r/dndhorrorstories

I don't know if this counts but I've always wanted to play DND but after this group its left a bad taste in my mouth.

I don't really get out of the house much (busy helping around and i can't drive) so I've been hoping to play online games of DND with friends or just anyone who'd take me on discord, but considering I'm someone who isn't comfortable being on VC I always wanted to do it through typing since that's what I'm better doing. I understand that it doesn't accommodate everyone so it's hard finding people who will.

I had a friend who offered to let me join her campaign since they do it discord roleplay style, so I obviously jumped at the chance to play finally. I wanna preface I didn't know nor do I still don't know how to actually play DND but my friend said it'd be fine cause the DM would teach me the basics and set up the campaign so I could jump in.

It was fine starting out, got a bit overwhelmed because it held a lot of homebrew in its setting and the DM had his own character creation thing attached to it, but I went along with it.

First problem arrived because the only character I made was a human wizard who used to be a court magician and all his spells were simple party tricks, the problem was he's bit of an asshole who thinks he's hotshit when in reality he isn't cause my plan was the party humbles him and he betters himself through out. Obviously since I don't know DND etiquette on characters, the group told me thats not how you're supposed to make your characters cause no one wants to play with someone like that (three of my friends would eventually tell me that's actually encouraged, to the point the dm of one of them even said that's the point of DND) but I didn't make a fuss about and made a ranger who just hunts monsters instead with no personality because I didn't have one yet.

Time passes by, no one has progressed the campaign, DM hasn't done what he's supposed to leading me to not understand the setting the campaign is in or what anyone's characters were. I get overwhelmed and decided to leave.

Time passes and I rejoin feeling more confident to tackle it, creating a new character which was a paladin.

I still never get freshed on the basics or what anything is, the campaign picked up after I left apparently and my friend is talking about me being a complete wreck. I also wanna preface I am not a political person, I don't understand politics so I tend to stay out but the second problem arised when one of the players got mad at me for not having an interest in politics and the like.

I try getting along with them because I don't know any of the people I'm supposed to be playing with aside from my friend, next thing I know my friend bursts into my dms mad at me for "latching" onto their friend. Context i apologized for bothering them because they just woke up and not everyone wants to chat when they've just woken up.

My friend at one point decided we needed to start taking a break from each other, and we chatted regularly up to that point so after a bit I started missing that.

I start talking to the other people on the server trying to get along with them, eventually mentioning how i miss chatting with my friend and stuff. Then I find out she blocked me, my friend who was an advocate for proper communication blocked me without telling me anything leaving me to figure out whats going on.

Then the guy who got upset with me about being uninterested in politics decided now was the best time to reveal that they just had problems with me the entire time I've been there.

Talking about my interests and stuff I like, talking to them privately, ranting and venting about things (ok fair) and how I tried too hard to be part of a group because all of that was supposed to take months and years of knowing them before any of that was allowed. I decide to leave, thinking it's for the best.

All of that time the DM has never set up the campaign a chance for me to jump in or ever teach me how I'm supposed to play.

Ive lost all interest in finding a DND group who can accommodate my no VC thing because dealing with that has just left a bad taste in my mouth and I don't really have an interest to give DND a try for quite a while. I admit I wasn't fully in the right in that situation either.

TLDR:

One player is incredibly rude and mocks the theatrical return of my PC to the party citing as a trope although the rest of table finds my short monologue to be pretty neat and had missed my character's presence.

Background:

I took over as DM for this campaign for the summer to put the party through a side adventure in the Underdark -- the regular DM wanted a break. I told him I'd only do it for the summer but he'd have to take it back by September.

Story:

I had been playing an Elven Cleric before I took over the campaign and in terms of story he had gone off for more training for a while. The party was now gonna face a BBEG as they came out of the Underdark a bit more toothsome -- sadly the campaign didn't last until we got the BBEG.

I decided for a bit of flair for the dramatic -- my character would be described as walking through the mists in a village and being there at just the right moment to return to the party. This was also a way for me to re-introduce him such as describing his appearance -- the party actually did miss him quite a bit -- and tidbits on some of the things he had on his person from our previous adventures.

When I got about half way through my monologue -- which was only going to last a few short minutes -- one player loudly made snoring noises and yelled (at the top of his lungs) on how stupid the scene was and how dumb I must be for resorting to tropes. I should mention this player was autistic and thought nothing of being rather rude -- he didn't generally care if you had a problem with it because it was part of him being autistic so it was okay.

I told him it was rude but he still said it was really stupid. He immediately thrust a screen in front of me -- I can't remember if it was a laptop or tablet -- showing me the tropes he had looked up on TV Tropes to illustrate his point. I calmly explained again how he was being very rude and obnoxious -- I kept a calm voice and wasn't resorting to personal insults. I also explained how he had just hurt my feelings and this would have made other players flee the table and feel unwanted.

He seemed to back down just a bit but we decided to call it there as he had turned the tables to essentially say it was now our faults for trying to make him feel bad for "yelling" at him. There was a slight raised tone from some players but we all had known him for years -- tried in vain to work with him on his behaviors -- and people just decided to walk away from that day's session.

I am the DM for my group and it is my favorite thing to do. I love preparing my sessions almost as much as I like running them. I'd been running DnD for a couple years at that point and Daggerheart had just come out. I really wanted to play it and it wasn't hard to convince my PCs to try a mini-campaign.

They voted on the setting and Age of Umbra won. I was thrilled because horror is my favorite genre. Fall is my favorite season and Holloween was right around the corner, so I was super excited to play a spooky and dark mini-campaign. My only restriction on character creation was to not make a character that would clash with the setting and mood of the game. I told them they could still make jokes and have fun, but don't betray the tone of the setting, especially if I am obviously going through the trouble of building tension.

My brother showed up to play and it turned out he was playing the biggest joke character I have ever seen. He had the name gimmick, over the top joke parody music, the hole nine yards. This immediately clashed with the tone. I had my own horror music playlist I was using and suddenly going from that to a parody song already had me irritated.

Imagine if Austin Powers was dropped into the middle of a movie like Hereditary, Oculus, or Sinister. The tone was killed immediately. His character ended up getting killed in the first session. He made another character mid session and that new character somehow ended up being an even BIGGER joke character than the last one. He was hostile towards the party and it felt like he was deliberately tanking the session with characters that just didn't fit the worldq. I have never been so angry while running a game before.

I am a pretty calm and easy going person. I don't get angry easily. I am very even keel, but after that game I scalded the hell out of him over text since we drove separatelyto where we would play. He didn't want to play Age of Umbra in the first place. He voted for something else and then pouted when it lost during session 0. He didn't want to play Daggerheart specifically because you don't role a D20 as your main die. So I truly believe that those characters were essentially him throwing a hissy fit like a child because he didn't get his way. This was back in late September-October and I still get mad when I think about it

Edit: I did have a Session 0. That's when we decided which setting we would use. He picked a different character, but called me later to ask if he could change it. I told him as long as it doesn't clash with the tone I didn't care. I guess I just trusted him too much

So I was gonna join this game and I was really really excited for it so I messaged some of the other players like the day of the day before just being like hey I’m really excited to meet all of you and I’m really excited to join this game and we finally get to the day of the game and we get there and not only the DM arrival late which I mean it’s fine. That stuff happens but he takes all of the current players into a call without me and leaves me there for like two hours and then just randomly kicks me.

Now what he said was that I had made people uncomfortable because I DM them and reflecting, I can understand how I can make someone comfortable and I know Reddit you only getting one side of the story I do have screenshots of text exchanges between all the players and stuff just so I have proof, but all my conversations were very friendly. I was not saying anything to provoke an idea of hitting on anybody and they said I was singling out the female players which I did message most of the players and just happens most of the players are women, but I’m very not into women. Like my character was an anthropomorphic bunny girl. Also the player I was talking the most to was a guy and I promise you there was no inclination of hitting on him.

