifics of the campaign. The world ends up pretty crapsack with no real way to escape the extremely awful area we are starting in. The game alternates between being stuck in a megadungeon with no gear at all and trying to figure out why we can't stay dead (we died a lot in this game). Highlights include: A paladin losing 20 years of his lifespan going from young to middle aged and being refused any restorative magic from allied religious organization. Multiple instances where a PC was going to accomplish a goal, only to have something or someone show up out of nowhere and force us to pursue something entirely differently. A session that was run like a MOBA; which is to say dozens of creatures in initiative that we the pcs could not see or interact with. We got a turn roughly every half an hour that consisted of 'I walk over here'. My character spent most of that session unconscious due to a bad die roll. The GM splits the party up and makes the combat character handle a diplomacy heavy peace talk and makes the social character engage in an extremely deadly combat encounter - he thought this was hilarious. After many, many sessions where it seemed like he was going with whatever idea he thought would be the most amusing to him, he admitted that he hadn't had many ideas of where the plot should go after the 3rd session. Our friendship had been on the rocks for a while by that point and I took it as an excuse not to come back.
The worst DM I've ever had is a pretty good friend of mine. He's pretty cool, but just a rubbish DM. One mission, we were told to go to a warehouse and retrieve something. We didn't know what, but we were told to. We got there, and our Kobold rogue was immediately spotted with no role by the dwarf in charge of the warehouse and tied up with an unexplained magic rope. The human fighter was allowed to make a stealth check... If I threw myself into the open. I was a blind drow bard. I was essentially defenseless against the 20+ dwarfs there, so I got creative. I had cast an illusion spell on the kobold's hand that looked like a badge (a failed attempt to sneak in). I used my action to make it move across the roof and turn into a glowing radiance of a god figure descending from the heavens. He began shouting at the dwarves that they were sinners and if they continued were to be punished. This gave the human fighter a chance to sneak around and free the kobold from the ropes. As they were leaving, the dwarf leader called them out "hey, I was totally aware that this was all an illusion and that you were escaping, buy I felt sorry for you, so you can go". Note that I had gotten a natural 20 on my deception check with the illusion, so there was no way he should have been aware of that it was an illusion. The rest of the game was us constantly being undermined by NPC's who would always brush off any attack, see through any illusion, or ignore any debuff. Note that as a bard, my main things were illusions, healing and debuffs, so I had spent dozens of spells for essentially no difference. The only one who was ever allowed to actually do anything was the human fighter, because the DM liked human fighters, so he got every magic item automatically attuned to him, and was literally given free level ups at random by NPC'S because they liked him. He was level 20 by the time we were 14
Tldr - the guy who spent an entire 3 and a half hour session having us walk up a staircase, just to walk back down it.
I think the worst DM I had was the one that constantly made me roll checks for things when I was flavoring how my character does them.
Example: Storm Sorcerer's can move 10 feet (Flying) without incurring AoO (Attack of Opportunity) before or after casting a Level 1 or higher spell so I can jump out of Melee and cast a spell. So what i did was have my character climb a wall (Climb speed is half your movement) so I got 15 feet up this pit and on the other side of it (10ft) was a ledge where the rest of the party was. I explained it as my character digging her daggers into the side of the wall and quickly climbing up to that point blunting the daggers before spinning mid air and firing a fireball down at the swarm of Lizard folk before landing on the platform.
Simple enough, Climb wall, Jump fireball. However he had me roll a Athletics check on climbing the wall (In 5e you dont need to do a check) I passed with my 8 strength barely then had to do a Acrobatics check for the flavor spin, failing as I smacked into the wall and fall only for a the bard to save me with a levitate spell and needing to throw the halfling rouge to catch me and pull me like a balloon.
I never talked about how I did things again, just saying 'Climbing 15, Using Class Feature 10 fly speed to platform and casting fireball down pit for feature.' Rather than painting a picture or getting invested in my character. She is a Sorcerer that was trained in Survival, she carries 3 daggers, a mess kit and cooks for the party. She wears thick clothing and where she comes from Ice Climbing requires knives/picks so she climbs how she would back home.
This was just one of the things that demoralized me with this particular DM.
I had a DM who was just bluntly absolute shit at running it. We were constantly attacked wit little to no world building, also all the enemy’s were able to kill us in just a few hits. There was legit no room for resting and he constantly tried to kill us anyway possible by adding random things in normal situations, such as whilst our party was having a normal time drinking inside a bar after a huge fight, we were “suddenly” swallowed by a “huge sea worm” and taken to the bottom of the ocean. While we were on land.
One of my previous DMs took the game and especially roleplaying _very_ seriously. Whenever he was at the table, you couldn’t talk to other players out-of-character about anything in general, which was especially weird because he would frequently focus on one player at a time for entire sessions. He would also try to dissuade me to _not_ choose a character class since “it wouldn’t fit my character’s personality”, to which I shot him down.
And whenever I made lighthearted jokes, he would take it dead serious, and _not_ change his mind even with clarification. For example: when my character was being mind controlled by the villains of his campaign, I was joking that my character was going around the base muttering “Must Destroy Rebels” Like a robot; everyone else at the table thought it was hilarious, but he had my character killed then-&-there on-the-spot, and he refused to reverse the decision even when we clarified I was just joking. Hell, when we were playing a Star Wars campaign, I just came up with the fact that my character knew too much about Death Star, but he “reasoned” that if so, then he would be “forced” to send the entire Imperial Military after me (which both makes no goddamn sense, and _wasn’t even in the game’s rules_ ).
As for me, I like D&D and other RPGS but the roleplaying part of the game is NOT an aspect I particularly care for and is one where I constantly struggle with (and all my other DMs didn’t particularly care about roleplay). But this particular DM just did not care, even when I brought up my concern. Hell, he would _always_ give me the lowest XP out of everyone since he only rewarded based on roleplay, even though he knew I had problems. But perhaps the final nail in the coffin was when he kicked me out. He had previously promised to help me find a new group to join that would be better suited to my playstyle since I really was having a hard time in his group, but he let me play in the group for the time being. However, he one day requested me to stop playing & not return, and all that help he promised went right out the window then-&-there. I was not misbehaving and some of the other players were missing me, but he just didn’t care. I spent several months on my own trying to find a new group to join, and I don’t think I’ll ever forgive him for how he mistreated me.
I'm a half elf, half drow, half vampire, half...
I had a DM who forced our characters to eat human flesh because the dragonborn who wanted to eat flesh rolled a nat 20 on his persuasion check. He also threw a vampire at a level 4 party.
For me, it was a guy named Phung.
