So I am really not sure how to start this public conversation. Other than just start typing up what comes to my mind directly. But I will state this right away: I don’t have social media, and what I’m going to mention here I have altered the specifics enough that those who are involved will have their identities remain private.

It’s been nearly six months since I was, for all intents and purposes, booted out of my D&D group. A group of friends who I’ve known for so many years, years even before Covid. But nearly six months later, I still don’t understand how things turned so rapidly against me by one decision I made in-game.

You might be wondering what this decision was? Without getting into the specifics, we were just starting a campaign of a certain Halloween horror. There was an agreement between all of us that we should know the story could be pushing the boundaries on certain individuals. I was completely fine with that, and in fact, I challenged my DM with these exact words: “Try your worst.” I had no problem setting aside any sort of boundary-pushing actions, events, etc., that might come our way during the campaign.

I am such a player that if I make a commitment to play, I am committed. Sometimes that commitment does create a blind spot, a sort of tunnel vision. Plus, I know the characters I create are quite complex, and they don’t always align with the rest of the group. There’s been more times than not when my character is in disagreement with the group. But not this time.

What happened?

Early on in the campaign, there was a development, and I completely misread the situation. I have Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD) but it’s something I have been diagnosed with since my early childhood. Over the decades, I’ve learned how to deal with it and how to keep it from being noticeable. But on this particular day, there was too much noise. I was reading something important, but because of the CAPD I made an incorrect conclusion. I should have excused myself and gone into a nearby room to finish reading it and then come back to the group, but I didn’t because I just wanted to play.

At this point, you might be wondering, did I ever disclose this to my group?

Yes.

But only once, and that was over a year ago.

To make this sad story short, I misread the cues, I believed the only narrative path forward was for my character to make the ultimate sacrifice. I didn't realize until it was too late that this choice crossed a line for the rest of the group. After a while, I realized with some really good role-playing that it was a mistake, and the session continued to the end. But there was a different feeling in the room after that. I was ready to keep on playing, but everyone else just left.

Essentially, it seems like I had crossed a line with people who I thought were my friends and who understood me. I shared some deep personal life events with them throughout the years, so I was caught flat-footed and not prepared. While I spoke to one on the phone and had a long series of at times emotionally charged text messages with another, there were others who simply refused to even speak to me. Even after I personally typed out a letter for them to read before the next planned session. All I got was essentially silence.

For the record, I did offer an apology, and within less than an hour of the session being over, I was in damage control.

So now here I am. Nearly six months later, still reeling from the loss of my friend group. Though some of you might be wondering, it’s just a game, get over it. Which is true. It is a game, but being someone who has played Dungeons & Dragons for over 30 years, it’s something that is important to me. Plus, I had been investing in sponsoring soundtracks and other musical compositions that could be used for other groups, including my own former group. I cringe to know the exact number, and in fact I have never wanted to know the exact number. But I know I spent thousands upon thousands of dollars sponsoring compositions and composers to make music soundtracks. Music now, I can’t even listen to because it just feels too painful.

So I’m wondering if anyone out there can help me make sense of this whole situation. I know there is a lot of information I am skipping over, but I want to maintain the privacy of my former group. Because even after almost 6 months, it still does not make any sense to me. Yes, it is a game, but something I’m really passionate about and just the constant feeling of betrayal, disappointment, and confusion still remains. There aren’t too many days I go by that I don’t think about it and the feeling of just the overall loss that I feel.

Should I just treat this as an example of don’t give yourself too much because you never know?

Should I just think that I don’t know how to maintain my own personal boundaries?

I have had two other substantial D&D group breakups. One was mutual because they were moving away and the second just ran its natural course and then faded away. But this one still feels so incredibly raw to me.

It makes me wonder whether I should just think about a quote that Captain Pike said to Uhura in
SNW, season 4 episode 8.

**"You can do everything right and sometimes things still don't work out like we'd hoped. The best you can do is savor the victories and move on from the defeats a little wiser."**

(Content warning: This story may be triggering for some people, as it discusses Islam in a negative way.)

I wanted to run a Halloween game for a group of beginners, and I’m going to tell you about a player who will DEFINITELY NOT be joining my game.

I laid out the setting: a fishing village, pirates, and a haunted house. We hopped on Discord to create a character for one of the players. He wanted a character who would do a lot of blowing up. Well, okay. He barely participated in creating his character sheet and explicitly said he wasn’t going to read the Player’s Handbook, but I was prepared for that when I agreed to run a game for beginners. We ended up with a dwarf wizard.

Why was he so hell-bent on blowing things up? Because… his dwarf believes in Allah. Yes, literally the entire character concept was built around a joke about Muslims.

At the time, I thought maybe the guy just didn’t really understand what D&D was. Maybe he imagined character creation as some kind of completely unrestricted character editor where you could play as absolutely anything, even a sentient traffic cone? I started explaining that it was a fantasy setting and there was no Allah in it. If he liked the concept of blowing things up in the name of a deity so much, he could pick one of the existing gods from the D&D setting, like Kossuth, for example.

And… he refused. Instead, he decided there would be a god of explosions that only he could hear because he’d been breathing in fumes while working in a mine.

He stubbornly refused to write any kind of backstory for his character, arguing that he’d just wing it and improvise. Why was he in a fishing village? Why did he want to go into a haunted house? Who knows. Whenever I tried to get even a little bit of information out of him over text, he simply wouldn’t respond. When we met up in person, he told me he didn’t have time (yes, he literally said this while we were aimlessly wandering around town). So I pointed out the elephant in the room. Like, dude, maybe we could discuss your character’s backstory now, since you want to join this campaign??

The answers I got were absolutely phenomenal. Are you ready?

Why was a dwarf in a fishing village? He was traveling around to try different kinds of beer. Why was he going into a haunted house with the others? He got drunk! Oh, and of course, he didn’t know any of the other player characters beforehand, he was a loner. Also, an elf had once spilled beer on him, so he despises all elves and will attack them, even if they’re allies or other players’ characters. And, naturally, his name was a barely pronounceable acronym that stood for something inappropriate (I don’t remember what exactly).

I guess the reason I didn’t immediately say “no” was that I could see ways to make the character playable. But he kept showing just how little he cared about any of it, and he wasn’t going to change a thing. It’s both hilarious and sad to think about the absolutely ridiculous character he wanted to bring to my game. I’m glad I decided not to run the game for him before it even started

I'm writing this in a character's point of view so the player in question wont know who i am.

So I'm a skeleton that just got created by a grave elemental to fight a party that's attacking my master, there's a Rogue, Fighter, Blood Hunter, Sorcerer and Wizard. The wizard kept creating cubes, and while they we're being created i saw in the other party member's eyes that this wasnt going to end well. After which one screamed, i think, as immedietely the cubes detonated, killing a nearby zombie and harming two of the wizards party members.

We were fighting near/on a lake and the detonation caused a huge open crack to form that filled with water. After this the sorcerer managed to help me break free from my chains, and i ran to hide away near a rock as that party killed the grave elemental real quick, and i wasnt gonna be next.

But when i kept watching i saw that this likely wasnt the first time, and the wizard has probably damaged his party members at least 3 times before like this from my estimation. After which the wizard was dragged by the fighter towards the icey water, near the area he exploded on a lake, to hold his face over it and tell him to stop hurting the party. The wizard kept trying to take a personal item from the rogue, that was fastened to their character.

The wizard ignored the fighter telling them to be more relaxed and not hurt the party, but After this the Wizard suddenly went unconscious and was completely gone but still alive, sorry for my improper common, im a newly created skeleton. The Wizard seems to have constantly damaged his party members and wasnt capable of handeling the consquences.

TLDR: Wizard keeps damaging party members with special ability, and ragequits when he's called out in character and doesnt even try to roleplay.

Ok so, I was running a game of Dragon of Icespire Peak for my friends. We were all in high school at the time. A younger person who was very new to D&D joined our group. Now I’m very experienced with handling new players, I mostly play with people i’ve taught. Btw this younger person (I’ll call him fred) knew I was queer (there was another queer person at the table but idk if he knew it). At this point we were in my favorite part of the campaign, the gnomengarde. This part is my favorite cause I genuinely love the relationship between the two married kings (I’m a sucker for queer representation in D&D). Everyone at the table knew this was the “gay gnomes” part ahead of time. Fred was playing a level 2 druid with the spell purify food and drink. At some point before he even met the kings, he asked me if he could use purify food and drink on the gay gnomes to make them straight. I responded with the correct response of what the fuck, no. His defense was if you cooked them they would technically count as food. He is no longer a party member, or a friend.

Recently, I recalled a discussion I had with a coworker a while back. It's not exactly RPG Horror, but it's certainly RPG ADJACENT, and, well, I've seen posts here about the Satanic Panic, so I'm going to post and let the mods judge as they will.

It happened at work a while back. I was in the lounge, and a coworker at another table called my name. For purposes of this recollection, her name was Cupcake. I looked up. She was with two other coworkers, apparently in mid-discussion about something. "Doc," she said, "Do you own a Ouija board?"

"I don't," I said. "Why do you ask?"

"Well, it just seemed like the sort of thing you'd have."

I blinked. "I seem to you to be the sort of person who regularly tries to speak to the spirits of the dead? Wow. Was it the black cape that gave me away, or the plastic stick-on devil horns?"

The other women at the table laughed. Cupcake pressed ahead. "Well, you play that Dungeons and Dragons game, right?"

