Most people don't share their d&d amazing stories because "man we played d&d and my DM did a super cool story" doesn't catch the attention the same way "my DM stabbed me "
Exactly, I could say "The campaign my DM wrote uses time in a unique way" or I could say "My party member died, and because of it I lost my left leg and no one remembers us anymore"
My group played D&D and my DM did a super cool story. We were solving a murder, and then we eventually realized the killer was a local shop owner, and it turned out he had an artifact that effectively let him quantum leap back in time into his own body (there’s probably a more similar time travel story than quantum leap but I can’t think of it lol) so the shopkeeper as we knew him wasn’t ACTUALLY the murderer yet, he would only BECOME the murderer later. After we beat him we were given one use of the artifact to go back to the start of the campaign (a choice we made) to redo everything and prevent the murder in the first place. And then AFTER that the shopkeeper never had his future self jumped into his body, so we took him with us to keep an eye on him to figure out what would cause him to snap like that in the future.
I had a campaign I missed the last bunch of sessions for due to homelessness but I made the final battle and my gm the bloody legend wrote me a gandalf esc last minute entry to save the day. I came in as an angel since I was a vengeance paladin riding my trusty bear mike who over the missed sessions built a small army of bears under his command all with a special polymorph item..... I fuckin saved the party from a hoard of dragons with an army of bears transformed into trexs. It's easily the most amazing experience I've had with dnd and I love my gm for making that shitty part of my life better by letting me just go fuckin nuts
When I first got into DnD, I got really into the backstory of my very first Paladin. The short of it was his reading about the myth of Excalibur as a child was the driving force to protect innocence and become a Paladin. My DM read it over and asked me to make a different character. I was so gobsmacked but I didn't know any better, so I did without arguing. Turned out that he stole my character, changed his entire campaign to be based around "his NPC", and played as him throughout our quest to find Excalibur.
I once had a gm force my player to have a specific backstory. It's been ages so I can't remember much, but it was my first time playing pathfinder and he just took my idea and said "okay but I've already made a bsckstory for you" I went to one other session after that before the group broke apart. He also kept smiting the other player for making little jokes or being silly
My first introduction to D&D was absolutely terrible on so many levels. 1) Horrible scheduling. We had a party of 7 (plus DM) and any time 2 people couldn't make it, the entire session was cancelled. We were "scheduled" to play once a week. In the 9 months of me being present, we played maybe once a month. The most sessions we EVER had in a row without cancellations was 3 which happened once. I only cancelled twice in that entire 9 month period, but some people were cancelling for months at a time. However, people also didn't give any advance notice of this. Often, we wouldn't know if the session was happening or not until maximum the morning of (but more often 2-3 hours before the session start). 2) The DM used to pressure people into roleplaying and publicly shame players at the table mid-session for not roleplaying enough. People would express that they were happy with the game and everything but they just aren't big on roleplaying, yet the DM just didn't listen. It wasn't even like deep character roleplay. it was like "buy a winter coat". 3) He was terrible at balancing his attention between players. He had one person who he considered his best friend and oh boy, could you tell. There was one session where I was ignored for over 3 hours straight, and the only character who had been involved in any plot for over 10 sessions was that best friend's character. Every single other player agreed that it was an issue and called our sessions "The [character name] Show". Half of the party didn't do anything themselves anymore because they would just wait to see what that one player would do so they could say "I follow him" simply so they could get some game time. 4) He didn't let players write their own backstories and would, without permission, change major parts or entire "chapters" of their backstory. Not even to fit into the world or anything... Just because that character's story didn't interest him and he wanted to see a different story play out. 5) The DM would guilt trip and vaguely threaten s**cide over even the SMALLEST bits of constructive criticism. As an example, he used to write these 3000+ word session recaps that literally no one read because they were so long and not very well-written (basic grammatical mistakes throughout). We repeatedly asked him to just make it a shorter bullet point list to make it easier for us to read/ quickly refer back to AND to give him less work. His response was to, again, vaguely threaten s**cide and act like we're ungrateful. There was also one instance where he literally asked for feedback on the sessions and when people gave him that feedback with a THICK layer of sugarcoating ("we LOVE your DMing and it's amazing how passionate you are about the game, but I think there should be this little tweak to balancing"), he once again guilt tripped people and threatened, you guessed it, to commit s**cide. If you said anything that could be in any way interpreted as criticism or even a differing opinion to the DM, he would straight up throw a fit. 6) Because he would become manipulative and guilt-trip-y any time you said anything even remotely critical, I as a brand new player had to take on tons of responsibilities that should have been the DM's job. I ended up writing the recaps, I ended up managing the party fund, I ended up sending out session reminders, etc. 7) I know it's bad to criticise other people's creativity, but the story was just bad. It was convoluted, the DM had gotten all his advice from TH-cam videos (no offense lol) and had taken the common advice of "don't railroad players" to mean "give them dozens of dead ends and unrelated clutter and give them barely any indication of which part is the main plot". I believe what is typically meant by "don't railroad your players" is to give some illusion of choice: several options that all lead to the same place and maybe allowing your characters to affect the outcome. If you're going to try to throw in unrelated quests or deadends, you should try to introduce them in a way that lets players know its unattached/dead end nature, and if players hit a dead end, don't shame them if they struggle to remember what the last "checkpoint" of the questline was. 8) There was also another campaign that he ran on the same Discord server and they would constantly gossip about our group. Bear in mind I have literally never spoken to those people before. They said I was b**chy and argumentative simply because I had publicly disagreed with him a small number of times (3-4 times across 9 months). From that, he had gone to multiple people on the server to ask "hey, hasn't that person seemed like a massive b**ch????". Everyone whom I had spoken to said no, and that I seemed normal, but he still decided to move forward and confront me about it, throwing multiple accusations about my personality (that came from the baseless opinions of people whom I had never met or spoken to before). I left the server and as far as I know, our campaign died with my departure. There were even more issues that I just can't remember right now (as it has been a while since I quit), but it really was a horror story. I didn't really have any issues with the other players really (except maybe with the best friend who could have maybe done more to pass on the attention or wrap up what he was doing in a swifter manner).
@@xhyunjones1513 Feels like a blast from the past getting a notification on this year old comment, lol. I haven't found any longterm tables since then, but this experience has taught me that having no D&D is indeed better than having bad D&D.
@@madeleine61509 thats true, well friend i hope one day u find ur table! theres a group of folks that are def willing to make ya DnD experience not sucky out there! Keep adventuring!
Start with 9 players... two of them have main character syndrome, so they are constantly fighting over the spotlight and the DM's attention and another two have absolutely no idea of how the game works and are constantly requiring the DM to spend ten minutes to explain the rules to them. And after ten minutes of explaining, they will forget all of it five minutes later. Then you have the person that always interrupts the DM... After all of that, you will be lucky if the DM even acknowledges that you exist.
I once fell asleep during a combat encounter. And it was one of my first sessions ever, so i think I've created a reputation of a shitty player for a long time
@@transientanus Also if it's in-person or online... In person games back in the day often had 6 or more people. Heck, a lot of 2nd ed adventures require 10+ players. Which is insane to think about but it was b4 advanced video games. So it really was a "Party".
@@transientanus My favorite campaign was a 9-11 player campaign run by my dad, but maaan every time I try to run for more than six I disintegrate. One day I'll be able to inherit his legacy, but that day is not today.
What used to kill me, way back in my first group, was that we didn't just have no-shows, the person would wait until the last minute to call. My excitement would be building all week and, an hour before we started when I was completely psyched up and foaming at the mouth to play, someone would call and say, "Yeah, this couch is pretty comfortable. I think I'll just skip it today." Then, I would beg the DM to do it anyway and he'd say, "I'm kinda busy too. Let's just do it next week."
A problem my group has is that one player is almost always late and don't really seem to try to be immersed. Like we've asked him if he even enjoys the game and he says he does, but he makes no attempt at interacting with characters and whenever the DM tries to include him by asking, "what does *character* do?" He'll say "eh, he stands in a corner and crosses his arms". Like I get not being super into RP or stuff like that, but it's getting hard to even think of his character as present as he don't really include himself in the game at all
@@kaspermoe3220 Yeah, that is strange. I know I probably have a tendency to get too into it, But I know that and I don't expect everyone to spend days coming up with backstories and things like me. But, to have someone who doesn't participate at all. It does make you wonder why they even bother playing.
My DM husband once planned a whole campaign that I finally got to be a part of (my crazy work schedule kept me from playing most of the time, so I usually told him to just plan campaigns without me). I worked really hard to plan my character out for this campaign and was so proud if her. My husband was super excited too and helped me out with her. The first session finally commenced. Five minutes into the session, one of the other players randomly decided to be a murder hobo and stabbed my character. I failed my rolls and she died. Five minutes in. After months of planning. My husband stormed out of the house. When he came back, he made us start the session over. To be fair, the other player is a good friend and he felt really bad. He thought he was just being funny. He didn't think I'd DIE lol for the startover session, he didn't stab me again so that was nice.
@@Pihsrosnec Yeah and in that case it is a DM problem, because he should have told them that. But I don't really see what other outcome could they expect...
@@magicrainbowkitties1023 in the first campaign I ever played in one of the other players literally just made the frog knight from chrono trigger, down to embedding animations from the game into his roll20 attacks. He was a solid roleplayer and fun to be around in general but unfortunately he couldn't be show up to every other session and after a couple months he left for personal reasons.
In my first game, everyone *but* me wanted to give their character's a stand, and the DM was the only one there unfamiliar with JoJo so I took 20 hours creating a set of themed stand user enemies that the DM could use based on the Greek pantheon. I then got kicked from the group for spoiling the ending of metal gear 2
7:26 A game I play is a public pickup game where people come in and out, there's regulars but they're not always there for this session. The DM has to yell over the noise of a bar, and last session he had to manage an 11 player game. He did it flawlessly. Bless you Franco, you're a beast.
I actually have the opposite of a horror story! My friend was DMing for a huge group of me and other friends, 8 people. A few sessions in after seeing how hard it was for us to get enough time to RP and have meaningful combat, he split the party up. Half of the characters ended up betraying the other half (me being one of the betrayed) and trapping them on an already collapsing bridge to die. My group, the goofy betrayed ones, now had more motivation and investment in the story in trying to figure out why we got betrayed and had a greater goal to work towards when we were just goofing off before. Sessions felt way better after that and we did actually reunite in a big session a couple times. Sadly it fell apart due to scheduling issues with many of us going into university, but it was fun while it lasted and a very clever idea to make things more interesting.
@@fuzzyapple not at all, they just DM'd both groups in tandem, where group A would get a session, then group B, then A, and so on. My group (the betrayed) was finding our way back to town and find some reason why the others would do such a thing, and the other group (the betrayers) was trying to break their way out of prison after being accused of destroying the bridge.
@@HappyBeezerStudios our group was very haphazard, our characters were inexperienced in the group (in the world we were some sorta cartel and our characters were newbies) and they wanted to get rid of us before we did more harm than good (it was all in good fun of course). That was the in-character reasoning, which was fair, and the irl reason was because the 8 people were too much to DM for at once, which is DEFINITELY fair. Didn't need a super crazy reason for the characters to betray us since they just needed any sorta reason to split the party
I haven't suffered anything "horror story" worthy, but my current campaign has been on hiatus for months because the players' parents decided to get in a feud over a comment on a Facebook post and now none of us are allowed to hang out until it is settled which is probably never 🙃 This is a campaign I've spent years writing and it's my first major campaign with a unique setting, I've poured hundreds of hours into this game tailoring it specifically to this group of 3 players, my 3 best friends. Needless to say I'm a little pissed and if this doesn't work out I probably won't play dnd ever again
Wait, so basically the parents are holding their children's fun hostage because they have issues with the other parents? Don't know if there's a damn good reason for their conflict, but if there isn't... It sounds childish and NOT like sensible parenting. But don't let it discourage you from using your work elsewhere. You might need to change or adapt some things, but GMs often face the situation of prep becoming obsolete. It might take a while, but usually, you can recycle most material sooner or later.
Sometimes, when I read comments like this, I am very grateful to my parents for allowing me to leave home at the age of 16 and never interfering with my private life. Someone might say it's wrong and it's mean that they don't care about me, but it allowed me to make my mistakes and learn from them. Now I am 29 years old and although I used to felt a bit sad and unloved by them, today it pays off for me.
If i had a nickel for everytime Jacob told the story about outing his secret assassin player during an RPG Horror Stories video, I’d have 2 nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
My first ever game of D&D, the DM made a big jigsaw-like puzzle that we had to solve to open a door to proceed. As in, we had to use our actual brains. Long story short, we never solved the puzzle, and resorted to attacking the door with our brand new low level characters. We spent a 3 hour game fighting a door. Because this was supposed to be a one-shot, the DM just moved the loot from the end of the dungeon and pretended the door was the final boss.
I love how it starts with "man, this was so bad. I made such an ass out of myself. I did [normal D&D things]", and then we get to the first complete horror story - ignoring the creeper in the store. that one was actually unnerving - and it starts with "this wasn't all too terrible" lmao
Group of brand new players, all lvl1, none had ever played before. I was a little more experienced but it was my first time DMing. The first turn of the first encounter of the first campaign, the wildmagic sorcerer's spell went wild, he rolled 'you cast fireball as a 3rd level spell centred on yourself' on the surge table, and tpk'd the entire party in the first 5 minutes. (we laughed a lot and retconned it)
@@LogaSLevaard Issue was that I expected my players to continue on a more wholesome route, trying to gain the humans trust and show that goblins arent that bad by doing good deeds. But out of nowhere decided not to.
what's crazy is that it was obviously clear the gm didn't intend for everyone to fail the save, or else he wouldn't have deus ex machina'd an npc there to save them lol
@@generatoralignmentdevalue I think it wasn't that the DM wasn't prepared to see the roll fail, he just didn't expect everyone to fail. Like how a DM might throw a banshee at a party and think "Okay, so the Banshee will wail, that Rogue with the +1 in CON saves is going to probably fail. The Barb and the Sorcerer will survive and they will beat up the Banshee and get the Rogue back up with the 10 healing potions they have." But instead the whole party failed.
We were doing an Underdark campaign, and I (the DM) described an area filled with mushrooms near the myconid colony the party was supposed to be going to. Instead of being like, "cool description" and moving on, two players literally spent an HOUR talking about how they found hallucinogenic mushrooms, while myself and the other three players became increasingly frustrated. When they finally moved on, I gave them some combat penalties for being high. This promoted one of the two to go off on me for favoritism and unfairly singling her out. I kid you not.
Lol sounds like a player I had once that rage quit when he died after he decided he wanted to stop running away like the rest of the party when the whole party was almost dead after a fight he initiated and forgot the chest in the hall was a mimic and then thought it was a good idea to fight the mimic solo. I even gave him a way out by asking "You sure you want to do this?" That was also the 2nd character he killed as the first died in the previous session from doing something equally as stupid. But it was MY (as the DM) fault... Some people lol
Our "DM" would always talk up his campaigns and ask how excited we were. He would tell us how much time he spent on the campaign and he was excited to run it. Then we would do a session, and he would always scrap the campaign claiming that it "wasn't good enough". There were many times that he would hype up the game, and then the night came to play and he would say that he didn't feel like DMing. We went through 8 sessions with 8 different "campaigns".
That’s actually kind of sad. He sounds like he was a self conscious perfectionist who got anxiety about it and couldn’t push himself through that. Unfortunate for everyone involved (you definitely weren’t in the wrong at all for asking for a new dm though)
Maaaan that's me ;-;. -Got a super idea for a campaing. -Spend weeks homebrewing everything, helping my friends with their characters and writing the story around them and their backstory. -Start the campaign. -Get massive anxiety. -My friends telle me it's all good and they have a lot of fun, but my overthinking, impostor syndrome, dming dumbass can't take the compliments and can't comprehend that, they might actually really having fun. -Loose motivation. -Stop the campaign. -Repeat. That awful, because I love all my ideas, and I really think my players have fun. But my anxiety is too much... That sucks a lot, and not for me but for my friends too... If you're a player, don't hesitate to tell you Dm everything, if you like the campaign, the sessions, what you don't like too! The most stress I have is feeling like my players don't like something and don't tell me. So just, talk to you Dm. It's not much, but a little '' so hype for the session tonight '' is like... Everything to some dm
@@UmbraDaiwrfol we do that every time! Talk about what we're enjoying, tell him how much we appreciate how much effort he is putting in, etc. But it's ok now, he has ghosted our group now and is instead running campaigns for his other friend group.
The 'I didn't want to tell people no so I ended up with 8 players' thing happened to me and, strangely, the group has been playing for 6 years with the all but one of the original group (and we replaced that one) But it takes /so/ much more work for balance and story progression and items and etc.
One of my current Exalted groups has 11 people in it. We're split up into a Saturday and Thursday session with some people in one group and some in another with me and another person GMing the two groups.
@@HalfTangible Yeah my current D&D group started in a similar way, a group got too big and unwieldy so a player took up the role of being a second DM and split off with his game, I joined that group after the split because Covid ended up messing with the schedule and who could play.
Ok so this one is more funny than horror, but once we were running a session and 30 minutes after the start of the session (everyone said they could make it earlier that morning) we were wondering where the last player was only for him to tell us “oops sorry I forgot I’m on vacation so I won’t be able to make it to this one”. He was on the other side of the world and had forgotten… it was very funny. Love that guy.
Had a good DM, nice group. Every character the DM's wife makes is literally, "My character's a bitch, and if your character doesn't cater to her whims she's going to be a bitch to you." Every party in-character interaction with her is walking on eggshells, or her character throwing a fit because our characters aren't putting up with her shit. She also can't separate herself from her character and is IRL upset, snippy, and silently fuming. Also she has Main Character Syndrome because DM is her husband.
I was a player in a one shot where we started as prisoners chained together inside of a warship, and he asked us beforehand to decide what crime we committed to get us into that position so no one would be uncomfortable. That's how that kind of situation should be handled, not forcing a situation onto a player that they aren't comfortable with.
