So, I was playing in a campaign that only took place once a month online.
I was having fun roleplaying, everybody seemed chill and genuinely fun to be around, no red flags, which is why, when out of the blue after a session the topic of "No-Gos" and horrorstories came up, I felt like it was not a big deal to throw mine out there.
I would not, under any circumstance, like my character to have sexual encounters.

Much to my surprise people started laughing.
Instead of the "Well, that's not gonna happen in this campaign anyway" I was expecting, I was bombarded with reasons why this was a dumb thing to say.
"People have sex, though!" "You can always fade to black." "Why would that be a No-Go for you?" "Are you a-sexual or something?" And no, I am not. This is just not what I am playing TTRPGs for.
I would not even be extremely uncomfortable to roleplay up until the scene before fading to black, it's just... not what I want to get out of the game.

Anyway, while this did not feel great, I did not feel super discouraged at first.
However, when the VERY NEXT SESSION had my character's childhood friend trying to go down on him, I did feel uncomfortable.
I made sure everybody knew that, whatever the joke was, I was not getting or liking it and left the session.
After how people reacted to THAT I left the campaign for good.

Not a major horror story, I know, but it did leave a sour taste in my mouth.

So tonight I went back to my FLGS for the first time in years. It is where I met the home group I was with which has fallen apart due to scheduling and I was having the itch to try 5.5e.

I drop in with a level 1 character. Pay my entry fee. The DM is there with a group of children and that session is wrapping up (there is an under 16 and over 16 time slot). I introduce myself, turns out there is another player new to the hobby eager to try it for the first time, and one new to the table as well as the regulars, some of them being children.

The DM introduces herself and before they have finished the first paragraph they state if anyone tries to hit on them their girlfriend is at the table and will beat up the offender. Okay...

Then they state this is a "gloves off" table for adults. They go on state they do not want to hear players detailing how they rip out a woman's uterus (Who on earth have they been playing with?). Then they list all the normal social contract stuff which basically amounts to "don't be a creep". Some how they worked in two more "or I will punch you in the face".

I was expecting adventure league content, turns out it is homebrew. They are running at level 3 so I am encouraged to upgrade my character accordingly and do. The other new-to-the-table player states they are making a new character, the DM "rolls" them stats of 18,17,15,17,18,11,16. Oh, and drop the lowest of those. This player acknowledges that he has been handed a super character, but then goes on to interject after every other sentence the DM makes. Then asks for boots of flying since other characters at the table have magic items. The DM says sure. He is doing a paladin/warlock build and decides everyone at the table needs to be impressed by how well he has optimized his build for smiting. Then he says my human fighter is so boring to the person next to him. This is an adult, by the way.

The DM then announces that the campaign has lead to 1v1 PvP in an arena. All the players from last time have all the magic items from last week's Halloween one-shot. Draws out the map, my character and one of her regulars, a kid about 12y/o, are up first. Turns out the house rule that you can use inspiration to cause a monster to reroll a hit applies to other characters as well. And he has "about ten or 20" inspirations banked. And he can use them one after another on the same roll. The DMs girlfriend confirms this is how they have always played. Apparently this was necessary one time recently because their was a monster that can only be hit with a natural 20. Oh, and the kid tries to use a fourth level spell, despite his character being third level.

By divine intervention, my partner calls to say they were in a fender-bender and need a ride. I really pity the player at the table completely new to the hobby. I pity the parents that dropped their kids off with this DM so they can learn to be more insufferable. I will try another FLGS next week. Wish me luck.

Forever GM here, and I've had plenty of games end poorly in my almost 20 years of running. From PvP, Murderhobos destroying towns, and inappropriate behaviors causing disruptions, I've witnessed quite a few potential horror stories in my games, but none of these could prepare me for what ended this campaign.

After the pandemic, my regular DnD group was apprehensive to meet, and a few of my players were not interested in trying to run the games online. I decided I would recruit through a popular MMO I play. I placed an invite in my LGBT+ company's discord server to see if anyone would be interested and was excited to have a handful of players express interested.

I ended up having 4 players able to join, we had a session zero, set up the schedule, and agreed upon rulings, the platform we would play on, and, having signed our social contract, the game began! Our group consisted of a Half-orc Barbarian, a Triton Bard, An Eladrin Warlock, and a Human Sorcerer.

The game was a pseudo homebrew, using a published setting meshed with material I had created for my in-person games, making tweaks such as removing parts my former group didn't enjoy as much, and tying the aspects they loved deeper into the narrative.

Probably 6 sessions in and I was in love with my group. Some of us even left our company in the video game we played and built one together. Our discord was filled with memes created by everyone, and we conversed almost daily outside the game through different social media as well.

At one point, however, our Triton bard had to excuse himself from the game. We were all understanding and told him he would always be welcome back. I consulted our group on whether we should continue with three PCs, or if they would be interested in recruiting a fourth player. Barbarian had a friend, who we were also acquainted with through the video game we played. He was new to TTRPGs, but was interested in trying DnD, and Barbarian was a bit of a cheerleader for the new player, always encouraging him to try new things. The party agreed, and we welcomed our new PC, a Changeling Druid (new players have such a knack for picking the most mechanically complicated options lol)

Sessions go by, and Druid is having a great time playing. He struggles a bit with all his character options, but I'm a patient DM, and Barbarian acted almost as a parent, correcting behaviors and encouraging decisiveness. I begin talking to Druid outside the game, and he begins to open up and confide in me. The man is one of the biggest sweethearts, and is very selfless, always apologizing and working in the healthcare field. It felt really great to be so close to my players, it was honestly a big apprehension I had felt recruiting online, but I was happy these worries were unfounded.

It was a day before our game night. When I woke up, Druid had sent me a "feeling cute, might delete later" selfie that morning. I told him he should keep it up, but he never opened my message. By late afternoon, I was just getting out of the shower, and ready to head to work, when I looked at my phone, and saw multiple texts and calls from Barbarian, instructing me to call him immediately.

I call Barbarian as I'm packing my lunch, and when he answers, he is almost hysterical. I ask what is wrong, and between gasps for breath, Barbarian chokes out that Druid was in a car wreak, and that he didn't survive.

I'm speechless as Barbarian relays the details he learned from Druid's parents. Barbarian was not in good emotional state, so I told him I would let the others know, and that our next session would be postponed. I wasn't sure what to do though. The only losses I had experience were elder family members I'd only seen a couple times a year. This was a friend who had messaged me only an hour before the accident.

We had a month of grieving before we finally decided to try and hold our next session. I had gone ahead and hid his token and character sheet in the game before the others joined, as I knew this reunion would be somber enough.

We continued playing, but there was a level of tension. Bringing up past events with Druid was awkward, but we didn't want to dishonor his memory by skirting around them. We even discussed holding a memorial in the video game we played and agreed that his DnD character had gone off to live his best life.

Tensions grew between Barbarian and I, though we had gotten along until now, we have quite different personalities, and they began to clash outside of game. Bard had returned shortly before Druid's death, and him and warlock also had their differences. The last session we played, a fight broke out over voice chat, and Bard left the game and the discord channel. Everything had become so emotionally charged, I decided to end the session, and told the group that I would need some space for a while.

In the weeks following, Barbarian would message me, telling me that we needed to talk. I was not ready to talk, and finally broke down and blocked Barbarian. He then messaged me through Warlock, and I snapped at him for it. He stopped talking to me as well. Everyone left the discord and the company in the video game.

I reached out to Sorcerer, but he wouldn't speak with me, though I still talk to Bard. I know I didn't handle things well, but I don't think many would when dealing with the death of a friend.

Rest in peace Druid.

A little over six months ago I asked 5 close friends if they would like to play DnD. We all go back a long time and are adult players. Since then we’ve been playing weekly without fail with myself as the DM. We’ve been playing the Lost Mines of Phandalin as I thought (as an experienced dm and player) it would be a good introduction to game for my friends who have never played DnD before.

I normally dm pre made modules, but like many people who use modules, I use the book as a kicking off point. Starting out the game is 70% book, by the time the module is finished it turns out to be about 70% made up by me.

I think I’m good dm, who has their feet firmly stuck in camp “FUN” but who can also, and decisively say “NO”.

But this story isn’t about my game. This story is about Timmy. Our group’s RAW rule-layer, who hates any sort of homebrew, cos it makes it hard for him to google. Timmy has 100% read thru the module book and early on in the campaign would be visually upset whenever the party came across something I changed, or worse, entered a whole section that I just made up or pulled from a different module. Timmy is a power player who likes to do big damage and swaps out the role play for dice rolls.

After 6 months we finally finished LMoP and a few tangent sessions that I just thought would be fun. Players are level 5, loaded with good stats, and level 1 feat, and wielding at least one magic utility/class item each. From the start I’ve been telling the players that the way we will work is that I will dm the long form module, then we will have a break for them to run some one-shots/two-shots/three-shots, and then we will jump back into another module with me back at the helm.

We are still about a month, month and a half, away from the module finish and Timmy approaches me about running a one shot. I’m delighted. I start sending him on resources, we talk one on one about dm tactics, and feeling and smudging the rules, CR rules, the whole shebang. I was really enthused and looking forward to a few weeks playing instead of prepping.

But it didn’t last long. Timmy began growing obviously impatient with the main campaign and how long it was taking. It was clear that he was trying to force the narrative in game, just to try and finish it out. At the same time he was sending me homemade dungeons and encounters to look over and give feedback (the feedback was never taken well), and then all of a sudden started talking about fan-built modules he found online. Some of which I knew and they were long campaigns. I reiterated to Timmy that at most he was getting three weeks, less if someone else wanted a shot, and then (as was the will of the rest of the players) we’d be diving back into our regular campaign. LMoP ends, we take two weeks off, and then we join back up in my place for Timmy’s side project. In that two weeks I send him a copy of my character sheet and a slightly gimmicky back story. I’ve said before that I was very, very generous with re-rolls when this group of players were designing their characters. They are buffed to hell. So I was very surprised when Timmy rejected my character sheet out of hand saying the stats didn’t look right.

It was a points buy via DnD beyond. A clever points buy. But points buy none the less. I sent him a screen recording of me doling out the points on my phone. He sighed but relented. Next he didn’t like my movement speed (Racial bonus +5 feet), or my AC of 15. He took issue with my “giving myself 2 feats.” I reminded him that the rest of the party had two feats by level 5 and I was just matching them. I then also pointed out that the magic item I requested had no combat utility and was almost purely a role play/flavour issue.

This is where Timmy lost the plot. He finally had heard enough. He told me that my character didn’t suit his setting (my character was undead) and he was trying to be accommodating. He also told me that I (as in me) would have to go back over the other players character sheets and adjust their stats for standard array. Otherwise I (as in me again) would have to tell the other players that they had to create new non-multi-class characters for his campaign.

My response was to whip out every DM’s most useful tool. A stern look and a flat, “NO.”

Timmy chose not to contact the players directly, surprise-surprise. And so the players showed up on Timmy night 1, refreshed and looking to play after a little break. They were actually pretty stoked to see someone else in the DM chair and me sitting among them, knowing nothing, with this character I’d been keeping secret for a month or so.

Timmy jumps into it. A dungeon dive, straight of the bat. No frills, no cheap introduction, just bam, here you are, and that’s the direction you are headed. We kind of liked it, it was rough and dirty. We just want to go crack some skulls so we plunge on in. It’s a solid hour of staggered combat thru some crypt or ruin or mine (I’m still not sure). Nothing to look at, no one to talk to, just plough, plough, plough. And it was fun, for us.

Timmy however was starting to look a bit nervous. It starts to dawn on me that we are just cutting thru Timmy’s session one, that was meant to be around three hours, in one hour. But other than combat there has been nothing to slow us down. No split corridors to argue over, no closed doors to panic at, nowhere to split a decision at all. Just fairly linear corridors and Timmy’s “You don’t notice anything out of the usual.”

We get to the end. “A golden skull sits on a pedestal, bathed in sunlight that bounces down from a mirror in the roof.”

We grab the skull and are immediately transported to a room that looks just like the room we started this dungeon run in. It’s the same dungeon. A voice echoes in our minds saying, “Very impressive. But can you do it again.” We collectively groaned. This is our Saturday night. We went through it again. This time with enemies popping out from the shadows, getting surprised rounds, and traps illogically appearing at the Timmy’s will. All the while Timmy is trying to fact check and reinterpret every skill, and every spell. Once he even questioned our wizard keeping track of his own spell slots.

The players are tired and their characters are beat to hell.

We limp back into the final room and we are face to face with the gold skull on the pedestal. As we pick go to pick it up a wizened kobald in a wizards robe appears, he was the voice in our head. He says he wanted to make sure we were worthy of the adventure to come. He picks up the golden skull and throws it at our party leader. We are all transported to some sort of camp site for miners and adventures (a la WoW’s Dragonflight) that’s busy with people milling about.

The setting is kind of interesting to me. Its busy and not what we expected. And of course, I finally get to role play this rp-heavy character I’ve been wanting to show off for the longest while.

We spend the next 15 mins or so walking around this camp site. Every npc we speak to either doesn’t want to speak to us, or doesn’t understand us. We’ve no idea what race anyone is, we’ve no idea of their disposition or reaction to us just showing up all bloodied and wounded. A foreman comes up to us to ask us why are we not working. We roll deception to ask him what it is we are meant to be doing. We roll high. Forman rubs his head, “Oh sorry, I thought you chaps were part of the crew.” “He goes off.” Timmy says. “We try to follow him.” “He goes off.” “We call after him.” “He goes off.” The druid casts thorn whip. “You don’t want to do that.” “Yes I do. 17 to hit.”
“The entirety of the camp site turns on you. Roll initiative.”

That’s, thankfully were we ended. I hit him with the “Lets not. How about we call it for the night?” and since it’s my place, that’s my privilege.

Timmy night 2. The session opens with us all locked in a jail cell on 1hp. We are fatigued at level 1 exhaustion, and without weapons and spell slots. Everything we do to get out of this hokey, wild-western type cell is rebuffed. Apparently its fort knocks. But still Timmy has us going thru the motions. Eventually I say, “I’m just going to elder scroll it and sleep it out.”

“Suddenly a grunt burst thru the door and throws ice cold water over you. “no sleeping,” he roars.” No we are under supervision and locked up.

Eventually the foreman comes. We are going to be escorted to the edge of the camp and set free. But without our magic trinkets, as payment for the trouble we started.

We are unceremoniously dumped on the edge of a prehistoric hinterland. We have no supplies, and are still without hp/spells. We can see giant dinosaurs roving in the distance, and what seems to be some sort of ancient ruin. What comes next is the most painful hour and a half of survival role play you can imagine. We can’t long rest, apparently, because we are out in the wild without provisions or protection, so we have to collect and build in order to survive. We do enough that Timmy eventually rewards us with a short rest, but then immediately hits us with a raptor encounter that drags us way back down.

It’s now been almost two sessions of a supposed three-shot. We have had no narrative, no hook, very little interaction, and know nothing about the setting. We say something to this effect and from the shadows as kobald ranger appears. He eyes us suspiciously. He doesn’t speak our language. We intimate to him that we are friendly (that bit was fun), and he leads us to his village and shaman leader who says something about the future, a prophesy, and needing strangers to cast out strangers.

The session ends abruptly.

It’s clear in his language and manor that Timmy hasn’t really got a story. More of an idea, and that he’s trying to stretch content to pad out for time.

