So I played Dnd 5e with a group of friends at DMs house a couple years ago. DM is a friend I met through grad school. He works with animals at a sanctuary.

The DM was pretty openly obsessed with snakes. He had snake art everywhere and would talk about snakes and snake facts endlessly. So it was no surprise that his campaign revolved around a Yuan-Ti empire.

And of course all the Yuan-Ti are hyper sexualized. And not just the human looking variants, I’m talking lurid description of Snake Lords—most of whom have tried to fuck us at some point in the campaign.

The issue in question that made us leave the campaign though was during a session he randomly without telling anyone brought one of his snakes to the table. One with bright colors and patterns over its body. DM excitedly said “Look who I brought to join us today!” We all give him a nervous look and he says “Oh relax he’s not that poisonous. Plus he is really friendly.”

I was willing to roll with it but most of the rest of the party was still like “Keep that thing away from us!” Which to DM’s credit, he did. He held the snake the whole time. At some point, DM says “Timmy (the snake) is tired, ‘aren’t you boy’” and he puts him into his lap.

As we played through the night, we (the party) were thrust into a serpentine dungeon and it was as fetishy as you can imagine turned up to 11.

And we can tell at this point that DM was getting a bit too excited by these themes as again, an actual snake is sitting in his lap. And it gets worse as the rest of the session goes on into the night. The straw that broke the camel’s back occurred when DM decided to railroad the party into a “secret room” that nobody wanted to explore. We were greeted by a group of Yuan-Ti that outnumbered us 5-1. And they locked all the doors with magic and then said “Its time for the ritual!” With the ritual being us getting gang raped. And he narrates in gruesome detail the Yuan-Ti gang rape scene (none of our rolls or attacks mattered in the slightest) as he is simultaneously talking to his snake and saying shit like “Good boy, keep laying right there. Don’t move” and then going back to describe how our characters are getting raped by a group of snake men.

All of us were dead silent during this scene but we all kind of looked at each other incredulously. Finally, I just nervousness made up some excuse to leave and everyone else was quick to say “Yeah lets call it” for a variety of excuses. We all texted each other and agreed that we are never playing in that campaign again.

We made up excuses about work schedules, dating drama, etc. to essentially get session canceled for a month until DM asked us if we were losing interest and we took this as an out and just told him we weren’t feeling Dnd anymore. Which was true. After that, I know I haven’t played Dnd since. It just left a real bad taste in my mouth. I mean just typing it out I can hardly believe it happened. I mean who is that fucking weird?

tldr DM brings his snake fetish to the table—with an actual snake. And then railroaded the party into a snake rape scene that made me never want to play Dnd again.

I am fairly new to DnD, Ive taken part in two campaigns but both of those groups fell apart due to real life circumstances. About six months ago some friends and I started our own group. Since I am the only one with any experience I took the role of DM.

So for our session 0 I did my research and helped them make their characters and backstories for Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. Right off the bat I told them no evil characters for our first campaign. So of the 4 players we ended up with a half elf cleric, a tock gnome fighter, a human hunter, and the problem character an elf warlock. While we were making characters he basically said that he wanted to play as satan trying conquer heaven and kill yahweh by enslaving people into his demon army. I told him no and explained that I needed him to come up with something that could feasibly fit into this campaign, and that being a chaotic evil character in a party of neutral to good characters would put him at odds with the rest of the party. Maybe a more experienced dm could make that work, but this was my first campaign, so “no”. He argued with the group for a while but eventually backed down. His new backstory was a chaotic neutral character that was sent to Stormwreck isle by his celestial patron to eradicate the undead.

So fast forward to session 1. The party arrives at the island and make their way to the cloister. The Warlock immediately starts causing problems by trying to bully and intimidate the Kobolds (for no apparent reason). Eventually I brought out Runara (>!who unbeknownst to the players is a bronze dragon!<) to reign the situation in. At this point he tried to intimidate her with a role of 18. Obviously this would not have worked even with a nat 20. At most I was going to have her look slightly startled before standing her ground. Its at this point Warlock says “my eyes start to glow a fiery red and I cast eldritch blast on her”

I was more than a little concerned at this point and asked him if he was absolutely sure he wanted to do that. I even said “you get a strong sense of restrained power emanating from her and the distinct impression that this is not a fight you can win, are you sure you want to attack?”

So despite myself and the whole party saying “dont do it” he attacked, saying that “this bitch is no match for the power of Satan!”

At this point I stopped and reminded him that I had said “no” to that backstory. To which he responded by saying that he had decided to stick with it, but as a secret identity, and that I should not be stifling the players with those kinds of restrictions.

So at that point I thought “fuck it” and decided to let him face the consequences. >!Runara transformed into a Dragon!< and one shot him because he was level 1 with 7hp. Warlock got visibly upset and tried to say that a dragon should be no match for satan and that it was unfair of me to kill his character an hour into the campaign. Luckily the table at large backed me up and told him this was entirely his own fault, not least for playing a character we had specifically told him not to. He was very salty about it, but had to spend the first session watching the rest of us play.

Happy ending though because he came back next session with a true neutral tiefling rogue and even apologized for his disruptive behavior. Since then we have all been having a great time with it and I think I am going to continue to run campaigns.

For reference: I love taking vanilla AF Fighter builds and developing deep RP around them. It lets me play a central role without hogging the spotlight from other players, and it gives me some writing challenges.

Some time back, I created a Fighter for my friend's game, and I explicitly made the character hesitant toward violence. He was one of those "I won't start a fight, but I will end it" types, at least when it came to protecting his friends. I kind of based his personality on one of my dogs. For the first few sessions, this was fine. But eventually the DM approached me and said that there were complaints about MC not "acting like a Fighter."

My immediate concern was that I must not have been doing the right things during combat. But none of the complaints were about how I had actually performed during combat, and there were no complaints about my build.

Instead, I was just told that my character was "too much of a boy scout" to be a fighter. The DM, a history major, told me that the "chivalric" way that I was playing my character was "historically inaccurate," and that I should play more aggressively or pick another class. This shocked me, as he was normally open to characters that broke stereotypes, and he was a martial artist IRL who was quite a bit of a "boy scout" himself. This wasn't an evil or even "edgy" campaign, so my character's personality overall wasn't the problem. I was just told to put it with another class instead.

Paladins were limited to being god-based only, and that didn't fit with my character's personality either. I just wanted to play a decent, supportive guy who also knew how to fight and was careful about escalating conflict. Ultimately, despite it being a great group with amazing RP interactions, I chose to leave. Even if I create a new character, I just don't know if I trust the DM to work past these kinds of stereotypes anymore.

I recently asked the DM if he thought that casters should immediately jump to trying to solve all problems with spells and if rogues should try to solve all problems with deception. He basically said yes. Am I missing something here?

This story is about how the current quest my party is on could easily be interpreted as me being against modern medicine, which I decidedly am not.

The party I DM for was tasked with eliminating a noble who runs an alchemical medicines company. The region surrounding this area has been plagued with a horrific miasma that causes any matter of diseases, which led to the villain's medical company becoming very successful, as she is the only alchemist who knows how to brew the remedy.

All of her lackies are equipped with Plague Docter-esque masks to prevent them from breathing in the miasma. When the party stole some masks and successfully infiltrated the city where the villain's alchemy lab is located, they were directed to a medicinal bath house, to ensure they were cleansed of any infections they might have been carrying on their skin from miasma exposure, However, they had to pass Wisdom saving throws while exiting the bath, and those that failed became Charmed by the villain and had to be snapped out of it by the others.

If the party explore the lab properly, they're going to learn that the miasma was started by her company, in order to force the populace to buy cures from them, since no one else can produce them.

So in total, I have ticked the boxes of:
Big Pharma being evil,
Masks being an icon of the bad guys,
Medicine = mind control,
And the fact that the large medicine emergency was fabricated by the elite.

I didn't realize the implications this plot had till it was too late to change. I am a little nervous my players will think I'm anti-medicine now lol.

So, my friend wanted to try being a dungeon master after me DMing for him for awhile. He told me that it would have a body system and had a story I was interested on. He got my other friend to play also. Il call the DM, DM and my other friend, Friend.

So we start playing and he skims past everything so fast, but I excuse it for his first time. We fight some enemies and eventually went into a spider cave (my bad judgement), and fight some weird spiders. I eventually break the eye on its back but it does nothing. I address how I'm a bit annoyed because I thought I was supposed to do that and it basically goes like this:

Me, "Wait, that did nothing?"

DM, "Yep."

Me, "Well, I thought that's what you wanted me to do?"

DM, "No, that was just camouflage."

Me, "Well, I don't really like that I wasted a couple turns just attacking it with no warning for nothing."

DM, "You don't know these things, didn't you notice how one spider went blind after it's antenna was ripped off?"

Although I know that my friend is known for being rude (he acknowledges it) I was just pretty annoyed at this.

Then we kill the spiders and we eat them for their abilities, and I chose to get more legs, where after he says their useless, as they are on my back. I thought he was going to have it as normal legs but just said their useless, and praises Friend for picking a different option. Both were against me.

Idk if I'm just taking this wrong or something, but I would appreciate some input.

TW: child endangerment, violence, sexual harassment/abuse

This story occurred just a couple of days ago and my head is spinning as to how things got so out of control so fast.

For context, I was first introduced to D&D by a friend about 5 years ago. This friend was my first DM and he ran a campaign that lasted over several years that I generally enjoyed playing in. The group consisted of the DM, his partner, my sibling, their fiancée, my wife, and me. Eventually, I started running a game for the same group of people but ended the campaign without finishing it due to some of the issues I’ll mention below. I have never been a fan of the DM’s partner’s play style, as they tend to play characters that are belligerent towards other party members and NPCs alike who use violence as their first option for solving problems. Along with this, this player also brings topics and themes into their backstories and role-play that have made others at the table very uncomfortable. Some of these things have included but are not limited to:

• Sexually harassing other player characters, such as forcing herself between a PC and her girlfriend while they slept
• Starting an in-game romance with a DMPC who had been repeatedly described as being at the same developmental level as a child
• Frequent mentions of child murder, including making a PC hail from an orphanage that also doubled as a crime syndicate/child slavery ring
• Killing random NPC’s in broad daylight and becoming argumentative when they were detained by town guards and taken to jail
• Using slurs repeatedly despite others telling them to stop

Many of these incidents have gone unaddressed and sometimes even defended by the DM. Understandably, the rest of the group lost interest in playing with them and we went on to form our own group separate from them, which we have happily played in for the last couple of years.

This brings us to the incident that happened recently. The DM and his partner are in the process of filing for divorce but they are continuing to live together for the foreseeable future for financial stability and to be available for their children. After a long hiatus from running games, the DM invited my wife and me to join in for a dungeon crawl one-shot with some mutual friends, which we agreed to do. We decided to host because the DM’s family was in the process of moving. When the day of the session rolled around, we were both surprised to see that the DM had brought his soon-to-be ex along for the session. Things turned bad quickly after starting the session. While making preparations for our descent into the dungeon, the DM’s partner’s character propositioned two child beggars to accompany them into the dungeon in exchange for some of the loot that they would get. The rest of us were immediately uncomfortable. My wife made an in-character comment to the children along the lines of “And that, kids, is an example of a predator.” The rest of us laughed, which we hoped would put a stop to it before it went any further. It did not. Instead, the DM’s partner doubled down, tripled down, and quadrupled down on their decision to take two children into a dangerous dungeon where the DM made it clear that the chances of death were high. The rest of the group expressed our discomfort with this decision in several different ways throughout the session both in-game and above-game, but the DM allowed it anyway. To make matters worse, the player justified their decision by saying “Haven’t you ever heard of grooming?” as if it was an acceptable thing to do. The DM defended this decision by saying that while the children wouldn’t do anything that would put themselves in obvious danger, they would go along with this situation because it would mean potentially getting more money than they had ever seen before. At that point, my wife was fuming and made an excuse to leave the session before she blew up on them. I wanted to do the same, but I was too in shock to do or say anything. Eventually, the session wrapped up and my wife returned. We informed her what happened over the rest of the dungeon crawl and the look we managed to find. The second she walked in, the DM’s partner exclaimed to her, “See! Grooming works!”

What. The. Fuck.

We are both disgusted with this player’s continued and repeated violation of other people’s boundaries, as well as the DM’s failure to consider the safety of the other players at the table in favor of including his soon-to-be-ex in the game. Needless to say, we will not be accepting an invitation to play with them again anytime soon.

​

Names are changed because privacy or something

A while back i played with the GM named Wayne. Dude’s games were kinda already set in stone before we got there but i didn’t learn that until years later. He ran, what i thought at the time, were these amazing superhero games.

The other players are:
Jim - his character had like a hundred powers but the dude legit fell asleep at the table so often we could almost never get him to help us.

