That DM was not looking to game, he was looking to direct a fantasy script he liked. Dipsh^t DM. I assume the DM was probably a kid... giving the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, someone who needs more therapy than gaming.
Was expecting the story to be the DM changing names to make it look like he came up with Curse of Dharst. DM: "You all are journeying somewhere, but on the way you receive a distressed letter, 'Hail thee of might and valor. I, a lowly servant of Ovbaria send honor to thee. We plead for thy so desperately-needed assistance. The love of my life, Elena Bengonia has been affected by an evil so deadly that even the people of our village cannot protect her. She languishes from her wound, and I would have her saved from this menace. There's much wealth in this community. I offer all that I have for thee and thy fellows if thou shalt answer my desperate plea. All that I have shall be thine.'" Disappointing.
What is funny is that if the DM had simply said "We are playing Curse of Strahd with LoL builds" when they were advertising it everybody would have been cool with the idea because that is what they signed up for.
@@willparry530 Yeah, I was going to say it would have to be fanfic. I often say that DMs this controlling need to write a book instead, but He'd write a curse of Strahd book, without changing anything, using LOL characters.
That’s literally one of the main parts of D&D. That’s like having a game of custom characters when there is only 5 presets to pick from that you can’t even modify.
Ah, so, Magic Legends which is based on the Magic the Gathering universe of elves and goblins and leonin and a thousand other things. So naturally you can only play Human.
@@VGJustice I guess? I was thinking more along the lines of Regular Show’s Realm of Dar-Thon where all the character figurines are all repainted hand sized garden gnomes with slight modifications here and there.
I think this is reasonable in a oneshot, especially with a new party or one with several new members. A quick one or two session game with some premades just to get the cut of eachother's jibs so to speak. Followed by a proper campaign, if the party meshes well, with whatever they want to play, within reason for the module or setting the followup campaign is going to run with. This is obviously not what happened in this case but it is a reasonable best case scenario for when this isnt a bad practice, or may even be a good idea.
@@TheodoreIchabod Well part of the problem was that the DM/GM didn’t allow people to pick for themselves. The poster said he had a full idea of what he wanted to play, only to be told by the DM/GM he’s playing this role while someone else got said role and didn’t even want to play that role. It seems like a group communication failure.
@@movespammerguyteam7colors Indeed, in the specific example of the poster yeah, seems unjustified. Like I said, seems reasonable for a quick oneshot to get the cut of their jib then go nuts with a campaign.
That bit about "we must be friends" sounds like a typical SadSocWard: Someone who claims to be 'socially awkward', and tries to bully and guilt people into being their friend, because actually developing the social skills or legitimate connections with people is just too hard for them.
Homebrew world with a small race selection due to the questgiver only inviting individuals from a few select regions for political regions works too, my current group has that setup (though if there are character deaths it is permissible to play any race the party has met and have learned of their quest as a replacement character).
I do this too when I know concepts are about to get too far out of hand, I run 3.5 so I have PHB and PHB2 to choose from, lots of options but still manageable
Through the editions I had a few restrictions in different games, like one were everyone must be a non divine spellcaster(so anything Arcane+artificer and or other classes like 3.5 binder) at first. You could multiclass after that but first three levels had to be within the specified restrictions. Or another game that we had to play exclusively non spellcasters. Overall, as long as there's a logical/plot related reason for restrictions, I'm usually fine with em. Especially in systems that grew too large (Pathfinder anyone?)
Welcome to the League of Legends champion spotlight featuring... Dungeon Master, the Railroader Dungeon Master is a ranged,melee, support, assassin specializing in forcing others to play by very specific rules. Dungeon Master's passive is Lying. By telling other champions lies, he gains a bonus to psychological damage against them. Dungeon Master's Q is Forced Character, in which Dungeon master chooses your champion for you. Dungeon Master's W is Bully, where if you don't something the way they want, they punish you for it. Dungeon Master's E is Blame, in which any mistake made by the dungeon master can instead act as a mark to an allied champion. And finally, Dungeon Master's ultimate is versatile, able to switch between Stolen Content and Ultimate Rage Quit, depending on the situation. Stolen content allows him to slightly change a stupidly well known module and call it his world, this prevents dungeon master from being called out on it being a module. And Ultimate Rage Quit instantly ends the game, alienating all champions, and giving everyone a Defeat. Soon to a Riot Store near you.
I like these irl conflict horror stories but kind of wished you'd do some more in game focused videos like Astoshan or the unorthodox green dragon again.
I once had a DM dictate me who my character should be. I had this idea for a pirate girl. Brash, rude, loud, proud, stupidly brave (the type that sees a dark pit and instead of investigating just jumps in, but also would throw themselves on a bomb to save others), deeply loyal to her friends and companions and A LOT of baggage from her family. He didn't like the concept and made me change her into a nice river sailor from a loving home with amzing talking skills. Literally the OPPOSITE of my character concept. I only stayed in that game for one session. A few years later a friend started a new game with the same system and I told him of my original character concept. The GM approved of it and let me play her the way I wanted to. He even took pieces from her backstory to transform them into an amazing personal plot. Needless to say, this character has become my favourite of all time!
@@R3GARnator Just homebrew as none of it was from earlier editions. Even the name spells required for Mordenkainen's area were poorly done as they came from mages from not just from Greyhawk, but Forgotten Realms as well.
Holy crap. I mean, I’ve re-written parts of my setting so that my players - and let’s be honest, they’re the important bit, not my “IP” - can play whoever the hell they want to play! That is some gutter-level DM action right there. Poor show.
In general I would agree, but as devil's advocate for a generic example: Say Mr. Generic DM decided to make a setting from scratch and decided to disallow divine casters because the setting is post-forsaken and limited the party to three starting races because he had written the setting and game to revolve around these three races and their cultures and history, would it be that unreasonable to expect the party to play those races and not pick those classes?
@@TheodoreIchabod absolutely. I’m not opposed in any way to limiting or putting conditions around things in-game for *story* purposes (for example, arcane necromancy in my homebrew is illegal, due to the setting’s Vecna-proxy and all that good stuff being rather recent and not ancient history; likewise being a barbarian is a bit more complex to decide on because the starting region is almost entirely urban - it’s a ‘reclaim the lost empire”, points of light-type deal) but that’s sort of my point: doing something for *story reasons* is an entirely different bag to doing it because you want that character in your game and that player has to play it a certain way. So, for instance, I happen to have a deathlock player in my game who was simply told ‘it’s illegal. Just so you know. Might want to consider how you behave within eyesight of any authority figures’ but specifically told to make their guy; I’m not about to stop him from doing what he wants to do - I can flex my story around it, absolutely no problem. I also have someone who wanted to be a barbarian, so I added a place for that character to come from that meant she still ends up at the start of the game as being within the city limits and familiar with that city, but has access to the ‘frosty homeland’ stuff she wants. It’s exactly as you describe - story stuff. It just cannot be the case that a way just absolutely cannot be found to accommodate the player’s wishes. Does that make sense? If you can’t cooperate to start with, cooperative story-telling RPGs might not be the best fit for your hobby. I don’t know if I’m doing a good job of explaining myself here…😂 basically, I’m agreeing with you, but also saying that I don’t believe that there are insurmountable, unsolvable problems when it comes down to stuff like this. So, to sort of look at the examples you give… someone has their absolute heart set on being a cleric in a game that, for story reasons, has no divinity? Cool, cool. Just call the cleric class the “shaman” class or “animist class” or something, and explain it away as being a much more mystical (in the classical sense as opposed to the pop-cultural) approach to the same arcane powers wielded by wizards or whatever. It can *always* be compromised on. Reskinning, reflavouring, exceptions… these are all (in my opinion, often underappreciated) tools in the DM arsenal. But: The douchenozzle running this game just straight up told people what they were going to be and how he expected to play. That, for me, is a borderline criminal offence. Piss-poor DM’ing. Absolute disaster.
