Hey, I'm back. This story concerns the way that my character has been treated over the past year of playing in a campaign, the same one that this story happened in.

This is mostly an infodump about how my second character in this game was treated poorly compared to the rest of the party, sorry if it is long. For context, I am one of three players, and the youngest in the group. I am on the autism spectrum, and suffer with other mental health issues. The other players will be referred to as Bard and Warlock. I am playing a bladesinger wizard.

We use a custom lingering injuries table, the effects of which happen on either a critical hit or if a player character goes down. This table includes some minor debuffs that are cleared with healing, but also dismemberment and other devastating effects that require Regeneration to heal. We also use a very incorrect version of the spell Divination, where you can ask literally anything and get an answer, not just questions involving potential future events or whatever. DM was the one who assured us that Divination worked in this way during another game that was running simultaneously (he was a fellow player in this game, and the only one who used the spell) , but I ended up catching the error after both games had been running for a long time. In the other game we stopped using it that way, but in this one DM said that the spell would continue working this way. I kind of feel bad for the dungeon master in the other game, because DM would abuse the spell to speedrun plot points constantly, and also ask questions that gave more information than it should have. He would ask something like "what are all of the abilities of the members of X faction" and the poor dungeon master would just....give it to DM. Because, when asked if that is how the spell worked, DM would get defensive and insist that it worked like that. I know now that we should have looked it up, but nobody thought to until I was trying to find ways around the spell in DM's game, as it was constantly used against my character.

So, speaking of how I was treated with the Divination spell: More than once I did something carefully, only for it to turn out that an NPC used Divination to ask who did it and find out it was me. These same NPCs didn't do this when my character was framed for stealing a 10,000 gold necklace that belonged to the lord of our town (that has a church full of clerics capable of Divination), when it could have proven my character innocent. No NPCs used this spell to catch any other player character doing anything unsavory, even when they could have reasonably had the means to do so. Bard often does shady crimes, and was the one to frame my character for the necklace (Bard and Warlock were participating in an underground fighting ring that used slaves, and my formerly enslaved character tried to get the ring shut down. I directly named Bard as someone who was involved to some NPC allies of ours but Bard convinced them I was making it up. In the end I was forced to give up about caring about slaves bc I believe Warlock in particular threatened my character), and Warlock has killed multiple people, but NPCs just turn a blind eye unless the DM knows my character can get in trouble for something.

This was just poor luck, but because of the fact that my character acted as a dodge tank of the party, I was critically hit and knocked unconscious the most of the group, and I always rolled something on the table that would result in dismemberment or disfiguration. We were at a level where nobody could cast the Regeneration spell in the party (Warlock had cleric levels primarily but not enough to cast Regenerate without a scroll) so I would often be stuck with the injuries for a long time. It got bad enough that I had several magical prosthetic parts in my bag just in case I lost a leg or whatever. It especially sucked because I had a cloak of displacement, and the DM would often roll two nat 20s on my character with disadvantage, pulling his dice tray out from behind his screen to show me with a big grin on his face. Maybe he was fudging rolls, maybe it was cursed luck, maybe it was the fact that he always used enemies with several attacks to fish for crits, who knows. But it sucked.

The big incident that showed to me how I was being treated was when it was revealed that my character's love interest (now named James for simplicity purposes) was selling the party's information to our enemies. James felt bad, and came clean to my character about it. I had my character break things off with him, and told him that I wouldn't pursue him in exchange for information on our enemies as well, but that I couldn't guarantee his safety from either Bard or Warlock. He vanished, but when I used locate creature to see if he actually left the DM told me I sensed three of him around town? I told the other party members what happened, and they decided to lure him back, getting me to agree to act as a damsel in distress to get him to try to save me. We ended up capturing him, and I was convinced to go get the guards. What Bard and Warlock didn't tell me was that they wanted to beat up James, and Warlock even tortured him by eating some of his fingers and biting huge chunks out of him????? I brought back the guards, and they dragged James off to prison.

I roleplayed my character being mortified at what happened, and managed to convince the guards to get a healer to visit James in prison. A few days passed in game, and we found out that he was managing to make some money in prison, with the plan to bribe someone to break him out soon. Bard convinced him to make a map of the enemy group's lair in exchange for enough money to break love interest out of prison. Bard ended up going back on the promise, not paying the full amount owed, and told my character about this. I shouldn't have done anything, but I made the mistake of having my character pay James the remaining owed amount. With the money, he broke out of prison.

This is where the unfair treatment started. DM decided that James' first order of business was to hire an unending torrent of assassins specifically for my character, and completely ignore the people that both masterminded the scheme to capture him and that tortured him. I think we ended up fighting like 5 assassins? Each time we killed one assassin, another would show up. In fact, there was basically a whole adventuring party dedicated to killing specifically my character. My character was killed multiple times (the party thankfully brought me back, but it was a huge financial drain on me), and each time an assassin took something from the body. One tore out his tongue through his throat, one took an ear, and another managed to kill my character by blowing up the entire adventuring guild we were stationed in. This time, the DM laughed to himself, and said "I think we agreed that if you get regeneration, it doesn't regrow hair, right?" then proceeded to tell me that the assassin would scalp my character's body. I actually had a panic attack, as he unknowingly hit a very specific trigger that I've had as a kid, and I begged him to do literally anything else. He generously settled for just REMOVING MY CHARACTER'S GENITALS instead. This was the last straw for the group, as we realized that James/DM would not stop sending assassins to kill specifically me until either James died or I wasn't revived anymore.

Also James ended up messing with Bard and Warlock, just not with assassins. Bard's favorite NPC was mind controlled, but we easily broke the enchantment and caught the random mage who was hired to do it, and Warlock's favorite NPC was attacked while we were all there to help. Both issues were resolved in less than a session, and James never messed with them again.

I'm not going to go into every detail about how we managed to find the place James went to, but know that it was on a floating island that was constantly moving, divination didn't answer where it was because there was literally no landmarks or anything to compare its location to, and research revealed absolutely nothing about the island. We ended up managing to scry on James then teleport there, but DM got mad after the session, saying it was also supposed to be immune to scrying but he forgot, and then decided to not retcon what happened. IMO it seems like he didn't want us to find this island ever, and he also made it so that James had unlimited food, water, and anything else he needed to stay there forever. So... how were we supposed to resolve this? who knows.

anyways, we go to this castle, and I had prepared a very specific tool to help us beat James. He was a scribe wizard, so I figured he would have a ton of traps, scrolls, etc. In a previous session, DM had an artificer with a magic vacuum that could be used to suck up magical traps and the like. I had asked the NPC if I could borrow it, went on a quest to get a new power source for the vacuum, and was given the vacuum. I was told that it had a limit to how much it could absorb, like a certain amount of magic charges and absorbing levels of spells used charges, and after that it would explode. Seemed reasonable, right? I figured it was probably gonna be like 50-100 damage, and even if it severely damaged me I could reduce the damage with one of my bladesinger abilities, plus I roll really high on DEX saves, and also it would hit James for the same amount! Win-win.

So we get into the fight with James, and I rush directly to him and point that vacuum directly at him, and turn it on. What I was NOT told was that it would continue to absorb magic even beyond the initial threshold, and that extra magic would directly affect how much damage the explosion did, at about 8 damage per singular charge over capacity. So DM sits there for like 10 minutes with a calculator, then shows me the result. Over 1,000 damage. He rules that it explodes, disintegrating James, myself, and everything in a 30ft radius. In the end, the party wasn't gonna get anything for all the effort we went through, because we confronted James in the same room as all the treasure. I begged DM to at least reward the other players, and he ended up relenting and giving them a couple things. He told me that my character would need True Resurrection if I wanted him back, and even then I would have to start over with literally nothing. I ended up deciding to bring him back, because I played him for over a year and was not gonna let DM finally get away with his plan to kill my character after OVER A MONTH of endless assassination attempts. I ended up owing the party like 25,000 gold, and spent the past several months crawling out of the financial pit my wizard was put in. Even now my current gear isn't as good as it was, but oh well.

wanna know the best part? Bard ended up bringing James back with a True Resurrection as well. Thankfully the DM decided that James was over his whole thing against my character, and he just left me alone. God. (EDIT: forgot context that Bard brought James back to help us with a quest later, I think part of the deal was that James leave us alone afterwards?)

TL;DR: Dungeon master seems to want to kill or maim my character at any turn, and get him in trouble for things with a broken version of the Divination spell. He ends up succeeding after a month of assassination attempts at killing my character, but I got better.

Also wish me luck, but this campaign is wrapping up and DM wants to run a pirate game

I have been DMing a group of five for over 2 and a half years, and I recently killed off the party's warlock by turning it into a deathlock. This was caused by the character, whose patron was an archdevil, repeatedly acting against his patron. I gave him many warnings, but the final straw was when the warlock killed his patron's favorite son, a pit fiend. I immediately asked him to make a new character and described the gross transformation his character underwent to turn into a deathlock. He immediately started screaming at me about it being unfair that his character died so easily, despite my repeated warnings. He said that unless I brought his character back, he would leave the table, so now I'm conflicted. Was I in the wrong for killing his character, and should I revive it or just let him leave?

Hi! I’m posting from an alt account since my main account is known by my players, and also by my community (I’m a medium-sized twitch streamer, one of the largest in a small community).

I joined a 5E group as a GM from r/LFG about a week ago, and we played our first session yesterday, but I’m starting to get more than a little. concerned about one of my players, some background:

There’s me: the GM (13F); Sorcerer (14M); Warlock (15M); Mystic(18M); Paladin (18M); and Ranger: the potential problem (18M)

Sorcerer and Warlock are total beginners, so new that I threw together a couple oneshots to play as a sort of tutorial with them before the first session. They set up the group originally, and had invited Ranger before me (he originally was going to GM for them, but decided he’d rather be a player when I joined.)

The rest of the group have varying levels of experience: I’ve GMed a couple campaigns for my family as well as a PBP campaign online (and an ongoing PF1E campaign), and I started with my family, as a player, when I was 6-7 so I’m actually pretty knowledgeable about the system (though I know PF better than 5E); Ranger has played a single campaign before which he says fell apart, and “a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3”; Paladin has some experience with Tabletops, but doesn’t know 5e super well and has never used R20 before. Mystic is very experienced, and has definitely been the most helpful player in a few different ways so far.

I did way too much prep given less than a week to set up the first game, and I made sure to treat it more as a Session 0.5 than a Session 1. We have a rules channel on our Discord which includes a number of pretty generic expectations, and I also went over my and everyone else’s expectations with our group before even introducing characters. Now, the problems:

1. Ranger rushed ahead to make our Discord server himself, and I had to ask him repeatedly to get permissions in it. It was another difficult ask for him to actually give me ownership of the Discord.

2. Ranger would often step in commandingly to try and answer questions about how the game would be run, and even a question about character creation for other players without consulting me at all. He also blatantly ignored a direction I gave in character creation, and got annoyed with other players for following it. (It wasn’t any kind of crazy ask, it was just telling players they could make PCs different ages from each others’.)

3. When I posted images of some NPCs the PCs would know, Ranger repeatedly asked me about one’s sexuality.

4. Ranger started a private group chat with the other PCs to come up with plans etc. that I would not be privy to. He only asked me if this was okay AFTER Mystic asked him if he had. (I later found out, he lied and told that Mystic he did ask me before he actually asked me.)

5. In the private group chat, he told other PCs it would be good to befriend an Owlin NPC because he thinks the Owlin would make a good boyfriend for his character. I initially said romance is acceptable, but only off-screen, since I am not comfortable in that kind of RP.

6. In the first game, I had to repeatedly stop him from backseat GMing. He also regularly took over the spotlight, even “accidentally” putting himself in scenes his character isn’t in.

7. He kept trying to worldbuild in his RP, even going as far as to adlib parts of his backstory that he thought would “impress” the Owlin NPC.

I’m worried that I’m being a bit paranoid, especially after only one session, so I’m coming here for a second opinion: New Player (pretending to be more confident than he really is) or Problem Player?

Thanks for your time, sorry to bother.

Edit: In a short discussion with Ranger where he suggested that only reason people were uncomfortable with the romance instance was because of homophobia (one of our agreed rules bans any kind of racism, sexism, homophobia etc. and everyone in the server eagerly agreed to it.), and went on to deflect and shift goalposts on everything else. He has been banned and blocked. Thank you for the help!

This is not as bad as some of these other stories I've seen but it still irks me to no end.

Me and my fiance always wanted to play DnD. We finally gathered the courage and about two years ago joined a session in a local Comic Book Shop. We were NEW players, never played any TRRPGs. Our DM was very gracious and unfortunately our first session ended up being us hogging the spotlight as we made our PCs. But the next week we started the session.

The cast: Me a rogue My fiance a fighter "Jackal" a barbarian Dunce the problem player w/ an OP homebrew class DM the Dungeon Master Names changed for obvious reasons, there two other players that can't stand Dunce but they aren't problems

Now, I'll give a few of my own red flag events but I will admit I may have played "wrong" for my group a few times. I just assume I was being an ass. Red flag 1: Dunce is THE prime example of a Main Character Syndrome member. This will become clear in the following stories Red flag 2: DM shows signs of favoritism. Jackal had this AMAZING moment of climbing up a ships mast and jumps from our ship to a random encounter ship, killing an escaped griffon. It was totally badass and I thought: sweet rule of cool. Me and my fiance are still new so we didn't do much in this encounter. Red flag 3: DM is gracious and tries to get me and my fiance to RP. However, each time the spotlight is on us Dunce butts in and says what he'd be doing. Even if it was just to say, "my PC is sitting in the corner smoking." Red flag 4: Dunce is NEVER ready for his turn. Like ever. DM constantly reminds us to be ready, sure me and my fiance were a little slow because we didn't know how to play or what we could do all the time. Add on top of this he has an ENTIRE BINDER of his homebrew and his notes. A binder he keeps closed until it is his turn. Upon which he picks up, that's right he kept it away from himself so he'd have to stand up to grab it and place it in front of him. He then takes forever to figure out what he wants to do. 90% of the time he ends up choosing to stay away from the fight and have Jackal handle it. Red flag 5: Oops! Dunce "accidently" looks at level, spell sheet, and other stats of a BBEG. (He clicked on it D&D Beyond campaign page) He laughs as he says we're in trouble and goes on and on about things he shouldn't have known if he "accidentally" clicked on it. Red flag 6: I have NEVER seen a critical failure and add on that he has an abnormal amount of NAT20s. I can't prove he was cheating but he never seems to have a problem with things he wants to do. It was as though he was guessing the DV and said that's what he rolled. Often the DM would raise an eyebrow but not call him out. Red flag 7: I am constantly being put down for certain choices both by punishments from DM and players. For instance, being a rogue, I thought if there was ever a chance to earn an extra buck I'd take it. I took a job to kill an elderly woman who owned an orphanage (a Skyrim reference I'm told). I did so as a solo side adventure. However, this triggers the label of "asshole" for the group. Even though Jackal killed a surrendering pirate captain by snapping his neck before he could even finish his RP. Jackal often does things like this, which I kind of liked the whole "kill em before they monologue" vibe. But everything I did was an asshole move. Like another time, we found a random encounter wizard. I stole his magicbook (thinking I could sell it later) by comforting the crying NPC wizard. I was labeled an asshole again. However, a group of paladins found us and arrested him, taking him back. Jackal (the defacto leader by DMs account) says "oh well, he did it to himself" as the NPC pleads us to save him. I don't mind being called an asshole but it felt like Jackal never got that comparison. Red flag 8: I never for rewarded for my ideas. I was usually shot down or the DM would make it so the NPCs would make my plan null. For instance, Jackal always got a cool moment in combat. When I tried, even with amazing dice rolls, nothing happened. I readied an action to ambush someone in a forest area. The NPC happened to get "freaked out" and leave my range of attack. But Jackal in that same combat had a enemy conveniently go from a position of advantage to right below Jackal so that he could replicate his aerial attack from above. It got to the point I just said "man, I never get to do anything cool." Red flag 9: DM rarely ever did anything about Dunce. I multi classed into warlock and got Awakened Mind. So when we encountered Flumpfs I was able to talk to them. Dunce was constantly saying shit like "oh, I say this" or "I would definitely do this if they said that." It wasn't the DM who had to remind him he couldn't understand the Flumpfs but the players at the table. It ruined a moment for me where for once I felt like the spotlight shown on me in a way that benefited the group. Red flag 10: Similar moments had me perform more rolls. I tried to steal something from a non-important NPC, Dunce was allowed to stop me without a roll. Later, Dunce tried to sneak up on a PC player to chloroform him (he was tripping balls on a mushroom), I tried to stop him because his antics were funny. I had to ROLL PERCEPTION to see if I could see another player in our party????? Red flag 11: I was climbing a ladder up from the sewers. I came across an NPC and tried to get her to let me out. Jackal is allowed by DM to poke me in the ass for my antics and tells me that I yelp. Mind you, I didn't roll to see if I'd yelp I was just forced to. And jackal was at the bottom, THIRTY FEET down and was allowed to poke me instantly without climbing the ladder (even though the DM made a point of saying how long it took me to get to the top). Red flag 12: Dunce NEVER helped in combat or RP unless it was Jackal. It wasn't just me but two others not named and my fiance. Any ideas were bad until Jackal shared the same view. Red flag 13: the DM NEVER integrated the background lore I set up for both myself and my fiance. When I attempted to find the cult that caused us so much lore/background grief DM would say "oh...uhm no they don't know anything." Red flag 14: I'm a MTF trans. And unfortunately I have a very deep voice. But I had made it clear to the group of my intention to be referred to as she/her. Regardless of this, Jackal ALWAYS said he/him, even if someone corrected him multiple times. Dunce was at least kind enough to attempt to remember my gender, even if he forgot. I gave them leeway at the time but in hindsight I should've spoken up more.