Alex - she played some kind of psychic magician, he had a Loa that protected her

Mich - who had the ability to ignore any kinetic attack, shoot lightning from his hands, and control the weather in an area the size of Germany. He could also manipulate kinetic projectiles to deal hundreds of times their normal damage. A handgun could destroy a building. A rifle could wipe away many.

Me - my character could shoot fire from his hands, recover quickly (broken bones in a few days), and could move at mach 2 under water and was the strongest man on earth… when under water. Salt water.

We all knew each other at the start, deciding it would be easier to be friend who all became heroes together. All of our powers were rolled randomly, both the powers themselves and the number we got.

We were in a mega structure of a city and this new energy source was discovered one that would apparently change everything. Through hard fought battles we learned some things. First, it was alien tech. Second, it wasn't a power source, it was a portal that would destroy the city when opened and allow an invasion force through.

We sat down and decided that the only course of action was to enter the facility that would be controlling the portal and shut it down. We had our psychic mage do some recon and found that there would only be two people in the control room. One was a demon, the lackey of the man in charge, who we thought was a superhuman. We had clashed with him a few times and studied him, did divination, looked up his history, we were deeply aware of his powers and limitations.

We prodded Jim and woke him up, asking him to be the driver for this mission as it would allow him to sleep most of the game and super driving was one of his powers. He could NEVER fail a driving check no matter how poorly suited his vehicle was. So we purchased a van and lined the back with metal bars like you see on busses to allow people to stand while riding.

The next step was to contact my character’s dad, who the GM decided was a Chinese arms dealer. We got our hands on a number of light machine guns, a 6 tube grenade launcher, side arms, grenades, shaped charges, plastic explosives… we wanted to take no chances. I think this was mostly the result of playing with this GM for years, all of us knew that 100% of the time, our powers and plans alone would never be enough, we needed to hedge our bets or fail.

When the raid started i lead Alex and Mich into the building, i brought only my armored costume and the grenade launcher. Mich brought a rifle and sidearm. Alex decided she didn’t need to go in as hard as us, figuring that i knew the system to an abusive level and Mich was so excessively powerful she could get under the radar. Her job in this was to be the one who disabled the portal. She was the only one of us good with computers and some of this was magic, its like this was made for her.

I told Mich and Alex i would clear the way, if this worked, and one of us went down legally for this, it had to be me, i had already gotten in trouble with the law. It would look like two REAL heroes were coming to stop me, a mad man. At some point two security guards drew handguns on me and i aimed the grenade launcher at them. The GM said they were eager to take me out. Even Jim was awake to see how bad i messed this up. But i told the security guards basically “you can probably hit me a few times, but look at my body armor, I’ll live. You wont survive the grenade i hit you with. You’re better off running and evacuating the building, you’ll look like heroes” when the GM said “no it doesn't work” Alex asked why i wasn't allowed to roll my trust/intimidate and the GM rolled his eyes and asked for a roll, i got well under my percentage and the GM said “no, you fail, they are gonna shoot” and Mich pointed out that my character was covered head to toe in shiny green armor with a mirrored visor and grenade launcher. Finally Wayne relented and said the guards run instead of fight. This was great because I had no idea how i would actually get rid of them if they actually decided to fight. I wasn’t about to kill two guys just doing their job and i had very few non-lethal options.

Something weird happens when Alex and Mich come in behind me. They start finding bodies. Now, i didn’t kill anyone on the way in. every time i saw someone i told them i had a bomb and they needed to leave. So when Alex and Mich start finding bodies i start to think that someone else is here and adjust my plans (turns out Wayne decided that we were doing too well and that I had killed people on the way in) When we get to the control room we are greeted by the man who controls all this, the guy we thought was a superhuman but turns out he’s an alien. His demon flunky starts to talk and i tell Wayne I’m firing off a fire blast every time the demon opens it’s mouth. Mich gets the memo and starts to shoot lightning at this guy. Eventually he gets mad and finally attacks.

This demon pounces and i keep its attention, leading it away from it’s boss. Mich and i already agreed ahead of time that he was more powerful and should be the one to face off against the alien and let Alex handle the machine. Well Mich and i had the luck of being unusually fast. Not super-humanly, but as fast as you could physically be in this system without superpowers. So i make the demon mad, firing off fire-blast after fire-blast, keeping its attention and anger. Wayne looks at its sheet and realizes it had no ranged options so he tells me its going to spend the round pulling steel off the wall to throw at me. I answer that when i see that happening, i wait for it to be nearly done and fire a grenade. He accuses me of cheating but i show him the high explosive grenade rounds he gave us in his own handwriting and he relents. So this demon and i start to play keep away as i run for the exit, keeping the fire-blasts which only do a quarter of the damage, more than i expected, and grenades for when he gets clever.

Meanwhile, back in the control room Mich fires off the mother of all bolts of electricity at this alien who also has no ranged option. Alex rushes for the control terminal while Mich proceeds to use his much better speed to run laps around the room to avoid this alien and keep hitting him with electricity and powered up handgun rounds. We can all see Wayne getting frustrated that his bad guys are being reduced to chasing us and hold no real advantage over us. Yeah the demon is WAY more durable than us but it cant get me. This alien could take all four of us in a straight fight but Mich is denying him the chance to do that. Eventually Wayne declares there are two of this alien now. He had never shown this power before and we had him in positions where we’re pretty sure he would have used it, this is new and Alex and i kind of look at each other as if to say “Wayne pulled this out of his ass and this isn’t really a game anymore.” one of the copies starts to approach Alex’s character offering to merge with her and make them both whole.

Meanwhile, i had lead the demon outside and knew that my speed advantage was over. It would take to the air and i wouldn’t stand a chance. So i legged it to the van and fired off my last grenade as it got into the doorway, trying to slow it down. Mercifully i was able to get into the van and wake up Jim long enough for him to say he takes off on the planned escape route. The demon takes to the air and Wayne smugly tells us that the demon would catch the van easily. I could almost see the grin leave his face when i told him, “first light machine gun, magazine empty spray” in this system you can choose to empty an entire magazine of a weapon and hit all targets in an area with no roll to hit and deal a damage multiplier based on the number of rounds. This gun had enough rounds to pass the threshold of dealing 50x damage for one round. Wayne mentioned that i would hit civilians and Mich came to my aid again and said “you said he’s flying in the air, he is the only target up there… unless there are flying civilians, we picked a route that is all businesses and the raid is on a Sunday, we also made sure there we no balconies”

Wayne was starting to boil, he always hated when we had answers to his threats and he hated it even more when we were prepared and actually read the system’s book. So this demon eats enough damage to take out a small car. Between the grenades and this, by all rights he shouldn’t be standing, much less flying. Wayne tells me that the demon is faster than the car. I ask for exact numbers and Mich punches the math and tells us that the demon will get to me in 4 rounds. Even with Jim’s superhuman driving power, this was the top speed of the van. So the next round i do the same thing with another machine gun. I am accused of cheating again and have to show Wayne the shopping list where he wrote “5 light machine guns any make you choose” he tried to say that he meant magazines but would let it slide this time. Eventually after emptying all of the LMGs into this thing it lands on the back of the van, stepping towards me. Thankfully Jim has woken up again and tells Wayne that he flips the van onto its side, knowing i would live and it would give us one more round against this apparently invincible thing. (as an aside, Wayne was explaining to us that we were very clearly doing damage at first then halfway through decided to stop telling us anything was working.

Back at the control room Mich is still running laps around the room keeping one copy of this alien distracted. The other Copy simply stands and talks to Alex, trying to convince her to fuse with him, that the portal would open anyways and it would all be destroyed. She could live if she fused with him. Alex continued to work at the controls and told him “pass, that sounds gross” and Wayne simply declared “he kills you with a swipe of his hand” there was no attack roll, no damage roll, nothing. Wayne was just done with us and this game. He said that when Mich’s hero stops to see the carnage he is also killed in a single swipe, no roll, nothing. This is the first time we’ve ever seen Wayne throw a tantrum like this and we all just look at each other and shrug. Even Jim is awake and kinda annoyed. The alien activated the portal and Wayne wanted to be sure he got me so we cut back to me and Jim in the van. Wayne starts to describe the demon killing me and Jim looks at the initiative chart and says “no, we have initiative.”.

I’ll admit that at this point i just wanted to see if we could even come out of this in any way. No… no i wanted to WIN. I was tired of every story we sat down and told ending in the superheroes failing to save anyone. it was clearly a DM vs Players situation, Wayne had snapped and the only thing we could do was hope we thought of something he didn’t. Well, Jim did. Jim’s character had nearly a hundred powers. One of them was some kind of tractor beam and flight. So he grabbed both the demon and i in the tractor beam and flew the remaining 2 blocks on our path before dropping me and the demon into the water. The Salt water. Wayne said “well the portal opens and boils the ocean away and kills you anyways.”

We decided that the story went differently among ourselves. It ended with The alien never splitting, Alex shutting down the portal permanently, Mich and Alex escaping and Jim and I trashing that demon while it was under water, among Jim’s hundred powers was the ability to swim at 55 mph and not needing to breathe.

Haven't played with this guy in years now. I think this was the last time he ran a game that I remember playing in. Played along side him in other people's games on a few occasions.

TL;DR:

The GM sets us up for failure and we constantly find a way to get a leg up on the villains until he starts to simply declare “you die”

First Superhero horror story if anyone is interested:
Superhero Horror Stories Vol 1

Disclaimer: Not my first language. Also a bit long, probably.

This happened in a Pacific Rim game I ran online on a discord server. It was supposed to be a 3 session adventure. We used the timeline of the first movie, but with some major changes, including the setting being Chile.

​

As the story began our heroes watch on live TV as “Libertador Cyan”, the last South American Jaeger, is destroyed after engaging a Kaiju without fully completing its repairs since last battle.

​

The first problem arises here, by the hand of a player I will call “Sky”. She suddenly takes the narration out of my hands, and starts describing how she boards her “experimental tech armored helicopter” and goes to fight the Kaiju on her own, valiantly sacrificing herself to buy some time.

​

I was really confused. I put the game on pause and explained to her that she didn’t have such helicopter (initial equipment had already been discussed during character creation), and that she was not allowed to take over the narration like that, since I was running the game after all. She tries to negotiate for some other armored vehicle, but I stand my ground, she apologizes and the game continues.

The characters, all part of the military base that provided repairs and weapons for the Jaeger, are informed that despite Libertador’s main weapon malfunctioning, it was able to severely damage the Kaiju. The monster is now regenerating in a shell-like cocoon, which gives them some days to reach and reactivate a decomissioned Jaeger Factory in the same area, in the hope of putting together something that can take on the Kaiju. If they fail, the government will call for nuclear strikes on the city, and the local Defense Corps will be dismantled for good. Session one ends.

​

Session two had some issues as well. Another player, let’s call her “Luz”, draws a gun on the base commander, blaming him for sending a damaged Jaeger to battle. The rest of the party tries to help and they all end up imprisoned waiting for trial, but since they are all ex-pilots or trainees, they have potential to pilot whatever Jaeger they manage to build in the factory. They are offered a deal: Charges are dropped if they fight the Kaiju. Somehow this took a lot of convincing.

​

Session three they managed to get into the Jaeger factory, kill some bull-sized vermin-kaiju, and with help from the army the reconstruction begins. Some in-game days pass and they make some coordination exercises to pick their partners, as well as working with the engineers to customize their future Jaegers. After this session, Sky asked if she can pilot a Jaeger by herself. I reminded her that at session zero we agreed no one would do such a thing (a few asked for the same). She then asks if she could create a better pilot suit since her character was an engineer, and I approve a small mechanical advantage for her.

​

The next session her character DIES. She talks to Luz, her pilot partner, and reveals that she has an incurable disease. She also reveals that she made a new pilot suit for Luz: A suit that would let her pilot a Jaeger by herself, since it has a built-in AI of Sky’s character. Immediately after, her character exhales her last breath. I was not informed of any of this.

​

I ended the session short and jumped into a call with Sky. I approved nothing of what she just said. I specifically told her what her suit could and could not do. She says I’m being unfair and I inform her that I’m kicking her out of the game. At this point she called the server’s admins.
Long story short, I was not allowed to kick her out. I’m not sure what kind of strings she pulled, but after some lengthy series of discussions, she ended up playing the last session as the AI in the suit. Both Sky and Luz died in the battle against the Kaiju, due to some unfortunate bad rolls.

​

Some time after, another player informed me that Sky pulls those kind of moves at every campaign she’s in: She looks for the earliest opportunity to sacrifice her character in some supposedly tear-jerking moment and then expects some kind of praise for her performance.

​

I have long parted ways with Sky and those admins, but I’m still bitter about the whole incident.

I apologize in advance because this got VERY LONG. I just have a lot of Big Feelings™ and am really confused about how to deal with all that.

TLDR: a co-worker GM'd a campaign where he heavily fetishized and harassed my character. I feel unsafe and uncomfortable towards him because of that. I never brought this up at work, but it recently started compromising my social interactions at the office and now maybe I can't avoid talking about that to my boss.