I need to know if I’m going crazy or if I stumbled upon a game that was really really not good because they have had a lot of turnover rate and it’s just driving me crazy please leave any questions in the comments or DM cause I really wanna get someone else’s input on this and we’ve already even asked if any of them had do not interact or do not message in like the rules or anything like that. I double checked the game page and there was no indication anywhere that you shouldn’t message your fellow players now if somebody told me, hey, please don’t DM me. I would’ve been like I’m so sorry. It will never happen again, but I never even got a chance to correct the behavior please please I need someone’s input on this.

The title wanted to be provocative but it's not far from reality. I just want to share my experience, hoping that someone might be help me trying to find some resolution; I will try to make it a short as possible.
So, I've always been in a group of friends interested in TTRPGs. In the past we used to try, even for a bit, different RPG systems. One member of the group insisted to DM for us in what should've been a year long campaign; matter of fact, at least 4 years passed, 4 years of increasingly bad and slog-ish campaigns. Now, most of us are fed up and extremely bored and disappointed with the situation, but we are trying to endure just for the sake of reaching the end of what, we hope, will be the final campaign and no to upset 3 new players that joined us.
Now, this last campaign really made me reach my limit, to the point I've actually take pauses during these months to miss some sessions. The reasons are many, from the extremely heavy use of Chatgpt in the script (the story makes no sense at all) to the continuous use of stuff taken from popular medias ( and I don't mean just taking inspiration, but literally a copy-paste process involving only a change of names) and much much more.
Now we, as a group, are probably going to be asked about our thoughts about the campaign and I don't know what to say because I don't want to hurt my friend. We had so many projects in mind but everyone is feeling very exhausted and I fear we won't play any TTRPGs in a long time because of this.
Has any of you ever found yourself in a situation like this? How did you solve it?

Trigger warning: Brief themes of assault. No actual assault. No one was harmed during this story.

This story isn't as dramatic as some of the tales on here, but I think it's pretty ridiculous, and an example of how one player can totally tank a campaign. It began when I joined a party on StartPlaying.Games, which might've been my first mistake, I don't know. Anyway, at first it was myself and three other players who were getting on pretty well with the DM. Especially one older gentleman who was a high school Spanish teacher, great guy. A few days before session zero, a fifth player was added. My alarm bells started going off right away, because his Discord screen name was “Jack Napier,” as in The Joker, and he started posting edgelord shit on main without context. Stuff like “my life is unknown suffering,” and “all ends are just beginnings.” Massive red flags right off the bat.

He missed session 0 (another red flag) and we all made our characters without him. A day before session 1 he revealed on Discord his character. I'm not kidding, this was his guy. He had made a chaotic evil rapist murderer drow, who's entire motivation for becoming an adventurer was so he could find both people and animals to rape and murder, but it was okay because bandits, wolves, and goblins are evil so it doesn't matter if he does that to them. Obviously, we players were all vehemently against this, even moreso when the DM confirmed it had been run by him first. I'm utterly, completely baffled the DM even entertained the possibility of allowing it. In an edgelord huff, he said he'd have a new character for session 1 tomorrow.

To his credit, he did come up with a character only a few hours after this debacle. Unfortunately, it was a meme character that he clearly made because he was mad we wouldn't allow him to be a literal sexual predator. His new character was a giant sentient weasel bard who wore a red trench coat and spoke in a voice that I can only describe as vaguely-Dutch Micky Mouse. This weasel wasn't, like, a beastfolk or anything, nor was it the monster from the MM. It was a man-sized weasel that walked on two feet and told bad jokes. I'm pretty sure he used a reskinned human. I genuinely don't remember his name, so we'll call him Weaselly.

Session 1 started and the party was tasked with solving a break-in at some rich dude's manor. For some reason, this rich guy also hired a rival adventuring party to solve this crime. It would be a race between the two parties to see who could figure it out first and get the reward. Before we've even left the manor, Weaselly went up to the leader of the rival adventurers, spat on his face, pushed him, and insulted his mother. The only reason we didn't fight right then and there was because the party druid cast Charm Person and my halfling paladin succeeded on a persuasion check to calm things down.

Later in the session, we'd tracked a potential lead to an old forest thicket, where we were attacked by a bunch of assorted beasts. Weaselly, going first in initiative, charged headlong into the largest group of beasts, didn't attack them, but instead let them knock him unconscious. Even after I'd healed him, he just laid there acting unconscious until the fight ended. We were all pretty frustrated, so the DM called the session early.

Session 2 the next week, we ended up in a large town. There, we collected a rumor that a magic store had been broken into. Seeing the connection between that and the manor, we went to speak with the shopkeeper. All of us but one, that is. Weaselly instead began a twenty minute shopping spree just buying random shit. A rug, a hat, a crowbar, a fishing net, nothing overly useful, just wasting time. It only ended when the DM forcibly cut to the plot, over at the magic store.

While the rest of us were now talking to the shopkeeper, Weaselly burst in, shouting at the top of his lungs, and started just messing around with stuff. He drank a random potion (which he did not pay for), tried to steal a wand, tossed about a bunch of paper, and spilled some ink on the floor. The shopkeeper cast Hold Person on him and that was that. It was agreed that the shopkeeper wouldn't report this to the guards if we got his stolen goods back. There would be no reward for this quest, Weaselly saw to that.

So, we tracked the bandits to an abandoned mill, where we got in a fight with them. Weaselly spent the entire fight just casting Vicious Mockery. He never used any spell slots, never gave out any bardic inspiration, just ran in circles around the map telling his bad jokes at the bandits. When that rival adventuring party eventually showed up, Weaselly tried to cast Hideous Laughter on the leader, which actually would've been a good move. It didn't work, however, so Weaselly ran away and hid behind a tree off the map. His antics wasted so much time that the session was cut in the middle of this fight, to be picked up in the next session.

I would not make it to session 3. Less than an hour after this clown show, I contacted the DM and told him I'd be leaving the campaign, and I was very particular in mentioning that Weaselly was the reason. I'd built up a decent rapport with the Spanish teacher, so I messaged him that I'd be leaving the campaign as well. That's when he revealed he'd also left, and the druid had as well, leaving just Weaselly and the other player I haven't mentioned yet, who was playing a high elf wizard. I don't know what happened with the campaign after that, but I can't imagine it recovered after losing three out of five players. This was a year ago, and has since been my one and only time using StartPlaying.Games.

It's obvious this problem player was just lashing out because we nixed his original extremely problematic character. I'm beyond amazed that the DM allowed any of this to happen. As far as I know, there were no conversations about his antics, and no attempts to remove him from the game, which ultimately led to the campaign likely falling apart.

TLDR: The Joker ruins everything.

This all started when one of my friends invited me to a campaign of his, I was kinda thirsty for a campaign as I had mainly played in one shots till then, so when he told me a mutual friend we'll call D and one other friend of his were in it I was excited to meet him. First session comes around and an important note, I was 16 at the time and D was 18, DM was in his late 20s so I though I would find out this friend, lets call him "Jay", to be about the same age, 20s maybe early 30s. Well to my surprise I find a 50 something year old fellow who's been playing D&D since 3.5 edition.

The first session goes well, I wont get too deep into the premise of the campaign as that isn't very relevant to the story, but its an Isekai type story where the PC's are from other worlds entirely, finding themselves in this foreign world. But one thing I did notice was that Jay was constantly debating the DM on rules that were from 3.5, when we were clearly playing 5e. I didn't think much of it, but it got slightly annoying. The DM told him it was 5e but he just kept doing it!

Second session rolls around and I really start to see what kinda character Jay is playing. A wizard with the overall goal of learning all kinds of spells out there. Turns out he can use spells from other editions and even other games (eg. pathfinder) at first I was confused as to why he could do that, but later on it was explained to me (by the DM) that it was an ability he had, since the isekaied characters could bring abilities from their own worlds, that was his. Another thing that came off as a red flag to me was that he said that theatre of the mind was for "poor people" and that D&D was meant to be played with minis. Either way, he was very critical of other players, constantly telling us how to play our own characters an example is that he questioned why I don't use more spells other than eldritch blast when I was a Warlock, a class notorious for having little to no spell slots. You could write it off as him trying to give advice but it comes off more condescending than helpful.

