Had a bad experience. We're not sure how to handle it -- would appreciate some input. - Downloaded from the Wizards Community, all coding removed by Solauren

Had a bad experience. We're not sure how to handle it -- would appreciate some input.

Post/Author/DateTime Post
#1
milkducks
Sep 11, 2010 22:43:05 So let me start off by saying I'm the de facto DM for our gaming circle, and I'm fine with that. But only recently, I realized that I'm 26 years old and I haven't been able to actually play D&D with my friends since High School. The guy who owns our local gaming store (who's actually a good friend of ours as well) said he'd run a game if we were interested, and of course we were -- so our first game was tonight.

He told us we'd be running a really "heavy roleplaying" game, and we're all totally cool with that. My best friend, my wife and I all rolled up characters and intended to have them already know each other when the game started. We're a human fighter (me), an elven seeker (friend) and a gnome bard (wife). The two guys that will also be playing are a rogue and a cleric (no other information available). I told the DM really early on that the three of us wanted to set up a guild of sorts in whatever town we find ourselves in the most. Kind of like a mercenary adventuring company that we run a bit like any other business. We attract fighters and hire them out to go out on dangerous missions, but we also help protect the town and we use our ritual magics to help ward off enemies and create feasts for festivals and stuff -- we really just want to be involved in the game world, and establish something of value that npcs can see and interact with.

He said that sounded great.

So we went to play tonight, and the other 2 guys (cleric and rogue) didn't show up. Fine, that's cool. The three of us can work together well anyway. We fully expected to start our session the way D&D usually starts: everybody rolls into town and heads to the inn or something, where they get wind of some adventure or another. Instead, this is what we got:

We wake up from a hazy dream all shackled up in a slave ship, next to hundreds of other slaves. It's dark, but we can see each other. The DM explains that we'll have to "roleplay our way out of the shackles". My buddy asks the slavers where they are, and what's going on, and they ignore him. I sit back and wait for more information to come in, because I don't even know where I am. My wife asks a slaver what's going on, and he hits her in the face and says, "Shut your mouth, bitch!".

Then some deva god-monk or something walks down the stairs and magically takes our chains off. No explaination or anything. Just takes them off. So much for roleplaying our way out of the shackles. The DM then says they're lining everyone up and branding their hands with torches. I just started this game, and I for one don't want my character's hands burned with a slave symbol, so I bull rush my way past them and rush up the stairs onto the deck, only to find out we're in the astral sea or something. It's all outer-space or whatever up on the deck, and I'm surrounded by slavers, and I basically have no choice but to be branded as a slave.

Which really bothers me.

My wife ends up sneaking her way past everyone, and actually makes it off the ship without being branded. Good for her! Except they're handing everyone back their gear as we get off the ship, and checking everyone's hands, so if she doesn't get back in line and get branded, she can't get all her equipment back. Weak.

After we're off the ship, we get sent in opposite directions by the slavers. That's right -- the DM split up the party ... My buddy and I went north, and my wife went west. At this point, we're about 20 minutes into gameplay. We played for another 2 hours, and she never ever got to do another thing. The DM focused entirely on my friend and I, and didn't say anything to my wife. But anyway, on with the story: my buddy and I get sent down the street to a big fort, and on the way, we stop people on the streets and ask where we are: we either get totally ignored, or told to go away. Which sucks.

He puts us in the fort, and we finally gather from some of the other slaves (there's like 150 or so slaves there) that we'll have to fight for our freedom. Okay, I can accept that. We wait in this place for 9 days. Nine whole days, and nothing happens until they finally come get us. They lead the two of us to a big fighting pit and say we have to fight to the death: we refuse. Our characters have a strong bond, and we're not about to kill each other in a pit. They say that's fine: one of us will fight, and if he wins, we both go free, but if he dies, we both die. We decide he should be the one who fights, since he's a Bloodbond elf Seeker, and he'd be almost impossible to lock down. The DM tosses down a giant troll figurine, and says to roll initiative.

We're level 5 by the way. I'm familiar with this enemy: it's a level 9 brute.

The DM says to roll initiative, and my buddy says he's going to roll a quick Nature check to see for sure what he's up against. He rolled a 28 on his Nature Monster Knowledge check, which means he knows basically everything about this thing. The DM brushed it off and said, "You know it's a troll", at which point we said, "According to the book, he knows the creature name, the type, all of its powers, resistances and vulnerabilities". The DM said, "Who's running this game", to which we replied, "the rules are running the game, lol".