​

This story started some years ago, before COVID. So a guy at work ("The GM") was an experienced GM and wanted to form a group to play after hours. Interest was low because The GM is a very tryhard, awkward person and most people at the office avoided interacting with him out of the strictly necessary. In the end, the only people interested were ones who never played RPGs before, and 90% were women, myself included.

He ran a medium-length D&D homebrew campaign that was mostly OK, with some weird stuff here and there but we were all inexperienced and everyone was willing to overlook things in favor of the game and social interaction. My husband is not a co-worker, but he knew The GM outside of work and, once quarantine/home office was a thing, he joined the group at the end of the first campaign and the start of the second (with my husband, there were 2 male players in the group, 3 males in total with The GM).

The second campaign was the stuff of nightmares. It was a dark urban fantasy setting with fantasy races, mostly homebrewed (we later found out pretty much everything in the setting was taken from creepypasta and horror games, but The GM made it look like he had invented everything). My character was a Nun and her stats were focused on combat. The GM pretty much begged me to make her a werewolf. It wasn't my original idea but he was so excited I figured it would do no harm.... and I was WRONG about that.

(I later found out he changed all PCs to things he wanted, and all personal plots were thrown out of the window).

On my end, The GM was heavily focused on implying that my character was not a "real" Nun, so in almost every session he tried to insert past relationships or imply that my character's church was fake, and every time I had to assert that she was serious about her calling and celibacy. Once The GM figured he wouldn't succeed in making previous relationships with his NPCs canon, he started focusing on trying to make my character break her vows. So EVERY. SINGLE. NPC. became romantically interested in my character out of nowhere. All interactions the NPCs had with my character had A LOT of innuendo. Once again I had to assert she was not interested.

The GM even had private conversations with me about making my character have an affair with one of his NPCs, and once again I had to assert that my character took her celibacy and her calling as a Nun seriously.

The result was that from then on, my character started being randomly harassed by ALL NPCs. So all the time she was called things such as "Jesus' little whore", "church's little bitch" etc. In almost every session my character was placed in random scenes of violence with NPCs with rape HEAVILY implied. Things got so bad, I was the only player to demand entire plots be removed from the campaign more than once. And even after that, things remained so bad that my husband had to speak with The GM in private and say that, if it continued, both of us would quit the campaign. Only after that the heavier stuff stopped and my character was back to only being called the church's whore.

It was only during the campaign we found out The GM was a diehard furry. Remember how he practically begged me to make my character a werewolf? He commissioned furry, non-explicit artwork of my character without my knowledge. He commissioned art pieces for the other PCs as well to "surprise us" at the end of the campaign.

I think it's important to say that the campaign was a miserable experience for ALL players, and ALL PCs were manipulated/misused in some way or another by The GM. There were a lot of hot anime characters making out, a lot of NPCs stealing everyone's thunder, it was a huge power trip on The GM's side. But the heavy sex/abuse implied stuff was particular to my character.

At that point, I wanted absolutely nothing more to do with him, no social interaction at all. My husband still had the opinion that The GM was just an awkward, lonely, socially inept person who just needed a friend to point him a better way (my husband is a BIG "I can change them" person). So, for the remainder of the quarantine, my husband remained in a VERY toxic friendship with the guy. The GM even joined a new campaign as a player and still made things miserable for everyone. Only then my husband realized the guy was indeed terrible and stopped having social interactions with him.

BUT I still need to coexist with The GM at work. I have as little contact with him there as possible and mostly try to behave as if he didn't exist. I also avoid all social interactions with him and am pretty hostile toward him (which no one seems to notice, because everybody is kind of rude with him anyways). But being all day in the same room as him stresses me out a lot. I usually turn my music all the way up when he's talking to someone in the room because I don't like hearing his voice.

I never mentioned that campaign to my bosses, HR or anything like that because everything happened in social interactions out of work hours and, after all, that campaign was terrible for everyone, not just myself. Plus, he never behaved indecently with me IRL and I didn't want to make A Big Thing out of it.

Recently, other people at work decided to form a new table with my boss as a GM for the first campaign. It was supposed to be a small table so when The GM said he wanted in, the table was already full (if he had joined, I would have left, as I have decided to NEVER play anything with him ever again). My boss said he didn't want to make it too big, and The GM could join in the next campaign, as they would be all very short. So I felt safe playing.

2 people at that new table were also in that campaign from hell (one of them even dropped early) and knew of my decision of never playing anything with The GM again. We were all very surprised when, last session, The GM appeared out of nowhere as a secret character and joined our party.

I felt physically sick. My reaction was a lot stronger than even I imagined. I waited for like 15 minutes, got up, said I had to take care of something, and practically ran from the table. I nearly cried on my way back.

And now I have to talk to my boss about dropping the campaign and WHY, and I'm not looking forward to it. Once again, I don't want to make A Big Thing out of it, but I'm also not sure if maybe this IS actually a BIG THING and I should bring The GM's behavior to attention? My husband doesn't think this is A Big Thing. He doesn't think what I went through with The GM is violence or harassment (because again, everyone went through some sort of shit with him during that campaign, even though only mine was sex/violence implied) and doesn't want me to be in a delicate spotlight at work.

But I really don't feel safe or comfortable around The GM in these interactions (or at all), and I'm very sad that he ruined another campaign for me.

Sorry for spelling mistakes english is not my first language. I(16f at the time) and a friend(m) of me around the same age had to act out the leadup to a fade to black while holding hands over the table and looking each other in the eyes, while talking in first person. We had to say stuff like "I'm taking of this garment" and so on and so forth, and when we tried to do something else the GM(m60-ish) steamrolled the scene into what he wanted.

This was one of many instances of this, I played there from I was 14-17, and I know about players that experienced stuff when they were as young as 10. There were sex scenes, S.A. scenes or threats and mentiones of S.A. Like I am pretty sure that none of my maine campaigne roles weren't either threatend with S.A or just S.Aed.

We have told the youthclub he operates out of about it, but nothing really happend, we're not sure what can be done like, like we all quit a couple of years ago.

Edit: I spoke to my parents, and we are gonna talk more to the youth club.

Quite tame but I still found it entertainingly bad enough to share.

A while ago I joined an online 5e game, quite generic in setting and plot. After the first sessionthe DM started to get frustrated h some of the rules and eventually decided at the end of the next session that this was now a Pathfinder game, put a link to the rules in the chat and told us to remake our characters in Pathfinder.

Seeing that none of us 6 players had ever played pathfinder, this was a bit sudden, not everyone liked how pathfinder worked and the fact that 'just making the same character in a different System' doesn't work super well didn't help. So by the end of the next session, four out of six players had left.

Annoyed with the player loss, the DM searched for more players and actually found quite a few. However, when it was session time, which was impromptu changed into a character building session (which I was kinda happy for since I wasn't sure if I made mine correctly) about half the new players apparently thought we were playing Pathfinder 2, not the original one, and started to complain how PF1 was a trash system.

The DM thought the best way to solve this problem was to change the system again, this time to PF2. However at this point I quit the game because I didn't want to learn yet another system in a few days to then probably have to discard it for whatever came next.

So yeah, this is how I ended up with one campaign that went to two and a half Systems before it reached its fourth session.

Bonus: one of the new players that joined in to play pathfinder thought we were playing 5e. Bless their heart.

Posted with permission from the other guy. We’re all good, I thought he wouldn’t even show. Just thought this interaction was funny.

Well there goes one of my last 3rd level spell slots… at least the DM let me reroll

Here is part 2 of my current ongoing horror story. Not as terrible as many on here but the guys still just not a great person.  This time featuring his attempts to impress a married woman like they are still in middle school. 

Part 2: Spelljammer Boogaloo

So, here is Part 2 of the saga of Skyrim.  No, I’m not sure yet why we keep playing with this guy except that he sometimes makes things interesting, and that he’s never done anything truly terrible to warrant kicking him out.  This campaign is still ongoing but is coming to a slow end.   

So, the cast gets an addition as well, and slight change up.  I’ll name the cast and what they are playing, so here is the set up so far:

GM: Same person from Star Wars, He’s managed to make a wonderful story for Spelljammer, and we’ve all enjoyed it.

Sorcerer: Myself, playing a hexblood sorcerer, playtesting a subclass that GM made.

Paladin: Formerly Hero, Now playing another super good guy Vhuman vengeance paladin and reflavored hexblade warlock who is basically a savant of divine goodness. Just a farm kid doing good things and rolling massive smite damage.

Ranger: Formerly Melee, now playing an orc horizon walker ranger.

Fighter: Formerly Pilot, now playing a Vhuman cavalier fighter knight of Solomnia.

Skyrim: playing an astral elf gunslinger fighter, then multiclassing to arcana domain cleric before shifting again to play eldritch knight/life domain cleric multiclass.  No, he is not building or playing it well.

Bard:  a childhood friend of Skyrim (This will be important) playing a half elf glamour bard. 

Session 0 and Character Building:

Session 0 we all were pitching out characters, multi classing was allowed if it was for story reasons, and you worked with GM to approve it and fit it into the story.  So, at some point later in the early Paladin decided he wanted to do a Hexblade multiclass because he heard about it’s power boost for a paladin, and after talking with GM, they just reflavored it to be a “blessing of Lathandar” for Paladin being such a good paladin.   Somewhere after the first dungeon and before the prison, and seeing that Paladin multiclassed, Skyrim decided he just HAD to multiclass his fighter as well.  He was already jealous and complaining his character felt weak because his fighter wasn’t out-damaging the Vengeance Paladin.  Now something important here was that Paladin had A: worked with GMs permission and aid to craft this multiclass, and B: Had put in time and research to how the mechanics worked on a deep dive of the rules and abilities to maximize his effectiveness.

Skyrim’s approach was to TELL GM “I’m going to multiclass because we need a healer” as if this was something we hadn’t managed fine without before.  It would have helped but we had options and GM was always willing throw us options for healing when we asked, finding potions vendor, hire an NPC healer, so this wasn’t something vital. His first idea, because Skyrim lives for the most edge he can find, was to go celestial warlock.  He messaged me with the idea, and I just had to shake my head.  I personally don’t like multiclass.  I like just straight one class.  He kept going on and on about his warlock idea.  I asked him his stats, and pointed out why was he looking at warlock when he had a 16 wisdom and 13 charisma (why he as a fighter pumped his charisma so much when he left con at a 10 or 12, I believe is because Paladin was the charisma user of the party and he just had to try to match that).   He ended up picking cleric, and despite all attempts by the rest of us to say “it’s not needed” he tried to go Arcana domain.   The problem with Skyrim multiclassing vs Paladin multiclassing was the level of work put in.  Paladin deep dived the rules and mechanics and had lots of one-on-one sessions with GM to hash out details, as well as asking the rest of us if this was ok because it was going to give him a power boost in damage.  Skyrim… is not someone who deep dives anything despite the fact he will hyper fixate on something.  He hyper fixated on this multi class but rather than read into it, he just looked at fighter as “I attack two times a turn and have action surge and grit points” then looked at cleric and went “I get healing and attack spells, and spell slots” and that was the extent of his work on multiclassing.  He never looked at what spells to take, any mechanics he could synergize, or anything. He never thought using action surge to do more healing or taking support spells to boost the party. It was healing and damage spells, mostly damage spells, all the way.  And healing took a distant 2nd to his primary goal of outdoing Paladins’ damage. 

The Game:

So, the game started with us on Astralgar to introduce our characters, and we all make our rounds, have some fun and sign up to join a ship looking to hire some new crew.  My character was a con artist by trade, and liked to run simple scams to see if he could get away with them for the fun of it.  One thing we learned above table, that Skyrim had picked fighter because this time he wanted to be the main damage dealer of the party but considered paladin as a class and vengeance paladin as a subclass weak.  None of us know why he thought this, and it set the stage for all sorts of things in the game.   

During the lead up to this game and before Session 0, I was getting a steady stream of private messages from Skyrim about how this time “Paladin isn’t going to be the party leader” and he wasn’t going to let him just take charge and be the one leading us. He was going to step up and lead the party.  I just went along with it, already tired of hearing this ongoing one-sided feud that seemed to exist only in his head.

One of the first things that came out in the game and that was pushed back hard, Skyrim was playing a racist elf.  Towards all of us, but mostly towards Paladin’s human character.  He never missed a chance to just try to slip in some racist comment to the human and every time paladin telling him to knock it off, as well as GM telling him to stop it both above board and in game.  Skyrim would continually try to say that he was joking, and we just were misinterpreting what he says.  Skyrim gaslights himself constantly still, tries to gaslight the party all the time about things he did or said, and it will show through the game.  The most amusing part is that he still to this day is playing a racist elf, yet while trying to impress Bard, forgets that she’s half elf, which is also half human.  She’s just been letting him dig his grave. 

