r/rpghorrorstories

hiya :3
so when I was an autistic fifteen year old I was pretty easily tricked and tended to go along with any situation im put in, combine that with being very desperate to finally play DnD after being obsessed with it for a long time it lead to todays story

I joined a group of guys, 5 players and one DM not counting me although only 2-3 playing regularly

I was the only girl had played through discord, they were all older and I dident know them

the world was custom, it was uber-edgy filled with slavery and "morally grey characters" which basically meant everyone was an asshole

there were alot of red flags, although I wanted my tiefling cleric to be a hero voulenteering to go on adventure instead I was told by the army sending my party on the expedtion that I was in fact being forced into this as a disgusting tiefling, and that if I did not comply or I fail my mission I would be taken as a slave instead

the mission was basically just killing, the kingdom we served sent out expeditions to eradicate monsters

during one early encounter some orcs stripped my character and I did not get any new clothes for a long time

both npcs and the group out of game would make fun of me for being a woman

the DM was honestly good at the non creepy stuff, at least to an unexperienced me.

there were barly any roleplay though mostly action and worldbuilding lore dumps lol

the DM would have these quick games he played with individuals instead of the group and one day I finally got an offer and was very exited to actually explore my character rather then being overshadowed by the other players

I wont go into any NSFW details of course but it was a very long game of my character exploring a cave, losing her torch, easily being kidnapped by orcs due to having no vision, exactly what they did to her was narrated in detail while I was made to say how I fought back and rolling dice that barly helped me

I eventuelly escaped only to encounter monster after monster, scenario after scenario

my characters escape and long walk home must have featured every kink this DM had, and yes his breathing was off

I never played with that group after that

Right off the bat, this is a story about a Werewolf: The Apocalypse LARP I played in for somewhere around a year to a year and a half a while back. Apologies if I've talked about this here before, but I'm pretty sure I vented on a different page... if not, well, I'm sure there's some folks who haven't seen this.

Most of the players in said game were great, but the head ST was one of the most terrible experiences I ever had, and it was for the specific reason that they were capable of running great, immersive, engaging scenes... but they also would make up reasons as to why players couldn't do X, Y, or Z, and when you pointed out that contradicted the rules in their own resource document, they'd hand wave it and say it was in a different part of the book.

I found out after hours of spite-searching that no, it wasn't in the document. Said ST just didn't like players succeeding, or having options, so he would make up reasons why they couldn't do the thing.

A few examples of this that I saw included:

• Rewriting stats on basic weapons so they were less effective in the middle of combat scenes (bow and arrow in particular seemed to be something he didn't like)
• Extra restrictions on technology for no reason (claiming that werewolves wanting to use basic, unmodified firearms were going to face the level of social ban that you'd catch for wielding the sci fi tech restricted to the Glass Walkers tribe)
• Changing how gifts worked mid-game (this always seemed to affect characters whose gifts were allowing them to be successful, and the ST would then go, "No, I don't think that's how that gift works. It actually does this," and if players objected he would just say, "We'll look it up later, but for now that's how it's going to run.")

My own personal breaking point came when a goal I'd worked toward for over a year was summarily dismissed by said ST, when they were the one who approved my plan in the first place.

Short version, I don't care for the glory-chasing system in Werewolf LARP. For those who don't play the game, there are Ranks in Werewolf that represent your status in the game, and the higher your status the more powerful gifts (werewolf magic) you're allowed to learn. Each rank comes with a challenge you have to complete, and that really isn't an aspect of the game that appeals to me.

My strategy with the character I had was to compensate for my character's lack of access to more powerful magic by custom-tooling my own weapons and armor. And, once I'd tested my results, to make things for the rest of the venue.

This game used a custom-made crafting system, which I read through, and made sure I understood. I laid out the blueprint for what I was doing with the head ST, and explicitly made it clear I wanted to create custom firearms and armor that were geared to use the advantages of alternate werewolf forms, and which would likely break every firearm law in the setting, so said weapons would need to be employed carefully so as not to draw unwanted attention from authorities.

Said ST heard my proposal, agreed that I understood how the crafting system worked, and said yes, if I spent the time and resources how I described I would be able to make the weapons I described, with the traits and stats I had listed.

And then, once I'd put in all the effort (which required months of constant effort and downtime resource-tracking), said ST reversed position and said no, I could only use my skills to make book-standard weaponry with my Craft skills. I pointed out how I had repeatedly checked to make sure I was following the plan, and for confirmation that the goal I had was coming along, and was told yes, it was, only to be told when I completed it that no, it wouldn't work the way we'd agreed it would.

Why? Because the damage output was too high, and equaled that of a magic weapon being used by another player.

There was no discussion, no claim we'd revisit it later, just shut down after all that time and effort with the distinct air of, "Well I didn't think you'd actually DO it." I left the game not long after, and I was the first of half a dozen players who walked, which sort of collapsed the venue. The game was being resurrected, last I heard, but with an all-new ST staff. I'm listening to feedback, but sadly even if I wanted to go back I just don't have the time and energy for adding it into my schedule.

Right now, at least.

Hello everyone! So I wanted to post the next section of the campaign that went... so-so. This next section I call "The kobold mines of doom", because of the sheer absurdity of deadlyness. Dont mind my terrible grammer or spelling, Im dumb. TLDR at the end

After following the quest marker we had been given by the king, we found ourselves at an abandoned mine, a point of interest along the way of the main quest, though it turned out to be a mandatory stop along the way. We all kind of guessed it was a classic dungeon crawl, and we were all interested in exploring a bit. So, we lit our torches, and we entered.

Things went wrong almost immediately. The barbarian, who was leading the party, failed on his perception check, and had stepped on a single caltrop. We all kind of laughed that the barbarian stepped on a lego. Our eyes widened when we heard the dm rolling several dice, then scooped them up and rolled them again. "Barbarian, you take 16 points of damage". Pur jaws dropped and there was an audible "HOLY SH*T" from the party. Stepping on a nail dealt more damage than getting gutted by a claymore. Being level 1, the barbarian was downed instantly. We used 2 potions to get him back up, but from then on we were extremely careful, knowing that if the wrong party member stepped on another caltrop it could mean instant death. Had we known each individual caltrop did so much damage, we would have stocked up! And it wasnt even poisoned or anything, we checked!

Soon after the caltrop, we came across out first actual "puzzle", a long hallway with large black circles like Swiss cheese. Some were real and were bottomless pits, others were just black circles painted on the ground. We discussed how to solve the puzzle when I got an idea. "Hey Dm, with prestidigitation, it says I can create a harmless sensory effect or the like, could I use it to make a fistful of glitter and toss it? That way the glitter would go down the real holes, but not the fake holes! Would that work?". I was pretty hopeful, I thought it was a neat use of the spell, but he shut it down pretty immediately. He didn't say why, he just said "no" and left it at that, so I figured there was a more intended solution. Nope. Rocks. It was rocks. Instead of letting me have a cool little moment, the solution was just to pick up some rocks and basically play hopscotch. I'm not saying he HAD to allow it, I'm just saying it would have been cool to let me have a small win when it wouldn't have changed anything. We will see more stuff like this going forward, where things that can/ should work are either rejected, undermined, or punished because the DM didn't like the idea or our attempt to add flavor to what we wanted to do.

Anyways, we started to see signs of life, hearing hushed whispers in the tunnels, and seeing make-shift camp supplies and mining equipment scattered throughout. We all entered a tunnel, rolling a perception check, and some of us passed, some failed. Turns out there was a band of kobolds standing 10 feet in front of us and we hadnt seen them, even with darkvision. They opened fire immediately. How we didn't see them when they were in an empty tunnel and not even hiding is a mystery. Luckily they missed most of their shots, and completely vanished. We asked if we could give chase, roll initiative, anything. The dm said "Nope, they are too small and too fast, they are gone". This was already kind of annoying, saying they were within arms reach and they can all just book it fast enough none of us can do anything. This repeated several times throughout the mine, and even with setting traps, readied actions, everything we could think of, the kobolds always shot first, then disappeared as a free action. In one instance the wizard had managed to sneak up on a group, and when within range said he was going to cast a spell, burning hands to hit the entire group. The dm said "okay, you try to cast burning hands, but they all turn around, shoot 4 times (3 misses) and then they run away, they are gone before your spell can leave your fingertips".

