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Worst DM I've ever ever had was a friend of a friend. I joined my friend and played his D&D 3.5 game for 3 sessions. On my 3rd session, I brought another friend. At this point we were level 3 and I was playing a thief. Setting was eberron.

So we were asked to find this guy for this group of paladins. We found him in a small good-aligned town (this part is going to be important later on) and were supposed to report back but a me and my friend decided to stay back and watch him in case he sneaked away while the other party members rode off to report to the paladins.

Then apparently 70 level 15 paladins turn up and start burning the town and shooting and killing everyone with arrows. For NO frigging reason and with no foreshadowing. Even ignoring the fact that it's a good aligned town with the church of a lawful good deity in it, the fact they're killing all these innocent people should really have made them fallen paladins instantly.

So one of the party members, who btw is also a paladin, goes 'no, this isn't right' and tries to stop them. Gets ganked for his effort. My friend also dies to burning arrows. Meanwhile, I'm hiding in the church and praying to the deity to save my char. DM makes me roll a d100 to test if my prayer works. I have to roll below 5 on a d100 and I do, and I hear this divine voice respond. So I quickly hide in the crypt. But nooo, paladins come in and somehow spot me anyway and kill me too.

Needless to say, LAST game I played with that DM.

@Sining

Did the DM even give you a reason for the incredibly stupid story he came up with?

Because had that been my gaming groups DM we would have just immediately called him out on that kind of BS

Basically me and my friend were so annoyed we left almost immediately after that session so we didn't talk about it. But basically the DM tried to defend himself saying that in religious wars, people do burn down innocent towns etc for no reason. Then I pointed out paladins have actual tangible effects from doing evil things like this. Even Paladins of the silver flame.

Also, I don't see a point in making you roll for a deity to save you, have you pass it and then go nope anyway.

Yeah, that sucks.

Sining wrote:
Basically me and my friend were so annoyed we left almost immediately after that session so we didn't talk about it. But basically the DM tried to defend himself saying that in religious wars, people do burn down innocent towns etc for no reason. Then I pointed out paladins have actual tangible effects from doing evil things like this. Even Paladins of the silver flame.

Also, I don't see a point in making you roll for a deity to save you, have you pass it and then go nope anyway.

Yeah, that just doesn't make any sense, if the church wanted to send soldiers to do some dirty work it definitely wouldn't send their paladins, and the fact that they were all at such high level makes even less sense. And if the DM creates a situation were the players are rolling for Deities to save them through no fault of their own, the DM has done something terribly wrong to begin with.

Worst ones I can think of:

1) GM was a liberal arts major and all the players were engineering/science majors in a game with no magic and not very advanced tech. Needless to say there were a lot of "this happens" followed by a lot of "that's impossible, here's why" or "we do this" followed by "it doesn't work" followed by a physics lesson for the GM. The game ended after a couple of sessions because of the above as well as the GM spending most of the time pumping up his significant other.

2) GM that only cared about combat and was railroading us towards his uber race he'd created.

3) Couple other instances where the GM didn't do a good job in limiting players (Rifts & Shadowrun) prior to the game, so we ended up with some weird and overpowered characters that eventually caused the games to fail.

On dice rolling, the longest game I ever attended was diceless and the players got along fairly well. Any other games I played, the GM didn't use a GM screen and everyone rolled out in front of everyone. No dice cheating, good or bad.

 Noir Eternal wrote:

Sining wrote:
Basically me and my friend were so annoyed we left almost immediately after that session so we didn't talk about it. But basically the DM tried to defend himself saying that in religious wars, people do burn down innocent towns etc for no reason. Then I pointed out paladins have actual tangible effects from doing evil things like this. Even Paladins of the silver flame.

Also, I don't see a point in making you roll for a deity to save you, have you pass it and then go nope anyway.

Yeah, that just doesn't make any sense, if the church wanted to send soldiers to do some dirty work it definitely wouldn't send their paladins, and the fact that they were all at such high level makes even less sense. And if the DM creates a situation were the players are rolling for Deities to save them through no fault of their own, the DM has done something terribly wrong to begin with.

Ignoring the roll is what really annoyed me. What's the point in giving people a chance if you're going to deny it when they succeed anyway. Also,it was my friends first time playing pen and paper D&D, and this was a really poor introduction to it

The worst GM I know of is one of my friends. He can only run printed adventures, which isn't a bad thing, but he generally doesn't read them beforehand and gets annoyed if his players go off the track. As he gets more flustered he becomes more unintelligible, forgetting details and speaking at a super fast pace. He also lacks an understanding of game balance, dishing out high out high powered items, then moaning we're winning too easily. When this happens he's fond of trying to kill the party with a Tyrannosaurus Rex that sneaks up on the party. Honestly, a game with him is a countdown clock until a massive ragequit. Outside the game he's great, and importantly makes a fine cup of tea.

