Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

What is the worst experience you have ever had with a GM? This thread is here for you to vent so have at it! But keep it actual game-experience related, don't mention a guy who is fine when playing, but emails you ever hour of every other Tuesday.
But anyway, my worst was in a game of Call of Cthulhu, The GM in question had us wandering around a town (he did a lot of "you decide to get in a taxi, it takes you to this place" events going around, talking to people who knew just about next to nothing, and when we eventually had a lead on something and we were having actual fun, he decided to introduced his Mary Sue GM PC. This guy was an all-knowing eldritch abomination (I forget what he called it, but I remember he made it up) in human form, who was for some reason "helping" us. I put "helping" in quotation marks because all he did was take away the fun of wondering what we were searching for by just telling us. told us to go somewhere else (yet again) and when one of our members refused, (the only high charisma character in a game where all we did was interrogate people) he had Mary-Suethulhu remove all his sanity instantly and with out a roll. At that point a silent decision seemed to have been made by the players to get rid of this guy, because we began to attempt to get him killed every chance we had, but dues ex machina saved him again and again...

Rogue Trader GM; I was the Rogue Trader, and we came across a desecrated old Imperial Cathedral. Seeing this as my sacred mission to purge the chaos taint within, I send my numerous bomber and fighter wings to bomb this place to oblivion (since it was that thing we saw along the way while doing another endeavour).

Well, turns out those 100 bombers and 150 fighters didn't do nothing, so we had to do it by hand almost died and we burned some fate point to survive.

turns out the GM had some deamon he wanted to have us faced (with warp weapons- which totally ignore all armour, getting us in the crit zone with 1-2 hits) and after that part, he specifically barred me form using my bombers and fighters in anything else than space combat.

Ambition knows no bound...except a GM that's pissed you're by-passing his planned adventure.

Same DM, but with D&D 3.5; we traveled to the north pole, escorting a professor in search of some thing or another. We reached some long forgotten place filled with doors to other dimensions, crazy monsters, and (finally) a actual possibility to get some fancy gear (since we were traveling in the wilderness all campaign long,w e never stopped at a town to buy gear, and we mostly faced monsters that don't use weapons). Then he stopped it, saying he was 'bored with it' and 'lacked inspiration'...his next campaign? We're escapees from some orc raid, and ourselves and the other in the town with us as now living in the freaking TUNDRA where the most technological items there is around is whatever we brought, and we sure fought alot of those snow wolves!

The worst GM I had was in a Shadowrun game, mostly because of his habit of ensuring that every fight was a barely-won scrape with death. While I get that Shadowrun is a harder and more complex game, there was never a fight that did not leave one or two people of a 6 man party downed. Even if that fight was against a smaller group of street punks (who somehow had military grade assault rifles, but they broke of course when they died. Of course).

My GM loved to use the carrot and stick approach, only to yank away the carrot every time. There may or may not also have been a fair deal of railroading.

Another friend of mine, who is an experienced (and great) GM has always said that a sign of a bad GM is one who does not lot players enjoy their growth and loot. If the challenge simply ramps up so that players' new loot and powers equal the same level of challenge, they quickly lose motivation.

A challenge is good and all, but constantly having to see the reward getting snatched away by circumstances or a good old impenetrable wall is just plain old bs in my opinion.

"You should be grateful for what you have."

Gee, thanks dad.

 BrookM wrote:
A challenge is good and all, but constantly having to see the reward getting snatched away by circumstances or a good old impenetrable wall is just plain old bs in my opinion.

"You should be grateful for what you have."

Gee, thanks dad.

And it isn't just taking away rewards. It's instantly inflating the challenges so that even with the rewards, the party has to work just as hard or harder.

 curran12 wrote:

 BrookM wrote:
A challenge is good and all, but constantly having to see the reward getting snatched away by circumstances or a good old impenetrable wall is just plain old bs in my opinion.

"You should be grateful for what you have."

Gee, thanks dad.

And it isn't just taking away rewards. It's instantly inflating the challenges so that even with the rewards, the party has to work just as hard or harder.

I personally don't mind the challenges inflating with character progression. Ideally, the new loot makes me awesome for a session or two, but then I have to work hard again. Prevents a boring cakewalk, but still gives you a sense of power and progression.

Inquisitor Jex wrote:
Rogue Trader GM; I was the Rogue Trader, and we came across a desecrated old Imperial Cathedral. Seeing this as my sacred mission to purge the chaos taint within, I send my numerous bomber and fighter wings to bomb this place to oblivion (since it was that thing we saw along the way while doing another endeavour).