Another quarrel I had with this player is that he's been wining for almost the entire campaign that we should switch from milestone to XP, and the DM said that he's seriously considering switching just to shut him up instead of putting it to a party vote, which I feel just shows the DM's bias towards the situation.

One last thing I noticed is that he doesn't use any devices, like at all! and he complains that me and D use D&D beyond instead of paper. He explains that "thats basically a video game were playing a tabletop game!" but when we do play he wants to do XP and constantly reminds us to fill up water skins and rations, which I feel is the most videogame like ascpect of D&D. I find that quite hypocritical.

My real question is, what should I do, I cant ask the DM to kick this player because he's a friend of his, I feel like the DM is giving Jay some special attention and feel powerless to do anything, your thoughts.

This campaign started at level 3 over Discord. I should have taken a firmer stance earlier, but I didn’t because I managed to look past the red flags and thought “no harm, no foul” until it blew up in our faces. I also know next to nothing about mental health and it’s really going to show. The cast is as follows:

• Me (20f), mentally sound and playing Cassius, a 13-year-old eladrin bardlock; a kid by Eladrin standards.
• Watermelon (17-18), who often talked about their mental health struggles in the server’s venting channel and played Wizard the 13-year-old shifter. Shifters reach adulthood at 10.
• Raspberry, who played Rogue
• Papaya, who played Paladin 
• Clementine, who played Cleruid
• And the dungeon master

In this server, every campaign gets its own channel for OOC discussion, and we liked to show off art of our characters. Watermelon gushed over the pictures I sent of Cass (who looks like a doll for backstory reasons).

As flattered as I was, I also found it a little excessive. But maybe Watermelon was just super invested in Cassius; there’s been a couple times where I’d also gotten more invested in a character than their own creator did. 

Besides, I’m not going to tell someone to stop complimenting my character. 

Come the first session, and Wizard immediately glommed onto Cass. They always talked to him first when RP happened and tried to butt into every conversation he had with Paladin, Rogue, or Cleruid, so I stopped initiating RP with Wizard because they more than made up for it themself. 

Rogue loved having a kid around to mentor (re: be a terrible influence on) and Cass, for his part, found him unbearably cool. Raspberry wanted to teach Cass to use thieves’ tools, so he, the dungeon master, and I came up with a mechanic to make that happen. Over the next several sessions, Cass drifted closer to Rogue than any of the others. Clementine and Papaya didn’t seem to mind. Watermelon, on the other hand… One day, Wizard told Cleruid to heal Cass before Rogue, and Watermelon started begging when Clementine pointed out that Rogue was getting walloped in the middle of melee while Cassius was buffing/debuffing from the sidelines and wasn’t getting hit as much. 

Raspberry called a timeout and revealed that he felt Watermelon had been being passive-aggressive towards him through their characters for no discernible reason and even unfriended him (wed all agreed to friend each other for the duration of the campaign), so the dungeon master dragged Watermelon and Raspberry into a private voice call. They came back several minutes later after supposedly having made peace, Cleruid healed Rogue, and Rogue ended the fight rolling death saves anyway. The dungeon master called session and the party would deal with the aftermath next week. 

Come next week, Wizard hugged Cassius like they were trying to get the last of the toothpaste out. There was a back-and-forth with Cass trying to wiggle away and Wizard trying to hang on. Then they tried to kiss him. I had a WTF moment at that, but I’d found this comedic up to this point and assumed it was just escalating the bit, so I laughed along and Cass smacked Wizard, and Watermelon PMed me to ask what that was for. It was such a stupid question that I couldn’t think of how to answer, so I didn’t and promptly forgot about it.

A few sessions later, the party had to get each other’s backstories, and Cass guards his like nuclear launch codes and tried to tell a version that left out everything he didn’t want to talk about, but the party wasn't having it. I said OOC that I wouldn't mind if they cast Zone of Truth or something on him. Right as Cleruid was gearing up to do just that, Paladin pulled Cass aside, got him to cast Zone of Truth on her, and swore up and down that she wouldn’t use a word he said against him. So he opened up. 

In the campaign channels a few days later, Watermelon said they wanted Zone of Truth, and lamented when Clementine pointed out that wizards couldn’t cast that. I said I wanted Life Transference too, but bardlocks can’t have it. Clementine admitted he wanted Prestidigitation. I asked the dungeon master if the party could teach each other spells like Rogue taught Cass to use thieves’ tools. He agreed as long as we didn’t get any more spell slots than RAW allowed and both the character teaching the spell and the one learning it both had IC justification to want to do so. Watermelon suggested that Wizard would do it because they were in love with Cass and I shot it down. 

Then I remembered the kiss and PMed Watermelon about it. 

Me: Hey so that kiss. Were u joking or was it sincere?

Watermelon: Sincere

Me: Well that’s creepy af

Me: Cass is 13, I’m 20, and you’re almost 18. I don’t want to have him get involved in a relationship with Wizard, especially not with our ages.

Watermelon: Wizard is also 13.

Me: That’s an adult for Shifters. Even if u homebrewed Wizard to age at the same rate as Cass, I’d feel weird RPing romance with a 17yo, and a 17yo wanting to RP romance between a pair of 13yos is creepy imo. One of them being an adult makes it worse. 

Me: No more of that, ok?

Watermelon never replied to that, but I figured a message that clear didn’t need follow-up, so I turned my attention back to the call. Next week, once the awkwardness had passed (or so I thought), Watermelon and I (mostly I, because Watermelon just nodded along to whatever I suggested) decided that Cassius would pester his patron every once in a while to get spell scrolls for Wizard in exchange for the lessons, and on Cassius’s end, he’d teach Wizard spells because he needs them to think he’s useful.

One day, Rogue asked to pull Cass aside to talk away from everyone else. Wizard tried to follow. Raspberry said the conversation’s supposed to be private (At least IC), but Wizard insisted on staying because they need to protect Cass. From Rogue? So Raspberry and I grilled Watermelon about why they thought Rogue was bad news, and they couldn’t come up with anything, so they backed off, asked us to forget that happened, and didn’t say a word the rest of the session.

Cass is illiterate and suuuper insecure about it, and Wizard is super bookish. One day, Cleruid asked why Cassius always gave the spell scrolls he got from his patron to Wizard to teach him, instead of learning them himself, then rolled insight, passed, and realized Cass can’t read. Wizard tried to comfort Cass and tell him it’s nothing to be ashamed of. 

Cassius doesn’t take coddling well, so he tried to deflect and insist doesn’t care that he can’t read (liar liar toga on fire). Watermelon wouldn't let it go and brought it up at every bit of downtime. Eventually, I asked Watermelon for Wizard’s passive insight, which was high enough for them to tell that Cassius really, really didn’t want to talk about it and was barely managing to hide red-hot rage behind saccharine politeness. Watermelon didn't ask again. 

The morning after the session, they PMed me. 

Watermelon: hey

Watermelon: I’m feeling really down rn 

Me: Oh no

Watermelon: I can’t stop thinking abt the fight with Cass 

Me: What fight? It was just an insight check

Watermelon: I’m scared I’ll cut

Me: wat

Me: You’re going to cut over the fight or am I misreading?

Watermelon: Yeah that’s right

Me: Over DnD? 

Me: It’s just a game bro. Idk what to tell u except don’t ig 

With that, I snapped my laptop shut and went to do the dishes. In hindsight, I should have told the mods, but I didn’t because I figured that Watermelon must’ve been pulling my leg (A valid reason to go to the mods in and of itself, now that I think about it). Surely there was no goddamn way in the nine hells any sane person would actually go so far as to cut themself over a GAME!

