The Whole Party left after 4 Sessions
Before we start, just wanted to say that there will be mild spoilers for the Module "Odyssey of Dragonlords."
You can probably still play the game after reading this but just wanted to put that out there, anyway onto the story. So the majority of you should know about the module and what it's like to make a character with, if not then it's fine. Only one part of it is important.
When making characters, you have to choose a "Epic Path." These are what will determine your character's journey. They are like backstories, but with a more mystical vibe to it.
Now time to introduce the important characters.
- The DM - guy who had made the Roll20 game and was the problem
- The Bard - Demigod of Kyrah epic path
- The Paladin (Alex) - Doomed One Epic Path
- The Fighter (Me) - Demigod of Pythor Epic Path
- The Warlock - Female Vampire
- There were 2 others (a Rouge and another Fighter) that sadly aren't important enough to the story, though that's also a problem.
A while ago I was looking on Roll20 trying to find a DnD group to join. I was sending out many applications and not really receiving any invites. So I was getting a bit desperate. That was until I found one for a module called "Odyssey of Dragonlords". The premise seemed fun and it fit well into my schedule. There wasn't any rules about character design, at least none I saw at first, so I sent in my character Idea for a Half-Orc fighter named Knight Demathin.
The main premise of the character was that he is a creature made by magic and given false memories. Think of the Knight card that gets summoned from the Deck of Many things, like that.
The DM responded immediately saying he loved the idea and told me to get into contact with him over discord. I did, and we got to talking about the campaign and it's settings. This is where the first major red flag popped up for me. As we were talk, it became increasingly obvious that this guy was using AI in his messages. I only noticed because of the fact that it had all the tell tale signs, the weird formatting, the bulletin lists, and the random image Emojis (✅ like this one).I didn't want to be rude, so I didn't ask him about it, and just kept on talking with him.
Then it came to my character. He said he loved the idea and was exited to DM for a character like that. He did want to change a few things though, just to make my character fit more naturally into his world. I said ok and that I just wanted my core idea for the character (being magically created and questioning his motivations) to remain the same.
By the time we were done talking, my character had gone from a Half Orc Fighter created by magic and with fake memories, to a Human Fighter who was a war veteran. Yeah, a lot changed and I was only agreeing with him cause I didn't want to try and find a new group. It was already hard enough to find this one. I was also fine with changing my character for a bit since I could still play him as the loveable himbo I wanted.
We were reaching the end of character building when it finally came to picking the Epic Path. Originally, when I was looking through them, I wanted to pick the Masterpiece since that seemed to fit my original character idea. A humanoid created my magical means, whose whole journey is about discovering if he has a soul. I liked it, and it seemed to fit my character well. The DM agreed that it was a good choice, there was just one Problem. My character couldn't be called Knight Demathin if I chose this. Apparently in the history he wrote of his world, the Masterpiece was a Robot named Argos. If I wanted to play as the masterpiece I'd have to give up the last bit of my original character.
I decided to switch paths then, and ended up picking the Demigod of Pythor path based on the DM's insistence. He kept saying that it would offer a rich backstory and have Heavy RP moments. That my character would really feel like a champion and legend if I chose this path. So I chose it, mainly cause I just wanted to play the game at this point. I was upset that my character was basically rewrote from the group up, but I was hopeful since I was excited to play my goofball of a character.
Cut to Session 0 and I finally get to meet the rest of the party. Everyone else seemed great so far and they had some interesting characters. But as we were introducing ourselves there came another red flag.
The Bard had said their name and the DM seemed a bit taken aback by this. Apparently the DM had accidently written down the player's name in his notes instead of the character's. He then said that he would have to cancel the session and that we'll try to pick it up again next week. We laughed, thinking it was a joke. It wasn't. We asked why he couldn't just change the name in his notes later and he said that he had a lot of he had to change and rewrite all because of this name change. The player then just said that they would just change the character's name to their name instead. To which the DM thanked them.
After that, the rest of the session went alright. We as the players were having fun together cause we were able to do some light banter and make jokes. There was even a moment when me and the rouge of the group went to do some arm wrestling with some NPCs. Again, it was fun and light hearted. That was until the DM deemed it time for us to go and do our first quest which was fighting a giant Boar.
I'm gonna say it right now, there were a lot of red flags during this fight and it would take to long to describe them in a lot of detail, so I'm just going to list them with a bit of a description for each. If you want more details for one of them then ask me in the comments and I will describe it there.
- Describing the scene
- There were many moments where it was clear that the DM was reading from a book or something when describing something. If we moved our token while he was describing he would get mad and yell at us to not move.
- The Boar's attacks
- This was without a doubt one of the hardest boss fights I have ever been a part of. Not only was this thing dealing about 20 damage per attack, it had 3 attacks per turn as well as legendary actions. reminder we were level 1.
- The Custom Armor System
- The DM had a homebrew armor system where things like your shield and armor had hit points as well. The only problem was that the Boar had one as well and nobody could do damage to it cause it had a high ac, and only magical attacks really dealt damage to it's health. Most magic attacks we could do were only dealing about 6-7 damage.
- The Death Aura
- Every Monster in this campaign seemed to have a death Aura. For the Boar, the Aura made it so that anyone who got within a 30 foot radius of it would have to roll a Con save at the beginning of their turn, if failed they were then dealt around 13 necrotic damage. Btw magic damage bypasses the armor and goes straight to our hp.
- Him dropping "Hints"
- He tried to drop hints for us during the battle to help us. Those hints were having my character's God Dad come in and say "Drop your sword, use your fists." Basically telling my fighter to act like a barbarian instead.
- The other things he did weren't really helpful and he even left out some stuff like a magical spear laying in the battle ground that could have helped.
- The Favorite Character
- He clearly had a favorite character and a not so favorite character. Since whenever I attacked boar, my punches would deal damage to it's health and his DMPC would only heal me. Yet almost every round, he would attack and kill the Paladin of the group. It wasn't that bad cause the Paladin had a quirk where he came back to life. After 3 turns.
- This also brings up the fact that during the fight, we would have many moments where many characters were sped through their turns because all they can do it either shoot a crossbow, or throw a spear. I felt so bad that I kept trying to push the spotlight off of me and onto them.
- Finally, the Killing Blow
- Towards the end of session 1 we finally managed to bring the Boar's health down low enough to gain some hope. Our Warlock was the one who delt the killing blow and we were excited and happy for it to be over. The DM then said that the Boar was entering Phase 2. We were shocked by this and when asked why, the DM said that the Boar had to killed in a specific way.
- The Specific way we later learned was that we had to either rip it's heart out, or have a woman deal the killing blow. Our Warlock is female. When we brought this up he said it had to be Melee damage from a woman.
We were all rightfully angry and I'm not gonna lie it kept getting worse from there, But this is already getting a bit too long.
I'll just say that we tried to stay for a couple more sessions but the problems were getting worse and we all eventually decided to leave the campaign.
Though funny enough, we still talk to each other over discord and have even thought about doing a new campaign together with one of us as the DM. I think it's gonna be fun.
Anyway that's my story, I hope you enjoyed it. Like I said earlier, I was able to explain everything bad that had happened, and if you want to know more about a certain part then go ahead and ask and I'll try to expound upon it in the comments.
TLDR; Entered a DnD game with a very controlling DM but left with some new friends.