So, I have an account on StartPlaying as I once upon a time intended to make more use of it. Then a bunch of IRL stuff happened. Anyway, my account there is still active and I occasionally get a message inquiring if I am interested in GMing a game. Such a message arrived in my inbox this morning...

> Hi What I am looking for is a GM for a one on one game of Rolemaster Standard Rules.

First, Rolemaster is not among the games I list that I have run or am interested in running.

> I like one on one because you don't need to get 5 to 9 people to have the same time available. All you need is for two people to have the same time available. I don't mind getting a message saying "Hey I am free for a couple of hours and want to do something, are you available?" instead of the "We will meet between X and Y time on Z day of the month and people are always missing the game because life gets in the way.

Now, I don't mind one-on-one games at all, but unless it's a play-by-post game, I need a damn schedule. When I was a teenager, I could and frequently did do the drop of a hat/spur of the moment games, but I'm 56 now and need structure in my life, dangit!

> I have created my own playable species for the RMSS and wish to play them.

Hooboy, here it comes...

> I prefer playing my Minotaur character. His abilities are very heavy in combat and things physical (yeah I know big surprise there) so I would like to pay a more social setting but not excluding combat entirely.

Okay, that's not what I was expecting...

> The challenge is a Minotaur bull in a china [sic] shop where the china [sic] are humans that brake [sic] very easily and the human town guard don't take to kindly to humans being broken (blood and hamburger meat left in a back alley that may or may not have been a human at one time) just because they just "happen" to have gotten in the way of my horns as I was just happening to be turning around in that back alley. "Officer that's my story and I am sticking to it!"

And there it is... they just want to be a murder hobo. In a social setting.

> I don't mind a game that is somewhat made up as we go as that does allow a lot of freedom for the GM and players.

I'm pretty sure that's the only type of game that would work for what they are looking for...

So, yeah, I don't know if this counts as an actual RPG Horror Story since it never made it past the player inquiry (I don't intend to reply. I just... can't... LOL), but there it is. Rolemaster social setting minotaur murder hobo...

So T was doing a one shot for her birthday and everyone was told to make level 20 characters. I made a fighter cleric that kicks butt, but mainly could heal and support. The rest of the party were a rogue, fighter, barbarian, and celestial sorcerer.

The set up was interesting. It was a civil war and the capital was under attack. We enter the royal garden to see the emperor about to be killed by the evil usurper.

We fight, I go last because I have rotten luck with initiative. The group takes some damage from the usurper and his minions. I go last and absolutely demolish the usurper's second in command with a wombo combo. Dealing over 140 damage with the use of holy weapon, action Surge, and my legendary dragon Wrath Glaive.

That was as good as it got for me the rest of the one shot, it was my turn 1. Immediately on the usurper's turn he casts time stop and flees on a dragon. The next round we finish off his minions, i get 1 more turn to attack. Then it's done. First combat ended in 2 rounds. Not the best but I actually got to pull off my combo so I was happy.

We find out the emperor is dying because of some ritual the usurper has started. We get a short rest and we teleport to where we think he is. We approach the shrine where we see the usurper meditating and a ancient dragon sleeping. I think, "thats it, no minions? No army?"

The Barbarian and the Rogue sneak up and we get a surprise round on the usurper and dragon. The rest of the party spends that time just getting to the fight becauselike 90% of the map is difficult terrain. The next round I decide to give the sorcerer true seeing so she can see through storm the usurper made around himself. I would regret that later. The rest of the party attacks, the dragon flies up out of the range of basically all of our attacks and becomes an annoying pest. The next round the dragon teleports and paralyzes me. I ask our sorcerer of the celestial subclass to use lesser restoration on me. She says she didn't bother with that spell because I'm the healer. Right now I'm pretty annoyed. Luckily the fighter, bless her, has a giant club that she can throw and the dragon got low enough for her to hit it. She smacks him 4 times and he looses concentration.

My turn finally comes around and I am desperately hurt. So I decide to cast mass Cure wound. It's immediately counter spelled. So I use my action Surge I was saving for my wombo combo instead to heal myself, the fighter, and the sorcerer. I would regret that later. Others people's turn go on and eventually the usurper goes and casts time stop.... again. How did he cast 2 level 9 spells in a day... your guess is as good as mine. The dm says the spell just works differently because he wants to do something different. So the usurper moves back to the shine and the sorcerer is somehow able to move too. She goes up and helps the usurper finish the ritual. The dragon then dies from the ritual.

And now the usurper becomes a sort of god. Because of BS I'm back at the end of the turn order. It's important to say the reason the dm decided to have a secret player betrayer is because the other players and I were talking about the one shot I ran where I asked if a player could switch sides if the fight was going poorly for the Tiamat.

But T just butchered the concept. So now everyone hard targets the sorcerer and the dm is pulling out every bullshit in the box to keep her alive. And the fighter and I are almost 1 shot before our turn even comes around. My turn finally comes around and I decide to try something desperate. Because I'm a fighter cleric I don't have a 100% chance of calling in help from my diety, but before the session the dm said my chance would be a lot higher because she wanted me to use it. So I try calling on my deity and nothing. So I'm pretty much checked out of the game by this point, I use my bonus action to heal what I can and back up.

More fighting happens and the Barbarian absolutely tears the sorcerer in 2 and she doesn't get death saves because his weapon takes her soul at 0 hp. My turn comes around and I'm basically forced to heal myself and the fighter because the usurper keeps hitting the both of us. The usurper's turn comes around and he tries casting wish to bring back the sorcerer... everyone is done with that at this point. The Rogue has been hanging onto counter spell he can cast with his mask. He casts it and barely succeeds in stopping the wish spell. But the dm says that there's a ledge there so the Rogue can't see him. A ledge that no one can see and has never came up before now. I've had enough and tell her if she just wants to kill us there are other ways. T eventually accepts the counter spell and we just have to fight the usurper.

Round after round I am going through my spells just to keep me and the fighter up because the usurper keeps targeting us both. 3 whole rounds of just me healing and eventually I can just barely get close enough to cast Toll the Dead on the usurper... he saves. More fighting happens and the Rogue who has had terrible luck gets a lucky critical and kills the usurper.

Overall my experience was a 3 out of 10. The first fight was fun with a bunch of different enemies but the final fight was just a bullet sponge with a bad guy that targets the same players, not to mention having a player switch sides less than half way through the fight. Leaving the sorcerer dead for over 2 and a half hours. I got to do basically nothing except pick up the slack left by the celestial sorcerer who was supposed to be our other healer because i am not a full healer, it sucked. I don't blame the sorcerer. It was the dm who told her to betray us that early in the fight. She told me after that she didn't know when it was going to happen. I delt 0 damage in that second fight. So much for a FIGHTER cleric.

I think what bothers me the most is the fact T is willing to break and bend rules for her monsters but not even fudge a roll for a player. I really wanted to try and use my divine Intervention and bring back the sorcerer on our side, or summon my god Dragon to bless us, or just give me and the fighter a little hp.

It feels rambley and might not be a big deal for some, especially compared to some of the real horror I see players go through but I felt supremely disappointed and has turned me off of any pvp in dnd.

Hi there. This is a story from old russian TTRPG forums, like 20 years old or something. I decided to translate it and share with international audience, because this gem should not be lost. If anyone really need it, I can look up the link to the original. The story is at least 83% fictional, but I truly believe it is based on the real events. You can't make all of this shit up. Sorry if my grammar is weird, in my defense, the original was weird too.

Day one. We were drinking beer in the tavern with some orcs. They were arguing about who would hit the innkeeper with a stool after ten mugs of beer. Some old man was constantly getting in our way with stories about a dragon and a princess. We didn't listen to him. The Orcs won.

Day two. The orcs are gone somewhere, and the beer is gone too. After leaving the tavern, we immediately got to the city square, where the crier loudly and clearly told about the princess abducted by the dragon. Out of respect for the DM, we listened to him. We decided to earn money by joining the caravan as guards. We searched all day, but we didn't find a single caravan where guards were needed. There's a complete set in each of them.

Day three. We ambushed the guards from one of the caravans and made sure that they would be incapacitated until the caravan would left. We came to the caravan master and argued for a long time about how we wanted to get hired as guards. He didn't hire us and left with an incomplete set of guards. In the evening, everyone in the tavern were talking about the dragon and the reward from the king.

Day four. We were looking for any kind of job all over the city. There is no work. Almost everyone talked about the dragon and the princess. We ignored them. The guards tried twice to invite us to the palace to listen to the king. We ignored them too. In the evening, we decided to move to another city, where would be orcs, beer and jobs in caravans.

Day five. Early in the morning, guards broke into the tavern and dragged the entire party to the palace by force. We tried to resist, but they beat us badly. In the palace, the king told us about the pile of gold on which the dragon sleeps, and how much the king himself is willing to add to it for saving the princess. He also told us about how small and harmless the dragon is. For the sake of interest, we asked the king why he did not send his guards to beat the dragon. We have not received a clear answer.