Fast forward several sessions. Mid-week, Watermelon replied to my “I don’t want to RP romance with a 17yo” PM to tell me it was their 18th birthday, which didn’t change my stance at all so I ignored it. Probably shouldn’t have. Cass, Wizard, and Cleruid had traded some spells, including Life Transference. 

During the session, Paladin went down in the middle of a fight, so Cassius cast Life Transference on her. After the fight, Paladin was equal parts proud of Cassius for doing that, horrified that he’d nearly sacrificed himself, furious at him, and at Wizard for teaching him such a self-destructive spell. Wizard was losing their mind over Cassius getting hurt and insisting everything was their fault. Paladin snapped that it was. 

Watermelon, breaking character, squawked and retorted that Wizard was just “yapping” because they were worried about Cass. Papaya said she knew that and OOC she thought the whole situation was dope af, but IC, Paladin does feel that it’s Wizard’s fault for teaching Cass how to cast Life Transference. Watermelon didn’t say a word the rest of the session and left early, saying they were having a bad mental health day. 

A couple sessions later, Cass and his 8 str ended an encounter pinned by an Entangle spell. As soon as the villain went down, Wizard ran to Cassius not to get him free, but to kiss him. I called a timeout to remind them that I’d said no romance because it’s CREEPY. The dungeon master told them off too. Watermelon tried to insist that Wizard was just overwhelmed with emotion. I pointed out that 1) Why is one of those emotions lust? 2) Cassius is a tween and Wizard is an adult by their race’s standards. 3) Even ignoring the hebephillia, kissing someone without asking, especially if they’re tied up, is gross. 4) I’d said no romance because it’s CREEPY. 

Watermelon: But Wizard loves him!

And their voice broke. 

Me: Are you crying? 

Watermelon: Why can’t you just play along? They’re both 13; it’s not that big of a gap, is it? I love him!

Dungeon master: Wizard is an adult and Cassius isn’t, even if they’re the same age. That's a big deal. 

Me: You love him? He’s not real. What’s wrong with you?

Watermelon: He’s real enough to make me cut!

Record scratch. Papaya and the dungeon master started spam-pinging the mods, but it was late and none of them were online.

Me: You cut yourself? 

Watermelon: YES!

Me: Over DnD? It’s just a game. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph – OVER A GODDAMN GAME!? 

In hindsight, I should have been nicer to someone melting down right in front of my eyes. But at the time, all I saw was a big baby who needed a reality check. 

Watermelon: It hurts me when Cass won’t pay attention to them.

Me: You cut yourself over a fictional kid ignoring your original-character-do-not-steal? It’s just DnD. IT’S A FUCKING GAME. WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU, BRO?

My dad heard that and knocked on my door to ask what’s going on/tell me off for swearing, so I hopped off the call to explain myself and then went to bed. 

When I opened Discord again the next morning, Watermelon had either left or been banned, and the mods had added a hotlines channel and PMed me to explain that there was more to Watermelon’s meltdown than just “being a big baby” as soon as they pieced together what happened. 

Watermelon and I share a couple other servers and they went from chronically online in both to radio silent. They also haven't unfriended anyone from the server as far as I can see, not even me. The campaign died. The dungeon master is traumatized and just plays in one-shots now. Watermelon had been running a campaign at the time; Raspberry started his own and poached a few of their players. I joined it too, bringing Cassius with me because I like him too much to give him up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X: I want to climb the tree

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

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

GM: Roll for Acrobatics

X: I rolled too low

GM: You fail

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

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

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

Hello, it´s my first time posting on Reddit, so I´m sorry if my formatting is off. Also, English isn´t my first language, so there might be a few mistakes, I apologize for that too.

I (24 F) run a campaign with one of my best friends Lilo (25 F), her boyfriend Anton (28 M) and my boyfriend David (27 M). (All names are fake) David and Anton have been best friends for a long time but kinda grew apart a little. I have also only ever run campaigns for friends, so I´m not the most knowledgeable or seasoned DM.

We had a session 0 and have been playing this campaign for a year when Anton asked me if he could change his character. He got bored of his first one. I allowed it and he created one. He played his character as a know-it-all who took himself way too seriously, which David couldn´t stand. Since there were no rules broken I asked them to sort it out amongst themselves. They are good friends after all so it felt right at that time. I also don´t know everything that was said.

After that Anton decided he wanted to try to make a third character and play that one instead. I get the thrill of character creation so I don´t mind it. He created a new character and when it came to playing he yet again started playing a know-it-all. At the start of the session it was fine but as the session went on he started saying things like "I know how to do it in a better way than you! But I won´t tell you what it is because you´re the one doing it and i don´t get to do it!" (out of character) or just belittling him for his decisions and actions. This all was directed solely towards David, who was getting fed up. I tried to intervene and it stopped for a bit but I got told later that there were underhanded comments being said towards David that I didn´t catch.

I don´t know if that is something I should be handling, since I´m the DM, or if it´s something the two of them should sort out. I want everyone to feel welcome at the table but I also don´t want to put David through this again. He himself said that Anton ruined his fun playing DnD.

David and I talked about it afterwards and we don´t know why Anton does it only to David. I could be interpreting into this but it feels like he needs to put David down to feel better about himself? I don´t know, is there anything I can do in game to help or change the situation? They both play introverted and distrusting characters, so I really don´t know how I could fix this in game. I also don´t want to meddle in their friendship out of game.

Also, for context: Lilo and Anton are both in a relationship for the first time. That means that Lilo does not find anything bad about Anton´s behavior and basically worships and praises him constantly. In her eyes he can do no wrong. So talking to her wouldn´t help either otherwise I would´ve tried that already.

Another thing: I don´t play favorites. If I can´t decide who gets to do something like questioning the NPC I let the dice decide. The dice is visible to the players, so there´s no fudging the outcome.

I´m so sorry if it´s all over the place. I try to make it understandable while adding all the context I feel is necessary. I would really appreciate any help or advice on how to handle this.

TLDR: One of my players is belittling the other one and I don´t know how to correct it or if it´s my place to correct it

Edit: I told David about this post and he told me to seek advice for the both of us. He doesn´t know how to breach the subject AGAIN to Anton. Any advice for either of us would be greatly appreciated.

My friend of around 6 years is insufferable. For some context, I started playing DnD about 4 years ago, and Magic: The Gathering about a year ago, and particularly in MTG, he is a baby. I recently learned how to properly build good decks and started winning. His response? Build the scummiest Mono-blue counterspell deck within Bracket 4. A quarter of his deck, 25 cards, are counterspells. This gives some context to his personality, he has to win, and he gets mad when he doesn’t. Today, we played a little campaign, and the theme is post apocalyptic earth, with mutants and such. Now, our mission is to eliminate all mutants and mutagens within a compound. Just about every creature has an ability to force a con save and paralyze you, or remove you from not only combat, but the game at large. I spent roughly 30 minutes watching my friends play dnd before I got on my phone. He then threw a fit and loudly proclaims “if you’re on your phone, the monsters can hear it!” I wasn’t wearing earbuds because I wanted to know when I was allowed to get out of the proverbial cuck chair, and I had the volume very low. He did not specify, by the way, how long I would be out, and our cleric got lucky and got syringes with the cure to my condition, but who knows how long I would’ve had to watch. I almost packed up my stuff and left then and there.

The main problem I have is that we have no recourse for his behavior. If we sat down to talk with him, he would deflect, blame, and finally pull the “I’m the host” card, even though his sister usually plans things.

Am I the asshole for suggesting that we cut him from the group?

Hey, before I say anything I should say that this wasn’t DnD but we we’re playing Vampire: the masquerade. For those who don’t know, in vampire all players are vampires suffering under the strict rules of the masquerade. It’s incredibly RP heavy, some campaigns will go months without any role for initiative!