Well, turns out those 100 bombers and 150 fighters didn't do nothing, so we had to do it by hand almost died and we burned some fate point to survive.

turns out the GM had some deamon he wanted to have us faced (with warp weapons- which totally ignore all armour, getting us in the crit zone with 1-2 hits) and after that part, he specifically barred me form using my bombers and fighters in anything else than space combat.

Ambition knows no bound...except a GM that's pissed you're by-passing his planned adventure.

That doesn't sound horrible, maybe... but I guess you had to be there. I'm assuming the GM was kind of a dick about it, and banning use of bombers is a going to be annoying, I'd guess. It sounds like the GM might have been better off trying a 'soft' way of dissuading the bombing (have a flunky say, "But... but, my lord... What if there are relics inside that are still intact?") and, if you persist, have the immunity-to-bombing be a 'special effect. (OK, your bombers make repeated runs, with the fighters providing air-cover and strafing. They break off as the cathedral collapses, but you hear panicked reports from pilots describing something horrible happening... A twisted mockery of the former Cathedral has grown from the ruins as an even greater atrocity against the emperor replaces the wrecked structure."

It's the spirit of the thing that counts, and how it's presented.

Rogue Trader seems to have a 'known issue' that players need to buy-in and be willing to send their players into battle instead of using the ridiculous resources at their disposal.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 curran12 wrote:
Another friend of mine, who is an experienced (and great) GM has always said that a sign of a bad GM is one who does not lot players enjoy their growth and loot. If the challenge simply ramps up so that players' new loot and powers equal the same level of challenge, they quickly lose motivation.

I think a good GM balances things such that there's a mix of 'challenge' encounters and 'show-off' encounters. Both have a role: the show-off encounters let the players feel they've achieved something and do 'bleed' some resources even if they aren't the most threatening combats. The challenge encounters allow for more drama and sense of risk.

As an analogy, for those who've played the classic PSX game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night this game combines some very tough sections (some of the boss fights and a few corridors) with some great sequences where you get to enjoy the abilities you've acquired in the game (find a corridor with infinitely spawning zombies and just shred away!

Exactly. I did not mean to imply that it should all be a cakewalk or that challenge is a bad thing. Let me see if I can give an example...

Well, let's go to my Shadowrun game that I mentioned before.

After a particular session, we had earned enough money and karma to amp up our characters with new skills, abilities and weapons. Our gunners had new, better guns, our mages had new better spells and I (an adept) had new, better punches and kicks. But the next session, we found that the enemies had immediately upgraded to match our levels with no explanation. The same corporate security guys now had new gear and armor to place them at exactly the same challenge as before, so all of our new abilities and gear felt way less meaningful. One instance actually had the guards suddenly show up with anti-gas gear as soon as we had got toxic gas weapons and spells.

That's what I mean by no value in growth.

If a GM gives his mooks gear to specifically counter your new kit, he needs to stop right then and there.

That scaling issue is a problem with "modern" RPGs generally. It's wrapped up in the idea of "game balance." The overarching context is a significant change in the nature of rule sets. Earlier RPGs tend to pit the PCs against a situation where the GM is the neutral referee interpreting a set of guidelines. Later RPGs tend to pit the PCs against the GM with the rule set itself providing fairness and neutrality.

Lets see
>2" three ring binder of house rules that not only would he not let our of his sight so you could make a copy for yourself
>Would make house rulings on a whim, that usaly countered and earlyer ruling. This might not have been to bad, but sometimes it would happen in game play and then not tell those that missed the game of such rulings.
>If you came up with a good idea that was not game breaking, but anoyed him he would just outlaw it.
[We had a guy who started to cast Inviability on doors to see what was on the other side. One day he just said NO!]
>Inconsisten to when he used his house rules.
>If you were female the rulings when her way, but if a male did the same thing it usualy did not work.
>He did nothing about the power gamers, in fact usaly gave them the broken things and those who were not got the sort end of the stick, most of the time with a peneltay for not bing powerful.
>A funky EXP system that you were reworded for being higher level or Female.
>Was Never Wrong!

 BrookM wrote:
If a GM gives his mooks gear to specifically counter your new kit, he needs to stop right then and there.

