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D&D 5E Has anyone ever been part of a group that has booted the DM?
- Thread starter David Norris-King
- Start date
machineelf
Explorer
I wasn't booted when I started as a DM years ago, but I probably should have been. I was so bad. 
GameOgre
Adventurer
When I was first starting out DMing I was real rough. Heck I have made just about every mistake a DM can make over the years and more than once has this gotten me into hot water with a group of players.
SEVERAL times I was either convinced to let someone else give it a shot or just flat out had most of the group not show up. For the most part I think those cases were fairly deserved and in a few cases maybe not but each time I learned a lot. One of the few things I got right early on was just admitting when something was my fault and learning to move on.
Even now after 40 years of DMing I sometimes but off more than I can chew and have entire games ruined. Recently on roll20 I tried to run a game of Spelljammer and did a pretty horrific job. After a short time I managed to put us all out of our misery but even that one some of those players just walked away unhappy.
As a DM you need to sometimes push the comfort zone of what you run and sometimes it just isn't going to work out. When that happens recognizing it and ending it as painlessly as possible is key.
SEVERAL times I was either convinced to let someone else give it a shot or just flat out had most of the group not show up. For the most part I think those cases were fairly deserved and in a few cases maybe not but each time I learned a lot. One of the few things I got right early on was just admitting when something was my fault and learning to move on.
Even now after 40 years of DMing I sometimes but off more than I can chew and have entire games ruined. Recently on roll20 I tried to run a game of Spelljammer and did a pretty horrific job. After a short time I managed to put us all out of our misery but even that one some of those players just walked away unhappy.
As a DM you need to sometimes push the comfort zone of what you run and sometimes it just isn't going to work out. When that happens recognizing it and ending it as painlessly as possible is key.
tardigrade
Explorer
Anyone in this thread self-aware enough to recognise that they might have been the problem is going to get an automatic +1 from me . I am constantly conscious I could do better but thankfully my players still put up with me, and in return I keep trying to get better 
Although the group I'm part of did experience this once (I actually know I wasn't at fault for this one because it all concluded six months before I joined them), primarily for railroading.
Although the group I'm part of did experience this once (I actually know I wasn't at fault for this one because it all concluded six months before I joined them), primarily for railroading.
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Eltab
Lord of the Hidden Layer
I took over for a DM that was graduating college and moving out of town.
A few months later, I flaked out on my group (prep work to take a second job) and handed over DM'ing to somebody else, showed up as a player.
Shortly after that, my primary employer changed my hours and I disappeared from the group entirely. For two years.
I just got to play again this month, and found that only one of my old group is still there. HE'S the DM now. I'm going to stay a player for a while, until we finish Yawning Portal and have to decide what else to do.
The good news is, I didn't take anybody else out of D&D with me. (I think.)
A few months later, I flaked out on my group (prep work to take a second job) and handed over DM'ing to somebody else, showed up as a player.
Shortly after that, my primary employer changed my hours and I disappeared from the group entirely. For two years.
I just got to play again this month, and found that only one of my old group is still there. HE'S the DM now. I'm going to stay a player for a while, until we finish Yawning Portal and have to decide what else to do.
The good news is, I didn't take anybody else out of D&D with me. (I think.)
David Norris-King
First Post
It's nice to find a topic where there aren't that many horror stories. Pretty certain I was an awful GM at the start myself, of course.
Teraptus
Explorer
Not so much booted, but we all ended up quitting the campaign. If we didn't follow his story he would get upset and make us "pay" somehow in the game, or he would just end the night early because he wouldn't prep anything that didn't involve his story. Complete Linear. He would later tell us after each session that we "missed" so much loot and xp, because we didn't follow his story.
I've also ended a campaign of mine, due to a bad group. It started out well, but one was on drugs, other on their phone 24/7, one didn't pay attention at all and the other kept thinking we were playing Pathfinder ruleset. Got so fed up I said..campaign is over.
I've also ended a campaign of mine, due to a bad group. It started out well, but one was on drugs, other on their phone 24/7, one didn't pay attention at all and the other kept thinking we were playing Pathfinder ruleset. Got so fed up I said..campaign is over.
Hussar
Legend
I wasn't booted when I started as a DM years ago, but I probably should have been. I was so bad.
Yeah, can totally agree with that. It probably would have helped me immensely if the players had just up and told me my game sucked and walked. Would have forced me to get better rather than the slow, painful crawl through the suckitude I did for years.
OTOH, I have seen two player revolts.