@@steveharrison76 I agree overall with your points, and you did a great job explaining it, I only have one caveat: That while a DM can indeed do all that to make exceptions for the PCs sometimes that isnt reasonable to expect. Some games the PCs are just not special, but can become special by effort. Sometimes a game really is supposed to concern a limited scope and while exceptions and confluence can occur, there are instances where the players should accept that this isnt that game and there will be others because the DM just doesnt want to work around that request, and that is fine, as the DM has to have fun too. Now if this is every game then there is a larger problem, but here and there it is okay for a DM to say no to a character concept, as the players are not entitled to anything they want to play and strictly everything does have to be okayed by the DM (even if mostly the DM should just go with it, at least in a generic game) sometimes they have to flex that right for their own enjoyment, even if that is the edge case. All in all I think we are broadly in agreement though, I just want to stress that there is always an exception to the assumptions put forth as I am a habitual devil's advocate and always think of a counter argument to any point i come across as it is too easy to take as given that 'which is known' and take it as dogma rather than thinking of the ramifications of that to all parties.
Okay, I would've bailed on this group so fast. Not being able to play the races I want is already a red flag, and so is that 'I only play DnD with friends so we MUST become friends!' thing from the DM. First off: you can't force friendships, and I don't need the kind of toxicity in my life that truly believes you can. Second: If my Tieflings, Half-Orcs and Drow are not welcome at your table, then I will find them one were they are. I often spend one day on a backstory in advance, and sometimes? I can't just switch out the race and call it a day, because it's a crucial part of that backstory. I mean, it is on my Tiefling Bard: I'd basically have to rewrite him, and the name 'Carreus Whisperfury' doesn't really sound like it fits a Human. So thanks, but no thanks: rather no DnD then bad DnD. That DM should write a book instead.
Having a limited range of races or classes is acceptable, it depends on the world. I have played in human only games and had great fun in a goblinoid only campaign I played in. Though it is good practice to have a session zero to build characters and then give the players a week to settle backstory and relationships etc.
@@TheodoreIchabod I feel like there's a world of difference between a game wherein for setting reasons, the DM has put limits on what races and classes are available, and what this DM did. Yes, limited campaigns can be fun, if the DM is doing this with full consent and buy-in from his group. It's the sort of thing you set up at the very start of the game during session zero, and make clear to the group, so that they know what their limits are, what the setting does differently from D&D baseline, etc., so that they are prepared for what they're going into. This DM did not bother with session zero, gave no coherent reasons as to why various races or classes weren't allowed other than vague, sneering excuses ("Only people who minmax play halflings," calling the character idea of the player who opted not to join "stupid," "I won't let you play bloodhunter because it's underpowered," "who even plays feylocks?", etc.), only to then have *other players* stuck into the very same classes he sneered at when talking to OP, and demanding that OP's ranger needs to have blinking, to the point that when the player wants to make the PC more effective in combat in order to shore up the group, he forces OP to take a homebrewed feat to give him the ability. He was also shown to be literally just recycling the same character concepts from previous games, and sticking different people with the characters he wanted them to play, as seen when Artificer and OP have their private chat and it's revealed she played basically the same character in a previous game of DM's. He also tried to control another person's game by bullying their players, wanting to inform them "how we play here," when he wasn't even the server owner, nor was he going to be DMing that group. Basically, this toxic DM was *miles away* from the kinds of DMs you're describing, and has nothing in common with a limited concept game whatsoever. This is a guy deliberately forcing his players to bend to his control, making them play how and what he wants, all while constantly lying to the players about what they're playing and what his "homebrew" setting entails.
campaign based on LoL. No small races. ...I guess he never heard of Yordles, then? "You meet a girl with blue skin, big, pointy, fluffy ears and a humongous hammer, and an adorable kitten with tusks and a skull for a hat. But they're both medium size, because there are no small races in LoL."
And how is a blinking Tiefling Ranger supposed to be Neeko? If I were to make Neeko in D&D, she would be a Changeling Sorcerer, or maybe Changeling Trickery Cleric, as that one has Invoke Duplicity, which fits the original character.
i think the feylok was neeko and and paladin and bladelok were garen and lux but the nordic ranger sounds like ashe minus the tiefling bit with the blink being flash
@@Razagul319 Best for telling "-from Hell" stories, otherwise they are the worst. Or, was that the joke you were shooting for and I just missed it? It's hard to get tone from text.
quick comment: someone I know was considering doing this, but not for a malicious reason. One of the players tends to look up whatever module (not to look at the content, but to see how long it should be, etc), so she was wanting to skirt that entire issue.
Yeah that sounds quite suspect indeed. DM should strongly consider obfuscating the module and changing it up if the player finds out in that case. Shouldnt pass it off as their own though, if nothing else that is just bad form. Saying something along the lines of 'This is a variation on a prewritten module that I will be witholding the name of for spoiler reasons' is a nice elegant solution.
Like using setting specific rules that may not have certain races or classes. Such used to be the norm for D&D in that certain niche races and classes were generally not widely available and even some core classes like the paladin did not exist in some settings like Dark Sun.
It is perfectly reasonable to limit races or classes for game reasons or worldbuilding. Like no goblins if the main antagonist is the goblin king or no divine casters because the game is set in an iconoclastic society and the party will be working with the iconoclasts to name perfectly reasonable examples. One game we are running at the moment has the party all drawn from a small set of races due to politics in a homebrew world because those were the original peoples the questgiver drew adventurers from for his initial intake, with the caveat that future characters can come from any allied race or peoples that the party had become on good terms with or otherwise learned of their quest.
I can only think of 3 good reasons to make players play specific characters. 1) you are playing a 1 shot game with newer players and have very limited time. so come to the table with a full team of premade characters and let them just pick 1 and play. (you might give them charactersif you have another motive for example you know Jeff wants to play a spellcaster in the campaign that starts next week so you give them a sorceror for this game to practice). 2) weird dream sequence, where the main characters change weirdly for plot reasons and spend a session or 2 in someone elses body, or with someone elses powers. 3) you are running some sort of side story for a bit to add context to the main campaign, so the players are playing established NPc's (good examples, instead of telling the story of the ancient champions killing the great Red Dragon you play it for a fw sessions. Or more short term, one of your main characters has been invited to a generals meeting but they are the only ones, you dont want to do a long scene between just them and 5 NPc's so you give the other players a general to play for that scene, allowing the party to figure out tactics etc). in all these situations the characters are only temporary and it should be clear that is whats going on to start with. At most this can go on for 3 sessions? but preferably 1 or less.
I can understand banning certain races, when we played Curse of Strahd our GM strong encouraged us to play human looking charakters because Berovia is very humancentric and it would cause problems and I see that as fair enough. I am pretty sure he would allow me to play 3 cobolds in a trechcoat in his next game. :)
Yeah, having a banlist for a given game is perfectly reasonable, preferably with an in universe explanation like the one you stated concerning the prejudices of the smalltown barovians. Limiting options isnt neccesarily a bad thing, as long as it is logical and applied evenly. Even simply saying 'I dont want to DM for an XYZ' is good enough, if not terribly satisfying (at that point just invent a reason as you get your own way either way, may as well make the effort to explain why in universe you know?). But letting one player play an artificer while banning it for another wasnt cool, no way to spin that as anything other than being a bellend lol.
@@TheodoreIchabod the only way I would do something like that is if someone else was an artificer and I wanted only one in the group. This would be explicitly communicated, though. Neither of these happened, though. Everything needs to be explicit, and laid out in the open. Preferably in writing so everyone is literally on the same page.
@@WukongTheMonkeyKing Yeah that is how we do things in our home games. We have an explicit document of divergences from base game rules and assumptions.
Honestly, I can't understand why some DMs become such dicks. When I DM, half the fun is seeing how my players build characters and grow them in my world. While I do offer suggestions on how each character backstory relates to my world(it is a homebrew with connections to the other worlds of Kirin, Faerun, and Eberron), I ultimately give them freedom to choose. My suggestions are just that. Guidance is part of being a DM but not control. Regarding PCs, the final call on persona, choices, and history is theirs to the point it does not interfere with other characters or major plot points. I've had disenfranchised nobles, evil creatures bound by magic to be good, and fallen deities all part of my games but I work out the details to avoid issues. Regular adventurers are often solely the player's choice and I have made some into champions of gods, granted nobility to others, or even helped them take a curse and turn it into a blessing. The players can add so much to a story and the story as I have said before, is all that matters. Good stories are fun by default otherwise they aren't good. We write them together.
I would have announced leaving the party at the end of the 7hr session. Too early in a campaign to have that long of a session, added fact of forced dm characters leads to 7 hours of not fun enough to play again.
