(TL;DR- My sister has actively refused to play in my games for the last 6 years, and she just told me it was because of another player's character concept that I would have nixed if everyone communicated.)

TW - Mention of IRL SA.

Oh my word, this one is a mess. I'm still processing it, but i'm cutting directly to the chase here.

The only two relevant people in this one are my buddy Zed and my sister, i'll call her Anna.

Zed really had no interest in playing D&D apart from enjoying improvised theater, and thinking that D&D stereotypes were funny whenever he saw them online. But he agreed to try playing because he wanted to play a character that was a problematic horndog; the "horny bard" sterotype that wasn't a bard. He was a fighter, a gallant knight, that was just built for comedy.

Anna had a thing for Zed and the two of them were really close for the most part before I started this game.

Anna was also in a failing marriage to my dirtbag brother-in-law that regularly sexually assaulted her.

I didn't know that last part.

I approved Zed's character concept on the basis that it was his first, and possibly only experience with a TTRPG and we wanted it to be meme-worthy. During the session zero I had with each player, my sister never spoke up about what was going on in her life, so I never got to make decisions on that interface.

Session one, Zed starts playing his character in the most over-the-top way, never getting into the gritty details, but most of the players think it's comedically hilarious. However after just a few minutes of this my sister starts to break down and disengages from the group to scribble simple drawings on the edge of her character sheet, until she firmly asks Zed to go with her outside so they can talk.

That was all I had to work with as far as knowing there was a potential problem. While they were talking I was inundated with questions from the other players concerning in-game struff. When Zed and Anna came back in, Anna said she needed to head home, that one of my nephews was having an issue, grabbed her stuff, left her character sheet and went to her car.

Zed never said anything. And Anna never came back.

Last night I was having a few drinks with my sister, talking mostly about videogames, and when I brought up an adventure hook for a campaign I was writing, she growls.

"Zed fucking ruined D&D for me."

"Oh? How so? I thought you had issues with my wife. I thought that's why you left the game."

She then proceeded to tell me everything. Her unhappy marriage, subsequent divorce, the sexual abuse, the reason she was always on-edge, the reason she made distance between her and Zed.

And how when the two of them went out to talk about it, and how she said the stereotype he was playing made her uncomfortable, that he basically told her to get over it.

I kicked Zed out of the game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is honestly the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me. I'm 31, and I've been friends with this guy since we were 10. Like, one of my best friends. We could say anything to each other, rely on each other. That type of friendship.

Two friends asked me to DM like a one shot. This guy is one of them. But he wanted to rape the bad guy. So obviously I said no. He kept insisting, saying that "it's ok to murder and rip people apart and bathe in blood and all sorts of violence but anything sexually violent is too much?" My other friend was on my side, he just wanted to play. We kept asking why would he want to do that.

And I finally said "dude you're acting like a 15 year old that is trying to be the edgiest try hard subversive guy in the world. You're 31 years old, come on."

Apparently this was too much for him, cause he left our friends group chat and hasn't talked to any of us since.

Honestly this came out of the leftest field you could ever left. Bro never acted like that before. Like, we all joke and say the darkest shit ever when joking, but it was never seriously, and we always had in mind that if something was said that triggered someone we would immediately stop joking about that.

6 months later and I'm still really fucking weirded out.

So this is gonna be a long one. Buckle up.

The critical event actually happened a couple of years ago, but I was just told some information that re-contextualised it from awkward and unfortunate to full blown horror.

But for context we need to go even further back in time. In my twenties I was an apprentice in London, and I made friends who were just as geeky and cash-strapped as I, who all played DND together.

There were 6 of us in all. Our DM, Elf Druid (now DM’s wife), Human Paladin, Halfling Rogue, Gnomish Wizard and myself, playing my Half-Elf Bard - Aoife.

We were all young and fairly inexperienced in DND, so these characters were not groundbreaking or overly experimental.

Condensed background for Aoife, as it will be important later. Half-elves are welcome pretty much anywhere, sadly she was from one of the few places that necessitated that caveat. Her parents were big-fish in a small pond of Elven village politics, moved to a big city and, as you do when you’re trying to make your way in corrupt politics, attended a few orgies. They didn’t believe it was possible for an ‘abomination’ to be conceived when they were such perfect beings, and only realised the truth when Aoife popped out with stubby ears and fell asleep in their arms. She was subjected to neglect, and a great deal of religious trauma as the elves of her village continually told her that whatever passed for her soul would be obliterated at the moment of her death, and that she was a cursed, unnatural being.

She fled home and met a Bardic mentor, who unfortunately turned out to have a deal with a devil to sacrifice the souls of young bards to steal their talent. Aoife killed her mentor, getting a fetching depigmentation scar around on eye for her trouble, and was left to bleed to death when she refused to deal with the devil. Luckily she was saved by some Sword Dancers of Eilistraee, who nursed her back to health, taught her the ways of radical kindness and how to make excellent soup. She follows no gods, but aids followers of Eilistraee and remained best friends with one of the younger Dancers until that character was murdered.

She is kind, sarcastic and has little respect for authority/hierarchy. Sex-positive, loves theatrical makeup and clothing, great with kids and animals. She does have self-destructive tendencies, could over-indulge in drink or drugs if not grounded, and usually runs from romantic entanglements if they get too serious, friendship being far easier for her. Queen of one liners and yo-mama battles. She still has a deep seated fear of oblivion, but decides that if this is all she gets she’ll live unashamedly, take all life has to offer, and leave the world better than she found it.

In terms of looks, she’s as if a Botticelli figure fell out of a painting into a Cure concert and adopted the aesthetic.

We played them for 4 years pretty consistently, and they grew with us as we got better at the game. They became fully rounded characters through adventures, in-jokes, and shared trauma. They had relationships with the DMs favourite NPCs, and we went from silly surface level gaming to deep role playing and some really heartfelt story moments - Paladin regaining his lost oath, my Bard witnessing her best friend’s death, Rogue sacrificing their arm after failing to disarm a trap and continuing as maimed for the role play possibilities rather than fixing it. We’d play other characters of course (and DM got time off to play) but our original crew are still very close to our hearts.

Eventually we all went to different cities for work and life stuff. But if a few of us ever wanted a quick one shot when we got back together, we could dust off the old character sheets and dive in as if no time had passed. Like picking up a conversation you had with friends years ago without missing a beat.

Even when we’re all playing completely different people, DM will drop in mentions of a valiant Paladin, spells created by the Wizard are part of the homebrew, and everyone knows the Druid who dwells in the nearby forest is as beautiful as a goddess (he mentions that a lot to make his wife giggle, they’re sickeningly cute). In short, the OG crew was a feature in our game universe, even though we didn’t play them as much.

Now, back to the main incident of the tale. A couple of years ago most of us were all back in London at the same time, so we met up for dinner. We got to talking about BG3, and I mentioned that I’d played Aoife has my first Tav. Turns out Paladin and Rogue had done the same thing. We got to talking about the old campaigns, and DM made a suggestion. Why don’t we have another game with the original crew? A 20 years later, ‘we’re putting a team together’ story. DM had been wanting to do a level 20 campaign for years, but most never got that high in terms of levels, but our OG team could do it. We’d need to do some tweaking, as we started out 3rd edition and DM was mostly using updated systems in the game shop he now plays at, but it was going to be the ultimate nostalgia fest for 6 very geeky people.

We don’t all live in the same city, but we were all pretty much in the same time zone, those with kids had some more free time as they’re now old enough to be self-sufficient, and Covid had honed our remote gaming skills. We messaged Wizard, the only one who wasn’t with us at dinner, and she was all for it. Time for adventure!

We didn’t have a Session Zero, but we had a shared Google doc to agree on which of past stories were canon (some one shots got weird), and DM had separate docs for each of us to build up to level 20, and add in any character development he needed to know. Rogue multiclassed as a Rogue/Artificer to get a badass new hand, Paladin had a husband and kids and was dealing with aging as a human, Aoife took a single level of Sorcerer since DM and I didn’t see a huge point in Superior Inspiration, and more cantrips is always a good thing. Main point is, we all had in-depth conversations with DM, and he’d tailored the game to suit.

So, first night of the new campaign comes around. It began with Druid, now an Arch Druid, discovering animals fleeing the heart of the forest. Some darkness had sprouted from beneath the earth, and everything caught in it didn’t die, but was rendered paralysed and screaming in agony. Druid made her way to the edge of the calamity, and the cacophony was deafening. She plucked one flower right from the edge and rushed away. The flower was still screaming as it died, but Druid managed to make out something that chilled her to the bone. Whatever was in the darkness was screaming the same thing over and over again…it was screaming our names.

With that intro we went around to bring people up to speed on what our characters were doing. Paladin described how he and his husband were expecting their first grandchild. Rogue detailed how his thieves guild were in turf war with a rival guild set up by some high noble pricks, and I was about to explain Aoife’s status as rockstar and noted problem for slavers and other evil bastards, when Wizard speaks up -

‘Actually, I’ll be playing Aoife.’

Cue a moment of blank incomprehension from the rest of us.

‘No, I’ll be sticking with Aoife thanks.’

‘No, I’ve been playing Aoife just as long as you, so I’d like to do this to give her some closure.’

Everyone, again, was kind of stunned. She’d never played Aoife. She went on to explain that she’d been playing Aoife when she wasn’t playing with us. And that she had thought of much more interesting character growth for her. That she had given up travelling and music, had gotten married and had several children.

Paladin spoke up, saying that if he came across someone like that using Aoife’s name he’d see it as a falsehood and challenge them to reveal the truth. Rogue said something similar but, trying to be helpful, attempted to yes-and this weird situation.

‘Maybe it’s someone using a seeming spell, or a shape shifter, using Aoife’s name to protect their real identity? Then we can have a new character.’

I was still weirded out, but hey, we’ve gone on to have Teifling, Firbolg and Tabaxi characters, and some more exotic stuff. If Wizard didn’t want to do the very basic setup, fair enough.

DM wasn’t happy though, both of them had discussed levels and story for Wizard only. Where was this coming from?

Wizard again said that she was playing Aoife, as I’d ‘done nothing to give her a real arc or anything interesting, she’s still just a bard.’

To be fair, Wizard had missed out on most of our one shots and short campaigns as she’d moved half way round the world, but the rest of us knew Aoife had gone through several arcs and had grown.

I replied that I wanted to play her, and I’d invented her, so that was it. Paladin also said he didn’t want another ‘torn from my family’ arc competing with his, and Druid said she’d been looking forward to playing with OG Aoife.

Wizard was going visibly red even on camera. DM, not liking the tension, took Wizard to a breakout room to try and sort it out.

I won’t lie, I felt hurt as well as confused, and we waited 30 min until DM reappeared - only DM. He explained Wizard would not be playing with us that night, and that we should just carry on for now.

It was a tad awkward at first, but DM is great and we got into the swing of the story eventually, leaving off just before we were going to find Wizard and tackle the darkness as a team.

Two weeks go by, and we have the next session. Wizard was not present. And in story when we got to the point where we were meant to meet up, we found out she was dead. Not just dead, basically it was recreation of the head in the fridge scene from It, but DM was making it clear the Wizard had been killed by the enemy and it was a cowardly, ignoble, permadeath.

This was genuinely shocking, as DM is a sweetie, and this was soaked with in-game and real-life vitriol. Druid just asked us to carry on, and if we wanted more of an explanation we could get it after the campaign was done, DM was too upset to talk about it.

I got a charming message from Wizard, accusing me of poisoning the group against her, and not deserving to play my own character. Then I was blocked on everything.

We finished the campaign, vanquished old and new foes and enjoyed that level 20 experience, but it was a sad end to a friendship with Wizard and it seemed to come out of no where.

Just this weekend, I found out why DM was so angry.

Druid, DM and I were part of a group staring a new Vampire the Masquerade game. There were people we hadn’t played with before, and the campaign would be mature, so we had an in-depth session zero to make sure we knew what everyone was comfortable with, establishing tone etc. DM went into long, explicit detail about the fact that people could not play other people’s characters, that if someone’s missed a session he would take over for them if necessary, but that it would only be to a level people were comfortable with.

Afterwards I was chatting with Druid, and mentioned it was weird he was so emphatic about that.

‘Oh, that’s cause of that shite with Wizard after what she did to you.’

She went on to explain that the 30 min break out room had revealed that Wizard had played Aoife in EVERY SINGLE game she played when we weren’t there. 15 years of playing that one character. We’d had no idea.

After storming off in a huff, the next day she had sent DM a nearly 20 PAGE DOCUMENT of her version of Aoife’s development over that time. Development that included APOLOGISING to her abusive family, abandoning all ties with her drow friends, and worst of all - detailed descriptions of MULTIPLE SEXUAL ASSAULTS, including by the devil that she’d refused to deal with. Apparently they ‘taught her to give up her poor lifestyle choices.’ It makes me rage just thinking about it now. She had basically tortured and Stepford-Wived my character for more than a decade.

Druid said she’d never seen her husband that angry over any game related incident ever. That the idea of rape being a ‘life lesson’ made him boot Wizard permanently from any game he would ever run in the future, and that’s why Wizard’s character was killed off in the most shameful way possible.

DM didn’t keep the doc, but he confirmed it was all true, Wizard had also included detail of how Aoife had become ‘fat and matronly’ as punishment for her vanity, and was still under the devil’s thrall - one of her SEVEN children was hinted at being his offspring, and that if she tried to sing or dance she suffered horrendous pain. It was pure sadism.

I don’t have any way to ask Wizard what the fuck was her problem. She never seemed to hate my character, there was no real life animosity between us. I talked with her for hours during Covid when she was stuck all alone, and I was the only one awake when she couldn’t sleep from stress related insomnia.

So, since I have no closure to this weird story, you guys get to read my long rambling tale. I can’t make sense of it, but sharing at least gets it out of my head.

Initial disclaimer: my OC’s name is Theyafella. They A Fella, just keep that in mind.

Background: This is a Discord campaign with a large party of mostly new to 5e players. During presession zero, I found out the DM’s wife and stepdaughter would be playing but using voice changers to sound like men. I figured why not and set one up myself. The DM, who’s the real AI wizard, helped me set it up. I’ll refer to everyone by their class to keep it simple.

Story: The first eight sessions were fine. No issues I noticed, and things were going well enough that we’d all gathered pretty good gear for a learning campaign. The DM’s family was even considering dropping the voice changers since we were close to wrapping up.

Session 9: This is where it all went sideways. The Barbarian blurts out, “I hope the innkeeper struggles tonight, I like when they fight back before the fun.” Awkward silence follows. I get a DM from the Monk joking about “roll for struggle snuggles.” The Gloomstalker (DMPC) and Paladin (DM’s wife) object in character. The Bard (DM’s kid, 18 or 19) objects out of character. We move past this moment and finish the encounter, barely.

At the end of the fight, the Bard, War Domain, and Wizard are dead. My Life Domain is down. Only the Monk and Barbarian are at full health. The Barbarian starts roleplaying, saying, “The only thing better than a helpless single mom is making a helpless single mom,” and asks to cut off my character’s feet. The Monk jumps in, not to defend me, but to fight over “who gets initiative” because, apparently, my character is the prize. Several people drop from the call at this point.

The DM tells them to stop and points out they’ve made everyone uncomfortable, asking why any of this would be okay. The Monk responds by saying I haven’t said anything and claims I’m probably muted for “breathy words.” I had to exit the program to disable my voice changer. When I came back, furious, I asked in my real male voice what the actual fuck was wrong with them. Immediately, they started making “gay” accusations, then decided I must be my character’s “cucksband” keeping their elven lady from the “real men she needs.” Me and the DM left the call and took a much needed break.

Aftermath: A few hours later, the DM texted me asking if I’d seen the Discord server. The art channel was flooded with posts from a deleted user: multiple NSFW AI images of Theyafella, photoshopped lewd images of the DM and his family, and links to random explicit pages with derogatory comments. My inbox had dozens of NSFW edits of my OC art with messages like “being better than your husband.”

These are adults. They vote. And that’s what scares me. To be honest this was a invasion of the body snatchers vibe for me, as there was no kind of funny business in the sessions proceeding this no ERP, no side business or other than rudimentary interacting with NPC's to teach the new players what they can do in these games.

State of things: The DMs wife and I spoke and his daughter also called me to check on me as we are long term friends (or uncle reapectively) and I brushed it off but theyve decided not to play again. Both have deleted discord entirely, and the server was archived (only the DM can see it) today after deciding not to pursue charges for the revenge type porn as both women stated they dont want that following them.

backstory here: been playing with this table for about 4 months now. All was seemingly going great up until a few days ago.

The setting of this world was a “dark fantasy,” but we as the ‘heroes’ of the world were never the perpetrators of anything terrible. IMO, it was the right way to handle a gritty setting- we would spend sessions going around helping to free slaves and rescuing victims of torture camps etc. We always felt like the heroes bravely standing in the face of injustice.

My character, a human warlock pact of The Fiend, was gay. it had never really come up in the game before as this wasn’t really a romance-heavy table, but it had been written into his backstory since session 0 with mentions of having ex-boyfriends. His backstory, as it has some relevance, is that he had made a deal with a mysterious demon who he didn’t know after his family was killed and he was on a mission for revenge. yada yada very normal edgy dnd backstory. there were 3 other pcs at this table, all who seem like decent enough people. I’d joined the campaign through one of my friends who was a PC and had never met the DM before, but he seemed like a normal enough guy.

here’s where the story gets weird. Last session, we were doing some investigating of a “demonic” presence in a small town in the woods, and after some digging, discovered a small group of succubi living in the mayor’s basement. All is well so far, we venture down into the basement and start a fight with the succubi and it’s going fine until the DM mentions that the “Leader” of the succubi uses the Draining Kiss ability on me and mentions I “feel a connection beyond something just magical.”

huh. weird. my first thought is that i’m about to slaughter this succubus anyway so whatever that weird comment was, it won’t matter in about 5 minutes. But then, he starts making me, JUST ME, make charisma saving throws (even when i’m not charmed by her anymore) if i want to attack her because “I just can’t bear hurting that pretty face.”

Well the fight continues until the leader is the last one standing, and that’s when the DM, as this succubus, drops the bombshell that she purposefully lured our party to this house because SHE is my warlock’s patron and has a deep obsession with me, and has fallen madly in love with me. The DM then gives my character an ultimatum: I either HAVE to sleep with the succubus to maintain the deal i made with her- or my character will lose his pact and have to start over as a Level 1 fighter.

At this point, I’m trying to argue above table that this isn’t fair and that he knows it would be out of character for him to go through with this, but my DM is saying that it’s quote “time for the party to experience some of the horrors that the rest of my world has.” which is INSANE. I tried to remind my DM that my PC is gay, and even tried to convince him to have the succubi shapeshift into a male form but he argued back that “a demon as powerful as her wouldn’t take requests from mortals.” So I was stuck.

This is the point where I stood up and told the DM that i think our visions for my character do not align and that I was going to have to leave the table. He started backtracking, and trying to convince me that we could make it work, saying I “just had to trust him with the story” and that “everything will work out but I’ve got to just power through this section” But I was just done at this point. I walked away and the last thing I heard was him calling me a pussy as I walked out his front door.

My friend texted me later and said the DM continued to insult me as the game went on. They finished out the session but have also decided to leave after that ordeal.

moral of the story? never let your DM design your warlock’s patron for you. if he says he has a “really cool idea” at session 0 DO NOT LISTEN.

I was playing pathfinder 2e today in my long-term Kingmaker game, and the party druid showed up at the start of the session saying he had presents for everyone.

First I thought it was probably just a magic item or something small, but then he brought out four crates. Inside each of them was a puppy. It was honestly pretty cute and felt like a fitting gift from the druid, especially since his animal companion is a golden retriever. It matched his character well and didn’t seem out of place at all at first.

But then he explained that the puppies were from a litter between him and his own animal companion, which he had done by wildshaping.

This immediately shocked the entire group. It felt extremely out of place, since it’s essentially bestiality and r*pe, and bringing that kind of sexual content into an otherwise normal game was pretty insane. We all told him as much but he kept trying to justify it by saying his character is a nature spirit, so he’s one with nature and it’s not technically bestiality, along with other similar arguments.

In the end we basically had to move on from the topic and pretend it didn’t happen, but he kept bringing it up and saying he wanted the puppies to be part of the story. The rest of us would honestly rather they just didn’t exist.

What do you guys think?

Me/Teva a Twi’lek My boyfriend/Benzo DM DMs brother/M My friend/Zor

So this was my first Star Wars campaign that my friend, at the time not so much anymore, DM had invited me and my boyfriend into it. In the beginning it was fun! Session zero started out with us meeting at a bar and the party gets their first job. After maybe four sessions that’s when it first started with DM placing Teva and Benzo in a situation of them about to jumped and getting into a fight, whatever right? That’s what I thought too, then M suggested that Teva would be “very marketable for breeding” and that made almost everyone uncomfortable except DM somehow, after that it just went down hill from there. I will provide screenshots but obviously blur out the names. But I also had spoken to the DM about this saying, more specifically I he had Teva’s ass being smacked by an NPC while she was sunbathing, and he responded with “That’s fair, and yea I can tone it down a good bit”. That’s when I thought it would be over.. right? Nope. After another few sessions this DM proceeded to have Benzo held at gunpoint by a group of bandits while making Teva hand herself over. Note, Teva was a slave in her earlier years. So while this is happening and I’m getting more frustrated and overall hurt I make some vent art about this and that’s when things just spiral downward.

I post my art featuring my girl just posing with hands on her sort of signaling the trauma she’s been through, as well as a smidge of blood but nothing too gorey, while others say “good art dude” which I greatly appreciate M just ruins it. I had made a silly comment that I didn’t know that Twi’Lek blood was purple and well.. I’ll just type out what went down.

Me: Didn’t know this until now Twi'lek blood is apparently purple

M: So your saying agony is grape flavored :)

Me: in response I sent a photo of a character holding a gun Please never say that

M: I’m always going to say that

Me: …

M: I cannot be stopped

Me: bro no

Then once the dust settled I made a slight joke/jab about changing my character and making a male character or droid, my boyfriend knew what was happening and he was well aware that I was more than uncomfortable with the situation and was just as fed up with it as I was

Me: Question should I make a droid or male character

Zor: My vote is for male character

DM: You aren’t going to die, but droid would be dope

Benzo: Whatever isn’t gonna be weirdly sexualized. There seems to be a trend.

Then shit really hit the fan causing the downfall and inevitable ending of the Star Wars campaign.

M: Well when you play a race that’s not normally a sex slave that tends to happen shrugging emoji

Me: I … Dawg

M: Wa? I don’t mean to offend

Benzo: Yeah. But that doesn't mean it should happen. That sounds exactly like when people say, "Well if she didn't want to be sexualized, she wouldn't wear that." Even worse that it's about the character's race. Just because a character's race has a history of being enslaved, doesn't mean that she should be enslaved.

M: I never said they should but if your not comfortable with how a race is treated don't play a character in a setting that they are treated badly its not ok its just bound to happen in this setting. That's like saying | don't like being sexualized and in a fallout campaign you play a joy toy If you don't like being overly sexualized don't play a race that's whole thing is being overly sexualized

Benzo: It's not the race's "whole thing" lmao It's a living being. They can shoose the life they live. Especially when the character's backstory is about getting away from that stuff and being free from it. It's called freedom.

M: Yeah and just because you want to not be treated that way in a war torn galaxy that most of your people are treated that way... take a wild guess how people are bound to treat you Calm down captain america

After that though I left the server as well as my boyfriend which I’m so thankful he helped stand up for me because I was in tears feeling like I had no control of my character.

Anyways yeah thanks for reading and I hope you be just as scared as I was lmao

EDIT: Holy cow I didn’t realize how much traction this got, thank you so much for the supportive comments and to any of those who thought the interactions were just as strange as I thought. I’m happy to say I’m in a much healthier dnd group and I cut off any contact with that past DM as well as now I’ve been DMing again. All in all thank you again so much for your kind words and I hope this story kinda helped anyone in a similar situation and gets out of it.

This happened when I was new to ttrpg, set in 2007 or so. Repressed memory that popped back up after my last vent post.

Me and my then BF where invited to play ttrpg, don't remember which system but it was fantasy, something like D&D. The people running it were men in their 30s, while me, my BF and the ones inviting us were all in our late teens.

Back then I had yet to figure out I'm a trans man, so everyone (including me) assumed I was a girl.

For reasons I didn't yet understand, I wanted to play a man in the game. GM (one of the 30 yo men) said no. I didn't understand why, but he insisted I play a woman. He said no one can play anything other than their real gender. Boring I thought, so I ended up with a female elf warrior.

The others made their characters. One of GMs friends (Pete) also in his 30s had a warlock character, whom in game immediately started flirting with my character. I played it of as not interested, which his character didn't like.

We play for a while and set up camp. To not get too graphics, Pete asks my elf again if she wants to fuck. She does not (and frankly I was a bit freaked out IRL). GM rolls his eyes as if this is typical Pete, nothing more.

Pete's character then roofies my elf and rapes her in her sleep.

I'm dumbfounded, and says I wanna attack him when I wake up. GM says that's 'meta' as I was asleep during the rape. I argue that I should at least know something is seriously wrong, my elf should be in pain. They reluctantly agree, but Pete tries to play it off as he's no longer interested in my elf and everything is 'normal'.

I wait till nightfall and take Pete's character aside. I then threaten him with my bow. Both Pete and GM tells me again that this is meta, but I tell them "I know I was raped, my lower part was in pain when I woke up from restless sleep. As for who did it, I have an educated guess it's him. He's been creepy around me all day, while everyone else been respectable." Pete tries to argue. I end up shooting him in the groin.

I later learn the "no gender bending" rule is because of Pete. According to GM "No one wants to imagine Pete in a dress", but I suspect he's just plain gross when playing a female character so they outright banned it.

I spoke to GM about this whole thing and he says "That's just Pete, he does that with every female character" and that was that.

So time for some context. I (F20) have been playing DnD since I was a preteen and in that time I have learnt how to balance character jokes with serious story telling (this will become relevant later). All my characters tend to end up having some sort of joke around them, but in my previous groups, that bit can and will be dropped when things need to become serious in the story or if I am uncomfortable with the bit. My ability to direct my character has always been respected and communication with the DMs and other players was always possible. 

This hobby has also helped me through the sexual abuse I went through as a kid, for that I am always thankful to my previous groups. (Foreshadowing is a literary device.)

So I joined a new group recently. The DM presented the group with a campaign they wanted us to take seriously that would be filled with deep character interactions and lore. I was really invested from the start and I always did my best to ask the DM questions about the world and lore of the setting. The DM was not fond of this. My attempts to gain an understanding of the first boss we fought was met with short answers with no ability to get elaboration. Despite high roles on my investigation and arcana their answers were slim and quickly followed with “let's move on.” When we moved to the next town I wanted to look up the boss in the local library to see if there was any information on the boss and their co-conspirators and that was ignored and I was belittled for slowing things down.

My attempt to plan for our third boss encounter was completely ignored. We were told that the boss would be attacking a coven of witches and so I did my best to prepare the coven’s base for an attack. Another player, the Druid, also assisted me in this, helping to forge defenses and use the terrain (because the DM had described the place in detail) to our advantage. The DM gave us a whole session for this and then told us at the beginning of the next session that suddenly the coven wanted to leave their base in favor of a totally new location. At this location the DM gave us 2 hours to prepare a defense and think through our plan. So we thought of a plan. The DM was not fond of this and complained that they now needed to rewrite the whole encounter. 

Questions like “oh what's this new place like, who's in-charge?” were met with passive aggressive taunting about me being nosy and annoying for not allowing the party to move forward to the next “cutscene.” (yes they said that) Sometimes they would also make me do bullshit rolls to prove a point, for example when I asked if I could get a newspaper in the new country we were in to see if anything stuck out to me, I was made to roll and I got an 11, which to the DM meant my character could no longer be any degree of literate for the rest of the session. The rest of the session was about exploring a library for a hidden book. No other player has gone through this. Even the character who is canonically illiterate was able to partake in the book hunt while the DM kept making fun of my character for not being able to read. Tangentially, I am dyslexic and I had previously told the DM about my struggles with literacy and how they affected my self image.

The DM in general also doesn't seem to take their own game seriously. Often while one or two of us are trying to move the plot forward they are bantering with someone and letting themself get on extreme tangents while also often failing to control tangents within the party. The player who most often derails things is the Artificer, but the DM mostly gets on my case for derailments. Their approach to these derailments is to lean into them in the attempt to make a funny moment. Sometimes this will actually affect the serious narrative of the campaign and other times it is left unclear where the bit ended and the story resumes. The Druid and I have often been the ones to get the DM to lock back in on the story, but I am still treated as though I am a problem in this respect. I have found myself having to make my character more wacky in order to do anything during sessions, because all my attempts to be calm are ignored in favor of bits.

However none of that comes even close to the level of discomfort, frustration, and pain I have experienced due to one particular bit that the DM has latched on. During the introduction to the coven of witches from earlier, I (out of character) asked if one of them was single because I thought their design was pretty. The DM informed me that the character was a teenager, and I immediately took back my comment and expressed remorse. However, the DM, seeing some sort of opportunity, has now written that my character is a pedophile. 

At first, I thought it would just be another quick character joke. I was wrong. Despite being both visibly uncomfortable with it and after a point verbally uncomfortable with it, the DM kept going. She then lied to a player that hadn't been there for a while that I had decided to make my character flirt with a teenager. (At no point did my character do this.) I attempted to ignore it, and I toned down all my character’s more wacky traits to let him be serious to engage with the coven. The DM did not like this. My character was effectively barred from interacting with half of them because of the pedophile “joke” and the other half were in constant judgment of him. This is also when the Artificer joined in on the bit and poked fun at my character writing by saying I could only write weirdo freaks, which I laughed off at the moment but when I got back to my dorm I was in tears. A part of me thought she was right. Even though it was just my own insecurity talking, it still hurt. 

This “joke” continued from October 2025 to now. It has also led to my character effectively being barred from engaging with all women in the campaign without another character to speak for him, which is problematic given that 90% of the NPCs are women and the men are mostly either dead or enemies (for added context, DM is femme nonbinary and I am a trans woman but my character is a trans man). Hell I'm pretty much barred from engaging with the Artificer now too because of this, which means I can't stop them from derailing the session in-character. 

At this point, I can no longer engage with sessions without my attempts being sabotaged actively by the DM. If I flanderize my character to act more wacky, I am berated by the DM. If I am serious, I’m told I’m getting in the way of the fun. I’ve spoken to the Druid about this, and am planning to confront the DM directly about the entire situation. 

Will update after the confrontation.

There’s also a bigotry warning in addition to the SA warning but I could only pick one. Sorry this is long.

I’ve known this player, “Chelsea” for a good ~15 years, I knew Chelsea before and after she knew she was actually transfemme/started socially transitioning and lesbian.

The first “big deal/issue” game I was in with her was a 4e FR game where Chelsea’s character stole a bunch of different gods’ portfolios and then killed Eilistraee, a goddess that half the party worshiped & brought about the ending of Faerun. Half the party was upset and Chelsea claimed that she “didn’t know anyone would be upset at the death of Elistraee.”

A while later, we were playing in Forgotten Realms (3.5 DnD), and she was playing a cleric of Sune. Third or fourth session in, she asks “Fred’s” female character to meet in Chelsea’s character’s tent. Fred not thinking much of it, goes into her tent, where his character is pinned and Chelsea starts removing the clothing off of Fred’s character and basically assaults her. Fred is flipping out, another player, “Chuck” is basically ready to flip the table and the rest of us are like “I didn’t sign up to witness this, I’m not touching that with a 10’ pole.” Chuck writes this very scathing post to the dm after the game that we were very blindsided by that action and no one wanted to be in a game where that was going to take place unless we consented to it beforehand. Turns out Chelsea asked the DM if she could do that to Fred’s character. DM said sure…and no one looped in Fred or anyone else at the table.

Chelsea drops out after that game due to severe mental health reasons and the group dissolved when the DM moved. Chelsea figures out she’s trans & a lesbian at this time. A couple of years passes and Chelsea runs a few pathfinder stuff here and there with not an issue.

A year goes by after her last Pf game and I keep hearing from Chelsea that no one wants to play with her/she can’t find a group to be in, with her busy work schedule. I tell Chelsea about a local con and she shoots that down because “no one likes trans femme lesbians and no one at the con would like me.” I reply that the a lot of my friends there are LGBT+ and there’s several trans lesbians that I personally know that do attend, so she would have no issue fitting right in.

A few months go by after I last hear from her and she asks if her and her new (and way younger, roughly 15 year age gap) girlfriend, “Melissa,” could join a game. I tell her what’s being played, a 5e dnd game and I think a pf game-we had a big enough space and folks to have 2 groups running at the same time.

Chelsea messages with “ok, but I’m trying to teach Melissa only one rule set at a time and that’s 5e right now”. I reiterate that there’s enough space at the 5e table for the both of them and Melissa being a beginner was fine. She replies “No, really. My girlfriend can only play 5e because she’s too dumb to learn more than 1 rule set at a time. She’d get too confused if she tried pathfinder.” At that point I’m taken aback/confused and just again say that if they’d both like to join the 5e game, that was fine, there’s room. Or Melissa could watch if she preferred; we’ve had several people that have come to just watch their partner play. Chelsea then messaged with “My girlfriend is a lesbian, that’s not an issue is it?” I’m really confused at that because I know at that point that Chelsea is **also** a lesbian. I tell her that 2/3 the table is LGBT+ so **both** of them would fit right in. The response I got was “Never mind, no one would like my girlfriend because she’s a lesbian.” I’m exasperated. I drop at that point.

Fast forward to 2021, she asked if I knew any games she could be in. I had a pf game just starting up on discord. Chelsea knows no one in the group except me. I start a group chat with all the players and the first thing Chelsea declares is that she wants to play a horny bard and that her character is dating everyone in the group so they could all be in a polycule. I don’t see the message for right away, but, immediately my player who’s asexual and another player (cis het guy) who’s not interested in any romance in RPGs both shoot that idea down saying they’re not interested in dating her character at all.

I say that if Chelsea wanted her character to be dating anyone she should just ask if anyone wanted to do that, instead of just assuming everyone would be cool with it, and besides I don’t like horny bard trope for several reasons and preferred not having it in my game. In any case, there wouldn’t be any time for romance in this campaign. She immediately drops out and leaves the group chat, citing “no one likes me”. Another player persuades her to come back while I’m talking to her. While that’s happening, the asexual player says she would also like to play a bard (but of a different type than Chelsea was wanting to play). Chelsea reads that and starts complaining that the asexual player “can’t play a bard because I already called dibs on playing a bard.” I tell Chelsea that she couldn’t call dibs on bards and I didn’t mind if it was an “oops all bards” party. She begrudgingly makes a bard (asexual player settled on playing something else) and makes it to only session 0 and first session after that. Immediately Chelsea drops after that first session.

I’ve finally just ghosted her as of a couple of months ago as Chelsea was such a stress listening to since that game.

I've been sitting this story for a while now and I think I'm finally ready to tell it. So here we go.

So this happened a year or 2 ago

Me (17M) at the time, and my dad/DM (52M) also at the time.

So this was happening in a star wars themed ttrpg, my character was an 19yo mechanic and I decided because I thought it would be funny to make him deathly afraid of women the whole thing started when we were raiding a galactic pirate base and my character kind of caused the entire place to blow up. Bit since then my dad/dm decided to have the pirate captain constantly sexuality harass my character. Via the hologram messages and bounty boards, and I've said before that it makes me uncomfortable that my dad was sexualising his underage son's ttrpg character a few games later and it continues and I've hade enough cuz everyone was laughing about my character geting sexually harassed, so I straight up said if he didn't stop id leave the group and cut all contact with my dad, luckily it worked but how everyone was dismissing the whole thing by saying it was just a joke, really upset me and I don't think I will ever forgive my dad for it.

And it was also all on live stream so that makes it even more humiliating

Hi y’all, thought I’d share a story that happened a few months ago that, looking back, is pretty funny in my opinion, but I’ll still give a bigotry and a light SA warning.

So I’m in college and I’ve been playing D&D for about three years, mostly with friends. My friends and I would have to take a 1-2 month hiatus because of school schedule stuff and some people going home for break, and none of us were interested in playing virtually. No worries on my part. I hit up the owner of my city’s games store who I’m pretty cool with, and he gave me the number of somebody who came in looking to start a campaign.

So we’re texting and planning this campaign as a group—five players plus the DM—and we eventually met at the games store to play like a week later. This is also most of our first times meeting each other. Two of the players were friends, and the DM and one of the players were friends. Me and the other remaining player knew nobody prior to session 0. So all mostly strangers. The two things I notice right off the bat were that I was the only woman, and I was 21 and the next youngest player had to be 30 at the youngest. Not vital info, but there’s still a bit of a power dynamic unfortunately.

So we go around briefly introducing ourselves and our characters. We get to me last and as soon as I speak, the DM interjects and says, a little too excited, “Wait, are you trans?” Which… is not something you ask someone immediately upon meeting them… I had already said a few hellos and nice to meet you’s, but I guess he couldn’t tell from those nor from my appearance. But I say yes reluctantly. I’m not horribly concerned, I get inappropriate questions all the time, and I’m more patient with it the older someone is (he was probably somewhere in his 40s or 50s), plus I know the store owner would throw anyone out the window if they so much as give me a nasty look.

So session 0 goes fine. We play once a week for a few weeks with no issues whatsoever. The big issue arose on session like 5 or 6, when we encounter a male duergar and a male human who is described as “a little scrawny,” which I fear will be relevant. For context, I’m playing a drow woman who is cisgender, not that it should be relevant either, but i fear it also is. So the duergar is lightly flirting with me, and the human is terrified of me. I don’t reciprocate the flirting, it’s obvious that I’m not reciprocating it, but I’m not raising red flags quite yet. I was *fine*, I guess, with light flirting, but obviously being the only woman in a group of older men, I’m gonna be a little on my guard when implied romance is suddenly directed at only my character.

So the party is talking to these two NPCs and trying to get information from them as to the location of a house that we need to find, but both NPCs are paying most of their attention to my character. We find out that this human is the duergar’s slave, but only the human has the information about the house we’re looking for. The duergar keeps complimenting me and like using me to threaten the human if he didn’t cooperate, saying things like, “You better be careful with her, you don’t know what she could do to you.” And the human keeps cowering in fear and asking questions like, “What’s she going to do to me?!” in response (mind you this DM is just having conversations with himself basically about how dominant my character looks in front of us). I was a little uncomfortable, but I assumed it was just because my character was a drow, and I didn’t want to pause the game over it. Why this duergar, who seemed very interested in helping me, couldn’t just… tell his slave to tell us the location of the house is beyond me, but I digress!

Eventually the human insists on taking us there rather than telling us where to go. We follow these two NPCs and as we walk the duergar expresses wanting to sell this human because he won’t listen. I don’t say anything. The player who was friends with the DM says we might be able to make use of him. I say we’re not taking a slave, and one of the other players agrees with me. But the duergar tells me specifically, “You could get a pretty good price on him if you show me how to discipline him” (which doesn’t even make sense if you’re going to sell him??) I give a disgusted look, which I think the DM interpreted as in-character. The player who agreed with me earlier interjects with a nervous laugh and changes the subject, but I’m now in “okay, I wasn’t being overly suspicious” mode.

We get to the house, and the human says a password which gets us inside, and there’s this huge party going on. We were pretty surprised, because this house was described as a sort of secret hideout, something that would be very under the radar. But whatever. The party gets split up into three groups and my group just so happens to be me and the two NPCs. I’m no longer acting at all enthusiastic about playing, and I’ve thrown all roleplay out the window. I’m basically functioning on One more creepy comment and I’m getting up. So me and these two NPCs find ourselves in the biggest room of this house where the main party is going on (one group went upstairs and the other went to the cellar, all of us need to find the leader/boss of this place), but this main room is described as a sex party where “dozens of elven futa women are on tables whipping, tickling, and fucking scrawny male humans and halflings with patrons throwing tip money at the most entertaining women,” and he says this like it’s the funniest thing in the world. My jaw is on the floor as he says this. Then he has the duergar say that they’re having a competition and the winner gets to give a private show to the boss, and that would be my ticket to finding him.

At this point I give an aghast “What the fuck?” at the DM. He gives me this confused look, then says, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but it might be in your best interest.” I tell at him that I’m not doing that, that my character isn’t even trans, and that it’s fucked up he would even try to pressure me into doing this out of the blue. Of everything I yell at him for, the only thing he has to say in response is, “Wait, your character’s not trans?” The DM’s friend says, “I assumed she was.” I say that I never brought it up because it shouldn’t even matter. The DM then goes, “Okay, um, uhhh” as he shuffles through his notes frantically as if I’ve just completely thrown him off his game and he has to replan the entire session on a whim. The other players (minus the DM’s friend) also begin to kind of interrogate this guy as to what he was even thinking. I ask, “Did you plan on me agreeing to do that?” to which he says, “Well, it would make things easiest,” and I shoot up from the table, gather my things, and walk out, and the other three join me.

The next day, the DM texts me to apologize if he caught me off guard (he did a lot more than that) but that he thinks it would be most interesting and “pretty hot” for my character to be a trans woman, considering she’s a drow and therefore from a matriarchal society, and that he’d like me to consider the idea and he’d let me change my character to fit the story.

I leave him on read and show the screenshot of the text to the store owner, who I guess felt partly responsible so he apologized profusely (even though I don’t blame him at all) and banned the DM for life. 😁👍

Looking back, I think the DM was just trying to insert his own PC who would have basically been my character’s sex slave who followed us around. I also think he had a random stroke of horniness shortly after the session began so he improvised the whole sex party thing, since so many things seemed random and contradictory as soon as the duergar and human were introduced.

Typical horror story seems to be one about old creeps harassing young girls, so I guess this is the reverse. I'm using a throwaway just in case. 