We even tried setting up a trap. There was a section of the tunnel that was perfect, a large room with multiple pillars and stones between them that made navigating it a bit confusing, and we had seen the kobolds run into a crack in the wall on the far end of the room. So, we made a plan. I used minor illusion to make it look like a large stone and a pillar were actually connected, like a cave wall and we all piled behind it. The other wizard used the same spell to make it sound like a kobold was calling for help, and we waited. The idea was to lure out the kobolds, and when they were in front of or past my illusion, we would jump them. This didnt work. "When the kobolds hear one of their own calling for help, one pokes its head out of the crack, looks in your direction, makes an 'eep!' Sound and retreats". We all wondered if it saw us or had seen through my illusion, but realized the dm never rolled or anything, so he explained. "No no, it didnt see you, but they've been living in this cave for almost 2 days now, so they know there was a supposed to be a tunnel where you were hiding. They've memorized this place right down to the last stone, so theres no way they would be fooled by something like this". So, we completely gave up on dealing with them and just let then shoot arrows at us whenever they wanted, sort of like an environmental hazard. They were so fast, we were told their base walking speed was more than double our running speed. These little lizard bastards were fast enough to trigger a quicksilver "sweet dreams" scene whenever they saw us. They were so aware of their surroundings they were near omnipresent. They had memorized this cave that even disturbing a single grain of sand was enough to alert them to intruders. So, we just lost interest in dealing with them. Funny enough we even contemplated convincing the king to take the kobolds and free us. If he could convince them to work for him (or even just enslave them like he did us), they could find the prince in a few days, since they were so fast they could move over 500 feet as a free action. But the DM shut this down too.

Eventually, we were told to make a perception check, which I passed! I was expecting what would have been the 4th or 5th pelting of arrows by kobolds, but instead we had stumbled across some ore in the tunnel walls! We excitedly tried to get it out, the DM describing veins of gold and silver we could see shining in the torch light. The Barbarian excitedly ran to the wall, using his muscles and fists to knock free the loose ore. He rolled... low. "You try to knock free the ore, but accidentally break your arm and take 18 points of damage". So this is more of a personal dm tip, remember that flavor is free. If the barbarian had said "I want to pry it loose with strength" there wouldnt be any punishment, at least not one this severe. So, for that same strength check, there shouldnt be a penalty for him wanting to describe it as "I hulk smash the wall", but thats personally just my own tastes. And if you DO want to have consequences, they shouldnt be to this degree. If he really wanted to deal damage, 1 or 2 would have been plenty. Or breaking the wall down and burying the ore, anything. But the barbarian effectively Evel Knievel'd himself for failing a basic strength check. Luckily we had 1 more potion, so we used it to get him back on his feet. From there we asked about tools, but they were too rusted to were missing handles. He wouldnt allow other strength checks wither. So I got an idea, and asked if I could use chromatic orb to knock the ore free from the wall, which the DM allowed. He told me to roll, and I ended up hitting. I dealt enough damage to knock it free, the dm telling is there was a large pocket of even more ore underneath the rubble I had knocked loose!

We were all pretty excited, so I asked if I could use my last spell slot to try to get the rest free. He allowed it, but then I was hit with some FUCKERY. After I rolled for damage, the DM rolled what must have been at least 10 dice, counting up damage. "Okay, since youre in a cave, the sound is amplified, so you take 15 thunder damage". I paused. That was almost enough to kill me outright, since my character only had 8 HP. "Wait, seriously? Why do I take 12? That would down me instantly, and I was like 20 feet away". He tried to explain, "well yeah but you're in a cave, so sound is going to travel easier. It makes sense if you think about it. Oh, and hold on..." he counted the remaining dice. "Okay, so at the same time, you also take another 18 damage as shrapnel blasts back". Okay, I was sick of this. "Dude, thats not even fair! That would instantly kill me, and why didnt it do that the first time?" I asked. "Because, the first time it just loosened the rubble, so it makes sense that it would cause some recoil if you did it again. Oh, was anyone else there? Anyone in a 60 foot cone is gonna take this damage too". He looked at the party, who all quickly said they were behind the corner. "Dude, why does it do so much damage from recoil? Thats basically me casting a level 1 spell and being punished by having a level 3 spell explode in my face, stronger in fact since its 10d6 in a 60 foot cone. If I used it on an enemy, would it do the same thing?" "No, thats just because I think the spell is really strong so I need to balance it out". Ive never heard someone call chromatic orb overpowered, but whatever. "Okay, but NO WHERE in the spell does it mention doing recoil damage at all, let alone THIS much! If you had a problem with the spell, or i knew this would be a side effect of casting it, i wouldn't have taken it". He looked at me, maybe a bit smug and said "yeah, well it also doesn't mention anything about being able to be used for mining. So I'll let you take back the action, but if you try that again, you're taking the damage. So, we decided to just leave this huge vein of gold in the wall, knowing whatever we tried would end in a catastrophic death.

From here, the entire party was pretty sick of this. We all just decided to leave the mine and forget about whatever else the dm had planned. Whatever was down here, it wasnt worth it, and we were all pretty vocal about it, which is definitely petty on our part, but we had all been sick of this for a while now. On the way out we started joking with comments like "C'mon guys, lets just go. This place is clearly cursed or something. If we fail a "drink a glass of water check", our intestines will explode out of our kneecaps or something". Once the DM realized we were serious about leaving, a random kobold ran up to us and said "Hey! You guys were looking for the prince right? If you help us, we can show you where he went, its on the way!". We had ZERO idea why this kobold wanted to help us, why he knew who we were, or why he only approached us once we wanted to leave and we had already been attacked by his tribe multiple times. Clearly the DM didnt want us to leave the mine yet, and we knew better than to "disobey". We just wanted this to be over, so we just went with it, killed a monster and left the mine. That was literally it, after all that frustration and what felt like DM vs player, it ended with the DM basically giving us the "solution" for free via a random kobold. Honestly this whole thing was so exhausting, everything we tried to do was undermined by devastating consequences until the DM decided we had endured enough torture and had given our pound of flesh. This was probably the worse session of the entire game, the last one was a TPK, which I was actually glad about. I might write about it if anyone is curious. I definitely want to talk about why the dm was like this though, and what a game of DCC was like with this guy as the DM. If you made it this far, thanks for reading <3

TLDR: We entered a mine, the barbarian almost exploded when he stepped on a lego. He almost exploded again when he tried to punch free some ore in a wall. I almost exploded when I tried to use a level 1 spell to knock that same ore loose. Also quicksilver kobolds kept harassing us before vanishing in a "sweet dreams" montage then gave away the plot in a dm intervention when we tried to rage quit the dungeon.

Edit: added a section I mentioned in the comments that I forgot to include here

Years ago I moved into a house with DM, Old, and New.

DM ran a game that myself and Old were in, it was great, and we were excited to move in together and be the "D&D house."

I met New shortly before they moved in but they knew DM and Old from college and seemed nice.

We start playing a new game run by DM with us 3 housemates + 4 other friends as players.

However after like 4 months or so of weekly sessions, Old and New are suddenly treating me like I'm a terrible Problem Player.

DM could be harsh when it came to consequences and failure and the party became extremely shy and risk-averse because of it. Hours of sessions were wasted catastrophizing decisions and getting paranoid about what would happen if things went wrong. I'd attempt to mediate and summarize everyone's concerns and point out paths to accomplish our goals but Old and New would interrupt and claim I was being bossy or say things like "I don't appreciate how you're speaking to us right now."

I asked DM if he thought I was a problem and he said no, but he couldn't control how Old and New felt. He tried talking to them but nothing came of it.

Then Old and New started coming after me while I was just trying to live in my own home.