Seems to me like the DM is just a control freak. Telling people he won't allow their character concept and then giving that concept to another player who doesn't want it is basicaly the DM saying "I decide what character you play, not you". And then the whole "you're playing wrong" and "next session specific characters will die" thing... Clearly he was using D&D to exert power over other people.
The closest I've ever come to forcing a character on players is pregenned characters of off the wall concepts or newcomers/one-off players looking to check the game out but probably not stick with it. For example, I was working on some homebrew Spelljammer-style things for 5E so asked a few of my friends if they'd play a session with some characters I'd genned up to try it out, all of whom were parodies of famous science fiction leads (Ripley, Kirk, Skywalker, Doctor Who, etc.) I still let them all figure out among themselves who was playing who, though, and though the game only went a couple of 4-hour sessions we all had a lot of fun (even giving the Doctor Who player a chance to regenerate when they unknowingly touched an Infinity Stone. I had a *crazy* series of possible encounters for them in that one.) The pre-gens for newbies were for a 4E game, so it wasn't like going pregenned took away a lot of control in that case, and it worked out well to give a few of my cousins and their friends who had never played before a chance to experiment and have a good time.
I'm guessing blinking rogue was Katarina though that doesn't explain the nordic background, Garen is basically a Paladin, and Articifer was more than likely Heimerdinger.
Its one to to make clear and CONSISTENT rules on which charector/race are disallowed at the table its another to assign charectors and then give another player the class or race you wanted.
I had an idea for a campaign once where the party were all clones of the same person, but with minor differences to help round out the party. And I knew it would be nearly impossible to successfully run such a game because it would take me explaining far too many restrictions to character creation. It could work, but only with a huge amount of trust. This DM failed on that trust step because he just wanted to be a controlling jerk.
Giving your players pre-generated characters (for a one-shot, so they won't be too attached, and you can be brutal; for their first game, when they are just trying to learn the rules and don't have time to learn all the character options, too) is OK, in the right circumstances. However, if you're giving them pre-gen characters, you LET THEM CHOOSE. You don't find out which character someone wants, and then force them to play something else, when what they want is actually an option, doing the same with the others, specifically so that EVERYONE is equally miserable! Everyone being unhappy with the result is NOT the definition of compromise. Insulting people for their ideas is a jackass move. Also, lying about "We're not doing a module. I made this ALL up, myself!" when all he did was change siblings to lovers, is just heinous. Plagiarism is a crime, yo. But the emotional bullying and blackmail is, IMO, the worst part. "Oh, no! It's not my fault that I was mean and cruel! It's everyone else's fault for not 'being friends' outside of the game." The thing is, if you leave it alone, friendships will blossom, naturally, among good people, whose personalities mesh well, anyway. And if they are not good, or their personalities don't mesh well, forced socializing will just be painful, and friendships will not form.
You can even still assign a pre-gen character to a player, so long as they're the ones in control of the character's backstory and personality from there. One of my current groups has a campaign that we've been running where the DM made a group of pre-gen PCs based within the confines of the setting's particular restrictions, and assigned them to players, but let us come up with backstory, give the PCs their personality, and define our friendships, how the PCs knew one another, etc. All he basically did was the math for making the PCs, then set us loose from there.
As a DM I often place campaign specific restriction, such as no Darkvision, low light vision etc. on horror campaign, where I want the darkness to be very scary on early levels, this also increases the value of items that grant such abilities. Of course I compensate the lack of darkvision by letting players who choose such race to pick an extra feat. Sometimes I I dont give any starting gear, if I want the start to be a survival heavy, such as ship crash etc.. But I never tell my players who to play their characters, or punish them for doing something unexpected, like not picking up the quests I have prepared for them, they just have to then accept that I have to wing it and improvise everything on the fly :)
I did something similar for one of my last campaigns not allowing people to take any necromancy spells or “death related” subclasses. It’s been going great for the past year!
@@TanukiTracks Novelists "recycle" just about everything... Whatever you think you've read that was SOOOO unique, I can generally promise was "stolen" from someone or something over a decade or two ago... Even one of my favorites, Harry Harrison, wrote the likes of "Grendel", which was a direct rip-off of "Beowulf" as "uniquely" told through the eyes of the monster... One of the top things you DO learn as a GM... nothing is original under the sun... ever. You can only give clever twists to things when your Players haven't seen it too often before... AND if they have, you can only undermine their cliches... This guy just did a HORRIBLE job of it... AND like that, even if he's not "technically" a novelist, he'd be better advised to do that than to try and be a GM with this kind of antics... ;o)
"bloodhunters are okay, but I won't allow you to play them because they're under powered" I mean they got nerfed hard but the DM can give them a bump to the class as they're god, tbh I would just leave when the dm started to be a ass for no reason.
Devils Advocate: TBH I dont think it is unreasonable to ban a class for being underpowered and being unwilling to homebrew it up to snuff. DMs already have enough to do and many, maybe even most, would rather players just use something out of the box and not have to think about all their toys as well as their own.
The only two restrictions I’ve ever had for my players on my games are “make someone who wants to be an adventurer”, and “no straight evil characters”. I just don’t have fun DMing characters that want to burn down villages, take over the world - or hate traveling and can’t handle the stress. Now if you were playing a character that was morally grey and did bad things for good reasons, then I can work with that.
Even though I haven't played dnd (yet) I probably would have left that game by the end of session 1 if not soon. I have listened to enough of these to know that this DM doesn't deserve a party based of how he treated them how he blamed them for his mistakes. If this was my friend there would be one of three outcomes. 1. I tell him and he becomes better in time. 2. I tell him and he doesn't listen followed by me "dying" in the next battle and not coming back. 3. Or I just straight up leave. Tldr: This DM was a #### and I wouldn't want to play under such conditions.
I would have left as soon as they dictated characters. Even if I ( for some reason) had stayed after that, I would have left right after they started with the "you're not playing your character correctly!" bullshit. This DM seems like a sociopath and control freak.
Yeah, if he had been open that this was an adjusted module with homebrew elements and had a written banlist for classes/races that was internally consistent and applied evenly it could have been a fun romp round barovia. Cest la vie.
Yeah, I wouldn't want that guy as a DM. First lying about a homebrew world. I get telling them "hey, I'm using CoS as a world" but then going along through the module that so many people know, thats a big no. And I also get restricting races or classes in a world from a lore point, but saying they're over- or underpowered is also no. If they're that way, nerf or buff them somehow.
Devils Advocate: TBH I dont think it is unreasonable to ban a class for being underpowered and being unwilling to homebrew it up to snuff. DMs already have enough to do and many, maybe even most, would rather players just use something out of the box and not have to think about all their toys as well as their own.
Meantime I have a relatively annoying dm. I'd say but It's an active campaign. A few non campaign specific complaints: we were promised heavy roleplay and walked into a meat grinder, I feel ignored as a player (possibly due to being new to the friend group? Possibly due to my roleplay heavy character), the beginning of last session the DM seemed to sit and stew for 10 min hoping we'd pick the dungeon he had planned for us after we'd already picked a different quest and then proceeded to railroad us into said dungeon by just... moving its map location so it's in our wayish?
I love the idea of a lol dnd game: I imagine it starts when the enemy team doesn’t show, minions don’t spawn and towers don’t activate. But forcing anyone to do anything auto qualify’s you to be called trash
I never understood why some DM's need to have claim to everything.. the story, the builds, the rules. Sometimes I do prebuilds, sometimes hybrid, and somtimes fresh. The best part of prebuilds or hybrids is that most of the "general work" is done and you can focus on adding a few fun Char's, encounters, or traps.
The best answer I can give you is that some Dungeon Masters want to immediately create their own fantasy world but are I’ll-prepared. To put it in perspective, the setting of my ongoing D&D campaign, Purgatory Chronicles, took me three years of writing and drawing to set up the groundwork, and in reality the true purpose of the campaign is to flesh out my world even more. A typical Dungeon Master wouldn’t have the time to come up with absolutely everything, which to them, feels like they’re not cut out to be a DM, so they claim stuff to compensate. Even with my three years of prep, I’m not an exception to the rule as I’ve had to use someone else’s artwork as a token for my characters sometimes. Other times I like to draw the character art myself, as the artwork for the PCs were done by me. Here’s my advice to you if you ever become a Dungeon Master yourself, “Close your eyes, Open your mind, and have pen and paper on standby”.