Finally...my own red flags Red flag 1: I have a "tone issue." I don't mean to but all my significant others have told me I have a habit of sounding condescending and aloof. When that's not what I intended. Fiance said that was my main problem with this group. Red flag 2: I wore my distain on my face. If Dunce was hogging the spotlight for instance, I would bury my face in my hands and whisper to myself "oh dear God." Or something to that effect. Red flag 3: I was disruptive. I would try and steal things to make money. I probably played the "it's what my character would do" card too much. But to be fair, I never tried to steal plot import items. Even when the other PCs gave me this accusatory look like I was going to. Red flag 4: This story is bias, I probably missed a few of my faults.

Regardless, me and my fiance ended up having scheduling conflicts and couldn't make it to the new day. And tbh? Dunce made it an extremely easy choice. Did me and my fiance mourn our loss of a session? Yes. But I got to say, the pill was much easier to swallow at the end of the day.

DM if you're reading this, I'm sorry if I was the problem player but I don't think you dealt with Dunce ever. Maybe it wasn't meant to be, you are still the most skilled and talented DM I have ever seen in action.

TL;DR DM never addresses problem PCs (including me) and plays favorites making my departure much easier to swallow.

Edit: To be clear, I don't mind when the spotlight isn't on me. In fact, I loved when someone else got to shine when they came up with something awesome. What I do mind is when the DM is trying to show it on someone else but Dunce CONTINUES to hog it from someone else. It doesn't matter if it's me or Jackal or someone else. He CONSTANTLY interrupts so he can get the spotlight on him. And honestly? I started getting tired of it.

I'm not sure if update posts are allowed, but here is the update no one (myself especially) asked for. Link to original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpghorrorstories/comments/11ak7zb/forever_dm_joins_campaign_then_rage_quits_2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

It has been a couple months since the incident I am going to talk about, and I feel like I have digested it enough to blabber to the internet void. December of last year (2023) I traveled home for the holidays. We needed some last minute items from the store and I offered to grab them since its been so long since I was in my hometown, I wanted to cruise around to see all that has changed. At the store I bump into no other than Druid's friend, who we will now call Tom for clarity sake. It was a surprise since I had not heard from him since the events of the original post which happened 7 or so years prior to that posting. I had no idea he even lived in town still. He began casual small talk, we talked about his recent engagement, our careers, just a quick catch me up stuff. He was giving off this nervous/awkward energy the entire time, like he expected me to be upset or something. I genuinely was just happy he was doing well, but simultaneously didn't like the vibes, so I politely said goodbye and moved on with my shopping.

The next day I'm hanging out with my family having a great time, when a number texted my phone. It read "Hey OP, its Tom, I'm not sure if you still have the same number, but if you do please give me a call. I would really like to talk to you about something I didn't bring up when I saw you. If you don't want to that's fine, have a good holiday with your family man." I'll admit I was a bit annoyed at this, I really didn't need an apology for something that happened when we were practically kids. I also don't need to be friends with him again. However as evening approached I started feeling bad that I wouldn't at least hear him out during the holidays, and figured one phone call wouldn't hurt.

I know I'm long winded so I'll keep this part short. This phone call ended up being 4.5 hours long. To my surprise, Tom doesn't apologize at all, in fact he never brings up how he ghosted me. Instead he tells me he stopped being friends with Druid about 9 months ago. He also tells me Druid has not stopped talking about me since he left my campaign. In fact, Druid has put in some version of me into every campaign he has run since, either as a foe the party has to fight, or a hag, or a village idiot. Tom says it is very obvious it is suppose to represent me, and sometimes Druid will explain the "inspiration" of the character representing "the worst person he ever met" to new players. People who have never met me. Tom also says Druid has said a bunch of other horrible things about me and my life or my family to anyone who will listen. If that isn't weird or creepy enough, Tom tells me that one of my close friends, someone I met shortly after the original post incident, has been one of the biggest contributors to this happening. He befriended Druid after I told him about that odd incident that happened a year prior at that time, and "has been feeding Druid information about your life ever since". I confronted this "friend" and he openly admitted to it, and then blocked my number. So I can only hope that this is the end of it.

CW; body horror, mental decline, and unwanted sexual attention/assault

Hello Internet, I'd like to share another of my years of horrible RPG experiences; today, I would like to talk about Jones, one of the greatest DMs I've ever played with…until he wasn't. If he ever was that great to begin with.

He had a great understanding of the rules of any game he ran be it RP-focused or combat, an English doctorate who use of words and descriptions makes theater of the mind like listening to radio play and would work with you. Character backgrounds would work with you to make the best character you want, mechanical and roleplay-wise. Complete with integrated questlines that sometimes interlock with other PCs' backgrounds and the main plot. He was great until his mother started to show signs of cancer and some inner demons that none of us knew about, or at the very least, I started to see come out. This was one of the games that it really started to show.

He invited me and three others (I think two of them were Group Dad and Kevin from this story) to play a game online. This was before COVID-19, so there was no roll 20, I believe. He had scrapped together a mix of Skype for voice, a browser host for dice rolls, and an old-looking open-source map program, and all three programs didn't play well.

The game plot was that a mysterious portal opened up in a swamp outside a small trade port. The portal is on the same plane as the world. In fact, it seems to be lead to the “new world,” which no one seems to get to by boat as the coastlines seem guarded by some spell. That destroyed any boat or airship that tried to land. Our mission was to go through the one-way portal, meet up with the spearhead camp, scout out the land, and find a way to break through the ward from the inside out or make a two-way portal. I was told up front this was a more Lethal than normal, rogue-lite one player asked and gangly confirmed. We rold up characters on heavy homebrewed DnD essentials and headed into the portal. I figured it will still be pretty fair on deaths based like most of his other games. So figured as long as your not doing anything blatantly stupid your good.

The first character I role up was a lizardfolk fighter, a chieftain’s son from a local tribe, rolling pretty well on stats. The party, I believe was a claric, rogue, and bard, went through and was in the middle of the base camp where a pack of hyenas had decimated the forward camp. Eating the remains of the researchers before laughing at the new prayer. We kill the hyenas pretty quickly, with me tanking most of the hits, and everyone else either played support or heavy hitters. We searched the camp and found some clues on some points of interest.

We decided to try making it to a large cliff face nearby as we have salvaged some survey gear. On the way we saw a large pride of dire lions. We were talking about what to do about them when the internet crapped out. I tried to reset my computer, and my dad tried to reset the router and couldn't get back online. I called the DM Joe this and he told me it was ok and he would see me next game I was told to make a new character as my character had been multed to death by the lions. He had sacrificed himself to try to keep the others alive. So my character and wizard died, but at least the others could complete the survey. Plus, everyone who survived leveled, so we were level two now. we would make characters to the surviving players' level at least.

My 2nd character was a human ranger, a war vet who lived through a lot of crap and was paranoid about everything with the wizard switched to a knight. We choose to avoid most encounters, but after running into what look cultists trying to sacrifice a friendly native, we acted. The native takes us back to their village. The chelf was thankful that we saved his daughter but pissed off the gods, “the cravers of flush,” and needed to do a “rite of peace and forgiveness.” me and the group started to ask what that entails when the internet crapped out again. The Rounitor died and needed a new one. I let the DM know what happened, and Joe said he understood and would play my character.

Come season 3rd and found out my character willingly volunteered to take place in the rite which invoiced him dismemberment and boiled in a pot with all of their, and I quote, “nonsexual bodily fluids” along with the woman we saved. The village’s gods said they could never forgive them for meeting with “flush so sour and tainted” and the whole village needed to be cleaned. So the village started to mutate into flush golums, Ala cronenberg. the party as well as the rest of the world were now forever enemies who's only worth is to be made into “flush puppets.”. The village of flush monsters quickly killed the rogue and knight, leaving the bard alive as he tripped the rogue while fleeing.

So character three, my last one before I dropped, was a half-elf woman wizard. A headstrong workaholic trying to prove herself to her academy. Also, coming in at level 4 at this point and sharing starting gold with the knight, now druid and rogue into a rogue/wizard. The 3 characters going to the same school to justify to the dm way we got sending stones with are starting gold.

We get to the camp to meet up with Bard, who is copying his notes of what we have seen so far and reports of how fucked everything was. The sending stones did not work in the camp because of “magical interferent” and would need to find place with a clearer aura than camp. One of the spots uncovered by the villager post flush monster was a tower of “forsaken magics” and the flush monster worshipers hate the place so must have something useful or clear of interference. So we go to the tower, sneak though the place, trying to attack from surprise as much as possible any cultists or flush mutated animals that beat us to the tower. burned books and notes scattered around that could helped stop what come next if “we made better choices with are time.”

We made it to the top of the tower and found we could set up the stones to start communicating with the camp back home. While the stones were toning we found an idol in the tower's center. It sent out strong magical vibes and was shaped…like a woman deep in self-graduation. Joe was a sex-positive person and had adult themes in all his games. So I did some checks and found it was likely cursed. I pointed the cursed idol out when I disconnected again. so I get my laptop out, moved closer to the wifi spot and walked into my character's death.

Joe was describing his homebrew cursed magic item. Lovecraftian body horror shift for whoever would touch it. So I walked into the game where My character, not 5 minutes, had explained why touching the cursed idol was a bad idea, and in the same breath, had ran up and shoved the whole thing up her ass. The idol was fusing with her body, violently twisting her into the shape of a magic rod. Make worse by the magic of the sending stone getting drained to feed its power, making them useless. It also destroyed the copied notes we were trying to send back. The sorcerer, bard, and rogue wizard were trying not to get sucked into the magic vortex around my character.
I asked what the fuck was going on as I was only disconnected for 5 minutes. Joe explained that he assumed that i was going to be gone for the rest of the season so rolled on the “inter darkness” table to see how terrible my character would behave without the “better nature” of the player there. he rolls for a descriptor and sin. that's was goal of that character to complete, evenif it kills them. So when I logged off, he rolled “repressed lust” for my character, so he had her pleasure herself with the idol.

I protested the role as I wasn't gone for that long, and it seemed very irrational for my character to warn the party one minute and fall for the trap the next. DM tells me he feels like a workaholic mage would be sexually repressed and stubborn enough to do so. I started looking for a spell to counter the effect but DM told me it was willing on my part so I can't stop it. I asked him if I could stop the sending stones from burning out, and he replied, “As you look to the sorcerer and rogue wizard. you feel the need to draw the pair into yourself as the refinding of your very soul, feels so damn good. So the three of us are turned into a powerful magical rod, fusing all of our powers and adding some charm spells. So 3 deaths from being transformed into a magic rod. The rod decorated the 3 of us passionately hugged each other.

I was pretty pissed at this point about the “inter darkness” roll and asked why wasn't this talked about before. The DM joe wanted Macanics to be revealed as a surprise as we placed the game. My last two characters, who died, roll on the “inter darkness” rolls as the lizardfolk rolled a “rageful pride” and provoked the lions, and the ranger rolled a “gullible inferences,” so he hopped into the cooking pot without a 2nd thought. At this point I just made up an excuse not to play and left the game.

I later talked to the bard player Kevin about what happened next, months later. He told me that Joe felt like I was disconnecting on purpose regardless of my shitty internet, as “he could have got to a cafe or library.” So there wasn't any real excuse other than his games aren't normally ones you play in public spaces, plus I didn't really have my own laptop. The inter-darkness chart was intended to be used for the game, but he may have fudged my rolls a bit.
The game I was later told ended up being slung. Every clue was destroyed before they even got there, and trying to keep the research up and documented was fruitless as it ended up getting destroyed. Every season, someone dies by flush monster save or die checks, and some sessions are near TPK.
It all came to a head as the bard waited for the others to make characters after another near when his PC disconnected as the power unit failed. Joe was living with Bard by this point, so he just walked down to let the DM know what happened. Joe starts to laugh Manicly as he started to roll on the inter-darkness table. The bard got something along the lines of “Gluttonous Manic Envy” and started to eat all the cursed tones the party could acquire. As the bard ate it all, remembering you shouldn't eat anything raw throws himself onto the fire to bake the food he just ate. The mix of fire, cursed books and his belly juices transformed the man into a gluttonous flush demon.

The other players were allowed to at least join as the characters they made but if no one Survived what was dwelling at camp than the starting level will reset to one. Everyone entered, and the beast that was the bard slaughtered most of them in a couple of rounds with save-or-die muti-attacks. Joe ended the session there and asked everyone to make new level-one characters. The players asked if the bard monster will still be there and Joe laughed and shouted, “hell fucking ya, easy food is there.” Everyone just walked at this point.

I got the group email for the campaign's epilogue, describing how the barrier fell, and the flush monsters flooded the world. Taking only hours to consume the world, the last holdout spent their final hour carving out stones. Stones that cursed out the player characters that enter the portal for not caring what happens to the world despite the world giving them everything.
TLDR; DM invites me and 3 others to a rogue-lite DnD game involving insta death flush monsters, last 3 sessions as every time, my character died because my computer sucked at running programs needed to play and DM takes it personally due to declining mental health.

Oh boy where do I begin. This campaign is still going on—albeit without the aforementioned creep. Thankfully, we didn’t get too far before this guy revealed himself.

For the purposes of this post, I will call him creep. He is 22 years old. This will be relevant. And he played as an 18 year old human barbarian. The other relevant players are DM and his girlfriend (bugbear warlock) and me (half elf rogue).

We started off in the main hub city of the campaign which was full of pretty much all D&D races and classes. Before we even got the first quest, he was asking about where the orphanage was. Kind of weird but we figured it was a backstory thing. We got our first quest and completed it by defeating a mountain troll. We even got to level up. Once we got back to the city, the DM introduced his DMPC—an 11 year old girl who was secretly related to the exiled prince. It was our job to protect her from the prince’s enemies.

Well, when went out on the road, he started flirting with her and then when called out he said “I’m just being nice. You guys just have dirty minds”. Well fast forward two sessions and we make it to a dark cave and get separated. Barbarian finds the child and tells her that there is “no one here to stop us” and whips out his dick.