Day six. We tried to escape at night, but they beat us up again. Then they cured and resurrected the wizard, who fell at minus twenty hp. At the afternoon they took us to the dragon. We tried to escape again, but we were beaten up again. In the evening, they drove us to a cave, into which we were forcibly pushed. Immediately after that, the ceiling collapsed and there were no way out. From the other side of the landslide, they shouted that there is another exit from the cave on the other side. We didn't believe them and spent the whole night trying to dig through the landslide.

Day seven. Early in the morning we tried to dig through the landslide again, but then a dragon came and frightened the whole party, which caused us to run out into a larger cave, where we immediately stopped being frightened. After 2 rounds, the dragon came out and said that he have a large pile of gold, he is old and weak, but he would not give us the princess. We said we didn't need anything and asked to be released. The dragon said he didn't believe us and would fight. We tried to give up, but he didn't accept it. We ran away from him for a long time, and he followed us. Eventually, the paladin stumbled and the dragon fell on him. Very unfortunate. Straight at paladin's sword. The dragon died immediately. Then the princess came out and said that we had saved her. Then our wizard noticed that we need a little extra exp to levelup, and offered to kill the princess. We tried. It didn't work out. The princess beat us badly. The wizard died again. Then the guards came, resurrected the wizard, and took us, the princess, and the dragon's gold back to the city.

Day eight. We tried to escape on the way, but we were shackled. After we arrived to the city, everyone congratulated us on saving the princess. We asked everyone to take off our shackles. We are the princess's rescuers, after all, it doesn't look good. As a compromise, the royal wizard made the shackles invisible. Then we listened for a long time the praises of our heroism from the King and the grateful people. The king said that our career as heroes has just begun, and he still has exploits for us. The shackles were never removed. In the evening, we were locked up somewhere again. That's how the session ended...

...We told the DM that the game was not bad, but it was too railroady. He said we were wrong. He have a living and interactive world, with complete freedom of choice. The sandbox, if you will, but it is realistic. That is why not everything and not always is possible. And if it seems to us that there are some rails, then we are just imagining it. And we should stop. For the future, the DM recommended us to better interact with the outside world, and the game would become even more interesting.

Hey guys, our Pathfinder campaign has hit of bit of a conundrum, and I was wondering if some outside opinions might help with some solutions. This campaign is over 2 years old now, so there will be a bit of explaining:

So, we are running a 5 player Pathfinder campaign. The overall narrative is that it is a sort of Witcher/Darkwood setting. A kind of survival horror-esc campaign where our characters have been mysteriously teleported to a land named Drustvar, a land recently cursed to be swallowed by the forest, where at night creepy Slavic-themed monsters come out and hunt people down. We are trapped in a village named Waycrest, and have to work with the people of the village to fend off this threat. Large factors of going into the campaign was moral grey-ness; the weight of choices and having to make shitty decisions.

For the most part the campaign has been fun and generally quite wacky, though there has been clashes now and then. The characters each player controls are:

Jaeger, a human fighter that lived in the forest. Primary goal is to keep Waycrest safe. Also, was secretly a werewolf.

Jonathan, a human Alchemist toxicologist, my own character. A psychopath who essentially is very focused on a 'means to an end' and loves to experiment on living things.

Seisen, a kobold cleric/necromancer. Has a powerful Necrodrake for a father that she is in frequent contact with. Sort of a bratty nepobaby who’s primary goal is to please her father, who is evil. She also wishes for necromancer and undead to be equals with the living.

King Rat, an Ysoki Summoner. Lived in the sewers of a city before recent events. Is a anxiety-driven morally grey survivalist.

Luka, a monster hunter. Wishes to save his wife from a curse that turned her into a doll, easygoing and generally morally good.

It’s quite a colourful collection of characters.

Long-term the campaign has been quite fun. There have been conundrums particularly with Seisen, where due to her father situation and the players generally assertiveness the story gets focused quite a bit on her at times. But this also means that her character come at odds a lot with our characters, particularly Jaeger. This is worth mentioning for later.

Eventually we decide that Waycrest is no longer sustainable, so we go to a city in the land named Novosk, gambling that if it is still alive, we can move everyone there. We split the villagers into a large group, and our own party into another, trusting that we could distract the monsters in our journey to keep the villagers safe in theirs. We make it to Novosk, which is still safe and flourishing. This starts some of the first issues of the campaign, as obviously a flourishing city is quite a tonal shift of our initial survival-horror theme. The other, larger issue, is that the GM has the governor reluctant to help us get the Waycrest villagers to safety unless we did errands for him, such as hunting down a vampire which took multiple sessions. This caused frustration, particularly with the Jaeger player, as obviously his goal is to get Waycrest to safety and we currently don’t know how they are faring in the forest.

The vampire hunt caused the first conflict. We finally found the vampire in the sewers, and the vampire knew Seisen’s father, and asked for her help. Seisen, seeing undead as equals and is naive herself, agreed and helped him escape. This caused frustration in both the characters and the party, particularly the player for Jaeger. Jaeger’s own goals have been further delayed, and he feels frustrated with Seisen’s character in general and doesn’t really like her. Whilst I understand the frustration I don’t think he dealt with it in a very good way, half-venting it as his character in front of Seisen, which made the Seisen player feel picked on and upset, as whilst she understands the Jaeger players frustration, this still feels like something Seisen would do.

Several sessions later, we have reached the main issue. We had to cross into a desolated part of the city that had been closed off, now haunted with monsters. A powerful druid was sent there by the governor and she has the power to help us with Waycrest, so we went there to help.

In an unlucky encounter, King Rat is killed on our journey from an unfortunate triple crit. The party presses on, and King Rat and the gm plan to revive him, which he eventually is after we find the druid, but under a shady deal with a mysterious entity according to the druid, and King Rat himself withholds.

Eventually the druid and her party say that she will help if we aid her in killing the enemy leader of the desolated land, a being called The Sovereign. We agree and follow her to a Cathedral, fighting enemies on the way. The druid cannot make it any further however as there is a hex that the Sovereign has woven that prevents her, so we keep going. This is basically where things fall apart.

We make it into the Cathedral and meet the Sovereign. She has several minions, but is not initially hostile. She is convinced that we will help her instead to kill the druid, and offers us a shop for morphs that Jonathan and Seisen are invested in. King Rat also secretly reveals that he is in league with the Sovereign as she revived him and has his life tied to hers.

Luka and Jaeger are convinced that the parties’ alignments are no longer secure, so leave the cathedral to discuss the situation with the druid. They and the druids party agree to help attack the Sovereign, and by killing her the druid can help out, choosing to gamble on who’s side the other three players take. They return to the cathedral, and the Sovereign asks if they have killed the druid, implyingly holding Jonathan hostage. Jaeger says no, the fight starts, and the session ends.

The gm basically says, next session will be a pvp session, and players are very likely, if not certain to die, and whoever won determined if the party would stay good or become evil. This was a surprise to most, but ultimately people felt optimistic, though anxious. Most agreed not to resort to killing other PC’s no matter the outcome. Ultimately though, I don’t think we had a lot of time to realise how bad this could be as due to a player being unavailable next week it was decided to start the next session the very next day instead.

The fight was pretty much a disaster. King Rat and Seisen took the bad side, whilst Luka and Jaeger took the good side. Jonathan stood on the sidelines before deciding to help the good side. Luka suffered a crit fail and was charmed, taking him out of the fight where he was eventually downed. Jaeger made a last attempt, and blew himself up with the Sovereign, potentially killing them both in a massive dramatic sacrifice. However, Seisen nonchalantly resurrected the Sovereign immediately after. Jonathan went to help Luka, and King Rat attacked him with an aoe, which ended up downing Jonathan and accidentally killing Luka, as he wasn’t paying attention to the death saves.

With that, the session largely ended. Jonathan and Jaeger were downed, Jaeger near death, but both barely saved by Seisen and King Rat, and Luka is dead. The evil side had won, and we would be shifting to a more evil route.

This of course did not go well. The ‘good side’, including me, were very unhappy with how things came out, and felt that if we went this direction we would be completely unable to play our characters. Jaeger and Luka were both ‘good’ characters and turning ‘evil’ betrays their entire character, purpose, and their own motives and secret plots. Luka is of course dead as well which added to the complication, and my own character, Jonathan, whilst was evil himself and a psychopath, part of the fun of him was that he was aligned with good and was forced to ‘behave’. Seisen’s player was pretty adamant that this was a good idea, whilst King Rat’s player was easygoing either way.

Eventually this caused a lot of argument on where the campaign should go. Especially because it was largely decided by a fight that we thought was just another ‘monster of the week’ scenario, and not something that would actually fracture the party like this. Eventually to give more context the GM reveal that there were long-term plans if evil won, that the Seisen player was unsatisfied with how things were and wanted to take an evil route, so the gm planned this out to satisfy it. He also assured us that taking the ‘evil route’ would not mean we betrayed our characters; he revealed that there were plans for Seisen to usurp the weakened Sovereign and create a faction that would likely help us. This calmed the situation down a bit and now I am not opposed to it, though Jaegers player is still unhappy and does not feel Jaeger would agree to this, as well as the fact the betrayal means Jaeger would hate everyone in the party. Luka’s player is unhappy that he died in such an accidental fashion, but if that is answered he is fine with either way.

