Worst DM Quotes at Gencon

[The_lone_gunman]

I dont know about the rest of you, but it seems that the DM quality at GenCon has been REAL low. Here are a few of the quotes I heard there:

1) "You want to sleep in the mill? Why would you want to do that, thats just dumb!"

*****a bit of background, there was something poisoning the town food supplies, we thought hiding out in the mill and trying to catch them in the act was actually a good plan, he didnt agree because it didn't fit in with his "plan"*****

2) "Well since you didnt say that you all where keeping watch while riding your horses you are all suprised by these 10 dinosaurs!"

***shouldnt we get a spot check? Or are we just riding around with our eyes closed?***


3) "I couldn't afford a GenCon badge, but Im just here to DM anyway. DMing is my life!"

***This is just so sad.***


4) "Give me a sec, I need to get through this flavor text."

***In response to a player who needed to ask a question. Nothing like the pain of getting through all that silly flavor text!***

5) "Can I borrow a DMG, PHB, and Monster Manual from anyone?"

***What a sense of forbooding I had when I heard this.***

6) "The dragon, as it dies, falls on top of your unconsious companion, killing him."

***This was such a load of crap, the dragon was 4 feet off the ground, and the character was 10 feet away. Somehow the dragon floated over and landed on him as he was dying apparently.***



Anyone else have any bad DM experiences they want to share?

TLG

 

[frankthedm]

uhm... Nope

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

It's Call of Cthulhu. We're in a cave, and four of us walk down a passage. The Keeper picks up our figs, carries them across the room, and says we're hopelessly lost. Mind you, he never said there was an intersection and never gave us a choice about which turn to make. Just, "You're hopelessly lost"

 

[Holy Bovine]

uhm... Nope

So you posted because.......?


I do remember one DM at an RPGA tournament that if the players were not constantly talking to him (ie we talked amoungst ourselves to plan ) he would have wandering monsters attack us, saying we weren't paying attention to our surroundings (including the Orc warband attacking us in the middle of a city in broad daylight). This happened at least 4 times so we always designated one player to take 'DM duty' and distract him while we made our plans.

 

[gfunk]

A DM at our Dragonlance session,

[to player] "So, how does charging work again?"

 

[MUKid]

Oh man...

These quotes are pretty tame compared to what we've experienced in the past. I've never, ever played in the D&D Open with a good DM (yet we keep going). Unfortunately, the experiences were so awful that I've repressed them and can't remember any exact quotes.

The worst time I ever had was playing in a Vampire game at one GenCon where the Storyteller (that's a funky Vampire way of saying "DM") had made basically a dungeon crawl. All we did was walk around with guns and shoot werewolves in this giant cave. FOR FOUR HOURS. Worse, he didn't understand the combat rules and we were all doing like quadruple damage, killing werewolves with one hit each. At the end, when time ran out, he just ended the game. Just ended it, picked up his stuff, told us "Time's up" and left. Sigh.

Of course I've had some really fun DMs (and players) at GenCon, too, but the quality is low enough that I usually avoid roleplaying in any game unless two or three of my friends are also signed up. There is nothing worse than being in Hour 1 of a 4 hour slot and realizing how badly it's going to suck.

 

[Myrmidon]

The party's cleric has fallen into the river during one of he Green Regent events...
DM: "So what's your swim check?"
Cleric: "Uh, -2."
DM: "-2 how is that possible?"
Cleric: "Check penalty..."
DM: "Huh, check penalty?"
Cleric: "You know, armor check penalty..."
DM: (Looks puzzled) "Well just take off your armor."
Cleric: "That takes 10 rounds, my Con sucks... I'll probably drown."
DM: "10 rounds? Uh, I'll let you do it as a standard."

 

[Bagpuss]

DM: "Can you all stop roleplaying for a while so we can get on with the adventure."

To be fair to the DM.... we were about two and a half hours into the three hours of gaming time you have for a session and the party still hadn't made it out of the prison cell we found our selves in at the start of the adventure.

To be fair to the players.... we were all Gully Dwarves and although we had come up with several escape plans, as we were acting in character the best one we had so far was to dig through the solid stone walls with a toothpick. Unfortunately the toothpick was already stuck fast in the lock we had tried to pick with it.

Other plans involved playing dead so when they came at meal times they might leave the door open or be off guard, unfortunately that plan failed at the first smell of blueberry pie, and we all got up to get the biggest slice.

Battering the door down by using one of our number as a ram only resulted in a heavy concusion for the battering ram.

I don't think we ever did get out.

 

[Adso]

The party's cleric has fallen into the river during one of he Green Regent events...
DM: "So what's your swim check?"
Cleric: "Uh, -2."
DM: "-2 how is that possible?"
Cleric: "Check penalty..."
DM: "Huh, check penalty?"
Cleric: "You know, armor check penalty..."
DM: (Looks puzzled) "Well just take off your armor."
Cleric: "That takes 10 rounds, my Con sucks... I'll probably drown."
DM: "10 rounds? Uh, I'll let you do it as a standard."

:::shakes head::: Sorry. The only saving grace is that you benefited from DM error rather than died from it. Still, I am sorry to hear that an RPGA DM didn’t know about armor check penalties and the taking off armor rules. Thanks for the feedback, though. Stuff to take with me when we start doing GM mentoring at Winter Fantasy 2004.

 

[Clain MacFaileas]

I rolled a 2 on an intimidate check against a pair of goblins. The DM looked over as I was adding up my bonuses, and before I told him what my total was, he said, "You just fail. I'm not even going to look up the rules for that."

The hairy git didn't even bother to let me explain that I had a total of +10 to intimidate (even without him giving me a circumstance bonus for using the name of the goblins' shaman in my threat, which he did not bother to do...), and that a 12 easily beats the DC for the 1 HD goblin.

This same DM had also looked over at my character sheet about two-thirds of the way through the game and said, "Huh. You can't be a noble." This struck me of all my class abilities and turned me into an Aristocrat NPC in the middle of the game, even though he said nothing about it at the start of the event, nor had the previous game's DM when I first created the character (these events were a four part create-and-watch-your-PC-grow thing).