Terrible games you've played in

[Fimmtiu]

The worst game I've ever played in wasn't actually all that memorable... just an immature DM making up everything (badly) as he went along. Thankfully, it didn't last long.

The second worst game I've ever played in ended in a shouting match. The DM was great, the new 2E campaign we were starting was well-prepared, the participants were all people I knew and liked, and everything got off to a good start. Except for... PLAYER X. We'll call him Ben, because that was his name. He seemed like a pretty nice guy, but I'd never played D&D with him before, so I was totally unprepared for the forthcoming weirdness. You know the kind of players who play D&D like it's a competitive sport that they have to "win"? Ben was that with the Paragon template applied. Over the course of the next two and a half hours, this promising and otherwise fun game devolved into The Ben and Ben Show, starring Ben! And here's your host... Ben! Armed with his firm conviction that the DM would never kill off a character in the first session of a new campaign, he proceeded to ditch the rest of the party and make life as difficult for the DM as possible, because, as we all know, whoever gets the most attention from the DM wins the game.

Forgive me; I can't bring myself to enumerate the interminably long, childish, and aggravating proceedings. I get a headache just thinking about it. Finally, when it became clear that he was not going to let anyone else have fun if he could help it, one of the other players suddenly ripped her character sheet in half and spent the next couple minutes telling Ben, in detail and at considerable volume, just where he could stick his dice bag, and then locked herself in another room until Ben left.

Have I mentioned that these were all adults of age 30 and up? That seems relevant, somehow.

Long story short, that particular campaign died a short, messy death that afternoon, and nobody has seen Ben since. Thank goodness.

 

[Visceris]

If I was that DM I would have killed his character. The fastest I have killed a PC in a campaign is 47 minutes. If the player does something that truly annoys me or does something incredibly stupid I let them know by killing their character.

 

[GrayIguana]

I really feel for some of you. While my story doesn't have the horror of many (especially Teflon Billy), I still get annoyed when I think of this one.

A friend of a friend knew I played and invited me to an associates new game. And this is also the last time I've played with anyone except for close friends. After taking much time rolling characters, we just found ourselves in this catacomb. At first the group used extreme caution in exploring our new surroundings and trying to figure out why we were all there. If we asked the DM questions about what we knew, he'd just smile and say we would have to find out.

Caution led to exploration which eventaully led to boredom. The DM has an enourmous map which we couldn't see, and seemed to enjoy the process of us duplicating his map. After hours of real time, we encountered nothing. Boredom turned to contempt. My character, a wizard began dancing and singing as we traveled down seemingly endless passageways. The DM would roll and we couldn't even attract a random encounter. Finally as the day neared its end we encounted . . . . a giant undead ant. Grateful for the diversion, the character lept to attack. My wizard began to cast a spell when I was reminded by the DM that I did not have any spell components. When I asked why I was told that I didn't have a chance to buy any. Forget the fact that we never had a chance to buy anything.

The undead ant didn't prove to be a challenge anyway, and the rest of the gaming time was spent wandering endless tunnels looking for a reason why we were there.

I declined to return the next week.

 

[Hardhead]

Wow, as long as all the posts are, this has taken forever to read. If you've made it this far, though, let's keep going!

Worst DM Ever: The group I currently game with is basically a synthesis of two groups that had stopped playing due to attrition, but met thanks to Magic: The Gathering. Anyway, the DM of the old group was an old-school This Is My World And What I Say Goes type. For instance, if we had an NPC to guard, that NPC could be killed without a roll of any dice. This actually happened once, when he announced that they had been killed by an arrow. When others mentioned that there's no way one arrow could kill the NPC and that he hadn't even rolled anyway, he got upset. "She was my NPC," he said. "I can kill her if I want to."

After that, my brother and I ran two campaigns (with him running a silightly better short-lived campaign between them). He's actually running again now, and we've managed to bring him around to our way of thinking. His current campaign is actually quite good!

