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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PaulGreystoke" data-source="post: 1405785" data-attributes="member: 10810">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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />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. <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=";)" />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? <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=";)" />  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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> 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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" />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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f621.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":mad:" title="Mad    :mad:"  data-smilie="4"data-shortname=":mad:" />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.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

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