r/dndhorrorstories

Hi. So, a couple of months ago I joined this campaign run by a long time TTRPG DM. The DM has had experience in playing and running different sort of TTRPG systems, so I trusted that they'll do the DND Campaign justice. This is the second long term campaign I've ever joined, and the first one is a whole different dnd horror story all on its own. So, I'm a bit more hesitant with joining campaigns in the first place.

So, our DM has a very high levelled NPC that acts as the quest giver/coordinator for the party. Especially since the style of how the party came to be is similar to regular people being dragged into doing agent stuff. So, this NPC coordinator started off normal for the first few sessions. Gave the party the mission and briefed them on what to expect. Let them plan for a bit, etc. But then in 2 out of 4 combats the party has had... the NPC is revealed to have this sort of pocket dimension domain.

For the first time we got wrangled into this domain it was because another NPC (the coordinator's co-worker) tricked us into going through a dimension door leading to that place without the party's knowledge for an experiment. NPC Coordinator randomly shows up at the end and deus ex machina the players after fighting the domain's mini boss (more accurately an aspect of a basically God-like hero of legend in the campaign's lore) with a finger of death after like a good hour or two of fighting.

No, we couldn't run away from the subspace, we were all trapped there and had to fight that aspect even when it is next to impossible to defeat. Then DM made the whole party roll to forget that happened in the first place. Succeeding the roll does nothing as the DM kept us rolling until everyone failed too.

Then, it happened again when the NPC Coordinator crashes out down the line as the whole party is brought to the domain by their will this time. Again, we fight all we can for an hour or two, but when we did manage to defeat all the monsters in the map, we're taken to a cutscene where the monsters just keep on spawning. We can't even harm the NPC coordinator either (trust me, I tried in the middle of combat). The PCs almost gets killed by being overrun by monsters, when all hope is supposedly lost the NPC Coordinator's "can do no wrong, pinnacle of good and justice" sibling deus ex machinas the party asking the NPC to stop and not rip the PCs to shreds.

Needless to say, I keep wondering why my character has to fight when it's hopeless in the first place. Along with the party having to deal with that too.

This occured about two or three years ago in an online game. It's the only time I got so uncomfortable (not annoyed or bored, but straight-up wierded-out) in a game because of another player that I had to leave.

I've actually had pretty good luck with random online games in roll20 and other mediums- I've made some good friends from both DM/GMing randos and playing in random games. That said, I've had a few situations where I didn't click with a person and gracefully bowed out of the game under the guise of "my work and-or social life getting really busy." However, one instance has haunted me for a while where one player made me feel so uncomfortable that my skin crawls to this day at the thought of his voice.

I had joined a random game for D&D 5e Waterdeep Dragon Heist. I haven't been big into D&D 5e for a long time, but I had actually run this game before as a DM years before, and enjoyed it enough that I wanted to try it as a player. I told the DM this prior to creating a character, and said I would avoid any spoilers or insider knowledge by defering to my other party members at pivotal moments. My character, a human fighter leaning towards being an Eldritch Knight, had a backstory with Waterdeep nobility, so there was plenty of room for a side-quests that tied in with the main plot, and the DM was excited to create content around.

Anyway, first session I met the other players and their characters; we had an tiefling druid played by a lady who worked as an accountant who was new to RPGs, a dwarf thief played by an absolutely hilarious dude who worked at a restaurant, another long-time-gamer and office worker like myself playing a elf wizard, and then... this odd-ball with his homebrew class/race.

The guy had a wierd, high-pitched way of speaking that was immediatly jarring, but I try not to judge people based off aesthetics, no biggie. He introduced himself and said he worked in education for pre-school to kindergarten-aged kids. Then he introduced his character- his class was loosely built around a warlock apparently, and race was essentially a muppet. He was a pink, furry extra-dimensional creature with pom-poms for hair that walked around on all fours like an ape, and he said essentially that he was a "living toy for children, and that he wanted to be manipulated and played with by other people."

Yikes!

I wasn't sure how to feel about this right away, his character felt like either a fetish realized or just extremely off-putting and weird, but I tried to give the benefit of the doubt. The DM seemed like a stand-up guy, the rest of the party seemed fun, maybe I could ride this out...

Without revealing too much, the beginning of WDH starts in a famous tavern called the Yawning Portal, and leads to an initial encounter/combat. Well, we spent the entire session roleplaying around this dude's homebrew being isekai'd into the Forgotten Realms, "What's Waterdeep? What's a tavern? What's ale? What's an adventurer? What's magic?" and the dude would just giggle wierdly with each of our reactions to him. He told us his character was completely child-like, innocent, and ignorant to the Forgotten Realms or being an adventurer. The other players were doing way better than I was at this point in interacting with him, I was already kinda wanting nothing to do with this guy, but I was still hoping he would kinda get into the game.

Then the combat started. His first action- Burning Hands directly into the party, stating that his character didn't understand magic. The blast took my character out of action right away, had to be revived by the druid, yadda yadda. The entire first session involved that first combat encounter because of dude wanting to play the "I don't know what this is" card for every-fucking-thing and then proceeded to nearly teamkill the whole party. Needless to say, I dropped out ASAP and told the DM specifically that this player made me SUPER uncomfortable. The DM replied politely and wished me well, but didn't address my statement about the problem player. I kinda wonder if he was a friend of the DM or something.

To this day, I absolutely cringe when I think about playing with that dude. While he may have been harmless, I was getting VERY bad vibes from his infintile behavior and wierd attitude about children...

EDIT- he maybe in this sub, just got a downvote for some reason?

CW: fantasy racism, implied PDFiled, sections of COVID, mentions of torture

So I watched Magic Hat’s bards video, and it reminded me of an old high school DM, Johnny in the late 2000s, who let the class stereotypes of TTRPG rule his DMing/play. A few that I could remember from high school. 
People tried to turn skill monkey into engineer types in Pathfinder 1e via the rogue, since gunslinger wasn't allowed and always started in jail or was branded a criminal because of “the class's background.” Regardless of craft, social class, or race, they had to be criminals, con men, or pirates, and never a Lawful alignment. The rogue could never be Lawful. Bards had to be able to sing or play instruments for full class features, plus be flirty. The worst was the strict Lawful Good paladin stereotype: law enforcers who couldn't commit crimes even if laws were unjust, refusing rewards and leaving characters undergeared or not scaling properly in 3.5 or 4e. The deity had to be Lawful Good or close, with backgrounds like Jesus or Judge Dredd, or paladins who had lost levels and needed long redemption quests, which few completed.
So, cut to 2021 or 2022, the pandemic is in full swing, and I just moved out of my folks' home, after increasing boundary issues and other toxic behavior. I was invited to an “anime dark” style online DnD 5e game by Johnny whom I ran into while working on gig apps.

starting at 9th level, where we were a group of outcasts;

Me as a dragon born oath of vengeance paladin/dragon sorcerer (sorcerer to allow for a tail) was a holy warrior turned knight-errant after the ordermaster of “the people’s defenders” freely went along with the corrupt reforms on the stripping of rights.

Puppy, a mute gnome College of Puppetry bard, whose circus burned down to the ground by racists to avoid paying them, and communicated with puppet sign/music boxes, by her parents.

Anger-Burns Tiefling gloomstalker ranger, an ex-bounty hunter who, after bagging a number of resistance members to the mad kings reforms, had the inquisition called on them for being part demon… despite the inquisition being quietly replaced by a demon cult by the new king.

Lord Shadowmore, the bastard born half-orc rogue who was formerly going to be the head of a noble house, but due to a mix of racial purity laws and both sides of his noble line getting purged by the rule of the new king. Fled in the night and trying to find his Orc cousins for aid.

Campaign background: Stuck in a nation that, thanks to the “wrong” prince getting crowned as the guy ahead of him disappeared around the same time, as the old king was assassinated by a non-human, according to the new king. Over the last 20 years, things have been hell for non-humans. Slavery, using them for sacrifices to dark powers, closing off the borders as too many non humans fleeing/threats from former allies. We were traveling together because we had all been screwed over by society, and our issues were, one way or another, linked to a strange noble lord in one of the worst parts of the country. All of us wanted him to pay in some way or another plus he may have away past the magic boundary keeping the non-humans.

Over the course of 3 to 5 sessions, we were traveling deeper into the heavily wooded  province. Where monsters of all kinds lay in wait, and the few civilized counties were at the smallest a gathering of Hamlets, and the largest a small trade post or lake/river port. It was the sessions, or at least parts of them in civilized parts that put a timer on the campaign.
Strike 1: After completing a quest to recover wagons of food meant for one of the few untouched halfling villages, we learned that the “good” part of the people’s defenders were extorting the town for the food. They demanded either that ⅓ of the town return to the capital as slaves or that the town give up most of the wood, coal, and furs stockpiled for the coming winter. I stepped in and asked the quest giver, “What in the name of the fucking gods were they doing?” only to be told, “Doing the people’s bidding by finding fresh slaves for the slave pits, as is the people’s will, through the god king emperor,” before pointing out that I still carried the emblem of the order. I was told I'm still part of the org and have to obey the king, especially as one blessed with dragon’s blood.
I naturally ripped the emblem off and broke it while in the same motion, stabbed the man with the two-handed broadsword. A short combat later, the Survivor points out that the key is enchanted not to open the food stores unless one) someone of true blood is touching it (pure human or dragon) or two) someone stronger than the owner claims it before trying and failing to teleport it away with puppy’s counterspell. Lord grabs the key and shoves it into the defender’s open wound while I lay on hands. We told the crowd with fair music from puppy’s dolls that they can rip it out of him and save themselves from hunger, leaving the man screaming as he is ripped apart by starving halflings. 
Strike 2: while coming back from a job dealing with cannibalistic bridge trolls, Anger-Burns was told to make a hard perception check to spot a tattoo to a bounty hunting group that was part of trying to hand her over. The sheriff confessed on the spot to it but it's been years ago, plus he now has a wife and kids and a productive member of the community…of what the DM put as “not even racist white trash would live here.” In fact, there was his wife and kids now. Running down the hill to tell him about their day, dinner in hand.
Anger-Burns and the rest of us waste no time killing whatever law enforcement was in the building which, to be fair, was being condescending and tried to shortchange us on the reward. The wife and kid were put in a jail cell within earshot by puppy, as Shadowmore looked over the records on the noble we were trying to find as well as freeing prisoners that were clearly being held on false charges. Anger-Burns and I took turns beating and scalping the crap out of the sheriff to get the combo for the evidence locker full of loot and other names of the man that wronged are party member who also seem to be working for the Noble that we were looking for. Before setting the sheriff’s office on fire but after letting the wife and kids go, the wife tried to stab Shadowmore, and in kind, he stabbed her, leaving the kids to grieve over the body.
The final strike: an inn out of the way of most of the townships run by catfolk as effectively used as a base for most of the game. While investigating the area where the Noble’s hidden manor was, the man had access to druidic magic to hide it. Getting back to see the place burned to the ground and the mother and father catfolk running the placed hanging from a tree, stripped of clothing and brutalized. The two kids were no where in the remains of the building we called home and was helping fix up. Anger-Burns tracked the drag marks to one of the swamp towns on the border. To make a long story short, the town was full of cultists, grabbing non-human travelers to sacrifice to a Lovecraftian swamp puppy. The family was accused of cheating one of the elders out of cards, sapplies, and possibly the dad was cheating on one of their wives, so they organized the kidnapping of the kids and the lynching of the parents.
Getting back to town after the “quest” they put us on, thinking their demi-god was unkillable, to a party of level 10s at this point, dropping the monster's head to their feet, they dropped the act. Going from anger at killing their god, to appeals to tradition, and shadowmores, and my character’s “purer sides” of our bloodlines. Ending with “you can't just kill all of us, we outnumber you, and clearly too good to wipe out a town,” which my character laughed, Shadowmore ordered the woman and children indoors and Puppy put a puppet by the door to the temple to block it. It didn't take long to massacre the whole lot of them after the warlocks and trained fighters went down. We then told the woman and children to flee into the night as we looted the temple and set it on fire. The session ended with Johnny telling me that I have become an oathbreaker and everyone was now of evil alignment and needed to make new characters.
The aftermath: we, the party, talked to the DM in a makeshift session zero, where the DM laid out what he hated after reviewing our sheets and backstories a bit more thoroughly. The first thing was that, by DnD tradition, we were not a real DnD party, as “none of you are playing your class right or the proper alignments!!!” None of us were on the Good axis, as I was CN leaning CE, Shadowmore was LN, Puppy was true N leaning NG, and Anger-Burns was CN leaning N or L. Johnny told us that leaning isn't a thing and we needed to role up good characters as “regardless of a shit world, Adventurer parties are always the good guys, you four act more like mercs and hired thugs.” Which, in fairness, adventurers are a step up from.
On top of the alignment issues, we were murderhoboing regardless of who attacked first, species slurs or refusal to talk until they were on their deathbeds. Even if spared, they just come back a session later with friends and mock us for our “weak mercy,” and try the same waterworks when they are nearly downed again. On top of that, we did kill women regardless of them attacking first, or us defending ourselves and possibly inadvertently killed kids by making them orphans.
He pointed out how each of us were failing as our chosen class, Lord Shadowmore was a rogue and couldn't be Lawful in any way, regardless of taking the noble background. The fact that he was also playing a “pirate” subclass when acting like an English gentleman showed that he never really played a “true rogue” before. Next was Anger-Burn who, as a ranger, was “too urban” and was also taking away the optional feature that replaces Favored Terrain. Rangers and keepers of the wild and also didnt like that she picked humans and the like as Favorites Enemies, regardless of her backstory having them live in the cities for most of her life, “its not logical for your character.” as he switch to puppy, o puppy the homebrew mute puppet bard was told that she needed to add a lot more singing or Poetry to her act to be a real bard. He also wanted to question if she was going for some kind of “Sexy Jester,” given the nature of the class. The performance acts around kids had Johnny concerned about if anything was going on. Given that the whole class was sexual in nature and was trying to quietly block them just in case. Which Puppy being IRL non-verbal autistic either from likely being told she was going to lose her text-to-speech bot or being suggested to be a PDFile, dropped the server, followed by burns and lord.
He was confused about why they dropped or even blocked him, and about the claim that “people don't understand what their character would do,” since class tropes are the building blocks of any character in the hobby. 

