u/Xqyu

I don’t know if you can call this a proper horror story.

But let’s start from the beginning: I recently started playing a D&D campaign on Discord, and both the GM and the players are people I hadn’t played with before.

At first, everything seemed okay—just a short description of the campaign, and importantly, the description listed “D&D 5e” in the system section. I was happy about that because I like 5th edition—I definitely prefer it to 5.5.

The first problem arose during character creation: out of the blue, the Dungeon Master told us to create our characters using 5.5 edition “Okay,” I thought to myself, “I’ve never done this before, but with the Character Maker on Roll20—since that’s where we were going to play—I’ll manage.”

And that’s where the second problem arose: on Roll20, the Dungeon Master had selected the D&D 5th Edition tab, which meant that every ability, race, class, backstory, and every spell—and there are quite a few at 5th level—had to be manually entered and calculated. Using the Character Makerallows you to do most of this automatically and guides you through the entire process. However, I did it, thinking to myself that I’d put in the effort once, and then it would be a good campaign—and it did look promising.

Before the session, we talked a bit about races and classes, so I knew that another player’s character—let’s call them X—was a tiefling warlock. During the session, when he introduced his character, he said he looked like a human—and okay. We figured out pretty quickly that he drinks blood to look that way—and again, okay, an interesting narrative effect.

There are some things that annoy me, though. First of all, when he says something that’s clearly not true, the GM still makes him roll for deception and us for insight—and I just think that’s lame, especially since, as befits a warlock, he has a lot of charisma

And generally, he has a bit of a “main character” attitude, which is why my character now believes he’s cursed, a noble, and who knows what else—but that’s something I can get over, even if it’s distasteful. However, the GM also lets him cast spells against his fellow players—like one that forces someone to do something—and, sorry, but I’m starting to lose my sense of agency.

But getting back to the blood—he forced another character on the team to fall off the wagon, then went to look for him and declared he was entering the forest; by that time, the character who’d fallen had already managed to get back on the wagon, and in the blink of an eye, he’d managed to get out of sight and, without giving us any warning, hunt down a deer that happened to be there, drain all its blood, and then return without a trace.

When I asked if there was any visible sign of him, he said he had his black eye exposed—and that was it. He bled the deer dry and didn’t get any blood on himself, and when I said that my character was getting off the wagon and watching him, the GM ignored it until he came back.

Same thing with the cultists a few hours later. The GM lets his character lead ours around by the nose.

What the GM also allowed was for his familiar to be an Emerald Eye—an Emerald Eye with stats just like my character’s, who has 54 hit points, which is more than twice as many as my character’s; an Emerald Eye that’s immune to almost all types of damage; and when I dared to point this out, the GM said that I’m the mage, and the Emerald Eye is only Challenge Level 1. Okay, but for a monster, Challenge Level 1 isn’t that low—there are levels like 1/8, 1/2, 1/4, and so on.

That player’s character also has to be able to do whatever he sets his mind to, like this:

X: I want to climb the tree

GM: You can’t do it; there aren’t any branches low enough

X: What if I conjured a Mage Hand and threw a rope over a branch, and then climbed up?

GM: Roll for Acrobatics

X: I rolled too low

GM: You fail

X: Then maybe I’ll cast a spell that lets me do this and that

GM: It doesn’t work that way And this is just to look for Pigs in the area—it’s not a perfect example, but when he decides he’s going to do something, he’ll do it at all costs, regardless of whether it’ll actually help him much.

Not to mention that, for some reason, he takes two or three actions per round in combat and doesn’t explain how