Terrible games you've played in

[Shadowdancer]

I know my story is not as bad as some on this thread, but I will post it anyway since it is my worst gaming experience. Thanks to years of expensive counseling and therapy, I'm now able to think about it without becoming comatose.

This goes back to my first gaming group, playing 1E AD&D. We were all in our mid-20s. Shortly after graduating from college, I got a job in my hometown. So I got to start playing again with my first gaming group. Except one of the players was my ex-girlfriend, who was now married to one of the other players.

My ex -- let's call her Witch -- was spoiled, immature and self-centered. She was the type of player that everything had to revolve around. She wanted the whole game to be about her. She kept going off by herself, getting into trouble, then expect the others to bail her out. At first we did, because she was my girlfriend. Then we did, because she was married to Tim. Then we just stopped. Plus, she cheated on her dice rolls, and lied about what magic items she had.

At some point while I was away at college and not gaming with these people, some bad blood developed between Witch and Tim's cousin, Jim. He killed her character. Then he chopped off the head and threw it in the ocean, so she couldn't be resurrected. Tim, who was DM, allowed her to be reincarnated, with the stipulation that she remembered nothing of her former life. Which Witch promptly forgot and was always trying to get revenge against Jim's character.

So about this time is when I start gaming with them again. We create new characters, but Witch's new character is still trying to get revenge for things that happened to her old character. She is always trying to mess with the characters of Jim and Mark, my best friend. One night, she gets into an argument with Mark's character, and pulls a sword. They fight, and he falls unconscious. As she is standing over his body, taunting him and about to deliver a coup de grace, my character walks into the room and sees what is happening. My character was double specialized in throwing daggers, so I throw three daggers at her, and kill her character. Next session Tim, her husband, who is still the DM, has my character arrested for murder. I'm put on trial, with Witch playing the NPC prosecutor. I get to defend myself. The other players are the jury. I win the case easily, mainly because no one except Tim like Witch, who now has to roll up a new character.

So a short time after this, Witch starts saying she wants to be DM. We all say sure, but not with our current characters. We all knew she just wanted to kill our characters, and we didn't want to lose them.

"But," she says, "I want to run an adventure where your characters get transported to an alternate dimension, where you have to fight evil twins of yourselves."

Again we all say no. She pitches a fit -- seriously, she left the room at one point to sulk -- but eventually she agrees to let us roll up new characters. So about 10 minutes into the first session, it is painfully obvious to all of us that Witch doesn't know the rules. And she isn't going to follow them, anyway. She is just looking to punish our characters. So we decide not to make it easy for her.

You would think that someone who had been playing a game for a couple of years would at least pick up some of the rules, but not Witch. In our first battle, we got into a fight with some guards at a bridge leading into a town. They wanted us to pay a toll. We could have, but we didn't want to, so we got into a fight. Witch told us that the guards had rung a bell to call up reinforcements.

On my initiative, I'm looking for the reinforcements, because I created this killer bow expert. She tells us that we can see the reinforcements, but they are too far away to shoot at with the bow. Fine, notch an arrow and prepare for when they are in range. Then on their initiative, the reinforcements melee attack me! WTF! How did they cover that distance so fast. "They just did," is all Witch says.

So, during this same combat on the bridge, we start getting backstabbed by someone with a ring of invisibility. When you attack someone while invisible, you are supposed to become visible, right? And you can't become invisible again until your next initiative. Well, this person would attack, become visible, then become invisible again, and then move away -- all in one initiative! Eventually, we outsmarted this foe -- and Witch -- and killed him, then took his ring and started using it to do the same thing. Except the ring didn't work that way for us. Witch kept doing things like that to us all night.

Anyway, we eventually were all knocked unconscious and taken prisoner. We woke up in a jail cell. The guards told us they were building a gallows so we could be hanged. We broke out of jail. While trying to leave town, we kept getting put in situations where we could surrender or die. We always chose death.

The evening ended with everyone's character dead. As Witch and Tim were leaving, they asked if there was any point in trying to play next week. We all said no. That was the last time I ever gamed with them. We started a new campaign with new characters the next week.