I tried to tell him, explain to him how that wasn't true, or the whole “why are you a bard around children, dont you know they have to be sexy” comment. Only to get my share of what was wrong with my character and me as a person.
Paladins and Clerics' first editions were always to be beacons of morality and justice, and all Paladin and Cleric players have to keep that in mind regardless whatever WotC say. He wasn't going to stop me from taking the Oath of vengeance but I needed to be the most lawful good version of that possible. Like how my antag, the ordermaster as a paladin, had no choice but to hold up the evil laws. In fact, if he had fully read my backstory or the others, he wouldn't have allowed me to become one, after finding a line about “losing their faith in the system…” meaning I didn't even have the most basic part of being a paladin, faith.
He went on about how I was “leading the party to the wrong Conclusion about the noble” as he was dropping hints that he was the lost Prince and all the pain and suffering he did to the party was accidental/prepping us to be the agents he needed to take back the crown.
He ended it with a speech about how I haven't changed since high school. Inflexible and unable to adapt to the pre-established groundwork that RPGs and fantasy have laid out to how the genre Works, I needlessly push the boundaries to be in my comfort zone instead of others, and I was still a Godless A-hole with no sense of right or wrong before kicking and blocking me.

TLDR; high school DM who follows class tropes too closely, grew up and invited me to his dark gritty game world, ends up destroying it with RPG tropes too when no one wanted to play into them. Tells me I haven't grown up at all, then blocks me.

edit 1: formatting

I was part of these Weekly one shot campaigns ran at a local game shop and i loved everyone that would go in. It was a first come first serve basis and we would always have a few regulars like me that would be there earlier to catch a seat and some new people. 6 or 7 players regularly. I missed a few Saturdays as life got busy and when i go back there is a whole new crew of people. Including an older teen boy who was on the spectrum.
Very unkempt, edgelord kid. I sit next to him in the corner and first thing he says is he doesn’t have dice. I have a huge pouch so i gave him a set as he was trying to get the shop owner to lent him some. Which is not a problem but she had a line of customers. So he takes them, as the campaign goes on I realize this kid is constantly scratching his dick under the table. I think he was stimming? As it seemed to happen when he would get exited.
He stands up as the last battle gets exiting and he is actively DIGGING in over his pants scratching and pulling at his crocth. I’m looking around the table and no one is reacting to this so I’m feeling crazy, mind you this kid is maybe 2 feet away from me pulling at his dick. I see people actively trying to ignore him. i grab my paper folder open it and place it on my righ hand. To block the view feeling extremely uncomfortable. I was at a table with 5 dudes i have never seen except for the DM and i just didn’t know how to react, when everyone else was acting like this is not a big deal.
So i get through it and at the end i tell him he can keep the dice. He tells me “you can have them, i have two sets at home but i would hate to loose them so i never bring them” grabs his papers and goes to look at the magic cards as we clean up. I honestly grabbed them with the paper and tossed them in the trash. I do not want the dice back after you spend 3+ hours scratching your balls with those hands. One of the players, grown ass man, told me i was being rude.
He told the lady from the store I didn’t want the dice after the “autistic kid played with them” and i threw them out in front of everyone. This was after i left.
She calls me to the counter my next time in the store, and talks to me. I tell her the situation and how uncomfortable it made me feel. I see that she KNOWS what i am talking about. She takes a deep breath and tells me that “you know, he is a very well behaved kid and his parents bring him here a lot and i dont want to make him feel uncomfortable” and it all boils down to his parents spending crazy money for him on magic cards…. Anyways, thats the story of why i never went back to my favorite game store, and my super uncomfortable game with the ball scratcher.

Kinda just want to vent, don't really need advice. Also I am new to Reddit so bear with me.

Key players:
Druid/Bloodhunter (D)
Bard/Sorcerer (B)

I've been playing D&D with this group for a little over a year now but only joined the campaign with this player towards the end of last year. The group had leveled up right before I joined and so I didn't see the level up process for that one. At the session before last we got to level up again (to Level 7) and our druid (D) made minor complaints about having to bump his wisdom because he doesn't want to bump his wisdom. (Kinda stupid to me as a druid main who knows that wisdom is highly important to being a druid but whatever life goes on and people play how they want.)

This player is known for using magic items and racial abilities far more than using his druid spells or abilities simply because everything he throws at a monster gets saved against. Again this is because he has such low wisdom and refuses to adjust it. Anyway, because of all of this, I've never really noticed that he's got another class he could pull from. He's also only played one campaign before this one and it was with this same group so I don't know how knowledgeable he is of D&D.

Now onto the issue. At our last session, he declared that he was going to use a level 7 druid ability and our bard/sorcerer player (B) realized this shouldn't work as we are level 7 characters and D has one level in bloodhunter meaning his druid level should only be at 6 and he wouldn't have access to that ability. This was a shock to me as I hadn't realized he had a bloodhunter level. However, D was apparently already having a kind of rough day but seemed to have tabled that for the game until now. From that point on, D was disengaged or constantly harping on B both in and out of character. D kept griping about how B ruined his idea and would bring it up every few minutes or so that he was actually at the table (he frequently will get up from the table once or twice during the game to take a call from his kids).

This honestly makes me a little put off of wanting to play with D but I love the rest of the table and we generally have a good time. Some of the other players (B included) and I have talked with the DM of this campaign about D's behavior and that it was seriously uncalled for. So, that's being handled.

I'm just confused as to how it could've gone this long that no one else noticed he was a level higher than everyone else because he was multiclassing wrong. I'm also confused as to why he would multiclass when it seems he's just wanting to play a straight druid despite not wanting to optimize for druid.

Thanks for letting me vent. Have a nice day everyone.

Content warning for child suicide. It gets a little crazy, man.

So my friends and I are new to TTRPGs. We started with a Mines of Phandelver campaign I DM'd about a year ago. The party included Mark, the guy I'm focusing on, and his girlfriend, Eve. Mark played a paladin and loved to have an almost child-like response to almost every situation. A shopkeeper denied his crude advances, so he broke some inventory on his way out. He heard a rustle in the woods, so he broke from the group and sprinted straight towards it. So nobody was surprised when they approached a castle full of goblin bandits and while the rest of the party started discussing a way to sneak in, Mark said, "I'm marching right towards the front door." Eyes were rolled and sighs were had, but they followed. Mark, being in the front of the group and refusing to not draw attention from the goblins, took the most damage. When they got to the final boss of the castle, he died in one of the last rounds of combat, but was able to get revived with a lucky scroll placement and a good roll from another player. It was the first time any of them had really gotten close to dying so far, so it was stressful for sure, Mark was pacing around the room, other players panicking trying to figure out if they could revive him, but I knew that I didn't kill him because Mark was the one who insisted on marching through the front door of an enemy keep.

Otherwise, Mark is pretty good. He has an occasional rebellious streak, like sitting out of one fight until the last round (I don't remember why), but mostly a good player. Fast forward to our next campaign, he makes a barbarian who is just terribly arrogant and overconfident because he has been coddled and sheltered. I tell him that his paladin already died once from that, and that he's gonna have to work with his team, not against them. He says he understands, and that he plans to have an arc where his barbarian eventually becomes a calm and reasonable person. I trust him, we start the game, and it's going well for a while, but we do still have the occasional outburst of running straight for things, not waiting for his party to make a plan, general bull headedness from him. But this all came to a head in the sixth session, where the party entered this valley with an intense and seemingly-permanent blizzard to hunt a troll. They find a camp of soldiers they can rest in, then set off to find their monster. After a bit of tracking, a fight ends with most everyone being pretty healthy other than Mark's barbarian, namely because he always refused to rage, since his character was so overly confident. So after the fight, Mark is at exactly 2 HP (I remember this because it still comes up). Since most of the party is healthy, they decide to skip camp and head straight for the exit of the valley. On the way out, there's a rustle in the trees. Maybe I was the fool for not seeing this coming, but Mark breaks from the group and sprints right for it. There was some set up to this (a mysterious and large white creature picking off wolves in the distance) so most of the party isn't entirely shocked when the rustling is revealed to be a white dragon, the source of the blizzard. The dragon immediately knocks Mark out, and everyone else is low level enough to understand that this isn't a fight, just a chase. They pick up Mark (as in physically pick him up, not heal him back to consciousness) and begin to book it back to their exit. At some point, someone heals Mark back up in the middle of the chase and he runs towards the dragon and swings on it. He says it's to protect everyone else because it was getting too close to them and could have dropped them with a breath weapon, but everyone is a little suspicious that he just wanted to run towards the dragon and swing. Mark's barbarian dies, the party gets away, and his barbarian's body is gone, meaning no chance of revival this time. Mark takes a long time to make a new character, and shares several ideas with me like "a goliath rogue that's terrible at stealth but always tries it" or "a fighter who refuses to wear armor" and I tell him that he's allowed to make those if he wants, but he's gonna die again, so get another backup ready. Eventually, he makes a rogue that's actually pretty reasonable and still in my campaign today.

Before we get into Mark's campaign, I wanna just ahead in time to share a short experience from my game, since they're being run at the same time. I had a plan for the party to encounter a bad guy barbarian, maybe it would lead to combat, and if it did, once he was hurting badly, he would try to knock someone unconscious and use them as a hostage to get himself out of the situation alive. My girlfriend was filling in for one of the players at the time and a few weeks ago I had told her about my plan and the possibilities. They had all had a pretty significant amount of shots that night so when the big dramatic hostage moment happens, my girlfriend, excited she finally remembers what's happen, shouts, "I remember you told me-" then cuts herself off and quietly plays out the scene. Mark gets nearly silent, stops engaging almost entirely, and becomes visibly bothered. After the game, I talked to him about it and he says it was partially the drinks, but also he got really frustrated when he felt like that section of the game was scripted and their decisions didn't have any weight because I had seemingly told my girlfriend that it would happen before the game started. I told him I would totally understand that feeling, but I had just told her about a possibility depending on your choices, and in fact, it was your choices in dialogue and combat that lead to that outcome. He gets the misunderstanding and we move forwards.