Jaeger and Seisen’s player have been arguing a lot over it. Seisen assures that whilst she wants to go evil, she won’t be some wild murderhobo and there is plenty of nuance to it. It’s clear that this frustration has also been built up over time, and ultimately, I want everyone to be satisfied with whatever comes out; even if this ‘twist’ was poorly handled, it was created because Seisen’s player was unhappy with how things were going.

So now we are deciding if we are to go through with this, retcon (soft or hard) the whole thing and start again, or to trust the GM, who is still confident he can handle this, and keep going despite the complexities it has caused.

A lot to say, but would anyone have any advice on what might be the best way to push on from this to make everyone happy?

(TL;DR - My ex-wife and I had a fight before a session started, and we did a bunch of stuff during the session to continue fighting.)

In the year before finally getting divorced, my wife and I got to a point where we were fighting about almost every stupid thing near constantly.

I was running a game that was basically an ad hoc combination of D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder first edition with a few house rules, I ran it Monday and Tuesday nights, in person at my house, and I had six players including my wife.

Three years into this game, and she still didn't know her sheet, didn't really understand any of the rules, but she had an over the top unforgettable loony character, and she role-played her extremely well.

One day her and I had a huge fight about money. At the time I was working for a garbage collection company, she wasn't working at all, and she could not understand why I was making $30,000 a year and we were still struggling. I tried explaining to her that $30k per year is not very much, and it was just getting our bills paid. She straight up accused me of having some kind of expensive drug problem, or financing a secret family. We fight about this for most of the day.

We put our son to bed, the players came over, we sit down to play, and I pick back up where we had left off.

The party had been lodged at an inn while picking up side quests to keep themselves busy until a major plot event happened, and the session was going to be mostly devoted to item creation, shopping and general antics.

At one point my wife's character and the party fighter were in a shop while the fighter was trying to negotiate purchasing a magic weapon. During the role-play, the shopkeeper says that the markup on the weapon in question was not much, and that he definitely wasn't getting rich on it for the price he was charging.

My wife then pipes up-

"I bet he didn't really pay much for it and he's just shoveling money into his other family."

The way she said it was incredibly snarky and passive aggressive. I tried to ignore it and move on.

Throughout that one interaction there, she continued to make a few other jabs like that before the party fighter and the merchant came to an agreement.

I went to the party sorcerer who was working on trying to gather material components to be able to craft an item. Again my wife chimes in-

"Those aren't that expensive. None of it adds up to 30,000 gold."

I told her to knock it off and we continued to work at the price list and talk about availability. She would make another couple of quips about only being able to afford certain components when it was convenient for the shopkeeper and other such things. Finally I lost my cool and made a jab-

"Yeah? Well maybe the shopkeeper would have the extra for better components if his wife wouldn't keep spending it on stupid shit!"

"Maybe the shopkeeper should actually be honest with what he's doing with it!"

"How much more honest is overhead and upkeep?! If she would actually draw an income of her own and help him out, maybe they wouldn't be struggling so much!"

At this point the rest of the table became very quiet, fully realizing that this was something that we had been fighting about all day and, apparently, were not willing to let go.

After about a half-hour of that, the players excused themselves and went home. And my wife and I continued to fight about money for the rest of the night.

That group basically fragmented in three when my wife and I finally got divorced. She got a group with her cousin and her cousin's boyfriend; I got to keep my two friends, and I ultimately had to kick our roommate for something unrelated.

Part 1, as a brand new player, experienced players led me to make a joke character and then scolded for being the joke character.

Part 2, party incompatibility, bizarre choices, "you haven't earned a social encounter," etc.

Rogue is a dick.

There was a time when he wanted to start a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire campaign with the table, and I was ecstatic to play and learn a new system. Not everyone was into the idea, so Rogue said he'd run on a different day to our usual in that case. He sent me all the resources, and I probed I'm about things and pitched character ideas. I had read the rules and got everything picked out for my character. The only thing I hadn't done was make the character sheet, and it's a good thing I hadn't.

A short time later, he started one of our normal sessions talking about the Star Wars campaign because he started it with Cleric and his friends on a different server. At a certain point, he asked me a question or a favor and prefaced it with, "This doesn't mean you're invited to join us."

Extra campaigns were common at our table because Bard wouldn't be able to make sessions. Sometimes, we'd carry on, and sometimes, someone else would take over. I would frequently volunteer because I wanted to practice DMing. It was fine to start. The group was participating because they wanted to help me cut my teeth because I was jumping in the deep end to figure it out.

Later on, however, I would volunteer ahead of time to see if everyone was interested in having me run if we knew the next week would be an off week. And more times than I can remember, Rogue would say he was up for it and then cancel on the day of. Twice he did it an hour before the session was supposed to take place, and one time he got on the call 10 minutes before we were going to start to tell me he was tired and didn't want to play. More than once, when he would cancel because he was tired, I would see him on a discord call all day with his friends on a different server, including his girlfriend at the time, Cleric.

Cleric, being his girlfriend as well, meant that if he canceled, there was a good chance she would cancel too. For the 5 years I've known Rogue as well, he was never in school and never had a job. So when I would get home from work, excited to run DnD for my friends, only for Rogue to cancel because he was tired, when I would see him on discord playing games all day with friends, I was more than a little pissed. Having a whole session fall apart and what I had worked on for a whole week being thrown out, possibly never to be used, made me feel like shit.

It was very much becoming an obvious pattern, so I went ahead and asked Cleric what his deal was because Rogue wouldn't respond to messages. And apparently, he just didn't like the character he had made one time, only accounting for about half his cancelations because I had 2 settings on the go. I still don't know what his issue with me as a DM is.

And while Rogue was starting games with other friends, very early on Cleric took DM, Barbarian, and Rogue to make a new table separate from me and Bard. It was a complete secret from us as well up until they wanted to share art of their characters. So early on, it made me feel like the group was already breaking into cliques as if to say, "We call you a friend, but you're not on the same level as this half of the group." If they hadn't kept it a secret, I'd like to believe I'd have felt differently at the time, but I was also still so excited to play and wanted to play more dnd, they probably didn't want the possibility that I'd ask to join them.

One Christmas Bard came to me with an idea. He wanted me to draw custom Florida Man cards for the whole group as gag Christmas gifts. He paid me to do it and wanted each of the 4 to have unique art, even putting some extra down to get one made for himself, so 5 in total. I then asked him when he had brought up getting one made for himself, if I should also do one for myself, I wouldn't charge him extra since it was for me. He told me flatly, "No."

I didn't push it, in case he was getting someone else to make one for me, and I tricked myself into believing this, because Cleric was also an artist. I kinda went the extra mile to having each artwork connected, i put references in the serial numbers, and I made the issued date on the card the day of our first session. He was impressed and happy with the results. So the day he handed out to everyone their gifts, they were all complimenting me and pointing out the references to each other, or I was explaining it to them.

And I waited.

But I never got a card, I didn't get anything. I guess Bard might have assumed the payment was my gift.

Not one of them noticed that I didn't get a card. Like yeah, it's a stupid gag gift, but what a way to make a guy feel forgotten. Being told no, don't include yourself in this group gift that I'm giving and you're making, and then have no one notice that you were left out.

And I don't know if this last one is just me whining, hell all of these posts could be that, but February of this year, my dog had to be put down.

The entire week leading up to it was rotten, something terrible each day, until I found out, and it would be a 3 day wait for the appointment to have it happen. I messaged the group the night I found out. DM was the only one to respond to me the next morning with condolences. Bard was next later that day, but not before he posted some memes in a different channel. And the other 3 never said anything, not even in the session voice call on the same weekend it happened.

Like, tell me you don't give a shit about me without telling me. For comparison, the Cleric has a cat she posts about all the time, and I know if the same thing were to happen to her, the chat would be flooded with sympathy for her.

Like, 3 of them couldn't even muster the bare minimum, "I'm sorry." Or react to the message with like, a fucking hug emoji, just something. And thats all I really needed, was to hear from them, to know the people I thought were my friends were there when I was in grief over losing a pet.

Anyway, more in-game stuff in part 4.

Important context: campaigns take place on Discord.

Anticipated FAQs

Q: Why do you do this to yourself?
A: Unfortunately due to my circumstances, this is my only consistent socialization. I’m trying to change this.

Q: Why would you be in two campaigns with your ex?
A: I was originally still with my ex in the first campaign and then I broke up with him. As for the second campaign, long story short, I decided I liked everybody else more than I disliked my ex. Which I feel like is saying something because my ex once told me I was getting too emotional over my childhood pet dying and then demanded me to answer how much grief I would feel if he died compared to my cat.

Q: How long were you with your ex?
A: Five years. I broke up with him last year. I want to note that the relationship gradually got worse. It was not always like this.

Q: What’s the situation with the guy you like and his partner?
A: It was a slow burn thing on my end. I started liking him because he was a better friend than my ex was at the end of the relationship. Due to the couple thousand of miles separating us and the fact that he has a partner now, nothing is going to happen between us. I’ve accepted this. Also, I genuinely like his new partner, but as you can imagine, it still all just… kinda sucks.