I've only ever insta-quit one campaign/game session in my entire life. I was a teenager at the time and had only been playing D&D for a couple of years by this point. This was WAY back when 2nd Edition AD&D was top dog in the gaming world. The optional rule books (Skills & Powers, Combat & Tactics, etc, sort of the precurser to 3rd Edition) hadn't even been written yet, let alone published. A friend/acquaintance of one of the players in my regular group, a guy named Phung, had invited him to join a new AD&D campaign and extended the invitation to the rest of our group (a "Your friends are welcome to join you" kind of thing).
We get there and the group he had assembled is MASSIVE. I think that there were like ten or twelve of us, not including the DM. We played on a ping pong table in Phung's basement. There were like four or five guys to a side, me and my best friend Laird on the end, and Phung the DM on the other end. I don't remember most of the PC races or classes. I do remember that I was playing a female human barbarian, and that Laird was playing a female half-elf bard. The adventure started out okay. It was pretty standard stuff for 1st level adventurers, even a group as large as this. Essentially the town had been plagued by constant attacks by evil humanoids such as goblins, gnolls, orcs, etc, so they put a bounty out on the monsters and we were to kill them and take their ears as proof in order to collect the bounty. The problems started when combat began. Initiative rules in 2nd Edition were quite different from what they are now, with different weapons having "Speed Factors" which alter your initiative roll (also, lower numbers = better initiative, and initiative was rolled on a d10). With a group THIS size, keeping track of THAT many initiative rolls is VERY difficult and some players are likely to get skipped in the confusion. A simple solution for this is to do Group Initiative (a single dice roll determines the initiative for the whole party, then the players go around the table either clockwise or counter clockwise each taking their turn). The benefits of a high DEX score are lost, but the hindrances of a slow weapon are also lost, and it eliminates any confusion for the DM and players. We explain this to Phung, but he insists on individual initiative rolls. And as predicted, players lost their turns because Phung couldn't keep track of that many player initiatives. Yet he refused to switch to Group Initiative.
He then had our party come across an OBVIOUS place for an ambush. It was a narrow canyon with sheer cliff walls on either side, virtually impossible to climb. When we emerged from the cover of the trees, There were scores of gnolls upon the top of the cliffs, armed with bows, waiting to rain death down upon us. We wouldn't move forward to put ourselves within range of their arrows, and between the height of the cliffs and the distance to the base of the cliffs from the tree line, they were well out of range of our archers as well. I figured that I would try going back into the trees and moving a mile off to the side to climb the cliffs where there weren't any gnolls. So a handful of other players (mostly the stealthier types like the thieves and the rangers) joined me, but when we emerged from the trees, there were always gnolls waiting for us at the top of the cliff. We would go back into the woods, out of their view, and head farther off to the side. Another mile. Then two miles. Then three miles. Then five miles. Every time we stepped out of the woods, there were gnolls waiting for us at the top of the cliff. We must have traveled FIFTEEN MILES, but apparently the gnolls were standing shoulder to shoulder the entire way. That's something like 200 gnolls per mile. At 15 miles, that's about 3000 gnolls on top of that cliff! That's a little much for a bunch of 1st level characters! (Also, a gnoll tribe has a maximum of about 60 members, including women and children, with only about 20 combatants per tribe, so that's gnoll warriors from about 150 tribes on this side of the canyon alone).
Finally we said "Screw it" and the whole party went back to the town, because ANYONE who can get THAT many gnolls to work together for a common purpose is WAY beyond our pay grade. Once back in town we tried to find some other means of making money. A different mercenary or bounty hunting job that was NOT a suicide mission. ANYTHING. DM said "no". Laird's bard tried performing for money (made a damn near perfect performance check too). The DM said "no". Just to alleviate the boredom I tried starting a bar fight. The DM said "Aside from you guys, the only other patrons in the bar look to be powerful enough to kill you all with ease". It was at that point that I just said "Fuck this shit". I packed up my books and dice and got up to leave. Then Laird followed suit, and then the rest of my regular gaming group. Then with us all leaving, everyone else decided to pack up and go as well. I never played with Phung again after that. He wasn't necessarily a bad guy, but if that was typical of his DMing style, he was a HORRIBLE DM.
i’ve never played D&D but low key this is interesting
You should find a group and try it out, it's actually super fun (assuming you get unlucky and have a sucky DM).
Same, I've always thought it would be fun, but I've never been able to
@Timothy Jones huh
I had a fellow player accuse our DM of constantly trying to outsmart and make a competition of killing us( even though The DM generally made combat in favor of us players) and then turn around and make fun of our DM when we won a fight. I felt so bad for my “bad DM”
That first bad DM case is absolutely disgusting. Hopefully he got his karmic justice...
These are my current DM's exact words about the campaign I've invested multiple weeks into with my ranger: " you wouldn't be able to do your run hide strategy, you wouldn't be able to shoot your long bow, you would be able to make half the checks you do." After I tried to adapt my character into his campaign, after I shared my backstory just to explain my character build, and after he killed me off with an unfair check, have me tortured with puzzle traps, and brought back to life with an intellect devourer in my head and used as his personal punching bag for not one, not two, but three of his encounters. he gives us ciphers that can't be deciphered, and he shuts down standard strategy. His campaign is about three empires, one focused on technology, one that's about greed, and one that's a military dictatorship. he said that the only enemies we would face were humans, and our first combat was a sky swimmer, with health in the thousands, while we were level 5, in a boat, that can only go in one direction, and if we stopped rowing, we would fall to our deaths. Easy right? Our next encounter was with 2 mind flayers and said intellect devourer, the only reason I didn't attack the intellect devourer was because one player was about to be killed by the mind flayer, I was trying to save him and got rewarded with death. I had to go through a tome where I was burned, poisoned and stabbed in the afterlife because my DM thinks puzzles are supposed to be torture. When the party fought vampires, I was immediately grappled by the guy in front of me, no stealth check to hide, no strength contest to break free, just stuck there and beaten to unconsciousness. Ironically, my easiest combat encounter was when we had to fight an ancient red dracolich. FYI, this DM calls himself "Bully DM".
So far one of my best friends (male).
We were in the school D&D club and the original DM couldn't make it to the last few sessions and put my friend in charge. Everything was going good until the last session... There where 6 of us in that campaign and he made 4 of us cry me included. this was a while ago and I still haven't forgiven him completely.
What made you cry?
Warhammer 40k Questor... a Discord RP Server takes the gold for the worst Dungeon Master I have ever had the displeasure of being under. To cover the entire story of this server and what happened there would be a small novella of content so for sanity's sake, I'll keep it brief.