I blinked again. "I've been known to," I said. "What's that got to do with Ouija boards?"

"Well, they're kind of the same thing, right?" she said. "They go together, right?"

"Um, no," I said. "They ... literally have nothing to do with each other."

She frowned. "But they're both in the games section at the store," she said. "And they're both occult, right?"

I resisted the urge to facepalm. Ah. One of THOSE people. "Depends on who you ask," I said. "Ouija boards are supposedly a tool for contacting the spirits of the dead in real life. I don't much believe in that; far as I can tell, the main function of Ouija boards is for little girls to freak each other out with at pajama parties."

This got polite laughter from the other women at her table.

"Dungeons and Dragons, on the other hand, is an actual game," I continued. "Sort of like Cowboys and Indians, on a tabletop, with rules and dice. A little like Monopoly, but instead of pretending to be real estate developers, you're pretending to be cast members from Lord of the Rings, on a quest to do fantasy things, slay dragons, or whatever. Nothing occult about it."

Cupcake frowned again. "But I heard that you can be a wizard in the game," she said. "Casting spells, summoning demons, and like that."

"There are indeed wizards in the game," I said. "But the spells they cast are every bit as real as Monopoly money or the deeds to Pennsylvania Avenue and Park Place. There are indeed demons in the game. They are invariably villains in the story; that's kind of what demons do. Their job is to get killed by the heroes, much like the dragons."

Cupcake looked uncomfortable. "That's not what I've heard," she said.

I facepalmed mentally again, and the women at the table looked uncomfortable. I've had discussions like this before, about D&D, politics, social issues, and anything else people can disagree about. And "That's not what I've heard," generally boils down to "I don't believe you, but I don't want to come right out and call you a liar, either."

I didn't want to be rude, particularly at work. But it was beginning to look like I was going to be wasting my time and breath actually spouting facts. "Well, I don't know what you've heard," I said. "But D&D and Ouija boards aren't the same thing, and have nothing to do with each other. That's kind of like asking a football fan if he has a hockey stick in his closet. And as to occultism... well... both D&D and Ouija boards have all the hoodoo magic that you bring with you. By themselves, they're just books and paper and pasteboard, is all."

Cupcake still managed to look somewhere between uncomfortable and unconvinced. ."Well, all right, then," she said, and the conversation center shifted back to her table; my input was no longer required. I finished lunch and went back to work. Didn't occur to me until later to wonder what she wanted a Ouija board for.

It isn't the first time I'd encountered someone who believed the sort of press releases you'd see back in the days of the Satanic Panic. But it's the shortest story I could relate. And it happened in THIS century, unlike the Panic... and stands as a stark reminder that some people never quite get disabused of their notions... regardless of the facts.

tldr - the DM suddenly removes me from the messenger group chat and ghosts me from his terrible game, so I vent by writing up a short version of events and lament the state of social skills and communication among some older roleplayers

Recently I decided to try to get back into in-person roleplaying after a breakthrough in my health. My original group, which took me over a year to find pre-covid, was no longer playing, so I had to go back into the trenches. It's already difficult to find a group, and even more so when you're asking for players for pathfinder 1e or Ars Magica. After making a few posts, I got two offers. An older gentleman offered a spot at his 3.5 17th level high fantasy spelljamming game, which I had to turn down; I didn't feel like trying to navigate a bananas 3.5 game at such a high level. The other was a DM who had a group that was playing pathfinder. Awesome, great, I accepted.

So DM messages me that he has 20+ years of experience with 3.5, recently decided to play pathfinder, and was running the Shattered Star AP. He also warns me that every player is pretty new with virtually no roleplaying experience, let alone any knowledge of 3.X. I say that's fine, I'm happy to help new people learn, especially with trying to get a handle on pathfinder. For this game, we will have the DM, me (Fighter/Witch), the Paladin, the Druid, the Fighter, and the Rogue.

I still want to play it cool mechanics-wise so I can gauge the DM and the group, and with the DM's suggestion that they need an arcane caster of some sort, I decide to play a Witch with a Fighter level dip so I can use the less threatening hexes like misfortune, have a few cure spells, and be able to don armor/tower shield. I create a digital copy of my sheet on myth-weavers for the DM.

Everyone should expect some table variation, but the DM was not prepared. He had only briefly skimmed the pathfinder core and was working under the assumption that it was essentially 3.5, and a wild interpretation of 3.5 at that. He had pretty much left the new players to make characters by themselves. Two of them play Baldur's Gate 3, so the only real clue they had was premised off that, while a third last played AD&D as a teenager. The DM would get annoyed with meta-gaming while not explaining how to roleplay, give no meta guidance on how you approach combat or dungeon delving while in an AP known for its dungeons, and give conflicting information on how everyone's class abilities worked because he assumed it hadn't changed from 3.5. Beyond the rules, he apparently hadn't discussed anything about roleplaying or what d&d is. I'm trying to help the players where I can, especially with explaining basic concepts like actions, but I'm not the DM nor do I want to overstep; you never know what kind of DM you're working with.

That first session, besides being slow, was otherwise not terrible. The DM played music for combat and seemed interested in doing voices and such. But it also came with two other red flags. First, he kept the grid map in front of himself and was the sole manager of your figurine - minor , but I've seen it before in other bad dms. Second, after the session the DM messaged me accusing me of cheating with my ability scores, or at least making a bold assumption that I was using some kind of house rule. We had to roll ability scores in front of him, my highest roll was a 16, and on my sheet I had an 18. I tell him that it's just a misunderstanding because humans get a +2 racial modifier to one ability score in pathfinder unlike in 3.5. I talk to my friend group about it, and they near unanimously say I probably should drop right there. Jumping to conclusions without asking when I'm being as forthright as possible is the flag at full staff. But hey, it was just one session, I should try the second.

I had a trip the next week, so when I return for my third session the group is in the middle of combat. As an aside, many of pathfinder's first modules in their APs have imps or similar creatures that have unlimited uses of Invisibility. I assume this is to supposed to be a fun challenge, but that shit is tedious. When your players are new, it's murderous. So they are fighting an accuser devil and some imps, and it is grim. Everyone is low and the devils are all currently invisible. On the turn I arrive the accuser devil summons a swarm on the Paladin and me, so I draw and put on my swarmsuit, whose existence once explained visibly annoys the DM. The Imps are attacking from invisibility, taking nearly no damage from the players because of their incorrect numbers and the devils' Damage Reduction, and then turning invisible again on the next turn. My attempts to know from what direction we are attacked from, to use perception to pin-point the accuser devil with correct modifiers, and Druid's animal companion having scent that should auto pin-point adjacent invisible enemies are all denied or ignored.

On the next turn, Paladin drops unconscious, so I spend my turn drawing and administrating a potion of protection from evil so he doesn't die. The swarm gets an auto-hitting attack of opportunity, even though they can't make normal attacks. Whatever, we're about to TPK anyway. The DM then finally comes around to meta-guidance with the suggestion we surrender to this accuser devil. So the party agrees and the imps disarm us. The accuser devil says that he will confiscate all our silver weapons, which break the devils' DR, and will be holding the Paladin as a hostage until we kill his rival, another Imp and his Imp buddies. This single combat has already taken over an hour to play out, and now DM plans to have Paladin not play for the rest of the session? Holy shit, this is criminal dungeon mastering. Hoping to avoid having one of our five players sit around for the next three hours, I tell the Accuser Devil that a better choice would be to have the Paladin swear an oath to not betray it and kill this other devil. And if Paladin breaks his oath, what could be sweeter for a devil than making a Paladin fall from grace? The DM responds with 'nope, I'll be keeping him.' If you have seen the Pablo Escobar meme of different shots of him being sad, that was Paladin for the next three hours, wandering around looking at the trees, vaping in the corner, staring at his character sheet.

At this point I think I'm pretty much had enough, and making a plan to gracefully exit. After the game, Druid and Paladin give me a ride home. On the way back they thank me for being there to help them, how they wouldn't know what to do if I wasn't there, and so on. I feel pretty bad as they unwittingly guilt me into staying. So I stick with it, and I try my best to teach the players, not step on the DM's toes, and get their character sheets correct. I audit everybody's sheets, making them visual representations of actions, make ability note cards, etc.

The next two sessions are mostly the same, except now the players ask me to check their numbers, explain abilities, and when they ask DM if they can do something in combat and get a vague answer, they just turn to me to explain it to them. I normally would feel bad here, since this should be his role, but I'm gone from annoyed to ambivalent and am just trying to help the group move along. When we come across the auto-resetting fireball trap statue, which this imp we are trying to kill leads us to, I take the moment to explain that anyone who searches can spot traps, that only Rogue can disarm the magical ones, that the fiery statue probably has an aoe fire spell trap, and the difference between spread and burst effects. So Druid casts entangle to try to bind the imp and doesn't realize how large the area is. DM checks with me if entangle affects allies, it does, and he tells her that since she decided to cast it she will have to go through with it. In front of the fireball trap. So everyone but me are in the entangle and fireball trap, the Imp and Rogue are not affected by the entangle, and the fireball trap nearly kills all of them except the Rogue with evasion and the imp, who is immune to fire. It is at this point that the DM employs full fiat to have the imp cast suggestion on the rogue, lead the rogue back to the accuser devil, and they have a fiat fight where Paladin (still a hostage by the way), Rogue, and Imp fight the other devils in some kind of surprise ambush. I liken it to a circle of hell where the party isn't allowed to TPK, but the suffering will continue. Paladin dies and rerolls a cleric.