At first Bard and Fighter weren’t with us, so it was just the 4 of us, and one of our first encounters was with space sharks.  I forget their name, but it was an interesting fight, and I failed a grapple check and nearly got swallowed by the shark.  This fight though set the stage for what was to come.  Paladin used a smite, while fighter was using a pepperbox.  And the jealousy started as soon as the smite damage rolled in.    I’m still not why or how in his mind that Skyrim arrived at the conclusion that paladins are weaker than fighter in terms of damage numbers, but somehow, he did so. 

After this and some in game lore, we found out the mission we were on was to help discover the ancient drow homeworld, which was lost.  One of our first missions was to the corpse of a dead celestial being, where we uncovered a tomb and some ancient tome as well as a Yuan-ti and a fight that really did not go well from us not working together, and just making a lot of dumb mistakes.  Later on, we were at a tavern where Paladin was up on stage playing an instrument and this is also where Bard was introduced to the party. Bard is a childhood friend IRL of Skyrim, brand new to D&D and from what it looks like to everyone else, an unrequited crush of Skyrims.   GM wasted little time in getting her in the game, I think a 5 minute wait? Then she was brought in, introduced by being the music player at the tavern.  Paladin joined her on stage, and the pair hit it off, as it turned out beforehand Paladin and bard had been approached by the DM to work together as her “in” to the party since Paladin’s player is new person friendly and knows how to work with a team.  Skyrim, in a fit of jealousy when we needed to get paladins attention, decided he would be the one to do so.  How? By pulling out a gold piece and throwing it at his head actively trying to hit him so that he’d mess up on stage and embarrass himself in game.  Despite his claims, this really was Skyrim’s petty jealousy of Paladin being the “in” for bard and not him.  He claimed this was a joke and everyone was reading too much into it, but none of us bought it. 

Now during this where we dealt with some slaver draconians, space sharks, and I forget what else, Skyrim had taken every chance he could to “impress” Bard.  He never succeeded. He often tried every moment in game to act like a tough guy to NPC’s usually needlessly and caused more problems than he solved.  Every time we had a fight, he was the first to rush in, only to take a single hit of maybe a D10 or D12 of damage at worst then rush back out of the fight.  During all this Bard and Paladins characters hit off an in-game friendship, as well as out of game one, bonding over families, life, and D&D.  Skyrim’s jealousy got even worse when she essentially ignored him acting like a loser 14-year-old with a crush on the popular girl that already had a boyfriend.  Saddest thing of this is Skyrim is in a relationship and has a family, Bard is married and has a family, and it sometimes really felt like Skyrim was back in high school with this or at least acting as if he was still single. 

It was during this Skyrim and I ran into a problem.  We got arrested.  Myself because I’d disguised myself (poorly, based on the dice rolls) and run a con scam selling potion vials full of mixed drinks that was just basically fruit juice, gold Schlager, and prestidigitation claiming it could do small things like giving someone the ability to drink like a dwarf.  Skyrim, never missing a change to jump into anyone else’s scene, asked if he was anywhere near the markets where I was doing this. You could hear GM’s sigh as he said probably, and instead of just walking past immediately jumped in to try to mock the scene by downing one and claiming some benefits of it in front of everyone in a sarcastic voice.  GM called for a deception or persuasion roll, and he did well enough I made a nice chunk of gold and shared it with him.  Later, before we could leave, we both got arrested because someone framed me for selling something worse.  I rolled with it, story point and honestly, I was not being a very good player either at this point, leaning too much towards chaotic stupid and I’ll own that.  Skyrim… took this personally and within the next session was messaging me that he’d been targeted by GM for this as well.  I pointed out that this was purely on me, because of what I was doing as a player, he was just unable to stay out of the scene and had to jump in, therefore getting lumped in beside me with the arrest. To cut things short, we got the services of a lawyer and in exchange for 2 drow artifacts each from us would clear our names.  Good to his word, he cleared our names, and we set about to get his artifacts.  And during the whole jail thing, there was a big attack by some fear monster at the jail, and rather than escape my character stayed behind because it would look better for him getting free.  Skyrim stayed behind by fact eh was still locked in his cell and no way out like I had. 

As part of this we first searched out a world that supposedly had been a drow colony world but had a cracked sphere.  We found our way there, only to discover most of the drow gone, the remaining ones all vampires, and drider that were free of Lolth’s influence. We found a meseum on the drow world, and turned out it was hallowed ground so the vampires couldn’t get us while we were inside.  With them only a minor concern we set about investigating the place.  Skyrim, WOULD NOT let Bard do ANYTHING herself.  Did she ask to look at something? He jumped in to look at it and use guidance and say she was giving him advantage by helping.  GM refused to let this happen and forced him to back off.  We found a locked desk in one part of the museum, guess how this went? Bard reveals she has profiency with thieves tools! Great! Her time to shine you would think. NO, Skyrim jumps in and insists he’s going to pick the lock instead of her by using tinkers’ tools.  Despite all of us pushing this as a dumb idea, and let Bard do it, he refused to back down and utterly failed his roll.  Bard managed to open the lock easy by using thieves tools, and Skyrim proceeded to sulk that he had not been allowed to succeed using tinkers’ tools.   We had some luck finding a set of magical earrings at a drow museum and while we talked over who would be best to use them Skyrim jumped in and said he was going to take them.  Even if they’d worked better for Bard. We also found a couple other magical items like some drow chainmail that was a big help for mine and bards AC.   We managed to find some books, as well as what we were looking for, and made our way back to the ship, and maybe unleashed drow vampires on the galaxy? I’m sure that’ll not come back to haunt us at all.  But we got out alive.  On the return we got the NPC captain’s permission to use some of the items to settle the debt and gave the captain all the books we took from the museum, which gave us our next goal in the game.   During our jail time, we ended up triggering some big evil thing on the asteroid that was causing mass fear, so we were going after it before going on.

Now, here’s a fun side thing.  This is where Skyrim decided he needed to multiclass. And that’s detailed above about the Session 0 and character building.   Since we had earlier left a temple like place full of mad writings to Azuth, I had gotten him to start there to look at things.  Of course, he took this to mean “go arcana domain” despite nothing of his characters personality or his play style fitting it, and pushed and pushed the issue with GM to allow this multiclass.  GM told him he would have to show he was serious about this and that this was a “profession of faith” not a transaction like a warlock pact is.  Skyrim just shrugged it off as of course, and immediately treated it like a warlock pact trying to get in the gods graces and get power.  GM, one of the others, and I pointed out that to follow Azuth would require him to move from his favorite alignment, Chaotic Neutral, and become lawful.  He claimed he would and immediately in every action didn’t even come close to anything matching a cleric of Azuth or Lawful Neutral or even true neutral.  He was griping to me every time after this about not getting cleric powers, just the level and HP and proficiencies, and I kept trying to make him see “pick a different domain, war, forge, any other domain. Stop trying to force arcana domain.”.  He of course didn’t.   It was always GM’s fault he was never getting anywhere despite constantly having what he needed to do spelled out to him in game and above board by GM and the rest of us.  So, during this whole thing he finally had his “moment” during a fight against killer clowns from outer space, which we attracted when Bard and Paladin threw a massive concert to try to draw the fear monster out.  It didn’t work as intended but Skyrim got his moment then proceeded to utterly blow everything about it afterwards regarding being a cleric of Azuth.  

After the clown fiasco, we had more problems in hunting monsters, we found neogi and some slaves inside the asteroid, and during this fight, our “healer” wasn’t much of a healer.  Skyrim instead believed in throwing out his limited spell slots on guiding bolt, then following up pepperbox shots.  He was unhappy over those fights because he just wasn’t rolling very good, and his damage was bad compared to the paladin with the smites.   

After a few adventures that I can’t fully remember, and being honestly a terrible arcana cleric, (and player in general) He decided to switch domains, going life domain which plays into our next arc, finishing off our debt and him getting what was around his 3rd damn arc for his character, even if he had to share it with me, it was around the 3rd time now GM had to focus things on him.

The Dragon:

So the GM gave us an easy out, sort of.  The lawyer claimed he would call our favors paid if we got a special item for him.  Simple really, we just had to slay a dragon for it.

This is where Skyrim didn’t just drop the ball, he deflated it and buried a hatchet in it and his own foot.  We were all hyped and scared to fight a dragon, and did a lot of investigations, both dice rolling and roleplaying to figure out just what we were up against and to prepare.  The best leads we had was that we were up against a black dragon.  So, my character dumped a lot of money he had come into on potions, one of supreme healing, and 2 more of greater healing, and 2 potions of acid resistance.   Now during this whole time we were going high and low across the city to figure out everything we could about this dragon, or most of us were, Skyrim was busy complaining “we need to do more investigation”  while his whole contribution to the investigation at this point was to ask “is there a temple of bahamut” and when told “no, there wasn’t a temple of that god” on the asteroid, to now be out of ideas and spend most of every session complaining we weren’t’ doing enough.  Meanwhile Ranger was hitting up NPC friends in dive bars for rumors.  I was chasing every legend and lead, as well as sourcing items that could help us, and Bard and Paladin were reaching out to all our contacts to see if we could hire some extra help for this fight and promising shares of the treasure hoard of the dragon.   Skyrim didn’t want the extra people, both because he didn’t want the treasure divided up more, as well as the fact we looked for a dedicated healer when he had multi classed for the express purpose of being our party healer (which he sucked at and why we hired a dedicated healer NPC).  There was also a point above the table and in game, where GM informed both Skyrim and I that as we required a specific item from the dragon and the party was doing this FOR US, we would forfeit our shares of the treasure.  Skyrim and I said alright.  This will come back later.

To find the location of the dragon, we had to do some work, first lead we had was a scroll, unfortunately it was in a room full of spiders and spiderwebs.  In my own fit of brilliance as a sorcerer, and seeing giant spiders all around us, I decided to use fireball on the room, which burned up the scroll that we were supposed to find to help us.  We had done some fancy tricks to rescue 3 boxes we thought held the information, but we missed one because of poor rolls.  The DM of course was prepared for this level of stupid on our part, and next was an oracle figure.  The rest of the party pooled their gold for them to be able to cast a spell that I forget now, but we had 3 questions to ask.  Any other questions would cost both extra gold and become less accurate.  We all agreed that Bard should ask the questions and took a good hour of the session outlining our questions and planning.  The start of this went smoothly, with Skyrim somewhat contributing to the questions.  It wasn’t going to last.  We went into it, and all of us agreed to keep quiet so the GM didn’t have any chance to use us speaking up to eat up a question and give bard the spotlight.   After the 2nd question Skyrim HAD to speak up with his own question that barely connected to what we asked, I believe it was “wait what happened that this city is abandoned?” costing us the 3rd question and had a flurry of messages between players all annoyed with him for ruining Bards moment as well.  We had to pony up I think it was 50 or 100 gold to ask another question that was relevant and hope it was accurate enough answer going into the fight.  The session ended after that with a sour note because of Skyrim. 

Now we had a location of the dragon, we had identified it as a black dragon, or so we thought, and we now were in full on “battle prep” phase.  At this point my character, shifting from being a con man to a game creator and player, went full “this is a game” mode of thinking and we started strategizing.  I was messaging Paladin, Ranger, Bard, and Skyrim, asking them to share abilities and spells.  We were all hyped for this fight, except Skyrim who was convinced this was a suicide run and targeting him specifically to kill his character.  Guess who barely returned a single message asking about strategy ideas?  He did tell me his spells and abilities, but every time I tried to get him to help strategize with the others, he just blew me off, until right before each of the 2 lead up session he messages everyone in the group chat with “I have a dumb idea” which, he never really had a good one so this was just a standard idea for him.  He had come up with the idea that Paladin could tank, while he would cast “warding bond” on himself and paladin to soak up some of the damage.  This was pointed out as a STUPID IDEA by all of us.  He didn’t have the HP to soak up 2 sources of damage, nor did we want our CLERIC wasting his healing spells keeping himself alive when our paladin and ranger would need healing.   EVERYONE kept telling him this was a bad idea, but for the next set up session, he FIXATED on it and refused to listen. During this time, we also recruited some NPC’s who came from Krynn, one a healer cleric of Mishkall.   He decided after meeting her, to take that goddess as his and be a life domain cleric.  The dragon fight was going to be a trial run for this.  A trial he would fail spectacularly.  I had every player messaging me and all of us sharing ideas for this fight, except Skyrim.  I had come up with all sorts of plans.  My plan for the dragon fight? Paladin was to get up front, in the dragons face and hit it till it dies.  Smite on a crit if he got one. Bard was going to hold heroism and kite it with her crossbow from the side and keep in cover. Throw out healing and support/ control spells as needed.  I was going to twin haste on Ranger and Paladin then hide in cover and throw out some damage spells and be ready with counterspell. Ranger was going to keep to the other side and focus on his ranged attacks. Skyrim? I ended up telling the rest “Ignore him in our plans. He’s going to do his own thing” and despite my best efforts to try to include him in the planning, even giving him something stupid but cool to do, he ignored all of it to fixate on warding bond and how this was going to get us all killed.  My idea for him? Since he loved dramatic acts (if there was zero risk to him) I told him pick up some kegs of smokepowder, glue and nails. We covered the kegs partially in nails stuck it to the dragon’s underside and then teleport out and shoot the keg.  It was exactly something he’d think is cool. I also told him he has great range; he should stay at a distance and focus on healing and using his pepperbox.  He never acknowledged my message about it or anything of him using his trick shots to keep the dragon distracted and focus on healing us.   Given this hyper fixation he had for his own “grand idea” we just ended up ignoring him and planning around him. 