Q: How do the dynamics play out?
A: Typically it’s fine, but because my ex has the social intelligence of a brick, there are occasional awkward moments.

Q: How are you dealing with all of this?
A: Barely! Thanks for asking.

Q: Why are you sharing this?
A: I think it’s funny in a fucked up kind of way.

I (30m) have been into ttrpgs for a long time but never really had a consistent group to play with since I was highschool age. I would dm the occasional one shot for friends/ family but nothing that went on for more than a session or two.

So I looked up my local game shop and saw they had a “learn to play dnd session coming up” the post said they had premade characters and dice and everything to learn to play, however the post showed a bunch of kids playing. So I was thinking “alright my niece (9 years old) has played a couple of times with my wife and I and she might want to learn more so I could just bring her with me to this event so i could get a feel for what the stores vibe was.

So I tell my sister and she tells my niece. She gets all excited counting down the days and everything and we show up to the store and I talk to the owner for a bit and he shows us to the table and says the dm isn’t there yet but should arrive shortly.

We sit there for like 30 mins until the owner returns with a 2014 PHB and some character sheets and condescendingly tells us “dungeons and dragons is mostly reading” and says we should read the book to make our characters. My niece had already made a lvl 1 character with me that she knows how to play but I didn’t bring the sheet because I expected we would be using generated characters. So we quickly knock out our characters in like 40 mins in which time the dm, and 5 other players have arrived ranging from around her age to around my age.

Then we sit there for about four hours while everyone talks about dnd and makes their characters. No real session 0 backstory talk, no learning what dnd even is … just people learning how to make characters. Then we leave and are advised we will start playing next week.

My niece said she had fun and was excited to play next week.

Next week rolls around and we show up to the table and there is a new player there. We sit there for like 2 hours as this new player creates their character and then the dm opens up a “hero of the borderlands” starter set.

He flips through the background cards and is unable to find a background matching my niece’s “guild merchant” background and says she will play as a criminal. We change her character sheet up a bit and she seems happy with the change.

We are introduced to the adventure as we are walking up to the keep and are spoken to by a guard.

My niece immediately says she wants to shoot an arrow at the guard.

I realize that becoming a criminal has ruined her ability to behave like a civil human and this is about to fall off the rails if it isn’t redirected right away. The dm allows her to make an attack roll on the guard and she misses. Another pc is able to restrain her to keep her from shooting another arrow.

My niece declares that the other pc is her enemy and vows to kill her.

I tell the dm we will be right back and I bring my niece outside of the store and briefly talk to her about table manners and “we need to be a party who all work together and gets along or else dungeons and dragons as a game doesn’t work” we do some quick backstory work and come to the conclusion that her character used to be a thief but is now trying to be good but is fighting with their reputation as a thief even though that’s not who they are now.

We go back to the table and the party is now inside a library doing some skill checks attempting to get some magic scrolls back into their cases. We have a good time with this encounter and it seems like everyone is having a good time.

Then a friend of the dm walks up to the table and asks everyone how the game is going. One of the players who is maybe 20ish years old jokingly says it’s good and we are trying to control my niece’s character’s violent outburst.

The dm’s friend then makes a joke about my niece being violent for a 5 year old.

My niece corrects the dms friend and says she’s 9.

The dm’s friend then calls her 4.

She says she’s 9

Dm’s friend calls her 3

Then my niece gets angry and said some of the most deranged and foul insults that I have ever heard and I didn’t even know what to say.

No one seemed overly offended but there was a clear awkwardness in the air.

The dm tells me he heard me earlier saying that we were planning on leaving around 5pm and it was 5pm now. ( I had not said anything about planning on leaving but I felt that I was potentially being evicted from the table). I agree and we pack up and head on out.

I messaged the dm on their store’s discord kinda trying to debrief the whole situation and was left on read. I tell my sister a synopsis of this whole incident and tell my niece that we won’t be playing dnd at the store anymore.

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

ok so i'm writing this from my throwaway bc my main has my art and i don't need weirdos. but i HAVE to tell this story before i forget.

so we have this roll20 group right? dm alex, me (lyra, elf cleric), my friend mira (tiefling wizard), and this dude... let's call him chad. human barbarian. big surprise.

from session zero chad was like "i'm the alpha" unironically. kept making jokes about how he'll "put a baby in one of you girls" and "you need a real man to carry on your elf genes" and shit. mira and i just... ignored it? like we didn't wanna make it weird. dm alex never said anything either.

anyway.

one session we're in this "temple of pleasures" (dm's words). chad is already like "i roll to seduce the hottest priestess" before alex finishes describing the room. alex says "ok but first everyone make a con save". we all fail. blackout.

we wake up. alex says "you don't remember what happened. maybe... intimate stuff with the clergy."

chad immediately LOSES it in vc. "HAHA I KNEW IT I TOTALLY BANGED LYRA AND MIRA" - i swear to god. mira types "????????". i just sat there.

alex goes "actually chad your character doesn't remember either. the priests were all nonbinary and very skilled. could be them."

chad: "whatever i still banged the sexiest priestess there"

alex: "there were no priestesses. but anyway. one of the characters is now pregnant."

silence.

chad: "called it! which one of the girls?"

alex: "the pregnant one is your barbarian."

i wish you could have seen his face on camera. like his brain just... blue screen.

chad: "my guy is a DUDE"

alex: "magic temple. divine conception. it happens. you'll get a baby bump in a few sessions."

chad laughed it off like "haha good one alex" but alex wasn't laughing.

next session: "-2 con saves, you feel nauseous." session after: "your belt is tight. your abs look... softer." session after THAT: "you waddle slightly. speed -5ft."

chad finally snaps: "ok this isn't funny anymore. remove the debuffs."

alex, calm as hell: "but you agreed to get pregnant. you literally cheered."

chad: "I THOUGHT YOU WERE JOKING"

alex: "in a world with dragons? male pregnancy is the least weird thing. you rolled to seduce. you didn't ask who you were seducing."

chad just... disconnected. we heard him scream through his mic for like half a second and then silence.

mira and i looked at each other and both FELL off our chairs. i was laughing so hard i choked. mira spilled her monster energy all over her keyboard. we laughed for like ten minutes straight.

then alex typed in chat: "sorry. i have an mpreg fetish. couldn't help myself. i'll tone it down next campaign."

we're still looking for a new dm. but honestly? chad deserved it.

• lyra (not my real name, please don't dm me about mpreg i swear to god)

Ok so I already wrote here and I indeed saw a lot of responses coming from all of you, which i aprecciated it.

I actually deleted the story, not because of the responses or anything, but because im pretty much a very scaredy person when it comes to share something, because i fear that someone from the party will see it and this would ruin a friendship. But this time, im not scared.

Some people I will mention go wiht the names of
- Koala
- DM
- Ruby

In fact, after telling that story, i got an update. So ill try to be brief (it complicates me, but ill try)

Last year, I joined a D&D campaign run by someone from my friend group. For context, our group had already started becoming unstable because one member, I’ll call him Koala, had a habit of trying to control everything. He acted like the leader in every space, pushed his preferences onto others, and got upset whenever people disagreed with him.

The D&D campaign felt like a fresh start. The DM made a separate server for it, away from the main group drama. At the time, I didn’t know tabletop groups usually work better with fewer players, so when I joined, I didn’t realize there had originally been a limit. Apparently, there was some miscommunication about who could participate, and that already created tension from the beginning. (It was Koala who suggested me to talk to DM to let me join. In the end, one friend who got left out and I joined, exceeding the limit from 5 members to 7.)

I was excited and tried hard to contribute, despite me learning how to do a character sheet on my own, but I was also in a demanding internship for my healthcare career, so sometimes I had to multitask during sessions. The campaign mostly focused on Koala and another player’s storyline, whom we will call Ruby, while I barely had opportunities to participate. Looking back, I understand part of that was because the story was still starting and facing time skips to follow the plot properly, but at the time, I felt excluded.

Eventually, the DM asked me to leave the campaign until I graduated. I accepted it, but I admitted to him that I felt left out during the sessions. That’s when the DM revealed he never really wanted me in the campaign to begin with and felt pressured into allowing me to join. He also admitted he intentionally avoided engaging with my character’s ideas or plot hooks.

At that point, I realized a lot of the things I had noticed (my character constantly being sidelined in sidequests, NPCs either ignoring my character or being mean, or nearly dying immediately) probably weren’t in my head. Still, I understand now that the situation came from mistakes on both sides. I shouldn’t have joined while juggling such an intense internship, and the DM should have been clearer about player limits from the start.

This is the point when I sent the original storyline here (And at the same time, that's when I found out about the member limit, the amount of time some campaigns take, this was all new to me.)

The update goes after this.

After I left, the friend group slowly started falling apart.

I distanced myself from the main Discord server because both Koala and the DM were there, though over time, I reconnected with most people individually. The only person I stopped talking to entirely was Koala.