But back when he was a bad DM, he ran a Star*Drive campaign (from Alternity), which was only Star*Drive in the vaguest sense of the word. It had magic, and lots of it. None of the locations had anything to do with Star*Drive. My character was captured and replaced by an "evil" version of himself at second level. But it wasn't a short-lived occurence like I originally thought. The evil duplicate wasn't revealed at around 6th or 7th level (and advancement was agonizingly slow in Alternity, so this took a long time!) Then, I got my "real" character back. Part of the duplication process let me remember everything the evil version did, while I was in some kind of cocoon thingy. I figured that'd mean I'd get the XP that the "evil" version did. Nope. When my real character returned, I was far behind everyone else.

Also, we started out with two ships in that campaign for reasons too complicated to go into. Long story short, my brother, a friend, and I built a cool ship (the Stargazer, bonus geek points if know the name's origin!) using the ship creation rules down to the tinest detail, mapping it out, and everything. We felt we'd done a cool job building a legal, and also cool ship (it had a couple neat quirks and a cool shape. We were proud). His friends originally from his group bulit a ship which only marginally followed the rules, and only where it gave them lots of kick-ass stuff, had weird nanite healing properties, and a super-intelligent AI. We were very annoyed.

 

[L0rd_Dark0n]

Worst games ever, hmm, let's see...

First group I ever gamed in (in fact taught me RPG and introduced me to 2ed DnD and was normally a good group to play with) the DM decided to get drunk. While at first entertaining as it actually helped move the story along at a smooth pace, quickly degenerated into an incomprehensible farce.

Same group, only different DM. The girl that was DMing us this time had us roll up new characters. There were only four of us in the group. VERY quickly into this game, it only became about 2 of the characters. Any time my friend and I would try to do something, say something, whatever, the DM just ignored us or told us to be quiet or something.

My friend and I sat on the sidelines and spectated until we finally got tired of the DM completely ignoring us and began to make up our own story which involved killing all her annoying NPCs derailing the whole game.

Normally a very rude thing to do, but we were sitting at the same table and neither she nor the other two players, even notice. So we were just going along and I was sort of improv DMing with the two of us rolling for combat and what not. We're sitting at the same table laughing, AND THEY DON'T EVEN NOTICE!

My friend and I are laughing and having a good time for a change reaking havoc on this shoddy game (bad DMing aside) when one of the other players finally had his character ask go outside of the temple and ask mine about the slaves that we, oops I mean the other two characters, had freed and were watching.

I couldn't help myself. The spotlight finally on me, the DM turning to me and looking surprised that I'm there, I related to them why neither my character, nor my friend's, nor the slaves were there. I tell the whole group what we've been doing for the last TWO HOURS! Two hours we've been doing this at the same table directly across them and they don't notice. They are so completely engrossed in just the three of them, that they don't notice all this going on and our laughing.

We convince the slaves to join us, hijack a ship, sail back across the sea, trick the guards into believing we have the cure for the poison that is killing the king, and we kill him instead.

Well, she's enraged of course, and I explain to her that this whole game had been a joke and a waste of time until we had just started doing what we wanted and began to have fun. She demanded our character sheets so she could destroy them. We flat refuse. She gets even madder and throws us out. We're so deeply hurt that we laugh all the way out.

Now get this, my friend and I are just horsing around. We knew that what we wanted our characters to do couldn't have really happened because the actual DM was not a part of our antics. She didn't know about any of it, so none of it should have happened. We were just having fun until something actually happened involving our characters. I just expected her to say nope and have one of the other characters ask mine something then go back inside and continue to ignore us. SHE LET IT ALL STAND!

Needless to say, I didn't care one way or the other, but she let our actions stand, and as she put it, completely ruin the adventure. Oh, we also made sure that everyone back in the nameless kingdom that we had come from know that we were working under orders from the other two characters. They couldn't go back there again.