DM just looks at him and says “What the fuck are you doing bro?” And he says “Getting some pussy. Its dark so the party can’t see us. Its just what my character would do in this situation.” DM reminds him of her age and he says “My character doesn’t give a fuck. He is in love” DM says “You really wanna be a freaking pedo? This is gonna be your character for a good long while and I doubt the party wants to deal with a pedo.” His girlfriend then said: “Yeah when my warlock finds you, she will 100% kill you.”

He then says “Oh come the fuck on. Its just a game. Besides he isn’t even really a pedo, he’s just a kid himself. Young and horny. Did you know the brain doesn’t finish developing until 25?”

Yeah I wanted to vomit after hearing that. DMs girlfriend looks at DM and say “Let me kill him. Now!” DM agrees and says “The cave suddenly lights up and the entire party sees what he is about to do”. We all are ready. The whole party rains down every spell, ranged, and melee attack they can and kill him in less than two turns as he tries to flee and we all get opportunity attacks and kill him.

He then says “Well I guess I’m dead now”—obviously butthurt about it. “You know that really was a dick move.” I tell him “You shouldn’t have rolled up a pedophile then”. He then starts raging at all of us and trying to argue that he somehow wasn’t a pedophile. DM then said “Someone needs to check your hard drives”. He snaps at DM and calls him a simp and a beta male for listening to his girlfriend and then implied that she “had a train ran through her”. DM then just said “Alright, I’ve fucking had enough. Get the hell out of my house. Right now!” (We were all playing at DM’s house). He then stormed out and that was that.

tldr Creep uses absolutely pathetic justification to be a nonce in game. The party kills him so he gets butthurt and insults DMs girlfriend.

This is not as horrible as other posts here, but it really threw me for a loop, so here it is.

Context: I play with two guys I know from school and their friend. Me and the player in question are not really 'friends', we don't have anything to talk about when I try to talk to him, but we are very friendly. Although they say weird stuff sometimes, it is mostly fun. (DM is great)

So in today's game our party completed a quest for a rich guy who promised us five thousand gold (at second level) and when we went to sleep at his mansion we woke up in coffins, presumably buried alive. Aaand that was a cliffhanger for the next session.

It made me (reasonably) uncomfortable, so I jokingly said that this is why we need to have session zero. DM quickly said that I should text him what I don't want to see in game. I said that I don't mind what he did now, but I said that I can tell him right now what I never want to see, and that it is rape. Player in question says something along the lines of:

"Oh come on, why?" and jokingly something like "It's no fun" and when I asked if he really was asking me this, he said he 'liked dark humor' and basically that it was not a big deal.

I understand humor. But it was not about jokes, it was said in a serious tone, while in a discussion about what I seriously don't want to see ever in the game. What shook me is that he said ANYTHING in response to what I said in this specific situation.

I can ignore almost every comment someone makes, but this takes the cake.

Throwback to the last session when we encountered goblins and he said "Good thing we don't have any women" I was like "Why?" - "Goblins love human women" and they laughed. I mean, it is not written in the monster manual, but after looking for this shit specifically, I found something online, as I understand not even DnD related, and still, what is there to laugh about?

As a conclusion, they are not smart people, I guess, and this is EXACTLY why I, as a female, play a male character, to avoid this at least in this made-up world.

So, one of my buddies is building a world for a DND campaign and wanting to get into DND for the first time I offer the second that it's mentioned. This guy has been playing DND all oh his life (we're all between young adults and late teens) and he gives me the lowdown on how DND works and points me towards the wiki.dot for more info and I make a PC, a human fighter (it's what he recommended to me as a newbie.) I look up class guides, tutorials, ect to learn what I'm getting myself into.

So after a couple of months, I'm making some outfits for my PC in Heroforge(HF) and I ask him what colors should I use for a tundra outfit and he recommendeds white and blue so I made a tundra outfit and he said it was really good and it's what he'd imagined what ppl living in the mountains would look like.

So in a creative fulled splurg fulled by autism I, without warning, permission, and even asking... I made 20 HF figures IN 4 HOURS. All of them are guards, chefs, priest, farmers, the DND base set of armors, etc. Then I just sent it all to him without warning.

I think I'm becoming a problem for our DM. He messaged me this morning (we use Discord) and basically gave me the "Take it to a publisher" treatment, BUT with a fuckton a of grace. He loved the designs, but he'd had his own special designs for his NPCs, and without dropping the ball I immediately suggested that I'd make them into HF figures he said that I was a good man, and that I didn't need to do any of that for him. But I still am, mindlessly, in fact. I was making peasant hunters in HF before I snapped to my senses, but I just kept doing it, and I was about to send him 5 more figs before I made this post.

Am I becoming a problem I think I am.

(TL;DR - My younger brother was a toxic player that brought in problem players to my games, alienated the good ones, and I didn't ban him from my games for almost 20 years.)

I was talking to some friends of mine during a meta-discussion over a game I was about to start. It was kind of in that bullshitting thing that you do after session 0, but not before you actually run the game, where people have idle chat and put finishing touches on character sheets, ask questions about things on which they needed clarification and such. One of my friends described the way he had his character built, and another friend groaned and said "that is the kind of character your brother would've played".

Yes my brother had an idiosyncratic way that he played characters, but he was not typically the direct reason a lot of games that he was in or running tended to completely tank.

When we first started playing TTRPG's, my brother was about 11 years old. Him and I were into reading about fantasy literature, and as kids we were largely inseparable, but some of his antisocial behavior began to manifest by about the time he was 13. He gravitated toward the kind of people that I wouldn't normally be associated, and he got a lot of them into TTRPGs. Back when I first started playing there were times where he was literally the only player I could get into a game I was running at a certain timeslot. Almost universally, he was about the most consistent player I had in games.

He had an idiosyncratic play style, he tended to play characters that were physically worthless, usually using his strength as the dumpstat, he would put all of his points into charisma, and play the characters as either charlatans, sychophants or whores. Apart from that he was actually a decent role player. When he ran games, he almost had a fetishized sadism for things that he would do to characters in game rather they were an NPC or other players character.

I can handle this sort of behavior from one player for a little while, nowadays you could just kick them and not have to suffer terribly because there are always bigger fish in the sea, but being that he was my own brother it was never that simple. Sometimes I would get angry at him and kick him out of my games, or he would get angry and leave, but I would still have to put up with him when I got home.

And he would hold grudges.

He would berrate me on the way home. He'd call me every name in the book, accuse me of everything up to (but not including) murder, and swear to make me miserable. He'd then try to sabotage my gaming groups by telling all of the members various things to try to get them to quit, tried to spread rumors, would even steal my stuff and try to cripple my transportation just to try to "punish" me for "slighting" him.

Over time I had some very good players that left my games because of his sociopathic tendencies, some players wouldn't play purely because they didn't want to put up with my brothers abuses. But one of the worst things about it was that he used to bring in certain players to "populate" my games. Friends of his that wanted to play a certain game and my brother knew at least one person who would run it.

The overbearing majority of the time, they were every kind of problem player you could imagine. Sleazy creeps, volatile hotheads, people that were sexually inappropriate, people that would leave mid session to go buy drugs, to go use drugs, some of them called out because they were too drunk or stoned to play, some of them would get progressively more drunk or stoned through the session, some of them just wouldn't show up for whatever reason, some of them would fight over personal issues in the middle of sessions, some would threaten me or others with physical violence if things didn't go their way and some of them just plain old had extremely stupid character concepts that they wouldn't let go and would derail the entire thing if they didn't get to play what they wanted.

During the most turbulent period in my brother's life, he moved across country, and not having him around really put into perspective just how much better off I was not having him at my table, and the exact extent to which his obnoxious and toxic behavior was damaging my gaming experience, as well as nearly everything else in my life. There were a few guys from his group that were great players, or even just okay that I brought in and formed a well-adjusted satellite group away from my regular one that I ran at the same time, and it turned out quite excellent.

When he moved back, I wouldn't let him play in my games anymore, and him and I would fight relentlessly about things not related to that. He moved away again, and I haven't spoken to him since.

The point of the story is that it took me an incredibly long amount of time to finally expunge my brother from any of my games permanently. A lot of that was because he was part of my family, and I still had to deal with him while he still lived with me and could express his dissatisfaction with my decisions to exclude him.

But fortunately, the people in my primary group only remember him for the characters he used to make. They are better off not knowing the fullest extent.

This is my first time ever submitting a horror story, but I've been listening to a lot of RPG Horror Story videos (mainly from Crispy's Tavern) and thought this would be a fun story to tell. Not so much a horror story, more like how I managed to avoid a horror story.

I'm a first-time GM about to run a pathfinder campaign (our session 0 is next Thursday! wish me luck!) set in a homebrew setting where most of the world is flooded with water. There are no actual continents, just small islands. Very "Pirates of the Caribbean" since I had binged those movies around the time I had the idea for the campaign. awhile ago, I off-handedly mention wanting to start a campaign to a friend, and then a friend of that friend asks if they can join, and suddenly now I have a group wanting to play together! Neat!

I give everybody the lay down of the settings and one player becomes really enthusiastic with their character concept, and that enthusiasm quickly rubs off on me since it felt really awesome to have a person already invested in the world. I get everything sorted with him, but I'm still feeling that itch to talk about the campaign, so I talk to another guy in the campaign, a very close friend of mine. Besties, even! We know things about each other that no man should ever know, thats how close we are.

I talk to him a bit in person about his character, and he says he wants to play a former pirate captain that lost his position after a mutiny. I say sure, but add on that his character should probably not have been a captain for that long, since we would be starting off at level 3. He's fine with this and tells me that he'll send me more about his character over discord. we parted ways and all was well, until I got that fated message.

Later that day, he sends me a very long text describing his character's backstory, saying that ever since he was a child he would "find any animal he could and torture them" and that he "eventually move onto larger animals and rodents like capybara or close relatives." (why the capybaras, man?) and that "his desire to torture those creatures would soon grow numb and he would find it tedious" and so, naturally, he moved on to killing and murdering his family in the night, eventually becoming a pirate and inheriting the ship after the captain died, and then getting mutinied because "the crew soon grew fearful of him"....

I took a moment to process this, collected my thoughts, and sent him the message (word-for-word). "okay, so, I have some notes."

I then explained how this character could potentially be a horrible idea. (not exactly like that, of course, I wanted to be polite and keep an open mind.) mainly mentioning that I want a more light-hearted campaign, that the character concept could very easily lead down the murderhobo route if he wasn't careful, and also that there is a very high chance that this character, as he was at the moment, would cause a lot of conflict in the party. still, I was very open, telling him that he didn't need to get rid of all of the edge, just some of it. his response was, paraphrased, "I definitely didn't consider the murderhobo thing, I honestly just got caught up in my own story, but I'll keep that in mind as I add onto it!"

I bellowed a sweet sigh of relief as I dodged that fatal bullet. and that, my good fellows, was how communication saved this character from the horrible, horrible fate of a murderhobo. thank you for reading!

edit: hate the fact i have to make an addendum but please dont make assumptions about my friend just based on his edgy pathfinder character. this is his first time making a ttrpg character, and we havent even had our session zero yet. he's a very chill and understanding dude irl, so stop assuming the worst about him. again, thank you for taking your time to read my little post.

I'll try to keep this one brief since there isn't a whole lot to it, and it isn't very "horror story" more just "odd behavior".

So we had a guy come play at our table for a while. His playstyle and personality were fine enough for the standards of a bunch of nerds in the late 90s-early 00s. However what's important here is that he brought his own dice, which were completely clear with white numbers.

Every single roll, he would cast his dice and as soon as they stopped he would "cup" the die with his hands to read them. After calling out the number, he would quickly scoop up the die before anyone else can see it.

Of course, this led some players telling me they think he's cheating. We had all noticed the dice rolling behavior, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. But I said I'd pay attention to him.

A couple sessions later, I told the group I did not think he was cheating because his rolls were TRASH. Every session he was rolling consistently under average. But the dice covering still made some people uncomfortable, so we came up with a solution. We had a bunch of spare dice sets, so we gifted him a set that had very easy to read numbers on it. However he continued to roll the dice, hide the result, then scoop them up. I still paid attention, and I will say his rolls got slightly better with the new dice but still not so good he was cheating.

He would end up leaving after about half a year or so, and I never figured out why he was so keen on hiding those piss-poor dice rolls.

I usually play with friends, but we all moved all across the country after graduating, and I still wanted to play DnD in person so I joined a local group.

Campaign was on the dark and gritty side of things, but was mostly pretty fun at first. Unfortunately it didn’t last.

I was playing an Oath of Devotion Paladin, fairly straight-laced. Very much a traditional Lawful Good type character. The party had just arrived in a border town and was waiting for a courier when my paladin sees a thug dragging a young elf girl into an alleyway. Obviously I decide to follow him.

The DM proceeds to describe the thug forcing the girl against the wall and tearing at her clothes. I’ve heard enough and decide to attack. One Smite later and the thug is dead.

The DM turns to me and says, smugly, that my Paladin instantly feels his power dissipate, leaving him a level 4 fighter (the party was level 8 at this point).

His justification was that the country we had just entered was really racist towards elves, so they had no legal rights at all. So the rapist wasn’t committing any crimes at all, so my Paladin had just murdered a guy and was thus no longer Lawful.

I protest that (a) Lawful Good doesn’t mean blindly following laws and (b) that’s not how Paladin Oaths work anyway. But the DM wouldn’t budge, so I decided just to leave that table.

(Quick disclaimers: Thanks to my ADHD this post might digress and ramble in places and I apologize if that happens. Names have also been changed as well and this was written over the course of a few years. Also, this isn’t entirely RPG based, though DnD was the centerpiece and crux of it all.)

Hey, Reddit. Never thought I’d be posting here, but Lo, four or so years after this happened, here we are.

Chapter 1, the Petal on the Tree, None Know of Its Poison Or background until session 1 if you prefer.

I’ll do some background to ‘Set the scene’ as it where. Me and my long time friend I’ll call Luigi had both really wanted to get into Dungeons and Dragons, and since he had since met a friend group on a Minecraft SMP, he decided to DM a home-brew campaign with them and me as his players over Discord. Mind you he’s known these people for about a year by now, so he’s familiar with them all and they all are about in the mid-to-late teen range and as such he feels fine running a PG-13 campaign. This’ll be important later.

The ‘Cast’ of This Shitshow Worthy of Being a TV Drama:

Tax: Me.

Luigi: Long time friend and DM

Petal: Problem player and “friend”

There’s other more minor people, and when they come up they’ll just be their classes.

Around 2020 is when I come in when I am invited to their server for the campaign. I get to know everyone and it’s fine, albeit awkward. However I can tell Petal is a bit off. Whenever she isn’t talking, she’s making sure people are talking about her or a topic she was interested in. I made a mental note of that but didn’t make much of it and the session 0 began about an hour later.

Now like I said this was a home-brew campaign and as such featured an expanded species choice selection. But I decided to be a massive 7 1/2ft monk Warforged who had multi-personality disorders. However after I watched a certain Red Lizard’s video on a problem player who had a multiple-personality character, plus Luigi feeling the Warforged were a little OP and Cell (my Warforged) specifically just didn’t fit his home brew universe, we decided to try draft number 2.

I then decided to take advantage of expanded species selection and chose to be a Mind Flayer warlock who was indebted to a deity for giving him free will from the Elder Brain. However he didn’t like that much so he’d use the god’s good graces and to be frank, stupidity, to go behind its back to find a way to free himself from its servitude.

Luigi nodded (At least I think he did, it was over Discord), and Xûl (pronounced: Zool) was created. Most people just called him Tom. Why Tom specifically? I don’t know. However that wouldn’t matter much. You’ll see why in a bit. He then moved on to the other players. I don’t remember them all well but I do know that we had a human child thief, an Aasimar Paladin, and lastly, Petal’s character. Don’t remember her class but she decided to be a home brewed giant slug. I was skeptical of her playing a giant slug, but then again I was the dingus who wanted to play a 7’8 juggernaut who didn’t feel pain and didn’t need to sleep, eat, breathe, get tired beyond rusting, and due to his design he has a massive flashlight-like head and therefor had built-in dark vision and suddenly I see why Luigi didn’t not want this character in the campaign, Cell was a gap-less monster.