Zond wrote:
When this happens he's fond of trying to kill the party with a Tyrannosaurus Rex that sneaks up on the party.

That's lame, but in a it looks cool kinda way..

I ran a game that had the regular joke of "A big red fire dragon flies out of the sky blows everyone away!" for about two years until it was "A big red fire dragon flies out of the sky and. . .Roll for Initiative!"

Does that count?

 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.

I did that with 1st/2nd, it kept the randomness without making the character permanently account for a single roll on level up. It was easy to explain in as having good days and bad days, however you could make a 'system shock' test to keep the previous sessions HP roll. However if you have down time you lose that privilege and have to roll fresh. If I ever GM 3.5 I will reintroduce this system.

I used the same mechanic for heroic strength, as all the real bonuses for strength were jammed into the 18/% stat which was odd I thought.

 Orlanth wrote:

I used the same mechanic for heroic strength, as all the real bonuses for strength were jammed into the 18/% stat which was odd I thought.

I think Hackmaster added percentile bonuses to all the attributes, while second edition and greater just got rid of them.

It was also a weird core rule for 1st edition that Wish and such would only raise attributes by a 10th of a point, so a 16.1 dexterity was possibly, and absolutely useless. Just saw this recently, but can't remember where.

I've been reading 1st edition AD&D books recently and it's "interesting" how arbitrary rules could be at times. Thinking about it, there's a few sources for this which kind of explains it.

The first is the wargaming roots of the game. I recently read Playing at the World which discuses this and mentions that the origional release of D&D used an Avalon Hill game to handle outdoor exploration rules... So you had the precedent of switching to an entirely unrelated ruleset, that had no provisions for fantasy bits and such, to handle wilderness travel.

The second is that a lot of weird rules may have started as 'spot rules' for a specific adventure or scenario that got carried over to the main game. I've noticed this a few times in "Lets's Read" forum threads over on rpg.net: Some monsters, even well into the 2nd edition era, might have a weird spell, combat strategy, or special disease rules attached. These rules probably made sense in the original adventure but then got included in compilations like the Monstrous Compendiums.

Of course, a lot of stuff in AD&D was 'ground breaking' for RPGs at the time. Knocking on it for arbitrary decisions is kind of like complaining about the lack of AC in a Model T car. Not the first car, but an early enough example that a lot of things were still being worked out.

Backfire wrote:

 curran12 wrote:

I agree that it is the GM's job to keep the game fun. And to ensure that the players are having a good time and that the story is moving forward.

I disagree that the GM has to cheat to make that happen. If a GM is fudging rolls because he feels things are too easy or too hard, that is a correction for poor encounter design. It is not the GM's job to guarantee that all players live, nor is it his job to ensure that there are always casualties either, mind you. The GM is the referee, and the referee cannot change the rules to suit the narrative. A GM should be designing encounters and events that challenge, and if there is no risk involved in the challenge, since the GM will bail out the players, I feel the value of the game is lost.

There is no joy in winning a game where you have a free out if things go bad.

'Fudging' is obviously a contentious issue. In my years as a GM, I've come to an opinion that some fudging and railroading tend to be necessary to fully enjoyable storytelling. Though it is a delicate balance, and anything beyond minimal fudging of the dice makes players and their actions irrelevant. Players also aren't idiots and experienced players can smell when things are being fudged and that takes away from the game. In the past there have been some sessions where I was just railroading things too much (for example, making encounters tougher by adding their stats or abilities on the fly when they proved too weak), but I toned it down big time when I noticed that the sessions were just less enjoyable that way. Players need to be able to play, not just travel along.

Having said all that, I think that "if the encounter is too easy/hard, then it's just poor planning" -folks just haven't played systems which are way too unpredictable for that. Maybe it's not such an issue in D&D, but when you play something like RuneQuest, where even weakling monsters can easily cripple or incapacitate very high level characters with nothing but plain dumb luck, sometimes players would just get too frustrated if you didn't tone down your truly awesome dice day.

Could not agree more on this. It is a fine balance. But done sparingly/minimally when it helps with storytelling I find no issue with the odd fudging of the dice. Also have an exalt.