DM was running a save the universe campaign which took place on a planet called Cheros III... a utopian world in Warhammer 40k with absolutely nothing wrong with it located just beyond the astronomicon. This planet was ruled by a bunch of vampires who wore Halo armor, contained an inter-dimensional threat known as Ozymandious who was dropped into numerous players sessions without warning and did cause people to quit, and he also hosted unwinnable fights against giant Titans. He set my character up for a crime, framed him, and then had another Mod have my character executed just so he could host the Titan Event. He tried several times to destroy the city we were building and almost succeeded in collapsing it with tunnels killing all our characters in the process because he hated us all. He attempted to frame me as being "Ethan Allen" a person from another server... I know this because the server owner for 40k Questor actually contacted me about it, and I had to prove my innocence. He quit the server, blamed me for his event failing as being an "abuser" and tried to have the actual mods get rid of me after he had destroyed his own module and screwed me over several times already. I actually ended up showing the server owner our entire contact history to prove my innocence. He manipulated Mods into banning one of my friends because he blamed my friend for destroying his campaign that took a year to plan. No, my friend didn't destroy this campaign. This DM destroyed his own campaign by keeping players locked in a bar during the duration of his Titan [giant monster] invasion until they quit the server, and by dropping Ozymandius into people's sessions leading to the destruction of their characters entire methos and causing them to quit the server because they suddenly hated it there. This happened with like 3 different people. Oh, and he also once dragged me into DM's with another Mod and verbally abused me for an hour because I wasn't cool with having Ozymandius invade my flagship, murder my crew, and force me to abandon it. [Was playing Dark Eldar pirate] Yeah... not gonna be forgetting him anytime soon.
Sounds..... fun.
My favorite game was actually one where my DM made the lore and main map for the entire location but we had no mission, no map markers(we all just arrived to the area) so we made our own missions and traveled around learning more and causing chaos for the thieves we found
My story:
I was about to have my first session in DnD but DM kick me out of a group because I didn't give him my characters story.... expect I did, even more I give it half hour after our session 0. He didn't even said it was too short or didn't fit in the world just I didn't give him which was a lie. Even another person in group agreed with me that something is wrong. Honesty I was expecting to be sad but I was more pissed than anything. It happened at the end of a summer and I don't really feel Iike getting into another session.
I've been super lucky with DMs, and most of them have been pretty good. The worst one I had fits a bunch of the classic 'bad DM' tropes. They ran a module and stuck slavishly to it; even when the party did something clever that should have vastly changed things from 'as written'. In another game (same DM) running his own storyline, he drove that story over the players like it was a freight train - serious rails under that one. Same game, he blatantly plot-armored a villain right in front of the group - the villain had a personal forcefield generator (this wasn't DnD) which the players wrecked... and the villain activated a second one.
In the final fight, again without even trying to disguise it, he stacked health onto this same villain because (direct quote) "I want to kill at least one PC with them".
The most unfair thing my DM did to me? Not letting my keep the few months old stray black kitten I found on in an ally way with a nasty leg injury. Still pretty salty about that.
This has been posted before with a little less detail. Thankyou for posting a video suitable for this post:
GMs who put personal OOC reasons into IC reasons ruins the enjoyment of the game. I had a GM frag an unconscious character. (from my point of view I had received a two sentence warning that he would me making me start from the beginning, despite having spent a lot of late nights and early mornings building up a character over 2 years. My reply to his 2 sentences was 'I will not stand for this") My reply to him fragging an unconscious character - I took a deep breath and basically let rip, this coming from someone who usually didn't say boo to a goose, even caught current friends off guard. ""You know what, F*Off I quit."
After 2 weeks of another GM demanding I appologised for basically standing up for myself, I followed through and walked away. Clearly I had nothing to lose by doing so. I have heard various stories over the years as to why he decided to do this (Mostly as the actions all GMs involved in the incident and the demands afterwards destroyed my trust in them or their judgement) The one that stook out the most was the GM in question didn't beleive that I was in the uk (The group was based in America and I am based in the UK). Somehow he didn't believe that I was living in the UK.
To this day, when I tell people I have a temper, they don't believe me. I usually follow the statement up with. "If you come after me without dotting your Is and crossing your Ts, you had better be aware of the consequences"
My main takeaway from this channel.. never let someone who is a big anime fan be a DM.
I take offense to that ! Anime had nothing to do with bad DMs ! Bad DMs just want to use anime because they can't come up with something of their own ^^
You're absolutely right.
@@AkrimaSablosang nah, I think the issue's anime.
That was a month ago... Where did you go for all this time, only to come back and give that answer XD
@@AkrimaSablosang found me way out the goblin hole. Simple as.
Technically doesn't count as I was not a player, but it was a one shot that happened because I couldn't run a session on that day, so one of my players ran a quick game. The others seemed to enjoy it, but when I heard about it, I could only step back in mild distress. Apparently the whole one shot was just him living out his power fantasy by trying to kill the players as gruesomely and quickly as he could. It all culminated with him bringing in a PC from a former campaign as the final boss. The boss was specifically designed to be unbeatable and slaughter the players. Which was all the funnier when the players actually beat her against all odds.
Only DM I've ever had was terrible. It was me, the DM and one other guy. It was his first time DMing and he made a "custom" pirate campaign. After spending like 4 hours one night making our characters, the next week we played. Started at sea, found an island with a cave, we fought a couple monsters and that was the whole night. We never went to a town, got a quest, anything like that. We played once, That was about 10 years ago. I'm trying to get a good group of friends to play soon
Whenever I hear "Oh I was inspired by this Anime" or "I have this homebrew Anime race/class", I'm always gonna go straight to the door.
Uncultured swine.
Anime is great. Using anime for d&d inspiration is also great. Going too far with it is not.
Anime is good. DnD is good. It's like chicken wings and chocolate. Delicious together, should never EVER mix.
Running my first campaign in a relatively modern/slightly futuristic setting and made a customized version of the Hermit background available called Otaku. Nobody took me up on it lol
Me. I tried DMing a standard dungeon crawl for my stepdad and... didn't realize that the CR for monsters did NOT mean "this is the character level that could easily defeat this monster." So I dropped a lvl 5 drow assassin... into a dungeon with SEVERAL CR 5 monsters.
I was, like, 13 or something at the time, but still.
The next time I DM'd was for a full party. I focused a little more on puzzles instead of combat while still having some fun enemies, but we didn't end up finishing the dungeon. I don't remember why - I think the session ended early and we just never got back to it.
I haven't DM'd for anything since then, and now I'm older, wiser, and MUCH more creative, so I'm looking forward to the day that I can try DMing again.
I was in a Pathfinder Society game maybe 6 or 7 years ago. I hadn't played D&D since college so I was stoked for an authentic D&D experience.