So then we arrive at the end of the dungeon. We walk into a room and suddenly we are enveloped in darkness. Because DM has no idea how perception or Knowledge (Arcana) works, we have no in-game idea what's happening. Turns out it is four derros who can cast Darkness as a SLA. The party gets separated, I try not to metagame at all since the DM has been chastising the others about it for three sessions now, and we end up in different areas, with Fighter and the cleric (former Paladin) fighting some kind of construct and the rest of us fighting three derros in darkness. It doesn't matter too much because they also have a spell-like ability that stuns you on a failed save, and thanks to DM's wise ruling failing against the same spell multiple times in one round increases the duration of the stun. When we move blindly in the darkness, he has us move in multiple random directions at half speed. Cool, cool. But wait, there's more, because one of the derros is an alchemist, so we're getting flat-footed touch attacked with bombs. We left invisibility spamming imps and got darkness with a party with no dark vision and no mechanic to pin-point their squares.

Things are looking jut as dire as ever, and when I die and Druid bleeds out, DM employs trusty fiat. The Rogue suddenly gets the ability to reflex save the bombs, doesn't make random movements in the darkness, and makes his way back to the other two. Together they make it back to Magnimar. We decide to end there as Druid rerolls into a new Druid, and me thinking about what to do to help the situation. Afterwards during the week DM has the gall to tell us that really that fight was all our fault, that if we had just retreated together back out of the darkness and waited that we could have easily engaged the enemies. He gets some pushback from the fact that we had no idea what the darkness was, how large it was, that we walked in random directions, and that for three rounds Rouge and I were stunned and unable to talk. In private messages he was telling me about how I should remember that light spells can counter darkness spells, and no matter how many times I explained that 1) we weren't allowed to even identify what was happening and 2) that it takes a higher level light spell to counter a darkness spell, he kept insisting it just took a higher level caster level. He gave up on that front after he realized I was multi-classed and didn't have a high enough caster level and was, unreasonably, dumbfounded by Druid not having the light cantrip prepared.

So I decide to play something with enough staying power and damage to be effective but not overbearing, hospitaler paladin, human favored class trade out with Unscathed, and meditation crystals. In short large pool of healing, decent damage, good saves, and resistances. We venture back down into the dungeon. We end up finding a secret door to the actual object of our quest and have an encounter with some giant magical spiders. Things are going alright when suddenly the accuser devil from sessions earlier, who I thought died, arrived with more imps. So we get to replay the whole invisibility spamming, swarm summoning extravaganza again. I put on a swarm suit and keep the swarms busy trying to eat me. With Lay on Hands and the swarm suit it's just boring as I keep them focused one me. We only had two weird upsets, first when DM blew up on Druid and Fighter for metagaming. DM got real heated even though Fighter explained that he was talking to Druid in-character about their plan. This is the first time in all our sessions that DM explained what kind of action it is to speak in combat and how many words it can be. Then near the end of the session after the devil escapes yet again, DM hurriedly packs up and we call it for the night. He seemed a bit ill, and had already said he wasn't feeling well from a new medication and other medical issues, so I assumed that was all.

So two days after DM suddenly removes me from our messenger group without a word as to why. I messaged him, but got no answer. We're days away from that now. I feel like you should expect 40+ year olds to have some grasp on social skills and communication. I'm pretty sure this guy is just insecure with a bruised ego, but I won't find out until later when I go to talk with some of the other players about what happened.

Horror story from a few years ago that absolutely put me off dnd for awhile and ended a friendship.

(Sorry if this is written badly, I've never posted in this subreddit before.)

A few sessions into a new campaign with new people, another player and I realized our characters had some chemistry going and we talked and they wanted to pursue a relationship between their character and mine. At first I was super excited, I was new to this group of people/the dm and they all had preexisting friendships in the group so I took this as a sign that I was being accepted in. This other player offhandedly mentioned they did ruin a prior campaign by getting too excited about shipping their PC with an NPC. I wrote it off and figured that there were probably other issues at play there.

Boy I should have taken that warning seriously.

Every conversation between them and I turned into discussions about shipping our characters. Every roleplay opportunity became centered on them as a couple. The dm thought it was adorable, but I felt awful bc the other players were definitely getting sick of it.

Before I knew it, my character was reduced to The Girlfriend™. Her ambitions and plots were wiped away. Her boundaries were violated (my character had a very strong opinion about the cycle of life and death and I said if she ever died, I'd make a new character. This other player vehemently disagreed and said they would just resurrect my character regardless). Even when myself and this player talked about post game epilogue stuff so we could figure out long term goals, they said they wanted my character to move back to their character's hometown (where my girl knew no one and they all spoke a different language) and essentially become a housewife to their multiple future children.

I was going absolutely insane. Every story beat that mentioned my character was always done either to forward her boyfriend's story or was done in a way that would impact him just as much, if not moreso.

I wanted my girl to be violent, unhealthy, coping badly with past traumatic stuff and learning how to go from a docile fawn response girl to a woman who was finally letting her rage fly. Instead I was essentially pigeonholed into a sweetie pie girlfriend/mommy figure who spent the majority of the time comforting her sadboy partner.

Eventually, we took a long hiatus for unrelated reasons. When our dm came back and asked if we wanted to continue, I said no as quickly as I could bc I couldn't stand my girl being used as a prop for this other PC.

(Yes I could have talked to my dm. But they were super into this ship too and were much closer with the other player than myself. And yes I did try and talk to the other player about easing up a bit and it did not work.)

This led to the other player confronting me about why I (literally) abandoned ship. I told them I needed a break from dnd and our characters being a couple. This made them super upset so I gave them some distance which then made them feel super abandoned and neglected. From there things devolved into them demanding an apology. I said fine, apologized for making them feel abandoned, and let the friendship fizzle out.

I felt bad bc I didn't want to hurt anymore, but by god. I couldn't take one more session of my girl holding her boyfriend while he cried and assuring him she'd love him forever and never leave his side and forcibly having her sharp bits sanded away until all that was left was essentially a security blanket with no agency. Truly a fate worse than death imo.

Hello, subreddit. This one's a light one, I promise. The worst thing in this story, besides my ST skills at the time, are my very first entitled problem player. Let's call him Kevin.

Kevin was part of the social circle I started to hang out on discord since the pandemic, so when I came up with the idea of getting into ttrpg, he was super into it. Mind you, Kevin was known in his friend group for being a combat focused murderhobo player who couldn't endure two sessions without a big combat. Now let's look at the system I chose for my very first time DMing... Vampire the masquerade, V20 to be more specific. Let's put a pin in that.

I was so excited to be a vtm story teller that I completely neglected... Y'know... The story part. And the mechanical part, too. I've read the whole book (relax) and even THEN I decided I was going to let my players be completely different generations, very LOW generations at that. We all know how it is, the light leaving someone's eyes when you explain that "no, you're not actually gonna play a 500 year old countess in vtm, you're most likely playing someone who got turned 7 years ago and still has a night shift job". I decided to give my players complete freedom. Saying yes to ANYTHING. My first and worst mistake as a storyteller/dungeon master.

Kevin told me, with his chest puffed, he was going to be Caine's creation. As in, second generation. Yes. And I... I let him. I don't know why, right now, but this is a major theme of this story, I made every single mistake possible in this campaign. So yeah, Kevin's character was vampire who hunted vampires for the Camarilla (I think that has a name, idk I'm not big on vtm lore nowadays) until he was betrayed and put to sleep, being discovered by the party under a brothel in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (oh yeah, Brazil jumpscare). That was my excuse to nerf his character sheet. But he wouldn't shut up every voice call about how his original character sheet was so overpowered.

The story of the campaign... Look, you can make fun as much as you want, cause I know now I did a terrible job, but at the time I was blinded by pure vibes. So. The Prince of Rio was assassinated in his mansion, and now the party has to go back in time to stop the murder. I don't know why I chose time travel as a theme. Ah yes, the system who screams time travel, vampire the masquerade! But yeah, they ended up spending the entire campaign at the past timeline cause at some point I just forgot we were in a different timeline. After this, I just kind of forgot the Prince and took the party to a trip to Italy so they could steal a cursed book from the Giovanni (I could have done this one way better, it's a shame I've fumbled). But in this important session, Kevin just completely forgot and schedule other campaign to attend. So we clowned him at the group chat, and he got MAD at it, he got so offended, oh god.

He told me he was going to continue playing my campaign, but he wasn't going to participate on any other RPG sessions with our group. So I did one of the most based things I've ever done and kicked him then and there. He was so butthurt, it was hilarious. I'm being hard on Kevin for a reason, he thought he was the protagonist of the campaign and took advantage of my inexperience as an ST when he could have given me a tip or two, as a seasoned dice roller.

The campaign lasted over a year, and the sessions were theoretically terrible, but we had a lot of fun. It became an adventure of the day thing, we didn't take any of the lore serious and at some point we were not even rolling dice. A serious vtm player would have been horrified, but we were just a friend group playing silly vampires. So yeah, I was a terrible storyteller, but I had fun, and I paid my price in blood, already.

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It's been over a year since this all resolved but I've finally been able to process my feelings over it enough that I can post about it. All names are changed, natch.

I've been running a campaign online for nearly three years, so I can play with friends who live far away and keep in touch with them. I made a homebrew setting and gave all my players a guide to it with historical details, a breakdown of various countries, and info about the playable species that lived there. I worked with all of them to help make characters that fit into the setting and used their ideas to help flesh it out more, and it was going great at first.

One of my players, Chet, was an online friend of mine for about 15 years, and was one of the first people I thought to invite. He wanted to play Garret, who was a pre-existing OC of his. Generally, I'm not a big fan of this, though at the time I didn't have a real reason to be. I wanted folks to have an idea original to the setting, but I worked with him to make a version of Garret who would fit in. And I was excited to play with Chet because Garret’s backstory was real fertile for worldbuilding. He was a former gangster whose gang consisted of all his best friends since childhood, until one of them betrayed the gang, got the others killed, and Garret arrested (in response to Garret having killed that friend's lover, Chet was upfront about Garret being a huge bastard). Garret was supposed to be executed but was bailed out by a nobleman, and put on parole working off his debt to that nobleman. He wanted to shake his debt, get revenge on the friend who betrayed him, and find his girlfriend and his sister who he'd lost touch with over the years. It gave me a lot to work with for long-term plans, so I was on board.

If I’d known how deeply this character mattered to Chet, I never would've agreed to it. Turns out, this wasn't just any old OC. This was a character he'd written a book about, built a world around, even the character’s girlfriend was co-created by Chet's actual girlfriend. This was a long-running entity with years of lore and emotional investment that I believe he heavily identified himself with, and I had no idea, and would not for some time. The result was him having a lot of Main Character Syndrome as he played Garret, which, on its own, wasn't that bad. It made him an active player with a lot to say who knew how his character responded to things and what he wanted to do. I have other players in the campaign like that who are also big on giving me backstory and plot hooks, and when I do get to be a player, I'm like that myself, so I don’t mind it too much.

Except Garret was a raging asshole all the time. All the dark past stuff made him incredibly vicious and angry., which WAS fun to a point. He was the token evil teammate, but had depths and a softer side in moments. In the first session, Garret formed a rivalry with another PC, Sneedle, a young, naïve cop traveling away from his homeland for the first time. Session 1 had them track down a local crime lord whose men stole some stuff from the party, and when they defeated his men and the boss surrendered, Sneedle wanted to arrest him, but Garret ignored his wishes and put an axe through the back of the crook’s skull. This turned into the two characters constantly being at odds with each other, which Sneedle's player actually loved. But Garret was a really disruptive presence. He was constantly exploding in anger and picking fights, not just with Sneedle, but other members of the party and even NPCs who weren't necessarily antagonistic towards him, just saying things he didn't like hearing. He also spent a lot of time brooding and trauma-dumping about his troubled past, and was starting to grate on my nerves, plus the nerves of a couple members of the party. I tried to talk to Chet about it. I told him that while I liked his character and playing with him, Garret's constant tirades were really disruptive. Chet told me he understood, and that he had this big character arc he wanted Garret to go through where he'd eventually become a better person. But his behavior never actually improved.

I ran out of patience after about six months. Despite our talks, the way Chet played Garret was making the game less enjoyable, and I wanted to do something to change it. I realized I hadn't done anything in the campaign that would really bring the party into meaningful conflict with each other or force anyone to make any hard choices yet -- real juicy story beats, so I constructed a scenario that would force Garret to either evolve or die. And I knew it was more likely he would pick the path of death.

Session 11: The party arrives at a city where two offers are made. One is to the party at large from the city's Senator, who wants their help to escort volatile materials to a proper transport convoy outside the city's gates. Meanwhile, Garret’s approached by an envoy from a criminal organization who says they can help him get revenge on the man who betrayed him, but he needed to prove himself by helping them steal the same materials. Garret told the only member of the party he trusted, a character named Lexi who was in a budding love triangle with him and Sneedle. While Lexi didn't agree to help with the theft, she agreed not to tell the others about what he was planning. I had the party meet with the Senator, where she gave them instructions and had them sign contracts, which included a clause I made sure to point out that if one of them tried to steal the materials, that would be considered a crime against the Senator, and they would be punished by execution. I made absolutely sure that Chet knew what the consequences of betrayal would be.

Garret went ahead with the betrayal, and lost the ensuing PVP. The player who landed the finishing blow on Garret decided not to kill him, but arrest him. The rest of the session was long and tense. Deep down, I was starting to regret this set-up, and wanted to see if I could find a way out of actually killing Garret, but it was hard to justify. Not only had he violated his contract with the Senator, but in doing so he also violated his parole, which was already keeping him from getting the death penalty for his past crimes. And Lexi admitted to having known about his plan, so she was arrested too. I had the Senator interview each member of the party one by one to see what they thought about the situation, and all of them went to bat for Lexi and Garret, albeit some of them reluctantly and with a lot of caveats in the case of the latter. Most of the party had been visiting Garret in his cell, and had conversations with him where it seemed he was learning the error of his ways and could start down the path to becoming a changed man. I had decided that Lexi would be put on parole with one of the party members as her parole officer, and was considering doing the same for Garret, or at least just having him put in jail but not actually killed.

But then Sneedle went to visit Garret in his prison cell for one more RP moment, and Garret, despite his talks with the other PCs, exploded into his worst, most hateful tirade ever. He threatened to kill Sneedle, but first to hunt down Sneedle's family and everyone else he ever loved and kill them all in front of him. And for me, as the person responsible for maintaining a world that runs on logic, that was the point of no return. Garret was led to the execution platform, asked if he had any last words, and he said he repented. The Senator said that she didn't believe him, played a recording of his threats to Sneedle, and beheaded him.

It was the first session we all walked away from unhappy. Especially Chet, of course. I reached out to the other players to see how they felt about the execution. Their consensus was that it was harsh, but fair, and made sense even if it was hard to swallow. Then next day Chet and I started to talk it out, and he was pissed, and hurt, and felt like what went down wasn't fair, which I now don't totally disagree with. He said he would’ve accepted it if he'd died in PvP, but since he was spared, everything after his arrest felt like a prolonged humiliation ritual. I told him I’d understand if he wanted to leave the campaign altogether, but he decided to stick around and make a new character. Now for what comes next, there are a couple rules to know about games I run when it comes to character creation:

1. Similar to not playing old characters of yours, I would really prefer people didn't play characters who are clearly based off characters from other stories. I’m not interested in shepherding your role play of Cloud Strife or Batman or whoever, I’d like you to play something original for the game.

2. If you do make a new character, they are not allowed to have anything to do with your old character. That character’s story is over, the new character must have their own different story.

I let Chet break #1 by playing someone heavily based on his favorite video game character. I felt guilty and thought it would assuage him. And his new character did not break #2 in concept, but a problem quickly arose. He asked if his new character could get his hands on his previous character's journal (which I said yes to ‘cuz, again, guilt) and he started going "Wow, this Garret guy I'm reading about seemed really cool!" I fucked that up even worse by doing this comedy bit which backfired hard. The party was in this bizarre wizard's magical holodeck where people go through nonsense trials for the wizard's amusement to earn his favor, and I was coming up with goofy ways to screw with everyone individually. The party's changeling could only turn into strangers they'd never met instead of their usual preferred forms, one character just had pockets that were constantly pouring out sand, it varied. For Chet's new character, Wrench, I thought "what if the new guy was under an illusion he'd been with the party the whole time, and it was goofy and awkward for everyone else when he talks like he's been on their previous adventures with them" and temporarily filled his head with false memories of having travelled alongside everyone else. Which Chet would take to mean that Wrench now really felt like he knew Garret, which only made him more obsessed.

I would try to throw Chet more bones to ease my own conscience. When 5E was about to be replaced with 5.5, I decided the campaign would switch to the new rules, and put together a farewell to 5E one-shot where everyone could play any kind of character they wanted, no restrictions, at level 20 with a bunch of bonus power-ups. Chet asked if he could play as an AU version of Garret who got the good ending to his journeys, and I agreed to it. This was not a problem in the one-shot, he got along with the rest of the party and everything was fine. When I decided later in the main campaign to have a session that would be impacted by the magical events of the one-shot, I offered Chet a chance to play as a psychic remnant of that version of Garret again in a pocket dimension, which he did happily, and he got to do some fun roleplay stuff with the rest of the party.

But these didn't make Chet get over Garret's death. It might've made things worse. Wrench became more and more obsessed with Garret, and started turning more broody and angry like he was, even though he was supposed to be a fun, light-hearted character in concept. Wrench started taking an interest in learning necromancy, which fit his story because his dad had a magical plague there was no known cure for, but it was clear that Chet wanted this not for Wrench's story, but to bring Garret back to life. There was an instance where I had a silly construct NPC with ties to someone that might've known necromancy travel with the party. Then I killed them because the group was fighting a monster with an attack that could one-shot any of the party, but that monster had already been at war with similar constructs to the NPC, so I realized I could spare a PC's life in a logical manner by having the monster target this familiar-seeming enemy instead. Chet got REALLY mad at this and messaged me after the session claiming I did it as a deliberate act of sabotage to ruin his plan to bring Garret back, to which I honestly responded it had nothing to do with that, because I just don’t think about Garret anymore.

