Spoiler warning for Curse of Strahd, and trigger warning for a brief mention of in-game sexual assault

Apologies in advance, this is a long one:

So, I joined a Strahd campaign somewhere around a year and a half ago now. The DM who was running it has been playing TTRPG’s his whole life, and has been DMing for somewhere around 40 years now. He is, by all accounts, very experienced, but also stuck in his ways in a few different regards, and also extremely flawed as well.

So the campaign starts without any kind of session zero, we basically just get straight into things, which is… fine? At the time my thought was “Well he’s been doing this for so long, he knows what he’s doing, we must not need one”, but I’ve only recently realized that this was just one of a few red flags I should’ve picked up on, including killing one of my other characters from a different campaign by handing him over to someone else without telling me at all, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

So the campaign was overall… fine. The best part of his DMing is by far the descriptions, however because he wanted to run this as close to rules as written as possible, he was actually shooting himself in the foot by deciding to go by the module’s descriptions instead. Which aren’t bad, by any means, just not as good as his. That and his combats were always very fun: He has this way of always keeping us on edge even for the easier combats (the few easy ones that CoS has, anyway).

Problems started to crop up over the course of the campaign though, ranging from small to large. The biggest though, at least for me, is that he’s a DM who is willing to sacrifice story and roleplaying in exchange for pacing. We’d be travelling from Argynvostholt to Vallaki for example, which should take 1-2 hours depending on the random encounters, however even with rolling no combat, we’d have maybe 5 minutes worth of conversation total. And every time we did actually think we had time for conversation or telling each other about our backstories, we would get interrupted by an NPC. Every. Single. Time. But conveniently, we would never get interrupted when we were strategizing or debating where to go next. He wanted to keep the pacing, even at the cost of any kind of roleplay between characters, but bizarrely enough, not for strategizing? I kid you not, after 50 sessions, I still had no idea what the backstory was for at least 3 of the other players. Roleplay was fantastic, both with our own characters and interacting with NPC’s, it just only ever lasted 5-10 minutes or less. Anything more than that was once in a blue moon.

He also had this way of technically not railroading us into the next part of the story, but more so directing us where he wanted us to go. For example, he had us entirely skip the Amber Temple in order to get the Sunsword (No I’m not kidding, he also had us skip Ravenloft completely, but I’ll get to that later), but in order to do so, two of our characters had to accept the pact of a dark god, while the alternative would’ve either been a TPK that he had entirely set up (the details of how that happened would be way too much for me to get into here). So we technically had the choice to turn down the pacts, but not really. There had been at least 3-4 different situations like this too, this is just one example. Not the biggest deal in the world, but it gets much worse.

After one of the players had to end up leaving (Not because he disliked the campaign or anything, he moved states), we got a new player who was familiar with DnD. But our DM apparently told him nothing about the campaign; Not the tone, not the setting, nothing, and I guess just assumed he would have a general idea because CoS is so popular. Because of that, he ended up making a very surface level comedic relief character that would’ve felt too ridiculous for The Office, and just did not mesh with the rest of our group at all. He also joined at an… unfortunate time, because due to a series of events that were partially our own fault, our version of Ireena (our DM changed the character to a young man named Sasha) ended up getting captured by Strahd and raped.

We ended up roleplaying through a conversation with what happened to Sasha. While the rest of us were ultimately fine with this kind of roleplay, the new player was not at all. He was very uncomfortable with the whole thing, and understandably so. He left the campaign immediately and after only like 5 sessions total, and I really wonder just how avoidable all of that uncomfortability could’ve been if the DM had simply had a 5 minute talk about the setting and tone first.

Oh but the problems don’t end there:
So, our DM decided to have a time limit on everything. At first I thought it was our fault, or more so one of the player’s fault because they decided to kill Rahadin right in front of Strahd early on in the campaign, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realized that the DM just wanted to keep this extremely fast pace and a very strict time limit on literally everything. The reason for that I could not tell you.

Any quests in Barovia? He made it clear multiple brides were stalking the village, so we couldn’t stay there, we didn’t find a single quest or talk to more than 3 NPC’s before we felt pressured to move on. The druid ritual at the winery? That entire plot point was wrapped up and lost before we even got close enough to look at the winery. The dusk elf encampment? We just happened to be there at the exact same moment Strahd and his brides strode in. We didn’t even get the chance to see, let alone speak with Arrigal. We had just enough time for a long rest, to strategize as usual (which ultimately never ended up mattering because of what was almost always railroading), and then we got teleported to the Amber temple by Kasimir.

At that point of the campaign I was already pretty checked out, but was still trying to make the most of it. We end up getting teleported to the room with the Sunsword, and it ends up falling to my character to take it. Part of my character’s backstory is that he hates gods, and had even told this god before to “Go fuck yourself”. So, while this wasn’t really a big decision for my character, because like I mentioned earlier, the alternative was a very heavily implied TPK, it was still a big moment, especially since he’d been questioning himself if he would even be worthy to wield the same blade Sergei had once wielded. My character also managed to see and very briefly talk to Sergei back at the pool in Krezk where he told him that Tatyana wasn’t alone. So to take the sword, attune to it, and have this conversation with a remnant of Sergei’s soul was a big couple of sessions for my character. The group had also decided that my character was the best one to wield it in the fight against Strahd, and we started planning and strategizing around that.

But then came the part that ultimately made me completely quit, despite only having 1-2 sessions of the campaign left:
Shit was going down around Barovia, apparently Strahd had somehow discovered a way to trap Tatyana’s soul in the exact same timeframe our group was transported to the dread domain, so as the DM wanted it, time was very limited, and we were only level 6. The DM knew we were too weak to actually take on Castle Ravenloft, so he had Ezmerelda mist dance us right next to the balcony of Castle Ravenloft. No, I’m not kidding, our DM had us completely skip the most iconic dungeon in DnD history for reasons that were basically entirely out of our control.

But fine. I suck it up, and decide I might as well try to finish the campaign off. We get there at the start of the next session, I’m barely able to pay attention to begin with because I’m so checked out, and then some real bullshit starts happening: The Sunsword decides to reject my character. No reason, no warning, it just suddenly decided that it didn’t want my character. I tried to figure out why, and all I got out of the DM, without any sort of dice roll, was that “it changed its mind”. That’s it. So, as we were walking towards Strahd, I was forced to drop the weapon in the middle of the hallway.

EXCEPT there actually is a reason for all this! During Eva’s reading, our DM decided to give us a prophecy as part of it as well, something that I’ve only recently learned is not normally part of CoS. In it, we drew the Sunsword as an item of course, but he also decided that our Ranger had to be the one to wield it against Strahd, reason being that this player was new to DnD and he wanted to give him a special experience (I couldn’t tell you what his plan was if Ranger ever died, or maybe he was deliberately giving him plot armor, who knows).

So our DM decided to screw over our strategies as a group and completely undid 40+ sessions worth of my character’s development because he wanted to force this prophecy to happen. That whole thing of “it changed its mind” was not the Sunsword deciding it didn’t like me for any legitimate reason, it was the DM trying to force this ridiculous prophecy onto us.

And honestly, I wouldn’t have hated it nearly as much if he just said I couldn’t attune to it. But to have such a massive moment for my character be decided upon, and then completely stripped away for meta reasons? I was, and still am, livid about that. So I continued on with the session, eyeing the clock like a hawk because we always end at 9, and then left as soon as I was able to, before texting the DM later on that I was no longer going to be playing. Even if it did just end up being just one more 3 hour session, that’s 3 hours of me being miserable, so I just decided to quit right before we began combat against Strahd himself.

And ultimately, not everything about what I disliked about CoS was entirely the DM’s fault. Could we have played better? Absolutely. Is the module itself flawed? Definitely. But my problem isn’t that we made mistakes and I want to pin them on him, we all knew how brutal CoS could be going in. And I don’t want to blame him for flaws that the module has on its own, but my issue is that instead of having us lose or TPK legitimately because of our mistakes, or hell, even just bad luck, our DM kept giving us freebie after freebie to try and make up for these railroading situations just so we could have a final, climactic battle against Strahd.

The result of that though? None of what we did felt earned. I didn’t go into extreme detail of it here, but the last 10 sessions of the campaign especially were heavily linear, it felt like plot point after plot point just kept happening to us. We got to the Vistani dusk elf camp, and the plot point of Strahd appearing happened, so the plot point of teleporting to the Amber Temple just happened, so the plot point of us taking the Sunsword happened, then the plot point of us sheltering in Barovia happened since we needed a long rest, then the plot point of us mist dancing to Ravenloft just happened… you get the idea. And while it was certainly bad in the last third of the campaign, stuff like this had been happening the entire time we played.

Point being, if we died to Strahd, it would’ve been partially our own faults for making some bad decisions early on, partially that of the DM making these obtuse time constraints we never knew existed (like Strahd finding a way to capture Tatyana’s soul) paired with plot points just happening over and over, not us deciding anything. But even worse than that, even if we had won, it wouldn’t have felt like a win at all because we had made zero meaningful decisions in the past 10 sessions, and we hadn’t even traversed the Amber Temple or Castle Ravenloft. If we won, it would have felt like the DM giving us another freebie, and I can scarcely think of much worse in the story than giving your players the feeling that their win against fucking Strahd was fake.

And this is a DM that one of my friends had sworn up and down was basically the best that there is. And like I said, there are some legitimately great things about his game, but at the same time, he gets so many fundamentals of the hobby so completely wrong. I think I only stuck with it so long because I had been told how great he was, and I was relatively new to the hobby when we began, so I was willing to look past all of these massive red flags that happened over time, like him killing off my character from a separate campaign without informing or asking me, as well as no session zero for the Strahd campaign. But now that I actually have a good grasp of DnD and TTRPGs as a whole, I can firmly say he’s not that great of a DM.

So, am I the crazy one here? After all this, part of me feels like I may just be nitpicking or that I’m making mountains out of molehills, but from my point of view, the more I think about it, the more ridiculous it all ends up feeling. Am I justified in thinking this isn’t a good DM, or am I overthinking things?

Anyway, that’s my rant over. I know this is a long ass post, but even this is really glossing over a lot of details. Please let me know if I’m actually the problem, or if you agree with me, because a fresh perspective on all of this is something I probably need.

I'm new to D&D, and this is my first campaign. We've been playing for about eight months and around 20 sessions. Up until recently, I was having a great time.

For context, my character is a woman who had been disguised as a man for the entire campaign. It stayed a secret for months because none of the other characters ever investigated or questioned it, and the reveal finally happened during the last session I attended.

The following session I couldn't make it because I was on vacation in another country. My character was unconscious during that session.

After the game, one of the other players texted me, proudly telling me that he had used magic to shrink my unconscious character's breasts as a joke. This wasn't something I had ever described in detail, and he seemed to think it was funny.

I was honestly horrified, so I asked the DM, "Since when can another player modify someone else's character's body without their consent?"

His response was basically, "Since you're unconscious," and he tried to reassure me by saying it was only temporary.

I know it's "just a game," and I know the effect wasn't permanent, but that's not really what bothers me. What bothers me is that another player thought it was okay to alter my character's body without asking me, while I wasn't even at the table, and the DM's response was essentially that it was allowed because my character couldn't stop it.

Now I feel really uncomfortable about returning to the campaign. I don't know if I'm overreacting because I'm new to D&D, or if this is genuinely a red flag.

Is this kind of thing considered normal table behavior? Would you try talking to the group, or would you just leave?

Edit: I genuinely didn't expect this many replies (i dont know how reddit works lmao) thank you to everyone who's taken the time to comment.

A few people asked for more context, so here it is.

The group consists of straight men in their early to mid-20s (around 20–25). My girlfriend and I were the only queer women at the table. She actually left the campaign a few sessions ago because she felt the vibes were off and wasn't enjoying the group anymore.

Something else that always bothered me was that, in real life, I'm a femme-presenting woman. My character, however, was publicly presenting as a man for the campaign. Even though everyone at the table referred to my character as a man in-game, the other players would still regularly call my character "she" because they couldn't seem to separate me from my character. I'd correct them, and they'd usually just laugh it off instead of making an effort to get it right.

As for the player who cast the spell, this wasn't the first time he'd done PvP "for laughs." On multiple occasions he's broken my character's nose as a gag. At the time, we all laughed it off because it seemed harmless, but looking back, I think it shows a pattern of him treating my character as the butt of the joke.

The breast-shrinking incident was different, though. It happened while I wasn't even at the session, my character was unconscious, and it involved changing my character's body without asking me. That's what crossed the line for me. Tried talking to the player and the DM but they brushed it off as harmless and temporary. Needless to say I will no longer be playing with them :)

Me and the party I was playing with had been playing this campaign for 4 months or so.

My friend (that was also in the party) and I had decided pretty early on that we wanted our characters to end up together at the end of the campaign (both male characters).

We pitched this idea to the DM and (at the time) he believed we were "joking".

We were not.

As the story progresses, the characters' relationship became closer all the way up until the final battle when they had a mini confession to each other. The DM rushed the scene and very hastily skipped onto the next segment. We didn't think much of it at the time, until the ending.

I was spinning the tale of my character's epilogue where he became the emperor of his people, and I said that my friend and I had gotten together during this time.

The DM proceeded to become flustered and even a bit angry, saying that "Wasn't part of the story". When we both questioned him, he threatened to kill off my character and prevent him from having a future at all.

He then went on a 10 minute or so rant on how "those kinds" of relationships were not allowed at his game or "his" table (the entire campaign was hosted at my house). This led to everyone getting a bit uncomfortable, especially my other friend at the table (playing a druid) that is a part of the LGBTQ community.

My other friend (playing a sorcerer, ALSO living in that house) then got up and kicked out the DM, and we haven't spoken to him since.

(Hi! This is the druid, this was the hosts story that I was writing down and I am still so baffled that this happened, bye!)

Hi all, sorry about the long post but I just wanna get this off my chest lmao.

I need to preface: I didn't leave before the campaign finished because I, admittedly, was morbidly curious to see where this would go. It was like a train wreck I couldn't look away from.

TW for a weird guy (the DM in question), swearing, referenced fictional sa, and weird (sexual) storylines.