They'd show up at my room "wanting to talk" or catch me in the kitchen or interrupt DM and I when we were talking about the game. They claimed I always shut down their ideas, forced everyone to agree with my plans, ignored anyone else's input, and dismissed players' concerns about difficulty and consequences. It was always 2 vs 1 and I couldn't ever defend myself to them. This went on for a couple months, and got so bad and frequent enough that I was considering moving out to get away from them.

I then apparently became such a bad player that Old and New demanded an "intervention" to talk about my "problematic" behaviour at the table with the whole party.

They presented their case to the group and smugly sat back to wait for them to all agree with them (I very distinctly remember the smugness).

Except the rest of the party immediately jumped to my defense and told Old and New they were being ridiculous. Every single one of them appreciated my contributions to the table, and none of them thought I was out of line or bossy or a problem in any way. Old and New were shocked that no one agreed with them and I felt like crying from the relief that the rest of the party had my back.

During what little of the game continued to happen after that, Old and New left me alone and didn't complain about me. I more or less got over it and we continued to be roommates for a few more years and we even successfully played in other campaigns together where all of us got along just fine.

To this day I could never figure out what their problem was that they suddenly took issue with me like 4 months into the game, but was a small enough issue they dropped it entirely once they were "outnumbered."

Hi everyone! Recently, I had my first RPG horror story at my local gaming club. There's a West Marches campaign going on there right now, and I decided to give it a try. Trigger warning: domestic violence.
I created a paladin who was the youngest son of an influential lord, and his flaw was pride. So, the session begins. Our ship gets shipwrecked, I fail a saving throw, and lose half my HP. Okay, I have Lay on Hands, so it's not critical. And then he appears: Ron (name changed), an alcoholic fighter with a fairy who is his wife/sex slave who truly love him and because of that allows him to treat herself as garbage. Yes, I'm not exaggerating - I haven't heard that many insults toward women in my entire life (I'm 30).
In character, Ron insulted my character. I tried to hit him... and missed. He didn't. I tried to hit him again, he struck back, and we both missed. I realized I didn't want to risk my character's health, especially with dice like these, so we moved on. Our characters have banter later but we acted like a team. The rest of the session was fairly fun, but after the game, the next day, I had a panic attack. The topic of violence against women is very triggering for me. I go to play TTRPGs to escape from the horrors of the real world, not to relive them. I think my gaming experience would be even worse if I played female character (I am woman IRL).
I told the GM about this and added that I wouldn't be able to play with Ron. He was understanding and offered to just invite me to games where that character wasn't present. I agreed, but I'm still afraid that this player will be with me in other games. The problem is that Ron's player is genuinely charismatic and a generally normal person IRL, but all his characters are edgelords beyond the pale (if it's important he is married IRL so there is no "incel fantasy" excuse).
I want to know: am I being too sensitive? Or was I right to refuse to play with that character in the same group?

This is the story of how I got into D&D. A lot of smaller events are left out, some details might be missing, this happened over the span of ~2 years so it's a lot to write out. Feel free to ask for more info and I'll try to provide it to the best of my ability.

If somebody from the group reads this, when you think back on all the shit that happened, it's pretty dumb and we all learned a lot since then. So don't take this as a personal attack or anything. We still shared a lot of laughs along the way and those are good memories.

I'm sure I wasn't a perfect player, or DM, either, I mentally checked out multiple times, at times it felt like nobody was taking anything seriously and I joined in on the "lets do dumb stuff because it's funny" bandwagon.

The Newbie Days

We're a group of friends (all fully grown adults over 25) who started playing D&D for the first time, including the DM. I fell in love with the idea from the start and spent most of my free time reading rules, Reddit, all sort of posts and watching content on YouTube on how to DM. I started a parallel, short homebrew campaign with some players from the main table, and that's when the issues with Charlie began.

I've known him for years, he has a fun personality trait where he is never wrong. Even if you pull out your phone and google something to prove he is wrong (since he never takes your word for it) the best you get is "Well, it's not black or white, it's gray" or a simple "Yes and no".

My first session as a DM. They captured an NPC for interrogation, incapacitated during combat. After some rolls and torturing the guy, who was actively telling them the truth, they still wouldn't believe him and Charlie announced "I want to roll Persuasion so he tells us everything he knows".

I explained that asking "nicely" during an active torture scene makes no sense. This ended in a 45 minutes debate where he kept insisting that I should allow him to roll. We obviously continued this after the session, asking him to try and think logically and through his character, but I was hit with "It's a magical make-believe world, how can I use logic if anything is possible?".

The 4-Hour Zombie Fight

As I started my homebrew campaign the main DM started his. He was nice but pretty passive. The whole table argued a lot, and it was hard to know if it's IC or OOC because a lot of rules and spells were being brought up constantly. The DM would joke about grabbing his popcorn, while the people were just arguing and nothing was being done.

Charlie decided to play a druid who allegedly lived in the forest for his whole life and didn't understand society, status, gold, etc. . Took him 2 sessions to start haggling for more gold. Since we were all very new, it took us a while to start RPing. But during the scarce moments when somebody managed to get into character Charlie would jump in with a wooden totem his character had and started telling the NPCs "LOOK, LOOK, THIS IS MY GOD. YOU LIKE IT?", this was him playing his druid who lived alone in a forest only talking to animals. This was happening constantly, and some possibly key NPCs were just deciding to ignore us.

Moving on, we ended up in a village where a necromancer was trying to sacrifice the whole village and got in good standing with the villagers by lending them 20 zombies to work for them. We tried coming up with plans to handle the zombies thinking outside of the box, but obviously we couldn't because of issues out of our control (the church only had 1 bottle of holy water, the building where the zombies stay during the night is not flammable, etc.). So, we tracked down the necromancer and killed him thinking the zombies would collapse. But, when going back to the village we ended up in a fight with 20 zombies at once (6 players, all level 2). Zombies acted independently of each other (no group rules), so a round of combat would last 15-20 minutes. The whole fight lasted around 4 hours irl. We only survived because we cheesed the encounter by climbing onto a shop tent where they couldn't reach us.

Metagaming and Loot-Hogging

At my table Charlie and Barbarian were constantly fighting and arguing because Charlie kept wasting time doing random things "just to see what happens" (literal quote from him), stalling the story. Barbarian was getting more and more annoyed so he started hitting first and asking questions later. It was a shitshow. I spent hours trying to mediate in private but it wasn't working.

The table was also metagaming heavily. I started texting secret info to individual players to force teamwork, but they just kept everything to themselves. (for example a PC would be talking to an NPC in private, and the rest of the party would instantly act on information that only that PC knew, while he was still talking to the NPC.).

Everything broke down when Charlie ruined a boss fight I spent days prepping. His usual shenanigans were happening from the start, Barbarian was getting more and more annoyed. Right before the boss fight he kept trying to steal a friendly NPC's books and cast spells on the NPC mid-ritual. The table exploded, Barbarian and Charlie started going at each other again OOC. I decided to force the group to take a 15 minutes break, I was trying to gather myself and convince myself to not pack my things and just leave. They wanted to press forward with the story, I was pretty much done at that point, but decided to just finish the fight and go home. So, I threw out the mechanics I came up with, the phases, the recurring NPCs, the trinkets they got as rewards from helping others, and just ran a boring, stripped down, boss fight just to end the session.

Tried talking to both Charlie and Barbarian, but Barbarian decided he was done and wouldn't want to play at the same table as Charlie. We talked about it with the main DM too and Barbarian decided to leave his game, while I had Charlie leave mine. This way everybody would still be playing D&D. After Charlie left, my campaign ran a lot more smoothly, no more arguing, just other types of issues later down the line (not included in this post).

With Barbarian gone, main DM also decided to take a break, re-think how he wants to run his games, he wanted to make it more gritty, resource focused, things like that. But, another player left because the DM wanted us to gather the components listed on all the spells because Warlock wanted to have resource gathering in the game. (Yes, those components which are jokes in most cases).