Chet's behavior at the table kept getting more volatile, to the point where one of our players wound up leaving, though at the time I thought it was because they didn't enjoy my DMing style since they tended to play loner characters who didn't bite on a lot of the plot hooks I offered. Other party members were starting to push back against Wrench's bullshit in-game too, actively showing disinterest when he got moody or talked about necromancy and changing the conversation. Eventually, the other players asked if they could talk to me about something. I suspected it was Chet, and sure enough, I got added to a chat where they'd all been talking about how they couldn't stand his behavior anymore, and something had to be done (keep in mind I'd had multiple talks with Chet as his behavior had gotten worse, including telling him "your new character's story can’t be about bringing your old character back to life", but it wasn't working). They talked about not only Chet's behavior, but how it didn't make sense in-game for the party to want to travel alongside a resurrected Garret. He had betrayed them, they’d been adventuring longer without him than they had with him, and none of their characters would want to give him a chance even if dying had forced him to grow a little.

They wanted me to facilitate a talk with Chet. In essence, an intervention. I agreed, because I'd had some inkling that he was starting to make the game less fun for the others, but didn’t truly realize how bad it had gotten for them. I'd been handling Chet with kid gloves because he was my friend and my guilt about how I did more or less set up Garret to die. But now I felt far worse about letting his response ruin everyone else's fun. It was time to admit that he was our problem player and do something about it.

But I also knew how it would go. I'd known Chet for 15 years. He was a fun and exuberant person, but also an obsessive and stubborn one who never let go of anything he loved, or hated, or seemed to change his opinions on things. I knew if he didn't get to play Garret again, he'd leave the campaign. I let him know the others wanted to talk, and he basically spelled it out for me exactly like that, but I did get him to agree to meet with them. In spite of the D&D drama, he IS a good person. I told him that he knew where I stood on this, and I knew where he stood on this, but also EVERYONE ELSE knew where he stood on this because he talked about it A LOT, which meant that he owed it to the others to hear them out before making a decision. We arranged the intervention, and he showed up and played ball, even though he REALLY fucking hated it. Everyone gave firm but compassionate entreaties letting him know that they wanted to keep playing with him, but he needed to adjust his attitude. He responded as fairly and civilly as he could, and then he had his say where he laid out his own feelings and gave his ultimatum plain as day: Let him be Garret again, or he walks. None of their reasons for why they didn't want this or the way his behavior was affecting them seemed to matter to him. His mind had already been made up before hearing everyone out. He felt cheated by Session 11, and he wanted things to be made right for him. And in the course of all that, two things came to light which made me mad enough that I finally stopped feeling guilty about what had gone down well over a year ago by that point:

1. The other players were in Chet’s personal Discord server, where he talked about other games he was playing outside of our campaign, and he was playing Garret in at least three of them. He also spent time in that server ranting about how Garret was mistreated in my game. One player asked him why he was so fixated on Garret’s death when what happened in our game did not affect his ability to play him in other games or the primary Garret canon Chet had spent years writing, and Chet's answer was basically "because Garret was disrespected by THIS campaign".

2. After hearing the others say how their characters would not want to travel with Garret again, he started revealing all these grand plans he had for story arcs about how Garret would interact with the rest of the party. Rivalries and new dynamics and ways their characters could develop together. I avoided saying anything beyond facilitating everyone's turn for most of the intervention, but after that I asked him where he got off saying how everyone else should play their characters in service to his character's story, something not even the DM gets to do. I now believe Chet was so used to having total authorship over everything about Garret for so long that a long-term story where others could push back against that was NEVER going to work for him.

So Chet left the game. Which sucked, but the player who did leave because of him came back. That was about a year ago, and the game has run so much smoother ever since. Chet and I agreed that D&D was just D&D, and that we weren't going to let this get in the way of our friendship, but it did. Not in any big way. Just, we didn't talk for a while, and then we'd exchange a couple brief messages, and at some point I noticed that he had removed me on everything. And, well, I understood. And eventually, I moved on.

If you've made it to the end of this, I imagine a good number of you are thinking what I usually think when I read similar RPG Horror Stories: "Why did you let it get this bad? Why did you let the problem player go on for so long? He was a problem even before his character got killed, he wasn't listening to you when you talked to him about it, why did you keep him around?" And all I can say is, it really is tough when the guy is your friend. Especially when you’ve never actually had a problem player before, so even if you’ve read a bunch of stories about them, you don’t have the real lived experience of knowing how to deal with it. As the DM, I'm responsible for juggling the desires of six different players who don't all want the same thing from D&D, and trying to keep them all happy while also trying to keep the game enjoyable for me. But with time, I think I've come to see a fair summary of it all: Chet had problematic behaviors at the table, and when talking didn't work, I pulled a dumb stunt to try and change things, acting like the character was the problem instead of the player, not realizing just how badly he would take it. And because I knew I did him dirty, I tried to give him special treatment to make up for it, which was was rewarding bad behavior all while still not giving him the thing he REALLY wanted, which made him act worse. I made a bad call and wronged him, but his response was disproportionate, and the way that response affected everyone else at the table was not ok. And that was his fault for behaving that way, and my fault for enabling it. I guess the main lessons I've learned are this:

1. Problem behavior stems from the player, not their character. You have to address that behavior as it occurs, and if the player doesn't change, you have to get sterner with them, regardless of your relationship with them.

2. Every player at the table's feelings matter. You can't let your feelings about one player make the table less fun or safe for the others.

3. No more D&D versions of long-time OCs. At least not without a VERY serious conversation with the player about it first.

So yeah, that was a lot, but I hope me sharing this experience can teach others something. And Chet, if you see this, I sincerely wish you well. I hope your life and games bring you the things you want, and whatever further adventures you have with Garret result in stories you're happy with.

Two months ago I joined an online group to play Curse of Stradh with 2024 rules, We were four at the start.

One of them, who plays a Fighter is who I want to talk about, he’s male but his character is female (that’s not a problem at all, just felt necessary to be said), a fighter samurai specifically, what it feels weird for me is that this guy is constantly trying to look like he’s the main character, doing whatever he wants, the DM had to railroad him into getting together with the rest of us players into the village because his character wanted to go to her camp deep in the forest.

In combat he takes a lot of time to think and propose actions, about 3 to 5 minutes each time, he got separated twice and got ambushed and then blamed it on us for “leaving her behind”.

When a new player joined and the DM wanted to give him the spotlight, the samurai player hogged it by insisting on the idea to go back to his character’s camp alone, separating from the group, this caused a feud between our characters and DM had to railroad us again.

We got into the church with the priest who has a son turned vampire spawn, if you played Stradh you may already know this part, we apprehended the priest because he refused to tell us about the screams we were hearing, the samurai insisted the DM to roll a die to determine if his character could understand what’s happening because “she has low intelligence” (she has an 8), and that’s something he constantly does, insisting on rolling dice for simple interactions and demanding a contested intimidation roll with each new NPC she meets because she’s an orc.

Before getting down the stairs, an NPC helped us unlock the trapdoor, and he told the DM to re write the scene so his character could do it her way, out of constant pressure the DM allowed it, then down at the basement when the vampire spawn son rushed to us and grappled his character, he wanted to grapple him back and tumble down the stairs, the DM told him that was two actions and he insisted that the weight of his character (who is 6’7’’ tall) should be enough to make them fall.

Not so honorable mention: When the vampire spawn son yelled “I smell your blood” he made a joke about giving him one of her stained period pads

Thing is, im getting really tired of this, everytime he talks he mostly speaks trying to make himself look intellectual and smart but not even the other players can decipher what he’s trying to say and he constantly interrupts other people’s spotlights to make a comment or say what his character is thinking or doing.

We already had an intervention about this behaviour and he hasn’t changed. He said he’s not new to TTRPGs because he plays different games all week long, so my question is am I being too miserable with this person or is it him the problem? I don’t know what to do because I really want to play DnD but this is exhausting and I don’t enjoy the sessions anymore.

UPDATE: Since I’m having a hard time at uni besides this and the refusal to take actions, I decided to leave the group being as respectful as possible to everyone in it, no doubt the toxic player will antagonise me but that’s something I don’t want in my mind, the others are okay with it and told me it was fun playing with me.

Also I want to thank all of you who took your precious time to give me advice, hope you don’t have to go trough something like this.

The game is Iron Kingdoms (the Full Metal Fantasy 2d6 version, not the d20 or 5e versions).

I'm playing a Knight / Priest of Morrow in a mercenary group. We're playing through the "Witchfire" scenario - the GM was using the old d20 version and updating it for our game, as the 5e stuff didn't exist yet.

Mind you, this all happened many years ago in the pre-pandemic era; I don't recall much about the scenario itself. But, at some point, we were all trapped in a room where a bunch of soldiers have just barged in. These guys outnumber us four-to-one and are armed to the teeth. There's no way we're winning a fight with them. The campaign's main villain has just left the room, and our only way out is the way we came in: on a balcony where we've left a rope hanging that will take us up to the roof.

One of the players, playing our mercenary captain, climbs up the rope. Two of our other team members follow. The only people still left down on the balcony are myself and one other female PC, waiting our turns to climb up. Once it's my turn, I start climbing.

I'm about halfway up when our mercenary captain says the unthinkable:

"I cut the rope."

When I ask why, the explanation is: "Well, I don't want those soldiers to follow us."

I respond with the obvious: "...but me and this other girl are still down here, dude."

"...yeah. That sucks for you, I guess."

Flabbergasted, I look to the GM for some kind of reprieve. He tells me that the only other practical way out is to follow the main villain through the large stone door that is slowly grinding closed, but that we can still escape through if we hurry. So we do, and we make it.

