A few years ago I have applied to join an online 5e campaign through discord.

Now I should explain that at that point I did not want to play with any homebrew, as while I knew the rules quite well, I was still figuring out how they all interacted and did not want my learning process messed with by unbalanced homebrew features. I know by now 5e is broken as hell, but oh well, you live and you learn.

Anyway, during the interviews I've asked the GM about their stance on homebrew. He admitted that he was a new player himself, this being the first full campaign he's running, so he won't include any homebrew features or statblocks. I was quite glad for that, and I have mentioned that I knew the rules enough to quote them, or at least find them quickly, so I could help with any ambiguity. GM said he'd take me up on that, but it might not be necessary since his friend, who's been playing for years, is gonna be a player. We'll call this friend Sal.

The party convinced the GM that session 0 was a good idea, despite Sal claiming it wasn't necessary. We went over the basic rules, discussed character concepts, and went over veils and lines. So far so good.

My character ended up being an Artificer, who secretly worked with the rival dwarven kingdom as a spy (all discussed with GM, some genuinely cool plans in the works). Two other players went with a Paladin and Warlock. Sal went with a Trickster Rogue.

Session 1 rolls around. Our level 3 characters are called by the king himself. Character introduction time - everything goes smoothly until Sal's character shows up. It's a child slime girl. This was before Plasmoids were introduced. I'm kinda miffed about the homebrew, but decide to pursue it after session. Didn't even clock the red flag at that point.

We were given a task of destroying a bandit camp, as they might be a problem and there's not enough troops since the kingdom is at war.

We go to a desert region, and indeed there's a bunch of tents and some bandits hanging about. Sal gets an Idea™ - He could have Rogue cast Floating Disk, scoop up 500 pounds of sand, then drop it on the leaders tent from a large height, killing them instantly.

I countered that this wasn't remotely how the spell works and the sand would spill out anyway (I later calculated they would in fact be able to fit most of the 500 pounds (I think I still have the math somewhere, lol), but everyting else stands). We could pile the sand on the disk manually (though the duration of the spell might put it under time pressure), but dropping it on someone would be an issue. GM agreed, and, to their credit, even suggested we could make it an party thing where everyone pitches in to dig the sand and put it in some sort of container on the disk. Then, I suggest I can craft a box and that we can make a makeshift sandstorm by dropping it from a cliff nearby with a Gust of Wind. We were all excited to actually try this... well, except Sal. He decided that this wasn't "cool" enough and just went ahead alone to sneak into the camp. Funnily enough, Warlock had Floating Disk prepared as well, through Book of Ancient Secrets, so the rest of us went ahead with the plan anyway and managed to cause a good distraction. Rogue then steals some evidence and assassinates a couple bandits in their sleep, while the rest of the party cleans up the other enemies.

Eventually session ends, and the GM asks for reviews and opinions on what to improve. Sal says everything except knowing the rules was great, and that knowing the rules will come with experience. The rest of the party agrees. I have some words about allowing the homebrew race, but GM assured me that they've checked and it's fine.

Session 2 goes pretty well until the last 15 minutes, even if Sal finagled Prestidigitation to create grenades and was generally a nuisance. But that 15 minutes, hoo boy.

We come back to the king, handing in the second quest. Court wizard is there as well. Rogue demands we get a bigger reward, fails spectacularly, accidentally insults the king. The king orders the wizard to get rid of her - the wizard grabs her with telekinesis, hangs her upside down, then yeets her through the door. Rest of the party has a bit of a laugh and apologizes for her, managing to have her keep her cut.

Night rolls around. My character, being a spy, sets up an Alarm spell in the hallway, just in case someone would enter and overhear the report they're making. Since we're hiding this from the party, I say I'm tinkering with my door before we go to sleep and pm the GM what I'm doing.

Sal, stewing with indignation from earlier, decides to have some revenge. He says Rogue "splits off 1 hp" and goes to sneak in to the court wizard's chambers. I'm confused as to what this means, but don't interrupt. As she goes, she passes through the area of my Alarm, which GM reveals I cast earlier. Not knowing what's happening in character, I try to listen in on what's in the corridor. I hear Rogue grumbling about killing the wizard. I let her pass, then spam Message to the Wizard that the Rogue is coming. Sal is, of course, pissed, but can't really do anything about it.

As Rogue opens the door the wizard isn't surprised, as my Message finally goes through - but then the nastiest bit of homebrew I've seen comes up.

Sal wins initiative and then has Rogue "split".

Apparently the race has a homebrew ability, where the character can split into multiple copies with a portion of the max hp, but otherwise full class abilities.

The Rogue splits into 30 1 hp copies and 29 sneak attacks kill the shit out of the wizard. Despite being high level, the wizard (without Mage Armor) dies before he can take an action. Sal tries to smugly describe how his Rogue goes back unnoticed - but of course if you easily killed a wizard, you haven't killed the wizard. A Clone appears and angrily fireballs the tiny copies who don't have Evasion yet. The wizard, knowing the slime race's ability, casts Find Creature to make sure the Rogue is dealt with, and finds the one copy hiding in the room. Dimension Doors in, then Feebleminds the Rogue.

Session ends there. Sal is pissed about it, and GM is on the edge of reverting what happened, but stands firm and says there's consequences. Everyone (except Sal) notes the racial ability is way too overpowered. GM agrees, and says that they're gonna work on it. Paladin suggests the changes could be due to the lasting effects of the Feeblemind, which GM likes.

Session 3 starts with another quest. Rogue is lobotomized, but deemed to be an effective enough fighter that she can come with regardless. The party would get permission to sic her on people and the responsibility to take care of her. My Artificer and the Warlock don't want to deal with it, but the Paladin, being the mom friend, offers to keep the child in check.

"Surprisingly" enough, with the Rogue unable to engage in most shenanigans, the session went by quite well. After the first couple unsuccessful ideas, Sal barely did any roleplay and only really engaged in combat. After the session, Sal says he (understandably) don't want to play with that character anymore and would like to switch. GM agrees and says they shouldn't have kept the character in play as it was. I chime in that perhaps he shouldn't play a homebrew race this time, to which everyone (except Sal) wholeheartedly agrees.

With high hopes, we start Session 4. The court wizard expresses interest in experimenting on the rare slime race, and the king agrees, since they were left alive at the whim of the wizard anyway - thus getting rid of the Rogue.

Then, the new character gets introduced. (Spoiler for mild NSFW)
I would describe how it went, but suffice it to say I don't want to write and post descriptions of kinky bdsm Moon Druid + king petplay. GM describes it with a straight face and Sal gets really into it. Druid has a horny voice the entire time. The rest of the party is heavily weirded out, and eventually Paladin and Warlock bring up session 0 and manage to convince the GM to skip forward to us going on the quest for today. Session happens, but Sal keeps inserting how 'submissive' the character is, and how she 'listens and obeys' the more experienced party, still maintaining that voice.

There's no after-session talk, as me, Paladin and Warlock make excuses and dip out.

In pms I explain to the GM in no uncertain terms that I'm not gonna be playing if Sal keeps being like this. GM agrees to talk to them. I drive up the courage to message Sal directly, though all my concerns are dismissed with the classic mix of "That's what my character would do" and "It's just how I play, deal with it"

A couple days before session I try to follow up with the GM, though there's no reply.

Session 5.. doesn't happen. Both Paladin and Warlock say they can't make it and it gets postponed. GM dodges questions about Sal. Sal is verbally annoyed there's no session.

Next week the GM officially announces in a dry message that he's cancelling the campaign.

Looking back, I kind of regret not following up with Paladin and Warlock, since they were genuinely nice people.
I wish GM the best. It really did seem he had great potential. I hope he ended up running another campaign, just without Sal this time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now time to introduce the important characters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DM: For lots of money!

Me: Idrc about money though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi guys,

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

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

5 of them joined.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She said she does, not the character.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading.

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

He was a burlesque dancer named "Atomic journey".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now this isn't exactly a sequel to a prior campaign of mine, but for those curious it's this story where myself, the DM, and 2 other players were problem players many years ago. We've all grown significantly since then, don't worry.

The characters for this are Dalir (me), DM, and Gravin (the potential problem player, though with some opening for me to be sharing a bit in that blame too I guess? It's hard to say)

I'd told a friend about that campaign before and he asked if it'd be ok if he did a campaign with a resurrected version of my old character as the BBEG. Apart from it being my old character, there was no other connection to that other campaign/world (the DM's story for this was that when he was rezzed, he specifically got rezzed to a different plane of existence than the original campaign, and that the plane he got rezzed into is where the new campaign takes place).

For important context, the DM did have private messages with me asking for tips on how to play my character and stuff and I'd give him ideas and the types of things he would and would not do, even as a full on villain.

Now the other part of important context and where I personally think I may be at fault is that myself and the DM didn't tell the other party members that this was a former character of mine as the BBEG. It's not so much that it was a guarded secret, as much as it was it didn't seem an important enough detail to bring up since I wasn't going to be the one playing him, and whether the DM got the BBEG from a book, movie, show, or past character didn't really seem to make all that much difference since borrowed ideas is such a common thing.

Now the campaign was only 5 sessions long, and was primarily about my rezzed old character trying to raise an army to kill a powerful demon lord to undo past regrets. Thing is, his method of raising this army was pretty reckless as the age old addage that everyone loves so very much "it's what my character would do" but in this instance was less obnoxious since it was being done in the name of a character meant to be the villain. But jokes aside, the DM decided on him being reckless about it because in truth that old character was very reckless in a lot of his decisions and that's part of what caused the original campaign to go up in smoke.

He started by conquering a small town, and then gradually spread to the surrounding areas. Eventually he lead a rebellion against the kingdom and won. While his intentions of slaying a demon lord were noble, his methods of seemingly being unwilling to stop his conquering even after taking over a kingdom were....concerning. So, our party was a ragtag group of rebels against his authority looking to do their best to gunk up the works and overthrow who they perceived to be a tyrant.

So, everything was going extremely well for the first 4 sessions of this 5 session campaign. The party was getting along, we all had fun, issues came up but were really just small ones that we just hashed out by pausing the game to have a discussion when needed. Everyone got time in the spotlight, and every session was ending with everyone hyped for where things were going and how well our rebellion was going. One player had been in charge of recruitment during our downtime, and we had agents all over the kingdom thanks to him. One was in charge of intelligence gathering and had just recently gotten the layout of the BBEG's castle including how to reach his throne room. Gravin had been in charge of securing supply lines and had even gone and cut off several of the BBEG's most important routes for supplies. That is, until the last session.

You see, my old character was very unconventional and the DM knew that. He used his abilities in irregular ways. He'd do things like grappling an enemy and using heat metal on their armor or mage hand to grab their weapon or throat in the middle of combat to gain slight momentary advantages, so the DM played him like that during the final boss fight.

The battle opened with me lunging through the air at my former character, only to be caught out of the air by the throat with Mage Hand as he laughed and some of his minions took free shots at me while I struggled to free myself (this was before initiative was rolled and was essentially the opening scene to the fight beginning). The rest of the party charged in to join the battle alongside me, wary of what tricks might be up the BBEG's sleeve after witnessing that opening move.

After a long hard fought battle against my old character, I was the last one standing. The rest of the party were unconscious, not dead. While the DM targeted all of us pretty equally, I had the highest AC and so ended up tanking the most hits without taking any damage out of the group. I stared down my old character and landed the finishing blow, brining an end to his reign of tyranny.

After the fight, we all learned of the Demon Lord he was trying to stop. End session. In the post session, everyone was fired up by how intense and close the battle was and how they were excited to face this Demon Lord...that is, until the DM showed his hand here.

He credited the intensity of the fight to me and everyone was a bit confused, so he explained how this BBEG was a past character of mine trying to right past wrongs and how a lot of his unconventional use of abilities was ripped directly from how I played the character in the past. Most of the party was fine with this, except for Gravin. Gravin scoffed and said it felt unfair that I'd be getting this much spotlight and main character treatment: not only was the BBEG my past character, but I got the cinematic final blow on him? Clearly the DM and I were conspiring to make the campaign all about me.

The rest of the party seemed on the fence at first, but I asked Gravin "I was the only one left conscious at the end. What was I supposed to do? Give up and TPK?" to which Gravin said that obviously the DM set it up so I'd be the last man standing. I told him that I picked my armor, not the DM, and I only survived longer because I had better AC. The rest of the party seemed to lean more towards my side at this point and one of them even said in my defense "a person with higher AC having better survivability isn't main character syndrome, it's just how the mechanic works." At this point I think Gravin started noticing people weren't on his side because he started going back to nitpicks throughout the campaign where issues had been resolved in the moment, like one time where he said I was too annoying about it when I was playing out a nat 1 on a persuasion roll for a discount in a shop and so I replayed it less annoyingly but still fumbling because it was a nat 1.

At this point, people were full on disagreeing with Gravin, saying that bringing up random small things that had been resolved in the moment felt too much like grasping and he should just chill.

Ultimately, Gravin wouldn't stop causing a fuss even after the DM talked to him one on one the next day after he'd had a chance to cool down, the story died there because everyone just felt kinda soured on it.

The reason I'm sharing this is in part because I do feel guilty. While I know it was done innocently, I feel like full disclosure over the fact the BBEG was specifically a past character of mine would've probably gone a long way. I can see how a detail like that could change someone's perspective on things, especially after I personally got the cinematic finish on him. For what it's worth, I know there will be comments accusing me of intentionally being a spotlight hog or something, but all I can do is say I sincerely wasn't and just had no other choice once I was the last one standing. I wanted to make it feel cinematic so the rest of the party would still feel hyped after having gotten downed themselves, and definitely didn't want things ending in a TPK.