After helping me DM a session in my campaign before he made his new rogue, he says he wants to start a campaign of his own and have his girlfriend co-DM. I love DND, and while I know he's been a bit obtuse as a player before and he was a little controlling of the players with our co-DM'ed session, I'm excited to be a player for the first time. He's making a WWI themed game with just as much fantasy and magic as a normal DND setting, but he has some stipulations about our characters- mainly, he's very specific about which classes we can choose. There are no full casters, no monks, no barbarians, and no artificers, as he sees them as over-powered and doesn't wanna deal with them in his game. Okay, sure, a new DM maybe doesn't wanna be overwhelmed by the litany of abilities from a wizard or the damage potential of a 2024 monk, understandable? Also, whoever picks the paladin will be the leader of the group. Before the group even meets or establishes a dynamic, we have a de facto leader. I thought it was weird, but I've never heard of a leader of a DND group in general, so I haven't heard anything bad about it- maybe it'll be fine. First session starts, I'm a soldier living in an encampment, sent by my general to go around the camp and collect the various members of my new party for a special mission to kill the enemy army's general. I haven't gotten any names for either general or nation, just that the bad guys are north and we are south. Our general gives me 5 riddles to find each party member. I guess he knows where they're at, wants me to find them in our base, but wants to be cute and mysterious about it? So we go around collecting members, eventually finding three men in a bar, one named Rex is drinking a beer, one is unconscious, and the last is beating the unconscious one. We ask the two conscious ones if they're who we're looking for, they say yes and two more PCs join the party, and we continue to find everyone. But we can't find our ranger. I should say, the players know it's a ranger, but the characters only know that the last riddle says something like, "the last soldier could be anywhere." So we're looking everywhere. A couple hours go by as we're looking in every building and tent in this camp with no luck. Eventually, Mark looks at the time in real life, says, "Guards teleport in front of you, pick you up, and begin to carry you to a tent." A couple people try to resist the kidnapping, but we're told we can't resist and persuading them is useless, so we give up. We're brought to the wizard's tent and he tells us that we're going to be teleported to the bad guys spot for an assassination, and to get into the teleportation circle. We all have familiars staying in the camp with us (except for one person because Mark thought it'd be funny to leave someone out and they only find out everyone else has a familiar once we start playing) so we ask the guards to get our familiars. They leave to get them, and we're waiting, but the wizard is harassing us to get in the teleport circle already. We keep saying, "we will, once we get our familiars." The wizard is just saying, "Don't worry about them, get in. Come on, hurry!" This argument legitimately goes on for several minutes until we all just relent, as we have been waiting even longer in game and the guards haven't returned. The second the last person enters the circle, the guards come in with our familiars. Mark tells us out of the game that it's just because his notes say something like, "When they enter the circle, their familiars are brought to them." So he had to wait for us to get in the circle. There was no reason for this argument, just the first example of a pattern of rigidity to a 'script.' Then we're teleported, but the wizard, old and forgetful, seems to get confused in the middle of the spell, and we're misplaced just outside of No Man's Land™. There's nothing here in No Man's Land™ but a dog that barks at us "nonthreateningly." The cleric and I are making jokes about the dog being suspicious and that it may be safer to tranquilize the dog instead of approach it, but Mark outright says, "Your character is smart, you wouldn't shoot this dog," and shuts it down. We approach the dog, who brings us to his owner, our ranger, unconscious on the ground. We wake him up, and Mark asks for someone to make a perception check. Our leader rolls low, says, "Ah, it's nothing, don't worry about it." Mark says, "No, no, what'd you get?"

"Uh, it's a 3."

"Well, 3 was what you needed. You see a thousand skeletons behind you."

Eventually, all one thousand of those skeletons start running at us, and we have literally no choice but to run into No Man's Land™. Rex reveals he's not actually who we were looking for, just some random guy, and the real person we were looking for was unconscious at that bar. The session ends there, with the ranger having a couple minutes of play time all session and my feelings are mixed. I love DND I'm happy to host and hang out with my friends, but I also feel a lack of agency and a little frustrated some details, but I know first sessions are sometimes rushed and linear to get us on track quickly and get the story into the right direction, so I'm hopeful.

Some side notes- Mark says that he told us before the game started that we had a ranger, and if we had just gone to the ranger trainer tent (there are class trainers like an MMO at the fort we started at) then he would have told us that the ranger was missing at not at the fort, and we would have saved so much time. I tell him that our characters didn't know anything about the last person being a ranger so we didn't have any reason to go to the ranger trainer, and he kinda shrugs. We're also almost never using character names. Mark is always referring to us by our player names, so much so that in our most recent session (10) our leader asked what my character's name was for the first time.

Second session starts, we find a hatch on the floor and start wandering through a dungeon of illusions. In one of the first rooms, everyone is turned to stone except me. While they're petrified, the players can't talk or interact with anything or anyone in the game. A table appears in front of me, along with a deck of cards. I sit down and the DM and I just start playing blackjack. After I win three rounds, I can touch someone and un-petrify them, where we then have to play more blackjack to release the other 4 players. One of us gets unlucky and loses his three rounds, causing a spectral scythe to appear in front of him and cut his head off instantly. No save, no damage rolls, just instant death. The player gives a "Oh, okay," and we move on. The scythe greets another player, but 4 of us make it out alive. As we step into the next room, the 2 of us who died are revived with full health, and we continue. In the last room of the dungeon we meet the general we were sent to kill, only he's here with us in No Man's Land™ instead of the North like he's supposed to be. As we walk in, all of us are instantly frozen in time by the bad guy general, and while frozen, we can't talk or interact with anything or anyone in the game. The general unfreezes one or two people and reveals himself to be a god, and that our general is his brother, also a god, and that the war we're in has been waging for longer than we know. He touches Rex from the bar and Rex has the glow about him, like some kind of magical bomb. Over the next few sessions, Rex blossoms into a homebrew chronomancer class that Mark found online. Eventually we're all unfrozen and allowed to leave.

A few sessions later, we're searching through an abandoned village and find a 12 year old girl. She becomes particularly attached to Rex, but there is no roleplay with her. Mark just tells us what she does, whether or not she is following us, and she never speaks but that's never acknowledged. Fast forward again, we find another village but this time it's filled with invisible people who have been living for a thousand years and worship the evil god we're trying to kill. They corner us in the inn and have us make a decision- we have to either give the villagers a weapon we found in town that would give us an advantage in the fight against the god, or give them the girl we found earlier so they can use her to "repopulate" once she's an adult. There are tense arguments across the table about what to do, and it's made very clear to us that these are our only options. We can't fight our way out, they're invisible and immortal and also there are literally hundreds of them outside now, we try to use a potion we found earlier in town that temporarily turned us into foods in order to hide her but suddenly the potion only she's her hair according to Mark, I try to slight of hand the weapon to myself so I can throw it out the window or hide it or something, but Mark doesn't acknowledge me asking- we have exactly two choices and no alternatives. After some time passes of debating, Mark says out of character that we have to vote and whichever choice has the majority, it happens. We vote to keep the weapon, saying that we'll come back and break the girl out so we can have both. Mark turns to Eve, his co-DM, and says, "Do you wanna tell them what happens?" We're then told that the girl is taken by the invisible people into the hallway where she grabs something sharp we didn't see her pick up from her pocket and ends her own life. The table is silent other than a couple nervous laughs and the session just ends. The only acknowledgement between players about the events is something like, "Yay, how fun." None of us are particularly squeamish but this came out of nowhere in a joke-heavy game where we were turned into cheese wheels and sausages an hour before.

It's in the next session or two that we have a fight with some storm giants that literally apparate around us and begin to charge, no chance to avoid them or talk our way out, it's just a planned fight. We are all feeling exhausted the whole time because it's pretty clear, to me at least, that we are vastly outmatched. Rex actually dies in the fight. When he does, the group mostly doesn't react, and Rex lets out an, "Oh, okay," and starts scrolling on his phone. Our cleric has to use his one resurrection item to get Rex back, but we are able to kill the giants. After the session, I decide to look into the challenge rating of the fight to see if my instincts were right and sure enough, the storm giants we were fighting at level 2 or 3 were double the deadly XP budget for a fight of our party level and size. I couldn't understand why this would have happened, so I reach out to Mark to make sure he understands XP budgets, given that we are all new to TTRPGs. He says yep, that was the intent, and he had some things planned to help us if we needed but we actually did pretty well, and doesn't seem to be concerned about the fact that one of us fully died despite doing nothing 'wrong' in the combat. As another note, every combat of this campaign has been a flat, open field with no objectives other than 'hit monster until number is 0.'

Because of scheduling issues, we're talking about doing our first Discord session for Mark's campaign and he mentions that it should be fine to do this session virtually because it's actually just a lot reading, 8 pages of reading, in fact, and that it should be pretty simple. Absolute dread sits in my heart as I imagine the next session is just sitting still for hours listening to 8 pages of monologuing that I know I won't be able to remember 30 minutes after the session ends because I won't be engaged at all. Mark, however, insists we all show up ready to listen because this is very important stuff and we have to remember it all. So we show up, meet a wizard who takes us into his basement and yes, it is a couple hours of reading Mark and Eve's NPC backstories as we touch test tubes and those backstories are beamed into our head. The 8 pages are written like short stories, with highly detailed actions and environment descriptions, and I am fully checked out by the end. I genuinely tried my hardest to commit those to memory because I want this to be an interesting and fun game and I don't want to drag it down by being dismissive of narrative, but I could not tell you a single detail from these stories, I doubt any of my fellow players could, and I would even be surprised if Mark or Eve remember much about them now, as they have not come up or impacted the game at all 2 sessions and about 3 months later.

The 8 pages session ends with us walking into the entrance of The Catacombs™, where we are greeted with a giant spider. The details of the monster are drip fed to us, and every time a new detail is mentioned, Mark and Eve both stop and ask Rex's player if he knows what the monster is yet, because Rex's player, not the character, has arachnophobia. So after a few minutes of, "You hear many giant legs tapping on the walls. Do you get it yet, Rex's player?"

"No."

"You see 8 glowing red eyes. Do you get it yet, Rex's player?"

"No."

Back and forth, Rex's player gets it, is uncomfortable, and the session ends as we are handed an AI generated picture of a giant spider in The Catacombs™. Throughout the whole campaign, Mark has been using AI generated images as visual aids and referencing how he asks ChatGPT to generate things like random encounter tables and even stat blocks.

Going into the next session, Mark tells us that there will be a decision early on that if chosen wrong, one character will inevitably die over the course of the next few games. Also, we had to have a friend take over one of our PCs last minute since a player was busy. So, that giant spider jumps towards the party and disappears into smoke. It wasn't anything other than, "Haha, Rex's player doesn't like spiders." But that spider seems to be literate and generous as it leaves behind a note that states, "Things are not always as they seem in The Catacombs™." We are allowed exactly one hallway moving forward, so we begin to walk down it when a wall splits the party in two. We are then allowed one door on each side of the party, and some shadowy smoke shenanigans ensue, then we walk through the next door and are reunited. A booming voice comes over the apparent intercom system and tells us, "One of you is fake, find the fake, and be rewarded." Mark then hands us each a card with either 'Real' or 'Fake' written on it, and tells us that the fake has all the memories and abilities of the real character, and they are distinguishable from the rest of us. A few minutes of conversation pass, and a player uses his familiar's ability to enter the spirit real and receive hints from the DM about how to progress. Mark tells us that he spoke with this person beforehand and made sure they knew they would be the fake, meaning it couldn't have been the player we got to fill in last minute. That is our only clue. A few more minutes pass and a man appears in the room with us, and is essentially just a silent clown. He very obviously and without reason targets the character in game whose player has a fear of clowns, and essentially just harasses him while the debate is happening. We eventually decide that we have literally no information to act on and our only choices are to move on a hoping that we somehow get more information, or choose one of us at random and potentially kill two people by getting it wrong, so we move on. As we go to leave the room, Mark looks to his notes for a moment, then back up at us. "I'm gonna give you one last chance to do something before you leave." Personally, I know this is BS and we don't have any way of making the right decision no matter how much we debate, so we should just move on. But the party is more easily pressured and decides to debate for a while longer before they then decide to move on. Mark asks us again if we're sure we want to leave, debate happens again, but eventually we do move on without randomly guessing at the fake. The next room features a bottomless abyss and a jumbled bunch of letters on the ground. Mark hands us postcard with 9 letters scrambled and we try to unscramble them. After what felt like 20 minutes of silence, Mark eventually gives us a hint and we solve it, revealing part of a bridge and another set of letters. We do this for about 7 or 8 words, with the last one being "sepulcher." A word that only our cleric can vaguely recall but can't remember how exactly to spell or pronounce it. So we struggle again, just randomly putting the letters in different orders until we get it. Then Mark says, "Okay great, now I want someone to say it." So we struggle again, just making noises and sounding out this word we have never heard of until someone stumbles into it. We move on to the next room and it seems to be a giant mirror until we get close. We aren't seeing reflections, but duplicates of us, and they mimic everything that we do until we try to pass by them, where they do whatever it takes to stop us. They are just as strong as us and have the exact same abilities as us, so after a few minutes of debating, we decide we have to shoot our way through. We make an attack roll, and so do they. Every single attack. So we just have to keeping rolling attacks until we roll better and tick down their health before they tick down ours. Our cleric isn't happy with this idea, and keeps trying to find other solutions, so eventually Mark just says, "I have it in my notes that the party cannot pass until they defeat themselves." So we realize that once one person defeats their mimic, they will be free to destroy everyone else's without worry. We just aren't rolling well enough and it takes all of us trying to shoot these guys but they are always hitting better than us. The last players steps up to try to roll and is able to get his mimic down first. Another player and I say, "Okay great, we can just skip forward past him attacking the others since there is no more risk anymore, right?" Mark ignores us and asks for an attack roll on the next mimic. And the next one. And the next one. All other 5 mimics need to be bleed out as the player rolls over and over and over again.

