r/CritCrab

So in my previous dnd I had to kick out two of my players because they got in a argument and started to literally fist fight each other (we play in a public area) and after that I obviously kicked them out, I kept in touch with one player since I knew him since the third grade we currently just graduated.

But yeah after I kicked him out he said how he’s gonna work on himself and wanna earn back my trust because I got super mad at him. That was super embarrassing and having to break out a fight over dnd is insane to me.

But after that two years goes by and I start a new dnd, and one of my friends and his gf are friends with the guy I kicked out, and they have been telling me how much he has changed so I gave him a second chance, but under one condition.

One of my best friend who’s playing and also me don’t like when people playing aren’t sober, just during the session I couldn’t care less what you do afterwards, so I told him that if he wants to play you have to play sober, and he said he would.

We have had three session with him in it and in every session who was high as fuck and would derail the story or fall asleep mid session, it was just a mess, he would also just rip one during session as if he knows he’s not allowed too.

And it’s also no him forgetting because he would say stuff like how he’s gonna get high the day of our session and I’d would tell him go ahead just now during our dnd session, so now I kicked him out and I feel like a idiot for giving him a second chance.

Context, this just happened a couple hours ago, I write this as fresh as posible, so let me get you all in context:

We have a little dnd group, me (artificer), wizard, artificer 2 and DM, in our group I've always been the DM, we just finished a campaign in the fallout universe, we aprticipated with a couple more player, in that campaign I did the usual DM stuff, trigger alert, talk to player, be understanding and you know, understand that DnD is a teamwork so we all can have fun, DM in that campaign was a doctor, so i created them a special system of medical actions so he could play without killing anyone, and when he wanted to engage in combat I created a special tazer for him, I'm telling this so is in context that I actually cherish my players and "friends", the few times I say no I explain myself, stablish boundaries and make agreements, so DM decides that now he wants to try being a DM, me and wizard are specially excited because she is my partner, so be able to finally play together was awesome, he prepared a oneshot, a classic medieval setting with a couple steampunk elements, the plot... was something weird, so, let's go to session 0

We get the setting... and that's it, no plot, no context, we just need to create characters, wich we all found very weird, because we could end making characters with no good reason to engage in the plot, and that same thing has happened already, so we push a little so we could have some more context, the most we could get is that an inventor lost his blueprints and we needed to found them, ok, we can work with that, we also got more info about the town, apparently was some kind of technocracy where knowledge is highly regarded, so wizard makes.... a wizard, I decide to make an artificer, artificer 2 obviously do that too, I decide to make a battle smith and they made an alchemist, now, I need to get into techincal details here

I made an Aarakocra who is a smug and lame know-it all, kinda like berdley from Deltarune, with an obvious character development, now to the tecnical details:

s: 12, d: 16, c: 14, i: 16, w: 8, c: 8

You can see that we used the point buy system, I actually was the one who suggested it, because rolling dice we have had some characters start with 20 in some stats, and I wanted him to not have issues in his campaign

As magical items I decide to create a shield+1 and a heavycrossbow +1

I grab a leather armor with 13 ac with the starting gold, so 13 plus 3 from dex and plus 3 from the shield was 19

My spells were: cantrips: guidance, mending and mage hand, level 1 spells: heal wounds, feeric fire, grease and identify magic object, from my subclass I got shield and heroism, I got gust of wind from my race and from my starting feat (rune carver) I got Comprehend Languages

As you can see all of them are basic spells from the corebook

Whye do I got so technical, well, after I showed him my character everything seemed allright, then he told me i couldn't have the robo-companion because fo lore reasons, I said okay, then the tolde me again that it was fine, but at moste he could only work with steam, ok, cool

ff a couple days DM says the session will be moved to next weekend, bum, but whatever, is fine, I get it, wizard decides to ask him directly, and apparently mi character was too OP?

He said that I was using a bunch of homebrew stuff, an unffair made up race, and, for some wild reasin he said that Aarakocras should not be artificers...... HUH?

Anyway, I know that the DM has the last word, so I'm patiently waiting for the DM to talk to me and tell me what's wrong, ff from monday to saturday, today, he told everyone but me that he was cancelling the session, again, he hasn't talked to me since I presented him my character and he said it was ok, remember that, and he told wizard that IT WAS MY FAULT?, that I made a character so I could screw him over in his first campaign, and that he showed the character to other people and he said I was an OP min-maxer who used unffair technices?

I'm not stubborn, I he would have just talked to me we could have worked something out, instead he went behind everyones backs to spil them the story, and that the one-shot wasn't happening, everyone but me, I tell wizard to please tell DM to talk to me, I¿ve been trying to talk to me, and when that finally happens he says that he is only doing that as a courtesy to wizard... HUH????

