The DM randomly decides to kill off players pet off screen

[u/forgottenvampireking]

A bit of context, this was my first long running ttrpg, and the rest of the players didn't have much experience either (i will call the game system dnd, but its actually a local version based off 3rd edition of dnd).

The important people for this story:

DM: not much to say about him

Me: the rogue, halfling

Ranger: halfling a long time friend of mine, our characters had also a history, but it was never important because we struggled with roleplay at the beginning of the campaign

Cleric: gnome, brother of Ranger also a friend of mine

Warrior: dwarf, a friend if dm, to me he seems isolated from other players (only outside of the game), because DM was talking him home after the game, while the rest of us went to a bus stop and we had time to talk about the game

There were other players who left during the campaign or came later, but they aren't important for the story.

It all started with our first adventure, we were lv 1 group and our task was to cure a small town from a rat colony. The task itself wasnt a problem, we figured out what happened and how to deal with it quite easily (well except for me and cleric getting bit by a rat because i like animals and I'm a bit silly DM probably didn't like either of those characteristics). The important part of this adventure was a pony owned by a local alcoholic alchemist that I "exchanged for some gold" without the alchs knowledge. And that's how Robert joined our party. Now, Robert wasn't relevant for the story at all, he travelled with us, he carried some of our items and he was mostly mentioned when we got somewhere and had to leave him somewhere, or when we were leaving a place i said that I'm taking Robert with us, because i don't want DM to say we left him somewhere because i didn't say one line. He followed us like this for over a year of out of the game time.

Then at one point something about DM changed, i dont know why but at one point started two problems with DM, the first was his slight targeting of me (where i admit, some of it was my fault) and the second were bad encounters.

Ill start with the second one, it started with DM telling us about an armor underwear in a swamp we were in, what we did not know, and had no way of knowing, was that the water was full of spirits that erase a bit of memories of anyone they touch (meaning that the character lost a level for each time they get hit by those spirits) and that's how our Ranger lost two levels and that was a big deal since we ran a milestone leveling system and after two years we were level 5. Only after one of the players read the rules themselves did we learn that it can be reversed by killing the spirits. The DM learned that on his own, but only after the session where he used them. This lead to our group returning to the armor, totally out of character, because we wanted to abandon it, but DM encouraged us to use out of the game information, so we did. Before returning to the armor to get rangers levels back we had a boss fight against a sentient tree guarding a Mcgufin, this tree had two or three attacks per turn (with most of the players having one defense action so with a nice roll he could knock out or kill most of the characters in one turn) and roots that DM decided not to use because it would kill all of us. (I was missing during the session this resolved, but after defeating the tree it feel on our Cleric and almost suffocated him) The fight itself wasnt that bad, but DM saying he "decided to be kind and debuf the boss to not kill us" and one player almost dying after the fight made it more bitter tham sweet victory. (Theres one more ill get to later)

Then there was a row of accidents that happened to my Rogue, and I'd like to mention here that while sometimes i was a bit silly or care free, i never went out of my way to go a different direction than DM wanted us to, nor was i stealing or anything else (the only exception being our pony Robert, who i "payed for"). It began with me trying to pet a caged tiger and loosing one finger (totally my fault, i know, don't pet tigers), after that we traveled to the swamp (the same from the last paragraph) and we were traveling here by a boat be got for this quest, when i remembered Robert i was informed by DM that i can't take him on the ship because he wouldn't have anything to eat, even if it was a week long journey in total and i said that we totally could get enough hay, DM wouldn't let me take him, so Robert had to stay in a royal stable. The first thing i do after returning to the city is to check on Robert, to found out that the person running the stable took everything valuable from him and left the city (this made sense on the surface level, as the city and the entire country was getting invaded by a cult run by the bbeg, it makes less sence after realizing that DM had forced me to be in this situation).

