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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mad_Jack" data-source="post: 7311111" data-attributes="member: 6750306">There's only been one game I was in where the DM got "fired", and it basically happened that I was forced to stage a coup for the good of humanity...  We all know one of those toxic people who tries to dominate a social group, always browbeating others into going along with them and what they want, because otherwise they'll make life interminable. So everyone eventually just goes along with them to keep the already-thick drama from increasing. They're leeches who suck the life out the group and destroy everything they touch.In this case, that person happened to be the DM of a group that was just barely out of high school. I absolutely loathe being a role-model for anyone, but it seems to happen with some frequency, so I at least try to take the job seriously as un-asked-for as it is. Many, many moons ago, a very young coworker at one of my jobs had discovered my interest in D&D and, as someone with decades of both gaming and life experience, had latched onto me as a mentor. They were playing in what sounded like a nightmare of a game, and it wasn't long before I got a somewhat desperate-sounding invitation to come to one of the group's gaming sessions.This turned out to be a group of 16-18-yr-olds with no self esteem or self-confidence, and they hadn't yet learned that "inclusivity" doesn't mean you have to let everyone into the group no matter how much of a sociopath they are. So the current DM had waltzed right into it and taken over. He'd insisted that, having learned to play 2nd Ed. from his uncle as a kid, he had the most gaming experience and thus should rightfully be the DM. The original DM didn't have the backbone to stand up for himself. Pretty soon the new kid had become some bizarre enfant terrible, a caricature of that DM, the one that we all tell stories about - it wasn't a gaming group as much as a hostage situation. Even worse than all the outrageous stereotypical Bad DM crap he pulled during the game, he'd also taken over the group's social dynamic: he'd browbeaten the entire group into believing that they couldn't hang out with one of their former friends because he'd been thrown out of the game, and quite literally told the one young lady in the group that she was now his girlfriend and had no choice in the matter if she didn't want to get kicked out of the game and shunned by all of them. Apparently, after almost two years of utter hell, the group inviting me to play with them had been their first ever group decision in defiance of the DM. Usually, my response to finding a bad game would be to just laugh at it and leave, but the situation was bad enough that I felt honor bound as a gamer and a human being to do some social engineering, take the game and the group away from the little monster, and screw their heads back on right.</blockquote>

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