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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jared Rascher" data-source="post: 5439286" data-attributes="member: 28825">I needed to take a break from running the game that I had been running for a while, and one of the people in the game had already volunteered his house for our games for a while.  He volunteered to take over the DM spot, and said that he had been running this campaign for years for different friends.The overall explanation was that he was taking a bunch of old BECMI and 1st Edition Adventures and stringing them into a campaign arc, converting them to 3.5  (and he had said he originally had done this under 3.0).When we got the the night where we were making up characters, he said that the campaign had "roles."  There had to be a "prince," a "royal spy," a "bodyguard," etc.  Okay, that's not too bad.  Then he said that the prince had to be an arcane caster.  Okay.When I asked if the bodyguard could be a ranger, he said no.  I asked if he could be a swashbuckler, so I could be more of an "in the know" court intrigue guy, he said no.  Finally he said that I pretty much had to be a fighter or a paladin if I was going to be the bodyguard.Well, I wasn't too thrilled with this limitation, but I ran with it, and made a fighter.  Then he started talking about how the campaign was going to be just like a novel.  I should have been worried at this point, but I didn't have time to DM, and I wanted to at least play, so I rolled with it.  After a few sessions, it started getting more and more frustrating.  Although we made 3.5 characters, he often announced, in the middle of a combat, that we were using old rules to cover a situation.  For example, in one fist fight I got into, I had to use the old hand to hand combat chart from 1st edition.We got up to about 7th level  (after starting at 3rd), and I had a nice suit of armor and a nice greatsword, even though I was built for a longsword and shield  (after all, this was "old school," and I couldn't buy or sell magic items, so I had to use the greatsword).  Then we had the run in with the people using "rust monster dust" to destroy my armor.Then we had a mysterious encounter where all of us, out of combat, got captured and dumped in a dungeon without any equipment.  On top of that, because it was an old 1st edition adventure where some of the storyline had to do with finding improvised weapons, he wouldn't let me pick up rocks or bones to use in combat because it wasn't the right kind of bones or rocks  (meaning the adventure didn't call for us to be able to make them into weapons).So for a few sessions my entire purpose was to just take damage while the spellcasters killed things.  That was fun.Then the "prince" mysteriously disappeared and my friend had to make up a new character, his half-dragon half brother, for the next leg of the story arc.  My friend has no choice in this, he just has to switch characters because that's what happens in the story  (the most amusing part of this being that my friend made the half-dragon a half-dragon/half-elf, and the prince had been human . . . our DM never caught the disconnect).Did I mention that in the middle of combat he ruled that fireball automatically destroys all magical treasure, so we lost a +1 longsword?  Or that he ruled that fireballs filled the whole volume of an area like in older editions?  Or that Iron Golems were only hurt by +3 weapons instead of magic and adamantine weapons?Finally, my fighter, after scraping together a magic weapon and some armor again, got to contribute in a fight.  We killed a vampire, and I lost a few levels.  Now, there was no "role" in the campaign for a cleric, because the DM thought they were boring.  We had a magic item that could cast restoration . . . but it was with the prince when he ran away.When we figured out where we had to go next in the campaign, I figured out how much time I had to removed the negative levels before they became permanent.  When I asked how long it was going to take to get to the next town on our quest where there might be someone to cast restoration on me, he told me it was one day longer than it would take for my negative levels to become permanent.He didn't have a scale on his maps, and he literally figured out that it would take a day longer than I had to remove the levels based on how long he "felt" like it should take.  That was the last time I showed up for the game.</blockquote>

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