Later, I learned the DM and Koala had their own conflict unrelated to the campaign. The DM had created an AU for a game series we all liked and asked Koala to help with sprite art. Koala apparently started acting like he co-owned the project and even referred to himself as the DM’s “right hand,” which caused a major argument because none of that had been agreed upon.

Honestly, that behavior matched what I had already seen from him for years. Koala always wanted influence over projects, groups, and creative spaces, and because he was the artist, people often became dependent on him.

By the end of the year the group was basically dead socially. Calls rarely happened anymore, and when they did, it was mostly just Koala, his boyfriend, and one or two others.

Earlier this year, I finally left Koala’s server completely. It took me a long time because I had a lot of memories tied to that place, but once I left, I realized how relieved I felt. Being away from someone who constantly made me feel miserable over fictional characters and group dynamics was genuinely freeing.

Koala tried contacting me afterward by sending me art of a character he knew mattered a lot to me, but I ignored it, and he stopped trying after that.

Recently, I talked to Ruby and asked whether the D&D campaign was still running. Apparently, it had been cancelled only a month or so after I left, mainly because of issues involving Koala. I don’t know all the details, but from what I heard, the DM eventually got exhausted dealing with him and gave up on the campaign entirely.

Ruby also told me that most people in the group eventually stopped talking to Koala altogether because they each developed their own issues with him. According to them, the warning signs had always been there. (Ruby still believes that Koala's boyfriend is still wiht him. We are not sure.)

Now the server Koala owns has apparently lost most of its original energy. Many old members left, new people joined, and the remaining community mostly revolves around agreeing with him on characters from games he enjoys. He formed his paradise and possibly surely replaced us easily.

Looking back, accepting and leaving was probably one of the healthiest decisions I could’ve made.

-----

If I'm being honest, I don't know if this is actually an RPG horror story, but it has an RPG involved part.

Anyways thanks for reading if you got to this part.

So, this was a group of 7, including the DM. This is mostly about the DM and 1 of the other Players, her code name will be Nancy

So DM and Nancy are married and this is everyone else's first ever DnD game. So Nancy is playing a roughly 17yo character, and there is this NPC who is AT LEAST in his late 30s, that we have to go to, to get information. And it's been about a year into this game and this NPC and Nancy's PC have been a little flirty this whole time, which, weird. But whatever that's how those 2 were all the time, but then we're rolling really bad rolls to try to get this information out of this guy, so (and I don't remember who suggested it, it's been a good few years, but neither of them were uncomfortable with it) Nancy's character decides to start hard-core flirting and then the DM starts describing in-depth the seggs they have. And while at that time it's been a year since we ooc started this game so technically I guess you could say this character was now 18, it was really weird and no one else at the table hadn't consented to hearing that because they COULDN'T! BECAUSE EVERYONE ELSE AT THE TABLE (besides DM and Nancy who were both in their 40s) WAS A CHILD RANGING ABOUT 5 to 14 YEARS OLD!

The DM was my father, and Nancy was my Step-mom. The other players where my siblings and my Step-Siblings. AND!! It was required! We would get punished if we didn't participate in the DnD sessions. It's not like we would be looking at screens if we weren't doing DnD! We wanted to go play outside! We wanted to play tag! We wanted to go over to the neighbors and play!

The sessions would last 7+ hours with minimal breaks, if we weren't fully attentive we would get punished, if we needed to go to the bathroom, or were hungry, we'd be punished. The youngest was 5 years old at the beginning of the game! That's absolutely not an appropriate expectation for children!

This was my first ever DnD game, it took me YEARS to finally try to go play again because as a kid I remember liking the concept but everything else was awful- some of my siblings refuse to even talk about DnD or entertain the idea of them playing any TTRPG. And I don't blame them-

I now play semi-regularly and have seperated the game from that awful experience, but it's safe to say I have since cut contact with my father and my step-mom.

Hello RPGHorrorstories, today I bring a short story and a question. The story is fairly short, and I am being a bit vague here as I don’t want to write out the several pages of lore and backstories that would be needed to contextualize every single character interaction. The story is a bit of an example, because I am curious if anyone else has ever encountered this dissonance of character and player.

My story is fairly simple, a couple friends and I recruited a few unknowns from a forum to play a game with us, with my friends and I having played together for the better part of a decade. One of these previously unknown players proved to be a bit of a problem, and I am going to be calling this person Player X. I will be referring to their character as Character X in this story. We were playing in a superhero setting, where our characters were delinquents on probation at a high school for superheroes. Character X was a preppy, popular rich girl with criminal parents. During session 0 and before the game started, there didn’t seem to be any issues, but those issues started to immediately crop up when we started playing.

Player X did not seem to grasp that even though “popular girls” in high school are often archetypically bitchy and fake, that having their character talk to everyone as if they were a small child and imply other characters were stupid to their face would not make them like her very much. Early in the game, Character X began to almost immediately start speaking in this way to my character, and later escalated the character conflict by attempting to publicly humiliate him in a pretty nasty way in front of the whole school at a party she was throwing. My character, who was intended to be volatile and a bit of a punk, responded by throwing hands, and later confronted character X and demanded what her problem was. Character X was evasive and refused to answer. Player X then complained out of session about the conflict, stating that it was no longer fun for them. This is completely fine, sometimes OOC conflict can get a bit hotter than intended, and things can be worked out OOC. I attempted to explain what my character was feeling, saying that because of a previously established connection where our characters were supposed to be on good terms, he felt betrayed by Character X, and that my character would probably apologize and forget about the whole thing if Character X tried to meet him in the middle, to which Player X refused, as “their character hadn’t done anything nearly comparable.” The GM then stepped in and ruled that they would just minimally interact for a session or two, we’d timeskip, and they’d forget about it and be cool, like a lot of teenagers do. We both seemingly agreed. The next day, I woke up to a full-page message in my DMs, where Player X explained to me, in the most condescending and passive aggressive way possible, that they did not consent to the way my character framed the incident, and demanded that I respect their non-negotiable boundaries that they control their own character, and that I rewrite the portion of my character’s backstory that included our characters being on good terms. I sent the message to my GM and let them handle it. Player X was told to just let the situation go, and they half-complied, albeit still making some pretty nasty remarks about my character and referencing the incident once or twice.

This wasn’t a major red flag, as Character X seemed to behave comparably with a plurality of the other characters in the game. At one point, Character X reported an NPC classmate and rival to school administration for bullying, and essentially got her months of detention. Immediately afterwards, Character X attempted to get the hero team of this NPC character to embark on a mission (without the other PCs) and was surprised when they did not want to comply, despite barely knowing her other than that she got their teammate put in eternal detention. She then called them cowards and losers, and was surprised that this did not motivate them to change their minds. On another occasion, Character X, in a scheme I still fail to understand, got another classmate nearly killed and seriously injured. After said scheme, Character X tried to have a sleepover with the Principal’s ward (another player character, who was also in trouble for unrelated shenanigans), and claimed they needed to stay with them because she did not feel safe at home. The principal demanded a further explanation, and Character X refused to elaborate, both on their scheme that nearly killed a classmate and feeling in danger. They were not allowed a sleepover, and when character X escalated a fight with the principal, calling her an “evil cunt,” among other things, were very surprised when character X was threatened with detainment. On both occasions (and several others) player X complained out of character about these incidents, and seemed to be surprised when the other players did not agree about the injustice of the situation.

The thing about Player X is that they behaved in a way very similar to their character, speaking with the same condescending tone and phrasing that their character did. They also would complain about the GM when the GM was not in call, criticizing that the GM wasn’t “yes and-ing” enough and that the other characters were receiving preferential treatment. When anyone else would try to explain why they were receiving the reaction they got, they were (apparently) shocked and argued why Character X was actually in the right. The game fell apart shortly after for semi-related reasons, but I still wonder if Player X genuinely believed that the character they were playing was likable in any way.

This comes to my question for the sub. I think it’s very possible for someone who doesn’t have a lot of charisma out of character to play a charismatic character, as things that can inform charisma like social confidence, quick thinking and good interpersonal instincts, and even more superficial things like eye contact and body language are less of an issue when roleplaying. However, when the player is someone who genuinely doesn’t see the reason why calling a bunch of people you barely know cowards and bitches wouldn’t motivate them to assist you in a potentially dangerous task, I think it might actually be impossible for that person to play a charismatic or likable character. Has anyone else played with someone (doesn’t have to be as serious as this story) where the player was so devoid of charisma that it carried over to their character?

TL;DR First-time player lead by experienced players into making a joke character, got scolded twice for being the joke character.

If anyone from this story were to see this, it would definitely burn some bridges. They all still call me a friend.

A month ago, at the time of writing, I left a DnD group I was with for the last 5 years, beginning in May of 2021. During my time with them, I was made to feel like a 3rd wheel, that I was just around because I was there at the very beginning, and the DM would tell me their actions that would make me feel that way were unintentional.

This won't all fit in one post, and there were events in and out of game that impacted how I felt. In this post, I'll cover the very beginning, at least.

This group came together as basically all strangers. The Cleric, who wanted to start the table, picked me up from a discord server over a shared interest of a horror podcast. Already in her discord was the DM who was happily taking on the role, but she sent out a message on her Twitter looking for more members to join the table. 3 people responded, becoming the Barbarian, Rogue, and Bard.