The fight was the next session.  We reach the place the dragon is supposed to be, and while searching for the dragon Skyrim, whom has been the least useful player ever unless you count racist comments as useful, up till now, decides he will scout ahead.  Instead of, say, ranger or even bard who has actual stealth.  Skyrim rolls not great for stealth and makes his way into what was basically a boss arena.   He walks all of 20 feet in, rolls a terrible perception check, and walks back out to tell us “All clear”, never checking the lake in it, or the lava pit or the ruins around the edges and in the middle.  We go in and all of us knowing he did the worst job scouting, Paladin asking him what all he saw with GM having to jump into say “you didn’t’ go that far in the room, you didn’t see X” or whatever he tried to metagame that he saw.  Paladin has warding bond on, despite all of us saying it’s a bad idea, and I had given paladin my supreme healing potion, since it would come in useful for him more than me.   Paladin goes up to a pool of lava, and finds the dragon, which turns out, was a hybrid red and black dragon and most of us proceed to eat an acid/fire breath weapon, dealing something like 8d6 fire and 6d6 acid, to the face.  Skyrim takes half this damage plus the full damage, and proceeds to freak the hell out, as the rest of us run for cover and take positions. He decided not to take one of the potions of acid resistance despite, you know, being the healer and tanking for the paladin.  I twin haste on Paladin and Ranger then run into cover to avoid the whole acid/fire breath and in general the giant dragon.  The NPC’s scatter as well and everyone starts going all out on the dragon. Everyone, but Skyrim.  Who takes another acid/fire breath thanks to paladin and his own decision to not hide in cover that was all over the arena. At this point, fearing his character would go down because his health had taken such a massive beat, drops concentration on warding bond.  He made all of one or two attacks during this fight and proceeds to stay at the farthest back part of the cavern where he’s still in attack range staying in the open, running around.  He threw a couple guiding bolts that miss, then burned all his other slots healing himself over anyone else.  Bard, who had taken a bad beating in this because she had to break cover to help paladin, is done to 1 HP, and says on the voice-chat “Guys I’m almost dead” to which we hear “I’m out of healing” from Skyrim because he’d burned his healing on himself thanks to that stupid warding bond spell and then throwing around guiding bolts and constantly failing the rolls.  Bard gets told by GM “I’ll let you maintain your concentration on Heroism if you roll a nat 20 on this check” Bard rolls and all of us holding our breath for Dice Maiden, and in a lucky moment rolls a nat 20 to keep the spell up and we all go wild.  Without warding bond, Paladin gets nearly killed as well, since he had decided because of Skyrims whining to not take the acid resistance potion I tried to give him.  Skyrim’s logic was it would invalidate his fancy spell idea and make it less meaningful. Paladin is knocked to around 2HP and was lucky I had that potion I gave him. A 10d4+20 supreme healing potion saves his life where he gets the big final blow and cuts the dragons head off in a “how do you do this?” moment.  Skyrim, in the end, does… nothing useful yet is acting as if he was the one who came up with the best plans, and was the most helpful of the fight.    The fight is over, and my character claims the item we came for.  I had made a speech before this fight while on the spelljammer that I was forfeiting my entire share just so I could claim the item we needed, and Skyrim, was talking up how much gold he was getting, despite GM telling us no, we weren’t, because this was a mess of our own making, and we needed this item to clear things up. Mostly my own mess, but Skyrim had to stick his nose in it and got burned for it.  Combine this after the fight with a bunch of racist remarks to Paladin’s character, and a week of him claiming that we told him to go ahead and use warding bond, and how it had been a good idea and how we hadn’t done enough research and nearly got TPKed for it.  Spoiler: He nearly got killed, Paladin nearly ate it, Bard nearly died, but Ranger and I were semi decent. I could have done more, but I was more focused on keeping Haste up and not losing that concentration.  I got fed up when he messaged me and screenshot the earlier conversations showing him exactly where he had said he was going to use it, and how all of us said it was a terrible idea.  He had refused my idea of “be Vortex warped under the dragon, shove a powder keg covered in nails to its leg or crotch.  He was up after me where he could astral step away from the dragon as a bonus action, then shoot the keg and try to deal a bunch of damage. A dumb idea, but he loves flashy heroic looking dumb ideas, so I thought it worked well for him.  After the fight, instead of trying to help anyone, he immediately acts like he was one of the big heroes of the fight and goes to loot the treasure and claim his share, till I, paladin, and DM remind him as part of the agreement he made, him and I only got the artifact the dragon had.  He argued it up and down and sulked off after wards. Sending me whining messages over the fight because despite screenshots proving it, he was being unfairly targeted by DM and this was another example of it.  I told him I was done, and he was just a shit player that I spent most of the buildup planning around, because none of us considered him reliable as a cleric or healer.  He said something about quitting and I think I said I didn’t really care if he did. Because it would probably just make the game better.  Of course, he didn’t quit, that would mean he’d no longer be around Bard to try to impress her (She was not impressed at all by him), and not get to the attention he wanted from us.

Kynn:

After our big heroic fight with the dragon, we bonded with the NPC’s and decided as a nice palate cleanser, we would hit up Krynn.  This was also partially again, to throw a bone to Skyrim who was not happy he was not doing well as a cleric (if he learned his class abilities it would go a long way).  This was also the 3rd rebuild of Skyrim’s character again.  And all of us were sick of it.  But we wanted to see Krynn. This was where Fighter joined up with us again now that Life had let up enough, he could play.  We met fighter quickly, and Skyrim is quiet towards them, mostly out of the fact Fighter is a male playing a character who also happens to be female, a knight of solomnia.  Fighter was introduced during a festival, joining us a table and gets to do rp diffusing a tense situation with a kender NPC and fellow knight NPC.  Fighter smooths over and otherwise is a fun time as we go through Palanthas, feast, RP, and have a good time.  The big mission of the world was set up for Skyrim, since they were complaining over the balance of fighter/cleric levels, and GM begrudgingly let him have one final chance to balance their character.  One of the first problems in game came when we met tinker gnomes.  Despite EVERY in game and out of game warning and advice to “Go read the wiki’s” that were linked in the discord, Skyrim skimmed it enough to learn “Tinker gnomes make things that go boom” and that was about the extent of his reading comprehension.  And one in game offer to “improve” his pepperbox, he jumped on it, even though he just watched a gnome nearly blow themselves up playing with smoke powder.  GM warns that letting the gnomes “improve” the weapon will mean that the failure rate on the pepperbox will go up.  Well Skyrim doesn’t listen, and has the weapon improved anyway.  So that it now jams on a roll of I believe 8 or so, and a roll of 3 causes it to blow up.  Next session Skyrim gets his improved pepperbox, and first roll to test it out rolls a 1.  His pepperbox blows up in his face and damages him.  So now he has a rapier left.  We set off after this with him now feeling dejected over losing his main weapon and how he's supposed to deal damage.  Keep in mind he was, in his own words, going to be changing over to healing and support.   

We went on to the big mission of the planet, breaking up a slavery ring, and a last chance where, as Skyrim was told by GM, that depending on how well he played up being a follower of Mishikall, he would be able to trade so many levels of fighter towards it, and at this point we were level 8 I believe.   To start off, I asked the NPC if the draconians had any superstitions, then used major image to create a silver dragon that told them to free the prisoners and run if they wanted to save their own lives.  Some really bad saving throws on the GM’s part and we saved the trouble of dealing with a lot of minions that would cost resources.  Then comes Skyrims big set up built to give him his last chance.  Of course, we all go in, and the boss draconian comes out, the fight starts, and we all do our thing.  All of us except Skyrim.  GM had been clear, Skyrim needed to live up to the teachings of his chosen goddess for this, and he had included a 1-page summary of those teachings with examples of what to do.  In it was the explicit example of being willing to go into this, eat some damage and try to get this guy to surrender.  Whether or not the guy did surrender wasn’t important, it was what Skyrim chose to do.  Skyrim chose to interpret this as “must make sure he surrenders”.   We went into the fight and Skyrim opted instead to throw out damage spells like guiding bolt, rather than try any negotiations tactics.  He actively dumped Paladin and Bard to handle the fighting while he hung back burning spell slots on failed attacks, and I think one heal to paladin or Fighter the whole time.  GM had to buff the boss’s HP to keep him from being killed too quickly, and from the first round was constantly urging Skyrim to step up and try to do what he’d been saying he would the whole game.  Instead, Skyrim fell back to old habits and only after every enemy was dead and GM had to relent and have the boss nearly dead, and on his knees did Skyrim finally move up close enough to try to talk him into surrendering.  It was a sorry state of battle and most of us felt like what should have been epic turned into a letdown of a fight when it was all set up to give Skyrim a chance to prove he was focused as a healer and support, despite so far proving only that he was only willing to step up when there was no risk to his character.   Krynn was a nice visit, but we left quick enough to the next adventure. 

Continued into comments

TLDR: PC sticks to their characters ideals and makes ONE decision that topples the domino creating a band wagon for this PC to be hated throughout the campaign despite their continued attempts to repent. When that PC faces their last battle, nobody helps them. Now the Player feels personally attacked, and everyone regrets it.

I’m going to go through this situation through the major points, because it literally spans the entire campaign which has been ongoing for nearly two years real time and is incredibly nuanced, between players not communicating, and the GM really not stopping anything, all the way to one player changing their backstory retroactively to better explain their decisions, but still not communicating this to the party. Also there is one more PC but I am not including them due to them always siding with the Monk and contributing nothing else to the campaign. 

Every player makes their characters within a bubble, and as such one player effectively makes a lone wolf Ranger, that more or less has a quick and efficient mindset of eliminating problems before they arise, they say they’re Chaotic Neutral. Everyone else has a straightforward code of ethics, barebones but at least Neutral Good to Lawful Good in alignment.

There’s a random encounter where one person goes ahead of the group and gets into a small nonlethal scrap with Macho Man Randy Savage as a Ysoki NPC. The combat ends with two of the four PC’s stopping the fight and calming everyone down to talk and explain the situation, and nobody is in any serious condition and everyone at least pacified, and the Ysoki explains that he was taking a piss in the grass previous PC scared the daylights out of him, and he had a fight or flight response.

“I shoot him”.

Everyone whips their head around to the Ranger that has stayed silent and watched for the perfect opportunity to strike. The table is in UPROAR. The GM calls for an attack roll, while another player (We’ll call them “Monk”) rolls a RFLX save to see if they can at least protect the NPC. Ranger rolls a Success, Monk rolls a Failure. As the bolt claims the life of this Rat Man, the Monk claims this moment to be the moment where they started to not like this character, not the player, but the character.

As the session continues it’s revealed that the Rat Man was a single Rat Dad to two young children and the party takes them to a nearby town without anyone revealing the truth to the children.

This is ALSO when the party as a whole begins to hate the Ranger, as through the next sessions the party takes after ONE of the two Rat Kids, showing favoritism and putting nearly all of their attention and effort into the chosen child, while the Ranger attempts to do the same with the other neglected child, as an ACT of repentance, still not clearly communicating the intent of said actions. The party refuses to let him do that, citing the “murder” of their father.

The Ranger does try to make amends as they heal people in need, offer the party items and provisions, basically extending an olive branch as the party refuses all of those advances and smack them away, condemning the Ranger as irredeemable. I’m the only one who accepts the gifts, being the neutral person in the party.

As the campaign continues rolling, the party ostracizes the Ranger, shutting down all attempts to roleplay and the Ranger welcomes it, taking it as a personal challenge to be better than everyone else in combat and statistical matters. When the rolls count, the Ranger is the only one to pull ahead, either through homebrew items approved by the GM or ludicrous stacking and rule bending also approved by the GM. Every player hates this, but I’m the only one to ever say anything against it.

Alongside this, every decision is immediately met with two opposing options, one offered by the Ranger and the other from the Monk. I decided to roleplay an oath of Neutrality, I wouldn’t pick one or the other, a happy medium. As we continue to play I continue the path of the neutral good character I play, until the Zinogre incident.

The GM has this situation where I’m separated from the party as I’m effectively holding back a wave of NPC enemies while the rest of the group goes into the lair and attempts to stop the ritual from summoning a creature, and due to me staying behind and telling the party to go ahead and stop it before it begins, they do in fact arrive in time to stop the ritual. The ritual requires a blood sacrifice of innocent people, and the more people the more powerful the exchange.

