Of course one complains about one’s DM in private, but it is not often that one gets the opportunity to complain about a DM in public. Today I joined a new role-playing group (one of these pub-based ones) and went along for my first ever session, proudly clutching my newly-created character, and my session was completely ruined by the DM-ing. So badly ruined, in fact, because the DM kicked me out after 2 hours.
In a nutshell: our party went the wrong way through the dungeon and ended up in the final battle way before we were ready. My character was the first to be attacked and died instantly. After the survivors ran away and the battle was over, I was told that, since I had died, I should leave.
No shit.
Of course, it didn’t happen quite this simply. The DM had 2 opportunities to prevent us reaching the final battle early, he had an opportunity to prevent the battle going quite as badly as it had, and he had ample opportunities after the battle to provide me with a new character to play. But he didn’t, because he was completely unwilling to deviate from the adventure-as-written. That is shitty DM-ing!
In detail, the mistakes ran in this order:
- I suggest searching a little shrine outside our target, the main temple, thinking it might have a secret tunnel to the temple. It doesn’t, but has a teleportation room behind the altar which teleports anyone who steps into it to the most deadly level of the main temple. Even though I did a really good search check and I’m an elven wizard, I get no hint of magic or risk, and there is no triggering device. You just step into the alcove and you’re gone. The DM doesn’t bother changing this to include a triggering device, of course – why should he care if a 1st level elf character gets teleported to the Room of Death? The obvious triggering device – a holy symbol of the religion in question – would have been sufficient for us to know that there was a secret route there but that we couldn’t use it…
- So everyone followed me through the teleporter, into the deepest level beneath the temple (we didn’t know this of course) and we were immediately attacked by 2 Ogres who we slew very tidily. To slay them, our Half-Orc Barbarian had to go into a frenzy so, being a Half-Orc barbarian, he decided to charge off to make the most of his frenzy after he had killed the Ogres. This is good role-playing, folks! While everyone else looted corpses, I followed the barbarian in case he ran into trouble. We reached a trapdoor in a side corridor, which (unbeknownst to us) was the escape trapdoor from the room where the Head Priest of Evil and his Bastard Skeleton Construct were hiding out. Again, here the DM could have stopped our Progress to Destruction by making the escape route locked from above (hardly unusual!) He didn’t, so the Barbarian did what a frenzied barbarian would do, and hauled himself through to attack the occupants. I did what any stupid elf would do, and followed to try and help…
- Instead of finding a way for the other characters to join us immediately, the DM followed the adventure-as-written and had them all stop in the middle of the previous room to communicate with a ghost that provided some helpful clues. This delayed them all long enough for our Date with Doom to proceed casually…
- Back in the Room of Destiny, the Barbarian had managed to haul open the trapdoor and climb into the room, in the process knocking over the Head Priest, who was standing on it (incidentally, another very good way to prevent us entering in the first place…) He followed this up with a good solid blow to the head, but even though prone and stabbed the priest managed to reel off a (successful) Hold Person, paralysing the only fighter in the room. Seeing this, I cast my only offensive spell (Colour Spray, which hurls lots of bright colours everywhere) and ran behind a pillar to avoid magic. The DM asked me if I would like to hide but, seeing I had just brought attention to myself with a big rainbow spell, I said no. Of course my spell failed (stupid ADnD spell rules) so the Priest wasn’t stunned, so he called forth his Emergency Guardian, a massive four armed skeletal construct that was in the pillar I was hiding behind. With nobody else in the room or moving, this construct naturally attacked me first, and since I was a level 1 wizard it sliced me and diced me.
- Now, of course, the remainder of the party reached the room but because some were in plate armour they couldn’t climb through the trapdoor quickly and took some rounds to gather. In the meantime this crazy Construct stalked around the room and killed off both NPCs. The Barbarian escaped his paralysis and killed the priest, and we discovered that the only weapon which could harm the construct was in the possession of one of the dead NPCs. So, having nothing else to do, the Rogue looted the body of the Priest while everyone else desperately tried to find a way to deal with the Construct. Here were 2 more opportunities to end the battle early – the Priest’s death could have disabled the construct, or he could have had a magic control device on his body which the rogue could destroy. But neither condition was in the adventure-as-written so… everyone fled, in 2 different directions
- Once everyone was safe out of the room, I asked the DM if I might have another character to play. The other players pointed out to him that since the Priest had died, all of the monks from the temple who he had specially enchanted to be his prisoners would be free of his spell and I could play one of them. He said no, and I said “so what? I just go home now?” and he said “Yep”.