I digress.

“Interesting idea, Petal. Though I don’t think you’d be allowed into any taverns. Which could be an issue with the whole, resting, thing.” I said

“She can sleep standing like a horse. She can just wait outside.” Petal replied

That was fair enough, though I was worried she’d miss out on a lot of RP chances, but who was I to judge what someone wanted to play? Everyone else then got their characters accepted pretty quickly and session zero ended with Luigi telling us the rules, setting, and more about the home brewed world. Seemed interesting.

After session 0 ends, the Kid Thief, Petal, and I all decide to play Stardew Valley together and a way to break the ice and bond for the campaign ahead. While seeming mundane, what happened here would show me the red flag of Petal way before shit hit the fan. We had a lot of fun, albeit Stardew Valley is not really my cup of tea, but it was nice having a friend group to just hang out and play with. I only really had Luigi back then as a friend. It was nice having more people to talk to and more perspectives.

While we were playing Stardew Valley, Petal’s stable was under construction and every in-game day she’d constantly brag about it and how she couldn’t wait to have a horse. The day it was to be completed, everyone who was playing at the time gathered around to watch as it finished (except me, I was lost in the mines somewhere. But I was there in-call!). She was super happy and paraded around the stable and while I was making my way up from the mines she was naming the horse.

I then showed up to the stable and decided as a prank to ride the horse away for a second then return it. However as I galloped away I near over the call,

“Tax give me back my fucking horse you piece of shit dog-ass before I kill you.” She said in a dead serious, non joking tone

I was so taken aback that I silently got off the horse and just sat there in shock. Even as she took the horse back she was still cursing me out and insulting me. And she was not holding anything back. Calling me slurs, attacking me as a person, the works. I was still a pretty sensitive person back then and it coming from a perceived friend who was as old as I was hurt a lot. Didn’t cry but was damn close, especially since she just did not let up on the swearing and insulting for a solid 15 minutes while the Kid Thief just sat in silence, too.

I left the call and game and went to de-stress with some single player gaming and just thought it’d be better on session 1 next Wednesday.

Throughout the week Petal would continue to incessantly preen and brag about her DnD and Minecraft SMP characters. Which I, wanting to burry the hatchet, drew fanart of. I particularly put a lot of effort into one of her SMP characters as she genuinely had an interesting design. Petal just blankly said thanks and went back to bragging about her snail character.

“Oh well.” I thought to myself as I mentally shrugged “Not everyone will like my art.”

But I’d later learn she decided to “deconstruct” it with her friends to mock my art style and lack of experience behind my back. Which…ouch. And I don’t mean Criticize and give ways to improve, more shit on it on say if this was what I wanted my main skill to be, that I had no talent and would be better if I just offed myself, which would make the world a better place than becoming an artist.

Along with that the others, including Luigi, weren’t as charitable as me with her spotlight hogging and relentless insulting. They'd regularly call her out and tell her to know her place in line. However she always chalked it up to her having depression, dissociative disorder, and a laundry list of disorders, including being lesbian??? Now excuse me, I’m not part of the LGBT+ community but last I checked a sexuality being called a disorder is one of the LAST things anyone part of it would like to be called.

I felt like she was deflecting, but due to the climate of the group I kept my mouth shut and just let it run. Luigi also didn’t have the heart to properly discipline her, being friends and all.

Session 1 couldn’t come around sooner, and what better way to start than in a tavern! We were a bunch of nobodies who all just so happened to all be at the tavern as a bunch of Kobolds decided robbing the tavern owner for some gold, cheese, and wine was a smart idea. As they were making off with it my Mind Flayer revealed himself and fired eldritch blasts at them, to which they all got NAT 1’s. All three of them. What chance is that? I got pissed and rage quit, also suffering an anxiety induced panic attack once everyone started laughing at the, now looking back, pretty funny RNG-based blunder.

Now that doesn’t excuse me bailing on the group, that was selfish of me and also hurt Luigi. I still feel bad and was definitely in the wrong there, I should’ve been able to role with the punches but didn’t and ruined the pace and immersion of the game, also gave a bad first impression as a DND player.

After about ten minutes of encouragement I came back and we continued. Petal grappled one of the Kobolds and stuck it onto her back, saying that he was friend now and would have soft tacos later. Xûl, fresh out of cantrips, went on to instead yeet the Kid Thief at one of the Kobolds, tackling and nearly killing it so she could rob it and bring it back to him for a fresh meal, Petal continued to talk about friend now and soft tacos even when it wasn’t her turn and interrupting people so she could brag about her snail. The Aasimar blew one up with a fireball (yes the lvl 1 paladin had fireball, how? I don’t know), Petal CONTINUED to talk about her Kobold friend as she cut off the Kid Thief talking to do so and decided her turn was now instead of after the thief and mine and immediately stuck the tackled Kobold onto her back as well. AGAIN not only reciting the soft tacos vine over and over again like a child, but also robbing the child thief from robbing, and Xûl a delicious Kobald meal-the nerve! Not only did her Snail saying this break immersion because last I checked soft tacos and Vine didn’t exist in 5E, but it just got annoying with now she’d interrupt people and steal their turns. Luigi was still new to DM’ing and was trying to make sure I didn’t have another panic attack so he was a little overwhelmed and kinda just let Petal do that stuff. The session ended shortly after with Petal never shutting up about soft tacos and friends and I sighed as I dropped out for my own mental health. I just wasn’t ready for DnD yet. Yeah I sound like a wimp but anxiety’s one hell of a monster, I’ll tell ya that much, especially for a teenager who was going through some tough stuff during that time.

But I’d quickly burry the hatchet with everyone who understood that I was simply just not mentally ready for DnD yet, including me. Except for Petal. She’d go on to gossip to Luigi and try and get him to stop hanging out with me or to just stop being my friend entirely. Fortunately for me Luigi’s a chad and knew me a lot longer than he did her and knew that I wasn’t usually an asshole nervous wreck like I just was in that session and simply just said “No.”

After session 1 I got promoted to your average Tabaxi and just waited for the sessions to end so Luigi could tell me the next part in an epic story. I didn’t mind (actually very much enjoyed it) and Luigi loved being able to talk to someone about his campaign that wasn’t in it. I also could serve as an outside second opinion who couldn’t use his drafts and ideas to meta-game. Not like I would, anyway, but Luigi’s that kind of paranoid person so it was nice to have that insurance. I don’t blame him, though, and it’s nice having a cautious friend. Though in time we’d both learn he should've been a little more cautious with who he made friends with.

Chapter 2, With the Petal Snapped Lose of the Tree, True Colors Begin to Show Or session 2 until The Reveal if you prefer.

From here time speeds up as frankly, nothing important until The Reveal happens to give context occurred. Really I just sat back, doing my things while Luigi told me of how each session went and bounced the occasional idea off me.

However one specific night Luigi and I were hanging out on Minecraft and he came clean to me that Petal had been talking behind his back. He confided in her with some personal issues and she turned around and gossiped to her friends. Then she turned back around and sighed and moaned that she was the group therapist, despite every single session would turn into a “Comfort me and let me vent my baggage to everyone” session instead of DnD.

She often used her sexuality and mental illnesses as excuses for her actions also reached and all time high. She’d treat the other girl players like garbage in and out of game, even her girlfriend, and when called out she’d just say “Whoops! That’s just how I show my love, if you don’t like it, leave!” Or when pressed she’d cancel the impromptu intervention because “Her anxiety and depression where flaring up!” As someone with anxiety, being told you’re being a dick doesn’t ‘flare it up’. And someone who has a whole family to has a history of and actively has depression, I can tell you how she was acting was a quack’s way whose never actually seen depression or lived with an entire family who has it.

Depression, from my experience with family, isn’t “Ugh I’m sad and hate everything”, it’s more “I have zero motivation and nothing brings happiness or satisfaction.” And it flares in waves, it isn’t a get out of jail free card whenever you’re being called out. But she goes by the average internet idea depression is just Sadness ++. Which…it's not. But that's just how I've grasped depression, I'm no expert and I've never had it myself.

But no one wanted to press her since she was good at crocodile tears, too. So she’d always get away with treating people like garbage and blatantly having a favorite person in the group (it was Luigi) and would constantly shaft her friends to try and spend time with him, even telling him if he didn’t get off call with me or someone else, she’d hurt herself or worse. He’s always call her bluff and wouldn’t you know it, she never did!

But then, one day as I’m chatting with Luigi, something outstanding is told to me.

“Hey Lou, anything new with Petal?” I asked, as he usually had a new horror story about her behavior to tell me

“Well funny story, Tax. Petal’s been completely removed from the group.”

I was dumbfounded. I had to pry further.

“Wh-? Why? Did her girlfriend or you finally snap?”

“More they shouldn’t have been dating.”

*Insert Inception boom

“So what would you guess Petal’s age is?” He asked

“Well she said sixteen. But since you’re asking me this, I have to assume not.”

“She was twelve.”

Petal had lied to everyone and used AI upscaling to make her selfies look older so she could play at the big kids table since she felt she was “Too smart for other kids my age.” Along with that, she didn’t have any of those disorders, she just thought it’d give her sympathy points and excuses, which it did. Until they found out because Petal was a moron and showed her birth certificate to her now ex girlfriend while in a heated argument where she questioned Petal's maturity.

Needless to say Petal was banished from the group and everyone blocked her on everything. Not only because you could hear the avatar of Chris Hansen beginning to manifest, given that all of them were 16/17 and I was 18 at this point, but also since one of them dated her and she lied to her for nearly a year. Along with her entire person, top to bottom, was a lie.

While I’m no longer in that group, I have heard from Luigi that Petal has been promoted to boogeyman that they always tell new players and friends of how lying gets you nowhere and eventually you will pay the price. And Petal's character next session promptly tripped up the stairs and exploded into the tacos she'd never shut up about. Was a pretty funny scene and a nice bonding moment between the players to close the book on such a toxic player.

As for cleanup, Xûl and Cell have been recycled to being characters in my own non-DnD stories, Luigi and I are still close friends, the DND group is still going strong, albeit with a few hiccups here and there, and finally Petal ended up finding a new group to leech off of apparently and that was the last I heard of her.

TL;DR, 'Friend' lies about her age so we would trust and fakes mental illnesses so no one would challenge her. Eventually her lies catch up with her and she's kicked from the group.

So here is the deal. I've been in a D&D campaign for a while now. It's run by a friend of mine and the entire group knows each other. It's a 5e campaigned rescinded as Star Wars, but wirh nothing added or changed to fit Star Wars.

The problem, however, is the DM. She is apparently afraid of failure, so the entire campaign as a whole has been a massive cakewalk. Here are the two biggest issues.

1. We are level 5. The strongest enemy wr have encountered is a group of reskinned CR 1/2 warrior NPCs.

2. Even if you would normally fail a check by not meeting the DC, she'll still let it pass if your outcome is an even number. Statistically, that means that even someone with +0 or -1 to a skill will have a 50/50 chance of succeeding a DC 20 check.

I want to find a good way to telling her that her campaign has been not fun, as there is literally no chance of tragedy or failure, but I don't want to hurt her feelings. Can someone help me please?

TLDR

Crappy DM (me) fails to include volatile player in a critical point in the campaign resulting in a blow up and said player leaving the campaign. I learn from my mistakes but at what cost?

Background

This story happened right at the start of Covid. I had picked up dnd out of sheer boredom but generally speaking I always had a knack for world building and fantasy. With this I began to read up and prepared myself to run games albeit in isolation. Up until this point I have only ever played with my friends who for better or worse didn't instantly love the game like I did.

Hence me going to r/lfg and assembling my first party and first 'serious' game. For all intents and purposes there are 4 people here; me, angry barbarian, calm barbarian (2 friends that joined my game together. The main players in this story) , and the rest of the party (The 3 remaining players for the most part were bystanders during this excursion). With this party all coming together the game began.

Starting the Campaign

For the first month or so of the campaign it ran pretty much without major incidents. I was getting my footing with these strangers and the party was working together. There were however some minor issues that as I would soon come to find would be a precursor to the downfall of this iteration of the party.

The most vivid problem that I remember was when the party was supposed to be fighting in darkness which I as a DM forgot and a member from the rest of the party attempted to correct mid combat. This resulted in a very strong reaction from angry barbarians whos turn conveniently fell on that moment. After the long moment of silence, I wiped the slate clean redefined the darkness and told down both players that I intend on handling these situations individually.

There were many other snappy remarks and just generally poor behavior from angry barbarians but nothing that to me at least was out of line in my eyes. Calm barbarian usually offered good insight and would talk down angry barbarian in certain situations. In this time I was working on my prep skills and generally talking to the players about expectations and specifically how the table would be ruled by me with input if need be (this would actually turn out to be a problem that would last a little too long for my liking with this rest of the party member but we're still here now).

Novice DM Splits the Party...

This brings us to the meltdown. This session had rather large implications within the scope of the campaign arc. The party was attempting to dismantle a neighboring town by taking out the leader. It is important to note for this session calm barbarian could not make it but gave the green flag to play since angry barbarian would be there and both of their characters were neigh on the same. The party splits up into the barbarians and the rest of the party who go in search of the leader and to set a trap to be able to secure the kill. It was during this time that the rest of the party would be paid a surprise visit from the leader and combat would start for them right away. It is in this time that I ask angry barbarian what the barbarians are doing to which the response was "nothing they aren't there. They (the barbarian PCs) don't know what's going on". From here was where I made my biggest mistake of the whole session with the response "ok". The combat would conclude with the barbarians intervention occurring after the battle.

Angry barbarian from this incident would leave the call blow up on me and later that night I talked with calm barbarian about the situation and how I should have improved upon the situation. We took a week off and in that time the barbarians would leave the game leaving the rest of the party. Two of which I DM for to this day

My Retrospect and My Question to you

This session has had me split as I do not know who is really in the wrong here or what could have been done better. It was clear to me that angry barbarian posed a problem but up until this session those issues were getting resolved. I botched the timing of the leader encounter and I failed to include the barbarians in that combat after it commenced. Calm barbarian should have been at the session and his advice was good saying how I should have reupped the commotion within the town for the barbarians to see. What would you have done in this situation? Did I dodge a bullet by not having to boot the barbarians? Was Angry Barbarian justified in his actions?

​

So a couple of the old tabletop crew and I were reminiscing recently, and we brought up some of the "horror story" players who only came a couple times before not getting invited back. I will make posts for some of the notable ones, but this guy stood out as an obvious first.

So we played a pretty relaxed game most of the time, I'd say roughly 50% in-character RP. I knew a guy, we'll call him Justin, who had said he'd played a little in the past and was looking for a table. We were always trying out new players, so I told him to come on over.

We all meet, he's meshing relatively well with the core group, though a little bit more "intense" than our more casual players. Some of the guys at the table did not delve into "nerd culture" past D&D while Justin is talking about anime and such. Not a big deal, he's obviously nervous and we've seen that countless times before now.

We get started playing and he's coming out of his shell. Maybe too much. The first sign of what to come is when he says "I swing my sword at the goblin!" and mimes swinging a sword horizontally. Nobody thinks anything of it, we've all got caught up in the moment before. Not typically for the first attack roll of the night, but hey, different strokes, or swings in this case.

As the night goes on, we watch Justin pantomime EVERYTHING his character does. Attacks, drinking potions, dodging traps, eating food, EVERYTHING. For a while, it's a little "much", but ultimately still tolerable. At one point, he slid his chair back to stand and "fire an arrow". Afterwards, we would agree we all assumed he'd eventually pick up that the rest of us are not acting out every single thing our characters are doing.