The DM provided no background information, no introduction, no maps or other visuals. He just said "This guy tells you he needs guards for a trade caravan." He sort of sleepwalked through the whole adventure. One of the other players was clearly bored & playing on her phone the whole time. I don't think he wanted to be DMing that day!
I had a DM once who:
1. Told one of the players that he could only play a gnome if his character wore a red pointy hat.
2. Ignored pretty much everything about characters' backstories (I don't mean he didn't incorporate them into the story, I mean one PC had a house big enough for the party in the city we were in and he still made us stay in an inn)
3. Kept the party in debt the entire campaign, literally as soon as we paid off one debt we suddenly had to go into debt again to pay for ship repairs (it was a nautical campaign)
4. Stole pretty much every story beat from anime
5. Had a random bandit oneshot kill a PC so said PC wouldn't upstage the NPC traveling with us (not even a DMPC, just some dude who was on the road with us)
Among many other things. It's amazing how long that campaign dragged on before one player finally snapped and had his character dive into the ocean with the MacGuffin.
How are gonna have valid points like "He killed a PC so that he could be a jobber to this NPC" in addition to petty qualms like "OK by your hat is red and pointy"?
@@AnonYmous-mc5zx The red pointy hat thing was the first hint that that particular DM would only allow things to happen the way he wanted them to happen. It is admittedly minor, but it should've been a red flag.
@@tuesdaynext7370 Did the DM hold the player at gunpoint and threaten then to write "pointy red hat" on their sheet?
@@AnonYmous-mc5zx No, he just brought the hat up constantly.
@@tuesdaynext7370 I can see how that might be annoying but I can also see that as more of an inside joke than a "red flag".
Our DM had SEVENTEEN DMPCs that were all level 18. We were level 6. One time while we were fighting on a ship about 3 miles from the shoreline, we had one enemy left to kill. The enemy was the captain of the ship and as our Druid was about to land the killing blow, his NPC threw her spear from the beach and skewered him through the eye. That was when we abandoned that campaign.
First story sounded like he could of spun that to his favor. I don’t believe him
10:20 +20 Armor is the LAST thing you want in 2nd ed.
Had us create uber powered characters that can fight and kill gods.
Up to this, one was killed, the other, Athena, was turned into a servant/secretary for one of the characters. My character was named Artemis. To add something interesting to my character, since the dm failed to tell me just how powerful we could make ourselves, thought of the idea that his mother used to be a huntress of the goddess Artemis but retired to have a family. She named her son, my character, after her. I was gonna have it to where he refers to her as grandma and they have a history. Instead my character gets turned into a living quiver by her huntresses that should have known him, and she gets turned into a cloud of ichor. My characters goal was to have it end without his grandmother killed or enslaved.
It was such bullshit I said fuck this and left the game because the DM appeared up for this and never bothered to say no. It almost killed my desire to ever play D&D again.
These types of videos are great for new DMs, it shows them what NOT to do.
6:00 Noel might as well have had given an ultimatum 'break up with your girlfriend so I can have her or we're not friends anymore and you're banned from my group'. He wouldn't have had been any less of a bad DM, but at least he'd be a lot less fucking pretentious and petty by actually admitting what he was really after.
Jeez, and I thought I was bad for not being as descriptive as my main DM.
To be honest, I've only had three DMs, and I can't say that any of them are bad, as we're all part of the same group - Vet, One Arm, and Legally Blind - but I guess I could go through any issues. (Playing D&D5e)
One Arm - Dude DMed LMoP. Nothing really wrong - in fact, any issues could be placed at my feet - had to go to the dentist a lot during those sessions, or I couldn't stay past a certain time, as my one ride would have to head home and my second ride wouldn't be able to come to the game for real world reasons. It was a good way to learn the game - played as a variant human dragon bloodline sorcerer with a Noble background (got to Level 3). As nickname indicates, Dude only has one arm. Useful for learning the rules.
Legally Blind - Dude is DMing a campaign set in a world where Giants won a war against Dragons, and status is determined by size, with Reptilians on the short-end of the stick regardless. As indicated, Dude has vision issues, so O. A. tends to act as a dice roller for him, although L.B. is smart enough to point in our general directions (or rather at the fuzzy blob that is us - Dude can see "okay" in bright light) and say "Roll me a (whatever dice he calls for)" in order to keep things fair. Only issue is that he likes to send rather tricky foes after us, especially when we are short on spell slots, and he goes "Oh, this might be a deadly fight!" My Yuan-Ti Pureblood Paladin of Vengeance (level 5 at the time - now 6), Criminal Background, fell three times due to the results of this pair of succubi - we actually had to reread the rules on Death to see if I was just Knocked Out or Dead-Dead. Still, Zirila would get back up, thanks to the efforts of the Aarakocra cleric in the group, and go "Yo, let's dance another round!" - finally took the one out, and caused the other to retreat. On the plus side, this is helping us know the rules better, for when we get back to the main game.
Vet - the group's Main DM. Vet gets his nickname for two reasons - he served in the Marines, specifically, over in the Middle East, and he was Wounded in Action (Simper Fi). Also, Dude has played D&D and other similar RPGs for 20+ years. The main issue I really had with him (beyond an issue where it's a bad idea to say give him a friendly slap on the back - he has back issues, and has to control his reflexes to not just grab and thus break your arm), has to deal with the fact that, when I first started playing, he honestly knew almost nothing of the supplemental books - to be fair, he only had the Core Trio at the time, and thus dealt with them - and while he knew they existed, he hadn't really read them beyond maybe a spell or two in a book that another player had. However, I'd make the mistake about talking about Non-Core races, subraces, and subclasses. He has a rule - Prove it's Official Wizards of the Coast material (book or PDF) and, once he's read it, he'll allow it, otherwise, no go. This came to a head over the Celestial Warlock - he made his challenge - "Prove it's Official!" He also pointed out his 20+ years to my then 2 months of experience. Piece of Advice - Support Your Local Libraries - they might have the info you need, and much like a young spell-caster at wizard school, I was able to find the Official Evidence. Vet looked at it, and I kid you not, he did one of those Thousand Yard Stares, as if Tiamat had suddenly appeared, and I'd convinced her to turn Vegan. Even the others at the table were surprised. O.A. (this being during his LMoP campaign) was like "Dude, I think you broke him." When he made his Wisdom/Intelligence Saving throw, Vet gave me a look that was a mixture of Shock, Awe, and Respect. He got his own Copy of Xanathar's Guide to Everything soon after, and this opened the floodgates to non-Core races and subclasses. Playing as Variant Human Champion Fighter with a Soldier background, with plans to change him over to an Eldritch Knight (got 16 strength, 15 Intelligence, but only 10 dexterity, at Level 6), as I want him to have some actual ranged capabilities and certain ranged cantrips would even out my guy's lack of bow capabilities.