I really didn’t mind finishing out his third act, just so we could never talk about it again. But the others approached me to say they couldn’t do another session of boredom and rule pandering. So we didn’t. I called into Timmy to say that one of the others had a one shot. It was their turn, and after we would be going back to the main campaign. We could finish his idea later. He was bummed out, but not argumentative. IF anything he looked kind sad. I asked him was he using any source material and he admitted that he wasn’t. He said he didn’t want people looking it up to find out its secrets. Out of curiosity I asked him would he be willing to forward me on his DM notes. There was actually a decent amount of prep work done. But most of it was either combat or far too specific. Like, in the camp if we talked to an npc named Jeff he would lead us out of the camp to safety. But how where we to ever find Jeff!? And in the wild we were meant to climb a tree and spot the Kobald village. But we just didn’t climb a tree. In the jail cell we could have played dead and rushed the guards when they came to check. But we had 1hp and no weapons/slots.

Anyway. For the last week we played a combat free who-dun-it which was great fun. Turns out I was the murderer lol.

A year ago I joined a homebrew campaign that had recently started that billed itself on being based around our character backstories. My character was a Dhampir Rogue on the search for his husband, and the rest of the party was a Human Wizard, Monk, Barbarian, a Drow Cleric and a Half-Elf Druid.

The campaign started out relatively normal, with our characters coming together in a fishing village and solving a magical problem. The campaign was going well, and the Cleric’s player had even drawn everyone tokens and some funny moments from the campaign itself.

Then the players found out my character was looking for his husband after an out of character discussion where I said that my character wasn’t interested in the only other dude in the party, and the Cleric asked me for his description so they could draw him. I agreed, and they drew the token but then asked if they could draw porn of my character with his husband. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful so, even if the request was a little weird, I said they could.

Following this was a session with a brief disagreement between my character and the party over taking a detour while on the way to a village tied to the Druid’s tribe to look for a way to cure her of a disease that was slowly killing her and tainting her magic. I relented once it was clear everyone wanted to do the detour, but that changed the party dynamic.

Where I was once a fairly normal member of the party, in game everyone acted like they hated him. The wizard constantly yelled at me to shut up when asking him questions, the Cleric stormed off when I asked about their backstory since they had a panic attack over being seen by something, and the Druid simply acted like my character hated the party and sulked around them. Which was weird and I asked out of game where all this came from but didn’t get an answer.

Then the next day the party started talking about my character and his husband and about what type of sex they’d have in the group chat, which I nervously replied with that I didn’t think about that because the game specifically had lines and veils regarding sexual content and the Barbarian replied that it must be a miserable marriage. I was then removed from the group by the DM with the note that I just “didn’t fit the dynamic he was looking for.”

Was a weird experience and I really don’t know what I was supposed to take away from that.

About 5 years back I was in an online queer community for an up-and-coming Twitch streamer. A few of the members got interested in D&D and I eagerly hopped on the opportunity to play; I hadn't been in a D&D group since 3.5e, and had been trying to get into 5e groups that never went anywhere since it came out.

We ended up with a group of 6, including our DM, all in our early-to-mid 20s.
Independently of each other, each of our players had decided to play caster classes: myself on Wizard, our first-time players on Druid and Artificer, and our veterans playing Wild Magic Sorcerer ("With the expanded table!") and a homebrewed subclass of Warlock.

First strike with this campaign probably should have been that our DM started all of us off at level 1. At the time, I wrote this off since we had two completely new players at the table, but it left our party a bit imbalanced since most of us don't come online until level 2 or 3.

First session, we introduce our characters, and three things are clear before it even ends:

• The veteran player of our Dragonborn Warlock, who bragged about having made "broken" (which I assumed meant overpowered) characters in the past, had made his character to have the Intelligence and Wisdom of a dog and played him like an autistic child who spoke 1 word sentences ("Food?" being his favorite). He was a gleeful user of "It's what my character would do" to try and cause as much trouble for the party as possible, like having his Unseen Servant steal alcohol to serve it to bar patrons for free ("He doesn't understand human money! He's helping!"). Much of the first session (and the rest of the campaign) I had to spend babysitting him so the party didn't get arrested out the gate.
• The player of our Human Artificer loved attention, didn't care about anyone else's time, and did things for the sake of being ~*random*~. Our characters went to a library to research the local festival we would be participating in, and his character proceeded to start eating the books. When he got bored of this, he left to rock-climb up the local lighthouse, because he saw something tall and wanted to climb it. (No, unlike the Warlock, he didn't have the excuse of low Intelligence or a backstory justification - being a new player, he didn't have any backstory written.)
• Our green DM didn't know how to say "no". When said Artificer began climbing the side of the lighthouse, the rest of us players had to sit in silence while the two of them rolled checks for an hour. Every time the DM brought up some obstacle - "the rocks are slick and you slide all the way back down," "the lighthouse keeper sticks his head out the window and yells at you for trespassing," "the guards are starting to assemble at the bottom and are yelling at you to come down," strongly hinting to stop - our Artificer would just start climbing again. An hour of this.

So the first session was a chaotic mess. I wrote this off as everyone getting the hang of new characters, no outright red flag behaviors like murder-hoboing so far.

Session two, we get on a boat to an island off the coast, privately owned by a gnomish illusionist who is hosting the festivities. Our ragtag bunch of misfits were "randomly assigned" a group together for the challenges ahead. Okay, a chance for some of our characters to talk to each other and flex our RP wings, great!
Nope. Our Sorcerer and I barely exchanged 3 sentence fragments before our DM skipped right ahead to the island.
Despite the skips, our session didn't go by quickly: the DM put so much detail into his Theater of the Mind that 90% of that session was just him talking to himself, like having a crowd of nameless NPCs ask and answer questions to each other. If he had a question for us, he only expected 1-2 word answers before he kept going.

Our goal in the festival: Be the first group to reach the illusionist's tower in the center of the island to win the grand prize. Our first obstacle: crossing a forest full of illusions.

From the beach, the DM asked us in classic Text Adventure fashion which cardinal direction in the forest we wanted to go. At no point did he mention what side of the island we had come in from, what direction the tower was supposed to be in, or given us any kind of map of the forest (Theater of the Mind) to cover in a grid search, so the party had nothing to go off of for this question; all of his prior chatter among NPCs was either vague outlines of the competition, or completely unrelated. Literally any answer would be randomly chosen and have the same weight or relevance to us.
This would become a recurring issue with his "puzzles": lovingly overexplained, but completely lacking any information necessary to work them.

Now, this is the part that truly annoyed me about the campaign: the DM made it clear that he only skimmed the backstories of each of our characters for keywords he could use.
He declared that my character saw his parents' ghosts in the forest and split off from the group to chase them. No rolling a save, no asking me what my character would do (which probably would have amounted to either "cast Detect Magic because it's a forest I already know is full of illusions and obviously my real parents are dead" or "open fire because obviously my real parents are dead"), just lazily using the fact that I had a backstory as an excuse to play my character for me. He did the same thing to our Sorcerer (the only other person with a backstory more than 1 sentence long - our Warlock only got as far as "I'm a foreigner on a vision quest" and the other two hadn't written anything yet) before dropping our first combat on us.

So ends session 2.

You may have caught by now how we're all first-level casters with nobody to take a hit, but have no fear, because come session 3, our Artificer decides he wants to be the melee character and just start punching guys left and right - no, not using Shocking Grasp or any weapon, just unarmed strikes with all of his +0 Strength and negative Constitution. Naturally he got knocked out and almost died if not for the Druid spending every slot tossing heals, and even my familiar ferrying potions to keep the party alive. We emerge victorious despite all odds, not because the fight was actually difficult, but because our Artificer was the Load.

After the fight we find some ruins with a clue written in Gnomish. Unfortunately the DM never checked with any of us ahead of time if anyone actually spoke Gnomish (my character had Sylvan on his sheet, but nobody had Comprehend Languages). Since it would have been a total progression stopper otherwise, the rest of the session is me making skill checks to try and translate this shockingly obscure language, for the profound answer of "Entrance Through Here."

The next (I shit you not) four sessions are either one-sided NPC chatter or puzzles, most bearing the same flaw as the forest maze: overwhelming detail for anyone's ADHD including the color of every tile in the room, but skipping over the things necessary to actually progress like "there's a lever on the far wall" or "there's a potion on the table".
(Meanwhile our Artificer had taken to eating leaves off of a dryad's sacred tree, and our Warlock was actively trying to trip every trap we came across. Somehow, neither died.)
One puzzle that sticks out to me was DM describing a room with a pedestal in the middle, a key on the pedestal, and several shadowy figures dancing in a spiral around the pedestal. Being tired of the puzzles at hour 3 in our third session straight of them, I just Mage Hand to pull the key over. The DM then asks, "But does your Mage Hand follow the movements of the dancing figures?" Just... giving the answer away.
"Uh. Sure, why not," I lied, to save us another twenty minutes of pointless description.

I'm not sure how many sessions in we were when our Sorcerer first asked, "So, why haven't we leveled up yet?"
DM: "Duh, because you've only been in one combat."

... He was basing his PUZZLE-BASED CAMPAIGN... on COMBAT XP. We slogged through seven sessions at first level because he saw no problem with this.
Our Druid mentally checked out after this conversation because there was so little he could do at level 1 without having a long rest since session 2, and his character had only gotten about 3 words in during the whole campaign. I don't think our Warlock had even gotten a short rest.

Session 7 had our long-awaited arrival to the tower and the gnomish patron giving a soliloquy, telling us all how our grand prize is that he plans to train each of us in our various magical arts, followed by the DM immediately saying we time skip a month into the future before the session even ends and that we've leveled up over the course of our offscreen training.
No time for our characters to actually interact with the gnome himself, mind you, and I'm frankly certain half of us wanted to punch him in the face for all the crap he put us through. (Dude drummed up my character's dead parents for the bit, obviously he's gonna have thoughts about that.)

Whatever, at least we finally leveled up and I got a chance to pick a subclass. Which didn't actually matter.

Our next arc was supposed to have us all reunite to investigate some town overrun by the mafia or something. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details since I got booted out of the campaign after the next session, thank god.
Thanks to our DM's continued "open-ended" style leaving us no direction where to start investigating, and everyone in the town just choosing not to acknowledge the mafia presence at all, my wizard resorted to shouting in the town square in an effort to actively draw the mafia's attention, which got the entire party arrested for public disturbance. DM privately messaged me immediately after that session asking me to leave, telling me that "some people" at the table were no longer comfortable having me around.
I would later learn from our Sorcerer that the Artificer had put the DM up to this. I had been trying to help him between sessions with coming up with a backstory, or any kind of consistent character who acted like a human being, and as far as we could tell that apparently "cramped his style." The DM didn't take much convincing since, as I said before, he could not say no to save his life; evidently my 'going off the rails' at the end of session was a tipping point for him.

The campaign didn't last long after I got booted; the Druid was already on his way out, and our Sorcerer didn't want to be saddled with babysitting two "LOL I SO RANDOM" people, neither of whom would ever progress the story on their own.

This is gonna be a long one, so strap in. I don't use Reddit often, but I've been listening to a lot of DND horror story channels like Den of the Drake, Critcrab, DND Doge, etc. I figured I'd share a "kind of" horror story, but it's extremely mild compared to many others I've heard so far. Names have been changed for privacy reasons. The cast of characters are all people I've played with in our Waterdeep campaign and in some one shots as well. Currently, we're all level 4 for Waterdeep, and this is me and my best friend's first game of DND.

DM as DM (28M) (let's call him Joey). Very talented and experienced as a DM, and he's also my best friend's irl boyfriend. They also have a young child together, but they're not relevant to this story. Joey tends to be very chill and laid back irl and as a DM, and he knows how to make all his games fun for everyone.

Me (28FTM/trans man) playing a green Dragonborn Champion Fighter named Volkran (Chaotic Good alignment). He's my first character I've rolled up and he's been a joy to play as in game.

Best friend (28F) (We'll call her Emily) (Our "problem player") playing a human ranger named Teavana, who later started multiclassing as a fighter. (Chaotic Neutral alignment. Yes, I know. Red flag is obvious red flag). Teavana can be a passive-aggressive jerk in game as a character, but she still made for a lot of funny and memorable RP moments, and has been warming up to everyone else in the party with time spent traveling and fighting alongside each other, as well as opening up about personal traumas and confiding in one another about what they've each been through. She's especially been taking a liking to my guy Volkran, long story short.

Good and long-time friend of me and Emily's (27F) (We'll call her Sophie) playing a Tiefling Warlock named Talia, with the Great Old One as her patron (pretty sure she's pact of tome type). She has minimal experience with DND, so Talia is not her first character. She's very sweet both in and out of game, and Talia tends to play the "mom friend" and level-headed mediator of the group.

Former party member (32F) playing an elven ranger named Arwell (let's call her Samantha). She stayed in our campaign for a while and played with me and Emily in our first 2 one shots, but then dropped out due to personal issues between herself and Emily, but the situation behind her dropping out is barely relevant to the story and so is Samantha as a player.

Friend and family relative of Samantha (Early 30's F) (Let's call her Patricia) played a bronze Dragonborn fighter named Bikri in our 1st one shot. As a player, Patricia isn't relevant to the main issue of the story.

So when me, Emily, DM, Samantha, and Patricia went to an anime convention earlier this year (Sophie couldn't make it), we decided to play a one shot in our hotel room with brand new rolled up characters, and starting at level 6. I rolled up a high-elf Arcane Trickster rogue named Pharom, who turned out to be one of my most favorite characters I've made after I expanded on his backstory months later. He has the Urchin background and has Chaotic Good alignment since he's a lot like Robin Hood, as a major part of his backstory. Emily rolled up a Tiefling Warlock named Nyssa, with her patron also being the Great Old One, and I think she's also a pact of tome type. Samantha rolled up a Kenku monk named Pewpow (who made all of us bust a gut throughout the whole session, I miss that character tbh), and Patricia rolled up a bronze Dragonborn fighter named Bikri. I'm sure this was her very first time playing.

So this one shot turned out to be VERY hard. We definitely had a lot of tough enemies to take out and evade from, and some very confusing puzzles to figure out too. Poor Pharom and everyone else had endured some very gruesome deaths and would all be respawned back at the start of the race area. I made a joke with DM mid-session about us playing a dice game form of Dark Souls, after Pharom was left alone and stumped with one puzzle after he tried calling out to Pewpow, who was the only other surviving member in the group and turned to a pile of dust in a dark tunnel. Soon after, Pharom turned to dust too just so we can all respawn and start over without dying again, since Nyssa figured out an idea for solving the tunnel puzzle together as a full team, and it thankfully worked, much to my surprise. Previously, Nyssa fell in a pit of lava after failing her "leap of faith" (you essentially had to call out to certain dieties before jumping over the pit, then levitating over the lava to the side of safety. Pharom used his high intelligence stats to figure it out. Seriously, I loved playing this guy so much and felt so proud that time). Bikri failed his Dexterity saving throw when he, Pharom, and Pewpow were crossing through a rockfall on a thin ledge, which threw unlucky Bikri into a pit of lava. Pharom was on the verge of a mental breakdown after being traumatized by such grotesque things happening to himself and everyone else, all after a day at his exotic dancer job he had to bring in extra funds for impoverished villagers in his adoptive elven tribal village. I also wrote that he was a guy who liked to get around a lot as a male sex worker, mainly to collect more money to aid fellow and poor elven citizens back home, while stealing goods and gold from nobles and aristocrats.