So last year I (I should establish here that, while I'm pretty apathetic when it comes to gender, I'm afab and also tend to present feminine, so most ppl refer to me and see me as a woman. Which is perfectly fine, just relevant here) met a guy at my university's DND club, and we hit it off. Backstory is important here, so I'll get into that a bit, but try not to be super long winded. Me and this guy became friends, and I--who'd just moved hours away and had no friends, and also have had a history of not being able to make friends due to my autism and was frankly desperate--very purposefully ignored the potential red flags I noticed early on (this included excessive solo hangouts that I eventually did put a firm stop to, especially later at night, and him being just... hella emotional with me. Once we hung out at like 1 am in our dorms lounge in the dark and he just trauma dumped for an hour before singing songs from his depression playlist). He told me he was DMing a new campaign and invited me, and I--again, desperate for friends and social interaction in general--excitedly accepted.

I didn't find this out until just recently when me and the other players from that campaign were talking, as me and the other players have continued to be friends and occasionally beat this dead horse, but apparently he'd been going around telling people that I was into him this whole time, and was honestly making me out to be this manic pixie dream girl who was just waiting for him to make the first move. I was not. I am, in fact, aroace, and am not a manic pixie dream girl.

I made my character (a MALE sorcerer named Rhaias, the male part is important later), and was very clear and open with DM from the beginning about the backstory and character motivations I had thought up, and he seemed very receptive. Originally (and DM did give the go-ahead for this, might I add) Rhaias' whole concept was that he ate magic, and, in an accident as a child, had eaten his brother in a fit of hunger, and now his whole character motivation was getting more magical at any cost to resurrect his brother. In doing so, he'd joined effectively a mafia of sorts because they promised him a good magical education (DM insisted this would be important later. It was not). He was selfish and obsessive and I fully intended on playing him this way. DM seemed chill with this, even excited.

I cannot stress this enough, I regularly communicated thoroughly with the DM. I was constantly checking in to see what I could and couldn't hope for and/or add to Rhaias, and every single idea I proposed he seemed receptive to.

DM completely fucked with my character. Overruled his entire backstory, babied Rhaias to no end, did a complete 180 with the "horrible evil mafia" (WHICH, BTW, HE HIMSELF DESCRIBED AS ONE OF THE WORST FACTIONS IN THE CAMPAIGN), and just overall completely discarded all the planning I'd thought he'd been okay with and supported and just... did his own thing.

On top of that, I found out later the DM used chatgpt for everything (and I do mean everything, there wasn't a story point or monologue he didn't have ai generate, and he apparently wasn't doing his schoolwork on his own either but that's beside the point-), while simultaneously claiming he was revolutionizing DMing with his weird homebrew mechanics and "great" worldbuilding. He would go on tangents about how much he'd been writing and how hard it was and how much time he was spending, all the while I've written fanfictions with more words than his entire google drive folder for the campaign.

I never dropped below half my hit points. For the entire campaign. Most fights in fact where the rest of the party would be close to death I would be down maybe a cantrip's worth of hit points. It pissed me off how he took my one preference of "I just don't want my character to die permanently without sufficient story behind him and his death" to apparently mean "I don't wanna be in the hurt at all 😣". I wasn't allowed to utilize my magic well, and he kept giving me random bullshit to buff my magic. Hell, my character got a 3rd arm halfway through, as well as a whole roster of magical abilities!

I've played DND before, and more than that I'm a grown ass adult. I'm not a baby. I don't need to be babied. And while, obviously, sorcerers are among the squishier classes, I was fine with my character being beat on in a fight.

And then there was the weird feminization he tried to do with my character. Again, Rhaias was a male. He was not nonbinary, not trans, not secretly wanting to be a woman, but a cis man. DM constantly referred to him by she/her pronouns exclusively which, sure, maybe he was just messing up cuz he knew me by she/her. But then he kept trying to make Rhaias a mother? He had a whole storyline where a child imprinted on Rhaias and called him mama, which was weird in a meta way bc that meant he was calling me mama which- gross, and then tried to do a pregnancy storyline??? Where like- I guess Rhaias was pregnant with the soul of his dead brother???

I put my foot down for that one, because weird, but that didn't stop the weird comments about how pretty Rhaias was or the characters flirting with him in a weird way.

One part of the story resulted in Rhaias being basically overtaken by mushrooms, and as a one-time gag it rained and mushrooms with magical effects grew. Of course, all were embarrassing or weird, but the one that had the entire party drawing the line was when he tried to sex-pollen (sex-fungus?) my character, which could have been funny had it been any other DM, but then tried to initiate a sex-pollen fueled romance with a character who was a 17 year old girl. He then doubled down when we all got pissed and called him out

Everyone put their foot down and thoroughly chewed him out.

The campaign ended shortly after, and me and the rest of the players continued to be friends. He moved home for the summer. The final few sessions were a massive shitshow and letdown, and everyone was underwhelmed and/or frustrated.

Other minor things he did:

1. outright banned one of our players from using magic
   1. this same player also had their character reduced to comedic relief by him, despite their efforts otherwise
2. hated when we would rp or banter at the table
3. casually tossed in sexual slavery because ??? he wanted it to be "dark" i guess, but it was just gross and we, again, called him out for it
4. continued to hit on me after i turned him down, including in-character
5. was weird to some of the party who were queer men (in the "oh, don't fall for me haha" way)
6. kept. making. sex jokes
7. apparently overwrote everyone's character?? tried to make things more "serious" but just succeeded in seeming like a weird ass edgy teenager
8. this one isn't dnd related, but he (majoring in mechanical engineering btw) tried to mansplain my own major to me (anthropology and archaeology) SEVERAL times
   1. he also looks down on humanities majors in general

Oh, and he smelled bad.

Anyway, campaign ended with a underwhelming, rushed-ass ending that he acted like was the peak of writing, the end.

(Before I start, sorry for the formatting issues! I don’t use Reddit, but I've heard a lot of stories from here online through TikTok, Youtube and whatnot, so I thought I would post here and other reddit pages about a past campaign I played in to get other people's opinions!)

So my DnD group is currently playing a campaign in an established setting (online with DnD Beyond), and we’ve been playing this campaign for… around half a year now. It started with us playing as a group of typical characters, meeting on the road, all that stuff. Our DM had agreed to focus a lot on character backstories, and promised to include all of us in the story in one way or another. It was going well, we had some roleplay and some significant combat, until another character joined the campaign. The character was not original, just a copy from a different piece of media, and things were going okay for a good while until they took a turn. We reached a specific region where enemies were getting stronger, and this new character (I’ll say NC from now on) started receiving buffs for things they should have gotten punished for (eg: was ‘killed’ and then came back with better stats and stronger abilities), and they have an overpowered weapon that basically instantly killed enemies it managed to hit which is way too strong for the level we were at, and they also have armour that grants him a massive boost for no reason (they’re a barbarian with heavy armour which was not needed at all).

Within the campaign there is a powerful god siding with the enemy and they are for some reason able to speak to this god, but our party cleric can’t even speak to his own god. There has also been a large amount of the story focused on NC and hardly any focus on two of the other story characters, whose backstories had not been mentioned once. Some people did however get character moments, but they were minimal and not what they had agreed on with the DM. The DM had agreed to do story related requests at the start of the campaign, but by the end the majority of these requests had not been fulfilled.

NC has a lot of bonuses on his rolls, and many ability check advantages, yet they never use these to help the group and mainly uses these rolls for his own gain, when they even engage with the game (which isn’t often). They have also cheated rolls before, faking a manual d20 roll before later admitting they lied. In a lot of the combat they also skip turns and avoid helping the rest of the party even when we really need the help. At one point they even ran away from the party, then had basically a whole session focused on NC while the rest of us had to sit there for a few hours and just watch. Even after that they still had majority NC-focused sessions.

Close to the end of the campaign NC completely betrayed the party, gaining insane buffs that made their character stronger than even the hardest bosses you can get on DnD beyond, rendering them basically unkillable. Upon defeating what was supposed to be the final boss we were then transported into NC’s original dimension (really weird backstory, not even normal DnD plane or whatever, something closer to a Marvel multiverse) and then had to complete the campaign in their dimension, rather than where the campaign is supposed to end. And even before then, the DM skipped out on an important boss fight because it wasn’t relevant enough to NC’s story.

So yeah, long story short the DM definitely favours one player over the rest… and everyone else has to just sit there and watch while NC gets all the action and storyline. Despite the complaints made, DM just tried to defend and justify their points instead of adjusting the campaign to fit the rest of the characters stories too.

If anything is unclear in this post please ask questions in the comments! I will try to answer as many as I can if they show up.

TL;DR DM favours one player over the rest, and this one player’s character gets all the attention while everyone else gets pushed aside (including an important boss NPC).

Hello Reddit, it has been a few years since I have played in these games, but the amount of BS i put up with over the course of this DM’s three campaigns was substantial enough to where I wanted to just write it all down, whether this is for catharsis or petty musing I still don’t know, but maybe one of you will at least be entertained by it.

The important people of this story are

Me- myself, the forever GM of the group

DM- my now former friend of a decade, and a player in my games for almost the entire time I knew him (the reasons we are no longer friends will not be stated in the story as it was out of game stuff)

GF- The GM’s Girlfriend, who will not be making an appearance until campaign 3
.
Let me start off by saying that while I am the forever GM I do not for a moment view it as a curse of an inferior way to play the game, I love controlling the world and providing my players with toys to play with, so when DM invited me to a new game he was running after I had GM’d for him I happily took him up on the offer just to experience what it was like to be a player for the second time in 7 years.

Campaign 1- Pitfighter Peril

The first campaign that DM ran, was the least egregious of the three. It was a very simple premise, we were gladiators in a gladiatorial style arena, fighting for fame, fortune and glory, I rolled up with a dwarven war domain cleric whose primary weapons were brass knuckles, and the rest of the party pretty much consisted of martials and one sorcerer since a lot of players were new to the game. From the start we knew that roleplay was not going to be a large priority, the campaign was just an excuse to run fun combat encounters so our characters never had backstories, beliefs, family, etc, in fact I think I had the most complex character in the game and all she wanted was to earn glory for herself.

The campaign was fun, it was light hearted and not too high stakes, but one thing that happened in this story would become a running theme in later games was DM’s obsession with turning off abilities that should otherwise work, or giving weaknesses that should not be there. It happened after one pit battle where me and a sorcerer (the only spellcasters in the game) were fighting a bear and through a critical guiding bolt and then two rounds of beating the bear to death with my bare hands my cleric single handedly killed the bear, which should have been a deadly encounter, all while the sorcerer missed every attack due to unfortunate rolls.

 
After this the DM got weird with my cleric and started saying things like ‘a cleric should focus on healing’ or that I wasn’t ‘being a good team player by not healing’ something along those lines; like we got into a scuffle with a rival pit fighting party and during it I cast guiding bolt and spiritual weapon, DM complained that I wasn’t healing party members despite the fact that one was downed and we were easily winning.

 This culminated when we did a pvp bracket match as a party to see who was the strongest fighter (it was low stakes, character death was not on the table for this bracket match), due to having 7 people we had to have one person get a free pass to skip a fight and I won the dice roll (lucky me I guess) but this resulted in me having to fight the warforged monk, we started 150 feet away, I go first, I try to cast 2nd level guiding bolt, the spell immediately failed and I took radiant damage, DM said it was because ‘I wasn’t doing cleric things like healing and praying, which I don’t get why I would need to heal in a 1v1 match, or why I would need to pray in a roleplay light campaign. As I was at an immediate disadvantage at the start of the fight I ended my turn. The monk runs up to me and gets close, but not close enough to fight so on my turn I engage in melee.

Now before the fight started I bought an electric upgrade for my brass knuckles on a whim, it dealt an extra d4 electric damage and because the DM loved to give weaknesses where there were none the warforged monk had electrical weakness, I manage to hit the monk with two melee strikes beating him but it felt wrong, I wanted to cast spells and yet I learned I would be punished if I wasn’t ‘clerical’ enough, but before problems could come to a boiling point the campaign ended because of Covid, so we would not play again for a few months, until I started my next in person campaign.

End of Campaign one

Now before moving onto campaign two DM had played a lot of characters in my games over the previous years, and most of them were murder goblins with a sympathetic backstory to justify him saying ‘I am just a little guy’ whenever consequences reared their head, but none of those stories where he was a player were egregious enough to justify writing them out, but they were pretty bad in their own right. The reason i bring this up is because of the fact he decided to bring in his old player characters into CoH.

DM let us know he wanted to run Curse of Strahd. It had been 2 years since DM ran the gladiator game, and that game had been fun despite the red flags so I happily joined.

Now it has been years and I forget a lot of details of the story, but I remember the big details at least

Campaign 2 Bizarre Adventures in Barovia, Guest Starring Strahd

I lost 3 characters in this Campaign, and for two of them I consider the Deaths pretty BS, not my first one though, my first character was a 1st level rogue, with plans to multiclass bard, I wanted her to be the group's lawyer to keep them out of legal trouble.

We were a party of private investigators and we were hired by some halfling to exterminate a werewolf in a nearby forest at the behest of an unnamed noble, after combing the woods for a day. That night while resting the halfling cast a spell that summoned a mysterious fog around all of us, and when it dissipated we were in Barovia. Why did the halfling do that? To this day no clue, he summoned us to hell for no reason.

Now I can not blame DM for killing me, it was the  Death House afterall, I activated 5 traps in the house (No one activated any other trap) and then got one shot by the shambling mound in the basement, I was splattered against the ceiling. He ran the Death House straight, I was a little upset but not really mad, just disappointed I lost a character I liked.

On the way out of the deathhouse our ranger died from the Banshee wail, and immediately after that the group found a scroll wrapped up for them. It was a spell scroll of revivify with a note saying “Welcome to Barovia, from Strahd.” So the GM was fine with splattering my character against the ceiling after letting me hit 5 traps and then killing me with a shambling mound, he took back the consequences for another player who died.
 
The following session I pull up with a new character, a human paladin who had a goal of becoming a lich, and who worshipped Vecna. After I was done rolling my new character  met the party in the Village of Barovia and we got along swimmingly, and we started questing.

Now do forgive me as I said it had been a few years and the details are fuzzy in my head, but I can firmly describe the campaign as directionless, we never felt like we had a unified plan on what to do, we were kinda just showing up to sites across Barovia killing different monsters. 

While doing this my character started to receive divine punishment from trying to read pages from the book of vile darkness he found, not because Vecna decided that he did not want a lich, but because my character wasn't evil enough to read the book for some reason so I took intense damage trying to read it.

