We've all had bad gaming experiences (i.e. the Guy Who Doesn't Bathe is a fondly remembered group experience), but which ones have you specifically had about DS?
Incompetent DMs that ran it like it was generic D&D or even FR?
One time...we used crit tables and a player playing Sheikenhein the mul gladiator rolled a crit and punched the guy in the leg...it was enough to kill his adversary...not knowing what to do I said, "You punch his leg off!" that line lives in infamy in my group.
Another character Talamon, was a wiley elf or half-elf trader, he got A LOT of money..I don't remember how, but somehow I gave it to him. And instead of allowing him to be filthy rich, I had it stolen by an evil bard. I was a jerk.
I've never had bad player experiences..just bad DMing.
Ah, and in one of the cases where I was a DM, a player accidentally killed Daskinor...
Lastard
So at his next proficiency gain, he specialized in "dart". With mul stats. (5d4 +2 for strength I believe.) And I hadn't seen the errata limiting thrown weapon's strength bonus to base die. (1d4+4 instead of the 1d4+ 12? I allowed.) with the 4 thrown per round (iirc) he basically walked through the villians and monsters. And since obsidian weapons were all over the place, he'd deliberately break weapons for more ammo.
I learned a valuable lesson that day.
When giving introductions to each other one of the players described his character as wearing 'defiler robes'. Sort of killed the mystery there. He also later went on to wear desk drawers on his feet while walking down an ancient stone hallway, which summoned a gigantic silt worm.
I forged ahead, but a character died while the group was underground, far from any civilization. Without much foresight or imagination I allowed the player to make a Dray character, but limited him from taking a 'common' or 'trade' tongue language.
Yeah, the group slaughtered him in 1 round with no hessitation.
All in all I guess I achieved some small form of paranoia and general fear of death, but the session was a one-off that was never to be revisited. I know it was a lot of lack of preparation, but it was also lack of interest (sadly) in the setting.
When playing "Freedom" two of my players (One of which ironically was named, in real life, Freedom) decided that they needed supplies to build a way out of the slave pits. So the Bard would use Charm Person on someone, lure them into a shanty, and then the F/P Half Giant would sit on the shanty. They stripped the body and shanty for parts, made weapons out of them, and traded the Thri-kreen PC and NPC the meat in exchange for their food. These two repeated this process twice more before they got into trouble doing it to an overseer. By that time the whole party had weapons made out of humanoid bones, shanty bits, or both as a result of one of the other characters both having weaponmaking and weapon improvisation.
A rainbow servant that could spontaneously cast 9th level divine spells at 13th level, a cerebremancer that overchannels like mad, and fights that are 10 encounter levels higher than our party level later, the game has become nothing but a farce. We didn't care for the setting, we wantonly dispatched both veiled alliance and templar "bystanders," and the DM was forced to so obviously adjust the numbers behind the screen.
Things came to an abrupt end when the DM tried to "have Rajaat kill us so that we could be revived as his forced slaves." (back then, we couldn't even tell the difference between Rajaat and Borys - we just knew that they were both creepy-strong, and were trying to kill each other) We barely survived the surprise round, and when it was my turn, I decided to hit him with a save-or-die. I overchanneled like I never overchanneled before, and even burnt up spell slots to power up my psi attack (I was using an obscure Dragon mag PrC that blended arcane and psionic). In the end, my powergaing got it up to DC 52. The DM rolled a natural 5 on the saving throw.
Rajaat passed.
We were summarily killed, and were talking to Rajaat as spectres when we walked out of the game.
To be fair, the fault was from both sides. We had a big DM-vs-player approach to the game at the time, and he did dare us to powergame. And now that I'm familiar with Dark Sun lore, the DM must have been desperate if he threw Rajaat at a level 15 party of super-munchkins. Nevertheless, the game sucked, and that was that.
I vowed to DM a proper game of Dark Sun one of these days. With the release of 4E Dark Sun, I hope that time is near. The same set of players have matured, and now we play to tell a story, not to try and defeat each other.
And maybe, just maybe, we'll get to level 30 and have a "fair fight" with Rajaat.