That was her last attempt at DMing for our group. We had been gaming together for about a year and all got along really well, but that night was just a nightmare. But the next week when I saw her, she apologized for acting the way she did, and the game went on as normal with our normal DM...NOT getting drunk.

 

[Macbeth]

(the Stargazer, bonus geek points if know the name's origin!)

The ship that Jean-Luc Picard originally served on? It's been while, but the name definately rings a bell...

 

[L0rd_Dark0n]

I've seen a lot of the "DM with a spouse/gf/bf in the game" horror stories in this thread, so here is mine, or rather I should say, my wife's.

Just within the last year, I DMed a Ravenloft campaign. There were only three players, my wife, and a couple of friends of mine. I usually throw in a fighter type NPC of slightly lower level than the party to help out with these small groups. Only this time, I had to field the Paladin/Cleric.

My wife's characters seem to have the most rotten awful luck. This one character of hers in one campaign (Feast of Goblyns) contracted Lycanthropy when no one else did (and all were bitten by the werewolf); later her char died after rolling several 1s in combat; then after getting raised from the dead (no easy feat when you can come back as a vampire instead in Ravenloft) she died again. Later after coming back a second time she got cursed to suffer a penalty to all rolls as long as she was in sunlight. In this same situation, everyone else either got nothing or got good stuff. She was the only one who got cursed. Good thing she's such a good sport! Eventually her character's bad luck somehow rubbed off onto the NPC and he was killed far from civilization. So, obviously no favorites in my game!

 

[Hardhead]

The ship that Jean-Luc Picard originally served on? It's been while, but the name definately rings a bell...

Ding! You are correct, sir!

Oh, and I just thought of another really bad campaign, that a friend of mine ran. I call it a campaign, but it was only two adventures long, and it didn't really involve any work of ours. This was by a seperate bad DM (he created the nanite-AI-super-ship in the Star*Drive campaign)

Our DM prided himself on creating unique monsters. They were uniquie. In fact, some were pretty good ideas. But they were all way too powerful for us. Basically, we'd be traveling in a caravan, and meet a monster. These weren't really encounters, per se, but more like demonstrations of his monsters. They'd generally kill a couple NPCs, demonstrating their power, and we'd run away.

 

[Wycen]

Lord Darkon reminded me of a few bad game sessions. I was running Star Wars, the d6 version years ago. It was basically 2 or 3 people, depending on who could make it. One of the guys, a friend, was just out of the Marines and boy could he drink.

Well, he decided to get slammed while we played and so on an Imperial controlled planet, while driving a speeder truck, he decides to "bump" into a Stormtrooper and run him over. I wasn't prepared to run a prison life game, so I let it slide, but I removed the 'treasure' and incentive for him to ever come back to the planet.

He and others got drunk a few other times, usually it didn't have a big impact, but I remember one Vampire session when we tried to get rid of a Tremere vampire, who's player couldn't make it. I pretty much figured the story teller wouldn't let us get rid of the character while his player was gone, but being drunk, my buddy couldn't figure that out. So, he did all sorts of things to the vampire and nothing worked. Being human he could walk around in sunlight and not worry about it, so he took the Tremere, (who was hog tied in detcord) to the beach during the day, lit a fire and stuck him in it, among other things. It was funny to watch at least.

Then I remember a cyberpunk game that turned sour at one point and I was glad when one of the character's exploded killing the whole party. If not for one mistake on my part, bad judgement being younger, that could have been a great game.

 

[robberbaron]

The worst initiation into a game I ever saw was when we were playing Bushido many years ago.

Our friend, I'll call him J on account of it being him, came along for his first go.
We got into a fight, his shiny new Yakuza died within 15 minutes.
He sorted out another character (luckily character generation is lightning fast in Bushido, for non-MUs that is), his Budoka ran in to the fight and died.
He sorted out another Yakuza (the fight had been going for about an hour and a half at this point), ran into the tail end of the fight and got cut in two.

He came back for more, though. What a trooper!