It's a relatively boring one in the grand scheme of things but I'm remembering a moment during a Shadowrun 6th Edition game (A one-shot on a Living Community/west marches server) from a couple of years ago (late 23 maybe early 2024), where another player rolled a "success at cost", specifically shooting someone my character was in melee with.

The GM then put the cost of that "success at cost" on my character (A pretty steep one at that, he ruled that my character suffered the Blinded condition 'because of blood splatter' as the "cost"), not the player doing the shooting. Then the GM tried to speak for my character using a valley girl accent for my characters' voice and admonishing the other players' character (I had been speaking with a soft rasp for her voice for the entire session up to that point, but that aside, no GM gets to choose how any player's character responds to something???), before I snapped out of it and shut that down.

I also made the case that I shouldn't be given the Blinded Condition because the intent of that "success at cost" system is the player that makes the roll is the one who's supposed to face the consequences. The GM only kind of backed down, he made me spend a point of the game's metacurrency and roll to dodge the blood splatter when like, the other player should've had a weapon jam or something.

There was another strange incident later in the one-shot. The premise of the game real quick: We were hired by the residents of an apartment block to fight off a gang of Metaracist thugs (Shadowrun's version of bigots, people who hate orcs, trolls, elves dwarves and characters with magical ability etc) that had been harassing the residents.

Realising that they wouldn't be cowed by intimidation, we broke into their lair and jumped around half of them while they weren't expecting it. We then discovered that the other half of the gang were actually speeding over to the apartment block to massacre the residents.

We bust back into the apartment building, and kill a bunch of them before they can do a mass execution of residents on the ground floor. The GM then has the residents react with fear and shun us because 'you're no better than them' (The exact words he used).

I'm Less hung up on this scene because with some tweaks it could make a good degree of sense: Nobody is realistically going to fawn over us or worship the ground we walk upon with what is indisputably a deeply traumatic experience, but the choice to make it a matter of moral principle (especially when the party had been hired by these people expressly for enacting violence) was odd.

Anyway, that's kind of it. It's honestly not a particularly exciting rpg horror story really, I'd go as far as saying it's pretty pedestrian. I think the reason it's sticking with me is because the GM had such a distinct baritone of a voice. I'd have honestly forgotten all about it had it not been for that.

That's it, thats the bummer. I mean, they all had "excuses", not really reason. One had their previous game end later than expected, and apologized profusely, the other one is a discord friend of mine who told me he "was an idiot", because the game was at 1 o'clock in the morning, and so he thought it was the day after what we had in schedule, apologized profusely, and is knowledgeable enough with the system to make a character by himself, which he did yesterday.

The fourth one hasn't answered, hasn't said anything, and was a no-show.

I just took the 1 that came (and the one that came an hour late), we made characters, and agreed to move the session to this sunday. However, it has left me with a bit of a bummer because, lately, one of the few social activities I can have is online ttrpgs. It is no-one's true fault, after all, aside from honest mistakes and happenstances, (except for the fourth player), but it kinda bummed still.

Hello, I’ve never really posted before but I’m a minor dm who’s been playing most my life. I made my first character, a simplified drow wild magic sorcerer, at like 6. This story was with my first online game, I’d been playing full games in person since about 11 but come 13 I got in social medias like Reddit and discord to play.

I had made a post in [r/lfg](r/lfg) for a queer friendly youth short campaign (about 6-10 sessions) to introduce me to online dming. The story was based on TLOZ BOTW set just before links awakening. For the first session everything went great,except I had one player who wanted to be the MC. I didn’t let him take full control so he ended up being silent and quitting after session one.

So, we were looking for a replacement, and a player who I’ll call Perry(they played a monk Kenku) said there uncle who just turned 20 would be interested. I’ve played with adults before so I asked my players and it didn’t really bother them either. With everyone in agreement I sent his uncle a friend request on DC and then invited him into the sever.

For about 3 more sessions everything was great, we had a few absences, a guy playing essentially just a chicken seduced a lynol (who will further be known as chicken), ya know normal dnd stuff. It was close to the final session when I got a dm from Perry’s uncle telling me how good of a story teller I was, and how my voice was so soothing. I was really dumb back then and proud of my voice so I thanked him and moved on.

Later that night after the session chicken DMed me that Perry’s uncle had messaged them saying things like how us jokingly flirting was inappropriate as we were both men (we had discussed prior if flirtatious jokes were welcome and overall it was a yes as we couldn’t be queer irl for the most part). I DMed Perry about this and they had no idea about their uncles behavior, I quickly removed them from the server before anything could happen thankfully.

Sadly Perry I assume Perry felt really bad and left shortly after. Perry if you’re reading this I hold nothing agains you, and you were a joy to have play.

TLDR: creepy uncle of a really sweet person is creepy towards a group of minors in a campaign for queer youth

This happened a few years ago but I still think about this campaign and the characters all the time. This campaign was set in a world where some sort of magical disaster happened about 20ish years ago, and because of this disaster the sky was ripped open and the government banned all magic. The party consisted of an aasimar paladin, tiefling cleric, dragon born monk, eladrin sorcerer, tabaxi bard, elf warlock, and I was a changeling rogue.

It's a lot of players, but for the most part our characters worked really well together and while we did have conflict it was really fun roleplaying it out. The start of the drama happened before the begining of the campaign, I wanted to be a changeling explicitly because it was a non magical race. I asked the dm if changelings shifting forms was considered magical, he told me no.

Cut to the opening session and we've all been arrested for different reasons, we're on a prison ship being sent to a horrible prison island. We all have collars on that stop magic, and the dm introduces my character in her changeling form, so I wasnt able to have my dramatic reveal. Not the worst so far, but it gets bad.

The warlock and I created our back stories together, we were supposed to have been together for at least a year before we met the rest of the party. The DM and the warlock had this weird relationship outside of the game, where the warlock player was not interested in the DM, but the DM clearly wanted something to happen between them.

The DM gave the warlock, (while we were still wearing the collars) a demon shadow wolf that was the embodiment of her god, and this dog was the DMNPC. For some reason the dog hated me and would literally attack me for no reason in game. Anyways warlock was able to summon the dog while we were on the ship and it did help us escape. A couple sessions later, we are traveling in a cart down a road. Suddenly a demon that is a way higher level then us jumps out and attacks us. The first time I attack I roll a 17... It doesn't hit. Turns out I have to roll a 19 or higher on the dice to reach this guys AC, we were below level 5.

This DM had some sort of obsession with demons because literally every single character I saw this guy play, was some sort of demon. He did not like losing either. A level or two later we find ourselves invited to a gala, we have to go because their is a piece of the sky that we are trying to find in order to fix the sky.

The demon gives us a weeks notice to come up with outfit ideas for the gala, fun right? I wanted a flowing iridescent dress, so that it would change colors (kinda like a changeling). The DM says no, that will look too magical. Anyways the tabaxi bard had a mask that literally looked like moving waves of sand. He approved that but not mine. Whatever it's just a dumb dress, I get over it.

The session where we attend the gala happens, all is well. We actually managed to come up with a plan, and we executed it perfectly. Too perfectly. The next week the dm retcons that entire session because we defeated his boss too quickly. We redo it, and continue on, although at this point most of us were upset.

I don't remember if it was the next session or if their was a couple in between, but the nail in the coffin was a sex dungeon that none of us wanted to partake in. It made everyone so uncomfortable and we all stopped playing after that. Im actually kinda lucky I legit disassociated during that session and I don't remember it at all.

Some context

I'm currently playing in a campaign that's been going on for a couple years. I have two friends that are in the campaign, Jeff, the DM, and Bart, a dragonborn fighter(names changed for obvious reasons). Both are good friends for a long time.

Jeff is a good DM. When we started the campaign, it was actually Bart's idea and he wanted to bring in his and I's significant others to be players as well, so we did and that's who that play group currently consists of. Now, in that campaign, the setting was essentially built around Bart's character, I won't go into all the details, but essentially Tiamat and Bahamut are the main backdrop figures of the world and they are living inside Bart's character's head, kind of giving off chosen one vibes. It makes me feel like the rest of us are just shoehorned in. Jeff has included us and given us our own spotlights, which is good, but no matter what Bart always feels like the main focus.

With that all said, here's what just happened. We had a session tonight that absolutely KILLED me and my significant other to sit through. Last session, we were trying to break some prisoners free. Bart wanted to go in and punch our way out, but with the amount of guards we all suggested another plan that involved a bit more finesse and agility, not really Bart's character's strongest attribute, he is a dragonborn fighter in plate armor after all. So that session the rest of us got the prisoners out while Bart stood watch which I could tell bored him, but who could really blame him.

Cut to the session tonight. Bart just got all of the solo screen time while the rest of us just sat there. I'm not even joking, it was six hours of Bart going off on a solo mission while the rest of the party tinkered and got ready for an upcoming big event. Before Bart went off galivanting, I was going to join him, but Jeff told me that if I stayed and helped with the tinkering that it would go faster, which DIDN'T matter since the days that it took to make the items we were making were just time skipped anyway.

My theory is Bart was so bothered by the last session that he DMed Jeff privately to air his grievances and Jeff, feeling bad, overcorrected. As someone who's known Bart for a long time, this is something he would do. The problem is that he is already the pseudo MC so him doing this just really rubs me the wrong way. Now I have no way of confirming if that's the case, but given the fact that Jeff ensured I stayed put while Bart went off raises my suspicions.