He actually got mad, and acted like we were pulling out some rules-lawyer garbage when in actuality ... that's how you use that skill. That's not some arbitrary rule we pulled out to take the fun out of his encounter, that's how you use Nature Monster Knowledge checks. The guy's an elven seeker with a super-high wisdom and an amazing Nature check -- he's seasoned. He knows what he's up against. That's the purpose of the roll.

Anyway.

So he naturally gets his ass handed to him. I mean my buddy can't even land a hit on the troll. When the monster bloodies him, I jump into the ring and charge it. I figure, what the hell, I'm gonna die if my friend dies anyway, so I might as well go in and help him and we'll suffer the consequences later. I think the DM realizes at this point that he put my friend up against something he had no chance of beating, so we started noticing he was fudging the results of his dice. Which is fine by us -- we killed it in a few rounds.

The crowd starts cheering for us, and a little 11-year-old boy is really happy and throwing his hands up and stuff. The DM has a guard go over to this kids, take out a sword, and cut his throat. Then he has two guys come drag him up the stairs like a piece of meat. A dude outside sees the kid and says, "throw him to the dogs". My buddy and I are good characters, and we get pissed. My friend fires an arrow through this guy's skull, and we're fully-prepared at this point to go toe-to-toe with anyone who wants to fight us. But nobody comes. The people all clear our like nothing happened ... so we just leave too.

We end up walking out of down and we discover it's like an island in the middle of the astral sea. If we want off, we'll have to find some other way out. We go back into town, and it's night and nobody is around except for these guards every few blocks. We walk up to one and ask where the hell we are -- because it's been 9 days and we still haven't been told where we are. He doesn't answer any of our questions, and I start getting pissed. I Tide of Iron this guy into the side of a building and shove his face up against the bricks with my shield, and I start really asking questions. The way the DM described it, this guy doesn't even care. It didn't bother him at all that I'm smashing my shield into his teeth for answers.

We literally just walk away from the guard because we couldn't get answers. We go to try to find my wife, who's being held at another fortress. We get there, and the guards won't let us in. They say that we've won our freedom in the fighting pits, but that our friend hasn't, so she either has to fight in the pits or we can buy her freedom -- which is bullshit, because the slavers took all our money. At this point, that magic deva god monk guy shows back up, and basically man-handles the two of us. My buddy shot him point-blank in the face with his bow, and the guy caught the arrow and handed it back to him. I shield feinted and was about to blow my daily to knock the smile off his face, but he just teleported behind me. It was immediately clear that this NPC was invincible. The DM wasn't even looking at my attack rolls; he just had him disappear behind me.

He said we were free, but we couldn't go home. He said we could stay with him if we wanted. We said no. But seriously, what are we supposed to do? We don't know where we are, we have no idea how we got there, all our money's gone, the only person we know is in that fortress and there's an invincible DM-NPC in the way. At this point, I was getting really frustrated, and I said I was going to the docks to kill pirates until I got all our money back, and the DM said I couldn't because I'm good.

Let me break this down for you:

I'm a mercenary captain. My friends and I were captured by slavers. We have no idea how that happened, but all we know is that we were magically asleep and then beaten awake in the belly of some slave ship. When my friend asked what was going on, they beat her up. Then they forced us to be branded with slave symbols on our hands. Then they locked us up for 9 days in some hell hole where the DM described people literally squatting in the corners to do their business. For days we waited while people were taken out a few at a time and killed in barbaric fighting pits. When it was our turn, they wanted me to fight my best friend, and when we refused, he had to fight a troll by himself with both of our lives on the line. Then when we won, they slit the throat of an 11 year old boy for no reason, and fed his body to dogs. Nobody will give us answers. We don't know where we are. We can't go see our friends. And we can't even go stay at an inn because all our money was stolen by slavers.

Don't tell me I can't go kill these people because I'm good. Everything about that situation says I can kill them for what they've done.

That's basically where we ended the session. None of us had any fun. My wife and I went for a walk with my friend afterword and we all really had a terrible time. None of us want to keep playing, but at the same time, I feel kinda bad. I mean I don't want to be a dick to the DM, who really is our friend as well. I feel like it's obvious that we didn't have a good time, and I don't want to hurt his feelings but ... wow, I mean it was really frustrating. From the very first moment of the game, we had no control over anything. It was like watching a long-ass cutscene. Our skills didn't matter, our attacks didn't matter. He keeps browbeating us to roleplay but nobody will talk to us. My wife got ignored for hours of gameplay.

