u/Unusual_Display6551

I'll get this right out of the way so you can laugh at me: we did not have a session 0. Yes, I know. Rookie mistake that could have prevented all of this. Moving on.

So. I decided to join an online game that was being run by someone I'd heard of in my circles but never actually played for. I'd heard he was a pretty cool dude though and that a lot of people seemed to like his campaigns even though they were often described as "brutally hard and edgy". That's not normally my preferred style, but apparently the DM was working with another DM who I HAD played with before. The second guy wasn't necessarily co-DMing per se, but apparently he was wrote lore or something like that for the actual DM's campaign. Like it was his homebrew world or something. I'd adored his stuff-he makes really well fleshed out and interesting fantasy worlds and he's top-tier at writing characters. Plus, there were people talking about the game and saying it has this crazy elaborate mythology to it about a full family of homebrew gods. That's really what sold me on it.

Anyway, we start off in session 1. I could tell you about the backstory I wrote for my character but it doesn't really matter because it literally never came up in the game. Suffice it to say I wasted my time coming up with something elaborate, and was playing a wizard, as I usually do. Everyone else was playing martials, big dudes with bigger swords and that kind of stuff.

The first thing happened was the party left some tomb where we apparently got summoned from some other land (literally isekai'd) but wouldn't let us know anything about where we come from or the land we were now in. I asked if we had amnesia and just he rolled his eyes as if the idea of my character having some kind of established history or something was inane. "Sure. If that's what you think," he said.

We then met eachother and I immediately asked the DM if I and the other guys looked undead. He said "you don't know". (This is foreshadowing for the theme of the entire campaign). I specifically stated that I was examining my own body to see if my skin was withered and stuff like that. He said no. Ok, so we're biologically alive, but we woke up in a tomb with no explanation. In hindsight it seems kinda weird but at the time I just thought it was supposed to be some kind of cool mystery we'd have to solve. (Oh how naive I was).

As soon as we leave the tomb, a huge monster comes out of nowhere and attacks us. Like literally drops out of the sky or something, I don't know. We were able to do some damage to it but based on how much damage we were dealing, and the fact that it wasn't "even bloodied yet", told me that it was way too high level for us. Each of us eventually gets one shot and dies.

DM then tells us we are getting resurrected again by some mysterious person that comes out of nowhere as well. At the time I was pretty annoyed and figured the DM was either just flexing to show he could kill us at any time, or he messed up and threw something too hard at us that we couldn't handle. I hoped it was the latter and figured, hey, its pretty easy to accidentally kill level 1 adventurers, so whatever.

The very next thing we see after walking around a bit is this beautiful celtic-looking land. And here is where I will give DM his only credit: he was fantastic at setting the atmosphere. He had beautiful visual aides, music, etc. However I would soon come to realize that this beautiful world was empty and bereft of anything to do except kill stuff.

Our eyes were immediately drawn to this giant-ass knight in gleaming gold armor riding around on an equally big horse. He was literally demigod sized, so I figured he was some kind of mythological being, possibly of the dead or something like that since it was in a tomb area. Since we had no idea what we were here to do, I decided to walk up to him, introduce myself, and ask about the land we were in. The other players just snickered and the DM gave me a weird look. Then he said "roll initiative".

Yeah so, it turns out that golden knight was another uber-powered boss monster or something. How I was supposed to know this ahead of time, and why the DM put something useless that we can't kill in the starting zone (but could easily avoid, it turns out) I have no idea. He didn't even say anything to me. Just silently attacked no matter how hard I provoked him. It was like the DM refused to add any personality or motivation to his NPC.

So yeah, I died while the other players ran away, chiding me for being so stupid. At this point I discovered something else: every time we die, we just come back like we did before. Now I'm a big fan of Planescape Torment, so I'm not just going to instantly say that there are no stakes or anything if we can't die. Immortality can be an interesting hook for a campaign if done right and there are still always consequences to death (like time or equipment loss) if the DM knows what they are doing. And this actually seemed to fit along with what we already knew. If the knight was the god of the dead, maybe he was patrolling for people like us since we'd be seen as "unnatural" for disrupting the cycle. I still don't know why we were only level 1, especially since we didn't get amnesia every time we died after the first two, so its not like memory loss could explain the loss of levels or something.

I told all this to the other players and the DM, who looked annoyed that I was even trying to figure out what was going on. It was clear they wanted to just walk around and fight stuff so I decided to humor them for a while while secretly hoping for more information. (Spoiler alert: I did not get it).