So, he decided to start a new campaign. Warlock player wanted to use a subclass from extended sourcebooks which the DM didn't allow as he wasn't confident enough and didn't have time to read through all the extra books. I found this out later, but, Warlock told the DM that, if he is not allowed to do it, he would leave the campaign, essentially blackmailing the DM, and apparently the DM also allowed him to start with a legendary/very-rare magic item at level 3. Warlock turned into a loot goblin. The moment combat would end, the DM wouldn't have time to say anything, Warlock would jump in "I loot the bodies and take everything, what do I get?". I talked with the DM after this happened a few times, he basically said it's party dynamics and it's on us to solve this. A new player joined, dragonborn, started out with a legendary weapon, still at level 3. Remember how I said Warlock was looting and hoarding everything? Well, at one point he had 1 legendary sword, and 2 very-rare homebrew magic items. At some point we asked Warlock to share some items, "Well, this item is better for me." and "Nah, finders keepers. If you want better items you should loot like I do". I later found out some items were meant for me and Charlie. Both me and Charlie had no magic items at this point.

The PVP and Timeout

I was a playing a Drow utility Rogue. I managed to bluff ourselves through a cult checkpoint without a fight. However, we'd end the session there as the DM didn't prepare anything moving forward and we'd end the session early. So the rest of the party decided to just fight the checkpoint to have some combat and also get loot.

Multiple times when I tried to use my "utility", to get past encounters, I'd hit dead ends, or the party would decide to drop that and just fight. Also noticed the campaign was combat heavy, so I just mentally checked out.

Level 4 party, BBEG fight. Adult Black Dragon. Obviously we couldn't do much, we couldn't run either since we were in a cave, and how tf are we supposed to outrun an adult dragon? Since he had resistance to non-magical attacks, I wasn't combat focused and was doing almost no damage, I started praying to the goddess I worship (My character was devoted to Eilistraee and I RP'd praying daily and in difficult situations for guidance on what I should do). So, given that we're going to die, what else would my character do? Roll religion, low number, nothing happens, I keep praying, rolled high. Dragon was smited from the sky for 100 damage. Everybody else at the table started praying for divine intervention. 300 God damage later the dragon dies.

DM decided to take a break for "Season 2", and since everything was very combat focused I wanted to roll a new character: Reborn(Skeleton) Battle Master Fighter. The DM gave me a sword he buffed to 2d8 extra necrotic damage. Charlie still had no magical items, not even a +1 weapon. He also decided to roll a new character, Blood Hunter Order of the Lycan. At some point he decided to threaten me over a quest objective because that's what his character would do. I won the initiative, action surged, knocked him out in the first round. He started complaining outside of sessions how everybody is overpowered and he doesn't have any items.

Later, we were arguing about which objective to go to and DM suggested we split the party. I took Cleric and went into a basement, ended up with no way of escaping without being in big trouble. I told everybody out loud that I'm going to put Clerics bag of holding into my bag of holding if we have no way of getting out. DM didn't seem to care, Cleric was on board with it, so we took a one way ticket to the Astral Plane. (I know this was metagaming, but I was trying to force the DM to say something instead of just sitting there giving us nothing)

Next session, me and the Cleric sat in silence (mostly), while the DM handled what the other group was doing, after around 3 hours of waiting we found out what happened to us in the Astral Plane. Taken prisoner by Gith, it was basically a punishment cutscene. If we spoke up against the NPCs, we'd get stabbed. I tried to RP pulling my shoulder back from a guard, stabbed. Decided to throw a hail mary and challenged a leader to a 1-on-1 combat for our freedom as we were basically just kept in chains and dragged around not able to do anything. I got 1shot instantly. This session lasted 6 hours, me and Cleric basically did nothing all session. Overall we spent 5-6 hours doing mostly nothing.

Some time passes, I decide I want to become a Lich to have an army of skeletons. DM said he'll figure something out and I should ask NPCs for help and I will have to spend some gold. A few sessions later I became a Lich after we killed a Lich. I didn't spend any gold, I guess the DM was bored of me asking random cult members about it. So, I class swapped to a Level 10 Necromancy Wizard and basically started controlling an army of 20 skeletons (Raise Dead). He never cast any AoE on my small army, I expected him to just wipe them with a single fireball.

We did some shenanigans here and there as I unlocked a new world of spells for the party. This is where I was fully on board the "dumb stuff bandwagon". Robbing magic shops, starting fights with NPCs that looked at us the wrong way, etc. . Things you shouldn't do if you care about the game.

When the campaign finally wrapped up, I had to join via Discord because I was out of town as they didn't want to run a session without me. The DM decided to kill my Lich by having the boss cast Wish to destroy my phylactery. So, he just deleted my character first round of combat. I could've tried to cast Counterspell but I was just done with it. I just said "Okay, do you need anything else from me or can I jump off". The party was kind of shocked and surprised.

The final straw

The DM took a break and started a new campaign. I tried to roll a serious, RP heavy Paladin. Charlie played a socially awkward Artificer and basically just insulted and mocked the whole party for the first few sessions. At one point I had enough, I told him to stop it or I'm going to kill him. Our characters have no reason to work together, our backstories are not shared, we aren't hired by anybody, nothing, we just decided for some reason to adventure together. So, the whole party was a group of strangers. I told him that it's breaking my immersion and that I can't take the game seriously especially with all the dick jokes flying around during serious RP moments. It came down to: it wasn't his problem I can't be immersed and focus on the game because of that. Either way, he stopped picking on my paladin, so I guess it worked?

Around this point life started to happen. I asked in the group chat if there's a possibility to move D&D night to another day as it would make things a lot easier for me.

The DM completely lacked any basic empathy. When I laid out my timeline, having to leave work early to make it to D&D in time and then having to make up for the lost time from work another day, he called my request "ridiculous".

I tried to explain that I was mentally drained and needed at least 30 minutes of lying in bed just to recover enough to function after work. The DM just responded with "Imagine that with kids at home", and just continued going on with "This made me laugh, no offense... You'll get used to it.". Pretty much just dismissing everything I brought up, laughing and making fun of my issues. I dropped "Sure, lets shit on people for wanting to balance their lives and trying to find a solution to please everybody". He went on how he chooses D&D for mental health, spending time with friends and that it's the best day of the week for him. I'm pretty sure he continued with something else which made me snap but I can't find the receipts anymore.

This is a guy I knew for a few years at the time and didn't have any issues with him personally. I wrote a message laying out exactly how bad my mental health was, that D&D feels more like a chore lately, and so on. And sent it on the group chat to avoid people messaging me why I left the group, I wished them the best and that I'm not coming back. I even included what I wanted my character to focus on if he becomes an NPC. Everybody was pretty understanding and wished me the best. The DM ended up reaching out to apologize the next day. Had a talk with him, accepted his apology but I was firm on not going back.

I still kept in touch with some of the players (as we're friends), apparently DM's wife also ended up scolding him for his lack of empathy. I have since moved to another town, the drama with Charlie never stopped, he is still making fun of the other characters. I don't remember exactly but I think Warlock wanted to kill off his character because of him. I have joined a couple of online campaigns and the difference between how other people play D&D compared to how we used to is huge.

The reason why I didn't leave the table up until the end was because we were all friends and this was us getting together to hang out and have fun.

So I had to step away from a campaign that was generally the highlight of my week.

The campaign is Curse of Strahd, so yeah, I know Strahd is >!a simp.!<

Basically the Charm incident is what pushed me over the edge because I was pretty sure that it didn’t work that way and actually looked it up. Lo and behold, it just makes you friendly.

There was one player who already knew the DM for years, who although some of his antics were hilarious and his character and I were actually allowed to be in a love/hate professional relationship at best (me a Rogue/Light Cleric and him an Elements Monk) he did kinda lead the incident to becoming a hideous jump the shark where I had to step away to avoid becoming the horror story myself.

Let’s just call him Frenchie because he literally sounds like the SpongeBob narrator with a potty mouth. Not that I had a problem with it even though I RPed my character as having a problem with it. He was still entertaining with some of his one liners (the Prestidigitation gags, a furry comment, something in-character about side quests I played along with by wondering what he was talking about in-character, some minute long rants that again my character was irritated by.)

