Terrible games you've played in

[Quasqueton]

Way back I tried to join a new group playing AD&D2. I made up a dwarf fighter for the game session, and the DM worked me into the group.

We went down into the underdark to rescue a king's son who had been captured by drow to sacrifice to a demon.

A huge battle raged in a drow cavern/temple, with a couple dozen drow and their goons. It was obvious from the beginning that the DM was making up everything as he went along, hitting us hard when we were doing well, and going light when we got worn down. The drow were throwing 3 dice fireballs, poisons had mysterious bonuses or penalties to our saves that we didn't know, and we had random luck rolls that I could never figure out the mechanic (including "god calls").

We were trying to fight our way to the alter to stop the boy's sacrifice (we could see the ceremony across the cavern), but everytime it looked like we might interrupt the priests' work, more reinforcements would show up between us, or a wall of X would pop up, etc.

This group used no battlemap or minis, so everything was done in the DM's head. He'd let us close some distance, then we'd get interrupted. When the interruption was overcome, we were surprisingly far away from our goal again.

When my character finally made it to the alter, the boy was gone and only the portal to who-knows-where was still there, but fading. Thinking to end my character's life (and my one and only game session with this group) in a grand exit, my character leaped through the portal on the pretense that he was looking for the boy.

The battle in the cavern raged on, and the DM told me the boy was no where to be seen. He hinted that the portal was collapsing. I started looking around the barren landscape for the boy. The DM suggested I needed to go back before the portal collapsed.

"Not before I've rescued that boy," I said.

Eventually I ran the timer out on that portal (read: DM's patience) with my looking around. (And the other PCs were debating whether to follow my character through the portal -- something I don't think the DM wanted or could handle.) My character was stuck in the Abyss or where-ever. The DM offered me a god call. I don't know why I took it. I figured I couldn't possibly make whatever roll was required, but I rolled the d20. Then the DM said roll again, and I did. Then the DM said that my god understood why I had risked abandonment in the Abyss, and he was pleased. My character was magically transported back to the Material Plane. <sigh>

I never went back to that game group.

The other Players seemed quite satisfied with how the DM ran the game. <shrug>

But the most disturbing thing about that game: the DM and his girlfriend would savagely beat their young dog when it got excited or wanted to go outside (interrupting the game). I wish I had said something, or left when I saw that, but I was more meek then, and I was a stranger in a strange land that day.

Quasqueton

 

[Vargo]

I played Synnibar with Raven C.S. McCracken at a 'con once.

That was my second worst RPG experience ever. I actually got up and walked away from the table. I can't even begin to describe just how *HORRID* that experience was. I'm not going to try at all, other than to say that the guy makes you roll for your sexual orientation, and then tells you how your character reacts, instead of letting you role-play your own character.

Um...

First worst was DMing a game over which two players used in-game roleplaying for one to break up with a third player, and start a real-life romance, WHILE THE GUY GETTING DROPPED WAS AT THE <Erik's grandma> TABLE.

Ouch.

Third worst was joining a "gaming guild" - a bunch of people who played at the library, and pooled cash for books. There was a membership fee, which is how the bookpool got started. However, I found out after joining that there was a sort of "core group" of gamers that didn't give a crap about the new joinees, other than how much they could fleece them for...

To wit, when I started playing, my 1st level monk (1st edition) was walking along a road. Suddenly, I had to make a save versus petrification. I made it. I ran and dived into a ditch, hoping to break line of sight with whatever was trying to petrify me. No dice, a second petrification save, and I was turned to stone. The other new guy got turned to stone as well, missed his first save.

We spent the rest of the session sitting, listening to these high-level characters throwing their armies at each other. Demanded full refunds, and walked.

 

[Creamsteak]

That reminds me of the issues I have with "way too nice GMs." Not "generous GMs" but those that pad your way through every encounter. If I run a character, there had better be a chance I get the character's ass kicked around every now and then. And I don't like arbitrary rewards (ancestral items, role-playing experience, recieving divine intervention for knowing the components of my spells...)

 

[Gothmog]

Wow, Gothmog and JesterPoet -- I think even my incredibly stupid junior high games were tons better than those. :\ I've never had a really bad game, only pretty good vs. really good.

To be fair, I've only ever had two bad gaming experiences. The one mentioned above (which I played in once a month), and a travesty high school campaign which was uber high magic and munchkin. I stayed with that one for all of three sessions before ditching. However, those two games were enough for me to have learned a lifetime worth of what doesn't work. I've been lucky since then to have mostly really good to excellent campaigns, and most of the players I have gamed with have been very good as well (of course, I'm picky as hell about who I game with).

 

[Desdichado]

The best bad gaming stories I've ever seen are on rpg.net's General Discussion forum. Do a search for any thread started by ab3...

 

[Remathilis]

Not too long ago, I played in a game set in an ice age. My PC was a fighter/rogue (going for ghostwalker) whose family disappeared mysteriously. He went off to find the killer, who was a necromancer (DM loved the dead). Well, sheer luck allowed us to kill him, and find out my character's son was still alive, but on the other side of this large Ice Plain no one has ever crossed. So, we decided to try. This blew a large hole in the DM's plans, who wanted to keep the storyline around for until we were 17+ level. We were 6th. So he railroaded us and threatened us to not go across the plains, refusing to let us. Eventually, I dropped the PC and played a no-personality cleric instead, but the game didn't last much longer.