Not sure if you've considered this, but carrying some javelins would give your fighter a bit more range (30/120) while still using his strength modifier. Don't let that stop you from switching to Eldritch Knight if that's what you want to do, though.
@@quasimofo6811 Javelins *are* my guy's ranged weapon. I'd rather have something that has more average range and Oomph! to them.
Five guys and a DM playing a year long campaign.... DM says ' Lisa is going to start playing, she will be a cleric, she doesn't really know how to play'... .. The only thing worse than a DM bringing his girlfriend into a campaign is a DM bringing a girl who isn't his girlfriend into a campaign. Lisa basically rolled a 20 on every hidden roll the DM did.
My worst DM followed what I call "extreme criticals". It meant that a crit success would make us immediately succeed in whatever we were trying to do, which a lot of DMs do run (I'm personally not a fan of it), but this guy took it a step further by making every critical failure kill you. Seriously, if you rolled to, say, pick a lock, if you rolled a 1 you would somehow stab yourself in the throat with the lockpick. Fucker also made you roll for literally anything. Pick up a cup? Roll. Talk to someone? Roll. Read a piece of paper? Roll and hope a demon doesn't reach it's hand through and fucking Kali Mah you. All with that 5% chance you will die to every little thing. He does this for every NPC too, including enemies, so if an opponent got a crit on us, we'd die instantly, and if they rolled a 1 on anything they'd die too. Seriously, I don't think any enemy or PC dropped to 0 health normally.
The only good thing I can say about the one session we played, is that around halfway through an important plot NPC picked up a bucket and broke their neck, and he ended it there.
Me. It's always me.
When you DM you either feel like your not doing good enough... or you aren't growing as a Dungeon Master
I lasted a session and a half with one DM. First session was pretty uneventful, but the second one, we made the oh so terrible mistake of attempting to investigate the river that the DM took time out to describe and put on the map screen, so we thought it'd be important.
"Roll initiative."
Six rounds later, they finally said that there had never been enemies present in the first place. When we actually reached the dungeon, they then proceeded to accuse me of metagaming when I cast a spell that uses several d6 of damage, or d8 instead of the target is sensitive to light. So I asked for the sake of which dice I needed to roll.
"No metagaming, just roll the dice!"
"Which ones?!"
I left before that session was over, and they tried to guilt me an hour later because I had been the healer.
11:20 So this illusionist basically used Aleister Crowley's Spiritual Tripping from A Certain Magical Index? Yet more homebrew anime stuff!
I wouldn't say I've had a bad GM but goddanm did I have an annoying player. Regardless if I was playing or running the game, the dude would rule jockey and "uhm ackshually" every single thing anyone said or tried to do. Worst part was, 9/10 he was actually just wrong about the rule he was trying to call out and we would open the core rulebook and read it out loud to prove him wrong.
The worst DM I ever had asked me what my paladin’s breast size was when I was describing her. The campaign only lasted two sessions. The guy just in general gave me bad vibes.
Most of the DMs I’ve played with have been pretty good. The two players in my group who usually took the role of DM were David and Laird. When it came to creating compelling stories and challenging adventures, they were really good. Unfortunately they both had the same shortcomings. They both bored easily. They would start an adventure/campaign, but then a few sessions in they would get bored with DMing and decide that they would rather be a player instead. So they would switch places as DM, and the first thing the new DM would say would almost always be “New campaign, new characters, and we’re starting at 1st level.”
In theory, having multiple players in the group taking on the role of DM at different times is a great way to prevent DM burnout. However, when you have a bunch of players who have put a lot of time and effort into their characters and want to see them advance in level and increase in power, then it’s a good idea to maintain the same campaign with the same characters and JUST swap out the DMs every few sessions. Instead what we had was a bunch of players with stacks of barely used low level characters because almost every time they switched roles as DM they would say “New Campaign, new characters, starting at 1st level.”
It didn’t happen ALL the time. They would sometimes switch roles and ask for characters of a certain level above 1st, allowing some of us to continue playing older characters and gaining XP to level them up. But it happened enough to be pretty darn annoying.
Worst dm I ever had was someone who had a dragon attack the starting town the PCs were in. I with my high Cha score combined with my quick thinking got the dragon to agree to a two week deal. If we could locate and attack one of his enemies, he would let the town live. Rather than allowing us to attempt to follow through with the deal or do something to counter the dragon using that dragons enemy, he just says “two weeks pass and you guys are preparing to defend the town from the dragon”
Like bruh, that’s not what we had in mind. It’s one option, but surely not the one we chose willingly.
Also, I had broken time using a home brewed potion combined with a nat 20 that caused my character to obtain limited powers from a Eldritch horror and wanted to keep that a secret from the party, but he openly talks about it to the other members and asks “do you want to use your spectral demon armor?” During that very dragon fight.
The worst DM I ever had was a combination of four terrible traits.
1: You could not play a character with middling or low intelligence or wisdom. Otherwise he would veto your ideas for being "too smart" for your character, permanently taking them off the table as an option, so someone else smarter couldn't then suggest it.
2: He had what we came to call plot anvils. Basically if we took too long making a decision the plot would move forward without our input, and we would be suffering for it.
3: He would sometimes ask only one person for an idea, and not allow anyone to discuss.
4: After everything went to crap because you either lost your time to Choice paralysis or gave a stupid answer because it was the only thing he would let you do, he would make sure some character involved chastised you for it.
My sister and i were looking for local games on craigslist and went to meet a self proclaimed DM at a game store. Some back story on my family, we have never been homeless but we have been hungry. We were in a good place at the time this occurred so we often put together bags of non perishable food with bottles of water to hand out to homeless people. The easiest way to find someone who really does need help is just see how they react to the gift of food. the real ones are always extremely thankful.
We also hand out gloves and socks in the winter.
To start off with this new DM could not remember what our characters were. He was trying to run the entire campaign out of a book which while not a bad thing he did NO prep. he had not ever read the book before and had nothing to hide it from us.
As a result i knew what was ahead of us as i could see the map in front of me he was trying to copy off of as well as where all the traps and monsters were supposed to be.
Honestly he was not the brightest crayon in the box.
Then when i was already reaching the point of just wanting to leave because i was not having fun and we were constantly just waiting for him to read the book and attempt to relay to us what it said there was a person outside the building who was clearly digging in the trash for anything remotely edible.
I commented that i felt bad because we didnt have any bags with us and there wasnt anything nearby we could run to to get them anything.