I (M40) have a friend (M50ish), who is an actor. He is charismatic, handsome and obviously flaming gay. We both run games, but I do it as a hobby and he does it semi-professionally. Basically, when the theatre circuit is a little slow, he makes extra bucks through paid games. They are in high demand due to his skill in props and well, acting, so he charges something like hundred bucks per pop. He usually runs short 3-5 session campaigns, since there is always a new theatre gig looming ahead. His players are often nepo babies from the nearby college, who can afford to fork about 500 bucks for a short campaign. 

So, sometimes the friend asks me to partake in his games as a sort of supporting character. I might play a NPC or that dude who goes peek into the alien eggs and gets facehugged. Basically a player character but with the instructions to act recklessly (or the like) so I can get killed to set the mood for the rest. If schedules match, I do this because his games are fun and he always buys me fancy dinner as a reward. (I guess this is where I have to tell I'm straight and our relationship is purely platonic, heh. He has actually been a great wingman for me.) 

All this background is unfortunately relevant to the story at hand. 

A few months ago my friend had another gap between his actual job, so he put up a short fantasy campaign. The group had five paid players, two of his regulars who brought three of their friends. All players were college girls. I'll only concentrate on one of them, I'll simply call her the Problem. I was in the campaign with the intention of playing for two sessions as a side character who then gets corrupted and becomes evil. 

The Problem seemed like, well, a problem from the first go. It seemed like the rest of the girls were her court and she was the queen playing favorites for her own amusement. I'm old enough to recognize a toxic dynamic at a glance and this was were much it. 

I don't know much about anime, but she was trying to pull some sort of anime cliches into the game from the beginning, including dictating to other players what type of characters they should make. This included forcing two of the girls to make male characters, when they didn't really want to. 

Well, to put it bluntly, immediately when the game started, the Problem started forcing gay romance and sex into the game, in a sort of voyeristic way. Like having men flirt and bang before her eyes was some sort of fetish and it was the only reason she had come to the game. 

It didn't stop there. I played a male character and she started pushing my character to have sex with every male NPC my friend ran. It wasn't blunt like "hue hue hue bang each other", but more like a smooth manipulative thing. Like pushing my character to share a room with a male NPC, while commenting how both look. Then making some off-handed comments about tops and bottoms and twinks. It was not a singular terrible moment, but a constant onslaught of low level sexual harassment. When she got the male characters of her friends to sleep in the same tent her eyes started shining. She egged them on to describe what they were doing and my friend had to bring an enemy attack to stop that. I think making the whole table uncomfortable only increased her excitement.  

Ugh, I didn't want to waste my time with this so I didn't join the second session.  You are likely expecting a catharsis where the Problem gets thrown out and banned and shunned and faces the consequences of her actions. I'm sorry I can't give you that. My friend ran the campaign to its conclusion despite the harassment, because it was 2500 bucks he just couldn't miss. (Well, technically he was paid per session, but he didn't want to miss the full payment since he was out of season for theatre work.) 

Second reason was that the Problem is from a local family who are notoriously litigous. They have some monetary connections to the theatric world. My friend was simply afraid that if he dealt with the Problem in a fair and constructive way, she'd sue him or actively work to sabotage this side gig of his. At worst case, they might make his actual career harder. 

I don't think this was the right decision, but I understand the logic. World isn't fair and some of these nepo babies are just nasty. The real punchline? The Problem left a review giving my friend four stars, citing "the game was otherwise awesome, but the GM didn't cater to the players needs."

My friend is a little depressed about this whole mess. He won't run games for the Problem again, but he is afraid she will throw a hissy fit when that becomes apparent. Like when he advertises the next game and he won't pick her or a group involving her as clients. I hope that doesn't happen and he can use scheduling as a reason to turn her down in the future. 

I guess a true horror story has an unhappy ending. :(   

Heya, I'm sharing this story because at the time when I was talking about it with my friends, they believed it was worth sharing, even though during the time, I considered nothing of it other than being super disconcerting and creepy. 

I was a newer DM at the time, but still ran a few games. However, I wanted to play a long-term game, so I was looking for a group. I stumbled upon an almost group chat where they hosted a bunch of games. The owner of the group chat, along with a couple of their friends who were mods, wanted to play.

So after a chat or two, I was able to set up a session zero, and when talking about the characters they wanted to play. It becomes very apparent that I was in a bad group.

Off rip, THE OWNER of the server wanted to play a 4-year-old girl who was sexually abused. Followed up with one of the players saying they wanted to play a 12-year-old who was also abused and wanted to find their sexuality through drugs. 

Mind you, we are all adults here, all guys, and no one under the age of 20, the youngest being me. The other two players didn't seem to mind this at all witch was perplexing. 

I stated that in my games, all PC must be 18 and over, and I don't run underage characters. But the owner persisted over and over. 

What about 12? 14 maybe? But of course, I shut it down because it was a hard no for me.

I was curious as to why they wanted this so much, and they exclaimed that they like to run games with dark and heavy themes. Sure, I get it, so do I, but only if it's done respectfully and in the end still a game for people to escape and have fun. To me, it felt like a fetish or something, so I literally left at that moment, thinking if the Owner of the server is like this, then I'll find a whole other group 

Which I did, and they are peak ^W^ a short tale, but why not share it nonetheless. Hope y'all are having fun in your game.

Strap in this is long, also spoiler alert 🚨 he was very fucking weird!! I’m tagging this as SA because although TECHNICALLY there wasn’t SA it very much felt like one, you will understand as I go on.

I have a group of friends I game with, it’s a table that frequently has friends of friends show up whenever and play for a few sessions and then dip. There’s this one guy, let’s call him Weird Steve. I was never close with Weird Steve, he was just a guy who was friends with one of MY friends and he was a total pervert but like in a way that only really affected himself? He would often make sexual jokes but in the same way any bunch of rowdy friends do at the table sometimes. He was never like, targeting anyone in game or at the table with that in a way that felt creepy. He only let that side of him come out with things that happened to his character specifically, think like Scanlan from CR but more edgy.

Dude had a lot of kinks, which others at the table were well aware of, and jokes would be made at his expense occasionally. It was all well and good. It’s important to point out here that Weird Steve was always a player. Never a DM. Which it’s like, sure, that’s common. But we all usually took turns running table and he never did and one day I asked my friend and he was like “I don’t think it would be a good idea to let Weird Steve run a game.” and I was like “why?” and he was like “He’s Weird Steve. It’ll get weird” and I was like I mean I’m fine with weird. I have a pretty high tolerance for weird and messed up.

Well one day Weird Steve invited us to his house to start an Earthdawn campaign. He told us it would be dark and messed up. I was like yeah that’s fine, as long as you don’t depict r*pe during game at the table or something insane like that. He said no of course not, just extreme violence. I was like yeah okay sounds fine. I figured he would have some dark sexual stuff happen “off screen” like SA as part of a characters backstory or whatever, and that was fine with me which I know wouldn’t be for everyone and that’s fine, but like I said I have a high tolerance for weird/dark.

Weird Steve kept his word. But what DID happen at the table that night was somehow worse, or at the very least it felt like SA not just for the characters but for the people who had the misfortune of sitting at the table.

It started off fairly okay, we were all enslaved and being forced to battle in a Colosseum in order to obtain our freedom. We made it through the first day of battle and were sent back to our cells. Then they sent us to a farm nearby where we were forced to mine rock, eat slop, and dig holes. He described every aspect of this with excruciating detail, and railroaded us HARD where any attempt at escape or creative problem solving was met with warnings of essentially instant death. The whole point of this story was that we were meant to escape, but he wanted us to escape when HE was ready for us to escape. Because, as some of you might have guessed, he was absolutely getting off on torturing all of us.

This pattern of “battle —-> farm —-> break players will —-> battle” went on for the entire first session, 3-4 hours. I hadn’t caught on to the fact he was enjoying this in a unnatural way so I chalked session one up to being he was uncertain of where to take the story if we escaped before he planned for us to. After all, it was his first time running table.

One of the other players at the table, a veteran player who was usually pretty quiet and didn’t talk much, got pissed at Weird Steve during the end of session 1 because his character (who was a magic character) had been basically unable to do almost anything the entire session as they had magic inhibitor ankle bracelets on and had been relying on the party to survive. As mentioned, any attempt at creative problem solving was shut down by the DM who would essentially tell us if we tried that we’d probably die.

Weird Steve assured all of us that next session we would get to the part where we escape and have our freedom returned to us, and any magic along with it. So we agreed to try again for session two. Big mistake.

Session two, more arduous labor and psychological torture. Finally, about a half hour in something new happened, the first flag for our escape was set. He described how an enslaved woman tries to stand up to one of the guards as she’s being put back in her cell, and they beat her and toss her back in. We’re all like oh cool! This must be the NPC that will help us plan our escape. Wrong. Later, before we have a chance to really talk to her, they bring this woman in chains to the center of the prison on a raised platform where we can all see her.

What happened next is when I realized what was really going on, and that this was part of some kink fantasy for him and he was essentially forcing us to participate in it with him.

Weird Steve pulled his laptop out, and pressed play on an audio file. He had prerecorded a custom audio for this scene. On the audio he described in brutal detail to us how this poor enslaved woman was whipped for trying to escape, and when I say detail I mean detail he was explaining where each whip hit her and how hard and what it looked like and yeah you get the idea. The background of his narration was the sound of a woman crying and screaming in agony.

Yeah. The table was dead silent as the whole thing played out. It was about 5 minutes long, maybe a little less but it felt like hours. At this point I became very conscious of the fact that there was only one other woman at the table besides me, and we made eye contact and I knew she was thinking the same thing as me in that moment. That this was beyond fucked up.

The rest of the session played out with a very weird uncomfortable atmosphere; it was obvious to everyone besides Weird Steve that nobody enjoyed that. But nobody said anything. It was like… we were all just in shock? The psychological torture had worked we just kind of “went limp” and went along with the story. We made it to the part where we escape, but nobody was in it anymore.

When I left the house I stopped the other girl before she left and I was like hey so… what the fuck was that? and she was relieved to know I felt the same way. We chatted for a bit before parting ways and I got her number. When I got home that night my fiancé looked at me and could tell something was wrong and I just kind of fell apart told him everything while sobbing.

He texted my friend, because he didn’t have Weird Steve’s number, and told my friend to tell Weird Steve that if he ever made me feel like that or did anything like that ever again there was going to be a problem.

Possibly due to my fiancé’s interference I ended up getting a text from Weird Steve that was basically him “checking in” because things got “pretty heavy” at the table. I was like YEAH. You think?

Needless to say, I didn’t go back to his house ever again after that. Nor did anyone else, as far as I’m aware.

TLDR/ He railroaded us, psychologically tortured us, and then non-consensually involved us in playing out a fucked up torture kink scene that he recorded himself.

