How my first D&D campaign got destroyed by a metagaming, main-character player and a DM who let it happen - and how it took several friendships with it.
So, as the title says, this is how my first-ever D&D campaign got destroyed and took two (maybe three) friendships with it.
For some context, this happened about a year ago, it was my first time playing D&D, as well as the first time for a friend of mine, who I'll call Bard. Our DM and friend was also a first-time DM, and the other player, who I'll call Druid, was a friend of the DM. We decided to play a published module together, which seemed like a pretty easy way for all of us to get into D&D.
It was not.
The Beginning
Things were already a little shaky from Session 0. Bard decided that their character hated mine, and to a lesser extent Druid's, because we were nobles. The funny thing is that neither of our characters actually acted like nobles.
My character had spent years away from his home as part of his backstory and was wearing extremely ragged clothes (think Caleb Widogast, which I didn't know at the time lol). Druid's character had a very similar situation. We had actually, accidentally, ended up creating fairly similar backstories. But Bard's character knew we were nobles because, well... the player knew we were nobles from our character creation session and sheets on Beyond. They proceeded to use that information to antagonise us and even tried to steal from us because their character hated nobles due to an extremely edgelordy backstory (which somehow isn't the issue). And believe me, I could absolutely see this being a fun character-character interaction, IF our characters actually behaved like wealthy nobles. But they. did. not.
So we already had some unchecked metagaming from Session 0.
Still, I figured I'd play it out and see where things went.
The Campaign
As the story went on, Bard's character continued antagonising ours and there was also a recurring issue where Bard would try to use our characters to avoid bad rolls on their own important moments. For example, there was one occasion where Bard rolled a natural 1 on something important and after they realised it wouldn’t be a "funny ah ah" failure, but could actually endanger their character and their shady dealings, they started begging the DM to have Druid roll instead, or to use Druid's roll in place of theirs and this was obviously granted by the DM (scoring us yet another point for metagaming). I don't actually remember every detail, but I do rememeber thinking "wth of a ruling is that" and almost pointing it out, glad i didn't. (Foreshadowing).
Meanwhile, the actual story increasingly started revolving around Bard's character. Now, to be fair, I can understand why some of this happened: my character was from outside the city where the campaign took place, while Druid's character was returning to the city after a long absence. Bard's character, meanwhile, had lived there for some time and had connections to numerous NPCs. The DM had also told us beforehand that our backstories would be incorporated into the narrative, so I wasn't expecting everything to be instantaneous.
What I wasn't expecting was for Bard's character to basically become the protagonist: their NPC connections became major NPCs, their backstory became deeply integrated into the main plot, their personal history became crucial to solving the mystery we were investigating, most of the information we received came either from Bard's sources or from one official NPC that I had managed to get my character connected to early in the campaign (hoping to help the DM tie me in, which never happened btw).
Meanwhile, I had exactly one (1) NPC from my backstory present in the campaign. Fortunately, this NPC was actually pretty important. Unfortunately, she also happened to start hating my character, and disappeared after about three or four scenes and told my character she wanted nothing to do with him, which was completely contrary to how she was in my backstory. Still I tried to engage with the storyline and even left her a clue that could have allowed her to come back into my character's life.
You can probably guess how that went.
Druid had a similar problem. She also had essentially only one NPC she was connected to from her backstory actually appear, and had to repeatedly force opportunities to interact with that NPC in the campaign. In the long run, those interactions became repetitive and pointless and honestly, I don't blame her for that as those were basically the only moments where she could actually talk to her NPC, without the DM intervening and actually putting some thought into her backstory.
And then came the session that finally broke everything.
The Incident
The DM decided to spend more than an hour roleplaying exclusively between Bard and Bard's NPC. Not an hour of the party interacting with the NPC, not an hour where the rest of us had things to do elsewhere, just Bard and their NPC role playing while my character and Druid's character were effectively just sitting at home drinking tea.
For the first few minutes, sure. Fine. Then it became unbearable. This was an online session which made everything worse, and eventually Druid and I started drifting off. We were doodling, checking our phones, getting distracted, etc. I know D&D isn't supposed to be about every character all the time. I completely understand that. But if you've spent 60+ minutes doing absolutely nothing while your character is literally sitting at home, you're going to get bored.