When our party made it to the end of this so-called "death race" (as stated by NPC quest giver) we were gifted with different magic items to choose from. Pharom picked out the Sunblade. Nyssa got the Wand Of Fear. Pewpow got some kind of item that gives the owner good luck (can't remember the name) and I think Bikri went with a Bloodrage Greataxe. We had a final showdown against the NPC teams that lagged behind us to the finish line...and this was when Nyssa single-handedly broke the game. The DM stated that the rules of the fight are that you can create literally ANYTHING from existence and use it in the fight against the opponents. So Nyssa just goes on and on with what she wants to bring in, and that's when I knew this "use whatever you want" rule was a doomed idea. She summons a mecha suit for an NPC to use (the one we had to guard from the other teams), she summons a dragon, she summons a crap ton of cannons and mine bombs, she summons this and that other insane thing, she gets her patron involved, blah blah blah. Before the DM admitted that all this added stuff was becoming game-breaking (this campaign was from a book btw, containing various horror and mystery themed one shots at various levels in difficulty), I just remember having Pharom cross his arms and shrug as he saw the dragon fly over him, then Pharom said "welp, guess my job here is done". Him, Pewpow, and Bikri all just kinda awkwardly stood there as Nyssa took full control with her chaotic antics and taking out enemies by the dozen. In short, DM definitely let his girlfriend get away with a lot of things. I can't imagine how she'd be around a different DM who would be way more firm and far less forgiving compared to Joey. Chances are, it most likely wouldn't end well for anyone involved. We ended the one shot with our characters being earned the title as champion fighters of their realm, then sent back to their own worlds. This would not be the last time Pharom would run into Nyssa though.

For our second one shot we did during a camping trip later that same month, it was me, DM, Emily, and Samantha. Patricia was out of state and Sophie couldn't get time off work to come with us. It was another level 6 one shot, but FAR easier in comparison to last time. Me and Emily used our same characters as last time, and Samantha rolled up a Menotaur barbarian named Shiran (she forgot Pewpow's character sheet at home by accident). Since Pharom and Nyssa both had magic items, the boss we had to fight for our quest giver was EASY AS PIE. Pharom was a beast with his Sunblade, and he was able to deliver the killing blow to the demon. The one shot ended with our characters being sent back to our regular worlds once we returned the heart to the quest-giver wizard gnome NPC, and Pharom decided to celebrate with a drink at a tavern before heading back to his elven village.

So for our third one shot, it was Halloween and murder mystery themed. Samantha had already dropped out of our Waterdeep campaign beforehand, so the DM needed more time to re-adjust everything for us in our regular game moving forward. At around this time, I joined an ongoing campaign with brand new people at a local card and game shop (they're currently lvl 7). I rolled up a black Dragonborn barbarian (path of totem warrior with both bear runes) and he's named Balasar. He was quickly brought in to the party for their upcoming quests. Balasar also has a traveling mount and animal companion, who is a brown bear. I've had 3 sessions with this new group so far, and everyone has been so nice and fun to play with, especially with our variant human Artificer Grom and our Tiefling Cleric Sir Hugh Jass.

So back to the Halloween one shot, now that I've got that out of the way, since Balasar is relevant to this one. I would have used Pharom since I'd want him to form some kind of friendship with Nyssa since they've already been on 2 adventures together, but decided to wait on bringing him back in when we all hit lvl 6 in our Waterdeep campaign and play another new one shot at that level. I didn't want to go through the trouble of de-leveling him, so I just chose to play Balasar at lvl 4 with a separate character sheet where he doesn't have any of his own magic items, like he does have in the card and game shop campaign. I was also super into a barbarian mood that night too and was pretty short on time. Emily chose to play Nyssa again (of course) and de-leveled her on a separate character sheet and removed her Wand of Fear. Sophie was with us this time and played a pre-made half-elf bard since she didn't have time to roll up a new character. She wanted to play a Tabaxi bard, but the DM didn't allow races that were not in the PHB, so she just told DM to pick out a pre-made bard for her instead. The one shot went okay, but we had a very tough boss fight that dropped our half-elf bard before Nyssa was able to revive her with a health potion. The one shot was wrapped up after we escaped from the desecrated mansion, and all our characters parted ways.

I know this post had been going on for a while, but it should give you a good idea of how the problem player in this story can be, going back to the 1st one shot. While I was happy our team won the final fight, I was also quite pissed that Nyssa had essentially stolen Pharom, Pewpow, and Bikri's moment of glory to take on the final bosses and come out on top. I decided to let it go though since I just wanted to focus on having fun at the anime convention. Another example of Emily's occasional stubbornness in game was when she had a 5 minute argument with DM about how her ranger Teavana's AC is 16 and should NOT take damage if an enemy rolls 16 to hit. It was just...petulant and pathetic more than anything else. But now I'm starting to approach the MAIN problem of this story (about time, too).

So the DM from my card and game shop group introduced me to DND Beyond, and it lead to me rolling up a TON of new characters. I'm someone who is super into world-building and text-based RP chat with Emily and Sophie, and making so many new characters gave me a lot of inspiration and ideas for RP moments in my world and in the RP worlds of Emily's and Sophie's. I ended up rolling up quite a few warlocks, because I was just always fascinated with how the class worked. My first warlock I made is a variant human one named Dorian (The Fiend for his patron, might make him pact of tome) and has Lawful Evil alignment. I'm reserving him for an evil campaign. The second one I made is a fallen Aasimar warlock of the Fiend named Zoram (I plan on making him pact of the blade). After him I made Despair, a Tiefling Warlock of the Fiend (might also be a pact of tome since he's a bookworm as a part of his personality traits and interests). I also got insanely lucky with his rolls too and gave him a really good backstory. I plan on using him in a new campaign on Discord, and we're supposed to have our session 0/meet and greet tomorrow night. After Despair I made Sengo, a Drow warlock with the Archfey as his patron (probably also path of tome since he's a scholar), and finally I made Lunacy, a Tiefling warlock of The Great Old One. I gave him the entertainer background and plan on making him multiclass as a Bard as part of his backstory. There's several other characters I rolled up with different races and classes, but all these warlock characters I made really stood out to me, and I've been really keen on taking a break from tanky Dragonborn characters and expanding my horizons with a caster class, since so far I've only played a fighter, a rogue, and a barbarian.

So I hit up Emily and Sophie and tell them how excited I am to play these new warlocks, especially Despair. I said that some of these will probably only be one shot characters. That is when Emily said "you can't play a warlock in our one shots though. I already have Nyssa for that, and Sophie has her warlock for our Waterdeep campaign. You can't play a warlock in that one either as long as Talia is still alive. You're gonna have to pick something else, OP". I was really annoyed by this, but decided to bite my tongue and say that I'm only using my warlocks for campaigns with different people. I think I also said that I'd be fine with playing one of my bard characters if Sophie doesn't end up calling dibs on that class for any future one shots we do, and that's how the conversation ended. This whole ordeal ended up staying on my mind for a while, so I decided to message my DM in the card and game shop group about it. He said that Emily is indeed being entitled and gate-keepy about it, and I should discuss it with her boyfriend. I'm willing to do that, but knowing how much of a pushover Joey can be (especially around his girlfriend), I don't know how well things will pan out between us. Should I bring up the fact to Emily that I just REALLY want to play a warlock next time we do a one shot? Card and game shop DM also said that 2 warlocks in a party should not be an issue, especially knowing that Hexblades are a thing. He also stated that DND should be about having fun and not constantly worrying about how optimal things are party-wise. I get that Emily wants the party to have some variety and be more versatile in things like RP and combat, but it's still frustrating nonetheless. I just don't know how I'm gonna be able to handle an argument with my friend who's always been like a sister to me since we were both in 4th grade. It's just some damn fictional characters in a dice game, ffs. Not a big deal, right? Emily thinks otherwise.

So, AITA for thinking my friend is being an entitled brat about trying to ban me from playing warlocks, or does she actually have a good point? I'm already on card game DM's side in the matter, but I still feel some level of guilt for thinking this way. I want all of us to just play and have fun, and not let this hobby tarnish our friendship. Advice is always appreciated.

TL;DR: My friend I play DND with does not want me to play any warlock characters in one shots since she already has one of her own, and won't let me play a warlock in our regular campaign since another party member has one who's still alive.

This isn't too bad, I know how to press and challenge the character build, but I'm running a strange 5e campaign where the party has all been turned into kobolds. This combines their original race/species with one of the kobold choices from Volo's Guide or Monsters of the Multiverse. I also said 35 point buy and there's plenty of feat room, and rules stolen from Pathfinder 2e because I like them and so does everyone else and there was this video I saw where the DM 'tricked' his party into playing a hybrid of PF2e and DnD. I also allowed most homebrew, especially http://spheres5e.wikidot.com/ So much so that in our Foundry session I ask people for their builds and import everything in by hand for them since they don't have a module. The idea is everyone's build should be 'online' so they can play with feats often looked over.

So there's a lot of build variety and it's very cool, but there is one player who rolled up a 2014 Champion Fighter with Sentinel and Polearm Master. He basically had the world available to him, even the way better Alt Champion from LaserLlama that I specifically offered and suggested to switch to when we moved to Foundry, but nope.

So last session after a battle against a vampire I got them to level 6. They are already looking ahead to level 7 and telling me that the Champion's level 7 feature is not useful, but my brother in Bahamut you made the build. 2014 Champion just adds half proficiency bonus to all Strength, Dexterity and Constitution rolls that don't already get Proficiency bonus. I do agree that isn't very useful but the player had every opportunity to switch classes. Do you choose the half-prof-bonus or do you choose, for example, Alt Champion where you get a swim and climb speed matching your walking speed?

Since I yoinked PF2e's skill boost system and expect skill rolls to get high anyway so I just had that feature add a further half proficiency bonus to everything, and in upcoming adventures I'm going to involve more skill rolls and a lot more enemies, and Tunnel Fighter is going to be a big no-no.

Also this isn't a newbie to TTRPGs or 5e in general, they seem to know the statblocks of enemies I throw their way. When I throw homebrew enemies at them they are often surprised.

This is an older story from what I lovingly refer to as "the worst game I've ever GMed" the games problems were numerous and some of them I would say were my fault. This is just one such story and it centers around my younger sister Bella. This is going to be long, I have 0 points in the brevity skill.

Bella was a newish addition to my table. At first she seemed to fit in super well, and I was so excited to have her be part of the little girl gang I'd assembled for TTRPGs. We had 4 regular players and a few drop ins that only played here and there. The setting was: a collage student housing house that has a magical door in the attic. The door leads to parallel worlds and the players are all college students.

The main cast: We have myself (GM)

Bella as Lois: a young woman who lost her father in a tragic boating accident at sea, only she survived the ordeal, but in the process she became a vampire. (The details make sense I promise)

Kim: playing a young woman named Dee who came from a mobster family. She was an entertainer and party girl.

Cora: playing a boy named Evan who looked super white but had Mexican parents. He had been switched at birth in the hospital and I planned to use that as a plot device later. He was basically a witch with healing magic, no one could explain where his powers came from.

Tanya: playing an Egirl type hacker/streamer named Emily. She had the ability to talk to computers.

The lead up: So we start the game off, and the first few sessions went pretty well. The players use the door to explore several parallel worlds and get themselves some magic loot. No big plot yet, just fun. As the plot starts to develop I start to weave in details about a big baddie named Ned (naming isn't my strong point, don't come for me). Ned was presented as a helpful dude, but in reality he was Evan's real father and he had plans he needed Evan to complete.

In the lead up to the big reveal about Evan's origins, Lois was insistent on helping him. Every time I asked the party what they wanted to do, Bella would chime in that Lois wanted to help Evan. So the plot naturally moved in that direction and all 4 players seemed okay with that.

Then... Something shifted.

At the time I had no idea what, but in retrospect it was out of game drama: Tanya and Bella had started to date in secret, not telling the rest of the group. And Cora had had a visible crush on Tanya up to this point, so suddenly the dynamic between everyone shifted and I wasn't able to figure out why.

Suddenly Lois didn't want to do plot points related to Evan, even going so far as to call the game "the cora show" at one point. When she thought I was focused on anyone other then her, she would tune out. To the point that I was often repeating things because she hadn't heard what I said. Several times I'd be talking directly to her, and when I finished talking there was silence until I said something like "Bella, how does Lois handle that?" And then she would say "oh sorry I thought you were talking to someone else, I wasn't listening".

About this time, she phoned me and the two of us had a long talk about her character, the direction the game was going, and what exactly she wanted in terms of her character. Basically she wanted an arc of her own. So I provided exactly that.

This is where the actual horror begins:

To start the process of this huge new arc I decided to run a rare in person game. We all traveled to the large city Bella lives in, and we played a long game centered on Bella and her Character Lois. Basically the party found a world were Lois had died in the boating accident instead of her father, and her dad was a big time super villain in this world. Using his vampire minions to oppress werewolves in the city he controlled. Lois confronted her father and he offered her a position in his criminal organization as his right hand. She declined, and the party fought their way out. This took 2 sessions. I also let her do a solo shopping trip to get cool magic items during this time.

Now, what Bella and I had discussed out of game was basically: she would return and accept his deal. She would then establish an underground railroad for the werewolves to help them escape her "fathers" oppression.

I can not express to you all how hard I worked to make that happen! For the next several games I had vampires show up at the college and attempt to talk to Lois. Each one asked her to return and have another conversation with her "father". each one was killed or sent packing by Lois herself. This happened 3 times in 3 separate sessions. Never mind the fact that she could walk through the magic door at any time and talk to him of her own free will. But instead she did EVERYTHING she could to avoid him, his minins, etc. I even had one secret agent vampire befriend the party. Nothing worked.

During this time the game went off the rails a bit. It seemed like everyone wanted something different and it was clear to me that out of game relationships were bleeding in. About 8 sessions after our in person session, I started to wrap things up. Letting the players know I was preparing to end the campaign. I gave several warnings for this over 3ish games.

I was able to finish up Dee's story arc and sort of handle Tanya's. She hadn't really engaged a ton in this game and didn't have a lot going on, but I tried to ensure she was included.

So finally the last game comes and I mention at the start of the game that this will likely be the final session. Bella seems surprised and asks "what about the thing you and I talked about for my character?!"

I tell her that we have a lot to get too already and it's realistically not going to happen for her at this point. She is visibly upset and attempts to run off from the party to do her big story arc here in the last session. I tell her firmly that there is no way we can accomplish that in the 3 hours we have to play. This is a huge undertaking that would have taken several sessions.

The game ended as it was always ment to, with the party destroying the evil mage Ned and saving the town. But Bella is obviously pissed off at me, she declares loudly that she isn't happy with how the game went and that it wasn't my best work. All that is true, it was the weakest game I'd ever run, but it still hurt my feelings. She dropped out of our group before the next campaign started and broke up with Tanya shortly after.

In hindsight, I should have talked to Bella about her avoiding the plot she had asked for, but the truth was I had stuff of my own going on and i figured she understood that if she didn't persue it, nothing would develop. For fucks sake, she plays video games and DND, she knows how it works. The lesson I learned was never assume anything I guess.

Maybe not the most dramatic story but I was thinking about it this morning and decided to type it out.