My DM did something VERY similar in the last campaign she ran. On session one she told us we were starting in a giant prison ship (area of Rhode Island, with 100 floors for each letter of the alphabet) and began the campaign by asking why we'd be in prison for life. She also had us put our boundaries on a Google form before sessions started (it was a program at a library that anyone could sign up for, not a friend group thing), along with other necessary information like if we had a character already, emails, ect.
Hey, guy from the mentioned Patreon game here, who definitely was one who missed multiple times. I was awful at keeping a schedule, and honestly also just wasn't really a good player at the time, but I'd like to think I've gotten better both at schedules and being a good player in the time since then! That part about us all being able to improve rings true! PS: Those games are still a very fond memory, thanks a lot again for the great times!
Back in days of yore, I had started playing D&D Adventurer's League at a LGS to try to break into the hobby. Once, I was able to convince a curious friend to go with me to give it a shot. I had my character and he made his beforehand: a pretty standard swashbuckler that he had lovingly written a whole backstory for. We sit down at an open table with a few other players and start playing. The game quickly turns into a chase scene with all of us on horses pursuing the bad guys on a cart. The DM has us roll Animal Handling checks to...determine if we could keep our horses galloping in a straight line? Anyways, my friend fails the first check and his horse starts slowing down and we joke about it. He fails two more checks, and the DM just decides that his horse veers off course and stops. My friend is a little annoyed that he's been rolling so badly, but it happens. I ask him if I should wait up, but he says go ahead, and the rest of the party continues the pursuit. Can he catch back up to us? ...No, he's too far behind, the DM says. What? What is he supposed to do for the rest of the game? Shrug. The party starts combat with the bad guys on the cart and my friend just has to sit there for the better part of two hours listening to the rest of the party actually play D&D (including one unsupervised 10-year-old who played a wizard that tried to attack enemies with his "adamantium claws" that the DM hand-waved...a story for another day). I buy him snacks and joke with him about his character's apparently unbiddable horse and we try to think of things that he could do on his own since the rest of the party is long gone (at least according to the DM). He thinks his character could return to the town we had just come from to alert the guards and get reinforcements. The DM says "Uh, sure. You go back to town. But the guards aren't going to get to the cart in time so you just wait in town until the rest of the party gets back." And so he does. He's miserable, having wasted his time on a game that he's not even going to be allowed to play...plus his phone died, so he had literally nothing to do. I'm unhappy, since the whole point was to play with my friend and introduce him to my new favorite hobby. Bad experience all around. I eventually got my friend to play D&D again, but it was a hard sell, and he'll still make bitter jokes about it to this day. I do too, and we've spun it into his characters having abysmal luck with horses across every universe we play in. TL;DR - Friends don't let friends play Adventurer's League.
@@StarWindEnergin Lol, yeah, hard to tell in retrospect if he didn't know what he was doing or he just didn't care. It was a lesson for me when I started DMing later.
Once played an adventurers league game and was told that the session was going to be "combat heavy" so we made our characters accordingly. It was NOT we spent an hour doing puzzles and talking, did 1 very short and easy fight, spent another hour doing puzzles to get to the final encounter and then our DM goes "Well we spent too long on the puzzles and talking so I'm gonna skip the final encounter that this entire session was leading up to, you guys would have won easily anyway". Don't get me wrong, I like puzzles and NPC interactions but to skip the finale of a session like that stung.
indeed screw that DM. But if the character didn't have like, proficiency in animal handling or a less trained horse - it is actually kind of hard to get a horse to obey you, many things can go wrong. Sometimes they just don't want to run even when you're squeezing them to go.
@@Kokonutzlz Oh sure, definitely true for real life. My issue with the DM was less the failed skill checks and more his insistence that there was no creative solution my friend could try to help or catch up after the fact, he just wrote him out of the adventure.
My short horror story: I had raised a yeti from a child to a full grown adult over the course of a Rime of The Frostmaiden game, acting as my character arc. The DM took this yeti, and threw him off a 1000ft cliff, killing him instantly in the last session. Theres more to it, but thats the basic version (Also it wasn't bad rolls or a bad decision. The DM, as the yeti, ran and jumped off the cliff)
@@chriscanfly6386 He (The Yeti) did it to finish off a boss that we were fighting. He grappled the boss and jumped. the boss just teleported out of his grasp and then casted feather fall, meaning he was fine while the yeti went splat. This may have been reasonable if the boss didn't have like 20 health when they jumped. It wasn't sacrifice, it was suicide
I have a lot of social anxiety but I still want to play dnd, but i haven't found a single game announcement where text, no voice or video is featured :(
@@Azure9577 You want to play D&D through text only? I think that might be nigh impossible to find. I play through Roll20 and we all use our mics. No video, though.
@@SaireiTheDragon while it is nigh impossible to find, its not actually impossible to play the game using text, I just need to find and convince a DM to do it
Back when I was a new DM, I was talking a lot about my new passion around, D&D and TTRPGs in general. At some point, my older brothers started to be really curious about the whole thing and wanted to try it out. They insisted on the fact that they wanted to create their characters and play an aventure written by me. I told them that it wasn't like playing a game of UNO, we needed to make their characters, which would take a lot of time, then I would have to write them a one shot, which would take a lot of time, then the session needed to happen, which would take a lot of time. They said they were okay with that, so I thought "Sure, why not ?". So the game was supposed to have three players : My two brothers, playing a Bard and a Druid, and one of my brother's Girlfriend, playing a Paladin. We determined that there would be only one occasion to play the session : the afternoon before my mother's and Aunt's birthday party (twins). Because none of them were available at the same time before that, I had to do Three "Session 0", explaining the rules and creating a character, for each one of them. They played spellcasters, so it took about 2 hours every time. Then, I spent an entire afternoon tailoring a session for them, because I wanted to design a one shot with a "sandbox" feel, to showcase what was important in TTRPGs to me. It was nothing fancy, but I was rather proud of it. Then came the awaited day where we were supposed to play. Again, this was the only time we would be all together and available for it. However, half an hour before starting, while I was setting up my PC and my DM screen, they decided that they were tired, and all went to their bedrooms take naps. Which lasted most of the time we dedicated to the session. I. WAS. SO. MAD. ABOUT IT. But as I said earlier we were supposed to celebrate a birthday the evening. So I thought "Okay, that suck, but I won't ruin my morther's and aunt's party because of a game and my stupid ego". The same night, my brothers started a fight, and they refused to talk to each other for almost an entire year. They completely ruined the event, and my mother, to this day, still think it was her fault somehow (I'll spare you more details), instead of her two sons being idiots. I'm still mad, but I can't talk about it, because it is forbiden to talk about what happened that evening. We don't want to bring back the (unrelated to the avorted D&D game) dispute.
Sounds like you were a lot more interested than they were, and they were just kind of bullshitting. Gotta vet interests before, see if they ever reach out first about it rather than always initiating it yourself.
@@supahdupah207 While it is probably true that they mostly wanted to play to show interest in my passion, this is something I was aware of from the get go. They were the ones asking for it in the first place, and as I stated in my first comment, I tried to explain to them that setting up a D&D session on an original story with custom made characters would require a lot of time, especialy from me. I did it because I wanted them to be aware of the necessary work, and maybe dissuade them from doing it if they were not motivated enough. They could have backed of right there, but instead they insisted that they were willing to do it anyway. They even went through the entire character creation process, only to let me down the day the session was supposed to be played. That being said, I still have their character sheets... So maybe one day we will do it, but I will not be the one putting the idea on the table this time either.
9:05 Can confirm, I was a part of this campaign, it really sucked because Me and the other play put a LOT of effort into our characters. We were just about to head into a town for a really important story encounter, and all of the sudden our Warlock (said guy) flaked for 9 weeks. Fortunately it has a happy ending however, we started a new campaign in the same world with new characters and everyone is getting time to play and develop equally.
I have yet to experience a "horror story" however I feel like I managed to avoid one when I started a D&D club and over 30 people joined day 1. several of them wanted to be DMs so it worked out in the end and I narrowly avoided having to DM the largest single DM table ever
30 would be insane. I've done 10 once and damn was that rough. Luckily 4 of the players were only there for the first session(they were moving away and just wanted something special to go out on) and 1 of them wanted to be a drop in/drop out character.
2:19 I know this was a joke from like a year ago but my favorite character I ever played was a Loxodon Monk of the Astral Fist that I built largely because I wanted to use something similar to the concept of stands lmao. But then he went on to be probably my second favorite character I ever played with a really fun back story and some amazing combat and RP moments.
I never had a horror story, but did have an uncomfortable experience one time; ran a game at a LGS, and had a father and son duo playing. The dad constantly micro-managed his son’s character choices and kept berating him for doing “the wrong thing”. I kept gently trying to encourage the kid to make his own choices, but didn’t want to step out of bounds with the dad because I did not know either of them personally. I never played with them any more in the future, but I do feel bad, because I can honestly foresee that kid likely had a horrible negative impression for the rest of his life about TTRPGs instead of it being a potentially lifelong passion and hobby. (Ignoring the repercussions of the dad and son’s relationship, because I know nothing of them personally). But it is a bit depressing to see what could have been a great experience likely ruining the whole way someone views a hobby that has brought fun to so many people.
14:14 Similar instance where our sorcerer tried to use fireball while grappling someone, for some reason thinking it would just hit only that person. Like they misunderstood the range rules. So instead they just kamikazed and hit another party member.
I was playing a beastman monk once and after I died in one of our first sessions my friend joined in at the beginning of the next session as a guest character ranger and skinned my dead still warm corpse and the worst part was that no one acknowledged it until about 2 hours into the session! Skinned their friend in front of them and it took 2 hours for someone else to be like 'hey, wait a second that was disgusting!'
ever since I read it I've been dying to make a dumb wrastler character from it using the charisma bonus strength checks and magic stealing thing for showing other casters who's king of the ring! Just as soon as I get the green light lol
Ok, I have one. Our DM decided to have a demon lord force himself on my fiance's character and described the entire act in graphic, horrific detail. We spent the rest of that session trying to figure out how to safely remove a demon baby from her character. He also forced her character to wear very revealing clothing. Basically transparent clothing. Incredibly awkward and uncomfortable, to say the least.
@@trinitylovesyou6868yeah... ill be honest, if the DM was upfront about it, we couldve been mentally prepared for it-- Also for the reply above you: GRIFFFIIIIIITTTTHHH
I’m not exactly sure the powers of necromancer but I had an idea of a character. A necromaster who is a lawyer that brings the victim back to testify therefore always winning the case
Witness, please produce a valid passport or ID card! No, no, that is not a valid one, that person is officially deceased. No, you can not testify without proper identification of your person.
Honestly, if it wasnt the whole "your group didn't even get a chance thing" then I'm kinda happy for them 😂 if thats the WORST thing to happen during a session, theyve had a great experience playing lol
God, two hours. I'd have trouble staying in that game - I'm not even settled into my character or the events by then, much less the tableside conversations and distractions. Hell, the game I DM 'starts' at 4:30 and we don't usually have the first in-game narration/activity until almost 5:30 XD
I've got 3 stories. 1. Joined a new game on saturdays, online, with a group of people that were all new. Not like, to dnd, but that the entire group was newly formed. Session 1, we all have fun. Then the DM starts changing things. He doesn't like the direction the game is going, and wants to either start over, or turn the game into a war game where we control armies. He doesn't ask us, he just says he's going to do that, so everyone in the group dips and we make our own group, where one of the players from the previous group becomes the dm. Been gaming with them for 4 years now. 2. A player in my long time online group, before the group in the previous story got together, invited me to a game with him and a friend of his who was dming. I go in, make a character, and the friend that invited me doesn't show up to the game. I find out later that he got me in so he could dip from the game since the DM was... Well, I made a character, and it dies in the first session. I make another character, and it dies in that session too. The third character I make survives, but dies at the end of combat because the boss blows up when it dies (a homebrew monster with no context to warn players). It wasn't that he was challenging us, he was making combats too hard purposefully, and then bringing in overpowered anime (legit, anime characters) NPCs that he controlled to save us, after killing of play characters he didn't like. I stopped showing up eventually. 3. This one was the longest. We had a player that was with us for years, one of the first people to join mine and my wife's online game. He was the quintessential edge lord dnd player. If you can think it, he did it in terms of edge lord behavior at the table. We're all adults. He's an adult. My wife and I were newer to dnd back then, so we put up with it for years. We had players join and quit our game because of him, and eventually, it came to a head twice. First was the previous campaign that ended because he was upset about a player dealing more damage than him, so he pulled a hissy fit in game to ruin it so we could start a new game. Then in the new game, he joins the cultists secretly behind the player's backs, and even tries to betray the player characters to further some agenda in game. We confront him about it after the players learn about it, and he is super proud of his ideas and whatnot despite us asking him not to do that kind of thing. Fervently denying it. We kicked him from the game, and still remember back to the time he was a player with "well it cant be worse than *player name*." We've had a few other players join, one we removed from the group because he was also edge-lordy and the players weren't really getting along with his player character choices. It was fine, just we weren't vibing.
Told my DM i was a sailor on a merchant ship and i hated pirates as my background. When we ran a one shot to play out that scenario he changed the enimies to beholders. If your player has a background that can work in multiple ways like having an interesting story twist, spawning random enemies, or just roleplaying in town, dont mess with it just so you can show off your cool new mini.
Never give your DM a blank check in your backstory (granted this was awesome for my drama-loving inner theater kid, but it still hurt!) So at the beginning of the campaign, I framed out the name of the kobold warren my rogue came from with some very basic details (their name, the colors/patterns common in the warren, her job/rank there, why she left) but otherwise left it up to her. I gave express verbal permission to introduce characters from my past and announce that I knew them, as I would simply roll with it. I thought this meant I would get some dramatic confrontations with people who had wronged her in the past, which admittedly I *did,* but I also got hit with the shadowy, life-stealing apparition of a child my character lost when she was very young that I didn't even know she had. I love my DM. She's amazing. I still haven't forgiven her.
Oh hey I didn't expect for my story to get featured here. Mine is the one about the non-horny bard and the SA mention. I'm glad you did feature it here because that was my first game and I was naive and did not leave nearly as quickly as I should have as I was nervous about ruining other peoples experiences by speaking up and establishing personal boundaries at the time. I hope that my horror story can help new players understand what is and is not acceptable at tables and that it is ok to put your foot down with your DM if you're uncomfortable so that they can avoid the same experience I had in my first game. On the bright all the other players and I left and made our own group to play for a couple years and we're all still really good friends, so there's some happy ending to that story!
I still don't understand why they thought it was a good idea without discussing with you first. They legit had conversations and came to the conclusion that you'd be okay with this. I'm really glad you and the other players left those creeps.
@@imugi-16 You're in the wrong to vilify DMs that you've never met. We're only learning half of the story. The reality is that the onus isn't on the DM to make sure a player is comfortable. It is on the player to make sure they understand the world that their character is entering into and to assert their personal preferences without expectation that the game will change to accommodate said preferences. The PHB makes that very clear. While having comfortable players is ideal, discomfort will happen from time to time. Antagonists are supposed to be detestable and there is no way for a DM to know what might trigger a player unless that player speaks up. If a player winds up triggered, that sucks. But the player should leave the table gracefully and without malice, knowing that they're not owed their preferred experience. The only exception to this is if the DM (or other player) is _trying_ to make the player, rather than the character, uncomfortable. That's player vs player, which I don't condone, rather than roleplaying PvE. Still, this also happens from time to time, even between long-time players/friends. An imaginary world isn't worth getting upset or labeling it as a horror story until police are involved.
So weird, sexual assault is not something you should be worried about in a game where murder and theft is common. Just an FYI, murder is worse than sexual assault.
A tip for when one or more players can't make it: run a one shot. Have a few players have a random one shot ready, roll up new characters, and play something different. Also gives your dm a break
I do this. In fact I have my own little side campaign that starts and ends every session in the same location. Easy to narrate off why someon'e gone. The simply didn't come to work that day.
@@damianwojcik6174 Funny you should mention that. I created such a campaign. My players were suffering from a little burnout and wanted a break from their regular characters. They wanted to try something higher level - you know, to have some characters with those abilities they usually never survived long enough to gain. So .. I let them create high level characters - warning them to expect tougher encounters. The levels were set to give them things like extra attacks, access to certain spells - but not things like Wishes. I allowed to to break one creation rule per character. For example, we had a hobbit monk who could do a Boot to the Head against an ogre. There was a barbarian with an abysmally dull intellect but with a Gamma World (TSR game) mutation of Disintegrate. And there was the Ranger who could dual wield long swords. Then I gave the group some artifacts. The ranger had a pair of long swords that could cast Haste on himself without aging. As we were running them into the Giant modules, this gave the group its name - Order of the Blade Barrier. Instead of a Wand of Wonder, they got a Rod of Awe. Same idea, much more mayhem. (The stupid barbarian got into an argument over who got to hold the Rod and ended up Disintegrating it.) What turned it into a game was the ranger deciding to adventure Beyond the Barrier Peaks by himself only to get himself stuck. This was the campaign created (rescue mission). They even continued on to the Demonweb Pits. Point is, they had fun. Never mind that they had no use for all the loot. Dragons would have been envious. Come to think of it, the Rod kept summoning an ancient Gold Dragon. We gave it a 01% chance of it being the same one the first repeat and it was. They healed the dragon and gave it most or all of the loot on each occasion.
8:12 honestly I feel like 3 players and a GM is the perfect amount of people for a TTRPG, add the extra person and you suddenly have scheduling conflicts, remove one and the party feels too small
I think my personal favorite to run is 1 on 1s with good roleplayers. There’s something so close about it, and tailoring the experience to just one player really gives the change to focus on their story. It’s a ton of work (especially with NPCs, which are super vital to 1 on 1 campaigns) but I find it to be so worth it. Beyond that, 2 or 3 would be my golden number. Gives everyone the chance to speak, lets the story be easily tailored to the characters, and gives the players good time to interact and do what they want.
That was the makeup of my group for about half a year. It was great, we didn't get off track as easily as we do nowadays (with SEVEN PLAYERS and a DM), our schedule was consistent (Saturday at 4 for almost two years), and we ended up being a very tight-knit group. I love our current party and I would die for each and every single one of them, but I do miss the four-person squad sometimes.