Eventually, the DM ended the session and so after more than an hour of watching someone else play D&D, we just stopped. I (and later found out also druid) came away feeling like I'd effectively stopped playing an hour before the actual session ended and hadn't really accomplished anything that day.
What’s funny is that Bard actually brought it up in the group chat afterward. They said they'd noticed that Druid and I had gotten distracted and hoped the long roleplaying moment hadn't been too much. I apologised for getting detached from the narrative, but explained that keeping us out of the game for an entire hour wasn't fun for us. I said that, from our perspective, it had started feeling more like an infodump about Bard and NPC's backstory (which, you guessed it, was also yet again crucial for the main story), which we were forced to spectate. I also politely suggested that future sessions could break up extremely long scenes so that nobody felt completely left out.
As you can imagine, that went over wonderfully.
The DM became hostile and said that this was simply their DMing style. They said they'd do the same thing for our characters when it came to it (which, for the record, I would have hated, as I would have felt awful keeping the others sitting around while I played) and that it was their choice in the moment because, apparently: "Your characters had nothing to do but stay home". Bard also jumped in and argued that it was their moment (the umpteenth) with their NPC and that it wasn't fair to them to cut it short or break it up because they were connecting with the character (for context, this was a weird sort of self-insert-romance between Bard's character and the NPC).
And then, to make things even more ironic, the one NPC I had managed to establish a meaningful connection with during the campaign, eventually joined the scene as well, as he had another weird romantic past with Bard’s NPC. So he too ended up being pulled into Bard's character's storyline. Fantastic.
After the incident, we played one more session and after that, we decided to have a check-in about the campaign. At the time, I (and Druid as I later learned) was actually happy about this as I thought we could talk about what had happened, clear the air, apologise for whatever we'd done wrong, and figure out how to make the campaign more enjoyable for everyone.
That was not what happened.
The Beginning of the End
The meeting basically turned into a crossfire. The DM and Bard mainly focused on everything I had done wrong during the campaign, and Druid also received some of it. We apologised for the things we had genuinely done wrong. Some of our mistakes had been honest and unintentional, and we were perfectly willing to acknowledge them. The problem was that the same standard wasn't applied in the other direction: whenever we brought up issues with things the DM or Bard had done, responsibility was deflected or justified.
To add insult to injury during this conversation, something else came to light. Apparently, from the very beginning, the DM and Bard had been constantly talking privately about the campaign and how to make things better for Bard's character, a treatment which wasn’t really reserved for me and druid, save for the bare minimum. Tbf Bard can get very enthusiastic about their characters, which in itself is a good thing. However, I do think that enthusiasm sometimes needs to be reined in a little. We had been planning a one-shot with me as DM, so I had already seen firsthand how eager Bard could get with their character and ideas. The problem was that our DM didn't really seem to keep that in chack and, from the looks of it, he just kept adding whatever Bard came up with directly into the story. Bard had also accidentally (it was an old module, and TikTok can be cruel) come across important information about the campaign, commented on it with the DM in private and referenced it in the group, which once again excluded us in a way. Apparently while talking with the DM they planned to act on that information in-game once it happened. So as far as metagaming goes, they weren’t exactly isolated incidents. It can happen to receive a spoiler, but the less you talk about it the better it is for everyone's enjoyment.
The Aftermath
After that, the campaign came to a screeching halt. The group slowly fizzled out over the following months and, eventually, both the DM and Bard ended their friendships with Druid and me respectively, bringing up a number of other grievances and grudges that weren't really related to the campaign itself. A while later, Bard apparently also stopped talking to Druid.
So, yeah. That's how my first D&D campaign ended and somehow, took several friendships down with it: a metagaming player whose character increasingly became the main character, a first-time DM playing favourites and enabling it, an hour-long RP scene with 2/3 of the party sitting around doing nothing, and a campaign check-in that turned into a list of everything everyone else had supposedly done wrong.
Thankfully, there is a happy ending. Druid and I actually became very close friends after all of this and I've since taken up DMing myself for her and other friends. At least my first disastrous D&D campaign taught me something in what not to do as a DM and player.