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Message: <blockquote data-quote="feycreature" data-source="post: 7335201" data-attributes="member: 6935219">I have been playing my first D&D 5e campaign weekly with the same group and DM for the last 5 months. I found him/them on the LFG subreddit looking for a 5e game and he responded. When we first met in a coffee shop and talked about the game, I quickly got the impression that something wasn't quite right. He had said he had DM'd before, but I later learned it was for FATE Core, not 5e, and I think it was only once. He also said he had trouble keeping his group together because of player disinterest. I was also initially a little surprised when he said he didn't have a copy of the PHB or DMG. He said it was because "they change the rules so much it's pointless to buy anything", but I also got the impression that he was just completely broke and couldn't afford them.Once we started playing, it was clear this guy hadn't read much of the PHB at all, and I learned later that he outright refuses to read the DMG (saying it just has stuff about the planes, how useless), and even scoffs at the idea that anyone would run one of the WotC published campaigns. He used some D&D wiki when helping create some of players' characters, but he didn't even realize the content wasn't even for 5e (or wasn't even standard for any edition, probably). One of our players just killed off his character after playing him for 5 months and re-rolled a new one because it was so screwed up.For about the first 3 months, we practically never rolled dice and very rarely fought things. Want to do something? "Yes, you do that" or "no, you can't". One NPC we fought, a boss-type of character, was literally invulnerable -- we'd whack him and he'd just take it with no damage, not speaking or anything. Other fights we've been in were so ridiculously stacked against us, we'd spend 2 or more hours fighting a fight that we knew we were going to lose, or we'd aggro some characters that had AC so high we couldn't hit them at level 2 or so, but if we ran away they would just reset like some kind of MMORPG AI. One NPC he designed to ambush and kidnap us with special abilities that made him seem like god, but with faerie fire, magic missile, and 5 PCs chasing after him, even his god-mode NPC went down relatively easily (I think he just had no idea how to design combat).He designed an island as a sandbox kind of environment with maybe like 5 or so locations in it that we can all get to in about a day's travel or less. The island is mostly desolate, so there's not even a lot going on. The one town is tiny with a store and no plot elements there. We occasionally fight random encounters that he comes up with, but they are frankly just a waste of time -- they die in one round or two at the most. We've had maybe like 1 or 2 challenging fights in 5 months.There're a few quests that we are ostensibly doing, but he doesn't use simple things like "okay, here's a plot hook that leads you somewhere".  There're no tables he rolls on, he doesn't use CR to figure out encounter difficulty, his NPCs are extremely unhelpful, our group has no real reason to be together, and the lore of his world (future apocalypse) doesn't make much sense with high fantasy characters who are half-orc, aasimar, high elf, and forest gnomes. We seem totally out of place but no NPC seems to notice.I recently introduced him to Critical Role and I think that is honestly the first D&D game besides ours he's ever seen. He even remarked afterwards that he felt insecure about his own campaign after watching it after seeing how different our game is from theirs. I don't think he realizes just how bad he is, and he seems resistant to 5e resources intended to help people like him get better. I've been carrying the group in terms of encouraging we roll using our skills for things, or using a rule from the PHB when it would apply, and he just sits back and lets us do all the rules lawyering, waiting for us to tell him how to run the game. I normally wouldn't care but his world is just so poorly designed that I feel like he's been a failure.I have brought some of these issues up to him, very politely and diplomatically, but I don't think my comments have had any impact. I still get the impression he literally hasn't read any of the DMG and he defers to me for everything about the PHB. I gave him full access (via content-sharing) to everything on D&D Beyond, but he doesn't ever use it. I am losing my patience with this guy.Sorry for the long treatise about my DM issues. I feel like this might be common enough that some of you more experienced players would have some sage advice for me? Thanks in advance!</blockquote>

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