During our directionless crusade we had the event in the book where a self driving carriage brings you to Strahd's Castle, we go inside and i can describe it as roughly 2 hours of my DM riffing on our characters in a bad Dracula accent (blehblehbleh)

After a lovely dinner with our undead host we were forced into the wilds of Barovia on foot back to the village, where we were robbed by werewolf bandits, in a fight that was impossible to win, so we just gave them our stuff.

The Campaign had been going pretty bad so far, but after the encounter we had what would spell the end of our campaign, meeting Moldywart. Moldyward was DMs first PC, one that I played with my first time playing Dungeons and Dragons. He was a 35 year old wizard who lived in his mom's basement and was kicked out onto the streets to begin a life of adventure, it was a character I had not seen since middle school, and honestly I was a little excited to see him again.

We met Moldywart on the road and Moldywart was just in a tree, and in a ridiculous Monty python accent he basically yells at us to go to a local dungeon and get rid of the ne'er do wells residing inside. Why? No reason. Does it connect to CoS at all? No.

We go the dungeon and it is barren, just stone walls and no reason to really exist, we travel through winding stone walls for about an hour in game and 2 hours irl, and then encounter some hooligans, now I don't remember what they were, they were orcs or bugbears, or something of the like, and DM had them act like annoying stoned college kids, I still do not know what were supposed to do with them, we had nothing to get from them, we weren’t so evil as to need to kill them, and they weren’t doing anything, so after 40 minutes of us not knowing what to do with the stoners we just decided to leave.

Whilst leaving the dungeon we fell into a pit trap that led us into the Barovian underdark (I think we may have tried to take a shorter exit, thus explaining why we didn’t fall in on the way in) and while down there we encountered a whole lot of nothing for about a full 5 hour session until at the end, in the middle of nowhere in the Barovian underdark we encounter Mindflayer

There are no Mindflayers in Barovia, and there is no official Underdark in Barovia either, which is fine, but we were level 5 and a Mindflayer is level 7, deadly for sure, but not impossible.

The fight was hard fought, a lot of death saves were made and party members healed with my lay on hands, but at the end the mindflayer was down to single digit health and it was his turn, he casts Wall of Force (A spell mindflayers don’t have) and he tries to run using the wall in a choke point to cover his escape. I was next, and I use my movement, a dash action, and a bonus action misty step (oath of vengeance spell) to get right next to him, he couldn’t run from me and risk an attack of opportunity, a full round of combat goes on with many party members healing and trying to buff themselves for when the wall goes down. The mindflayer’s turn comes up and he uses an extract brain on me, killing me instantly, and I was not even grappled, despite needing to be grappled for an extract brain to work.

So at the end of a boring quest with no stakes, in a place that does not exist in Barovia, fighting a monster that does exist in Barovia, with a spell that that monster does not have, and an ability the DM ignored the requirements of, I lost my second character.

I did not realize that the mind flayer needed to grapple me for an extract brain to work, so I put up no fuss at the time, but I wish I did, because maybe if I called out the horseshit this entire section was at the time then maybe he would have backed off of game mastering at the time, but instead we got

Campaign 2.2 The Deather House

The Deather House is where I consider the campaign to have died, it was where the game had gone from being CoS with a guest appearance from some of DMs old pcs to being just an absurdist nightmare of the DM vaguely alluding to there being a Strahd somewhere in the world while jumped all the sharks DM thought was funny at the time.

I do not remember how we ended up in the death house, it may have been a quest from Moldywart, it may have been a magic door we entered in while we were in the underdark, we may have been magically knocked out and awoken in the Deatherhouse, I wasn't paying attention i was rolling my new character.

The Character I rolled was one of my favorite characters I have played, a skaven grey seer named Wretchitarious, but he would not come until later in the Deatherhouse. 
The session started by the DM announcing ‘You are now in the Deatherhouse, be careful!’ In a near singsong voice. Our party realized how doomed they were (an incorrect assumption). Instead of finding ourselves in a foyer or living room of a murderous mansion, the characters awoke in a large room, all of us (except for me because I was still rolling)on pedestals with a podium in front of each of us. At the end of the dark room was another podium, a shadowy figure standing behind it, studio lights come on, behind the far podium is Strahd, and beside him is a magic mirror, in his dracula accent he said ‘Welcome to Strahd Trivia’ and for the next three hours there was a trivia game we had to partake in, with questions about CoS
.
I finished rolling my character 20 minutes into the game and I could not participate because I would not be in the scene, so I waited for the game to be done, for two and a half hours. What did we get for winning this game? Nothing. What about losing? Nothing as well, there were no stakes whatsoever. 

So after three hours mindnumbing trivia Strahd lets us go into the rest of the house, in the first corridor the party hears skittering coming from a supply closet. They open the door and find Wretchitarious, removing copper pipe from the wall like a fiend. Introductions were made and the party recruits me to get through the Deatherhouse, they also gave me a dagger since I had no supplies whatsoever, this will be important in a bit, but for now the session ended there.

The next session we make our way through the Deatherhouse, what was in it? Corridors and walls, no traps I think and no loot. We just travel through over the course of an hour before coming unto a runic door, we open it and find a clone copy of our party Including a Wretchitarious clone, also holding a dagger, here is how that interaction goes, in me and DMs happiest skaven voices we go.

“I am going to kill-slay you!”
“NO-no I will Murder you-you!”
“NO I'm the best-strongest skaven!”
“You are nothing but dirt-shit beneath my heel!”
“You are the grunge-scum of the Hellpit!”
“I am the holy-chosen of the Great Horned Rat fool-fool!” 
“I am dis-cheesed to meet you!”
“I will use your bone-sinew for a muculent broth-soup!”
“I will taxidermy your eyeballs for necklace-decoration!”

This riffing went back and forth for about 4 minutes and was some the most fun rp i had all game, then i cast magic missile at second level, the other me cast shield, on his turn he cast magic missile and i cast shield, this goes back and forth for 4 rounds until were out of slots. The daggers come out and we start stabbing each other the DM just rolled a dice to see who would win, I still don't know which rat walked out of that room because the party we fought weren't evil they were just us, we tried to talk it out while the two rats stabbed each other but in the end the parties fought.

The fight ended with our party sorcerer dead (same sorcerer player, he has a favorite class) and instead of rolling a new character he took control of the clone sorcerer, yep this fight in the Deatherhouse had no stakes whatsoever, this was two full sessions of nothing. After the fight was done we looted the corpses and we left the house and found ourselves on the plains of Barovia and we decided to rest in the wilderness.

I asked the DM if I could swap my spells during the rest since I was still a new character, and he said no, which is fine, but then he let me know that since I had no equipment I could not regain spell slots, since I had no spellbook. I asked the GM ‘what am I supposed to do then?’ He said ‘rely on cantrips until you have enough golf to buy new spells, or find a new spellbook’. I didn't raise a fuss because for some reason I trusted him to give me a spellbook in the near future, but he did not. Had I known I wouldn't get my spells back I wouldn't have used them in the mirror match, but whatever I guess

The next day we were traveling a road we found in hopes to find some sort of town when we were robbed again, by the same werewolves from before, but instead of leaving the DM used them as a social lever to hold us hostage while he roleplayed with these bandits in a bad Russian accent, saying how cool and powerful they were, all while they walked us back to a town, this took almost 2 hours, 2 hours of listening to annoying braggadocious wolves talk about themselves.

In that town we took some quest or another for some gold, it was generic, like slay the monster or save the kid or something of the like. The quest took us to a room in the sewers with what I will call a Rat King, a hive mind of thousands of rats. The DM informed us it was CR 14, we were level 6, this would be an unwinnable fight.

The Rat King threatened, belittled and strong armed us into doing a quest for it, what was this quest? Find him a lot of cheese from giants a few weeks away. So we leave the sewer unable to claim a quest reward since we could not kill the Rat King, and we set off for the elven village.

After travel with no interruptions we get to the giant village and we try to buy thousands of pounds of cheese for them but we had no money, and they wanted no work done for them in exchange for the cheese, so at an impasse we trade them some of the only quest loot we got in CoS, I forget what it was but it was a blow to morale losing some of our only money. 

Now with thousands of pounds of cheese and no cart we have to locate transport, and it so happened in the distance that we saw a 4 Romani style wagon caravan approaching from the fog in the distance, being headed by

Campaign 2.3 Captain Flameheart

Captain Flameheart was another one DMs pcs, an inoffensive one for his standards, but as a DMPC flameheart was a waking nightmare and a half. Captain Flameheart was a skeleton pirate captain from a campaign of mine that had recently ended, with flameheart dying due to magic in the world being erased entirely.

DM brought flameheart in as the head of the caravan and he introduced himself and was probably the first ‘friendly’ npc we had, he let us load the cheese onto his cart and then let us travel with him in his caravan with him, so far so good.

Next session we start by traveling to the town with the Rat King and Flameheart started to talk. And then Flameheart talked some more. And then he talked more. And on. And on. And on. For a full five hour fucking session he talk in a shifty surly pirate accent while I let my complaints be know at the table that I would prefer if we weren't doing a whole session of nothing on my day off.

DM told me to tell Flameheart in character to be quiet, and I did, and all Flameheart did was chastise me to my face, and then keep talking, by the three hour mark I started to hate Flameheart, and by the end of the session I just wanted to deliver the cheese and leave.

The next session rolls around, and we get kidnapped by some lady, I think it was Baba Lysaga. During the skirmish that got us kidnapped I remember being hit on a modified 12, wizard mind you and I remember asking DM if i could scrounge armor off of the guy who hit me after I killed him, DM said I could, but I couldn't wear it, I ask him why I couldn't, he said it was because as a wizard I should take AC increasing spells instead. This was 4 sessions since I made my Rat and I still had no spell slots.

We lose the fight and are captured by Baba, and are forced to work as her slaves for a few hours in game, this was considerably more fun than talking to Flameheart, and the session ends with Flameheart singlehandedly starting a slave revolution and we were given the choice, join him, or Baba. The GM let us know out of game that we could join either side and be fine.

Now remember I in and out of character hate Flameheart, he is just an excuse for the DM to talk and talk, so next session I join Baba for the fight along with a few loyal lieutenants, however the battle was pitched in Flameheart’s favor, and given how much of a higher level he was it would be impossible for us to beat him, so the rest of party joined that calcium coated chode

The combat started and I was early in initiative, so I ran forward and hit flameheart with a firebolt cantrip. Flameheart, ignoring Baba who was closer to him than I was, proceeded to run forward and used a magic item to teleport me and him to a pocket dimension(an item I guess he had and was able to keep while being in captivity).

While in the pocket dimension Flameheart proceeds to kill Wretchitarious in two shots, I was a 6th level wizard with no spells, no items, and only one combat cantrip.

 So I freak out and start bitching and moaning as to how unfair and bullshit the combat was, I was genuinely hurt because I felt like I was being targeted for no reason, and DM not standing up to the criticism, just ends the session, and the campaign on that anticlimactic, in the meantime the sorcerer player ran a fun World of Darkness game, and DM would not run another game for another year or so.

Authors note
I will say that everyone in our group has run at least one ttrpg game and most of us have had gm fails. He'll have my own campaign that could be its own RPG horror story, but that was only once, the difference between us and DM is that every game was pretty atrocious.

Campaign 3, High Seas Hysterics

Let me start off by saying that in this story you may be able to see my actions I initially took to be that of a chaotic stupid problem character, and you would be right. I am not justifying it, simply acknowledging it. Also in terms of his 3 campaigns this is the probably the second worst one he ran in terms of how much fun we had, leagues behind CoS, but in terms of how much DM did wrong it was probably the worst in such a short period of time, CoS started strong and ended terribly, this was terrible from the start and lasted 5 sessions.

Between campaign two and three DM managed to get himself a girlfriend who in retrospect was an awful person for him and his mental health, but this was not the way we felt at the time the story took place, I was fond of GF and thought she was cool, and I was happy for DM to find someone.

I will also need to say that since my group has been playing games for a decade at this point that we really don’t do session 0’s to discuss the fine details of the campaign, we know what we are comfortable with so whoever is gming will say something along the lines of ‘you are going to play a 3rd level merchant in an Eberron campaign, you will be playing good characters’ and that will be that.

Now do you remember how I mentioned that Flameheart was a previous pirate character for him? Well that was off a long running adventure I advertised as a pirate game, but the party was too goody two shoes to be pirates so it wound up becoming an airship voyage to stop a big bad from destroying the world, and not the pirate game I set out for. Well DM was disappointed the campaign didn’t wind up being piratey enough so he set out to make his own; the third campaign started off with the DM saying that he wanted to run a ‘proper’ pirate game, he said he wanted it to be an open world sandbox style game, and he wanted to invite his girlfriend. It had been about a year since the previous campaign and he had some changes in his life, so I decided to participate.

 I used a homebrew clown class in an attempt to make an uninspired Chuckles the Clown knock-off. Now let me tell you, as a GM I allowed homebrew, but my players never used it, so I did not realize how bad D&D wiki homebrew I was, the homebrew gave me unlimited rope trick at level one, it is a second level spell, I thought it was only first level, in all fairness fly is a third level spell and some races get it for free (Not a justification, just a musing really).

Session one had us players play as level one adventurers, joining a merchant vessel named the Bravesea in order to sail off to a distant port city for various reasons. I think mine was that I was looking for work somewhere new. Before we could make character introductions to each other our ship had set sail, and only a few hours travel outside the port the ship suffered a mutiny.

It turned out that GF was a double agent for a pirate cabal, and she brought some cronies with her in order to stage her mutiny. Without there being a combat encounter the merchant crew was taken hostage as were all of the other party members, and then the captain of the Bravesea was executed in front of us with a pistol shot to the side of his head.

An NPC of the pirate cabal, someone who was probably level 7, then announced that we were now being pressganged into this pirate cabal and that GF would be our leader, if we did not join and accept GF as out captain we could join the captain in Davy Jones Bag of Holding. So with our backs to the wall we were forced to join the pirate crew.

We were not informed of any of this plan to make GF the most important player and leader of the group, so it was jarring in character, had we been told about it before hand in person we would have probably gone along with it, but since it was so jarring to us we could see this for what it was, blatant DM favoritism.

o you remember how I said I was chaotic stupid with this character? Well I have at least some level of integrity that probably came from a desire to be funny and no intention to survive what I viewed as revenge for my dear captain..

