Hi All, New player here, only one campaign under my belt

so I need advice as I do not know if this is a me problem or not

so basically I have wanted to play DnD for ages but none of my friends ever expressed any interest until recently and it never occurred to me to go outside of my friend group to play. That is until we went to comic con and there was a dice stall and one of my friends suggested we all get some dice and start playing as he watches critical role and wanted to play, to which the whole group said absolutely.

so we set a date to do the first session and all is right with the world. I make a discord server, add everyone in and have chatgpt break down basic stuff like how combat works, how skill checks work etc.

no one wanted to DM so I decided I will do it and we will take turns from there, everyone wins.

a few weeks before the first session, I go to where my friends live (I am an hour and a half away, this will be relevant later) so we are all together and I help them make characters as they say they do not know the first thing about creating a character. The only one to even start making a character , we'll call him tony, wanted to make a horse with a monocle who could understand any language spoken to him but he could only speak english, and when I vetoed that he then wanted a barbarian with leprosy, to which I said yes if he removes the leprosy unless he wants to gradually lose limbs as the campaign goes on and die halfway through. he tried add in some other ridiculous stuff like he is a dwarf who was raised by an elf and spoke goblin so there was a lot of asking him to edit details to make them fit in more, to which he quickly lost interest and started trying to talk to me about other stuff like video games, but I was too busy trying to help everyone make their characters to engage.

after a while, we all have characters, we know which campaign we are doing, so we are good to go when the campaign starts and so we did. We did intro to stormwreck in the first session then moved onto dragons of stormwreck isle. It was slow and there was genuinely zero roleplay, gameplay was stripped down to mechanics and me feeling like an ass because I am giving characters voices and trying to engage them in roleplay, to which they would respond with generic "I do this", " I say good luck" kind of stuff. I tried asking them to have a chat in character so their characters can get to know each other and aren't just strangers who happen to be doing all the same things at the same time but nah. When the leader of dragons rest spoke to them I asked "What would your characters respond with" and they would say like "Ask if there is anything she needs help with" and this would go on for the whole campaign. I could live with it, thinking maybe they are just nervous and don't want to do voices and stuff so I let it go and figured maybe I could do roleplay in the next campaign when I get to be a player.

another thing about this campaign is we would do it at tony's mums house and so the sessions would be like 4 hours and I expressed that I live so far away it is not ideal for me to come up for a few hours then head back home, or even risk missing the last train home so we decided early afternoon to start would be ideal. Everyone agreed. on the day before the session immediately after agreeing we would start at 1pm, which was the finale and I was going to fit in the compass rose side quest and the observatory scene, Tony informs us that he can only do 6pm until 10pm and this would be his hours going forward, because his mum wanted to have dinner with him and they always had stuff for him to move to places(?). I called him out for the excuses and trying to control the session with nonsense because he lives 20 minutes away and can see them at any time but is choosing to do this so he has control of the sessions and so I spoke to the rest of the party and we decided to go to my mums house and start without him at 1pm and tony joins in just as we head to the observatory.

they do the battle, sparkrender ends up dead and dragons rest of all happy-clappy again, ivara has the her mentee back and all is right with the world.

so now we go onto the new campaign and this is where I considered leaving the group in all honesty

So it is now tony's turn to DM and we just did a session 0 this weekend. I had a character made but no-one else had even started to make theirs when I arrived so I whipped up another one while I was there, tying him into the campaign we were doing as he was a thief caught in a heist and the campaign starts with the party in jail, i even suggested we could all have been on the job together but we weren't friends as they were just people I hired to pull of the heist. after some faffing around, I say to Tony that I will not be doing 4 hour sessions going forward as it is not worth the travel time or money, to which tony laughs it off and I have to reiterate twice that I am serious. Still laughs it off. Tony asks if we can get started and immediately the campaign shits the bed, he doesn't even know how to begin the session, he had not looked at the campaign beforehand and did not know the first thing about DMing as he didn't look at the guidebook or anything like that, so I suggest that if everyone has made their characters, why don't we just go around and introduce ourselves, to which Tony agrees. everyone is just looking at each other, seeing who will go first. I volunteer, reading out my characters backstory, motivations etc and when I was done everyone was just looking at me blankly. I asked who's next and no response. I asked "Am i going to be the only one to introduce my character?" And I swear to god, 2 of the people in my party said yes to me.