There are roughly a hundred people in this room cloaked much alike to the enemies that the entire campaign has been centered on, which actually end up being innocent civilians (this was found out after inspecting the bodies), alongside a wounded monster, so the party assumed the ritual is taking place and needed to stop it.

“I shoot my Explosive Bolt into the Crowd”

The table is in uproar, and the GM rolls with the consequences of this action. Cue a Zinogre fight that nearly wipes the party, as the Ranger has balanced dealing damage and healing the party, even reviving the Monk multiple times to keep the combat going, I’m able to finally join on the tail end to finish the combat scene.

As soon as the dust settles, the Monk swears that the Ranger is his absolute mortal enemy and starts a duel. The Ranger agrees, beginning the duel to the death, and ultimately ends up sparing the Monk.

Through the next sessions, its calm seas. Everyone refuses to acknowledge what has transpired, but every session is a directly worded “I hate your character” both in character and out of character. I simply state to everyone during a camp rest, that I will no longer be neutral. I will choose the decision that is the easiest and will ultimately benefit the party and/or story.

Following the trail of the central antagonists of the campaign, the party finds a general of said faction who happens to be the Son of one of the major NPCs of this group. Battle ensues and everyone is gung-ho for the murder of said Son, until the Ranger spares their life and speaks on his behalf to recruit the Son, emphasizing the importance of his information/worth. The Son becomes a trusted ally to the party as he willingly joins to help kill his father.

Despite the outcome of the Rangers continued attempts to make amends, nothing is good enough to sway the party’s views of the Ranger, who is still viewed by the party as irredeemable, citing the “murder” of Rat Dad, and him being the trigger for the Zinogre incident.

This comes to a head last night, when the Ranger decides he is strong enough to 1v1 a CR 13 Barrioth being a lvl 9 PC. I get ready to start combat, when I say jokingly say to the Monk: “This is your moment”.

And the Monk does not join in combat. They stand there watching as slowly but surely both the Barrioth and the Ranger wear each other down to near death, saying to the whole table ”This is Karmic Justice”.

The Barrioth critically hits the Ranger for far more than what is necessary, devours the Ranger’s corpse and limps away. I have instant remorse, so I roll to see if my character would do anything, and I roll enough in my mind to at least kill the creature in revenge.

Out of character, the Ranger is still smug, thinking everything is fine, stating that he has insurance of a scroll or something to revive him.

I ignore it, he’s dead.

I kill the Barrioth, and begin to extract the Ranger from the monster. I finally get to the digested body and go to grab his bag, to revive the Ranger.

I don’t.

I sling the bag over my shoulder and walk away, as the Ranger is quiet, the GM is in Awe, and the Monk breathes a sigh of relief.

Thats where the session ended. A PC that nobody liked, finally meets their end from the party watching them die. And naturally, everyone says “Please make a different character, we love playing with you, but we fucking hate the Ranger”. But that damage is done.

I plan on making this a huge step for my character to break the Oath of Neutrality and finally start being more proactive, to never let this happen again, maybe even take the reins as an official leader of the party.

The Ranger is taking this as a personal attack, but ultimately does want to continue playing. Everyone feels like shit for it ending this way, but the party feels it’s best that the character is canned.

The Monk feels like an asshole, but regardless is excited to finally not have the weight that is to be constantly aware of the Ranger at all times.

I can’t wait for next session, if there is one.

A story from around the year 2000.

I was in college and got invited to a game of DnD, probably 3E at that time (It wasn't AD&D and 3.5 wasn't released yet). I didn't really like the DM but the other players were nice, so I decided to join in, and, well, it certainly changed my opinion of the DM...

It was like he was applying for a job at the train company; the railroading was insane. The party would come to a fork in the road and we decide to go left.
"You can't go left."

Why not?
"I didn't prepare anything to the left."
Dude, then why give us the option?!

He also wanted to play a campaign with starvation/attrition, there never being any food or resources. Until my character solved the issue by levitating above a pond and lightning bolting it so some dead fish would float up for us to collect. The classic "fishing with a hand grenade". This worked the first time, and the second time, but the third time the levitation gets cancelled as I am floating above the water. So I think, cool, a mystery to investigate! But no, no explanation, no reason, just "move on and starve like I intended."

Then one game, we travel and make camp for the night. All good. We wake up and the DM gleefully tells us the horses are gone because no one said they were tying them up so they just wandered off. I was pissed and started saying "Hey DM, I am breathing in!" "Hey DM, I am breathing out!" because apparently if you don't say it, you're not doing it. (yes, I was being obnoxious on purpose here).

I don't quite remember how, but I ended up with a new character and I just went for the stereotypical meathead barbarian who solves all problems with Strength. The DM didn't like that either, so he gives me a magic ring that enhances my strength at will even further. So I use is once or twice, but at the third or fourth time, the DM says "okay, you just keel over dead!" Because apparently, every time I used the ring, he added 10-20 years to my life total without it having any noticeable effect! So when I hit 85, he just decided to kill me from old age.

At that point I just said "FU" and left.

Years later he tried befriending me on Facebook. I had no interest to see whether or not he was still an asshole, so I just ignored it.

So I play Dnd with a group of friends and my cousin. My cousin is a lesbian and a teenager (15). This is unfortunately relevant to what happened. This recent campaign (no longer going on) involved a newer “friend” that I met through the game shop.

He was an older player (about 45ish) and a veteran DM and had a fairly good reputation and I had played in a few one shots he ran so when my Dnd group (friends and cousins) all came to this game shop—it was only natural that we got this guy to DM for us. Boy was that a mistake.

So we meet for session 0 and the DM lays out the rules and establishes the setting. Nothing out of the ordinary. It was to be set in a world that utilizes maps from Game of Thrones, Avatar the Last Airbender, and Lord of the Rings with a hodgepodge of inconsistent lore splattered across (i.e. a firebending R’hllor worshipping Targaryen dark lord looking for the one ring).

The problem came when we rolled up our characters. Most of us played some variation of orc or elf. I was personally a half-elf barbarian. But my aforementioned cousin decided to play a female tiefling druid who was married to a woman. None of us took issue with this except the DM who made an offhand “joke” about scissoring. I am embarrassed to say I didn’t know what that meant at the time even though I definitely should have..

The BBEG was basically the aforementioned Dark Lord and our job was to travel the globe looking for magic items to prevent him from taking over the world. We had about 4 sessions before I noticed the disproportionate amount of homophobic NPCs and DMPCs who would target tiefling druid. A couple of them even attacked us.

One time, after she talked about her and her wife’s daughter (adopted) and he just had to bring in a whole ass DMPC to object. I’m paraphrasing but he basically said “No way you two got a baby? You’re literally gay” as he started laughing his ass off. Then he said “Magic ain’t gonna make a baby outta two holes” and started laughing again like an ass. I glared at him and he said “What its true. Its basic biology.” I ended up making an excuse for us to leave early that day.

After that session, I asked my cousin if she wanted me to talk to him because I was ready to lay into his ass. I told her we can find another game. She said “Nah please don’t. He’s probably in the closet himself. A lotta guys like that are. Plus sometimes characters can be assholes. Its part of Dnd.” I agreed to not talk to him to respect her wishes.

But it got worse. A few sessions later, we ended up going to a dark empire over the ruins of what was once Mordor–ruled by a Lich-Emperor. He had an important magic item we were looking for and he was supposedly a mixed bag and not totally evil. But when we got there, we were arrested by his army of Mind Flayers who read our minds.

Apparently as we were being investigated, the mind flayers bring up the fact that my cousin’s character is gay and married to a woman. They apparently hated gay people and threatened to TPK us over it. But instead they brought us to the emperor to decide our fate. Once we reached the Lich-Emperor, he also made his disdain for gay people very clear. “I don’t tolerate homosexuals in my realm. Gay men are summarily executed but lesbians?”.

But what broke me was when the DM deadass looks at my cousin with a disgusting grin on his face and “in character” says quote: “We can fix lesbians. They just need to know what a real man feels like. Mind Flayers, hold her down!”

We all look at him with digust. At that point I said “Oh hell no! We are not doing this.” And I told him in no uncertain terms that we are leaving and not coming back. The DM then tried to walk it back and said “What it was a joke! Come don’t tell me you’re really gonna ragequit over this.” I refused to listen and just grabbed me and my cousin’s things.

Thankfully my friends all backed me up so there wouldn’t even theoretically be a chance for my cousin to give him the benefit of the doubt and stay in the game. The campaign ended right then and there. My cousin did thank me at the end and said that she wouldn’t want to play with him again after that. And later we did find a better DM to play with.

tldr DM won’t stop commenting on my cousin’s sexual orientation. Eventually makes a comment so disgusting that I forcibly ended the campaign.

A very mild horror story: I rolled an 11, a 17, a 14, a 17, 11, and a 16 for my Bladesinger wizard, which is one of the best rolls I've ever made for character creation. The DM made me give up the 16. She asked me to give it to someone else in the party who had really bad rolls, and I took a 9 from him instead. I now jokingly talk about my wizard as "having the build of a guy with 16 strength" and purposely ask other players during RP scenes to help him open jars.

Sometimes I think about what could have been and how much more dangerous it is to be a frontliner (which the party kind of needed with an INT skill main, and I would've loved a +3 to CON. I know there were alternatives like Psi Warrior or Eldritch Knight but I went with Bladesinger for out of combat purposes anyway). Our combats are pretty brutal, and I'll always find myself at odds with saves for half damage because of my wizardly health pool (the true horror of the story). But now whenever our party's druid rolls a success on his CON saves and thanks me for it, it kinda makes up for it. We play at his house so I feel like it was a worthwhile donation. Anyways thanks for stopping by my rpgspookystory. Hope you found ending kind of wholesome before you go back out there :)

Before I begin, there are some personal stuff I need to clarify: English is not my primary language I am a min maxer and a roleplayer (recpecting the game rules most of the time), I preffer to create characters that are good at their own thing and bad ath the other, for example, a very social rogue with poor academic knowledge. I tend to get mad in situations where players tell people how they should role their characters or jump to critizice others when making desitions about their characters, it is something I need to work at. I like to keep a good game phasing without interruptions from other players when making personal desitions.
This happened a few days ago, the people involved are:
Paladin- Me
Rogue- a friend of mine, kind of swallow minded somethimes but generally a nice guy, but old fashioned in his jokes and remarks
DM- the person who I had a personal issue here (not problem player, I let that for you to decide)
Artificer- a new player, in his 18 or something
Me, Rogue and DM are long time aquainted, our age are 28, 29 and 28 respectively.
I had a complicated story with my past dm with a horror story of its own that happened about 2 months ago, it involves real life SA, power abuse as a dm, ignoring PC abilities, and creating bad situations with my PC in moral conflict with lvl 20 npcs that would end up in public humilliations and social punishment from the city where the PCs lived. I will save that for another story.
I had told my new DM about this past events and all the scars that let in me, because that guy was a friend, in fact, the boyfirend of another friend of mine, so the wounds where very fresh.
My new DM and I agreed on making another campaign with D&D 5E wich I knew only by playing bg3 and making some research, because I was kind of tired of playing pathfinder 2E and I wanted to try a Paladin Hexblade, recently we both played baldurs gate 3 and it was a nice build that I wanted to try.
So...we rolled our stats, but I told the GM that I would had point buy at hand in case the rolled stats were bad. It was not that bad, but not good either, here are the stats + race bonuses at level 1:
Paladin: STR 13, DEX 13, CON 15, INT 12, WIS 12, CHA 15
Rogue: STR 14, DEX 17, CON 14, INT 13, WIS 16, CHA 13
Artificer: STR 8, DEX 8, CON 15, INT 19, WIS 11, CHA 13