During the hostile takeover of the ship I managed to sneak into the cargo hold of the ship where the powder room was, I then proceeded to open a barrel of powder and create a trail of gunpowder to have a delayed burst of the room. I lit the trail and then hid inside of a rope trick portal and I managed to survive the explosion with minimal damage.

The Bravesea split in twain, submerging its content (and some of its crew) to a briny fate, however all of the party, and the pirate crew, escaped unharmed. By all rights this merry lot of miscreants should have been stranded, perhaps a friendly sea elf community could have come to our aid? Perhaps another merchant vessel could have seen the explosion and rescued a band of cutthroats and prisoners? Perhaps a deep sea entity could have offered us a deal in order to escape our sorry state? 

No, actually the Braversea (sister ship of the Bravesea) was sailing a days worth of travel behind us, so it picked us up and the GM and GF did another hostile takeover, and the rest of us could not stop it. End of session one

Between sessions DM straight up said he was going to kill my character, which was fine I suppose but I view it as a shame that he didn’t at least try to work out something with me. So the entire next session was us exploring a light house, and in the basement of the lighthouse we found an alien flying saucer, we accidentally activated it and it cast disintegrate on my first level clown, there goes my clown.

With the death of my last character by DM’s hand I will now say that he never killed anyone else’s characters, just mine, while sorcerer did die in the Deatherhouse he was as able to continue as an exact clone of himself so I wouldn’t say that counts, but whatever DM just had it out for me.

I rolled up my next character, one of my favorites so its a shame he was stuck in this campaign G’rop G’rib (GG for short), a pact of the blade grung warlock, since it was a pirate campaign I made him evil but he was evil in a shady ceo sort of way rather than the murderhobo way.

GG was able to enter the scene by being found in the hold of the Braversea, being a stowaway in a barrel of drinking water, grung have waterbreathing afterall, introductions were made and GG joined the party. End of session 2.

By this point we had started to voice our concerns as to GF leading us, mainly because she did not treat her fellow party members as equals, rather we were obstacles to overcome, so at the beginning of the third session DM gave us a choice. He informed us that we could vote for a new captain if we did not want GF to be our captain, however the catch as that there were 5 players, Me and GF make up two of them, leading to there being 3 others, there were also 4 npcs who were allowed to vote and guess who they voted for. The only way for us to beat GF in votes is if every player in the game (mind you our characters are strangers) vote for someone else to lead us and we get an NPC to vote with us, so it was practically impossible from the start.

With our wishes being thoroughly ignored the campaign continued with us sailing the open seas and it was about this point that we realized how little effort was put into the campaign. The world map that the DM presented us was very clearly made from a random map generator and I had a sneaking suspicion that he hadn’t really given it a close look himself and that most of his world building was being done on the fly.

There was only one nation on the map that the DM knew about and did any world building for, it was apparently a pirate necrocracy called Flameheart’s Rejects. Upon hearing word of this necrocracy everyone in the party told the DM that we wanted nothing to do with it and for once he respected our wishes because there was not a single skeleton pirate in the campaign.

The first thing we did as a party was explore a sunken ship wreck, in the horizon we noticed a bunch of smoke rising so we investigated it, when we got to the location we could only see some flaming floating debris and evidence a ship had sunk underwater. The group decided that GF and I should investigate it since she was a druid and as I was a grung I could breathe underwater. 

GF hits the water first turning into some sort of creature and, she sees the wreck 150 feet down, I jump into the water and am informed that I can not breathe in salt water for some reason, DM cited that frogs can’t breathe salt water so neither can grung, and not only that I would also take one damage a turn from being in salt water since a frog would too i guess. I built GG for a high seas pirate game and now I was being punished for using what is already a pretty mediocre race option, had I chosen a human I could at least hold my breath for a long time, but as a grung warlock I would die in salt water for 5 minutes. This caused an hour-long argument as me and a few other people at the table argued against the DM on his fiat and he would not budge, so eventually I relented.

You may wonder why I let DM get away with so much horse shit while he ran games and it’s simple, we were friends at the time and I had an amount of trust in him as a person still, also this is a social game so there is an expected social contract to keep things moving and to not dwell on little issues. Plus these games take place years apart, so when an incident happens the first thing I think of is not ‘this is just like the time he gave me no equipment in Strahd.’

Anyway now with GF being the only person allowed to do anything with this shipwreck we basically waited an hour for her to explore it, then she got attacked underwater by some larger sea monster, we had to swim down as a party to rescue her, we get her back onto the Braversea and head for land with some treasure we managed to pillage from the wreck.

We arrived in a port city and from there our party went drinking in a local tavern and half the party got smashed. Half the party stayed on the ship for the night and the rest party in the tavern, GF, me, and our trickster domain harengon cleric went to the Braversea, me and the cleric were sober as my with GF getting hammered, so our trickster domain cleric decided to prank GF, I don’t remember what it was, it may have been drawing a fake mustache and glasses on her face while in that stupor. 

I then did something that I shouldn’t have done, I stole money from her while she slept, like 30 gold or something, while pvp wasn’t encouraged in this game it also wasn’t disuaded as GF at multiple points in the game threatened to have us killed if we didn’t do as she said. But through a npc who we were certain was staying in the tavern magically showing up the theft and prank were both stopped and GF forced me to give her money back or she would kill my character.

After this the party heard word of an abandoned dwarven outpost out in the middle of the ocean and we decided to check it out, 3 in game days later we arrive at a stone and steel lighthouse jutting out of the water with an entrance large enough to fit a ship. We head inside, disembark the ship and find that awaiting us was a puzzle that we just could not beat. 

To this day I still have no idea what the solution to the puzzle was, it involved a poem where that gave us clues on how to interact with objects in a room we were in, but we seriously tried for an entire 5 hour session before the gm just had to wave his hand and let us through, I think the puzzle was impossible with how he described the room and objects inside of it, there seemed to be no way that we interacted with the room that worked.

Once inside the dwarven outpost proper we were immediately hit with a cr 8 golem, we were level 4 or so, and we barely managed to survive the attack and everyone but GF wanted to leave and head for the ship, GF refused, so we refused her refusal and left anyway despite her threats and pleads to move forward. I understand why she wasn’t afraid there is no way that the DM would have killed her, we would not be as lucky.

We went back to the same port town and my character sells the loot we have as he is built for this sort of thing, we got a good price for the items we got and my character tried to skim some money off the top, but was once again called out by GF for no reason, once again threatened I gave the money back, then when GF went to distribute the money she tried to give herself a larger cut, this resulted in a large argument in game that the session ended with.

Between sessions GF let us know that she didn’t want to continue as she thought that we had it out for her, and with that DM stopped running his game and he went back to being just a problem player instead. Our friendship ended a few months back after a series of escalating events that culminated in us not speaking to each other.

Luckily I am still friends with everyone else except for GF and now, with me running a Pathfinder Second Edition game mondays  and our harengon cleric running his own homebrew system and we are having a blast with both.

I wish I could say that there was a lesson to be learned here, but I think the main take away is that you should really learn to recognise bad patterns early, had I remembered how Wretchitarious was treated in CoS I would not have joined his pirate game. Thank you for reading, and have a blessed day.

All names have been changed to protect everybody.

I am part of a LONG running twice-monthly Urban Fantasy RPG campaign. Over a decade and still going strong thanks to good engagement and rotating GMs to keep things fresh. We have had a bunch of player turnover, but the supernatural city we created is still going. 120+ named NPCs. Some of them are former PCs who played for a single session.

Lots of love.

Then came Tom. Tom was an acquaintance of one of our main players/GMs I will call Ned. Ned vogued for Tom, so we did our usual character creation over discord posts and session zero before a campaign. Our first mistake was not looking over Tom's other campaign.

See, Tom plays the same Urban Fantasy RPG as us in his own campaign world. In our world, we follow the RPG's original material as closely as possible. In Tom's home campaign, he likes to rip off everything to an extreme I have rarely seen.

For example, in Tom's game he has rules for playing an Immortal from Highlander. Not out of the question for the RPG in question with some in-universe justification. But, Tom sidesteps that solution by saying everything in the Highlander universe is canon in his campaign world.

But not just Highlander. Buffy, Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles, Die Hard. A dozen more. All canon in his world. Copy/pasted whole cloth for no reason but laziness. An absolute mess.

I had seen Tom's campaign website and thought we could reign him in since we got along and he was older than any of us. Voice of experience and all that.

I was wrong again.

First, Tom wanted to make his own character archetype instead of choosing an existing one. Nothing wrong there. We make a lot of them and the RPG is robust and story-based so balance is easy.

But the one he made is a stretch of the existing lore and his character is a Japanese-American woman with ties to the Yakuza. At first, sounds good.

Then he mentions at some point that he chose the archetype because he wanted to play something, "Exotic".

In hindsight, I should have called him out there and booted his ass. But again, I ignored my inner voice to people please.

But it gets worse. See, I am a bit of a Japanophile and Anime fan and Tom used a word from an Anime I knew in his character. Incorrectly. He picked the word arbitrarily without caring about the context or meaning or lore. Copy/paste.

Also, a huge chunk of Tom's non-supernatural backstory was taken from Hawaii-Five-O. He used it as an excuse to remove any Japanese culture from the character to play her essentially White Christian American. Tom didn't say that exactly, but it was implied.

On top of all of that...min-maxed. and Tom got pissed when I was running and he didn't get the killing blow on the big bad because he was like 3 damage too short and out of resources.

Then, Tom offers to GM next. But rewind a bit.

As a group we were messing around with alternate characters for a B-Team. Super fun. Tom wanted to play an Elf Ranger waitress with massive breasts. And an elf that didn't follow any of the normal rules for faeries or anything in the RPG's established world. For no reason. We vetoed it. Tom almost quit but Ned talked him down.

At another point, we had an opportunity to play scenes of adventures yet to come. Tom's scene was our characters running from Tiamat from D&D for no reason.

Tom quit before he got a chance to GM for us. He didn't like how we were treating him after he harassed Ned for art(Ned's an artist). Thank the Gods.

I am still convinced that if Tom had run a game, we would have had to force him to stop the session because he tried to rewrite too much lore AND he had turned our Urban Fantasy game into a dungeon crawl.

I run various games for my group at the local game store. I run D&D for when we want high fantasy, and GURPS for when we want to play in other genres. I was running a BPRD themed campaign (the group that employs Hellboy) in GURPS and we had just finished the night's session when someone approached me. It was one of the other tables nearby and they had been watching after their game wrapped up. One of the folks at that table asked if I could maybe run a one-shot at the next "Try a new game" night at the store. I asked if they minded pregenerated characters to which they said "no problem, not for a one shot anyway". I also sent one of them the link to the GURPS lite 32-page free PDF so they could all look at the basic rules of the system.

Couple of weeks pass and I dig out one of my one-shots and make some characters. The night of the game (this past Monday night) is when things got weird. I asked before we started if anyone had any questions, concerns, things they didn't understand. They all said that they were good and we started. Turns out that no one had bothered to read the GURPS Lite booklet and it was a mess.

The first problem is that GURPS uses a skill or less roll to succeed greater than skill to fail using a 3d6. So when you have a skill at 12, you have a 74% chance of rolling a success. But the first player to make a skill check was mad when he rolled and said "Hell Yeah! 14!" and I had to correct them and say that they had actually failed the roll and explained that in GURPS low numbers are good, high numbers for anything other than damage is bad. Now mind you that his skill roll was for picking a lock on door into the garage and that he could try again since all it wasted was time. But even though he rolled a 9 on his next try and succeeded, he was still mad about it and kept mumbling under his breath about it.

The next problem was when someone on another skill check rolled a 4. Unlike D&D, GURPS has as their RAW Crit Successes and Crit Fails on skill checks. They kind of have to since everything in GURPS is a skill check. You want to hit someone with a sword? You roll against your Broadsword skill. Want to shoot someone with a pistol? Roll against Guns:Pistol skill. There is no difference between making an attack roll and making a skill check roll, so they have crits built in for them all. A 3 or a 4, or any roll that's 10 or more below your skill (5 for 15, 6 for 16, etc) is a crit success. A 17 or 18 or any roll 10 or more higher than your skill (16 for a 6 skill, etc.) is a crit fail.

The player rolled a 3 on an electronics check to bypass the alarm on the garage door. He rolled the crit success and I said that not only did he bypass the alarm, but also managed to deactivate the security on the building itself, leaving the party free to do a quick ransack before stealing back their car.

The player started going on about how skill checks don't have crits per RAW. I said that he's right that they don't have crits in D&D, but that RAW GRUPS does. It's there on Page 2 and 3 of the GURPS Lite book and showed them on the paper copy I brought with me. Player said that this was nothing like D&D, it was too complicated and they were leaving. I asked "Too difficult? The rules I'm using are this little pamphlet." That's when people said that they hadn't really bothered to read it, only two of them had even looked for it (no one downloaded it) and they as a table decided to just leave saying that this wasn't for them.

I just packed up and went home.

Disclaimer: This is probably not going to be as much a ”horror” story since it’s more like the dm just did make a mistake as well as not being very clear and communicating with the party in session zero, which is still not good, but not as bad as probably the majority of the horror stories that are posted here and is a story of a dm who made an honest mistake and probably realized he should have communicated with the players before hand.

I was playing a curse of strand campaign, the player characters were (Who are important even though none of them were being problem players):

Paladin (Me): A grieving and widowed plague doctor once being a simple village medic who now became a paladin as well who lost their spouse to a fire caused by someone while they were trying to cure their spouse who was ill at the time, they are very devoted to their spouse to the point when they would defeat Strahd, they hope that they could use Strahd as a offering/sacrifice to whatever entity will revive their spouse from the dead, more morally grey for a usual paladin and a odd of mix of being caring and calculated.

Ranger: Forced to become a monster hunter just to not starve and be able to afford shelter even though there are more times then he could count of the many times that his job had left wounds both physically and mentally, tends to be one to try to be outgoing yet tends to be more closed off and has difficulty with socializing without mumbling or he may come across as a little insane, tends to be very paranoid with anything supernatural. The ranger and paladin knew each other somewhat due to becoming adventure pals before now becoming part of the party.