At this one shot me and the DM were the only ones experienced with Vampire, me and DM were there to help everyone through all the confusing dice roles and such. I played Angel who was part of the Nosferatu clan (vampires who are deformed, connected with animals, and tend to be spies) but I wore a mask to cover the ugliness. I also gave myself the flaw ‘child’ meaning I turned to a vampire at 14 years old but in reality I was a 40 year old women (which is still young for vampires).

When I explained I was a spy but went under the radar for appearing so young, Hannah(fake name) decided I was secretly a mole and in character decided to constantly make rude comments and always fought me (remember I was there to help guide the new players). She wasn’t the only offender of this but she was definitely the loudest one about it and the others were more teasing me.

At this oneshot we were sent by our sires(the vampires who turned us) into this haunted house, the doors were locked but there was a small window for someone to squeeze in. Me, playing the body of a 14 year old girl, immediately went in. I was now in the basement and proceeded to break open a window and call for everyone. We split up, me and Hannah went down stairs further to the basement while everyone went upstairs. Hannah proceeded to ditch me, lock the door, and run up. Trust me, I tried everything to push this door open but I kept on rolling sloppy and we had to move on to everyone else.

My DM kept on asking if anyone wanted to help me but everyone for some reason was just “nah, she’ll find a way out” but I never did. When I sensed it was nearing the end of the one shot and all my rolls were shit I just went to the bathroom. Of corse I was pissed off in the moment but now the image of me peeing while holding back angry tears is so funny.

When I came back though, the DM I guess knew I was pissed/sad and decided to let me out even though my roll was bad again. He’s my DM for my current campaign so he knows when I get upset I guess.

Unrelated but Hannah also kept on using she/her pronouns for me out of character, and yeah I understand because I’m a trans man who hasn’t gone under any reassignment surgery so I appear feminine but I wrote he/him on my name tag and had a he/him pronouns pin on my shirt.

So I’ve been watching Den of the Drake and other DND story Youtubers for a while now (sidenote, Drake is my absolute favorite! He’s made me learn how I want to GM my own games and how to better myself as a player. Plus the voices he puts on are iNCREDIBLE and really help bring the stories to life! Dude should seriously consider doing audiobooks!) and decided to finally post the story of my first experiences with TTRPG‘s. DND 5e and the Cypher system by Monty Cook Games. (The Cypher system is an underrated TRPG. Would honestly recommend it if you want to do more story and role-play centered games. it’s genre neutral with a lot of expansions. Anyway, no more shilling.)

There are two important characters to this story, each one being a DM, their fake names will be Pinky and Brain. (Yes after the show) All of this happened a long time ago, BTW. A little over a decade.

After years and years of me pitching the idea of a DND club to my school, even almost getting involved with the student government to bring it to life, Pinky started to host one. When I heard this news, I was ecstatic! The only DND I’ve ever been able to play couldn’t even be cLASSIFIED as an actual game. Basically just role-playing with the occasional “guess what number I’m thinking of” sort of stuff. Most people had no experience with DND, so having a session zero just to figure out what we would even be doing would’ve been nice. There were about 16 players in this game with only one GM. Not a great start.

If you were lucky to catch Pinky after school, he’d help you fill out your character sheet. Only about half got to meet with him. Meaning the first session was mostly just people sitting around bored while people made characters. I COULD’VE BEEN AT MCDONALD’S FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! I have no problems with setting up characters during the first session,, but with so many people it starts to really burn people out just sitting there doing nothing. It’s also important to know, we had NO IDEA what ANY of the stuff we were we selecting even did! Pinky would just give us vague answers if we asked any questions. I was so new at the time I didn’t even know how the basic stats worked! Now I won’t be too harsh on Pinky, I learned later that he was new to DMing. For this club he even spent his own money to get the books. So I’ll let him off the hook a little bit.

For the sake of transparency, this lack of knowledge I feel led me to becoming a problem player. We had no discussion on etiquette and I had been coming off of games like Skyrim. So I would often interject in role-plays I didn’t belong. I was used to being the main character and not having a session zero didn’t tell me what the expectations of the game were for stuff like this. My second character even almost killed a PC the first day they joined the club and had spent two and a half hours making a character! I mean, that guy was discovered to be a huge racist piece of shit at one point calling one of the black players at the table his slave, this was out of game not even in the club room, so maybe it was cosmic justice. But still! I literally used the phrase “it’s what my character would do“. luckily I was able to have the self-awareness to knock that shit off. (If I could realize that in about 12.08 seconds, there’s no excuse for the people that can’t!)

I wish I could say I enjoyed the game. I did end up meeting some friends there who I still play with to this day, and considered to be my closest friends, but the size of the group, along with the other stuff I will mention, just made me not enjoy playing. We would spend so long just sitting there waiting for our chance to do anything. It was terrible. But this is where I stop, giving Pinky the benefit of the doubt. He promised us that our back stories would be relevant to the game. Me, and a few other people in the group, spent literal weeks writing and rewriting our back stories. We weren’t making them super long or anything. I think the longest one was about five pages? But nothing… I repeat, NOTHING, was EVER used from ANY of the players! All of that time wasted, and it never became relevant. That’s, in my opinion, one of the worst things you can do to a player. If you can’t guarantee their backstory will show up you should tell them that. Not act like it’ll be some huge important thing that will help shape the world and story then just never do anything with it! Still pisses me off to this day.

For the first six months of the campaign, we just never got to use our character sheets. Pinky would have them, but whenever our turns came up we always had to ask what options we had at our disposal instead of us keeping track. Really didn’t solve the problems of us not knowing the system. Probably made it worse honestly. He did eventually make a custom hyperlinked Google doc character sheet layout so it would be easier for us to use our sheets, which I respect, but you still gotta give your players’s access so that they can, you know, play the fucking game! We had some spell casters in our party as well! Imagine that, trying to remember your spell slots and cantrips off the top of your head. Genuinely insane.

Lastly, the thing that relates to me the most is how we just didn’t get to know the lore of the setting. I’m not sure if we were using a module, but it was all base game stuff. But again, none of us knew the base game stuff! One of my characters was going to be a multi class paladin cleric. I wanted him to be a holy knight type character. But instead of going over the pantheon he just had me worshiped Leviathan. If I remember, that’s a god of war, but is also lawful good. that’s at least what he told me. My character did become slightly lawful stupid, but I was new to the game so can’t really beat myself up that bad. But it genuinely pisses me off that I was just given this god. Now that I know actual basics about DND, I can tell you I would’ve wanted to be a pallet of Helm and a cleric of Illmatter. A knight who defends the innocent and tries to take on the suffering of others so that they don’t have to suffer themselves sounds AWESOME! But instead, I became generic paladin number 557.

Now it’s time for you to meet Brain! He was a second GM that came in a year or so after the club started. Apparently, he had more experience! Great right? Ha ha WRONG! He hosted the Cypher system. Let’s get one thing straight, i’m planning to run a Cypher system game, and I can tell you Brain did NOT run this game correctly. Maybe it was slightly different before the revised version came out, but I can’t find anything online about the major differences. He neglected to use damage track, a very important thing to the game that essentially acts as crippling/debilitating wounds the closer you get to death, and he gave us a printout of the names of descriptors (things that affect your stats), types (classes) and foci (essentially secondary classes) with no descriptions of what they even did or which was which. He set up the characters correctly, but trying to build them ourselves was impossible! Literally throwing darts blindfolded! If I had to hesitate a guess, I would say he was only using the free rules primer to run the game and found a vague list of the character options on the Internet.

He also promised that our back stories would come into play, but I didn’t stick around long enough to find out if that was true or not.
I mention this because, again, I put in a lot of work into my character. We were doing a sci-fi campaign, so I made a knock off Jedi. I even set up some hints to their culture, how they got wiped out and were being hunted as plot hooks. Again, never used, but at this point I was used to that. Still pisses me off though.

