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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6949086" data-attributes="member: 996">Yep, no D&D rules can be good enough to overcome the Dreaded Bad DM.  Of course, there's that line between the incompetent and malicious senses of 'bad.'   A DM who merely lacks skill can be greatly aided by a better system.  But the willfully BAD DM, well, no system can protect you from him.  At best, a better system will make it more evident what's going on.  The clearer & simpler, the more robust, consistent & intuitive the system, the harder it will be to use it as camouflage.  Unfair rulings, miss-applied rules, and the like will more likely stand out.Take the horror story, above.  Hiding is one of the more confused 5e sub-systems, and 'surprise rounds' are a feature of past editions.  It's not odd for a DM to rule without regard to a clunky sub-system to move the game along - good DMs will do that, for good reasons.  It's not odd for a whole table to follow an out of date rule they all happened to be accustomed to.  It might have swiftly become clear enough to the victim what was going on, but he couldn't salvage the situation - bailing was the right thing to do.As tired as I got of rule debates in 3e, a Bad DM probably wouldn't have gotten away with something quite that blatant, quite that easily.  He might have been argued into relenting, or lost more players as a consequence, for instance.  Or not, depending on relative system knowledge around the table.  The zeitgeist of the day just fostered less trust of the DM and more in the RAW, I suppose.  Now, a Bad Player in the 3.x era....... the solution to the Bad DM Problem is obvious, though:  run.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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