But there was the problem of the substance abuse and the

While my character one got himself drunk during a pivotal confession where he freaked out about killing a vampire spawn, Frenchie’s character coped by inebriating himself and getting stoned.

Bad influence, especially since he’s a parent, but I know it’s pretend. Basically what DARE stands against.

But then there’s been a few incidents he’s forced his drinking and drugs that seem to overtake characters you’d think wouldn’t do it. DM to be fair threw me a bone and had one other character avoid that.

Said character has a few traumas as well and even heartwarming moments, but shouldn’t be forcing his vices upon players. While my aversion was played for laughs, there were a few raunchy things he did such as constantly sexually harass an NPC or two while one claimed she “doesn’t swing that way” as well as the interrogations with him groping his targets.

I too should’ve thought those red flags even though I cast Prestidigitation to make the illusion of them soiling themselves to get them to talk. My character at that point was also stressed out and furious.

However one time, admittedly of good faith to a faction, Frenchie forced wine down my character who was already suspicious and mentioned after that incident he won’t drink alcohol. He also constantly smoked in-character with what is obviously marijuana. He kept gaslighting the other party member into helping him secure some from other animals. Perks of being a Druid I guess.

My character, to get Frenchie to shut up as well as accept that they’re gonna have to do some assassinations, gave in and really hated it afterwards. His character then said things about how he liked my character (who is supposed to be a stern logical type) better on the drugs. And then he got my character’s current BFF hooked on the stuff as well inside a church where my character was clearly appalled.

However this reached a boiling point that got very bizarre with >!Vasili Von Holtz / Strahd’s attempt to charm everyone. My character failed, even with Heroic Inspiration as a human so I had to admire Strahd. And that is when Frenchie made the comment to the effect of “even though I don’t swing that way, I feel like swinging that way.” I know Ireena is supposed to be enamored with Strahd while charmed as well, but even another DMPC was becoming weirdly erotic. I too felt pressured even though I was fighting against the raunchiness.!<

I was distraught. I looked up Charm and made the original post you might see if you look at my history about how Charm shouldn’t be a Date Rape spell but DM and Frenchie sure as hell made it seem that way.

And Frenchie was allowed to slap me (all on Discord) even though there was no PvP allowed.

I know CoS is dark and >!Strahd is supposed to lust for Ireena,!< but the loss of agency in that situation got really rapey. And now I was compelled to let >!Vasili/Strahd bite me!< and it felt weirdly sexual.

I know I shouldn’t be hung up about make-believe / group storytelling, but I felt like I was intruding on their friend group at this point since what was soft core Black Comedy Struggle Snuggle became perfectly acceptable.

DM did admit it was weird and I could’ve used a card, but clearly he’d favor Frenchie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TLDR: The Joker ruins everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I started off playing a solo PbP with someone that was advertising such. Once we’d had a sort of session zero discussion on expectations and playstyles, we started off with my character on the road to a small town at night after a long day of travel and it was made quite clear that I needed to get somewhere to safely rest so as to not risk exhaustion.

Real quickly I ran into NPC #1. I tried talking to him but he revealed himself to be unhinged, likely to shift hostile if the wrong thing was said, and he spoke in euphemisms. He staked a claim on something/someone out in the forest amid his ramblings. OK, cool, whatever then, I'll mind my business and stay out of yours then, no problem. We parted ways.

Hours later, someone else (NPC #2) ran across my path and she was pursued by two others on horses (NPCs #3 and 4). It seemed to be an escaped fugitive or slave situation and it also sounded like what NPC #1 warned me about not interfering with. So I stood by to watch from a hiding spot as NPC#1 showed up. But before the first round was even half-way over, it was clear that NPC #1 (who the DM had now dubbed "murderhobo") was in a poor situation, so I joined the fight. Seemed the thing to do, the readily available plot hook dangled in front of me I should respond to, that sort of thing, you know?

At the end of round 1, NPCs #1 and #3 were both down and it was me and NPC #4 fighting a battle of attrition and dice luck. NPC #4 was threatening to either kill me in various explicitly grotesque ways or enslave me and clearly was the type to get off on violence. While this was going on, NPC #2 ran in to give me an advantage on an attack but then got downed in one hit. By sheer luck, I took out NPC #4, but had like 2 HP left myself.

As that fight was winding down, the DM got very upset with me and we had to break for an argument. He had NPC #4 constantly running her mouth throughout the fight, and he was upset that the only time I spoke back to her was when she asked who I was, and I snidely told her that's not for her to know. He felt frustration that I "wasn't engaging properly with the NPCs" and that he didn't like I was playing a "quiet character". I pointed out that there wasn't anything for me to respond to other than the combat as I have no context for what's happening between the various NPCs and she's clearly too hostile and violent to answer any questions, so why waste any breath on attempting such? We're in a fight, not a negotiation or a casual conversation, anyway, so wtf is there to talk with her about mid-fight? And taunting her back just seems really dumb. The DM countered by pointing out that by design, I'm not supposed to have context for the situation and her ranting is meant to provide some. OK, but she's still a psycho (DM agreed) and there's no logical basis for banter or attempting to question her during this fight, and I have no idea how I'm supposed to "properly engage with" this kind of NPC besides keep fighting her.

So anyway, the fight ended far from how the DM intended for things to go, with me barely standing and 4 downed NPCs around me: 1 probably friendly, 2 clearly hostile, and the remaining one likely hostile but not entirely confirmed as such. And despite this being a higher level start, I only had starting gear, a healing potion, and like 10 gold. I was playing a race that could do a little healing once a day though, so I used that ability on myself and still considered the priority to be to get to town and rest, with even greater urgency due to how that fight went down and how badly injured I still was. The situation I walked into? No clue what's going on, but I've got nothing on hand to help NPC #2 and based on everything I know about NPC #1 (the designated murderhobo), he'd probably attack me. I tried to get some information or supplies off the dead NPCs #3+4, but rolled low, so got... nothing. Not even a single gold coin. I tried to at least remove the manacles from unconscious NPC #2, but didn’t hit the DC on that and the DM decided that meant my thieves tools were now broken (and it wasn't even a crit fail, let alone a roll under 10, so no idea what was up with that). So I decided to quit wasting time, my very scant resources any further, and the impending threat of exhaustion and get to somewhere else for rest and to take care of myself.

Of course then the DM was again mad because things weren't going how it should and we had another big argument. I had to point out that 3/4ths of the NPCs thus far were hostile, so I had to factor that in with dealing with them. Every attempt I'd made to interact with a plot element had just put me into a substantially worse state. We're apparently playing on hard mode and resource scarcity - and that was by surprise rather than mutual agreement - so now I have to factor that into how I'm going to approach things since the DM has just made it clear that any roll that doesn’t meet the DC has hugely negative consequences. So yeah, I'm walking away from this absolute disaster of a situation before it gets even worse since I'm going to have to prioritize survival at this point under these conditions. Then the DM was ranting again about how I can't play a "quiet character" (my dude, who is there to talk to??) and need to roll better to advance the plot (like I deliberately rolled low??) because he can't move this forward without those things happening. I decided I'd had enough and left after pointing out that if the DM needs certain things to happen, they can't be roll-locked or contingent on the outcome of a battle and engaging with apparent plot elements needs to have some kind of positive, or at least neutral, outcome and not just constant loss of items/equipment and application of debuffs.

I'll get this right out of the way so you can laugh at me: we did not have a session 0. Yes, I know. Rookie mistake that could have prevented all of this. Moving on.

So. I decided to join an online game that was being run by someone I'd heard of in my circles but never actually played for. I'd heard he was a pretty cool dude though and that a lot of people seemed to like his campaigns even though they were often described as "brutally hard and edgy". That's not normally my preferred style, but apparently the DM was working with another DM who I HAD played with before. The second guy wasn't necessarily co-DMing per se, but apparently he was wrote lore or something like that for the actual DM's campaign. Like it was his homebrew world or something. I'd adored his stuff-he makes really well fleshed out and interesting fantasy worlds and he's top-tier at writing characters. Plus, there were people talking about the game and saying it has this crazy elaborate mythology to it about a full family of homebrew gods. That's really what sold me on it.