I wanted to get advice from people online before/if I confront anyone about this, because I don’t really know if my DM's rulings and homebrew are actually bad or if I’m just overreacting. WARNING: This is pretty long, I just started typing in a google doc and it’s about 4 pages long. Oops.

My DM friend invited me and our usual group of friends (All about 19-20) to join a new upcoming campaign of his, where we would basically be isekai’d into the DM's homebrew world with our goal being to find our way out.. I had heard a lot of good stuff about DM’s games so I immediately said yes to joining. Once the plans have been made the DM tells us that this would be a high-level campaign, and that our classes and stats were predetermined, although subclasses were our choice. 

The group ended up consisting of 2 druids(Both F), 1 wizard(M), 1 monk(M), and a sorcerer (myself, M, but I’ll get into my gripes about that later.) On top of that, our DM joined as a DMPC bard. And just to make sure this information is completely clear: the PCs were ourselves, being isekai’d into this world. So the DMPC was also the DM himself, which raised a lot of questions because this is DM’s homebrew world, but we let it slide.

Campaign begins and we all get brought into the world in our own ways, some more creatively than others. (I blinked and found myself in the world, Druid 1 was mauled by her dog, Monk walked through a cooler at work and found himself in a forest. I don’t remember what happened to the Wizard and Druid 2.) We all meet up, including DMPC, we get attacked by tree monsters, DMPC does some weird magic teleportation thing and we escape. 

Now I want to confess something really quick before I continue: I was a shitty player. DM broke my trust in a different unrelated scenario so I had a lot of distrust with the DM and I didn’t realize how much that was affecting me until a lot later. I’ve apologized for my actions and once the party talked to me about it I genuinely worked on my issues, but that doesn’t really come into play until a bit later, but the DM’s actions during the lead-up did not help.

So basically after we escaped we began to realize that we had magic/new skills that we didn’t have before, of which involved me accidentally casting fireball and accidentally causing a forest fire but that’s not too important to the story. We get to a small town where DMPC tells us to wait outside while he grabs something. I am the only party member that doesn’t really know anything about this homebrew world and so I argue that we should all go together, or that DMPC should at least tell us what he’s doing, of which DMPC gives us no answer except a cryptic “You don’t need to know”.

So just to speed through these events DMPC comes back with a red candle and dodges my questions about what it is, we get teleported to some weird bar where DMPC talks to someone else, gets handed another candle, and we get teleported to a dark room. There we are given our gear, a homebrew weapon, and a couple of magic items. I receive a bladed shield called “The Rejection”, a cloak of Elvenkind, and A Ring of Mind Shielding. Why is the shield called “The Rejection”? Apparently it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that I’m Aro/Ace and that the DM had a slight crush on me, but it was that I didn’t like to be touched. Back when I was barely friends with the DM and he came up from behind me and hugged me without any warning while I was in a environment I was uncomfortable in (Another DnD horror story for another time.) 

And then, the first main quest comes into play: The scantily clad BBEG shows up out of nowhere and kidnaps DMPC. The party freaks out because DM/DMPC made this world, probably not a good thing that he got kidnapped by someone who is evil. So our mission becomes “save DMPC from BBEG.”

I don’t want to list everything that happened in the campaign but I want to make sure that the important details are mentioned, so I have 3 main events that are pretty much the cause of this post (plus a bonus one because I remembered to talk about being a sorcerer in the campaign):

First, in order to get help from this other NPC who is pretty well known among the party we have to fight him with all of our abilities and “impress him.” This fight is the only one that my mistrust of the DM hurt, as the players talked with me the next session about my actions. I didn’t want to share any plans with the DM because of said mistrust and just ran into the fight as is. But as it turned out, this fight was not in our favor even if we made a plan to begin with. 5 Lv. 10 adventurers VS. 1 weaker version of a Lv. 15 Echo Knight Fighter. Why was it weaker? Because the DM gave NPC an ability: If this NPC was hit by a Magic attack, he could send it back at the player and make the PC take the damage. It would also heal NPC for half of the damage it dealt, and it also worked on magic weapons. Quick reminder that our party consisted of 4 full casters, 1 monk, and the only weapons we had been given were magic weapons.

The fight lasted so long that some people in our group had to leave early for various reasons, leaving the Wizard and I as we got our asses handed to us. We got the NPC to be bloodied. I was sitting there fuming during this fight as everyone else had pretty much just gone “Yeah we were just counterpicked.” Good news is that we managed to “impress” this NPC so he was willing to help us the next day after we recovered. Yay.

Second, a couple of sessions later a few of the other players wanted to do a “non-canon tournament” so we could see who was the most powerful. I was pretty neutral about the whole thing, partially because the kidnapped DMPC was also going to take part in this so I was already pretty confident who was going to win this. Tournament started and my first match was against DMPC himself. I started by casting Ice Storm, a good attack that would also limit DMPC’s movement by making difficult terrain all around them.. Well imagine my surprise when the DM tells me that DMPC uses an ability called “Full Counter”. An ability that I was told by an online friend of mine is from the anime Seven Deadly Sins. What happened in the fight is that my magic was sent back to me, and I had to avoid my own attack. On top of that, difficult terrain was now around my feet and on TOP of that, I received double damage because of Full Counter. Double damage also “coincidentally” being how the DM rolls crits in his campaign. 

DM tells me that Full Counter is a reaction to use. So I cast the spell Summon Construct, because the stone construct variant had a feature that did not let creatures within its reach to use reactions. The DM tells me that he was going to use Full Counter every other turn but because I made it a 2v1 he was going to be using it every turn. He then proceeds to use his magic scarf that apparently allows him to fly to get out of my construct’s reach and destroys me. I had to sit and seethe in the other room to control my temper because that was bull. 

I gained access to DM’s homebrew through the app we use for character sheets. I wanna read the details of Full Counter. These are actually two variants of it, one for physical damage and one for magical damage. They read as follows:

Casting time: 1 Reaction

Range: Self

Components: V,S

As a reaction to a (Magic/Physical) attack on you, you reflect the damage back at double the power.

That’s it. I don’t know how DMPC learned that ability given that he was not in our sights for about 10 minutes before getting kidnapped where he has been put in a test tube by BBEG (learned through our dreams.) And I haven’t watched the Seven Deadly Sins anime myself but I imagine it takes a lot of practice and training to master that ability. I didn’t really pay attention for the rest of the tournament, except for the DM yelling “STOP DOING THAT!” When the Wizard started casting the spell Slow to limit the DMPC, DMPC still won anyway. I’m still so incredibly salty about this whole thing.

And finally, we had eventually confronted BBEG, who had just kidnapped the Wizard and Druid 2. So it was just Me, Monk, and Druid 1. BBEG casts a spell described as a “arrow of light” which flies into the Monk, who falls unconscious immediately. BBEG talks a bit more before he tries to send two more arrows of light at me and Druid 1. I react fast and cast Wall of Force to protect us, specifically because the spell says “nothing can physically pass through the wall.” BBEG scoffs and uses another homebrew spell which is a save or suck, depending on our wisdom scores, being a DC 15 minimum Wisdom score to pass. I fall unconscious, Druid 1 succeeds. Druid 1 and BBEG have a RP moment. DMPC breaks out of his test tube and saves our asses. How? Using another homebrew spell. What confuses me about this is how he’s able to cast the spell. Assuming DMPC didn’t level up separately from us, he should still be Lv. 10 at the moment. The spell he casted was a 7th Lv. spell, DMPC was a Bard, Bards don’t get 7th Lv. spell slots until Lv. 13. 

Oh, I mentioned earlier I had some gripes earlier about being a sorcerer. Well, the DM claims that he asked people who know the party what classes he thought everyone was in. I ask who he asked in regards to me, because I moved into their town the year prior and only talked to people from this friend group. The DM says that he subtly had us choose each other's classes a while ago before anyone knew this campaign was going to happen. I’ve asked the others why I was a sorcerer and everyone and everyone claimed that they didn’t think of me being a sorcerer. Which could only mean two things:

I said I was a sorcerer myself and just don’t remember saying so, feels off but it’s possible. Or two, the DM didn't ask anyone and just made me a sorcerer. Well OP you’re being paranoid. It’s not like the DM constantly claims you’re his “rich” friend just because you have a big house and he’s grown up poor… Wait.

But that’s about it, I really just need everyone else’s opinions on this because I don’t know if this is bad DnD or if this is just a different way to play that this particular group enjoys more. If people have any questions I am more than willing to answer them to the best of my ability. I thank anyone who’s managed to read all of this, and I hope you have a good day!

(Edited to fix some spelling mistakes and to make some small clarifications.)

So I’ll preface this by saying I’m new to DnD. This was my first real campaign that I was in for a few months. At first it started out great. We were making some progress, kicking ass and taking names stuff was going great. Then stuff started going wrong when a friend had a mental breakdown due to his schizophrenia. He eventually came back but it wasn’t the same after that. Then I had to miss a couple of sessions because I was busy directing a massive project for school. I told them that I was doing this project ahead of time and they were making me feel guilty because this was during a big moment in the campaign when we were about to do some big heist and had to get information from the warden. While I was in the middle of directing a team of people for this big project I got a message from one of the players. Basically making me feel guilty about not being there and that apparently the DM and our only female player started dating and another one of the players (let’s call him Nick) left the campaign.

Nick was our last healer in our party after the friend who had to bow out again cause of schizophrenia. Oh but the campaign I missed they found the Warden. So our plan was to have Nick and this female player be workers at a brothel and try and infiltrate the Warden’s House. So the female player (let’s call her Ruth) decides to go to his house anyway. We were warned by the DM’s side characters the Warden was into weird stuff but when Ruth went alone for some reason despite the other players being there ready to help and the Warden pulled out power tools for weird BDSM shit. Ruth got so uncomfortable that she actually started crying (keep in mind the DM and Ruth were supposedly dating at this point. The DM said he’d fade any sex stuff to black but still when I heard this I didn’t know what to say.)

So then this other player starts putting the pressure on me to have something prepared for the next time I did show up and then he was pressing me to try and change my subclass to something that could use healing spells. And I was like we have 3 fucking fighters on the party one of you guys do that! I’m so tempted to just leave the group. It sucks cause this started out genuinely fun. I miss when it was fun.

Hey everyone! Friends of mine are thinking about playing DND for the first time, which led to me fully remembering this incident, which happened, like, 10 years or so ago.

I have never been a regular player of any RPG, but I have played maybe ~10 rounds or so as a teenager. When I was at university, I talked about this to some people and a small group wanted to really try it out.

When talking about how was going to DM, I said that I would love to try it and the 3 Players liked the idea, since I was also the Only One with any (But not a lot of) experience.

I don’t really remember which game we played, but it was a typical Fantasy setting. Pathfinder maybe? And I think it was a pre-made scenario for beginners. There were 3 Players and me and while 2 of the Players were extremely easy going people, the third one was a bit complicated - We all Liked her, but still.

We started playing and at some point they went into the basement of a tavern and there were some normal sized rats there. Player 3 had, I think, a longbow as a weapon and was trying to shoot at the rats that were running on the ground around her feet.

I said that this shot would be more difficult for her since she had a long-range weapon and was trying to hit small, moving targets at a short distance.

But she was not having this. She wasn’t accepting this under any circumstances, arguing that hitting closer targets with her bow should be even easier. At some point I told her that we might just agree to just treat it as a normal shot, but not, she was adamant that it should be easier (I am sorry, but I don’t remember all the correct words for those situations). She even tried calling her boyfriend multiple times, who was doing archery as a hobby, to prove that she was right.

I am not sure why, but at this point we had a short break. Maybe to order something to eat? I really can’t remember. Player 3 gets her Laptop (We were playing at her place) and after a bit it just stops working - It was still on, but nothing happened when you clicked on anything. She turns it off and on again, but this time, Windows isn’t even booting. It looked like a serious issue and the laptop just wouldn’t work. One of the other players was pretty tech-savvy and told her that he is very sorry but it appears that her Hard Drive had just died and there was probably nothing we could do right know and there is a real chance most of the data on there is lost.

She wouldn’t believe him and wanted to wait for her boyfriend (Who also knew a lot about Tech) and who came home shortly after - And came to the same conclusion. It seemed that her Hard Drive just stopped working. But he said that this shouldn’t be a problem, since he has set up an external Hard Drive for her to do regular backups on, which she has surely done, right?

Well, the backups have been to much of a hassle for her and the last one was a LONG time ago.

And since all of us were going to university at this point this meant she had probably lost A LOT of important data for her studies.

Player 3 starts crying. Has a fight with her boyfriend. Starts posting on Facebook about how she just lost so much important Data on her Laptop. Friends of her in the comments say that it’s her fault for not doing backups. She and her boyfriend get into arguments with those people on Facebook. Me and the other players were still there at that moment and decided to get out of there shortly after.

Player 3 and her BF had a huge fight after this, stopped talking to multiple other people and a couple weeks after that she writes into the group chat of us four that she would like to play again, but with her as the DM, since she feels she is the most suited to the role.

Nobody replied and a couple months later people left the chat. Nobody ever mentioned this incident ever again.

Funnily enough: The next time I tried playing an RPG, I went to an event for beginners, because it had been a long while ago and I was trying to explore new hobbies and maybe meet new people. Had a fun time, was told there were more events coming, etc.

That was in February 2020. You can probably tell that there weren’t any more games for a long time after that.

So what an appropriate story for a horror story that takes play during a Halloween one shot.

Some background information first. I have only been playing with this group since last Halloween of 2023. This is a group made up of people who meet regularly at local comic store for DnD on Tuesdays. Our usual games are DMed by guy going to call W. Sometimes W has to work late and can't make it to DM our game. A couple times of canceling said game player K said he was working on a campaign and said on days W couldn't make it, he'd run his campaign.

So after running a few sessions of K's campaign, K seemed to really enjoy DMing and asked the group if ok if we meet up every Thursday so his campaign could be on a constant schedule instead of just waiting for when ever W has to cancel.

Since this is a public game at comic shop, people come and people go, but there seems to be a constant group of players who are constant and been playing for a lot longer together since before I joined this group which I'll call W, K, D, and C. C is the player who I have trouble with how he plays. C seems to play more selfishly than thinking of the team. He likes to cast darkness which screws everyone else in the party cause he only one with Devil Sight. In one encounter, we were tasked covertly deal with assassins in a palace, everyone had to "sneak into" backrooms of the palace while one person had to stay and pretend "to keep the ambassador busy" but when it was his turn in combat he kept saying "I want to leave and go to a magic shop" while K had to keep shutting down that idea. When ever a new player brings in a new character he always wants to try attacking them before getting shot down by either W or K. He always seems to be rules lawyering as well, whether his objection is correct or not, or confusing Pathfider rules with 5E. Either no one else is bothered by this behavior or no one wants to upset anyone else cause the issue seems never to be raised.

So with that preamble out of the way here is the main story. Since it was Halloween on day K usually holds his campaign he was going to run a NON-CANNON one shot with our current characters. Mind you what I just said, this one shot was NON-CANNON where his whole goal was to kill us all in a COD Zombie style hoard wave based scenario. We get told, we had to get to Xs on the map, and also survive each round. (the x's were red haring's to make split the party but weren't told this until after the game.)

