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Message: <blockquote data-quote="irdeggman" data-source="post: 2331238" data-attributes="member: 16285">A couple of examples (both were and are friends of mine).First one:Runs a game like he wanted to be in the party himself. What I mean the NPCs outnumbered the PCs in the party and they were, or course, much better equipped and statted up.Same person also likes to use the analogy ”They could do it in the computer game and the books had him do this or that.”Same person is not a really good role-player, plays his PCs as min-max munchkins that aspire to be gods (every time).Second one:First off this GM is a tremendous role-player and it is almost always a joy to game in the same party as his PC.Doesn’t understand the rules.  Instead of looking things up (either at the table, (worst thing to do) or when putting together the adventure). He goes by memories of “years of experience as a player and GM in 2nd ed” and thus makes things up at the moment that don’t fit into any sort of consistency.Doesn’t know how to tell a story. His games are almost always 99.99% random encounters that he rolls up at the table. “Take a 45 minute break while I put together the stats for this encounter you are going to have, but don’t know yet.”Makes the game his house-ruled setting (which is absolutely fine and this behavior should be reinforced IMO). But he doesn’t think things out when he puts them together. For example elves have susceptibility to cold iron (3.0 before the material type of 3.5) and take an extra point of damage when hit by weapons made of iron and iron alloys. Well he didn’t give them any benefits to balance out this restriction. So all of sudden elves can’t use most metal weapons (mithral is allowed), wear most armors or even eat out of most cookware without taking some kind of damage.  Can’t even use metal arrow heads.Has no concept of what balance means. IMO balance is what keeps one player from thinking he is getting shafted while another is getting huge benefits simply due to the character they are playing.One PC started with a herd of trained horses (didn’t need any ranks in handle animal), got to wear her armor all of the time (even sleeping) and really had no down size to this. The horses did most of the fighting when we had encounters and she got to tell them what to do in pretty specific detail.Another PC came from same region only more educated. The DM placed a lot of background and history in this region, even though the adventuring party was set in another distant region. This PC got to start with better than average equipment (katanas that were house ruled to be even better than the one in the DMG).PCs from other regions pretty much got squat with no history of their area to base any sort of character development on.Poor application of existing rules. For example in order to craft a wand the character had to start with a masterwork quality wand. When asked what this meant and how one would make it the answer was all magic items need to have a masterwork base component its in the rules (no it isn’t only weapons and armors have this requirement).  In order to make a masterwork quality wand a character could use whatever skill worked (again what does this mean?).  The description of the cost of crafting a magic wand includes the gp for spells. He read this as referring to the cost of the wand itself. Again when pointed out what happens when the wand’s charges are used up? Per the rules it turns into a useless stick, well masterwork items don’t deteriorate like that they are supposed to be sturdier.  Also what qualities are placed into the generic masterwork wand that makes it masterwork? Weapons get a +1 to hit, armors get their armor check penalty lessoned by 1 and tools get a circumstance bonus to their function.  What does a stick get?Reminiscing on how the campaign he ran with another DM was so enjoyable that people just had a great time with it. Turned out they a great time despite his method of running the game, the other DM was a tremendous one who basically carried the load (per some of the players who actually played in the game).</blockquote>

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