He then procced to tell me that the main reason he was backing off was my character's fault, that I "should have know better", "I showed other people you character and told me something was fishy"...... THEN WHY YOU DID NOT TALKED TO ME?, I obviously didnt yelled at him, but I was pretty pissed, he offers me no explanation and he says "you are taking this too seriously"

Bro.... like you come to my chat literally to tell me that my character is your campaigns 13 reason why, refuse to talk to me for a week and then you only come as a "courtesy fo wizards' petition" but I'm taking it too seriously?..... "Yes" he said

I'm honestly shocked, I don't know what could I have done to deserve this, like, I'm always helping, making sure everyone is having a good time "oh yeah, I know, love what you did for me", THE AUDACITY OH MY GOD

Then he said "but I'm chill, I don't want to expose you as a campaign ender", honestly that pisssed me of so much that I told him "You know, you should do it, tell everyone that the reason you are cancelling this is that you send a character sheet to some dudes, they felt that the sheet was shady and without telling anything to the characters author I cancelled everything", he said okay and send the exact thing I told him, like literally, I said my goodbyes and left the group.... AM I THE A**HOLE?

TL;DR DM decide my character is too OP, tells me nothing about it, ignores me for a week and cancel everything

I love my group and all, but I've had a red flag moment and had to do some research.

My character and another got charmed along with two allied NPCs and everybody was horny and making innuendos. I'm gay myself and the other PC claimed they're straight but the other male NPC and his straight character kept making dirty humor.

I have no problem with it, but I don't think Charm Person is supposed to be mental rape either.

I actually kinda got really uncomfortable? I'm mainly homoromantic / most likely asexual and calmly discussed with the DM. He was open about it, but I otherwise love my group and don't want to be petty either.

Thoughts?

So, very recently, I had a game completely fall apart in a matter of seconds. I'm honestly a bit impressed that it only took the DM saying one thing for everyone in the group to say, "fuck this shit, I'm out." But I'm getting ahead of myself. This was a Pathfinder 2e group I found on Roll20 that was running official Pathfinder adventure paths set in the official Golarion setting. Now I love Golarion as a setting. I did a PF lore binge around the time of the OGL incident, and it quickly became one of my favorite fantasy worlds. I really wanted to RP in that world, so I jumped at the chance to play an official adventure. And that's when the problems began.

So the first campaign I tried playing was Blood Lords, which takes place in a nation ruled by the undead. And when I first logged into the game on Roll20, I was actually impressed. The guy put a lot of effort into the maps he made. They had all the fancy stuff like animated effects, background music, and fog of war. To someone who's used to theater of the mind and basic grids, this was fancy. I was less impressed by his frequent complaints about not having enough official maps to work with. And when I say constant, I mean it happened like every 30 minutes. Every time we'd enter a new area of the city, we'd get a complaint about how he didn't have a map for it. This overreliance on the fancy maps would cause another problem when all the fancy effects started glitching out. This didn't happen too often, but when it did, the session would grind to a screeching halt while he tried to fix it. He was also not very good at RPing the NPCs and had a tendency to rush us to certain plot points. Dude was also not good at improvising NPCs. If there wasn't a description or statbock in the book, he'd complain that Paizo (the company that makes Pathfinder) wouldn't give him enough information. Still, I could ignore all these small annoyances and try to have fun. Whether or not that was because I'm a tolerant person or because I was desperate to play is up to you. What I couldn't ignore were half of the players dropped out of the game entirely. They said that it was because of work stuff, but looking back, I'm not so sure.

So the first campaign was a bust. That's fine, DM had a plan B. We'd start a new campaign. The new plan was to start with Wardens of Wildwood (an adventure where we had to deal with the change in leadership of a druid lodge) and move on to Spore War (where we'd assist an elven nation in fighting some demons). Now I was really excited for this one. Both of these adventures take place near my favorite nation in Golarion, The Republic of Andoran (a.k.a. fantasy colonial America that spec'd hard into abolitionism instead of capitalism), giving me the perfect excuse to make my character one of Andoran's elite Eagle Knights. DM got a brand new group of players together, and we were ready to start playing. And every session had someone drop out. Sure, they all said that they were too busy (and one guy legit said that he had more fun smoking week than playing Pathfinder), but I could tell that the DM was becoming a bit too much for some of them. When the group got down to just me and another guy, we decided to move on to plan C, grab some new dudes, and start Spore War. We did just that and got two sessions in before we ran into a different problem. Spore War starts you at level 11, and half of this new group had never played PF2e before. They were a bit overwhelmed by all the stuff you get at higher levels. So we all decided it would be best if we just started over with an adventure path that started you at level 1. And just our luck, Paizo released one around that time.

Plan D, Hellbreakers. It's time for our ragtag group of adventurers to free a nation from its devil-worshiping oppressors. We all got our character sheets ready, backstories written, and dice ready to roll. I even decided to make my new character an Eagle Knight, too. And the first session went great. Sure, the technical issues cropped up again, but that was overshadowed by the group really finding our footing with our characters. Our first mission was to evacuate civilians from an active warzone, and we took to it like fish to water. The party RP was really fun, especially when one player found a friend of his executed by the aforementioned devil-worshipers who invaded the city. The session ended with us in an alleyway, and one of the party members sent his weasel familiar to scout ahead. The weasel said something to his owner, but the session ended before he could report back to the rest of the party. I feel like it's important to mention at this point that this game was played every two weeks late at night. I'm talking 9 pm to midnight late. So by the end of the session, we were a bit tired and many of us wanted to go to bed. Two weeks later, we get ready for session two. We were pumped, we were excited, we hopped into the Discord VC ready to kick some hellish ass. Then the player with the weasel said, "Hey, I don't remember what my familiar said last time. Could you give me a recap?"