I had a DM do that to my group once, assign us all premade characters. I got stuck playing a bard, a class I have no experience playing. So instead going along with the DM's bullshit, I decided that my bard was batshit crazy and thought he was a Count, Count Fliptyswitch Von Humptybuns.
Yep I've seen this before. "This is entirely homebrew, I wrote it all myself, 100% original, so you're in the yawning portal tavern when a fight breaks out" mhm...
To be fair, the term homebrew is often used by people who run modules but tweak them a bit and use Hombre Rules. Some AL Fanatics go so far as to say that if isn't strictly AL, you should say it's "Homebrew"
I don't think you can move Hunter's Mark unless the target dies and if the hallway guard was at full life it could have been a long time before you get an internal ping that you could re-target without recasting it.
TTRPG Players should only play Characters they create or Characters they agree to play as (Preset Characters). Simply put, a DM should never be so controlling.
This isn't meant to be offensive or controversial but I think mental health is sometimes a bigger issue than we realize and probably a core issue with a lot of the stories. What a mess! I hope those players recover from this abuse
I could understand having a set of pregen characters that your players chose from, or maybe more like a set of traits so 'someone needs to have X skill, someone needs to have X flaw, someone needs to have Y ties in their backstory'. The main system already does this with the expectations of tanks, dps and healers so if its roleplay I have no problems saying there has to be a noble bastard, someone from a conquered nation, and someone who can sail a ship etc, but let them mix and match the traits as they like. Why randomly assign mostly completed characters to strangers?
Funnily i had the opposite experience where i had a player continuously tell me my game was Strahd, in reality it was a omage to the 2004 Van Helsing because i loved the story and universe, however the player continuously thought it was strahd amd got increasingly "offended"(?), oh well i tne other players liked the game and thats all i cared about.
Exception: Premades for a quick one shot to get to know your group. I think that is reasonable, then you can follow up with a proper campaign if you like how eachother play.
I've heard quite a few of these bad DM/Player stories by now, and I just can't wrap my head around how they progress beyond the point of it being a small issue. The moment I see shitty behavior from someone, I'm out with a block for each offender.
Hey, maybe you, crit crab, and den of the drake should play a dnd game on channel with a few more friends either as a one shot or a series. I think that'd be super hectic and entertaining
You asked a question how am I supposed to play a character that I didn't even want to play in the first place with the DM like that I find reason to play the character so that I can destroy his world in his little mind
Dude, if the DM wants to put LoL into D&D, he should have just told the players to pick LoL characters and base their builds of of them. Much easier and less toxic.
I once had a dm try to make me play as a wildcasting sorcorer, he kept saying that wizzard was too hard and that i should play sorcorer, instead i ended up playing a barbarian for that campain
What I don't understand in these stories is why the players even begin to play. All these races and classes bans, blatant lie about homebrew, assigned characters, clearly invented ability on the spot, etc. This is just not DnD. I would've bailed out as soon as I couldn't use one of my 5 BUILDS!
Thats ... weird that he translated Neeko into a blinking nordic ranger when... neeko doesnt do any of that. She's an illusionist burst mage from the fae wilds. no blinking outside of the "flash" summoner skill. I guess there is her little stealth thing she does but that would be a stretch. The only nordic ranger would be ashe and MAYBE sajuani. The artificer would obviously be one of the piltover or zaun characters, and the faelock could be a wide variety of champions. Still, dude had a WAY too bloated sense of self importance and confidence in his CHA score.
I would imagine her as a Changeling, with the class being either a Sorcerer (probably Wild Magic) or a Trickery Domain Cleric, since that one is all about trickery and has the Invoke Duplicity, which is pretty similar to her W
Hi! I'm the OP of this story, and my ranger was Ash, I dont know where "blinking" part came from, but information, that DM gave me on generation was exactly what LOL website says about Ash. Feylock was a snaky human with mask of many faces, so she was Neeko. Paladin was Garen and Bladelock was Lux. I struggle to name Artificer.
10:55 A cardinal sin of DnD, making a player not want to play DnD anymore... I say this as genuinely as I can, that DM seems to be a horrible person who feigns being a responsible DM while having zero accountability
The DM plays LoL with voice chat... This actually explains literally everything. I play it, but only tft and vs ai for theory craft and chill. My elo? (did I say that right? My ranked play rank) Non existent. I occasionally play aram actually now that I think about it, but barely ever.
That’s stupid, Curse of Strahd is the most popular D&D Module, if you want to be secret about it, do one that’s not widely known.
If anything you could always blend homebrew with known mods.
I get the feeling this man's enormous ego prevented him from thinking critically.
Thanks Andy! Great tip!
@@Foretelling I don’t recommend passing D&D Modules off as your own...
@@LordofDragns I think I just wrote it wrong
The audacity of that DM. "You didn't play your characters right." They were never our characters to begin with.
That DM was not looking to game, he was looking to direct a fantasy script he liked.
Dipsh^t DM. I assume the DM was probably a kid... giving the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, someone who needs more therapy than gaming.
"You don't seem to understand. These characters aren't yours to play."
That DM should just write a book or something.
Was expecting the story to be the DM changing names to make it look like he came up with Curse of Dharst.
DM: "You all are journeying somewhere, but on the way you receive a distressed letter, 'Hail thee of might and valor. I, a lowly servant of Ovbaria send honor to thee. We plead for thy so desperately-needed assistance. The love of my life, Elena Bengonia has been affected by an evil so deadly that even the people of our village cannot protect her. She languishes from her wound, and I would have her saved from this menace. There's much wealth in this community. I offer all that I have for thee and thy fellows if thou shalt answer my desperate plea. All that I have shall be thine.'"
Disappointing.
What is funny is that if the DM had simply said "We are playing Curse of Strahd with LoL builds" when they were advertising it everybody would have been cool with the idea because that is what they signed up for.
That DM needs to be blacklisted from DMing forever.
Just awful.
It's called being a loser
I'd suggest an intervention or two first... the second one with that alternative being the threat if they don't stop being a director instead of a DM.
This DM needs a write a book, given all the control they wanted over the narrative in his "game".
And even if he did, he'd get called out for blatantly ripping off characters from LoL and other things, considering how horrendously unoriginal he was
He'd only be able to write fanfiction given how blatant the ripoffs were
@@willparry530 Yeah, I was going to say it would have to be fanfic. I often say that DMs this controlling need to write a book instead, but He'd write a curse of Strahd book, without changing anything, using LOL characters.
That’s literally one of the main parts of D&D. That’s like having a game of custom characters when there is only 5 presets to pick from that you can’t even modify.
Ah, so, Magic Legends which is based on the Magic the Gathering universe of elves and goblins and leonin and a thousand other things. So naturally you can only play Human.
@@VGJustice I guess? I was thinking more along the lines of Regular Show’s Realm of Dar-Thon where all the character figurines are all repainted hand sized garden gnomes with slight modifications here and there.
I think this is reasonable in a oneshot, especially with a new party or one with several new members. A quick one or two session game with some premades just to get the cut of eachother's jibs so to speak. Followed by a proper campaign, if the party meshes well, with whatever they want to play, within reason for the module or setting the followup campaign is going to run with. This is obviously not what happened in this case but it is a reasonable best case scenario for when this isnt a bad practice, or may even be a good idea.
@@TheodoreIchabod Well part of the problem was that the DM/GM didn’t allow people to pick for themselves. The poster said he had a full idea of what he wanted to play, only to be told by the DM/GM he’s playing this role while someone else got said role and didn’t even want to play that role. It seems like a group communication failure.
@@movespammerguyteam7colors Indeed, in the specific example of the poster yeah, seems unjustified. Like I said, seems reasonable for a quick oneshot to get the cut of their jib then go nuts with a campaign.
That bit about "we must be friends" sounds like a typical SadSocWard: Someone who claims to be 'socially awkward', and tries to bully and guilt people into being their friend, because actually developing the social skills or legitimate connections with people is just too hard for them.
The only restrictions I've ever had was "please pick something from PHB." Which is hardly something crazy to ask.
