u/AudienceOne8591

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I started a D&D group and slowly terrible things started happening to everyone that got worse and worse and now we are all too scared to play. Using fake names cause everyone deserves that.

So at the start of this story I (39M) was pretty new to dnd. I had only watched people play it a couple times. My best friend Sierra (30F) had been daydreaming about playing for years so I suggested my finance Ray(38N) could DM for us. Ray had some experience playing, probably not a lot DMing. So we get together a group to play and its like this:

Ray (38N) -DM and my partner

Me - Bard

Sierra(30F) - Cleric and my best friend

Kory (32N) Rouge

Cass (35F) Sorceress

Ari & Nico (27N&N) - players that are a couple I’m grouping them to make this easier. Barbarian and Monk

So we all meet up to make our character sheets. All new players but one. Ray says they will work with everyone individually to make their sheets. Said we had to use money to buy our supplies but wouldn’t tell us how much we had. Wouldn’t let anyone use d&d beyond or let the rouge (who wasn’t new) multi-class. Didn’t do standard array. Everyone is confused, the DM is pissed at everyone, only helps certain people and spends hours quietly helping one person to the side and only half explaining things, being purposefully vague when people ask questions. Like ‘dont worry about that youll confuse yourself.’ We had three months of meetings and no one had a completed character sheet. Everyone starts bickering. There are some tears.

At this point Cass drops out cause she gets Lyme disease and is too sick to do anything.

We finally start the campaign and the three sessions we have ended up being three different campaigns cause Ray kept changing their mind without consulting anyone.

Fourth session Sierra and Kory get into a bad car accident on the way. We don’t meet a while because Kory has a really bad head injury.

Me and Ray broke up a little after that. It’s a very messy break up. The group disbands.

I didn’t like how all this went down so I decide I’m going to learn to DM. I go to my local game shop and exchange lessons for pies (I make a good pie). Good, back in business. I call up the gang six months later to see who wants to play with me as DM running the Candlekeep book as a campaign. Kory and Cass say no due to health stuff so new group is the cleric, and the new group is Sierra, Ari, Nico, and Sierra’s friend Ricki (M27) who decided to be a sorcerer.

Now we are cooking with Crisco. We have our session zero through five and we are doing good, having a ton of fun, everyone’s learning. We have a few one shots when Sierra cant make it (shes super busy). All is going well until Ricki’s mom dies right before his birthday session we all got him gifts for. He is devastated and we feel bad for him. We don’t hear from him for a long time so we play some without him. Ricki eventually drops out and moves out the city to take care of his dad.

At this point Ari & Nico (who had been together for eight years) broke up. They say its okay to still play together.

We don’t meet up for a long while. I use the time to buff out the campaign. Eventually Heather (30F) who I used to play with when I was learning how to dm hits me up and says shes looking for a party. We make a date for us all to start up again, with Heather included.

Now I know at this point yall might be like OP is full of shit but the week of the session someone set Heather on fire on the train. She loses most of her fingers and is in the burn unit for five months fighting for her life. Eventually she moves back home with her parents. She still wants to play but physically cant cause the talking is too much.

At this point yall none of us wanna try it again. It almost seems irresponsible. Anyway I really want to DM again but now I’m legit scared. Been a player in my friends campaign to get my fix but I still daydream about that golden period in the middle when we were all making it work.