I mean, I don't know. What do you guys think? How should we handle this situation?
#2
salla
Sep 11, 2010 22:55:21 Show him your post there. It was well-detailed and analytical and seems to cut to the core of the problem nicely. You got railroaded, you got Deus Ex Machina'd, you got alignment-straitjacketted, your abilities were rendered insignificant ...

Don't take this the wrong way, but this sounds so much like a stereotypical bad game part of me can't believe it actually happened. I mean, it's like every bad DM trait came together in one guy, and BY YOUR POWERS COMBINED, I AM CAPTAIN BADGAME!
#3
theunknownreturns
Sep 11, 2010 23:00:59 Get another DM. Simple answer I know.

I've got a system to where we all know how the characters power up and the kinda gear they should be getting. I've got pretty standardized. With this we can each hand off the game to anybody else who has a good story in mind. Its a multi-DM game. If you do it with the idea that you're mercs and eachjob is essentially its own deal then it doesn't matte what happened before or next the current DM can do whatever he wants as long as we stick to the agreed to system.

Your DM sounds like a control freak, and maybe really new. I wouldn't bother to go back honestly, but maybe you can talk to him and fix the situation. I once had a DM who had me shackeled with an army at my cell door and a dragon on the other side. He counted down from 5 and said the dragon ate 'Why didn't you do something?' What was there to do? He talked about jumping in a grate below the floor after I picked the locks. He thought I would do exactly as he would and all the answers were simple. That could be his problem also, he thinks you'll think exactly like him and has the game planned uber hard.
#4
Pashalik_Mons
Sep 12, 2010 1:17:04
Show him your post there. It was well-detailed and analytical and seems to cut to the core of the problem nicely. You got railroaded, you got Deus Ex Machina'd, you got alignment-straitjacketted, your abilities were rendered insignificant ...

Don't take this the wrong way, but this sounds so much like a stereotypical bad game part of me can't believe it actually happened. I mean, it's like every bad DM trait came together in one guy, and BY YOUR POWERS COMBINED, I AM CAPTAIN BADGAME!

I agree with this.

