What is a bad DM?
I have seen some great bad DMs and good ones. Sadly, I saw one DM who was good go bad. Here are some of the things that eventually caused me to leave a gaming group that I was involved with for some 21 years. (An old friendship that were waning came to an end, because I disagreed publicly with the DM. It was a case of "my way or the highway", so I told him I was leaving as I was no longer enjoying his games.) A game that I once considered fun became, to my mind, a parody of itself.
The favored NPC/ex-PC
It is one thing to have an NPC as an ally or a source of information. However, an NPC became more important to the party's plans than several of the player characters. The NPC was far better equipped, and was well-nigh invulnerable. The NPC also was repeatedly revamped to take advantage of different rules supplements. Tne NPC is naturally a few levels higher than the rest of the party.
The Uber-NPC from Nowhere
Imagine that you have legitimately worked a wizard character up to high level, and that your character is considered to be one of the most knowledgeable persons in the world. Suddenly, out of nowhere comes the former pupil of a defeated enemy, who is far more powerful than your character and more knowledgeable. Add some super-cool unique magic items, some cohorts that are at least on level with the party, and find out that your character is superfluous in some area. A variant on this was a character who had amazing speed, supremely high initiatives, and was an NPC who showed none of these abilities when first introduced years earlier. Often the NPCs drove the plot, and the PCs were along for the ride. Towards the end, the role of the PCs seemed to be to support the NPC in a common cause. Naturally, it was the NPC who was crucial for the party's victory.
A variant included the all powerful NPC group, which some of the PCs aligned with. From one of my last discussions with the DM, he had expected every player to join the group.
Railroading
Something big happens offstage, and your characters are blamed for not stopping it. Never mind that the DM only let you know of the big event after it happened --- even if some members of the party would have been paying attention to some of the parties involved inthe big event. Alternately, you fail because you failed to spot the bug on the tree. The DM ensures that if you go off track, that either nothing happens of interest to the characters or that something bad happens. If your character does NOT want to be king, naturally everyone in a position of power in your country is incompetent. But not in the next country over where another PC or a favored NPC is pulling the strings.
Lack of consistent rules and balance
One problem that the DM in my former group had was failure to consider campaign balance and the impact of introducing supplements. Quite literally, towards the end of my involvement in an ongoing campaign, the DM allowed players to bring ANY D20 supplement to the table to modify and enhance characters. The power gap between characters of similar levels was often eneormous... due to PrCs, equipment, and rules variants. Worse, the DM had some of the newer players only allowed characters that were several levels below those of many of the existing characters. So, I quite literally saw someone in an epic level game trying to play a 22nd level monk in a party where some of the other characters were in the low to mid-30s. (In my case, I ran a wizard on par with a Mordenkainen or Elminster. The character was underpowered in comparison to other characters of similar levels. Indeed, the equipment of some characters made a bigger impact than some of the other characters. I also felt that some players were favored over others. ) The end result was that I felt my character was unimportant in that stage of the campaign, and that a game that I also considered my own was no longer mine. I honestly thought it had become a weird video game world where my characters on all levels -- as well as my opinions -- no longer mattered inthe wake of favored players and over-powered PCs and NPCs.
Lack of appreciation
I had gone from being called a co-DM, for my work on countries, culture, language, maps, and history, to being called a creative consultant. Instead of the DM saying that the world was our world, it was his world. So, I left him to it.
Manipulation
It is one thing for a player to plot against another player. One player, the DM's cousin, took an action against my character that seemed puzzling and resulted in a loss of face for my PC. Although I was able to force a resolution of this conflict to a more neutral status, the action seemed completely inconsistent for the player. A few months later I chatted with another player who left, who believed that the DM pressured his cousin as he would not normally try to humiliate another character.
Lack of campaign integrity
As anything was allowed at the end, we had such headaches as Bane worshippers from Toril sneaking into the world. This was a homebrew setting, and Bane was not part of the cosmology. Similarly, there was a sense of the campaign setting becoming less distinct over time.
Recycled plots
It is one thing to have a sequel, it is another to fit almost the same opponent with a slightly different name. Or to have a NPC revived just so the players can kill the same opponent.
Altering the timelines
Not just altering the timeline, but rewriting events so that some PCs and NPCs look better. Contradicting the DM was frowned upon.
So, I left and I am happier for it. Towards the end, I was only showing up out of loyalty to someone I thought was a friend. I have promised that when I start a campaign of my own not to make the same mistakes.
, but it's difficult to give the game a serious tone when the party is building a lab so they can make Erky "booties of striding and springing." Oh and for the record, I didn't have any gnome phobias prior to that game.
