I'm starting this thread because I feel like I could relate with people with blasphemous DM stories.
Unfortunately these "Stories" must be true. I've gone through a number of them, and so have you! I encourage you to share a story about a terrible DM you've had running the table.
My first bad experience with DnD did revolve around the DM. Now most of the time the success of a game hinders on how good a DM is. This game was bad. I went on Craigslist (first red flag) and found a posting for a Pathfinder game about a 40 minute drive away. I'm like: "Sure, I'll bite". I talk to the DM online and she seems okay, so I make a 1st level paladin and the whole game then turns to shame:
"Sure, I'll bite?" Kinda seems like you were expecting not to enjoy it. Any chance there was a little bit of self-fulfilling prophesy going on there?
1) I get there and there's this stench filling the house. Apparently, the DM is a manager of some sort of food warehouse and you can taste the frozen snacks just by breathing the odour in through your nostrils. I took a bite from one of these so called 'snacks' and politely refused any more of them.
Not sure what you mean by "frozen snacks." But the DM invited you into her home and offered you snacks. That's nice.
2) The DM helps her friend build a character. Now, she claims to have been DMing for "awhile" so, I assume she knows how to help her friend in making a Ranger. At the end of it, her Ranger had below average scores with a Dexterity of 13 even though she wants to specialise in archery. Great. Now I have a +5 to hit... our Ranger has a +2. Like really? Couldn't you have given her a free score of 15 or something and let her drop one of her 11's?
Maybe the DM or her friend prioritized other aspects of a character? Other than just combat optimization, I mean. Not everyone plays for the same reasons.
3) We sit down and start playing through the module. It seems okay. There are only 3 players, which is fine because I assume the DM is going to scale back the encounters... WRONG. After leaving the starting village, we are ransacked by random encounters, one after another. We come across constant CR3-CR4 Encounters (Which is like a boss fight for a Lv 1 party with 3 party members) even when we're trying to rest. We didn't have access to healing items in town, nor did we have a chance at finding any in the wilderness. I think we almost got TPK'd to a Grey Ooze, sitting in the middle of the road in the dead of winter.
Not necessarily a problem, unless the DM makes it difficult for you to retreat.
4) During these unbalanced battles, the DM completely screwed up the movement rules. She didn't understand the premise behind the Pythagorean theorem, something you learn in grade school, and enemies that could move 50feet, could now move diagonally 75 feet. When we met 3 Wolves in a huge field with little cover, sure it helped that my 20foot move speed paladin could now move 30 feet (due to ignoring diagonal squares), but that was no match for the movement of the wolves and every enemy we came across that had higher movement speed than the party.
Assuming Pathfinder uses the same unnecessarily complex movement rules that 3.X used (I don't know, because I skipped Pathfinder), I can understand why she would certainly want to ignore them. When I was DMing 3.X, I
always had players who would get tripped up by them. It was definitely a barrier to their enjoyment (not the only one!). 4e did it better, allowing diagonal movement at no extra cost, but not allowing it at all when turning corners. With 4e's emphasis on providing breaks in the battlefield, this tended to balance out the extra movement.
Better still, for me, was theater of the mind. So much so, that I even used it for 4e combats during the last couple if years (which, despite what the skeptics may say, is entirely possible). Of course, if the DM hasn't actually had much non-Pathfinder experience, she may never have been introduced to these concepts. If you were still in contact with her you could perhaps help her out there.
At the end of the second session, we were basically almost TPK'd by fairies, but she made the enemies retreat or something. Our underpowered party got nowhere, and we got nowhere fast. With combat after combat slowing the game down... It wasn't an experience for me, it was an ordeal. I promptly got home, thought about the meaning of life, and deleted the email conversation with the DM. Good riddance!
Generally, when a party is facing overwhelming odds, the best option is to withdraw and formulate a plan to tilt the odds in their favor. Was this not possible?
Regardless, I suppose it is for the best that things worked out for you (although, did they? You still seem bothered by it). Not everyone is a good fit for everyone's play-style. Still, it might be a good idea to keep in mind that all good DMs were once bad DMs. The craft must be learned through practice.
When I think of the many mistakes I have made in the course of learning to be a good DM, these seem, at worst, trivially annoying. But I'm probably not looking for the same things in a game as you are.