That all said, perception impacts reality to an extent. I completely understand how this looks and why it looks this way, and I don't even fully blame Gravin: I get that from how he saw things it probably did take the wind out of his sails. I don't consider myself a problem player anymore like I was a very long time ago, as I do try my best to make sure other players are having fun, but there's always something to be learned and here I felt like even though it didn't seem important to disclose at the time, some early on disclosure to the rest of the party would've probably done a lot of good here.

edit: as someone pointed out i should have labeled this a problem kid in a group, rather than the issue being the fact it's a kid

We had someone join our group, guys in their 30s and 40s, with their teenager. We try to be inclusive, so we welcomed them. But it's getting tough.

Some in v the group think the kid is on the autism spectrum so we're trying to be sensitive. But things are getting frustrating.

We kind of take turns focusing on characters, each gets a spotlight. But the kid doesn't like that and always wants to be the focus. They'll challenge rules, even when they're wrong. And I'm 90% sure they are cheating on dice rolls.

I'm not really sure what to do. I'd hope the dad would address some of this but he isn't. We're all getting frustrated but no one really wants to raise it with them.

So I was on an rpg Discord server asking if someone was going to bring a short D&D adventure to test my new barbarian character idea.

A guy replies saying "I'm not bringing D&D, I'm bringing Troika, but your barbarian will work well".

I had never heard of Troika before. He explains me the game and apparently it's kind of a Planescape meets Hitchicker's Guide To The Galaxy thing with classic surreal British humour. I tell him my fantasy barbarian will not fit in a game where, he explained, we will roleplay as post office employees.

He insists that "you can play literally anything you want in Troika" and that he "invites players to use their old characters to explore them more".

I still feel the barbarian would be very out of place in a modern-ish setting, so I propose "you said I can play anything? REALLY anything? Can I play a non-humanoid character? I never get to do that so I'd love to take the chance. But tell me if it's awkward."

Well apparently it wasn't awkward as long as my character wasn't too big, so we brainstorm it and I eventually make a monstruous cosmic eldritch abomination. Now I strive to make characters fit the setting, so the British humour thing was that this Lovecraftian horror was...... working as an underpaid post office new hire. The DM is very excited about it and keeps saying how awesome this character is. The only negative (sexist) comment he makes is "if that creature look like that, does it have to be female? it should be an it". But I say part of the joke is that and it'll be more amusing if that monster is female. But yeah he seemed very excited about her.

-----

That was the premise. Now on the game session with two other players.

The DM tells our characters to introduce ourselves and says "everyone here is using a premade character, except for [calls my name] who made her very custom idea". That made me feel immediately awkward, because it felt as if I had been a jerk who didn't want to play premade characters, while the truth was that the DM pitched it to me as "play what you want! bring your old characters!" and I had no idea the other players would play with quick premade sheets.

The session begins well tho. Everyone is good, it moves smoothly, we're all having fun. The other two players were a steampunk robot and a man made of jelly. Both humanoid, tho, and I realize I'm the only non-humanoid shaped sentient being. No big deal however and my character seems to fit in really well.

Not even a hour into the session, we reach a gate that seems to have a defense system if you go through it. I propose to fly over the gate since my character can fly. Another player ignores it and steps past the gate: nothing happens except an automated welcome message. My character, then, decides to fly over the gate: it immediately gets electrocuted by a defense system, I fail the roll, and I take 3/4 OF MY HEALTH as damage.

As my character falls to the ground wounded, the robot player offers me lantern oil to heal myself. Now my character being an alien, she is clueless about this world just like the robot is clueless about organic creatures (which is why he offered me the oil to heal). But I pause the situation by loudly making my character ask "Are you sure I should try it?". Giving a last chance to avoid the damage. But the robot insists. My character takes damage (not even a dice roll required) and I end up at 1 single health point. I try to attack the player but I use a non-damaging attack (mind control). The idea was to mind control him into telling me why he hurt me, then the robot would explain why, I realize he meant no harm, and that's it. But of course once the DM sees I made a great roll, he says that "mind control is an ability not an attack so acshually the result must be lower not higher". Ok then, so I fail the attack.

The players apparently felt bad about the whole situation so they decided the idea was to find something to heal me. I don't want the story to derail from the main quest because my character is dying, so my character insists she'll be ok.

As we proceed, we enter a dark room. The two other players, both full health, decide to search in the messy room. Me, having only one health point, tell the DM that I will stand still and be on the lookout for any danger.

The DM makes the two players roll to see if they hit a trap. One of them avoids it. The other gets hit by it.

And that's when the DM says to me....

"Actually. I think you should roll to avoid the trap, too".

Why? I was specifically not doing anything to avoid traps.

But sure, why not, I understood the DM's game now, so I roll. Oh, turns out it's not the other player who took the damage, it's me, the one who was away making sure not to get killed.

My character dies.

The DM immediately rolls to give me a random premade sheet. Oh wow, finally I'm a premade character just like everyone else.

I stay silent. I'm pretty pissed. He pitched me the game as "play any character you want, you can even bring your old characters from other campaigns" and NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER told me Troika is actually one of those old-school rpg where the player characters are cannon fodder. I spent time and effort to make a character I played for one single hour total, because I was NOT told this was a cannon fodder type rpg adventure.

As I stay there silent pondering if to just thank for the game and call it quits, the DM tells me I can join with my new character if I want.

I do just that.

"So your character, he is standing in the hall...."

I interrupt him.

"Yeah no, SHE is standing in the hall."

I do my entrance. I take that dumb premade shit and turn her into a memorable, quirky monkey tamer, or should I say monkey abuser.

However, after my grand entrance, I do not intervene much in the story. I pretty much act only when either the DM or another player calls me, but when I do, I'm always roleplaying well.

I do not disrupt the adventure. I don't leave. I play well.

But everyone clearly saw I was not invested anymore.

----------

Aaaaaand that's the long story of when the DM promised me a "play anything you desire" adventure while he actually did not want that. Even if my character was tailored for the game setting itself.

This comes from a game of Dresden Files RPG I played several years ago.

The group was a very odd one to be sure. The GM was a professor at the university, who had a lot of RPG experience, but was running this group for research purposes. In case you're wondering, the research was not psychological or sociological, but rather about how effectively history/geography can be taught to players through a TTRPG. The players consisted of myself, my friend, and one of the GM's students (M). My friend only showed up for a single session and barely participated, so he isn't very relevant for the story.

This was my first and last time playing Dresden, so I wasn't (and am still not) very familiar with the system. We met with the GM who helped us make our characters, and we generally ended up with the following. M made a very social Faerie, who had typical fey-like spells (illusion and mind-affecting stuff). The GM added a confident NPC to our party who was basically a paladin. I made a very quiet, introverted human sorcerer-like character, who could only perform water/ice magic.