"12."

"Miss."

"16."

"Hit, roll damage."

"8."

"Miss."

A couple minutes of just rolling over and over pass until the session ends. After the session ends, Mark tells us that there will always be alternate solutions to his puzzles, whether we find them or not. Someone asks about the puzzles we did this session and he tells us, "If you had just tried to cross the abyss without solving the words, you would have been fine because the bridge was just invisible. So all that time with the words was for nothing!" He laughs. "And I'm the room with the mimics, if you had just stood still for 2 minutes, they would have turned to do stone. So that whole fight was for nothing!" He laughs again. Rex's player and I turn to one another and joke, "Ah yes, we should have just not played the game! Why didn't we think of that?"

I have known this whole time that part of the blame is absolutely on me for not having shared my concerns with the DM, but all my criticisms are so vast that I can't help but feel like I'd be saying, "I noticed you're being creative and vulnerable sharing that story with us, but nothing you're doing is right or fun." But finally I decided after that session that I need to say something. I talk to Mark about my biggest single complaint, that we have no choices and this all feels more like a novel we're being read rather than a game we're playing. Mark says he understands and that there have been multiple things he admits he wish he would have done differently and will implement more choices into the game.

So our next session, just last night, starts. Mark immediately asks for a perception check from everyone and one of us notices a door in the otherwise totally empty room. We walk forward and the party is split again. Our paladin leader is lead upstairs while we walk into the next room. Believe it or not, the main group of the are frozen in time, and can't talk or interact with anything or anyone in the game. But, the cleric can suddenly telepathically communicate to the paladin leader upstairs. Mark then hands the cleric a few note cards, and tells him a list of words he can't say. Essentially, the cleric has to read the paladin a list of riddles, and then the paladin has to solve them and input the correct answers in his room in order for us all to progress, but the cleric can't really give hints because of how few words he can say. However, the riddles are all mathematical descriptions and the answers are all numbers, things like, "I am split cleanly by a prime, but I am not a prime myself." Paladin, the only one allowed to solve the puzzles, doesn't know what a prime number is, and is struggling as the entire table is staring and waiting on him. So the next hour consists of 2 players talking while the other 4 doom scroll or give the table a good thousand-yard stare. After we get to listen for that first hour of the session, we're allowed to play the game again when the puzzle gets solved. The next room features a teddy bear on the floor. Rex runs up to it and picks up, and then Mark makes fun of him for not inspecting it first, Rex gets hit with a ton of damage, and we roll initiative with a troll fight. While we're rolling, Mark is telling us that he actually prepared so many details about this room if we had just done any checks, such as the fact that the room is soaked in blood and the teddy bear has a palpable feeling of bloodlust around it. He actually just reads us every word of his notes that we could have noticed if we checked before the fight starts. A player asks, "Could we have gotten through this without a fight in anyway?" Mark definitively says, "No."

After a slow fight where we hit the monster until the number is 0, we walk into the next room, and believe it or not, we are frozen in time, where we can't talk or interact with anything or anyone in the game. The evil god greets us again. He gives us a choice to join him or he will kill us. Mark hands us post cards to mark 'yes' or 'no' while we are told that talking at all is forbidden. In the end, half of us choose yes and half choose no. When Rex chooses to join the evil god, the god approaches him and morphs into him, and Mark tells us that all along, Rex has been the evil god. He then turns to the paladin and says, "I will also give you a chance to reveal yourself now." The paladin says, "Oh, I can do that now?" And says that he is actually one of the characters from the 8 page test tube backstory session. Mark turns to the cleric and says the same, "I will also give you a chance to reveal yourself now." But the cleric declines, even though we all know now that he has some kind of secret identity, likely another one of the test tube characters. The game ends there, and Mark tells us that the party is split now, and sessions will be split amongst them so every other session will only feature one half of the players. The cleric's player is pretty obviously upset by this, I didn't get details about why but it's pretty obvious that he didn't know or sign up for this, and each player will only have 1 session from Mark's campaign instead of 2 like we've been doing. Mark also reminds us of the debate we had to sacrifice the little girl or not, and the fact that we sacrificed her for nothing since Rex made off with the weapon anyway. We also asked him about which one of us was the 'fake' we would be rewarded for finding, and he says that he had 7 cards, 1 said fake, and the rest said real. We all got the real cards, so there was never any fake in the first place and, "All that debate and arguing was for nothing!" Mark laughs again. He also mentions that he had talked to many of the players before tonight and planned a lot of this out, so much of this was essentially scripted. He tells me that this decision to split the party was inspired by my conversation with him a few weeks ago where I asked for more choices, and he says, "You wanted more impactful choices, how about one that changes the entire game?"

And that's kinda the end for now. I left out a lot of small details, like Mark having a seating chart at the table to make sure players don't get distracted talking to each other, giving disadvantage rolls pretty regularly if a player is distracted, telling us one time that we weren't allowed to take a long rest outside of town without giving any reason, a couple more, "You are frozen in time/stone and can't play the game for a while," moments, stuff like that. I fully take responsibility for a lot of this because I know I haven't communicated my feelings, but that one confrontation had me nearly sweating with anxiety, and I'm working on it. Plus, I don't hate hanging out with my friends at my house for a few hours. Thanks for reading, I know it was a lot, I hope it was more fun to read than to play.

Edit: *Unconscious bias

Hi, so I recently put two and two together with a pattern in a campaign I'm in. To give a background, this campaign started on a bad note for this DM. A male DM who broke up with his GF right at the start of the campaign where they broke up and she got together with someone who the DM thought he was bros with. (Which actually put the start of the campaign on a halt for a month or so while he tried getting over his breakup.)

In the campaign, there are 4 PCs with NPC partners. Two NB players (myself included in the two), a lady player, and a lad player. For a good few 10+ sessions it was alright since the romance wasn't the main focus of what was going on in session.

Then the lad's NPC S/O came into the view. The first NPC s/o who appeared and greeted the party within the first 10 sessions. She is considered really important and well respected in the setting. She is also severely obsessed with the PC (I'll call him Bus) to murderous levels. She causes a bit of focus on the romance aspect for the campaign down the line. Bus eventually ends up getting the NPC pregnant and will be getting married sometime in the campaign. She disappears here and there but she is constantly a big part of the party. Hanging around and giving basically free info on what she can gather as a sort of info broker who'll do it for free since Bus is there.

The DM also has a couple of prominent male NPCs with prominent S/Os who are happy with their partners. One very prominent NPC to the party in particular, who is bordering on self-insert DMPC at this point since it was clear he had levels, is getting a wish fulfillment sort of situation. This NPC, I'll call Tie, has a smith after him, an all very powerful witch after him, along with basically this DM's favorite character from a show. Who will likely fight the powerful witch lady who is getting jealous to get with him. This happened around the 13-21th session mark.

Then we move to the AFABs and Lady Players.

When we reach the 25th and onwards, the two AFABs have their spouses kidnapped like it was nothing, almost no hint of resistance despite also being strong. Along with how my PC has to fight off another NPC who wants to claim my PC's s/o as their own. Barely any time with the PCs, and if they did, they leave immediately and have a very low chance of coming back compared to Bus and his NPC s/o. Barely any respect compared to Bus' NPC and the DM's NPCs.

The lady player had to hear her PC's fiancée be emotionally tormented and mentally manipulated. To the point that it made this player cry in their first session and first time being in a campaign too, mind you.

With that in mind, how do I put it gently to the DM that I think he's carrying some unconscious biases and that it's kind of showing in sessions?

Ok, so I’m fairly new to the DND scene. I’m freshly 21 years old, only played homebrew, combat heavy, or a low rp family campaign prior to this. While I have played BG3 and overall knew the mechanics of DND, I had some learning to do, which I was completely willing to do. I had experience in roleplay in non-DND settings, but roleplaying within a group setting is new to me, as all of mine have been individualistic. I am posting this as I’m kinda heartbroken on how it all turned out and want to gain some perspective if there is any.

So when looking for online games, I looked for ones specifically that were new player friendly. I would look for them on either r/lfg, group finder, or roll20. Still in two groups that I found on r/lfg and group finder currently, but in total through this process I found four groups. One completely fell apart because of issues with the DM, the other is the topic of this story.

To make things easy as there’s a lot of characters to follow, here are their nicknames (from most relevant to least):

- Marshmallow (me | Drow Fighter | Neutral Good)

- Sam (DM) (male | mid 30s)

- Craig (Goblin Cleric of Life) (male | don’t remember)

- Edward (Human Paladin) (male | late 20s I think)

- Thomas (Satyr Ranger) (male | late 20s)

- Kendra (Half Elf Rogue) (female | late 20s)

- Talia (1st character: gnome sorcerer | 2nd character: tiefling cleric of war) (female | mid 20s)

- Andrew (Human Wizard) (male | mid 30s | DMs long time irl friend)

Note to add that not everyone was in the game at the same time, there were not many players. Spoilers, a total of three were kicked if you include myself, and new people kept being brought in when the second got kicked. This was over the course of over a month, since late March. I don’t know if that’s a lot of time, but it felt like it.

So we’ll start from the beginning with how I got into the game. This game I found on Roll20, sent an application, and got through the interview process with Sam in discord. I was going to be the youngest there, but he thought I had a lot of spunk and would work well with the rest of the group. He said my chances were good for me to get in and I was ecstatic.

Now I want you to put a pin in a little detail I’m about to tell you. In this interview process, I told Sam that I had a bit of an issue I have to work on. Since I haven’t had much experience roleplaying with a group, coupled with my autism, it’s hard for me to tell if someone is done talking or not. Especially over discord when I can’t even see their face (voice only). So I told Sam if this became an issue, don’t just subtly try to tell me, go ahead and just call me out on that right there and then. I’d rather him yell and insult me, then to have an issue fester and get worse. I want to improve, and I cannot improve if people don’t tell me what’s wrong. He reassured me that I would be fine and that that tends to happen in discord anyhow, so I wouldn’t be the only one. I thought it was fine, and it was..for a while.

Now before we get to my kick, we first start with the two other kicks within this group. 

First was our cleric:

He was there for one session. Honestly, imo, seemed pretty chill. We talked about Joan of Arc and music tastes prior to the session with Edward since we three arrived early. The session went great. Honestly all the sessions did, Sam was a really good DM from an immersion perspective and it was so much fun. Me and Edward’s characters had a cute moment of her insisting to give his character a ration because of a little inventory mistake where he didn’t even have any. The two characters actually seemed like they were going to form a friendship over time with how similar they were.

Meanwhile, Craig got downed immediately in a—funnily enough—goblin ambush. He was our CLERIC. It made for a funny moment where he was literally shot in the head and Edward had to heal him.

After that session, suddenly in the week, Craig got kicked. Sam announced the reason why was because he was “acting weird in DMs with him”. Now I found this very weird at the time cause Craig didn’t seem like that kind of person, but my thought process was this: if Sam was a female, I wouldn’t be questioning this. This would’ve been an understandable silent kick, and I shouldn’t be interrogating him on this just cause he’s a guy. All of this I later told him about. Red flag #1

Second was our Paladin:

It took quite a few sessions before this happened. I would say it was around session 4-6 when this happened and it was when I started to have worries. Edward was a very chill guy, had great roleplay, and was good in combat. Now here’s the thing, he had work prior to the session and had to DM a game afterwards (at least according to DM). Our session was 3 hrs long and we couldn’t go longer than that because of that reason, which by the way was the time on the listing. That was part of the reason why, but not everything.

You see, Sam wanted our help in giving him reviews for his page on this paid DND site where he could advertise his paid games. He needed 5 reviews in other to list there. Now all of us BUT Edward gave 5 stars cause we genuinely felt his DMing was amazing. Now Edward did find his games fun, but he felt weird about what happened to Craig. So he gave a more slightly balanced review of a 4 stars, which in my opinion was good, but he had a feeling Sam wasn’t going to like it.

So out of everyone in the group, he friended me preemptively just in case Sam kicked him and so that way I had his side of the story. At the time, I reassured him that that’s not going to happen…oh how wrong I was.

It didn’t happen immediately, a little over a week after that review, that was when he kicked him. He didn’t elaborate in the announcement, but he decided to “spill the tea” with me in DMs. Mainly cause I reacted with an emoji or something at it, and he asked me if I wanted to know more. 