So the first round was skeletons, zombies and a drow caster of some type. We take care of the zombies and skeletons, and when time to take out the Drow DM K says he disappears, completing round 1. We are given a short rest to prepare for round 2 where, C makes it into a room with a similar stone dais containing part of goddess of randomness and entropy. Before round 2 can start, C states, "You're not the only one who can disappear." He states that he also disappeared. When combat starts again, when it comes to C's turn he states he cast another spell and ends his turn. DM K who has less than a year of DMing experience at this point is trying to figure out what spell it was cast to make C disappear. So K keeps asking questions like "Are you still on the material plane" C answers "Yes" and questioning of C goes on like this halting combat for 30 whole minutes. During this time, C is passing his phone around to everyone else showing that he cast Meld into Stone, and Nondetection on himself. Once had enough K just asked what spells were cast which everyone other's had to tell K instead of C being one to tell K what C had casted.

So once K had learned that C had chosen to Meld into Stone, holding part of a split goddess trapped, K states that C took himself out of the game cause he no longer existed. K said it wasn't punishment from keeping what C had cast secret but have seen these exact daises before so should have known not to mess with them in first place. So C had to sit out rest of the game. C's reasoning doing this, "I'm a coward who hates pain"

Bruh you're not your character, you don't feel your character's pain. Second this was a NON-CANNON session, it was a NIGHTMARE shared all of us. Our characters turned out better than we started cause at the end of the session we woke up after a long rest which was badly needed from previous session.

Just had to get that off chest.

Hello everyone, is the first time I write here; some friends suggested me to do so in order to help me to forget some nasty things that haunts me to this day after a bad dnd campaign. Also english is not exactly my first language so I apologize for grammar errors.

This story is from my past dnd campaign. I'm not very expert on the game since that was just my second one. The first one I had a friend of mine that convinced me to try dnd and I had a blast, was so good I regret not starting dnd earlier. I had this wood-elf soulknife rogue and it was amazing to play her. I gave then a shot to join another campaign with another friend. This friend, I will call him just DM, was starting a fresh new campaing heavily homebrew and asked me if I wanted to join, since I was trying to get my hands more dirty with dnd.

Now something about myself. I'm a huge spider nerd. I love spiders, I love spider vibes and I love everything that have to do with spiders. But I also understand that many people have arachnophobia nowdays and I always try to respect that. However the DM assured me that no one in the party would be bothered by that after coming up with my character.

The idea was kinda strange indeed. I was playing a Drider, life cleric of Eilistraee. Tldr, the lore was a drow that was turned into a drider by loth for punishment and my character after years of solitude found Eilistraee light and found purpose in life. Now, even with her vile aspect she wanted to do good and live her life with joy. Everyone was okay with that. In session 0 we agreed that my character would join after a couple of sessions, after being rescued from a illegal zoo of a vile high elf noble.

Everything was going very well. We started at level 2 and our party was: me the cleric, a tiefling fighter, a dwarf artificer and a human sorcerer. I never meet those guys before but everything went real smooth and we started to go along pretty well. We even started to play some other video games together in random days.

My Drider was enjoying her life with friends even with many obstacles. Sometimes she needed to hide, sometimes she would be forced to sleep inside some stables, and every time she would try to show some kindness she would systematically fail any roll in order to persuade people she was harmless, and that was hilarious in most of the situations.

We reached level 5 and we were killing it. The sessions were very nice and we were all having fun. Then DM invited another member to the game, a girl who plays a half-elf gloomstalker assassin. She and the DM started dating like 2 weeks before so he invited her to join us. Fine by me and everyone else since she seemed to be very cool.

However some troubles started at the second time we played together. I started to pick some sentences like "your character is very creepy" and "I will have nightmares with your character tonight". Nothing wrong I thought first but I was starting to hear those alarms of people having arachnophobia for some some reason. I just laughed about it. My character was not a murderhobo or a vile person, she was very nice. The only thing one could define "edgy" (maybe) was a little modification I had with a cantrip. The DM allowed me to use Infestation but instead of mite, fleas and parasites, would be just spiders.

One day I was able to kill a boss with that cantrip and with the famous "How you want to do it?" I described how the spiders would kill the enemy. Was nothing gross but I like to describe this kind of things so I went on for some seconds. Oh boy...

The next day the DM sends me a message on discord asking me if I could tone down the "spider thing" of my character. "You realize my character is a Drider right?" I asked. He replied "Yes, of course. Just try to be less graphical. Gloomstalker was kinda upset and she really hate spiders." I facepalmed internally replying with a simple "k mate."

From there I started to notice a sudden change of behavior from everyone. Gloomstalker suddenly became the center of attention of the group. We made many sessions about her character and her personal growth, and fine with me since I was still having great fun. My luck with dices was kinda constant during all the campaign, very good on combat but terrible with people and it was hilarious for me.

One day I failed to convince a little child that my Drider was nice and the kid just darted away in fear. Gloomstalker character got angry at me and, out of the blue, decided to roll dices against me. I was very confused since my character was literally a very nice person with everyone. But she insisted that I was a danger for everyone and I should leave the party. For my surprise, none of the other members helped my characters so after some bad rolling, my drider got beaten up to a pulp. I remainded in character and never rolled to attack since gloomstalker was a companion.

I was left with 1hp to sleep alone in the stables and no one healed me up. I asked everyone OOC if there was any problems and they just shruged saying "This is just IC, dont mix up." I asked the DM if wtf was that and the reply I got was: "I can't control your actions, you guys have to sort it out."

Part of me wanted to leave but I decided to stay. The next days I noticed that the guys were playing more videogames with gloomstalker too and i was not invited to join anymore. I would join some games by my own initiative sometimes but realizing that no one was looking for me anymore kinda sent me off, triggering a lot of insicurity on me.

After a couple of sessions we did something different. The DM asked us to make some backup characters so we would run a paralel quest with some secondary characters that would be relevant for the campaign in the future. I decided to make a Leonin Barbarian, I was playing BG3 a lot back there and I took insiration from the Berserker build you can make with Karlack. We had two sessions and I noticed that Gloomstalker was very nice with me all of a sudden.

After the 2 sessions, she sent me a DM on discord. She never done that before so I was wondering what happened. She wrote that she liked my character a lot, that he was very cool and she hoped to see him again. I was already sensing some redflags but I just thank her. "Maybe he will if something happens to my Drider." I then replied. Big mistake.

The next session we started a new adventure with our main characters. We were tasked to retrieve a powerful item stole from some Centaur tribe. Some nobles stole the artifact for pure greed and this object was sacred to them. And our group vouched to help those people who got wronged by nobles so we agreed.

Three sessions and we manage to find the bbeg of the moment; we fought and it was probably the hardest fight I ever had. we were level 9 and I had used basically all my spell slots and I was doing my best to keep everyone safe. After a long fight, the fighter was able to crit with his crossbow and killed the villain.

The gloomstalker then, ooc, starts to talk about the healing potions she have and asks people how many hp we had. I was in a bad spot with 3hp and I told her, but I was fine since the fight was over and was also kinda late so I knew the session was about to end.

Then it happened. Gloomstalker attacked my Drider with her swords. The DM, without asking me anything, allowed her to attack with advantage since my character, for some reason, was not expecting that. She rolled a 21 and... well, more then 3 damage. I protested and again I got the "I can't control you actions, you have to sort it out." I asked then the Gloomstalker what was happening, and not in a very nice tone. She just replied "Look, I hate spiders, I have aracnophobia. Everyone hates your character. It's okay you can play with your Barbarian." I then asked if everyone was thinking the same and I got just awkward laughs and silence.

I immediately ended the discord call and never went back to that game again. The DM contacted me 30 minutes after I left the session. I told him I had to sleep over what happened otherwise I would say/write things I would regret later. The next day I wrote him and told how the treatment was unfair, that since session 0 everyone was fine with my Drider. But since Gloomstalker arrival everything changed.

The reply was very surprising. Suddenly this was a "jealousy" thing and I was being a child. that DND is a game about our characters and we need to deal with what happens around us and we will never have full control of the situation. That was not a bad thing that my character died and I could play with "a more fitting character."

Now I'm usually a nice person and I try to be respectful with everyone. But that for me was too much. I wrote very bad heavy things to the DM in reply saying that he was doing all of that just to please his new GF and everyone on the party was going along because Gloomstalker was the only girl of the group and everyone was just trying to get attention from her. I never spoke with this person again and for a long time I always refused to join other games if I don't know every single person in the "table" before hand.

The reason I'm writing here is because I got invited to another game and after refusing I explained why. Then the DM, who is a colleague of mine and wants to dm a campaign, suggested me to write here and to see how, sadly, these experiences are part of the game and if I can relate to people who had similar or worst experiences were able to overcome these things I would also be able to move on.

Anyway, I thank everyone who read this. I hope was at least entertaining. I'm still dodging invites but I truly love dnd and soon I will also start to dm my own campaign.

So for context I was a DM to 5 of my good friends and we played online. I planned for this campaign for over a month and a half and I thought it was a really cool world and story. BUT none of that really matters because we didn't get to play much of it.

Session One

We all had session zero's and I had a "presession" for them all to "find" each other and become a party. Now comes session one where they found out that a whole town went missing and they all decided to go and find out what happened(I bribed them to check it out with gold). They got to the town and found a fog surrounding the place and one child(who they found out was a ghost). They helped the kid and told him everything was going to be alright.

First Gripe

I don't mind when my players are on their phones or doing something menial while playing especially online, but the wizard of the group "Jake" (who told me in their backstory that they pray to the raven queen, so i figured to call his name because i haven't heard him in awhile and figured his character would be interested) was "doing something" and told me "hold on" (this'll make more sense later). I said no prob, waited like 5 min and he rped for 30 seconds, said this kid is a waste and moved on, while my other PCs helped him. I didnt mind, RP as much as you want or as little.

Second Gripe

Later on in the same session it was boss fight time, they found out whatever and were fighting a homebrew mist monster who was the cause for all of this... Every turn he was delayed to react, like it took anywhere from one to three minutes to get a word out of him once I told him he was up.

At this point I was getting kind of irritated but to this point I've never had a bad experience playing DND.

At the end of combat (this was about 3pm for all of us-important) another player was speaking less (Nick), who up to that point was a yapper. Its whatever I don't pay it any mind.

Final Gripe

At this point we've been playing for about 3 hours (started at noon on a Saturday). They make it back to main town and I hear "Jake" yell lets f-ing go, confused I say "what?". He then proceeded to tell me that he got Emerald rank in League of Legends after the match he just finished. Lets just say I was rather irritated that every time I was describing something or walking them through something or even combat that he was playing league, which is why he didn't speak the whole session.

2 minutes later i hear snoring as Im trying to tell them something important for the worldbuilding and for their story(Nick), and I lose my cool and say "if y'all aren't going to listen or play I'm done DMing".

At that time I was really upset and hurt that I put together this world and story just for 2 of the 5 players to not pay attention. Honestly I put a lot of time and effort into this first session and really wanted them to enjoy it but they just didn't care.

After 3 weeks I resumed the sessions and played with the three other players but honestly, not only does it really hurt for my handwork to be trampled on by my unbothered friends, but it kind of made me not want to DM ever again.

AITA

So I’ve been online DMing for about 6 years now and had several issues with finding a group that meshed well and could all actively participate without someone decided to “main character” their characters. I have been running the current campaign for three years now, and have only retained one player who was there from session 0 (he also left the group for about six months, but that’s another story). The current group consists of the one guy who has been there from the start, three guys who all know each other IRL and two others who joined later on, joining in this most recent story arc.

I’m the kind of DM that doesn’t like running a session if someone can’t make it, as I don’t want my players missing out on potential plot points, or fun story moments. I have a rule in the group that if you’re going to be late or unable to make it, to let me know as soon as you know, so we can plan an alternate activity ( usually Cards Against Humanity) or cancel the session entirely. My players regularly disregard this rule and will start off the session with “oh yeah, I won’t be here on such and such date” or “hey, I’ve got a hard out at this time” and then someone else shows up an hour late without explanation.

We’re down to the final two sessions of the story arc and I’m burned out, if it’s not the scheduling issues, it’s players coming to me afterwards and talking about how they feel like their character isn’t “being heard” when they didn’t try to even speak up when the conversations had break points. I’m seriously contemplating just telling the guys that the last session of the story arc is going to be the last session because I don’t want to deal with the bullshit this group has put me through any longer, but you know, less asshole-adjacent.

Howdy Reddit

Important characters: Paul (My dads friend playing a Goliath barbarian), My Dad (playing a drow bard), Alice (my girlfriend playing an aasimar Druid) and myself (Dungeon master)

There was supposed to be a fourth player (my friend Steve) but he had a family emergency and couldn’t make it

Backstory

I’m a 16 year old guy who has been playing dnd since the third grade. I started playing with lost mine of Phandelver solo with my dad, and fell in love with DnD. Fast forward to a couple months ago and I’m a DM, I love writing and have been running games for my friends for a couple of years. My girlfriend is not your typical DnD gal- nor am I but it’s not really about me- She’s into sports and is a real social butterfly. She got into DnD because I mentioned it in passing and she wanted to play with me, awesome because I’m running a one-shot.

The incident

I was reading online and found this monster called the ‘False Hydra’ and I immediately knew I wanted to run a one-shot with it. Cue the setting, a town under the false hydra’s effect, already missing vital members of its community. I called all my friends but only Steve and Alice were available, not ideal but I run more role-play heavy games anyways so I could sideline the combat. Later on Steve came by my house so we could go to the gym and mentioned his character idea for the one-shot, my dad overheard and asked if he could join, I said yes. This isn’t weird for us my dad plays in most of my games and we’re all cool with it he’s super chill. So everyone makes characters but Steve has a family emergency the day before I’m set to run the adventure so we’re down a man. Luckily (or unluckily) my dads friend Paul is in town and Paul loves DnD, so boom Paul is in. So it’s the day of the event, my dad is grabbing snacks and Alice and I are chatting when Paul arrives, he sits down at the table next to Alice and just kinda stares at her. I ask what’s up and he just remarks “I don’t know why they let girls dress this way” Im already upset but my dad returns before anything can happen. So we’re playing the adventure and everyone is introducing their characters, when Alice says she’s an aasimar Paul laughs and says “of course” he then starts talking about how “those that stray from god always try to associate with him” which I still don’t fully understand, was he saying that she was straying from god by dressing how she was? Anyways we’re playing and I’m dropping the first couple hints that there is a hydra, Alice is super smart so I’m worried she’ll catch on but she doesn’t know what a false hydra is, good, we’re in the clear. The first night passes and I’m geared up to deliver the big hydra moment (that there had in fact been a fourth adventurer with them that had just been killed in front of them, I was going to describe adrenaline pumping and them seeing a severed arm, they would find a backpack containing a journal that described the things they had done only from a different perspective, that of their dead friend) you can tell I’m passionate- but I don’t get to, I’m about to launch into the scene when Paul pipes up that he wants to do something “real quick” in downtime. I’m not about to stop role play so I give him the go ahead. He turns to Alice and starts leering at her, he starts describing how his Goliath finds her so irresistible and goes into great detail about her “voluptuous body” she looks positively terrified and I get this protective surge. I stand up and practically yell at Paul “you are not about to non-con my girlfriend in a dnd game, get the f— out of my house” Paul leaves in a fluster shouting about how Alice was the spawn of satin and my dad starts getting mad at ME about how I treated Paul. I took Alice home in a rage. Was I in the wrong, should I have let my dads friend have his way? I don’t think so, since she won’t play dnd with me anymore.