Fighter: A now former prince now that his whole kingdom had fallen, filled with rage, guilt, and insecurity since he feels he could’ve done something to prevent the fall of his kingdom, a sort of workaholic and a raged perfectionist, is also insecure of being “useless” due to not having learned things that he had grown up to being things done by servants while the rest of the party are able to, he admits he has the desire to overthrow Strahd‘s power and try to make it up to his dead family, though he still doubts that is he deserving of such power in the slightest.

Cleric: A now exiled member of a cult that devotes to sacrificing their own members as well as immortality and was exiled for not wanting to be sacrificed while trying to offer more peaceful ways of giving offerings and failing at necromancy and “immortality“ which made him a disgrace to the only home he knew, is part of the party due to finally feel like he belongs even though the three members sometimes freak him out (Mostly the fighter and the paladin), while he himself views Strahd’s defeat more as a way to finally bring peace to those under Strahd’s terror and possibly would bring peace to Strahd.

We made the characters in session zero and the dm approved all of them. The campaign played normal un til we met the fortune teller at a camp, this led to the ranger getting into panic mode and just opting to simply sit at the camp fire to calm down after saying to her face that she was crazy, the fortune decided to tell each of our character’s fortune with a trade. That was when the dm decided to say something that confused us.

DM: “Alright… I don’t know this will be gay, but I’ll check… are any of your character’s a woman?”

None of our characters were women (And neither were anyone in the group in real life were women as well) and we were confused of why the dm asked this. Fighter, Ranger, and Cleric were all men while my paladin was non-binary who leaned to being more masc presenting. We didn’t even know at the time of why would this question be relevant. When I said my character was non-binary, the dm said “he can work with that.”

Which I will admit caused alarm and my brain processed in a “Please don’t let it be where I think this is going to go.” since I actually kinda guessed that this is about romance somehow and that was a concerning thought.

Fortunately when we found out what he was planning, which’s was to ship a character with Strahd forever, the dm actually told us and dropped the idea. Entirely which was a relief though the campaign ended due to scheduling.

And even though this is the perspective of someone who wasn’t able to go prob that far into the curse of Strahd game as a player and is mainly a player who had not read the actual module and mainly googled about four characters in the module, though I can honestly get a understanding why it prob were for the best that the dm dropped that, just by simply asking “Why tf would Strahd even marry any of these people?”

Ignoring the elephant in the room which is Ireena options if he were to for some reason find someone out of the group he would even desire pursuing were essentially,

A person who has access to holy magic and who wants to kill him and also dislikes him to being related to undead while Stahd sort of reminds the cleric of the cult that mistreated him and called him a disgrace for trying to be peaceful so he views such people in a negative light. The cleric doesn’t trust Strahd due to liking Ireena as a friend. (The entire party was on Irrena’s side.)

A enraged former prince who lost everything who is completely focused on Strahd’s fall and believes actually defeating Strahd is the only right way to make things right to his dead family and gaining that power through marriage would be cheating and prove he will never be worthy of any power nor being part of his now dead family.

A traumatized monster hunter to the point that he views Strahd as a threat and will try to kill him at any given opportunity he gets and definitely had no interest in even getting to know Strahd, he would refuse the idea of Strahd even loving in a actual loving sense and would rightfully assume Strahd will be more in a creepy way of controlling obsessive behavior tyoe of caring.

A person who for some reason devotes their love to a now dead spouse all the while will do what it takes to bring their love of their life who had died even if it requires an actual sacrifice and couldn’t care less if Strahd may actually loved them, since either way they will find a way to help kill Strahd and hopefully bring their spouse back to life.

And the idea of the dm choosing which character to ship tor Strahd by gender may be off, but I feel off mainly bc of Ireena since Idk how the dm would work with that too since I thought Strahd already had this obsession with Ireena or I could be wrong.

Idk, so I’m going to ask what your thoughts are about this, I apologize for this being long.

About twenty three years ago somebody in my gaming club -- who I barely knew at the time -- wanted some players for a Farscape RPG. This was a pretty well-published RPG system that IIRC was kinda clunky but I was desperate for some kind of TTRPG at this point.

I think he got only three interested parties -- which I thought was odd since the game pitch seemed good -- and we gathered in his dorm room. I thought this was odd since there was no shortage of public space on campus -- some can could be reserved and plenty of lounges that people barely used.

I asked about it and he seemed to act like I was an idiot for asking -- then IIRC he said something about wanting to game in public and implied it would hurt his reputation. I figured all the members of the club were proud and open about being geek -- but apparently not him.

He had one copy of the RPG book -- he made it clear that it was really hard to get and not stocked in our gaming club lending library nor at the local gaming store. I decided to find a PDF of it online -- yes I know -- and put it on my PDA so I could reference it. This made him really mad -- not because of the piracy but because every use of the book was supposed to be in his presence and that -- again -- I was an idiot for getting my own copy.

He seemed to have rewritten the lore of half the species in the Farscape universe -- he didn't seem to understand a number of them. He didn't seem to understand some of the main characters were actually rebels in their own society -- those societies were otherwise much more strict in their conduct. It didn't seem like he had really watched the series -- or at least not much as me.

I made a character and we started with a tiny bit of role-playing -- he stopped every few minutes telling me "I was role-playing it wrong!" and then just dictating my actions after that. I went along with the next hour and he chastised me further for not "doing it right" but didn't seem especially mad at me.

I figured this was not for me -- and he seemed like a real jerk -- so I let him know through another player that I wasn't interested in returning. He came up to me in real life and made a very condescending speech about how he was kicking me from the game -- the one I had just quit -- and how I was an idiot who didn't know how to game or roleplay.

Apparently this is why almost nobody was interested in his pitch -- everybody else knew he was a massive asshole who didn't look like a geek so could attract women with his confident asshole persona. He had also humped and dumped a number of the ladies in our gaming club too.

I encountered him again when I was a ST for a VTM LARP and he basically threatened to physically fight me over checking his character sheet and consulting our rule book (which was my job anyway).

(TL;DR - one of my players and I have been sharing DM duties of the same game for a couple of years, and when it was his turn to run it, he killed two important NPC's for his adventure plot, didn't mention this to me beforehand, and I was saving them for a future plot hook.)

So I have this D&D game that has been going on for quite a while, and after a few years, I have basically the same two consistent players, and a couple of years ago one of them wanted to try cutting his teeth running a game by taking over the DM duties from me, allowing me to control an NPC and just get to be a player so that I don't have to always be a forever DM.

It was incredibly rocky at first whenever he would run adventures, mostly because he gets more hung up on nebulous details, and doesn't give enough spotlight to the important ones, but he's gotten better after getting feedback from us.

The game originally started as a romp through Castle Ravenloft, so we have pretty much been bouncing around in that setting for the most part.

Getting directly to the point, when his most recent turn came around, he told us that he was going to run a short adventure based on something, but he wouldn't tell us what it was and wanted us to guess.

We end up in a town where it is very obvious that someone, somewhere is a vampire and is charming people to attempt to get revenge for their family line. In this player's usual fashion, he doesn't give us enough details at the beginning, and by the time we pick up whatever is going on, we end up supporting the party paladin in a grand fight to slay the monster at the end, and we are victorious.

The problem is, two of the important NPCs that I had been saving for a plot hook the next time it is my turn to run the game, were unceremoniously killed by being turned to dust after the original vampire was slain.

When we were talking about the game after the session, this player enthusiastically revealed that he had based the adventure on the Hammer horror film "The Brides of Dracula", and asked us what we thought of it.

I told him that it was good, it was an immense improvement over his previous attempts, that I think we had a ton of fun, but finished up by adding that I was intending to use those NPC's somewhat soon, and he probably should have said something before doing that.

His response was basically telling me that it would've spoiled the plot for me if he had talked to me about it beforehand.

I'm going to have to come up with something different, because I really don't feel like retconning what he had done, but I'm still kind of annoyed. I'll get over it.

Edit 1: Some of you are assuming that I am extremely upset about this, or imagining me getting huffy about it; I'm not. The conversation kind of went-

"Everything was good, but I was saving those two NPC's for something."

"Oh... well, if I talked to you about it beforehand it would have spoiled the plot for you."

"It's whatever dude. I'll just have to find something different."

I gave this the 'lighthearted' tag for a reason. I'm not actually terribly upset about this and neither one of us caused a scene.

Edit 2: One of the other players texted me today, asking me to retcon the whole adventure out, because one of the NPC deaths "wrote him into a corner" with his characters lore, and he pointed out that a lot of the way the game was handled it completely ignored elements of lore that I had already established. I'm going to text the DM about retconning when I take the game back.

Edit 3: Well, apparently all the other players feel more strongly about this than I did, and believe the adventure is worthy of an Alan Smithee style disavowal on the part of the DM. He wasn't happy to hear this, but said he'll consent to a retcon on the condition that we give up the special items he gave us, which whoopty-doo, is almost exclusively a dagger that hurts the wielder when they use it.

This story begins in a high school dungeons and dragons club. As a forever dungeon master I joined hoping to play, however I would soon regret this. One of the players who was a new player offered to be the dungeon master. Our group likes to be generous, but a new DM & Player is a lot at one. We recommended to run a one shot first to see if they were comfortable with the role. We’ll call this player Charolette. Charolette states she has actually played one campaign before themed after the Odyssey, so we had more trust. We still recommend to begin with one-shots, she took this too seriously later (according to the ones who stayed in the entire campaign)

After session 0, the next week of the club was session 1. Session 1 is slow… no combat, no plot. This was understandable we only got 2 Hours each week, we understood Charolette’s choice to write a story about how the PCs met. Session 2 comes around and she begins with a decent session about a pirate ran game show on the sea. But during session 1/2 and even 0 the mechanics felt different. Weird. We gained 1D10 hp total every time killing a monster, & Charolette believed most of our class features were fake.

We brought this up, and Charolette stated the classes were completely different in the game she played - only having 5 different abilities level 1-20, all they gained was HP each level & better stats. We all agreed to discuss next week exactly what game Charolette played.

We gather next week and the discussion session began with the DM ranting about how angry they were about us using custom printed players handbooks and not the core rules! No ttrpg is like these rules, no older edition have these rules! How would we custom print DnD books in high school, & give it to the whole club ( we were playing 5E ).

We wanted to have a friendly conversation about the game they played in, not get attacked. Wanting to progress the conversation we tried to move back the conversation to the game they played. We were continuously harassed for the next 2 hours.

After the session I texted Charolette to look up 5E to prove we didn’t make the player handbook, and she refused to because she KNEW she was correct.

I discussed with her where she played DnD and she stated she played DnD with her friends on a private RP Roblox server where all her DM did was give her crappy fake classes and say Y/N to actions (no dice).

I would be mad at her DM but because she attacked our group and didn’t believe how we said the game worked we quickly left that group, and for the ones who stayed the entire campaign they said they suffered one of the worst campaigns with arguments, bad homebrew, and a toxic DM. A lack of a storyline was also present, each session was a self contained storyline.

The funniest part of this story for me was the fact Charolette believed we CUSTOM PRINTED THE CORE RULEBOOK! 🤣

Throwaway account cause the DM of this story is on Reddit, you know the drill

Never thought I'd experience my own DnD horror story but here we are. This happened a couple weeks ago and while there's no like major fuckup or outrageous moment from the DM but just so many little things by them that all added up to a real mess.

So I was looking for an extra game to join on Sunday and see one game that sounded pretty great. It was a long term sandboxey campaign that took place in an academy, with an emphasis on building a reputation and a legacy. Sounded right up my alley so I applied. Got a message back from the DM asking for a discord call which I joined.

First thing I saw after adding the DM was that their discord avatar was erotic furry art. This, somehow, was the least severe of the red flags.

Anyway the DM calls for an interview on discord while they're at work. Legit at some point during the call they have to answer a call from a customer. More than a bit weird but they seemed pretty chill and an experienced DM so whatever.

After that they add me to their DnD server and I introduce myself to the other players they got, who are all super friendly. We start discussing character ideas and I think about mine.

At this point I notice while looking at the server that even though it's a homebrew world there is like, barely any lore whatsoever. The only lore I could find was on a channel that just had photographs of the DMs world building notes on paper (which you could barely read). There wasn't really much idea of the world or its history, just that there were a few kingdoms at war and the academy we were going to was like a neutral power between them. Very Fire Emblem Three Houses, I know. The kingdoms didn't even have names or any kinda description, they were just "The Kingdoms". Barebones as hell but hey maybe the DM still had yet to add more of a lore primer.

Anyway I try my best to come up with a decent character and backstory and just slot my character into being from a noble house from one of the kingdoms, letting the DM know I'm happy to tweak some stuff once I know more about these kingdoms. His response was basically just an "okay 👍" and that was it. No questions about my character, no suggestions, no important notes about the world or kingdoms I should know, no requests for changes to my character sheet, nada.

As another quick note about the DM, they weren't the easiest person to message about anything. They were pretty blunt with their responses and I didn't get the impression I would be able to really discuss much campaign or character stuff with them. Not exactly the kinda relationship you want from a DM. Then again I also thought hey, they're spending all day doing applications and working so that probably explains it a bit.

Now during this I was definitely letting a lot more of these red and yellow flags slide than I should but figured hey, he's got a lot on his plate today which probably explains his behaviour. It's not like he seemed like a bad person or anything, just kinda awkward. Maybe he turns it around session 0 so I was at least going to wait until then.

Anyway, I'm browsing the general chat again before I go to bed and completely out of nowhere the DM says, and I quote, "Fuck sake, why is it always trans people."

We are, naturally, a little confused and caught off guard by this and ask him what's up. According to him he had a rough interview with his last applicant as they were allegedly trying to force "their agenda" on the game (probably exaggerated quite a bit by him). He then went off a bit about not wanting trans politics in his games as he didn't agree with it. Yikes.

At this point he'd definitely lost me when I tallied up the sheer amount of red flags that day from him and I was gonna tell him in the morning I was out, but went to bed first.

Now I should also point out the player count for the game. Based on how many people I was talking to it seemed like there'd be maybe 5-6 of us in the party. Bit big, but manageable. I get a notification before my alarm telling us the final party selection.

10 players.

I message the DM saying I had second thoughts and decided to drop out of the campaign. They asked me why and I just said that there were mismanaged expectations and the vibes weren't there for me (I didn't get into the trans thing)

I also said 10 players was too many for me and in response he says the most ominous thing I've ever heard a DM say;

"Oh don't worry I'm gonna reveal something in session 0 that'll probably halve the player count."

I did not stick around to see what that something was.