Heavy Roleplaying is great, but Heavy Roleplaying didn't happen there. You guys made characters(presumably well-fleshed out characters, since you were expecting to roleplay), and then you sat down and listened to the DM talk for a few hours.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 milkducks Sep 11, 2010 22:43:05	So let me start off by saying I'm the de facto DM for our gaming circle, and I'm fine with that. But only recently, I realized that I'm 26 years old and I haven't been able to actually play D&D with my friends since High School. The guy who owns our local gaming store (who's actually a good friend of ours as well) said he'd run a game if we were interested, and of course we were -- so our first game was tonight. He told us we'd be running a really "heavy roleplaying" game, and we're all totally cool with that. My best friend, my wife and I all rolled up characters and intended to have them already know each other when the game started. We're a human fighter (me), an elven seeker (friend) and a gnome bard (wife). The two guys that will also be playing are a rogue and a cleric (no other information available). I told the DM really early on that the three of us wanted to set up a guild of sorts in whatever town we find ourselves in the most. Kind of like a mercenary adventuring company that we run a bit like any other business. We attract fighters and hire them out to go out on dangerous missions, but we also help protect the town and we use our ritual magics to help ward off enemies and create feasts for festivals and stuff -- we really just want to be involved in the game world, and establish something of value that npcs can see and interact with. He said that sounded great. So we went to play tonight, and the other 2 guys (cleric and rogue) didn't show up. Fine, that's cool. The three of us can work together well anyway. We fully expected to start our session the way D&D usually starts: everybody rolls into town and heads to the inn or something, where they get wind of some adventure or another. Instead, this is what we got: We wake up from a hazy dream all shackled up in a slave ship, next to hundreds of other slaves. It's dark, but we can see each other. The DM explains that we'll have to "roleplay our way out of the shackles". My buddy asks the slavers where they are, and what's going on, and they ignore him. I sit back and wait for more information to come in, because I don't even know where I am. My wife asks a slaver what's going on, and he hits her in the face and says, "Shut your mouth, bitch!". Then some deva god-monk or something walks down the stairs and magically takes our chains off. No explaination or anything. Just takes them off. So much for roleplaying our way out of the shackles. The DM then says they're lining everyone up and branding their hands with torches. I just started this game, and I for one don't want my character's hands burned with a slave symbol, so I bull rush my way past them and rush up the stairs onto the deck, only to find out we're in the astral sea or something. It's all outer-space or whatever up on the deck, and I'm surrounded by slavers, and I basically have no choice but to be branded as a slave. Which really bothers me. My wife ends up sneaking her way past everyone, and actually makes it off the ship without being branded. Good for her! Except they're handing everyone back their gear as we get off the ship, and checking everyone's hands, so if she doesn't get back in line and get branded, she can't get all her equipment back. Weak. After we're off the ship, we get sent in opposite directions by the slavers. That's right -- the DM split up the party ... My buddy and I went north, and my wife went west. At this point, we're about 20 minutes into gameplay. We played for another 2 hours, and she never ever got to do another thing. The DM focused entirely on my friend and I, and didn't say anything to my wife. But anyway, on with the story: my buddy and I get sent down the street to a big fort, and on the way, we stop people on the streets and ask where we are: we either get totally ignored, or told to go away. Which sucks. He puts us in the fort, and we finally gather from some of the other slaves (there's like 150 or so slaves there) that we'll have to fight for our freedom. Okay, I can accept that. We wait in this place for 9 days. Nine whole days, and nothing happens until they finally come get us. They lead the two of us to a big fighting pit and say we have to fight to the death: we refuse. Our characters have a strong bond, and we're not about to kill each other in a pit. They say that's fine: one of us will fight, and if he wins, we both go free, but if he dies, we both die. We decide he should be the one who fights, since he's a Bloodbond elf Seeker, and he'd be almost impossible to lock down. The DM tosses down a giant troll figurine, and says to roll initiative. We're level 5 by the way. I'm familiar with this enemy: it's a level 9 brute. The DM says to roll initiative, and my buddy says he's going to roll a quick Nature check to see for sure what he's up against. He rolled a 28 on his Nature Monster Knowledge check, which means he knows basically everything about this thing. The DM brushed it off and said, "You know it's a troll", at which point we said, "According to the book, he knows the creature name, the type, all of its powers, resistances and vulnerabilities". The DM said, "Who's running this game", to which we replied, "the rules are running the game, lol". He actually got mad, and acted like we were pulling out some rules-lawyer garbage when in actuality ... that's how you use that skill. That's not some arbitrary rule we pulled out to take the fun out of his encounter, that's how you use Nature Monster Knowledge checks. The guy's an elven seeker with a super-high wisdom and an amazing Nature check -- he's seasoned. He knows what he's up against. That's the purpose of the roll. Anyway. So he naturally gets his ass handed to him. I mean my buddy can't even land a hit on the troll. When the monster bloodies him, I jump into the ring and charge it. I figure, what the hell, I'm gonna die if my friend dies anyway, so I might as well go in and help him and we'll suffer the consequences later. I think the DM realizes at this point that he put my friend up against something he had no chance of beating, so we started noticing he was fudging the results of his dice. Which is fine by us -- we killed it in a few rounds. The crowd starts cheering for us, and a little 11-year-old boy is really happy and throwing his hands up and stuff. The DM has a guard go over to this kids, take out a sword, and cut his throat. Then he has two guys come drag him up the stairs like a piece of meat. A dude outside sees the kid and says, "throw him to the