 

[Sarellion]

1. A D&D game set in the Council of wyrms setting. We were all dragons and we could shapeshift into normal people. The DM had his favorites and the first session I played for about 10 minutes or so. He more or less ignored 2 or 3 of 6 players. Three guys were playing all the time, the others just hung around. I´ve got to read the setting book, so it was not wasted time. :\

I came back I don´t why for a 2nd and 3rd time. We got a city full of gates and strange marks and powers. We jumped thru the multiverse without a clue and the event that stuck out from the plane hopping wasElminster sitting on a trunk smoking pipe and welcoming us to Faerun!

I had a BattleTechgame where I was shot by one guy with artillery (Arrow System). He claimed that he could hit every square with a 2. I told the moderator that this was not right but he ignored it. After I got hit by the artillery my mech lost a leg. i checked it, presented it but the mod said that I am right but the ruling stands. Yeah nice, took me pretty much out of game because someone cheated.

There was a con game where we were playing a party of mid to high level. Our enemies were superpowerful. We´ve took prisoners but they bursted the ropes attacked us and changed to demons (they were only demon worshippers). We took one outand healed him but within one second he was able to get out of coma and cast a spell withouta chance that someone could stop him. Heh, the guys were standing besides the prisoner weapon in hand!
there was also the infamous chimney effect. A mage threw a fireball inside a sturdy inn made out of stone. The whole building burnt down within 6 seconds.

 

[Andrew D. Gable]

The worst game I ever played in would have to be one I played in HS when I was first learning 2e rules and had no concept of game balance. Not that I worry overly about balance but... giving the PCs a spell called "Nuclear Blast" which killed over 500 orcs was quite excessive. They were routinely beating up gods and taking their "phat lewt". Gaah.

That game was followed by a lengthy (5 year) hiatus from DnD...

 

[Janx]

Some time after I moved to TX, a FLGS finally opened up and I finally got into gaming. There we joined a campaign that was just starting.

The GM wanted to do Tomb of Elemental Evil as a campaign. Being new in the area, he had about 8 players volunteer. My wife and I had joined, just to network (I had a bad feeling...and knew to stay away from any holes or big black balls).

This was in the 2e days, and the guy insisted on using points for PC generation, and insisted that everybody gets a minor magic item at 1st level. I think i made a bard of moderate ability.

The next meeting we find that we (half the party) start the game as prisoners in one of the outer most buildings of the bady guy facility that the rest of the party is exploring. Without our items (including the magic items that were much so vaunted as being a clever way to make PCs cool).

The GMing style was akin to drawing the map as we explored on a big Chessex battlemat. That's it. I died against some skeletons or something in the first encounter. I had a club (which I was not proficient with). He was going to have my PC "hover on deaths door" but I looked at my watch and said "oh look at the time, don't worry about my guy. See y'all next time." And we promptly fled. That was 2 hours into the game.

I did use it as excellent recon on the gaming prospects and took half the players into my own new campaign which lasted for about 6-7 games. The other one pretty much died that night.

These were people aged 18-25 or so.

All this gives credence to Jordan Weisman's (the FASA/WizKids guy) theories that the problem with gaming is there are so few good GMs.

Janx

 

[TroyXavier]

Mine was definitely playing Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. Well, the first problem was having the group face a Blue Dragon when they were 2nd level(though we did beat it while only losing one player). Then he had the group attacked by werewolves(with no magic or silver weapons mind you), one of the players was bitten. Of course, he decided to try and control it and succeeded(which totally threw off the DM). Then while walking thru the Temple(briefly. We never got far), he threw in tons of troglodytes. Now, despite the fact that a character with scent should be able to smell these things from way far away, he never let him detect them by t hat, gave us no spot or listen checks, and gave them surprise every time they attacked us. By the end, we were ready to just hand him the character sheets and have him tell us what happened. We never let him DM after that.

 

[demiurge1138]

Well, I have two stories about bad gaming experiences that are on the top of my head. One's long, and the other's short. So I'll tell the long one.

Names will not be changed. There are no innocents here.

Our normal DM was also a football player at his HS, leading to irregular schedules whenever he had a game. Usually, we just canceled the game. But this one week, one of the players, Matt, decides that he'll be the DM, and our DM lets him. Foolish, foolish DM. Now, all of the group knew that Matt was a cheat and a munchkin of the highest order (looking back, I realize how not-very-good of a powergamer he actually was), so we were all relatively leery.