Homebrew world with a small race selection due to the questgiver only inviting individuals from a few select regions for political regions works too, my current group has that setup (though if there are character deaths it is permissible to play any race the party has met and have learned of their quest as a replacement character).
I do this too when I know concepts are about to get too far out of hand, I run 3.5 so I have PHB and PHB2 to choose from, lots of options but still manageable
Through the editions I had a few restrictions in different games, like one were everyone must be a non divine spellcaster(so anything Arcane+artificer and or other classes like 3.5 binder) at first. You could multiclass after that but first three levels had to be within the specified restrictions.
Or another game that we had to play exclusively non spellcasters. Overall, as long as there's a logical/plot related reason for restrictions, I'm usually fine with em. Especially in systems that grew too large (Pathfinder anyone?)
@@BlackRainRising Bruh PHB2 has Duskblade, I am extremely okay with this restriction
@@lepatriote5767 my g/f is playing an Avariel (winged elf) Duskblade using a scythe, she's having a little too much fun with it :P
Welcome to the League of Legends champion spotlight featuring... Dungeon Master, the Railroader
Dungeon Master is a ranged,melee, support, assassin specializing in forcing others to play by very specific rules. Dungeon Master's passive is Lying. By telling other champions lies, he gains a bonus to psychological damage against them. Dungeon Master's Q is Forced Character, in which Dungeon master chooses your champion for you. Dungeon Master's W is Bully, where if you don't something the way they want, they punish you for it. Dungeon Master's E is Blame, in which any mistake made by the dungeon master can instead act as a mark to an allied champion. And finally, Dungeon Master's ultimate is versatile, able to switch between Stolen Content and Ultimate Rage Quit, depending on the situation. Stolen content allows him to slightly change a stupidly well known module and call it his world, this prevents dungeon master from being called out on it being a module. And Ultimate Rage Quit instantly ends the game, alienating all champions, and giving everyone a Defeat.
Soon to a Riot Store near you.
Man i miss the old school champion spotlights
I play Dungeon Master as a jungler, for tons of damage.
Running Curse of Strahd and Claiming it's his homebrew, is actually the least bothersome part of that game.
That is extraordinarily frustrating to hear. People who use DM purely to dictate everything for their enjoyment is frustrating.
I like these irl conflict horror stories but kind of wished you'd do some more in game focused videos like Astoshan or the unorthodox green dragon again.
Seconded
Yes please. If I wanted stories about bad DND players I'd go to critcrab to be depressed.
I 100% agree. Half the reason I subbed to this channel was because I loved the Astoshan story so much.
ill make sure to contribute some of my campaign in the near future. some real feelgoods from my little kobold arcane trickster *chaotic good*
yeah, kind of stopped following this channel because of this. Return sometimes to see if any great stories have been uploadet
"Hey can I copy your homework?"
"Sure, just change a few things"
I once had a DM dictate me who my character should be. I had this idea for a pirate girl. Brash, rude, loud, proud, stupidly brave (the type that sees a dark pit and instead of investigating just jumps in, but also would throw themselves on a bomb to save others), deeply loyal to her friends and companions and A LOT of baggage from her family. He didn't like the concept and made me change her into a nice river sailor from a loving home with amzing talking skills. Literally the OPPOSITE of my character concept. I only stayed in that game for one session.
A few years later a friend started a new game with the same system and I told him of my original character concept. The GM approved of it and let me play her the way I wanted to. He even took pieces from her backstory to transform them into an amazing personal plot. Needless to say, this character has become my favourite of all time!
Puffin forest made a series of his experience of curse of strad.
(Spoilers)
Very much the deluxe experience there, most of that is supplementary stuff the DM found on reddit likely taken from earlier editions if not homebrew.
@@R3GARnator Just homebrew as none of it was from earlier editions. Even the name spells required for Mordenkainen's area were poorly done as they came from mages from not just from Greyhawk, but Forgotten Realms as well.
And it is brilliant!
DM: *Writes a book*
The Book: *Literally just Lord of the Rings with LoL characters and a different title*
Lord of the League
@@theepicmagikarp9621 Is it bad that I got that reference from people talking about it alone even though I never played League?
AND NO HOBBITS!!
Holy crap. I mean, I’ve re-written parts of my setting so that my players - and let’s be honest, they’re the important bit, not my “IP” - can play whoever the hell they want to play!
That is some gutter-level DM action right there. Poor show.
In general I would agree, but as devil's advocate for a generic example: Say Mr. Generic DM decided to make a setting from scratch and decided to disallow divine casters because the setting is post-forsaken and limited the party to three starting races because he had written the setting and game to revolve around these three races and their cultures and history, would it be that unreasonable to expect the party to play those races and not pick those classes?
@@TheodoreIchabod absolutely. I’m not opposed in any way to limiting or putting conditions around things in-game for *story* purposes (for example, arcane necromancy in my homebrew is illegal, due to the setting’s Vecna-proxy and all that good stuff being rather recent and not ancient history; likewise being a barbarian is a bit more complex to decide on because the starting region is almost entirely urban - it’s a ‘reclaim the lost empire”, points of light-type deal) but that’s sort of my point: doing something for *story reasons* is an entirely different bag to doing it because you want that character in your game and that player has to play it a certain way.
So, for instance, I happen to have a deathlock player in my game who was simply told ‘it’s illegal. Just so you know. Might want to consider how you behave within eyesight of any authority figures’ but specifically told to make their guy; I’m not about to stop him from doing what he wants to do - I can flex my story around it, absolutely no problem. I also have someone who wanted to be a barbarian, so I added a place for that character to come from that meant she still ends up at the start of the game as being within the city limits and familiar with that city, but has access to the ‘frosty homeland’ stuff she wants. It’s exactly as you describe - story stuff. It just cannot be the case that a way just absolutely cannot be found to accommodate the player’s wishes.
Does that make sense? If you can’t cooperate to start with, cooperative story-telling RPGs might not be the best fit for your hobby. I don’t know if I’m doing a good job of explaining myself here…😂 basically, I’m agreeing with you, but also saying that I don’t believe that there are insurmountable, unsolvable problems when it comes down to stuff like this. So, to sort of look at the examples you give… someone has their absolute heart set on being a cleric in a game that, for story reasons, has no divinity? Cool, cool. Just call the cleric class the “shaman” class or “animist class” or something, and explain it away as being a much more mystical (in the classical sense as opposed to the pop-cultural) approach to the same arcane powers wielded by wizards or whatever. It can *always* be compromised on. Reskinning, reflavouring, exceptions… these are all (in my opinion, often underappreciated) tools in the DM arsenal.
But: The douchenozzle running this game just straight up told people what they were going to be and how he expected to play. That, for me, is a borderline criminal offence. Piss-poor DM’ing. Absolute disaster.
@@steveharrison76 I agree overall with your points, and you did a great job explaining it, I only have one caveat: That while a DM can indeed do all that to make exceptions for the PCs sometimes that isnt reasonable to expect. Some games the PCs are just not special, but can become special by effort. Sometimes a game really is supposed to concern a limited scope and while exceptions and confluence can occur, there are instances where the players should accept that this isnt that game and there will be others because the DM just doesnt want to work around that request, and that is fine, as the DM has to have fun too. Now if this is every game then there is a larger problem, but here and there it is okay for a DM to say no to a character concept, as the players are not entitled to anything they want to play and strictly everything does have to be okayed by the DM (even if mostly the DM should just go with it, at least in a generic game) sometimes they have to flex that right for their own enjoyment, even if that is the edge case.
All in all I think we are broadly in agreement though, I just want to stress that there is always an exception to the assumptions put forth as I am a habitual devil's advocate and always think of a counter argument to any point i come across as it is too easy to take as given that 'which is known' and take it as dogma rather than thinking of the ramifications of that to all parties.
Okay, I would've bailed on this group so fast. Not being able to play the races I want is already a red flag, and so is that 'I only play DnD with friends so we MUST become friends!' thing from the DM. First off: you can't force friendships, and I don't need the kind of toxicity in my life that truly believes you can. Second: If my Tieflings, Half-Orcs and Drow are not welcome at your table, then I will find them one were they are. I often spend one day on a backstory in advance, and sometimes? I can't just switch out the race and call it a day, because it's a crucial part of that backstory. I mean, it is on my Tiefling Bard: I'd basically have to rewrite him, and the name 'Carreus Whisperfury' doesn't really sound like it fits a Human. So thanks, but no thanks: rather no DnD then bad DnD. That DM should write a book instead.