I was kinda dissapointed that my best stat bonuses where 2 stats at +2, my paladin is a variant human, so stat bonuses are not really in the menu so this left me in a bad mouth taste. Maybe may biggest error at this point was to let the session continue without telling the dm that is wanted to use boint buy or standard array, and there was no session zero, that was the first session.
So we played just like that, his way of dming is quite good, he usually runs sandbox worlds with the enviroment and npcs reacting to the players and putting story hooks here and there, not gonna complain about that, his games are fun. But some stuff with rogue started in a bad turn at the beguinning, we where at a town square when a dwarf announced a mission for brave adventurers, and needed som escort for traveling with his carriages, full of goods and food to sell at the next settlement.
We offered to go as escorts and I offered to drive the second carriage, I was roleplaying how I adjusted the horses strings and making sure their shoe horses where clean, and rogue told that I had to make an animal handling because the horses could get violent at me, I told him that usually carriage horses where more submissive than war horses, chivalry or race ones, but he keep up with that and I raised my voice at him telling him that this was just a roleplay thing that i wanted to do before I get into the drivers seat, so the dm made me roll an animal handling check wich I succeded, later on rogue keep making sexual comments about my paladin (it is a female paladin, but we were all guys at the table), I tried to ignore them, but they were kind of disrupting.
Some days ahead in the travel we encountered an ambush on the road by goblins, and found tracks that indicated that our contractor, the dwarf and his bodyguard where assaulted on the road and taken to a cave, deep in the forest, we went there to rescue them and found 3 wolfs starving, barking and with fleas, so I decided to gave them apples that I found on the road, Rogue told that wolfs eat meat, and I told him that I had no meat, but he keep insisting that they would not eat the apples, DM tried to keep arguing and I told him to focus on my action at the moment, so the wolfs started fighting for the apples, we had to stop further ahead for the next session and I writed the next day to the dm that he should not listen to rogue when I want to do stuff in the game (keep in mind that he is a 10year experience dm) and that it was disrupting the game and making me do checks when he as DM should be the one deciding who makes checks, but he responded me that I was just stressfull, and needed to relax and treat the table as a good moment to share with some friends, wich I agree, but he added that he would keep listening to suggestions from players because he does not know everithing as a DM, later I told him about changing my ability scores to point buy or standard array.
This is when things get kinda bad: He told me that artificer had two 8s and one 11 and was not complaining, that my stats where fine, and I explained that my character needed better stats that I could get by legal character creation methods and that rogue had better or equal modiffiers in every ability than me, with the exception of charisma, but he would not budge, so I explained why I needed my con, str and cha for and my future plans for the build, and he said "ahh, I understand". I took it as a yes and proceeded to change my stats to point buy.
Later he scold me and told me that I did not have his permission for doing that and It was not ok for me to do things behind his back, wich is true I am not going to lie, he said that I was not just overstepping him as a dm but also the other players, who he did not gave that chance, so I could not have the chance. I was pissed at him and I did not know what to say so we leave that topic for that day. Next day I found a video about 5 house rules for dnd that did not include topics about the issue we just discussed, and he ignored me. Later on I tought to myself "maybe if the point buy option is offered to the other players then the opcion could be open". So I brought him the idea.
He responded "Each day I understand more and more your former DM"....yeah, the guy who tried to abuse me and treated me like dirt in his campaigns when I did not get him what he wanted.
I was very shocked and sad about that, I did not expect that from DM. I responded that there was much more to that story and it was a very different case, he then says that I send him a video with instructions of how to dm and I was out of line, I apologized for that and told him that I did not intend to offend him, and that he did say that he would listen to players because hi did not know everything about the game, and my request about using pint buy stats was not somtething illegal in the system. He proceeded to say "In my 10 years of dming you are the first player who complicates so much the creation of his character, we already talked about this, and you should use what you got, If you do not feel comfortable to keep on the table, we could suspend the campaign and try latter", I responded "No...its fine, I am going to adapt to theese stats I got"
I know I am a problem player, but I feel like shit for talking about past trauma to a friend of 11 years an have that trown to my face at the first opportunity, also that personal attack about being the most questionable player in all his dming

So this isn't actually that bad in the grand scheme of things. But it was one of those where I had to roll my eyes.

A friend recently started to run an interim campaign while one of our group members is out for a few weeks.

It's their first proper campaign and they've used the Eberron setting and fair play to them it's really fun!

The first session however, had a fight scene where their DMPC (literally, he would play this character in another game shortly after)

Was a higher level than all of us and we got into a fight with another high level enemy.

However, what ended up happening (and im assuming this is by design) is that we the party got to take on the adds while the DM had an epic showdown with his own NPC bad guy where the DMPC got 2 crits on his first 3 hits...

Meanwhile we were over to the side trying to survive.

It actually ended ok. My character used sleep to take out most of the extra characters whilst the others took out the rest.

The DMPC killed the bad guy with some small help from us and the rest of the campaign has run decently since. The DMPC has popped up a bit as a recurring ally but in the next fight since we've levelled up didn't take up nearly as much of the spotlight and was run much better.

It very much feels like a newbie mistake. Or maybe he had something else in mind but as a player, it very much felt like oh cool I'm spending the first half of this session feeling useless and like an extra in this whole story and the other 3 players felt the same as short of a brief introduction, none of the attention was on us until well after the fight.

DM here, so the campaign has been going relatively normally with the exception of a single player who at pretty much every turn does the meanest possible thing (especially to the characters that happen to be women). He randomly picked up Ireena and tried to carry her away, killed a very plot-important ally literally on a whim, and more recently used a Hat of Disguise to impersonate Strahd and coerce Gertruda into having sex with him, and he kept rolling really well until I deus Strahd machinad the real Strahd into the room stopping the encounter dead. I later made a "joke" about how his character's defining trait is committing violence against women and he didn't deny it...

Really not sure what to do with him.

EDIT: So yeah he's definitely not coming back, with this being my first time DMing it really hadn't dawned on me just how fucked up the whole situation was until outsider perspective made it kinda click. I admit I'm a huge pushover IRL so it's really great to see people calling me out and telling me that it's okay to put my foot down.

Honestly a relatively tame horror story but wanted some advice

Be me, big barbarian. 2 Guards were trying to arrest an innocent market stall worker on false charges and just generally being bullies. Guards are wayyyy under equipped compared to us, ask to intimidate them, roll a 27, they are unphased. Got into a minor scuffle with them where I push em around, restrain em, and the guy goes free.

We ditch town and head straight to the next area, a border checkpoint next to a village. We’re trying to find and question/ potentially assassinate a corrupt guard captain.

See some smoke in odd patterns within the keep, think it’s some sort of Morse code or signal. Told I can’t roll investigation to get a hint if it’s irregular, just take a guess yourself.

The plan is to act like a bounty hunter and inquire about bounties since some other party members were wanted and then ‘capture’ the other party members to do a reverse breakout, kill the captain when we collect the reward, and also see what’s up with the smoke.

I walk up to the keep. They instantly notice me and despite wearing a hat and being hundreds of feet away they say they recognize me by a crude sketch and that I’m under arrest (keep in mind we went right here after the previous crime, quite far - although maybe they could’ve used sending). I ask if I could try to deceive them by acting like they must have the wrong guy and if I was a criminal I wouldn’t just walk up to them. Nope, no chance.

I comply and go to jail. They say they need to put these manacles on me. Once they’re on Turns out they’re magical manacles that give me disadvantage on breaking out. No trial or anything. Guards start stealing my stuff (wearing my armor/clothes, drinking my wine). Not allowed to intimidate them to stop.

Ask to break out. Rage to roll straight. Roll a 24, close to the max someone could get with max STR and prof. Apparently barely not enough.

Now I’m using an alternate barbarian class but the important part is I have 3 exploits I can use per rest to add a d6 to a STR roll. Since the manacles were stronger than I thought I ask if I could (now or later), reroll while using these exploits to enhance my roll. For a better chance.

“Nope you tried once you can’t try again”

I then sit in jail for the next few ages bc I can’t do anything until I’m freed

Meanwhile we have deep gnomes rerolling stealth after they see a bad roll with their racial ability and a light cleric who rerolls after they see attack rolls for warding flare as well as rerolls the moment someone pulls out a crowbar (although idc too much, all stuff that RAW you gotta use/declare beforehand). We also have party members dogpiling every check known to man.

I just wanna know should I be upset? Or am I making too big a deal out of things. I feel like I was put in a virtually unwinnable situation. Also in general if you’re told you can roll should some people be impossible to intimidate? (I understand it being a super tough roll perhaps, but just sucks to roll so high and be told it doesn’t matter). Bc pretty much any time I’ve rolled high on intimidation so far, people never do as asked or intended, they either panic and fight or run (told it depends on the NPCs flight or fight instinct)

TL:DR: Joined a gigantic, very expensive paid game which turned out to be very bureaucratic and dysfunctional, and I didn't even get to play.

The Story

I've been spending some time looking for smaller D&D Youtubers, because some of them have really awesome content despite low sub/view counts. Imagine my delight when I found a channel giving really good D&D advice, and the guy who ran it was a paid DM for a "Tabletop MMORPG" with thousands of players!

He had about a half-dozen videos pitching this game, which he emphasized was all about "forging a legacy" and "making player choice matter". He showed off some cool art and their high-production-quality VTT sessions, and talked about "raid"-style one-shots and one-on-one roleplay. Sounds awesome, I thought - basically a West Marches server with some extra perks, and I'm lucky enough to have some disposable income. As a forever DM, I'm happy to spend a bit of cash to have a really good experience as a player.

I clicked the link under one of his videos, which lead me to a click funnel website, the same kind of thing you see from "alpha male" influencers trying to hard-sell their testosterone supplements. Kinda sus, but whatever, not everyone has the web design skills to make their own site. I clicked through all the pages until I got to the pricing tiers: $37 and $62 a month, with the latter tier requiring an interview.

Or, sorry, did I say per month? I faked you out, dear reader, because that's what I thought too - but no, it's $37 a week. Almost $150 a month to play D&D! But, what the heck, there's a two week free trial, I may as well try it out. So, I put my credit card info in and clicked through to the Discord.

It took my over a day to get set up, because their signup bot was broken. They had me fill out several forms, most of which were duplicate information (like entering e-mail, Discord username, and pronouns on each one) and some of which referred to Patreon, which they apparently don't use anymore. Everything was managed through an Escherian network of Discord bots and channel access roles, there were buttons that were marked "DM ONLY" that players could absolutely press, and security amounted to the head DM constantly reminding staff not to mention secret things in channels players could see.

I was then pulled into a "Session 0" with a "Player Manager" where I was informed that they use a 3-tier system where players at lower tiers get bronze tokens and players at higher tiers get silver and gold tokens, which can be used to kick other players out of games; if a session is full of bronze-token players, a gold-token player can bump one of them out in order to skip the line and play. With my $37 a week tier, I'd get 4 bronze tokens a month. There was also a "shop" channel where a bot would post every day, reminding me I could get extra bronze tokens for just another $25, or a gold token for just $50!

There were only a few quests available, almost all full, and most at times I couldn't make anyway, since I have a 9-5 and two home games. I eventually found a TC ("traditional campaign", not a West Marches quest) to join that said it would meet weekly at a time I could attend. I read through dozens of pages of homebrew, made a VTT token, set up my D&D Beyond, made a character, and waited expectantly as almost a week (half my free trial) went by. I was really hyped; in this world of wild homebrew, I'd made a human wizard who was seeking to understand the mysteries of the universe. I thought it'd be a neat way to roleplay with all the weird and wacky custom race characters and magitech weapon wielders. I even wrote a backstory that tied in with some recently added lore.

Imagine my disappointment when I logged into Discord on game day to find that my DM wasn't there. Nor were any of the other players. I joined an active VC thinking I might have misread the names, only to discover that it was for another game. Okay, maybe I'm just early? So I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

The scheduled session time came and went.

Nobody showed up.

Eventually my Player Manager told me that just being part of the campaign wasn't enough; the DM had to also make a Quest Board post, and all the players had to put tokens in. Since that hadn't happened, the game wouldn't be starting this week - meaning I wouldn't get to play at all during my free trial.

Of course, I cancelled immediately, and I was kicked from the Discord before I was able to give any feedback. I'm pretty unhappy about it, but at least I didn't get charged any money! I feel bad for all the folks who subscribe for $140/mo and just get kicked out of the one session they can make each week by someone paying twice that...

I’m not sure if this is really a horror story, since we still enjoyed the game, but it came across as bizarre.

We started the adventure being told by the adventurer’s guild to visit someone’s uncle and help them out. The uncle asked us to fetch some mahogany boards from the lumberjack in the next village. The lumberjack asked us to go to get his axe sharpened. Then..

When we actually got to the dungeon we were saving a meteorologist’s daughter so he could give us a weather report to give to a Druid in exchange for a spell scroll to give to the leader of the Dwarf mafia so he would release an apocethary’s friend so the apocethary would make a potion to cure a blacksmith’s cold so he would make us some metal cages to give to a farmer to transport chickens to a starving village so that the village head would act as a character witness at the trial of a friend of another blacksmith so he would sharpen the axe for the lumberjack to use to cut the mahogany boards for the uncle…

I’m not entirely sure if it was supposed to be a parody, but it didn’t come across that way.

This one's more funny than anything, so if you are looking for a story where someone is the bad guy: sorry, im the closest one to the bad gal. Also, obligitory memory is spotty and typing this on mobile disclaimers.

The system was Pathfinder 1e, and our DM was starting up a pirate themed campaign, another player tried to run the skull and shackles adventure path and got burnt out fast.

The exact classes of the other two players are not that relevent (so I'll just call them Fighter and Summoner), but they were very melee focused combatants, while I rolled up a Sorcerer/Bard Kitsune (we were playing with gestalt if you know what that is) who focused on enchantment spells, maybe a bit too much. I put as much as I could into charisma, intended to go down the magical tail featline for more enchantment nonesense, and generally disregarded direct combat beyond having a light crossbow. I only had a 12 in CON for a total of 9 HP.