The party is in the middle of a regular campaign at this point, so Matt has us find a portal in the dungeon we were exploring. The party enters, and finds themselves in a massive treasure vault/ throne room. One of the sorcerers casts detect magic. His head explodes.

Bad sign no. 1.

The game continues. We find that the occupant of this room is a god-general (and also Matt's PC in a pre-epic epic level game), and he wants our help defeating an army of massive proportions that threatens the world. He also kills several party members arbitrarily before equipping us with selections from his horde. I distinctly remember getting a +4 vorpal throwing returning keen mercurial scythe. I was the party's abjurer.

Anyway, the god-general then takes the surviving party members in his flying permanent [/I]prismatic sphere to the first wave of the army; 20,000 myconids. Initiative is rolled, and each player takes out a few myconids in their turn. Then the pet-NPC goes. We then realize that the sun is a lot lower in the sky than it was when the fight started, and all of the myconids were dead. We then learn that the pet NPC has a belt of infinite time stop. Even though we barely participated, the fight put us up to 13th level. We started the game at level 7th. Sigh.

The game continued for a while. More absolutely off-the-wall antics, some angel slaying, and Matt constantly putting the only girl in the party (the DM's girlfriend, of course) in sexual situations. When the DM got back the next week, he was properly horrified at the whole situation. He tried to salvage the campaign, failed, and quit in a matter of weeks.

On the plus side, I was DMing a much-trimmed version of the group (no Matt, for one thing) in a matter of months.

Demiurge out.

 

[Blue Sky]

Wow. I must say, there's some real horror stories here. Worse than Stephen King, mate.

The worst game I ever played? I was playing a bard, buddy of mine was playing a fighter. We're travelling through the elflands, and continuously (sp?) were told we had to attack a mage, because that was the prophecy. So, our first level characters charge the mayor of the elven city, kill him, and announce ourselves as the new world leaders of the elves.

DM: Okay. You're the mayor. Now what?

Should've been our first clue right there.

After a hour or so of jerking the dm around, we finally decide to attack the wizard we're here to kill, according to prophecy. This wizard had over 1000 hp's. (The dm admitted it.) The wizard was something close to 30th level. (The dm admitted it.) The wizard's strategy? Magic Missle for 1d4+1 points a round. That's right, the wizard could only cast Magic Missle, and only for one missle. Oh, and our attacks did no damage (magic armor). After 3 or so rounds, the wizard flees in absolute terror. Why? Because he was afraid of the fighter's sword, which he found in a pile of trash in the wizard's pantry!

Aside from that game, I've only had bad DM's, not bad games.

 

[WayneLigon]

Boy, these are some pretty terrible stories. I don't have much to compare Esp. not with the original post, or with Teflon Billy's oversexed weretiger.

Most of the really bad games I've been in have been destroyed by arguing players or player vs DM foo. Usually it's someone who just totally Does Not Get It.

I'd GMed a Champions game for a little while, and we were needing new blood. We found this guy through the usually reliable game store bulletin board, and I sent him a one sheet on the campaign and the general tone of the world and such.

I was running an unabashed Silver Age-ish world. Heroes were respected. They didn't kill. They honored the law, within reason. So, New Guy brings in his new PC. Said PC uses some ... questionable build techniques, but nothing truly untoward. It's just a bit more 'efficient' than most people are built. Then once he's in play, it becomes painfully apparent that either he's not read the sheet, or is simply ignoring it. When we break for lunch, we talk and I find out that yes, indeed, he's read the sheet... but he finds the mere concept of not killing an enemy (Enemy def: someone who opposes me in any fashion) to be unthinkable. Literally, he tells me this. So... I try to explain to him how the comics usually work and it's like trying to explain quantum physics to a toddler. I realize about halfway through lunch that he really doesn't grasp this concept of not being rid of his foes, once and for all.

Things rapidly go down hill the next couple of games as I try to salvage the situation, but it's not working. I decide I need a break from the game and put it on hold for a 'few weeks'. New Player says that he'd like to try running a Champions game; he's done so before, and in a weak and truly stupid moment I say... yes.