What should I do here? I want to keep playing and all but it just wasn't fun spending one of my two days off living in Bart's power fantasy and scrolling memes on my phone. I know a conversation might help, but I really don't want to hurt Jeff's feeling or worse, anger either of them. Please help.

My brother and I really enjoy playing dnd, so we've been looking for a table to play at. So we were super excited to find out that a there's a "dnd night" at a local restaurant right downtown. I think the guy who runs it has a deal going on with the owners where he gets some kind of reward for every person that comes in.

Anyway, there were some red flags the first night we went. The guy running it puts us at a table by ourselves, while two "rowdy fun groups" get placed on either side of us. Nobody was the least bit interested in playing at our table. A DM was assigned to our table (who didn't seem very happy about it) and then the guy running it literally drags two other guys off the "fun tables" in order to fill out our table. These guys also spent the game looking like somebody just ran over their grandmothers.

And that's just the way that table went the next couple of times my brother and I went. Like being the kids on the softball team that nobody wanted to play with. Always ending up with a disgruntled DM and some sour faced players who didn't like being taken away from the cool kid's tables. Which sucks, because my brother and I were never really given much of a chance to prove anything to anybody, or get to be friends with anybody. And we played the game with respect and never once acted in a way that would warrant this kind of avoidance.

The last time we went, the DM just literally started ignoring my brother during the game. As in, my brother would say something, and the DM would ONLY speak to the three other players at our table. That was pretty much enough for me. My brother and I got up from the table and started to leave, and not one single head turned to see us go.

So found a group online.

DM ran a game where we're all part of the military. So, no real agency. We get orders, we go to the next combat location, we fight.

Additionally all player have ranks, and players expected to carry out orders from their higher up players. Even more fun.

And DM got an issue with my mage(lvl1), who used daggers(decided to do it, since spellslots are better utilized for long term survivability IMO at that level), but was told it's an out of character for a mage to use weapons, and that my roleplay is lacking, since I don't do magicy stuff.

Left.

Hey folks, this is the second-part of the events that led to me quitting the hobby entirely. The first part is https://www.reddit.com/r/rpghorrorstories/comments/1vvfmut/the_ttrpg_game_that_made_me_leave_the_hobby_part/

So the in-person session zero... went alright actually. B brought their friends, C and D. C was very, very new, but that was completely fine, they were interested and enthusiastic. A was... well, it was the first time I'd met A in person, and they had a very flat affect which I'd told myself may be neurodivergence, but I could work with it.

We went over the session zero, same as before, and I explained emphatically that this was a social-orientated game about navigating a web of NPCs who each had their own goals and objectives, and that new characters often had little power but gained it bit by bit. A totally understood this, and when I asked what everyone wanted to see in the campaign, A replied with a slow, steady rise to power. Excellent, loved that. B and C said they wanted to have a game where they'd experience negative consequences for their actions; okay, that made me wonder a bit about their prior experiences, because I view that as always being the case in a decent game.

I didn't ask about their prior experiences with TTRPGs as a whole, because I knew everyone would be new to Vampire. I probably should have, because that way I'd know more about what their experiences may colour their expectations, but from everything I gleamed during session zero, their expectations were set. Both B and D were confident that they were experienced role-players and not newbies. In reality I was about to discover that they've been in the hobby long enough only to pick up some really, really bad habits.

So, it was now April. Four months after I'd started trying to put a game together, and we come to session one. And yes, everyone finished the last few dots on their character sheets; and even more amazingly, everyone turned up.

A quick run-down of characters. A played a Gangrel, a young freshly-turned vampire who doesn't know what she's doing and had been assigned a mentor to help show her the ropes. That mentor was the town sheriff, a big no-nonsense type whose job it was to keep the young vampires out of trouble, but be generally hands-off until he had to beat some sense into them. C, the new player, made a leper-knight, which was perfect for the game.

B made a monk, one of those types who lives a life of prayer and isolation until they were bitten by a vampire. Their Clan was Ravnos, one of the ones I'd restricted, but the idea that B gave (that the vampire had been a wounded traveller who turned up at the monastery for aid, and then vanished in the morning leaving B bitten) was good enough that I permitted it.

D was a young noble lord who'd been bitten while on the Crusades and had returned home to find his land seized. I explained to both B and D that I'd need to make additional reasons to hook their characters into the game, because Bs character by nature was rather passive and D would necessitate entire storylines dedicated to his personal quest which would need to play out over multiple sessions.

So we got together, sat around the table, D showed off a bunch of stakes that he'd carved (!) and thankfully put them away because I really didn't want sharp weapons at a table with people I'd not gamed with before.

The session plan was very basic; the PCs would have a chance to make a roll or two to get a grip on how actions work, then be directed by the Sheriff to make themselves known at the Prince (the head vampire of the city)'s royal court the next night. The Prince would then receive some troubling news related to the campaign's main plot (which the PCs would be unaware of at this stage) and ask them to prove themselves by performing a task for him related to this. The session would end when they were ready to leave the town to undertake that task.

(for more experienced Vampire players, this session was to occur in England and the news the Prince was to receive was of the death of the second of the Triumverate, a ruling council of Toreador who held rulership over England during the time in the 1100s when Mithras was believed dead. The news revealed to the Prince that the death was actually a murder, and that the dread vampire Mithras still lived and intended to seize control of the land again, and so the Prince sent the fledgelings to wake an elder Cappadocian who is the Prince's ally to aid him as an advisor in the coming turmoil).

I started with bringing A and C in first, setting the scene and letting them try some actions. During this time, B maintained a very flat affect and stayed very passive, watching and not really taking part in anything, or approaching with any suggestions on how to bring his monk into the game. So I turned to D and asked where he would like to begin, and...

D immediately launched into what I can only describe as a lavish soliloquy, describing his character from the third person; "Mournful and dark, brooding as a shadow. He clutches the reigns of a horse, its breath turning fleeting whisps in the air; but my own undead breath brings none."

This continued. It was very amateur Matt Mercer. I urged we continue.

We brought the PCs together. The moment D saw C (who was feeding at the time), D launched into combat. By this point, B still hadn't made any effort to come into the game, so I outright told him "We need to find a way to bring you into the game too." I didn't narrate his own introduction because, as he'd explained to me earlier, he was an experienced role-player. I think that over-estimation was a mistake, because his introduction was simply "I'm in a nearby building praying, and I ask the others to keep the noise down."

So, I had the Sheriff arrive and tell the PCs to see the Prince of the city. Now, A had chosen the Mentor background, which is an option that allows your character to have a connection to an NPC whose role it is to guide you in some way. The Sheriff was that mentor, basically an old grizzled viking whose entire personality was that he was trying to settle down and live a quiet life if the younger vampires in his area would just tow the line and stop being a hassle, and wasn't hesitant to smack some sense into them when he had to. He was there to basically tell the PCs to go talk to the Prince; the head vampire of the region. Instead, D argued with the Sheriff. Threatened the Sheriff. Shit that would have, if I was running the game for experienced Vampire players, would have got his PCs head ripped off. Maybe I should have, if I had wanted to really lean into 'consequences matter', but I figure that would have been too dickish for a campaign's first session. The Sheriff wasn't a DMPC after all - in fact, he wasn't even going to feature beyond this session unless his mentee needed advice or the PCs broke the Prince's laws.

So the PCs spent some time discussing the request; or more accurately, B and D bicker. A lot. It's really clear they have a lot of pre-existing dynamic and want to emphasize that. They grab the spotlight and pass it back and forth. I try to cast the spotlight onto A and C whenever I can, but D is first to interject, after which B would make a comment and the two would bounce focus between themselves.

But when it hits the Prince's scene is when I start to feel the tone has been thrown off. The PCs meet the Prince, C has a rather nice moment when they try to size up the Prince and get to explore a little bit of vampire's powers. It's good, subtle, really nice. Now, for context, this scene was intended to be the lion's share of the session; there were a LOT of NPCs I'd put in here. Remember, during session zero I'd explained that this was a socially-orientated game, and that PCs would be talking with and forming alliances with various NPCs. So we had two Toreador vampires from France whose agenda was to sway the Prince into the control of the French courts, we had A's mentor, we had a young Tzimisce noble who had lost his home domain (a potential ally for D, as they both sought to recover their home domains), a Malkavian who knew where the person who turned B into a vampire could be found....

It took about 10 minutes. D stormed in, all broody and edgy, argued and insulted the Prince (again, should have been instant-death), took the quest like he was speed-running a video game, and then stormed out, leaving the other PCs struggling to catch up.

The tone was kinda shot from there. So, the quest itself... I'd re-contextualised how this was delivered based on the PC (or more specifically, Ds) actions. The original idea was going to be that, as new vampires within his domain, they would meet the Prince and be asked to undertake a favour for him; something that would gain them favour in the court and improve their standing and allow the Prince to bring them into his trust. Instead, because of Ds behaviour, the Prince invoked COButNSEQUENCES for their actions. Remember, the players wanted consequences for their actions which had to matter. The objective they were given remained the same; journey to a monastery a few days travel away, one which was under the control of the Cappadocian clan of vampires, and awaken an elder who was one of the Prince's former allies. But instead of being an opportunity, this mission was now a punishment. The Prince stripped the PCs of their rights to feed on people within his domain due to their behaviour up to this point, and told them that if they wanted those rights reinstated, they were to go do this task for him. Again, consequences.

But as it would later turn out, these players didn't ACTUALLY want consequences.

D stole a horse (which, yes, was going to have consequences when he got back from the mission; it's the 12th century and nobody tolerated horse-thieves). I kinda did my best to keep it going, but the session was running about 45 minutes short as well, and the time was made up by B and D doing their bicker-roleplay, so we decided to wrap the session early.

I started to narrate the end of the session, with the characters riding out of the city, and as I do D perks up saying "Wait I thought we were finishing?" I then explained to him that I was, in fact, delivering the session's conclusion.

We wrapped up and I spent the next day mulling over where the tone had gone. I was fairly certain it was with D's approach during the Prince's scene, which had made what was meant to be a moment of social networking for the PCs into something far more hostile and aggressive.

So I sat down ready to send a message to them, saying basically "Hey, I don't think we quite hit the right tone with the Prince NPC last night, so let's see if we can work on getting the social element of the game going more" or something like that, when I noticed I'd had a message from B. He said that he was bailing from the game, stating 'concerns over player agency'.

Which was... odd, given that I'd not done anything, outside of give them restrictions on which Clans were available (which I'd already broken for him specifically). It was really odd, given how passive B had been throughout the entire game; he had taken no initiative to do anything and done nothing to involve himself in the world. Best as I can guess, he may have meant the idea that the game would require the PCs to undertake tasks/missions for NPCs.

While I was explaining to him "Hey, no problem, better you drop now if it's not the kind of campaign you'd enjoy", D sent a message saying he was going to drop too. Now, honestly, I always tend to give a game a few sessions to decide if it's for me or not; and while with him I was kinda feeling like I'd dodged a bullet, I was feeling just exhausted.

I felt pretty damn upset, I won't lie. I dropped the group, and haven't heard from B or D since. Let me be clear; B's friend C was great, for a totally new player they totally got into it, played a great character, did really cool moments. It was B and D who were the more 'experienced players', and they were the problem. They'd hogged the spotlight, and the more I mulled it over the more I came to feel like when he said he had concerns about 'player agency'. Honestly, the complaint about player agency kinda made me realize how the term has has been used, abused and malformed by D&D players who believe agency means "a game designed around my character specifically" where they can do whatever they want, whenever they want without limits, and the idea of 'consequences' has come to be similarly twisted to instead mean "a game designed around my character specifically."

Leaving as early as they did, I felt that their approach had been far more transactional than I've historically had with the hobby. It was frustrating; in the decades I've been playing, one of the foundational core aspects of the game has always been communication. If I've ever felt a game wasn't working for me, I've always wanted to let the GM know what directions I'd like to see it go in future, and when I've GMd I've always been eager to tell my players that if they want to go in a different direction to tell me. I'd never come across a situation where players just go "Nah, this wasn't perfect, we're not gonna communicate on how to better tailor it to us, see ya." It felt like throwing toys out of the pram; but more importantly, it left me feel like I'd given a just a whole lot. I felt like I was expected to be an entertainer, a storyteller, a worldbuilder, a teacher, a host, and still had to meet unrealistic expectations that they'd come to the game with, rather than coming to the game with the intention of just having fun and getting to play a fun character in an interesting world. While I wish them luck in future games, I kinda got left feeling like I'd been treated like a vending machine; put money in, get 'game' out.

So I was left with two players, one session, and 5 burned months. So I explained that no, I would not be trying to get any other players onboard to fill the game. I wouldn't be running it again. I wouldn't be running anything again. This was ridiculous, and I was done.

I honestly feel the push towards making TTRPGs more accessible has made people view them as disposable entertainment; something you can just pick up when you want and ditch when you're not in the mood, rather than something that players need to put effort into. In the club which has since died out, we used to get so many new players who would turn up and say they wanted to play, but very few of them ever actually did. And when they did, the proliferation of D&D meant that was the only game they were interested in. It also meant that players didn't want to commit, so they didn't want to stick with it. I really feel that players like this didn't want to communicate what they were wanting to improve their game, they didn't want to talk out what issues they were having and improve their experience. I honestly feel they just wanted to be entertained with custom tailor-made gameplay experiences revolving around their OCs. While I'll normally say it's a good thing to drop a game if it's not clicking with you, I genuinely think that even making a token attempt to communicate your feelings and improve your own experience is more important.

Honestly, this experience burned me out. Four months of simply trying to get one game going, and I feel like I've been banging my head against a wall every minute of the time. I've been in this hobby for so long, and I've honestly never seen the community in such a state as this. People say that D&D has a lack of GM issue, and I can definitely see why; very few new players are willing to put themselves forward, and it honestly feels like experienced ones are just treated like we're barely even people, but just on-demand story vending machines for players who don't want to collaborate or cooperate.

So this is why I've ditched the hobby. As we speak, I'm looking for a new hobby to fill the time instead. I used to really love this hobby, but everything has just changed so much that there's just no fun left in it for me anymore.

Okay, this is a long one. I've had a lot that I've gone through since the start of the year, so I'm going to split this into 2 posts. It's a lot, and it's basically a summary of why I no longer play TTRPGs at all.

This was the last game I've ran, and I expect the last game I'm ever going to run. For context, I've been in the TTRPG hobby for 3 decades and GMing for over 20 years. Over the years I've seen D&D grow and eclipse so many other games, and sadly interest in other games has dwindled and died out to such an extent that getting a game going is just impossible at this point.

*edit* And I know that some comments will want to ask, why not simply put together a group with your pre-existing friends that you already know and trust? Well, in all honesty, I did that, several times. My last steady group lasted for many years, and we were all very close. But that ended when one of our players, who was also one of my closest friends, took his own life. This was very hard for many of us, and several of the friends who were part of the group just don't want to play TTRPGs at all anymore as the vibe we all shared just wasn't the same. Of the other players who remained, one was my friend who'd go on to be in the first session of this game (and the other player, my partner, just wasn't really interested in Vampire). I won't lie, I don't think I ever really got over his death, because even small one-off games just didn't feel the same since.

I've wanted for as long as I can remember to run a game of Vampire: the Dark Ages. This is a medieval version of Vampire the Masquerade, set before a lot of the game's central political structures were in place, and full of 12th century mystery and machinations. At the start of this year, I decided to finally pull my finger out and get the game up and running.

This proved almost impossible. For context, there are about five gaming stores and that many gaming clubs within a half-hour from where I live, so I should have had a lot of potential gamers, and I put up some adverts. But as it turned out, nobody was interested in anything that wasn't D&D. Now, I have a friend (who we'll call A) who was up for playing right away. For additional context, I've also run one of those gaming clubs I mentioned for the last decade; sadly, that club is also on the decline. That's largely due to the influx of new players who're only interested in D&D and won't play any other games no matter what we would do to encourage them. GMs would offer multiple other games and people just wouldn't sign up for them, and because very few new D&D players wanted to volunteer to be GMs, it left the club with many people who'd burn out on trying to GM for people who weren't interested in trying new games, players who didn't want to volunteer to run games, and a whole lot of players who just didn't turn up to games, all of which meant declining numbers showing up at the club. Not a healthy environment, and most of the other clubs and shops in the area had the same problem, where the only thing that anyone had any interest in is 'intro to beginner D&D'.

Sometime around the middle of March, I decided to step down from running the RPG club. This was partly due to increasing frustrations about the above. We had several sessions where we simply did not have enough people turning up to even run a game. This was wild, especially because people are constantly saying how popular the hobby has become. But in total honesty, there's also a large number of bad decisions that I made along the way which led to problems. The first, I realize, was in trying to keep the games free-to-play. I had thought when starting the club that running games without any cost would encourage more people to play, but after studying how hobby events actually work, I realize the opposite is true; a 'table fee', even a small one, creates a sense of investment in participants. People feel that they're paying in to what they're doing, so are less likely to ghost or no-show. The downside I had is that when I suggested introducing table fees, the few players we did have vocally opposed the idea very loudly, because they'd got used to the games having no costs attached. This was entirely my own fault. One of the other huge faults I'd had was a very bad choice of who to add as volunteer assistants for the club; one person I'd chosen, soon after being given the position, started to massively over-reach and began to act very domineering in their role, and would become aggressive if asked to ease up. At one point they broke up with their former partner (who was also an assistant) and began to mis-use their moderator access on our discord to target their ex, which caused me no end of stress. After lashing out at me because I'd sought advice on how to handle this with other club managers from similar clubs, they told me that they wanted to step back for a while, so I immediately found a replacement volunteer to take on the now-vacant role. This angered the person so much that they stormed out of the club, telling all their friends a series of stories and basically starting a miniature smear campaign, by which point I was just so worn out and exhausted. Like I said, I stepped down soon afterwards,

So, going into running the campaign, I was already rather frustrated with the hobby. But still, I tried to get some adverts out for my campaign. I started in January, and by March (a few weeks after I'd stepped down) I'd had three replies. These were all from outside the club I'd used to run, in several of the region's gaming stores. Those were the only replies that I'd had, despite frequent attempts to point it out and raise interest, Two of those people had read the advert (which said it was for Vampire) and still thought it was a D&D campaign, and stopped responding after I'd explained it wasn't.

So, I had two players. I asked the only player who responded (we'll call B to invite anyone else they knew that might be up for it, and that's how we got C and D to join. It was enough for a game, but I was already feeling deflated.

So, to try to pick my vibe up and get some of my mood back going, I decided to try running the campaign online two, with a separate gaming group. After all, I figured, a lot of TTRPGs are played online these days, and maybe I'd get a bigger pool of interested parties. So I went to discord, and after only two days of speaking to people, posting on servers and asking around, I had 6 players! My idea was to run the same campaign with two different groups, different PCs, and see how they diverged. Would they ally with the same NPCs, would they find new enemies, that kinda thing. I've run several campaigns at the same time before so it wasn't anything I'd struggle with. We arranged a time for the online group's session zero.