First one was after the DM, after two or three full sessions of planning, stopped our group dead cold ten minutes into the attempt of what we were planning to do. The group, on the spot, quit. Wasn't the first problem, but, it was definitely the last.
Had another group where I complained to the DM, "You think your NPC's are more important to the game than the players" to which he replied, "Of course they are." Yeah, that group fell apart shortly afterward.
iamntbatman
First Post
Sure. The first group I joined had a pretty decent variety of player types and a DM who was supposedly very experienced and a longtime D&D dork. Things seemed dandy at first, but what I chalked up to being issues between the players not really being experienced enough to dive into the roleplaying aspect eventually came to light as being more symptomatic of the DM. He ran straight up 5e adventures without much tweaking at all, which would be fine except for how much he railroaded us into following the adventures as written and didn't like us going off the rails, blatantly punishing attempts to do anything other than what he expected us to do. Irritating considering how he always bugged us about how much work he put into things and how lazy we were being as players by not bringing more to the between-session RP stuff he wanted us to do. Beyond that, he was real gaslighty - he'd go real hard into why we wouldn't be capable of playing certain character types, or when I was supposed to take over for a one-shot he was meant to play in, he kept going into detail about how I should just run a premade one-shot adventure for low level characters rather than attempt anything creative because it'd be too much for me to handle. He also really liked to talk trash about other players behind their backs (I got lots of Facebook messages about how much he didn't like some of the other people). We had one really unsatisfying session that left a lot of us with a sour taste in our mouths, then we didn't play again for about six weeks. The final session we had actually went pretty well, but when we weren't doing the between session forum based RP stuff to the DM's liking (following game day) he suddenly blew up, said we were being lazy and called the campaign finished. To top it off, he sent a group message to several of the players, excluding several others he had repeatedly complained about, and made it clear he was aiming to continue but without them, using the drama of the ended campaign as a cover to kick them from the group without actually confronting them about it.
All around, very immature handling of things outside of the game, and the sessions were becoming increasingly dull and railroaded into the prewritten adventures, so the whole group of us players got together and decided that we'd just run our own game and rotate DM's. One guy did the intro session, the most experienced guy ran a bunch of sessions to introduce us to the world, and now I've taken over the chair as the group continues to open all sorts of cans of worms in our homebrewed world. We're all a million times happier in our current campaign than we were with the previous DM.
All around, very immature handling of things outside of the game, and the sessions were becoming increasingly dull and railroaded into the prewritten adventures, so the whole group of us players got together and decided that we'd just run our own game and rotate DM's. One guy did the intro session, the most experienced guy ran a bunch of sessions to introduce us to the world, and now I've taken over the chair as the group continues to open all sorts of cans of worms in our homebrewed world. We're all a million times happier in our current campaign than we were with the previous DM.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
As DM I've been booted once, though it was kind of by mutual consent.
My game had been staggering along from one disaster to another for some time. I'd had my fill of it, as had the players, but they didn't know I felt this way nor did I realize they felt this way; and so we all just kept going through the motions.
A new guy with some DMing experience quasi-joined the group as an observer. Before too long I was quietly making plans with him to transfer the PCs into his world during the run of play, where he would just take over. Meanwhile the players were quietly making plans to have him take over in some sort of coup, of which I never did find out the details.
End result: the DM-to-DM transfer happened before the player coup did, and I wound up as a player in that game. Problem was, this new DM played favourites. Female players did just fine, male players didn't, and of the four male players he inherited (me being one) three (me being one) were out within a few months while the fourth soldiered on till the end; the two inherited female players went on to great things in that game.
Lan-"the best laid plan of mouse and of man comes completely undone"-efan
My game had been staggering along from one disaster to another for some time. I'd had my fill of it, as had the players, but they didn't know I felt this way nor did I realize they felt this way; and so we all just kept going through the motions.
A new guy with some DMing experience quasi-joined the group as an observer. Before too long I was quietly making plans with him to transfer the PCs into his world during the run of play, where he would just take over. Meanwhile the players were quietly making plans to have him take over in some sort of coup, of which I never did find out the details.
End result: the DM-to-DM transfer happened before the player coup did, and I wound up as a player in that game. Problem was, this new DM played favourites. Female players did just fine, male players didn't, and of the four male players he inherited (me being one) three (me being one) were out within a few months while the fourth soldiered on till the end; the two inherited female players went on to great things in that game.
Lan-"the best laid plan of mouse and of man comes completely undone"-efan
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