dogs". My buddy and I are good characters, and we get pissed. My friend fires an arrow through this guy's skull, and we're fully-prepared at this point to go toe-to-toe with anyone who wants to fight us. But nobody comes. The people all clear our like nothing happened ... so we just leave too. We end up walking out of down and we discover it's like an island in the middle of the astral sea. If we want off, we'll have to find some other way out. We go back into town, and it's night and nobody is around except for these guards every few blocks. We walk up to one and ask where the hell we are -- because it's been 9 days and we still haven't been told where we are. He doesn't answer any of our questions, and I start getting pissed. I Tide of Iron this guy into the side of a building and shove his face up against the bricks with my shield, and I start really asking questions. The way the DM described it, this guy doesn't even care. It didn't bother him at all that I'm smashing my shield into his teeth for answers. We literally just walk away from the guard because we couldn't get answers. We go to try to find my wife, who's being held at another fortress. We get there, and the guards won't let us in. They say that we've won our freedom in the fighting pits, but that our friend hasn't, so she either has to fight in the pits or we can buy her freedom -- which is bullshit, because the slavers took all our money. At this point, that magic deva god monk guy shows back up, and basically man-handles the two of us. My buddy shot him point-blank in the face with his bow, and the guy caught the arrow and handed it back to him. I shield feinted and was about to blow my daily to knock the smile off his face, but he just teleported behind me. It was immediately clear that this NPC was invincible. The DM wasn't even looking at my attack rolls; he just had him disappear behind me. He said we were free, but we couldn't go home. He said we could stay with him if we wanted. We said no. But seriously, what are we supposed to do? We don't know where we are, we have no idea how we got there, all our money's gone, the only person we know is in that fortress and there's an invincible DM-NPC in the way. At this point, I was getting really frustrated, and I said I was going to the docks to kill pirates until I got all our money back, and the DM said I couldn't because I'm good. Let me break this down for you: I'm a mercenary captain. My friends and I were captured by slavers. We have no idea how that happened, but all we know is that we were magically asleep and then beaten awake in the belly of some slave ship. When my friend asked what was going on, they beat her up. Then they forced us to be branded with slave symbols on our hands. Then they locked us up for 9 days in some hell hole where the DM described people literally squatting in the corners to do their business. For days we waited while people were taken out a few at a time and killed in barbaric fighting pits. When it was our turn, they wanted me to fight my best friend, and when we refused, he had to fight a troll by himself with both of our lives on the line. Then when we won, they slit the throat of an 11 year old boy for no reason, and fed his body to dogs. Nobody will give us answers. We don't know where we are. We can't go see our friends. And we can't even go stay at an inn because all our money was stolen by slavers. Don't tell me I can't go kill these people because I'm good. Everything about that situation says I can kill them for what they've done. That's basically where we ended the session. None of us had any fun. My wife and I went for a walk with my friend afterword and we all really had a terrible time. None of us want to keep playing, but at the same time, I feel kinda bad. I mean I don't want to be a dick to the DM, who really is our friend as well. I feel like it's obvious that we didn't have a good time, and I don't want to hurt his feelings but ... wow, I mean it was really frustrating. From the very first moment of the game, we had no control over anything. It was like watching a long-ass cutscene. Our skills didn't matter, our attacks didn't matter. He keeps browbeating us to roleplay but nobody will talk to us. My wife got ignored for hours of gameplay. I mean, I don't know. What do you guys think? How should we handle this situation?
#2 salla Sep 11, 2010 22:55:21	Show him your post there. It was well-detailed and analytical and seems to cut to the core of the problem nicely. You got railroaded, you got Deus Ex Machina'd, you got alignment-straitjacketted, your abilities were rendered insignificant ... Don't take this the wrong way, but this sounds so much like a stereotypical bad game part of me can't believe it actually happened. I mean, it's like every bad DM trait came together in one guy, and BY YOUR POWERS COMBINED, I AM CAPTAIN BADGAME!
#3 theunknownreturns Sep 11, 2010 23:00:59	Get another DM. Simple answer I know. I've got a system to where we all know how the characters power up and the kinda gear they should be getting. I've got pretty standardized. With this we can each hand off the game to anybody else who has a good story in mind. Its a multi-DM game. If you do it with the idea that you're mercs and eachjob is essentially its own deal then it doesn't matte what happened before or next the current DM can do whatever he wants as long as we stick to the agreed to system. Your DM sounds like a control freak, and maybe really new. I wouldn't bother to go back honestly, but maybe you can talk to him and fix the situation. I once had a DM who had me shackeled with an army at my cell door and a dragon on the other side. He counted down from 5 and said the dragon ate 'Why didn't you do something?' What was there to do? He talked about jumping in a grate below the floor after I picked the locks. He thought I would do exactly as he would and all the answers were simple. That could be his problem also, he thinks you'll think exactly like him and has the game planned uber hard.
#4 Pashalik_Mons Sep 12, 2010 1:17:04	Show him your post there. It was well-detailed and analytical and seems to cut to the core of the problem nicely. You got railroaded, you got Deus Ex Machina'd, you got alignment-straitjacketted, your abilities were rendered insignificant ... Don't take this the wrong way, but this sounds so much like a stereotypical bad game part of me can't believe it actually happened. I mean, it's like every bad DM trait came together in one guy, and BY YOUR POWERS COMBINED, I AM CAPTAIN BADGAME! I agree with this. Heavy Roleplaying is great, but Heavy Roleplaying didn't happen there. You guys made characters(presumably well-fleshed out characters, since you were expecting to roleplay), and then you sat down and listened to the DM talk for a few hours.