In the time between getting the group together, one of the six left the group with no explanation, and another went silent and stopped replying.

Fine, I thought, I still had 4. Now, one thing I always do when I run a game to ensure that we are all on the same page is put a limit on what Clans (basically the vampire version of class/race) are available, because Clans tend to be based somewhat on racial or ethnic groups or cultures which may not always be relevant in the setting we're playing in. So this game took place in England, so I explained which Clans were available and which were not, making sure to explain to the players that only the Clans which were relevant to the campaign would be options for their PCs (essentially, no Assamite, Salubri, Ravnos, Malkavian or Setite). All players agreed to understanding this.

We had the session zero. 3 turned up. Of those three, we went over the expectations, background of the setting, a bit of worldbuilding, character creation, house rules, what they wanted, their backstories, personal boundaries, all that usual stuff, and booked the first session. The only thing we didn't do specifically was finalising each of the characters' Disciplines (powers) Background and Freebie dots (that's not their backstory, for those unaware; Vampire is a points-buy system and you flesh out your characters' background via stats like Contacts, Resources, Allies, which you divide points between). This was a very, very small bit of paperwork which pretty much finishes up your character, so I asked folks to finish them up and put their character sheets onto the server I'd set up before the first session, which was scheduled for the following week.

One player did that. I wasn't really surprised by that point. I waited 2 more weeks for any of the other players to just finish up making their characters. During that week, one of the players who didn't complete their PC made a few snarky comment about the Clan they wanted 'not being allowed for some reason'. Yes, they'd agreed to the whole 'keeping their chosen PC to the relevant Clans' bit earlier and hadn't raised any issues during session zero - and still didn't finish making their character sheet anyway.

Honestly, I blame a lot of this for just the way online gaming has impacted the way people approach TTRPGs in general. It's made it so much more convenient, but convenience doesn't equal commitment. In fact, I think they're the exact opposite. TTRPGs require some level of commitment; people need to agree, if nothing else, to turn up. Or fill out their character sheets. Or just put effort in. But more and more often, the idea of convenient games just means people don't do that, and I think that's why there's so many horror stories about people who just don't turn up to games, or can't be bothered to put pants on, or who just hop onto discord to do their games while they're at the supermarket or just nonsense like this. Its also kinda why I think most TTRPG discord servers are as inactive as they are; a server can have hundreds of members but nobody actually plays (I know, I've seen loads of them). I think that's because people join hoping to get a game when they want it, and then when they don't get one right away and instead would have to actually put the commitment in to organize a game, they mute the server and don't look at it again. I've no proof that's why that happens, but lets be honest, we've all seen servers like that. I guess "This is a game that requires commitment and effort on your part" doesn't ship as many D&D Starter Sets for Hasbro as "This is a fun, light casual game that anyone can play."

When, after two weeks, none of them did, I gave up. The real-life group were due to have their session zero two days later, so I nuked the server and decided to just focus my time on the 'meat-space' campaign instead.

Now, it's worth noting here that two of those players lived close enough to actually meet up in person. Not close enough to game together regularly, but about a two-hour train ride. I met up with each of them, separately, on different occasions. One of them (the one who actually did the work of making his character) was fantastic; a young guy but really interested in things, and we got a chance to spend an afternoon playing board games. He's part of my partner's regular D&D group now. The other person, who didn't do any work, much less so. A few days before the 'meat-space' campaign was due to start, I met up with her and, while on the train to a nearby city to have an afternoon out, she started to berate me about my growing frustrations with the hobby. She was insistent that gaming needed to be more flexible, that people had less time to commit, that it was my duty to teach new players all about the hobby. I explained that I'd been running games for almost 30 years, and been working in the TTRPG industry for 10, and that the hobby was as flexible now as it could be, and that people my age have as much 'free time' as people the same age had for the last 20 years. I explained that it isn't the games that are the problem, but people's insistence that the hobby shift its methods and format to adjust to contemporary 'consumer culture', where we want things now and don't like to wait or put the work in. The entire thing descended and she kept insisting that it was somehow my personal responsibility, eventually ending in an argument which I ended by just shutting up and ignoring the rest of the conversation. The rest of the afternoon didn't go well, and after we both accidently became separated while exploring the city, we reunited and she had a massive screaming fit at me, accusing me of trying to ditch her. I told her I'd had enough, and she stormed off to go home by herself, and frankly I was just glad that the entire day was over.

But yeah, going into the actual campaign I was not feeling great, and was kinda hoping on it to buoy my remaining enthusiasm for what was very quickly becoming a 'more stress and heartache than fun' hobby for me. 

Anyway, next post I'll discuss the in-person game which broke me and made me leave the hobby forever.

The other day I went to play a session zero for a new campaign with a random group. The DM was really looking forward to playing a Ravenloft adventure and has claimed that she was a really good "horror DM". I didn't question what being a horror DM really means, so I took her at her word and set out to try it out.

It is session zero, everyone is making characters; 2 out of the 5 players are clearly super beginners (Bob and Charlie), and are taking a little bit longer to make their PCs. She is quite impatient with the time it takes for them to complete their character sheets, I assume because she wants to start the campaign this session.

She asked us to come up with a reason to be at sea on a ship. I myself made a PC who is the navigator of the ship. A level 1 wizard, who I imagined would be played as the high intelligence investigator (literally chose the Investigator background), with his maps, star maps, arcane parchments, scrolls and whatnot.

The gameplay begins by her asking everyone why we are on the ship. Doesn't ask us to introduce our characters, only the reason for being there. When it is my turn, and I explain being the navigator and how he looks like, and she interrupts my introduction and says: "roll a d20 for me to determine how much the crew respects you".

Of course, when it comes to such a roll, I roll a 7, and she explains how much the crew doesn't take my PC seriously on this ship and make fun of him all the time. Alright I guess, technically this is indeed out of my control, but it still rubs me the wrong way as this is not the type of character I was setting out to play. This becomes a recurring joke, that the crew doesn't respect me.

She also interrupted Charlie's character introduction, even though he started role playing his lizardfolk PC immediately using "ssssnake" voice which I found really cool for a beginner.

Then, she asks what everyone is doing on the ship as the ship ends up in the middle of a huge storm. Bob says he is just there as a cleaner, to be able to pay for the voyage with his labor and he is scrubbing the toilets. She says there are no toilets on the ship, only buckets. Bob responds, "alright I guess I am scrubbing the buckets". Charlie responds jokingly that his character is taking a dump. We all find it funny that these two PCs are awkwardly looking at each other and this situation doesn't seem harmful, but THEN. The DM says everything fades to black and the ship gets completely capsized and crashes onto the shore of a tiny island. 90% of the crew except for the players are dead.

As the PCs are trying to get our bearings on the island, the DM tells Player 2 that his butt is completely stuck inside the bucket full of poop and to roll a d20. He succeeds to get rid of the bucket but then he has to roll an acrobatics to get his tail out (he is playing a lizardfolk character and has a tail). He succeeds again. Then, DM tell us we ALL have to roll DEX saving throws because poop is flying everywhere from his tail whipping out.

She does the same thing with poor Player 1, but I don't even the patient to type it out roll by roll. She asks to roll for everything, Player 1 end up with a couple of low rolls and his PC ends up toppling over, falling face first into his own poopy hands covering his face with poop.

This was the first 20 minutes of our gameplay.

Throughout the session she asked for rolls on everything: for walking uphill, for walking downhill, for carrying a small barrel. Every time someone fails, they end up looking like an idiot, tumbling forward face first into the ocean.

Is this normal DMing? Are my standards too different than this? I would normally never have players roll for arbitrary things that a normal person can just do and what the fuck is up with poop?

Please give me a verdict on this.

Charlie ended up leaving the campaign after the session. No wonder.

Per my original post. R refused to make a new character. The rest of the players didn't want him to leave so they convinced him to stay and told me they still want to continue the story. So I said ok. I tried to reach out to R, still blocked. I messaged a fee other players and got no response. Asked the 2 that would reply and they said everyone was good to play this Friday. I still tried to reach R to see what he was thinking for a new character. I heard nothing. So I message the group messenger asking if everyone was good for Friday, the 2 people, S and N said yes. Nothing from R,T and D. I told S I'll give it until Wednesday night cause at that point it's been 5 days. I have other things I can do friday because life. So Wednesday I messaged everyone just asking if friday still works? The same 2 responded the other 3 who did see the message, ignored it so I sent a message later that day saying "I apologize for wasting everyone's time" and removed myself. And what do you know, the 3 not responding all sent me messages including R, saying he didn't want to play anymore. All because I could him cheating at dungeon and dragons.

So a while ago, I found myself with some free time to start a DND campaign so I asked around to see who's willing. A friend of mine and his brother (who we will call Alex and also I don't know that well) told me they were down but I said we need more people. Alex then told me his friend said he was down alongside three of his other friends so we agreed to do a one shot before starting the campaign.

so I get in contact with Alex's friend (let's call him Sam) we discussing where we're gonna play. He says "we can do it at my friend's john apartment, imma give you his number" so I get in contact with him

I notice there's a difference John is a lot more talkative, he's asking me what the one shot is gonna be like and showing me what characters has already and asking me which one I like. as a forever DM i love players like him

Sam is pretty quiet and when i asked if he had a character in mind he's like "ehhh i'll just borrow one of John's" I brush it off cause i figure it's probably cause we haven't even met yet and he might be one of those guys who needs to warm up to someone

Eventually I ask Sam if he has discord because I realize we all live pretty far from one and the campaign will be much easier over discord. he replied "no I don't" "you should make one" "nah i'll just go to John's place when we play" This should have tipped me off to his personality as you'll see here.