 

[Wycen]

Rarely has a game started bad, usually they "warm up" to being bad. I can think of a few like that.

Our first 3E game was a group of 1st and 2nd level characters dungeon crawling and coming to a room with a 'thing' rising out of a tub of goop and firing off a 10d6 lightening bolt at us.

Unfortunately, our solution was to have somebody else DM. That started fine, but made things worse, such as the DM complaining about the three highest level PC's being "too powerful" because we rolled out stats instead of using point buy. So, he counted us as being 1 level higher for challenge ratings.

Then, while we could find no permanent magic items at 4th and 5th level, the orc barbarian could go into the local mages guild and BUY a magic greatsword, that was semi-intelligent and a mage bane, wanting to kill arcane magic users, which the party had 3 members of, (bard, sorcerer, wizard).

Then there were the weekly, "a meteor falls on the party and kills you all" comments. Hah hah. :\

Or the druid getting killed by a bear and being reincarnated as a bear and playing as the bear, making hand gestures and walking around town like everybody was fine, like they knew the bear for years.

But the straw that broke the camels back was finally finding all 3 keys to open the "invulnerable vault" in an ancient keep, only to discover once we opened it, that goblins had tunneled into the dungeon below and left grafitti, getting to the actual treasure room, opening it and finding a hole in the floor and another note scrawled on the wall saying, "Kilrock the dwarf was here".

The 3 of us who were livid at this point kept our cool and ventured to the one room we skipped and ventured in, then decided to leave it alone, which was a good thing since the DM made a point of telling us, "if they mess with the sarcophagus, 22 wraiths stream out of the walls and kill the party".

That was the last time I showed up for that game.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Ab3 makes for great reading.

Where's diaglo, BTW? He's got some good horror stories.

I don't have any "worst game ever" stories, but I can contribute some of the elements that have been in common from some of the bad games I've played in in the past:

- DM PC's, especially those more powerful than the party, and particularly when they're the only ones who seem to be able to solve things.

- DM's who act like rules layers, but obviously haven't spent much time reading the rulebook (DM: "You can't do that! The PHB says [something ridiculous]". Me: "But ... [show page] ... ")

- Plot nazis. "I don't care that the entire party finds this plot hook here extremely interesting; you're supposed to do XYZ ...".

- Random house rules. Mid-session: "XXX works like YYY in my game." Players: "OK." Later: "XXX works like ZZZ in my game." Players: "But you just said???"

- Unpublished house rules. Midsession: "You can't do that, that mechanic doesn't work that way in this game." Me: "How was I supposed to know that? You approved the character concept!" DM: "Well, now you know ..."

- DM's pet players ... the one who gets all the best stuff, and is clearly markedly better than everyone else at the table, and gets "special hosue rules" applied.

- Cheaters. 'Nuff said.

Luckily, I've never had all of these in one group/session at the same time.

 

[Viehl]

I played Synnibar with Raven C.S. McCracken at a 'con once.

...you have my deepest sympathies.


-V

 

[Amaroq]

You know, I've never stayed in a bad campaign long enough to match some of the horror stories posted above... but I had a great "bad RPG experience" at a con one evening.

The game was the "Star Trek RPG", and the game had what sounded like a promise-filled premise: three groups of PC's with three GM's. One group played Federation characters, one group played Klingons, and one group played Romulans. The GM's would play their group until some amount of time had passed, and would then break, confer, and update each other as to anything which has changed in the "world state", then they would return to their group and play another interval of time.

Well... to make a long story short, one of the groups buggered the lift shaft (elevator equivalent) to disable it. My group wandered into that lift, and discovered that not only was it broken, we were trapped inside. "Right, we have the engineer try to break us out." Roll, roll, roll. "Sorry, he fails." "Can I try again?" "Yes, in ten minutes." "Is there any other way out?" "No..." We tried about eight really creative descriptions of how we might escape, but the GM ruled that none of them would work. "If you had cutting tools, or had somebody outside of the lift, you might be able to try something, but you're out of luck." "Okay, fine, we wait for ten minutes."

This was about eleven at night. During the "ten minutes of game time", the other two groups came in contact with each other, and got into a battle. In the reactor chamber. In which we discovered that the game's combat system took seemingly infinite amounts of time to resolve a minute of "game time". Our GM goes off to help adjudicate - part of the slow-ness problem is that the other two GM's aren't as knowledgable of this rule set.

Every half hour or so, we get told, "It'll just be a few minutes longer..." We ask if our ten minutes have passed, but are told that they haven't. By three a.m., everyone in our group is exhausted, beyond frustrated and way beyond bored, and more than ready to call it quits. I mean really, if we'd known, we could've fired up a board game or something!

Finally, after four hours of keeping us "on hold". Our GM walks back in. "Well, guys, they got in a gun battle in the reactor chamber. And one of the characters rolled a fumble... He hit the reactor core...

"And the entire station just blew up."

Where was that thread where the guy was complaining about arbitrary death-by-golem again?​