Levistus's_Leviathan
5e Freelancer
This is a mix of a bad DM horror story and a Problem Player horror story. To simplify a long story, I became friends with the DM through them introducing me to M:tG, and we later found out that both of us play D&D 5e, so he invited me, one of my friends, and one of my cousins to come over to his house for him to DM a campaign for. I was extremely excited, because as my table's DM I am only very rarely able to play a character, so I created a Human Illusion Wizard, as I love playing characters that have a diverse amount of options to get out of any given situation, and also wanted to have a secret diabolical plan that my character would hide from the rest of the party (basically, I would use my illusions, given enough downtime at higher levels, to create an elaborate plot of a cult to a powerful demigod that wanted to ascend to true godhood). My character wanted to do this in order to fool the world, and get super well known as "that guy who faked the end of the world". After the party succeeded in "defeating" an elaborate illusion of the Avatar of this fake demigod, my character would come out and reveal that he had been behind the adventure's main plot and that it had all been fake. He wasn't evil, just egotistical and wanted to prove to the world of his intellectual superiority without doing anything that was really evil or damaging in the long term.
I asked the DM about this plan, knowing that if it worked it would make for a really memorable adventure, and he was 100% on board and helped me come up with plans for my character to accomplish his nefarious goal.
We played a few sessions, with the other party members being an Aasimar Paladin and a Half-Elf Rogue, and the DM's world was super in-depth and awesome. I loved it, and my PC's plot was moving along quite well, with him being able to convince the local Thieves' Guild into setting up a fake ambush against them in order for the character to try to prove his loyalty to the party by fending off the thieves with his magic.
Then, the DM decided to add a new player without asking any of us.
The new player was the DM's cousin, a person whom I knew from school for many years (and he had bullied me from every year from 7th grade to 10th grade), whom the DM just added into the campaign without asking the rest of us. I don't know what I would have said if he'd asked, but I would have at least have liked that courtesy as a player. The new player chose to make a Chaotic-Stupid Dwarven Barbarian, that both had a -2 to Stealth and an extremely unhealthy obsession with causing havoc wherever he went. At first it was mostly fine, if not very annoying, small things like deciding to rip a book in half in a library that was owned by an Archmage, urinating openly in public for no reason, breaking every glass bottle and cup in the local tavern, and randomly stealing barrels from wherever they could be found, but it got worse. The player proceeded to derail the entire campaign, and started doing many things that my fellow players and I, and our characters, found disturbing (trigger warning: violence against children and mothers) including stealing an infant from its mother, ripping off the arms of the baby, and then murdering the mother with his handaxes and using her arms as improvised weapons against the city guards. The player was laughing/smiling the whole time, while the rest of the players (including me) were either completely quiet in long stretches of awkward silence, or adamantly telling the player to stop doing stuff like this and let the campaign just progress along peacefully.
The DM saw no problems with the actions of his cousin's character, letting the character get off the hook for murder because, and I quote, "They have clerics and paladins in this city to raise the people he murdered from the dead". I argued that "even if they can negate the deaths, those people are still going to be traumatized", and the rest of the players backed me up, but the DM just shrugged off that point like the whole encounter wasn't a big deal. I then privately shared with the DM that my character wasn't okay with his cousin's character's actions, and that my character, although not good, had standards, and that the Chaotic Stupid Dwarven Barbarian had irreversibly crossed a huge line for the character, and that the character was going to plot on a way to murder the Dwarven Barbarian and make it look like an accident, as he saw him as a huge obstacle to accomplishing his ultimate goal of fooling the world, as the world would not take the character seriously if he associated with the sort of people that did stuff like the Dwarven Barbarian.
The DM decided to choose his cousin over me (somewhat understandably, as they are related, and we were just friends from school). The DM then ghosted me, we never did another session of the campaign, and I have not heard from him or his cousin since.
I asked the DM about this plan, knowing that if it worked it would make for a really memorable adventure, and he was 100% on board and helped me come up with plans for my character to accomplish his nefarious goal.
We played a few sessions, with the other party members being an Aasimar Paladin and a Half-Elf Rogue, and the DM's world was super in-depth and awesome. I loved it, and my PC's plot was moving along quite well, with him being able to convince the local Thieves' Guild into setting up a fake ambush against them in order for the character to try to prove his loyalty to the party by fending off the thieves with his magic.
Then, the DM decided to add a new player without asking any of us.
The new player was the DM's cousin, a person whom I knew from school for many years (and he had bullied me from every year from 7th grade to 10th grade), whom the DM just added into the campaign without asking the rest of us. I don't know what I would have said if he'd asked, but I would have at least have liked that courtesy as a player. The new player chose to make a Chaotic-Stupid Dwarven Barbarian, that both had a -2 to Stealth and an extremely unhealthy obsession with causing havoc wherever he went. At first it was mostly fine, if not very annoying, small things like deciding to rip a book in half in a library that was owned by an Archmage, urinating openly in public for no reason, breaking every glass bottle and cup in the local tavern, and randomly stealing barrels from wherever they could be found, but it got worse. The player proceeded to derail the entire campaign, and started doing many things that my fellow players and I, and our characters, found disturbing (trigger warning: violence against children and mothers) including stealing an infant from its mother, ripping off the arms of the baby, and then murdering the mother with his handaxes and using her arms as improvised weapons against the city guards. The player was laughing/smiling the whole time, while the rest of the players (including me) were either completely quiet in long stretches of awkward silence, or adamantly telling the player to stop doing stuff like this and let the campaign just progress along peacefully.
The DM saw no problems with the actions of his cousin's character, letting the character get off the hook for murder because, and I quote, "They have clerics and paladins in this city to raise the people he murdered from the dead". I argued that "even if they can negate the deaths, those people are still going to be traumatized", and the rest of the players backed me up, but the DM just shrugged off that point like the whole encounter wasn't a big deal. I then privately shared with the DM that my character wasn't okay with his cousin's character's actions, and that my character, although not good, had standards, and that the Chaotic Stupid Dwarven Barbarian had irreversibly crossed a huge line for the character, and that the character was going to plot on a way to murder the Dwarven Barbarian and make it look like an accident, as he saw him as a huge obstacle to accomplishing his ultimate goal of fooling the world, as the world would not take the character seriously if he associated with the sort of people that did stuff like the Dwarven Barbarian.
The DM decided to choose his cousin over me (somewhat understandably, as they are related, and we were just friends from school). The DM then ghosted me, we never did another session of the campaign, and I have not heard from him or his cousin since.
Last edited: