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I staretd a thread on the most unbalanced PCs that people had ever come across and it got some nicely vented spleen, so now I'm turning the tables and asking about the GMs and DMs that have made you want to bite a hole in your rulebooks and shove your dice up their noses.

When I run a game I always try to remember the fact that the PCs are the stars of the show and the players want a chance to engage in some escapism that allows them to feel that while they have a chance of winning the day, there's still the very real possibility that they'll fail and maybe even die in a heroic fashion as well. I like to make them fight for their lives, but at the same time I'll happily fudge a roll that would have killed them for no good reason; on the other hand I also like to occasionally land them in it to keep them alert and have a laugh. If they're having fun and comment to me afterwards that they enjoyed something then I know I'm probably on the right track.

An example that I always like to use was my brother's first character, a half-elf ranger/arcane archer, which he rolled up after watching LOTR and geeking out for Legolas. At one point in the game the PCs were taking on a large Gnoll tribe in their cavern lair and the upper half of the cavern was divided from the lower by a wall of rock with a switchback flight of stairs carved into it. Now the Gnolls just happened to be using large metal shields, and one just happened to drop his at the top of the stairs and more Gnolls comming up them just happened to need killing. So he rode the shield down the stairs, kick-flipped it round on the landing and went down the next flight all the time killing Gnolls with his bow. The rules be damned, it made him feel like his character was Legolas x10 and gave him a gaming memory he'll never forget.

On the other hand a terrible DM that I played under seemed to think that the job revolved around rolling random encounters and dropping the party into situations that always resulted in PC deaths for no logical reason. The game was 2nd Ed D&D in Forgotten Realms and the party was very low level (2nd to 3rd max) and most of the "action" was taken up by the party wandering towards a location for days of game time with the DM rolling a random encounter every hour. We were on a riverboat that was eaten by giant crocodiles, despite the fact that boats supposedly went along it all day every day. We were attacked by landsharks in the middle of a quiet rural town and then when we beat them the town was overrun in the night by giant acid-spitting ants and destroyed.

At one point we were told to go kill a dragon for a spell component and just managed to pull it off with half the party unconscious after the fight when a guy in fullplate armour teleports into the room, demands to know who landed the killing blow and then simply butchers them in front of us. Apparently he was the dragon's guardian, but never thought to turn up before it was killed by the party. Then the guy who was killed gets the offer of being ressurected, by a demon, who will then own his soul.

The game went on like this as the DM sat in the corner, eating cheese sandwiches and responding to any requests for a recap by stating that everything we needed to know had been in the four page, self-penned, droning and boring passage he had read out at the start of the first session and at the time neglected to mention was both vitally important and never to be repeated.

100% Jerk

As I've mainly been DM/ST whatever the system calls it over the past 22yrs I've been tabletop roleplaying, I don't have many stories.

The only one of note, was a mate I had for a while back in the early nineties who introduced us to the World of Darkness.

He liked throwing enemies against us that we had very limited chance of beating in CC and whenever someone died, which was often. He'd insist that the player hand over the character and he'd write DEAD boldly on the sheet with a thick pen with an eager grin.

Worst GM I have had made it impossible to progress. Every encounter ended with whatever we were fighting getting away. Thus he would award ZERO XP. After 5 weeks of gaming once a week for 4 hours we were all still level 1. Seriously. I think we had killed maybe 1 enemy. So for the rest of the campaign we killed everyone we saw, civilians, NPC's, whatever.

Had one in the LFR group (he has been banned from the group and store) that would fudge rolls, take things out on people he was upset with, make up rolls, give things arbitrary boosts to attack and defenses, and make up things up on the maps. The most infamous being a hallway that was 20 squares long with every square setting off a trap in the wall. Found out later the mod actually had the hallway at 5 squares and 2 wall traps. What should have taken a few minutes lasted well over an hour.

Mine was an Australian.

'Nuff said.

infinite_array wrote:Mine was an Australian.

'Nuff said.