I was elated to start playing, I was brand new, I had been listening to actual play podcasts for the last 2 years. I was excited to meet new friends, as I didn't have any lasting connections after dropping out of post secondary and the pandemic.

They had session 0 without me.

I got to pop in at the very beginning, where everyone was kinda talking about what they wanted to play. I found out that Cleric was going to be playing their Cuphead OC, a toonkind character, DM had a, everything goes attitude. I got to briefly pitch my character idea, a hermit who likes to pickle things. Druid and Goblin were floated, and I went to bed thinking about names while they remained in the call, making their characters together.

The following week, I would make my character sheet and try to come up with a name. Unfortunately, Pickle Rick was immediately suggested, but I landed on Pickle Brinestone.

I feel it's important to mention again that I was brand new to playing DnD at the time. The DM had an unknown amount of experience, Cleric had at least a year, Rogue and Bard sounded like they had at least experience with 4e or later as well as other ttrpgs, and Barbarian was the most experienced out of all of us.

I reiterate because this is where Pickle started getting pushed in the joke character direction, which I have realized may have been the worst possible thing to happen to me as a new player. Instead of helping me to come up with a buy-in for the story and a motivation to adventure, he became a restaurant entrepreneur who wanted to open pickle themed restaurants on other planes. I was on board for this, I had primarily listened to NADDPod, and I was all in for the goofs.

Session 1

DM tells us a war happened (news to me), the illithid had lead a devastating incursion across multiple planes of existence, and have since retreated. Barbarian and Rogue wake up in a military hospital, are given exposition, gold, and immediately go shopping. Once they are done with that, the military general NPC leads them to a strange illithid ship, more exposition, and it turns out Barb and Rogue had the ability to open it. Inside, they find the Toonkind Cleric, who goes through a whole anatomy lesson on his body. It was beginning to get late at this point, and the DM finally got to me and Bard.

(Bard was a Warlock at the time, but the same character)

Pickle had this massive brining barrel he brought with him everywhere and was taking a nap in it. So the DM described the barrel being loaded on the ship as Pickle dreamed. Bard entered Pickles' dream and somehow also the ship because his warlock abilities at the time meant he was his own patron, could enter dreams, and was immortal because he existed through all of time all at once.

After waking, the other 3 obviously thought we were intruders, Pickle tried to explain himself. But Bard decided instead to cut him off, sitting on the barrel lid trying to push him back in.

I had brushed this off as DM let me make a STR check to push my way out, but Bard described himself as graceful dismounting. I'm really not sure what this was, if it was just a casual razzing or if he was trying to impress the rest of the group in some way. At the time, it was also getting late, and I had gotten maybe 15 mins all session to play, same as him.

Important to note as well, when I went to do Pickles voice, I panicked, I had been practicing different ones, and I thought I had landed on something. But in the moment, it came out as a gravely Brooklyn accent. This then gave rise to more jokes about Pickle, that he's from fantasy brooklyn, that he's jewish, and I leaned into it cause we were all laughing, and I felt accepted, so I wanted to keep them laughing.

First Arc took us to Shadowfell, and we were charged with looking into mindflayer activities. We went to a variety of locations, one being a lab where the Bard found a purple skull crab, and he handed it off to Pickle. At a later location, while the party investigated for close to a half hour, something that would turn out to be just flavor, Pickle sat alone and found out the crab was psychic. I didn't understand how familiars worked, and I asked him if he would be mine. So Pickle got his familiar, Scuttlebutt the psychic skullcrab.

We would eventually arrive at a monastery in a mountain, and going below, we would find a city in the mountain. We encountered a family of NPCs that led us to a cave where they worshiped a giant creatures skeleton that was sat at the edge of a pool. I can't recall why, but Pickle cast faerie fire on the skeleton, and we discovered there were small versions of it swimming in the eye socket.

I said Pickle takes out his fishing rod to try and get one of the smaller skeletons, but I was immediately stopped by the table. Full stop, halted what I wanted my character to do, which I can get being cautious. However, the Rogue immediately went over and climbed up to scoop one out with his hand, with no resistance from the party. By doing this, in a later session, the DM invited the Rogue to take Warlock levels for a custom patron.

In hindsight, a Druid Warlock multiclass for a brand new player would've been awful, but if I had been allowed to take the action I wanted, imagine how exciting that would've been as a new player. Having such an interesting and unexpected proposition made, a possibility I would've never thought of or expected. Instead, Pickle was literally picked up and carried out of the cave, so I also couldn't grab one like the Rogue.

We descended further into the mountain, eventually reaching another lab, where we found a creature made up of a mass of different bodies that was fused to a giant metal ring in the middle of the room. Seeing that there were dwarves and other humanoids fused into the creature, they attempted to ask it questions. This resulted in random memories being projected into their minds as well as taking psychic damage for even being near it. I don't remember how long this took, but I eventually said Pickle goes to touch the control panel that was also in the room.

Up to this point in the campaign, still only months in, I had been jokey with Pickle. I had filled a cup of peanuts with wine because I forgot there were peanuts in it. I pitched a restaurant franchise to a friendly beholder. The barrel he carried with him became a vile vat, when as a group, we decided that things like cheese, corned beef, and shrimp were in it. Pickle had an iconic way of saying "Hello" that the table liked to imitate. We were all having a good time with it.

There was no indication as to what the machine was. The DM gave me no warning. I said I pulled a leaver, and the DM responded, "A portal opens, cutting the mass in half, killing it."

The table lost it at me.

Both in character and above table. I was scolded for what I did. My character was manhandled. The Rogue took my familiar away (who is played by the DM) and told him that if he didn’t keep me in line that he would boil him.

I was stunned. I didn't know what was happening, I don't even remember how it all resolved. Eventually, an evil NPC entered the room, and the scene continued.

Not much else happened during the Shadowfell arc. We all boarded the illithid ship again and headed back to the material plane.

DM intended the return as a brief interlude, a short break for the PCs. But one night, Pickles barrel was stolen by the DMs homebrewed Grablins. The Grablin fight left the party cursed by the Wave Mother and was the DM effectively telling us, "Don't go near the ocean." However, for some reason, the party took a hostage grablin who we interrogated back at the Inn. We weren't getting much out of him, and they didn't want to leave him in the room alone or walk him through town in broad daylight. So Pickle picked him up and stuffed him in the barrel.

It wasn't until we reached the next location where we were taking our prisoner that we found out that Grablins evaporate when they touch salt water of any kind, which include Pickles brining barrel.

For the second time that month, I was scolded above table for something I could've never known would happen.

I told them that if its getting to be too much, I can bench Pickle and let him have some off-screen development. You guys are obviously having an issue with how I'm playing him. They responded with, "No, you don't have to do that.", "If you change characters, that's your choice." I felt so confused.

But I ultimately decided to bench Pickle and make a new character, after only one arc of what would be a 4 year long campaign.

I've reflected on these events a lot, and when I was still at the table, I talked to the DM about them. He would agree with me about things, but most times, the conversation would end with him deflecting that we were all very new to each other as people.

These and other events left me feeling defeated. Over time, I just became more passive as a player.

Recently, someone had brought up favorite moments. They listed all these big cool things the other players did, and for my character, "He really came into his own." The DM then chimed in, listing his favorite moments, and for my character, "He really locked in toward the end."

I'll go over the moments that contribute to this later, but I should end it here for now before I get any more off-topic.

I don't think its controversial to say stories on this sub are not exactly all "believable" or "true". But I think there are degrees to how trustworthy a story seems.

For example, some stories are (in my opinion) likely based on true events but with certain aspects exaggerated for effect.

But then there are ones that are so blatantly false, everyone knows it and calls it out. And I'm curious what everyones' lines are for telling that.

For me personally, the deadest giveaway is any variation of "The Problem Player (tm) always had bad rolls and failed literally everything they tried to do, and I (the Perfect Player) had all nat 20s and never messed up and was flawless and everyone loved playing with me".

I've played with a problem player before and let me tell you- those people do, unfortunately get lucky sometimes. I played a one shot with this old friend who was not great but he did get a nat 20 to kill the final boss quickly. It just happens sometimes.

So… was this player toxic, or am I the problem here?

I genuinely need outside opinions because this situation ended with a player getting kicked from our campaign, and somehow I still feel guilty about it.

We’re playing a dark fantasy campaign in a corrupt city ruled by an oppressive government. My character is a Peace Domain cleric who started idealistic but has been slowly breaking mentally because of the horrors happening around him.

Let me introduce the party first:

- Larry: Wizard

- Sylph: Paladin

- Sera (my character): Cleric

- Martin: Hexblade Warlock

My issue is mainly with Martin’s PLAYER, not necessarily the character itself.

The biggest problem was constant interruption.

For example:

We’d be in the middle of an emotional/dramatic character arc scene, and suddenly he would interrupt for no reason just to make some random joke that honestly wasn’t funny, then keep repeating it while laughing into the mic for several minutes straight.

Or he would suddenly insert himself into scenes he had no reason to be part of.