On the other hand, while 'new kit' should be safe, I've had a few game ideas (primarily some Deadlands ideas I wanted to run) where the prologue would have included something along the lines of, "The world runs on the Golden Rule. If your characters shoot to kill immediately and word gets out, the law will respond in kind. On the other hand, if you're traditional cinematic 'morally conflicted' cowboy-types that take prisoners, don't kill without need, etc. expect the police to treat you much the same. Your choice. Of course, this does not apply to evil spirits, zombies, black hats that jsut don't care or things with too many heads."


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Anpu42 wrote:
Lets see
>2" three ring binder of house rules that not only would he not let our of his sight so you could make a copy for yourself
>Would make house rulings on a whim, that usaly countered and earlyer ruling. This might not have been to bad, but sometimes it would happen in game play and then not tell those that missed the game of such rulings.
>If you came up with a good idea that was not game breaking, but anoyed him he would just outlaw it.
[We had a guy who started to cast Inviability on doors to see what was on the other side. One day he just said NO!]
>Inconsisten to when he used his house rules.
>If you were female the rulings when her way, but if a male did the same thing it usualy did not work.
>He did nothing about the power gamers, in fact usaly gave them the broken things and those who were not got the sort end of the stick, most of the time with a peneltay for not bing powerful.
>A funky EXP system that you were reworded for being higher level or Female.
>Was Never Wrong!

Yeah, that's pretty bad. Best to just find a different GM, really.

The banning a tactic thing is interesting, though. One reason I don't really like to run D&D is it's hard to run without some weird logical Setting Fails* anyway, but that's always a difficult trick. Once it's a tactic and cool, but anything repeated gets old. I get bored if the players are too well trained and run a dungeon crawl like a SWAT team clearing a house. On the other hand, GMs can encourage this kind of behavior by abusing traps and other 'cheap' surprises, so neither party is blameless. It's a definite balance.

 Balance wrote:

 BrookM wrote:
If a GM gives his mooks gear to specifically counter your new kit, he needs to stop right then and there.

On the other hand, while 'new kit' should be safe, I've had a few game ideas (primarily some Deadlands ideas I wanted to run) where the prologue would have included something along the lines of, "The world runs on the Golden Rule. If your characters shoot to kill immediately and word gets out, the law will respond in kind. On the other hand, if you're traditional cinematic 'morally conflicted' cowboy-types that take prisoners, don't kill without need, etc. expect the police to treat you much the same. Your choice. Of course, this does not apply to evil spirits, zombies, black hats that jsut don't care or things with too many heads."


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Anpu42 wrote:
Lets see
>2" three ring binder of house rules that not only would he not let our of his sight so you could make a copy for yourself
>Would make house rulings on a whim, that usaly countered and earlyer ruling. This might not have been to bad, but sometimes it would happen in game play and then not tell those that missed the game of such rulings.
>If you came up with a good idea that was not game breaking, but anoyed him he would just outlaw it.
[We had a guy who started to cast Inviability on doors to see what was on the other side. One day he just said NO!]
>Inconsisten to when he used his house rules.
>If you were female the rulings when her way, but if a male did the same thing it usualy did not work.
>He did nothing about the power gamers, in fact usaly gave them the broken things and those who were not got the sort end of the stick, most of the time with a peneltay for not bing powerful.
>A funky EXP system that you were reworded for being higher level or Female.
>Was Never Wrong!

Yeah, that's pretty bad. Best to just find a different GM, really.

The banning a tactic thing is interesting, though. One reason I don't really like to run D&D is it's hard to run without some weird logical Setting Fails* anyway, but that's always a difficult trick. Once it's a tactic and cool, but anything repeated gets old. I get bored if the players are too well trained and run a dungeon crawl like a SWAT team clearing a house. On the other hand, GMs can encourage this kind of behavior by abusing traps and other 'cheap' surprises, so neither party is blameless. It's a definite balance.

Well when 4th came out a part of us just went "No House Rules For At Least One Year!" We also stated that we would not accept his house rules with out agreing first.
I have played D&D with him for alsmot 2 and half years and are now happy.

 Balance wrote:



That doesn't sound horrible, maybe... but I guess you had to be there. I'm assuming the GM was kind of a dick about it, and banning use of bombers is a going to be annoying, I'd guess. It sounds like the GM might have been better off trying a 'soft' way of dissuading the bombing (have a flunky say, "But... but, my lord... What if there are relics inside that are still intact?") and, if you persist, have the immunity-to-bombing be a 'special effect. (OK, your bombers make repeated runs, with the fighters providing air-cover and strafing. They break off as the cathedral collapses, but you hear panicked reports from pilots describing something horrible happening... A twisted mockery of the former Cathedral has grown from the ruins as an even greater atrocity against the emperor replaces the wrecked structure."

