u/Bigrobbo

Sorry for the long story.

For context, I am DM for a long term campaign of D&D 5e. I also earn a little money on the side running games for the local Library. I also run intro sessions for my friends bookshop events he runs a few times a year. I am no Matt Mercer but I like to think I am a fairly experienced DM.

At the last event my friend ran, a guy approached him and asked if he could DM for one of the events. My friend said "well I don't know you so how about you DM for my regular group one day and we can see how you do there". He agreed and we started looking for a day he could run a oneshot for us.

So given we have had a few members of the team leave recently and I am taking a long trip out of the country for a few weeks. We decided to let him run a session the other day.

Firstly, I want to say, the world building this guy did was awesome, lots of lore and history.... but things got a bit rough when for a three hour one shot... he gave us a pretty open ended prompt. The prompt suggests we will be exploring Islands from a ship and with him allowing early firearms. I built a Level 4 fighter with a musket, going for a real pirate vibe.

The session begins with us arriving on an Island and thus... the railroading began. I'm pretty sure we could have gone anywhere and the 8 Plot critical NPCs would still have found us. We'd still have ended up at the local village in the trees. With the friendly local girl welcoming us and then saying she had to run an errand that night so we should go to bed and she would see us in the morning.

I literally narrated my character going to sleep. The DM tells me a few hours later I am nervously waiting by the window to see this person return (Even though... I am asleep), Just as she gets home, we spot something going towards her home. The party rushes to help, arrives takes 18 Psychic damage and is frozen in fear as the murderer flees.

When I can move I set off in pursuit.
DM "It's fleeing through the trees"
Me "Ok I want to try and dash through the trees and swing from the branches after them"
DM "Make acrobatics"
Me "that's 19 + 6, 25"
DM "You are chasing after them but they are gaining distance and you notice they are heading towards the ground"
Me "I follow them"
DM "you need to take the vine lift"
Me "I'm climbing through the trees..."
DM"yes but they went down"
Me "I want to climb down"
DM "take the lift"
Me "I want to follow them down through the trees"
DM "Roll perception"
Me "uhhh ok 2"
DM "you don't see how they got down"
Me "I don't want to follow the exact route, I want to climb down a tree"
DM "take the lift"

So, I realized later, The DM needed the killer to escape so they were apparently flying... why them flying stopped me climbing a tree I'm still unsure.

We are then encouraged to take a short rest... right after a murder and when the victims father is promising to go to war in retaliation.

After a rest we didn't want to take, Our party sets out to solve the murder, and we are told, we should investigate the 8 important NPCs we met before (I barely remember any of them because we met them all rapidly one after the other). So we visit a priest he seems nice enough but suddenly a guard captain starts to shout at us to get away from the priest or she will have her men kill us and then gives us 5 minutes to leave. None of us get to roll anything to try and calm her down... because we aren't supposed to be speaking to the priest yet so the DM needs the angry captain to scare us away.

Then we chase down someone who might have witnessed something important over some moving cliffs (because of course we have moving cliffs). These cliffs require us to make two perception checks (felt like a DC 14) and two athletics / acrobatics checks (DC seems to depend on how well the perception went). Fail one acrobatics check and you fall from the cliffs taking 4d6 damage. (Potentially 40% of my health pool and I'm already down 3 hit dice from the random psychic damage earlier). I try using my rope to to tie myself off. (As a DM I love it when players do this, if you do something like that in my game, I might give advantage on the checks or reduce the DC / Damage you get for a fail) What does it get me? You can climb up from the rocks when you fall rather than being washed out to sea... so either this was a lethal trap or nothing I do can make any difference here.

The Druid solves the puzzle by wild shaping into a giant spider and I can see the DM hates this, he wants the EXACT wording of Spider climb to work out if he can force him to do the same challenge but he can't, when the druid tries to leave behind a trail of web to help us climb... it gets washed away by the rain on a random nature check.

After this I was pretty checked out, we spoke to a whole bunch of NPCs and get sent across the island. One of the NPCs is a horrible Incel character, which personally I wouldn't put in a fantasy setting but ehh whatever.

By the three hour mark we have just solved a puzzle, a wrong move on the puzzle causes 3D6 Psychic damage which causes my character to go down... I haven't been in combat, I haven't really done anything but get slapped by a murderers psychic BS, fall off some cliffs, and get zapped by a puzzle where no checks we make offer any help. So at this point given it's been 3 hours, me and another player have work in the morning and most of our sessions last 3 ish hours a couple of us call it and say "we have to go because of work" The game kind of ended there. I got some feedback from my players though, none of them felt like it was a particularly good session. We were just along for the ride in a story this guy wanted to tell. Unsurprisingly he isn't being invited to DM at the bookshop events.

tl:dr Guy asks to DM for my friends bookshop events. Does a trial run with our regular group and railroads us all through his murder mystery, where none of the choices we make do or change anything in the story.