Horrid DM's

[MechaPilot]

I'm starting this thread because I feel like I could relate with people with blasphemous DM stories.

I have no issue with DM's not getting all Pythagorean on diagonal movement. The stink part is bad, but if you really want to see what a horrid DM experience is, let me quote myself and tell you the story of how I almost quit D&D.

Years ago I had an experience that almost caused be to quit playing D&D. My DM relocated, so I had to find a new group to game with. I found a group, but I didn't really know anyone there. During the game, the party bit off more than it could chew, and we were captured. I was the only female player, and I played the only female character in the group. The DM proceeded to have our captors rape my character. He even pushed me to roleplay the scene, describing what the rapist was doing to my character and asking me what my character was doing.

I was horrified to the point of silence.

When I looked around the table for support, the other players just stared at me and watched as my face turned pale, glancing back to the DM as he described the "action." Once I realized that yes, this was actually happening and they expected me to be a part of it, I grabbed my stuff and left as quickly as I could.

It was humiliating, terrifying, and degrading (I could only assume they were imagining me going through what was being done to my character). In retrospect, I think I was very fortunate that I didn't suffer a real life assault that night. However, as fortunate as I may have been that night, it was also a very scarring experience that informs my decisions about playing with strangers to this day. That's how I almost quit D&D for good. . .

 

[der_kluge]

The worst for me was probably a really, really railroady GM who happened to have a Doctorate in Psychology. He could literally manipulate us into going exactly where he wanted us to go, and doing exactly what he wanted us to do. Once we finally clued in on this, it seemed we were completely unable to foil his plans. Me and another player deliberately tried to derail his game - even in small ways, in vain. It was actually a really good campaign, overall, and he was a good GM - but the forced nature of his story REALLY frustrated us after a while.

 

[Jhaelen]

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.

Yup. this was the first thing we house-ruled when we started playing Pathfinder. Next came the healing rules. I guess, we're all spoiled by 4e.

More alarmingly, I don't think our DM understands encounter math - or at least he doesn't care for it. So far, we've been lucky, but I'm sure eventually there'll be an ugly 'accidental' character death or even a TPK. Then again we also had some encounters we practically steamrolled - which is likely the reason other encounters got 'buffed'...

Still, I don't consider our DM 'bad', he's just inexperienced and not too interested in the 'boring' details of the rules.

 

[Eltab]

I personally know one Horrid DM - me. (Albeit a lot younger and less experienced.)

One year when I DM'ed for Gamma World at conventions, I created a scenario where the players could finish customizing their characters by adding feats. The main plot was to race down to a riverboat before it could launch with all the stuff the pirates had stolen from the village. I figured that the more turns it took the PCs to get past the guards, the farther out into the river the boat would be.

One player took Cleave and Greater Cleave as his feats. He took exactly one round to defeat the sentinels, and they had no chance to warn their fellow pirates.
I had no idea such a thing might be possible, and had no backup plan. The PCs stormed the boat before it could even leave the dock.

Total Victory for the characters, but the players and I got done about halfway through a four-hour time slot.

 

[Eltab]

...let me quote myself and tell you the story of how I almost quit D&D...

OUCH !

 

[Blue]

I had a DM that had a lot of great points, but one of his defining characteristics is that he knew the story he wanted to tell and the players were there to get to that end. We couldn't change the game world except in the ways he wanted. Also the law of unintended consequences should have been renamed the law of pervasive negative consequences - unintended consequences where never positive, and quite frequently occurred to twist whenever we thought outside the box.

Anyway, one game with this DM met every-other week. The group got information and followed up on it, even though in retrospect it was a red herring. He then spent seven sessions (14 weeks real time) following up the red herring to have it matter not at all in the end.

 

[ccs]

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:

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 tasted nothing but old cheese (not the good kind) and politely refused any more of them.

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? This wouldn't be a problem if this was a a more story-driven adventure... But it wasn't.

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 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. We tried to retreat, but enemies would just catch up on us.

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. I even went as far to draw a triangle on the table and explain why the hypotenuse IS the longest side. 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, which happened to be basically everything.

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.

OK, so the worst thing here is a stinky house & some stale snacks. Now tell us an actual "bad DM/game" story.

 

[S'mon]

Not sure if this is bad DM or bad player thread.

I was expecting some actual horror stories, not "The GM used 4e style movement rules!" "The free snacks were sub par!" "The other PCs were insufficiently optimised!" and "The CRs were too high!"

I'm sure she's not the greatest GM, but this sounds like a pretty typical newbie game. And PLAYERS are supposed to be the ones bringing the snacks, with which to bribe the GM. I suspect this was your fundamental error.

 

[S'mon]

I have no issue with DM's not getting all Pythagorean on diagonal movement. The stink part is bad, but if you really want to see what a horrid DM experience is, let me quote myself and tell you the story of how I almost quit D&D...

Yeah, this is the kind of thing I think of when I hear "GM horror story". Commiserations, Mecha.

 

[jasper]

I've been gaming 35 years, and I'm perfectly happy with diagonals being the same as straights. You'd probably walk out of my game, too.

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HEXES RULES! BOXES are for squares!
Edit to add.
6 inch binder DM (1982). I'm smarted than E.G.G. here are my house rules in 6 inch binder. Back then you had to steal the binder from the army maintenance manual to get that size.
Mages rule other classes drool. At 2nd level the mage took out a bear by himself. By 5th mage had their own keep.
Dungeon and Generals. Wanted us to role play and roll play out huge battles. 100+ men and arms on both sides etc.
It's the Buffy Musical! We recreated the Buffy musical. Would been okay if we had sheet music. But the kid was only 13.
I know there is more but that was long time ago and the booze thankfully killed those memories.