A GM and three players can be great, but from my experience, it needs to be people who are really into the game. If there is even one player who is not really invested and just kinda there, you basically reduce the capability of your characters by 30%. Everyone needs to meet their responsibilities such as knowing and picking their spells and abilities, paying attention to combat, etc.
Okay, so I was living abroad and had this bff who did VO work, had a HUGE library of TTRPG books, etc and just...best possible person to run a campaign, finally decided to run a game, with me! First session: DM printed out tokens and maps of every potential scene we'd encounter that session, and had them organized in such a way that he could just pop open an envelope of tokens, dump the contents on the table, and enter the scene almost immediately. It was all laminated to write on and so well put together. His RP and voice work was so good that it took me about an hour to stop giggling with this massive smile on my face with how amazing it was, and stop seeing him just as my bff making me smile and focus on getting into the game. The other player phoned it in. Seriously. He was distracted on his phone, and looked bored the whole game even though he said he was a veteran. It was throwing me out of it when an amazing scene would take place that my bff spent so much time on and performed as a DM like it was a one-man stage play (so much fun when you can identify an NPC from the voice the DM uses for them), and this guy's like "Hold on a sec, I gotta reply to this. Okay, what were we doing again?" You know it's bad when it takes over an hour to resolve combat with 2 PCs and only 6 baddies. I wanted to cry. I felt horrible for my friend. After all that, my friend never ran another campaign with anyone outside of some group he'd been playing with for years. Best and worst DnD experience of my life.
On the topic of one missing player, unless it is a super important story moment, my group has always played when we are only one player down, and haven't run into any issues yet. And in the case that someone is out, and we delay for a week for them, we ask ahead of time if they will be their next week. If they cant give a hard yes, we let them know that we will just play without them, and the DM will give them a breakdown of the session sometime after. We are all adults and understand that life happens, but we also understand that one persons time isn't worth more than the rest of us (1 DM and 5 other players) and the show must go on.
There was a game i played way back in high school with some classmates i couldn't participate in one of the sessions because my grandmother had passed away next session the DM punishes me for missing a session by amputating one of my characters arms i was a spellcaster Later he punished another player for missing a session but much less severe than mine he just lost some equipment
I missed a session for a funeral and my character was jettisoned out of a spaceship air lock. Did not even relieve so much a "hey make a new character" text before the next session :/
Man, that just hurts to read. DMs should be more understanding on missing sessions, though I do get annoyed when players aren't at sessions, the DM shouldn't of punished your game and character because of it though
Shoutout to that one time I was running a sorta sci-fi magitech game for some friends of mine. They were visiting this city that had magical artillery emplacements, and of course, they wanted to see up close. So they're walking around, and there are big glowing canisters storing magical energy to fuel the guns. One of the players pulls out a knife and pokes one. Some dude runs over and says "hey, be very careful with those. If the magic energy gets out, it'll start a chain reaction that'll destroy a big chunk of the city." Take a wild fucking guess what my player did next.
@@Vanq22114 then why did you make it blow up that hard? You're the DM, it can only blow up as hard as you want it to. Another thing to keep in mind, though in moderation.
They realise that poking the canisters is a bad idea, apologise to the dude and ask for a tour of the gun implacements The dude excepts and they have a lovely time, afterward the party invites the dude out for a drink and they become the best of friends and live happily ever after
Our group started a new campaign with one of our guys DMing for the first time. The DM had clearly put in a lot of effort for this, sending us heaps of world building stuff he'd created before we even got to our first session to prep us. We start the campaign with a little intro section in a forest with the party as a caravan escort. This was meant to take maybe half of the first session before we got to town and kicked off the rest. This ended up getting drawn out over 3 or so sessions thanks to our fighter constantly interrupting, drawing attention to himself and just being a general menace. He decided that as a fighter, he had to fight everything, party members included. I started to get pretty mad after a bit of this, as our DM had clearly been putting in a lot of effort for this campaign and I just found it to be really fucking rude. Eventually, I got fed up and my barbarian got into a fist fight with him and knocked him out. The party then just left him unconscious in the middle of the forest. He left the campaign after that and said something about the game being 'too restrictive'. Without this guy the campaign ran smoothly and we all had a blast. We finished up the story early 2022 after running for around 2 years.
It is heartbreaking to see a DM go all out and to have a player (or players) not invest in the campaign, the story, or their characters at all. I'm glad getting rid of the player fixed the issue - sounds like he didn't know how to share the table with the other players, or how to operate a charater properly.
The horror story forewarned at the beginning of the video (TW: Sexual Assault) is from 12:13-14:07👍🏽 The story itself is fairly short, and the rest of the time is Jacob explaining how important communication is, to avoid such circumstances in your game.
I opened the video for Spooky D&D stories. I stayed for Therapy with Jacob. Man, your "unasked advice" was genuinly good. You should do more. I loved it.
Yeah but I also feel it can be a way to just built anxiety and create a warped perception that there’s like a 90% chance you’re going to end up in a D&D group with a potential psychopath or sex fiend.
I feel like the party getting charmed by the baddie was a series of bad rolls, and that's why the DM had to bring in the NPC ally to save them and avoid a TPK or whatever.
to be fair although it's unlikely to have every player fail a save. despite that you shouldn't build an encounter expecting at least one to pass. it turns the encounter into "save or die"
@@christophercrafte I mean, devil's advocate for the DM, the DC could've been something low like 15. If everyone's dropping low rolls, they're still gonna fail, especially at lower levels. Sometimes you can't really account for everything.
We had something like that in our last BBEG fight. We were hit with a power word stun immediately followed by a meteor storm. Only the NPC druid survived. Our DM does almost exclusively deadly fights. Our level 6 party fought 2 dragons in the in-game time span of 30 minutes. In my own campaign I ran a medium fight against 14 crabs and the party was absolutely astonished it was considered medium difficulty.
@@GoodOldGamer I’ve watched my entire party of six fail a DC 10 Perception check. I’ve seen one player in particular die with advantage on death saving throws, he can basically roll a one on command. You can set the hurtle ankle height, but if you count on your party to succeed at something they will always find a way to trip and break their necks instead.
for me, my party is playing a one piece dnd game. They're a pirate crew, and they're trying to be somewhat good guys in this world of bad pirates. One member of the party, tried recruiting a small town to join his cause, however failed his persuasion roll. He decided, it'd be best to kill the entire town, and he did so using nearly every spell in his book. The crew kicked him out of the crew after that, it was not his first rodeo with going against what everyone else was doing.
7:30 I related to that, back in my university days I was the "forever-DM" of the entire mechanical engineering department and I would always end up running 8-player tables, and 8 was a hard-cap I placed cause otherwise I'd be DMing Band of Brothers. Thankfully by my 3rd year other people started to DM as I was close friends with a lot of people I couldn't let play simply for lack of room.
I created a specific location for the kind of player, new or old, that like to swap characters or restat. I called it the Unwritten Halls as it was a large demi-plane that would "conveniently" show up whenever a player wanted to swap out. It was basically a guildhall for heroes through time which allowed my players to switch characters and take up quests through any area from any game or homebrew setting while maintaining a somewhat coherent story.
My sister and her boyfriend ask me to run a short game for them and my other siblings. We play the first session (about 1 hour) and everyone seemed to have had a good time and said they wanted to play the next session tomorrow. So I kept working on the campaign, they would keep saying they wanted to play it but would push it back. My sister’s boyfriend did not live in are state and had to go back home. I had spent about fifteen hours hand drawing maps building models and writing the campaign just because they kept telling me they wanted to play the campaign.
This video could not be more beautifully timed lmfao. Last Saturday I was supposed to DM, and it was gonna be my first time! I played a bit in high school but I really wanted to try out running a campaign myself. Found some friends and coworkers who were interested and had a neat little 5 person party. Come 8:30 and I get cancelled on last minute by 3 of the 5. Bought all the books, dice, basic map stuff etc. No game. There is a kind of happy ending though. A few days later (Tuesday) I ran a session with my best friend, his 3 brothers and one of their friends! They were all extremely new and the youngest ones are in high school still, but they did great! Had a lot of fun and it was really cool to introduce them to TTRPG!
My nightmare was my first time as a DM. I had this super cool homebrewed campaign set up about this dark mist that crept around this valley at night kidnapping people, then you throw in some cannibalistic bandits and a cults that would incinerate upon death and the players were to figure out what the heck was going on. All was well for the first couple session, as they gathered clues and did some side quests for some locals, along with some sprinkles of lighthearted quests for this mysterious unhinged wizard, "Einar the Bizarre!!" who has 'silly and bizarre' magic. i had this set up in 3 sections, traveling across 3 towns, getting more clues, and the final town had all the exposition they would need. but during the second town, one of the players who was trying to run a 'morally good necromancer' was not having fun as he wasn't able to have armies of dead following him around (too low of level) so i worked with him, as he was my friend and killed him off and had him come in with a new character, a wanted Pirate criminal. Shouldve saw the signs.... We finish up the 2nd town and get to the third location which was a larger walled city. i had many side quests planned so the party would go around and do these fun lil side quests and recruit as many people to go fight the big bad of the campaign, but that player i mentioned earlier started to get bored again and began to cause issues, like burning down the general store, killing the nice old Loxodon that ran it, or putting a molotov into the pocket of one of the main quest givers. when i called him out on it. he said everything i was doing was shit and the game sucked and walked out. Note, it was a 3 player campaign and now it was down to 2... and after that, right on the cusp of when the story would heat up. scheduling issues arose for another player... that was well over a year ago at this point. it just sucks that they were so close to the end of my first campaign and never got it :(
Thankfully, my DM interviewed every single player before he let them into the game we play together. We haven't had any problems from players themselves in game. We've met up on Mondays each week and if someone has something come up, we'll have advance notice about it, so schedule-wise it was rather good to work with. It's been a year and a few months now since the campaign started and we're all loving it, to the point where we have our own inside jokes, mini-stories we tell to family and friends, and meaningful moments of character building between characters we portray and the players themselves. We did have a player who started off in our first session, but they left afterward due to real-life schedule conflicts, but the rest of the game continued onward and we've bonded over the whole experience. Kind of sad that they missed out, but it didn't hamper our time in the newly crafted world.
A player who communicates during character creation, comes with a concept that works in the world, and can actually make a goddamn decision is a rare gem. I’ve had to drag people kicking and screaming through character creation, and had to full crackdown draw a reference for his character (because I have *standards* for God’s sake, brought it on myself I suppose)
I do this every time I join a game. I have a lot of character concepts bouncing around in my head, so I'll choose one that sounds particularly good / one that balances the party, then work with the DM to make it fit the setting. I've never drawn a character before though. Cuz I can't draw for shit. But I'll write backstories in narrative form, either the events around the character's history, or in two cases the character themselves talking about their life and the experiences that brought them to the 'game.'
Can we play a text only session together?, Complete newbie to dnd who read and watched a freak ton of dnd content so I won't need to much of an introduction.
Same! I force my party to sit down because expectations are important. Everyone hits the table with an idea of how things are going to go in their head, and its important for everyone to be on the same page (or at least in the same book). I also want to make sure I am doing right by their characters, and I can only do that if I know how they are wanting to play their character and 'who' their character is. I honestly don't know why some players struggle so much with character creation. It is literally your role at the table, to play a character, how can you not put any effort into fleshing them out at all? Blows my mind.
My first time ever playing DnD (or any TTRPG) and I THINK it was AD&D but I couldn't tell you for sure. This was a friend of a friend of mines _I think_ one-shot (this was a while ago). I was super into magic casting in games at the time and wanted to make a mage that could use telekinesis type magic. I barely knew anybody except my friend, and after a week of waiting in anticipation, and extreme nervousness (huge introvert here), I stepped into his house feelign like a total and complete stranger. I got my friend to help me with my sheet, and the game starts eventually. This is it, DM asks me what I want to do in this castle keep like thing, I swallow my nervousness, and I ask if it's possible if I can go into an adjacent room that I can see. He knows full well I have 0 experience with this and sends me into the room. A round goes by of other peoples actions, i'm feeling ok, when I ignite a candle and he tells me of an Orc staring directly at me. I ask what's around me that can be seen, he informs me of a bed, a night stand, and on that night stand a cup of a mysterious black liquid. I use my weak telekinesis to send the cup flying at the orc. DM tells me to roll, and I did. Success. But that the cup was just full of hot coffee, and the orc was now super pissed off with me. DM tells me that the orc takes a swing at me, rolls, and outright kills my character immediately. I was not given an opportunity to spin up a second character. I was just out of the game. Gone. Done. All that anticipation and build up, and my character didn't even get a chance to speak a word to anybody. I was just ... hanging out on the couch, away from the group, watching some random TV movie for the rest of the night. I didn't play DnD again for over a decade.
ah yes... The "you die in the game, you die in real life (but really it's just the DM and sometimes the players ignoring you like jackasses)" approach. That's so """""fun""""" to have happen.
On the factor of “if one person’s scheduling doesn’t work” kinda thing. Yeah, we had one member of our 5 person party (6 people total, one being dm ofc) who played with us for the first couple of sessions and then missed the next couple. By the time we had the final session going (the fight with the bbeg), he rejoined, and it felt so weird. Then we had our wrap up session, where weird stuff was happening while setting up the next campaign after this one set in the same world, and he missed that. Our of everything we all made it for, he always was away. More recently the same DM has been running curse of however u spell his name strahd, for us, and this same player has missed 2/3 sessions he was meant to be in. Since we have split this groups, it’s not that big of a deal as he can always join the other one, but nope, he misses that as well. Sometimes you feel like shit and can’t make a session, I’ve had a handful of those times, but this has happened for months now and it’s just sad. I love him as a friend so much, and he’s genuinely such a fun roleplayer / dm when I get the chance to play with him, but he just misses so much it’s a struggle sometimes. I don’t hold it against him, he works really long hours and doesn’t have much time for everything else, along with general university shit and all that, just kinda sad and annoying we don’t see him as much nor do we get to do sessions sometimes.
The only D&D horror story I have was the time I joined an online Ravenloft group. I was still fairly new to RP and another Ravenloft fan offered to RP a few scenes between my half elf cleric noblewoman and Count Strahd Von Zarovich. It went well until he started stalking me out of the online forum and tried to play it off as “that’s what Strahd would do.” He also would often make remarks about my relationship status and find irl information on me from other online platforms like Facebook. Long story short he groomed me, sexually harassed me and blamed it on a character from my favorite campaign setting. My friends told me to give Ravenloft another chance and now I can safely say it’s one of my favorite settings in D&D.
about the constantly changing characters one, i had a player who decided to play a barbarian, got introduced, and before they even used a single one of their abilities they were like "barbarian sucks, i want to change it"
Very short version from a much longer horror story. My first and only time playing Strahd, DM kept us in Death House for 8 sessions and wouldn't let us rest or level up. I dropped out as soon as we were done.
How do you even spend 8 sessions in the Death House? We pretty much went over the entire house with a microscope, the whole time being super careful to not walk into any traps, and it took us 5.
Had a friend join the group only to spend majority of the time rule lawyering the dm to the point the group majority voted him out after a few sessions. This was after a lot of us talking to the problem guy about the issues we were having and him just not grasping or not caring. Things included fudging his dice rolls, not allowing other players to have a spotlight, trying to get his character to roll checks because "his was higher," and finally, trying to get people to follow his metagame advice.
I was DMing a long-running campaign with some friends in college, we met every weekend at our school's D&D Club. Nearly 2 years into the campaign at the start of a new semester, over a dozen new people come to the club to try it out. That's great, it's how I started playing, and there were a few other tables that were meant for first-timers, but one of my friends invited _4 new people_ to my game without asking me. I said we were right in the middle of an arc, too much was going on at that minute to bring in someone new (let alone a total stranger), and I _definitely_ couldn't accommodate that many players. Out of the blue they all left to start their own game without me and never said another word. I didn't go back to the club after that. It still hurts all these years later.
4:09 I think the problem here is that the bbeg used a charm that not only affected everyone, but also all of them failed, then had to be saved by an NPC. The fire part, maybe it’s just the player was constantly being knocked out, and as a result never got to do anything.
Good timing! I played DnD for the first time today and already have a horror story! It was a one-shot in a longer campaign my friend played. She invited me, my sister, and two other friends to join her, the DM, and another guy. That other guy spent the whole time talking over other people, telling them what they should do on their turns, what *he* was going to do despite it not being his turn (including the HDYWTDT finishers) , and then spent every fight talking about how he was going to lobotimise or otherwise terribly maim the enemies. Overall it was just uncomfortable because you could tell how much the DM wanted to make a good impression on everyone new to the game but we couldn't go a second without this guy butting in or throwing slurs around. I had fun with the moments I played but, yeah, I'd want to find another group before trying it again
Could you make a video about D&D Wholesome Stories? I'd love to see some good DnD stories to mix it up! Like, i really like CritCrab, but all his videos are about some terrible shit happening to other people, i'd love to see some good and wholesome DnD stories for a change
The story at 14:13 is a good example of why new players probably don't need to have access to Fireball in the second session. Start them at level 1 and let them learn the game in more manageable pieces.
we were a group of new players with a pretty good dm and at level 3 i used a fireball scroll against some goblins, and of course the dm told us it was an area effect but me and my friends didn't expect the damaged to be so high.. i went down at full health and the other guy who passed the saving throw somehow survived with 1 hp
When my previous character had to be retired, I was introducing a new character that was unlike those I had played before. He was one of if not my most highly anticipated character to play ever. The dm and I had worked out a nearly 13 page backstory filled with lore and plothooks, and it took a favor from him to get the player into the story. The end result was a fairly tame character that was vague and mysterious with connections to the plot of the setting. The character was the dm and my attempts to get the players interested in the rest of the plot (as I am an unofficial co-dm). Session one. My character is introduced as a mysterious draconic-bloodline human child who is leading a group of dark elven mercenaries in the underdark. The player character I happened to meet was an orc, and I enticed him with the mention of a great foe we could slay nearby. We end up killing this great foe, and my character seeing potential in the orc offers to team up as the rest of the party began to arrive. Session 2 begins with my character offering to work together with the orc, trying to convince him of my usefulness, but he denied irefutably and began to leave. I insisted, telling him that many more great battles could come if he worked with me, and he took insult in my assumption he couldn't find them on his own. He ended up attacking my group, and the party arrived to see the orc attacking a group of dark elves and some random child, and they all joined his side. The result was a slaughter, one dark elf was blasted with a cannon to meat and bones, one was crushed to death in the jaws of the orc and was eaten, and one was being slowly and painfully crushed to death, and my character decided to mercy kill them before teleporting away and having a mental breakdown in an alley. (Tl;Dr. I introduced myself to one of the players and he killed and ate my friends)
I think that assassin moment you talked about was a great opportunity for roleplay. Because in a meta sense that player noticed that he was making roles of an assassin. But you could say that in game, he was noticing that his ally “had the graceful yet ponionet movements of an assassin, betraying his secret”
At the first session of my D&D Club, I believe that my last group had been talking about our sessions, because 14 people came to my table. It took a lot out of me to shift many of them into other groups.