This was when the guy we came to meet lost all respect he might have even had a chance to earn. He said all homeless people should just be put down for being worthless.
We challenged him asking if he would still say that if he became homeless and of course he claimed yes.
That was the end of even pretending we wanted to be around him and we just left.
I would rather go to a homeless camp and feed everyone there out of my own pocket than be around that asshole again.
And I thought my first campaign was bad.
it's you, I SEE YOU AGAIN
Finally, a worthy opponent! Our battle will be legendary!!
2000 pounds of platinum coins? That's literally too much to even carry away!
That’s 100K platinum pieces. By any stretch of an economy, that’s filthy rich
@@reyntime8735 Even trying to spend it all would cause Weimar republic style hyperinflation.
I had a high school friend who’s brother played D&D often. My friend thought he would be a good DM, and I wanted to try out the game.
We spent a week or so creating my character after school, a fighter, then planned to play that weekend.
My character was sent to a cave where I was supposed to retrieve an item for someone, where there were 30 hobgoblins hiding, apparently waiting for me and I was killed instantly. The game lasted about 20 minutes.
I didn’t play for years after that.
...He...literally created a character whose class coudl solo entire adventures...
In 2E.
...Oh God. That third story is physically painful. A DM who just...IGNORES the rules...you're not playing D&D. You're playing "Let's Pretend".
one of the worst dm’s I’ve ever encountered was just SO terrible at social interactions in-game. They called their games combat-oriented, and it was only that way because NO NPC actually had believable reactions to our characters.
It was like pulling teeth trying to get him to calm the f*** down, because all npc’s were out for blood. We go to talk to a npc elf slave (slave to humans) and she’s screaming in a corner, when us, a group of druids rangers and elves, go up and try to ask her what happened. Screaming. In. A. Corner. because we were: “not speaking her language and came on very threateningly”
Us: we go up to her calmly and ask her in elven if she’s okay, and we’re here to help, if she can tell us what happened.
DM: Yeah she’s screaming in a corner to go away and now you’re starting to draw a crowd
Us: Um, okay, we tell her again, we’re here to help, we need to talk to her son who witnessed the incident
DM: Yeah now you have 15 guards coming down the alleyway as you try to harass this woman, roll initiative.
That was the first incident of the session, then we go to the forest to meet what we are sure are centaurs, because the humans are cutting down the forest and disturbing the treants. The centaurs are acting like defenders of the forest.
My druid character claims she’s a friend of the forest, wildshapes into a direwolf, and bows before them.
They. Shoot. Her. For 3 rounds they’re laying into her with their bows, knocking her out multiple times.
He claimed that centaurs wouldn’t understand what a druid is and what a wolf bowing means (Centaurs have a pretty good wisdom score, like 12+ - they know what a bow looks like in canines. He was just being an ass) - that it was an act of surrender. So he had the centaurs keep attacking us even after we all threw down our weapons and surrendered. Then he yelled at me for essentially being spoiled and that “not everything will go my way”.
This dm really just was terrible at rp and he wanted any opportunity to play a fight scene. He was one of those, “Yeah I’m the DM and what I say goes” - even when ALL of his players are telling him he’s not letting us talk to people without them freaking out. He was just SO unaware of how people act in real life.
He’s my husband’s friend and I don’t want to cause a rift, but I really can’t be a player in his games anymore. They’re just not fun, and he doesn’t listen to any of the players.
> Min-Max your characters
> Chooses Monk
I see you have chosen death then.
I enjoy watching all these videos about D&D, especially about DMs and how they can get better at it and how to avoid being a bad DM since I will be a DM for my friend group's first game (as soon as they create their characters)! No one in my friend group has played DnD, I've only tried Pathfinder two times so it will be new and exciting experience for everyone :) Hopefully I can avoid any major mistakes by watching these videos
How did that go?
@@zara8607 Damn, reply to a 2 years old comment :o It went well! We've had a few sessions and we're supposed to start a premade campaign (if we ever find time). Luckily I managed to hook another friend to DnD and we are going to continue another premade campaign soon :)
I'm so happy it went well, I've been binge watching DND videos for a bit now so I was curious about your comment haha@@LaraSilvestris
A guy who ran RPGA mods (3rd ed DnD days). He never read them, always said he ran them best if he skimmed them at the last minute. Either the fights were under or over powered. The last time I sat at his table my 4th lvl party (I was the kinda dps with a ranger) encountered what turned out to be an assassin with improved invisibility. I got sneak attacked and failed my death throw. He told the party, who barely survived (thanks to out of the box thinking), they could raise me if they sold my darkwood long bow. I stood up, said nope, and walked from the table. Afterwords we had words about my unprofessionalism. Told him NOTHING had inproved invis at our lvl. His home brews were worse. Thankfully I had a buddy who could usually find a way to cheese weasel out a win on real hard fights.
My worst DM was one of those "D&D youtubers" and I got to play in his campaign as a patreon reward, since I joined the game late I got to make a lvl 3 character and I made a paladin and sent him a backstory and asked for his input. This was about 1 week before the session.
Session arrives and I've not heard so much as a squeek from him. Then game starts and im thrown into it like a ragdoll. Into combat. Ok sure, thats fine with me. get to be a badass right away. Introduce myself to the party and proceeds with the session.
Couple of sessions later we are fighting some fiendish homebrew of his and I cast Protection from Evil and Good, making it so every fiend attacks me with disadvantage, he instantly switched from me to the other PC's because " I play monsters intelligently" Sure, ok.
But the straw that broke the camels back was when we were investigating a house in waterdeep, we had gotten a job to go in and steal a collection of swords without being seen or cause any damage.
We walk around outside the walled-off home and look for the best place to enter, The entire thing was lined with magical statues that basically targeted anyone trying to get over the walls with Thunderwave, so when our Ranger and Fighter jumped over, there was a loud explosion. Me, the wizard and the cleric was on the other side of the house, we went over to investigate the sound, when we arrivem so did the city guard who arrested us 3 for trespassing. We werent even on the property and was just back there looking around for our now dissappeared friends.
And since we had tried to go in "the wrong way" we had alerted the owner and the next day the quest would be harder, while I said we could wait a week to let the heat go down, Nope, we had to do it now. no waiting allowed.
I removed myself from that campaign after and never looked back xD
I have had an awful DM who has put our game on hiatus for a number a months despite claiming we have probably two sessions left until the module is over. In the off chance we someday will finish, I'll wait to air my grievences until after.