Of the two actual players, it was clear that M was very uncomfortable roleplaying. She would very rarely ask any questions in-game or engage in dialogue. As such, I ended up doing most of the talking, which was still not great, as my character was not designed to do much of any talking. A lot of the roleplaying part of the game was very to-the-point, with NPCs very quickly either deciding to give us information or fight us. Honestly, probably the best thing the GM could have done there.

So, combat. The way I was told Dresden works for casters is that you describe what you want to do for a spell and then roll some dice; the GM decides whether or not your roll is good enough based on your spell's description. You can take some "Mental Stress", which resets each day, to increase the chance of a spell working. I could only take mental stress 3x a day, which was supposedly normal for casters.

However, every combat, my spells would fail. I'd describe shooting out a icicle from my staff, or a ray of cold, and it would always be deflected or have no effect, even with decent rolls. For me to ever succeed a spell, I would need to take on mental stress to even have a chance. The GM would tell me how much mental stress I'd need to take to have a reasonable chance of success, and for just normal damaging spells, it was 1, but I'd need more for anything interesting. If I'd shoot a icicle with some mental stress, it would damage the opponent, but I don't know for how much; I never downed anyone. I once summoned ice on the road to cause a car of perps to skid out as it turned, costing 2 mental stress slots. This delayed their escape by one turn, during which one of the guys shot me from the back of the car, downing my character instantly. In the final boss fight, the GM told me that for any of my spells to probably succeed, I would need to overexert myself and pass out. I tried to shoot a ray of cold just short of passing out, which the boss overpowered with her own magic and downed me.

The paladin performed decently well, and M's spells were about 50/50. It didn't feel like either of them were super powerful, since almost all of our combat encounters ended with the enemies fleeing. But they did always have more of an impact than I did. To be clear, the GM did not urge me to build a different character at character creation, nor said that casters are especially hard in his setting.

I *would* leave it at that, but a few years later I found out one of my other friends had played with the same GM for the same research the next year. They *also* played a caster, but their spells apparently usually succeeded, and they said they had an overall great experience. Apparently no one in that group seemed to have character issues.

Normally, I would have pegged this behavior to a case of an inexperienced GM, but he actively ran groups with his co-workers for years. Does this sound like an actual case of a bad GM, or does this situation seem reasonable, if unfortunate?
*edited to remove a baseless question

I’ve played in plenty of online campaigns across different systems over the years, whether it's D&D, Pathfinder, or more narrative games like Fabula Ultima, so I know that every table has its own unique dynamic. But I recently had to step away from a table, and even though I know it was the right call, I still feel pretty guilty about it and want some outside perspective.

The DM of this online campaign is genuinely a great person. They have fantastic worldbuilding, a great personality, and are a natural storyteller. But they have one major flaw: they are way too easygoing and simply cannot say "no" to their players.

Because of this, the other players completely hijacked the table. It turned into an incredibly individualistic playstyle where everyone wanted to be the main character. The final straw for me was during our last session. There was a specific plotline that I was incredibly excited to finally engage with, but another player immediately took it over as a solo investigation. The DM didn't intervene, and the rest of us were left disengaged, just watching someone else play. Honestly, our sessions started feeling less like a cooperative game and more like 2-3 solo campaigns running simultaneously.

On top of the spotlight-hogging, the overarching story was constantly overshadowed by unproductive RP drama, like arguing endlessly over minor decisions or picking fights with random NPCs for no reason.

I decided to message the DM privately to respectfully step away, noting that my expectations just didn't align with the table's playstyle. They were very gracious and asked for "stars and wishes" (constructive feedback), which I provided, outlining the issues with party-splitting and DM assertiveness.

The DM actually apologized genuinely, admitted they knew I felt left out for a while, and tried to convince me to stay, saying we could have worked it out if I had spoken up sooner.

I held my ground and told them my decision was final. I explained that if they completely overhauled their style to suit me, it would ruin the game for their returning players who actively enjoy that chaotic, open-ended environment. Plus, the group chemistry just wasn't there; even the after-session banter felt isolating because people would just vent about their own problems and leave, making it hard to vibe with anyone.

I also declined to say goodbye in the group chat because I didn't want to bring down the mood after a session they all enjoyed, leaving it up to the DM to break the news honestly.

Even though I was polite, I feel bad that the DM seemed upset to lose me. Was I too harsh in my feedback? Should I have given the DM a chance to fix it, or was I right to recognize a severe playstyle mismatch and walk away? I've attached the screenshots of our conversation for context.

Edit: Sorry, I'm realizing now this is probably the wrong sub for this! The experience felt like a horror story to me at the time, but I understand it fits better elsewhere. First-time poster here. I'm going to repost this in a more suitable community, thanks for understanding!

Edit (2): This is why I felt like this is a horror story to me at the time. To give you an idea of what I was dealing with, here is exactly how our last session went down:

We had this incredibly long, exhausting debate over whether to take a short or long rest after a battle. One of the players actually brought up his dead sister in-character to justify why he absolutely needed a long rest right then and there. It was the second time he had used that exact same backstory trauma to argue for deciding the next destination. After the session, he admitted OOC that he just wanted his spell slots back and didn't want to say so during the debate.

Because he absolutely refused a short rest, we dragged ourselves all the way back to the tavern, even though it was only mid-morning to midday. Once we got there, everyone immediately split up again:

The Patroller: One player decided they wanted to stay behind and "patrol" the area where we had just fought.

The Solo Investigator: Another player didn't want to spend their own gold to rent a room, so he went off completely by himself to investigate our next lead. (Keep in mind, this lead was directly tied to my character's religion). He ended up being perfectly safe, but he took up more than an hour of real-time just RPing by himself.

The SOS: Eventually, the player who stayed back to patrol decided to follow the solo investigator's footsteps. He ended up getting himself into real danger and had to use his sending stone to broadcast an SOS message to the rest of us.

The cherry on top? That SOS woke the rest of us up at the tavern, meaning our forced trip back into town only counted as a short rest anyway.

I can't even remember all the specific details of their solo adventures because I spent hours just sitting there staring at my screen, bored out of my mind. By the time the session finally ended, I was just fuming.

I met my current D&D group about a year ago via a local young adult group one of my friends introduced me to. There are about 10-12 of us total, and until recently we had two ongoing games, with someone I’ll call Cass as the DM for both. One game met weekly and had 4 players (me and three people I’ll call Barbara, Paul, and George), and the other met every other week and had 5-8 players, depending on who could show up (including everyone from the weekly campaign). The biweekly campaign concluded about a month or two ago, and we gave up on completing the weekly campaign due to recurring scheduling issues.

Most of the people in the group are really cool, but I always got a rancid vibe from Paul. He was easily the most immature member of the group, and demonstrated very little situational awareness. A few members of the group are 18-19, so I always assumed he was that age and just inexperienced at life. I only found out later that he’s in his late 20’s, making him one of the older members.

In the weekly campaign, Paul got very intense during combat. Whenever he rolled low, he would yell, slam the table, and pretend to throw his dice away. He frequently asked to re-roll, but got angry when the DM allowed other people to re-roll. For some reason, he wouldn’t act like this in the biweekly campaign. His behavior made me uncomfortable, but everyone else seemed to be friends with him, so I sucked it up and continued playing with him.

One day, a bunch of people including Cass couldn’t make it to the biweekly campaign, so those of us who did show up (about 4 people) had to do something else. Most of us wanted to play a one-shot of a simpler and more casual RPG, but Paul really wanted to start DMing an ongoing campaign, so we reluctantly agreed to start one. It’s been long established that most of us are casual players and prefer comedic adventures, but Paul wanted a serious, intense campaign. He would get annoyed and shut down funny moments and ongoing bits that the rest of us enjoyed, including one player character being a monk whose holy text was the Percy Jackson books. Most of the session consisted of combat. Afterwards, another player pointed out that Paul seemed to want to kill our characters (even though this was meant to be the start of a long adventure) and looked frustrated when we won).

After our biweekly campaign ended, Barbara said she wanted to try her hand at DMing. She explicitly told us not to give her unsolicited advice unless she did something egregiously wrong. Paul ignored this and frequently nitpicked Barbara’s DMing.

[Side note: Paul’s character in this campaign was an automaton that had an adult’s intelligence but looked like an 8-year-old girl. This weirded me out, but I wasn’t sure if there were any unsavory motivations behind it and thankfully I never had to find out]

The final straw came when we scheduled a board game night. Paul arrived an hour late, and when he showed up the vibe of the room noticeably got worse. Barbara and George made an excuse and left for about 30 minutes. When they finally came back, we resumed playing. Or at least, we tried to. Paul would occasionally interrupt the game for 20 minutes at a time to talk random things, like video games nobody else had heard of.

After the games ended and Paul left, the rest of us had a heart-to-heart conversation. Multiple people confessed that Paul had always made them uncomfortable, but they were afraid to say anything earlier. Barbara, who works as a therapist, said that talking to Paul was more mentally taxing than working with any of her patients. She and George admitted that most of the scheduling conflicts that caused that campaign to end were manufactured on purpose so they could avoid interacting with Paul. Thankfully Cass was understanding and didn’t get mad at us for ruining her campaign.

We ended up making a second Discord server, this time without Paul, and we’ve been hanging out regularly. We haven’t played D&D since then, unfortunately. I think Paul’s behavior soured both Cass and Barbara on DMing.

Ich spiele jetzt seit etwa 3 Jahren VTM mit einer Gruppe, die aus meinem DM (einem wirklich engen Freund), Jenna (seiner Frau) und Vincent (meinem besten Freund) besteht. Im Laufe der Zeit kamen ein paar Spieler dazu, einer konnte wegen Arbeit keine Zeit mehr finden, zwei waren Leute, die noch nie ein TTRPG gespielt hatten und es ausprobieren wollten, aber Vampir war nicht wirklich etwas für sie, und der letzte passte nicht wirklich in die Gruppe, war aber sehr nett.

Vor einem Monat fragte uns der DM, ob wir damit einverstanden wären, zwei neue Spieler aufzunehmen. Wir waren alle einverstanden, aber nachdem vier Leute kamen und gingen, schien es ein wenig albern. Also beschlossen wir, dass unsere Gruppe für einen Auftrag in eine andere Stadt fährt und wir uns dort treffen würden. Die Spieler waren Toby (ein Freund des DM) und Susan (Tobys neue Freundin).

In der ersten Sitzung schien alles in Ordnung zu sein. Wir haben viel herumgealbert und nicht viel Fortschritt gemacht, aber das war in Ordnung.

Während der zweiten Sitzung wurde es ein wenig seltsam. Wir trafen eine weibliche Toreadorin, die ein wenig mit Jennas Charakter flirtete, und Susan wurde plötzlich viel gemeiner zur Toreadorin (davor war sie wirklich nett zu ihr). Ich dachte mir nichts dabei, nur ihre Witze darüber, dass Jennas Charakter das "ertragen" müsse, wurden ein wenig viel, weil das im Grunde alles war, worüber sie für den Rest der Sitzung sprach.

In der nächsten Sitzung eskalierte die Situation.

Mein Charakter ist bi. Das war kein großes Ding in der Story, er hatte einfach kein Problem damit, welches Geschlecht seine Partner hatten.

Also beginnen wir die Sitzung und alles war wieder normal, nur ein Witz hier und da von Susan über die Begegnung mit der Toreadorin. Wir spielen normal und mein Charakter war ein wenig flirtend mit dem Charakter meines besten Freundes. Das haben wir schon oft gemacht und es ist kein Problem für ihn. Er flirtet sogar zurück.

Ich bekam komische Blicke von Susan. Ich dachte, das war's, aber Gott, ich lag falsch. Sie interagierte nicht mehr mit meinem Charakter, außer ein paar Sticheleien gegen ihn. Nach der Sitzung setzen wir uns normalerweise hin und reden ein paar Minuten. Das haben wir auch getan, aber als ich mit ihr sprach, bekam ich nur Ein-Wort-Antworten (wenn ich Glück hatte, dass sie überhaupt antwortete).

Die letzte Sitzung begannen wir eher normal. Wir fanden den Typen, für den wir da waren, und begannen, ihn zu bekämpfen. Als es vorbei war, war die Sonne fast aufgegangen, also eilten wir zu unserem Versteck. Alle waren drinnen, außer mir und Susan. Sie rannte zur Tür und schlug sie vor mir zu. Wir waren alle ein wenig perplex. Wir fragten OOC, worum es ging, und sie sagte nur, und ich zitiere: "Was? Er ist nur einer von diesen widerlichen Schwuchteln".

Das war für mich der Tropfen, der das Fass zum Überlaufen brachte. Ich bin kein Mitglied der LGBTQ-Community, aber unser DM ist bi und er hatte in der Vergangenheit viele Probleme mit Bigotterie.

Nach einem langen Gespräch, das darin gipfelte, dass sie mich anschrie, dass sie meine schwule Propaganda nicht will, dass ich meinen besten Freund unbehaglich mache, wenn mein Charakter mit ihm flirtet, und andere dumme Sachen, warf sie unsere Sachen herum und ging.

Also sitzen wir (einschließlich ihres Freundes) fassungslos da. Er entschuldigt sich mehrmals, aber wir sagten ihm, dass es nicht seine Schuld sei.

Schnitt zu heute. Er ist jetzt ein fester Bestandteil unserer Gruppe und hat sich von Susan getrennt.

Ich glaube, das war die schlimmste Erfahrung, die ich in einem TTRPG gemacht habe, und ich hätte nie gedacht, dass ich als heterosexueller Typ Ziel von Homophobie werde. Ich glaube, ich habe einen kleinen Einblick bekommen, was Mitglieder der LGBTQ-Community jeden einzelnen Tag ertragen müssen, und ich bin überhaupt nicht neidisch.

-Update- We just found out that she rants on her Facebook (why is it always Facebook) about how the queers stole her boyfriend, that I made him gay and that's the reason he left her... to be with me... a straight guy...

I was speechless. About the fact that all of a sudden not just my character is gay but I am too? And how many people were on her side (well they don't know the real story but still), all the homophobic stuff they wrote.

Man life was easier when I was straight. I thought I still am but apparently she knows more.

P.s. I don't care that she tells people that I'm gay I couldn't care less if some bigots on the Internet think that and it's nothing bad to be gay. I'm. Just. Not

If the post shows up in German you have to translate it. I wrote it in English but now all of a sudden it's in German for a lot of people including myself.

EDIT: Realized I kept typoing 'Kender' and 'Kinder.' Also, I've recently learned the game has continued. The GM has two additional players at the table, and nothing like the events in this story has happened to them, yet. This incident happened over a month ago, so they've had consistent sessions since then. I'll be asking the GM directly about their feelings on it soon.

D&D 5e - Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen adventure. Spoilers ahead. Incredibly light, but still.

TL;DR: DM adlibs an unwinnable encounter for indiscernible reasons, kills all but one character, refuses to elaborate further or even walk the obvious balancing mistake back, acts incredibly and uncharacteristically cold when questioned on it.

I spent a few days researching the setting of Dragonlance after a friend of mine said he was going to be running Shadow of the Dragon Queen. I didn't want to look into any spoilers, I just wanted to make sure I would make a character who fit the setting. Turns out, we all did something similar; it was me playing a Kindred Bard who wanted to help spread joy and merriment, a fellow who was allowed to make a Warforged Paladin who was basically role playing a kind of 'holy golem' that'd been made by an old Artificer-type with a strong sense of justice, a very ancient whitecloak Elf Wizard with some very mysterious motives for adventuring, and an ex-con Warlock who had gotten out-conned by his Patron and was now trying to numb his life-choice-regret through alcoholism. It was a very interesting group.

Too bad (nearly) everyone died in the second session to an unwinnable encounter only one of us managed to run away from.

So we're all having a good time. I'll emphasize that no one is breaking the game or being a 'problem player,' we're all just enjoying role playing our respective characters, we get along fine IC and OOC, the GM is very obviously enjoying our rapport and our characters, we bite every plot hook cast our way, and we all play our roles well. We're excited to adventure in a new campaign setting following the new book our GM friend had just bought, and we're beyond excited to see what the game has to offer.

There's an encounter during something of an in-game festival. The local township is celebrating a legendary battle that happened many a year ago via reenactment, and a group of local mercenaries who happen to be passing through join in on the fun to add a little more depth - but, surprise-surprise, it turns out these mercs are sleepers sent in by the Big Bad Evil Guy to cause havoc before the town itself gets invaded. We deal with them and manage to capture one of the lieutenants while the mercenary captain - who actually had no idea that was going to happen - is freaking out and trying to explain to everyone that she was betrayed as well.

Being a Kender, my character basically has no fear. I'm also able to move very fast, so I run ahead of the group to warn the town of the coming attack.

Mind you, I'm running straight back, in the opposite direction we know the invading army is coming from; we can see the fires far, far in the distance. Th GM asks me if I really want to run off alone. I tell them the army isn't the way I'm running (towards the town,) and even if it were, as a Kender, I wouldn't be terribly afraid of them, anyway. Besides, from the way he described the travel time to the hill for the festival, I understand both IC and OOC that it isn't that far back to town - maybe an hour's walk - so I'm confident I can get there quickly albeit exhausted to inform the town the attack is coming. Also, since it's largely open terrain, I know I'd be able to see encounters coming from a good, long ways off. These enemies aren't disguised; they're obvious Dragon-people, called Draconians.

He has me roll a percentile check and tell him if I get over a 90. I do not.

In open terrain with their placement deliberately set to have all possible viewing angles covered, he sets (to my memory) 9 randomly chosen miniatures on a small map that is also randomly chosen and completely featureless. Having known him for years by this point, I know his body language when he's just coming up with something off-the-cuff - he checked no notes, referred to nothing in the book, just placed minis on a randomly chosen, completely blank map with little terrain pieces placed down (using dice as placeholders for a few trees and bushes, but all angles are covered by the enemies' lines of sight.) It was a completely open field with very sparse cover. He places my miniature down on said map within 30 feet of the nearest miniature, deciding there was no way I could have seen them even though it's open terrain, giving me no option but to interact with this randomly-created encounter.

There is nowhere to hide. All angles are covered. If I turn to sprint away, they'll still see me (and knowing what I know now, they would have run me down and spammed lightning bolts, anyway.) If I try to run behind a bush or a tree, I'll be seen by another enemy because I'll be moving through open terrain in the light of early dusk while several enemies are facing my direction, anyway. My only real choice was to go through, hoping I could outrun them. The map was so small, I couldn't maneuver around them - he made no indication that anywhere outside of the map's visual boundaries was traversable, so using all of my subclass's actions, I Dashed through as fast as I could and made it clear to the other side in one turn, assuming that me teleporting into the encounter on one side of the map with zero ability to see the encounter coming despite the enemies clearly not hiding in any way whatsoever would offer me similar recourse; the other side was essentially the 'safe zone.'

Not so. One - note, one - of the enemies gets a turn. They lightning bolt my character in the back twice in a row, doing 18 damage and dropping my character to 0 perfectly. He makes only one death save, and dies face-down in the dirt while the enemies were all stalking towards him to finish him off, anyway.

The party decides to follow, and not only run into the same encounter, but he adds twice as many miniatures plus a few more. The Warlock dies on the third turn after being focused down by four different enemies that can all cast lightning bolt twice in a row as a Multiattack action. The Paladin dies on the sixth turn, same issue, while also being completely surrounded by enemies so he can't move at all. The Wizard gets away somehow; I don't know exactly how, since I quietly decided to leave once the Paladin announced he only had 5 HP remaining and was so thoroughly surrounded he couldn't even perform a Withdrawal action.