Having a limited range of races or classes is acceptable, it depends on the world. I have played in human only games and had great fun in a goblinoid only campaign I played in. Though it is good practice to have a session zero to build characters and then give the players a week to settle backstory and relationships etc.
@@TheodoreIchabod I feel like there's a world of difference between a game wherein for setting reasons, the DM has put limits on what races and classes are available, and what this DM did. Yes, limited campaigns can be fun, if the DM is doing this with full consent and buy-in from his group. It's the sort of thing you set up at the very start of the game during session zero, and make clear to the group, so that they know what their limits are, what the setting does differently from D&D baseline, etc., so that they are prepared for what they're going into.
This DM did not bother with session zero, gave no coherent reasons as to why various races or classes weren't allowed other than vague, sneering excuses ("Only people who minmax play halflings," calling the character idea of the player who opted not to join "stupid," "I won't let you play bloodhunter because it's underpowered," "who even plays feylocks?", etc.), only to then have *other players* stuck into the very same classes he sneered at when talking to OP, and demanding that OP's ranger needs to have blinking, to the point that when the player wants to make the PC more effective in combat in order to shore up the group, he forces OP to take a homebrewed feat to give him the ability. He was also shown to be literally just recycling the same character concepts from previous games, and sticking different people with the characters he wanted them to play, as seen when Artificer and OP have their private chat and it's revealed she played basically the same character in a previous game of DM's. He also tried to control another person's game by bullying their players, wanting to inform them "how we play here," when he wasn't even the server owner, nor was he going to be DMing that group.
Basically, this toxic DM was *miles away* from the kinds of DMs you're describing, and has nothing in common with a limited concept game whatsoever. This is a guy deliberately forcing his players to bend to his control, making them play how and what he wants, all while constantly lying to the players about what they're playing and what his "homebrew" setting entails.
@@Mokiefraggle 100% in agreement.
campaign based on LoL. No small races.
...I guess he never heard of Yordles, then? "You meet a girl with blue skin, big, pointy, fluffy ears and a humongous hammer, and an adorable kitten with tusks and a skull for a hat. But they're both medium size, because there are no small races in LoL."
maybe they didn't like Teemo so banned all Yordles?
And how is a blinking Tiefling Ranger supposed to be Neeko?
If I were to make Neeko in D&D, she would be a Changeling Sorcerer, or maybe Changeling Trickery Cleric, as that one has Invoke Duplicity, which fits the original character.
i think the feylok was neeko and and paladin and bladelok were garen and lux but the nordic ranger sounds like ashe minus the tiefling bit with the blink being flash
No gnomes,no red hats,no derro,no fng midgits ok !!! >_
MUNDO ROLEPLAYS AS HE PLEASES!!!!
Wow! Just wow! Toxic DMs are the worse!
Toxic people in general. They ruin whatever they're involved with.
Or are they the best? O.o
@@Razagul319 Best for telling "-from Hell" stories, otherwise they are the worst.
Or, was that the joke you were shooting for and I just missed it? It's hard to get tone from text.
quick comment: someone I know was considering doing this, but not for a malicious reason. One of the players tends to look up whatever module (not to look at the content, but to see how long it should be, etc), so she was wanting to skirt that entire issue.
Yeah that sounds quite suspect indeed. DM should strongly consider obfuscating the module and changing it up if the player finds out in that case. Shouldnt pass it off as their own though, if nothing else that is just bad form. Saying something along the lines of 'This is a variation on a prewritten module that I will be witholding the name of for spoiler reasons' is a nice elegant solution.
When your DM is trying to force anything on you, whether its character wise or ability related, always refuse. Freedom to express is part of D&D.
...Unless you discuss with your players first about the boundaries and why you're setting them.
@@RustyhairedAlp9575 true but not to the extent where you ban character types for illegit reasons
And have a session zero to learn what your player's expectations are, and how they like to play.
Like using setting specific rules that may not have certain races or classes. Such used to be the norm for D&D in that certain niche races and classes were generally not widely available and even some core classes like the paladin did not exist in some settings like Dark Sun.
It is perfectly reasonable to limit races or classes for game reasons or worldbuilding. Like no goblins if the main antagonist is the goblin king or no divine casters because the game is set in an iconoclastic society and the party will be working with the iconoclasts to name perfectly reasonable examples. One game we are running at the moment has the party all drawn from a small set of races due to politics in a homebrew world because those were the original peoples the questgiver drew adventurers from for his initial intake, with the caveat that future characters can come from any allied race or peoples that the party had become on good terms with or otherwise learned of their quest.
I can only think of 3 good reasons to make players play specific characters.
1) you are playing a 1 shot game with newer players and have very limited time. so come to the table with a full team of premade characters and let them just pick 1 and play. (you might give them charactersif you have another motive for example you know Jeff wants to play a spellcaster in the campaign that starts next week so you give them a sorceror for this game to practice).
2) weird dream sequence, where the main characters change weirdly for plot reasons and spend a session or 2 in someone elses body, or with someone elses powers.
3) you are running some sort of side story for a bit to add context to the main campaign, so the players are playing established NPc's (good examples, instead of telling the story of the ancient champions killing the great Red Dragon you play it for a fw sessions. Or more short term, one of your main characters has been invited to a generals meeting but they are the only ones, you dont want to do a long scene between just them and 5 NPc's so you give the other players a general to play for that scene, allowing the party to figure out tactics etc).
in all these situations the characters are only temporary and it should be clear that is whats going on to start with. At most this can go on for 3 sessions? but preferably 1 or less.
I feel really bad for BladeLock, I really do hope they give it anther chance with a better DM.
I can understand banning certain races, when we played Curse of Strahd our GM strong encouraged us to play human looking charakters because Berovia is very humancentric and it would cause problems and I see that as fair enough.
I am pretty sure he would allow me to play 3 cobolds in a trechcoat in his next game. :)
Yeah, having a banlist for a given game is perfectly reasonable, preferably with an in universe explanation like the one you stated concerning the prejudices of the smalltown barovians. Limiting options isnt neccesarily a bad thing, as long as it is logical and applied evenly. Even simply saying 'I dont want to DM for an XYZ' is good enough, if not terribly satisfying (at that point just invent a reason as you get your own way either way, may as well make the effort to explain why in universe you know?). But letting one player play an artificer while banning it for another wasnt cool, no way to spin that as anything other than being a bellend lol.
@@TheodoreIchabod the only way I would do something like that is if someone else was an artificer and I wanted only one in the group. This would be explicitly communicated, though.
Neither of these happened, though. Everything needs to be explicit, and laid out in the open. Preferably in writing so everyone is literally on the same page.
@@WukongTheMonkeyKing Yeah that is how we do things in our home games. We have an explicit document of divergences from base game rules and assumptions.
@@TheodoreIchabod
i would like see a dm have the balls to ban humans as a player race...
@@chongwillson972 I played in a Goblins only game, so... yeah, seen it, loved it, we still talk about it. Good laugh.
I hope everyone has a good day
I DEMAND everyone has a good day
You too
I demand that you all have a good day and a plate of chili fries.
I like you I think we can keep you arround
No
Honestly, I can't understand why some DMs become such dicks. When I DM, half the fun is seeing how my players build characters and grow them in my world. While I do offer suggestions on how each character backstory relates to my world(it is a homebrew with connections to the other worlds of Kirin, Faerun, and Eberron), I ultimately give them freedom to choose. My suggestions are just that. Guidance is part of being a DM but not control. Regarding PCs, the final call on persona, choices, and history is theirs to the point it does not interfere with other characters or major plot points. I've had disenfranchised nobles, evil creatures bound by magic to be good, and fallen deities all part of my games but I work out the details to avoid issues. Regular adventurers are often solely the player's choice and I have made some into champions of gods, granted nobility to others, or even helped them take a curse and turn it into a blessing. The players can add so much to a story and the story as I have said before, is all that matters. Good stories are fun by default otherwise they aren't good. We write them together.
I would have announced leaving the party at the end of the 7hr session. Too early in a campaign to have that long of a session, added fact of forced dm characters leads to 7 hours of not fun enough to play again.