Anyway, we start off in session 1. I could tell you about the backstory I wrote for my character but it doesn't really matter because it literally never came up in the game. Suffice it to say I wasted my time coming up with something elaborate, and was playing a wizard, as I usually do. Everyone else was playing martials, big dudes with bigger swords and that kind of stuff.

The first thing happened was the party left some tomb where we apparently got summoned from some other land (literally isekai'd) but wouldn't let us know anything about where we come from or the land we were now in. I asked if we had amnesia and just he rolled his eyes as if the idea of my character having some kind of established history or something was inane. "Sure. If that's what you think," he said.

We then met eachother and I immediately asked the DM if I and the other guys looked undead. He said "you don't know". (This is foreshadowing for the theme of the entire campaign). I specifically stated that I was examining my own body to see if my skin was withered and stuff like that. He said no. Ok, so we're biologically alive, but we woke up in a tomb with no explanation. In hindsight it seems kinda weird but at the time I just thought it was supposed to be some kind of cool mystery we'd have to solve. (Oh how naive I was).

As soon as we leave the tomb, a huge monster comes out of nowhere and attacks us. Like literally drops out of the sky or something, I don't know. We were able to do some damage to it but based on how much damage we were dealing, and the fact that it wasn't "even bloodied yet", told me that it was way too high level for us. Each of us eventually gets one shot and dies.

DM then tells us we are getting resurrected again by some mysterious person that comes out of nowhere as well. At the time I was pretty annoyed and figured the DM was either just flexing to show he could kill us at any time, or he messed up and threw something too hard at us that we couldn't handle. I hoped it was the latter and figured, hey, its pretty easy to accidentally kill level 1 adventurers, so whatever.

The very next thing we see after walking around a bit is this beautiful celtic-looking land. And here is where I will give DM his only credit: he was fantastic at setting the atmosphere. He had beautiful visual aides, music, etc. However I would soon come to realize that this beautiful world was empty and bereft of anything to do except kill stuff.

Our eyes were immediately drawn to this giant-ass knight in gleaming gold armor riding around on an equally big horse. He was literally demigod sized, so I figured he was some kind of mythological being, possibly of the dead or something like that since it was in a tomb area. Since we had no idea what we were here to do, I decided to walk up to him, introduce myself, and ask about the land we were in. The other players just snickered and the DM gave me a weird look. Then he said "roll initiative".

Yeah so, it turns out that golden knight was another uber-powered boss monster or something. How I was supposed to know this ahead of time, and why the DM put something useless that we can't kill in the starting zone (but could easily avoid, it turns out) I have no idea. He didn't even say anything to me. Just silently attacked no matter how hard I provoked him. It was like the DM refused to add any personality or motivation to his NPC.

So yeah, I died while the other players ran away, chiding me for being so stupid. At this point I discovered something else: every time we die, we just come back like we did before. Now I'm a big fan of Planescape Torment, so I'm not just going to instantly say that there are no stakes or anything if we can't die. Immortality can be an interesting hook for a campaign if done right and there are still always consequences to death (like time or equipment loss) if the DM knows what they are doing. And this actually seemed to fit along with what we already knew. If the knight was the god of the dead, maybe he was patrolling for people like us since we'd be seen as "unnatural" for disrupting the cycle. I still don't know why we were only level 1, especially since we didn't get amnesia every time we died after the first two, so its not like memory loss could explain the loss of levels or something.

I told all this to the other players and the DM, who looked annoyed that I was even trying to figure out what was going on. It was clear they wanted to just walk around and fight stuff so I decided to humor them for a while while secretly hoping for more information. (Spoiler alert: I did not get it).

Session 2. We encounter a random dude who babbles nonsense at us that we have no explanation or context for. Something about a magic artifact, and we have to get it to save the land for some reason. Extremely cliche much? He also called us incels, and I think that was the DM just making an immature joke. But every time I tried to ask a question, the DM would just say that "you can't ask that" or "he doesn't tell you" or "you'll just have to figure it out on your own". Except how am I supposed to figure out anything if all the NPCs do is babble cryptic nonsense and don't react to anything I do like they're inanimate signposts!

We started walking into a forest and encountered some more knights. These guys are normal sized and not godly looking, so I think maybe they're not with the giant asshole. Nope, apparently they are, cause they just attack us on sight as well for no reason. They wouldn't even shout battle cries that might clue us in to their motives like "I'll put you down, deathless cur!" I tried as hard as I could to talk things out with them because I had this weird theory that maybe we were reformed villains or something like that, so I didn't want to kill random people who thought I was still evil just because of a misunderstanding when I could run away and avoid them instead. But nope, they were as silent as a brick wall.

My party had no compunctions about killing, however, and what's more this DM was using XP, so I was just missing out on character progression by not participating in combat. Despite the fact that my character was a peaceful academic who never seen war before, he eventually decided that if everyone in this land was going to act like a murderous automaton, he was willing to defend himself. It was actually a pretty fun moment to roleplay, even if no one else at the table cared and it ultimately meant nothing.

I'll spare you a lot of boring details, but we kept fighting for a few more sessions. I cannot overstate how boring this was. It was like grinding for XP in an MMO. All we'd do is walk around until we saw more knights, attack them, loot, and move on. No RP, no dialogue, no context, nothing to explore, no hidded notes or clues (I looked), nothing. There weren't even towns or normal villagers I could talk to either, just psycho knights, monsters, and an endless rolling Irish countryside.

I think the perfect example of just how creatively bankrupt this DM was was when we came across a bridge guarded by more knights (they even had a freaking ballista!). For some reason, I had it in my head that this bridge must be important. Like, they must be guarding it for a reason, right? And that means someone else with intelligence that we could possibly talk to must have commanded them to do it, like a leader or necromancer or something (I had this theory that maybe the knights were undead, though the DM wouldn't give me any info on that).

So I came up with an idea. We'd picked up enough armor pieces from our murder spree to where everyone in the party could get fully decked out as knight if they wanted to, including me. I proposed the idea of going undercover. Maybe, if we could impersonate one of these knights, they'd actually talk to us, maybe spill some kind of secret. At the very least we could observe them more closely and from the inside to get some intel.

The other players didn't want to do it, so I volunteered to be a test subject since I can't die permanently anyway. There I go, striding in, looking exactly like a knight. They can't see my face, hair, skin, anything like that: I actually asked the DM to confirm it.

And what happens? You guessed it. The Ballista fires and kills me instantly. I almost rage quit right there and truth be told, didn't last much longer. I might have stuck with the campaign, maybe, just for the funsies of fighting random stuff. But the biggest fuck you was when I finally found a spell trainer who could teach me some spells. And guess what? The DM made custom spells just for the campaign! That was honestly more than I expect any DM to do.

But sadly, his spells had one fatal flaw: they were all damage spells, and they all did LESS damage than my level 1 magic missiles spell. Yes. You heard me right. Advanced magic I learned from a trainer was WORSE than magic missiles, the literal most basic spell in the game.

That is pretty much where I just told the DM I wasn't having fun. My character had no motivation, no history, no knowledge about this world, no reason to care, no goal. The literal only point of playing the game of just grinding enemies for XP and loot was completely ruined too. I didn't want to just spam magic fucking missiles the entire campaign.

I asked DM if he was singling me out and if I'd done something to piss him off. He just said "I'm not going to fix your spells, just get good. There is a story there, you just have to make it and look for it."

Except there literally wasn't. Every attempt I made to learn more information, talk to someone, get creative and figure something out, RP, etc. was handicapped by the DM. He didn't let me do anything fun. I genuinely have no clue how the other players weren't bored out of their minds. DM took the work of a guy who is known for creating engaging fantasy worlds and made an empty wasteland full of mute psychopathic knights out of it.

I left gracefully and decided to let the other players beat their heads against a wall if that is what they wanted to do.

Brief explanation: I'm gonna use this as a newspaper for possibly unexplained events and open police cases. Doesnt necessarily mean that all news is about occultism/paranormal/horror etc... it can be, but since these should be rare, most would be a bit strange but maybe explainable events.

