Nat 1 on traps and got stuck into a 2e campaign
TL;DR - First time D&D 2e "narrative" campaign turns out to be a dungeon crawl where my poor second level mage goes 3 sessions before each long rest.
New, experienced DM asks my group to play a 6-session narrative campaign of D&D 2e. We usually play narrative heavy campaigns with recent systems but I once tried a fencer in 3.5; I politely accept to try something new;
During session 0, having absolutely no knowledge of this particular system, I propose an Elf Mage that wants to collect many spells and magic, especially quircky ones; DM decides 5 level 1 spells for my character to have and adagger from the very limited options of the mage, plus proficiencies on common actions like singing and dancing. At this point I do not know anything about my class still.
Session 1 I discover that my spells must be decided ahead of time each day. I don't like this but play along without problem.
Session 2 DM tells me the mechanic of declaration of intents before initiative, and that if I ever will get hit before casting the spell during combat I will have completely wasted the slot. DM says "cantrip" can't even startle a horse, so creative use of magic seems to not work either. Our sixth player's roleplay smashes against a table of NPCs attitudes. He vanishes and as today never got back.
At home I read the manual by myself: Wizards have a huge amount of limitations on everything, including where, how and why they cast spells basically. I start to feel like the rules are trying to balance a power (spells) that at this level is almost non existant. I'm also picking up a trend where my melee companions are quite considerably more effective in all situations of the campaign.
Session 3 I declare to prepare sleep for an eventual assault from the backdoor. An enemy charges and I put him to sleep and feel good for about 2 seconds until a second guy materializes after the first from the same door. By any chance it was in the area of effect? Of course not. Next round DM is surprised I didn't prepare 2 sleeps as my spells (I needed one to understand what magical items we found the session before). I go on with the dagger without hitting anyone.
Session 4 I've got the spellbook from a dead mage, but DM says I have to study it over time in order to read what spells are written down. Also, I need to cast my Read Magic spell in order to read each page. I point out that this mechanic would not fit well with his fast paced campaign that spans days, since we were about to infiltrate a fort. I get nothing out of it. I'm not happy, but I do not question it further, expecting downtime every now and then to learn my new spells. This would never happen.
...
Next 5 sessions (now 9 out of 6 planned) got spent crawling into a dungeon, fight after fight, room after room. we slept only on session 7, so I've got a grand total of 4 spells to cast during 5 whole sessions, and it's always been Sleep, since nothing else ever come up. I feel that my class isn't built for this, feeling powerless and starting to get frustrated. We ended session 9 saying we will sleep on the next. Finally.
...
Last session (10) we decided to sleep. DM rolls 3 times to see if something disturbs our sleep and of course it comes up. I get "lucky" with the guard duty and get the 4 hours that as Elf are enough to take my spells back.
DM manages to have the whole lot of guards come up on us from both sides of the corridor. I focus Sleep 1 on one side. Then the others get melee with us. I explicitly use my second sleep on the remaining part of that group to prevent them from waking each other; "very smart" says DM. Then on his initiative basically he conjures 2 new unseen enemies on that side that wake their peers up. I have to remind him that waking one takes a full action from someone so he couldn't wake them all up in one go.
I ask if I can throw flaming oil flask at enemy. No, just oil. I also fail due to thaco. At this point I'm frustrated as hell.
Our strategy was to hold on until one of us convinced a captive monster to fight with us for his freedom. One player spent the whole fight getting to the cellar, talking to the monster and running back. Once the monster arrives, enemies just close a door. We want to finally charge after the monster so... no, he is hungry, so ignores everything and start eating from corpses. I have to risk one of my magic rings at 50% in order to persuade him so he finally charges with us.
The moment the door opens 3/5 characters me included fail the save against spell from an instantaneous 5th level Cleric Hold Person and will spend the next 6 rounds waiting for the monster and 2 free players to simply hit the other guys over and over until we eventually won.
Then we agree on leveling up for the next session, finally.
...
So I ask him in chat if he wanted me to roll randomly to see which spells there were in the other spellbook, so that I can (at least try to) learn them, since I spent hours reading it. He laughed and said that "you can't learn new spells since learning a spell takes time like taking an exam at university". I reminded him that his campaign was spanning only days in game, so what he expected my level up to be. He said "well you get one more casting of your spells".
At that point I revolted and said to him I would not accept not even being able to level up correctly just because his own campaign timeline doesn't work with his ideal learning times for spells.