Or interrupt conversations constantly in general.

I’m not exaggerating when I say he could talk for literally 30 minutes straight, then get annoyed if someone else wanted to speak. And when he DID let someone talk, sometimes it would last like 10 seconds before he interrupted again and took over the conversation.

And this wasn’t just a “once or twice” thing.

We actually recorded some sessions, and after rewatching them, yes, he REALLY was talking for that long.

Another issue:

He constantly tried to argue other characters into completely changing their beliefs.

Example:

My character had JUST witnessed someone die horribly in front of him. The literal next scene, Martin’s character pulls mine aside for what became a 30+ minute real-life argument trying to convince my cleric to exploit the poor for information by giving them food/money in exchange for spying.

I kept refusing because it directly went against my character’s beliefs.

Then he asked if he could roll persuasion on me.

This was especially frustrating because during Session 0 we ALL agreed:

No player-vs-player persuasion/deception/insight rolls unless BOTH players consent.

And it wasn’t only me.

He did this with basically everyone, including NPCs.

Even when a decision was already clearly made, he would keep arguing endlessly trying to “win” the discussion.

At one point he argued with the paladin for around FIFTY MINUTES about using lethal traps.

Our sessions are only 3-4 hours long once a week.

You can imagine how exhausting that became.

Another issue:

He almost ALWAYS pushed for the most violent solution possible.

(Warning: violence)

Breaking fingers.

Cutting tongues out.

Psychological torture.

Threatening helpless NPCs.

Etc.

At one point, his character mocked, threatened, and physically assaulted a mentally unstable NPC who we actually needed alive, which ended with that NPC killing himself.

Naturally, my character started distrusting his character after this.

Later during a combat encounter, I cast Bless… but intentionally did NOT cast it on Martin because my character no longer trusted him.

The player got genuinely upset OUT OF CHARACTER because I didn’t buff him.

And honestly that confused me.

Like… am I somehow the bad guy for roleplaying consequences?

Anyway, the session that finally destroyed everything happened recently.

Martin’s character wanted me to meet a character named Silas, someone ONLY he knew. Apparently they were secretly planning some shady stuff together, and I accidentally ruined their plans earlier by doing something morally good.

Now here’s the important metagaming context:

Silas SPECIFICALLY told Martin:

“Just deliver ONE sentence to Sera and tell him where to meet me. Do NOT argue with him. Do NOT discuss anything else.”

This is because Martin’s relationship with my character was already terrible.

Instead… Martin immediately started the conversation by insulting my character for ruining plans my character didn’t even know existed.

Then he suddenly said this phrase to my cleric:

“Peace is not stillness. It is bond. Break it, and you break yourself.”

This sentence is EXTREMELY important to my character’s backstory and goddess.

He NEVER told ANYONE this phrase before. Ever.

So obviously my character freaked out and demanded to know how Martin knew it.

Martin’s answer?

“Someone told me to tell you.”

That’s it.

No explanation.

No reassurance.

Nothing.

And keep in mind:

This is a character/player who lies CONSTANTLY.

Even over small pointless things.

And my character had caught him lying many times before.

So naturally my character didn’t trust him.

Instead of trying to calm the situation or explain things better, Martin spent around TEN REAL-LIFE MINUTES threatening my character:

“I’ll kill you.”

“I’ll torture you.”

Etc.

But honestly, it stopped sounding like roleplay very quickly.

The threats became extremely personal.

There was direct insulting, mocking, and aggressive language that genuinely felt aimed at ME as a player, not at my cleric.

And this is important:

This was actually the SECOND time he had done something like this.

Normally I try very hard not to take in-character conflict personally. I actually enjoy character drama when everyone is respectful about it.

But after the session, the OTHER PLAYERS themselves came to me and said:

“Yeah… that definitely sounded directed at you personally.”

and

“That stopped sounding in-character a while ago.”

Which honestly made me feel even worse because I kept trying to convince myself maybe I was overreacting.

Finally I asked the DM if I could speak because I literally couldn’t get a word in.

My character responded basically saying:

“You’re disgusting, manipulative, and socially incapable. If you want something from someone, ask respectfully. I’ll ignore your threats this once, but if I see you again, I’ll stop you myself.”

Important context:

My cleric is usually extremely kind and forgiving, but from the start of the campaign we established the ONE thing he absolutely does not tolerate is personal humiliation/insults.

Then the DM asked Martin’s player:

“Do you want to retcon the threats?”

And Martin’s player said:

“I don’t mind retconning, BUT THAT IS WHAT MY CHARACTER WOULD DO.”

The moment he said that, I told the DM:

“Then I don’t want the retcon either. If that’s what his character would do, then let the consequences stay.”

The DM agreed.

Session ended there.

Afterward the DM heavily criticized the player, but the player still insisted he wasn’t wrong.

Eventually he admitted that he had started taking things personally OUT OF CHARACTER because I kept unintentionally interfering with secret backstory plans that I literally knew nothing about.

And even then he still insisted I was actually the problem.

The DM finally decided to remove him from the campaign.

The weirdest part?

AFTER all this, I actually defended him and said maybe we should give him another chance.

The DM refused.

Then I privately messaged the player afterward because I genuinely felt bad for him and wanted to comfort him despite being the one who got personally threatened for 10 minutes.

Do you know what happened?

He ignored me completely.

He still talks normally with every other player EXCEPT me.

And the thing that hurts most is:

We were actually friends before this campaign.

So honestly…

Am I crazy here?

Was this toxic behavior?

Or was I a bad player?

I know in the general area in the story I'm not the asshole, but I just want to know if I was being a dick in the beginning.

This was a few years ago in high school but it's been weighing on my mind recently.

Back when I was a freshman, I had been-and still are-really into Dungeons and Dragons, and the D&D club back then had disbanded mid year over social conflicts in the club, and here's where the club member-let's call them Cindy-comes in.

Cindy was an acquaintance since middle school but since almost no friends that I had went to my high school since it was cross city from where I previously went; she became my only friend.

We'd joke about comics and things we were interested in and one of comics we both read had D&D in it and Cindy became interested. Awesome! The more people playing the better. Cindy found the D&D club at my school and joined it. I was content just hearing about it since I just didn't jam with the other members personally.

When they disbanded, I found the opportunity to take it over just so Cindy could play D&D. Because I had been playing D&D for a few years-therefore knew more- I was the DM and President even though Cindy was last surviving member (I was conflicted about doing that but college transcripts and she seemed fine with the arrangement).

I found a member that could join and the club grew from word of mouth.

The problem really started after Cindy transferred schools. I knew that after that; she probably wasn't allowed in the club officially but we still let her come to sessions and play since we did it online on discord over the weekends.

Few months of blissful sessions and then all hell broke loose. We finished a campaign and were making characters for the next over a few weeks as I prepared. Cindy DM'd me privately how she wanted her character to actually be a ghost but the rest of the party doesn't know, even the actual players. I didn't like that much since I prefer full transparency between players but I let her do it anyway since she was still a beginner and would grow out of it.

Little did I know that what Cindy meant by "ghost," was god that's immune to almost every type of damage. One of my players was looking at the other character sheets on D&D Beyond and saw that she changed everything on character to be massively overpowered. She did this without telling me, and this is where I don't know if I messed up:

I DM'd her after taking away her OP stuff "Ok scrap that ghost idea, you can’t put those resistance’s and immunities and not tell me. Never do that shit again" Ok a little harsh but I was pissed. I thought that would be end but no. I check Cindy's character sheet and she added it AGAIN. Now I was furious. I posted to the group without singling her out that if they're going to do something again after I tell them not to, they can leave.

So she left. No, I'm sorry, no, my bad. Just left. I was fine with that. She may have been the OG member technically but she still broke a rule I had set and left of her own accord. Then she left a final note. Summary is: I hurt her so bad, she has no will to live, and for me to go to fucking hell.

End of story now? Nope. For the next 2 weeks she keeps DM'ing and harassing me and members to get back in the group because she needs "story ideas" to write her own book. (Basically taking the stuff I create and saying it's her own).

Obviously I don't, since she has now disrespected me and my players but I wonder if it's not so obvious and am I really the asshole here?

Ok now the full story beyond that, because it get's even crazier. SHE STARTS COMING TO MY SCHOOL, STALKING ME TRYING TO GET LET BACK IN!!!

I had a friend that went to the same school Cindy went to and she knows her as well but doesn't like her so she told me that she got word that Cindy was coming to my school!

I start freaking out. That was so weird and creepy and ugh. Now she knew exactly what room the club met during the school week, so before school started I went to the room to tell the sponsor that we wouldn't be meeting there this week, and lo and behold; she was already talking to him! I ran out of there as soon as I could because I didn't know if she would bring a gun to school or not since she was becoming increasingly unstable in the DM's she sent us.

A bunch of stuff happened in between but this story is already too long, so if anyone really wants the scoop I'll edit it later, but the story finally ends when I reported her to the Dean to talk to her schools Dean and she disappeared from any trace of my life.

Seriously scared the shit out of me. Also let me know if this belongs on RPG horror stories or not.

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.