So I left, 2 hours into a 4 or 5 hour session. I have never seen a player kicked out of a game for dying before. I had barely taken part, this was my first session in this new group, and multiple plot junctions where my (and the NPCs) deaths could have been averted were ignored because the DM refused to change the adventure-as-written. I can’t imagine that he conceived of such a poor opinion of me in just 2 hours that he really needed to work that hard to get rid of me. He went against the wishes of the whole party in denying me a new character (he even said “I don’t accept your argument” as if it were a debate about the damage a longbow does or something). Everyone else was getting along fine. I really do think this was just a case of bad DM-ing, combined with a good dose of good old-fashioned bullying control freak.
This is the second pub-based rpg group I have tried in London, and the other one is hardly going much better. It is a sad irony to me that having arrived in a city where I will finally get an opportunity to experience a variety of role-playing, I can’t because the nerds in question are so horribly socially maladjusted. I suppose there is, however, no option but to persevere…
Compromise and Conceit 
September 1, 2008 at 10:35 pm
That was…. bad!
Agreed on persevering. … Or do what so many bullied RPGers that decided to keep going and become a DM.
Thanks for sharing this…
Gah!
Pity you leave so far away from me… I’d have giving you a mercy game where you’de have been badass for a few hours to make up for that slug of a DM 🙂
September 1, 2008 at 10:45 pm
haha! Thanks for the vote of support.
The sad thing is, I’ve been DM ing for years and have gone back to playing so I can remind myself of what playing is like. I have learnt a few useful things about my own mistakes already, but mostly what I am discovering is that there are an awful number of nasty people at these pub-based role-playing groups.
In the long term I’m pretty confident the solution will be to find a decent group of players and go back to DMing, but in the meantime…
September 1, 2008 at 11:41 pm
I’m just sorry you had to deal with that. I’ve had bad DMs before, but this is worse than anything I’ve ever experienced. I hope things improve for you!
September 1, 2008 at 11:54 pm
So do I! I think they will though. I have noticed that in all these groups, there are 3 or 4 reasonable people and one wanker. So surely I can find a group without a wanker soon.
I had bad experience with a player in another group last week. This week I am trying a different group with marginally more socially adjusted people. At least in these pub-based groups one can shop around!
The real worry is that I am in London, and one notices a lot of rudeness and general sullenness in London. If the problem turns out to be consistent because it is related to the fact that the people I’m dealing with are Londoners, well then … in that case I’m going to be in trouble…
September 2, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Well, hopefully it’s not Londoners…for your sake 🙂
June 2, 2009 at 11:43 am
Hmmm… alas, the weak link in role-playing is always the people who play it: a social game predominately played by the inherently and chronically unsocialble. I’ve not gamed in years and although I’d like to give it another go sometime, I’m sceptical about my chances of finding a bunch of players and/or a ref who I’d actually want to play with. I think my solution is to hoodwink people from without the hobby… but that’s easier said than done thanks to the terrible rep of gamers…
June 2, 2009 at 9:15 pm
That’s exactly what I’ve always done – find players from amongst my friends. But after 3 or so months of trying I found a group here, dropped the guy who tried to start a fight with me, and now I have an awesome group who are fun to play with and fun to hang out with. Yesterday we went to a burlesque show, tomorrow is Terminator, and on the weekend they were at a party with me – it’s the best I’ve ever had!
February 27, 2010 at 1:22 pm
[…] I moved to England, and had within 1 year three really bad role-playing experiences – shitty DMing and shitty playing. Two of these experiences occurred in a story-free, sandbox type gaming […]
March 5, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Let me get this straight. You are throwing a hissy fit because the DM didn’t bend over backwards to save your characters from their own stupidity?
This isn’t a case of bad DM, this is a case of bad players. Players who enter a game – a game! – and expect to be granted a victory as a matter of course.
