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Message: <blockquote data-quote="spunky_mutters" data-source="post: 1409054" data-attributes="member: 5426">I mostly ref, but I have had two bad playing experiences that I can remember:The first one involved a friend of mine who wanted to DM us through a campaign he had been working on. There was a lot of role-playing, and it was fun when it started. We were trying to find some sort of bandit leader, and avoid the local politicos. The first sign of a problem was when the bandit leader used a crossbow to sneak attack someone in the party. The other players all went ballistic at the DM, but I defended him. Then after we defeated the bandit leader in combat he was able to escape from us. He just ran from combat, and we were given no chance to follow, or even to find tracks. That's when I started to get frustrated. When we ran back to the city to find him giving a speech that was mesmerizing the locals, I set about trying to stop him. The DM just read the speech out and glared every time I described something I was doing to try and stop him. We fled the city as they were all charmed now.At this point I had no idea what was going on in the game. None of us did. We were attacked by wraiths nightly from that point on. We were never at full health, or properly rested. This continued for as long as the campaign went on. The last thing I remember about that campaign was that I went away on vacation for a couple of weeks and came back to find out that the party had fought a dragon. None of the players really knew why the party was doing the things it did, as the DM seemed to just tell us what our next step should be, but not why. The dragon was a radiation dragon, and it's breath dealt permanent damage. I've left a lot out, but it was a never-ending exercise in frustration and despair.The other problem game was my fault. Since I mostly DM, I am usually very good about cutting DMs slack. When my most problematic player decided he wanted a shot behind the chair, I decided it was time for a lesson. If he didn't listen when the rest of the group complained about his lack of attention and random violence, he might think about things a little more when his hard work was subjected to the same kind of player.I used all the tricks up my sleeve to make a combat monster who could walk through whatever he put us against (unless he chose to simply kill the whole party), but who was very difficult to deal with. My character was a dwarf fighter with a 3 int, and a 3 chr. I could only speak dwarven, and nobody else could. I didn't even try and communicate with the other party members in character. I just wandered through the adventure like a run away train. To his credit he really tried to play things fairly, and didn't arbitrarily come down on me. He tried to make everything work. I didn't try to derail the adventure, I would just short circuit all of his obvious machinations, and then kill whatever popped up. This wasn't fair of me, but I had spent several years having him fall asleep or wander off to watch tv (usually during long combats) while I was behind the screen. It was somehow satisfying to see him realize hom much the DM relies on his player's cooperation and participation for the game to be successful. After that adventure he never DMed again for us. He decided it was too much work. He was a lot more interested as a player after that, though. Or at least that's the version that I remember.</blockquote>

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