The straw that broke the hippogriff's back, however, was when they encountered a lone hippogriff in the woods. After some deliberation, Justin decides he wants the hippogriff to be his new mount. He stands from his chair, steps away from the table, and announces, "I leap onto the hippogriff's back and hold on until it accepts me as it's rider!" while, of course, taking several large steps and leaping across the dining room. This was an old house, and the landing caused everything to shake.

At this point, our most outspoken (and the owner of the house) member shouted, "Enough! You can calm your ass down and stay in your seat!" Justin did go back and stay in his seat, however he continued his charades for the rest of the night.

After it was over, he thanked me for inviting him.

I responded, "Justin, have you ever thought about LARPing? I think you'd like it better."

The usual Stuff: English is not my first language, first post, long time lurker, tl;dr below, you know the drill. This is the tragic (and pretty long) story of a campaign that started with problems, then completely derailed several times and finally ended with a burning wreck. The whole thing happened about 7 years ago and most of the group were relatively new to the hobby and relatively young (16-19). The story took place in a self-written set of rules, which later worked quite well, but still had some problems at the time. Fortunately, most of the drama was limited to in-game stuff, but it was still quite the journey.

The extensive cast:
- Gold, our DM. Still quite inexperienced at the time, but has my massive respect for how he somehow kept this adventure on course for quite a long time despite all the disasters.
- Uranium (me), creator of the rulebook. Initially played a mad scientist serving a sinister sea deity in this round. I wouldn't blame myself for some of the events to come, but I definitely wasn't innocent either. So, That Guy.
- Mercury, initially played my Doctor's rather dim but extremely battle-hardened Henchman. A bit to enthusiastic about killing other player characters at the time. That Guy.
- Helium, played a very very edgy necromancer. Had a pretty strong tendency to overestimate himself. His character was the partner of Silver's character. That Guy.
- Arsenic, played a druid for a short time, but then switched to an evil paladin who belonged to the same deity as my doctor. Had amazingly good dice at important moments, but strangely would avoid to roll them openly at any cost. That Guy.
- Silver, played an elven archer. His character was the necromancer's partner.
- Iron, played a dwarven warrior who became the party leader. Apparently his dice luck was stolen by Arsenic.
- Copper, played a Naga necromancer on a secret mission for her order. Not the best secret agent.

Prologue - The stage
Gold has the adventure loosely based on the Icewinddale trilogy, but ported to our homebrew world and with a few changes. In an icy region, an evil wizard was up to mischief, and there was also a conflict between barbarians and a group of fanatical inquisitors.

The game was played online via Discord. However, dice rolls were initially made with real dice without a cam, so you couldn't see the rolls of other players. Also, only the players who were currently in the scene with their characters were present in the voice channel.

The group met up on the journey through the icy wasteland, with each character having their own goals and some of us working for competing organizations. Arsenic joined the group later. The first section of this story is mainly characterized by our edgy necromancer.

​

Act 1 - The somewhat inglorious death of the Chosen One
The Necromancer of Helium had an... “interesting” backstory. Born to simple farmers, one day his village was attacked by necromancers. His parents were tortured and killed in front of him, which the youngster naturally took as proof of their weakness and joined the necromancers. It also turned out that he had enormous magical potential and was chosen by a prophecy to one day rule the whole world!

In the end, however, he fell madly in love with a prisoner of his necromancer family, the elf of Silver. As a result, he not only destroyed the other necromancers himself to save her, but also an elite squad of the Inquisition. To put this in perspective, this is roughly equivalent to a level 1 wizard in D&D single-handedly crushing a few liches and then two dozen level 10 paladins.

The main problem was that his Necromancer behaved as if he was the Chosen One with unlimited power, even within the adventure. Unfortunately, the reality was somewhat different. The rules allowed a great deal of freedom when creating characters. Helium took advantage of this and gave his necromancer extremely high values in intelligence, magic and charisma.

In theory, this allowed him to cast very powerful spells at the start - but he had very few points left at character creation. Therefore, although he had the potential to cast powerful spells, he only knew two very simple spells, a spell to torture defenseless targets and a healing spell. The second and even bigger problem was his HP.

In this rulebook, characters had 70 HP by default. Tanks could start at 90-100, but you could also spare some HP and go to 60-50 if you were brave. Helium, however, had so ruthlessly maxed his stats that greater sacrifices were necessary. And so he started with 30 HP. Without wearing any armor. And the only weapon he used was a short sword.

The first encounter consisted of a fight against two mountain trolls, who were pretty strong opponents for this level. Even a character with normal HP had the potential to be at least knocked out in one hit. Fortunately, I had a secret biological weapon at my disposal: my trusty Henchmen. He had its stats distributed in such a way that he was perfect for fighting and doing physical work. My character, who was basically a kind of tank mage, took care of the rest.

The Henchmen was so strong that he defeated one of the two mountain trolls on his own. However, Helium couldn't let that stand, as his character was the mighty Chosen One and therefore threw himself into close combat against the second troll. Iron's dwarf warrior tried to support him, but unfortunately he slipped on the snow due to a crit fail and managed to inflict more damage on himself than any of us took from the troll.

The necromancer did no damage at all, but fortunately wasn't hit either, before the second troll was quickly reduced to rubble by the Focus Fire of the rest of the group.

So the journey continued, and just before the next town we decided to rest for the night in a cave. Here Helium had a wonderful idea: he wanted to get Henchmen drunk and gave him a strong drink. Now that Henchmen was even more animalistic than before, the necromancer tried to train him as a kind of dancing bear. Henchmen refused this service, so the necromancer did the only logical thing: he used his torture spell on him. This didn't have much effect, except that it made Henchmen angry and he threw a stone at the necromancer.

It was a critical hit. The high strength of the Henchmen resulted in a damage of 45. Including armor, this would have been painful for a normal character, but not too serious. For the necromancer without armor and with 30 maximum HP, this meant instant death.

Gold tried to save the day and the necromancer was merely knocked out. But it didn't matter, because Helium said this was “bullshit” and left the round on the spot without ever returning. Silver might have had reason to turn against us in terms of RP, but he was a grown-up and mainly let his archer mourn her lover, so there was no further PvP. For the time being.

Unfortunately, after this speed run to death was over, things really got going. In the next round, Arsenic joined our group and this was the moment when the real horror began.

​

Act 2 - Arson, shit on the doorstep and another character death
When we arrived in the city, we met Arsenic's first character, a pyromaniac druid. His first act was to set fire to a passenger ship just leaving the harbor. Not that there were any of his enemies on this ship, he just set it on fire to see what would happen. Likeable guy.

Unfortunately, the character was too boring for him. So in the very next round he switched to a paladin of the same god that my evil scientist served. However, this had the unfortunate consequence that Gold had actually planned a whole not unimportant druid subplot, which was now simply awkwardly there, but to which none of our characters had a relationship anymore.

The town was quickly attacked by a horde of undead. Our dwarven warrior led us into battle and fought a duel with an undead sabre-toothed tiger. Unfortunately, a critical failure during the attack caused him to sink his own axe into his leg in the very first round of battle. This not only caused a lot of damage, but also left him unable to move. Several attempts on his part to pull out the axe failed despite his high strength value because his D20 was apparently incapable of rolling more than a 5. Meanwhile, the poor dwarf was mauled by the saber-toothed tiger for several rounds, but barely survived due to his high HP.

In the end, the attack was repulsed and the dwarf was declared the leader of our expedition because of his bravery - and probably also because he was the only one of our characters who didn't seem like a psychopath. So we had our first rest in the town, where we all spent the night in a cozy tavern - and after that, things went downhill very quickly...

Arsenic's character stayed awake longer than the others, got completely drunk and robbed the innkeeper. He then defecated in front of the door to my doctor's tavern room. So the next morning, my character was in for a rather unpleasant surprise. In retrospect, however, my choice of words was not a particularly good idea: “If we catch the bastard who did this, he's going to die.” For Mercury this wish was his command and when he identified Arsenic's paladin as the culprit, he didn't hesitate for long.

My doctor began to engage the paladin in a fistfight. Meanwhile, the Henchmen jumped on the Paladin from behind and tried to strangle him with a garrote. The paladin then drew his two-handed sword and tried to cut our characters to pieces. However, he was no match for the Henchmen and was finally knocked unconscious by my doctor.

We decided to feed the paladin to three captured trolls in the marketplace. To this end, the paladin was bound, gagged and dragged to the cage. Gold's attempt to subtly appeal to diplomacy was skillfully ignored by us. The moment we opened the door, however, the paladin cast a spell that freed him. This was strange because as the author of the rulebook I was very sure that this spell required free hands, Gold was of the same opinion but Arsenic insisted that he had written the spell out and it didn't say anything about free hands. So Gold looked at the character sheet and sure enough, no mention of free hands.

So the second fight broke out, while the captured trolls escaped and ran amok in the city. Our fight ended relatively quickly due to the fact that the Paladin miraculously rolled 4 critical successes in a row and killed the Henchmen with three maximum damage hits. Amazing coincidences do happen.

While the madness was going on outside, the rest of the players were still in the tavern in another voice channel, passing the time with RP. Copper made his grand entrance here. His character was on a secret mission and knew about a number of powerful Naga artifacts hidden in the region. The Naga was supposed to secretly (!) recover them and secure them for her people. So the logical conclusion was to tell this in detail to all the other characters from other factions, while the DM was not there to intervene.

As the battle broke out outside, the rest of the group joined us. My doctor and the paladin were arrested. The naga now had the brilliant idea of how to fight the trolls: By summoning a horde of skeletons! So now trolls, skeletons and the town guard were fighting each other in the village. A short time later, we found ourselves back at the gates of the town, with the request never to return.

I decided to retire my doctor as I felt pretty bad about the situation afterwards as my action had completely derailed the session. I apologized to Gold and built a new character that was less confrontational.

After the round, we looked at the spell in the rulebook. It clearly stated that you need free hands. This passage had mysteriously disappeared from Arsenic's character sheet... when asked, he couldn't explain how this had happened.

Act 3 - A grave, a turncoat, an inquisitor and an explosive finale
After the massacre in the village, the group calmed down a little for a while. Arsenic and Copper canceled most of the appointments at short notice, which is why their characters acted as NPCs most of the time. Mercury had chosen an alchemist as his new character, who could create various different potions and items. My new character was a vampire who practised a forbidden school of magic and was characterized above all by an absurdly high charisma value.

Our path led us to a tomb in which a powerful artifact was hidden, as we now knew thanks to our talkative Naga. Before that, however, we came across a horde of barbarians who worshipped the tomb as a shrine. My vampire took over the negotiations and learned that an Inquisition force had landed on the coast and was on its way here. I convinced the barbarians to let us enter the tomb to retrieve the artifact so that we could destroy the Inquisition soldiers together.

There was some fighting and puzzling in the tomb until we finally encountered a powerful undead. Since both my character and myself are cowards, I brought a strategic retreat into play, but the group disagreed. The Paladin of Arsenic had stayed behind as an NPC at the tomb entrance to stand guard. So I decided to at least alert him and made my way to the entrance. There, however, I didn't come across barbarians and the paladin, but a Grand Inquisitor and his army of elite soldiers.

I decided to change my faith and told our benevolent Grand Inquisitor that the barbarians had forced us to desecrate the tomb. In reality, of course, I was an agent of the Church, sent out on a secret mission to investigate the situation on the ground. Fortunately, the Grand Inquisitor was a good fighter, but not too bright, so he didn't realize that this was a complete lie, nor that my character was a vampire. So I became the Inquisitor's personal advisor and was separated from the rest of the group for most of the remaining time.

The group inside was able to defeat the undead. When they came out of the tomb, my character and the Grand Inquisitor had already disappeared. Not some of the lesser inquisitors, though. As Mercury's and Silver's characters had both had bad experiences with the Inquisition, they decided to launch a surprise attack, which was successful.

After the inquisitors were dead, another tomb was looted. Here the group fought a frost dragon, and Copper's naga fell to the ground. Iron's warrior dwarf tried to drag the necromancer off the battlefield, but he lost a tug-of-war with the dragon to a bad dice roll, resulting in him suddenly only holding half of the naga.

Shortly afterwards, the group was captured by the Inquisition. My vampire was able to convince the Inquisitor to spare the group. Only the Paladin of Arsenic, who was also captured, insisted on a duel against the Grand Inquisitor. However, after a new rule was introduced that throws must be made in public, he strangely canceled at short notice.

The heretical paladin was thus executed. In the meantime, however, the evil mage behind the undead had captured my now NPC doctor and had him breed an army of henchmen-troll hybrids. So it came down to an epic battle between the Inquisition and that troll army.

In the meantime, we had collected some artifacts. As a magical advisor to the Inquisition, it was now up to my character to identify them. Unfortunately, I didn't succeed with all of them, and the naga who knew more was known to have become dragon fodder. On the one hand, there was a kind of magical crystal sphere, and on the other, a shell-shaped bowl had been found on the evil paladin. So I had an idea. What would happen if you put the ball in the sphere?

Well, i found out several things:

1. the sphere only fitted into the shell very well by chance
2. the two artifacts were dedicated to different deities who absolutely disliked each other
3. the sphere was the magical equivalent of an atomic bomb

The ensuing explosion not only tore my character into several pieces, but also half the army's camp. At the same time, the released spell drove all living creatures for miles that did not pass a saving throw insane, so that the entire Inquisition army was wiped out within a few minutes.

Since my character was a vampire, he barely survived despite massive damage, but was unconscious. Iron's dwarf warrior, meanwhile, wandered the battlefield grievously wounded and decided it was time to end it. He would dispatch my vampire and himself with his axe in a final fit of insanity - but before he could do so, he failed a Constitution roll and collapsed from his wounds.

And with that, not only was the whole region presumably doomed, but the adventure ended.

Helium never played in any of our groups again.

Both I and all the other members of the group cut all ties with Arsenic after he said some very questionable things in voice chats. In addition, at some point before he said in connection with the adventure: “It's not cheating if you don't get caught.“

Copper didn't play in any of our rounds again either, but as far as I know this was mainly due to the fact that he turned to other hobbies.

The rest of the cast still play together today.

After the adventure, Mercury set himself the questionable goal of killing another player character. He tried this three more times, with his characters losing out twice. The third time he was successful. He hasn't initiated PvP since then.

I myself have not participated in any PvP since the adventure. I now only try to play characters that aren't quite as vicious or cowardly as the ones in this round. At least the vicious part I think I manage quite well.

Iron still suffers a Vietnam trauma as soon as you mention his dwarf warrior. His characters have never touched a battle axe again.

Silver is still a very good and relaxed player with great RP

Years later, Gold got the chance to try his Icewinddale dream adventure again with Rime of the Frostmaiden. This time it worked much better and it was one of the best rounds we've had so far.

We have now banned PvP from our rounds - and in memory of this adventure, I think that's for the best.

The End

How the hell do I summarize this now? Well, let's give it a try:

Tl;dr
A group of characters sets out into the ice desert. Half of them die from PvP. The round is completely derailed several times. The DM somehow tries to keep the whole thing on track. In the end, OP accidentally blows up the entire party.

So I play Dnd with some friends. Our forever DM usually hosts games at his dorm. This was our most recent campaign as we haven’t played Dnd at all since (I think I may try to DM in the future though). Our game was a time travel campaign that involved us trying to stop this evil time lord. Our actions had a lot of weight in this campaign as anything we did in the Prime Material Plane (homebrewed world), Shadowfell, or Feywild would affects the future. The DM also homebrewed some time spells so most of us ended up choosing magical classes (wizard, warlock, bard, druid, and me—a paladin). We started off in this quaint town and then set out, found some Atlantis style ruins, and then went to the grand city of Tyloria (capital of a great empire) where the Time Lord’s minions (demons-some low level enough for us to fight and survive) attacked it and destroyed it.

We then fled to a secretive city state that the Time Lord had not ravaged yet and found a time crystal that gave us access to the near future—which was post apocalyptic and hellish. Made to look like the Time Lord’s fiery empire in the 9 hells (which itself was unaffected by time travel).