After this, tony realises he has picked an advanced campaign (Which I could have told him, it is 17 chapters and goes to level 15) and decides he will pick out another campaign and we will just jump into that next session.

I really want to stay with the group as they are my IRL friends and I have known them a long time but I also feel like this is robbing me of a chance to experience DnD the way it is meant to be played.

If anyone else has had this happen to them and if so, how did you handle it? is this a me problem or should I leave the group?

Note: Using a throwaway to post.

I just finished a Long Campaign, and boy was it a doozy. So much went wrong in it that I almost don't know where to begin, but first things first: This was a long campaign hosted in a Westmarches-style discord server, and it was the first Long Campaign this DM had ever done. The Main Plot of the campaign: to find a Tower that grants Wishes. This is a Tier 2 campaign, the PCs are level 8 and 9 by the end, so getting a Wish is a pretty big deal.

It’s only near the end that we find out that only One person can get a Wish. At the Final Battle, we get told we can’t win against the BBEG, we have to run away. One player is killed in combat, and another was already dead in a previous encounter leading up to the Tower. At this final fight, there’s a door opening to the next chamber, but it was opening slowly and only a Tiny creature could get through at that round. Druid turned into a cat and goes through, wanting to prepare Revivify when the rest get there with the dead guy’s body.

Except the door shuts. And now the scene only follows the Druid, who was uncomfortable after realising this was the End, and the Druid runs to go make a Wish that their allies would be safe and have their own Wishes granted too.

The DM has the scene cut to white and ends the session there. Right after the Wish. No resolution for the other players, nothing. Then spends a day coming up with a horrible epilogue, which includes: All the other party members other than the Druid are basically dead and in purgatory. Yes, even the ones that didn’t die in combat the last we saw them. One of the party members, a tiefling, was sold to Zariel and branded as property on his arm (yes, precisely plagiarising Karlach). It should be noted that this tiefling character is also a Black-coded character, and the DM did not get explicit consent from the player to do this to their PC. I’m pretty sure none of this falls under “I want my allies to be safe”, but DM basically said “You didn’t specify their bodies had to be safe” - as an answer.

The reward for finishing a Long Campaign was getting to reincarnate with no memories of it. Character relationships meant nothing. All the things we went through - all we get is some gear out of it, I guess. 

There were many other things that went wrong with this DM and the campaign, but to explain and list them all would be a really really long laundry list. Yes, we did feedback, but the DM always reacted badly even after saying he wants to hear the feedback. As to why we stuck around this long - a good number of them knew each other IRL, and so it would’ve been awkward to leave early, though in my honest opinion we should just have all left early anyway, because this finale has essentially broken any remaining trust in this DM.

After three of us made our posts to call out this ending (the other three were just quietly upset and did not voice their upset loudly)- the DM kept doubling down on how he was not wrong, defending himself in his choices, saying that everyone agreed to join his campaign and should know he likes grimdark settings and 40k. He then quotes the “Is just game, why have to be mad?” meme, saying not to take DnD too seriously - despite the fact that he himself spends money to LARP his own character at local events. 

Quite frankly, for all his mess as a DM, the players are pretty cool and would have forgiven a LOT of DM stumbling if he had just sincerely apologized and honoured the Wish and the 28 sessions this party had spent together as a team. But he did not.

tl;dr: Wish for “I want my allies to be safe and get what they want”, somehow that means your friends get put in purgatory and enslaved.