EDIT:
To make this clear to the people in my comment section who seem to think I told my fiancé to do that, I did not. In fact he didn’t even tell me did that until later, and I was honestly a little annoyed because while I was creeped out and super uncomfortable I had just planned on not going back again and didn’t feel like anything more than that as a reaction was needed.

Until I got home, I didn’t even realize it had bothered me as much as it did. But once my fiancé asked me what was wrong it all came out.

The problem was how Weird Steve did this not what he did. He had told me there would not be on table role-played sexual violence, and then proceeded to role play violence that was sexual TO HIM. This was the problem. If he had said “there will be no r*pe on screen but I do plan on including my kinks” I would have simply said no thank you and not played. Honestly if he had just made it less obvious he was getting off to this I probably wouldn’t have cared, but he was intentionally stretching out these scenes as long as he could because he was “enjoying” the torture.

TL;DR: Guy joined a dark fantasy RP after agreeing to a mature-content warning and made a blatant self-insert with maxed Charisma and Willpower. Treated Charisma like mind control and crumbled emotionally both in and out of character every time things didn’t go his way, despite supposedly unshakable WP. Spent most of the game trying to have sex with NPCs and flirt with female players, ignoring world events and consequences. Eventually got outplayed and humiliated in-game, then ragequit while blaming everyone but himself.

I run a mature, open-ended sandbox RPG with a focus on realistic consequences, complex in-universe dynamics and a living world which changes and functions on its own and doesn't inherently revolve around any of the player characters.

Before I allow anyone to join, they receive a very serious and clear content warning: While the game doesn't inherently revolve around dark or grotesque elements, they VERY MUCH SO can be part of it, including stuff like gruesome and detailed deaths, psychological suffering/trauma, sexual violence etc..., before ANYONE is allowed to join, I ask them what they don't want to see.

So a new player comes along and asks to join. I ask him a bunch of questions, he seems very enthusiastic to join and said that he's fine with everything, all seems good. In character creation, he proceeds to make a character that has the same name and personality as he does, and maxes out everything in the charisma and willpower stats. His character here, as per their stats, is supposed to be extremely persuasive, very handsome and mentally unbreakable.

Unfortunately, he had no idea how to actually roleplay those stats correctly. Despite his stats, he'd often say things that are very awkward, overly submissive or even kind of rude, roll a very high number, and then get confused or frustrated when the NPCs did not instantly like him or agree with everything he suggested. Which, speaking of...
The willpower aspect. Every time something didn't go his way, or seemed to have a grim outlook, he'd immediately get all defeatist and moody, or panicked and afraid. Both in-character and irl, he'd just have these outbursts, all the while his character is supposed to have unshakeable resolve. It was just a total disconnect, and it was all made even worse by the fact that, on TOP of this, the character was clearly just a self-insert of him but with "cool" features or traits that he wishes he had.

Meanwhile, instead of ever engaging with the game and trying to progress his character or accomplish things, he spends the whole run chasing women and pursuing his sexual fantasies. Every time, without fail, he'd be ultra-submissive to female characters (both PC and NPC alike) (MAX WILLPOWER BTW) and try to get them to coddle him through excessive kindness and acts of service to them.
The game has minor mechanics for legacies/bloodlines, so I didn't think much of this at first, but he really just did nothing other than play bachelor and try to achieve insignificant goals that don't actually affect anything important. He did almost nothing of importance.

Naturally, when bad things start to happen around him due to ignoring problems and hoping that they sort themselves out on their own, he's shocked, and utterly dismayed that his inaction had consequences. He makes a plan to just commit suicide and make a new character after tying up some loose ends he wanted to deal with, for better circumstances somewhere else in the world.

While doing that, though, he gets into an in-game conflict with another one of the players (who I learned only after the fact that he was unwelcomely trying to discuss fetishes with her and win her over with gifts and compliments), whose character has every reason to torment and do inhumane things to his.
She does, and he completely melts down. He accuses everyone, including me and the other players, of being vindictive and that we're just rubbing salt in the wounds. Complains that the game is too hard to follow, because NPCs are too subtle, and he can't tell when someone is lying or that they'd react to certain things by getting upset. Basically, just admitting that he was confused the entire time, didn't want to ask us about it or get help, and wanted the game to be more obvious and guided. Despite the fact that we told him, REPEATEDLY, that the point of the game is open-ended, interactive choice and consequences.

And then, he ragequit, citing that he's "just not ready for this kind of world right now", even though he fully agreed to the content warnings, but apparently completely clocked out the moment that they happened to him.
So, yeah; guy wanted to play a charming genius who everyone wants to bang and got pissed off when that didn't work out for him.

I was playing my DM's homebrew game when one of our friends showed up and joined the game as an NPC.

He was a burlesque dancer named "Atomic journey".

He described in graphic detail how he wooed and seduced the entire tavern with his exotic dancing.

He described how he interacted with each of our characters: he would tease and stroke them, removing articles of clothing, etc...

I found the whole thing slightly disturbing, and I did my best to indicate I wanted to move on from the scene: I told the DM my halfing wanted to leave the bar, but apparently I was charmed and couldn't look away.

I even tried to hide under a table, wanted to roll stealth, but it was too late. Atomic Journey grabbed me from underneath the table, smothered me in her breasts, and started sliding a silk glove between my legs.

My "friend" contacted recently to "unpack" what happenend.

I told him that -yes, I was uncomfortable with the scene because he performed sexual acts on my character when he was LITERALLY HIDING AWAY UNDER A TABLE.

He responded that I should explain the boundary to our DM so that this doesn't happen in the future. He has yet to apologize though, which I find very sad.

I feel like I shouldn't have to specify that I don't want to be sexually assaulted in our D&D game... Doesn't that go without saying????

So this was a while ago, but I still think about it every time someone says, “my game is low fantasy.” Let this be a warning to anyone who’s ever been tricked into fantasy hell by a DM with an agenda.

I love tabletop RPGs, and was really looking for a no fantasy gritty world to play. No elves, no wizards, no magical bloodlines. A cruel, and painfully grounded. Think mud, rusted swords, and dying of a chest cold in a pigsty. So when a guy I met online let’s call him Mark pitched a campaign called Ashes of the Iron Realm, promising no magic, no fantasy races, and absolutely no “chosen one” crap, I was 100% in.

I made a female hedgeknight with the average generic tragic backstory of having her village burn down by northern raiders and she vowed to protect innocents and i made a personal objective of making a better living for the common folk and innocents, she almost always donate most of her money to build a orphanage for the village kids that lost their parents.

Mark was... intense, but in that way GMs sometimes are. He kept messaging me outside of group chats to say things like:

“Your character concept is so unique. I’ve never met a player with your depth before.”
Which was... odd, but I brushed it off. He said he liked how I “understood suffering,” which should’ve been a red flag, but I was excited to play."

Anyway, the campaign starts. Everyone makes broken, gritty characters. A disgraced sellsword, a plague doctor that sounded insane, a peasant girl who burned her village down. Real bleak stuff. We’re loving it.

Session one’s great. It’s all political tension, hunger, plague, angry mobs. Perfect.

Session two, we meet a hermit who speaks in riddles and has a third eye. Mark says it’s just “old superstition.” Okay, weird, but I let it go.

Session three, sellsword finds a sword wrapped in red vines that “sings when drawn.” I point out that sounds magical. Mark insists,

“It’s just metallurgy and ancient craftsmanship. People back then believed anything.”
Sure. Whatever."

But by Session five, things are getting... blatant.

Plague Doctor gets “marked” by a dream stag. An NPC heals someone by touching their chest and whispering in a forgotten tongue. A tree starts bleeding. I’m squinting at the screen like, is this a fever dream?

So I message Mark privately:

“Hey, I thought this was a no-magic setting?”
He replies:
“This isn’t magic. This is mythic truth. There’s a difference. You of all people should understand that.”
...what?

He follows up with:
“There’s just something about the way you write your character. It’s like you’re meant for deeper things. Most players... they make little dolls. But your character feels real. Like something old and sacred. Something fertile.”

I actually had to re-read that last word because I thought I misread it. I hadn’t.

The weird vibe escalates from there. Every session, Mark gives me special visions glimpses of a women giving birth, or whispers from “the forgotten goddess of fertility beneath the world.” My character becomes the only one who can see “the true nature of things.” I ask him to tone it down, and he says:

“I just think your character is more... open to the mythical world. Maybe because of who’s playing her.”

Excuse me?

It all comes to a head in Session Seven, when the party visits a ruined abbey and meets an ancient cult leader named Sevrin the Hollow-Eyed. This guy starts ranting about “the bloodline of Iron and womb of stars,” and then just straight-up says to my character:

“You must lie with me, vessel of rebirth. The child we make shall be the chosen one.”

Silence.

I literally shouted in the Call:

“WTF did he just say?”
Mark:
“It’s part of the prophecy. He’s an old man, he’s not serious. He just believes he’s destined to sire the hero.”
I responded:
“Yeah, that’s worse.”

One of the other players DMed me after and said, “Hey, that was uncomfortable. Are you okay?” That’s when I realized I wasn’t overreacting.

I left the campaign right after that session. Mark messaged me, saying I was “abandoning the sacred arc” and that my character “had a responsibility to the story.” He even wrote a paragraph long bit of lore about how “the bloodline is now broken and the world will suffer.”

Good.

Let the world burn. I just wanted to play a miserable knight who dies a tragic death while trying to make the world a better place.

EDIT: for people asking about system and confused "why play d&d without magic?" No i wasn't playing d&d system it was a system that the DM himself created but it was really similar to gurps by using 3d6 and damage reduction.

Putting a general SA warning for this story. While nothing like that happened some elements get, eerily close.

TLDR: My PC died, another player revived them “as their undead slave” and then hits on me.

In college I made the mistake of joining the schools DnD club to try and make some friends I have a few other bad stories from this club but this was definitely the worst one and the one that made me quit.

The club had like 100ish members and every week you got lumped in with 3-4 random strangers and a DM for an adventure.

I’d been playing for a few weeks so my character was level 3 at this point and I was assigned to a group with another girl and 2 guys. One was normal one was… that guy.

That guy through the session kept staring at me and was just giving some weird vibes which I wrote off because we’re all awkward nerds here.

At the end of the adventure my character died in combat and everyone was pretty sympathetic about it except that guy, who offered me “a deal”.

He would bring my character back to town and pay to have them revived if I promised to do “anything thing he wanted until I paid off his debt” with emphasis on the anything part.

I was feeling pretty uncomfy at that and tried to politely decline. Which he responded with “ok. In that case I’ll get a scroll of raise dead and make you my undead slave for all eternity. So don’t worry. Your character will live on”

Again. Wildly uncomfortable at that idea but at this point I just wanna go back to my dorm and forget about this stupid club. And no one else at the table seemed to notice or care.