He explains his reasonings like the review, the time thing, and on top of that: the text rp. So in between sessions for down time, we would hold text rp sessions to help build the characters relationships up a bit more. Edward had said he would do text rp, but I think he was thinking of within the session, not out of session. So he said he wouldn’t be able to do it. Thus lit the powder keg of immediately booting without a warning.

Edward in retaliation in a way changed his four star review to like a one star, which I personally don’t condone but after knowing the full scale of what Sam is like, I don’t blame him anymore. At the time, I personally thought they just didn’t mesh well in terms of expectations and didn’t communicate, thus it imploded like this. I checked with Edward when this was all going down and he and I stayed friends cause he wanted to know if anything else happened. Call him Cassandra, cause he told me more people were going to get kicked and I didn’t listen..

Finally Me:

This happened yesterday for me and out of the blue. I was in this campaign for nearly two months and was even invited to Sam’s curse of strahd campaign for Sundays a couple of weeks ago. I was having fun, getting along with everyone (at least I believe so), designing everyone’s art for free to get to know them, and was even finally completing my backstories for both campaigns. Everything seemed good, I was becoming closer with the main group and getting along with the other, so all of this seemed so out of left field.

Now let’s unpin that detail from earlier. My character flaw of not knowing when people are done and interrupting. I kept trying to fix that actively in both games, letting everyone else have a chance to participate, but it was quite hard when everyone else is more quiet and I’m a very talkative person. In fact, in the curse of strahd game I was playing a more reversed, no-social-skills type of character so I was actively working on it. 

Whenever I interrupted someone, I would say sorry and let them speak. Semi frequently when session ended I would ask “hey, am I doing alright?”, even asked if I’m doing any main character stuff by accident. Sam said that I was doing fine, so did the other players. One of things he said, and I’ll never forget this, was that he was going to make a fantastic player out of me, and that got my confidence up. I was making token art, animations, and even discussed with the other players relationship development between my character and theirs that we could do. 

Now for the sad part, for the past month my grandfather, who’s like a second father, was put on hospice. It was very out of left field as he was always extremely healthy, so for him to die before my grandmother was a shock. He and I were very close, and it hurt so much seeing him like that. He died 5 days ago. 

I let Sam know what was happening and that I’m going to check with a therapist tomorrow if it would be ok to still go to the games that weekend. He said that’s alright and to just let him know. I went to therapy the next day and she said that going to games might actually be good for me cause it’ll give me routine in the madness. I let Sam know the exact reason why, why I would need these games mentally and emotionally. At that point, I thought we were friends.

We had the session on Friday and I played like normal. Everyone was playing as normal. I even talked with Kendra and Andrew prior to the games start time, everyone in this group got along. Then when the game was done, a lot of us stayed back to chat more including Sam, everything seemed fine. I even started writing my character’s completed backstory (I had a simple one before that Sam had) and had the help of Thomas when making it. Stayed up all night to complete it and Sam knew this.

The next morning I received this text. 

“Hey Marshmallow... After giving it a lot of thought over the last few weeks, I’ve decided I’m going to remove you from both campaigns.

I want to be honest that this comes down to overall group fit and table dynamics. Over time, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern of interruptions, difficulty sharing spotlight time, and social friction that has been affecting the experience for me and some of the other players. I don’t think this group is the right fit for you or for the rest of the table.

I do want to say that I don’t think you’re a bad person, and this isn’t meant as a personal attack. I know you care a lot about the game and your characters, and I appreciate the enthusiasm you brought. I know this probably isn’t easy to hear, and I’m sorry because I never wanted to hurt your feelings. But as the DM, I have to make decisions based on what I think is healthiest for the group overall, and this is the decision I’ve come to.

I’m not looking to debate the decision, but I did want to be respectful and tell you directly instead of disappearing or being vague about it. I genuinely wish you the best and hope you find a group that’s a better match for your playstyle.”

I woke up to this, and I tried to reply, but I was already kicked from both discords and he unfriended me. I was so confused. I was still friends with the other players and so I sent them the screenshot, let them know what was going on, and left it at that. I was close friends with one of the other new players Talia, so I talked with her more in depth. 

She told me that Thomas actually left as well. Thomas was the player who replaced Edward and was a more experienced player than me. He was also a DM himself, so keep this in mind. I was really worried he got kicked as well cause he had no plans of leaving soon, I heard from him he was going to write his character's backstory also that night. I contacted Thomas by getting his username through Talia, and we talked. 

Apparently he confronted Sam about the announcement within the server itself, saying it’s not a play style issue, but a new player flaw that needs to be ironed out with time. He did not talk with the other players about the kick, like what he did with Edward and Craig, and overall was very dismissive. Thomas, partially out of solidarity, mostly because he saw the red flags in this, left. He was not going to deal with that. Me contacting him made him get more context that he was right that Sam never spoke to me genuinely about the situation.

The whole thing caused me to have a breakdown honestly. I was constantly cautious about this problem I had and I thought I did everything right by constantly checking with everyone if I was going alright. When issues were brought up to me, I fixed them immediately, and this was meta gaming issues like telling someone the most optimal way to do something (something like reminding the player how flanking works). So it’s not like I was against criticism or anything. Nothing was ever told to me and it just felt like highschool all over again. Haaa PTSD war flashbacks.

Everyone else in the group is either staying out of this or not answering just yet. I don’t know if anyone then talked privately to Steve about my behavior, but I constantly checked with feedback from them as well so I don’t know what happened. Me and Thomas are trying to join as a duo in another group to replace that one, and I don’t know I just feel so depressed about the situation. 

He was a fantastic DM and I was having so much fun building a story with everyone in the group. In the first game, Kendra and I were having a sisterhood between our characters, which was so sweet. Thomas was like our babysitter keeping us out of trouble. Me and Talia were thinking of having a romance between our characters in the strahd campaign if we lived long enough. Then finally another player (not named) in curse of strahd and I were thinking of a big brother, little brother dynamic as well. It’s not like I wasn’t getting along with everyone, I was. 

It just came out of such a left field and he didn’t even say anything to me. I thought maybe this is normal, but I have no idea anymore. That combined with everything that happened with my grandfather, it’s just..awful and I’m still reeling from it.

Not the most dramatic horror story, but it feels like it to me. Thank you for reading.

Time for one hell of a slow realization dnd horror story. because it only became worse with the recent sessions. Hello so I've been a player for this campaign for a good while and slowly but surely, I got information that the NPCs in the campaign are the DM's PCs (from either campaigns they didn't get to finish or never got to use in the first place.)

Now, please keep in mind that I know the difference between a prominent NPC vs a DMPC. One DMPC is a sort of handler for the party, is usually present and if they aren't... then they're always present in session epilogues (Think post-session vignettes like what Aabria Iyengar does.) It would have been alright to have this DMPC, let's call them Suit, if Suit weren't always the center of attention for lore.

• Like Suit just had to be there and caused all of the party's problems in lore before session 1 happened because of a prophecy to get their sibling back.
• To add from above: How Suit was there for a PC's important backstory battle, how they were the direct reason for the tragedy for the Kid PC, how they were the reason why one of the PCs became an orphan, how he caused another Kid PC to have to deal with a world ending issue that Suit caused, and how they were always there watching when my PC was going through all reincarnations.
• When Suit DID get their sibling back, sibling immediately becomes a Deus Ex Machina saving the party against SUIT. Because Suit literally wished to tear the party mentally to shreds after crashing out in character over my PC being close with another character that looked like Suit's sibling. (The sibling also acts like the paragon of goodness and honor and how dare my PC kill them in their first incarnation type of vibes that kept going.)
• How Suit knows EVERYONE everywhere, contacts and what not. Like all NPCs, Suit knows them.
• How the lore is spotlighted on Suit being the favorite of his patron (they're a warlock with levels, told us the players that they're like level 18-20. We're level 11.)
• How Suit has multiple people after them romantically, like 3 of them (one being very murderous over other people that like Suit). The one likely to get together with Suit is their favorite character from an animated media too. Which keeps on appearing in the lore despite: not meeting any of the PCs for so many sessions, not being a part of ANY of the PC's lore directly, was not originally part of this campaign either (Is from this DM's friend's campaign, they both share the same favorite character), is becoming another DM's DMPC in another campaign that isn't theirs. (SO BASICALLY, DMPCS, FROM TWO SEPARATE DMS.)
• How Suit hates my PC for what they did in lore (not lore that I wrote for my character either but was orchestrated by this DM.)
• How Suit did what they had to do and wants the players to see that Suit is very morally gray because they only acted based off my PC's past self being a chaotic evil murderous tyrant and how much they get canonically belittled for something they don't even remember. Along with epilogues with how much they're such a good caretaker for children and is like a regular person with a job. (Suit remembers my PC's past incarnation which again, never wrote this one in for my PC lore).

This is just one of the DMPCs. Another is Suit's other friends/co-workers also being PCs this DM played or never got to play. Them being key figures in the world, all of which has much more spotlight or importance than the party. Despite not being directly related to any of the party's lore at all. Because of them being like the heroes of this world, how they run the government, and how big they have influence in this world.

With how things are going, I will not be playing any further campaigns this DM throws out. (They already put up a campaign they're gleaning interest for, did not want to join.) No DND is better than Bad DND.

Hello. This story happened a few years ago and was online, but it recently came back to my current memory and thought I'd share. I had been playing with this group of people over discord for 4 years at this point. We're all open about our personal lives, incredibly tasteful when we joke (usually), and are just generally good friends. The old DM, who I'm going to call Eric (not a real name), after the last session of his campaign asked if anybody wanted to DM. Literally eveyone said they'd rather be a player, but were willing to be a DM if needed. May I reiterate: WE ALL SAID WE WERE WILLING TO DM OF NEEDED! After hearing about this, Eric told us that he had a friend who wanted to learn how to DM anyways, so it would be fine. We cut to a week later, we scheduled a night to play, and I was exited. I had just discovered that I was gender fluid at the time, so I was exited to play my first Female DnD Character. Her name was Haldiphe Cassia. She was a Neutral Good Hill Dwarf Circle of Spores Druid that was based on Magical Girl Animes like Sailor Moon. I came up with a backstory, thought about her voice and unique lines she would say, and even made art (which isn't something I usually do for characters).

I entered the call and met the new DM. For the sake of this post, we’re going to call him Alex. Alex was... fine. Nothing about him seemed inherently off at first. He talked about the home brew world he created and it was genuinely interesting. He made a post apocalypse style fantasy world with differing factions that your character could be a part of. (Think Fallout but with Magic.) The DM asked us to introduce our characters, and with me being ignorant and excited, I went first.

I was getting into describing her backstory of her Noble parents selling her to a hag in order to save their own hides, but the Hag ended up loving her and training her in the ways of Fungus. Alex, after I was done describing, asked me why I used words like "her" and "she" to describe Haldiphe. Note! He didn't ask in a genuine or curious way. He asked with with a mildly aggressive tone. I can't mimic it through text, so just imagine how a Christian mom would point out how you're smoking. I, in confusion, just said the truth. That she was a girl. Alex than proceded to ask why I would play a woman when I presented myself as a man in that same tone. I explained what being gender fluid was and how, sometimes, I wanted to act more like a woman than a man. He proceeded to laugh in my face and say

"OH! You're playing a joke character." I explained to him that it wasn't a joke, and he didn't understand. He said that it had to be a joke, otherwise I was a "Liberal Gay Tranny." Eric then proceeded to kick him from the server in less than 19 seconds.

I understand that this isn't the worst thing in the world to happen, but it really stuck with me and made me feel insecure about playing Haldiphe or any other woman at the table for a long time. I did eventually start playing a female Half-Orc Storm Herald Barbarian named Gura in the following campaign, but that happened after my old character died in a boss fight, which helped me re-ignite my passion for female DnD Characters.

Now, I must talk about the reason why this came back to my current memory. Well, that's because Haldiphe may come back! My group is starting to learn Pathfinder 2e, and I may try to convert Haldiphe into that system and play as her in the new campaign.

Again, I know it's not the most spicy story or the most dramatic, but I wanted to vent it out somewhere. I hope you enjoyed reading this story and that you have a pleasant rest of your day.

Prior to the start of session 1, all we were given as info about the homebrew world was the information that "everyone lives on the moon because the planet is inhospitable." I thus assumed pretty much everything else was going to be D&D as normal- DM even confirmed we could worship standard pantheon gods.

Cue session one. One player hasn't even started character creation while the rest of us have characters made, so he's doing that in the midst of everything, and asking a bunch of questions that interrupt the narrative.

The DM then unloads a bit more information about the setting. I say, "Well, I was planning on my Drow Hexblade being a former slave soldier who found his hexblade in a ruined temple and then fled from his matron. Would that background still work?"