It's the spirit of the thing that counts, and how it's presented.

Rogue Trader seems to have a 'known issue' that players need to buy-in and be willing to send their players into battle instead of using the ridiculous resources at their disposal.

Well, the thing is we were already on planet as we were exploring the world as we worked with a Columbus rule that the RT must set foot on a planet to actually claim it for his Dynasty; in fact we came to see that Cathedral after we found some descendants of an old colony living in a cave and they showed us toward the Cathedral and some roaming chaos mammoth like monsters; I called the air strike so that we can get that colony back on track again and the resources exploited, not because I didn't want my char to forgo his 3 o'clock tea for some mundane and possibly dangerous fight against chaos...and really that GM is more axed toward fighting and fights; if we spend a session planning and doing endeavours and such, sure bet that we'll spend the next session almost entirely in a combat, or numerous combats in space and on land...nothing wrong with that, but if I wanted night pointless combat all the time (we always ended up fighting Orks and they always had no valuable loot, according to the GM, or sometimes daemons that poof back into the warp when killed) I would have gone with another game than RT.

So yes, way WAY better off than what others have experienced (truthfully, I am been a GM way more than a player, so if there's ever a Worst Player treat, I got a few examples) it was still rather a rundown for me, due to my lack of being a player..that and being a new face in a group of friends, most of my ideas were turned down due to age old argument of "Oh, it's Person X GM-ing, so he always does XYZ in ABC situation." then combat happened.

Worst DM I ever encountered spent 90% of the time looking up one thing or another in his books. He made no attempt to describe or color the place we were in, or how we got there.

One of my GM's made the main villain David Cameron, railroaded us with the most contrived excuses and eventually made a dragon rape one of the players.

We don't talk to him anymore.

 snurl wrote:
Worst DM I ever encountered spent 90% of the time looking up one thing or another in his books. He made no attempt to describe or color the place we were in, or how we got there.

Yes, I admit that is a rather horrible thing a GM can do....One session ok, since it's session 1 maybe he forgot things due to stress or whatever..all the time, no.

Let’s see other one.
We used to have an open game day, the idea was for simple table top games for 2-8 players like Shogun [now called Samurai Swords], Robo-Rally things like that. Well he kept pushing to run an Anime RPG even though that was for a different day.
Well I had to run an errand and when I got back he had ranged the group into the game. This was not bad, but I had no concept right then so he told me to let him know when I did and he would get back to me. It took me about 10-15 min to work up a character and told him such. Well the game continued and the characters started to dig them into a hole. The farther they went and the worse it got he started to cut off any attempt for them to dig themselves out of it. Then 2 and a half hours later when one of the players left to go to work [This was also the player who started everything] threw 50 gallons of gas on the fire so to speak and then left them to deal with it just because he was leaving. It was then that the GM asked me what I wanted to play with about a hour or so left play.

Another one kept trying to get us to try his Home Brew Game. After talking about it for a while about half of us said were not truly interested, mostly because you had no control over your character creation. And I mean no control, not race, gender, class or even gear it was all random. Well after about 6 months of him getting other players to roll up character in the middle of other peoples games we gave him his chance. Now he knew all of us and that we like to have a certain level of starting gear. Well to put in simple D&D Terms, we essentially were given 0-Level Characters armed with what we picked up out of the kitchen and off the farm. The powerful warrior was armed with a shovel. Now that was not that bad, it could have been fun, but we ended up taking on a band [10-15] 2hd Orcs lead by a Drow Wizard. If two of had not figured out a loophole in the rules that let us get up to 5 attacks around with a dagger more than 3 of us would have died. He was also another who would not give us a copy of the rules before the game started.

I've not had any really bad experiences. However i've had a bloody boring one,

D&D 3.5 Standard group. GM insisted we went with the D&D format suggested for groups. Spent the 3 months of the campaign dungeon crawling. There was no plot or story, just dungeon after dungeon as we got rich with the loot. I decided i wanted to hire a few guards ( I wanted to start a rebellion) nope cant hire guards, okay then I want to hire a market stall so we have a reason for the dungeon crawling, nope can't do that either.

The GM just made us dungeon crawl with the subscribed format group, and it was always the same monsters, nothing ever changed so it became a chore. I stayed for the 3 months because it was the only game my group played, left after the third month when the gm wouldn't even let us go out of the city.