Next week we show up at his place, ready to play. Show him our characters, and everything is cool though he's wondering why a couple things were not built in the most 'efficient' manner. But still no biggie. We soon have uranium thieves to pounce upon and a combat begins.

Time and again, I've seen people post about the interminable nature of Champions combat, to which I generally respond with handwaving motions. I can and regularly have run three or four combats with multiple opponents within a standard six hour game session.

The people who have posted such tales must have had this guy as a Champions GM. Not that he didn't know the rules; he knew the merchanics just fine. A little too fine, in fact. Five hours later, we're still in the same combat. The villains get knocked out, and always get their full Recoveries. Many are built with Endurance batteries that go off when they get knocked out, so the next round they're back in the fight. It's a running endurance battle by the time we finally fight them to a draw, and they leave with the uranium while I lick my wounds and look for the parts to one of my comrades. Owie. Never went back after that little debacle.

===

There was a Vampire game I was in where the GM apparently had this fixation on street gangs. Street gangs ruled everything, though this being the WoD this was really not so out of place. But they were also combat monsters, all of them. Truly, they were terrible foes. We were vampires, with the power to pump ourselves up to car-tossing strength, resist most mortal weaponry, etc... and we were getting our asses handed to us by these 14- and 15-year old kids with chains and zip guns and baseball bats. They were worse than werewolves, and had the ability to sustain anime-levels of damage. Backhand them into a wall, they reverse in mid-air and use the wall like a trampoline to leap back at you.. that sort of thing. No, they weren't supernatural in the least, either.

No wonder the street gangs did so well in that city...

====

 

[PaulGreystoke]

Well, since I have been playing various editions of D&D for over 20 years, there are a lot of contenders for the title of worst campaign. Among the possibilities:

the campaign where the DM hated the the system (1E) but ran it because that was what the players wanted. To make it more of what he wanted, he added an everchanging mixed bag of rules from Runequest & every other system he preferred to AD&D. To keep his original players mollified, their characters always had their munchkin abilities grandfathered into the latest version of his rules set, but new players had to play it straight. Thus while the party was filled with fire giants wearing helms of power & mages with super-enhanced staves of power, I entered the campaign as a guy who basically could drive an all-terrain vehicle.

the campaign where the DM was a total munchkin who only understood power & more power. This was actually the successor game to the above campaign, when the original DM finally got sick of DMing a system he hated & walked away, leaving his maps to one of the players. Unfortunately this player had no idea how to actually challenge the remaining players except by continually ramping up the power level to cartoonish proportions. My college roommate & I took to calling the game "Helmets & Hammers" since it clearly wasn't D&D anymore & since one of the fundamental cornerstones of the campaign (carried over from the original campaign) was that the forces of good wielded hammers of power while the forces of evil wore helms of power. The upside to this campaign was that I got to play an absurdly munchkin dual-wielding wild elven ranger/monk, so it wasn't all bad.

the Forgotten Realms campaign where I got disinvited for roleplaying. This one started out well enough when I was invited to join a 2E campaign that had been running for some time but was about to lose all of its fighter-types to graduation & general attrition. The DM had played with me in a Champions game where we had established a good rapport & I respected him as a good roleplayer, so I was looking forward to playing for him in a world that he obviously loved. To fill the fighter void, another player & I built a paladin & a ranger with contrasting fighting styles, alignments, & personalities. Things went well at the beginning of the first session, where our inter-character bickering was greeted with warmth by the rest of the party as we were welcomed into Waterdeep. But things took a rapid turn for the worst when our propensity for roleplaying got in the way of the party distributing the loot from their last foray into Undermountain. The munchkin albino drow mage/thief leader of the party fumed while the paladin & my ranger got involved in a series of misunderstanding with one another & the Waterdeep authorities & kept taking the DM's attention away from loot allocation. Things rapidly spun out of control when the paladin & my ranger were arrested & thrown in jail for disturbing the peace. I think the DM intended this to be the end of the matter, expecting us to cool our heels in the pokey while the rest of the party split up the wagon load of loot from their last adventure, but of course it wasn't. Has any PC ever taken jail time lying down? My character began searching for ways to escape while the paladin demanded a fair hearing in the matter - questioning the right of commoners to pass judgement on him since he was of noble blood. Ultimately Peirgeiron himself had to step in to resolve the issue. After the session, we were politely disinvited from the game so that the party wouldn't have roleplaying getting in the way of their loot acquisition & allocation - which of course is the point of D&D.

