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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8303598" data-attributes="member: 70468">I have a very short list of people who are not welcome at my table and in whose games I will not play. And by short list, I mean one person.That guy was an incredibly antagonistic GM. Most of his games fizzled out because people would just stop showing up. One Mage game sticks out because of the way it ended. As people would drop out, he’d have their PCs turn heel, and we’d end up fighting them. Eventually, it was down to just two of us. Other mages were going to attack our manse, so what do we do? The other remaining player had the perfect answer: we would get on a plane, fly across the country, and start new lives.In his 4e games, he would use absurd tactics. Everything would fight optimally. Kobolds would shift around all over the place to make sure every single one had the optimal number of allies and got to take an attack. Stuff like that. He would also lecture us on our tactics, but he didn’t like it when we actually tried to fight tactically.For those who didn’t play 4e, the shaman class has a spirit companion. You can pick a different type depending on how you want to specialize (defender, striker, leader). You could summon it as a minor action and dismiss it as a minor action. In one of his games, I played a bear (protector) shaman. After getting lectured on tactics, I started using my spirit more tactically. I would dismiss and resummon it to block attack lanes, so things couldn’t just charge us. I was playing a quasi-defender, so that seemed pretty appropriate to me. He did not like that.At first, he’d just have enemies focus on killing my bear. You have to do a fair amount of damage in one hit, so it’s not easy to kill. Of course, he switched to GM fiat to make sure the bear got killed when he needed it. You take damage when that happens, so that was lame (on top of everything else). The first time I did that, I tried to look up how that was supposed to work, and he tried to forbid me from looking it up. I was the host and intimated something about finding other places to run, and looked it up anyway but said nothing since I didn’t want to escalate things further. I don’t really like rules arguments during the game.Of course, that game fizzled out when people stopped coming. However, that was after he had transported everyone to ancient Rome. The kicker was he wanted us to all write backgrounds for our characters. I wrote a nice one too, but it was all worthless. There was no point because not only did he incorporate nothing, but he moved us to a completely different setting, so it would have been moot anyway.As a player, he wasn’t much better. He tended to be a spotlight hog. He was also very patronizing about how I played my monsters, continuing his lectures on tactics and occasionally praising how I might do something well in an encounter. In one game, he played a character with a low int who followed Bahamut. He would do stuff like try to keep NPCs as pets/slaves and claim that he thought it was okay because he was too stupid to know that wasn’t okay according to Bahamut.It was the lectures and tactical crap that pushed me over the edge. I was running The Lost Mines of Karak in the Scales of War adventure path. The last encounter of the session was the harpy encounter. They have a power that can be used to pull PCs towards them. At one point, the harpies were positioned around the room, and they would pull PCs away who got too close to them. As soon as we finished, the player starting complaining about the encounter.Admittedly, it wasn’t a great encounter. However, he’d given us so much crap about our tactics that I’d finally reached my limit. That was on top of all the other crap (and there was more in the other nWoD games he ran). That was our last session. I told them I was done running and ended the campaign right there.After that, I tried running some Pathfinder 1e for a couple of the players. That group fizzled due to attendance, but we were able to get most of the old group back together plus some new people they knew to do Kingmaker on the weekends. There have been some additions, and some people have left (due to life stuff, also one of the players rage quit*), but we’re still playing together a decade later.[HR][/HR]* I feel bad about that one. There was a style mismatch, and I could have handled things better. What happened is his character died during the Stag Lord fight. Knowing it was a nasty fight, I had informed the group of my policy for new characters (come in equal to the lowest level in the group). When he died, he wanted to make a new character. Everything thing went downhill from there.He claimed he was being punished for another player’s attendance (who couldn’t always attend and was a level behind). We said he could raise his character, but that was acceptable because it would be punishing the party by spending their treasure to bring him back. He then demanded a new character identical to his old one, and I said no. After he stormed out, the other players were like: characters die sometimes. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷🏻‍♂️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-1f3fb-2642.png" title="Man shrugging: light skin tone    :man_shrugging_tone1:" data-shortname=":man_shrugging_tone1:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />I think we ended up having 18 deaths total over the course of that campaign. After the party got back to town, they raised his character and made him their kingdom’s magister.</blockquote>

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