This makes me feel so fortunate to be able to play in person with all my good friends and always have great sessions we enjoy so much.
That really matters? somebody thought so. This opened the door to the "experts" that were howling at the door. Good job
7 hrs without a break!? That's bonkers. And for your first session too.
Seems to me like the DM is just a control freak. Telling people he won't allow their character concept and then giving that concept to another player who doesn't want it is basicaly the DM saying "I decide what character you play, not you". And then the whole "you're playing wrong" and "next session specific characters will die" thing... Clearly he was using D&D to exert power over other people.
The closest I've ever come to forcing a character on players is pregenned characters of off the wall concepts or newcomers/one-off players looking to check the game out but probably not stick with it. For example, I was working on some homebrew Spelljammer-style things for 5E so asked a few of my friends if they'd play a session with some characters I'd genned up to try it out, all of whom were parodies of famous science fiction leads (Ripley, Kirk, Skywalker, Doctor Who, etc.) I still let them all figure out among themselves who was playing who, though, and though the game only went a couple of 4-hour sessions we all had a lot of fun (even giving the Doctor Who player a chance to regenerate when they unknowingly touched an Infinity Stone. I had a *crazy* series of possible encounters for them in that one.)
The pre-gens for newbies were for a 4E game, so it wasn't like going pregenned took away a lot of control in that case, and it worked out well to give a few of my cousins and their friends who had never played before a chance to experiment and have a good time.
I'm guessing blinking rogue was Katarina though that doesn't explain the nordic background, Garen is basically a Paladin, and Articifer was more than likely Heimerdinger.
Except that he said no short races so probably not heimerdinger
Jayce or Viktor maybe? OP said that the blinking thing was supposed to be Neeko (somehow)
Its one to to make clear and CONSISTENT rules on which charector/race are disallowed at the table its another to assign charectors and then give another player the class or race you wanted.
I had an idea for a campaign once where the party were all clones of the same person, but with minor differences to help round out the party. And I knew it would be nearly impossible to successfully run such a game because it would take me explaining far too many restrictions to character creation. It could work, but only with a huge amount of trust. This DM failed on that trust step because he just wanted to be a controlling jerk.
Giving your players pre-generated characters (for a one-shot, so they won't be too attached, and you can be brutal; for their first game, when they are just trying to learn the rules and don't have time to learn all the character options, too) is OK, in the right circumstances.
However, if you're giving them pre-gen characters, you LET THEM CHOOSE. You don't find out which character someone wants, and then force them to play something else, when what they want is actually an option, doing the same with the others, specifically so that EVERYONE is equally miserable! Everyone being unhappy with the result is NOT the definition of compromise.
Insulting people for their ideas is a jackass move.
Also, lying about "We're not doing a module. I made this ALL up, myself!" when all he did was change siblings to lovers, is just heinous. Plagiarism is a crime, yo.
But the emotional bullying and blackmail is, IMO, the worst part. "Oh, no! It's not my fault that I was mean and cruel! It's everyone else's fault for not 'being friends' outside of the game." The thing is, if you leave it alone, friendships will blossom, naturally, among good people, whose personalities mesh well, anyway. And if they are not good, or their personalities don't mesh well, forced socializing will just be painful, and friendships will not form.
You can even still assign a pre-gen character to a player, so long as they're the ones in control of the character's backstory and personality from there. One of my current groups has a campaign that we've been running where the DM made a group of pre-gen PCs based within the confines of the setting's particular restrictions, and assigned them to players, but let us come up with backstory, give the PCs their personality, and define our friendships, how the PCs knew one another, etc. All he basically did was the math for making the PCs, then set us loose from there.
I feel like even after watching this channel so much, this is the worst DM I've ever heard about. Total control freak.
after so many videos on this channel i am come to realize DM's 99.99999% of the time a terrible.
As a DM I often place campaign specific restriction, such as no Darkvision, low light vision etc. on horror campaign, where I want the darkness to be very scary on early levels, this also increases the value of items that grant such abilities. Of course I compensate the lack of darkvision by letting players who choose such race to pick an extra feat.
Sometimes I I dont give any starting gear, if I want the start to be a survival heavy, such as ship crash etc..
But I never tell my players who to play their characters, or punish them for doing something unexpected, like not picking up the quests I have prepared for them, they just have to then accept that I have to wing it and improvise everything on the fly :)
I did something similar for one of my last campaigns not allowing people to take any necromancy spells or “death related” subclasses. It’s been going great for the past year!
@@Paul2hip8 Yea gotta tweak the rules to fit the campaign
You know what they call a "Bad GM"???
A novelist...
THIS is why. ;o)
He's not even a novelist. He's just plagiarizing AND trying to make them fit his 'scene'.
@@TanukiTracks Novelists "recycle" just about everything... Whatever you think you've read that was SOOOO unique, I can generally promise was "stolen" from someone or something over a decade or two ago...
Even one of my favorites, Harry Harrison, wrote the likes of "Grendel", which was a direct rip-off of "Beowulf" as "uniquely" told through the eyes of the monster...
One of the top things you DO learn as a GM... nothing is original under the sun... ever. You can only give clever twists to things when your Players haven't seen it too often before... AND if they have, you can only undermine their cliches...
This guy just did a HORRIBLE job of it... AND like that, even if he's not "technically" a novelist, he'd be better advised to do that than to try and be a GM with this kind of antics... ;o)
"bloodhunters are okay, but I won't allow you to play them because they're under powered" I mean they got nerfed hard but the DM can give them a bump to the class as they're god, tbh I would just leave when the dm started to be a ass for no reason.
Devils Advocate: TBH I dont think it is unreasonable to ban a class for being underpowered and being unwilling to homebrew it up to snuff. DMs already have enough to do and many, maybe even most, would rather players just use something out of the box and not have to think about all their toys as well as their own.
@@TheodoreIchabod that is fair
The only two restrictions I’ve ever had for my players on my games are “make someone who wants to be an adventurer”, and “no straight evil characters”. I just don’t have fun DMing characters that want to burn down villages, take over the world - or hate traveling and can’t handle the stress. Now if you were playing a character that was morally grey and did bad things for good reasons, then I can work with that.
Even though I haven't played dnd (yet) I probably would have left that game by the end of session 1 if not soon. I have listened to enough of these to know that this DM doesn't deserve a party based of how he treated them how he blamed them for his mistakes. If this was my friend there would be one of three outcomes. 1. I tell him and he becomes better in time. 2. I tell him and he doesn't listen followed by me "dying" in the next battle and not coming back. 3. Or I just straight up leave.
Tldr: This DM was a #### and I wouldn't want to play under such conditions.
I would have left as soon as they dictated characters. Even if I ( for some reason) had stayed after that, I would have left right after they started with the "you're not playing your character correctly!" bullshit. This DM seems like a sociopath and control freak.
I ran Curse of Strahd with a tiefling-only party, so seeing this noti scared me a bit
If the dm wasn't being shady with what he was doing it still sounds like it could've been a fun campaign
Yeah, if he had been open that this was an adjusted module with homebrew elements and had a written banlist for classes/races that was internally consistent and applied evenly it could have been a fun romp round barovia. Cest la vie.
To be fair, the token used for my campaign’s first major villain is Caitlyn from League of Legends (the villain’s name is Victoria Machina).
Yeah, I wouldn't want that guy as a DM. First lying about a homebrew world. I get telling them "hey, I'm using CoS as a world" but then going along through the module that so many people know, thats a big no. And I also get restricting races or classes in a world from a lore point, but saying they're over- or underpowered is also no. If they're that way, nerf or buff them somehow.
Devils Advocate: TBH I dont think it is unreasonable to ban a class for being underpowered and being unwilling to homebrew it up to snuff. DMs already have enough to do and many, maybe even most, would rather players just use something out of the box and not have to think about all their toys as well as their own.
Few social experiences mix well with personality disorders, D&D is no exception, particularly when you are the DM.
Meantime I have a relatively annoying dm. I'd say but It's an active campaign. A few non campaign specific complaints: we were promised heavy roleplay and walked into a meat grinder, I feel ignored as a player (possibly due to being new to the friend group? Possibly due to my roleplay heavy character), the beginning of last session the DM seemed to sit and stew for 10 min hoping we'd pick the dungeon he had planned for us after we'd already picked a different quest and then proceeded to railroad us into said dungeon by just... moving its map location so it's in our wayish?