But the winner is the following - the last 2E campaign in which I played:

the campaign where the DM hated the players. This one started out with tremendous promise, as the DM had professional experience online & was really looking for a chance to strut her stuff face-to-face. It was a little weird when we weren't allowed to build our own characters (the DM designed them herself instead) but I felt that it would mean that she would be invested in our characters & that they would likely be well-balanced against one another. After I was emailed my character (a half-elven ranger - which should have been a danger signal, because everytime I played a ranger, bad things happened - see above) I tried to work out a good background for the character. But it was hard since the DM refused to use any established setting (creative DMs make their own worlds dammit!) & she wasn't giving us much info to work with. Anyway, I decided to play the character as a paeon to one of the great ranger archetypes - Hawkeye from J. Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales - & sent the DM a useful outline of his background. I worked on giving him a distinctive accent & an appropriate frontier attitude, figuring that he had been honing his skills on the edge of the wild since birth.

In the first session, I amused the other players with my character's somewhat comic idiosyncratic way of speaking as we all met in a bar. :\ Despite the stock first scene & the DM's hamfisted efforts to get us together, the players (who mostly didn't know one another) warmed to one another immediately. Since we were commissioned to guard a caravan into the wild, I was looking for a chance to showcase my skills right of the gate. The DM quickly nipped this in the bud when I tried to act like an authority on the wilderness. She pointed out that I was only a 1st level ranger & thus a newbie. When I intimated that my character had a well of experience to draw upon since I had grown up in the wild, she overruled the character background that I had sent her & declared that I had grown up on a farm in a well-settled part of the world, just like everyone else.

As it turned out, I wasn't being singled out for this kind of character neutering - everyone in the party was nerfed to some degree. The DM treated us as if we were just a bunch of dumb newbies who needed to be led around by the hand by her high level NPCs - who always treated us with a measure of suspicion & disrespect. Still, since the players rather liked one another, & since the threat we were facing seemed spooky & interesting, we continued to come back for more each week, assuming that it would get better as we raised in levels. It didn't. It became apparent that the characters were not balanced with one another (the DM believed balance was stupid, but made it a state secret punishable by XP loss if players noticed or mentioned any imbalance) & this had its typical deleterious effect - as the players of the weaker characters quit in frustration at their characters' incapacities. Despite having what would eventually be revealed to be the weakest character (in terms of ability scores & gifts of abilities & magic items from the DM) I stuck around because I really liked my character.

But the campaign kept getting worse & worse. The mysterious threat that we were facing became more nonsensical the more we learned about it. What had seemed spooky & interesting before was now just bizarre & opaque. But the campaign kept going on because as the original players gave up & quit, new players just kept flowing in. Nevertheless, we never seemed to be getting any closer to figuring out what was actually going on. We players wondered if even the DM had any idea what it was all about. In any case, the whole plot abruptly came to an end with no real explanation. The DM had apparently tired of the whole thing & simply made it go away. The players heaved a sigh of relief & pledged to one another to never mention any of the loose ends again - afraid that the DM might feel obligated then to reopen the issue.

This abrupt change of campaign direction was because the DM wanted to run a high level campaign module she had bought (apparently creative DMs can use campaign modules, just not pre-made campaign worlds dammit!) The module was designed for 10th-15th level characters with gear appropriate to their level. Unfortunately we were gear-poor 5th level characters. Rather than allow the party to grow into the campaign module, the DM threw us right into it. Every encounter was a fight for our lives. The DM made it clear that she thought the reason for our problems was not a lack of sufficient power, but rather that we were stupid players.

Anyway, the revolving door in players continued until I was the sole remaining original player. We recruited a player to fill the hole at melee fighter. Revealing his inner munchkin, he designed a dual-shortsword-wielding, weapon specialized, platemail-wearing fighter with exceptional strength. In a private email to the DM, I respectfully pointed out that the character would cause balance problems unless toned down. She dismissed my comments, insulted that I should imply that she couldn't handle a character, any character. She was a DM dammit! And then she found that she couldn't handle the character. After a few sessions of confronting this munchkin, she quit the campaign. To this day, she probably talks about the time she wasted DMing a bunch of dummies.