It turns out it would not. Not a single part of it. My character could be at best a militia soldier who found a hexblade in a field one day, held by a dying monster.

I couldn't even pick where my character started the session without it turning into "DM, may I?"

Me: I'm at the tavern.

DM: there's no tavern at the settlement.

A tavern seems like a pretty basic staple for a settlement to have, even in a backwater. People need a place to unwind, regardless of dangers around them and the back-breaking labor of forging a new settlement.

Me: I'm at the barracks?

DM: There's no barracks.

So the moon has all sorts of dangers, but we don't have a barracks dedicated to overseeing training for the local militia? Seems kinda bizarre.

At this point I just opted for walking around the town and people could randomly run into me.

It got a little better after that, fortunately.

So for context I am playing in my first ever DnD campaign, and it's been ok (bit of a problematic player recently but that's not what I'm here to talk about) what I am here to talk about is the fact that, we're sort of at the tail end of level 5, and at this point my money... HASN'T CHANGED SINCE SESSION ONE. I was given 25 gold to start the game and it hasn't gone up or down at all. Also none of us have gotten a single magic item, and to cap it all off we've never had "downtime" ONCE, I'm barely even sure what that means in DnD. I'm genuinely thinking about switching tables because I don't even think I'm playing DnD it has basically just been a constant plot railroad. Unless this is totally normal and I'm overreacting I don't know.

Currently running two campaigns and this player was in both. Most of my players have been in my groups for years and are a really tight knit group. I DM on Roll20. Some of my players even meet up for things elsewhere so I’d like to think I did a pretty good job of putting my groups together.

I had one player who was a constant pain. He always wanted to take female NPCs to another room. He brought politics to every game to the point he wouldn’t talk about anything else.

Player made a disrespectful comment toward me that I initially ignored because I was in a really good mood and had some epic things planned for my players. After the other players brought it to my attention is when I realized what it was.

The last straw was when we caught him changing dice rolls on his character sheet in Roll20. Originally we took it for experience. Maybe he misread something or didn’t understand. He said he didn’t even know how to change the modifiers, but when I told him to change them he knew how to do it instantly. We found him doing it for every dice modifier to the point I couldn’t trust anything he put on his character sheet. He would even change the dice for simple weapons and try to sneak in extra rolls.

I politely explained all this and told him I would be removing him from my campaigns.(He had enough chances to fix everything.). For weeks I was getting messages on Discord about being a fascist and comments on not learning anything from my time in service.

Fun times!

So, i am writting this just as the session ended, and the DM told us that the Boss that we will face next session

Her name is Eloisa Daeremund, first of the six calamities, royal bloodfiend, a summoner boss, who will summon previous enemies that also have their own broken mechanics

Our party consist of: Me as a Lore Bard, our Gloomstalker Ranger, our Redemption Paladin and the resident Min Max Warforged Warlock

We have some magic items, we had overcome a array of challenges with strategy and some good rolls, but the session ended and i can't think a way to kill this boss quickly, because our DM told us "when this creature's HP drops to 0, if its AC it's highier than 20, heals 152 HP and its AC drops by 1" LIKE, WHAAT??? HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO THAT MULTIPLE TIMES??? I KNOW FOR A FACT THAT HER AC IS HIGHIER THAN 23, EVERY ENEMY WE FACED IN THE LAST 15 SESSIONS HAD 20+ AC, WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO????

Sorry for the spelling mistakes, i am frustated with this

I play in a group of 7, usually as the DM, but one of my players wants to run a mini campaign. He won't give us details on what the campaign will be, other than that it's 6th level and it won't be a simple dungeon crawl. To make characters he had us roll "suicide dice" to completely randomize everything except subclass, background, and gear. We each had to roll d20s for stats, which had to stay in the order rolled, no rerolls, and he randomized the order in which the stats would be assigned, then a d12 for class and RNG a d13 for race. The spread of party members and stats are as follows:

Dragonborn Bard: Str 10, Dex 19, Con 1, Int 17, Wis 9, Cha 4

Aasimar Rogue 1: Str 12, Dex 14, Con 15, Int 15, Wis 18, Cha 10

Aasimar Rogue 2: Str 8, Dex 2, Con 16, Int 13, Wis 19, Cha 11

Human Rogue: Str 4, Dex 6, Con 20, Int 18, Wis 17, Cha 16

Dwarf Rogue: Str 19, Dex 5, Con 6, Int 18, Wis 17, Cha 14

Halfling Druid (me): Str 15, Dex 20, Con 5, Int 11, Wis 3, Cha 10

At first I was like "okay maybe it won't be so bad, I can increase to 5 wis with my background and maybe that'll be enough." Then I actually read through druid and realized that I would be basically useless to the party. I won't really be able to do spell attacks because I figure even with a Wand of the Warmage my bonus would only be +3. My spell save DC will be at best 9, so I won't be able to control the battlefield much. I can't even really heal because healing word and cure wounds would have a negative modifier added to them. I have a pretty good Str and Dex, but no proficiency with martial weapons, medium armor, or shields, and a negative Con so I can't be front lines either.

I asked about magic items and after a few days of thinking about it he said everyone could have 1 rare magic item but that "there'll be a twist so don't have it make or break your build." That's when I have the idea to multiclass into barbarian. Usually barb + any full caster isn't a great idea but I figured since wild shape is the one druid feature that doesn't require a high wisdom, it doesn't matter if I can't cast spells. I'll just take a few levels of berserker barb for the best rage damage boost, then put the rest into moon druid and spend all my time in wild shape as a brown bear. In wild shape I would get a multi-attack and could still rage for +2d6 damage per attack, and my low con wouldn't matter because I would get the con and AC of the brown bear stat block. I also consider taking the Wraps of Unarmed Prowess to overcome damage resistance and an attack bonus. I thought this was a creative solution to make my character viable, play a multiclass that usually doesn't feel optimal, and still respect the fact I rolled up a druid with 3 wisdom.

When I bring this idea to him however he says that if I multiclass I have to roll for another randomized class, and that I can't back out if I don't like the class I rolled. I would have to take at least one level of it, and couldn't try to multiclass again after that because it would be "against the spirit" of the suicide dice. So that's when I bring up the issues I have, just to emphasize that if I don't multiclass then I won't be able to use 90% of my class features. The most optimal thing for me to do would just be to stay in the wild shape I gained at level 3 through moon druid and/or do a single attack every round with a +2 weapon. His response struck me as extremely dismissive. First response was "Look at some feats or skills man. Try to enjoy the un-min-maxxed nature of it. Or try to roll the multiclass." as if the only feat I would be taking wouldn't be ASIs, and as if any skill I took wouldn't be outdone by one of the 4 rogues in the party. When I told him that the barbarian multiclass wasn't min maxxing, just making a half way viable character with the stat array I rolled.

There was a bit more back and forth with him just saying things like "take a special weapon, take an item that gives you a familiar." I just said flat out that a doing a straight druid with this stat array gives me basically nothing to do at the table other than be an additional pool of HP to target. After that he said he would think about it, but a few hours later messaged the group chat and hadn't changed his mind: multiclassing was allowed but HAD to be random. At this point I figured I would just roll and see what I get because if I got literally anything other than a cleric at least I could be a mediocre-to-good 5th level character in a 6th level game. I rolled a 4 which was apparently a warlock on his randomized table and that's when I actually went back and looked at all the other player's stats and realized that 5/6 of us had negatives in our main stats and 3/6 of us had negative con modifiers as well.

I will admit I got a bit upset at this point because this didn't feel like a fun challenge to figure out a way to make a viable character with completely randomized stats. This felt like just an extremely unbalanced party with dogshit stats. And when he took away basically the only meaningful method of customization by saying we shouldn't expect to rely on our magic item, it just felt like yeah: it's just a bad character with no way to make it work except taking ASIs to make the negative modifier less bad. I sent him a message expressing that in probably a more passive aggressive tone than necessary and said "I guess now I'm just playing a 5th level warlock though."

He messaged back "so do the barbarian if you want I guess. No one else is having a problem here." All I can say is that no one else has EXPRESSED a problem with it that I know of because no one else has messaged the group chat about it other than the human rogue who very much did want to multiclass and got monk on his random roll.

I don't know, maybe I'm over reacting but the dismissiveness I'm getting when I bring up that I'm not having fun due to a total lack of agency when building my character is really upsetting and it's because of that more than anything else that makes me not even want to participate in the mini campaign. I don't think any of us are going to have fun whiffing every attack and getting one-shot by enemies (except for the one player you miraculously rolled an average of 14 on his stats) with characters we had no say in the design of. Especially not when he is going to blame us for not being "creative enough" with what we were given.

Hello everyone, English isn't my native language, but inspired by the various stories of other unfortunate players and DMs, I've decided to write about my most recent terrible experience. Warning: Content includes physical violence, gambling, explicit sexual content, SA, mild homophobia, abortions, and in-game violence against minors.

About three years ago, I taught D&D to a group of friends who enjoyed roleplaying on Discord. After I mastered a one-shot, one player decided to become a Dungeon Master by creating a homebrew campaign.

The story's characters and their respective characters are the following, whom I'll give nicknames to for privacy reasons:

-DM (M, 21): The Dungeon Master in question (90% of the problems)

-Phara (F, 21): A Tabaxin bard/cleric of death, the DM's girlfriend

-Ginny (F, 21): A Wood Elf Druid of the Moon Circle, very anonymous (she didn't come to sessions often)

-Eltoz: The DMPC, a very stereotypical Frieren genderswap

-Damacos (M, 22): A tiefling rogue/bard who played my best friend and with a rich background, joined later.

-Sanguinius (M, 21): My first character, an Aasimar Warrior/Sorcerer who was cursed with the unique power of wild magic and was crucial to the world's lore (think of him as a mix of Gandalf and Sanguignius from Warhammer 40k).

-Asmodeus: My second character, whom I later retired, a barbarian/Warlock who served as an avatar for Asmodeus himself.

Let me start by saying that the campaign is in a Homebrew setting that blends "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" and "Elden Ring." We've established the following Homebrew rules: multiclassing is optional, and multiclasses advance equally in both classes. With this explained, we can begin session 1. Our characters start in a tavern, taking the main quest from an NPC to bring an item to the other side of the world to finally kill the "demon king." It would be a classic start, except our characters end up in prison. Here we meet Ginny, whom we help get out of prison. That's when the problems begin. The GM has us face a homebrew golem with 25 AC at level 3. If we hadn't been creative and blown up the floor, we would have risked a TPK in the first session. Fast forward to the rest of the party and I find Damacos in a necromancer's dungeon. He's injured and his clothes torn, making us think something had happened to him. My friend doesn't take it well. Between one thing and another, we free him and start doing a side quest for the necromancer. The first problems were already starting to appear at the table.

The spear episode.

The DM asked us to privately send him some Homebrew items we'd like to have for our characters during the campaign. I remember perfectly that Damacos had requested a spear inspired by King's spear from 7DS. It was a particularly complex spear to use and had several transformations that would have created a perfect playstyle for a PC designed to be a "jack of all trades." After the necromancer quest, the DM had Damacos find the spear. All well and good, except that the DM asked Damacos to make an arcane roll to attune himself to the weapon. Damacos succeeded, rolling a very high number like 35. The DM said he couldn't attune. A few seconds later, he made the same request to Ginny, and she succeeded with a much lower number. Not wanting to make a fuss about the moment after the session, I asked the DM what DC Damacos would have to beat. He replied that even if he had rolled a 20 natural, he would never have attuned Damacos to the spear because, in his own words: "The spear is much more in keeping with Ginny than with Damacos, and besides, you're veterans; there's no point in giving you strong weapons right away." I promptly pointed out that regardless of everything, Damacos was upset and should at least apologize. The DM said he already had another item ready for him. A few sessions later, we found a chalice that, if activated by sacrificing 1d4 HP, could transform into a sword that only did 1d6 magical slashing damage. Damacos gave a tight smile as soon as he got it, intending to sell it for something else. In the same dungeon, he had had Phara find a +5 hammer that did 2d8 tag damage. + 1d12 radiant damage and that it did triple damage against Fiends and undead. Needless to say, both Damacos and I felt very obviously taken for a ride.

The first Pg change.