I love the idea of a lol dnd game: I imagine it starts when the enemy team doesn’t show, minions don’t spawn and towers don’t activate. But forcing anyone to do anything auto qualify’s you to be called trash
I never understood why some DM's need to have claim to everything.. the story, the builds, the rules. Sometimes I do prebuilds, sometimes hybrid, and somtimes fresh. The best part of prebuilds or hybrids is that most of the "general work" is done and you can focus on adding a few fun Char's, encounters, or traps.
The best answer I can give you is that some Dungeon Masters want to immediately create their own fantasy world but are I’ll-prepared. To put it in perspective, the setting of my ongoing D&D campaign, Purgatory Chronicles, took me three years of writing and drawing to set up the groundwork, and in reality the true purpose of the campaign is to flesh out my world even more. A typical Dungeon Master wouldn’t have the time to come up with absolutely everything, which to them, feels like they’re not cut out to be a DM, so they claim stuff to compensate. Even with my three years of prep, I’m not an exception to the rule as I’ve had to use someone else’s artwork as a token for my characters sometimes. Other times I like to draw the character art myself, as the artwork for the PCs were done by me. Here’s my advice to you if you ever become a Dungeon Master yourself, “Close your eyes, Open your mind, and have pen and paper on standby”.
I had a DM do that to my group once, assign us all premade characters. I got stuck playing a bard, a class I have no experience playing. So instead going along with the DM's bullshit, I decided that my bard was batshit crazy and thought he was a Count, Count Fliptyswitch Von Humptybuns.
Yep I've seen this before. "This is entirely homebrew, I wrote it all myself, 100% original, so you're in the yawning portal tavern when a fight breaks out" mhm...
YIKES, and I thought just railroading the PLOT was bad!
To be fair, the term homebrew is often used by people who run modules but tweak them a bit and use Hombre Rules. Some AL Fanatics go so far as to say that if isn't strictly AL, you should say it's "Homebrew"
Which is one of the reasons I don't like AL. :/
bro...just with the "ñañaña those races cant you must choose what i want" id go out just because of the DM xD
I will forever love how you pronounce artificer.
*mispronounce
But it is funny either way.
It's a bot I feel lied to
Idk how he never thought anyone would ever learn about straud.
**GROAN** Please tell me this knob is not DM-ing anymore.
I don't think you can move Hunter's Mark unless the target dies
and if the hallway guard was at full life it could have been a long time before you get an internal ping that you could re-target without recasting it.
No lie league is what got me into to dnd
TTRPG Players should only play Characters they create or Characters they agree to play as (Preset Characters).
Simply put, a DM should never be so controlling.
This isn't meant to be offensive or controversial but I think mental health is sometimes a bigger issue than we realize and probably a core issue with a lot of the stories. What a mess! I hope those players recover from this abuse
I could understand having a set of pregen characters that your players chose from, or maybe more like a set of traits so 'someone needs to have X skill, someone needs to have X flaw, someone needs to have Y ties in their backstory'. The main system already does this with the expectations of tanks, dps and healers so if its roleplay I have no problems saying there has to be a noble bastard, someone from a conquered nation, and someone who can sail a ship etc, but let them mix and match the traits as they like.
Why randomly assign mostly completed characters to strangers?
That DM is the actual textbook example of everything you don't want to do as a DM...
Honestly sounds very similar to my groups DM before I took over
This would have been grade a drama to watch in real time.
Realistic, just like the teleporting tiefling.
Funnily i had the opposite experience where i had a player continuously tell me my game was Strahd, in reality it was a omage to the 2004 Van Helsing because i loved the story and universe, however the player continuously thought it was strahd amd got increasingly "offended"(?), oh well i tne other players liked the game and thats all i cared about.
Man forcing character choices would have me nope right out of there. We're playing a game together, I'm not an actor in your stage production
Exception: Premades for a quick one shot to get to know your group. I think that is reasonable, then you can follow up with a proper campaign if you like how eachother play.
"blood hunter is okay,but its under powered" I take it this Dm hasn't played a lycan or a mutant huh.
Having never played lol, or seen much of it, I would have been totally blindsided by these characters...
I've heard quite a few of these bad DM/Player stories by now, and I just can't wrap my head around how they progress beyond the point of it being a small issue. The moment I see shitty behavior from someone, I'm out with a block for each offender.
Hey, maybe you, crit crab, and den of the drake should play a dnd game on channel with a few more friends either as a one shot or a series. I think that'd be super hectic and entertaining
I’m going through this rn but it’s not bad at all, names of the towns are changed but the home brew is cool
Curse of Strahd Module:
Ismark, Irenea, Strahd, Death House, Baroiva.
Curse of Strahd Homebrew:
Ismark, Irenea, Strahd, Death House, Baroiva.
I cant believe this guy got to play with Tracey Hickman!
You asked a question how am I supposed to play a character that I didn't even want to play in the first place with the DM like that I find reason to play the character so that I can destroy his world in his little mind
" is no fun , is no homebrew... "😉. Also league of legends has a vampire, Vladimir of Noxus
The fact that he chose everyone's characters when other players wanted to play those classes.
"As with any other good horror story, this one starts a few months ago." Wait, what? What happened a few months ago? Did I miss something??
Subtitles are amazing!!!!
Dude, if the DM wants to put LoL into D&D, he should have just told the players to pick LoL characters and base their builds of of them. Much easier and less toxic.
I once had a dm try to make me play as a wildcasting sorcorer, he kept saying that wizzard was too hard and that i should play sorcorer, instead i ended up playing a barbarian for that campain
Deathhouse is incredibly hard for level 1-2 parties. That godamnn animated broom can kill. You have to tone it down a bit.
What I don't understand in these stories is why the players even begin to play. All these races and classes bans, blatant lie about homebrew, assigned characters, clearly invented ability on the spot, etc. This is just not DnD. I would've bailed out as soon as I couldn't use one of my 5 BUILDS!
OP wanted to see the trainwreck, the rest I don't kow. Maybe they were desperated, mmaybe they were gaslighted
I saw the title and it was cut off and I was really hoping it was going to stay homeworld
I want a real horror story one that is scary not a bad dm or players
Never claim it's all your's if you borrowed from other adventures.
We are all friends down here.. Say it... Say IT......SAY IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
did i just hear bloodhunters ok but it is underpowered!?!?!?
I would definitely not play with a DM like that.
Funnily enough I just bought curse of Strahd and plan to run a game for my boyfriend and my brothers
Pulling teeth here, I would've left after session 1. Too many red flags and you couldn't even develop or properly role play your toon.
I think I personally know this DM in real life.
Thats ... weird that he translated Neeko into a blinking nordic ranger when... neeko doesnt do any of that. She's an illusionist burst mage from the fae wilds. no blinking outside of the "flash" summoner skill. I guess there is her little stealth thing she does but that would be a stretch. The only nordic ranger would be ashe and MAYBE sajuani. The artificer would obviously be one of the piltover or zaun characters, and the faelock could be a wide variety of champions. Still, dude had a WAY too bloated sense of self importance and confidence in his CHA score.
I would imagine her as a Changeling, with the class being either a Sorcerer (probably Wild Magic) or a Trickery Domain Cleric, since that one is all about trickery and has the Invoke Duplicity, which is pretty similar to her W
Hi! I'm the OP of this story, and my ranger was Ash, I dont know where "blinking" part came from, but information, that DM gave me on generation was exactly what LOL website says about Ash. Feylock was a snaky human with mask of many faces, so she was Neeko. Paladin was Garen and Bladelock was Lux. I struggle to name Artificer.
@@katerynahaponova2737 Was it a small man who makes turrets and several rockets?
@@chronee5390 No, it was a noble human woman with a human shaped robot, who had a heart, I think.
10:55 A cardinal sin of DnD, making a player not want to play DnD anymore... I say this as genuinely as I can, that DM seems to be a horrible person who feigns being a responsible DM while having zero accountability
I swear half of toxic DMs are control freaks that want to write a book.
The DM plays LoL with voice chat... This actually explains literally everything. I play it, but only tft and vs ai for theory craft and chill.
My elo? (did I say that right? My ranked play rank) Non existent.
I occasionally play aram actually now that I think about it, but barely ever.