WARNING: The following post is a long rant written by a bitter player drawing from months of frustration over being potentially ripped off.)
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So some context: I've been into DnD for years (listened to podcasts, watched tutorials, read articles, watched the movie which I liked, etc), but it isn't a popular hobby in my home country, so I never really had a chance to play it since finding a party was next to impossible. But last year I've moved to London for studies and work, and since then I've been having a blast getting to interact with the far bigger and more active DnD community here. Overall, it's been a mostly fun experience to finally try the game I've wanted to play for so long, on top of other games like Call of Cthulhu and Daggerheart.
Key word "mostly".
See there are also plenty of these DnD cafes around London were you can play one-shots for a price. It's a bit steep (about 15 Pounds per session), but I've been to two of them a fair number of times. One of them in Holborn, Arcadia Games, isn't too far from my University campus so it's super convenient if I want a quick game. I heard some bad stuff about AG, especially controversies surrounding the owners and financial mismanagement, but personally I've had an enjoyable experience there. The DMs are good, atmosphere is friendly, and I've never dealt with any problem players (a few annoying ones maybe but never outright toxic).
The same cannot be said for the second one, RPG Taverns.
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Anyways, first session. It's barely two weeks since I've moved to London, and after a quick Google search I learn that there's this place not too far from where I live in Elephant and Castle, the aformentioned RPG Taverns, which has "beginner friendly" introductory sessions and character creation. I wasn't confident enough to join a regular party yet as I had next to no experience actually playing, so i thought that getting an introductory one-shot would be great for me to properly learn the ropes of DnD. So I book for that evening and make my way there.
First comes character creation, which is enjoyable enough: They give me and other newbies a quick rundown of the lore for their homebrew world, give us the table rules and guidelines (be respectful of players and DM, don't use slurs or other offensive language, the typical stuff.) and finally we get a rundown on making a DnD Beyond Character. Since I'm still new to this, I decide to make a simple one: A Champion Fighter who is a boisterous and deeply insecure Knight and may or may not be inspired by another axe-weilding Champion Fighter Dwarf-Man from NADDPOD.
After all that, we begin the session: Basically we've been tasked by the Adventures Guild to investigate a series of bizarre and unexplained disappearances in some village. We're guided there by a young girl from said village who lost her mother, and for the first twenty minutes it goes well as me and the other adventurers banter and talk and joke around while the DM stays completely silent. Then we arrive in the village, and that's when the fuckery began.
Not the good kind like we find monsters or the mystery begins or whatever, but "fuckery" as in it seems like the DM is determined to railroad us away from anything remotely interesting.
We try to speak to anyone in the village for information or clues, and all we get are variations of "they avoid talking to you" or "they know nothing."
Warlock tries to roll an arcana check, to sense if there's any magic influence, rolls an 18. The response? Just three words: "You feel nothing."
Ok, Wizard tries "Detect Magic"... still nothing, according to the DM.
Young teenage Bard PC tries to speak to other kids and their parents, and successfully charms them? "They seem to like you, but either know nothing or won't tell you."
Always the same laconic answers from the DM, and when the Wizard PC asks above table what we should do then he goes: "You just gotta keep looking deeper into this."
Mind you, that's exactly what we've been trying to do. What we've been doing for an entire hour. At this point we're more nearly halfway through the session (normal sessions are 2.5 hours) so I'm getting a little frustrated because jack shit has happened as we try to look for seemingly nonexistent clues, not helped by a DM that seems determined to give us no trails to follow at all.
So after the mid-session break, we decide to just go speak to the town elder directly. We heard from the girl who guided us that the Elder may be connected whatever is causing the vanishings, thus our party corners the man in his home and interrogate him. But that crochety old fart must've had nerves of steel gifted by the very gods, because nothing we did or said could make him divulge anything. I rolled a fucking nat 20 on an inimidation roll, and the man, according to the DM makes absolutely no change in his demeanor and just tells us to leave the town alone because we don't know what we're doing. Yeah, I agree, we don't know anything because, again, we haven't been told or informed of anything.
By that point the DM probably noticed that me an the other PCs were getting properly annoyed (and that the clock was ticking to finish this session) so the remaining thirty minutes takes everything from zero to a hundred in an instant. Suddenly the DM becomes more emotive than he's been all evening as he describes the sky going red and we see a massive fire in the distance in the hill overseeing the village. The elder panics and runs to his hut while we run to the surface of the fire. Finally we see something interesting: A massive Wicker man burning with corpses inside, a circle of robed cultists that we recognize as some villagers. And standing at the center is the girl, who reveals herself to be responsible for the town's vanishings. In a totally-not-rushed exposition dump she (or the DM) explains that she is in fact a demon who the village made a deal with the villagers to protect them from vampires (vampires that were NEVER mentioned before, btw) in exchange for sacrifices. She had lured us into the village so that she could make a deal with us to expand her grasp across the land and beyond the village, offering "proctection" from the vampires.