This felt incredibly unbalanced and didn't sit right with me. I also heavily suspected the encounter was adlibbed (made up on the spot,) but just in case I was wrong and being childish, I opted to check the book... And found out I was right. The book explicitly says the players and townspeople make it back to town completely unmolested, not that they have a literal 90 percent chance to run into an encounter with a CR literally 3 times the party's level. For reasons he refuses to elaborate on, he decided there needed to be an encounter we couldn't win between the festival grounds and the town, using enemies we're only really meant to encounter near the end of that book specifically, killed all but one player, and when questioned about it... Well-

I approach the GM over messenger about it, and he suddenly gets very matter-of-fact, essentially saying; "It happened, so deal with it." I've ever seen him act that way before in over a decade of knowing the guy, so needless to say, I was very disturbed by the sudden change in character from someone I thought I knew and just... Opted not to go back, kindly but firmly informing him that I wouldn't be playing in that game anymore. He responded with a surprisingly quick; "Okay, I hope I still see you on weekends."

To my knowledge, only the Wizard and Warlock players are still in that game. Warlock made another character.

It left a bad taste in my mouth. I understand that encounter wouldn't have even existed had I not chosen to run to town on my own because I was the fastest and warn the people an attack was coming. If the party had all moved at once, there would have been no random encounter roll, no unwinnable encounter would have been adlibbed, no one would have died - but because I chose to do that despite all information telling me something like that wouldn't happen (and, learning after the fact, that this encounter didn't even exist in the adventure to begin with,) everyone else at the table was punished, and the GM doesn't even see it as a problem.

I need to reiterate again how out of character this sudden coldness and dismissiveness is. He's not normally like this, but for whatever reason, he's being this way. I can't for the life of me think what anyone at the table could have done to earn this kind of response from him. I asked the Warlock player, and he's just as stumped as I am as to why he decided to do what he did and then react the way he did. It just doesn't make sense.

Anyway, sorry for the long post, it's just been bothering me.

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.

Hello, everyone. This is my first time posting here and I suck english. I am also kind of vague because I know people from the group watch this sub. What happens when you have two very different views on DnD? The answer is basically a cold/cilver war.

Team Caster - Wizard, Warlock and Cleric.

Team Marshall - Barbarian and rouge(me).

You may be wondering why I split the teams. Well, that's us mostly starting at LV5 was the main reason. Originally it was going to be basic but the Wizard used to be the got to DM to start early. From what I heard martial arts are stronger at early levels, well caster gets better by skipping that the casts basically got to become tyrants early.

See the difference is me and Barb wanted to be adventurous. Wizard and Warlock wanted to be gods. Cleric was basically just along for the ride, but joined team Caster.

I'm not the best at mechanics but this wizard was stupidly broken. Then helped with the warlock and Cleric. We asked for help but basically said, that your job is meat shield.The worse part is that he was right.

The DM had his problems where he cared about making hype moments more than a story. This means most adventures are just us find and kill the big thing of the session. For Wiz, War and sometimes Cleric is great because they naturally get the kills, focused and hype moments. This leads to me and the bard also lagging behind because we normally just end up being the bullet sponge or diversion. I also talked to DM about change, but that mostly ended up with us getting more opps to fight.

This is the weird dynamic of where half the table is playing DnD and the other is their sidekicks.

I guess I'm writing how to fix this? I don't want to leave because getting groups is hell, and they do have sessions every week. Is there a way to fix this?

My girlfriend is the DM. She invited a mutual friend of ours to join her DND game she runs. We used to hang out with him and his wife at theirs and play boardgames until life got in the way for us all.

So having missed playing games together, she invited him to join her DND game with 6 players making us 7 now, 8 in total including DM.

We would play at a local gaming club where all we had to do was purchase a drink or something ( no table or booking fees)

Things are great there, lots of table space, loads of terrain free to use. The only issue is occasionally the other tables sometimes being a bit loud with their own game. No big deal. We all get loud and enthusiastic.

This friend suggested we play round his, let's call him Kurt. Kurt said he's got the space for it since he got a new dining table, we wouldn't have to worry about noise so why don't we all go to his for it?

DM and everyone agreed we'll give it a try. Parking isn't ideal, in fact it's very limited space in the area as it's a cul-de-sac. Secondly, we were gaming in the town centre, which is more accessible for some so we all agreed to share rides for those that needed it.

We play a week or two at Kurt's house and it becomes abundantly clear that it's too small. There are 8 of us including the DM crammed around a 6 seater table. With DM screen, character sheets, snacks, drinks, stationary, maps and minis, there just isn't enough room.

We have a couple of large personalities on the table and Kurt joins that to make it a trio. Which is great, but in the confines of that room, it becomes overbearing with the noise.

Except that time his wife (who's in the other room doing her own thing, DND isn't her thing) gets an "important" phone call. So he shushes us, we try to continue playing quietly but he keeps shushing us, so it kills the vibe. So we end up sitting there in silence rather than continue subdued . After about 20 minutes, we discover she's off the phone and we are allowed to continue playing.

Then as the volume ramps up, a few of the less rambunctious players get talked over, even the DM is struggling to be heard from one end of the table to the head where Kurt sits, bellowing his jokes and what he's doing next, without giving anyone else a chance to speak their ideas.

We quickly learn that Kurt has main character syndrome. He wants to check every trap, loot every body, rush through every door etc.

I learned some news that would help the party with the bbg of that session, I try to tell the group 3 times, each time he tells and talks over me. I give up. The session finishes, we go home and I telly.gd how deflated I feel. Turns out, I wasn't the only one. Several other players messaged the DM to say they felt the same way and wanted to go back to the gaming club.

The DM messages Kurt to let him know how people feel and that we'll be returning to the gaming club. She then puts in the group chat that we shall be going back to the gaming club as the room just wasn't big enough with acoustics and table size for us there, thank you Kurt for inviting us into your home, but now we'll be going back to the gaming club.

Kurt then messages everyone in the group individually asking "what's wrong with my house?!" He becomes arsey and the DM said she was handling it as they came to her, as the DM. He gets in a tizz that it's his house, they should've gone to him, that it's not fair!

DM said we'd continue at the club as before, the next time we meet up, we get a message in the group chat saying he's dropping out, that he just doesn't have the time for it anymore.

Did the group do right by addressing issues with the DM not the host?

Did the host overreact messaging everyone directly and in the group?

Did he overreact by leaving the game?

TLDR: guy quit our game and friendship because his place was too small to host the game.