It's embarassing how much I like to hear about DnD horror stories. my own experiences are a bit odd. In one game we had a player who's character only flirted with everyone and then one time showed up in a lobster suit and went from comic relief to obnoxious attention seeker. He said that his antics were the only thing making the game fun and that it was too miserable when we called him out. And then he quit. I also called him some names that were entirely undeserved. Yeah he made the game worse, but comparitively it wasn't that bad, so I feel bad I went off on him to such a level. I ended up adding to the depressing atmosphere and being part of the horror story by getting so mean over it. I realise now I'd be lucky if this was the worst horror story I had. Another time we had a player character go full attempted murder AND attempted sexual assault on another player character. It got so bad and as soon as we (the other players not involved in the scene) realised that the ones that were involved were not in agreement with this event, and it was just one player's doing, we quickly retconned it as he was still trying to RP it out. Putting an end to that promptly against his resistance, even when the victim character's player said they'd leave the game if this continued. Asking the gross jerk weirdo about it later on, for years he refused to explain what happened. So I'm left just to theorise that he had taken a mind altering substance and is super ashamed of the whole thing. He never did anything like that again... Well, there was debatebly one more time that happened in a session 0 years later. But after so many years of good games that were better than Critical Role, with the best players I could ever hope for... We had that one campaign. The one where every single horror story cliche happened at once. The GM had ruined a previous game by getting angry at a player OOC because she didn't like how his character had talked to her character. But we didn't use that against her and assumed she'd grown up since that time. As a GM though she was so much worse it's incredible. Imagine the worst games you've ehard of, all of them. Combine them. That's what we had. Our characters got random nerfs whilst her GMPC was a literal goddess who then molested the youngest player character and in the OOC chat threatened to kill anyone's character that interfered. I recall two players saying that their good alligned characters just could not ignore it, but the GM did not care. The GMPC cured a PC of their mental disibility, which was a major part of the character. The GMPC also cast revive on a PC who died heroically and ruined the moment where they wanted to get out of the game. And also plagiarised the plot directly from Legend of Zelda, refusing to adapt the areas to our characters and instead creating nonsense curses that just took our abilities away if we were able to solve the dungeons in a way that was different to the "correct" way like it's meant to be done in the games. And then when I tried to leave and was told "no", I had my character attack the GMPC, keeping it in-character that I thought she was evil. I was proved correct as she turned into her demon form and one-shot me. It was actually a bit of a cool moment I thought. She RPed it well. But still got incredibly mad at me afterwords, despite not stopping any part of it from happening... Oh and we also had a really nice moment of party bonding where she said "Oh I wasn't watching all that happen as it happened so it doesn't count." We had a log of all the events but she deleted that log and just said no. But we never got to have good RP moments like that whilst she was around and dictating that we fell into a water 'trap' and now we had to roll to avoid drowning. Even though Link can swim in all the games, but for us the water was as dangerous as lava. That was never explained. We then fought a few enemies and she got mad when we called them bosses, even though she admitted she added TWO 0s to the end of their health. 2hp enemies became 200hp enemies. She said we were rolling too well so she had to... Finally we get TPKed, all of us except for me. Still wanting to leave the game, I say my character goes back to town. I was going to get help for everyone, but the GM instead had a big bad child molester boss enemy that she wouldn't let us kill, show up and chastise my character for having a "lack or morals" and for abandoning my party. He one-shots me and feeds my character to spiders. The other players were pissed after their characters awoke later, and they backtracked to save mine. The GM offered them overpowered magical items in echange for letting my character die. Even though they knew I was leaving the game, they still refused the items and saved my character, allowing them to leave the party, and live peacefully in town. They did this purely out of respect, and the GM did not like that. My fellow players are great and I am so glad we stayed together after this bad game. The GM though soon after quit the game and ended things, vanishing from the group entirely never to be seen again. And wouldn't you know it... It would later come to light that had been grooming a young person online. It was happening at the time and none of us knew. We should have reliased when she got personally angry at things said to her character, that she was someone that did not separate reality and fantasy. For the rest of us we've played some morally awful characters, so we knew not to judge each other on what we do in fiction. But she was sadly a case where we should have. But since she left none of us ever found out what happened to her. I don't know if she's still out there, or if she's in jail. But she was a genuinely awful person and went on to become the worst GM in history. The game we had with her was every other horror story I know of, combined. I really should do a video on it some day, but it's gonna be hard with such a dark subject matter.
We did a modern day set one shot based off the movie smile... we were in a school and i somehow ended up in the vents, the DM would constantly toss cool stuff my way (including secret rooms) and i just kept going through the vents passing up every chance, i was the only one of my group to survive the one shot lol
I once had two friends, a couple with relationship problems. One of them was the DM. She put all her problems in the game. Mean npc's, getting ambushed by way too high level npc's, getting negative outcomes for everything we tried to do, and just straight up bullying us for failing her impossible questline. And if we asked if she was alright she was fine. It was really uncomfortable. Few weeks later it turned out she had a secret second relationship. Never talked again to her after that.
my entry to dnd was a bit of a horror story you could say the party consisted of 4 ppl and the dm, 3 of the party members (including me) never played dnd before this, the other one was an og player. 20 sessions of me being called stupid for not knowing how the game worked or not noticing that i could do certain things and the og player just raging and trying to kill al of us before i just leave the group and never looked back
Honestly for the knight one I would not only have the villagers be hostile but just say something like "players, after hearing the sounds of spellcasting you see your friend disappear, only to be replaced by the evil guy. Please roll initiative."
Nah, I'd have the villagers be hostile but also the highly trained heavily armed reinforcements have just arrived and jump into action upon seeing him. Then take him into custody and interrogate him. If they try fighting, deal with that character swiftly. Justice served
The assassin one reminds me of one of my own horror stories. One of my friends was DM'ing for his friends back in his hometown. Come the next year of uni, he moved it to roll20. I asked if I could be a part of the game, given I was always free at the time and wanted to play more with said friend. I knew 2 of the 4 players in the game from playing other games like league, but 2 of them I had no clue until the week before I joined, where the DM had us introduce ourselves. The horror story starts with me showing up with a fresh lvl 3 assassin, CE with a very obvious reckless abandon attitude, on display from my introduction as I pickpocketed the tavern I was to be introduced in. Needless to say, the ?LG? paladin in the group, one of the people I hadn't met prior to this game, was not having my shit. Reprimanding for my actions to put it lightly, he would make factual attack rolls against me when I did something non-law-abiding, knock me out on the second offense, then taking my gear from me before bringing me to consciousness. I was effectively at his whim, since paladins are kind of good early game. The original premise of me joining the party was "I'll get caught pickpocketing, and the party will want to reform this man who has redeemable qualities instead of taking him to prison. They also needed a rogue for their next dungeon crawl. It all lines up". The DM and I even (briefly) discussed how a possible self-actualizing character arc could be made for it. But after the paladin left me tied up in a forest and convinced the other players to leave me for dead, I cant say it would've worked out. That was the only session I played with that group. I still don't interact with that friend of a friend that played the paladin, as both of us clearly got off on the wrong foot. I know I was in the wrong for picking a character of the opposite alignment to the party, as well as not reading the room when I wanted to do #roguethings. I feel like the paladin was also in the wrong for introducing pvp and leaving me to die in the woods. The DM had minimal fault, if any, because he was unaware there would be a domino effect put in front of him in real-time. I think the big takeaway is to minimize opportunities of player vs player conflict by being smarter players.
there is for sure a middle ground that should have been met. your character committed crimes so the paladin punished you its what a LG character should do, however as a player at a table you should also understand there may be more to the other player's character and want work it out. a sort of meta-gaming leniency. my fellow players recently found out I might be some kind of werewolf or vampire after I went missing after a long rest and rather than say "ah hes a monster we should hunt and kill him" they are tracking him to see if hes ok and find out whats happening. to be honest, if it happened like your story and they turned on me that would kinda suck but id laugh a little.
@@christophercrafte yeah, there was potential for a meaningful resolution, but that was YEARS ago at this point. I'd only had a single year of experience at the time, so I was just like "ah, shame, this didn't work out". I didn't try to make a resolution, I just stepped away from the problem. I've definitely made strides as a player since. With my current characters, I'd hope that any "turned on me" moments have story significance, rather than alignment-related. Alignment as a basis of your character is sort of been phased out at this point, at least for my group.
I wonder if the other player saw a CE rogue and assumed you were going to be one of those obnoxious, attention-seeking players who just drags everybody into every crime they can think of because they don't care about the story or tone. They tend to have introductions like that. Though I have literally played a paladin who met a rogue and, as he was explaining that he was robbing me now, found an excuse for my paladin to see him as redeemable enough to adventure with. That should still be the default approach to other player characters.
Obviously I wasn't there and can't really comment on what happened, but it seems like the DM is MOSTLY at fault here. They could have told the paladin player OOC what your plans for your rogue were and to just tag along with it for a bit. And if that didnt work then he could have tried to have an NPC in game intervene like the tavern keep or a trustworthy town guard say something like "Oh yeah thats just DRida64 the rogue! Always getting into trouble! But they have a good heart and never do anything too bad!" And failing both of those they could have just said "Ok, so the rogue clearly isnt't working, lets roll up a new character for you real quick and introduce them." Not sayiing your DM was bad or anything. They were probably just inexperienced and blindsided by what was happening.
I ran a one-shot for a friend and friends of his that I didn't know. I told him that if any of them had any questions at all to come to me. I send them the boundary's for the characters they could make. There were no questions. And he helped them make their characters. One player turned up late, didn't pay attention at all and their character was a a piece of bread. They also left after and hour and a half in the middle of the session. After they left it was great and the other players had a lot of fun.
"Junkyard DnD, we didn't even know what was going on, we were just rolling the dice and killing eachother-- I don't even know what was happening" LMAO cursed af. thats so crunchy
Man I feel for everybody and those peeps. The worst I had was another player with a bad case of “Protagonist Syndrome” and trying to DM for the DM. It was…fun. But I never had the opportunity to play with him again.
Listenin to this really makes me appriciate my DM as he has some themes of sexuality and romance in his games but he always prefaces it with asking if us as players are okay/want to do that with out characters so nothing like this happens. Never really had a bad experience with dnd so far cos of it
I introduced my players to a succubus posing as a noble, and sort of built this romance thing between her and one of them in a solo RP after a session. We fade-to-blacked anything past their first kiss and I don't really intend to RP much of their interactions in general, more just "you're all in town for a few nights. Byn, do you go to visit Lady Sirina?" and let it be assumed what happened. Each visit, he returns with a slightly reduced max HP, but in character doesn't actually know what's going on yet. I didn't talk to him before I did this, and part of me feels bad about that after reading some of these comments. But I'd come to trust him as a player (and adult), knowing he'd handle the whole thing well. And so far it's been great.
@@carlchristopher7015 I'm pretty sure the DM who just decided that one of the players was accused of sexual assault without talking to anyone, was doing the bare minimum. Talking with players before those themes come up is more proactive and open than most, and definitely deserves appreciation.
@@la9406 No that DM was straight up doing a wrong thing, not the bare minimum. It's a given that you should inform your players if those kinds of themes will come up, just a standard practice that all (good) DMs will do. Not really worthy of praise. Something to "appreciate" about your DM is that they have a super colourful elaborate world with compelling NPCs, or balanced, fun combat encounters, or story arcs that put the spotlight on all the players.
@@carlchristopher7015 Well I hear about all these dnd horror stories, so shit seems to happen to a decent amount of people in their game, so I would say it's fair that I can appriciate that the DM I have keeps open communication, and is proactive in making sure his players are comfortable, feel included and such. Like I get one shouldnt have to thank someone for not, as mentioned, have your character charged with sexual assault out of the blue, but I can still appriciate that they make sure everyone's having a good time nonetheless
Not sure I'd call it a horror story, but we nearly had a stampede of wild animals in the Waterdeep Dock Ward. Our Druid was basically a fantasy vet and wanted to free the animals on the circus ship, so while our Warlock went to have a meeting with the captain she Wild Shaped into a spider and snuck on to the ship. A few rounds later, she nearly got caught and my Barbarian and the Monk had to perform a fake fist fight in order to draw the crew's attention. Luckily she didn't free the animals and cause absolute chaos, but my Barbarian did suplex the Monk right as the Warlock came over to see what was going on.
A friend of mine was wanting to run a game for a decently large group of players and decided he would write his own campaign. We were all fairly excited because it’s not every day someone volunteers to DM. I built my bladesinger wizard, and was hyped to start playing. 15 mins. in, I figure out that this mf is running *Cave Story* as a campaign. To the letter pretty much, he didn’t even rename NPCs, locations, anything. We didn’t keep playing. Bonus, one of the other players said “your character is too similar to [famous stream game wizard]. it’s unoriginal, you should be more creative with character creation.” 1. the only similarity was that I was playing a wizard in D&D 2. that’s just needlessly mean 3. this guy was the second person to say he was going to play a changeling bard during character creation, even picking the same subclass as the first guy
Why are you EXCITED to share a HORROR story?! If it's TRULY a HORRIBLE thing then it should NOT be celebrated, it should be REMOVED from the hobby! And I do NOT mean that for about half of these stories, most of these are things that just SUCK, they are NOT horror stories! Though there did start to be some as he progressed!
I was playing a game with a DM when I realized I had no autonomy, so I kept trying to fight all his level 20 NPCs (which were basically DMPCs) and yet they still never killed me or even treated me differently.
"Have you seen Jojo's Bizarre Adventure" That segment just hit me right in the soul. I was exactly like that when I first was a player... and first time being a DM lol.
The horror stories about schedule conflicts just reminded me about the game I played back in school. All the other players were in PhD programs, so they were physically present year-round to work on their research and stuff, but my Master's program involved summer internships so I was always gone for those 2-3 months. I worked with the DM to have a plot-relevant reason for him to take over my character (surprise, turns out he was the BBEG!) but because the story got dragged out, that big reveal didn't actually happen when it was supposed to and I ended up playing as the villain-in-disguise for the entire next academic year. (Not a horror story, but yeah -- if schedule conflicts are a thing, figure out how to play without that guy!)
As far as the “too many players” issue goes, I’ve DMed a lot for like school clubs and stuff like that and every time we always have like 9 people in the party, which I’ve just had to deal with. One time I did have like 10 people in a home game and ended up saying I couldn’t run it anymore cuz of burnout, before inviting my closest friends from that campaign to start a new campaign. I still feel a little bad about this but also I like my sanity.
I've always loved the quote:
I didn't ask "how big is the room?" ... I said "I cast fireball."
"Did I stutter?"
"the cleric has spell slots left over"
DM: Okay, you cast fireball in the center of the 10 foot by 10 foot room, destroying your entire party and the magic item in the chest. Game over.
@@stellleoPOV: they have a remaining player who didn’t enter just in case with revive
@@markob8934 Does the player have anything? They would need several 300 gp diamonds just to cast Revivify
Most people don't share their d&d amazing stories because "man we played d&d and my DM did a super cool story" doesn't catch the attention the same way "my DM stabbed me "
Exactly, I could say "The campaign my DM wrote uses time in a unique way" or I could say "My party member died, and because of it I lost my left leg and no one remembers us anymore"
My group played D&D and my DM did a super cool story. We were solving a murder, and then we eventually realized the killer was a local shop owner, and it turned out he had an artifact that effectively let him quantum leap back in time into his own body (there’s probably a more similar time travel story than quantum leap but I can’t think of it lol) so the shopkeeper as we knew him wasn’t ACTUALLY the murderer yet, he would only BECOME the murderer later. After we beat him we were given one use of the artifact to go back to the start of the campaign (a choice we made) to redo everything and prevent the murder in the first place. And then AFTER that the shopkeeper never had his future self jumped into his body, so we took him with us to keep an eye on him to figure out what would cause him to snap like that in the future.
I had a campaign I missed the last bunch of sessions for due to homelessness but I made the final battle and my gm the bloody legend wrote me a gandalf esc last minute entry to save the day. I came in as an angel since I was a vengeance paladin riding my trusty bear mike who over the missed sessions built a small army of bears under his command all with a special polymorph item..... I fuckin saved the party from a hoard of dragons with an army of bears transformed into trexs. It's easily the most amazing experience I've had with dnd and I love my gm for making that shitty part of my life better by letting me just go fuckin nuts
@@jebbryant6522 I like how you add "due to homelessness" like that doesn't just add questions lol
@@Pihsrosnec oh yeah I was homeless for a few months and that's why I missed like 10 sessions. I thought that explained it well lol
An 8 man party playing descent into avernus? That's one way to survive the first encounter.
What is the 1st encounter?
A bar fight with way more enemies than some four man parties at level one can handle.
…oh man were supplements designed for big groups this whole time?
@@korelockmir1566 some how. My group did it whit only 4. 2 where down. But we done it.
Ha!!
When I first got into DnD, I got really into the backstory of my very first Paladin. The short of it was his reading about the myth of Excalibur as a child was the driving force to protect innocence and become a Paladin. My DM read it over and asked me to make a different character. I was so gobsmacked but I didn't know any better, so I did without arguing. Turned out that he stole my character, changed his entire campaign to be based around "his NPC", and played as him throughout our quest to find Excalibur.