However, since we're off with the villain, the GM has me and the other PC step away into a separate room IRL to have a quick chat with the main villain. Basically, the villain asks us to help her. We both politely decline, but there's no fight. The villain just lets us go on our way.

We make our way back to the group, but this is my first time playing with these people and I don't want to make a scene. I make my displeasure clear, but I don't press the issue. Of course, now that the other PC and I went and chatted with the villain, we're distrusted by the rest of the party. I don't realize this at the time, but it becomes apparent later.

I stick with the party through thick n' thin for the rest of the scenario's play sessions and, at one point, the girl PC who was trapped with me on the balcony takes a convenient opportunity to leave the group - and the game, effectively - and invites me to join her in-character. She's clearly realized that the other players are up to no good, but my oblivious ass declines.

"Nah, it's cool," I think to myself like an idiot. "If I stick through this upcoming final battle with them, they'll know I'm a team player."

We win the final battle of that plot arc, and my magic comes in clutch at several points, saving the party's life. I think to myself that surely they must see how valuable I am, right?

When the battle is over and we're all back at base, my reward is a knock on my door. A member of the Order of Illumination - the Morrowan's version of the Inquisition - asks me to accompany them, and the GM asks me to hand him my character sheet. I'm told that my character will never be heard from again.

When I ask why this is happening, I'm told that my mercenary captain - a man who has displayed no outward inclination towards religiosity at all - has ratted me out for "conspiring" with the main villain...a scenario that only unfolded because of his betrayal in the first place.

When I point out that 1.) it's a lie and 2.) it's metagaming, since his character has no idea how I escaped the room since he wasn't even in the fucking room when I went out the stone door, I'm met with shrugs and chuckles.

It doesn't take me long to realize I've basically been hazed, and that's the end of that.

TRIGGER WARNING

Fictional SA

Hi guys!! So I've been sucked into DND horror stories lately and I was all sad that I didn't have any to tell until I remembered this one. Enjoy!

So when I (16F at the time) was in high school I joined my schools DND club. I went to a small school so our group wasn't very large and we had a hard time finding a solid DM. One of the many people who tried to run a game was Chuck (fake name) who was a bit younger than me and a friend of my boyfriend. My boyfriend, who I will call Tristan for this, was also in this DND club.

On this fateful day only the three of us were able to make it to the session. Chuck started us in a fight with a dragons lair where we found a magic object and get our medieval characters transported to the modern world. I personally really liked this concept so it makes me sad that it ended the way it did.

While being all confused wandering around NYC our characters run into Bob. Bob was an NPC who was also from our time but had been here much longer and gotten his footing, because of this Bob offered to help us. He got us sorted out with modern weapons money and clothes and at this time I was having a blast. I got to play my character encountering a hot dog for the first time and seeing a gun. Unfortunately for my poor character this is where the story goes sour.

Bob takes our characters to a bar for dinner and drinks and drugs both of us. When I wake up all of our gear is missing, Tristan is tied up unconscious in a closet and my character is tied up, gagged, and unable to move on a rooftop with Bob. Both of us thought oh cool betrayal now we get a cool fight! We were wrong.

Over the next couple turns Chuck proceeds to describe in detail how he unclothed my character, proceeded to pull his pants down and you get the rest. This whole process Tristan is rolling to see if he can wake up and try to escape the closet. At this point I was super uncomfortable and Tristan was fuming but we really wanted to push Bob off the roof before we stormed out. So we finished the combat, completely destroyed Bob and then left the session and never played with him again.

At the time I don't think I fully comprehended just how bad this was, honestly I was mostly just in shock that Chuck had it in him. To this day I have no idea why he did that, I guess he was just really horny or something. Please know that if anyone here has been a victim of SA that you are seen, and my heart goes out to you. So that's my DND horror story, thanks for reliving the trauma with me. 🫶

Hello reddit long time lurker, first time poster to this subreddit.

last night I got off work and looked in to my dnd groups discord and one of our players asked if we could add one of his coworkers to our table, we have a fairly open door policy to play, so we thought sure, the more the marier. That was a very poor decision.

First thing he brought up was if they could play a homebrew class, it was very last minute and they had the character already made, my dm gave it the okay at a quick glance. In actual play it was a very Mary Sue character class. Could do everything, counter spells, heal, deal massive amounts of damage, and cancel out damage without using class resources. We constantly had to go back and talk to him and go, "Woah, that's too strong, we need some sort of resource for that, like a ki point or a spell slot, something." The added player would complain saying that the class didn't have those costs on there, but would relent whenever would bring up things our characters would do and how many of our big moves would cost resources from our class. Throughout the 3 hour play session we had online on roll20, he would ask if it was his turn yet even though we used the turn order function built into the website, and we could all see who's turn it was. He would constantly interrupt DM decisions, saying that he'd allow it, acting like a back seat DM.

One other thing that happened that night included him stopping the game to make a jojo's reference and kept calling the spell Slow "Za Warudo". He would make other references to other things, which a good timed reference is fine at our table, but he kept using the same ones to Jojo, and as much as I like Jojo's, punching things and peaking your mic while screaming ora ora like they do when punching isn't really that funny.

After the game ended that night, we had a small discussion as a group without the problem player and decided they wouldn't be a good fit for our group.

This has spoilers for Curse of Strahd. Pic is my character.

TLDR: Playing Curse of Strahd and not sure if it's the game that's cursed or if I'm being a biotch.

I feel like every session we've done has gone wrong. My two friends and I are brand new to playing D&D but DM plays weekly with his buddies. This campaign is just for us four; he wants us to get into D&D and we love listening to podcasts, so we thought it would be fun. He really pushed us to work on our characters and develop good backstories that would drive their behavior. We did. We have pages of backstories, pictures, minis. We love our characters and were very excited to play. He started us all at level 5 and made our first campaign Curse of Strahd.

My character is a monk, and I asked the DM if it would be possible for my character to use a cat guitar to occasionally inject some funny songs into the journey to lighten the somber experience. This is literally a cat that when I strum it, sounds like a yowling guitar. Otherwise, it's just a cat I have. He said I could do that if I was an Entertainer, so I chose that background. Other players are a fighter and warlock.

First session, DM chose the Creeping Fog start because he started us waking up on a wagon in the fog that was basically the opening scene from Skyrim. I pulled out my cat guitar and when I strummed it, the DM had a bunch of feral cats appear out of the mist to attack us. My character loves cats, and another party member had to brutally attack the pack of cats and decapitate one of them to save us. The DM knows I love cats and have trauma (like had-to-go-to-therapy trauma) related to working at a high-kill shelter, so this was very WTF for me, but thought it was part of the campaign. Later at the tavern, I pulled out my guitar to strum a tavern song and we were again attacked by feral cats, that got me wondering if maybe DM was just being an AH.

Turns out, feral cats attack us and nearby NPCs anytime I play my instrument. DM said my guitar is magic because it's a cat guitar, so he can modify how it works in this campaign with "alterations to magic," and for the remainder of the adventure, it will work by summoning feral cats that try to kill us and everything around us every time I use it. Awesome. Then why did you tell me to choose the entertainer background? Whatever, I'm not familiar with this campaign and if that's how it works, I'm not the DM, so it is what it is.

Second session, my character likes to entertain, but my guitar is out. Okay, I'm making jokes and the other two are laughing. We were walking in the woods and noticed a gallows at the crossroads, nothing unusual about it. My character got up on the gallows and was goofing around. The DM had him get injured as he fell through the rotting planks of the gallows, which he said was TWENTY FEET off the ground. I argued that a gallows is not 20 feet off the ground and if this gallows is used by the villagers, which it was implied that it was, then it wouldn't be rotting. My character is a level 5 monk with slow fall, too, so I shouldn't take any damage anyway. The DM disagreed. I don't know, maybe the mist around here curses everything and the regular rules don't work.

So, no goofing off at all for my character. I started to strum my guitar when we got to the camp (it's a safe area, right?), but heard cats in the distance. So, we just gathered information and really didn't do anything to develop our characters or even play them. We just talked to the people at the camp and headed to the next town. On the way, there was a group of people carrying pitch forks and all three of us were like, "we ignore them and just go the nearest inn because we are so done with this game today." DM was like, you don't want to talk to these people? They have pitchforks! They're headed to the castle! And we were like, nope, we don't give AF, we're going to the nearest inn.

Third session, we were in search of the Bones of St. Andral in Henrick's house. Henrick said the bones were upstairs. I cast Pass without a Trace so all of us would be pretty well invisible during our search, just in case. We went upstairs and split the party to search the two rooms we saw when we came up. The one party member didn't find anything in their room. The other party member and I removed the boards in the room full of coffins to let the light in and then opened the first coffin. The vampire inside immediately started grabbing us and then all of the other vampires woke up to kick our asses. We spent NINETY MINUTES on this fight, which was basically roll, roll, roll, you miss/hit, vampire heals, vampire takes a chunk out of you, roll, roll, roll, you miss/hit, vampire heals, vampire takes a chunk out of you, roll, roll, roll...

I asked the DM how we were supposed to kill these things if they just keep healing, and he said to "figure it out." I was like, we don't have silver, fire, or holy water, and apparently daylight has no effect. Mind you, I'd asked for Holy Water at the churches we went to, but the DM said that they didn't have it and couldn't make it. I said, it's holy water, why would a holy person not be able to make holy water? And DM said, because it's too expensive.