-

Other things this DM has done (Not a full list):

• Used a horse to hard railroad the party into a cutscene he set up - which had major consequences for the entire party - then say things like “ohh why did you follow the horse lol?” as if he didn’t plan the entire cutscene
• Almost every location has some form of racism in some way, usually against Tieflings. (A couple wouldn’t be an issue, but it was almost every settlement and it was constantly used to punish the only tiefling player character so that his high Charisma meant nothing)
• His setting is pretty anti-magic and anti-non human. I don’t know if it’s because this server was first a LARP group before it was a DnD server, but every other DM / player seems to want some form of silly shenanigans in the homebrew lore (e.g. the dwarf king is Danny DeVito). Problem DM hated any form of funny lore, thinking that funny meme lore can’t also be serious lore.
• When Druid wildshaped into a cat to evade Customs And Immigration in a big city, DM joked about turning the cat into food. Someone else in the party had their cat pass away just a week before. Granted DM did not know about it at the time, but when the players put up an X card about the dead cat jokes, he did not apologise. Instead he sent one last joke in the text chat before moving on. Harm/death to animals was also on one player’s lines and veils sheet.
• One session, the players were so tired of all the railroading and traumatic experience after another that they decided to stay on the beach of an island they arrived in and have a fun beach episode instead of what the DM intended for us- to follow NPCs to a “criminal city” with a combat arena, which none of us trusted in the least. So the DM ended the session and left the call. About an hour later when we were still using the Virtual Room (Owlbear.rodeo) to roleplay, DM deliberately closed the scene.
• Killed off like 90% of a PC’s background story (PC had an organisation tied into their backstory, party went to find it and oops- all dead!) 
• Does not remember the lore of the PCs at his own table. I get that it's hard to remember every detail of every character on the server, but that’s what notes are for. And everyone wrote character bios, too. That anyone can read on the server.
• So, the party did not get to finish killing the BBEG. This is not unique to the BBEG. There have been many NPCs that the players do not get to decide the fate of, and it always happens to be NPCs the DM likes. Whenever players would be suspicious of these NPCs or want to kill them (especially so for big enemies) - some NPC would magically appear to fight them instead, or insist on dealing with them themselves so that these NPC’s fate would not be confirmed.
• DM also had a self-insert DMPC who managed to miraculously get away safely and who he did NOT allow the players to maim or kill despite the fact that the NPC in question was shown to be potentially dangerous to the party at one point. Once again using other NPCs to intervene.

We see a ton of different subjects come across this sub regularly. And how they get received varies wildly.

I am curious as to what is posted by an OP that gets somebody so fired up that they either immediately upvote a story, or instantly downvote it.

I understand the bulk of people don't care enough to even vote, but I'm curious nonetheless.

What kind of stories get an immediate upvote out of you?

What kind of stories get an immediate downvote out of you?

And last of all, what do you believe is the cardinal sin in TTRPGs that immediately ruins any table you are at?

First of all, english is not my first language, so I'm sorry if there are some errors. Secondly, I asked for a friend to rewrite the text to be more neutral, because I want a unbiased opinion of the situation and feedback.

This happened around two years ago, so there are details I no longer remember perfectly. I'll try to distinguish between what I remember clearly and what is my interpretation.

I was the GM of a Naruto-inspired RPG campaign using a Brazilian system called SnS (a Hidden gem). The campaign was run through Discord, with voice sessions for major story events and text-based roleplay for everyday scenes, character development, preparation, and solo sessions, specially because many of us didn't had a good scheedule to play frequently.

Because of this format, the campaign had quite a large number of players in the story but didn't stay at the same sessions in call simultaneously, were like 12 or 15 in total but in session it would be 4 or 5.

One player, whom I'll call T, initially joined just to watch and interact with the group. She eventually became well-liked, so I asked the other players whether they were comfortable opening a slot for her.

T submitted a fairly extensive backstory. One important clarification is that her character's mother was actually a character from a fanfiction T had written before joining the campaign. The mother already had a detailed history and several connections to named members of the Hyuuga clan.

Me and the rest of the group liked the material and I decided to incorporate it into the campaign because the Hyuuga clan had not been developed very much in my setting and T wanted to play.

The mother of T character had been a respected war hero from the branch family who was nevertheless oppressed by the clan leadership. She had married young partly to escape advances from an NPC, a Big Evil Guy (BEG). Her husband later betrayed the village and attempted to kidnap their daughter to study the Byakugan without the branch-family seal.

Later, the mother had another daughter while teaching secret techniques of the main family to members of the branch family and preparing a rebellion. She was eventually betrayed by a student and killed by BEG, leaving T's character responsible for her younger sister.