Shortly before the battle against the Necromancer, we faced a huge undead moose with divine powers. In lore, it was a being created from the body of an angel by the Necromancer. The fight was unbalanced: Phara dealt very high damage for level 6 PCs, while Io and Damacos dealt almost negligible damage, and Ginny wasted time figuring out how to use the spear because, in her opinion, it was too complicated. During the battle, the DM started focusing on my PC Sanguignius, who was a sorcerer warrior who used spells more and had little defensive ability. After the fight was over, I decided to switch characters after defeating the necromancer. I talked to the DM about it, telling him that not having a tank was the best thing to do. After about an hour of discussion, I showed up at the new session with Asmodeus, a demon who was supposed to represent wrath and had a sword that slowly transformed whoever wielded it into Asmodeus. The session was smooth except for the final boss he had us face. He had designed him as an enemy that would act as support for his minions. Realizing this immediately, Damacos and I acted accordingly, focusing on the boss, who was knocked out after a few turns. The DM didn't take it well at all, so Damacos and I gave him some suggestions on how to improve, giving advice like adding more gimmicks or putting more minions to act as mini bosses. DM said that these were stupid suggestions and that we were metagaming. In the session the following week, he will proceed to put all our suggestions on the table, passing them off as his own ideas.

Las Vegas Fantasy.

A few sessions after the party, he went to a highly developed steampunk city where prostitution and violence were commonplace. Soon, the city recognized the possibility of selling oneself into slavery to pay off debts. When we enter the city, we immediately see the degradation between the poor and the rich and we are approached by a boy who offers us to go to a brothel. As soon as we enter, an eccentric and annoyingly stereotyped homosexual guy welcomes us, offering women and men for the members of the party. Partly for the meme, partly because we are perverts, we accept everyone. When Ginny decided to take the room with two women, the DM turned up his nose but allowed it. The next day he made us roll a d20 and it ended up with Phara being impregnated by a gigolo. Seeing the slightly disgusted face of Phara's player, I decided to make her abort by making a medicine roll and giving her some herbs. While I did so, the DM looked at me badly the whole time and during the session he made us pay a lot, and not a little, he made all the prices of the items we needed extremely high and the bad sellers free. Subsequently after this compulsive shopping session we decided to continue with the Main quest and the situation worsens

The Anti-Magic Tower.

During our exploration, we discover that the duchess of this city has been kidnapped by a cult that worships the demon king, and we face their leader, who is an evil version of Percival de Rolo. The fight is interesting if it weren't for two battle gimmicks. The boss has a pistol that rolls 2d20 to hit; one determines whether or not it hits, while the other, if it rolls an 8 or higher, can continue shooting that turn as long as it rotates its target. The other is an anti-magic golem, a mini-boss. In short, every time a party character casts a spell, it is absorbed (without making a saving throw or anything else), losing the spell slot. Yes, even healing and bardic inspirations were included. While Asmodeus wasn't negatively affected by it, being a predominantly martial artist, I explained to the DM after the session that this mechanic ruined the fight, making all spellcasters, including his DMPC, useless, and that no one had any fun even during the second phase of the fight, where the magic field did stop working but everyone had already lost their slots.

The Slot Machine Episode

A few sessions after the boss fight, we were invited by the Duchess to the castle, but first, to pass the time, the DM made us gamble. He invented some tricks, rigging the games, like moving the CDs of the rolls without telling us, or sometimes making us roll at a disadvantage when playing roulette, etc. Having figured out the trick, Damacos and I went off to look for new ways to collect the money our companions were spending. So we decided to scam a rich NPC who was nearby. Shortly after we scammed him, Ginny, who had run out of gold, decided to accuse us to the guards of stealing the gold from these rich NPCs, expecting a reward in return. When the guards arrived, Damacos tried to convince them that we were innocent and that they were wrong, by making a deception test. The DM then decided, after the fact, that this test was only valid for Damacos, and he had Asmodeus captured anyway. While he was in prison, the guards asked him for sexual favors to get out of the cell. Obviously, I refused, and I was thrown in jail. Damacos broke me out with a teleportation spell. After the breakout, we mutually agreed that our PCs would take revenge on Ginny. Of course, when she asked why we were doing it, I promptly replied, "Asmodeus would do it after you sold us out." The DM had his DMPC cast hold person, and shortly thereafter, the session ended. When Ginny asked the DM what he got for his arrest, the DM shrugged and said, "The happiness of having done the right thing."

The Character Change

After about six sessions, where almost nothing incriminating happened, I realized I no longer cared about the group and that my character was following them for no apparent reason. I tried to talk to the DM about Asmodeus not being involved in the story. I brought this up at least once a week before the session until I got tired of it. I told him that, since I wasn't being listened to, I wanted to change characters. After about four weeks of pause, we resumed the session. At a certain point, after Ginny and Phara had been teasing Asmodeus throughout the session, I decided to say that he was disappearing into the bushes. I stared at the DM for the next three minutes, after which we started a heated argument. I essentially told him that if I didn't do this, he wouldn't listen to me and the DM didn't want me to create a new character. Finally, after about 1 hour and 57 minutes of discussion, I started using the character sheet again. Sanguinius's character and modify his build but only a little, now I don't remember the exact subclass of the warrior that forced me to choose but I was a little more satisfied and so we started to face the fight after

"Immunity to Physics"

In the next session, the DM had us face a version of the demon Qual from the anime Frieren: after the end of the journey, named after his unstoppable magic, Zoltrak. The fight was difficult due to some of the boss's very unbalanced abilities. Each of the four players had Counterspell, which we promptly used to cancel the spells he sent at us. This exclusive spell, called Zoltrak, had a damage type never seen before and could not be stopped by any means, not even with a shield or anything else. In other words, it was a cantrip that dealt 3d12 unspecified damage and would automatically hit. After hours of demeaning combat, we defeated and eliminated him, although it took the entire session. Shortly after, a few days, the DM told me that Zoltrak was immune to force damage and would take half damage to all damage types. This explains a lot, but I decided to shrug and ignore it.

Some random final things

After the Zoltrak episode, we went to the kingdom's capital to save it from the demons. In short, in this episode, the GM, to make me pay for switching characters again despite having forced me to bring back Sanguinius, came up with another of his brilliant ideas. My Sanguinius build was initially based on spear attacks, so a build that combined the Sentinel and Polearms Master talents, which, for those who don't know, prevented enemies from moving if hit by an attack of opportunity. The DM knew this, so he had us face a demon tormentor, an executioner whose gimmick was specific resistance to both magical and physical attacks of opportunity. After the session ended, he himself told me it was a countermeasure to eliminate me. I didn't play the following sessions with much involvement, and in fact I remember practically nothing from the subsequent sessions except for a rematch between my character and the tormentor. Damacos was missing at that point, and our group split in two for a double joint assault. I alone took care of him and a wyvern, even though I had no hope of level 10, even though I was playing in the hope of killing Sanguinius in that fight. The DM didn't let me die, transforming my sword into a weapon that would automatically bring me back from the dead regardless of whether I was in combat or not.

During session 0 of this campaign, we established specific rules: you always play every week, and the day is variable. You only skip if two people are missing. All of this led to a terrible situation where if Ginny was missing, Phara didn't want to participate, and the DM didn't want to continue the campaign because Phara didn't want to participate, and so on. Often, we'd go for entire periods of up to five months between sessions. When I pointed it out, they told me I was obsessed with D&D and that there was no session that week to "Punish Persistence." After a while, I got so annoyed that I lashed out at the group. After the umpteenth time I was told I was overreacting, I simply let it go. A few months ago, Damacos introduced me to his group of friends, the party I now play with regularly. They're fantastic people and we play every week barring any obstacles. I even got engaged to a player in that party. As for the previous campaign, time simply killed it; we left the story halfway through, and eventually the group disbanded.

Hello, this will be both me complaining a bit and finally letting some frustrations out, and also me asking for advice on how to bring this up and talk about it in the best way.

I have been part of a longterm pathfinder 2e campaign for almost 2 years now. I enjoy it a lot and I know the other players as well as the GM do as well, but there is one player we have some small issues with, we will call him Jake.

Jake is incredible at what I would call casual roleplay. If it’s a funny interaction or just some random filler stuff, he is quick with it, often hilarious, and engages the other characters a lot as well. One thing has been brought up by my boyfriend (who is also a player in this campaign) however.

That being, that as soon as the roleplay requires more than a witty quip, he’s not up for it. I believe he really tries his best, but he barely remembers his own backstory when it comes up, can’t remember any names of important NPC’s or places from the campaign, forgets what our quest is on the regular, and it slows down sessions by a lot, having to explain most of what has happened so far every time.

We also do rotating recaps, in the same order every time, at the start of each session. He has not managed to do an actual recap once. He always forgets where the last session started, where it ended, who we talked to, most of the important info we found, and sometimes even what the whole objective was entirely. Every time it’s his turn to recap it’s a group effort.

I keep very detailed notes (like a full page for each session, as well as favourite moments, info to remember, and a short 2-3 sentence version of those notes) in a google doc that is shared with all other players. In addition to that, all our sessions are recorded by another player and uploaded to an unlisted youtube playlist we all have the link to.

This hasn’t bothered me as much as it has my boyfriend and one of the other players. I get he enjoys the game more casually than the others and I’m fine with it most of the time. The one thing that is kind of frustrating to me though, is that he just doesn’t pay attention, especially during combat.

His turns have always taken at least double the time (sometimes triple or even more) than anyone elses. And every time, he just ends up doing the exact same thing anyways. It has been two years and he still doesn’t understand how his character’s abilities or the character sheet on foundry work (for example, one and a half years in he asked what “AC” is). Also, he just doesn’t play well in a team. I can’t use lots of my spells in combat because he will always exactly stand where he will also be hit, or when I want to do a group heal (even when I announce it during the turn before) he will move exactly out of range. 

Everyone else has no problem with working as a team, everyone has at least a basic understanding what the others can do and can usually kind of predict what the plan for the next turns is going to be. Even when he discuss a plan before combat, Jake will completely forget or disregard anything that was discussed beforehand.

Additionally, he does not notice when it is his turn. We often have to call his name multiple times to grab his attention so he starts his turn. Then we have to spend the time to explain to him what everyone else did on their turns just for him to not use any of this information at all. One time we had an ally fighting alongside us and the first thing he did on his turn was attack that ally, even asking before “why this one has a yellow ring” (the enemies always have a red ring).

This has been brought up multiple times and it usually gets a little better for the session right after, and then it goes right back to the way it was before. We know that he often plays video games during the session and when we asked him not to do that, he said he doesn’t see the problem, because he knows I often crochet during other’s turns in combat and one other player sometimes plays solitaire on his phone. But the difference is, we are still able to pay attention while we do that.

Now, as the campaign is coming to an end pretty soon and I still manage to enjoy the sessions, I thought I’ll just keep the peace and don’t bother. But now we also started a Lancer campaign recently and my friend who is running it, has invited Jake to play as well.

With Lancer, we have after only 3 sessions, already ran into a couple of problems. The first one being that he let AI write his entire character backstory, so once again, he barely remembers it. When he first read it to us, all of us realized his character is working for a completely different goal and has basically complete opposite morals of our characters. Usually, I would see this as a fun roleplay opportunity, I don’t mind some in character friction. But when we mentioned it, he completely failed to understand why our characters would dislike him. We talked it through for almost an hour and he is still not understanding the issue. So I know if at any point his character does or say anything that ours disapprove of and we voice it, he will take it as an out of character offence and it will be a long discussion (this has happened a couple of times in pathfinder as well).

This was also the day it was revealed to me his pathfinder character’s backstory was also written by AI and that he does every single level up by asking ChatGPT what he should do, and then doing it, which hasn’t been working well at all.

He also does not pay attention during Lancer combat either. And I get it, our sessions have been 7-9 hours long so far, combat taking up at least 6 of those hours. All of us are on our phone from time to time during combat, even getting up from the table and going on the balcony sometimes, but we still pay attention. We know how our characters work and what they can do, and we do our best to keep our turns as short as possible. 

With him it’s the same as in pathfinder (recapping what everyone else did, him thinking of what he could do and asking how his abilities work, and then just doing the exact same thing in the end every time). His turns on average have been 15-20 minutes long. Maybe it’s more frustrating to me because we play Lancer in person and it’s more noticeable that he isn’t even trying to pay attention than it is online for pathfinder.

For the first two Lancer sessions I was sitting next to him and when I looked over I would find him actively chatting with ChatGPT most of the time. Other times he would loudly watch youtube videos during other people’s turns or talking with friends on the phone.

Another issue has been scheduling. We all understand that scheduling an in person game that’s supposed to take up about 8 hours of the day is harder than an online 3 hour pathfinder session, but it has started to feel intentional. 

Him and I are the most inflexible people of the Lancer group time wise (for me due to working 12 hour shifts for most weekdays and mostly being available on weekends). At first our GM sent a poll in our groupchat with possible dates. For the first 2 sessions this worked, but since then, Daniel always votes on it last and always exactly for the days I can’t make it. 