Just remember a good GM is a GM that can react to anything his players do and not force them to follow his planned dogma.

I always try to have a story that's pretty straight forward, but open enough that the players can do it their way and interesting enough they actually want to.

Of course I always tend to see RPGs as more of a series of interesting squad scale tactical exercises separated by story segments...but that comes of being a wargamer before I got into RPGs.

I imagine if I ever had to run any kind of really investigative character driven combat light game I'd be a horrible GM, through incompetence rather than malice though (That said, I can run a mean game of Paranoia, although to be fair that game pretty much runs itself once you get the players initially off balance and keep giving them bigger and bigger boots to kick each other in the head with then they fall down).

Worst experience I had was with one of the best GM's I've ever played with.

He had his own home brewed edition of D&D. At first lvl he made us roll for hit points, and casters couldn't unlock spells until level 2 at the earliest. I was rolling with a lvl 1 cleric with 1 hit point.

Our first quest was to deal with a den of ogres. TPK in the very first encounter...

After that I stopped playing D&D with him. His other games were amazing though. That man could tell a story like no ones business.

 djones520 wrote:
He had his own home brewed edition of D&D. At first lvl he made us roll for hit points...

To be pedantic, I don't think that became an official rule until 3rd edition, although a lot of people used it for earlier editions and it might have been an option in the core books for earlier editions.

I've also heard of people who rolled maximum HP per level or per session... So someone with 5 Hit Dice might roll 5d8 each time they sit down to play, and have an ever-changing HP max.

Admittedly, I've been looking at 1st edition AD&D stuff recently and it's scary how small the damage and HP numbers are. Even the big scary stuff rarely exceeds double digit HP, and most damage rolls are a single die from d4-d8 with a relatively small plus... Of course, the scary stuff might have three or more attacks per round.

Hmm, I used to always run big, cinematic style quests, that would inevitably fall apart as the characters ignored clues and bickered amongst themselves...in one quest alone, I had two players team up and convince a third player to murder a fourth player. In the ensuing battle, a fifth player copped some damage from an errant fireball and turned on the first two, killing one of them as well. So, two dead characters in a single game, and that was just in the bar at the start...after that we started playing a new game...

While I've only been a GM for other people once (and even then, it was to playtest a ruleset) I know that if I was a GM, it wouldn't have been good. I would likely wind up making almost endless amounts of retcons to make the story more "epic". It would have been awful.

Our group had the “Night of the Ninja”

We were playing an 1st edition Oriental Adventures Campaign.
The Party:
>Hengeyokai Panda Bushi [My Character]
>Human Samurai
>Human Ninja/Bushi [From Clan-A]
>Human Ninja/I Don’t Remember [From Clan-B]
>Human Ninja/I Don’t Remember [From Clan-C1]
>Human Ninja/I Don’t Remember [From Clan-C2]
>Bamboo Folk Wu Jen.

We were sent by the local Lord to go and investigate the strange goings on in a town about 5 days travel away, it would have been 1, but only the Samurai had a horse. Well things were going great until the night of day4. For some reason all of the Ninjas decided to head into the woods and throw on their Pajamas. Not as a group, but individually. This would have not been so bad but one of them spotted a rival clan member and attacked him. Well the Samurai hear the commotion and shows up Justin time to see a Ninja Attacking someone and Kills Ninja C1 [20, backed with a 20]. Ninja C2 sees this and Attacks the Samurai, Ninja A whose job was to protect the Samurai Attacks Ninja C2. Well Ninja B decides to take out the Samurai for some reasons still unknown. Ninja C2 kills off Ninja A as the Samurai kills off in one round Ninja B and then C2.

Meanwhile The Wu Jen and me are just sitting on the sideline are just watching having no idea what was going on.
That was the night that we all made Ninja an NPC Class only for years.

 Balance wrote:

I've also heard of people who rolled maximum HP per level or per session... So someone with 5 Hit Dice might roll 5d8 each time they sit down to play, and have an ever-changing HP max.

Oh, I LOVE that idea!

He said this to the group:
"You go to meet them on a ship - I know that is not what they said - but when you are on board, the ship explodes. Yea. . .I did not like that character."
The final word in singular was intentional.

That sounds like a 10 year old.

The worst example of a GM I knew, but didn't play for, was a complete carpet to his players. As part of HackMaster Tournaments (HMPA and HMGMA), we met his players a few times. The all had +10 dragon armor, +3 Vorpal swords, had all gained +1 Int from eating dragon brains, and so on...