Wtf???? What a douchebag
Are some people just so oblivious that people have more common sense than a crab?
Did he think you were a fucking idiot?
I once had a gm force my player to have a specific backstory. It's been ages so I can't remember much, but it was my first time playing pathfinder and he just took my idea and said "okay but I've already made a bsckstory for you"
I went to one other session after that before the group broke apart. He also kept smiting the other player for making little jokes or being silly
oh that is just pure evil
My first introduction to D&D was absolutely terrible on so many levels.
1) Horrible scheduling. We had a party of 7 (plus DM) and any time 2 people couldn't make it, the entire session was cancelled. We were "scheduled" to play once a week. In the 9 months of me being present, we played maybe once a month. The most sessions we EVER had in a row without cancellations was 3 which happened once. I only cancelled twice in that entire 9 month period, but some people were cancelling for months at a time. However, people also didn't give any advance notice of this. Often, we wouldn't know if the session was happening or not until maximum the morning of (but more often 2-3 hours before the session start).
2) The DM used to pressure people into roleplaying and publicly shame players at the table mid-session for not roleplaying enough. People would express that they were happy with the game and everything but they just aren't big on roleplaying, yet the DM just didn't listen. It wasn't even like deep character roleplay. it was like "buy a winter coat".
3) He was terrible at balancing his attention between players. He had one person who he considered his best friend and oh boy, could you tell. There was one session where I was ignored for over 3 hours straight, and the only character who had been involved in any plot for over 10 sessions was that best friend's character. Every single other player agreed that it was an issue and called our sessions "The [character name] Show". Half of the party didn't do anything themselves anymore because they would just wait to see what that one player would do so they could say "I follow him" simply so they could get some game time.
4) He didn't let players write their own backstories and would, without permission, change major parts or entire "chapters" of their backstory. Not even to fit into the world or anything... Just because that character's story didn't interest him and he wanted to see a different story play out.
5) The DM would guilt trip and vaguely threaten s**cide over even the SMALLEST bits of constructive criticism. As an example, he used to write these 3000+ word session recaps that literally no one read because they were so long and not very well-written (basic grammatical mistakes throughout). We repeatedly asked him to just make it a shorter bullet point list to make it easier for us to read/ quickly refer back to AND to give him less work. His response was to, again, vaguely threaten s**cide and act like we're ungrateful. There was also one instance where he literally asked for feedback on the sessions and when people gave him that feedback with a THICK layer of sugarcoating ("we LOVE your DMing and it's amazing how passionate you are about the game, but I think there should be this little tweak to balancing"), he once again guilt tripped people and threatened, you guessed it, to commit s**cide. If you said anything that could be in any way interpreted as criticism or even a differing opinion to the DM, he would straight up throw a fit.
6) Because he would become manipulative and guilt-trip-y any time you said anything even remotely critical, I as a brand new player had to take on tons of responsibilities that should have been the DM's job. I ended up writing the recaps, I ended up managing the party fund, I ended up sending out session reminders, etc.
7) I know it's bad to criticise other people's creativity, but the story was just bad. It was convoluted, the DM had gotten all his advice from TH-cam videos (no offense lol) and had taken the common advice of "don't railroad players" to mean "give them dozens of dead ends and unrelated clutter and give them barely any indication of which part is the main plot". I believe what is typically meant by "don't railroad your players" is to give some illusion of choice: several options that all lead to the same place and maybe allowing your characters to affect the outcome. If you're going to try to throw in unrelated quests or deadends, you should try to introduce them in a way that lets players know its unattached/dead end nature, and if players hit a dead end, don't shame them if they struggle to remember what the last "checkpoint" of the questline was.
8) There was also another campaign that he ran on the same Discord server and they would constantly gossip about our group. Bear in mind I have literally never spoken to those people before. They said I was b**chy and argumentative simply because I had publicly disagreed with him a small number of times (3-4 times across 9 months). From that, he had gone to multiple people on the server to ask "hey, hasn't that person seemed like a massive b**ch????". Everyone whom I had spoken to said no, and that I seemed normal, but he still decided to move forward and confront me about it, throwing multiple accusations about my personality (that came from the baseless opinions of people whom I had never met or spoken to before). I left the server and as far as I know, our campaign died with my departure.
There were even more issues that I just can't remember right now (as it has been a while since I quit), but it really was a horror story. I didn't really have any issues with the other players really (except maybe with the best friend who could have maybe done more to pass on the attention or wrap up what he was doing in a swifter manner).
wow that sounds awful. i hope u found better people to play with, that dm fr just sounds like a awful guy in general if he was doin this over dnd
@@xhyunjones1513 Feels like a blast from the past getting a notification on this year old comment, lol. I haven't found any longterm tables since then, but this experience has taught me that having no D&D is indeed better than having bad D&D.
@@madeleine61509 thats true, well friend i hope one day u find ur table! theres a group of folks that are def willing to make ya DnD experience not sucky out there! Keep adventuring!
Horror story template:
Step 1: Start with 9 players.
Step 2: You’ll fall asleep before this step
Start with 9 players... two of them have main character syndrome, so they are constantly fighting over the spotlight and the DM's attention and another two have absolutely no idea of how the game works and are constantly requiring the DM to spend ten minutes to explain the rules to them. And after ten minutes of explaining, they will forget all of it five minutes later. Then you have the person that always interrupts the DM... After all of that, you will be lucky if the DM even acknowledges that you exist.
I've ran a very successful campaign with eleven players. It's all about how well you run your table.
I once fell asleep during a combat encounter. And it was one of my first sessions ever, so i think I've created a reputation of a shitty player for a long time
@@transientanus Also if it's in-person or online... In person games back in the day often had 6 or more people. Heck, a lot of 2nd ed adventures require 10+ players. Which is insane to think about but it was b4 advanced video games. So it really was a "Party".
@@transientanus My favorite campaign was a 9-11 player campaign run by my dad, but maaan every time I try to run for more than six I disintegrate. One day I'll be able to inherit his legacy, but that day is not today.
What used to kill me, way back in my first group, was that we didn't just have no-shows, the person would wait until the last minute to call. My excitement would be building all week and, an hour before we started when I was completely psyched up and foaming at the mouth to play, someone would call and say, "Yeah, this couch is pretty comfortable. I think I'll just skip it today."
Then, I would beg the DM to do it anyway and he'd say, "I'm kinda busy too. Let's just do it next week."
Relatable
The pain, it burns
A problem my group has is that one player is almost always late and don't really seem to try to be immersed. Like we've asked him if he even enjoys the game and he says he does, but he makes no attempt at interacting with characters and whenever the DM tries to include him by asking, "what does *character* do?" He'll say "eh, he stands in a corner and crosses his arms". Like I get not being super into RP or stuff like that, but it's getting hard to even think of his character as present as he don't really include himself in the game at all
@@kaspermoe3220 Yeah, that is strange. I know I probably have a tendency to get too into it, But I know that and I don't expect everyone to spend days coming up with backstories and things like me. But, to have someone who doesn't participate at all. It does make you wonder why they even bother playing.
That player would be kicked ngl
My DM husband once planned a whole campaign that I finally got to be a part of (my crazy work schedule kept me from playing most of the time, so I usually told him to just plan campaigns without me). I worked really hard to plan my character out for this campaign and was so proud if her. My husband was super excited too and helped me out with her.
The first session finally commenced. Five minutes into the session, one of the other players randomly decided to be a murder hobo and stabbed my character. I failed my rolls and she died. Five minutes in. After months of planning. My husband stormed out of the house. When he came back, he made us start the session over.
To be fair, the other player is a good friend and he felt really bad. He thought he was just being funny. He didn't think I'd DIE lol for the startover session, he didn't stab me again so that was nice.
hey that guys a scammer ignore him
The people who tried to murder their friends in RPG are the worst, both for DMs and players.
@@blade7y156 to be fair from the comment it seems like they just didn't know it would actually kill
@@Pihsrosnec Yeah and in that case it is a DM problem, because he should have told them that.
But I don't really see what other outcome could they expect...
@@blade7y156 idk, maybe they high rolled with a butter knife lol
That scenario with “have you seen JoJo’s” is exactly what I put my first DM through and I’m still sorry to this day
My friend is playing his first DnD game and his character is literally just a gunbreaker from Final Fantasy
@@magicrainbowkitties1023 in the first campaign I ever played in one of the other players literally just made the frog knight from chrono trigger, down to embedding animations from the game into his roll20 attacks.
He was a solid roleplayer and fun to be around in general but unfortunately he couldn't be show up to every other session and after a couple months he left for personal reasons.
In my first game, everyone *but* me wanted to give their character's a stand, and the DM was the only one there unfamiliar with JoJo so I took 20 hours creating a set of themed stand user enemies that the DM could use based on the Greek pantheon.
I then got kicked from the group for spoiling the ending of metal gear 2
Don't worry I'm still friends with the DM to this day
Yeah, I hate it when my players try to have fun.
7:26 A game I play is a public pickup game where people come in and out, there's regulars but they're not always there for this session. The DM has to yell over the noise of a bar, and last session he had to manage an 11 player game. He did it flawlessly. Bless you Franco, you're a beast.
I actually have the opposite of a horror story! My friend was DMing for a huge group of me and other friends, 8 people. A few sessions in after seeing how hard it was for us to get enough time to RP and have meaningful combat, he split the party up. Half of the characters ended up betraying the other half (me being one of the betrayed) and trapping them on an already collapsing bridge to die. My group, the goofy betrayed ones, now had more motivation and investment in the story in trying to figure out why we got betrayed and had a greater goal to work towards when we were just goofing off before. Sessions felt way better after that and we did actually reunite in a big session a couple times. Sadly it fell apart due to scheduling issues with many of us going into university, but it was fun while it lasted and a very clever idea to make things more interesting.
Wait, so did your DM just not let the other half play anymore? Sounds like a horror story for them lol
@@fuzzyapple not at all, they just DM'd both groups in tandem, where group A would get a session, then group B, then A, and so on. My group (the betrayed) was finding our way back to town and find some reason why the others would do such a thing, and the other group (the betrayers) was trying to break their way out of prison after being accused of destroying the bridge.
@@Glennjamyyyn so what was the reason for their betrail? I hope something interesting with twists and turns.
@@HappyBeezerStudios our group was very haphazard, our characters were inexperienced in the group (in the world we were some sorta cartel and our characters were newbies) and they wanted to get rid of us before we did more harm than good (it was all in good fun of course). That was the in-character reasoning, which was fair, and the irl reason was because the 8 people were too much to DM for at once, which is DEFINITELY fair. Didn't need a super crazy reason for the characters to betray us since they just needed any sorta reason to split the party
I haven't suffered anything "horror story" worthy, but my current campaign has been on hiatus for months because the players' parents decided to get in a feud over a comment on a Facebook post and now none of us are allowed to hang out until it is settled which is probably never 🙃
This is a campaign I've spent years writing and it's my first major campaign with a unique setting, I've poured hundreds of hours into this game tailoring it specifically to this group of 3 players, my 3 best friends. Needless to say I'm a little pissed and if this doesn't work out I probably won't play dnd ever again
Wait, so basically the parents are holding their children's fun hostage because they have issues with the other parents? Don't know if there's a damn good reason for their conflict, but if there isn't... It sounds childish and NOT like sensible parenting.
But don't let it discourage you from using your work elsewhere. You might need to change or adapt some things, but GMs often face the situation of prep becoming obsolete. It might take a while, but usually, you can recycle most material sooner or later.
@@Gargboss waste not, want not
A friend of mine has a group that meets up and plays at dennys once a week. May be a little awkward to play in public, but might be worth a try.
Sometimes, when I read comments like this, I am very grateful to my parents for allowing me to leave home at the age of 16 and never interfering with my private life. Someone might say it's wrong and it's mean that they don't care about me, but it allowed me to make my mistakes and learn from them. Now I am 29 years old and although I used to felt a bit sad and unloved by them, today it pays off for me.
I can't relate to caring what my parents thought of my friends, sooo
If i had a nickel for everytime Jacob told the story about outing his secret assassin player during an RPG Horror Stories video, I’d have 2 nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
For reals I was like… “Deja vu?”
Dated reference, use beans instead.
I had to make sure EVERYONE knows
YESSS!
@@XPtoLevel3 what happened to Runesmith?
My first ever game of D&D, the DM made a big jigsaw-like puzzle that we had to solve to open a door to proceed. As in, we had to use our actual brains. Long story short, we never solved the puzzle, and resorted to attacking the door with our brand new low level characters. We spent a 3 hour game fighting a door. Because this was supposed to be a one-shot, the DM just moved the loot from the end of the dungeon and pretended the door was the final boss.
That's actually pretty wholesome
I love how it starts with "man, this was so bad. I made such an ass out of myself. I did [normal D&D things]", and then we get to the first complete horror story - ignoring the creeper in the store. that one was actually unnerving - and it starts with "this wasn't all too terrible" lmao
Group of brand new players, all lvl1, none had ever played before. I was a little more experienced but it was my first time DMing.
The first turn of the first encounter of the first campaign, the wildmagic sorcerer's spell went wild, he rolled 'you cast fireball as a 3rd level spell centred on yourself' on the surge table, and tpk'd the entire party in the first 5 minutes.
(we laughed a lot and retconned it)
I didn't witness it but two of my friends witnessed their friend rolled 6 nat 1s in a row....
My funny cute group of goblins went from doing a circus, to doing warcrimes in 2 sessions.
Overachievers
Pretty typical of goblins TBH Had a pirate campaign that had a goblin sniper in it, he blew up a civilian harbor in 3 sessions.
That kinda just sounds like normal DnD.
@@LogaSLevaard Issue was that I expected my players to continue on a more wholesome route, trying to gain the humans trust and show that goblins arent that bad by doing good deeds.
But out of nowhere decided not to.
@@coolboy9979 that is, indeed, typical dnd goblin behaviour, so sounds like a you problem :P
That bard charmed one is probably because they though horror story meant bad in game situations
what's crazy is that it was obviously clear the gm didn't intend for everyone to fail the save, or else he wouldn't have deus ex machina'd an npc there to save them lol
they just didn't understand the assignment
@@demonderpz7937 This is why you should never ask for a roll you aren't prepared to see fail.
@@generatoralignmentdevalue I think it wasn't that the DM wasn't prepared to see the roll fail, he just didn't expect everyone to fail. Like how a DM might throw a banshee at a party and think "Okay, so the Banshee will wail, that Rogue with the +1 in CON saves is going to probably fail. The Barb and the Sorcerer will survive and they will beat up the Banshee and get the Rogue back up with the 10 healing potions they have." But instead the whole party failed.
@@Zulk_RS exactly this. I've seen it happen a lot. Sometimes the dice are just bad, and other times they are just REALLY bad.
We were doing an Underdark campaign, and I (the DM) described an area filled with mushrooms near the myconid colony the party was supposed to be going to. Instead of being like, "cool description" and moving on, two players literally spent an HOUR talking about how they found hallucinogenic mushrooms, while myself and the other three players became increasingly frustrated. When they finally moved on, I gave them some combat penalties for being high. This promoted one of the two to go off on me for favoritism and unfairly singling her out. I kid you not.
Lol sounds like a player I had once that rage quit when he died after he decided he wanted to stop running away like the rest of the party when the whole party was almost dead after a fight he initiated and forgot the chest in the hall was a mimic and then thought it was a good idea to fight the mimic solo. I even gave him a way out by asking "You sure you want to do this?" That was also the 2nd character he killed as the first died in the previous session from doing something equally as stupid. But it was MY (as the DM) fault... Some people lol
Your name makes this SO much funnier. Gruul DM vs. Golgari players
@@paigeepler That's true lol
Our "DM" would always talk up his campaigns and ask how excited we were. He would tell us how much time he spent on the campaign and he was excited to run it. Then we would do a session, and he would always scrap the campaign claiming that it "wasn't good enough". There were many times that he would hype up the game, and then the night came to play and he would say that he didn't feel like DMing. We went through 8 sessions with 8 different "campaigns".
That’s actually kind of sad. He sounds like he was a self conscious perfectionist who got anxiety about it and couldn’t push himself through that.
Unfortunate for everyone involved (you definitely weren’t in the wrong at all for asking for a new dm though)
That sounds just like my dming skills, I spend a ton of time making up mechanics and lore and then I’m like “ idk I just don’t wanna do this”
I can relate to him a lot. I have a ton of anxiety and stage-fright so DMing is terrifying to me even if I wanna do it really bad.
Maaaan that's me ;-;.
-Got a super idea for a campaing.
-Spend weeks homebrewing everything, helping my friends with their characters and writing the story around them and their backstory.
-Start the campaign.
-Get massive anxiety.
-My friends telle me it's all good and they have a lot of fun, but my overthinking, impostor syndrome, dming dumbass can't take the compliments and can't comprehend that, they might actually really having fun.
-Loose motivation.
-Stop the campaign.
-Repeat.
That awful, because I love all my ideas, and I really think my players have fun. But my anxiety is too much... That sucks a lot, and not for me but for my friends too...
If you're a player, don't hesitate to tell you Dm everything, if you like the campaign, the sessions, what you don't like too! The most stress I have is feeling like my players don't like something and don't tell me. So just, talk to you Dm. It's not much, but a little '' so hype for the session tonight '' is like... Everything to some dm
@@UmbraDaiwrfol we do that every time! Talk about what we're enjoying, tell him how much we appreciate how much effort he is putting in, etc. But it's ok now, he has ghosted our group now and is instead running campaigns for his other friend group.
The 'I didn't want to tell people no so I ended up with 8 players' thing happened to me and, strangely, the group has been playing for 6 years with the all but one of the original group (and we replaced that one)
But it takes /so/ much more work for balance and story progression and items and etc.
One of my current Exalted groups has 11 people in it. We're split up into a Saturday and Thursday session with some people in one group and some in another with me and another person GMing the two groups.
@@HalfTangible You wanna run that back?! That uh... that's not... you'll figure it out!
@@HalfTangible Yeah my current D&D group started in a similar way, a group got too big and unwieldy so a player took up the role of being a second DM and split off with his game, I joined that group after the split because Covid ended up messing with the schedule and who could play.