Now this is where I need to add some context about our real life group dynamics. As I mentioned, we met at our DM’s dorm and we were all good friends. We would come over to his place on Saturdays, eat some food (usually from on campus), play Dnd, and then play video games and talk about life until we went home.

One day however, warlock’s player suggested we eat something good for once and go off campus. DM suggested Chick-Fil-A. He LOVED Chick-Fil-A and hadn’t been there in forever cause so far away and he doesn’t drive. Wizard’s player said he wanted some Mexican food from around that same area so he’d go out and get it. We all agreed to get our food from around that area too and we ordered our food. DM said he wanted two spicy chicken sandwiches, frosted lemonade, extra ranch, and a large order of waffle fries. He texted his order to the group chat as well. We then gave wizard’s player the money and he went off to get our food.

Unfortunately, I don’t know if wizard’s player forgot or the restaurant screwed it up cause they gave him a regular chicken sandwich and no ranch. DM was like “Is this regular? I said spicy. And where is the ranch? That’s like the best part? Come on man.” Wizard’s player then just said “Stop being a baby and just eat the damn sandwich.” DM then said “I even gave you a tip!” Wizard’s player then said “There’s no real difference between the spicy and regular anyway.” which ENRAGED the DM as they started arguing and escalating until this was now a full blown shouting match. I was afraid hands were going to get thrown until DM just said “Let’s just get back to the fucking game!”

And we did as DM barely touched his sandwich. We picked up as the party returned to the past in order to figure out how to stop the BBEG but we returned greeted by an Infernal Knight who told us that time is the domain of the Time Lord—not low lives like us. And immediately attacked us. We were level 3–he was a CR 20 monster. We had no chance and got TPK’d on the spot.

We all were upset and tried to protest and DM just said skill issue til wizard’s player just called him out for doing this “Over a fucking sandwhich!” and DM just said “Like I said, skill issue. You couldn’t get a basic order right. Maybe god made intelligence and wisdom your dump stat.” Wizard’s player just stormed out and the rest of us just were kind of silent for a sec and then we left too.

Like I said, we haven’t had a game since. DM apologized to the rest of us (except Wizard’s player) for the TPK but said he still doesn’t wanna DM anymore. Wizard’s player and DM aren’t talking and we are all just kind of sad that our friend group has been soured by this.

tldr Friend group and Dnd campaign ruined over a Chick-Fil-A order.

Hello. I [M22] was playing with 6 friends. A rather large party, I know, but we seemed to be having fun. The player in question [M39] has Main Character syndrome. He's been working on it, and he was much better than we was in previous games we played. However, he indoctrinated 2 players into having specific backstories/relationships tied to him. It's not TOO big of a deal, but it did make it a little more difficult for the other two. They played together for a while, 4 of them being more wuick to action/violence than most, not even taking into account moral grays.

Whatever, I edit my campaign a bit to try to help keep it appealing to them. A new member joins, who I THOUGHT was a friend of one of the current players (turns out they met a single time. Definitely would've been more hesitant to let him play if that was the case). He comes in and is a more peace oriented character. A College of Eloquence Bard (and before you think it, he didn't actually get to use his insane persuasion because he joined at a place where it wasn't happening much and never really asked to try and persuade people. He was super cool.

They're confronting an evil noble who they suspect has been taking messengers and imprisoning or killing them. He and another player say they should try to organize a duel since this noble has particular beef with one party member. The others wanted to walk in and try to just kill him. They are convinced to be more careful. The noble engaged in the duel, and he turned out to have been a copy. After that, the inciting player seemed to go off the deep end. Having his character cut his hair, putting on his military armor, and going full soldier. He told me that he was going to pose an ultimatum to the party. They don't do anymore talking, and they just kill all the people in the thieves guild.

We get to the session, and he doesn't say that to them. I assumed maybe he's calmed down. Oh, and he separated his character, the brother, and the third guy's character away from the other 3. So, at the beginning of the session, I was bouncing back and forth between the groups as they did their investigating. Eventually, they meet up, and they decide to keep searching. They find a lead and follow two members of the thieves/assassin's guild toward their base. The new player says in character that while they're talking about not letting their emotiona control them, they're acting pretty angry/aggravated. The soldier character says, "No, I'm acting as a soldier! I am a leader, and I lead and follow orders! You either are in, or you're out." Posing the ultimatum halfway through the session.

The new player in character makes a comment saying something about something else, and the player just says, "Im done. I'm leaving. See you tomorrow (other player)" and leaves. We all are pretty confused, and the other player leaves the call to call the player that left. The player of the brother of the soldier character also leaves. I chatted with the two peaceful members (the other one felt sick and didn't join the session), and we ended for the night.

I wake up to the discord server gone, the creator of the server (player of the brother character) telling me that I basically have to choose between him, the soldier player, and the other player, or the peaceful players. And that the soldier player can't play with the others and is done with them. They never spoke to me or the other two players and just peaced out. They invited me to continue playing with them, but they were done with my campaign, and the brother player would take over as DM for a new campaign. And I'm utterly baffled how that person whose nearly 40 and one of the more level headed people I know decided to act like a 9 year old throwing a tantrum, refusing to change (after I and one of the other players changed for him), and didn't even attempt to talk it out.

TLDR: Players disagreed, and instead of talking about it, he got his friend to kick everyone from the server and told me to end the campaign

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Bonus Content: Solider Charcter Guy also said he was attached to this character, and he was in his mindset a lot. I mentioned that they were heading towards a dungeon and that there was a good chance that members of the party could die. He then looks at me and says, "Oh, my character isn't dying. If things look bad, he's teleporting away using Dimension Door". Assumably just leaving either his childhood friend or twin brother there to DIE with the rest of the party!

Greetings and hello, I am Kyo. A perma GM of many years. I've run god knows how many games at this point so I have a fair amount of horror stories, but this one is particularly egregious, but I still laugh at it and decided on a whim to type it up while i'm bored at work. Most of the interactions of the problem player could be passed off as playing a particularly horny swashbuckler, and I chose to ignore the mounting red flags because "Haha, who the fuck is going to touch themselves in the middle of a session."

I am a straight man, this is somewhat important to the story and as a preface, i don't care what your particular enjoyment of another humans genitals lean.

The setting is Pathfinder 1e homebrewed campaign where the theme was random adventures and just being guild members and adventuring with a very large open world feel on roll20.

I had four players in this particular instance, three of them were normal players, nothing noteworthy about them in terms of story. The gnome wizard emotionally hurt me and my Gibbering Mouthers.

A gnome illusionist wizard: Nice dude, he was very creative with his illusions.
Human cleric of Shelyn: She was friendly but quiet, combat was more her thing.
Half-orc fighter: He was a pretty normal fighter, he used a spear and shield.
Captain fap: Captain fap played a male elven swashbuckler. He professed he was gay.

Session 0: Session 0 goes quite well, we get the plot and themes, players wants and limits on what they want to see in the campaign. There were no real red flags aside from Captain saying he finds my voice attractive. I tell him i'm flattered but not interested in using DND to find relationships as is one of my rules. We are here to smash dragon heads in, not fellow players. He seems to take this in grace and understanding. No problems right? I fuckin wish.

Session 1: The players are introduced to the bartender, a retired adventurer and an old character of mine living out his dreams and helping new adventurers by filtering them to safer quests while more dangerous ones go to more experience quests. His name was Belkath. I like to start my sessions off by allowing each character to introduce themselves to him while he serves them a drink that gives them a small boost for the next level or session. Magical drinks that cause things like "You feel the sense of RIGHTEOUS MIGHT AND A SENSE TO PURSUE JUSTICE! Gain a +2 on your attacks." The effects of the drink are based on a d20 roll.

Players roll initiative. Gnome gets a potion that made him feel the same elation and wonder of the first time he cast a spell. Fighter gets a potion that made him feel the fear of death grasping at his heart before he steeled himself.

Then we get to captain.

Captain gets a drink that reminds him of those feel good things of summer. Whimsy, wonder, ect. To note, the drinks are only alcoholic if the player desires and unless they roll a nat 1 on fort, won't make them drunk unless they wish it to.

Cap: "Oh, I do love a big strong Ork serving me drinks. "
He then asks to roll diplomacy to attempt to seduce the Ork bartender. I tell him I will allow it, but to make me a perception check first. He rolls the perception check and passes. I tell him "You see on the Orc's hand is a wedding ring." Leaving no uncertain terms that he was married.
Cap: "I roll my diplomacy anyway. I tell the Ork "If you keep serving me drinks like this I might just have to put a ring on you~""

Now, I allow for players to flirt with my NPC's or even date them, I just fade to black if things get down and dirty.

Belkath, being a man of good humor replies with a loud laugh that fills the bar. "I'm flattered kid, but i'm in a committed relationship, and my love of my wife burns hotter than her breath."
Now, I make Belkath married for three reasons.
1: He is an 18th level fighter and I do not wish to have an DMPC, I just want to be able to roleplay as my first character.
2: His wife is a Elder Silver dragon that he impressed when he fought her to a stand still.
3: It gives me a reason to have a strong spell caster that can craft any items they need that they would struggle to buy or find normally.

Cap: "Oh, I don't mind being your side peace."

I laugh it off and move on. Swashbucklers gonna Swashbuckler.

The cleric gets a drink that makes her feel like someone is watching her, giving her a bonus to her perception.

The session goes on and no real issues.

Session 2: There were no real red flags that i would have noticed during the session, rather just things I see now retroactively. Captain would breathe heavily occasionally on mic passing it off as having to go off and do something and hurrying to get back. Sure, it's DND, people from the heavier side of things are fairly common.
Captain continues to flirt with random NPC's, teetering that line between SFW flirting and NSFW flirting. We are all adults so its whatever.

Session 3 4 and 5: Everything continues as usual, except Captain starts muting himself so he doesn't bleed from the mic. He would do this for 4-5 minutes at a time and only once or twice a session. So, makes sense if he is doing running like he said he is.

Session 6 The clusterfucking: Session six. We are about half way through a small dungeon crawl and they are starting to approach the boss of it. After a break and doing a ready check for players we begin the bosses monologue. I'm getting into a good pace "Blah blah blah, you'll never defeat me puny adventurer's". Then we hear it from his Mic. A weird noise. Like flesh slapping flesh. Rapidly. The call goes quiet. The only noise is slapping flesh and heavy panting.

Gnome: "What the fuck."

Me: "Uhh, swashbuckler, what the fuck are you doing?"

The swashbuckler quickly mutes himself and started to type in chat, saying he was slapping his leg out of boredom.

I am a seasoned GM and I take no shit from bad players.
So naturally, I banned him from the server, booted him from the game on roll20 and blocked him personally, as did the other players.

I didn't quite know how to continue from there so we ended the session. The fighter quit the game not long after, no longer wishing to be a part of it. The campaign died before we hit session 7.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed my suffering and unwittingly helping a dude get his rocks off without my knowledge.

Hey there, so I'll recap the story i posted a month ago, so be warned, it has mentions of SA:

One month ago, an Irl d&d group i was a part of had made several SA jokes towards me, an SA survivor + 15 year old, because i was stuck in a room with the only female player at the table. I blew up at the dm, and he almost kicked me out because i "can't take a joke." He knew what had happened to me, yet he still did what he did. After i posted my story, my favorite worker at the gamestore the game was hosted at became manager, and due to everyone helping me via telling me what to do (thank you all by the way, even if some people got the story wrong and tried to say that i was an SA'er... somehow) I had told him and he told off the DM. Unfortunately, he can't ban the dude for saying stuff that he didn't hear. However he's on thin ice.

Here's the sweet, sweet ending everyone wants to hear:

Cut to a month ago, here i am. I left the d&d group there, however i still go to the gamestore and get stuff from time to time, saying hi to my favorite manager ever, in a place where i finally feel safe. I now host d&d online, i found some discord groups and now I'm finally having fun both as a DM and as a player. Both with friends, and over the Internet randoms. I'm finally having fun in an environment where i feel safe and secure. My new groups know my triggers, and make sure they don't trigger them. I feel happy playing this game that i love again, and in part, i owe it to this reddit for pushing me to report that DM to the store. Thank you all. I unfortunately have one more post to make in this server, but I won't right now. It's a lot less...horrible than the last story, but it's still not good either. I'll see you all in that next post, thank you all for your help.

Repost of this because the last one got a lot of negative attention and was made over two months ago. I might get negative comments again but whatever. Facts are facts. I didn't make this post originally for ADVICE. I just made it to VENT. Here's a story from a horrible DM about a horrible player.

The details make the bulk of it, but are entirely skippable if you want.

!!!TLDR AND EDIT AT THE END!!!

I love creating stories and worlds in my head. They come in all kinds of formats. Books, movies, comics, and video games to name a few but the book variety is the only kind I thought I would ever have skill enough for. (Edit: started making pixel art and now plotting out a game with a friend)

Then, I was introduced to TTRPGs by Curie (I'm calling her by one of her character's names). The first campaign I was in, she was the GM and I was the player. With her help, I created this cool cursed, cowboy necromancer named Sheriff Steel that I loved with all my heart. Me and three other players traversed Curie's world of cool settings, good backstory tie-ins, and surface level plot (that was a bit hard to follow for me). Nonetheless, I loved how funny the character interactions were, including making Kevin glow, meeting the Spanish Inquisition, and my character being a whiny dweeb despite the edginess he puts out.

Then we stopped doing sessions for a couple weeks. I asked Curie why and she said she "wasn't up to it." Months pass and I'd started making my own campaign out of a story in my head (it was formatted like a video game with a generic male MC so I just cut that guy out and planned to replace him with the players). I eventually asked Curie about her campaign and she straight up told me she dropped it. She said she hated the world and was bored by it. Granted, this was a world she had a 20 page google doc for and spent weeks raving about. I was beyond confused and more than anything disappointed.

This was the first sign of a soon to be pattern.

I started telling my friends about the campaign I was going to run soon. Very little combat, if any, and centered on story with mystery at it's core. Entire thing is home brew. Took place in an urban-fantasy, magical high school. Romance was welcome considering this was a high school setting with high school characters played by high school players. I got one person on board, I'll call him Evening based on the only times he was free for sessions. This was his first foray into TTRPGs and I wanted to have fun as friends. Then Curie asked to join with her new hyperfixation character. And so was born Curie (the character), a cat girl with a rich dad and the ability to make portals and attack with glass.

The campaign was fun. We had many emotional moments with characters and it ended with one big battle against the principal. I was a little upset because they missed one of the big mysteries and asked if they wanted to bring it back for a season 2 to tie up the loose ends. Curie informed me she wouldn't be joining for the continuation. I understood and said that her character would still be in the story just as an NPC. It wasn't until later on that I found out the two reasons she quit. A) she didn't like Curie as a character anymore and B) she didn't want to see anything bad happen to the girl she romanced. I kept note of point A since it sounded similar to the first campaign's end.

Things were getting slow on that campaign so I started building a new one to fill in the time. This one came to be similarly to the first one. Video game idea with generic male lead that I cut out to replace with PCs. The story was a generic save the kingdom fantasy story with occasional combat interspersed. I had heard how many of my friends wanted to get into D&D too so I tried to collect as many as I could and get them into one campaign. (A D&D campaign with 7 people, half of which being new players, is a horrible idea don't try this.)

Nevertheless, Curie wanted in on it too. She had a new character in mind, heavily inspired by Angel Dust from Hazbin Hotel. I had informed her that with how I built the campaign there was a very limited amount of homebrew races that would make sense with the lore and setting. She said it was BS so I tried my best to expand the list while keeping true to the world I'd made. I presented everyone with it and they came up with fun characters. 2 shadow beings, a fairy, 2 half-fairies, a demon, and unfortunately... the spider... she wouldn't budge. I told her she could do something similar if she played as a shadow being but she didn't care. Not that it mattered anyway. She only showed for one session before saying she hated the character and ditching.