FINAL EDIT: I've left the group. Hopefully they can find a more accommodating DM. I don't know what else to do in this situation and I don't know what to believe anymore.

This may not be that severe. Consider this more of a rant, if anything. All of the names are made-up replacements. This isn't a call-out post.

To set the stage, I am a long-ish time D&D player, with experience running and playing in multiple games for multiple years. Earlier this month, I offhandedly mentioned creating and hosting a local/real-life DnD group to brush up on my DMing skills, and to get me out of the house. Since the lockdown, I'd only played Online DnD, and I've been itching for a physical game for months.

Onto the bad stuff.

I originally was going to host the game at my house, but got the axe from the rest of the family I'm living with. So, for a while, the main problem consisted of finding a place to set up a table in peace. We're gonna put a pin on this point, but it is relevant information.

Red flag one: The very first player I invited, who is the same friend I offhandedly mentioned the idea to, created a discord server for the campaign and invited me without even asking. I thought this was a little weird, as I woke up to an invite to a random private dnd server. I've never heard of a player running/owning the campaign server before, but the game was physical, so I brushed this off and just asked for admin for organizational reasons. Whatever. No harm, no foul.

This same player, who I will call Tav, will contribute no shortage of issues in the future.

Tav invites another player, Lee. I don't mind, as I know both Tav and Lee in real life, albeit not in-depth. Lee doesn't have a car, but Tav volunteered to carpool. Rad! That's completely fine. We actually glazed over this subject when first discussing the group, so I wasn't surprised to see Lee there. Cool.

Red flag two: The non-consensual invites continue. Tav invites Jack. I've never met Jack before, but that's okay. He's a partially experienced player. Tav and Lee are both newbies. Even though this was a beginner focused campaign, I didn't mind somebody joining and helping out. So I didn't hate the idea of Jack being invited out of the blue. It wasn't even offhandedly mentioned. He just sorta popped in, and that was that.

Around this time, I invited a player of my own, who we'll call Drago. Drago and I met at a local convention a few months back and occasional hung out on discord. She's also, new, but that's kind of why I invited her. Awesome, four players. That's exactly enough to start the module.

Onto red flag three: Scheduling was a headache. We initially agree on hosting games on Thursday afternoons, and wrapping up between 5-7 PM, but Jack chimed in far too late into the conversation (I'm talking days), that his work shifts don't end until 6 PM. Fuck. Tentatively, I agree to try hosting games from 6:30 PM to 10 PM, but I'm not a fan, and I encourage Jack to try and adjust his schedule, as he's the only one with conflicts.

This is around the time I learn that my permission to host the game at my house is revoked. Double fuck. I spend the next few days looking for venues to host. Option A, a game store/cafe in a nearby city. 25-30 minute drive. Do-able. Option B, a public library. Closes at 6 PM, and private rooms are only for two hour blocks. Not possible unless we change the start time to 2 PM. Option C, a very nearby LGS that closes at 10/11 PM depending on the day. Workable. Option D, the subdivision's clubhouse. Down the street from where I live. However, takes a $100 deposit and the fee costs $40. Only rentable once a month. Not great.

Option A hangs up on me whenever I call, so I 86 that place. The library closes too early. The clubhouse costs a lot of money, so we rule that out (maybe use it for emergencies). Option C sounds like the contender. I call the store and they're very helpful. They have free tables and have a private room to rent. We finally all agree to have session 0 there.

this entire time, I've been the only one actively trying to remedy the situation, so call this red flag number four.

Red flag five: After getting this information out, Jack FINALLY reveals that he actually lives an hour away from that location (which is close to my house, the original hosting place. And hopefully where we'd be hosting in the future). I tell him to figure it out because I'm kind of sick of playing the scheduling game, and I'm not running my game into the middle of the night. Lee and I have work, Tav as school the next morning. Unable to come up with a solution, Jack takes a hint and drops the game. Sorry, man, but I wasn't surprised.

Without Jack, we all agree on changing the start time to 3 PM. None of us want to be out late, and I hate driving in the dark.

Red flag 6: Tav strikes again. When Jack bounces, Tav says "hold my beer" and immediately invites another player- again, without asking me. I brush this off again because this time I KNOW the new player, who we'll call Jay. Jay, Tav, and Lee are all friends. I met Jay once a few months back. He's chill. Jay doesn't say too much, as he's busy at work and all prepping for a Halloween party in a few days. After learning Jay is brand new to the game, I drop a few resource links his way and tell him to contact me if he needed help character building before session 0, which is in a few days.

Red flag 7: It's two days before session 0, and by God does Tav have another idea. Without my consultation, Tav invites another guy named Paul. Why? Because "he's cool", The campaign is written for 4 players, but I'm not a newbie DM, and don't mind having a party up to 6. I'm confident in my abilities to adjust encounters. Paul is enthusiastic, moreso than Jay, and I like the energy. I let him stay, but gently tell Tav to stop inviting people without my permission.

Paul actually gets his character done in only two days, along with supplemental character stuff, which I love to see. Everybody else is kind of dragging their feet completing their stuff, even though they've had about two weeks to do it. The only exception is Lee, who mostly had things done.

Session 0 finally rolls around. I've spent that past week buying and crafting my own supplies. I built my own custom DM screen, and I'm dotting a whiteboard with enamel paint for a grid map. I bought minis and assembled my books. I've probably dropped $150 into the game so far. So we show up to the game store, who have allowed us to occupy a table for free for the next few hours (Seriously, out of everybody so far, the game store employees have been the most considerate).

Jay is unable to make it, as he's just NOW decided to check the location of the game, and has learned that it's an hour drive away (if not longer). Jay apologizes and says he'll have to drop the game, but he stays in the sever, as most of us are friends. 4/5 players is still okay.

Ref flag 8: Players routinely get distracted. They're new, I'm not too mad, but I made it a point in my game rules that focus in important. Tav is especially zoned out, but I move on forward explaining the rules and reviewing sheets. Drago accidentally used the 2024 rewrite d&dbeyond character sheet...even though I linked the correct one in the sever. We agree to fix it later.

I run PvP to explain combat to them, and they enjoy it. Tav is unfocused and getting up from the table. They tell me they're overstimulated. We ARE in a public store, so it's a little noisy. I use this opportunity to explain the X card system, so they can leave to take a breather without disrupting the flow. Session 0 ends after 2 hours on a relatively high note.

Lee actually volunteers to host at his house for session 1. This works out great, as my only other option was to rent out the LGS private room for $50 next week. We all agree to meet up at his house next Tuesday for the first real session.

A few days pass. I go to work, I make my maps, and I completely finish decorating my DM screen. Lee finally gets around to sending me the address to their place so I can notify the rest of the party. I pop the location into Google Maps to familiarize myself with the area, and that's when I see it....

Red flag 9: Lee lives 90 minutes away from my town. What the fuck? I hope this is a mistake. I take a screenshot to confirm the location with Lee. He says that's correct. I'm now tearing the rest of my hair out, because I'm not driving an hour and a half to play DnD, especially not on Atlanta rush-hour traffic. Lee says he wanted to host weekly because A) he doesn't have a ride B) Tav said he doesn't wanna carpool anymore, as gas is super expensive.

All I can think to myself is "Why the fuck did you join this game?"

Not wanting to immediately shut down the idea, I tell Lee to ask the rest of the party to see if they can make it out that far, as most of them live within a twenty minute drive or less from my location- and considering Tav was driving him, I assumed he did, too. At this point, I put my phone away and focus on going to a small Halloween party hosted by Drago. It was fun, but I'm kind of irritated because I feel like I'm playing the scheduling game for the third time this month.

The party wraps up. To my horror, Lee says everybody is okay with making the 60-90 minute commute. Now I feel like an ass saying I'm not willing. Genuinely, I hate driving with all of my soul. Due to previous panic attacks, I'm unable to drive for longer than 45 minutes at a time (my car is also a shitbox. The thing will probably break down if I drive that far at once anyway.) It's never been much of an issue, as I'm a homebody. Even Dargo agreed, despite the fact that she lives the farthest away. She even offers to give me a ride because she knows about my agoraphobic tendencies. I shrug and say I'll think about it.

And think about it I did. Frankly, I'm tired of playing schedule ping-pong, with most discussions consisting of ignoring my points. I'm tired of Tav inviting people who live FAR AS HELL. I said local, but I guess local means the entire metro-Atlanta region to him. Every time I mention renting a table, half of the party shuts the idea down, despite the fact that I said I'd cover the cost, and that contributing would be completely optional. I'm not professional, I wouldn't feel good charging an entrance fee.

The entire reason I created this group was to give myself something light to do, make friends, and get out of the house. But so far it has only given me headaches. I feel kind of disrespected by my party, and my personal life has left me with a low stress tolerance. I don't want to kick these people, as they're supposed to be my friends. But also, I worry they'll start treating me passive aggressively, as we are part of the same online and offline social circles, with me being the newest person there. That's probably an immature thought, but I'm a paranoid person for a reason.

Currently, the campaign is officially on pause. I told them I wouldn't be running session 1 until shit was figured out. They're welcome to try and come up with solutions, as I've done most of the work until now, and I'm too stressed with my own life to make this my main focus for the next few days. If they cant work shit out, I may just drop the group entirely, and offer to run games for the LGS, as they dont have a current campaign, and they were very nice to me.

EDIT: spelling/grammar

Warning SA

I was in a game a few years back for like 7 months maybe. It was fun and the DM ran consistently with multiple groups but we were all in the same world dealing with the same problem so sometimes we got to play with other groups too so it was a fun community. One of the sessions had our group go find a trainer who was Master Roshi who lived at a beach house.

He was super pervy and immediately started hitting on my character and two other females in the party. We said no and the DM had Roshi just keep hitting on us and then asked my character to go to his room. I said no again but the DM said he rolled something over 20 (I don't remember the exact number) and said my character had to go. I told him no, my DC is like 60 for that and the DM said that's not how DC works and he sets them so he started describing my character going with Roshi to the room. I started just saying no over and over until he stopped cuz he couldn't get a word out, but then he did it to another girl. She tried to say no but was shyer so I tried to say she said no but DM ignored me. I generally am super nonconfrontational so I didn't keep sternly saying no, but I had my character try to help get her away from Roshi, since it's easier for me to do something in character, I know, pretty stupid. Anyways, the DM had it so my character couldn't get into the room to help and the other girl was basically SA'd but according to DM she wasn't cuz she agreed to go cuz Roshi rolled high. After she got out of the room, Roshi tried to hit on the girls again and our characters just locked themselves in a storage unit for the rest of the time there. I know I should have left, but it didn't cross my mind at the time because this DM was our DM for a long time and I talked to him about non dnd stuff so I thought we were friends. The whole community also was great until then, so yea, didn't even think to leave until it was actually over and I processed what actually happened.

To give some initial context no this was not in anyway the female players fault, if anything she is the most well behaved out of all of my players. This was completely the fault of my own and two boys in particular that we're incredibly immature and downright sexist (in a childish way). Also this has happened in the past two weeks and pretty much ended.

I am a TA (teaching assistant) and the school I work at is K-12. I help a history teacher teacher at the school I work at to run the dnd club, he runs the campaign for the older kids (9-12)while I run the campaign for the younger kids (6-8). The main individuals that were involved were T, V, M and myself.

T and V were soul brothers, they were so alike, and were very friendly with each other, they were both in 6th grade and absolutely fit the stereotype of a nerdy middle schooler. M on the other hand was very shy and introverted, despite that you would never guess she like playing dnd. She had also moved from another state to the one I live in which made it even more difficult, however when the parents of M asked me about the dnd club they explained that they play dnd at home and it's activity their daughter loves to do, they felt as though she would have an easier time making friends. I wish I said something there... but I didn't. You see the boys in my dnd group are... well immature, they usually just run around killing monsters not really caring about the story or their own characters development, they pretty much treated it like a MMO video game like warcraft. Where it was about being as powerful as possible and getting the best loot possible by any means necessary. This is where the fault lies with me, I had tried when I first joined the DND club to create a more role play focused and story focused campaign but it became very evident very quickly that my players weren't really enjoying any of it, after talking with the head of the dnd club he and I agreed that the boys would probably just enjoy a hack and slash type of campaign instead. So I created a new campaign where the boys were monsters hunters that would take bounties to hunt monsters. I should've tried harder to have the boys participate in more 3 dimensional ways for the campaign, and that you can't kill your way out of every problem.

When M signed up to join she told me about her character idea and wanted to play as a Monk who was raised by a dragon, but one day abadoned her character for an unknown reason, and M's characters goal was to find their dragon mother (yes this sounds eerily similar to a plot points in the anime Fairy tail but I didn't say anything). When she gave me her backstory it was a good 4 pages and I was impressed, the other boys in my campaign either didn't write a backstory for their character or just write a few sentences. When M joined the first day T and V were acting very weird when she joined, they would laugh almost every time she spoke (she spoke with a lisp so I think that's why). When I asked them why they were laughing they just said "We were thinking of a funny joke", I was getting pretty annoyed with them since I knew the reason why they were actually laughing, so I told them "Imagine how M feels with you boys laughing at her every time she speaks, please be more considerate even if you don't mean anything by it". They rolled their eyes, at this point this is when I knew there would be problems, its like watching a train collision in slow motion. As I introduced M's character T and Vs character would intentionally mispronounce her characters name, M laughed at this and didn't think much of it. For this session I had planned to introduce the party to a dragon, but not an evil dragon, as this would be a way to have a plot hook for M's character as well as maybe teach a lesson to the rest of the boys that they don't need to kill everything... boy I was so wrong.

The party was given a quest to INVESTIGATE the whereabouts of a Golden Dragon, and report back to the monster hunter guild, they were specifically told to come back if they found the dragons lair. Since M's character was an Ascendant Dragon monk I gave her advantage on recalling information about a Golden dragon and their lair. She got a nat 20, so I told her in detail the scrolls she read about as a child. I told her that golden dragons are the greediest of dragons yet also the most diplomatic and the most likely to strike a deal with other creatures. They don't go out of their way to hurt people unless they have been stolen from. I also explained that a dragon knows everything that goes on in their lair so it would be a bad idea to go into a dragons lair without a plan. She of course relayed all of this information to the party, and they decided (everyone but her) the best course of action was to attack it... head on... in its lair... in the middle of the day. They found the dragons lair relatively quickly. I so wanted to just say "we're not going to do that", but I figured this would be a good lesson for the party, having them fight something that is stronger then them to maybe not get such inflated egos, this way in the future it would have them be more strategic with what they want to do during combat. M's character having a connection with dragons asked the party if she could try talking to the dragon first to see if it could be bargained with. The rest of the party told her yes, but decided to use her as a distraction to attack the dragon, even though I already told them that the dragon knows as soon as you step foot in its lair... . M's character approached the dragon to ask about the whereabouts of her mother, but before the golden dragon could even answer the boys decided to charge into the lair and attack the dragon, hoping that it would be distracted enough to notice them. I said in my head "fuck it this will be fun". As in 3 rounds of combat I downed everyone except M who wisely decided not to fight the dragon. Again because they were't strategic at all they all clumped up together, I rolled highest on initiative I used the golden dragons breath weapon and round one the caster and ranger go down, T and V were the only ones standing but with only a little bit a hp, I decided to give them a chance as I spoke as the dragon "Hahaha that was quite foolish, but I will spare you if you surrender now", and what do they do? They charge at him despite 2 of their team members getting one shot, I think the boys we're doing this as a joke for the most part, but the boy who played as the wizard seemed genuinely upset that he didn't do anything that combat and went down like a sac of potatoes, but that's the life of a wizard for ya. After T and V went down they were laughing and waiting for M to be next. However the dragon asked M "Are these your... friends?" which she replied with "They are my colleagues, but definately not my friends" . T said "Wait why isn't he attacking her?! shes part of our team she should go down as well" to which I replied "She has decided to not attack the dragon so the dragon isn't attacking her". To which T replied "That's not fair". At this point it was no longer a joke to him, he genuinely thought everyone deserved to go down because of his poor decisions.