We can't help that american D&D is pretty much daily life for us

Walking to shops, "i'll take a short cut through this bush", random encounter! Lizard with no legs.....
I kid Since i avoid bushlands that is
But we're not that bad... are we?

MikZor wrote:

infinite_array wrote:Mine was an Australian.

'Nuff said.

We can't help that american D&D is pretty much daily life for us

Walking to shops, "i'll take a short cut through this bush", random encounter! Lizard with no legs.....
I kid Since i avoid bushlands that is
But we're not that bad... are we?

Naw, he wasn't - isn't, I should say- that bad . Just a bit of lighthearted humor. (Plus, I know he's probably seen this, and is most likely plotting a gruesome and horrible death for my character)

My real aggravating GM was a guy I used to know in High School. Apparently, I asked out a girl just before he was going to - I was told this by her friends just after we broke up. So we dated for a while, broke up, and she started dating him.

The thing is... I was supposedly playing D&D with this guy and his group at the time. I stopped getting any info on when the game was, would never get any replays to texts, never could find him in school.

infinite_array wrote:Mine was an Australian.

'Nuff said.

yeh, I heard he mauled your Lv2 character with a Lvl 6 Elite Cave Bear...

Then he joined the game as a Half-Elf Drunken Monk and hauled your comatose arse through Shadowfell Keep cos you were AWOL playing tea parties with your sister and her friends...

Melchiour wrote:Worst GM I have had made it impossible to progress. Every encounter ended with whatever we were fighting getting away. Thus he would award ZERO XP. After 5 weeks of gaming once a week for 4 hours we were all still level 1. Seriously. I think we had killed maybe 1 enemy. So for the rest of the campaign we killed everyone we saw, civilians, NPC's, whatever.

Were you playing D&D when he was having these things "escape" from combat?

If so then he was screwing you on the rules.

If the other side flees the battle, then you defeated them and you get the XP.

In D&D you don't actually have to kill an enemy to have defeated them, the DM chose to have the enemy retreat from the combat and so you count as having defeated them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

infinite_array wrote:My real aggravating GM was a guy I used to know in High School. Apparently, I asked out a girl just before he was going to - I was told this by her friends just after we broke up. So we dated for a while, broke up, and she started dating him.

The thing is... I was supposedly playing D&D with this guy and his group at the time. I stopped getting any info on when the game was, would never get any replays to texts, never could find him in school.

The DM that I mention in my OP was schizoid about his other half at the time as well.

After I had to leave the game to go back to uni, he actually gave my character to her to play, which resulted in him somehow changing from a male human ranger with no magical items and who had spent every session battling tooth and nail to keep himself and the rest of the party alive to a female elf ranger who suddenly found a magical artefact blade and became the founder of a nation and the centre of the game.

Apparently sleeping with the guy was the way to get ahead ingame...but then to look at him you'd think that he'd have had to come up with some way to compensate the poor woman for the horror of sharing his bed.

One of my closest friends kept playing and was the victim of his paranoia later on. He arrived early for the session one night and found the DM and his mates playing Magic in that very intense and anti-social way that some people have, while his girlfriend was being ignored in another part of the house. Now my friend is both the most outgoing guy in the world, very funny and the last person who would try to muscle in on another person's partner. So he naturally spent the time before the game started chatting and joking with the DM's other half. Then after the game was over, the DM takes him aside and lectures him about the consequences of trying it on with his girlfriend.

How paranoid do you need to be to see a guy just talking to your other half as a threat?

I wasn't surprised to find out later that the guy was on the local mental health register.

Whoa.

Ok everyone reading, take a seat, and I shall give you the short version of this GM.

He was a dark heresy gm. First time GMing. Things were good the first few games.

Then players started to read the books. He was allowing us to take two half actions, as the same action, so two single shots from a gun, two swings with a sword.

This rolled into the talents, he started house ruling stuff like crazy. This is when we heard about the restriction on seal wounds, that it had the same rules as the weak heal in the game. Something he added.

This compounded with him playing obvious favorites with his girlfriend who was playing, who had 13 fate points.

Furthermore, he accepted no help from the players regarding the game, GMing or anything else. Going so far as jump on someone for asking a player if they were having fun.