So he kidnapped that character. I was being a bit stupid and trying to run after what was clearly, in hindsight, meant to be the BBEG. But my character just got kidnapped. You see, I made it to her and started to fight her. I got my ass kicked, but I fought her. In this situation you could just have her throw my character out of the ship, but nope. My guy got kidnapped. Brain never even asked the classic DM question “are you sure?”, so I had no idea that there would be these major of consequences. Criticize me all you want for being stupid, but at least warn your players in someway that there could be drastic repercussions to their actions if it will affect their characters this much! just have her kick me down the ramp back onto the station. We weren’t even in space! She just turned on the engines!

Now here’s the thing you might be here for, one of the players decided to leave the game to go back to the 5e session, which was running at the same time. This player had a grenade on him and said he wanted to go out with style. Well, we started fighting some giant spiders that had taken up nest in the ventilation of a space station. We were able to beat them with every character surviving. I guess Brain was expecting the former PC to die because, as we were walking back, the character just started choking and fucking died! Naturally, we thought the air vents were maybe doing some cleaning cycle releasing chemicals into the air or maybe he had been bitten and was poisoned. But Brain wouldn’t even let us roll to figure this out. He gave us meta game knowledge that the character just choked to death on the air and died. It sounds objectively hilarious out of context, but the player specifically wanted that grenade to be used as a way to send off his character. If you can’t think of a way to make that happen with these enemies, just say the vent breaks and there’s a giant spider queen or something. The Cypher system literally gives GMs the tools to be able to do stuff like this on the fly with the way its monsters work! Have us fight it, get our asses handed to us, and the former player sacrifice himself in a blaze of glory to kill the thing!

One last bitch fest about Brain. He decided to host a short campaign using standard DND 5e. We weren’t going to finish anything because he was using the water deep module and we never even started it. We only had a month to play this. We just kind of existed in the city doing random jobs. But yet again, just like Pinky he expected us to know the lore of the setting without telling us. Apparently drow live underground and worship a spider god. Guess who didn’t know that when they were making their character? That’s right! ME! So anytime I did something that was out of character for a drow, he hit us with the classic ”um actually”. And corrected my characters behavior. A few times he would even change full actions I would do in investigation or force me to say something different in dialogue. Icing on the cake, when the month was over every other player, except me of course, got to describe how their character retired. Even though I was there, I just didn’t get to explain my characters retirement. Small thing, but it’s still irritating. There were some funny moments in that game though.

All of this together made me question if I even enjoyed TTRPG’s. And I think I’ve learned that I want to be a forever GM. Maybe they were just shit, but I find myself enjoying telling the story more than being a part of it. Over the past few years I’ve been in games as both a player and a GM. Granted, my friend group was too poor to afford any actual books so our system was held together on notes, bubblegum, duct tape, and hope! But even that was MUCH better compared to this. Now that we finally have our hands on a system I’m excited to play again! I will be the GM, and I’m trying to do the exact opposite of what these guys did. I want to give players info, I want to hold a session zero, I want to make sure everybody’s on the same page before we even play. Some of the stories I’ve told have brought my players to tears from the emotions. (that was a huge ego boost since I love to write lol) the group I will be hosting for now that I have an actual system will be a little bit big, normally it’s only the friends I made in the club and I who play, but I think it will work. One of my friends even mentioned he was thinking of using the system. I think I might bring back my paladin and do him right this time! Assuming he will fit in the setting, of course.

I’m sorry for how long this was, but it’s been building in me for a long long time. I have some other horror stories as well, damn gooner furrys,. I might post those at some point, but that’s a different story. Thanks for reading. End of story.

It’s like the title says, my DM refuses to let me play my OC Bogre the Half Ogre wild magic sorcerer. I’m completely and utterly confused. Currently the party consists of a two races/classes from the Monstrous Hero’s book, an Oread (rock person) and a Dragon.
A HECKIN BLUE DRAGON for crying out loud. That’s completely fine but my DM draws the line at Half Ogres!?? Complaining that it’s “too hard to implement” or something

I’m a losing my marbles or is it my DM?

Edit: I haven’t added enough context people are saying so I’ll mention this. The problem with Half Ogres according to my DM is that they’re “way stronger than normal people” and “too big to be a normal race” Even though the Dragon player in my campaign gets to fly at level 1 and at level 3 becomes Large in size anyway. The Oread (rock guy) has 20 constitution score at level 1 and uses it for his HP, AC and Spell casting ability and save DC.

Half Ogres? The home-brew I’m currently looking at they just get to be classified as Giant and gets plus 2 to strength score like Mountain dwarves

CW: In-game kidnapping and patricide. General Fantasy violence

I’ve had this story for a while and have been considering whether or not to post it, but I've decided it was too funny not to. Buckle up, it's a long one.

So at the end of my freshman year of College I decided to run a dnd game for my friends. It was my first time running a game but not playing, and I opened it up to both beginners and experienced players and we ended up with 6 players total. 2 with plenty of experience, 2 with medium experience, and 2 with 0 or very minor experience. The focus of this story is one of those inexperienced players who we’ll call Jake. The other non-experienced player will also come up, so I'll call them Andi.

I left pitches very open for the players and took an approach of characters first, build the world around the characters. Jake’s pitch… left a lot to be desired. He said ‘I wanna play a guy who lives in the woods and is really good at building tree houses.’ And i said, ok that could be fun, what class and race were you thinking for a character like this? I was expecting the typical druid or ranger. Instead he said, ‘Fairy Monk’. First I said, ‘Fairy isn’t a race in the rules, did you wanna play homebrew?’ And we decided on a basic homebrew race but it meant that he was like a foot tall in game. I told him that may have narrative consequences and may not mesh well with monk. He said that was fine. Secondly, I asked him why his character was a monk. He said ‘oh my parents died when i was young and custody was given to my (full human) grandmother who enrolled me in a martial arts academy. She died like a year before the campaign starts, and feeling abandoned I went to live in the woods and began building tree-houses’ I begged him to spend more time talking and building this side of the character with me as it had actual things I could work with when writing the story. He was dead set on just building treehouses. I probably didn’t push as hard as I should’ve but it was my first time running and I like to think I’ve learned a lot since then. We ran a quick backstory session to help him get the character and sheet down. As part of this I gave him a music box that his grandmother left him when she died. He found a little key in it and used it to open a safe that held an encoded journal. This journal was a linchpin in my plot, and the key to deciphering it was the notes to the song the music box played. This will come up later.

Fast forward to the game start and Jake was an immediate problem. We were both RA’s at our college and had to schedule community events. We got to decide the date and time of every event we ran. Our dedicated dnd was Fridays and one player was taking full days off of work to play, and Jake constantly scheduled his RA events during our sessions, then would tell us last minute he couldn’t come and ask us to reschedule. We did a couple times before eventually telling him to stop doing that. He did not. We told him we weren’t going to reschedule for his RA events anymore and his solution was to arrive 2 hours late to sessions. While in sessions he was never paying attention, he was constantly on his phone/switch, and would interrupt our RP heavy table’s really intense Role play moments to show us the pokemon he caught, or ask us about our school projects. When it came time for him to role-play, he decided that his character was mean. Not in a ‘There’s something going on here and the meanness was a cover for a impactful arc’ just, mean because he thought it was funny. I tried to leave plot hooks for his character and to push him into character moments, but it always turned into a snarky comment followed by him laughing wildly and us all looking uncomfortable. As a contrast, Andi was still struggling with Rules and getting the flow of things down, but was diving full into playing a True neutral for their very first game. To this day I have never seen someone embody a true neutral character better than they did. And they didn’t screw over other players to do so. We all cried at one of their performances.

With the journal I gave him, he decided that he didn’t trust the party for literally no reason and point blank refused to tell them about the journal. When he did, he in RP acted like it was the party’s fault for not just asking him about it. Then he did the exact same thing with the music box. To the point that the players knew the meta solution to the puzzle for 3 full sessions, but couldn’t do anything because Jake just refused to give them the music box.