@@JacksonOwex It's been going for a year and it's actually working better than you'd think
@@HalfTangible well. Thats 2 groups
Ok so this one is more funny than horror, but once we were running a session and 30 minutes after the start of the session (everyone said they could make it earlier that morning) we were wondering where the last player was only for him to tell us “oops sorry I forgot I’m on vacation so I won’t be able to make it to this one”. He was on the other side of the world and had forgotten… it was very funny. Love that guy.
Literally that video with Tom Scott
“I’m in Antarctica!”
Imagine waking up and going about your life normally only to find out around noon you're in Brazil.
Had a good DM, nice group. Every character the DM's wife makes is literally, "My character's a bitch, and if your character doesn't cater to her whims she's going to be a bitch to you." Every party in-character interaction with her is walking on eggshells, or her character throwing a fit because our characters aren't putting up with her shit. She also can't separate herself from her character and is IRL upset, snippy, and silently fuming. Also she has Main Character Syndrome because DM is her husband.
ignore that guy its a scam
I was a player in a one shot where we started as prisoners chained together inside of a warship, and he asked us beforehand to decide what crime we committed to get us into that position so no one would be uncomfortable. That's how that kind of situation should be handled, not forcing a situation onto a player that they aren't comfortable with.
My DM did something VERY similar in the last campaign she ran. On session one she told us we were starting in a giant prison ship (area of Rhode Island, with 100 floors for each letter of the alphabet) and began the campaign by asking why we'd be in prison for life. She also had us put our boundaries on a Google form before sessions started (it was a program at a library that anyone could sign up for, not a friend group thing), along with other necessary information like if we had a character already, emails, ect.
Hey, guy from the mentioned Patreon game here, who definitely was one who missed multiple times. I was awful at keeping a schedule, and honestly also just wasn't really a good player at the time, but I'd like to think I've gotten better both at schedules and being a good player in the time since then! That part about us all being able to improve rings true!
PS: Those games are still a very fond memory, thanks a lot again for the great times!
I love the phrase "junkyard D&D." It is becoming part of my lexicon, starting immediately.
It's pretty much how D&D was played when it first came out back in the dinosaur era, back when it was still a wargame adaptation
Honestly it is the best kind of D&D
Is like sandbox... But trashier
Back in days of yore, I had started playing D&D Adventurer's League at a LGS to try to break into the hobby. Once, I was able to convince a curious friend to go with me to give it a shot. I had my character and he made his beforehand: a pretty standard swashbuckler that he had lovingly written a whole backstory for. We sit down at an open table with a few other players and start playing. The game quickly turns into a chase scene with all of us on horses pursuing the bad guys on a cart. The DM has us roll Animal Handling checks to...determine if we could keep our horses galloping in a straight line? Anyways, my friend fails the first check and his horse starts slowing down and we joke about it. He fails two more checks, and the DM just decides that his horse veers off course and stops. My friend is a little annoyed that he's been rolling so badly, but it happens. I ask him if I should wait up, but he says go ahead, and the rest of the party continues the pursuit. Can he catch back up to us? ...No, he's too far behind, the DM says. What? What is he supposed to do for the rest of the game? Shrug. The party starts combat with the bad guys on the cart and my friend just has to sit there for the better part of two hours listening to the rest of the party actually play D&D (including one unsupervised 10-year-old who played a wizard that tried to attack enemies with his "adamantium claws" that the DM hand-waved...a story for another day). I buy him snacks and joke with him about his character's apparently unbiddable horse and we try to think of things that he could do on his own since the rest of the party is long gone (at least according to the DM). He thinks his character could return to the town we had just come from to alert the guards and get reinforcements. The DM says "Uh, sure. You go back to town. But the guards aren't going to get to the cart in time so you just wait in town until the rest of the party gets back." And so he does. He's miserable, having wasted his time on a game that he's not even going to be allowed to play...plus his phone died, so he had literally nothing to do. I'm unhappy, since the whole point was to play with my friend and introduce him to my new favorite hobby. Bad experience all around. I eventually got my friend to play D&D again, but it was a hard sell, and he'll still make bitter jokes about it to this day. I do too, and we've spun it into his characters having abysmal luck with horses across every universe we play in.
TL;DR - Friends don't let friends play Adventurer's League.
Dude, screw that DM!
@@StarWindEnergin Lol, yeah, hard to tell in retrospect if he didn't know what he was doing or he just didn't care. It was a lesson for me when I started DMing later.
Once played an adventurers league game and was told that the session was going to be "combat heavy" so we made our characters accordingly. It was NOT we spent an hour doing puzzles and talking, did 1 very short and easy fight, spent another hour doing puzzles to get to the final encounter and then our DM goes "Well we spent too long on the puzzles and talking so I'm gonna skip the final encounter that this entire session was leading up to, you guys would have won easily anyway". Don't get me wrong, I like puzzles and NPC interactions but to skip the finale of a session like that stung.
indeed screw that DM. But if the character didn't have like, proficiency in animal handling or a less trained horse - it is actually kind of hard to get a horse to obey you, many things can go wrong. Sometimes they just don't want to run even when you're squeezing them to go.
@@Kokonutzlz Oh sure, definitely true for real life. My issue with the DM was less the failed skill checks and more his insistence that there was no creative solution my friend could try to help or catch up after the fact, he just wrote him out of the adventure.
My short horror story: I had raised a yeti from a child to a full grown adult over the course of a Rime of The Frostmaiden game, acting as my character arc. The DM took this yeti, and threw him off a 1000ft cliff, killing him instantly in the last session. Theres more to it, but thats the basic version
(Also it wasn't bad rolls or a bad decision. The DM, as the yeti, ran and jumped off the cliff)
bruh wtf
Ngl kinda funny tho. Not cool but the nonchalant wording made it a silly read
was it a self sacrifice to save the players?
@@chriscanfly6386 He (The Yeti) did it to finish off a boss that we were fighting. He grappled the boss and jumped. the boss just teleported out of his grasp and then casted feather fall, meaning he was fine while the yeti went splat. This may have been reasonable if the boss didn't have like 20 health when they jumped. It wasn't sacrifice, it was suicide
that really sucks!
When we were first building my old DnD group, the social anxiety thing was definitely a factor.
We almost ended up with a 14-player group.
that me right now with a 12-player maybe 10-player group
I have a lot of social anxiety but I still want to play dnd, but i haven't found a single game announcement where text, no voice or video is featured :(
@@Azure9577 You want to play D&D through text only? I think that might be nigh impossible to find. I play through Roll20 and we all use our mics. No video, though.
@@SaireiTheDragon while it is nigh impossible to find, its not actually impossible to play the game using text, I just need to find and convince a DM to do it
@@Azure9577 have you looked into play by post?
6:42 - crazy how it's sometimes the 'fill-in' players that end up being real MVPs and long-term friends.
Back when I was a new DM, I was talking a lot about my new passion around, D&D and TTRPGs in general. At some point, my older brothers started to be really curious about the whole thing and wanted to try it out. They insisted on the fact that they wanted to create their characters and play an aventure written by me. I told them that it wasn't like playing a game of UNO, we needed to make their characters, which would take a lot of time, then I would have to write them a one shot, which would take a lot of time, then the session needed to happen, which would take a lot of time. They said they were okay with that, so I thought "Sure, why not ?".
So the game was supposed to have three players : My two brothers, playing a Bard and a Druid, and one of my brother's Girlfriend, playing a Paladin. We determined that there would be only one occasion to play the session : the afternoon before my mother's and Aunt's birthday party (twins). Because none of them were available at the same time before that, I had to do Three "Session 0", explaining the rules and creating a character, for each one of them. They played spellcasters, so it took about 2 hours every time. Then, I spent an entire afternoon tailoring a session for them, because I wanted to design a one shot with a "sandbox" feel, to showcase what was important in TTRPGs to me. It was nothing fancy, but I was rather proud of it.
Then came the awaited day where we were supposed to play. Again, this was the only time we would be all together and available for it. However, half an hour before starting, while I was setting up my PC and my DM screen, they decided that they were tired, and all went to their bedrooms take naps. Which lasted most of the time we dedicated to the session. I. WAS. SO. MAD. ABOUT IT. But as I said earlier we were supposed to celebrate a birthday the evening. So I thought "Okay, that suck, but I won't ruin my morther's and aunt's party because of a game and my stupid ego".
The same night, my brothers started a fight, and they refused to talk to each other for almost an entire year. They completely ruined the event, and my mother, to this day, still think it was her fault somehow (I'll spare you more details), instead of her two sons being idiots.
I'm still mad, but I can't talk about it, because it is forbiden to talk about what happened that evening. We don't want to bring back the (unrelated to the avorted D&D game) dispute.
That sucks so much. I’m so sorry
Sounds like you were a lot more interested than they were, and they were just kind of bullshitting. Gotta vet interests before, see if they ever reach out first about it rather than always initiating it yourself.
@@supahdupah207 While it is probably true that they mostly wanted to play to show interest in my passion, this is something I was aware of from the get go.
They were the ones asking for it in the first place, and as I stated in my first comment, I tried to explain to them that setting up a D&D session on an original story with custom made characters would require a lot of time, especialy from me. I did it because I wanted them to be aware of the necessary work, and maybe dissuade them from doing it if they were not motivated enough. They could have backed of right there, but instead they insisted that they were willing to do it anyway. They even went through the entire character creation process, only to let me down the day the session was supposed to be played.
That being said, I still have their character sheets... So maybe one day we will do it, but I will not be the one putting the idea on the table this time either.
9:05
Can confirm, I was a part of this campaign, it really sucked because Me and the other play put a LOT of effort into our characters. We were just about to head into a town for a really important story encounter, and all of the sudden our Warlock (said guy) flaked for 9 weeks. Fortunately it has a happy ending however, we started a new campaign in the same world with new characters and everyone is getting time to play and develop equally.
I have yet to experience a "horror story" however I feel like I managed to avoid one when I started a D&D club and over 30 people joined day 1. several of them wanted to be DMs so it worked out in the end and I narrowly avoided having to DM the largest single DM table ever
30 would be insane. I've done 10 once and damn was that rough. Luckily 4 of the players were only there for the first session(they were moving away and just wanted something special to go out on) and 1 of them wanted to be a drop in/drop out character.
30 just gets into LARP territory at that point haha
2:19 I know this was a joke from like a year ago but my favorite character I ever played was a Loxodon Monk of the Astral Fist that I built largely because I wanted to use something similar to the concept of stands lmao. But then he went on to be probably my second favorite character I ever played with a really fun back story and some amazing combat and RP moments.
I never had a horror story, but did have an uncomfortable experience one time; ran a game at a LGS, and had a father and son duo playing. The dad constantly micro-managed his son’s character choices and kept berating him for doing “the wrong thing”. I kept gently trying to encourage the kid to make his own choices, but didn’t want to step out of bounds with the dad because I did not know either of them personally.
I never played with them any more in the future, but I do feel bad, because I can honestly foresee that kid likely had a horrible negative impression for the rest of his life about TTRPGs instead of it being a potentially lifelong passion and hobby. (Ignoring the repercussions of the dad and son’s relationship, because I know nothing of them personally). But it is a bit depressing to see what could have been a great experience likely ruining the whole way someone views a hobby that has brought fun to so many people.
14:14 Similar instance where our sorcerer tried to use fireball while grappling someone, for some reason thinking it would just hit only that person. Like they misunderstood the range rules. So instead they just kamikazed and hit another party member.
I was playing a beastman monk once and after I died in one of our first sessions my friend joined in at the beginning of the next session as a guest character ranger and skinned my dead still warm corpse and the worst part was that no one acknowledged it until about 2 hours into the session! Skinned their friend in front of them and it took 2 hours for someone else to be like 'hey, wait a second that was disgusting!'
Your friend is based
Sitting in their new monk-skin leather boots made by their new ranger friend when suddenly, "Hey, these boots feel oddly familiar..."
I had no idea you wrote the Parasite Warlock subclass in Grim Hollow, its easily my favourite subclass from Grim Hollow.
How does it work
ever since I read it I've been dying to make a dumb wrastler character from it using the charisma bonus strength checks and magic stealing thing for showing other casters who's king of the ring! Just as soon as I get the green light lol
Thanks!
Ok, I have one. Our DM decided to have a demon lord force himself on my fiance's character and described the entire act in graphic, horrific detail. We spent the rest of that session trying to figure out how to safely remove a demon baby from her character. He also forced her character to wear very revealing clothing. Basically transparent clothing. Incredibly awkward and uncomfortable, to say the least.
why would you not intervene and say that this is not okay tho?
HOLY SHITE
That has to be one of the most insane things I have ever read. Holy crap. I hope that DM never DMed again.
Your DM read too much Berserk.
@@trinitylovesyou6868yeah... ill be honest, if the DM was upfront about it, we couldve been mentally prepared for it--
Also for the reply above you: GRIFFFIIIIIITTTTHHH
Why the hell didn't you stand up for her???
I’m not exactly sure the powers of necromancer but
I had an idea of a character.
A necromaster who is a lawyer that brings the victim back to testify therefore always winning the case
Undead can’t talk
@@dragerdetnot with that attitude
“Dead men tell no tales? Wrong, your honor. As a necromancer, I literally summon my first witness, the victim.”
Witness, please produce a valid passport or ID card! No, no, that is not a valid one, that person is officially deceased. No, you can not testify without proper identification of your person.
@@dragerdetspeak with dead is literally a thing
Yeah, 3 definitely heard "give me your RPG horror stories" and they just thought that meant "tell me something bad that happened to your character".
Honestly, if it wasnt the whole "your group didn't even get a chance thing" then I'm kinda happy for them 😂 if thats the WORST thing to happen during a session, theyve had a great experience playing lol
I love it when you have a weekly 2h session, and people cancel like a few hours before the session, like they didn't know beforehand :D
God, two hours. I'd have trouble staying in that game - I'm not even settled into my character or the events by then, much less the tableside conversations and distractions. Hell, the game I DM 'starts' at 4:30 and we don't usually have the first in-game narration/activity until almost 5:30 XD
Our group doesn't find out until we basically are getting ready... it's exhausting
@@miller0002 Feels bad
Only valid if they still live with their parents 💀
The amount of times I've had to cancel last minute BC my parents got mad
@@Arya-db3yd "People living on their own dont have a life outside of the game." That is certainly a take.
I've got 3 stories.
1. Joined a new game on saturdays, online, with a group of people that were all new. Not like, to dnd, but that the entire group was newly formed. Session 1, we all have fun. Then the DM starts changing things. He doesn't like the direction the game is going, and wants to either start over, or turn the game into a war game where we control armies. He doesn't ask us, he just says he's going to do that, so everyone in the group dips and we make our own group, where one of the players from the previous group becomes the dm. Been gaming with them for 4 years now.
2. A player in my long time online group, before the group in the previous story got together, invited me to a game with him and a friend of his who was dming. I go in, make a character, and the friend that invited me doesn't show up to the game. I find out later that he got me in so he could dip from the game since the DM was... Well, I made a character, and it dies in the first session. I make another character, and it dies in that session too. The third character I make survives, but dies at the end of combat because the boss blows up when it dies (a homebrew monster with no context to warn players). It wasn't that he was challenging us, he was making combats too hard purposefully, and then bringing in overpowered anime (legit, anime characters) NPCs that he controlled to save us, after killing of play characters he didn't like. I stopped showing up eventually.
3. This one was the longest. We had a player that was with us for years, one of the first people to join mine and my wife's online game. He was the quintessential edge lord dnd player. If you can think it, he did it in terms of edge lord behavior at the table. We're all adults. He's an adult. My wife and I were newer to dnd back then, so we put up with it for years. We had players join and quit our game because of him, and eventually, it came to a head twice. First was the previous campaign that ended because he was upset about a player dealing more damage than him, so he pulled a hissy fit in game to ruin it so we could start a new game. Then in the new game, he joins the cultists secretly behind the player's backs, and even tries to betray the player characters to further some agenda in game. We confront him about it after the players learn about it, and he is super proud of his ideas and whatnot despite us asking him not to do that kind of thing. Fervently denying it. We kicked him from the game, and still remember back to the time he was a player with "well it cant be worse than *player name*." We've had a few other players join, one we removed from the group because he was also edge-lordy and the players weren't really getting along with his player character choices. It was fine, just we weren't vibing.
Told my DM i was a sailor on a merchant ship and i hated pirates as my background. When we ran a one shot to play out that scenario he changed the enimies to beholders.
If your player has a background that can work in multiple ways like having an interesting story twist, spawning random enemies, or just roleplaying in town, dont mess with it just so you can show off your cool new mini.
Never give your DM a blank check in your backstory (granted this was awesome for my drama-loving inner theater kid, but it still hurt!)
So at the beginning of the campaign, I framed out the name of the kobold warren my rogue came from with some very basic details (their name, the colors/patterns common in the warren, her job/rank there, why she left) but otherwise left it up to her. I gave express verbal permission to introduce characters from my past and announce that I knew them, as I would simply roll with it.
I thought this meant I would get some dramatic confrontations with people who had wronged her in the past, which admittedly I *did,* but I also got hit with the shadowy, life-stealing apparition of a child my character lost when she was very young that I didn't even know she had.
I love my DM. She's amazing. I still haven't forgiven her.
I agree, giving us blank checks is asking for trouble!
@@jaxusr235 I've learned my lesson!
....Also I'm going to do it again.
@@ruthcavazos3621 Excellent!
that's some real 0-100 stuff, damn
@@jaxusr235 And prepare to make it double!
Oh hey I didn't expect for my story to get featured here. Mine is the one about the non-horny bard and the SA mention.
I'm glad you did feature it here because that was my first game and I was naive and did not leave nearly as quickly as I should have as I was nervous about ruining other peoples experiences by speaking up and establishing personal boundaries at the time. I hope that my horror story can help new players understand what is and is not acceptable at tables and that it is ok to put your foot down with your DM if you're uncomfortable so that they can avoid the same experience I had in my first game.
On the bright all the other players and I left and made our own group to play for a couple years and we're all still really good friends, so there's some happy ending to that story!