After that inevitable failure, I started cooking up a pirate campaign. There wasn't a set story to start with this time. Just wanted to pirates. This time, Curie insisted on joining YET AGAIN. I was hesitant but agreed and she showed off her character Ash. Ash was a healer that drank creatures blood? or something? I don't remember the details. All you need to know is that there was one character that was secretly a dragon and THAT was the one she intended to romance. Of course the two of them eventually found out that neither of them were the humans they claimed to be and that brought them even closer. Dangerously close. The dragon had gained an "I will kill for you" mentality, which was easy to get since she already killed for fun anyway.

Then, guess what happened. Guess what? She decided she didn't like her character and left the campaign. This time, it was a big deal. The campaign was going smoothly. Things were good. Then she left and I had to pause the campaign to figure out how I would write her out. The players got tired of waiting and I scrapped together a session. It felt empty. We were aimlessly wandering around awkwardly trying to find things to do. I managed to start a quest and hint at lore about other crew members. My biggest feat though had to be the fact that the dragon, the one that I had to wipe all attachments to Ash from as best I could was successfully romanced by a different PC. Still, the campaign didn't last past that session, no matter how much we tried to save it. To everyone's disapointment, I shut it down with the promise of a revamp in the future.

In the meantime, I decided to revamp the fantasy campaign from the eighth paragraph, this time without Curie. Evening was one of the 7 people who were there for the first run and missed it dearly so I promised I'd bring it back for him. But as soon as Curie heard I was starting a new campaign, you can bet your ass she had a new character. She had reworked cat girl Curie from the high school story, saying she was "less OP" but mainly flaunting about the fixed characterization. I had to inform her again that this was a campaign with limited race options for PCs and that if she wanted to be a cat girl she could be a shadow being. She told me the new Curie wasn't a cat girl but was a cat-like centaur princess and since she can open portals it'd still make sense for her to be there. I caved and told her she could as long as she didn't overshadow the other PC who was playing as a human this time.

Now, there are multiple things that went down in the campaign that I feel deserve their own post so I won't be dealing with that and focus on what I mentioned in the title. We introduce the characters in a flower field Undertale style and meet a fairy NPC. Then comes the first combat segment. I have a rabid shadow creature jump into their path and growl at them. The fairy is roaring for a fight and the human is terrified. Curie opens a portal and sends it another dimension with the snap of her fingers, ending combat immediately. Looking back, I don't know why I allowed this. This was meant to be an easy fight to introduce them to the mechanics I'd set up and how the fights would work. And yet there was no fight because it was sent to the shadow realm. I told her not to do that again outside of session and moved on.

It was somewhere around this time that Curie (the player) and Evening started dating. Naturally, they decided to get their players together as well. It did little to the story and added filler for me so I let them. Later on though, like late in the game, she told me she wanted to drop out. I had started to see the pattern by this point and adamantly refused but what could I do? If she didn't come to sessions, I couldn't make her. But I did let her know that I couldn't just write this one out like all the others. This time she had romanced a PC and that can't be fixed so easily. So she told me her solution.

In team battle. Uncharacteristically, at the start of Curie's last session of this campaign, her character stood up and tried to start combat with the other PC. I shut that down since I didn't want the remaining PC to die but didn't see how Evening's PC could work up the courage to fend off her own girlfriend. The campaign went null after that.

Now. Current campaign. I announced that I'd finally be revamping the pirate campaign. This campaign is still on going so I don't know if she's going to flake or be too OP but so far her biggest powers have just been super funny since they're all stuck behind wild magic. "I slap the goddess." "Roll wild magic." "12. Whatsat mean?" "Random polymorph. She's been turned into an aardvark." Fun stuff like that. Also, making a deal with the god of lies while under the impression that he's the god of luck (he lied). She's been fun for this one yet I'm terrified she's going to drop this whole campaign.

I originally let her in because she insisted she wouldn't do it again. That she only did it because er other characters were bad. This one was a good idea and she'd stick with it. This one was a water genansi. I didn't know what that was or how to fit into the world so I recommended changing it to a demigoddess. To my surprise she agreed and Wendy the daughter of the Storm God came into being. I set the general time frame for the first session and started writing the story around the PCs.

About a month before the scheduled Session 0, she told me she wanted to switch characters. I was stunned. This was a big character that I had been building a lot of plot around and she wanted to change it?? Her reasoning was "I can't really think of a proper move set." Who cares!?!? Make it up on the spot like everyone else!!!! But then she came up with her current character Basil, the alchemist, mob member, wild magic user, drug dealer, cursed woman that can and will kill the gods.

I'll be honest, I'm scared. She keeps bringing up how a fight against the entire pantheon and their angel warriors will be a slaughter once she reaches full power. And how it doesn't matter which god she made a deal with. But that's not why I'm making this post. Today, she came to me saying that if Basil died, she has a backup character ready. I expressed my concern with her making a new character and potentially getting so invested in it she loses interest in Basil but she's like "nahhhh that won't happen" but it might.........

Also there was an entirely different example that I forgot to write about where she did eventually join Season 2 of the high school story as a phoenix but left so soon into it that I just started season 2 over again with a new person in her place.

TL;DR: Curie keeps leaving campaigns short notice because she gets bored of her characters and yet I KEEP LETTING HER IN CAMPAIGNS BECAUSE I'M A COWARD AND AN IDIOT

EDIT: I didn't make this post originally for ADVICE and especially not HATE. I just made it to VENT. Though, the hate made me realize that I'm also a toxic player in this scenario and her being here isn't just damaging the fun for me but the fun for everyone.

It is only now that I am asking for advice. I am considering sending this post to 'Curie' but I'm not sure yet. She has done a couple crazy things since I wrote this, but I'm also kind of glad she hasn't dropped the pirate campaign, even after 13 sessions. Though, that doesn't discount the fact that I picked up on a campaign and she SWITCHED CHARACTERS BECAUSE SHE FORGOT THE LAST ONE!

She really isn't suited for my style of campaign, as someone pointed out in the previous version of this post.

Thank you, Shorester!

EDIT 2: Will Not be sending it too her. I don't know what I was thinking. Just angry, ig. Don't want to lose a friend over this anyway. Am gonna kick her from one campaign though. She made the character she switched to the kind of person who will kill anything that commits a crime. A lot of the campaign is crime committing and she knows that. If she stays, her character might kill other PCs. She'll be staying in the pirate campaign, but if she leaves this one preemptively, that sucks. She will never be returning to a game of mine.

She is making a campaign herself and I'll let her know I'm not joining. I plan for Pirates to be the last game I play with her (unless we somehow find another person running a one shot but that's pretty specific so I highly doubt it'll happen)

Wasn't sure if I needed the sa flair due to it just being my character but just in case.

Context: Second time ever playing. Introduced via my roommate who knew the players/dm well. I knew of everyone but wasn't close to any of them. I was playing a tempest cleric firbolg worshipping thor and a very big tree hugger/had a running gag that he had 0 game with the ladies but he never initiated anything (just couldn't talk to women good, think Raj from big bang) which was fine as I didn't want to do any romance stuff. There was a session 0 romance stuff was never brought up, I didnt even think it was a thing cause i find it weird personally but to each their own. We had just finished our first arc, ended on a semi bad note with the big bad fight. (Dm feeble minded our level 4 wizard on the first round of combat, our tank was petrified which we had no way to cure it [we luckily found a potion in the loot to cure it], never got a reward as we were double crossed)

Story begins with the dm suggesting a 1 on 1 session with each player to go over what our characters did during the 1 year time skip. This was due to exams coming up and schedules getting out of a whack. Me and my roommate both do ours on the same day I sat in on my roommates session since he didnt care that much and neither did dm. Pretty normal stuff, found his dad etc. Due to my characters norse background and the fact sailing was going to become a big part of the game, I wanted my time skip story to be that i built/bought a viking longboat. So me and the dm sit down and I start with how i want to build a longboat, he stated that it would take longer than a year but I could buy one from a nearby pirate organization. So my character goes there and begins the process of buying a boat. Everything is normal until he introduces the pirate captain as this Amazonian woman cpt firebrand. Me and the dm are both dudes which was one of the big reasons why I didnt think romance was going to be a thing, I don't know him very well, and no one else had romance going. So he starts rping how this Firebrand is being all flirty and feeling up my character, to which at this point I'm cringing out of chair. So I interrupt and say this is weird I just want to buy the boat and that be it. But then he offered up an idea where the two have a "special" night and that it'll be an interesting dynamic to have her get pregnant and then appear later on with my kid. I promptly tell him absolutely not and that I buy the boat end of time skip. Me and my roommate never played with the dm again. Turns out this wasn't his first pregnancy thing as one of the other players had been in one of his games a while back where a bandit r*ped one of the player's character and was pregnant.

Hi, I just want to start off by saying this is this not a horror story and more of an AITA story, I'm not sure if this is the right place to write it but I'll be happy to redirect it if it's not allowed here.

And no, the title is what you think it is unfortunately.

For starters, I would like to mention that I have Asperger, a form of Autism in which it's hard for me to communicate with people, this will be relevant trust me.

This story began when I decided to try and get back into Anime. I wasn't like those weaboos and I considered myself to be a casual anime fan, so when I decided to watch GATE (you should try it, it has a really cool premise that I think is let down by every isekai mc that I've grown to dislike lately) and found out that there was a Discord Roleplay server of the same anime that I was watching, I decided to give it a try since I had some experience doing discord roleplays. I made my character and joined a simple deployment that was about to start.

For context, we were gonna go to a city to get a CO out of jail (who was convicted over a misunderstanding) and we were gonna give the princess of the main capital to the knights (the reason why the Princess was in a military base isn't fully clear to me even to this day, but I do know it has something to do with her getting injured and us treating them), pretty simple right?

It would've been, if Ramirez didn't stray from the unit.

You see, Ramirez was a Private and I made my character a Captain, meaning that I outrank him, this is relevant because I didn't mention this to the person playing as Ramirez which is already mistake number 1 counted.

The second was when Ramirez left the unit to explore the medival fantasy city a bit and I decided to follow him without radioing the others IC that I was gonna do that. Mistake number two even if I initially thought that it would be a simple, but interesting banter between the two before I would reel Ramirez in.

And then, the catalyst for the third mistake: A fucking catgirl mage.

It turns out that the person playing as Ramirez had a catgirl mage and didn't use her until now when she found a way to have her in it. The only problem is was that she didn't tell me what she was gonna do OOC, so I was pissed when I found out that her snatching us away and violating laws as knights chased us, was all because she wants us, the army, to free her enslaved people controlled by the kingdom that the Princess belongs to, even when I told her OOC that I would dip away from the chase mid way because that's what my character would do in this situation and Ramirez's player insisted to follow them.

See, because I had NOT radioed my unit of Ramirez going AWOL and I had followed them and essentially became a victim of poor circumstances, this lead to mistake number 3: Saying things that I didn't think of beforehand.

I could've answered the CO a bit better when he asked me questions, but I was so caught up by the moment that I foolishly followed a Catgirl all because she wanted the military's help when she could've just DIRECTLY TOLD US WITHOUT CAUSING US TROUBLE. And thus, I idiotically back talked to my CO.

As of writing this, my character has yet to be court martialled for not following protocol well and we don't have Military Polices IRP for me to plead my case. I'm writing this to vent it out and see in the comments on how I could've handled this situations better.

Warning: kinda long-ish, mentions of self-harm and fictional violence towards pregnant women.

Shout-out to CritCrab, Sir Knox the Teller of Tales, Den of the Drake, DnD Doge, Crispy's Tavern, Tales to Morrow, KiwiVO and Crowe's Perch.

Love your stuff.

Previous stories, useful to understand the association we play at:

The Tale of Skeptic

The Tale of Mess

The Tale of Sicko (this one to show that, while bad things happened at the Association, WORSE things happened outside)

NOTE 1: everybody in this tale is on the Autism Spectrum, except for the Bard. Yes, I am, as well.

NOTE 2: all the players knew from the beginning that this first story arc of the campaign was going to be focused on doing tasks for the various factions and organizations in town, in order to build a reputation and to gain favor to call upon later in the campaign.

NOTE 3: no, we can't chase people away from the table if they create trouble, nor we want, in this specific case.

NOTE 4: I know that the “horror” factor of this here story doesn't even begin to compare to some of the most infamous tales on this sub-reddit, but I needed to tell you this tale, both to vent and to ask for advice.

NOTE 5: no, nobody in the group hates the problem player, he is not an actively bad person and he always volunteers to pay for snacks, for example. We have nothing against him as a person, only against some of the things he does, okay? Okay.

Le cast:

DM: me, doing my best, and scared that said best might not be enough.

Guild: old-time friend, excellent GM creating vast and articulate homebrew worlds, and an example I try to follow for what a GM should do and be. He also helps me with certain mechanical aspects of the game, so I'm lucky to have him by my side.

Pie: family friend of mine, this campaign is her first introduction to the TTRPG world. Playing a Bard.

Bisanzio: another friend, his character's goal is to cause a revolution.

Bastion: stoic friend, his character is looking for the guys who murdered his caravan.

Fanboy: slightly problem player, but not that much. His only problem is that, whenever it's not his turn, he literally curls in a ball to watch anime clips on YouTube with his cell phone, and we need to call to him like half a dozen times each time to remind him that he is playing with other people. Good at role-playing as an Abadar Paladin, credit where credit's due.

Ego: the REAL problem player, and you'll see why soon-ish. Playing a Monk.

Shy: playing a Brawler.

The premise: Pathfinder homebrew campaign.

There are fights, but also lots of social interactions to become big shots in the city, in order to be called upon by the people in charge for the BIG, PLOT-RELEVANT MISSIONS.

Also, I believe in consequences for the players' actions: and I don't mean crap like “LOL the hobo you just hit by mistake is actually Asmodeus in disguise, make another sheet”, that's just “Rock falls, everybody dies” with extra steps.

What I mean is that players' actions don't happen in a void, and they influence how other characters will interact with the PCs.

A merchant won't keep selling them stuff if he just saw them murder his entire family in cold blood, for example.

That being said, let's get it on.

First session in which Ego takes part: Ego demands a reward for defeating bandits (with no bounty on their heads, and that the players were not ordered to defeat by anyone) from the High Commissioner of the City Guard.

When Fanboy tells him that the High Commissioner represents the Law, and that a common citizen can't just “demand” stuff from him, Ego answers “Hey, look, with the Law I wash my balls!”, while the player mimics the act.

Charming.

His second session: they're about to be hired by a pirate woman from the Shackles, to kill some son of a mother in town, getting paid 300 Gold Pieces each.

Ego makes up a narrative, based on absolutely no evidence or clue whatsoever, that the would-be employer is being paid a hundred thousand Gold Pieces to give them the job, therefore she better pay them more.

All of this without even knowing what the job's details actually were, he just made up stuff because he decided that he deserved more.

He also likes to interrupt other players while they are role-playing, and to try and dictate how everybody else should play THEIR characters.

He seems less interested in the adventure and cooperation, and more in getting purely combat-focused advantages for his character alone and to boast to everybody with an authority position (be it an high-ranking NPC or even just an employer) how much of a big shot he is, and how much HE has the final and only say in how things go.

Basically, he appears to NEED to disrespect everybody (both in-game and out of game) he perceives as a threat to his ego (hence his nickname), and he often does so in our other current campaign, the one mastered by Guild, as well.

Another problem is that Ego loves to ask questions, and hates to accept that the answers are not always what he wants to hear: the last Guild's session, he kept interrupting to ask questions Guild already answered many times about the lore, but Ego refused to hear the previous times because it wasn't all about how much versatile and able to do ANYTHING he himself was.

Another time, we had to literally repeat him 18 TIMES in a single session that, no, you can't increase your Wisdom score without levelling up by simply reading books.