In terms of rules he made absolutely 0 effort. We ran sessions roughly twice a month for like. 8 months. And these were 4 hour sessions, roughly half of which were full combat sessions. By like session 8 he had no grasp on the rules at all. As an example, a real conversation we had went something like this

 ‘X is swinging at you, what's your AC?’ 

‘My what?’

‘Your Armor Class. It’s the thing that determines whether or not an attack hits’

‘Where on my sheet is that?’

‘Its near the top in the giant box that says AC’

‘Ok it says 14’

‘Ok X rolled a 17 so that hits’

‘I’m gonna dodge’

‘No, dodge is an action you can take on your turn, it’s X’s turn, you are getting hit’

‘And I can’t do anything about it, like make a dexterity check to move?”

‘That’s what your AC is for. It determines whether or not the attack hits. Your Dexterity is built into the number on your sheet’

‘That’s stupid’

This specific interaction happened at least twice a combat, and usually took a full 5 minutes to play out each time.

The crowning moment was a session I spent a full Month prepping for. The party had been kidnapped by the Fey (our BBEG) and were brought to a deserted island where one of the Fey offered them a deal. Escape the Maze and I’ll let you go, then summoned a giant shifting maze splitting the party. I had hand crafted encounters for each player that were designed to play on that character to push their arcs further. Like confronting them with their worst choices, or the times that others hurt them. And my players absolutely loved it. It's our most legendary session and we all still talk about it to this day. Here was my most diabolical plan and the payoff for the tension I had been building all session. Andi’s character was adopted, and didn’t know their family. Unbeknownst to the players Andi's father was a fey I had chase them around the maze. The plan was to use this to stop them from picking a spot and hiding. And once they had all encountered him, to stick him in front of the DPS’er and then throw him at Andi, baiting Andi into killing him while he was weak. Basically I made them kill their dad without knowing, and then had the fey who orchestrated it show up and tell Andi.;

Jake arrived to this 8 hr session 5 hours late. When he came in, the whole group was on edge because of the game situation. He waltzed in and sang at the top of his lungs ‘Who wants sna-acks!’with no regard to what was happening in game. I told him we would finish the scene we were in before moving to his character. For his character I had drawn a complete blank on what to give him. He ignored every hook and emotional beat within the story. Plenty of other players were confronted with moments that happened in the campaign, not their backstory. But I had nothing for him. So I decided I was going to have him encounter his dead grandmother. He found her and failed the insight check to clock that this was very fake. He decided that he was going to get her out, and that the best way to do this was to fly straight up and out of the maze with her. Remember that he is a 1 ft tall fairy and she is a regular human. He had tried this exact tactic to no avail 3 times before in the campaign. I imposed disadvantage because of the size difference and had him make a strength check. He passed and pulled her to the top.

On the top he decided he was going to fly her down to the shore. He moved her to the edge, then said ‘I’m going to take the hypotenuse to be further down the beach because that’s the shortest distance to my destination’ and gave us this look like he was so smart for knowing this fact. And I said, ok but the shortest distance to the ground is a straight line down. Then you can walk to that point. The longer you stay in the air the harder the strength check to carry your grandmother down will be. Had he not continued pushing I wouldn't have cared and given him the same DC, but he decided that he had to prove me wrong about a basic math principle. Jake proceeded to argue with me about how the Pythagorean theorem works. I was in IB and AP in high school and was in HL math for any who know what that means. And he had taken one intro college math class and was trying to tell me he knew more on the subject. Eventually he came down and took the hypotenuse, so I made the check harder, and he failed by like 1 or two. So I had him drop the grandmother like 2 feet from the ground. I was really frustrated at this point, but trying to remain fair. I described the beach he landed on and asked what he wanted to do now that he was out. He then looked at me and in full seriousness went. 

“I wanna build a treehouse”

I absolutely lost it at this point. I screamed “THERE’S NO TREES YOU’RE ON A BEACH” like 5 times, and then he said the thing my friends all quote to this day. “But I have tree house building proficiency?” I screamed again, that no he didn’t, that's not how proficiency works, and that if he did there were no trees. He’s on a beach. This didn’t matter to him. Only that ‘he had proficiency and wanted to’

I had to leave the room I was so mad. Everyone else was dying with laughter. While I calmed down the experienced players explained proficiency, a basic concept of the game. I came back and asked him what he’d like to do. And he said he wanted to walk onto the boat that had kidnapped them, no sneaking, just walk aboard. I asked if he was sure, explaining that they had kidnapped him. He said yes. So the crew fired 2 ballistae at him. He asked why he couldn’t dodge and had to use AC. My players had to talk me out of killing his character on the spot.

All my tension was gone in a span of 20 minutes. I still pulled off the patricide to great effect, but everyone agreed it would’ve been so much more impactful without Jake there. I later learned about a conversation he had with Andi where he complained that we all took the game too seriously. He touted around all the homework he had to do and acted like he was gracing us with his presence by showing up despite this. He said all of this to an international student with a similar or higher workload than him, who had to maintain a perfect 3.95 GPA or risk being kicked out of the country. He was not invited to my next table and pitched a fit when he found out.

TL/DR: My player ruined the most impactful narrative moment of the campaign due to repeated disrespect of the game, players, and story and thought he had “Tree-house Building proficiency”

I'm a brand-new DM running a campaign for a group that's almost entirely new to D&D, and I'm honestly getting really discouraged. I spend hours between sessions writing encounters, making puzzles, and trying to make the story interesting because I genuinely want everyone to have a good time. But when we actually play, it feels like nobody respects the effort I put in.

Players regularly get up in the middle of the game to have completely unrelated conversations. Sometimes they just ignore me entirely while I'm trying to narrate. One player in particular constantly argues with my rulings to squeeze every possible advantage out of encounters. On top of that, he misses about half the sessions without saying anything. He'll ignore calls and messages, then act like we're "harassing" him for trying to find out if he's coming. I've even told him he doesn't have to play if he isn't enjoying it, but he insists he loves the campaign. That same player—and a few others—will randomly put in AirPods during the game and then ask things like, "It's not my turn. What am I supposed to be doing?"

One session, two players intentionally split the party. While the rest of the group was fighting through a combat encounter I'd spent a lot of time preparing, the other two wandered off to find an empty field so their characters could... play soccer. While I was bouncing between both groups trying to keep everyone involved, the two players who left eventually took out an Uno deck and started playing. Even after combat finished, they just kept playing Uno instead of rejoining the game.

Another session, I made a puzzle encounter. Three of the players were genuinely engaged and having fun solving it, while the fourth spent almost the entire time on his phone. Then he looked up and said the encounter sucked because it wasn't designed well. When I told him that was honestly pretty insulting because I'd spent a lot of time making it—and he hadn't even been paying attention—he said I shouldn't be offended because I'm "a great DM," he just thought it was a terrible puzzle. Then, after finally getting off his phone and actually participating, he literally said: "This is actually fun, huh."

The following week I suggested we do a phone pile to help everyone stay engaged. Every single person agreed except that same player. He argued about it for two hours before finally pretending to put his phone away. He actually put his phone case in the pile and kept the phone. We only realized about half an hour later because he was... on his phone again. When we asked him to actually put it away, he physically cried over it.

Another player spends almost every session creating a completely made-up language instead of playing D&D. Every week it's a different one. When he isn't doing that, he has his head down on the table and barely participates in combat or puzzles.

At this point I honestly feel less like a DM and more like a babysitter. People constantly get distracted, play with random objects in the room, wander off, or just tune out.

The only consistently great player is the one person who's actually played D&D before. He's always engaged, tells me he enjoys the story and encounters, and has even said he thinks the other players are making the experience miserable.

I just feel like I'm putting in a huge amount of effort for people who don't seem to care at all. Instead of looking forward to sessions, I'm starting to dread them because it feels like I'm fighting just to get everyone to pay attention. Is this just what it's like DMing new players? Am I expecting too much? Or is this level of behavior actually as disrespectful as it feels? The only thing making me hesitate to end the campaign is that these are basically the only people I know who are interested in playing D&D. I don't know if I should stick it out and hope they improve, or accept that this group just isn't a good fit.