After the golden dragon told M's character the last known locations of M's mother he flew allowed the party of be healed and leave. However T was very upset, both with me and with M, and because of this V followed T's lead. T and V would now no longer participate in combat, they were ambushed by a Shambling Mound and when I asked them why they wouldn't fight T said "Why does it matter? We'll get one shot any way so it's best to not get involved like M right?". At this point they were just being petty, so I decided to end the session there and talk with the boys seperately. They said I was giving M special treatment since she was the only one who didn't get knocked out, I explained to the boys that A. She didn't attack the dragon, and B It could've worse and the dragon could've killed you and kept all your loot. I explained to the boys that I urged them to not fight the dragon at least in it lair, yet they thought they were invincible and ignored my advice AND interrupted the RP moment M wanted to have. I told them that they need to be more considerate, which is when V said "But DND is for boys anyways, why did you let a girl join?". I talked with them on the other side of the room to keep them from getting embarrsed in front of the rest of the group but V knowingly (most likely) said it loud enough for M to hear, she just looked down and walked out of the room crying. I immediately walked after M who was out in the hallway gently crying, I sat next to her and I apologized for the boys behaviour and explained they were very immature, I made T and V apologize to her and I talked to all of the parents, but heart breakingly she hasnt come back to dnd yet, I talked to her in the halls a few days ago and she said she was unsure if she wanted to go back. And honestly I can't blame her for not wanting to play with a group of jerks like that. I told the club head who had a talk with the boys and he made them do study hall for dnd club time last week as a consequence for their behaviour. But I don't think they really learned their lesson. I talked to M's parents who were sad that happened, and that they would talk with her about it. But I'm sure they don't want their daughter going back to a toxic game like that.

To be perfectly honest I am still very displeased with T and V, and I think they know that. But they don't know why, or they don't care, which displeases me further. They are still eager to play but they don't have the same energy, I am conflicted about the whole things and I am trying to figure out how to make it a learning moment. I asked the DND club head of M could join the older group which he said he would consider, as there is 2 girls in the older group, so I am hoping she will feel more at home having fellow girls in the group instead of being singled out but a group of immature boys. We shall see. I do feel somewhat responsible though for conditioning the boys to think its okay to just run at every encounter murder hobo style, they did not like the fact that M wanted to talk to the dragon, but what I don't understand is why they are being so unreasonable, as 6th graders at the age they should understand the consequence of their own actions, but they genuinely think the fight was unfair even though they were the one's who started it and I urged them that if they were to fight the dragon to do it outside of it's layer. I really hope M comes back I don't see her hanging out with many kids, I talk to her time to time but my heart breaks seeing her feel like she isn't welcomed.

TLDR: Male players decide to play stupid games to win stupid prizes, and then proceed to get mad when their fellow female player does not get the same stupid prize even though she didn't play the stupid game.

Edit: M has been invited by the club head to join his group. Today (OCT 30) I had both T and V write letters of apologies to M for the session and they could not play until I accepted the letters. T got done in roughly 30 minutes but V did not. And he was upset he missed the session, I told him that he needed to write about in his letter the actions he did that made her cry and what he will do in the future to prevent himself from saying hurtful things to people. As of right now he genuinely does not seem to understand what he did wrong. But it's her fault for being such a whiner (his words not mine). I told him the longer he has that attitude the longer he wouldn't be able to play. When I talked with his mother she felt is was unfair for him to be punished while everyone else plays, she just said "Why should he show up if he can't play". Despite the mom not being on my side of the court I will strive to help not only M but T and V as well.

I have been playing a homebrew campaign for about 4 years. We meet about twice a month, sometimes three times per month for 3hrs each time. Recently, we have made it to level 9 after I would say 80 sessions. I feel he is leveling us up *slow*, but that is not my major complaint. Unfortunately, I am just not having much fun anymore. We have been stuck in the same dungeon-crawl for the last two years (50 or more sessions), and I feel the DM is somewhat adversarial - and moreso recently. I know that's a whole thing - the myth of the adversarial DM. However, almost every combat feels like a chess match between the players and DM and takes *forever* to complete. The DM will say things like 'I really tried to get you there, but you managed to outwit me' or 'i was hoping to not lose any men in that battle'. There has been *one* instance of roll playing in the last year and a half of play (it's become all travel and combat). I haven't been feeling it for about 8 months, and this latest incident really put me over the edge.

The incident in question: We were 'ambushed' at night by some rogues- the player on watch was attacked in the middle of the night (even though he was invisible(?)). He woke the party, and half of us stayed behind to guard the camp, the other half went after the ambushers. Once we chased the bad guys off, we find our camp was ransacked (even while half the party was within 30 feet) in 5 rounds. In those 5 rounds (30 seconds?) most of the magic items not in hand were stolen, food and perishables were *defecated* on, and bags/boots/backpacks/leather goods/bows and arrows were destroyed. How, in 30 seconds, did someone go through five backpacks, steal the most valuable items, destroy various items individually, then crap on a bunch of stuff? It's absurd. What's more, between the initial attack and the attackers 'getting away' took an astonishing 7 hours of play time.

I mean, I understand railroading, and that it can have its purpose to further a plot. This was pushing it way too far, and almost feels malicious.

I am doing this for fun, and it hasn't been fun for a *long* time. I used to finish sessions exhilarated and satisfied, now more than not I am annoyed by the end. I'm good friends with all of the players and DM, and don't want to mess up a friendship because the campaign has grown adversarial and frankly unpleasant. What do I even say? am I overreacting?

So basically in this campaign out of nowhere (later explained in the story) a portal spawned a necropolis that kept expanding into the world, and from out there undeads kept coming out. In this world the concepts of undead, resurrection or even different dimensions were never explored and it was kind of an introduction in its lore. The party decided to do something cause the necropolis kept expanding into the world and decided to go inside to find a way. The concept was pretty cool, session 1 and 2 went EXTREMELY well and the DM was good at narrating and stuff...

Basically the third session one player arrived 2 hours late... we started a boss fight in the meantime and to have it make sense the DM got the latecomer player's character knocked out of the fight by the boss. When he arrived we almost finished the fight and he was annoyed he couldn't fight and said like that his character looked weak.. This led to us deciding the DM could use our character in fights just in case we wouldn't be present or be late, i didn't agree but whatev...

A session later one of the players (he had a lawful good cleric) was very high and and decided out of nowhere to turn into an idiot and slap an npc who was doing some important exposition to us... the DM (and 2 of us) were kinda weirded out and even if it was funny for how he made it happen, it was very out of character and not in tone with anything in the campagn, the DM during that gag told him "i cannot allow it from your character..." saying that he was supposed to be lawful good and based on his description and how he played so far we told him that was really stupid and out of nowhere...

These 2 players told us in private they were not liking the campaign (suddently, they loved it before) cause the first one was knocked out and in other fights his rolls were really bad, the other was denied to play as he he wanted, but a friend of mine told the second one that that was dumb and he was high that night and it ended there...

Next session the lawful good cleric's player said he wasn't liking playing lawful good and wanted to change it cause he really wanted to kill a player's character and wanted to BACKSTAB him, saying he would lead the group to death with his decisions. We went out of character there, telling him he couldn't just do a 180 on his LAWFUL GOOD CLERIC cause he changed his mind, so for the rest of the campaign he played very passively, doing nothing and staying on his phone most of the time...

I told the DM we could find a way to make him turn evil or chaotic but the DM was mad at the player for just wanting to be a murder hobo out of nowhere and wouldn't allow it just because he wanna be dumb while being high.

The second-last session we faced the final boss, a player arrived 2 HOURS LATE and we started almost at 11pm. The DM was very determined to kill the final boss before the end of the session and this player's first reaction to the boss was to run away cause he didn't know how to fight it, being very strong. As he teleported away, DM let us fight it, and the player just left to smoke without saying anything. When he came back DM tried to reintroduce him to the fight but he complained and said "i kill myself so you can play" and went on whining that we started playing late (...it was his fault we even waited for him?) and he wasted his free day from work staying there and doing nothing... mind you, this all happened in almost an hour, he didn't play for an hour not 4 lol. And he said it was DM fault and blamed him for how he treated the other 2 players who complained (they weren't present that night) he even said he wouldn't play with us anymore and went home all mad...

He came back for the final session tho (lol) and played normally, we even liked the ending, me and a friend loved the campaign in general! Can't help but thinking it could've been GREAT and MUCH BETTER if it wasn't for all of this... but i'm not sure who to blame...

This, dear reader, is not your average DND horror story. This is a horrific, comedic, tragic clusterfuck. There are no good guys to root for, there’s only villains.

Content warnings for the following: spoilers for Phandelver and Below, murderhoboing without consequence, use of AI, mentions of hot hot AI wizard sex, unreliable narrator, and certain eventual disappointment.

PROLOGUE

The haunting stage is set, there’s five newbie players on Discord with their buddy as a newbie DM in way over his head using the DND Beyond VTT to try to run his campaign.

The party is stumbling through Phandalin, murdering innocents, desecrating bodies, and taking hostages at the whims of the two loudest and most domineering players. They face no repercussions for their actions. Plot hooks and quests are laid to waste as these adventurers carve a trail of destruction through the land. These adventurers don’t even know anything about each other because the players won’t roleplay in any meaningful capacity. They barely remember each other’s classes, much less the plot.

ACT 1

The party slashes through the Redbrand Hideout leaving no survivors (the mother and children being held captive didn’t even make it out alive) and comes upon the wizard Glasstaff’s quarters. Two characters, whom we’ll call Olympia and Gameofus for their privacy, are the first to enter the room.

Olympia’s player is one of the quieter players, and she rubs her last two brain cells together and presumably thinks something like hey, this guy seems like an important plot point, and his character art is kindaaa 👀, so I’m gonna have my character flirt with him to try to get more information or get him to join us. Olympia struggles with her words due to her player having a severe lack of verbal roleplaying experience.

Gameofus’s player is one of the domineering murderhobos mentioned before. Thus far in the game, Gameofus has grasped the townmaster’s penis, pissed on the townmaster’s home, cut the ear off of an NPC, and probably committed many other horrific and stupid acts that I’ve simply erased from my memory. His player has spent most of the campaign belching into his microphone.

While Olympia is floundering, Gameofus rolls high on a Hellish Rebuke and reduces the wizard Glasstaff into a pile of fucking ash.

ACT 2

Olympia is devastated, and the others give her shit as they continue wiping every trace of life from the hideout before returning to town with the corpses of the mother and children & Glasstaff’s crispy head impaled on top of his staff.

Her player later steals the DM’s book and makes an AI chatbot based on Glasstaff to replay the scenario to her liking. Somewhere in Phandalin, Olympia is smiling because her counterpart in another dimension is having hot fucking wizard sex with AI Glasstaff.

Upon further reading of the forbidden tome, the player discovers many more things. Glasstaff should’ve ran away through a secret passage when the party approached the main door of his chamber. His AC should’ve been higher. And dear reader, she discovers that Hellish Rebuke is supposed to be a REACTION, not an action, and the target is supposed to make a dexterity saving throw. The word Rebuke is literally in the name and not one of these fuckers caught on to the fact that it’s supposed to be a reaction.

That’s it, that’s the whole story. There’s no petty revenge, there’s no divorce, there’s no true interpersonal conflict, it’s just a group of the most incompetent people you’ve ever met throughly desecrating your favorite game. I hope you’re horrified. Read your spells, kids.

Hiya my favorite subreddit! This is a story about my first and second campaign. As the title describes, this is the tale of a problematic (but incredible skilled) DM, a newbie learning what could be seen as red flags.

tl;dr - Newbie player joins a campaign, was not allowed to play a trans character without that character needing to outright die, other players were railroaded by the DM with one getting an unwanted spotlight, then DM left because he was neglecting being a father.

As every post has, allow me to introduce the stars of this little play~ Names changed of course
Me - First a half elf swashbuckler rogue, then a satyr on the run from a cult with their found family of a party.
Ayaln - First a half elf sorcere, then a half-elf cleric who is the adoptive older sister of our satyr.
Emileon - First a human echo knight, then a aasimar paladin who really liked shiny stuff.
Hyperion - First an aasimar paladin, now the wonderful dm of the second and current campaign.
Barony - The powerplayer who first played a powerful ranger, then a minmaxed cardslinging wizard.
Kinger - The previous DM. Honestly an incredibly skilled dungeon master, but some of his practices were... competitive to players.

Kinger, despite some of his practices, was incredibly skilled, and honestly at the time I loved the session before it was cut short. Combat was difficult but manageable, roleplay was actually quite interesting, but I personally never had any issue that wasn't in game. He DM'ed for decades, even doing it every day for several a few months at one point. He held a lore-based session while driving, no notes or anything. I was impressed, even if it was unsafe.

My side
Of course, then he told me stories. He almost bragged about he managed to make a player retire someone's character in a fight, like it was a badge of honor. Don't get me wrong, I am fine with giving characters hardship, I even told him a way that would mess up my swashbuckler mentally! But then he told me that he had 'win' conditions for his players... and 'loss' conditions. I understand, sometime bad stuff happens to the characters, but having an idea of how to make that bad stuff happen isn't too good in my opinion, it sets up a gm vs player dynamic.

This was also at the time that I wanted to put myself into the character. I wanted to make him like me. I am trans mtf, so I was wanting to have my character transition from male to female. I wanted to have him were dresses, look pretty! The DM... Shot down the dress idea hard, which all of the players were either quiet about or disappointment with the refusal. Ayaln's player even helped me pick out a dress for reference! But for the transitioning? Kinger, however, only offered up a single option. Total bodily obliteration. They'd actually have to get turned into a red mist to transition by using true resurrection. That... Kinda sucked, like a lot- I didn't like the idea of my character having to die horrifically to become what they were comfortable with. Oh well, I guess it simply... Won't happen. A bit of a downer, but I didn't make a big deal over it.

Edit: I don't want to say Kinger was transphobic in case that was the message that was coming across, by the way! He respected my pronouns for the most part, it didn't help that my voice does not help my identity. I was just disappointed that the idea of transitioning was so... drastic. I should also mention that he NEVER said no. If he said no, I would have dropped the idea that moment. I only kept it up because he never said I couldn't.

Others side
Kinger also set up the campaign in a way that the spotlight would be split up over arcs. The first arc would be based on Hyperion, the aasimar paladin of the first group. We were going to go get a staff that belong to the their ancestor, that had immense healing powers! As the few sessions went on, we realized that... The spotlight was actually barely on Hyperion, like at all. Rather, it was on Ayaln and Emileon a LOT. Over all the free time, it was mostly on them- Ayaln interacting with an npc privately a lot, Ayaln and Emileon getting married in game, stuff with the character's parents and all that- None of it was related to Hyperion.