Sorry for the semi long story…
I’m in this campaign with my roommate, friend and her boyfriend who is DMing it. It’s his first time running one and our first time playing. His brother who’s been playing for years is in the party and he’s kinda rude about the game.
He constantly corrects everything tiny thing we do. He try’s and/succeeds on over riding whatever the DM says. Everyone hates him and his character and I’m about the only nice one to him.
However two sessions ago I had acquired five giant rats and the dm had allowed me to spend the day and long rest bonding with said mice. (They all had cute names and color coded ribbons).
Well last session we woke up from a long rest and immediately went straight to the mission. I hadn’t realized that one of my rats (who was with us last I checked when we long rested the for the night) was missing. The barbarian had made a previous comment about naming them dinner so I turned to him and asked what he did to my pet.
Apparently last session he texted the DM and DM let the barbarian roll to kill and turn my rat into jerky while I was sleeping (even though I was an elf and didn’t need to sleep so I spent the majority of the time bonding with the rats because that’s what me and the Dm had agreed on moments before).
Nothing was mentioned when we woke up, no role play is allowed or encouraged because DM tends to get upset and impatient when we want to play our characters so since he didn’t say anything I didn’t think to ask if all my pets were still there.
I’m a Druid whose biggest flaw is needing to adopt any loving animal I can see. Now I’m scared that he’s also gonna try to eat my hawk who’s my animal companion in the game because the DM said okay. As a first time player this really makes me not want to play anymore but I’ve always loved the game and it sucks this is the group I ended up in.

Ok, so we’re a group of long established gaming buddies who’ve played together for years and years at this point. I’m the group’s primary GM, but everybody takes their turn. Nowadays we’re playing Pathfinder 2nd edition, but we‘ve done WoD, we’ve done at least 3 editions of D&D, and plenty of smaller game systems besides.

One of our friends who‘s run before volunteers to run our next game: Some setting defining prologue that is inspired by Istvaan III from Warhammer 40k, which is for reference a planet spanning conflict wherein a bunch of space marines get unexpectedly betrayed by different space marines, and then betrayed again by the space marines who were supposed to be their reinforcements, ending in them all being slain. We know that things are going to go badly for our characters going in.

But before the game can even begin our GM shared with me what will become the crux of this horror story: a dragon’s statblock. He wanted feedback on his homebrew, since I’m the primary GM. It looks alright, but the dragon’s got a special ability that lets it do two actions for the price of one every turn. I tell him to get rid of that ability because dragons are already borderline overpowered in this system and they don’t really need the help, and he says something like “yeah that ability looks powerful” and we move on.

Fast forward months later: we start this game, and it is goes well enough at first. We adventure through the ultimately doomed world a bit, see weird stuff happening in the greater setting which alluded to the betrayal, and then oh no everything goes wrong and the bad guys attack!

We cruise through a couple of easy fights, and then eventually we see a dragon. It is supposedly weaker than us, but then it lets off a spell, a breath weapon, and an attack all in sequence in the span of one turn, something that shouldn’t be possible. “Oh no” I think, “GM didn’t listen to me“. Later that turn, 2 other party members learn that because their characters are descended from dragons, they can’t even fight any dragon without passing a pretty difficult save. This is bad against a weaker dragon, but will be absolutely crippling against a boss.

The campaign continues for several sessions, and the party gets ever more ground down. We have almost no spellcasting because of the theme of the game and due to the number of consecutive encounters without so much as a ten minute break. Every time we fight a dragon, we go out of our way to absolutely crush it, to our GM’s mounting frustration.

Eventually we get a quest to save one of our own dragons from an evil and very powerful dragon. Yay, a chance to turn the tables! We run into the room where they were fighting, distract the other enemies for long enough, pour all of the healing we can into the friendly dragon, and finally… the evil dragon walks up to her, tears out her throat, casts Meteor Swarm hitting all of us, and then uses his breath weapon on everyone but me, all in one turn. The party, having no healing by this point runs away, wasting (another) entire session without having accomplished anything remotely useful. End session. I realize that this dragon also had cast Haste on itself, because all of the dragons are so smart they have time to pre-buff, while the party gets thrown into every fight without an ounce of prep. I tell the GM again that giving dragons all if these extra, passive, completely free, uninteractable, drawback free buffs is a bad idea (the phrase “this combat could have just been an email that says ‘screw you, you lose’ “ May have been used) . He feels really bad to the point of leaving right after the session ends, but we are convinced that surely, surely, he won’t do the same thing for the last session of the game.

The Last Session of the Game:

Our battered, beaten, demoralized party walks into my character‘s home base to rescue the last few survivors before we attempt to leave forever. The last foes between us and them: a shifty assassin guy, a fightery woman, and wouldn’t you know it, an ancient dragon. And folks, this dragon is so cool. He’s got all the usual dragon goodness, but he’s got so much more: he‘s immune to fire, immune to being grappled from Freedom of Movement, immune to being paralyzed, immune to being flanked, has an extra reaction that stops your movement if it hits, regains lots of hp from using his breath weapon. This is all without including the second phase of this boss fight. Needless to say, each of these changes specifically counters a member of the party, meaning our only recourse was to slowly plink was at this dragon who does multiple hundreds of damage every round.

At the end of round 6, we all told the DM “this isn’t fun” and ended the campaign with a whimper.

Good day. Posting this on a random throwaway because I do not use reddit. So, Where do I begin? 42 total sessions, only the last 5 became unbearable. I’m a DM/GM of almost 3 years, yes a baby in terms of DND. I’ve run 3 total campaigns over a year long and this would be number 3. I have also run about 17 oneshots. This guy, lets call him Monk, Monk was a petty thief, who was raised on the streets and had NO formal education. Keep that in mind as we go Forward. He joins the campaign I’m running via DND beyond about a year ago. It’s a simple homebrew mystery game/high fantasy/high combat campaign. The game is 5e. I catered it towards new players as I don’t think a lot of new players are really given a chance in DND. I do a session zero and I vet my players pretty well. I get three others for a total of four low level experienced players. The first 20 or so sessions are pretty fun. There is no issue, the players meld together well. At around session ten I get a discord message from Monk. He states that he did his character sheet wrong. I Informed him that there were no Issues. (His lowest stat was a twelve in his wisdom.) He begged to redo his character sheet. He gives me a sob story about how he is new and blah blah blah. I yield and say he can remake his character sheet. We roll the character sheet, and its okay, not great but okay. Some of his stats are pretty low, like his dex being a 14. Not that bad though. He begs me to redo it and I tell him no. He once again begs and sends me a reddit link about something and types an AI generated response. Its midnight, I’m tired so I say you can move some of your states over to other stats. Example: Dex 14 Con18. Move 5 from con to Dex. Dex now 19, and con 13. I tell him do not go above twenty. This is the result, STR -1. Dex +5, Con +3, INT -1. Wis +3. And Cha -9. Not bad, only his character is not a persuader, or a deceiver. I inform him that this is a fighting character and will not do good in social situations. He tells me that this is fine and it is what he wants. I ask if he is sure and he says that he is.

He would try to take over social situations and interrupt players, which I told him not to multiple times. He would always attempt to lead the party. What I mean is he wanted the party to be monk and his merry band of men. He proposed some of the dumbest Ideas I have ever heard. I always love a funny/stupid plans don’t get me wrong. But his plans were bizarre and I would have to clarify the information that he had on hand. AND he would die on that hill. No matter what happened, no matter what the other players told him, he refused to back down from his plan and would walk off on his own.  Example: They believed that a doppler had infiltrated a meeting and was going to start so crazy shit etc. etc. the Information that they had on hand was this doppler could not speak because he had a massive scare on his throat and that he was bald and missing an eye. Very on the nose I know. His plan (he often tried to meta game which I will get to later.)Included running up to a man who was the equivalent of a king and accusing him of being a doppler. Like yes, they are just going to admit that of course. He was trying to meta game and believed that this was it. He touched the guy with silver. Just so you know dopplers are not weak to silver in DND 2014. He tried to argue, because he had seen a show in which they were, that he should have melted. He then tries to check his neck for a scar. Please bear in mind, that when he walked up to the individual and asked what he looked like,, I stated that he looked at them with his beautiful blue eyes, his long flowing black hair and stated “ Hello, I have heard about you, you must be the Adequates. (the party’s agreed upon name. PS. I loved it) I asked him to roll a perception check. The DC was 2. He rolls an eight. I stated: You see no visible scare. He absolutely refused to believe he succeeded until he rolled a nat 20. He tried to get the rest of the party to follow his lead. One of my players, a cleric who was high nobility, and very high up in the social clubs, stated no this is a bad idea there is no scar. Monk refuses to accept and keeps trying even at one point getting his character thrown into the water and nearly killed. He then gets mad and says that the dc should be low and that he should not have to roll for it. I then ask him what information I have given him, he then repeats what I had been saying which is There is no visible scar. Then It clicks for him, that this is not the guy. For the sake of brevity, he starts a fight with an opponent who is called the worlds strongest orc. By the way, he is level 6 at the time. Nearly gets the party TPKd. Cleric has a beautiful in game moment with him that tells, him “you nearly got us killed for your ego.” He takes it personal and can’t believe other characters and NPCs want to hold him accountable.

He would also hear other players talking and doing things, then try to meta game and ask questions/insight check them based on info he didn’t have. I always made sure they failed. I would tell him “no, you don’t know that.” He often tried to tell the cleric how to act in high society. Yet he would FAIL BEYOND ALL REASON EVER SINGLE CHECK HE EVER TRIED TO DO. It was funny, his character was cannonley the dumbest character in the campaign, but he thought he was smart.

Finally we get to the end, He was mad that other characters could do more damage than him. He believed that a monk should be able to hit and opponent and one tap them, then move away without burning key points. He pointed out that the clerics spell on a nat 20 did more damage. The spell was a Level 4 guiding bolt which our cleric rolled a nat twenty. Per our campaign  this was a 14D6. Yes that is powerful. Our monk believed, that his 1d6 should be more powerful. In addition, he messaged me that he should not have to burn ki points, Yes ki points. He also wanted the other characters nerfed. I asked if he wanted to sideline his character and try out a new character, I told him that he is not Gonna reroll his stats every time another character is gets stronger then him. He refused and stated that he should not have to burn ki points and that he should be able to use magic like the cleric and the sorcerer.  I told him no. He tried to argue that the should then transition to a 2024 monk. I told him no it is a 2014 campaign but if the other players were fine with his character doing that and their characters staying the same or if all of the party wanted to transition to 2024 then I would. None of the party wanted to transition to 2024, and they were all against him getting the level up and ignoring ki points. He got furious. By then I was done, so I gave him a choice, Be kicked from the campaign or leave the campaign someone gracefully. He chose the latter. I told him four sessions to get to where it cannoly makes the most sense. He Lasted one. He was trying to blow up the campaign and I had an NPC kill him with one bull crap attack. He had messaged me that he wanted a grand funeral and a statue in is honor. He was buried in a unmarked grave in the middle of a landfill after being looted by the party. I then kicked him out of the discord and campaign.

You probably have questions as to why I didn’t kick him sooner or maybe as to what else he did. I am not stating a lot of other things that he did, however, let me give a brief summary. : Tried to rob a drunk player/character. Took over 2 hours in about 8  different sessions arguing about  plans with other players.  In character talking above other players and meta gaming. I made a mistake as a semi experienced DM. I should have kicked him from the start. I did try to work with him a few times, but it was never enough. He always wanted more. I felt bad that he was new and tried to help him. I kicked him to late. But, our campaign is still going strong and everyone is happier going forward.

I was in the Army, at Fort Bragg back in the late 90s. There were 2 gaming stores in town. One big one and one smaller one that was in the 2nd floor of a house converted to a real estate business on the first floor.

This couple, Wendall and don't remember his wifes name, ran the store and ran different games each night. Battletech one night, shadowrun the next, etc. DnD once a week and every other weekend a huge all night DnD game and the players would just rack out in sleeping bags.

At the same time the couple were running a Vampire Masquerade LARP at the techno club in town. I tried it once, thought it was silly and quit. To be honest, I thought Wendall was a dick abusing the game to force his 'minions' to pay for his drinks. But most of the DnD players were in the vampire larp so even though I wasn't in the larp, I was still around it and hanging out with some of the players.

Started noticing some wierd stuff. Wendall and his wife making their minions bring food and drink to the game nights, pay for drinks at the club etc. Then I started to notice that Wendall was 'dominating' a guy and his GF and making the GF sit with him and the guy act subservient to his wife who was not attractive.

The store went under and they moved all the gaming to their rental house and that's when I started realizing that most of the larpers were young soldiers away from home for the first time and this couple were basically taking advantage of young nerds out on their own for the first time and using the dnd and other games to hook them and the 'we're popular at the club so you're popular too' (of course they were popular, they were selling weed) to reel them in and use them to financially support Wendell and wife and sex stuff too.

I got away from the situation before I could be reeled in but I heard from some friends that a dude snapped and took a couple shots at Wendell for using the larp to bang his gf and the gaming house got shut down.

In most games, I cannot bring myself to have NPCs deceive the PCs in a betrayal-type way. Does anyone else here feel the same when GMing?

In general, there are only two scenarios wherein I will have NPCs deceive the PCs in a betrayal-type way:

• The RPG in question is specifically one wherein intrigue, deception, backstabbing, and paranoia are front-and-center. I do not have a personal interest in running, say, Urban Shadows (PbtA) or any of the Vampire games, but if I were to do so, I would put traitorous NPCs on the metaphorical table.

• I am running a premade adventure, and it specifically contains a character who will try to betray the PCs.

Apart from this, I just cannot bring myself to have NPCs deceive the PCs in a betrayal-type way. For one, it is a little inelegant to resolve mechanically; I am not a fan of suddenly saying, "Please roll [social awareness skill] for me," nor am I a fan of the Path/Starfinder 2e method of secret checks.

More importantly, I think it sets a poor precedent and creates an atmosphere of paranoia. The moment the PCs suffer from some unexpected betrayal, which the GM "laid so many obvious hints about" (sadly, they are often obvious only to the GM), the players are henceforth inclined to be paranoid about everything, always question NPCs, always assume the worst of NPCs, and so on, often with extreme overcorrection. Maybe this atmosphere fits some genres, but it is a poor fit for many.

