Bad DM stories

Hatchling Dragon said:

Amish is a religion? I thought it was a way of life, eschewing all technology as 'evil' or some-such.

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[hijack]Definitely a religion. I can't find my appropriate textbook, but the Amish are devout Christians, offshoots of some Dutch(?) heresy from a few hundred years ago. They practice absolute nonviolence toward other people, believing their reward awaits them in the afterlife. They don't hate technology (many Amish carry cell phones with them into the fields), but they believe that unnecessary technology is vanity and contributes to moral decay (thus the cell phones can only be used in cases of emergency, their buggies cannot be equipped with pneumatic tires, and they're absolutely forbidden from getting premium channels in their cable package).

Amish kids, incidentally, are given some free rein: until they officially join the community around the age of eighteen, they can do quite a bit of wild experimenting. Once they reach majority, however, they either have to join the society or break off most ties with their family and friends.

In a fantasy world, I'd play an Amish-inspired religion as immensely mistrustful of most magic, including any divine magic other than healing spells. And they'd be absolutely nonviolent, therefore poor adventuring stock (although an ex-Amish character could be fun)[/hijack]

(Hoping that my linking this discussion back to fantasy keeps it from being forbidden religious discussion)
Daniel

It was me! OH goodness, it was me!

I almost never have any problems with unfair or harsh or sexually frustrated DMs, but once a player in my group had a huge problem with me as an inexperienced DM.

It was a few years ago and we had just started getting into the hobby, I was running a group of three through an old module in 2e when near the end they fought some Slaad (sp?) Anyway, they were big frog monsters from the Abyss who plant eggs in a character when they hit with a claw attack, one character became infected and I wrote it down for later on.

Well I forgot about it completely until 10 minutes from the end of the next week’s session. So I simply asked the player to roll a save vs. death, he passed it and placed a puzzled look on his face. I told him not to think about it and an hour later (game time) I asked him to roll again, this time he failed so I frowned a bit and announced that he was dead. Everyone else in the party sees a huge Abyssal Frog jump out of his head. Would you like to roll for initiative?

Everyone started laughing uncontrollably while the dead PC’s player was yelling, “You’re the worst DM ever!” again and again between laughs.

I played a few sessions with a DM that had his gf/wife playing as well. This was supposed to be 1e D&D, but he was using using Palladium stats and combat rules. Every character was a mutant with Heroes Unlimited superpowers in addition to being classed.

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I've thank fully never run in to the mix match mega powere rules problem before but i'm all to familiar with the dm's girlfriend problem!

The SO, lets call her Nora, was a elven fighter/cleric. The god she worshipped gave her the full spellcasting abilities of a mage of equal level. Not only that, but she was technically considered to be a demi-god RCC from Rifts and recieved Psionicist abilities of equal level as well. That 4 full classes for the experience cost of 2!

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Agian it has come to this extreme but she does play a whole family of characters, mothers, aunts, children, ect. She thought a real good charaacter concept was having every character you ever play be related to or be an alternate dimension clone of another character. Whcih won much praise for in genios roleplay from the dm. Oh yea this "family" also rules, in one way or another every major kingdom in the reagion we campaign and then some.

This would not have been so bad if he applied these rules to eveyone, but he did not. Any other player had only a 1% chance of being a god's child, but 4 out of the 6 characters that I know she played were demi-gods RCC

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Again this is exterem in conparision to my problem, but the same principle applys, no matter what we do our pc's never have any lasting impact on the gaming world, but hers rule it.

We had a party of seven. I was playing a single classed bard (acutally the gypsy bard kit - one of the few 2e classes he would allow), but never seems to caught up with her in experience in the six game sessions I played with them. I found out later that the two would roleplay (and she would get experience) while the two were alone together. I can see it now, "I will give you 2000 experience for a BJ."

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They also play a lot when we're not there, not sure if he gives her xp, but he does have her listen to all his plot ideas for constructive crititsisum. The main problem there being she would know the differance between player knowledge and charater knowledge if it took a plop on her head.

Ahhhh, so many bad stories.

On one occasion, the DM ran an "across the continent" quest for 1st level characters. He mapped out EVERY SINGLE DAY, whether there were any encounters. The only roleplaying was amongst the PCs, as we rarely interacted with NPCs. So non-encounter days were just boring. Each "day" sometimes took an hour to go through.

Now most DMs will just gloss over that sort of detail after awhile. "We make camp, the usual way," is usually sufficient to answer the questions of what the characters are doing during boring intervals. His method involved hours of meticulous, "and then what?"

Most annoying of all, it rained every single day. I am not kidding. The first 41 days of the campaign it rained. A lot. Constantly. All kinds of rain. It was like that scene in Forest Gump.

And eventually, my Cleric made 3rd level and memorized Call Lightning and it never stormed again. It was worth it to waste a spell slot to stop the rain.

Greg

I played in a Birthright game a few years ago. The DM was a clsoe friend of mine, or so I thought. We were all supposed to be human, one character was a half-elf. No one was to be of evil alignment, one character was. Everyone started off by somehow losing all wealth; within a few turns several characters had found a huge treasue trove, and the only challenge they faced was a rat.

Ok, the characters listed above then started get more attention and role-playing time from the DM, and consequently they got a lot more XP. It was so bad, that I would get to the DMs house and sit there for 2 hours or more just waiting for them to come out.