I still don't understand why they thought it was a good idea without discussing with you first. They legit had conversations and came to the conclusion that you'd be okay with this. I'm really glad you and the other players left those creeps.
@@imugi-16 You're in the wrong to vilify DMs that you've never met. We're only learning half of the story. The reality is that the onus isn't on the DM to make sure a player is comfortable. It is on the player to make sure they understand the world that their character is entering into and to assert their personal preferences without expectation that the game will change to accommodate said preferences. The PHB makes that very clear.
While having comfortable players is ideal, discomfort will happen from time to time. Antagonists are supposed to be detestable and there is no way for a DM to know what might trigger a player unless that player speaks up. If a player winds up triggered, that sucks. But the player should leave the table gracefully and without malice, knowing that they're not owed their preferred experience.
The only exception to this is if the DM (or other player) is _trying_ to make the player, rather than the character, uncomfortable. That's player vs player, which I don't condone, rather than roleplaying PvE. Still, this also happens from time to time, even between long-time players/friends. An imaginary world isn't worth getting upset or labeling it as a horror story until police are involved.
I’m happy that you found your own group!
So weird, sexual assault is not something you should be worried about in a game where murder and theft is common. Just an FYI, murder is worse than sexual assault.
@@jaednhowlar2359 Yeah I bet you're a real pleasure to play with and totally haven't been kicked from a table for making people uncomfortable
The fact that the "Mythical Murder Knight" story came from JoCat is wonderful.
He’s such a cool dude
A tip for when one or more players can't make it: run a one shot. Have a few players have a random one shot ready, roll up new characters, and play something different.
Also gives your dm a break
Or play a board game like Munchkin.
I do this. In fact I have my own little side campaign that starts and ends every session in the same location. Easy to narrate off why someon'e gone. The simply didn't come to work that day.
and then the "one shot" becomes the new campaign. Happened to me twice...
@@damianwojcik6174 Funny you should mention that. I created such a campaign. My players were suffering from a little burnout and wanted a break from their regular characters. They wanted to try something higher level - you know, to have some characters with those abilities they usually never survived long enough to gain.
So .. I let them create high level characters - warning them to expect tougher encounters. The levels were set to give them things like extra attacks, access to certain spells - but not things like Wishes. I allowed to to break one creation rule per character. For example, we had a hobbit monk who could do a Boot to the Head against an ogre. There was a barbarian with an abysmally dull intellect but with a Gamma World (TSR game) mutation of Disintegrate. And there was the Ranger who could dual wield long swords.
Then I gave the group some artifacts. The ranger had a pair of long swords that could cast Haste on himself without aging. As we were running them into the Giant modules, this gave the group its name - Order of the Blade Barrier. Instead of a Wand of Wonder, they got a Rod of Awe. Same idea, much more mayhem. (The stupid barbarian got into an argument over who got to hold the Rod and ended up Disintegrating it.)
What turned it into a game was the ranger deciding to adventure Beyond the Barrier Peaks by himself only to get himself stuck. This was the campaign created (rescue mission). They even continued on to the Demonweb Pits.
Point is, they had fun. Never mind that they had no use for all the loot. Dragons would have been envious. Come to think of it, the Rod kept summoning an ancient Gold Dragon. We gave it a 01% chance of it being the same one the first repeat and it was. They healed the dragon and gave it most or all of the loot on each occasion.
8:12 honestly I feel like 3 players and a GM is the perfect amount of people for a TTRPG, add the extra person and you suddenly have scheduling conflicts, remove one and the party feels too small
That’s the exact makeup of my group, and the other three all live together. So scheduling is so easy.
I think my personal favorite to run is 1 on 1s with good roleplayers. There’s something so close about it, and tailoring the experience to just one player really gives the change to focus on their story. It’s a ton of work (especially with NPCs, which are super vital to 1 on 1 campaigns) but I find it to be so worth it.
Beyond that, 2 or 3 would be my golden number. Gives everyone the chance to speak, lets the story be easily tailored to the characters, and gives the players good time to interact and do what they want.
That was the makeup of my group for about half a year. It was great, we didn't get off track as easily as we do nowadays (with SEVEN PLAYERS and a DM), our schedule was consistent (Saturday at 4 for almost two years), and we ended up being a very tight-knit group. I love our current party and I would die for each and every single one of them, but I do miss the four-person squad sometimes.
A GM and three players can be great, but from my experience, it needs to be people who are really into the game. If there is even one player who is not really invested and just kinda there, you basically reduce the capability of your characters by 30%. Everyone needs to meet their responsibilities such as knowing and picking their spells and abilities, paying attention to combat, etc.
Okay, so I was living abroad and had this bff who did VO work, had a HUGE library of TTRPG books, etc and just...best possible person to run a campaign, finally decided to run a game, with me!
First session: DM printed out tokens and maps of every potential scene we'd encounter that session, and had them organized in such a way that he could just pop open an envelope of tokens, dump the contents on the table, and enter the scene almost immediately. It was all laminated to write on and so well put together. His RP and voice work was so good that it took me about an hour to stop giggling with this massive smile on my face with how amazing it was, and stop seeing him just as my bff making me smile and focus on getting into the game.
The other player phoned it in. Seriously. He was distracted on his phone, and looked bored the whole game even though he said he was a veteran. It was throwing me out of it when an amazing scene would take place that my bff spent so much time on and performed as a DM like it was a one-man stage play (so much fun when you can identify an NPC from the voice the DM uses for them), and this guy's like "Hold on a sec, I gotta reply to this. Okay, what were we doing again?" You know it's bad when it takes over an hour to resolve combat with 2 PCs and only 6 baddies.
I wanted to cry. I felt horrible for my friend. After all that, my friend never ran another campaign with anyone outside of some group he'd been playing with for years. Best and worst DnD experience of my life.
On the topic of one missing player, unless it is a super important story moment, my group has always played when we are only one player down, and haven't run into any issues yet. And in the case that someone is out, and we delay for a week for them, we ask ahead of time if they will be their next week. If they cant give a hard yes, we let them know that we will just play without them, and the DM will give them a breakdown of the session sometime after. We are all adults and understand that life happens, but we also understand that one persons time isn't worth more than the rest of us (1 DM and 5 other players) and the show must go on.
There was a game i played way back in high school with some classmates i couldn't participate in one of the sessions because my grandmother had passed away next session the DM punishes me for missing a session by amputating one of my characters arms i was a spellcaster
Later he punished another player for missing a session but much less severe than mine he just lost some equipment
I missed a session for a funeral and my character was jettisoned out of a spaceship air lock.
Did not even relieve so much a "hey make a new character" text before the next session :/
Man, that just hurts to read. DMs should be more understanding on missing sessions, though I do get annoyed when players aren't at sessions, the DM shouldn't of punished your game and character because of it though
This is a quick quit .. if my dm do that i will just leave
@@paperip1996 I hope you quit after that.
Shoutout to that one time I was running a sorta sci-fi magitech game for some friends of mine. They were visiting this city that had magical artillery emplacements, and of course, they wanted to see up close. So they're walking around, and there are big glowing canisters storing magical energy to fuel the guns. One of the players pulls out a knife and pokes one. Some dude runs over and says "hey, be very careful with those. If the magic energy gets out, it'll start a chain reaction that'll destroy a big chunk of the city."
Take a wild fucking guess what my player did next.
to be fair, you brought it on yourself there
@@yujin_sumeragi That's true.
However.
One of my players came to me the next day and said he "didn't expect it to blow up that hard." Direct quote.
@@Vanq22114 then why did you make it blow up that hard? You're the DM, it can only blow up as hard as you want it to. Another thing to keep in mind, though in moderation.
They realise that poking the canisters is a bad idea, apologise to the dude and ask for a tour of the gun implacements
The dude excepts and they have a lovely time, afterward the party invites the dude out for a drink and they become the best of friends and live happily ever after
oh, I know what they did next! They saw a brilliant flash of light and then rolled new characters! lol
Our group started a new campaign with one of our guys DMing for the first time. The DM had clearly put in a lot of effort for this, sending us heaps of world building stuff he'd created before we even got to our first session to prep us. We start the campaign with a little intro section in a forest with the party as a caravan escort. This was meant to take maybe half of the first session before we got to town and kicked off the rest. This ended up getting drawn out over 3 or so sessions thanks to our fighter constantly interrupting, drawing attention to himself and just being a general menace. He decided that as a fighter, he had to fight everything, party members included. I started to get pretty mad after a bit of this, as our DM had clearly been putting in a lot of effort for this campaign and I just found it to be really fucking rude. Eventually, I got fed up and my barbarian got into a fist fight with him and knocked him out. The party then just left him unconscious in the middle of the forest. He left the campaign after that and said something about the game being 'too restrictive'.
Without this guy the campaign ran smoothly and we all had a blast. We finished up the story early 2022 after running for around 2 years.
It is heartbreaking to see a DM go all out and to have a player (or players) not invest in the campaign, the story, or their characters at all. I'm glad getting rid of the player fixed the issue - sounds like he didn't know how to share the table with the other players, or how to operate a charater properly.
The horror story forewarned at the beginning of the video (TW: Sexual Assault) is from
12:13-14:07👍🏽
The story itself is fairly short, and the rest of the time is Jacob explaining how important communication is, to avoid such circumstances in your game.
I opened the video for Spooky D&D stories.
I stayed for Therapy with Jacob.
Man, your "unasked advice" was genuinly good. You should do more. I loved it.
Listening to other TTRPG horror stories and telling your own can be really therapeutic!
Yeah but I also feel it can be a way to just built anxiety and create a warped perception that there’s like a 90% chance you’re going to end up in a D&D group with a potential psychopath or sex fiend.
I feel like the party getting charmed by the baddie was a series of bad rolls, and that's why the DM had to bring in the NPC ally to save them and avoid a TPK or whatever.
Yeah, that was my thought too. I assume the person who left the reply didn't understand the question.
to be fair although it's unlikely to have every player fail a save. despite that you shouldn't build an encounter expecting at least one to pass. it turns the encounter into "save or die"
@@christophercrafte I mean, devil's advocate for the DM, the DC could've been something low like 15. If everyone's dropping low rolls, they're still gonna fail, especially at lower levels. Sometimes you can't really account for everything.
We had something like that in our last BBEG fight. We were hit with a power word stun immediately followed by a meteor storm. Only the NPC druid survived.
Our DM does almost exclusively deadly fights. Our level 6 party fought 2 dragons in the in-game time span of 30 minutes. In my own campaign I ran a medium fight against 14 crabs and the party was absolutely astonished it was considered medium difficulty.
@@GoodOldGamer
I’ve watched my entire party of six fail a DC 10 Perception check. I’ve seen one player in particular die with advantage on death saving throws, he can basically roll a one on command.
You can set the hurtle ankle height, but if you count on your party to succeed at something they will always find a way to trip and break their necks instead.
for me, my party is playing a one piece dnd game. They're a pirate crew, and they're trying to be somewhat good guys in this world of bad pirates. One member of the party, tried recruiting a small town to join his cause, however failed his persuasion roll. He decided, it'd be best to kill the entire town, and he did so using nearly every spell in his book. The crew kicked him out of the crew after that, it was not his first rodeo with going against what everyone else was doing.
7:30 I related to that, back in my university days I was the "forever-DM" of the entire mechanical engineering department and I would always end up running 8-player tables, and 8 was a hard-cap I placed cause otherwise I'd be DMing Band of Brothers. Thankfully by my 3rd year other people started to DM as I was close friends with a lot of people I couldn't let play simply for lack of room.
I created a specific location for the kind of player, new or old, that like to swap characters or restat. I called it the Unwritten Halls as it was a large demi-plane that would "conveniently" show up whenever a player wanted to swap out. It was basically a guildhall for heroes through time which allowed my players to switch characters and take up quests through any area from any game or homebrew setting while maintaining a somewhat coherent story.
Sounds a lot like D:OS hireling hall...
My sister and her boyfriend ask me to run a short game for them and my other siblings. We play the first session (about 1 hour) and everyone seemed to have had a good time and said they wanted to play the next session tomorrow. So I kept working on the campaign, they would keep saying they wanted to play it but would push it back. My sister’s boyfriend did not live in are state and had to go back home. I had spent about fifteen hours hand drawing maps building models and writing the campaign just because they kept telling me they wanted to play the campaign.
Time to play online or without a player that can't make it.
@@iandestroyerofworlds576 I wish I that was possible but I have no friends.
@@latenightorange4439 hey, hey you.. ive never played dnd because i have no friends o.o but ive always wanted to
This video could not be more beautifully timed lmfao. Last Saturday I was supposed to DM, and it was gonna be my first time! I played a bit in high school but I really wanted to try out running a campaign myself. Found some friends and coworkers who were interested and had a neat little 5 person party. Come 8:30 and I get cancelled on last minute by 3 of the 5. Bought all the books, dice, basic map stuff etc. No game.
There is a kind of happy ending though. A few days later (Tuesday) I ran a session with my best friend, his 3 brothers and one of their friends! They were all extremely new and the youngest ones are in high school still, but they did great! Had a lot of fun and it was really cool to introduce them to TTRPG!
My nightmare was my first time as a DM. I had this super cool homebrewed campaign set up about this dark mist that crept around this valley at night kidnapping people, then you throw in some cannibalistic bandits and a cults that would incinerate upon death and the players were to figure out what the heck was going on. All was well for the first couple session, as they gathered clues and did some side quests for some locals, along with some sprinkles of lighthearted quests for this mysterious unhinged wizard, "Einar the Bizarre!!" who has 'silly and bizarre' magic.
i had this set up in 3 sections, traveling across 3 towns, getting more clues, and the final town had all the exposition they would need. but during the second town, one of the players who was trying to run a 'morally good necromancer' was not having fun as he wasn't able to have armies of dead following him around (too low of level) so i worked with him, as he was my friend and killed him off and had him come in with a new character, a wanted Pirate criminal. Shouldve saw the signs.... We finish up the 2nd town and get to the third location which was a larger walled city. i had many side quests planned so the party would go around and do these fun lil side quests and recruit as many people to go fight the big bad of the campaign, but that player i mentioned earlier started to get bored again and began to cause issues, like burning down the general store, killing the nice old Loxodon that ran it, or putting a molotov into the pocket of one of the main quest givers. when i called him out on it. he said everything i was doing was shit and the game sucked and walked out.
Note, it was a 3 player campaign and now it was down to 2... and after that, right on the cusp of when the story would heat up. scheduling issues arose for another player...
that was well over a year ago at this point. it just sucks that they were so close to the end of my first campaign and never got it :(
Thankfully, my DM interviewed every single player before he let them into the game we play together. We haven't had any problems from players themselves in game. We've met up on Mondays each week and if someone has something come up, we'll have advance notice about it, so schedule-wise it was rather good to work with. It's been a year and a few months now since the campaign started and we're all loving it, to the point where we have our own inside jokes, mini-stories we tell to family and friends, and meaningful moments of character building between characters we portray and the players themselves.
We did have a player who started off in our first session, but they left afterward due to real-life schedule conflicts, but the rest of the game continued onward and we've bonded over the whole experience. Kind of sad that they missed out, but it didn't hamper our time in the newly crafted world.
A player who communicates during character creation, comes with a concept that works in the world, and can actually make a goddamn decision is a rare gem. I’ve had to drag people kicking and screaming through character creation, and had to full crackdown draw a reference for his character (because I have *standards* for God’s sake, brought it on myself I suppose)
I do this every time I join a game. I have a lot of character concepts bouncing around in my head, so I'll choose one that sounds particularly good / one that balances the party, then work with the DM to make it fit the setting.
I've never drawn a character before though. Cuz I can't draw for shit. But I'll write backstories in narrative form, either the events around the character's history, or in two cases the character themselves talking about their life and the experiences that brought them to the 'game.'
Can we play a text only session together?, Complete newbie to dnd who read and watched a freak ton of dnd content so I won't need to much of an introduction.
Same! I force my party to sit down because expectations are important. Everyone hits the table with an idea of how things are going to go in their head, and its important for everyone to be on the same page (or at least in the same book). I also want to make sure I am doing right by their characters, and I can only do that if I know how they are wanting to play their character and 'who' their character is.
I honestly don't know why some players struggle so much with character creation. It is literally your role at the table, to play a character, how can you not put any effort into fleshing them out at all? Blows my mind.
My first time ever playing DnD (or any TTRPG) and I THINK it was AD&D but I couldn't tell you for sure. This was a friend of a friend of mines _I think_ one-shot (this was a while ago). I was super into magic casting in games at the time and wanted to make a mage that could use telekinesis type magic. I barely knew anybody except my friend, and after a week of waiting in anticipation, and extreme nervousness (huge introvert here), I stepped into his house feelign like a total and complete stranger. I got my friend to help me with my sheet, and the game starts eventually. This is it, DM asks me what I want to do in this castle keep like thing, I swallow my nervousness, and I ask if it's possible if I can go into an adjacent room that I can see. He knows full well I have 0 experience with this and sends me into the room. A round goes by of other peoples actions, i'm feeling ok, when I ignite a candle and he tells me of an Orc staring directly at me. I ask what's around me that can be seen, he informs me of a bed, a night stand, and on that night stand a cup of a mysterious black liquid. I use my weak telekinesis to send the cup flying at the orc. DM tells me to roll, and I did. Success. But that the cup was just full of hot coffee, and the orc was now super pissed off with me. DM tells me that the orc takes a swing at me, rolls, and outright kills my character immediately.
I was not given an opportunity to spin up a second character.
I was just out of the game.
Gone.
Done.
All that anticipation and build up, and my character didn't even get a chance to speak a word to anybody.
I was just ... hanging out on the couch, away from the group, watching some random TV movie for the rest of the night.
I didn't play DnD again for over a decade.
ah yes... The "you die in the game, you die in real life (but really it's just the DM and sometimes the players ignoring you like jackasses)" approach.
That's so """""fun""""" to have happen.
That guy has to be the worst DM in the entire fucking world holy shit.
On the factor of “if one person’s scheduling doesn’t work” kinda thing. Yeah, we had one member of our 5 person party (6 people total, one being dm ofc) who played with us for the first couple of sessions and then missed the next couple. By the time we had the final session going (the fight with the bbeg), he rejoined, and it felt so weird. Then we had our wrap up session, where weird stuff was happening while setting up the next campaign after this one set in the same world, and he missed that. Our of everything we all made it for, he always was away.