All of his mistakes, he either tried to play off or didn't revoke. It was only after I started using firestorm twice each round did he seem to start to see how he broke the game, but his ego wouldn't let him fix it.

In the end, the game stopped, yet started again with half the players, the other half never told it started back up. He mentions one day he knew why the game failed, there are two kinds of people in games, roleplayers and combat. Lies and ignorance.

From what I've heard, his game has devulged into having the whole party addicted to drugs, the techpriest psycher inquistor who was a member of the ordo hereticus trying to travel across the stars to see if the tyranids had anything to do with the tyrant star, and to try to get some of the deathwatch to assist them.

Completely stupid at this rate, and the fluff person in our group effectively flips tables upon hearing this stuff.

The worst DM I ever had was one who followed the rules of the game more or less to the letter. Until then I was used to GMs who would bend, break, or flat-out ignore rules to allow awesome things to happen.

In all seriousness, I haven't had any bad GM experiences, but I haven't played a whole lot of tabletop RPGs.

Luckliy I get to play with a good group of people. One of our GMs though can be a little annoying. He has some really amazing and awesome ideas for campaigns and adventures in whatever game he is running, but he has a tendency to eventually get to a point where the players cannot succeed and always have to rely on some annoying megapowerful NPC to solve their problems for them. Gets old after a while. Same GM a few times has taken a character concept someone has created and enjoyed and behind the scenes, without consulting the player, came up with all this crazy background info that completely changed that character into something they didn't want to play, and then at some point in the game would randomly drop it on them and then couldn't understand why, after weeks of trying to tell him they wanted to play the character they created and not the monstrosity he had turned it into, they would leave the game and never play again.

Closest thing I had to an annoying GM was a guy who always plotted out every step of his adventures/missions/quests/whatever and as soon as we did something he didn't decide we should do would then try forcing the group back on to his scripted path. Eventually he learned that players will never do what you want or expect them to do and the easiest way to deal with that as a GM was to be a lot more free form and expect them to do things bassackwards from what you expect. He turned into a really good GM. We were hard on him, though, as it seemed almost accidentally that any NPCs he would create hoping to have them around for a while would end up dead within a session of their introduction. Not really sure why things happened that way....just did...

The worst GMs, though, are those who let their pants make decisions for them. Never, EVER, give your significant other bonuses in game...all it does is piss everyone else off...judging by this thread some people really need to be beaten with the cluestick about this point.

Skriker

Skriker wrote:Luckliy I get to play with a good group of people. One of our GMs though can be a little annoying. He has some really amazing and awesome ideas for campaigns and adventures in whatever game he is running, but he has a tendency to eventually get to a point where the players cannot succeed and always have to rely on some annoying megapowerful NPC to solve their problems for them. Gets old after a while. Same GM a few times has taken a character concept someone has created and enjoyed and behind the scenes, without consulting the player, came up with all this crazy background info that completely changed that character into something they didn't want to play, and then at some point in the game would randomly drop it on them and then couldn't understand why, after weeks of trying to tell him they wanted to play the character they created and not the monstrosity he had turned it into, they would leave the game and never play again.

Closest thing I had to an annoying GM was a guy who always plotted out every step of his adventures/missions/quests/whatever and as soon as we did something he didn't decide we should do would then try forcing the group back on to his scripted path. Eventually he learned that players will never do what you want or expect them to do and the easiest way to deal with that as a GM was to be a lot more free form and expect them to do things bassackwards from what you expect. He turned into a really good GM. We were hard on him, though, as it seemed almost accidentally that any NPCs he would create hoping to have them around for a while would end up dead within a session of their introduction. Not really sure why things happened that way....just did...

The worst GMs, though, are those who let their pants make decisions for them. Never, EVER, give your significant other bonuses in game...all it does is piss everyone else off...judging by this thread some people really need to be beaten with the cluestick about this point.