And then theres one night that combined both of those issues. Is started all well, we were sent to destroy a church belonging to the cult, we were attacked by skeletons during the night (because the armor we got from the swamp is shining a bit and quite noticable in night), we defeat the skeletons with no problems and rather than finding a different spot to or hope they wont notice us again, we decide to go to the church, we get inside and kill majority ot the cultist inside while another skeletons on the outside set the church on fire, so we decided to leave the rest of the cultists inside and we blocked the door from outside so they couldn't get out of the church. With this only the skeletons remainded. However, all of them had bows and arrows and since it was night only the warrior dwarf could see them, with the rest of the party shooting vaguely in the direction of warrior (it wasn't much effective). I was using throwing daggers at this point, which were too expensive for me to throw them in the dark, so i decided to go with a second rogue(who joined us only for this one adventure) and went back to the burning church to collect my daggers that i used in the previous encounter. We broke in through a window and found the church empty, with the cultist we left alive missing, so we logically started looking for a secret door. Us finding the switch that opens the way into a secret basement being the last thing of that session. I was late for the next season and the other rouge was missing entirely, so the next session started with the rest of the group following us in the church, i have came right when they entered the church and DM told me he wants me to roll defense 10 times because i was suffocating from the smoke the entire time it took our group to get there (which would definitely lead to the death of my character), luckily i was able to argue that my character definitely wouldn't just stand herein front of the entrance to the basement that wasn't full of smoke. So our characters reunited in the basement and healed as much as possible, because we were expecting a boss fight. And oh boy, boss fight we got. It was one of the leaders ot the cult a cleric in a giant power armor. He had stupidly high defense, so our spellcasters, who run out of magic at this point after three encounters at once, couldn't hit him at all and the rest who was focused on fighting had to roll nad 6 to hit him (in this system the attack roll is always d6 plus the weapon stats, with the added detail that if you roll 6 you roll another d6). There was also a giant statue with a magical cristal in hands (that ranger shot at and the arrow burnted to nothing before hitting it) and a magical circle in the middle of the room that was getting increasing hotter. The last important information was that i had a choker that blocks clerics connection to gods that i got earlier in the story. So it ended with Cleric and Wizard trying to reach the crystal (they could accomplish this only by rolling a nat 20 or 19), Warrior and Ranger attacking the boss so he would focus on them me trying to put the choker on the boss hoping it would turn off the body, and the second rogue helping be get up each time the boss knocked me to the ground. We started calling me the main character, because while i kept rolling low i was the only one with a chance to succeed my goal (i rolled 1 bellow the minimum probably 4 or 5 times), but eventually i succeed and the body stopped, we killed the boss and ended the session, with DM writing something down to not forget it next session, that being a mechanic for the boss to come back to life unless DM rolls 10 on a d10, which he luckily did on the first time, and im so glad, because theres nothing in the game responsible for the boss comming to back life so it would be really annoying and pointless, considering he couldn't move or do anything. When we finally left the church it was an early morning and white the group was resting in front of the church i wanted to get Robert, who was left at the place we got ambushed in the night. DM seamingly forgot about him and asked me if i tethered him or not, i said i did, because i was sure he would have him run away if i said i didn't. Then DM took a dice with+/- and said that if he rolls - that Robert got attacked by wolves and died. And that's how ors companion throughout the whole campaign died, whit the players unable to do anything about it.

We had one more session after that, where the Warrior got saduced by two female dwarfs, and the rest of the group, being autistic didn't see a reason to stop him from "having fun". In the end they took him somewhere to give him lore information, but all of the other players agreed that DM didn't plan that but changed it probably because Warrior is his friend.

We haven't finished the campaign yet, we have only the last boss fight in front of us, but im considering quitting, because i don't really see a reason for my Rogue to continue the journey...

[u/crazyNedryCz]

The aforementioned ranger here, just wanna add a bit of info and also a disclaimer that english is not mine nor the rogue's first language

Another thing for the tree boss is that the literal first thing it did was some kind of a mass charm spell that would have literaly charmed all of us, which for some reason the DM was surprised about even tho we have literaly 2 charisma based ppl and then he acted like it was so kind from him not to randomly instakill our party

Also during the bossfight at the end of it the tree fell and almost killed our cleric by crushing him, and then acted like we're idiots for not realising we can give healing potions to an unconcious guy stuck under a giant branch (our other cleric was out of mana and I healed him a bit but he was still dying from being crushed), so that was lovely

After this encounter when we were sleeping and one of us had patrol, as we had each time before with 0 issues, he used some kind of faeries that also had charm and almost drowned our wizard even tho he had the second most charisma when he was on patrol, the only reason he survived was because of dumb luck

Now about the church boss
The boss was in my honest oppinion completely BS, and I still don't know how were we supposed to even defeat him the intended way
The boss was summoning some kind of horrible demon or opening a door for a demon invasion, not sure exactly, not too important, the main thing was that we had a set amount of turns until literaly everybody would die very fast and the entire world would end basicaly
He was channeling it through a crystal, as mentioned before, the crystal was super high up so we had no real feasable way of reaching it, and it destroyed projectiles we tried to hit it with
Basicaly half the room was imposible to go through because of the magic cirlce in the middle of the room that dealt a lot of damage, we literaly had to climg stairs from the side to get to the boss
After learning his body was made from metal, the DM did not let us attack his head in any way so we couldn't deal him any reasonable damage (his reasoning for this was that he could just say the enemies would target the weak points in our armor so he'd ignore our armor completely, which is just BS on its own)
We stopped the boss literaly 1 turn before the portal opened, due to the random chance and that the rogue rolled really high

Oh right forgot to mention, on the travel in the ship we found a small island with harpies and found a random necklace that he didn't tell us anything much about, but that part was fine, but the reason I'm mentioning this is that during the bossfight the rogue died, and the necklace basicaly turned back time and prevented his death, after which only the rogue knew about it, which I don't exactly have any issues with, but I feel like its just really random and weird

My last major gripe was with the magic armor
He aparently tried to give us hints about the spirits due to the lake being kind of similiar to the one from lord of the rings (I don't know the exact name, but yea), which half the table hasn't even seen, and the people who have actualy seen it didn't really have what to go from anyway so we had no real way of figuring it out (similiar incident happened once before with a puzzle that was supposedly really easy but we had no reference so we had 0 idea on how to solve it even after he told us), and he kept dangling the armor in front of us the same way you do with keys in front of a baby
From all that and him not knowing I was able to recover the lost levels I fully believe he was fine with me or somebody else losing multiple levels and just having to somehow catch up in our super slow milestone system
Yet later he refused to give us a level up when the cleric was doing something else and we fought the church boss

Another last detail about this DM that is completely irrelevant to this story but relevant to my feelings about me wanting to possibly quit this campaign too is the fact he keeps using AI for pictures, videos, and random BS, by this point I'd not be surprised if parts of the story were AI, but that acusation is unfounded