After we make our character's, the scene is set, we are adrift on a crappy ship and a much better merchant vessel is ripe for invasion and takeover! We board and I roll a really sweet intimidate check to convince most the people on board to not fight us, except for the captain and first mate. When combat began my involvement may as well have ceased.

DM wanted to encaspulate the size of the ship so he decided that every square was 30 ft, instead of the usual 5 ft per square.

As the melee combatants got into the fray somewhat slowly, I set up my bard buffs up and... couldn't do much else.

To actually attack the captain or first mate, the melee combatants had to move inside their square, which is fine for everyone, except me.

Level one casters have it pretty rough, most of the spells I picked had a range of 30 ft/level. Pretty much melee. And I had an ac of like, 12, while the captain could reasonbly OHKO me if I was in range.

Should I have taken mage armor in hindsight, as Summoner lightly ribbed me for not doing so? Yeah. That didnt change the fact that trying to get into effectively MELEE RANGE against a guy with a FLAIL makes me a liabilty since I need to keep my perfomance active.

A couple rounds of doing nothing later, I had it, I dont care if I hit or not, I wanted to do something! I took my crossbow, aimed for the first mate (or captain) and....!

Nat 1. Crossbow string snapped.

I'll admit, afterwards I kinda checked out of the game, since I couldnt do anything but provide a +1 to the actual players, and my saltiness was kinda leaking into some passive agressive quips from me during combat (which i still feel bad over)

We're all still friends (cousins, actually) and still playing together, and I dont hold any ill will to anyone involved. If any of the three involved see this, I adore our games, and look forward to playing more.

TLDR: DM wanted battlefield to feel big, accidentally made using my spells suicidal in the process.

Sorry if this is overly long. For context I’m vision impaired, and this story happened roughly 10 years ago. It also remains the only experience I have with TTRPGs.

A friend of mine, here after referred to as C, and I were talking one day and somehow got onto the subject of dungeons and dragons, the more we talked about it the more interested I became and as luck would have it C and his group were starting a new campaign at the end of the month. A week goes by and he asks if I’m still interested in playing, and offers to help with character creation, I settle on Dwarf Barbarian, which I mentioned because it will be relevant shortly. The day finally arrives and I’m introduced to everyone, three other players who won’t be relevant for this story and C’s cousin the DM. DM does seem a little off when meeting me but I put it down to being big new guy.

We all chat for a bit, layout the ground rules etc. And DM asks to see everyone’s character sheets, so far, so normal. He gets around to mine and sighs, then promptly tells me I’ve made a mistake with my character sheet. When I ask what the issue is, the response went along the lines of well. Obviously you forgot to mention that your character is blind, I reply that I didn’t forget and my character isn’t blind, but quickly get shut down by DM essentially saying that because I’m vision impaired my character must be blind, acting like it’s a rule so I just take his word for it but dewpoint out that had I known I would have chosen a different class. DM briefly explains that choosing to play a blind melee character is going to make my life hard, but doesn’t detail how, and says I really should have chosen a magic user but it’s too late now. I’m far from happy about the situation but decided just to roll with it because how bad can it really be right?

Finally, characters are done and before we close things off DM wants to narrate an introduction cut scene for all of our characters before we come back for the following week. Everything seems to be going as normal again and I’m getting back into the spirit of the game. The highlight being C’s character, cleric, insisting to the wizard that holy water is a hangover cure, and once again I only mention cleric because it’s going to be important in a moment. We get to the entrance for my character and DM asks me to roll a D20, it’s been a decade so I don’t remember exactly what I rolled but I believe it was rather high. DM then gleefully describes how my character trips over an object. He didn’t see while trying to enter the Tavern, causing general chaos and narrowly avoiding decapitation via his own ax in the process. DM laughs his way through most of the scene until C tries to have his character go over to check on me and which point DM’s mood changes, he insists that C’s character wouldn’t do that and when one of the other players chimes in saying it seems a little unfair to put my character through that and then stop anyone from going to help DM insists that he was actually being generous to the new guy, he then reveals that only a Nat 20 would have been a success and that he was being generous by not regarding anything else as a crit fail. At this point C, other player, and DM start arguing which culminates in DM saying words to the effect of “blind people can’t do anything, it’s all C’s fault for bringing him in the first place” C, other player, and I Pack up, shortly followed by Wizard and all three apologise and not to play with DM again. They did invite me to play with their new group a few months later, but I declined

This really sucks because I have put quite a lot of effort in the characters and story for this game.

Few of my friends decided that we should start a DnD campaign, all except me and another guy had never played before, although all of us have watched critical role and thats how the other got into DnD. Theres me and two other guys and two girls. They all said that I should be the DM because I've been playing the longest.

I've spent quite a lot of time in the last two weeks helping them with their characters and backstories and have been looking up artwork for NPCs and making a story.

We started the game and they made an adventuring party. The guildmaster who is a retired adventurer gives them a quest and as they don't have a healer he sends one of his students with them. Now for this student, I had made the story that her village had been saved by the guildmaster when he was an adventurer and thats why she became an adventurer and was training under him, and looked upto him.

One of the players , Sarah while talking to this NPC said that the guildmaster looks lousy and incompetent, and the NPC takes out her weapon amd tells her to take the words back. Sarah got really pissed about this and told me I shouldn't be making such female characters who looked up to male characters in such a creepy way and that I was taking away players agency by not letting her rp properly. (I had thought this was rp opportunity but apparently not) She kept making remarks the entire session about this, how I should learn to make better NPCs , that it was Cliche to have a girl saved by a man and that I should learn from Matt Mercer how to write better female characters.

This led to us arguing and stopping the session early. I don't think we'd be continuing.

I joined a Pathfinder 2e game, starting at 11th, with free archetype and ancestry paragon. It was a homebrew setting. We had to help the fairy Summer Court against Spring, Autumn, and Winter.

I created an archer fighter. We were entitled to an 11th-level item. I picked up +2 resilient explorer's clothing. I spent 2,850 gp on a +2 striking longbow with astral and flaming runes and a greater phantasmal doorknob.

During the first two sessions, no PC ever rolled a critical failure on an attack roll, in part due to Hero Points, while I am fairly certain that some enemies did.

In the middle of the third session, an ancient white dragon attacked a festival from the sky. I acted first and launched a Felling Strike. Critical hit. The dragon's flight was shut down, the flaming rune generated persistent damage that would constantly trigger its fire weakness 15, and the greater phantasmal doorknob automatically blinded it. It was epic and satisfying.

I used my final action on a vanilla longbow Strike. Due to a natural 5 and −5 MAP, I rolled a critical failure. I elected against rerolling it with a Hero Point, because it was not worth it.

The GM declared that my character accidentally broke their entire magic bow. The GM read that dry firing a bow breaks it. Forgetting to nock an arrow and thus dry firing the bow seems like something that would happen on a critical failure.

I protested. I said that this was arbitrary and unfair, that it would be patently absurd for a master archer to commit such a mistake, and that enemies previously rolled critical failures on attacks to no ill effect.

The GM replied by saying that RPGs are about telling interesting stories, and that highs need to be balanced out by lows. The GM said that the rules empower the GM to declare what happens on a critical failure (and no, this is not quite right).

I protested further, but the GM either booted me from the Discord server or deleted it outright.

How could this have been better handled?

These stories are about 12-15 years old I'd say. I haven't thought about posting them here before, but did on another sub a long long time ago.

At this time, fourth edition was a few years old, but I still swore by 3.5. It had been a while since I got to play, or dm, but whenever I'd go out with two of my friends (we'll call them Ruby and Jade), they would tell me all these fun stories about the group they were in that played weekly. Eventually Ruby asked me if I'd like to join, and as I was between jobs, I jumped at the chance!

She came over one weekend to help me do my character, as I had never played fourth edition before (it's not as bad as the reputation it gets leads people to believe. Whatever, fight me.), and that week they brought me over to where they played. Here, I met James, Katie, and fucking Ray for the first time. Ray is what I refer to as a "Family Guy" player, in that there's no rhyme or reason to anything he does. He just does stupid shit that he thinks will make people laugh (and often fails at it). Katie did alot of the same things, but with a side of cheating, but that's a story for another time.

So, we get settled in and I tell everyone about my character (a drow wizard), and the game begins. Ruby wraps up what the party had been doing from the previous week, and then goes to introduce me by having me skulking around the bushes near where the party was. Ray takes this opportunity to use his pipe wrench (the weapon he wanted for his fighter) to clock me upside the head and of course rolled a crit. Helluva first meeting, no?

There weren't any notable problems with him beyond that in this campaign, but eventually Ruby reached a little bit of a burn out and just wanted to play for a bit. I offered to dm, but I don't think they knew me enough to trust me yet, which is fair, so Ray took over.

When Ray runs a campaign, he only runs AD&D (whoever came up with THAC0? There's a special place in hell for you...), so we had to make all new characters of course. At this time, I was obsessed with Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and specifically the character of Greed/Ling, so I wanted to try a concept where I played two different characters depending on who was the dominant personality. It never really came into play though, because we had to deal with the deck of many things. Now when I say that, I mean a HOMEMADE deck of many things! A box with envelopes in it that each contained cards that did certain things to our characters.

One of the first draws that I saw was a forced gender change, and seeing how at that time I was still in the closet on my gender, this was not a prospect I wanted to face possibly happening to me, so I just sat back and decided I'll stay away from the deck. This wasn't something Ray was happy about, so he started trying to insert reasons into the sessions to force me to draw from it. I lasted two sessions before I decided I wasn't going to another game he ran, but it actually seemed like I wasn't alone, as I was swiftly approached to take over dm'ing.

So the next week rolls around, I show up at James and Katie's house and everyone hands me their character sheets (we switched to 3.5), and Ray rolled up a barbarian with two weapons: a ten-foot metal ladder, and a spell book to hit people over the head with. Session one hasn't even started and I'm already annoyed.

The final straw with Ray for me though was the following week. I had the players exploring Icewind Dale, and after a long fight, they discovered a hidden lab that was buried underground. We had a small dry erase board that, whenever a new location was reached, we'd draw it on, so as they entered the lab, I picked up the board. Ray proceeded to rip it out of my hands and start drawing. I looked at him confused and asked what he was doing. Her said he was "drawing my map", and was chuckling the whole time.

I looked at Ruby because I wasn't sure what the hell to do, and all she could do was shrug. After like five minutes I said dude, give me the board. "Hang on a second!" He's practically cackling at this point. Finally, he finishes and puts the board down... Ray, in all his "wisdom", had decided that my map should be in the shape of a swastika. He was still laughing after he put it down too. I did you aren't fucking funny and quickly erased it. What made this even worse though is at this time, we were trying to convince Jade's best friend Mia to join us for the campaign. Mia is Jewish.

Whatever happened to Ray? He moved out of state down south, became a born-again Christian and remarried (it should be noted that he is at least twenty years older than all of us). We had heard stories about him being physically abusive to his new wife in passing, but nothing we could confirm. He was finally cut off by all of us when he began to pay a series of awful shit on Ruby's Facebook page after she came out as trans. I cut him off years prior so he didn't know I did as well. He got some fun messages from the both of us needless to say.

By far, the worst person I ever played with.

While it is technically true, the title is a bit of a joking hyperbole, but here’s the details.

I was DMing a heavily modified 5e campaign over discord. The players in the story were me (the DM), the Wizard who is technically the match that started the trash fire, the husband who I believe was playing a Druid, the wife who was playing a bard, and the ranger (who was there but not involved).

The campaign set up was that the party was hired by a Grand Duke to explore the wilderness of a newly discovered continent and establish a settlement on behalf of the kingdom. It was a highly sandboxy game that used a lot of settlement building and exploration rules that I homebrewed for the game.

Everything was going well until at one point during session 9 or 10 wizard asked the group, “Do we want to explore the new wilderness region or focus on improving the settlement first?” Husband wanted to build the settlement first and wife wanted to explore. They then began to argue very publicly about it on the discord.

My big failing was not ending the session immediately, but in my defense it was hard to tell the argument was out of character and not just a debate about what to do until it was way too late. I kept trying to get the reigns again, but husband was talking about wife’s “not prioritizing things in life properly” and wife kept saying husband was “always like this”. I decided to end the session early (literally only got 30 minutes in when we’d typically play for three to four hours), but the damage was done.

The day of the following discussion I received messages from both husband and wife saying they had been fighting about this literally all week and were going to be getting a divorce. They both said they didn’t want to play with the other and had decided to leave the campaign so everyone else could play. At this point the party was cut in half and the game soon petered out.

I know that they obviously had a lot of issues outside of the game, but it is still weird that it was MY game that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. From time to time when I’m hanging out with my D&D friends we still bring up that time my DMing was so bad it destroyed a marriage.