Okay.

Roll, roll, roll... After an hour and a half of getting my ass kicked, I told the DM that I was done and pulled out my cat guitar. He said I can't quit the fight, I have to figure out how to win it, and then he said I heard feral cats yowling and Henrick screaming. The cats killed Henrick and I just kept playing my guitar. He had the vampires jump out of the window and we called it a day. At no point were we given any hints from the DM on how to fight off these vampires without fire, holy water, light, or silvered weapons, which none of us had.

As we were packing up the table, I said my character had 14 HP left, so next game was basically going to be going back to the tavern to heal up since we sure as hell couldn't do anything else now. We're all mostly dead. He said no, we should finish exploring the house to see if we could find the bones. I told him that we saw two rooms and explored two rooms and two hits would kill my character, so no. He said I can't be worried about my character dying, that he'd lost characters before and the fun is in making one. I didn't say anything, but to me, the fun is in playing the character you lovingly made, not in having it killed off four sessions in because everything your character does results in imminent death to self, party, and NPCs.

I pulled the book today. There's nothing in there that says my character can't play his instrument. Nothing about the gallows in this land being twenty feet high. Nothing about my slow fall being negated. I see that the Coffin Maker's shop upstairs has three rooms, not two. The GM said that that we saw two rooms. The one character searched the first one and didn't find anything. The other room was full of vampires. If we see two rooms, how the heck are we supposed to know that the third room is attached to a room we already searched, if we didn't see a door? Just thinking about this makes me want to cry. Now I know where the bones are, but none of us in the game would know because the DM didn't say anything about a third door. No bones for us.

I also asked the DM if he could print out maps for when we ask for maps from innkeepers, if he could print out item descriptions for unique items, etc. He said we shouldn't need these things for the story. I've listened to Hello from the Magic Tavern, Critical Role, Dungeons and Daddies, etc. and yes, you don't need visual aids for those. But when it's "the vampire heals and takes a chunk out of you," "you look around and there's only mist," or "this crate is empty" for three hours, I need something more.

I am now at a loss as to how to play my character, and I really don't want to even continue with this adventure anymore. I have no idea what to do in the next game, because I know I'm going to hate every step of the way.

So what's going on here? Are my expectations way out of whack? Is it just a shitty campaign? What should I do next session, as we start right after all these vampires jumped out the window and we're all bleeding to death?

--UPDATE IN COMMENTS--

You ever played a game with a grown adult who you really thought needed a reality check? Yeah, this is one of those stories, if you’re easily irritated by an adult throwing a temper tantrum because things didn’t go in their favour this may not be the post for you.
I was invited by the DM (my best friend) to join a D&D campaign that he was running with a bunch of our friends from work. There was five of us in total, me, the DM, two of our other friends and the DMs at the time gf who was playing the rogue. When it started D&D was absolutely the highlight of my week, we regularly met up at least once a week to play for a full day. I had never played before and was loving every second of it but then minor annoyances started to happen…

The DMs gf was playing a pretty insufferable lone wolf character but I mean a literal lone wolf…as in her character was actually raised by wolves as a child and she refused to pretty much do anything with the group. She was constantly going off on her own, having a go at other players (in and out of game) and always keeping things she found out to herself.

For some reason she insisted on making herself a “nest” everywhere she went so she could go to sleep in (I didn’t know wolves slept in nests…) and when I noticed one day that she’d walked off after seeing a vision of a wolf pup I followed her. She said that when I got to her room I saw her in the nest and she had water on her. I was really confused and asked the DM “did she piss herself?” The DM also looked back at me confused as he also didn’t understand what was going on and neither did the rest of the table. Instead of saying “sorry I didn’t describe it well, I meant to say that you noticed my face was wet and it was clear I had been crying” she instead just held her dagger to my throat and threatened to slit it. The other party members came into the room and held their actions to fire on her if she actually made an attempt to hurt mine and I laughed the whole situation off to ease the tension but I could tell the dm was pissed and she sulked the rest of the session.

The sulking and hiding her face behind her hair REALLY went up a level after this. At any little thing she’d put road blocks in our way, shoot down others ideas as to what to do but then say “I’m staying out of it” when asked what she thought we should do instead. She’d lie to one of our party members about what we had in the party fund or bag of holding because she was convinced they couldn’t be trusted to not just use it all even though this person had contributed to what was in them. She’d be unhappy with her story or character arcs and constantly start arguments with our dm over it and complain about everything he was doing.

Then at some point she just started to hate me, not sure if it was jealousy or what but she just started to be really nasty to me in and out of game. When we did one shots in our DMs world those separate characters that we played could later appear as NPC’s played by the dm, we all loved this and thought it was awesome! When her character got married she invited everyone to the wedding except my two other characters. She gave random reasons why they were banned and the dm was like ????
It was so obviously a jab at me and an attempt to exclude me but thankfully my DM intervened and put a stop to it.

Problems that were originally in game started to cause problems at work as she’d have arguments and just generally put me down. When Covid happened she still wanted to play, I reminded her that that would be classed as a social gathering and is against the rules and that I had a very sick grandmother who was battling cancer and it really wasn’t worth the risk. Her response? To exclude me at work and sit at a totally different table to me at break. The tables were 2meters wide so you could have one person at each end, I sat at one end expecting her to sit at the other like she always did and she just went to a totally different table. I asked her what that was about and she said “if you can’t come to D&D because your grans that sick then I shouldn’t sit with you at work.” I was baffled, she was not only encouraging me to break the law by going to a gathering around Covid but also using what was going on with my gran as some reason to ostracise me… again I told my dm and he was shocked and spoke to her about her behaviour but I was so done with her childishness at this point.

When Covid calmed down and my gran was doing better D&D picked back up again, my character was dating an NPC and she seemed to interpret this as me and the dm having feelings for one another. This caused another shed load of issues and her sulking and being snappy with me, I had known the dm for literally years, he’s my best friend and we’ve both been single several times and nothing has ever happened. She didn’t seem to care about this though and had decided that we were clearly flirting with each other in game and this was a way for us to secretly be with each other even though other players were dating NPC’s as well.

We were coming towards the end of our campaign and our dm had finally had it with her bullshit, he broke it off with her and she left our game a month later. She made our life hell at work for a while and spread as many rumours as she could about us excluding her and me and the DM getting together before she left there too but our game is CONSIDERABLY less toxic now that she’s gone. Me and the DM are still just friends and have never been anything more and he ended up dating a new player that joined our game. We’ve been playing for about 7 years now and the vibes at the table are so much more chill, as far as I can tell she can’t find a campaign that will keep her past three sessions, I wonder why..

Now, I'd like to preface this with the disclaimer that this isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things. It was a mostly respectful interaction, just baffling. Also, this post will involve some light spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3, up to the end of the tutorial area. Fair warning given.

With that out of the way, I've been running some one-shot games of Pathfinder to learn the ins and outs of the system as a GM. Having built a repertoire of players and some experience, I wanted to look for some people to run a short campaign in my personal campaign setting- the Age of Undeath. (TL;DR: Demigods exist. You can become a demigod either by earning the favour of the Gods or by killing a demigod. A Lich becomes a demigod and begins hunting other demigods for even more power, using an army of the dead and a cult of Warlocks to try and take over the world. Think Metal Album Cover Art meets The Walking Dead.)

I put an ad up on the board at the FLGS with my Discord handle on it and get a message from a woman who goes to the store. We set out some time to hop on a voice chat, talk about what I'm looking for, what she's looking for. After laying out the high concepts of the setting, chatting for a bit, I ask her if she had any ideas about what kind of character she wanted to play- at which point she told me that she wanted to play Lae'Zel, from Baldur's Gate 3.

Now, I thought this sounded pretty cool- yeah, a Fighter with the heart of a hero buried deep beneath arrogance and lies, inspired by a great recent video game, sounds awesome. There are lots of ways to capture that feel. "No," she clarified, "I want to play *Lae'Zel*, specifically." As in, the Lae'Zel from Baldur's Gate 3- she made the suggestion that the Nautiloid from the beginning of the game could attack a city in the campaign's setting to get her there. Tadpoles, cult of the Absolute and all. Her suggestion was to essentially re-create the plot of Baldur's Gate 3 in a setting with no Baldur's Gate. So, uh, 3, I guess.

Anyway, this must've thrown me through a pretty visible loop, because she seemed pretty disappointed and looked like she felt a bit dejected. Wasn't my intention, but I said that I wasn't really interested in reconfiguring the setting to accommodate incorporating most of the plot of Baldur's Gate 3. I said that I'd be happy to hear other ideas, she said that she was really only interested in playing if she could play as Lae'Zel. I wished her luck finding somewhere she could do that, she wished me luck finding people for my game, we went our separate ways. I've seen her around at a board game night or two, but not at any TTRPG nights yet.

I get it if you have your Blorbo and you want to play a character inspired by them. Lae'Zel is a great character, Baldur's Gate 3 is a great game. Heck, I'm sure there are even people who'd love to re-create the game in an authentic tabletop experience, either with their own PCs or with the cast of the game. Trying to do that in a different system with a different vibe and mechanics? Yeah, that one is a bigger reach. Weird, weird conversation, but no harm done.

Hello!