You had ample opportunities to leave the level you were in, escape from battles, and regroup. You elected not to take them, and paid the price. Stop blaming your own failures on others.
March 6, 2010 at 12:33 am
No, having a hissy fit because he didn’t let me roll a new character even though there were freed slaves wandering around from which one could have been drawn.
Also, what is the “failure” in opening a secret door? This is the sum total of our “stupidity”? Prey tell, what is the smart thing to have done?
Also, are you aware of the old adage that there are no winners in this game? Your stupidity is crowned only by your inability to read.
October 10, 2011 at 6:18 am
(The shitty DM here) – @faustus – I would have let you bring in a new PC once the battle was over. You may not have noticed, or have immediately forgotten, but at the time the fight was still going on.
October 10, 2011 at 8:27 am
There weren’t any freed slaves BTW, the elven ‘siswah’ were still mind-controlled by a trio of incorporeal witches allied to the Rahib, the dead BBEG; defeating them was the climax of the module.
October 10, 2011 at 8:18 pm
You never said anything along the lines of “you can make a character after the battle is over,” S’mon. This is because the battle was over. I explicitly asked you if your refusal meant I wouldn’t be able to rejoin the adventure at any point, and you said “that’s right.” Furthermore,everyone else asked you to let me make a character, so they obviously weren’t breaking their combat to wait. You’re actually lying about what happened here, plain and simple.
October 11, 2011 at 7:41 am
Reading this account, I do think there was a heavy dose of player foolishness involved in the deaths here, setting aside the issue of what happened with making a character.
Why did the half-orc go charging off hell-for-leather? That is NOT good role playing in this type of game; it just causes trouble, as you discovered.
And why did you try and help him, since he was being stupid?
It’s clearly a clash of play styles, which is why establishing what kind of game is being run is so important. I am totally fine with S’mon’s behaviour here (leaving aside the character generation thing); it sounds like he was playing the role of DM-as-neutral-arbiter to a ‘t’. He perhaps should have been clearer about this before you joined the game, so you knew what to expect (e.g. that his role would not be protecting you from your own mistakes). But otherwise I don’t have a problem with it.
October 11, 2011 at 11:21 pm
The half orc went charging off because he was in berserk mode, and chasing the enemy: I think at the time everyone thought this was just a reasonable piece of role-playing. As for trying to help him – we were working as a team, right? And team members look after each other. Plus, this kind of dramatic tension is what makes gaming fun.
I have never role-played with anyone who felt any kind of need to establish what kind of game was being run before we started, like some kind of weird job interview: part of the job of the GM is to assess what players want as they go and either a) adapt or b) explain how things work in their games or preferably c) both.
Usually people tend to be a little forgiving about these sorts of misunderstandings in the first place (remember we had met for two hours when I died). They do things like say “on this occasion I’m going to do blah but usually you should know that’s not the style of game I run” or they give you a warning like “if you keep running down that hallway being crazy you’re probably going to get everyone killed and be unpopular.” Even if we had gone through the GM-as-job-interview process there’s no way we would necessarily be able to adapt to it in the first 2 hours in any case. And then, not letting someone make a new character because they died under the ruthless thumb of a GM they’d met two hours ago? That’s called “bullying.”
Of course if I knew my GM’s style well and expected it and he let me do this, then fine. But it is absolutely not cool to run a “neutral arbiter” style game and then not let people roll up new characters after they die.
I don’t believe, anyway, that this GM was a “neutral arbiter”: he was a tyrant. There was a telling moment of this at the beginning of the game, when I was rolling up my character: I asked if my PC could have a familiar that wasn’t in the rulebooks (I think from memory that it was a cloud of dragonflies). I made it clear that I didn’t expect this familiar to have any special powers, it would be exactly the same as one of the familiars in the book in all practical ways, it would just look different – I made this very clear. The GM refused, and I could only choose a familiar from the book. To me that is the equivalent of not being allowed to wear a brown cloak. It’s petty tyranny at best.
Also, what element of “Player foolishness” enters into point 3? That’s GM obstinacy, plain and simple. As is refusing to put a bolt on the top side of the trapdoor.
October 23, 2011 at 10:38 pm
[…] comments to my post on shitty GMing it has been suggested that the problem simply came down to a GM who was running the game as a […]