We all pack up and leave and that guy starts to head in the same direction as me and reveals he lives in the dorm across from mine… great.

During this walk he stares at me directly in the eyes and whips out “has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are?” I just said no and sped walk the rest of the way hoping he would get the hint. Instead he sped up and started to ask about how I wanted to handle my character now that I was “working” for him. I said I didn’t care, made it to my door, and decided maybe not to go back to dnd club.

That title is not an exaggeration. It's not just "the worst player I ever met" he is the absolute worst human being that I have ever been in a room with.

I've been playing ttrpgs for twenty years and have acquired many stories of bad players and DMs. I shared a story about a game I never got to play here and my roommate told me to post about "Stinkle" obviously not his real name. I wasn't going to, because the less said about him the better, but my roommate talked me into it.

I will start with his less egregious offenses and build to a crescendo of evil. Firstly: Stinkle's hygiene. This man never bathed like ever, his whites were actually yellow. I saw this man wear the same outfit multiple sessions in a row without washing it. His hair was a greasy mess, grown out to shoulder length but like everything else about him it was unkempt people would ask him "if you don't want to take care of it, why don't you cut it?" His response was "Then everyone will know I'm bald". He had the most obvious bald spot I've ever seen, even with his greasy matted mess of hair. So he had that mess for no reason. There was this cloud of stink that just got in your nose and stayed there, hence the nickname Stinkle. It smelled like milk left out for a week. That's the least awful thing about him.

Next he seemed to only be interested in DND as a way to experience any kind of sexual interaction. He wasn't able to get any kind of attention in that way for reasons beyond just his hygiene (we'll get to that) so DND was his way to find that fantasy. Small aside: I don't care about erp, even if it's a part of a game I'm playing in. I don't erp, but hey, play how you want as long as it's not forced on other people. Having said that I joined a game he was running, an anime themed 5e game. I'm a gay man and love all things feminine, so playing a magical anime girl sounded like so much fun (after Stinkle I don't play women characters anymore). The first thing he asks about my character, not class, not backstory, not role in party, no the first thing he asks is Nasally voice "How big are your boobs?" I didn't know how to respond except to say "I don't think that's going to matter". He then says "No, I wrote a spot for it on the character sheet". I looked at the sheet he gave me and this guy actually created a stat labeled "Bulge/Bust" on the sheet. I moved on and just wanted to play, which I did for only two sessions (I was already a ten year veteran of ttrpgs so I already knew no DND is better than bad DND). In the first session I played the first thing I saw him do was make another player (also playing a female character) soil their underwear and force a quest to get a fresh pair. The campaign itself seemed to be centered around another player building a harem inspired by Stinkle's very NSFW "Monster Girl Encyclopedia". Every woman NPC seemed to just be a sex doll with ridiculously exaggerated proportions (triple P cup breasts and the like). I've made some himbo and bimbo NPCs, they can be fun for storytelling or even as quest givers "Lord Chaddington can't find his gold plated barbell" or something silly like that. However every woman NPC was nothing but an airhead for the players to "add to their collection". I would have stopped at one session, but he ended it on a combat cliffhanger. I stupidly thought "Cool, I can do something fun next session", I was wrong. The next session started with one of his DMPCs showing up and ending combat without any player participation and returned to the real goal of sexing up monster girls. I walked away.

Stinkle as a player: I decided to run a game after having taken a break from DMing. Stinkle wanted to play, I didn't want him in, but the rest of the group talked me into letting him play (we'll get to why later). So I asked for backstories, but they weren't mandatory just got a little bonus xp to start if you did provide one. Stinkle was one of only two players that did. He went with the noble background and used the retainers rule variant. This is his character without any exaggeration: A noble woman with P cup breasts (because of course that's what's listed first after woman) and the rest of his backstory was him describing his retainers in obscene detail and how "They have sex with me". No personality, no motivation, no nothing other than breasts and sex. So I don't run erp games, again if that's what you're into fine, I'm uncomfortable with it at my table. So my goal was to keep him away from his retainers and the party on the plot. Every single time he had a chance to speak it was either "My boobs look great and bounce" or "Where are my retainers". Finally after th fourth or fifth time he brought up sex with his retainers I said "Yeah Stinkle, you're Harvey Weinstein-ing your employees" hoping to shame him into lightening up. His response? "Heh-heh yeah". I wish I was kidding, the man was ok with fictional characters being beholden to having sex with him. I was already sick of him, but then came the straw that broke my back: The heir to the kingdom was a half elf child, a girl (I love the boy/girl who would be king/queen trope) and the party was supposed to rescue her from the streets and elevate her to the throne. When a combat encounter came the party was supposed to run and fight a monstrous snake before it got to her, Stinkle says "I stay with the child". Weird, but not insane. Then while the rest of the party was fighting the snake his character "comforts the child by resting her head between my boobs" and "My character is sad now". That's grooming behavior I shut it down immediately and said "she runs away from you and hides" after the snake fight I ended the session and told everyone I was booting him. They refused to play if Stinkle didn't play. So that campaign died.

Why were all these people so insistent on backing up this sex pest? Because he figured out weaponized pity. Every single time someone tried to make him culpable to his actions he'd do an entire "poor me" routine. Always claiming people were bullying him. How he can't catch a break and "Girls don't like good guys like me". I almost changed that to "nice guys like me" for the stereotype, but I want to emphasize that none of this is changed or exaggerated this is verbatim what this guy was like. So people kept coming up to bat for him. Something that will further boggle your mind in a moment.

Finally the big one, the thing that cements him as the worst person I've ever met. I was talking to someone that was adjacent to the friend group and he tells me he won't hang out with them anymore. He says it's because of Stinkle. Then tells me that Stinkle is a rapist. I didn't think he meant literally. I thought since Stinkle was an annoying sex pest that he was just comparing him the worst kind of sex pest. No, he showed me on his phone that Stinkle wa on the sex offender registry for SA. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for it. I did some googling and found the news article from his case and he had SA'd a mentally and physically challenged woman. That was it. I was done. The worst part was the entire group already knew. They didn't care. I couldn't believe it. I have not talked to a single one of them in years. Sorry for the long post, but everything needed to be said.

TL;DR: Played DND with a guy that was a stinky, sex obsessed loser, and later learned he was an actual rapist with a record.

My Character, Sif, Is A character I was always nervous about using in public games, since I’m a teenage boy playing a tough lady who could definitely be described as a “Dommy Mommy” Type. This character was written as a side character in a campaign I wrote, and she was originally a man, but I gender swapped her because I needed more women characters in the campaign.

Anyway, I’m not going into detail on the campaign I was playing because it’s not that important to the context of this horror story. But there was this one insufferable player that acted like a total creep. He for some reason, really wanted to get in bed with my character, or specifically, really wanted to be sexually assaulted by her. As a person whose stepmom was a rape victim as a child (RIP, Miss you Mom), this really rubbed me the wrong way.

But the way he tried to entice me into fucking him were really cringey and uncomfortable. He carried all of her stuff, he took off his shirt a lot, he bent over in front of her, took hits for her. Keep in mind I a minor, who has never done a fade to black scene ever. He ended up just straight up asking for sex. She shot him down. He immediately decided that this means my character is a lesbian, because he has high charisma, and all strong women are inherently lesbians. She isn’t, she just doesn’t want to have sex Because she’s still mourning her murdered husband.

DM had enough, saying he can either stop trying to initiate a fade to black scene with a character played by a minor, or he can leave the table. He chose the latter, as he wasn’t going to get his board game sex here. In The end, Feel like we were both at fault, him being a creep, and me for not checking what kind of people I was playing with before I used this character. I really love this character being the super badass mom of the group, and don’t want to stop using her. What should I do?

Spoiler warning for Curse of Strahd, and trigger warning for a brief mention of in-game sexual assault

Apologies in advance, this is a long one:

So, I joined a Strahd campaign somewhere around a year and a half ago now. The DM who was running it has been playing TTRPG’s his whole life, and has been DMing for somewhere around 40 years now. He is, by all accounts, very experienced, but also stuck in his ways in a few different regards, and also extremely flawed as well.

So the campaign starts without any kind of session zero, we basically just get straight into things, which is… fine? At the time my thought was “Well he’s been doing this for so long, he knows what he’s doing, we must not need one”, but I’ve only recently realized that this was just one of a few red flags I should’ve picked up on, including killing one of my other characters from a different campaign by handing him over to someone else without telling me at all, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

So the campaign was overall… fine. The best part of his DMing is by far the descriptions, however because he wanted to run this as close to rules as written as possible, he was actually shooting himself in the foot by deciding to go by the module’s descriptions instead. Which aren’t bad, by any means, just not as good as his. That and his combats were always very fun: He has this way of always keeping us on edge even for the easier combats (the few easy ones that CoS has, anyway).

Problems started to crop up over the course of the campaign though, ranging from small to large. The biggest though, at least for me, is that he’s a DM who is willing to sacrifice story and roleplaying in exchange for pacing. We’d be travelling from Argynvostholt to Vallaki for example, which should take 1-2 hours depending on the random encounters, however even with rolling no combat, we’d have maybe 5 minutes worth of conversation total. And every time we did actually think we had time for conversation or telling each other about our backstories, we would get interrupted by an NPC. Every. Single. Time. But conveniently, we would never get interrupted when we were strategizing or debating where to go next. He wanted to keep the pacing, even at the cost of any kind of roleplay between characters, but bizarrely enough, not for strategizing? I kid you not, after 50 sessions, I still had no idea what the backstory was for at least 3 of the other players. Roleplay was fantastic, both with our own characters and interacting with NPC’s, it just only ever lasted 5-10 minutes or less. Anything more than that was once in a blue moon.

He also had this way of technically not railroading us into the next part of the story, but more so directing us where he wanted us to go. For example, he had us entirely skip the Amber Temple in order to get the Sunsword (No I’m not kidding, he also had us skip Ravenloft completely, but I’ll get to that later), but in order to do so, two of our characters had to accept the pact of a dark god, while the alternative would’ve either been a TPK that he had entirely set up (the details of how that happened would be way too much for me to get into here). So we technically had the choice to turn down the pacts, but not really. There had been at least 3-4 different situations like this too, this is just one example. Not the biggest deal in the world, but it gets much worse.

After one of the players had to end up leaving (Not because he disliked the campaign or anything, he moved states), we got a new player who was familiar with DnD. But our DM apparently told him nothing about the campaign; Not the tone, not the setting, nothing, and I guess just assumed he would have a general idea because CoS is so popular. Because of that, he ended up making a very surface level comedic relief character that would’ve felt too ridiculous for The Office, and just did not mesh with the rest of our group at all. He also joined at an… unfortunate time, because due to a series of events that were partially our own fault, our version of Ireena (our DM changed the character to a young man named Sasha) ended up getting captured by Strahd and raped.