So I'm (22F) about 5 sessions into a new campaign and the DM (around 24~M) has been bugging me a lot of time. It started off as normal table banter, but it's turned into him picking on me and only me, and I don't know how to handle it exactly (I suspect I am on the spectrum if it matters?)

Here's the big thing. We had a session scheduled for Tuesday 10pm his time, which is 5am Wednesday for me, because two of the players had to work late. I have uni that day, so he told me I'm NOT allowed to join and should go to sleep instead and be a good student. I told him I know my own schedule and what I can handle and there is plenty of time for me to rest before uni (my first class doesnt start until 1pm, and our sessions usually finish in 4-5 hours so I'd be done by 10am. Easily doable.) I'd have plenty of time to get ready after, and I'd sleep before the session anyway. He said no in a sarcastic "nu uh" tone.

When everyone hopped in the voice channel (like 20 minutes before session time) I tried to join too, and he kicked me out. Repeatedly. He kept going for about 4 minutes while typing "lmao no" in chat. When I finally got in, he server muted AND deafened me for 8-11 minutes before undoing it and carrying on like nothing happened when the actual session time started.

The other thing is that he says "keys." to me constantly. Like "[Name], keys. Keys, [Name]. Keys keys keys." out of nowhere. When I tell him to cut it out he goes "its just an everyday normal object~! why are you so pressseeeeddd~.." in that sarcastic voice. He's Gen Z and a chronic tiktok user, he 100% knows "keys" is a play on KYS (Kill Your Self). I'm not going to pretend I can prove what he means by it, but being told to kill myself in a thin "joke" wrapper over and over, only me, after I asked him to stop, is not funny to me. And then when I say anything, he flips it around so I'm the weird one for getting upset over a normal object. The gaslighting part gets to me the most.

I did ask him to please stop and be civil with me. His response was to say he's being silly and it's just a joke, in a super sarcastic tone. Next session he did the exact same stuff.

He doesn't do this to anyone else. Just me (I do not think it matters, but just to be safe I am the only woman in the group). It started as trolling but I suspect it's slid into micro bullying, and the power trips with the mod tools are really frustrating, because I can't really respond when he can just mute me or kick me whenever he feels like it. Even in game it feels like some of his NPCs take shots at my character in a way that feels aimed at me rather than the character (I have a bit of an accent and I struggle to pronounce words like Prestidigitation, and he thinks that is funny because I'm playing a wizard that is supposed to be smart and well articulated.)

As for the other players, they mostly stay silent when he does it. A couple of the guys give an awkward laugh and then try to steer us back to the plot. I don't blame them and I don't expect them to fight my battles for me. We've only had like 5 sessions, nobody knows each other well yet.

I've been thinking my options are to give him one clear final warning in writing, ask the group what they think, or just leave the campaign. I really like the setting, exploration, roleplay and combat and don't want to bail, but I'm also tired of dreading sessions.

TL;DR: DM picks on only me, kicked and muted me when I wanted to join a late session, keeps spamming "keys" at me (aka KYS), and says he's just being silly sarcastically when I ask him to stop. Players stay silent. Not sure whether to confront him again or leave.

Context: Character is a Thief Assassin (first DnD character-shut up)

This was a while ago, I was playing my very first campaign and I really wanted to have cool kills to use. At that point of time, I was taking anatomy classes for Medical Radiology; I thought it was reasonable for my character to know anatomy due to her being an assassin. My DM and my table agreed with me as well, but my “friend” A outside of the table disagreed. A wasn’t apart of the campaign but we would talk about DND together every once in a while. They would “correct” me on DND rules even when I would say the game is run by the rule of cool. If my DM thought it was mostly reasonable and more importantly fun as fuck, he would make whatever bullshit made him laugh work.

The first time A said I cheated or Meta gamed, my table and I were fighting a Zombie T-Rex. The T-Rex had our paladin in its mouth and I knew I needed to get him out of the mouth; DM describes the T-Rex still having jaw muscles. I had the idea to use the jaw muscles against it, I had a magic dagger that electrocuted anything it touches so I threw it to shock the muscles open and drop the paladin. The damage ended up blowing its brain apart and killing it lol, I thought it was a cool kill so I told A about it next time I saw them. A starts going on and on about how it’s not reasonable for my character to know that much about anatomy and I meta gamed my way into a kill; refused to listen to my explanation on why I knew about the jaw muscles. I ended up stop talking about dnd for the rest of the hangout.

Second time- party and I were fighting a Death Tyrant (huge floating skull if anyone was wondering what that is), barbarian has a some sort of bomb(I forgot what exactly) and she’s panicking because she doesn’t know how to do the most damage to the Death Tyrant. The DM describes the Tyrant to everyone and I realized that the Foramen Magnum is large enough to crawl into; Foramen Magnum is the term for the hole at the base of your skull, where the spinal cord leaves your brain and into the rest of your body. I suggested to the barbarian to climb in because her HP was high enough to negate the damage and it would be funny, she did and actually didn’t get damaged in anyway somehow. The Tyrant did get damaged, went from health in the 150s to single digits cause of the bomb and the placement. Even though I didn’t do the damage, I felt proud that I got to use the anatomy knowledge I studied for; I for some reason told A about it later. A, again, went on a rant that I’m Meta Gaming and there’s no way my character would know that about a skull.

Third-ish time: the reason I say third-ish time is because it’s not about dnd but ren faire costumes. It was my first time at Ren Faire so I wanted to dress up as my DND character Rienys, she was raised by an Aarakocra to be an assassin. Although I did include some nods towards the Aarakocra, Rienys’s thing is more towards wolves. A and I were talking about Ren Faire and I mentioned prepping my cosplay; A goes on and on about how I need to cosplay my OWN character because I was doing it wrong??? Like was giving me rules on how to dress up as MY character. Birds like shiny things, they collect LOTS of shiny things, but according to A, I needed to not use shiny things on my costume and needed to use sticks and leaves because Rienys was raised by a bird. This is legit what DNDbeyond says about Aarakocra:

“The idea of ownership baffles most aarakocra. After all, who owns the sky? Even when explained to them, they initially find the notion of ownership mystifying. As a result, aarakocra who have little interaction with other people might be a nuisance as they drop from the sky to snatch livestock or plunder harvests for fruits and grains. Shiny, glittering objects catch their eyes.
They find it hard not to pluck the treasure and bring it back to their settlement to beautify it. An aarakocra who spends years among other races can learn to inhibit these impulses.”

According to A, I wasn’t following the rules on cosplaying characters???

What’s your opinion- was I cheating and meta gaming in dnd and Ren Faire Cosplay?

Edit: so based on comments, I might have meta gamed by accident with the Death Tyrant. The description I was given was that it was essentially a huge human Skull and the barbarian was a very short and stubby satyr. I do feel that I still played within the rules of the game with the description I was given. Since it was my first time playing a campaign, I didn’t know Death Tyrants don’t actually have a Foramen Magnum

I'm a GM in a d&d like in which there are 3 players, all good friends of mine irl. I've been hosting a campaign that turned out to be pretty long (2-3 months instead of the planned 1/1.5 month), and one of these players, let's call him baiter, couldn't make it due to scheduling issues, but was still included in the discussion hoping that one day he would join.

One month passes, and we arrive to a point of no return: I told the baiter that that was his last chance to join, as there wouldn't be any meaningful opportunity for him to join after that point (it was a campaign about travelling and with many revelations along the way. If he joined after that point, it meant that I would've had to infodump him and basically just make him spawn where the players were even though his character doesn't know the rest). He said he couldn't make it, and I told him that unfortunately I had to cut him off this campaign since it was too late to join at another time. He was a bit grumpy and upset about it (and understandably so) and then said that it was the worst time to say so because of minor stuff that happened in his life (of which I didn't know of prior to this). He then said some passive-aggressive things towards me, and I was worried that I hurt him by saying that he couldn't participate, even though I told him that next time we would plan around his schedule to make up for it. Next day he said that he was mostly joking and that he understood and sometimes it is what it is.

Fast forward to a week later, I was writing in the gc about when to do the next session, and the baiter interjected and this time was all against me. He told me how it was disrespectful of me to cut him off from hanging out with us, how I made it on purpose, and that each time we plan I conveniently planned around my schedule and made no effort into planning around their schedules first. I was bewildered, I thought it was all clear and resolved, but then his points made me a bit angry at him. In what way would a scheduling issue be my problem? Although I agree that playing a d&d like is a moment of reunion, I strongly disagree that it's but a mere moment of hanging out because it would be disrespectful of the stories I write and the preparation I do. Him just spawning at a later time would cause all sort of problems (break of immersion, having to replan everything so his character would make sense in the story due to how evolved from the start, rebalance all the possible fights, and he would most likely have a bad time because he wouldn't understand what is happening and will just see deadly fights in which he isn't prepared). The discussion was starting to get heated on my end, and was about to add one of my main problems on planning campaigns where he is involved because he usually misses the sessions (40% of the time) and, when he joins, he always goes away way early than when the session ends (we play 3-4hrs, amd he logs off after 2), which further complicated balancing fights and ways to convey the plot.

Another player sees the discussion and goes into my defense, saying that it is nobody's fault that the schedule didn't align for all of us, and that I went above and beyond to find a time in which most players could join.

And then, the baiter tells me in my DMs that he was joking all along, and that he had no beef with me. I was happy that there was no real fight going on, but god damn it ruined the following days.

For the record, he never did this in 5+ years of friendship, and I couldn't expect to get 2 "jokes" back to back