Session 2. We encounter a random dude who babbles nonsense at us that we have no explanation or context for. Something about a magic artifact, and we have to get it to save the land for some reason. Extremely cliche much? He also called us incels, and I think that was the DM just making an immature joke. But every time I tried to ask a question, the DM would just say that "you can't ask that" or "he doesn't tell you" or "you'll just have to figure it out on your own". Except how am I supposed to figure out anything if all the NPCs do is babble cryptic nonsense and don't react to anything I do like they're inanimate signposts!

We started walking into a forest and encountered some more knights. These guys are normal sized and not godly looking, so I think maybe they're not with the giant asshole. Nope, apparently they are, cause they just attack us on sight as well for no reason. They wouldn't even shout battle cries that might clue us in to their motives like "I'll put you down, deathless cur!" I tried as hard as I could to talk things out with them because I had this weird theory that maybe we were reformed villains or something like that, so I didn't want to kill random people who thought I was still evil just because of a misunderstanding when I could run away and avoid them instead. But nope, they were as silent as a brick wall.

My party had no compunctions about killing, however, and what's more this DM was using XP, so I was just missing out on character progression by not participating in combat. Despite the fact that my character was a peaceful academic who never seen war before, he eventually decided that if everyone in this land was going to act like a murderous automaton, he was willing to defend himself. It was actually a pretty fun moment to roleplay, even if no one else at the table cared and it ultimately meant nothing.

I'll spare you a lot of boring details, but we kept fighting for a few more sessions. I cannot overstate how boring this was. It was like grinding for XP in an MMO. All we'd do is walk around until we saw more knights, attack them, loot, and move on. No RP, no dialogue, no context, nothing to explore, no hidded notes or clues (I looked), nothing. There weren't even towns or normal villagers I could talk to either, just psycho knights, monsters, and an endless rolling Irish countryside.

I think the perfect example of just how creatively bankrupt this DM was was when we came across a bridge guarded by more knights (they even had a freaking ballista!). For some reason, I had it in my head that this bridge must be important. Like, they must be guarding it for a reason, right? And that means someone else with intelligence that we could possibly talk to must have commanded them to do it, like a leader or necromancer or something (I had this theory that maybe the knights were undead, though the DM wouldn't give me any info on that).

So I came up with an idea. We'd picked up enough armor pieces from our murder spree to where everyone in the party could get fully decked out as knight if they wanted to, including me. I proposed the idea of going undercover. Maybe, if we could impersonate one of these knights, they'd actually talk to us, maybe spill some kind of secret. At the very least we could observe them more closely and from the inside to get some intel.

The other players didn't want to do it, so I volunteered to be a test subject since I can't die permanently anyway. There I go, striding in, looking exactly like a knight. They can't see my face, hair, skin, anything like that: I actually asked the DM to confirm it.

And what happens? You guessed it. The Ballista fires and kills me instantly. I almost rage quit right there and truth be told, didn't last much longer. I might have stuck with the campaign, maybe, just for the funsies of fighting random stuff. But the biggest fuck you was when I finally found a spell trainer who could teach me some spells. And guess what? The DM made custom spells just for the campaign! That was honestly more than I expect any DM to do.

But sadly, his spells had one fatal flaw: they were all damage spells, and they all did LESS damage than my level 1 magic missiles spell. Yes. You heard me right. Advanced magic I learned from a trainer was WORSE than magic missiles, the literal most basic spell in the game.

That is pretty much where I just told the DM I wasn't having fun. My character had no motivation, no history, no knowledge about this world, no reason to care, no goal. The literal only point of playing the game of just grinding enemies for XP and loot was completely ruined too. I didn't want to just spam magic fucking missiles the entire campaign.

I asked DM if he was singling me out and if I'd done something to piss him off. He just said "I'm not going to fix your spells, just get good. There is a story there, you just have to make it and look for it."

Except there literally wasn't. Every attempt I made to learn more information, talk to someone, get creative and figure something out, RP, etc. was handicapped by the DM. He didn't let me do anything fun. I genuinely have no clue how the other players weren't bored out of their minds. DM took the work of a guy who is known for creating engaging fantasy worlds and made an empty wasteland full of mute psychopathic knights out of it.

I left gracefully and decided to let the other players beat their heads against a wall if that is what they wanted to do.