Yet another time, our party needed to build an alliance with the Brotherhood of Assassins (no, there wasn't Ezio Auditore, unfortunately), and he refused because he DECIDED that they were actually a gang of serial killer and that, if we allied with them, they would've killed us for no reason.

It took us over half an hour to find the properly clear way to explain to him that he was wrong, and now, months later, he is still suspicious of them for NO REASON, other than the fact he decided at the beginning they were untrustworthy.

But the most infuriating part is, as I already told you, that he interrupts fucking everybody: when the current Master narrates or describes, when NPCs are talking, when the other players are talking... he just can't wait for someone else to finish!

And, yes, we tried talking to him, to politely and maturely ask him to tone it down, at least with the interrupting of other people.

Multiple times.

Each and every time, he said he understood... and then, the very same session, he kept interrupting, trying to speak over everybody else even while we were all, once more, asking him to stop that very moment.

He seems to think that, if he preemptively apologizes for being rude, he can interrupt and nobody has the right to be upset at this.

This is all combined with an insanely high opinion of himself, to the point that, despite this being one of his first TTRPG experience (all of them started fairly recently, in 2022), he decided that he was a Dungeons & Dragons expert because he thinks that his father's bar was the first place D&D was ever played in our entire Nation, and so, despite him never playing before, he absorbed D&D-ness by sheer osmosis.

We're talking about a guy who literally thinks that, since he used to play the drum and therefore knows how sonic vibrations work, he literally knows more about astrophysics than... Wine (there's a reason for this nickname, and no, it isn't that he is an alcoholic), another friend of mine who has an actual university degree in astrophysics.

Heck, he once tried to force us all to accept a series of rules HE created, unilaterally, and that in his vision every newcomer HAD to respect to be given a chance to play with us.

He ghosted us for the following two sessions, missing some pretty intense fight and one with a lot of plot-twists and stuff my players found really cool and interesting (among which, a possible plot-hook for a future side-quest focused on Guild).

WE DO NOT BLAME HIM FOR THIS, it was apparently for purely health-related reasons, and I'm referencing this fact purely to give a more complete picture of the situation.

So, with all this in mind, I have a thing planned for next session: while they are at a Hell Knight's fortress, they would meet a pregnant noblewoman, married to a high-ranking member of the Knights.

She would act cold and dismissive towards them, for perfectly valid reasons (she is a Granduchess and they are some random commoners)... and that would be a test to trigger a reaction from Ego, which might lead him to attack her.

This would lead them to having to face the Hell Knights and, were they to survive and escape, fail the mission they're currently doing, which requires to cooperate with the Hell Knights, at least momentarily.

It would have BIG consequences, because the Hell Knights would want to hunt them down to the end of Golarion, and would require me to completely rewrite my plans for the campaign, with such a huge change, but I literally see no other solution.

Instead of telling Ego to leave, anyway, I would remind him that in this game, actions have consequences, for him and the rest of the party.

But I'm still uncertain if I should do this.

Apart from having to cancel all the work I already did for the rest of the campaign and rewrite it fully, there's the humane side to consider.

We tried talking to Ego and explaining things to him, but he seems to think that his power fantasy of disrespecting authorities and getting away with it because he is so much better than everybody else is the only thing that matters, and screw everybody else's enjoyment of the game.

Maybe, being forced to face the consequences of his mistakes, and to learn that the game and the other players won't bend backwards to accommodate him and him alone, might do the trick.

One problem is that I personally already feel like kind of a douchebag for making a session that is, for all intents and purposes, a trap designed specifically to punish a single, specific player.

But the BIGGER problem is... he is known to resort to self-harm and to violence in the case of a meltdown, and I fear I might trigger one such occasion if I were to interfere with his power fantasy.

Therefore, the question is... WIBTA if I were to do this?

Thank you in advance for your opinions, I'll edit an update once I saw how things played out.

I’ve been sitting on this story for a long time, and it’s a long one so strap in.

I was in this campaign which was supposed to be like a magitek setting, and after a while it became obvious that the DM could have just written a novel for it because of how lore heavy and railroady it was.

Oftentimes he would just have the PCs be transported everywhere they needed to go for plots sake and would have our characters be under strict orders because he made them join the military. It became pretty obvious that it just became him acting out his military fantasies and not necessarily was about us all having fun anymore. He would get actually angry when we didn’t know the exact military protocol for handling things, and genuinely would fume if we wanted any autonomy for our characters. Btw no we did not initially go in expecting it to be a military based story.

When we signed up for the campaign, we didn’t know it was going to be a realistic war setting, so there was no safety tools set up and no content warnings. We got into some very heavy material which should have been covered with a body horror warning.

Another issue is that most of us in the group are transgender and he is not, which is not the issue, but he originally got pissy when some of us wanted our characters to reflect our identity, and we had to find a loophole in his “it’s not realistic” to convince the DM to let us make our characters trans as well. The loophole was literally “well trans people are real,” which was absolutely insane to have to tell someone.

Literally so many red flags. I took off a few months to “no dnd is better than bad dnd” until bg3 reminded me that dnd was normally fun and I went and found other groups to play in.

I'm really sorry if there'll be any poor grammar in advance because i'm not a native english speaker.

So, this is going to be my first post ever out there. Hopefully, it'll be last, too, and in future there'll be no such major dramas in my friend group.

So, for this particular situation, which, i admit, could be very dubious, i'll need to give you a ton of context.
Me (Forever DM-turned-fresh player) and my friends are consistently playing DND and Pathfinder for 3-4 years, and everyone was getting along pretty well... Except me and the guy we'll call New DM.
Me and New DM go a while back, and ever since our first game we've had some sort of problems and conflicts with each other: in the beginning it was due to the mainly New DM acting up and overall being VERY toxic to me and other players (being passive-aggressive, leveraging his position as a proactive player in order for us to cut him some slack or make an in-game decision in his favour). However, i should note a couple of things here: even though as a player he was toxic and sometimes unruly, he absolutely excelled in roleplay and was initiating a ton of things (even offering me to help with the creation of some homebrew mechanics, which, i admit, did make our games more interesting and thrilling), so i always gave him the benefit of the doubt, letting him stay in our circle and take initiative in some crucial moments for our party or game.

Fast forward a few years, and now New DM is - you guessed it - offering each and every one of us to play in his game and custom setting. Right then and there, there were some major red flags for me: the world is basically over-the-top dark fantasy where gods are very much real, walking among mortals and governing their respective states. The thing is, humans live in what could be called a glorified bandit state, with a good chunk of their gods being liars, manipulators and crazed scientists. The only two that are somewhat morally good or right? Well, too bad, the Token Good God in said pantheon is a loser who fought against totally-not-skaven and lost (badly), and who can barely fight near-apocalyptic cult within his country. Same goes for the only lawful god that has tried (and failed) to push for reforms within this circus of "hahaha i'm so evil and vile" human deities. Of course, this setting also has elves, the race which is not only immortal, but also is much more technologically advanced, simply CANNOT LIE ON BIOLOGICAL LEVEL, and are servants of some S+ tier goddess of death therefore can totally kick everyone else's asses.

I absolutely hated the premise. Yet, i rolled with it, hoping that maybe we, as players, would be able to make some changes in this world. So i've created this Joan of Arc type warrior lady, basically a servant of the Good God mentioned above. Thing is, that's where the situation starts to get really controversial, and i'll admit that. You see, this warrior lady had a vigilante class - because she was posing as a man. An arrogant and cocky man, which did get the character into trouble once or twice. So, with that out of the picture, i'll try to describe my possible wrongdoings below, after i introduce the main cast. Nevertheless, the New DM have cooperated with me, giving an enchanted set of armor that basically helped my character to conceal her identity.

Now, time to get to the main cast and story itself. Beside me there were 3 players important to this whole situation: we'll call them the Wizard, the Alchemist and the Druid. To cut a long story short: the Druid was my main buddy and supporter throughout this whole mess, and played as character with somewhat established moral compass; the Wizard was sort of mediator, taking neutral stance both OOC and IC, which made him do some REALLY questionable things ingame; And, finally, the Alchemist, while being certainly a chill guy IRL, rolled an absolute monstrous totally-not-skaven scientist with a ton of servant NPC guarding him and running around him.

I think you can see where this is going. Right from the very start of the story we had not only IC, but OOC conflicts. Why? Because i was NOT fond of what New DM was doing with the Alchemist's character. From the get-go, the man, who i knew would be up to some really suspicious stuff, got the mechanic to surround himself with the servants that are, in essence, just additional characters with the same stats and skills as PCs. And he managed to effortlessly get not one, but THREE of such servants in prologue only. In addition to this, Alchemist was the first one to get his character arc started: in the same prologue he recruited an allied totally-not-skaven NPC into our party, and we basically could do NOTHING to stop or hinder him. And my character, who, need i remind you, was STILL the servant of the Token Good God that fought and lost to this race? Well, she had nothing. Only said enchanted armor set and sort-of-blessing by the Goddess of Beauty for my in-game efforts during the prologue boss fight. In fact, by playing cocky vigilante persona i haven't even established my character as confident and experienced knight - New DM has decided to punish me for my overconfidence and brash attitude, and, while i was giving advice to allied NPCs on our war council, was shunned and threatened to be incarcerated.

Then came our infiltration mission of the basically BBEG's (or so i thought) lair, who hosted a large party (yes, he did that in the middle of war and in a besieged town). Let's just say that from there on situation went absolutely FUBAR. Druid's actions made us basically obey all the wacky and absurd stuff BBEG forced us to do, as his (and, as i learned later, mine) important background characters were held captive. There came the second Alchemist's... Problem. What he did was unleash A LITERAL ELDRITCH MONSTER upon our party during the mock arena battle for the entertainment of BBEG's guests. This was another moment where i had to break my character's logic and do nothing, because, even after we've defeated this monster, everyone else reacted to the event as "water under the bridge". Once again, what did my character get for this whole mess of a situation? I've barely managed to buy out 3 not terribly powerful or important NPC's from my character's backstory from slavery in exchange for IMMENSE amount work and time that i've put into this infiltration mission, as well as broken artifacts from the character's backstory. And even then, for these NPCs and items she had to give up the idea of saving her fiance - a person that was essential to her backstory. There was now another grudge that i held against New DM.

So, out of sheer will not to turn the aftermath of infiltration into slaughter between our party members (Druid couldn't return to our allies due to characters from his background being held hostage, and the Alchemist simply didn't want to), my character went and basically negotiated the contract between our party and BBEG in order to save Druid's background characters. I did this with clear-cut intent to betray him somewhere along the lines... Sadly, that's where the Wizard comes into picture. He was chosen as the leader of our now officially formed party, and he was adamant on "being neutral and not risking too much". I knew then and there that it'd be catastrophic ride for my character. Because, as soon as we've left the BBEG's lair onto our quest to recruit guests for his party, our squad just became absolutely chaotic and unlawful bandits. On our path we later attacked the human militia that was hunting down elves just because the Wizard was afraid to fight said Elves (and, as you could've guessed, they're OP as hell), and, due to me trash-talking both the Elves and the Wizard IC because of that decision, got threatened and shunned once again. We've later learned that the Alchemist was also continuing his research on eldritch beings, and also allied himself with doomsday cult, although now he was trying to hide behind the "noble goals". The Wizard was more or less fine with it, only saying that "it's dangerous" IC. The last straw for me and the Druid was encounter with a necromancer we found during our travels. The necromancer who openly admitted to raiding and destroying peaceful settlements. The Wizard came up with a brilliant idea to recruit him as a guest and send him right to BBEG.

That day me and the Druid decided to conspire against the Wizard and the Alchemist, outright deciding to kill their characters and turn our campaign into something more lawful. We've gathered all of our NPCs and prepared an ambush. An ambush that turned into slaughter of my character, the Druid and our NPCs. You see, New DM came up with the brilliant idea of giving BOTH OF THEM not only powerful NPCs and allies, but also nigh IMMORTALITY. Our ambush didn't do a thing: not only our NPCs were considerably weaker (my lvl 8 and 5 fighters along with lvl 6 ranger and lvl 4 expert vs lvl 9 paladin and lvl 6 gunslinger, bard and fighter), we just didn't have any means of killing the Wizard and the Alchemist. The former had this as a mechanic and "character trait" established in the process of creation, while the latter was straight up rewarded for his research of all things eldritch. And here we were, the "good guys" that have tried negotiating and arguing both IC and OOC, killed off as some random mooks. I went absolutely BALLISTIC and left our server then and there. I should also note that New DM didn't try to contact me after the incident, and only the players encouraged me to talk with him about the situation... Which didn't end so well, as i just lashed out at him over and over again.

So, AITA for leaving and badmouthing the New DM? Is he really just playing favourites, or i'm too paranoid and that's what lead to eventual PVP?

TLDR: I feel like my DM is playing favourites and gifting the players who do morally wrong choices, which forced me to start PVP in order to create more "good" campaign. After losing my character, I ragequitted the game. AITA?

So, this is something that has never really happened to me before. I've been a DM for a while, not extremely experienced or anything like that, but I've run a few games. A few weeks ago, I started talking to someone I know, and they mentioned they had a group of friends looking for a DM and asked if I could do it.

Since I really like D&D, I didn't think twice and said, "Sure." I met with this group for a session zero of sorts to discuss what they were looking for in a game. Here's what they told me: They wanted someone to run Curse of Strahd for them. Which is fine; that is one of my favorite modules, but that's where problems... came up.

I told them I'd be happy to, as CoS actually has a lot of variables and ways to make things interesting. That was when a player stopped me mid-sentence and said, "Before you start, I want to make sure you're running it for us without change. I want you not to influence the module at all. Don't even change a comma. I hate when DMs think they know better than the folks at D&D."

That was strange, to say the least, but I understand wanting to run something as it was intended, and I said I would definitely follow the module. However, the player continued, "No, you shouldn't even use dialogue that isn't in the module, okay? That's how D&D is meant to be played. Also, you need to roll dice out in the open for us to see."

Things felt really strange to me. I know I'm not experienced or anything, but this didn't feel normal. So I asked them plainly what they were expecting of me. And this one player, who seemed to be speaking for the group, said, "We hate when DMs abuse their powers to manipulate the world. That's why we only play modules and make sure the DMs don't change a single thing from them!"

I imagine my expression didn't seem too good when he said that because what followed were a bunch of complaints about DMs, and from me, it sounded way too close to player-versus-DM mentality. It went on for a while, but there was no way I was DMing for them. I'm barely experienced enough to deal with normal players, and to me, this definitely isn't normal.

Honestly, at that point, they were expecting me to be an AI simulator for their game with a voice, which is not at all what I'm looking for. I told them that, and that we weren't going to be a good fit. As expected, they didn't like my response and started to angrily shout that I was wasting their time, that I wasn't a "true DM", etc. That being said, I will no longer be DMing for this group, or for anyone that this "friend" of mine introduces me to. 

I'm just glad it didn't go beyond a session zero.

My problem specifically is the whole injecting your character into every moment thing, I really like roleplaying as them and talking to other people and describing what my character does but I've realised that I do it way too often, so sometimes im like 50% of the conversation at a 5 person table.

I've started taking my ADHD medication for when we have DnD and that's helped, but I still think it's really hard to determine when it's appropriate to butt in and go "oh my character would probably react to that" or when to have them join someone else to go check out a room or sth, and even harder to tell when I'm doing it too often.

Are there any rules of thumb to keep in mind? I know the one of always being the last to speak which I've tried, and I've also started using my interjections to try to include some of the party members who don't speak up as much, like I'll go "my guy asks X what they should do" or have them bring them into the conversation but i still just end up talking way too much.

I think the reason I do this is bc I tend to hyperfixate on dnd quite a bit and it builds up between sessions, and then I let it all out when we finally get to play, is there another place I could channel that energy during sessions? I've started doodling my character sometimes and that's helped a bit, but it just doesn't scratch the same itch as getting to play out my character does.

As one of the most experienced subreddits for dealing with people like me, do you have any advice for how I could curb my problem playing?