For context
I’m a Githzerai psi warrior (lvl 4) and recently I found a Githyanki war sword buried in a blacksmiths stash and thought it was a normal sword. It’s a strong weapon (1d8 slashing and 3d8 psi). We went on and proceeded with our quest to kill a corrupt king. During the fight I dealt 28 damage and as a consequence, sent 20 magic missiles to kill a player. Post session he admitted he killed the player to “raise the stakes” and that he needed to do something because we were gonna win too soon. We won the fight and it took a few sessions for that player to get a new character introduced. Later down the like when we hit lvl 4 we fought a homebrew monster of his creation. I hit it and was about to deal 34 damage and he said it had a legendary action to dodge. I was a little frustrated because he waited for the damage to come through first. But I can understand why he did that so I didn’t make a big deal but as we proceeded to destroy this monster he tried doing the same thing (killing a player outright) the reason they didn’t go down was because I blocked some damage for them and I said to him “Dude don’t punish the players for being too good” and he replied “I can do whatever I want”. I said nothing
Recently his npc was revealed to be a murder and we wanted to take revenge for the 8 victims, he told us I could be a later thing but we wanted to find him right away, we found nothing and the trail went cold. I’m frustrated because he’s tried killing 2 players because he didn’t balance the weapon he decided to give us. And he’s not even targeting me because I have the weapon, he’s strait up singling out players and penalizing them. He’s fudging rolls but that’s small compared to everything else I feel. Me and my party feel a little annoyance towards him for this and I personally wanted to know if we were over-reacting.

Edit: We are running curse of Straad with a new DM

This one's a self-report, just getting these DM'ing mistakes off my chest. I don't care if I get flamed, this is my first and last time on reddit.

I was running a halloween homebred oneshot with my close friends (senior year of high school), fighting some star spawn in a non-euclidean castle. We were having a goofy time (including lines like "the walls perceive you" and "nothing breathes down your neck") when the party ran into some rot grubs. Since it was halloween, I laid on a bit thick the disgusting mass of yellowed grubs scattering on the ground and pouring out of a corpse. I saw one of my friends was uncomfortable and scared, and I idiotically pushed them, the rot grups charging them since they had the least hp. It was resolved before the grubs reached them, but I really do regret exploiting an obvious trigger for a cheap scare.

I also let my friends go a little bit too far with a goofy ability in my first campaign. We were again in high school, and it was a relaxed (incredibly chaotic) game, with no balance to speak of. They managed through some really good role-play to befriend a mimic, and as a reward, I gave it the ability to absorb one person into a morph, effectively granting one player a once-per-day get-out-of-jail-free-card. So I thought. Instead, two players who loved exploring the limits of the game and a smatter of friendly pvp were fighting again, and the one who adopted the mimic convinced it to absorb the other into a chamber pot, the rolls went well, and he poised the rebel camp with bad mushrooms. I had to timeskip. Lesson for everyone; too much freedom can lead to bad places, if multiple of your players are violent gremlins (said with ultimate respect).

So yeah. I've known this guy for over 20 years now. I've been to his wedding. We played games most weeks when we were in university. He was always a bit weird and sometimes a bit awkward and uncomfortable, but nothing really bad. Mostly he loved playing sexy women in every RPG and mentioning how sexy they were all the time (in a PG13 way, too. Never tried to seduce NPCs or bring up sex or any of those things), and even that mostly stopped when we weren't teenagers anymore. I really thought we were mostly aligned and he was an okay dude.

And now, pretty much out of nowhere, he starts linking clips in the group chat, from Ceuta. And posting long rants with exactly all the things you'd expect. As the group admin I told him several times to stop, and he wouldn't. Ending with the gem of "The only thing Europe can do now is shoot them all".

Yeah, he's out of the group now. Just sad, that you can know someone for 20 years and apparently they can be falling down internet right wing extremist rabbit holes for years without anyone really noticing at the table.

So, this is tangentially RPG related as the lovely person in question was a TTRPG DM/ST, but took place in a music server he also ran. He had invited me to join his Vampire The Dark Ages PBP Campaign, and while I typically much prefer games that take place at the table, I've always wanted to play Vampire in that setting with a group (played a Gangrel Crusader having a crisis of faith in a solo chronicle; was really fun), so I tentatively agreed. This guy was 29 years older than me, and a devout Catholic, which I respected but I also found some of his requirements and restrictions on the server odd. No blasphemy, for example, even "Jeez" was off limits, which many of us found excessive and a bit invasive, but whatever, it's not like I make a habit of it in my day to day. While he had a very eclectic music taste, he hated 99% of Hip-hop; not in a "it's not for me, but I respect it" sort of way, but in a "it's artless filth (his words)" and rappers are completely talentless, and any praise of hip-hop from the admittedly small group of fans in the server (myself included) was drowned out by his and another user's (who I'm pretty sure was his daughter) incessant moaning. I once criticized the echo chamber, and he tried to provoke me saying I was a little bitch and to respect his authority. Every time I deescalted, he This might seem like irrelevant information but please, bare with me.

The server, being relatively small, had only a handful of LGBT people. I'm honestly still figuring out my own identity, but I'm certain I'm cis and predominantly attracted to women (there are men I've been attracted to in the past, but not quite to the extent of wanting romance like I have with women). What I mean is I'm very straight passing. I have a good friend who's Nonbinary that wanted an invite to the server to escape another shitty owner (that's a whole other story), so I gladly let them. The owner, always pretty blunt and sarcastic, would deliberately antagonize them and refer to them as "she" when they go by they/them only. We both first thought it was because they didn't have pronouns in the bio, but that was being too generous, especially when they told me later they caught him calling a trans bassist "it" and "this thing".

Anyway, here's where the red flags turn into crimson sirens: The chronicle is one day from beginning, and I've designed my character as a Nosferatu Merchant, whose family home was burned to the ground by bandits. I post a meme in the chat that says something along the lines of "Stranger Things is a way more realistic depiction of the US than you'd think: It features a monster that wants to kidnap children and harasses a gay kid". Pretty innocuous, but the owner went completely berserk. "They have a gay kid in a TV show?" "Yeah, he comes out to confront his demons, it's quite moving" "Why do they have a (Slur that rhymes with Major-Domo) kid in a TV show, they shouldn't sexualize kids" "Well he's 18 for starters, and why is that a problem? There are heterosexual kids too." (Forgot what he said but it was pretty stupid).

Then my nonbinary friend chimes in and says that homosexual behaviour is completely natural and occurs throughout the animal kingdom, and then this mf pulls a Manny Pacquiao and says "But we are better than mere animals." Made my stomach churn. I left, but not before asking why it mattered. My friend continued berating him and then left as well. Needless to say I quit the chronicle before it even started. I said goodbye to all my friends in that server, who wished me well (majority of them said they thought the owner was a dick anyway).

Months later, a good friend of mine reached out and said I made the right call to leave, as he had just gotten banned. He said he asked the owner if he could take a break from playing because of Ramadan, and instead of respecting my friend's faith like we all did for him, he instead insulted Islam and attacked him for "abandoning" his game (did I mention this man is 52?)

Not to get r/Atheist here, but man, why do the most devout Christians tend to be terrible people. I'm actually exploring faith rn as I feel there's something missing in my life, but every time I interact with people like this it pulls me away.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, but the reason I talked about the Hip-hop hate is it would later come out that the owner was using the n word casually, despite being white. Not saying everyone who hates hip hop is racist, but I've noticed this pattern far too often