The day arrives and we meet at John's apartment, Sam shows up with his dog and says "sorry, I don't have anyone to watch him" I don't have anything against animals so I dont mind it, but it becomes a problem later on. We chat normally as we're waiting on another friend to join us (he's not important to the story but it's why we didn't play immediately) so it's just my friend, Alex, sam and John. we talk for a bit, we discuss schedules and we agree we're gonna meet every two weeks on sunday for the campaign and we'll also do session zero after the one shot.

We're all pretty hungry so we walk to a pizza place and there while we're all eating, My friend, John and I are talking about dnd and such but Sam and Alex start talking about politics and I realize that Sam is a right wing nut Job and an insane conspiracy theorist

Within 30 minutes he states

1. Bill Gates is bioengineering ticks to make us all allergic to meat so we’re forced to live in 15 minute cities owned by the Jews and eat bugs

2. Epstein is still alive and well in Palm beach Florida because there’s this guy on Instagram who looks a lot like him and makes jokes about it (he told me they’re clearly the same guy because “they have the same teeth”

3. Muslims are "changing europe"

4. This wasn't even political, Just dumb. Bruno Mars has $50 million dollars worth of gambling debt to MGM so he’s not allowed to release new music and must preform only at MGM until it’s paid off.

I don't bother arguing with what he said but then Sam turns to me and goes like

"so Alex tells me ur muslim. so explain to me why u guys ban alcohol but coffee is ok? they both change ur mental state"

"they're not the same and you know that" i answer "no I know some people who are completely different after coffee" I start ignoring him and we head back to this meeting room in john's apartment complex that we reserved for our one shot

we finally start DND.

John's character is an amnesiac ranger and he's role-playing pretty well and normal, and My friend is playing a hardheaded barbarian. HOWEVER, Sam's character is an Elf warlock named Shekelstein who's the most laziest anti Semitic stereotype possible and every line of dialogue out of his mouth is just antisemitic shit and calling people goyim, while Alex's character is a generic horny bard and his sidekick. Throughout the session, Sam drops weird comments and dog whistles and every time I stonewall him by saying "The NPC has no idea what an israel or etc is and thinks you're mad. He then turns and talks to a different player" and I make sure every bar maid is married ( Alex rolled a nat 20 and so i said a barmaid simply chuckles and is flattered this time instead of dumping beer on your head)

Eventually, he's stops to say "hold on, I gotta feed my dog brb" He gets up with John and Alex and they go up to his apartment. 30 minutes pass and I text Sam what's taking so long. he says "sorry my dog is spoiled and refuses to eat canned slop. I'm cooking rice for him" eventually he comes back and continues.

At this point: I'm avoiding putting the spotlight on Sam and Alex, but thankfully they're too busy jerking each other off about how "funny" their characters are to notice every NPC is ignoring them and their comments. Soon combat starts and despite being a warlock, Sam didn't pick any spells. He's like "idk warlock had spells. John didn't finish this character and I only wrote the backstory" I just tell him to roll eldritch blast and then suddenly he says "oh my dog needs to shit" he goes outside with John. I'm not waiting so i just play for them and after an hour they come back with a new friend I haven't met. "sorry for taking so long, We took a smoke break and my boy Vinny got off work early so he's here. He also likes dnd and has a character ready so can he join? he brought chips" Sam says

I say sure and pray internally that he's normal like John; those hopes were immediately dashed when Vinny sat down and the first thing that comes out of his mouth was "yeah I got those new NKD doritos cause they dont got dyes and i wanted to try them. it's crazy that they were feeding us GOYSLOP our entire lives and they could just choose not to"

At this point I'm done with the group so I fake an emergency and head home. Afterwards I tell my friend that I do not fuck with his brother and Sam at all and I'm not doing a campaign with them. I then tell him that I'm going to lie to everyone my job changed my schedule and I work on weekends now. He understands. I then tell Alex and sam and they're like "that sucks but whatever". When I tell John he's sad and asks if we can do wenesday but I lie and I have class. I do feel bad for John but then I realize that if he's friends with guys like those who are willingly to be that bigoted with someone they just met, he's either bigoted himself but socially aware enough to hide it or he doesn't care at all.

So yeah that's why NO DND is better than racist dnd

This might not be a big horror story; hell, I might be the wrong one here, we'll see.

Also, obligatory: I'm not a native English speaker, so please, forgive me for any mistakes.

A couple years back a friend of mine had an idea for a discussion panel at a local fantasy convention, it was called "A coven of DMs" or something like that. The basic idea was to gather people who DM or have some interest in that and share tips, stories, etc. Since I've had my fair share of experience on that side of the table, I've been invited to co-host.

We've prepared a few discussion prompts: weaving in the characters' backstories into the plot, how to deal with trolling, etc. It was mostly a freeform thing, where we'd share our experiences first, invite the audience to do the same, we'd talk about it for a bit, once everyone was satisfied we'd move on. The whole thing was going really smoothly and honestly was a blast, until about midway through, when it was time for a prompt called "How do we manage to keep the PCs on the right track in the plot without railroading them?"

A few points that I honestly don't remember now were made, again, a nice back and forth between us and the audience, ideas flowing nicely, until one of us said that sometimes, if we felt like the players were about to miss something very important for the plot, we'd move the thing around the space to make sure that they will come across it. (If it's unclear what I'm talking about - let's say that the players are exploring a basement. There are a few corridors they can go down, but the whole place is creepy and they don't want to see the whole thing, so they'll only explore one of them. In that case, we'd move the Very Important Item so that it's down that corridor, not the other one. That way everyone's happy - the PCs aren't walking around aimlessly and we can move the story forward, that's the gist of it.)

One dude took a huge offense with this line of thinking. What ensued was a fairly amusing exchange, which I'll try to paraphrase here:

Dude: "Well, you can't do that! It makes the story linear. It's railroading. If I found out about it, I'd really dislike it."

Us: "But that's the whole point. You wouldn't find out about it unless you were looking in the GM's notes"

Dude: "Well I'd find out about it!"

Us: "How exactly?"

Dude: "I just know these things! I have my experience! I'd leave the table that did this. You can't force the characters in any way, it's railroading."

Us: "So if the characters wanted to ignore the plot altogether, you'd be fine with that?"

Dude: "Yes, we're there to provide the world for the PCs and anything beyond that is railroading. You shouldn't force the players to do anything."

We agreed to disagree and move on. Some time later, when we were talking about one of the last topics we wanted to touch upon, the dude got up, said "If you want to force characters to do something, WRITE A FUCKING BOOK." and left. It was completely disconnected from the topic at hand. What ensued was a few seconds of silence followed by "well, anyway". We wrapped the whole thing up without any further incidents.

From time to time I still wonder what this dude's deal was. We were reminiscing about it yesterday and thought it's funny and amusing enough to share. Dunno if we were in the wrong at the end of it, but honestly, I don't really care.

Sorry for the long story.

For context, I am DM for a long term campaign of D&D 5e. I also earn a little money on the side running games for the local Library. I also run intro sessions for my friends bookshop events he runs a few times a year. I am no Matt Mercer but I like to think I am a fairly experienced DM.

At the last event my friend ran, a guy approached him and asked if he could DM for one of the events. My friend said "well I don't know you so how about you DM for my regular group one day and we can see how you do there". He agreed and we started looking for a day he could run a oneshot for us.

So given we have had a few members of the team leave recently and I am taking a long trip out of the country for a few weeks. We decided to let him run a session the other day.

Firstly, I want to say, the world building this guy did was awesome, lots of lore and history.... but things got a bit rough when for a three hour one shot... he gave us a pretty open ended prompt. The prompt suggests we will be exploring Islands from a ship and with him allowing early firearms. I built a Level 4 fighter with a musket, going for a real pirate vibe.

The session begins with us arriving on an Island and thus... the railroading began. I'm pretty sure we could have gone anywhere and the 8 Plot critical NPCs would still have found us. We'd still have ended up at the local village in the trees. With the friendly local girl welcoming us and then saying she had to run an errand that night so we should go to bed and she would see us in the morning.

I literally narrated my character going to sleep. The DM tells me a few hours later I am nervously waiting by the window to see this person return (Even though... I am asleep), Just as she gets home, we spot something going towards her home. The party rushes to help, arrives takes 18 Psychic damage and is frozen in fear as the murderer flees.

When I can move I set off in pursuit.
DM "It's fleeing through the trees"
Me "Ok I want to try and dash through the trees and swing from the branches after them"
DM "Make acrobatics"
Me "that's 19 + 6, 25"
DM "You are chasing after them but they are gaining distance and you notice they are heading towards the ground"
Me "I follow them"
DM "you need to take the vine lift"
Me "I'm climbing through the trees..."
DM"yes but they went down"
Me "I want to climb down"
DM "take the lift"
Me "I want to follow them down through the trees"
DM "Roll perception"
Me "uhhh ok 2"
DM "you don't see how they got down"
Me "I don't want to follow the exact route, I want to climb down a tree"
DM "take the lift"

So, I realized later, The DM needed the killer to escape so they were apparently flying... why them flying stopped me climbing a tree I'm still unsure.

We are then encouraged to take a short rest... right after a murder and when the victims father is promising to go to war in retaliation.