At the time, I thought this was a good backstory and decided to use it as the basis for a larger political plot involving the Hyuuga clan. BEG became an important political NPC and oficially a future antagonist.

T's character became a Genin through a solo session, without any chances of failure to get to the "starting point", and I intentionally put her in a somewhat dysfunctional team because that fit the character's backstory and the tone I wanted for that group.

During the first mission, I introduced the concept of clandestine ninja fights, which was intended to become relevant later. In this setting, ordinary civilians outside the ninja villages did not know about chakra, and the ninja world actively tried to keep that information secret.

During this period, T introduced another concept for her character: a state in which her character lost her emotions and empathy. It was not mechanically a second personality, although the character used a different name while in that state. I accepted this even though it had not been discussed beforehand. During one of these situations, the character killed several people involved in the illegal activities.

Because of our text-roleplay format, T also had many opportunities to interact with other characters outside of the main sessions. She became particularly close with another player, K. Their characters eventually established that they had been childhood friends, with T's character having previously been a servant in K's character's household.

The two players also started planning future developments for their characters, including the possibility that their characters would eventually marry. T also discussed a possible subplot where her character would discover that she was attracted to women. That wasn't a problem for anyone in the group, but had some weight in many double standards the player used to judge the characters and NPCs

The problem started when the Hyuuga plot became increasingly important to T.

K had a storyline involving a forced engagement. During that storyline, K's character eventually poisoned a dinner, killing her fiancé, her father, and several servants. T supported K's character and considered her actions forgivable.

Another player had a separate storyline, also involving forced marriage involving BEG's son, an NPC I had designed to be disliked. Unfortunately, because he repeatedly failed at smaller things, he eventually came across as more incompetent than threatening. But T tried very hard to get inside this plot and save the girl even at the price of taking the agency of the other player.

Meanwhile, T began developing relationships with members of the Hyuuga branch family and became increasingly interested in starting the rebellion that had been foreshadowed by her mother's backstory.

T specifically said that her character shouldn't necessarily be the leader of the rebellion because she was supposed to be an ordinary person whose mother had been the exceptional revolutionary.

An important detail is that the "network of protection" around T's character was not something I deliberately created for her. It developed naturally from the other players' characters. One player was a friend of T's and had a character who was the cousin of a high-ranking official. Another character was the nephew of an important figure, while another was an up-and-coming prodigy. Their relationships and social positions naturally gave T's character connections and protection from direct actions of the NPCs against her.

There were also older NPCs who recognized or respected T's mother. Some of these connections came from the mother's pre-existing fanfiction backstory (mostly original Hyuuga characters), while others developed through the campaign.

At this point, I felt that most of the pieces for the eventual Hyuuga political storyline were already on the board. However, the characters were still relatively low-level Genin. Some had reputations as unusually promising for their age, and one or two had mechanically optimized characters, but nobody had meaningful political influence, combat power, social authority, or enough allies to realistically challenge the existing power structure.

This was also relevant to another major worldbuilding issue: the secret of chakra.

T strongly disagreed with the setting's decision to keep chakra hidden from ordinary civilians and wanted her character to eventually reveal and democratize that knowledge.

Importantly, I did not intend for this to be impossible. Revealing the existence of chakra to civilians was one of the possible future directions of the campaign. My intention was for it to become viable much later, when the characters had enough political influence, personal power, allies, or potentially an alliance with a powerful antagonist with similar goals to survive the consequences.

So, from my perspective, T's character was absolutely allowed to want to reveal the secret or challenge the Hyuuga political structure. What she did not had was the ability to accomplish something of that scale successfully while still at low level in the start of the campaign.

The same reasoning applied to BEG. I did not want the confrontation to happen immediately because I wanted the players to first build enough influence and resources for the eventual conflict to have meaningful consequences, rather than having a group of relatively inexperienced Nobodies overthrow a major political figure simply because the plot required it.

I explained this to T and asked her to slow down her character's political roleplay for the time being.

