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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 4860267" data-attributes="member: 14159">My "GM not playing by the rules" horror story:The campaign was a New World of Darkness campaign.I'd never played in (New) WoD, just the Old one, so I was looking forward to trying out the system, especially since I actually had the books for once.  Heck, I got one of the first copies of Mage: The Awakening at the Gen Con release in '05.Unfortunately, the GM (Storyteller, whatever) didn't know anything about rules differences (or setting differences) between the two editions/versions and had only loosely read both editions and figured they were much the same.  Top that off with a "GM is God, thou shalt not question him/her" attitude and it's trouble in the making (since the PCs were expecting a fairly standard, by-the-book NWoD game).Combat with NPCs typically went with us going through our normal rolls to attack and such, and then she'd just arbitrarily narrate what happened, then look at us, roll a couple of dice and just randomly hand out damage or debilitating injuries.  Her NPCs never, ever failed at any task they really wanted to do, their magic/powers never botched (but PC's did all the time), and difficulties for using skills were so random that there was no point.My PC was a (starting out) normal mortal, his backstory was that he was a US Navy Fleet Marine Force Hospital Corpsman, fresh home from Iraq and wanting to use his GI Bill benefits to go to college and the seminary.  He had loads of Academics (Religion) and Medicine skills, but even doing trivial tasks had ridiculous .  Set a broken bone?  4 Successes, Difficulty 8.  Doing difficult things was nigh-impossible, stabilizing somebody who is dying slowly of a gunshot wound to the abdomen?  6 Successes, Difficulty 9.  Simply put, if she wanted you to fail, she'd set the difficulty absurdly high (and on the off chance you succeed, something comes along later and undoes it: stabilize the dying guy and he takes a random hit from a stray round in the next fight that finishes him off, for example), and if she wanted you to succeed she'd probably just tell you not to roll and you succeeded.In retrospect, the best we could figure, she was just doing some diceless roleplaying using character stats as guidelines and narrating things while using dice to create the illusion of randomness.It was clear after the first few sessions she didn't know the rules, and really didn't want to know the rules (she snapped at somebody fierce when they tried to politely tell her how combat really worked, saying that she will not stand to have rules thrown in her face at her own game).  The game had a busload of other problems too (heck, I had two ENWorld threads about those roughly 3 years ago, simply put the plot of the campaign was a bad cross between a Laurell K Hamilton novel and the Saw and Cube movie series).</blockquote>

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