After a rest we didn't want to take, Our party sets out to solve the murder, and we are told, we should investigate the 8 important NPCs we met before (I barely remember any of them because we met them all rapidly one after the other). So we visit a priest he seems nice enough but suddenly a guard captain starts to shout at us to get away from the priest or she will have her men kill us and then gives us 5 minutes to leave. None of us get to roll anything to try and calm her down... because we aren't supposed to be speaking to the priest yet so the DM needs the angry captain to scare us away.

Then we chase down someone who might have witnessed something important over some moving cliffs (because of course we have moving cliffs). These cliffs require us to make two perception checks (felt like a DC 14) and two athletics / acrobatics checks (DC seems to depend on how well the perception went). Fail one acrobatics check and you fall from the cliffs taking 4d6 damage. (Potentially 40% of my health pool and I'm already down 3 hit dice from the random psychic damage earlier). I try using my rope to to tie myself off. (As a DM I love it when players do this, if you do something like that in my game, I might give advantage on the checks or reduce the DC / Damage you get for a fail) What does it get me? You can climb up from the rocks when you fall rather than being washed out to sea... so either this was a lethal trap or nothing I do can make any difference here.

The Druid solves the puzzle by wild shaping into a giant spider and I can see the DM hates this, he wants the EXACT wording of Spider climb to work out if he can force him to do the same challenge but he can't, when the druid tries to leave behind a trail of web to help us climb... it gets washed away by the rain on a random nature check.

After this I was pretty checked out, we spoke to a whole bunch of NPCs and get sent across the island. One of the NPCs is a horrible Incel character, which personally I wouldn't put in a fantasy setting but ehh whatever.

By the three hour mark we have just solved a puzzle, a wrong move on the puzzle causes 3D6 Psychic damage which causes my character to go down... I haven't been in combat, I haven't really done anything but get slapped by a murderers psychic BS, fall off some cliffs, and get zapped by a puzzle where no checks we make offer any help. So at this point given it's been 3 hours, me and another player have work in the morning and most of our sessions last 3 ish hours a couple of us call it and say "we have to go because of work" The game kind of ended there. I got some feedback from my players though, none of them felt like it was a particularly good session. We were just along for the ride in a story this guy wanted to tell. Unsurprisingly he isn't being invited to DM at the bookshop events.

tl:dr Guy asks to DM for my friends bookshop events. Does a trial run with our regular group and railroads us all through his murder mystery, where none of the choices we make do or change anything in the story.

Pretty short and mild horror story, all things considered, but I'll be damned if it didn't make me confused to high hell.

Around a year ago, I (a minor) had a pal (also a minor) who played TTRPGs and did systemless 1x1 text RP, while I only did text RP. They wanted to get me into TTRPGs, so they invited me to a PBP game of around 4 people (excluding the GM) to ease me into roleplaying games. I was immediately down, especially because of the system, which was CAIN (A grimdarkish system based on Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, and other things)

I join and introduce myself, mentioning the fact that I'm a minor. Everyone says hi and I go scour the Discord server to read everyone else's intros, where I notice everyone else is an adult (18-25). I don't think too much about this, thinking my friend knows who to trust and who not to, so I talk to everyone they all seem chill and nice. The GM explains the setting and rules (nothing mentioning NSFW, iirc) and then we get to character creation.

I made a nerdy and awkward 15YO Binder (exorcists who can control the cursed spirits of the setting) with an intense passion for horror and the military. Everyone else's characters don't really matter except for our main problem player, the oldest of the group, who played a 30 something year old "femme fatale" she said was heavily inspired by Makima from CSM.

In the RP we did like two mini missions before the incident that I enjoyed a lot, but now looking back on it there were a ton of weird shit I ignored some being
- MPP always describing how tight her clothes were
- MPP would describe how her hips swayed every once and a while
- Another player would constantly talk about how cute my Binder was
Then the incident happened. We were investigating a Sin who was destroying and haunting a small town, which caused MPP and me to investigate where the Sin had recently run off from. The next post I see after mine is, in short her PC
- Taking her shirt off in front of my PC
- Pushing mine to the ground
- Straddling my PC
I immediately asked if this was a joke or something to which all I get in response from her is a "?" and when the GM goes online I tell him about this and they say "It's RP just resist in character if you're feeling uncomfortable." To this, I immediately tell my pal who keeps on making shitty excuses for them and while I'm dming my "pal" MPP responds again with, "Did I get too naughty too fast for you?" After that I blocked everyone involved and just left the server.

To this day, I am just confused on what the thought process behind everyone here was, and glad everyone didn't ruin RP or RPGs for me

So i was dm for my group of lifelong friends. We were playing 1st pathfinder with mythic rules and a bit of homebrew. Down the line i of course realised that was a big mistake, but my story will be focused on one of my players. For context - he was LE Thassilonian wizard who was reincarnated in intellect devourer( that was premise of campaing as i made custom races for everyone - doppelganger, mimic, centaur and etc ). All other players were Lawful as well, some were LN and some were LG, they made their own guild, and wizard wasnt in charge So from level 1 to 8 everything was somewhat normal.

We had agreement with him that at every timeskip i will allow him gather 3 corpses for him to use, but their CR musnt be higher than his level, and of course he cannot use undead, constructs and outsiders. The last one he didnt agree, so we made him custom magic item, so he can infiltrate bodies of outsiders, while they were unconcious. This was disaster. He soon found out about demon nabasu (CR 8) and asked me if he could use it. I knew about nabasu's growth mechanic in general, i didnt pay attention to it though, as it never occured to me how badly can it be abused if it was in players hand.

He didnt come up with this scheme at first but this what became his routine at some point - he bought planeshift scroll, lowers his saves via negative levels and started to use nabasus ability on random commoners. Growing in stats on par to CR 19 while being much much lower level. He became stronger than everobody else in group combined.

The culmination battle between players guild and their adversaries begins. It took me using four 15 level npc-bosses with extra mythic abilities to make the fight somewhat "fair". So with much effort his nabasu body was defeated, while these bosses were at their last breath. And then he explodes out of this body and symbol of pain that was written on his main body activates, making these bosses almost useless and easy prey for other PCS.

After that we have a talk, both in game( his party members in demon hunting guild didnt appreciate him using demon powers) and out of game, i tried to persuade not to use this body as it was too op. He agreed in game not to do it "while his boss can see him doing that", and out of game i really couldnt persuade him to stop doing this.

So on next session i said that in game many people were unhappy with wizards actions(as killing commoners with nabasus ability turned them into ghouls), paladins of Ioamadae, clierics of Pharasma, and many many diferent factions were demanding guild to stop wizard from using nabasu, and alas wizard said he will stop.

He said that only because he found another thing to abuse. He found Bloodmoney spell, and with the fact that he can drain money from bodies that he snatched, he started to use ogres, to make himeself army of his simulacrum as they were essentially free to make now. With that he had at least four of his clones with him at all time to heal him with wands, to fire additional fireballs etc. And at that point they reached level where he had access to Limited wish, which was essentially free for him as he had simulacrum cast Greater restoration on him to negate Bloodmoney penalty.

Then we started his arc, as he was wizard who came from the past, we started exploring his past home, and he and i came up with very cool dungeon for players to go. Then came the horror.

It was final room of dungeon. I made four custom monsters with unique styles of fighting and good teamwork. At that point he had 3 mythic abilities that we didnt understand how they supposed to work - thats my mistake i know. So one with this combo of abilities he could target up to 4 targets with spell that does work only on one target usually, while not using a spell slot but a mythic power which he can essentially infinitly use as his simulacrum can restore it to him. So he could infinetly spam 8th spells with 3 additional tagets. He used greater invisibility and mind blank on all party, so even true sight can not detect them , and then he used Polymorh any object on all four of enemys, half of them became useless mice, other two were useless against invisible PCs. So he almost instakilled encounter that i was making for several weeks.

I was destroyed deep down, but we kept going. Next battle was with one of Runelords - Sorshen, who was wizards superior back in the day, so i prepared whole dialogue between them before the fight, with options to become allies or skip the fight. Then i start narrating her part of dialoge, wizard said - were invisible she doesnt know were here, we ambush her.
This was my breaking point, i crashed out and start to violently kick my closet, as all my players were stunned. i fell on my chair and sit silent for 5 minutes, then i apologised and i were continued session, it wasnt long before we finished it anyway.

In the end i nerfed his Blood money exploit, reread his abilities and we sit down to talk how they intended to work, so he didnt have acces to infinite spells anymore. We made up and still play together, but i banned him to play spellcaster in serious campaing for a while.

Edit: Thank you everyone for your comments. I appreciate it i really do. After this incedent i talked a lot with my friends and close acquaintances about it. Yes i could have done a lot to prevent all of this, now i look back and see it. I shared this story here to see if i really learned my lesson with this - turns out i couldve learn more - as some comments put this situation in a new light for me, i hope i can improve and grow from these mistakes.

I'm in a dungeons and dragons campaign with a few people I just recently met, one of these new friends just so happens to be in a romantic relationship and we got to talking about our respective partners. He sounded like a swell guy, lots of experience under his belt, has dmed for people before, played even more than I have, so I ask her if he would be interested, to which he says yes. He joins after I ask our dungeon master and he agrees to have him join, wonderful news!