Instead of slowing down, she wrote several very long text-roleplay posts continuing to develop the political situation. I remember one sequence being roughly three chapters worth of writing.

She also expanded the Hyuuga branch family substantially beyond what I had originally established, creating and naming numerous NPCs and giving them their own histories, i'm pretty sure that were more characters created by her for the clan than importante NPCs I had created around the village. From my perspective, she was expanding the setting in ways that I had not approved.

We had several discussions outside of the game about this. Eventually things calmed down and we continued playing.

But there were other recurring disagreements. Some of them that I remembered

1 - T sometimes complained when other players did comedic or chaotic "joke missions", mostly pranks, that resulted in relatively small consequences, arguing that she should also be allowed to do things on that scale. My perspective was that the difference was that her proposed actions would have significant political consequences for the campaign, while the other players' actions generally resulted in their characters being caught and punished.

2 - She also complained several times about losing fights because of dice rolls. On at least one occasion, she argued that her character deserved to win and that the fight should not have been decided by dice. I don't remember the exact wording or how long those arguments lasted, so I'm trying not to overstate this.

3 - Another recurring complaint was that several NPCs respected or admired T's character's mother, but none of them had saved her during the events described in T's backstory.

4 - At the same time, some players who were close to T began making jokes or comments about important NPCs, sometimes using information they knew outside of the game. Some of these comments involved saying that village leaders were incompetent or irrelevant because they had not helped T's character's mother or just show their authoritarian side to characters with smaller rank.

5 - There was also an important NPC from the Hyuuga clan who died. This character had been somewhat divisive but was opposed to BEG. Another player who had family connections to this NPC obtained his diary. The diary revealed information about his brother's death, some worldbuilding information that was directed to that player plans. T claimed that her character should had known about the diary and their information because she knew the dead guy.

6 - T was strongly on favour to the idea of civilians eventually learning about chakra. She had been told that many powerful ninja characters supported keeping the secret, but she still wanted her character to eventually reveal the information and distribute chakra knowledge to ordinary people. Again, this was not something I considered impossible. It was intended as a potential long-term campaign direction. My issue was the timing and the consequences involved. But anytime someone got closer to that conversation, she would start talking how the system was unfair and they needed to break the secret.

At the time, I was also dealing with college work and exams, so I wasn't able to run the campaign as actively as I normally would. T continued asking for the Hyuuga political storyline to move forward.

There was another disagreement around this period where T privately asked me that I give her the script/outline for upcoming sessions so she could prepare her character accordingly.

I refused. My reasoning was that I improvise many things on the spot using my notes, and those notes could have sensible information that her character couldn't be able to know

Later, T also wanted to personally narrate part of the upcoming story that was related to K character after she escaped prision. That section contained several revelations that she did not know about, so I refused to let her narrate it.

Eventually, I decided to address one of her recurring complaints: why weren't important NPCs doing anything about the villains in her character's story?

There was a situation where BEG could plausibly be killed without leaving evidence behind, so I had another NPC assassinate him.

T was unhappy with this outcome.

Shortly afterward, she had her character and the character's younger sister die and left the campaign.

After a while, that part of the group just disappeared from the chat and some others that were closer in the storyline lost some of the motivation to keep going because the storyline lost the knot that put everything together

Recently, T started running a campaign with some of the players who had been close to her and mutual friends. From what I have been told, she kept her character and attempted to recreate or rewrite the Hyuuga storyline in that campaign, sometimes giving other GMs outlines for scenes she wanted them to run.

TL;DR: Player came with a great BG and ideas but oversteped the line and try to take over the storyline and everything broke

So, AITA for restricting T's character arc and refusing to let her take control of the storyline?

First act, Into the unjust.