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Hi! I had a previous post (link) where I mentioned this D&D campaign in a couple of replies, and I thought it would be interesting to tell this story, too. This one takes place before the previous post, and happens when we were in high school together. It is the same DM and the same players.

There is a TL;DR at the bottom. :)

This is the story:

Our DM is the only guy in our friend group, and all of the players, including me, are girls. We were about to start a campaign, and the DM tells us to create a character and lets us have any magic item. He didn’t care about how good it was or what it did, and even allowed the players to make custom magic items.

I created my first male character: a blue dragonborn cleric, Zenith, strongly based on a character I was obsessed with at the time. I admittedly did not play the personality of this character well, but it was because I didn't prepare, and because the inspiration character was a lot more extroverted than I was comfortable with at the time. In Zenith’s backstory, he had two very close dragonborn friends  that they grew up with, one of which was a wizard who was studying in a library in the astral plane. The other was a blacksmith that lived with Zenith. The 3 of them had known each other for about 20 years. The magical item I gave Zenith was a necklace that allowed him to communicate with his friend in the astral plane, while also allowing him to summon a few small ghostly fiend creatures that would attack enemies for him. It was a gift the wizard friend had given both Zenith and the blacksmith while they were away. It thought it was a good magic item that had pretty reasonable abilities, and the DM accepted it. The backstory characters were only going to establish why the character has this magic item and to make this character very similar to his inspiration. At least, that's what I planned.

The campaign starts, revealing that the only reason the DM gave us any magic item was because he was going to take it away right at the start to get the characters all in the same place. It was a good idea. For all of the players, there was a clue left behind that would point them towards the city we had to be at. For Zenith, however, there was more than just a little thievery. The DM decided to fake-kill the blacksmith friend (which I figured out when a spell didn’t work) and kidnap them. I guess it was more incentive, but I felt it was a little much, especially because none of the other players got something like that. Now, Zenith's motive was a lot different from the other characters.

Anyways, the party gets to the city, and classic D&D shenanigans ensue with lore and basements and taverns and some classic fun. Then, the party meets the Big Bad, a demon who runs a cult, and who also was the culprit that stole our magic items (and Zenith's best friend). The Demon was very upfront about stealing our stuff, and even treated us to some food and a meeting, where he told us something along the lines of “I distributed all of these magic items with other Lords and Ladies of the city, so you'll have to go to all of them.” 

This Demon Lord had Zenith’s item and, as I had found out through some snooping, both the blacksmith and wizard friend. He knew that Zenith had found out about him kidnapping the friends and allowed Zenith to speak with them. But the DM played them very out-of-character. They were cagey and wouldn’t tell Zenith anything. I get that maybe the DM just didn't know these characters, but he could have asked me a little about their personalities, and maybe considered that best friends of more than 20 years would act differently.

After learning about the Demon Lord's cult/religion, which was actually pretty reasonable and less “evil” than what it had seemed. Zenith, being a cleric and wanting to do anything to save his friends, offered to join the Demon Lord's religion if it meant that his friends would be released. The Demon Lord was actually a reasonable guy (and bound to his word, I believe), and agreed, on terms that Zenith had to rise in the ranks of the religion and perform certain tasks. It was a fair deal.

Changing religions, however, meant that Zenith had forsaken his former religion and chose a more “evil” one, so the DM gave him the death domain from the DM's guide. It was pretty cool, and a show of how my character cares more about these friends than anything else. Eventually, Zenith was able to free his friends, but they, for some reason, hated him? Which was definitely not making sense, or how these characters would act.

Then, the bad stuff happened. Zenith, sometime in the midpoint of the campaign, suddenly was overtaken by the ancestry of his mother, a black and purple evil dragon and became evil and had to fight the party. The DM and I had never talked about this. I didn't know that my character had this mother. I didn't know that I was going to randomly be evil. And I didn't want to fight the party. 

When this was revealed, I was just as surprised as everyone else, and I even straight up told my DM right then that I did not want to be evil and fight the party. He told me that he could play my character instead, but I thought that would be worse and even less fun. The session was ending right there, however, so I had until the next session to think about it. I was pretty salty at the start of the next session, but I was a pretty big people pleaser back then, so I still went along with being a villain, and played Zenith myself. 

I ended up damaging the party a lot, and I couldn't tell if just the party hated Zenith, or if the players hated me too. My character ended up being defeated, and the “magic of his mother” or something was removed from him and sealed in a bottle, which made Zenith not evil again.

The campaign continued, but the party didn't really trust Zenith anymore, and the players kept bringing up how I attacked them, more focused on the fact that I did it instead of the fact that it was out of my control in both cases. I didn't like it, but I continued the campaign with the other players, and ended up finishing it as intended. Zenith got a cleric domain centered around friendship, and the other players got new custom subclasses. The rest of the plot of the campaign was cool, but that surprise evil arc bothered me the whole time.

A few other weird stuff happened with my characters afterwards, but it was just more of the DM playing Zenith's friends weirdly.

I wouldn't call this one worse than the Aegis situation, but it was definitely a red flag that I should have noticed and acted on sooner.

TL;DR
The DM traumatizes my character, kidnaps backstory NPCs and plays them wrong, then gives my character another backstory, turns them evil, and forces them to fight the party, all without talking to me about it before it happened.

A few clarifications: 

Yes, I am still playing with this DM. I am in the middle of a campaign right now, but once it ends, I will not be joining another one DMed by him. 

The reason that I have tolerated this for so long is because he is my close friend, the players are all my close friends, and also I have been a pretty bad pushover (until recently). We were very young, and still are, so we didn’t really know how to deal with all of this. 

Despite the weird DM stuff, I want to end on good terms, and have a good time with the players (who are closer to me than the DM) before we part ways.

Since that time I cooled off, it happened 2 days ago but I still feel backstabbed.
I am a level 11 time oracle in a party with swashbuckler, gunslinger and Magus
We had a lot of info about a convoy coming to our city. We knew we were going to fight at least 4 demons so I prepared 6th level banishments just for that fight. I wasted a lot of additional spells just to ensure banishments were successfull (hypercognition, prophet's luck, blur and haste) I used 3 actions on banishments so they had -2 circumstance penalty and with prophets luck I added -1 status penalty. This succeeded once and the other time I misspoke and said I have spellsave DC 33 (yet nobody else in my table corrected me after I was flexing to my magus that I have DC 30, one more than him) - so my DM sent out Greater Nightmare to go to hell and bring back 2 riders. This is when my rules lawyering went in and I said this is not possible, because interdimensional travel takes 10 minutes to cast, not 3 action nor greater nightmare can bring more than 1 rider. My "erm actually" was ignored because I missspoke...
On one part I agree that Banishment trivializes encounters and it would be boring yet on the other hand it has incapacitation trait. I burned three 6th level spell slots and three prophet's luck spells ruining my combat versitility just for them to come back with no excuse and breaking rules?

Since I play the spellcaster in pathfinder I feel bullied by my DM, and yes this is 80% fault of paizo hating spells in game about magic but my accuracy just seems so sad (maybe its cuz I was a wizard 10/ cleric 1 in earlier 5.5e campain where I was so absolutely OP it was not really fair)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I remembered the kiss and PMed Watermelon about it. 

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

Watermelon: Sincere

Me: Well that’s creepy af

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

Watermelon: Wizard is also 13.

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

Me: No more of that, ok?

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

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

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

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

The morning after the session, they PMed me. 

Watermelon: hey

Watermelon: I’m feeling really down rn 

Me: Oh no

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

Me: What fight? It was just an insight check

Watermelon: I’m scared I’ll cut

Me: wat

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

Watermelon: Yeah that’s right

Me: Over DnD? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watermelon: But Wizard loves him!

And their voice broke. 

Me: Are you crying? 

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

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

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

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

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

Me: You cut yourself? 

Watermelon: YES!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Might not be classified as a full on horror story but I'm looking on advice on how to prevent a bigger one from happening.