I am part of a somewhat large online RP/TTRPG group of around 13–16 people. We call our campaigns “lores” because they are mostly theater-of-the-mind storytelling with character sheets, but not always traditional TTRPG mechanics. We switch between different settings like modern fantasy, Star Wars, high fantasy, magic fantasy, and realistic settings.

I have been in this group for over two years, and I am trying to figure out whether I am being unreasonable for wanting to pull back.
The biggest issue is that there is almost no structure. There is no real start time. Things happen whenever the DM feels like running something. I usually show up in call around 9–10 AM while I work from home. Some people trickle in during the day, but when the DM appears, people are suddenly available. Then the group often gets distracted and actual story does not start until somewhere between 9 PM and midnight. Most nights go until 5 AM if we actually start.

With 13–16 players, turns are usually based on alphabetical order by character name. My characters are often in the middle of the order, so I commonly end up waiting for hours and still not getting a turn. I even once made a character with an A first and last name to try to get earlier turns, but then the turn system changed to starting from Z first. I know that sounds petty, but after repeatedly staying up extremely late and still not getting a chance to play, it started to feel like the only way to participate was to game the turn order.

Most other players’ turns seem to last around one to two hours. When I get a turn, I am often lucky to get 30 minutes to an hour, and it is frequently interrupted by the DM getting pulled away, getting distracted, or needing to leave. A recent example: my turn was cut short after about 40 minutes because the DM needed to go to bed. He said he would pick it up the next day. That was 18 days ago, and someone else still got a turn later that same night.

Another issue is how often we switch campaigns/settings. In the last year, we have probably done somewhere between 13 and 22 different “lores.” Some last a month, some a week, and sometimes we switch more than once in the same week. There have even been times where we changed settings multiple times in the same day. These arcs are usually meant to last months, but we often do not even get through every character’s introduction before switching.

There is one campaign we keep returning to that has lasted over six months. In that one, my character has been heavily sidelined despite me putting a lot of work into him. I make character documents, backstories, ideas for the DM to use, and I have commissioned art of my characters and teammates. I genuinely care about the stories and want to participate.

In that longer-running campaign, my character went through a major traumatic event where he was severely burned, disfigured, lost limbs, and is now only alive because of machinery. He operates a robotic body just to have some version of a normal life. I am not against consequences or dark storytelling; I actually like serious character arcs. What frustrates me is that other characters have survived similar dangerous events with little injury or even gained power from them, while mine suffered permanent consequences and then still barely got focus or follow-up afterward.

That is the part that makes me feel stuck. I do not want to be the “main character,” but I do want the effort and consequences attached to my character to matter. Right now it feels like I get the suffering without the story payoff.

I have brought this up before with the DM and others in the group, but it usually gets brushed aside. I have offered help and even made a scheduling format/Google Doc so players could have set times or a better turn system. The DM never opened it.

The common excuse is that not enough people are available, even when most of the group is there, because the DM wants to wait for one specific person. One of the people we wait on most is the DM’s girlfriend, who tends to have an important character in each campaign but often goes to sleep before things start. The DM also gets distracted playing games, even after the person we were waiting for arrives.

From my perspective, there is favoritism. The DM says he keeps notes, but it often does not seem like he does. Some players get a lot of attention, flexibility, and follow-through. My messages, documents, and character ideas often get ignored or acknowledged with “okay” and then moved past. If other players say they cannot go, they are often promised a turn later. If I say I am busy during a certain time window, that somehow becomes the only time I could have gone that day, despite me being available most of the day.

Other people are frustrated too, but many of them still get more turns than I do, so the frustration fades for them. The group also tends to excuse the DM because he does a lot for the group, but from my perspective the actual experience has become more disappointing than fun.

This has also started affecting me outside of the game. This group and these stories were supposed to be something I looked forward to, but lately they have become a major source of stress and depression for me. I find myself getting excited, showing up, waiting around for hours, and then ending the night feeling ignored, disappointed, or like I wasted my time. I know it is “just a game” to some people, but when you care about the story, the characters, and the friendships around it, it starts to hurt when the pattern keeps repeating.
Recently I started giving myself a midnight cutoff. If nothing is happening, things are too slow, or I feel ignored, I just leave without saying goodnight. I am also pulling back from making extra documents, ideas, and character work because it feels like none of it gets used.

I am trying to figure out what the healthy move is here.

Am I being unreasonable for pulling back from this group? Is this just what happens in very large RP/TTRPG groups, or is this a table-management problem that probably will not change unless the DM actually wants it to? How would you handle being invested in the story and characters, but feeling like your time and effort are not respected?
What can I do to improve this situation or do I just cut my loses?

Context: Our party is fairly new to the campaign we're in (5 sessions in) and new to dnd all together, our DM has played before as a PC, but hes a first time DM.

Pretty much EVERY time we've met an NPC this run, he's put them at a level way higher than us, or has given them abilities that are way stronger than us. Like i get that its a good incentive not to fight them, but when he ends up saying stuff like "if you do that, he can fireball and 1 shot all of you" when we just hit level 4 last session.

Like in the first area of the map we were in, we bumped into a pretty egotistical dragonborn, like he physically bumped into me, and as a cocky, confident dragonborn myself, i got confrontational, until "ding ding DM notification, you might not wanna fight this guy, he's level 9 (im level 3 atp).

Its just getting kinda annoying at this point, and i didnt know whether to put this in AITA or here, but here it is.

So one of my players characters raped the wife of a corrupt nobleman they were out killing and I have a deep disgust for rape and rapists so I want to kill the player character however the player themselves are a good person and I like them as a friend and they really like their character and they have a backstory that I want to pull from so like what do????????????? 😭😡

Edit: Btw I am not sharing any personal information about me or them. And secondly we have talked and have confirmed that it was a joke and some of the players also think that the character should die.

Edit2: The reason I didn’t stop them is because I don’t like railroading and it was the end of the session, so I’m not sure if it is “cannon” or not also I don’t like bossing my friends around like that.

Edit3: Also I am pretty sure what we are going to do is ditch these characters anyway since most of them were like chaotic neutral or just didn’t even have an alignment yet and I’m a relatively new DM.

So I’ve been a forever DM for years, got my players into a Dark Fantasy Mystery style part of my homebrew world. I got a call from one of my players after a session a week ago. He said he’s refusing to call a character I introduced by the proper name. Naturally I go with it, say alright but ask him why, and get an evasive answer. Anyway, we talk character lore for a bit before I mention the character he refuses to use the proper name of their spouse, who is of the same gender. I ask him why again and he says ‘oh I don’t agree with that’ I think I hear him wrong so I ask him to elaborate and he says, direct quote, ‘call me homophobic but I think same sex love is wrong because of my faith, and my character would think so too.’ I’m baffled, I’ve known this guy for years and never caught a hint. I brush past it and end the call. Fast-forward to next session, his wizard starts to try and frame them for making each other angry, building a fight in the couple over something his character set up, thus disrupting their relationship. At this I call him out to the explain all of this is which I hear is ‘what his character would do’. I say that I’d rather him not disrupt a pair of NPCs for no reasons which he raises his voice at me about. I de-escalate the situation, giving him a warning about it at the table. A few of the others players, who like me are members of queer communities  start talking to him about it and we pause the session. It turns to a full confession that literally the only reason he was doing this in character was because of the NPCs sexualities. I got uncomfortable at the table and ended the session early, not knowing how to proceed with the group that I’ve played with for years. Am I the asshole? 

EDIT: Don’t want a comment to be lost in the storm so I’m adding it to the post body. My table has decided to be done with this campaign, and the current table for a while. I’m not confident people will want to come back with me involved so the issue is resolved. The Wizard Player has reached out to contact me about putting a new table together with me and I flat out declined and blocked him. Thank you all for support and advice and even the ones telling me I’m the asshole, I needed to hear it