 

[dok]

The infamous Temple of the Demon Dead!

This one is a long-held favorite "bad gaming story" of mine.
Gaming convention. The flyer has a module called "Temple of The Demon Dead", and says to bring two 18th level, 1st edition D&D characters. My older brother & I exchanged ruleful looks. We knew a bad situation, but we figured since it was at a gaming convention, it might just be fun. You know, no-holds-barred, bring-the-noise type fun.

We were wrong.

Horribly wrong.

The first chamber consisted of two rows of pedestals with skulls atop them. The party cleric walks down the center of the room, between the two rows. As soon as he gets between the first two pedestals, the DM rolls dice, cackles (he did that a lot, as you'll see) and says "You're held". Player politely responds that he's wearing a Ring of Free Action.

DM: Yes, I know. You're Held anyway.

The mage casts Detect Magic & reveals "eye beams" coming from the skulls. The rogue is cautiosly checking for traps along the sides of the room, hoping not to have to walk between the Eyebeams of Doom; after all, who knows what they do? Then came one of the few good moments in the game:

Me: So, about how high are these pedestals & the eye beams?
DM: Oh, about here -" [places hand mid-chest] "Chest high to a man.
Me: So about, what, three, four feet high?
DM: Yep, that sounds about right.
Me: My dwarf strides down the center of the room.

Fun. But it didn't last.

Second room of the dungeon: (and the only one we got to...)
It's a wide hallway with six doors. At the end of the hall is an antichamber that has a statue. However, there seems to be some sort of "force field" (his words) surrounding the dias that the statue is on.

Player: I pick up a rock & throw it at the field.
DM: "Oooooh. That was the worst possible thing you could do! With a loud pop, all the doors open at once!

At this point, all six doors open, with strange looking creatures pouring out. Many appear to be elementals of some kind or another, though at one point the DM describes what "looks like a man, with a strange squid-like head, and the brand of Cthulu on his chest" and proudly mentions that these are "unoffical" monsters from an "unlicensed suppliment" he got in 1970-something.

Oh good. Because 1st edition monsters weren't screwy enough...

Round one of the combat went as follows:
Player 1: I throw a full volley of darts at that water elemental near me. With a dart of returning, and my girdle of storm giant strength, I do 127 points of damage!
Other players: Oooooh!
DM: OK. The creature attacks you back. Take 35 damage...
Player 1: OK..
DM: ...and loose six levels.
Other players: What the [eric's grandmother ] ???
DM (looking inexplicably smug): That's not a water elemental; it's a vampiric nalfashnee water elemental.
Players (collective): < vomit >
Player 2 (my older brother): Uhh, we've got sixty levels of cleric sitting at the table and over 150 character levels total; I think we should be able to guess what makes up these creatures on-sight, rather than have it sprung on us...
Player 3: I'm a mage; I'll die if I loose levels & get hit. I cast Prismatic Wall to keep the closest thing away from me!
Player 4 (who threw the rock that started this mess): Hey! That traps me with two of these things!!!
DM: Actually no. This one just flies throught the prismatic wall and says "yum yum; I'm from the plane of Radiance so that was a nice treat!"
Player 4: Fine. I fire four arrows into the Glabrezu-Wraith-Fire Elemental that's on this side of the wall.
DM: What kind of arrows are they?
< cue second good moment of the game >
Player 4 (nonchalantly): Arrows of Demon slaying. The adventure was titled "Temple of the Demon dead"...
Other Players: < mixed cheers & laughter >
DM (straightfaced): Are they arrows of elemental undead demon slaying?

Combat dragged on for a few more rounds that took hours. The Vrock Vampiric Earth Elemental got taken down by a Decanter of Endless Water set to guyser, (since running water kills vampires) and the guy with drops his foe after the DM grudgling allows a saving throw against the arrows. (this was 1st edition, where arrows of slaying killed. No save, and nothing fancy; if any part of you met the arrow's critera, you died.)

I'd love to say I recall how the rest of the fight went, but all I really remember is that as a group, we walked away from the table after that fight.