As the title says, I'm starting a new campaign in a few weeks and almost the entire party has made their characters. It's relevant to say that I have a few third party books players can use to make their characters, namely a book called Monstrous Heroes that adds a few race/class hybrids that are in my opinion balanced surprisingly well. One of my players is an earth elemental and another is a dragon, which SOUNDS very overpowered but from my impressions and what ive heard from others with the book they are relatively balanced.

This is relevant because this specific player really wants to play a half-ogre either wild mage sorcerer or wizard named Bogre the Ogre (for a serious campaign btw). Besides the name l actually didn't mind this idea too much, but I told him that if he wanted to play a half-ogre he could use the ogre class (from the same book). Only downside is that these race/classes have a trait that restricts multiclassing until you reach a certain level, so he would have to wait to either pick the oni-blooded subclass (Third caster) or wait to multiclass into sorcerer.

He didn't really take this well, which is a little weird because I was trying to work with him and he normally isn't like this. He said he doesn't want to use that book and just wants to play a half-ogre using a race he found on dndwiki. I don't know if people will agree with me on this but I a don't like the idea of having races like half-ogres be normal races because to have them be balanced they need to be Medium sized, which to me just makes it feel like you're not ACTUALLY representing the species properly and I feel like it would conflict with my settings lore for half-ogres. So I just told him directly that I feel like a monstrous race like that shouldn't be accessible unless he wants to dedicate himself to it. I also thought he would understand since when I've played with him as a DM he massively restricted player options, but it didn't bother me because I understood it was to fit his sitting.

INSTEAD what he does is scoff and start getting a little aggressive complaining about another player playing as a dragon while a half-ogre is too strong, so I tried to explain my reasoning but he literally just wasn't listening to me, or he would cut me off while I'm trying to speak to him like a normal person. I mentioned how it might be hard to justify his character in the setting, especially considering the name which just set him off even more. He ended up just going on a rant about the dragon player (who was also there making his character, we were in person). The dragon player ended up leaving and said he was going to finish his character with me later. The ogre player then ended up leaving as well because he wanted some time to cool off.

I've texted him a bit because we're meant to play a session of his campaign next week, but he keeps on just bringing up different points as to why I should let him play a half-ogre, and he keeps on dogging down on especially the dragon player's character. He's also been implying that he won't be playing in my campaign if he can't play as the half-ogre AND that I would be kicked from his campaign?

I really don't know what to do about this. We have a pretty small group so we need all the players we can get and the ogre player is a good friend I've had for years. I've been looking over the dragon/elemental classes and looking in the book's discord server but the only complaints I've seen is them being a little underpowered compared to normal character classes.

TL/DR: Player wants to play a half-ogre wild magic sorcerer with a joke name for a serious campaign. Currently allowing Monstrous Heroes to be used to make race/class characters, offered player to use one of those to fit the setting of the campaign but he has started becoming passive aggressive towards me and other players. I want to satisfy his needs, the needs of my other players and I want to stay friends with the player both in and outside d&d.

Using a new account so the player doesn't see this, might have gotten a bit too specific anyway but maybe seeing this will be a good way to calm him down? If anyone was wondering about the third party book its called Monstrous Heroes and its written by Esper the Bard.

A dumb little rant in the middle of the night. A while ago I was in a curse of strahd campaign with my friends. There was one friend who was the meta gamer of the group. We all kind of made a gentleman's agreement to not try any cheese strats or builds, but they absolutely could not help it. They simply like being strong, and will take any advantage made available. We'd call it them 'being a nugget' for some reason. It's just how they are, and for the most part I don't care too much. However this is the one time that I did.

Now I'm a bit aversive toward arguments, so whenever a magic item popped up I would often just kinda keep my hand out of the pot to avoid any conflict of 'who gets what'. This meant my warlock would usually get hand me down magic items that the other party members would throw her way to free up an attunement slot. That's essentially how the entire campaign went, clear through Strahd's eventual defeat at the hands of out rag tag little group. Now with the big bad gone there was a considerable treasure pile to sift through, one item being a whole ass staff of power. My warlock had just recent snapped her own magic staff in half for character arc reasons, and ho boy would that make a great replacement. This was probably the only time the whole years long campaign that I called dibs on a magic item. My patience had bore fruit after all this time

....My friend told me no.

The sanctitiy of 'dibs' was broken.

His cleric had run off ahead of everyone to appraise all the items first, and since their character saw it first, they got it. With their 1 level dip in warlock (edited note here. They actually had 4 levels in warlock and 11 in cleric.) they could attune to it too. They gave me their +1 rod of the pact master as compensation. Yet another hand me down item. They were called out on them being a nugget. They responded with just this goofy laugh, the kind of nervous laugh someone makes when they cant hide something theyre doing wrong. I did really want to argue, but like I said Im not a big fan of causing an argument with my friend over imaginary magic staffs. I just kind of relented immediately, though a little verbal about my dismay. They had also grabbed up the lion's share of everything to be honest. Several items and over half the gold in the whole of Castle Ravenloft got nabbed up by their cleric as 'they were the first there'. It was the end of the campaign anyway, so any earnings were just kind of a formality. Nobody really was all that annoyed and at the time were more preoccupied in closing the campaign out with some final roleplay.

But now years later talks of a reunion campaign have cropped up, and while talking about it I did bring up the staff, and that it felt like a low blow. They just kind of gave another goofy ass laugh and joked that at least I got the pact master rod. It just kinda rubs me the wrong way. I dont consider this a full on horror story, but it was something I felt the need to rant about to strangers at 1am. I really wanted that staff, dude. Feels bad.

• Wow hey editing this in because I think some of you guys are getting kind of nuclear in the comments and making it out to be more than it is. This was just a little angy vent at 1am about an imaginary stick that make numbers on a paper a little bigger. Despite my aggravation about their munchkinism theyre still my good buddy. Infact this dnd group in general is composed of some of my best friends. I'd never want to play with any other gaggle of dorks that isn't this one, even when one dork in specific gets greedy. If its them or the staff, im picking them. Theyre my friend. Plz dont call my friend a cunt.

Hi Reddit, I apologize in advance for my English; it’s not my native language, and I use Google Translate. This story is about a small RPG group; we’ve been playing together for over three years. We had a long-running campaign that concluded, followed by a sequel campaign—both run by my boyfriend. He has become very disheartened, and I share that feeling since I’ve also GM'd for this group. We noticed a pattern: our two players have major issues with engagement and attention during the game. Sometimes they’re kissing, other times they’re bickering (the two players are a couple), and once the session ends, the conversation literally dies. There are no theories, no feedback—the game goes dormant until the next session. Unless the GM actively encourages things or brings up the game, nothing happens. We’ve gone months without playing because the GM lost motivation, while I was the only one updating my character sheet, coming up with theories, or asking about game dates.

This was a major issue, especially when we compared it to the game run by one of our friends who doesn't engage; at that table, this simply didn't happen. Since those two friends are a couple—with Azriel as the DM—his girlfriend Snow always engages, asks questions, comes up with theories, and is always eager to play; yet neither of them does any of that at my table or my boyfriend's.

I had a serious talk with my boyfriend, and he reached a difficult conclusion: he would no longer run games for this group, and the two open campaigns would simply be abandoned. The older campaign was a continuation of our first major game—centered on Snow’s and Azriel’s characters, who had survived the original campaign—but my boyfriend didn't want to run it anymore; he was tired of a story that dragged on endlessly because Snow simply refused to let it come to an end.

Since my boyfriend didn't want to run that continuation anymore, he announced that he was dropping it to start a new universe—a completely original story—and he put a lot of effort into it. We played the first session and everything went well, but after that, no one else mentioned it but me; everyone only talked about Azriel's game, which was currently running.

My boyfriend decided to talk to our friends about it, and they reacted the way they always do when asked: "We love your campaign," "we want it to continue," "you're an amazing DM." But honestly, it’s pointless for them to say those things only when he talks about ending the game and stopping as DM.

We talked for a long time, and it came down to this: my boyfriend won't be running games for that group anymore, and I won't be running long campaigns—only one-shots. I’ve grown tired of that kind of attitude, too. I wanted to get your opinion on whether we were being extreme.