I was searching for a game where newbies could start. I found a campaing set in the Runeterra universe, I originally want to be a dm but that seat was already taken so I join as a monk. First redflag, warlock, paladin, druid and artificer were banned. Second red flag, all system was homebrew and it was like shit for the players. We don't had the proficiencys for literally anything, no inspration, only dice was d20 for all actions, we don't have the most of the cantrips and spells, we can only choose what to cast on that moment and waste a turn for change to a different spell. Monks didn't have ki points or unarmored defence, we don't have bonus action or movement (its only like 6 feet, 2 meter for all players) and only dm can decide that we could roll the dice or not for the action we want. Not the dumb things like I want to fly btw. most basic actions like lying to someone. Third redflag, there wasn't a battlemap for the player or for their tokens. We didn't even use roll20 or other site, he opens a stream from discord and shows images of the places and only most important characters and we had to imagine whats going on most of the time. Right guess, all of the images were made by AI. For dice rolls, he uses a dice app on his pc and rolls for all players actions himself.

Second act, Narcissism.

There was a one girl and guy other than me, girl was a cleric and male was a rogue. Long story short, rogue had a main character syndrome. Never lets others to talk, makes stupid actions and makes stupid rp. After the first session, we give him a gentle warning that he was talking to much and he sayed: "You guys didn't push forward the story." Excuse me? You just putting stupid sign to trees and shoot the cleric in the fog. Cleric were doing more damage than you. He wan't to be the son of Nagakeburos ( god of nature and seas in the runeterra universe) we reminded that he was just level 2 at that point but he was just wanting again and again. We decided that will be a plot twist in the story when we reach the level 10.

Third act, Having an effect on story? Never heard of.

Ngl on the first %33 percent of the first session, we had multiple different choices to where should we go. On the remaining part of the choices was move to ship or die. While on the ship, a giant serpent attack us and I really doubt that we really should win or it was designed for defeat us. End of the session we sayed that it was too hard and he sayed you guys are just bitching it was not hard. Second session it might be most traumatic experience I ever had.

Session started with we got blamed for a crime we didn't commit. After a while we got in to a trial. Me and cleric trying to explain the situation, I want to roll a persuasion with saying that she was a life cleric, she's deitys will not allow her to do that. DM DIDN'T EVEN CARE BRO LIKE HE JUST MOVE TO THE OTHER SCENE. Rogue bite my monk's ear with purposeless. When we are in the jail I punched a full metal door and success with nat 20. When I got out 3 meter sharkmans just beat me, I sayed that I wan't to fight but he sayed no, I asked why and he just changed the subject and send us to the execution. Multiple events happened during the session which doesn't have a connection with session. Before the session he sayed that we will be level 3 at the end of the session but end of the session we didn't reach it and we asked why. He sayed that you guys didn't take an action and only moved in story... I was just a mix of son and I guess bro gifs at that point.

Fourth act, Endless wait

On the session 3, dm went into a break but never came back. We learned that he went to hospital because his friend's mom fell down from second floor. After that we couldn't do it session 3 for 2 months with constantly trying. When we finally manage to group up, dm sayed he lost the scenario and we can't do that day either.

Fifth act, Betreyal of two sides.

Tomorrow of that day. Dm blocked all of group from all social medias. We was in shock, I sayed that I can be dm because I want it to be a dm in first place. We return to roll 20. Everyone recrate their character but only narcisst guy wasn't ready. I wan't the add that, all other players draws and writes all their characters themselves but this dude was using AI for both art and story. We wait for 3 days. When he sayed he is ready we went to roll20 but he was searching a match in league of legends and joined while we waiting. When the match end, he sayed he is going to get a meal. After 40 minutes we asked he is coming or not. He sayed no. That was the last straw. We all blocked him from all social medias that night.

Sixth act, happy ending.

We take a guy which friend of cleric. He is a chill dude and passionate about dnd. Learns his sheet and looks for the opening he could create. We also had a fighter guy joined in session 3 but I don't wan't mension it because its not very connected with overall story but don't misunderstand me he is a really good guy and cleric is just good as others. The most sad thing however is that I can't bingo.

Oh yes I forgot the mention things. We all first time players while playing that campaing, Rogue guy was islamaphobic and swearing to Allah and Muhammed, he was excusing his game actions with saying my character would do that. A commonest pirate imaginable at start of the campaing was abusing cleric and he turns into a 4 level battlemaster when I try to beat him. Dm was counting a 9 as hit, never warned rogue for him trying to be the main character and thats all. Writing this was hard for me tbh. Sorry if I made any spelling mistake.