Worst DM I ever had was an ex-friend of mine. I only made it 2 sessions before I quite right there and left. Playing 5th edition and this was her first time DMing. I made a rogue/cleric and played him like a trickster. More con-man prankster. Any action i tried was met with either aggression from the npc's or a "doesnt work" (aka, used magic to defile a statue, "doesnt work". Slept in the alley at night, guards were immediately hostile and attempted to arrest me.) The plot was railroaded from the start by teleportation and a giant dragon, who would kill us and bring us back just to show they could. (She made it very clear on several occasions that they were happy to kill us at any moment). The thing that did it for me though was during our first major encounter. Got one shotted to 0 by a random rampaging creature and was asked what my negative hp was. Reminder this was 5e. We got into a heated argument about how there ISNT negative hp, with the DM refusing to either admit it or check. When they finally did and saw there wasnt negative hp, they pulled the "I'm dm so I make the rules" line instead of just working with it. Then they said in pure anger "why do you have to be such a [Friend's name]. I LOST it. This was a friend we both hung out with and knew had some anger issues and had minor rules lawering tendencies. I told them off and left. I havent spoken nor seen them since and never plan to. I could deal with the terrible dming, but you dont use a friends name as an insult to another of your friends.
I had a DM that if you pissed him off, he would send hellhounds after the party. I personally never experienced this, but I heard from the other players in the group. The DM even confirmed that it was true. The worst part was that, me being relatively new to the game and interested in trying DMing myself, I thought it was normal. I even started making a list of monsters in certain situations to send after the party. It wasn't until I mentioned it to a friend of mine who would DM for another group I was in and he said it was pretty fucked up that I begin to question it and realized how toxic it was.
Some real truth at the end. No one should forget themselves.
Thank you for your content.
Mine was a former friend whose obsession with critical role caused him to screw up both games just because he was bored and I was running my game better than he was.
Wish I was kidding he ran a Dragonlance inspired game a decade or so ago so invited me to join a version of that where I had a malformed elven ranger ready to run.
He asked to convert her into a cleric so I did using what I knew of his setting selecting a variation of Sehanine Moonbow but named Kestra even had a background story to do with her.
Never got used as his obsession with critical role meant he used the Dawn War Pantheon despite that having nothing to do with his original game.
I reduced my character's back story to answering a call for aid from her son and he proceeded to kill off the son and refuse to let her locate his body after he repeatededly stated the npc was dead.
After pointing out no mother would abandon their child he then asked me to start a new character.
I should point out had he any sense he should have set his game at the hamlet that first game ended up at, but he claimed it was just an introductory game and wasn't important.
Yet he involved my character's back story in his "campaign" that turned into a series of one shots that he couldn't even run properly!
I ran the next game so within 15 minutes demonstrated how an "introductory game" was handled revealing my characte rhad been banished from Exandria and was recovering from temporary amnesia which she did thus her goal was finding a way home to check on her grandchild.
Ian continued to take pot shots at my character since I was a newbie with 5e, however I handled that as best as I could until he decided his game should be set on Exandria too.
Once that session ended I called him to confirm his act of stupidity and then quit when he confirmed after previously repeatedly stating his campaign WASN'T set on Exandria he finally decided he didn't give a damn about either game.
For me it made me realise he wasn't a friend and barring an email from one of the others I have heard nothing since and feel it confirmed I did the right thing.
He made similar mistakes with his Star Wars games, but back before episode 8, I didn't consider that a problem in retrospect it was a warning sign I should have paid attention to.
Could be worse I could still be wasting my time thinking he was a friend after all!
I have only ever had two DMs, both have used completely homebrewed settings and modified classes and combat (so technically not DND). Funnily enough, they are both brothers, the older brother is a friend I made in college and my first DM, he preferred to more focus on the world, world-building, characters, and plot rather than on combat or gear or anything. This meant that literally, everything went off of d20s, roll to hit, roll to damage, every roll can think of was just a single d20. If you rolled high enough, 18-20, you could gain additional modifiers to your roll. Somehow I was lucky enough to end up with a +5 to my deception rolls (everyone starts with no modifiers to any rolls unless your weapons or gear gave it to you) with the deception I almost got away with lying to an actual telepath who was reading my mind during an interrogation with two other people in the room scrutinizing my words. The reason for this was that every race was supposed to be separate from each other due to highly advanced sci-fi aliens invading and occupying our fantasy world, my character was an elf with was caught in a human settlement. Shortly after my arrest, I was put into a jail cell to fight in a coliseum, everyone in the jail cell was a human so I couldn't speak to them and they to me, so I asked if I could roll to see if my character knew sign language. One nat20 later and not only does my character know all forms of sign language but the DM rolled a 19 so all the prisoners knew it as well, and just like that our party gained an army of over 100 prisoners after half of them ended burning to death. To be honest, the story felt kind of like one of the interactive telltale games combined with tabletop role play, it was still fun and it was my introduction to tabletop role-playing games. The second campaign by that DM was a mashup of DND and Warhammer fantasy, it was a brutal, unforgiving, somewhat masochistic story that invited permadeath for your character at the turn (he warned us of all this and told us not to get attached to our characters but I still did anyway, Dixonister Arnoldger survived to the last and I was quite proud).
I always expect me to end up in these kinds of videos.
My worst DM was my first one. Played with the group for over a year, the DM has his own character in the game that was overly OP. Before i joined one of the PCs wanted to kill the DMs character for plot reasons but the DM announced out of no where that the PC was in love with that character and couldn't do it.
But my personal story is that when the party was hiding in a safe house a package was legt at the door. One character went outside, closed the door, and opened the package. My character couldn't see, smell, touch, hear, or taste anything in the package but SOMEHOW the contents made my character contract vampirism. Which i have made very clear before, my character has a seething hatred against stuff like this so my character tried to off herself only for the DM to tell me (the person that created and played the character) that my character wouldn't do that. I insisted she would, and is. DM instead announced that another PC just entered the room and is allowed to respond to my actions which logically they did restrain my character. I did not play again after that session. Don't force something on your players with no logical explanation.
My worst DM was also my first and by default only DM. It was back in middle school, I wanted to join in the fun at the school game club. Only problem was, I didn't understand how the game worked. (And no one let me borrow their dungeon manual so I could read up on it.) So, rather than teach me, they just killed my character off and said I couldn't play until a new session was going.
I believed this, and managed to get into a new session just as it was starting off, once again no one explaining how the game worked. This time there were a lot less players, so the DM had to keep me around, if only so there was someone to keep an eye on the literal murder hobo. (I didn't hear that term till years later, but thinking back, there is no better description. Killed everything he met and pissed on the corpse.)
THAT game ended a couple sessions later when they decided they were gonna quit DMing. Their choice, but they could have made the announcement another way besides "the scroll of anubis makes you all unkillable by killing you all."