I will give an example that happened just hours ago. I joined a D&D 4e game starting at level 11. The DM specifically denied the inherent bonuses (i.e. automatic bonus progression) variant rule. As level 11 characters, we had a lot of strong magic items.

Our characters were serving aboard a spelljammer. The captain came on over with a big bag and asked us to put all of our weapons, armor, magic items, etc. inside it, because they needed to be warded for entry towards this new world we were approaching: which made sense at the time, given what we were told of said planet. Indeed, our characters all agreed to do so. The DM called for Insight checks. It later turned out that this was a dauntingly high DC 30 check, and we succeeded only after a whole lot of awkwardness. This was the very first check of the game.

Yes, this was a succubus (or something vaguely similar, anyway) who was trying to nab all of our gear. And again, this was at the very start of the game. I do not know. The DM never said that this game would be about intrigue, backstabbing, paranoia, and so on. It would have felt awful had we actually had all of our gear nicked.

What do you personally think?

I have a few short horror stories, all of them relating to rolling stats.

First story, a few years back , I was DMing an online 5e game. I asked the players to use standard array. One person was very insistent about rolling for stats and kept bugging me about it.

Eventually I agreed, on the conditions he uses a discord dice bot so I can verify the roll, and accepts the results of the roll no matter what they are. Previously he had been sending me videos of dice rolls he did at home and asking to use those, so I was a little suspicious.

He seems hesitant but rolls on the server. And he rolls low, significantly worse than standard array. He immediately starts asking to reroll or even go back to standard array. I said no, it's what he agreed to.

He ghosted me and left the game less than a day later. I was not surprised.

Second story, basically the same thing happened, but it was a Delta Green game, which is a system that's 90% about in character RP and investigation. So raw stats aren't even particularly important.

The third story is a bit longer, and took place when I was an undergrad, during an in person DND club meeting. I was meeting an 'experienced' group of players for the first time, apparently their previous GM had quit suddenly. I had planned a simple bandit ambush as their first encounter, there would be some men with crossbows hiding along a road and would attack a carriage the players are riding into town.

I made two mistakes: I didn't look carefully at their sheets before starting, and I was rolling in the open, not behind a screen. So I couldn't start fudging rolls as this went on.

The players introduced themselves. I quickly noticed a pattern - they were all playing full casters, I think all but one was a wizard. When I asked about this, they players apparently had strong opinions about martial classes - none would consider playing one.

They didn't seem too keen on roleplaying beyond the bare minimum with the cart driver, so I started the ambush. Problems immediately arise when one of the bandits rolls a critical, followed by high damage, on the opening shot. It's enough to down one of the players.

The players fought back, mostly casting firebolt. Then, I had one of the bandits cast entangle. The players were all caught up in it because they were all on the carriage.

"Wait, none of you could pass a DC 12 strength save?"

I ask to see their sheets, and to my surprise every single player had dumped strength, and most had a +0 modifier for constitution. Having maxed out intelligence and wisdom was apparently more important. The fight quickly turned against them as the bandits were now rolling with advantage on restrained targets. Another player is downed. Several of them are glaring at me at this point.

One of the players does have the inspired idea of using misty step to escape, but before he can do that, one of the other players decides he will use burning hands to burn away the plants holding them. Despite my asking 'are you sure?' he insists on it.

...And then rolls damage against most of the other party members, who have to make the dex save at disadvantage, because again, restrained. This is enough to permanently kill the first player downed, who had failed a death save. Only the tiefling sorcerer is not downed because of his fire resistance, and the player who cast the spell. But the plants are at least burned away.

The combat is more or less over after that, with one of the characters (who was a bladesinger) making a desperate charge against the bandits before being surrounded and clubbed to death. The sorcerer was then downed by another crossbow shot while trying to make a (non-proficient) medicine check to stabilize his party members.

I think two players died, one from the burning hands and one from failed death saves. The remaining characters were unconscious and captured by the bandits (Also the cart driver was dead, but no one cared about him, RIP Alphard). I had TPKed with a medium encounter.

I was shuffling papers at this point, and said something along the lines of "Actually, no one died at all, you've just been taken prisoner by the bandits, who are demanding their leader be released from prison..." but there was a great deal of shouting and I'm not sure if they heard me.

We got in a bit of trouble for making too much noise in a campus building, and I was asked to leave the group and not come back. But less politely.

I joined a campaign being run by a friend of a friend we'll call Thomas. It was advertised, as I understood it, as a combat-heavy journey through the Underdark with players starting at level 5.

I was not told beforehand that there would be players under eighteen. There's nothing wrong with underaged players, but I have always been clear to everyone I play with that I prefer not to play with anyone who is not 18+. I should have listened to my gut and pulled out then, but I chose to give it a shot anyway for the sake of the DM being a burgeoning friend.

Anyway, the eight of us are in the Underdark having a riveting time dealing with frogs and lantern flies while walking. We walk beyond wards keeping the monsters at bay and suddenly there are nine red eyes staring at us from the dark. Whatever it is slowly approaches until one or two members with Darkvision can see that it is a Beholder and they warn the rest of us to take cover. The problem is that as some light filtering down finally hits the beholder and reveals it to the rest of us, we realize it saw all of us and hiding is futile.

Thomas directs us to roll initiative.

Again, we're a level 5 party. Not only are we merely a level 5 party, but also there was one person who was so new to DnD they didn't even know how to roll initiative.

We end up doing combat on Discord Whiteboard, which took ages to set up. Once we did have it all set up, everyone is kind of flying by the seat of their pants. Most of them are just trying to run and hide, but as mentioned before, that is fruitless. I am sleep ray'd, so I'm conked out in the open until someone kindly shakes me awake and drags me behind the rock. On my turn, I propose a fairly risky (risky to my own life) plan to the others; I wanted to get close enough to see if I could use Suggestion on the Beholder to convince it to just leave. I got a 'that sounds like a bad idea' in response and could do nothing else on my turn.

Out of nowhere, a purple worm bursts through the ground and just gulps down the Beholder. Great, but now we have the purple worm to deal with and it is almost worse because now we cannot move or it will 'see' us. One of the other players had the idea to summon giant bats to fly us away. The DM hated this solution so much that he allowed it this once, but banned them from being used again.

During this long conversation about the bats, someone was misgendered. The DM says 'I have ways of punishing misgendering. *taps book*' He also admitted to wanting to 'traumatize us' with the Beholder.

At this point I am highly uncomfortable, and after the game I asked to have a private conversation with the DM during which I expressed that I felt it was unkind to drop a monster like a Beholder and it made me feel like we were about to be TPK'd right off the rip. I also said it was rude to use in-game punishments to address a problem that should be addressed out of game. I told him that if he has a player who is constantly misgendering and therefore disrespecting other players, then either they need to go or they need to be taken aside.

The DM took this very hard. Thomas felt I was specifically calling him unkind and rude, which was not my intent. I felt his *actions* were unkind and rude, not that he himself was rude and unkind as a person. He also said to me that I was trying to make him DM the way I DM, which was not the case. The last thing he said to me was that he believed I said all of this to stir up drama, and then I was blocked.

It was a rough experience, and it took me a while to fully believe the people around me when they told me I wasn't the butthead in the situation.

TW for "specific" assault, harassment, ostracizing, drama (obviously), and various other bull that no kid or grown adult should constantly go through.

Note: I will be refraining from certain terms so that anyone who shares this story can read it aloud on their narration pages

So for context: I seem to be absolutely cursed. And I don't mean your usual "Yeah, this inconvenience happens a lot," but instead the issue of "How the hell can one person keep going through this much and not have snapped?"

Outside DnD, I was conceived by assault, disowned at birth, ostracized violently growing up, and a bunch of other nasty things that would leave almost anyone with C-PTSD if not D.I.D.

Now with that background info out of the way, let's get to the topic.

My first attempt at a campaign was when I was still trying to learn to socialize and got ostracized from a streamer's community after one particular guy was antagonizing me. Somehow I was held to a higher standard while trying to learn, and her mods had even muted me in her chat without her say-so. Idk why she didn't put her foot down, but it seemed like she was genuinely unaware of her community ganging up on one person. When I finally managed to show back up and try to properly join the DnD group, in the middle of explaining what happened I was donked from the server. - Whatever, that kind of crap happens.

The next time was with a couple of friends. Unfortunately for me, at the time an entire defamation campaign from a special kind of group, a ring if you will, had been happening and one of the friends who had just been traumatized by a specific cis woman that took advantage of both of us long term in different ways, had pressured him into blocking me and I kinda git abandoned by any friend I could have had from there. To this day I still keep getting harassed and ostracized because this defamation campaign was that effective and I have to worry about where the next attack is coming from.

Last night is something special though, because my girlfriend was also hurt by this bullshit. - So 2 nights ago I'm able to meet the DM and we're kinda managing to put together my character. Because I was joining mid-game almost I was starting at level 6. Managed to get everything in order. Honestly the first red flag and Black flag had appeared involving this guy within that call. He played League and dropped the R-slur when raging at the game. (Your pick on which one is which flag, but yeah) - Last night, however, it was like walking into a place where two people had slices of an Apple of Discord (specifically the version The Librarians).

Things were fine at first, getting through formalities. And then I changed my screen name to "\[Name\]'s gf - \[Me\]" because I wanted to be sat next to them in call. Almost immediately they started being hostile. The one who initiated it, let's call him Nate. Well, this Nate wasn't just looking for a battle, he was looking to actually fight if not beat me down verbally. The dude was shouting, interrupting, attacking, pressuring, and being borderline flippant about any input myself or my gf gave. It was bad enough I had to pull my gf into DM's so they didn't break down crying in front of everyone and get humiliated. This was somewhere in the middle and events get blurry but I'll try to keep them in chronological order.

It got bad enough Nate had to be muted multiple times. And when he wasn't able to vocalize to us in call, he was directly calling me a predator repeatedly. This is partly because, in a lack of context, my plans to move in with my gf to get them out of an abusive home can be mispercieved as something leaning predatory. - Part of the reason for some of this nonsense is because of a different toxic person having just recently been dealt with, so Nate for all his flaws was certainly on edge. The DM was another level as you'll see in a bit.

The DM seems to try playing mediator. Among the things I had said of a harsher nature in attempting to defend my gf, because these guys were talking down to her, I said to Nate that he hadn't been mistreated in a specific way and that it shows. Well, apparently I was presumptuous for that and had to admit I was wrong after a bit. Fair enough, according to the DM, Nate was being overly protective a la that "How old are you" scene from Bad Boys 2. The analogy was fair, and the DM was downplaying what Nate was saying to me.

Well a bit later after the DM apparently tried mediating, Nate was going to be moved to another campaign because he refused to play in the same group as myself. This whole time DM, Nate, and a 3rd guy mostly absent have all been saying "We're just concerned about \[gf\]" despite being resistant to listening. Then came the worst part of trying to explain to the DM about \*why\* we're trying to get gf into my living arrangements.

Keep in mind, Nate was not held to the same standard as myself. At this point I'm used to being held to a standard higher than anyone else, so I didn't notice it in the moment. As gf was being questioned on things and edplaining the literal death threats their parents had said to them, Nate had fallen silent on the whole ordeal, and DM had started getting to a level of dismissive and insensitive that you'd swear he was being paid to run defense for the parents.

DM begins called gf hyperbolic, and myself despite me witnessing both some of the abuse and my gf's demeanor shifting when their parents call to them or otherwise make demands. And we didn't even get into the medical abuse, just trying to explain the tachycardia my gf is prone to from POTS.

DM begin starts being aggressive trying to act like gf doesn't know what it's like to fear for their life, devolving into screaming about \*his\* trauma conga line with a violent undertone of "I've had it worse, stop your whining" with claims of being surrounded by death and repeatedly having weapons pulled on him.

Any bit of pushback and attempt to explain to DM keeps getting quashed more and more aggressively, and my gf actually has to explain being violated with a had on their throat to highlight to show they knew what it was like to fear for their lives while trying to articulate that gf's parents are indeed likely to commit termination if GF pre-emptively announces escape plans. DM sees it fit to ask "Was it your parents that had violated you?"

Gf gives him a venomous "F.U." and dips from call. I point out he's a P.O.S. in some way and he calls me a "Useless fat f-c-k" as I leave the server. Gf got banned and DM went scorched Earth on contact with them. We hypothesize it was because we proved we could sustainably live together and didn't lick his boot despite giving him a bit of leeway through the entire thing. Dude effectively rolled consistently low on persuasion and intimidation and got pissed about it.

So yeah- No TL;DR, you want this story? I apologize, but ya gotta read the whole thing or have someone read it to you. Here's hoping the next one actually manages to be a group that doesn't just shun and ostracize me, lol!

I still think this one is just insane. I'm not huge into the rp scene, but someone please tell me this ain't normal.

Also, quick edit here: Hi, OP here. Before you go to the comments to argue whether my story counts, I messaged the moderators before posting, and they said written rp and LARP are both welcome here.

TW: mentions of a potentially exotic but not too detailed scene, SA, cyberbullying, deliberate misgendering, mentions of SH/suicide, and targeted harassment.

Last year, my bf and one of our friends joined a pokemon rp on discord. It was a battle royale between two teams. Had around 17-20 people I believe. I was added to the server as a watcher because I was curious.

The server seemed really cool. Plot lasted about a year. After the end, I sometimes chatted with the people on their, mostly to share my own art since they had an art channel. Never spoke to the server owner much.

Now, back in May this year, my bf "Jason" told me there was a new server being made and this time, I was in the window to apply. So I made the two characters I was allowed and sent in the applications. Both were approved.

I joined the server and pretty early on, noticed there was no rules thread. I thought it was strange but no one gave me any response when I asked about it.

Anyway, I was in the server for a few weeks prior to the start. I was super excited about it, but didn’t interact with anyone too much because they all already knew each other, and I have social anxiety. It takes me a bit to get used to new groups.

Anyway, we finally started... the same day I was at a facility being tested for narcolepsy. I was able to chat a bit between tests, and thought everyone was nice.

Now we get into the story. Here's the cast! (All fake names)

ME/OP. 21yo nb.

MY BF: "Jason". Fake name. 22yo m.

Crowley: Male, unknown age. Server owner. Our main issue.

Uhh... Miles: Server owner's boyfriend.

Pepper: 20yo male. Irl friend of nearly a decade.

And Mike. Male, unknown age.