Skriker

The mantra that I always keel to when I'm in the GM's chair is the fact that the PCs are the stars of the show and I'm there to have a good time and allow others to do the same as well, if the PCs want to do something that you didn't plan for or go off in a direction that you hadn't planned for then tough, you obviously didn't write the game well enough to make them want to chase the goals that you set for them.

My local Deathwatch group started growing to the point where it was getting too large for one GM to run things. I'm talking 10-12 players every week. Our GM is pretty awesome. I love playing games with him (he's even more fun when he gets to play because he's so chaotic!). He will emphasize roleplaying and problem solving but knows that there are times for hack and slash, so he balances it pretty well. He also does voices for different characters, which is pretty awesome and adds some humor into the game.

We decided that we would split the group up into two and run concurrent campaigns. Basically, two kill-teams on the same world, working out of the same watch-fortress, but run by the 2 GMs with them working together. I ended up with our original GM and about half the group ended up with the new GM.

Only a few weeks in with the new GM, one of his players questioned a decision that was being made by an NPC commander and asking for a reason for it, in character. The GM responded by having the commander pull his bolt pistol, shoot the player in the face and declare him dead. "Do I even get to roll a dodge?" 'No...' "How bout burning a fate point to stay alive?" 'No...'

Needless to say, that player walked over to our table with his character sheet, sat down, and proceeded to play in our group. Since then, we've had another player join our group with the original GM. That occured after he threw his group into an impossible situation, killed that player, and another player, and severely wounded most of the rest of the party. After the first player left because he was pissed off at the situation, the GM decided that he should more or less ret-con the whole thing by saying that the team had been effected by a neuro-toxin and it was all a hallucination... after he realized that he had gone overboard and pissed off half his group.

The problem I have with this GM is that he thinks it's "his" game... in reality, a GM has 2 not quite rules, but guidelines... kill your players and provide a fun experience for your players... he puts a little two much emphasis on #1 and not nearly enough on #2. Actually, I don't think he realizes #2, since he only seems to consider his own fun, which is fulfilling #1.

My good GM, he knows these rules and he follows them. He tries not to outright kill a character, unless that player wants him dead (and we routinely will approach him about killing a character so we can do a new one that we have an idea for). However, he will give the players enough rope to hand themselves and often throws us cookies when he see's us struggling with something. He's a great GM and I love playing in his games... this other guy though... he's got a lot to learn about GMing...

I once had a GM that would stop everything that was going on, duri to ng our D&D games to cater to one person in the group for entire sessions, so he could steal items. In addition, in order to stand a fair chance a survival you had to play one of his races, which made no sense. I ended up quitting from playing that campaign because he could not realise that sitting at a table for four hours at a table was no fun, so you could not stand a chance playing a human, because he made you take tens for every stat, and banned most of the classes unless they were special classes you can find on D&D wiki.


I still wonder how you end up as a half-vampire, as bieng a vampire is sort of a binary thing, either you are, or you are not, the only possible exception is bieng a ghoul.

juraigamer wrote:... who had 13 fate points...

The feth...?

I was once in a group that was terrorized by a DM who considered a die cocked if it landed half on a single sheet of paper. My reaction to that was to ritualistically remove all paper from my area of the gaming table every time I was called on yo make a dice roll, while explaining to him every single time why I was doing it. He never got a clue, eventually everyone else started doing it and so after a few more sessions he rage quit. Victory!

Where the hell do these people come from?

H.B.M.C. wrote:Where the hell do these people come from?

Necessity is the mother of crap GMs. That is to say, when the GM pickings are slim, you have to go with whoever's willing to run a campaign. Often with dire, dire consequences.

htj wrote:

H.B.M.C. wrote:Where the hell do these people come from?

Necessity is the mother of crap GMs. That is to say, when the GM pickings are slim, you have to go with whoever's willing to run a campaign. Often with dire, dire consequences.

The worst experiences that I've had with both players and GMs has always been where I haven't known them socially and as a result it always seems that there's someone in the room who grates on me or feels the need to assert their urge to be a dick.

The best people I've played with were pretty unsuprisingly the ones that I also had a healthy social relationship with and I'm lucky that my game group is small and composed of those people today.