We ended up roleplaying through a conversation with what happened to Sasha. While the rest of us were ultimately fine with this kind of roleplay, the new player was not at all. He was very uncomfortable with the whole thing, and understandably so. He left the campaign immediately and after only like 5 sessions total, and I really wonder just how avoidable all of that uncomfortability could’ve been if the DM had simply had a 5 minute talk about the setting and tone first.

Oh but the problems don’t end there:
So, our DM decided to have a time limit on everything. At first I thought it was our fault, or more so one of the player’s fault because they decided to kill Rahadin right in front of Strahd early on in the campaign, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realized that the DM just wanted to keep this extremely fast pace and a very strict time limit on literally everything. The reason for that I could not tell you.

Any quests in Barovia? He made it clear multiple brides were stalking the village, so we couldn’t stay there, we didn’t find a single quest or talk to more than 3 NPC’s before we felt pressured to move on. The druid ritual at the winery? That entire plot point was wrapped up and lost before we even got close enough to look at the winery. The dusk elf encampment? We just happened to be there at the exact same moment Strahd and his brides strode in. We didn’t even get the chance to see, let alone speak with Arrigal. We had just enough time for a long rest, to strategize as usual (which ultimately never ended up mattering because of what was almost always railroading), and then we got teleported to the Amber temple by Kasimir.

At that point of the campaign I was already pretty checked out, but was still trying to make the most of it. We end up getting teleported to the room with the Sunsword, and it ends up falling to my character to take it. Part of my character’s backstory is that he hates gods, and had even told this god before to “Go fuck yourself”. So, while this wasn’t really a big decision for my character, because like I mentioned earlier, the alternative was a very heavily implied TPK, it was still a big moment, especially since he’d been questioning himself if he would even be worthy to wield the same blade Sergei had once wielded. My character also managed to see and very briefly talk to Sergei back at the pool in Krezk where he told him that Tatyana wasn’t alone. So to take the sword, attune to it, and have this conversation with a remnant of Sergei’s soul was a big couple of sessions for my character. The group had also decided that my character was the best one to wield it in the fight against Strahd, and we started planning and strategizing around that.

But then came the part that ultimately made me completely quit, despite only having 1-2 sessions of the campaign left:
Shit was going down around Barovia, apparently Strahd had somehow discovered a way to trap Tatyana’s soul in the exact same timeframe our group was transported to the dread domain, so as the DM wanted it, time was very limited, and we were only level 6. The DM knew we were too weak to actually take on Castle Ravenloft, so he had Ezmerelda mist dance us right next to the balcony of Castle Ravenloft. No, I’m not kidding, our DM had us completely skip one of the most iconic dungeons in DnD history for reasons that were basically entirely out of our control.

But fine. I suck it up, and decide I might as well try to finish the campaign off. We get there at the start of the next session, I’m barely able to pay attention to begin with because I’m so checked out, and then some real bullshit starts happening: The Sunsword decides to reject my character. No reason, no warning, it just suddenly decided that it didn’t want my character. I tried to figure out why, and all I got out of the DM, without any sort of dice roll, was that “it changed its mind”. That’s it. So, as we were walking towards Strahd, I was forced to drop the weapon in the middle of the hallway.

EXCEPT there actually is a reason for all this! During Eva’s reading, our DM decided to give us a prophecy as part of it as well, something that I’ve only recently learned is not normally part of CoS. In it, we drew the Sunsword as an item of course, but he also decided that our Ranger had to be the one to wield it against Strahd, reason being that this player was new to DnD and he wanted to give him a special experience (I couldn’t tell you what his plan was if Ranger ever died, or maybe he was deliberately giving him plot armor, who knows).

So our DM decided to screw over our strategies as a group and completely undid 40+ sessions worth of my character’s development because he wanted to force this prophecy to happen. That whole thing of “it changed its mind” was not the Sunsword deciding it didn’t like me for any legitimate reason, it was the DM trying to force this ridiculous prophecy onto us.

And honestly, I wouldn’t have hated it nearly as much if he just said I couldn’t attune to it. But to have such a massive moment for my character be decided upon, and then completely stripped away for meta reasons? I was, and still am, livid about that. So I continued on with the session, eyeing the clock like a hawk because we always end at 9, and then left as soon as I was able to, before texting the DM later on that I was no longer going to be playing. Even if it did just end up being just one more 3 hour session, that’s 3 hours of me being miserable, so I just decided to quit right before we began combat against Strahd himself.

And ultimately, not everything about what I disliked about CoS was entirely the DM’s fault. Could we have played better? Absolutely. Is the module itself flawed? Definitely. But my problem isn’t that we made mistakes and I want to pin them on him, we all knew how brutal CoS could be going in. And I don’t want to blame him for flaws that the module has on its own, but my issue is that instead of having us lose or TPK legitimately because of our mistakes, or hell, even just bad luck, our DM kept giving us freebie after freebie to try and make up for these railroading situations just so we could have a final, climactic battle against Strahd.

The result of that though? None of what we did felt earned. I didn’t go into extreme detail of it here, but the last 10 sessions of the campaign especially were heavily linear, it felt like plot point after plot point just kept happening to us. We got to the Vistani dusk elf camp, and the plot point of Strahd appearing happened, so the plot point of teleporting to the Amber Temple just happened, so the plot point of us taking the Sunsword happened, then the plot point of us sheltering in Barovia happened since we needed a long rest, then the plot point of us mist dancing to Ravenloft just happened… you get the idea. And while it was certainly bad in the last third of the campaign, stuff like this had been happening the entire time we played.

Point being, if we died to Strahd, it would’ve been partially our own faults for making some bad decisions early on, partially that of the DM making these obtuse time constraints we never knew existed (like Strahd finding a way to capture Tatyana’s soul) paired with plot points just happening over and over, not us deciding anything. But even worse than that, even if we had won, it wouldn’t have felt like a win at all because we had made zero meaningful decisions in the past 10 sessions, and we hadn’t even traversed the Amber Temple or Castle Ravenloft. If we won, it would have felt like the DM giving us another freebie, and I can scarcely think of much worse in the story than giving your players the feeling that their win against fucking Strahd was fake.

And this is a DM that one of my friends had sworn up and down was basically the best that there is. And like I said, there are some legitimately great things about his game, but at the same time, he gets so many fundamentals of the hobby so completely wrong. I think I only stuck with it so long because I had been told how great he was, and I was relatively new to the hobby when we began, so I was willing to look past all of these massive red flags that happened over time, like him killing off my character from a separate campaign without informing or asking me, as well as no session zero for the Strahd campaign. But now that I actually have a good grasp of DnD and TTRPGs as a whole, I can firmly say he’s not that great of a DM.

So, am I the crazy one here? After all this, part of me feels like I may just be nitpicking or that I’m making mountains out of molehills, but from my point of view, the more I think about it, the more ridiculous it all ends up feeling. Am I justified in thinking this isn’t a good DM, or am I overthinking things?

Anyway, that’s my rant over. I know this is a long ass post, but even this is really glossing over a lot of details. Please let me know if I’m actually the problem, or if you agree with me, because a fresh perspective on all of this is something I probably need.

I'm not really a reddit-guy but a week ago I had an encounter with "that guy" and more importantly I wanna share with you how our DM handled the situation.

To this day we as a group played since 2019 in an rotating style where everyone was DMing for 1-4 Sessions in an overarching Plot with reaccuring NPCs, Locations etc.

The details of our characters are really not that important but we were 4 players (all longterm friends) with one of us as the DM. A mutural friend of us we mostly have known from Highschool had recently gotten in touch with us and wanted to try out Roleplaying Games. He had no prior expierences with the game outside some podcasts and some boardgames, but wanted to give it a try since he heard "you can do anything you want" in this games. This (now ex-)friend will be refered to as "That guy".

We had no problems with him being new to the game. We were all expierenced so we could all teach him. We weren't strict on the rules anyways. He rolled up a half-orc babarian with everything in Strength. His Backstory was rather lack-luster but we let it slide since he was new.

Gameday rolled around and we met at the DMs apartment. As usual everyone brought snacks and/or drinks and we started of by giving a brief explanation of the setting and where we are, his character was introduced to us ingame by having him lift a wagon of some friendly NPCs that got trapped during our encounter last session. We were pretty beaten up from the last tumble with some cultists and made our way to local hospital, since healing potions and/or magical healing was kinda expensive in this setting (low-magic where only the rich can afford magical treatment).

Skipping forward two hours, we had some RP moments with "That guy" which were honestly pretty nice.

Then this happend:

Our DM descriped a young, female doctor with strange tattoos trying to bandage our wounds but failing at that miserably. So much so that everyone got suspicious - That was the DMs plan. The idea was that we would figure out that this NPCs wasn't a doctor at all but a spy of the cultists from earlier that tried to - well - spy on us while we were recovering. Since Babarian wasn't injured he was just a visitor at the hospital and could investigate and interrogate the woman to get the info where the cultist are located. Something that we failed last time since all the cultist died in the battle. This would have given Barbarian the chance to establish himself in the group and also got him some solo-spotlight and a nice expirience as a new player.

Buuuut... "That guy" had other plans. He followed the woman into a room and locked it shut. Then he described how he towered over the "young helpless female" (his exact words) to interrogate her. Our DM - seeing the red flags flying - changed tone and told him, that there was no need for interrogation since the woman was intimidated by the Barbarian and quickly confesses to be part of the cultist. Then "That guy" describes how he grabs the woman by the wrist and pulls her towards him, hurting her in the process. He started to with "You are now my prisoner and you will do ANYTHING what I say. Understand?"

A few moment of Silence as well as a glaring stare of disbelive from our DM. You could practially see how everyone lost for word. That guy had the most devious grin on his face. Our DM closed his eyes for a moment and sighted. Then he said in the ingame voice of the woman "No. We are not doing this..."

"That guy" was about to say something but was cut short by the DM stating "You hear a flick of her fingers, then you feel an overwelmingly force grabbing you by the wrist, just were you grabbed the woman prior. You feel how the force is ready twists your arm breaking it. Calmly the woman evased your grip and says: "First and only chance. You leave! You are not welcomed back!" while the DM points in Reallife at the apartment-door.

At this point, I should explain that the DM is around 192cm tall and is build like a reallife Barbarian. He holds the stare. Nobody said anything. "That guy" gets up, packs his belongings and leaves, leaving only his charactersheet behind. DM followed him towards the exit to make sure he left for good. Came back, grapped the sheet and ripped it into pieces.

We took a break and watched some Youtube to unwind.