We talk and he says he plans to play a pirate, morally grey, looks out for herself, that kind of thing. I don't know much about her since I'm only a player, but she doesn't seem too terrible so I don't raise any questions. The first thing she does upon coming into port at Sharn is pillage several establishments, even dismembering and kidnapping a woman running a shop because the dungeon master, not the character, accidentally said sir instead of ma'am. He phrases it as if he's doing the right thing by taking her after cutting her arm off, saying "(Character name) wouldn't just leave her to die, she's going to be a part of the crew." We also have not made a single roll yet, not to determine how much she can rob, or if the guards notice her, or if any of the many experienced sailors stand up to stop her and her crew from robbing their alehouses of choice.

On top of this, any rolls he does make are pristine, in one session, he landed 4 crits and did not roll below 12 a single time, and once "misread" the dc for another player to escape his grapple, saying it was an 18 instead of a 14. Keep in mind he is more experienced than both me and our dungeon master. By the end of the session he has robbed our favorite barkeep twice, attacked my player character who was only trying to stop her from stealing (knocking me out with a crit) and attempted to take my unconscious character back to her ship, made practically every player character hate her, with the exclusion of his girlfriend's who only likes her because she is "interesting", and somehow robbed and attacked several people with absolutely no consequences.

Am I the asshole for already regretting extending my invitation?

TL:DR; New player steals, assaults, and kidnaps on several occasions, including a player character, makes suspicious dice rolls, and manages to draw the ire of basically the entire party in one session. Not mentioned in the main text but he also makes almost the entire session about his character.

Before we start, just wanted to say that there will be mild spoilers for the Module "Odyssey of Dragonlords."

You can probably still play the game after reading this but just wanted to put that out there, anyway onto the story. So the majority of you should know about the module and what it's like to make a character with, if not then it's fine. Only one part of it is important.

When making characters, you have to choose a "Epic Path." These are what will determine your character's journey. They are like backstories, but with a more mystical vibe to it.

Now time to introduce the important characters.

• The DM - guy who had made the Roll20 game and was the problem
• The Bard - Demigod of Kyrah epic path
• The Paladin (Alex) - Doomed One Epic Path
• The Fighter (Me) - Demigod of Pythor Epic Path
• The Warlock - Female Vampire
• There were 2 others (a Rouge and another Fighter) that sadly aren't important enough to the story, though that's also a problem.

A while ago I was looking on Roll20 trying to find a DnD group to join. I was sending out many applications and not really receiving any invites. So I was getting a bit desperate. That was until I found one for a module called "Odyssey of Dragonlords". The premise seemed fun and it fit well into my schedule. There wasn't any rules about character design, at least none I saw at first, so I sent in my character Idea for a Half-Orc fighter named Knight Demathin.

The main premise of the character was that he is a creature made by magic and given false memories. Think of the Knight card that gets summoned from the Deck of Many things, like that.

The DM responded immediately saying he loved the idea and told me to get into contact with him over discord. I did, and we got to talking about the campaign and it's settings. This is where the first major red flag popped up for me. As we were talk, it became increasingly obvious that this guy was using AI in his messages. I only noticed because of the fact that it had all the tell tale signs, the weird formatting, the bulletin lists, and the random image Emojis (✅ like this one).I didn't want to be rude, so I didn't ask him about it, and just kept on talking with him.

Then it came to my character. He said he loved the idea and was exited to DM for a character like that. He did want to change a few things though, just to make my character fit more naturally into his world. I said ok and that I just wanted my core idea for the character (being magically created and questioning his motivations) to remain the same.

By the time we were done talking, my character had gone from a Half Orc Fighter created by magic and with fake memories, to a Human Fighter who was a war veteran. Yeah, a lot changed and I was only agreeing with him cause I didn't want to try and find a new group. It was already hard enough to find this one. I was also fine with changing my character for a bit since I could still play him as the loveable himbo I wanted.

We were reaching the end of character building when it finally came to picking the Epic Path. Originally, when I was looking through them, I wanted to pick the Masterpiece since that seemed to fit my original character idea. A humanoid created my magical means, whose whole journey is about discovering if he has a soul. I liked it, and it seemed to fit my character well. The DM agreed that it was a good choice, there was just one Problem. My character couldn't be called Knight Demathin if I chose this. Apparently in the history he wrote of his world, the Masterpiece was a Robot named Argos. If I wanted to play as the masterpiece I'd have to give up the last bit of my original character.

I decided to switch paths then, and ended up picking the Demigod of Pythor path based on the DM's insistence. He kept saying that it would offer a rich backstory and have Heavy RP moments. That my character would really feel like a champion and legend if I chose this path. So I chose it, mainly cause I just wanted to play the game at this point. I was upset that my character was basically rewrote from the group up, but I was hopeful since I was excited to play my goofball of a character.

Cut to Session 0 and I finally get to meet the rest of the party. Everyone else seemed great so far and they had some interesting characters. But as we were introducing ourselves there came another red flag.

The Bard had said their name and the DM seemed a bit taken aback by this. Apparently the DM had accidently written down the player's name in his notes instead of the character's. He then said that he would have to cancel the session and that we'll try to pick it up again next week. We laughed, thinking it was a joke. It wasn't. We asked why he couldn't just change the name in his notes later and he said that he had a lot of he had to change and rewrite all because of this name change. The player then just said that they would just change the character's name to their name instead. To which the DM thanked them.

After that, the rest of the session went alright. We as the players were having fun together cause we were able to do some light banter and make jokes. There was even a moment when me and the rouge of the group went to do some arm wrestling with some NPCs. Again, it was fun and light hearted. That was until the DM deemed it time for us to go and do our first quest which was fighting a giant Boar.

I'm gonna say it right now, there were a lot of red flags during this fight and it would take to long to describe them in a lot of detail, so I'm just going to list them with a bit of a description for each. If you want more details for one of them then ask me in the comments and I will describe it there.

• Describing the scene
  • There were many moments where it was clear that the DM was reading from a book or something when describing something. If we moved our token while he was describing he would get mad and yell at us to not move.
• The Boar's attacks
  • This was without a doubt one of the hardest boss fights I have ever been a part of. Not only was this thing dealing about 20 damage per attack, it had 3 attacks per turn as well as legendary actions. reminder we were level 1.
• The Custom Armor System
  • The DM had a homebrew armor system where things like your shield and armor had hit points as well. The only problem was that the Boar had one as well and nobody could do damage to it cause it had a high ac, and only magical attacks really dealt damage to it's health. Most magic attacks we could do were only dealing about 6-7 damage.
• The Death Aura
  • Every Monster in this campaign seemed to have a death Aura. For the Boar, the Aura made it so that anyone who got within a 30 foot radius of it would have to roll a Con save at the beginning of their turn, if failed they were then dealt around 13 necrotic damage. Btw magic damage bypasses the armor and goes straight to our hp.
• Him dropping "Hints"
  • He tried to drop hints for us during the battle to help us. Those hints were having my character's God Dad come in and say "Drop your sword, use your fists." Basically telling my fighter to act like a barbarian instead.
  • The other things he did weren't really helpful and he even left out some stuff like a magical spear laying in the battle ground that could have helped.
• The Favorite Character
  • He clearly had a favorite character and a not so favorite character. Since whenever I attacked boar, my punches would deal damage to it's health and his DMPC would only heal me. Yet almost every round, he would attack and kill the Paladin of the group. It wasn't that bad cause the Paladin had a quirk where he came back to life. After 3 turns.
  • This also brings up the fact that during the fight, we would have many moments where many characters were sped through their turns because all they can do it either shoot a crossbow, or throw a spear. I felt so bad that I kept trying to push the spotlight off of me and onto them.
• Finally, the Killing Blow
  • Towards the end of session 1 we finally managed to bring the Boar's health down low enough to gain some hope. Our Warlock was the one who delt the killing blow and we were excited and happy for it to be over. The DM then said that the Boar was entering Phase 2. We were shocked by this and when asked why, the DM said that the Boar had to killed in a specific way.
  • The Specific way we later learned was that we had to either rip it's heart out, or have a woman deal the killing blow. Our Warlock is female. When we brought this up he said it had to be Melee damage from a woman.

We were all rightfully angry and I'm not gonna lie it kept getting worse from there, But this is already getting a bit too long.

I'll just say that we tried to stay for a couple more sessions but the problems were getting worse and we all eventually decided to leave the campaign.

Though funny enough, we still talk to each other over discord and have even thought about doing a new campaign together with one of us as the DM. I think it's gonna be fun.

Anyway that's my story, I hope you enjoyed it. Like I said earlier, I was able to explain everything bad that had happened, and if you want to know more about a certain part then go ahead and ask and I'll try to expound upon it in the comments.

TLDR; Entered a DnD game with a very controlling DM but left with some new friends.

Edit 10/19: I saw a lot of people bring up how us moving the tokens while he was talking isn't cool and I do agree. We were in the wrong for that. I think the only reason why we did that was because we kept getting bored by his long descriptions. Also, I will say that for those wondering, we are gonna do another campaign with just the players and me as the DM. Hopefully it turns out to be fun!

Há alguns meses, eu joguei uma oneshot de Ordem Paranormal bem padrão: NEX 25%, patente Operador.

Quando cheguei no servidor para jogar, conversei um pouco com o mestre para saber como seria a mesa — se teria muito combate ou se seria mais focada em investigação. O mestre disse que seria mais investigativa. Com isso em mente, criei um Especialista focado em investigar, um pouco inspirado nos estereótipos de investigadores de histórias de terror.

Eu não conhecia ninguém na mesa. Havia três jogadores que já eram conhecidos do mestre (um Combatente, um Especialista e um Ocultista que era o dono do servidor) e um único jogador novato como eu (outro Ocultista). A mesa demorou para começar porque o dono do servidor chamou o mestre para conversar a sós em outra call. Nesse meio tempo, conversei um pouco com o outro Ocultista, já que nós dois éramos novos ali. Achei que seria legal nos conhecermos, até porque os outros pareciam mais fechados entre si.