Ayaln was actually not okay with this. She didn't like the spotlight and tried to tell Kinger to put it back on Hyperion. Kinger also liked to just decide stuff and railroading a LOT of stuff. Like outright saying some of Ayaln's choices were the wrong choice, and she'd have to act out of character to get the right choice. Kinger did NOT like going off his script at all (e.i. why my character wasn't allowed to wear a dress, Ayaln being forced to do choices she wouldn't actually choose in character.)

Kinger also decided to take Barony and weave his character into the story a lot. Like, outright central to the plot, eyes and ears everywhere, was going to become the richest and most powerful character in the campaign. Barony reveled in this, was completely down and was let in on tons of info that none of the other players were privy to.

Out of Game
Kinger also held incredibly late-at-night calls, specifically to give out lore and inspirations (he gave out a lot of inspiration because holy fuck we needed it). Everyone in it would get rather important lore to learn more about their in-game families and such! However, I was... The only one who couldn't take part in these claws. I worked an over-night job, so I was never able to get in to the calls. I always had the least amount of information and inspiration out of everyone. Definitely didn't feel sorta isolating, nope.

Several times, the sessions were also cut short or cancelled because Kinger was a father- Two children with one on the way. I respect the choice though, games do not come over family. Eventually, the campaign was cut insanely short because DnD was actually starting to make him neglect his responsibilities as a father, and he had to choose his family. After he left, we have not spoken to him since, he has since left the server and refuses to talk to any of us.

I don't hold it against him at all. Real life comes over a game. But now that I remember back to it, I realize how many problems there were. Rose-printed glasses finally came from my face... But honestly, if he ever came back as a DM? I'd honestly play with him again, but I'd try to bring up the issues since I don't think he knew it was an issue. Yes, I was the newbie.

Now, I am in a new campaign with Hyperion as a DM, and it is going wonderful! We just had to kick Barony for several reasons, and if people want, I'll write up a story on that as well!

This is the second Horror Story I'm posting here on the Reddit. My First was long and had a lot of information that didn't really need to be there, and while I feel most people enjoyed it, it had flaws that I will try to avoid on this one. Once again, I will let you decide if I was the problem, or if the DM overreacted.

CW Flags: In-Game Racism

I'd like to start off by saying I am not giving any of the names in this story, but will be keeping the characters the same race and class combos, as well as their personalities. Also, I would like to say that I am Neuro-divergent, and have a hard time picking up on some things, so I always tell my friends to speak to me if I upset them, as I can't see personal boundaries like others do.

Earlier this year, like midway through it or just a few months earlier, myself and a few other Twitch Streamers had wanted to do a Twitch DND series that the DM had homebrewed up, and she had invited myself and 3 others to be players. She had brought it up initially, and once a month I'd ask her if she had made any progress with setting it up, because I was definitely interested.

We got the players together, and I had run my character through the DM to get approval. I was going to play a Goblin Ranger with a custom background. He was banished from his Goblin Tribe and had a large notch cut into his ear as a sign of shame, and thus, he was called a 'Notch-Ear' and lost his rights to a real name. The reason he was banished, was that he had abandoned his post as a Guard and a band of adventurers (Primarily Artificers and Warforged) came in and slaughtered the majority of his people and stole their valuables. So, reasonably, he had a strong dislike towards any machines or Warforged that they may come across. DM approved and we moved on.

The other characters were a very Sleepy Tabaxi, we called Eepy.

A Kenku Rogue who's name I forget.

A Human Barbarian (that I helped make)

And a Warforged Paladin.

I was kinda excited about having a Warforged in the party, because it meant that my character could start off disliking him and eventually grow to show that he was wrong about Warforged. So, once everyone's introduced and we started playing and streaming, we got into character and started to roleplay about how we wake up in shallow graves with nothing but our equipment and plates with our names on them, including Notch-Ear's real name which he hid from the others. The Kenku player was fairly new to DnD but had a lot of fun, Eepy the Tabaxi was disconnected and aloof, hardly there most of the time, and the Barbarian was VERY new, being only his first ever session so he was fairly quiet. But the Warforged was experienced, loud, boisterous and had a touch of 'Lol Random'. When asked how to write his name by the Kenku, he said something along the lines of, "The Letter E, A, turn around three times, a left arrow, the concept of a happy birthday, and then a Z." He was honestly really funny. My character interacted with them as a sort of guide, being a ranger, and tried to keep them out of danger, but he was outwardly racist towards the Warforged, saying things like "They can't feel pain." and "They aren't real people.", as well as "You don't have a soul, you're a Machine." even though the Warforged swore up and down he was once Human, and still even had a full head of luscious blonde hair.

After the session, I was pulled aside by the the DM and they asked why my character was being so rude towards Warforged Paladin, and I explained the entirety of the situation once again. He doesn't like Warforged or Robots or Machinery, but he's going to do a full 180 eventually. The conflict is temporary, and while he might not like Warforged characters, I have no problems with any of the players and definitely no problems with the Warforged Paladin. If it made the Warforged player uncomfortable, he didn't say anything. I told the others that if I ever, EVER make them uncomfortable or upset, that they can tell me and I will apologize and never take that action again.

Now about the stream, I will admit- I took a little bit of advantage of the situation. I was exposed to 4 other people's communities and pushed my Twitch Channel and stuff, not crazy hard or anything, only bringing it up twice in 4 or 5 hours to follow ALL of the channels and go to their donation links and stuff.. They had later, after the session, asked me to refrain from doing it so much and I apologized, agreed, and waited til next week. They didn't mention it again.

Second session rolls around and we're playing, Roleplaying, fighting monsters and things straight out of The Evil Within Video Game. I've rescued the Warforged Paladin a couple times at this point, either from himself (He was caught in one of those Portal 'infinitely falling' loops) or from the jaws of a monster, made friends with some NPCs and the Kenku, even going to far as to tell the others that I trusted them enough to keep watch over them in some scenarios. (Goblins, being small and weak, can be considered prey by many, many MANY creatures and thus need to stay in groups to avoid being taken away or pulled underwater by creatures trying to eat them, which I had explained.) Warforged Paladin had his (in-game) feelings hurt by Notch-Ear, and after a moment, he went after the Paladin, realizing he was wrong. He told Notch-Ear about how he felt and Notch-Ear stammered, trying to find the right words to express how, even if he was Right or Wrong about Warforged as a whole, the Warforged Paladin was different than what he knew, and maybe wasn't so bad. It was a tense moment where blades could have been drawn and (in-game) emotions were high. We ended the session a while later, after recruiting two NPCs to journey with us since they were familiar with the area more than us.

Later that night, after a couple hours, I receive a single Discord Message from the DM's Alt Account. She first started off by saying that she had told me not to push my channel anymore (I hadn't.) and the In-Game Racism made her and ALL of the other players uncomfortable, and about how she expected better of me. I was then immediately kicked out of the game, out of the discord server, and banned from ALL of her things (Twitch, Minecraft, Discord etc). The Kenku had also blocked me, which made sense, the DM and Kenku were close friends. No one else had blocked me, or said anything. So, I went to each of the other players and apologized about my behavior and wished them the best. It seemed like... none of them really had an issue with it, and they didn't even know what happened. Just that night the DM was talking about kicking me because she was against all of my in-game behavior. One of them was gaslit so much that he genuinely thought I as a person was racist, which was weird because I showed interest in his home country and asked him about things I didn't know about but found interesting.

They never had a session 3.

I'm still cool with the Warforged Paladin to this day.

And to this day, I wonder if I was in the wrong. I probably was.

So I'm not 100% sure this will count, but I'll write it anyway. It's been on my chest for over 4 years now and I still ain't over it.

Short version: A former DM unexpectedly kicked me out of their campaign based on assumptions and a refusal to work things out.

Long version: So it was about 10 or so sessions into your run-to-the-mill 5e campaign. This DM was actually a pretty good one; no big mistakes in terms of rules, roleplaying or anything like that. Except for one not so tiny detail: the further we got, the more odd man out I became. Every other character (we were like 6 in total, including me) got to be involved with the story. Their backstories became major plot points, their relationships with NPC:s - and eventually each other - got a ton of focus and a couple of them even received a bunch of goods and power-ups. Only time my character was relevant was when I actively aimed to be. Did I do my best to engage with the story? Oh, absolutely. I tried to do a bunch of bonding moments with anyone who my overall quite social character would reasonably engage with, and this paid off. As long as it was with the other party members, that is. Anything and anyone controlled by the DM never went anywhere, and the only times my backstory/story engagements came up was very minor compared to the others. Like "one or two of them was present in a scene when everyone in the party had backstory NPC's present" minor. Of course, there was a pretty obvious reason for this - the two most favored members of the group were in a relationship with the DM.

But that's not the reason I'm writing this. The others were still nice folks and I did have fun, so the favoritism wasn't ever an actual problem. Until it started to affect me as the player. See, one of my character's main flaws was that she's very impulsive and doesn't stop to think when loved ones are in danger. Twice over this lead to dangerous moments, both involving the PC's played by the people in said relationship. The first one was when my character rushed in to save a captured party member from some cultists. Which... yeah, that's fair. The captured character almost died, and I admit that was more my fault. I played off of a character flaw, but I did it pretty poorly. But the second one was when another PC had just been saved from being frozen solid, and my - as I mentioned, impulsive - very strong character hugged him in relief. And because I appearantly didn't think that this, without warning, would be the very first time in all my time playing DnD that being frozen would be treated realistically, the hug caused a bunch of damage and I - not the character, I - got chewed out. That was the first red flag.

A while later my DM messaged me about this, and wished for me to not play like that. I replied that it was an intended character flaw, but if it caused trouble then I'd do all I could to change that. I remember being very clear that I didn't want to be hurtful and I'd even be willing to switch characters if that was needed, and the DM ended off very friendly and even said they valued me as a friend. Around the same time I had vented my frustrations regarding an entirely different campaign I was part of (in that case one player was actively halting story progress) in a Discord server both of us were part of. And that's where the whole thing crashed and burned. The day after I had been kicked from both the game and the mutual server we were on and my DM had blocked me on Discord.

Turns out that, without ever bothering to confirm anything, they had assumed I was talking crap about THEIR campaign in my venting. Then the moderators of the mutual server - both close friends of mine, and we've luckily moved past this since - messaged me to tell me the DM's grievances second-hand. Appearantly I'd been "too reckless" and "ungrateful" during the game, in addition to speaking ill about it behind their back. Again, the vent was for a wholly different campaign with wholly different issues. So after a long time of favoritism, bad communication and eventually villifying me... I was out. Unable to clear things out since they blocked me, and still bearing a grudge years later.

Again, they did have some legitimate points - maybe my character flaws were too hurtful to the actual campaign. I'm not trying to deny that, nor am I saying that I deserved the spotlight more than anyone else. But that's when you talk it out and make sure to change the flaws. Either by agreeing to let the player work on it in-character, write it out or switch characters entirely. You do NOT use it to determine that the player themself is the problem that needs to be erased. Especially when it's based on an assumption that you never bother to confirm and send others to deal with for you.

There were several instances and I’ve been …mulling it in my head …just kind of stewing over everything and I wish to know what other people think on the situations. Context I am a plural system(it’s related to two of the exchanges) People Involved pinkie pie (generally the dm given that name because she loves pink and mlp) and cowboy (he’s …a cowboy and I am uncreative with names in this situation apologies)

Also I apologize for the length alots been on my mind and the situations been building up

I guess I should start with the smallest one in baulders gate 3 me pinkie pie and cowboy normally played together I one time was considering to play rouge, as a means to help myself get over the trauma I have because every problem player I’ve ever had was always rouge..but when I mentioned it pinkie pie just started softly telling me “remember all the problem players remember how uncomfortable the class makes you” and I couldn’t follow through with playing rouge because of that.

Next I have a history accidentally harming my group with aoe which has prompted me to be much more aware of my surroundings with using aoe spells and how to best utilize said aoe. I like to take thorn growth as a means to crowd control. I placed it in this one narrow path as we were running from some enemies that cowboy awoken (in baulders gate 3) cowboy decided to run back and I get blamed for cowboys character being on death saves. When I asked cowboy why he ran back he didn’t answer.

Cowboy wished to romance Karlach and I wished to romance lae’zel I would be teased for wishing to romance lae’zel and told how nobody at all likes lae’zel it bothered me greatly because I adored lae’zel’s story and while I of course found her physically appealing I adored the hardships being a githyanki in the world of baulders gate 3 would give. When I attempted to argue this point I was shut down every time and they’d almost always leave lae’zel to rot and b line to karlach and would start to chew me out to where the protector of my system almost comes out … when I start losing interest (for more then just the romance reasons)

Cowboy and me would playfully attack each other a lot, I found a thing that allowed me to cast create water and started spamming it when ever we’d get into camp. Normally over Cowboy during his conversation with karlach I as per usual am running around gleefully using create water on everything, I used it on top of Cowboy while he was having a conversation with karlach and the conversation ended he suddenly leaves the group and leaves call and I am told in call how important the conversation was and that I ruined it by pinkepie. I start trying to message Cowboy apologizing and he still mad starts venting about it, and while I’m trying to problem solve it turns out we were to far in the fun for the romantic cut scene anyway …yet he never apologizes for exploding at me. Am I wrong for being upset he never apologized?

Cowboy and pinkie pie would accuse me of being a loot goblin; as I do tend to stuff my pockets for anything in the hopes of selling it or giving it to the other members of the group who might need it more then I do. Yet…they run ahead of me take everything from a room and go through every chat option (even though I build my character to be the high charisma high dex character) and Devi up the loot amongst themselfs and Sometimes me if they don’t want it themselfs or if they found a better item …that half the time they don’t even use. This coming to ahead during this one mansion battle I had to leave for dinner so I let pinkie pie control my character from what I was told it was a hard battle my character was near 20 hp. The moment I get back I exclaim that I’m back and instantly cowboy attacks my character putting them on death saves, I get a little grumpy and go into cowboys inventory and grab to things he wasn’t using he gets really angry leaves the game leaves call and I get a strongly worded letter how I’m terrible for doing so from both pinkie pie and cowboy..was I in the wrong? Was I not?

Me one of my other head mates (my host (calling him shark boy)who the others make jokes at the expense of a lot) were playing pathfinder pinkepie was the dm for a homebrew world the sensai to shark boys character came up and was shoved off a large building by shark boys brother me and the host fell asleep as we were exhausted from sleep apnea and have problems falling asleep during the night. The session was already 3 hours long at this point pinkie pie decided to have the group fight shark boys brother without shark boy there. And when questioned why he did so…the reason was “because I wanted to” and that was it that was the extent of shark boys character motivation wrapped up while everyone else’s mine included kept going It was even worse because sharkboys sensai ended up being a talking skull the cowboy and pinkie pie used to mock him. Mean while my characters back story is so lovingly woven in the world that the bbeg is the reason my character is transformed into a warebare. The favoritism being so geared towards me that the group travels to the underworld to save my character specifically because I pulled from the deck of many things 4 times.

Not completely related but i wished to get art of something related to tabletop from a artist and pinkie pie would spend multiple days mocking the persons art suggesting I should comission her instead and insulting the persons art

Am I a bumhead for….not wishing to be cowboys and pinkie pies friend anymore? Am I the bumhead in any of those stories?… if so please let me know I can handle it please be harsh

Again I apologize about the length and bad grammar it’s early in the morning