Naturally we all say no, and you'd expect a fight right? A big climactic battle to save the village? Nope! There's less then ten minutes left for the session so we gotta rush through everything. Demon girl leaves, vampires enter village kill everyone (no indication or sign, we just come back to the village and BAM! everyone's dead) and the elder tells us in his dying breath we should've left them alone before croacking. Session over.
If that last section seemed over really quick, well that was because that's exactly how quick it felt when that DM that spent three quarters of the session fucking around and railroading us to nowhere realized he had to end it.
Needless to say I leaft this place feeling like I lost two and a half hours of my life I'm never getting back. By then, most people would have washed their hands of this place and never come back. But I heard that that DM was still new and inexperienced (in fact this was his second game he's DM'ed for ever). So you know what? I was willing to give this place a second chance, because surely the other more experienced DMs were better, right?
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The second one-shot I played in was somehow worse.
Here I was, booking for another fifteen pounds to enjoy an evening at this cafe. We were in a new room, one that was styled after a tavern and gave off a pleasant atmosphere. One of the randoms I was with that night also played with me in the last game so it was nice to have a familiar face. Plus, the setup was much more interesting: We were hired by a secret society of sacred protectors to find proof that a cult was hiding out in some music store downtown. We were to be discreet, to act unnasuming while we found the dark underbelly hiding beneath the shiny glamour. Sounded like something that would be RP heavy, which I was happy for (RP between PCs being the one good thing from the first game). Probably also for the better, since the party was extremely imbalanced: One half of the team (including me) were level one or two, and the other half were level six. The thing about this cafe was that there were no level specific one-shots (except high level sessions for those level six and above), so you could have parties with PCs of widely different power levels. But surely they'd care about balance to make sure everyone had fun right?
Anyways, much like before, the beginning went well enough: We began by bantering and introducing ourseles, and then we came up with a plan where me and the other level oners would talk and fool the clerk while the level sixers tried to sneak in the back. It was cool to RP and we played well against one another... until one bad roll threw everything down the shitter.
It happened almost instantly: I try to roll deception on the clerk and failed. DM rolls insight, and she gets a 17.
In an instant, she pulls out a dagger and slits my throat, before immediately attacking and knocking out the other level oners. In a single turn.
No warning, not even a chance to dodge or react. Just instant knockout as she dealt over forty damage in a single attack. The whole plan falls apart as the level sixers than have to come out of hiding to stop her from killing us. The following combat encounter has me and the others on the floor the whole time, in complete silence while the DM seemed to have the time of his life RPing and describing each attack. It's then I realized that there was no balance whatsoever: This clerk was level seven according to the DM. The level sixers don't even get to kill her cause she throws a smoke bomb and just vanishes.
The whole hook of the session? That it would be "RP heavy"? That it was all about infiltration with some combat? Yeah, that was gone. No more sneaking or anything, just pure action the rest of the session. We enter the basement after we're all healed and spend half an hour running around random traps that made no sense that the DM seemed to be pulling out his ass like even he hadn't fully prepared for this. And the last hour has us battle the cultists in the basement, consisting of a wizard and her knight protector on top of the clerk. Altough "battling" was a generous term for me and the level oners. Cause we were so weak we effectively couldn't do jack shit most of the fight, the enemies knocking us out in one hit or we'd try to hit them to no avail cause their AC was too high or our damage output was comparatively pathetic, making for one of the most infuriatingly boring fights I've ever played.
It didn't help that the DM was also being a smug ass douche about it: He kept having the villains insult us and mock us as we tried to fight, and always specifically the level oners. Didn't help that the witch had vicious mockery so we'd be often incapacitated or knocked out by said insults, which only made him even more smug. It came to a point where it felt less like RPing and more like he was straight up bullying us. So much for the rule about no offensive language.
To add insult to injury, the session ended anticlimatically much like the first time: The clerk flees again, not before setting the whole place on fire, effectively destroying all evidence of the cult. The store is destroyed and we have to flee authorities. Once again, making all our efforts and pain in this session pointless.
After that game, I told myself I was pretty much done with the place. Twice I've been there and twice I've been left in a sour and dissapointed. First session was boring, second was frustrating. I left this place and didn't come back... for four months.