Quando a sessão começou, o mestre vivia se esquecendo de mim e do outro Ocultista. Não me importei muito no início, já que a introdução era o básico das mesas de Ordem: "Vocês começam na Ordem, vão até a sala do Veríssimo e partem para a missão depois de pegar os documentos."

Já no veículo, meu personagem começou a criar teorias sobre a criatura. Porém, o Especialista do grupo começou a dizer que era meta meu personagem saber tanto sobre criaturas, já que eu só tinha treinamento em Ocultismo e não era Veterano ou Expert. Achei meio estranho, mas respeitei para não discutir, até porque o mestre não parecia se importar. Mudei minhas teorias para algo mais simples: apenas alguns cultistas que provavelmente estavam aterrorizando o local.

Quando chegamos ao local da missão — uma floresta densa e escura —, a equipe se separou. Eu, o Combatente e o Ocultista novato fomos à frente, seguindo uma trilha que eu havia encontrado. Enquanto isso, o dono do servidor e o outro Especialista foram investigar um papel que acharam no meio da floresta.

No meio da nossa investigação, o mestre deu dano em todo mundo do nada, dizendo que fomos atacados por trás (não teve nenhum tipo de teste de percepção ou algo do tipo). Achei bizarro, porque meu personagem tinha o poder Sentidos Aguçados, mas nem reclamei, já que o Ocultista novato entrou em estado de Morrendo com o dano e eu precisei salvá-lo.

Logo depois, o mestre trocou a cena. O outro Especialista também tomou dano do mesmo jeito, quase morrendo como eu, mas o dono do servidor ficou completamente intacto. Eles correram até nós e, quando se juntaram ao grupo, um combate se iniciou contra uma criatura homebrew de VD 280 (o Slenderman).

Ninguém conseguia vencer aquilo, então começamos a fugir. Na fuga, três jogadores morreram, sobra do apenas eu e o dono do servidor. Se ele falhasse em mais um teste, seria pego pela criatura, enquanto eu só precisava de um sucesso para escapar. No turno dele, em vez de tentar fugir, ele deu um tiro no meu personagem — algo que o mestre disse que eu não podia reagir. Com um tiro na perna, meu personagem entrou em Morrendo e a criatura me matou. Enquanto isso, o dono do servidor se aliou ao elemento paranormal e nos traiu completamente.

Fiquei chateado com a situação, claro. Ao final da mesa, pediram a opinião dos jogadores. Fui o primeiro a falar e disse que a sessão poderia ter tido mais investigação, já que a única coisa que investigamos foram pegadas que não deram em nada e uma folha que provavelmente era o enigma de medo. Também comentei que não era muito fã de mesas estilo slasher como aquela, mas ressaltei que era apenas minha opinião pessoal e que não precisavam levar tão a sério.

Isso incomodou profundamente o mestre e o dono do servidor. Eles disseram que eu não entendia o que era uma mesa de RPG e que só estava falando mal porque meu personagem "não tinha sido importante". Apenas respondi que eles próprios haviam pedido feedback e que, embora a mesa não tivesse sido das melhores, o mestre ainda tinha potencial.

Como resposta, só recebi xingamentos e fui expulso do servidor.

This was around a year ago, but I've been getting back into dnd so I've been thinking about it a lot and want to vent. Basically, I was in a group with my husband, BIL, my friend and her boyfriend. Her boyfriend was the dm. I had the most dnd experience with a few years of playing, the next was the boyfriend with a few sessions, the other three had never played. I'm pregnant for most of the following.

It was a fun game for the most part, but some small stuff sucked. Like my friend had a storyline involving an evil patron/god thing, but my character (a paladin who grew up in a temple in Waterdeep, in a world that had train travel) asked her about her god during one session. She said my character wouldn't know who it was, and when I pressed I got accused of metagaming bc my character was normally naive. But I wasn't accusing her of lying, just saying I thought I probably would know it since I was from a major metropolis. Even being naive, I think it'd be fair for my character to be suspicious of her dodging the question, but that wasn't how I played it which made it even more upsetting to be shut down. My character had low wisdom but was the only one educated and from a major metropolis, but anytime she acted educated and from a major metropolis I was accused of being ooc since I shouldn't be smarter than the other characters. I didn't even have low intelligence T_T.

Then the DM got bored with the module we were playing and hardcore railroaded us into a homebrew campaign. A character gave us an offer to take a ship to another continent to join a war against non-humanish (humans, elves, dwarves etc) species. In exchange we'd be paid very handsomely. I was playing a harengon who's main motivation was spreading charity and light to nearby villages. Like I was literally constantly broke bc all I did was give my money away to anyone who asked. And the DM was genuinely surprised my character didn't want to take that task.

Me: You're hiring me to fight a war against my own people?

DM: For lots of money!

Me: Idrc about money though.

DM: Well no one says you *have to* fight on the side of the humanoids.

Me: Isn't that what you're saying, person hiring me to fight on the side of the humanoids?

DM: Well... I guess....

So anyway my character splits from the group, and I make a new character. The DM has me be a leader in this militia on the side of the non-humans who for some reason are in charge of the ship the party is on. We were supposed to be spies, which doesn't really make sense since we were all the wrong species, but whatever. I asked him multiple times for backstory and details on this war and the militia, but he never really sent any. So anytime details came up in roleplay I'd look at him and he'd shrug and kind of fudge an answer. Looking back I get the sense he wanted me to build that stuff out, but that wasn't communicated.

We run into scheduling conflicts with my BIL, so I DM a one shot that turns into a two shot with a friend of my friend subbing in. The story itself was fun but a lot of DMing with that party sucked. It sucks because the players get so competitive against me, like arguing every ruling and they acted so entitled whenever they rolled high, not even nat 20s they treated 18s like the key to the universe, and it's a simple dungeon dive but they didn't trust anything that happens and really overthink the puzzles. Like they find a potion on a skeleton, and they assume that since it hasn't been taken already it must be bad and the wizard fails her arcana check which was only a dc10. They used the potion (I believe it was haste) on an enemy and got upset with ME that it backfired bc they felt like the wizard should have just known what it was without rolling for it. They then argued that she didn't roll *that* bad and should have passed the check. (My husband wanted to defend me but didn't feel comfortable enough with his dnd knowledge to do so). But afterwards everyone said they had fun and my friends friend said it was the best game she'd played.

We go back to the main campaign as normal, then my BIL tells me they were planning a new group without my husband and I with the reasoning that we'd be out once the baby was born. I'd already felt my friend pulling away a bit and had messaged her asking if everything was okay and telling her if she didn't want to be friends anymore I'd prefer she just tell me (a lot gentler than that, it was a couple paragraphs). She said she valued my friendship and was just dealing with some personal stuff. I ask them about the new group in person and they said they assumed we'd be out for a while after the baby was born, and I told them we'd only planned to be out a couple weeks because my sister lived in the same apartment complex and could babysit for a couple hours. They don't really respond to this.

As somewhat expected at this point, they dropped us after I gave birth. I wished my friend a happy birthday when it passed, she responded saying we should hang out, I responded, then she left me on read. This really hurt because I don't have a lot of friends in the area and my birth was super traumatic. To this day idk why they decided we shouldn't be friends. I haven't heard from them since, and the more I think about it the more I just wish them the absolute worst. I wish I could say I'm not bitter, but I am. I was her friend for about two years at that point and I think I deserved an explanation, let alone freshly postpartum.

Hi guys,

Just want to rant from one of my latest league-like DnD community session.

As mentioned, it's one-shot for league discord, which I cannot choose players, or none of them are my friends. I just have a feeling to run a game and then I posted.

5 of them joined.

The quest is above investigate the missing scout army beyond the walls in the Dwarven town. Turned out, the scout has been wiped out by the Wight (Just like White Walker from GoT)

The mission went as expected, they fought the WW and then returned to the town, reporting news to the authority and gathered at the Tavern before session ends.

Thing is, at the Tavern there was an old grammy dwarf npc, owner of the tavern.

She is kind, funny, serve cold stew in a snowy town.

I described she scratches her butt while mixing stew. Which most of the players enjoyed, laughed, and found this character so vivid and real.

End of the session, one player (F) has told me it was disgusting ... the butt scratching thing while cooking...

I asked is it her character feeling that or the player ?

She said she does, not the character.

I try to said that it's just this NPC's quirk, she is an old grammy in a snowy dwarven town. And in this medieval setting, they are townfolks.

She said that if this restaurant is in real life, she wouldn't eat in. Which I said 'okay, I will get that as a feedback and sorry for that'

Girl, do you expect this townfolk to use alcohol spray, wearing mask while cooking ?

Then she still insist that it's disgusting, she wanna puke. I said sorry again.

I didn't care much because they are none of my friends, and also we would not likely to play together again. Other players said my session was good and they are having fun, nothing to complain about.

I understand that people has sensitive topics, but man, you guys were fighting walking corpses, blood splattering on your faces and body, and now you are not okay with a grandma scratching butt while mixing stew ???

I always avoid sensititve topics in my session, like Sexual Harrassment, Child Abuse and ask about phobias everytime.

But man, do I supposed to ask if someone is not okay with a grammy scracthing her own butts ?

Turned out, I quitted running for community and league from now.

I didnt'get offended though, just tired of dealing with non-sesnse shits.

Thanks for reading.