Alright, so, this isn’t going to be nearly as crazy as some of the other stories on here but I hope it will be educational for those looking to learn from these and entertaining enough to those looking for drama.

So let’s assign names.
DM - DM
DM ‘s Wife - DMW
Me - Me
My wife - wife
My wife’s sister - sister
Friend of DM - DMF
The partner of friend of DM - DMFP

This was about 2 maybe 4 years ago. I was in a 7 person group counting the DM. This would be my wife’s second game, her sister’s first game in person game, and the DM’s friend’s partner’s first game. The DM, myself, DM’s wife, and DM’s friend had all been in plenty of campaigns and even ran games before. I have even done games with wife, DM, and DMW before that went great.

We started this biweekly (twice a month roughly) game by first playing “the quiet year” and that was entertaining enough. Lots of shenanigans and silly things being put onto a map and honestly seemed like a good enough way to put some world building onto the players. Based on this I thought that the chemistry of the group was good.

DMW was playing a paladin, I was playing a changeling bard, wife was playing first an artificer then changed to a warlock, sister was playing a rogue, DMF was a wizard, DMFP was a fighter.

Preface: I do not like playing bards in this game but I love playing support characters in others. I specifically chose this time because I felt comfortable trying to just run a supporting character during combat and to try and do the party face stuff. Typically I play combat focused characters and let the others shine during non-combat encounters. I was surprised how much I really enjoyed this character I had created and still think about trying to make him again when new campaigns are brought up.

Now I mentioned this to the people above the table. Telling them I wanted to do the talking and take a step back during fighting by just supporting them. They all seemed to understand and the first couple of sessions rolled smoothly.

I started to notice some cracks forming when Wife and Sister kept going off on their own to do some hijinks that didn’t directly help the party. There was also a serious lack of communication happening outside of the group. It would be a few days before the session and I would reach out to the group chat seeing if the date was still sticking, only to be met with a cancellation by DMF or a need for a reschedule. On top of all this the sessions were more heavily combat focused. The very few social encounters we got were either trivial with no rolls or being spear headed and hoarded by the sister’s rogue character.

We got to about level 4 or 5 (about 10-13 sessions) and this continued. I brought this up above table to sister after a session that I would like to do the talking if we can. I had a +11 or somethis to the persuasion (from my memory) at the very least and her answer to this was “I know that but my character doesn’t know that.” Honestly, I was taken aback and should’ve just been more forceful with my wants at that point. But instead I reached out to the DM personally concerning the issues at hand (minus the scheduling one, I am used to being the one who confirms dates). We talked about whether or not to continue with the character or switch to a new one. I mulled it over in my head and decided to try one more session with my Bard before switching. I informed the DM of what I would be doing. After another combat heavy session with role play dominated by the rogue I decided to switch to an artificer who was going to be the most armored and had a terrible charisma score. In other words a combat focused character who provides nothing to outside of combat encounters. Now I informed the DM of this and I made sure the character was alright with him. After the approval I got him all ready to go for our next session.

Guess what that session turned out to be? An interrogation. An entire session dedicated to talking. On the session I had told the DM I was bringing my new combat focused character to. 

I sat through the session and the way it ended told me that the next session would also be about talking. I talked with my wife about what was going on. I mulled it over in my head for about a week then told the group “it was fun but I am done” and stopped going. Not a single message in the group chat after that. No cancellation, no group ending, nothing. I asked my wife if she was going to the next session and apparently after I quit everyone just stopped going. No one held the dates together, no one talked to each other, the group just ceased to exist once I left.

So always remember kids, no table top roleplaying is better than bad tabletop roleplaying and when your needs aren’t being met you owe them nothing just leave.

(This is a long one! It's sort of a brain-dump reflection on a situation that happened awhile ago.)

This happened when I was still in high school, and looking back I can't believe I stayed in the game for as long as I did. However, I was young, nerdy and desperate to try out this dragon game I'd heard so much about. I also had a severe tendency to people-please even if I was uncomfortable in situations. Now, fortunately I've grown and can look back with perspective on how weird this was.

I met our DM through school as we shared a lot of interests and were in a few classes and clubs together. I was either a freshman or sophomore at this time and he was in a grade above me. When he mentioned that he was into D&D and invited me to join a game he DMed, I was super excited. I'd always wanted to play, but the closest I'd gotten before was researching the game on my own and watching/listening to a few popular actual plays online. I told him that I knew very little about the mechanics but I was willing to learn.

We had a preliminary call where we designed my first ever character in D&D 5e, a tiefling artificer. I remember him asking, "so what's your angle here? Like a 'little girl with a big sword' sort of character?" I was confused, as I hadn't indicated that this was what I'd been aiming for at all. I wanted this character to be a badass sharpshooter inventor with a mechanical mount. Regardless, after sorting out the details, I felt confident about session 1.

It was an online game using voice call. Since it was an ongoing campaign, he sort of just threw my character into what the party was already up to, which was a war zone. There was some high concept magical war going on, where the party was a group of special forces invading the enemy's secure military base. The first session was a blur. I wasn't oriented at all on the context of what I was supposed to be doing. I tried to offer support where I could, but I felt like my character's presence had nothing to do with the story. I was also the only female player and felt constantly talked over by the party, who were all good friends already and at least several years older than I was.

The weirdest part I remember about that first arc was this: before the actual invasion plan kicked off, there was suddenly a bathing scene (?) at our home base with the whole party present. We'd done very little roleplay at all before this point.

I remember DM asking, "[OP], do you get in?" while everyone waited for my response in awkward silence. I said that no, my character would sit to the side and prepare her equipment for the upcoming battle. The whole scene was played for laughs, with the guys snickering the whole time. The vibes were generally very uncomfortable and bizarre. This was supposed to be a game about slaying dragons and now we were doing an anime-esque bath sequence. It literally felt like in-game fan service.

Once we got to the actual invasion plan, my character ended up being nominated to stealth ahead into the enemy's base camp as part of our larger plan. As I rolled for stealth and started to scout, an armored general appeared out of nowhere on a dragon mount and torched my character to death in a single round. No opportunity for healing, nothing. She just got fried to a crisp. I'd barely gotten used to any of her abilities and she was perma-dead. Over the rest of the session (which I had to just sit and watch,) the rest of the party also fell one by one, and it was an extremely sudden TPK.

DM sort of apologized for the fluke, saying that his games tended to be very intense and high-stakes and we needed to be on high alert. He allowed us to continue the same plot, but this time our party would be on the opposite side of the conflict.

Don't ask me why I stayed after that first arc. I guess I was caught in the euphoria of having a group to play with and determined to have fun regardless. I thought that maybe I was just playing the game wrong or hadn't been careful enough to avoid being taken out by the dragon. Despite the TPK ending of that session, I do have to say that the mission had been pretty suspenseful and exciting. Plus, I still wanted to see what all the hype was about. Surely D&D could be better than this, right?

In the next arc, our party was a group of high-level mercenaries who were infiltrating a magic school where the enemy was supposedly training dangerous spellcasters for their cause. The logic the party decided on was just to... burn the school, torching the students within just for learning magic on the wrong side of the war. I get that sometimes games are built around playing evil or morally corrupt characters to make for an interesting story. However, this didn't feel good at all. It felt like extreme murder-hobo play mixed with the worst kind of power fantasy. Being such a new player, though, I didn't know what to do but go along with the party's plan. I didn't have the will or tools to push back. So my high-dex tabaxi fighter spent his time smashing oil lamps to add to the blaze while his party members stormed the other floors. This earned the approval of my group, who applauded my destructive tactics.

Around this time is when I started to lose hope that the game would change for the better, as it seemed to devolve into endless combat-slog for a bloody cause that neither I (nor my newly rolled character) were given a reason to believe in.

Out of game, I was pretty decent friends with the DM. One day, he casually mentioned that he likes to stream our games on Twitch and had been doing so for awhile. This completely caught me off guard. What I'd thought had been private casual gaming sessions were being broadcasted weekly to his audience. This icked me out enough that I finally said that I wasn't comfortable continuing the game.

We still saw each other constantly due to our school schedules, but eventually we drifted apart for other reasons. When I was talking about my college plans, he sent me a paragraphs-long tirade about why women and gender studies were a complete waste of time that contributed nothing to society, and why I shouldn't be a feminist. Not that it matters, but I wasn't even planning to major in WGST. This was one of the red flags that made me cut him off entirely and really re-contextualized the weirdness of our past D&D games for me.

I'm thankful that I eventually moved on from this group and matured into a much more self-assured person and player. I'm also thankful that this experience didn't drive me away from the hobby entirely. I DM my own games now with a group of good friends, and I always take extra steps to make sure everyone at my table is comfortable with the atmosphere and content before we roll any dice. Consent is important in all areas of life, TTRPGs included. I truly love my group and the adventures we've shared.

Back then, I thought "It has to be better than this..." and it turns out I was right!

Whenever I feel uncertain as a DM or worry about including my players enough, I just think, "do the opposite of whatever that guy was doing," and it works every time.

Never settle for bad D&D. If you don't feel comfortable, never be afraid to just walk away!