Then we tried it another way. I would just send every single day I am available for the coming month (it would usually be at least 8 days) and then our game master would send a poll with those dates and he would not be available for a single one.

This week, I asked him to please send in his availability for the coming month and said we would try and work around the days he can make it. He kept asking for me to send my days in first for multiple hours, saying he is free almost all the time. When I relented and sent in my days first, he couldn’t make any of them again.

My boyfriend is also part of the Lancer group and is even more frustrated about it than me. He also finds it weird that he can never make a single day I’m available anymore. And when I move around things to make it work with a day he said works (but didn’t originally work for me), he will cancel a day before. We haven’t played for 5 months now since our third session.

We get the feeling he isn’t actually enjoying the game. And that would be perfectly fine, I bet a lot of people wouldn’t have fun with 8 hour long combat sessions. But he just won’t say anything, and I’m afraid if one of us brings it up he will take it as us not wanting to play with him (which would be kind of true at this point, not going to lie, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings).

It feels so complicated because I truly like him and enjoy spending time with him, all of us do. When we hang out and don’t play any game, he is a blast to have around. I’m just at a loss on how to deal with this, because right now, it feels like Lancer will just keep being a huge problem and resentment will start to build up, which I don’t want to happen. So please, if anyone has advice for me, please give it to me.

[removed]

Hello, I already published this story in r/rpghorrorstory, if you feel like you've already read it now you know why

Hello everyone, English isn't my native language, but inspired by the various stories of other unfortunate players and DMs, I've decided to write about my most recent terrible experience. Warning: Content includes physical violence, gambling, explicit sexual content, SA, mild homophobia, abortions, and in-game violence against minors.

About three years ago, I taught D&D to a group of friends who enjoyed roleplaying on Discord. After I mastered a one-shot, one player decided to become a Dungeon Master by creating a homebrew campaign.

The story's characters and their respective characters are the following, whom I'll give nicknames to for privacy reasons:

-DM (M, 21): The Dungeon Master in question (90% of the problems)

-Phara (F, 21): A Tabaxin bard/cleric of death, the DM's girlfriend

-Ginny (F, 21): A Wood Elf Druid of the Moon Circle, very anonymous (she didn't come to sessions often)

-Eltoz: The DMPC, a very stereotypical Frieren genderswap

-Damacos (M, 22): A tiefling rogue/bard who played my best friend and with a rich background, joined later.

-Sanguinius (M, 21): My first character, an Aasimar Warrior/Sorcerer who was cursed with the unique power of wild magic and was crucial to the world's lore (think of him as a mix of Gandalf and Sanguignius from Warhammer 40k).

-Asmodeus: My second character, whom I later retired, a barbarian/Warlock who served as an avatar for Asmodeus himself.

Let me start by saying that the campaign is in a Homebrew setting that blends "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" and "Elden Ring." We've established the following Homebrew rules: multiclassing is optional, and multiclasses advance equally in both classes. With this explained, we can begin session 1. Our characters start in a tavern, taking the main quest from an NPC to bring an item to the other side of the world to finally kill the "demon king." It would be a classic start, except our characters end up in prison. Here we meet Ginny, whom we help get out of prison. That's when the problems begin. The GM has us face a homebrew golem with 25 AC at level 3. If we hadn't been creative and blown up the floor, we would have risked a TPK in the first session. Fast forward to the rest of the party and I find Damacos in a necromancer's dungeon. He's injured and his clothes torn, making us think something had happened to him. My friend doesn't take it well. Between one thing and another, we free him and start doing a side quest for the necromancer. The first problems were already starting to appear at the table.

The spear episode.

The DM asked us to privately send him some Homebrew items we'd like to have for our characters during the campaign. I remember perfectly that Damacos had requested a spear inspired by King's spear from 7DS. It was a particularly complex spear to use and had several transformations that would have created a perfect playstyle for a PC designed to be a "jack of all trades." After the necromancer quest, the DM had Damacos find the spear. All well and good, except that the DM asked Damacos to make an arcane roll to attune himself to the weapon. Damacos succeeded, rolling a very high number like 35. The DM said he couldn't attune. A few seconds later, he made the same request to Ginny, and she succeeded with a much lower number. Not wanting to make a fuss about the moment after the session, I asked the DM what DC Damacos would have to beat. He replied that even if he had rolled a 20 natural, he would never have attuned Damacos to the spear because, in his own words: "The spear is much more in keeping with Ginny than with Damacos, and besides, you're veterans; there's no point in giving you strong weapons right away." I promptly pointed out that regardless of everything, Damacos was upset and should at least apologize. The DM said he already had another item ready for him. A few sessions later, we found a chalice that, if activated by sacrificing 1d4 HP, could transform into a sword that only did 1d6 magical slashing damage. Damacos gave a tight smile as soon as he got it, intending to sell it for something else. In the same dungeon, he had had Phara find a +5 hammer that did 2d8 tag damage. + 1d12 radiant damage and that it did triple damage against Fiends and undead. Needless to say, both Damacos and I felt very obviously taken for a ride.

The first Pg change.

Shortly before the battle against the Necromancer, we faced a huge undead moose with divine powers. In lore, it was a being created from the body of an angel by the Necromancer. The fight was unbalanced: Phara dealt very high damage for level 6 PCs, while Io and Damacos dealt almost negligible damage, and Ginny wasted time figuring out how to use the spear because, in her opinion, it was too complicated. During the battle, the DM started focusing on my PC Sanguignius, who was a sorcerer warrior who used spells more and had little defensive ability. After the fight was over, I decided to switch characters after defeating the necromancer. I talked to the DM about it, telling him that not having a tank was the best thing to do. After about an hour of discussion, I showed up at the new session with Asmodeus, a demon who was supposed to represent wrath and had a sword that slowly transformed whoever wielded it into Asmodeus. The session was smooth except for the final boss he had us face. He had designed him as an enemy that would act as support for his minions. Realizing this immediately, Damacos and I acted accordingly, focusing on the boss, who was knocked out after a few turns. The DM didn't take it well at all, so Damacos and I gave him some suggestions on how to improve, giving advice like adding more gimmicks or putting more minions to act as mini bosses. DM said that these were stupid suggestions and that we were metagaming. In the session the following week, he will proceed to put all our suggestions on the table, passing them off as his own ideas.

Las Vegas Fantasy.

A few sessions after the party, he went to a highly developed steampunk city where prostitution and violence were commonplace. Soon, the city recognized the possibility of selling oneself into slavery to pay off debts. When we enter the city, we immediately see the degradation between the poor and the rich and we are approached by a boy who offers us to go to a brothel. As soon as we enter, an eccentric and annoyingly stereotyped homosexual guy welcomes us, offering women and men for the members of the party. Partly for the meme, partly because we are perverts, we accept everyone. When Ginny decided to take the room with two women, the DM turned up his nose but allowed it. The next day he made us roll a d20 and it ended up with Phara being impregnated by a gigolo. Seeing the slightly disgusted face of Phara's player, I decided to make her abort by making a medicine roll and giving her some herbs. While I did so, the DM looked at me badly the whole time and during the session he made us pay a lot, and not a little, he made all the prices of the items we needed extremely high and the bad sellers free. Subsequently after this compulsive shopping session we decided to continue with the Main quest and the situation worsens

The Anti-Magic Tower.

During our exploration, we discover that the duchess of this city has been kidnapped by a cult that worships the demon king, and we face their leader, who is an evil version of Percival de Rolo. The fight is interesting if it weren't for two battle gimmicks. The boss has a pistol that rolls 2d20 to hit; one determines whether or not it hits, while the other, if it rolls an 8 or higher, can continue shooting that turn as long as it rotates its target. The other is an anti-magic golem, a mini-boss. In short, every time a party character casts a spell, it is absorbed (without making a saving throw or anything else), losing the spell slot. Yes, even healing and bardic inspirations were included. While Asmodeus wasn't negatively affected by it, being a predominantly martial artist, I explained to the DM after the session that this mechanic ruined the fight, making all spellcasters, including his DMPC, useless, and that no one had any fun even during the second phase of the fight, where the magic field did stop working but everyone had already lost their slots.

The Slot Machine Episode

A few sessions after the boss fight, we were invited by the Duchess to the castle, but first, to pass the time, the DM made us gamble. He invented some tricks, rigging the games, like moving the CDs of the rolls without telling us, or sometimes making us roll at a disadvantage when playing roulette, etc. Having figured out the trick, Damacos and I went off to look for new ways to collect the money our companions were spending. So we decided to scam a rich NPC who was nearby. Shortly after we scammed him, Ginny, who had run out of gold, decided to accuse us to the guards of stealing the gold from these rich NPCs, expecting a reward in return. When the guards arrived, Damacos tried to convince them that we were innocent and that they were wrong, by making a deception test. The DM then decided, after the fact, that this test was only valid for Damacos, and he had Asmodeus captured anyway. While he was in prison, the guards asked him for sexual favors to get out of the cell. Obviously, I refused, and I was thrown in jail. Damacos broke me out with a teleportation spell. After the breakout, we mutually agreed that our PCs would take revenge on Ginny. Of course, when she asked why we were doing it, I promptly replied, "Asmodeus would do it after you sold us out." The DM had his DMPC cast hold person, and shortly thereafter, the session ended. When Ginny asked the DM what he got for his arrest, the DM shrugged and said, "The happiness of having done the right thing."

The Character Change

After about six sessions, where almost nothing incriminating happened, I realized I no longer cared about the group and that my character was following them for no apparent reason. I tried to talk to the DM about Asmodeus not being involved in the story. I brought this up at least once a week before the session until I got tired of it. I told him that, since I wasn't being listened to, I wanted to change characters. After about four weeks of pause, we resumed the session. At a certain point, after Ginny and Phara had been teasing Asmodeus throughout the session, I decided to say that he was disappearing into the bushes. I stared at the DM for the next three minutes, after which we started a heated argument. I essentially told him that if I didn't do this, he wouldn't listen to me and the DM didn't want me to create a new character. Finally, after about 1 hour and 57 minutes of discussion, I started using the character sheet again. Sanguinius's character and modify his build but only a little, now I don't remember the exact subclass of the warrior that forced me to choose but I was a little more satisfied and so we started to face the fight after

"Immunity to Physics"

In the next session, the DM had us face a version of the demon Qual from the anime Frieren: after the end of the journey, named after his unstoppable magic, Zoltrak. The fight was difficult due to some of the boss's very unbalanced abilities. Each of the four players had Counterspell, which we promptly used to cancel the spells he sent at us. This exclusive spell, called Zoltrak, had a damage type never seen before and could not be stopped by any means, not even with a shield or anything else. In other words, it was a cantrip that dealt 3d12 unspecified damage and would automatically hit. After hours of demeaning combat, we defeated and eliminated him, although it took the entire session. Shortly after, a few days, the DM told me that Zoltrak was immune to force damage and would take half damage to all damage types. This explains a lot, but I decided to shrug and ignore it.

Some random final things

After the Zoltrak episode, we went to the kingdom's capital to save it from the demons. In short, in this episode, the GM, to make me pay for switching characters again despite having forced me to bring back Sanguinius, came up with another of his brilliant ideas. My Sanguinius build was initially based on spear attacks, so a build that combined the Sentinel and Polearms Master talents, which, for those who don't know, prevented enemies from moving if hit by an attack of opportunity. The DM knew this, so he had us face a demon tormentor, an executioner whose gimmick was specific resistance to both magical and physical attacks of opportunity. After the session ended, he himself told me it was a countermeasure to eliminate me. I didn't play the following sessions with much involvement, and in fact I remember practically nothing from the subsequent sessions except for a rematch between my character and the tormentor. Damacos was missing at that point, and our group split in two for a double joint assault. I alone took care of him and a wyvern, even though I had no hope of level 10, even though I was playing in the hope of killing Sanguinius in that fight. The DM didn't let me die, transforming my sword into a weapon that would automatically bring me back from the dead regardless of whether I was in combat or not.

During session 0 of this campaign, we established specific rules: you always play every week, and the day is variable. You only skip if two people are missing. All of this led to a terrible situation where if Ginny was missing, Phara didn't want to participate, and the DM didn't want to continue the campaign because Phara didn't want to participate, and so on. Often, we'd go for entire periods of up to five months between sessions. When I pointed it out, they told me I was obsessed with D&D and that there was no session that week to "Punish Persistence." After a while, I got so annoyed that I lashed out at the group. After the umpteenth time I was told I was overreacting, I simply let it go. A few months ago, Damacos introduced me to his group of friends, the party I now play with regularly. They're fantastic people and we play every week barring any obstacles. I even got engaged to a player in that party. As for the previous campaign, time simply killed it; we left the story halfway through, and eventually the group disbanded.