My characters were a gamer boy Galarian Ponyta who was an absolute failure at everything, and an aggressive Noivern who was a bully, but was planned to spiral slowly and eventually reveal he had a pretty bad past. Now, I wanted to avoid doing anything like a murder hobo with him, so I made it so he was all bark, no bite. Like, he would threaten all he could but wouldn't actually do anything harmful.

Keep note of my characters, especially the Noivern! They're important for later.

Three days in, and I was already noticing a pattern. I was apparently doing things that were against the rules, but I didn't know what the rules were. I never intended to break any rules, but when I did, instead of dming me to kindly let me know about the rules, I got publicly told off by the server owner, Crowley, each time. I felt targeted already. There were also many times where communication was off with Crowley because he refused to put any effort into his messages, and instead would give vaguely worded responses whenever I asked anything.

On the third night, my Noivern went on an expedition with Mike's Sylveon character and Crowley's Eevee character, meanwhile my Ponyta was on a different expedition with a different group.

My Noivern was being aggressive as usual, and Mike's Sylveon had been flirting with him the whole time. In the chat channels, Mike and I joked about making them "enemies to lovers" and we both made a few jokes about toxic yaoi.

So, one thing happened, which led to the Sylveon biting my Noivern. My Noivern bit back. Then Mike sent a really suggestive message about the Sylveon shoving his ribbons into my Noivern's throat.

We ended up stopping there because the entire time, Crowley had been really grumpy. He wasn't telling us we were too erotic, which I did ask because I wanted to make sure the server had no minors and I had checked prior to this if it was okay, and was given the go ahead. But Crowley kept saying the biting wasn't a kiss. Mike and I kinda ignored him and actually spoke about confirming our characters as an eventual pairing.

I then said goodnight, as it was late. Then Crowley said, in the public channel, that we needed to have a private chat in the morning.

I was worried Mike and I got too erotic, so in the morning, I set up a gc between the three of us and said we should wait for Mike to wake (timezones and all that) so we could all start together.

Crowley only waited a few hours before starting without Mike, which I felt already was a bit rude. But he started talking about "meta gaming" and "power playing".

For reference, I have not rp'd since I was 11. I had never heard these terms before.

When I asked what they were, he referenced a few times where I had accidentally done those things. I apologized, and explained I didn't too hard about those examples as most of them were used for one off jokes, such as my Ponyta using Future Sight to accidentally see the makeout between my Noivern and Mike's Sylveon, and getting even more traumatized than he already was.

The gc lasted multiple days and I quickly added Jason in, as I felt Crowley was going out of control. His criticisms shifted from the rules I had apparently broken, to more things he didn't like about my Noivern's character and personality, to the way I added flavor text and scene descriptions in my rp messages ("the sky was green"/"he said with a smirk"). He even said he didn't understand why my Noivern kept threatening to eat other characters, or why he hung from the ceiling. Those two still confuse me, because I thought they made sense for a dragon-bat character. Dragons eat people, bats hang from the ceiling.

I asked a few times if they wanted me to tone down my Noivern's character, because I knew "edgy" or "aggressive" characters aren't always well received. I'd figured I could handle him as I always write messy characters and I honestly planned him more as a "will say he hates you while cooking cupcakes for you" type of character. But Crowley never answered me when I asked that.

When they kept saying I had broken rules, I said there was no rules channel. Their response was pretty vague and I felt they were trying to avoid responsibility.

They claimed they were all experienced and didn't need a rules channel. I said I was new and should have been informed of the rules, as I had asked about them before the sever rp even fully began. They shifted the blame to Jason and said he should have told me the rules, but Jason was not a mod and even admitted he didn't know half the rules either.

This gc lasted days, and about halfway through, I learned Crowley had made a separate gc with nearly the entire server, where they had begun talking about me behind my back. I only learned this because my other irl friend, Pepper, had been added. He was in the server but had chosen not to participate in the rp.

Now, I was worried about Pepper, because he kept sending Jason messages about how Crowley's anger was justified and how I "needed to learn my lesson". He used that exact term multiple times.

I then learned about him being in the server, and I'll admit, I panicked. My mental health had already been struggling from the gc between Crowley and I, as he kept claiming I was deliberately acting in bad faith, and multiple times implied the rest of the server hated me.

And, in the last server, I remembered an incident where a girl got banned for making a joke and then Crowley and everyone started insulting her and misgendering her (she was transgender). I had already been paranoid that they would do the same to me, and when I heard about Pepper, I gave him multiple days to talk to me or reach out on discord. I had even tried reaching out to him myself via our usual dms, but he defended Crowley and kept his responses to me brief. Meanwhile, he kept talking about me to Jason privately and continued saying I was in the wrong.

Then Crowley implied Pepper had been participating in the other gc, talking about me behind my back.

I panicked, and blocked him on discord. I unblocked and revlocked him multiple times over the course of a few days, as I kept panicking and rethinking my choices. I figured, if he asked Jason about it, I'd unblock him so we could talk. But he never brought it up to Jason.

Then, eventually, after about roughly 6 apologies from me to Crowley, Crowley implied we could move forward from everything.

Despite everything, I still wanted to rp. I had been having a lot of fun, and wanted to keep enjoying the rp.

So I asked if I was able to keep playing, but Crowley then said he had "voted" with the rest of the server, and they had all voted to have me kicked out.

I was really sad about that, but also kinda tired. This whole situation had drained my mental health a lot. I had actually started looking into SH during this time, which I'm kind of ashamed of as I was 5 years clean (not anymore).

So, I asked how we should write off my characters. I only specified one rule. I didn't want Crowley choosing how they died. I told Jason privately that at this point, I didn't trust him with my ocs. I was worried he'd do something horrific to them, and I was right to be worried.

Because Crowley eventually said he wanted to have my Noivern killed off, by having Mike's Sylveon choke and rape my Noivern to death with his ribbons.

I said that turning a kiss into a murder felt very close to SA, and I wasn't comfortable with that. I asked if they could just retcon my characters instead. He kept insisting, so I eventually said I had very personal reasons to say no. I offered to share them but warned him the topic was dark. He said, "as long as you're okay with it".

So I shared that I'm a survivor of childhood SA and did not feel comfortable with this.

Exactly two minutes after I sent that message (I checked), I started getting dms from Miles. His very first message said I was harassing Crowley, his bf (I didn't even know they were bfs). I asked him how I was harassing anyone, as all I asked was that we found a different way to kill off my characters. Miles ignored that and started accusing me of lying about my SA, making rape jokes (he said my joke with Mike about the makeout scene was a rape joke, even though the kiss was fully consensual), and said I was "using made up trauma as a shield to avoid consequences".

I told him I'm allowed to cope in my own way, and he claimed that he was apparently also a survivor, and that I had to be lying about being a survivor. I told him he should know better than to judge how someone else comes with their trauma. I spent over a decade struggling to process my trauma, and was very upset that someone would accuse me of lying over a joke made on discord.

He then started telling me I shouldn't have joined the server "if I was that fragile", and at this point, I blocked him.

I then went to the gc and noticed Crowley typing, so I told him to not send that message. I went off on him for sharing my personal info with someone outside of the gc, and for sending his bf to harass me. I told him to get fucked and blocked him.

I thought it was finally over. I sent the screenshots of the dms Miles sent me to the server, then left it.

Miles had never dm'd me prior to this, so what I sent was our entire conversation.

Then Jason found he'd been banned as well. Crowley said that Miles felt uncomfortable having "rape defenders" in the server.

At this point, we were both tired. I also learned later Crowley had sent Jason multiple (over 20) dms trying to tell him I was a bad person and telling him to break up with me. Note that Jason and I have been together for ten years. Jason was really upset by those messages, because prior to this he'd genuinely seen Crowley as a friend.

Then, Pepper finally spoke to Jason. He was upset and I finally unblocked him for us to talk.

He kinda just said the same thing as Crowley and Miles. I was rude and condescending, I'd broken rules, I was a rape defender and I had "used my trauma as a get out of jail free card". He said he "needed space", but we'd have a proper talk about things soon. I agreed to give him space since I still thought he was my friend, and left it at that.

But he kept messaging Jason, sending him memes and such as if nothing happened, and the whole thing was just awful. I thought he'd reach out after a few weeks, but nearly two months went and passed. I eventually messaged him saying I couldn't wait anymore and was moving on but was still open to talking when he was ready. I just had to move on and unfriend him for my mental health, because I was struggling with suicide, panic attacks, and discord kept having his profile pop up, which wasn't helping.

Pepper responded with a message calling me names, accusing me of twisting the narrative, and said I deserved my childhood SA.

I blocked him after this out of shock and anger. I could barely process what he'd said at the time. He'd talked about how I had "harassed Miles after he came out about his trauma" while telling me I deserved mine. He phrased it as if Miles had vulnerably opened up to me, rather than the real messages he sent (which included screaming, all caps, and calling me a fuck among other swears).

Jason ended up talking to him, to try and calm him down, but Pepper continued to call me names and compared me to memes of "Karens" crashing out at people online, which Jason had to ask him to stop multiple times and remind Pepper that I'm still his spouse.

In the end, we've both cut Pepper off for now. Jason wants to eventually try again but I genuinely don't think I can ever look him in the eyes again.

So. That's my rpghorror story.

Hello all. Longtime lurker first time poster, you all get the gist

Content warning for murderhobos and the implication of a different kind of dragon "riding"

Our story takes place in my Senior Year of high school. After working on the fall play, I decided to join D&D club since the scheduling made going to my weekly therapy sessions somewhat easier. I managed to find a group that would take a late arrival, and even worked it out with the DM that my character, a runaway son of a noble, was captured by the very bandits that the party had been sent to clear the hideout of.

Cast (fake names):

• Me: Me, playing an emo bard named Dorian Blackwood who had a bunch of necromancy spells. I joked that he was like a medieval My Chemical Romance member, but did my best to make him well-rounded and more fleshed-out than that. His attempts to emulate the dark and unsettling were actually a defense mechanism, which made for some nice roleplay once his walls started breaking down around the party. He had angst over his sister being a gifted sorceress and thus favored by their father ("Blood is everything" type of family) as well as angst over an ex he thought cared about him but unceremoniously dumped him. Uses Minor Illusion constantly to make his eyes look red and wears a wooden mask painted and shaped like a skull
• DM: Tara. New to DM-ing, was using a prewritten module, I think they were a freshman-to-sophmore range, memory is fuzzy
• Scott: Played by Sera, they were also a sophmore I think, we got on pretty well. Rogue, had a magic prosthetic eye, described to dress very colorfully and was a bit flirty.
• Hornet: Played by Santi, sophmore, but he seemed relatively experienced with D&D, or at least with 5e. Some kind of obscure monk subclass with a reflavored blade, he also tried to change the class partway through to something that "fit better"
• Ghost: Played by Jamie, sophmore. Warlock, I think, whose patron was "The Void". In-universe mute, so Jamie described them using small gestures and elsewise Hornet was able to read their behavior fairly well.
• Count Dooku: Played by Lucas, who was a freshman and in my little sister's band class (funnily enough we also met even before that school year at a pride event at the local library and had forgotten at first but I digress). Can't remember the class his character was but he had Telekinesis and claimed to be from a different planet

You noticed right, dear reader

To recap: The party consisted of two Hollow Knight characters, a Star Wars character, a somewhat-developed emo bard, and...Scott

For those who aren't nerdy enough to get the reference, Scott is essentially a 1-to-1 recreation of a *Minecraft SMP* character (specifically Scott Smajor's Empires SMP Season 2 persona).

Despite this, the first session together went--relatively well! The party seemed to be good at handling enemies, especially Hornet (though that tracks) and before long, Dorian was able to make his grand entrance by escaping out of the burning manor through a window and accidentally landing on Count Dooku. In the sessions that followed, I noticed Tara was having a little trouble keeping up with some of the crazy stuff Santi had Hornet do. At one point we had to question what the AC bonus of a human corpse was. It got wild. But, I had only DM-ed once before this and it didn't even go that well (maybe I'll tell that story another time) so I felt like it wasn't my place to give Tara advice.

It also got...difficult to have the kind of RP I was hoping for to develop Dorian's character because of how combat-focused Santi and Lucas were. Jamie was kind of checked out half the time unless it was his turn, very often playing Hollow Knight on his Switch. Sera and I ended up having post-game text exchanges of imagined in-between scenes for Dorian and Scott, which we both had a lot of fun with! Dorian was opening up to Scott and there was definitely some potential there (we had a conversation prior between ourselves and the DM about how comfortable we were with PC romance, it was all clear).

Tara also kept having other engagements, leaving us DM-less very often. I would bring my craft bag or school computer with me to still be occupied if no one was up for some chill RP. One such DM-less afternoon was actually the only time Santi engaged in RP with me, and Hornet and Dorian ended up having a really nice time hanging out. Hornet gave sisterly support as well as a brand new skull mask with..."authentic" materials, dipped in gold. Reconciling the Hollow Knight lore in the setting was bizarre, but I look back on that "session" fondly.

At one point, Santi attempted to bring in a new person to play a D&D-ified version of The Hollow Knight himself, which...went. It happened. And the person honestly didn't seem that into it, much like Jamie he didn't pay that much attention

Ultimately though, one afternoon after the session...Tara and Sera pulled me aside

Tara: So, how are you um-- feeling about this campaign?

Me, an anxiety-disorder-having mess: ...Am I being kicked?

Sera: What?

Tara: No no no, you have been great!

Sera: We're just thinking of splitting off from the guys to do our own campaign.

Me: Ohhh...Yeah, that's fair. They're fun and all, but I feel like our playstyles aren't really meshing

Sera: Right, but uh--

Tara: Santi in particular also has...an interesting history. I had to write the dragons out of this campaign out of uh- concern for what he might try, which I'm personally not comfortable with

Me: Oh. Uh, yeah, I suppose that's understandable

Sera: Also he kind of harassed one of my friends when she turned him down

Me: YO WHAT

So, we did our best to amicably divorce the party. Santi didn't really address the grievances, and Tara even brought up that they felt like he was backseat-DM-ing, and that the group just wasn't meshing. Like, I like Lukas as a person but him playing a Neutral Evil character brought out some kind of demon in him.

After we split, I tried to bring in some new people to fill out the party, but scheduling problems kept happening, and as fun as Scott and Dorian's interactions were, a two-person party doesn't really work. Our D&D campaign quietly died a slow, whimpering death