Ah yes, very true Carmine. You're almost always better off playing with people you already know you enjoy the company of.

htj wrote:Ah yes, very true Carmine. You're almost always better off playing with people you already know you enjoy the company of.

The most depressing thing is of course that none of the awful people that I met at roleplaying games were socially well adjusted or simply not arseholes.

Strangely the people with proper jobs, spouses, interests in things outside of rpgs have never seemed to be interested in screwing me over during a game that while a great hobby, amounts to a grown-up's version of let's pretend.

H.B.M.C. wrote:

juraigamer wrote:... who had 13 fate points...

The feth...?

My thoughts exactly. I know some GM's reward players with an extra Fate point for doing something extraordinary, but this.. wow.

Carmine the Wolf wrote:

htj wrote:Ah yes, very true Carmine. You're almost always better off playing with people you already know you enjoy the company of.

The most depressing thing is of course that none of the awful people that I met at roleplaying games were socially well adjusted or simply not arseholes.

Strangely the people with proper jobs, spouses, interests in things outside of rpgs have never seemed to be interested in screwing me over during a game that while a great hobby, amounts to a grown-up's version of let's pretend.

Yes, it's always a concern playing with those types. Skirts dangerously close to the game being more real than their life for them. For some reason, they feel this gives them the right to act like infants. Presumably this is because, mentally, they are. Bitter? Moi?

Carmine the Wolf wrote:The worst experiences that I've had with both players and GMs has always been where I haven't known them socially and as a result it always seems that there's someone in the room who grates on me or feels the need to assert their urge to be a dick.

The best people I've played with were pretty unsuprisingly the ones that I also had a healthy social relationship with and I'm lucky that my game group is small and composed of those people today.

Couldn't agree more. Recently was looking to start up a new Sunday night game with friends since my wife got the old one in the divorce.

Had someone point me to some website that listed local people in the area who were looking for a group. I don't randomly bring people in to my gaming group who neither myself nor anyone else in the group knows. Just asking for headaches that way. Unfortunately that 1 in 10 player who makes a good addition to the group is usually the last of the 10 and not the 1st so it can be a pretty painful process. In fact I'd rather welcome a complete gaming noob who I know is an OK person into the group than someone who has years of gaming experience, but is a total unknown otherwise.

Skriker

BrookM wrote:

H.B.M.C. wrote:

juraigamer wrote:... who had 13 fate points...

The feth...?

My thoughts exactly. I know some GM's reward players with an extra Fate point for doing something extraordinary, but this.. wow.

I'll explain, I did a lot of research to figure out how the player had 13 fate points.

It turns out, you know the scum income table in dark heresy? the one that refers to fate points? Instead of getting thrones as they should have, the GM misread it and gave the player fate points as "income" and never, ever, even after fully explaining what the mistake was, fixed it.

If you think the 13 fate points thing was stupid, I was purposely trying to prove he broke the game by allowing two half actions to be the same action by tossing out the psychic power firestorm twice a round. I had a blast 6 area of death that wrecked house until he finally fixed the rule. Even then it took 4 games and a sit down explaining it to him. Nothing like 5d10+ 5 in blast 6 killing everything twice a round.

What did he say after you explained it to him? Was he doing it because he thought that's what the rules allowed, or simply because he preferred to house-rule it that way (despite the obvious imbalance)?

And to think, the one time that I DM'd, I was berated for taking it easy on the players because I wanted them to finish the campaign I'd concocted for them. Some people...

I played with one group that was a blast and I don't play much. Kept things flowing and fun. Eventually the group burned out and we were to busy. I later played a game with a group who had a really bad DM. She played the game way to seriously and dragged everything out. Yelled at people for talking because it ruined the focus of the game. I left after one game, to annoying and to in love with the rules. Just play the game!

H.B.M.C. wrote:What did he say after you explained it to him? Was he doing it because he thought that's what the rules allowed, or simply because he preferred to house-rule it that way (despite the obvious imbalance)?

He just said "Oh well" and argued letting the player keep all their fate points because A: they weren't the greatest player and B: it was his girlfriend.