Looking back now, with 15 more years of pop culture osmosis bringing me up to speed on the game, the DM was always kinda sketchy. Always had a wizard GMPC that they never had to roll for, and almost never rolled for encounters either.
Worst one I have ran into probably was the guy DMing the first time I tried playing Curse of Strahd, who was so insanely railroady it is kind of comical. The recurring theme was that one or another super powerful npc (he all the time made not so subtle remarks about how the npc in question could easily wipe out the whole party if we pissed them off/didn't do what they said), like for example, when we ran into Morgantha in the first village (our characters were like level 3), and some of the characters were about to attack her after finding out she had a kid in a sack in her cart, the DM literally tells us ooc how she can cast power word kill so attacking her would be really bad idea. Then more than once, some npc or another told us that we needed to go to place x and do y, and then literally teleports us right at the location, to make sure we don't get side tracked along the way I guess... He also gave some ridiculously overpowered magic items to his favorite players, like for example, at 5th level, giving our party bard staff of power (and hand waving the whole thing about bards not even being able to use said item in the first place). I left the campaign soon after that.
Without a doubt, my worst DM was the one that was super lenient at the start of the game. The other players took notice, and decided to ask for more and more broken homebrew items. The DM didn't want to hurt their fun, and it ended up with a super unbalanced experience. Monsters had to be boosted to keep them challenging for ⅗ of the party, and that made it harder for me and the only other legit player to compete.
And when I say broken, I mean the 4d10 glaive used by our warlock/bard, and the monk/cleric with an AC of 34 and a +20 to Wisdom saving throws.
In the end, it was the players that were bad, but the DM let it happen
Came here for the DnD did not expect the pep talk/ heart to heart Subscribed
That second party sounds like they're just having fun, but... it's not even a TTRPG anymore. It's like when you're playing make-believe as a kid with your friends and just keep making up whatever you want to do.
I had a dm who got mad new players to D&D didn't stay in character for 6+ hours with constant acting.
I was still very new to D&D so I decided to play a bright eyed Tielfing fighter. Hearing stories of heroes and dragons and deciding he wanted to make his home town known by becoming a legend or going on a grand quest.
It seemed fitting because we were adventurers being paid to solve a issue regarding a family curse from a noble family.
Had the dm admit to sending 100 goblins at us because we didn't talk to a shop keeper long enough. Also I have a horrible memory. My friends know this, my family knows this. Bad enough memory I will forget names people mention 5 times sometimes. Forget numbers mentioned. Forget if I leave the sink filled after dishes and walk away for 5 seconds, etc.
He got mad I couldn't remember a shop keepers name
The worst, and currently only (though im about to start a new campaign with my brother as DM for a DnD game), i've ever had is my father in multiple Pathfinder campaigns. He forced me and my brother to always be in character whenever we spoke even if we explicitly told him we aren't in character. Also turned everything I did against me. They rarely lasted longer than one session.
How about a DM who ALWAYS tell the players that they have ample time to do stuff, but also ALWAYS put them under absurd time crush to accomplish world saving mission after world saving mission. Things like : You have ample time, but you have 7 days to go there and finish your mission. There being located at about 10 days of forced march and the mission expected to take about 10 more days. Most player would welcome a world saving mission or adventure, but, to have ALL OF THEM being world saving ? Having a time crush can be good, but definitively NOT all of the time. Especially when the characters have personal, DM determined (read imposed), side quests involving creating a set of 8 new spells, all of level 3+, the creation of some magic item by a non-magic wielding warrior, or something similar.
oh hi, cool story
My DM made me, a human barbarian level 1 fight 5 guards and a Animated Armor on session 2
LMAOOOO needed to vent about this -- my worst DM is the best DM RIPPPP because he is good with his DM stuff like storytelling, NPCs, giving a story for our characters etc. HOWEVER, the DM as an individual isnt stable. He would fight with people, guilt-trip, be snarky, overall not a nice person off-game. He is a great DM but a HORRIBLE player. Would talk shit about other DMs and players. Worst incident was when he started bullying this player for having a half-orc and half-elf character. Our rogue recently left his campaign because he doesnt want to take anymore of the toxicity. I just hope I can find a DM that isnt mean nor a bad DM. I only stay in his campaign because I loved my character, the fellow players, and the storytelling. But I wouldnt be surprised if this campaign combust into flames because of his clownery smh
EDIT - The half-orc half-elf character is NOT in this DM's campaign so the guy has no authority to dictate what is allowed. We were all players to another DM but the poor guy would get criticized EVERY FKING SESSION by this jerk. The incident was the last straw and he is thankfully no longer in that campaign.
I don't have a worst DM, but rather a worst kind of DM. Clearly unexperienced, clearly railroad-y, clearly unprepared for what's going to happen, uber-powerful entities happen to be present for session 1, the game falls apart after a couple of sessions tops. I don't know whether the worst one was the guy who decided to heavily homebrew a good chunk of the mechanics without any idea on how to actually implement the rules, run a party of 8 players and then gave up after session 1, or the guy who railroaded us into winning a tournament by saying "your opponent cheated" every time one of us lost a fight.
My worst dm was me, I had absolutely nothing prepared
I played a game under a friend's dad once, there was constant conflict between party and DM (most of them were family) and he was so strict on the rules that anything creative was out of the question entirely. Want something with the exact statistics of a dagger but it isn't technically a dagger? Nope. It's not in the books.
What’s the best way to approach the meta-game mentality of “everything’s a mimic”?
Not DnD specifically but rather a roleplay, and let's just say the DM should never never be allowed to DM or even RP.
DM was new to RPing and asked some friends to help start an RP. DM forces a scenario to happen, gets criticized, and hides away, stalling the RP. DM constantly to threaten to kill off the RP for every little mistake that's made and ultimately kicks out one of the players. DM disappears again due to actual family issues that meant he was without a computer for a while, or so the story goes. DM eventually lets RP die on its own and all the players go their separate ways.
This was my first and last RP ever. This was nearly eight years ago and things have changed for me, but I don't let myself RP again because of what the DM turned into and I don't want to witness that transformation again.
I was the DM.
My worst dungeon master was easily my first one. My first time playing DND and I love magic based characters so I was playing as a High Elf Wizard. My character never got to take part in anything. At all. When it came to combat, everything would die before I got a chance to attack, or I'd be completely useless due to everything either resisting my damage (I was going with an Ice/Fire themed character, so only used spells related to that). Not to mention the DM also gave me some dice that either had some back luck with them, or were weighted cause for some reason I always rolled Nat 1s on them.
13 views, 14 likes, let's go.
That's because UA-cam liked it
The likes load fester then the views
The second "And he ran a DMC" I went...ho boy.