When conflict finally broke out and my character was killed the character that did it was three levels higher than mine just from the role-playing XP. Also, the thing that initiated the fight was a PC getting injured nearly to death by an NPC action, and a Paladin PC (who associated with the above PCs) stabbing the unconscious royal PC in the heart, commiting Bloodtheft.

Now, get this, after all the fighting was over and several PC characters were dead, the Paladin PC was put on trial and found not guilty. Those of us who reacted to the murder and Bloodtheft of a noble friend and died in battle were creamated so no one could cast Raise Dead on us.

I have never been back to that DMs game again, and I refuse to play in any game that she even plays in.

Sometimes I'm glad I GM and seldom get a chance to play.

I've only had one "bad" GM ... but mostly he just didn't have any time to prep (0, at all) and played the game about 2/3 2nd Ed. Eventually he bowed out as GM and somebody else stepped up. It wasn't great, but I had some fun.

I had some crap sessions back in high school that I ran. Hrmmm. Lemmie think of a good stinker.

I had one game where my players all wanted to use the 2nd ed Player's Options books and whatnot, and one guy who was utterly obsessed with using theoretical OOC knowledge IC. I.E. he found the recipie for gunpowder in a book and decided that his character would suddenly make it because it was POSSIBLE to make gunpowder. And put it into clay pots to light and throw as grenades. Y'know, juvenile crap. After THAT conversation started a huge outbreak of: "Dude, I want to make gunpowder, lets kill these merchants and steal all their stuff so we can make more to kill the badguys." So, eventually, after they tried to burn the city down and I was tired I rebooted everything with the good ole': "So you wake up strapped to a table in the lab of the mad illusionist you had been hunting for weeks ..." bit.

And things actually improved from there, after the boos died down.

--fje

"You enter the tower through a doorway at the base of the castle wall. The stones have cracked with age and weather, and the floor of the tower is covered with loose leaves and other windborne debris. Have the player with the highest intelligence make a perception test... Oh, wait... Um, I mean what do you do?"

Then, not five minutes later:

"The top floor of the tower is dimly lit by holes in the dilapidated ceiling. Motes of dust dance in the sunbeams that stab downward to the dirty floor. The air is hot and carries with it an odd musty scent of decay. There is a 50% chance that the tower Gargoyle is inside the room hiding from the brightness of the sun. Its treasure is hidden... oh, no never mind that part. Okay so what do you do now?" (rolls dice)

I can't say that he did this through the entire adventure, because I couldn't make myself sit at the table for that long. After waiting a couple of times at each new doorway for him to read the next room (presumably so that he wouldn't keep reading to us the DM's portion of the descriptions) I suddenly "remembered" that my wife needed something from a pharmacy... on the other side of town.

Players complain about “railroading” all the time, but my WDME (Worst DM Ever) nomination goes to this girl I knew in college. She was a great person, and a great player… Just a lousy DM.

Why? Because all of her adventures were way too painfully “open-ended.” They weren’t even adventures, really. More like sessions of “what-does-your-character-do-now?” In other words, she ran the game more like a simulation than anything resembling an adventure. Her first adventure “ended” when all the characters became farmers and the players left the game out of boredom. We let her know that “open-endedness” is good up to a point, but gamers also expect some kind of overall plot to engage in.

She was given another chance to DM a week later. After 30 minutes of more what-does-your-character-do, every player suddenly remembered a more pressing engagement elsewhere.

Pielorinho said:

My worst DM story is from a LARP.

This was back when LARPs were really rare, when there were no official rules for them, when they were all one-shots, when whoever ran the LARP basically pulled rules for them out of their butt.

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So it was a bunch of guys dressed in bad Ren gear running around looking like morons only more so?

Well, compared to a lot of these stories this one is pretty minor, but it will be told anyway...

I'm not sure if this was more a 'bad GM' story, or a 'merely mediocre GM trying to run an appalling prewritten adventure' story.

It was at a con a few years back, and we were trying out a Living Death module. We'd told the GM that it was our first time gaming in the campaign (or the RPGA for that matter), but we still have to solve an obscure wordplay puzzle requiring the players be campaign afficionadoes to even get the mission briefing.

After that, well, it all fell apart a bit. The GM thought that the 'take 20' rule allowed you to roll your skill check as normal and then add 20 to the result, but when I gently suggested he might want to check the rulebook on that he threatened to expel me from the game for 'troublemaking'. So I shrugged, and needless to say the PCs took 20 a LOT for the rest of the ill-starred game.

Anyway, we asked all the really obvious questions about the mysterious murder, and then decided (there were a considerable number of other clues written into the module, but you needed spells and skill modifiers about 4 levels higher than ours to find them) on that something fishy was going on in the cemetary. How right we were. Our four 1st-level characters run into six revolver-armed cultists (I think they were 3rd-level commoners, or something similar), an imp, and a 9th-level cleric/voodoo priestess with her buff spells already cast. The imp has DR, and the cleric has a protection from arrows/bullets going, so there's pretty much no way we can hurt them (no dispel magic, no magic weapon, no see invisibility...) We mostly die (I know my poor British sailor-boy did), though one PC managed to run away. While packing up our dice and shaking our heads in disgusted bemusement, we ask the GM what we did wrong. He said that we should of used a number of spells (that were unavailable to us) in the investigation, but there was pretty much no way to finish the module successfully without winning that (vastly lopsided) combat. This didn't seem to bother him a hell of a lot, or in fact at all.

Blech. I had a couple of passably enjoyable Living Greyhawk games later on in the con, but that one pretty much soured me on the RPGA for good...