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Now, in hindsight, I REALLY should have learned my lesson after last time. I should have just cut my losses and left RPG Taverns behind. By then, I was much more familiar with the TTRPG scene in London: I was going to that other DnD cafe I enjoyed much more, I was joining clubs and attended public events, even became a part of a regular party of players that I grew close to and vibe with really well. By all accounts, I didn't need to go back there.
But you know what? I kept hearing from other people that the Tavern wasn't so bad. That they had a good time there, that it was fun. I keep hearing nothing but praise from other DnD players around me. So eventually I go: "You know what? Maybe third time's the charm!"
Spoilers: It wasn't. It really, *really* wasn't.
Session three managed to strike a near perfect balance between my experience with the first and second game: Being both boring AND frustrating.
Let me set the scene: The DM for this session was apparently one of the main writers for this venue, responsible for writing anf creating the homebrew world we played those games in. They also had a new major story event going on about the undead and the ruins of an ancient city. Sounds riveting, perhaps a setup for explorating dungeons. The session seemed to be setup this way: This time my new character (A halfling barbarian that was somewhat of a joke character after I got bored of my champion fighter) joined a group of fellow adventurers in trying to rescue a group of acheologists that have become trapped in a cavern in that ruined city. We were to traverse through the ruins, holding among us a huge bomb that we were supposed to blow up the caverns to get to the trapped souls. Sounded cool. Yet again, it started promising: This new party I was in included a necromancer who used her dead ex-husbands as thralls, a goblin artificer who loved explosions literally named BOOM! (all caps), and a comically serious Tortle veteran barbarian that my newbie barbarian was really beginning to vibe with, among others. We entered the ruins, saw heavy mist of death magics approach us, and we thought we'd traverse through and fight undead along the way.
Instead the DM has this huge grin as he pulls out a custom figure the size of my forearm of some massive undead monstrosity that looked like a mech made of bone. Think a mix of Lord Nito from dark souls and the cyborg demons from DOOM. It was, to their credit, a really baddass, well made figure. Shame it didn't make the fight any better.
This massive beast turns out to be a boss, and we get no chance to avoid or evade it as we are all thrown into initiative. The fight goes on the entire session. No RP, no exploration, we don't even get close to the archeologists we were supposedly here to rescue. We spend the next two hours hitting that thing with all we had, even using the bomb we had on it to kill it, and we barely even scratch it. Thus thing didn't even get bloodied until the session was nearly over. All the while my character and a fellow level oner is utterly useless the entire time. Again, we are level one, it was my first session with that character, and this as apparently some all-powerful superboss with an AC of 19, so we couldn't do anything to it. I spend the whole session running in the backlines, letting the high level players who won't get one-shotted deal with it while I kept running around avaoiding it (which as a halfling with only 30ft movement is NOT easy) but it doesn't stop me from getting one-shotted twice from legendary actions.
Yet again, like poetry, the DM realized we wasted time till the session was over and decided to rush things, so a dinosaur comes out of nowhere and battles the undead monster, giving us a window of escape. With all of us blodied and the bomb gone, we had to flee the ruins, basically leaving the archeologists to die. Our efforts are for naught once again.
The real kicker? After the session ends, that writer admits that this thing we fought we fought was an "event boss" for the big story arc they have prepared for this ruined city, and we were the first party to have faced it. He says he wanted to have a big fight to introduce the creature and, in-universe, to have it spread around for parties to hear the threat it posed.
Essentially, he spent this entire session making us the fodder NPCs that in proper campgins would have been killed the BBEG to establish the threat to the actual players. We were the sacrificial lambs to some plot I didn't know of or cared about. So personaly it just felt like I once again spent two and a half hours on fucking nothing. The DM even tells us we could've sneaked passed it, but considering the map had no cover and the thing effectively just spawned in front of us, I doubt it. Either he hadn't properly prepared for this session or he was lying through his teeth.
Either way, I leave this place feeling cheated, and if I was almost ready to ask for a refund. But I guess I was too tired at that point, so I was just like "eh, it was whatever" and left the cafe.
and this time, THIS TIME, it will be for good.
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Now I know that this post is really long and ranty. I guess I just needed to vent about this shit for a while because the whole experience at that Tavern left a bitter taste in my mouth. Maybe if I hadn't spent 15 Pounds for each of these sessions it wouldn't have left me so pissed, since I can't shake the feeling that I've been straight up ripped off.
Look: these three sessions are only a small part of my experience with the community in London. Most of the one-shots I've had in other places were fun, and my regular party are currently playing through Storm King's Thunder and I've been loving it so far. I still play DnD, I still enjoy it and interacting with the community. It's just that now I'm extra careful when a DM says that they're "new to this" or "likes to mess with players."
'Cause those could mean "I don't plan ahead" or "I'm a fucking sadist".