The DM replied with, "No. You should've written it down. I don't like repeating myself."

Fucking... what?

DM: "Yeah, you guys need to write stuff down. I can't be expected to do everything while you do nothing."

This was the last straw. Three out of the five of us dipped immediately. The last guy and I spent like half an hour trying to tell DM that he needed to cut us some slack. This wasn't a test that we needed to study for; we were all here to have fun and play a game. But it was like talking to a brick wall. He eventually decided to leave the VC and then deleted the entire server in the middle of me talking to the last remaining player. I think it's safe to say that this was a bust.

If there is a lesson to be learned here, it's that as a DM, you have to remember that we're all here to have fun and play a game. I know you want your players to pay attention and actively engage with your plot, but you can't treat TTRPGs like a classroom. People are busy. They've got jobs and responsibilities that can be very distracting. They might forget something, even something important. That's normal, that's human. It's not your job to punish your players for forgetting something like this. It is your job to make sure that everybody is on the same page, though. I'm still pretty new to DMing, but even I give a "previously on Dragon Ball Z" style recap at the beginning of every session. And these recaps are especially important if there are long gaps in between sessions.

It is a shame that this game fell as flat as it did. I still love Golarion and really want to play in it. I'm sure my time to be an Eagle Knight will come one day. And when that time comes, I'm gonna make sure that I won't get rejected when I ask for a recap.

I'm a first time DM with some experience as a player who runs a homebrew campaign for a group of mostly beginners. Before we started the campaign I heard about this homebrew "God of scheduling conflicts" who'd just temporarily remove a PC from existence if their player couldn't make it to the game. Since our potential for scheduling conflicts was high I introduced the concept to my players with the exemption that we'll reschedule if the plot doesn't allow the absence.

Over time I started to expand on this God, giving him a name, a personality, powers, lore and even a homebrew cleric subclass. The result was the forgotten god Timal, God of splintered timelines. I took inspiration from Griffin from Men in Black 3, making him a being that can simultaneously see any possible future across all points of time. He quite enjoys watching the world the other gods created but his presence can cause changes in the world. Things like, merchants arrive too late to a business deal because the time of the meeting was changed without adjusting his knowledge of the time. Or, a day suddenly is 48 hours long which results in the party having to manage their resources until the evening. I have a whole D100 random events table for such events.

Timal also turned out to be a great help with the only player who wrote a "bad" backstory. I honestly can't make sense of it until this day and even he admitted that he doesn't quite understand it. We know for sure that he wanted his character to be the daughter of the Goddess of Nature, but she doesn't know that. And then there was something about an Aarakocra poacher with a feathered hat she never saw clearly who mumbled something about passing up on the opportunity to drink unicorn blood...

Well, the player and I are friends from evening school and he always stays for the whole weekend instead of just coming here on Saturday for the game itself. So we made a habit of it to just take a long walk on fridays and just have some solo roleplay along the way, thanks to DnD Beyond. So, Timal became kind of the center of these solo sessions. The first time she woke up in his realm she just learned of his existence, had a nice chat with him and thankfully didn't lose her mind thanks to a high wisdom save. She didn't retain all of her memories upon returning to the material plain but the name Timal echoed in her mind. The second time, he reminded her of the things she forgot and told her, that he was keeping a closer eye on her than he should have which caused the Aarakocra poacher to exist for a brief moment in her timeline. His interest in her comes from her divine heritage though he's unwilling to share the identity of her parents. The player actually thanked me for that since he himself had no idea what to make of this poacher storyline.

Today, will be the third time the two meet and since the group leveled up last time the player wants to multi class into cleric and take the homebrew subclass.

Besides that I've found another great use for Timal. Since the campaign started as a sandbox so my players can get the hang of the game and I can get experience as a DM, the world is relatively empty. But I've recently been stuck in this rabbit hole of "what was medieval life actually like", "what kind of food should your players realistically be served in a tavern", "how to define baronies and the political landscape of your map" I've decided that I'm not that comfortable with the world I created anymore. So in the coming weeks and months I'll work on redesigning the map, making the world feel more alive and then introduce them to the updated world as the work of Timal.

Of course he still serves his role as remover of PCs but that itself can produce so many nice ripple effects when only the party remembers that their comrade ever existed. They once were challenged by the empresses bodyguard to fight him in the local arena since he thought their victory over a green dragon was sheer luck. The 4 PCs went into the viewing gallery to watch the other fights before it was their turn but in the next session they were only 3 and nobody but them saw any issue with that. In the session after that the bodyguard even addressed that during the fight there was no doubt in his mind that he was facing the full group despite clearly missing a member at that time.

I love the potential this forgotten god brings to my game and I'm sure he'll be part of every campaign I'll dm in the future.

Tell me what you think about the God of splintered timelines