More recently the same DM has been running curse of however u spell his name strahd, for us, and this same player has missed 2/3 sessions he was meant to be in. Since we have split this groups, it’s not that big of a deal as he can always join the other one, but nope, he misses that as well.
Sometimes you feel like shit and can’t make a session, I’ve had a handful of those times, but this has happened for months now and it’s just sad.
I love him as a friend so much, and he’s genuinely such a fun roleplayer / dm when I get the chance to play with him, but he just misses so much it’s a struggle sometimes. I don’t hold it against him, he works really long hours and doesn’t have much time for everything else, along with general university shit and all that, just kinda sad and annoying we don’t see him as much nor do we get to do sessions sometimes.
The only D&D horror story I have was the time I joined an online Ravenloft group. I was still fairly new to RP and another Ravenloft fan offered to RP a few scenes between my half elf cleric noblewoman and Count Strahd Von Zarovich. It went well until he started stalking me out of the online forum and tried to play it off as “that’s what Strahd would do.” He also would often make remarks about my relationship status and find irl information on me from other online platforms like Facebook. Long story short he groomed me, sexually harassed me and blamed it on a character from my favorite campaign setting. My friends told me to give Ravenloft another chance and now I can safely say it’s one of my favorite settings in D&D.
about the constantly changing characters one, i had a player who decided to play a barbarian, got introduced, and before they even used a single one of their abilities they were like "barbarian sucks, i want to change it"
0:03 now you can infinitely scare him.
JEEZ! YOU SCARED ME! YOU CAN'T JUST COMMENT LIKE THAT! YOU HAVE TO ANNOUNCE YOUR PRESENCE SOMEHOW!
Very short version from a much longer horror story.
My first and only time playing Strahd, DM kept us in Death House for 8 sessions and wouldn't let us rest or level up. I dropped out as soon as we were done.
How do you even spend 8 sessions in the Death House? We pretty much went over the entire house with a microscope, the whole time being super careful to not walk into any traps, and it took us 5.
God damn. We got through death house in 4 hours.
Had a friend join the group only to spend majority of the time rule lawyering the dm to the point the group majority voted him out after a few sessions. This was after a lot of us talking to the problem guy about the issues we were having and him just not grasping or not caring. Things included fudging his dice rolls, not allowing other players to have a spotlight, trying to get his character to roll checks because "his was higher," and finally, trying to get people to follow his metagame advice.
I was DMing a long-running campaign with some friends in college, we met every weekend at our school's D&D Club. Nearly 2 years into the campaign at the start of a new semester, over a dozen new people come to the club to try it out. That's great, it's how I started playing, and there were a few other tables that were meant for first-timers, but one of my friends invited _4 new people_ to my game without asking me. I said we were right in the middle of an arc, too much was going on at that minute to bring in someone new (let alone a total stranger), and I _definitely_ couldn't accommodate that many players. Out of the blue they all left to start their own game without me and never said another word.
I didn't go back to the club after that. It still hurts all these years later.
4:09 I think the problem here is that the bbeg used a charm that not only affected everyone, but also all of them failed, then had to be saved by an NPC.
The fire part, maybe it’s just the player was constantly being knocked out, and as a result never got to do anything.
Good timing! I played DnD for the first time today and already have a horror story!
It was a one-shot in a longer campaign my friend played. She invited me, my sister, and two other friends to join her, the DM, and another guy. That other guy spent the whole time talking over other people, telling them what they should do on their turns, what *he* was going to do despite it not being his turn (including the HDYWTDT finishers) , and then spent every fight talking about how he was going to lobotimise or otherwise terribly maim the enemies. Overall it was just uncomfortable because you could tell how much the DM wanted to make a good impression on everyone new to the game but we couldn't go a second without this guy butting in or throwing slurs around.
I had fun with the moments I played but, yeah, I'd want to find another group before trying it again
Could you make a video about D&D Wholesome Stories?
I'd love to see some good DnD stories to mix it up!
Like, i really like CritCrab, but all his videos are about some terrible shit happening to other people, i'd love to see some good and wholesome DnD stories for a change
The story at 14:13 is a good example of why new players probably don't need to have access to Fireball in the second session. Start them at level 1 and let them learn the game in more manageable pieces.
What? no. As always, if a fireball didn't solve the problem, you fireball again...
we were a group of new players with a pretty good dm and at level 3 i used a fireball scroll against some goblins, and of course the dm told us it was an area effect but me and my friends didn't expect the damaged to be so high.. i went down at full health and the other guy who passed the saving throw somehow survived with 1 hp
@@maxorcg Hey, but you got the goblins. Sounds like a mission accomplished to me
@@maxorcg If i could guess, i'd say that the guy who survived with 1 hp probably did it because he passed the saving throw.
When my previous character had to be retired, I was introducing a new character that was unlike those I had played before. He was one of if not my most highly anticipated character to play ever. The dm and I had worked out a nearly 13 page backstory filled with lore and plothooks, and it took a favor from him to get the player into the story. The end result was a fairly tame character that was vague and mysterious with connections to the plot of the setting. The character was the dm and my attempts to get the players interested in the rest of the plot (as I am an unofficial co-dm).
Session one. My character is introduced as a mysterious draconic-bloodline human child who is leading a group of dark elven mercenaries in the underdark. The player character I happened to meet was an orc, and I enticed him with the mention of a great foe we could slay nearby. We end up killing this great foe, and my character seeing potential in the orc offers to team up as the rest of the party began to arrive.
Session 2 begins with my character offering to work together with the orc, trying to convince him of my usefulness, but he denied irefutably and began to leave. I insisted, telling him that many more great battles could come if he worked with me, and he took insult in my assumption he couldn't find them on his own.
He ended up attacking my group, and the party arrived to see the orc attacking a group of dark elves and some random child, and they all joined his side. The result was a slaughter, one dark elf was blasted with a cannon to meat and bones, one was crushed to death in the jaws of the orc and was eaten, and one was being slowly and painfully crushed to death, and my character decided to mercy kill them before teleporting away and having a mental breakdown in an alley.
(Tl;Dr. I introduced myself to one of the players and he killed and ate my friends)
I think that assassin moment you talked about was a great opportunity for roleplay. Because in a meta sense that player noticed that he was making roles of an assassin. But you could say that in game, he was noticing that his ally “had the graceful yet ponionet movements of an assassin, betraying his secret”
At the first session of my D&D Club, I believe that my last group had been talking about our sessions, because 14 people came to my table. It took a lot out of me to shift many of them into other groups.
It's embarassing how much I like to hear about DnD horror stories. my own experiences are a bit odd. In one game we had a player who's character only flirted with everyone and then one time showed up in a lobster suit and went from comic relief to obnoxious attention seeker. He said that his antics were the only thing making the game fun and that it was too miserable when we called him out. And then he quit. I also called him some names that were entirely undeserved. Yeah he made the game worse, but comparitively it wasn't that bad, so I feel bad I went off on him to such a level. I ended up adding to the depressing atmosphere and being part of the horror story by getting so mean over it. I realise now I'd be lucky if this was the worst horror story I had.
Another time we had a player character go full attempted murder AND attempted sexual assault on another player character. It got so bad and as soon as we (the other players not involved in the scene) realised that the ones that were involved were not in agreement with this event, and it was just one player's doing, we quickly retconned it as he was still trying to RP it out. Putting an end to that promptly against his resistance, even when the victim character's player said they'd leave the game if this continued. Asking the gross jerk weirdo about it later on, for years he refused to explain what happened. So I'm left just to theorise that he had taken a mind altering substance and is super ashamed of the whole thing. He never did anything like that again... Well, there was debatebly one more time that happened in a session 0 years later.
But after so many years of good games that were better than Critical Role, with the best players I could ever hope for... We had that one campaign. The one where every single horror story cliche happened at once. The GM had ruined a previous game by getting angry at a player OOC because she didn't like how his character had talked to her character. But we didn't use that against her and assumed she'd grown up since that time. As a GM though she was so much worse it's incredible. Imagine the worst games you've ehard of, all of them. Combine them. That's what we had. Our characters got random nerfs whilst her GMPC was a literal goddess who then molested the youngest player character and in the OOC chat threatened to kill anyone's character that interfered. I recall two players saying that their good alligned characters just could not ignore it, but the GM did not care. The GMPC cured a PC of their mental disibility, which was a major part of the character. The GMPC also cast revive on a PC who died heroically and ruined the moment where they wanted to get out of the game. And also plagiarised the plot directly from Legend of Zelda, refusing to adapt the areas to our characters and instead creating nonsense curses that just took our abilities away if we were able to solve the dungeons in a way that was different to the "correct" way like it's meant to be done in the games. And then when I tried to leave and was told "no", I had my character attack the GMPC, keeping it in-character that I thought she was evil. I was proved correct as she turned into her demon form and one-shot me. It was actually a bit of a cool moment I thought. She RPed it well. But still got incredibly mad at me afterwords, despite not stopping any part of it from happening... Oh and we also had a really nice moment of party bonding where she said "Oh I wasn't watching all that happen as it happened so it doesn't count." We had a log of all the events but she deleted that log and just said no. But we never got to have good RP moments like that whilst she was around and dictating that we fell into a water 'trap' and now we had to roll to avoid drowning. Even though Link can swim in all the games, but for us the water was as dangerous as lava. That was never explained. We then fought a few enemies and she got mad when we called them bosses, even though she admitted she added TWO 0s to the end of their health. 2hp enemies became 200hp enemies. She said we were rolling too well so she had to...
Finally we get TPKed, all of us except for me. Still wanting to leave the game, I say my character goes back to town. I was going to get help for everyone, but the GM instead had a big bad child molester boss enemy that she wouldn't let us kill, show up and chastise my character for having a "lack or morals" and for abandoning my party. He one-shots me and feeds my character to spiders. The other players were pissed after their characters awoke later, and they backtracked to save mine. The GM offered them overpowered magical items in echange for letting my character die. Even though they knew I was leaving the game, they still refused the items and saved my character, allowing them to leave the party, and live peacefully in town. They did this purely out of respect, and the GM did not like that. My fellow players are great and I am so glad we stayed together after this bad game. The GM though soon after quit the game and ended things, vanishing from the group entirely never to be seen again. And wouldn't you know it... It would later come to light that had been grooming a young person online. It was happening at the time and none of us knew. We should have reliased when she got personally angry at things said to her character, that she was someone that did not separate reality and fantasy. For the rest of us we've played some morally awful characters, so we knew not to judge each other on what we do in fiction. But she was sadly a case where we should have. But since she left none of us ever found out what happened to her. I don't know if she's still out there, or if she's in jail. But she was a genuinely awful person and went on to become the worst GM in history. The game we had with her was every other horror story I know of, combined. I really should do a video on it some day, but it's gonna be hard with such a dark subject matter.
We did a modern day set one shot based off the movie smile... we were in a school and i somehow ended up in the vents, the DM would constantly toss cool stuff my way (including secret rooms) and i just kept going through the vents passing up every chance, i was the only one of my group to survive the one shot lol
I once had two friends, a couple with relationship problems. One of them was the DM. She put all her problems in the game. Mean npc's, getting ambushed by way too high level npc's, getting negative outcomes for everything we tried to do, and just straight up bullying us for failing her impossible questline. And if we asked if she was alright she was fine. It was really uncomfortable. Few weeks later it turned out she had a secret second relationship. Never talked again to her after that.
my entry to dnd was a bit of a horror story you could say
the party consisted of 4 ppl and the dm, 3 of the party members (including me) never played dnd before this, the other one was an og player. 20 sessions of me being called stupid for not knowing how the game worked or not noticing that i could do certain things and the og player just raging and trying to kill al of us before i just leave the group and never looked back
Honestly for the knight one I would not only have the villagers be hostile but just say something like "players, after hearing the sounds of spellcasting you see your friend disappear, only to be replaced by the evil guy. Please roll initiative."
Ah yes, punish the other players with another boss fight because one player was being a doofus.
Good job, dm
@@MRJTD99 what? No, the guy wants to be a smartass and pretend to be the bbeg, so I just tell the players that he appears to be the BBEG
Nah, I'd have the villagers be hostile but also the highly trained heavily armed reinforcements have just arrived and jump into action upon seeing him. Then take him into custody and interrogate him. If they try fighting, deal with that character swiftly. Justice served
The assassin one reminds me of one of my own horror stories.
One of my friends was DM'ing for his friends back in his hometown. Come the next year of uni, he moved it to roll20. I asked if I could be a part of the game, given I was always free at the time and wanted to play more with said friend. I knew 2 of the 4 players in the game from playing other games like league, but 2 of them I had no clue until the week before I joined, where the DM had us introduce ourselves.
The horror story starts with me showing up with a fresh lvl 3 assassin, CE with a very obvious reckless abandon attitude, on display from my introduction as I pickpocketed the tavern I was to be introduced in. Needless to say, the ?LG? paladin in the group, one of the people I hadn't met prior to this game, was not having my shit. Reprimanding for my actions to put it lightly, he would make factual attack rolls against me when I did something non-law-abiding, knock me out on the second offense, then taking my gear from me before bringing me to consciousness. I was effectively at his whim, since paladins are kind of good early game.
The original premise of me joining the party was "I'll get caught pickpocketing, and the party will want to reform this man who has redeemable qualities instead of taking him to prison. They also needed a rogue for their next dungeon crawl. It all lines up". The DM and I even (briefly) discussed how a possible self-actualizing character arc could be made for it. But after the paladin left me tied up in a forest and convinced the other players to leave me for dead, I cant say it would've worked out. That was the only session I played with that group. I still don't interact with that friend of a friend that played the paladin, as both of us clearly got off on the wrong foot.
I know I was in the wrong for picking a character of the opposite alignment to the party, as well as not reading the room when I wanted to do #roguethings. I feel like the paladin was also in the wrong for introducing pvp and leaving me to die in the woods. The DM had minimal fault, if any, because he was unaware there would be a domino effect put in front of him in real-time.
I think the big takeaway is to minimize opportunities of player vs player conflict by being smarter players.
You can definetly be the paladin in that spot and not fully stop another player from doing stuff
there is for sure a middle ground that should have been met. your character committed crimes so the paladin punished you its what a LG character should do, however as a player at a table you should also understand there may be more to the other player's character and want work it out. a sort of meta-gaming leniency.
my fellow players recently found out I might be some kind of werewolf or vampire after I went missing after a long rest and rather than say "ah hes a monster we should hunt and kill him" they are tracking him to see if hes ok and find out whats happening. to be honest, if it happened like your story and they turned on me that would kinda suck but id laugh a little.
@@christophercrafte yeah, there was potential for a meaningful resolution, but that was YEARS ago at this point. I'd only had a single year of experience at the time, so I was just like "ah, shame, this didn't work out". I didn't try to make a resolution, I just stepped away from the problem.
I've definitely made strides as a player since. With my current characters, I'd hope that any "turned on me" moments have story significance, rather than alignment-related. Alignment as a basis of your character is sort of been phased out at this point, at least for my group.
I wonder if the other player saw a CE rogue and assumed you were going to be one of those obnoxious, attention-seeking players who just drags everybody into every crime they can think of because they don't care about the story or tone. They tend to have introductions like that.
Though I have literally played a paladin who met a rogue and, as he was explaining that he was robbing me now, found an excuse for my paladin to see him as redeemable enough to adventure with. That should still be the default approach to other player characters.
Obviously I wasn't there and can't really comment on what happened, but it seems like the DM is MOSTLY at fault here. They could have told the paladin player OOC what your plans for your rogue were and to just tag along with it for a bit. And if that didnt work then he could have tried to have an NPC in game intervene like the tavern keep or a trustworthy town guard say something like "Oh yeah thats just DRida64 the rogue! Always getting into trouble! But they have a good heart and never do anything too bad!" And failing both of those they could have just said "Ok, so the rogue clearly isnt't working, lets roll up a new character for you real quick and introduce them."
Not sayiing your DM was bad or anything. They were probably just inexperienced and blindsided by what was happening.
I ran a one-shot for a friend and friends of his that I didn't know. I told him that if any of them had any questions at all to come to me. I send them the boundary's for the characters they could make. There were no questions. And he helped them make their characters. One player turned up late, didn't pay attention at all and their character was a a piece of bread. They also left after and hour and a half in the middle of the session. After they left it was great and the other players had a lot of fun.
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"Junkyard DnD, we didn't even know what was going on, we were just rolling the dice and killing eachother-- I don't even know what was happening"
LMAO cursed af. thats so crunchy
Man I feel for everybody and those peeps. The worst I had was another player with a bad case of “Protagonist Syndrome” and trying to DM for the DM. It was…fun. But I never had the opportunity to play with him again.
Listenin to this really makes me appriciate my DM as he has some themes of sexuality and romance in his games but he always prefaces it with asking if us as players are okay/want to do that with out characters so nothing like this happens. Never really had a bad experience with dnd so far cos of it
I introduced my players to a succubus posing as a noble, and sort of built this romance thing between her and one of them in a solo RP after a session. We fade-to-blacked anything past their first kiss and I don't really intend to RP much of their interactions in general, more just "you're all in town for a few nights. Byn, do you go to visit Lady Sirina?" and let it be assumed what happened. Each visit, he returns with a slightly reduced max HP, but in character doesn't actually know what's going on yet.
I didn't talk to him before I did this, and part of me feels bad about that after reading some of these comments. But I'd come to trust him as a player (and adult), knowing he'd handle the whole thing well. And so far it's been great.
You shouldn't "appreciate" someone for doing the bare minimum
@@carlchristopher7015 I'm pretty sure the DM who just decided that one of the players was accused of sexual assault without talking to anyone, was doing the bare minimum. Talking with players before those themes come up is more proactive and open than most, and definitely deserves appreciation.
@@la9406 No that DM was straight up doing a wrong thing, not the bare minimum. It's a given that you should inform your players if those kinds of themes will come up, just a standard practice that all (good) DMs will do. Not really worthy of praise. Something to "appreciate" about your DM is that they have a super colourful elaborate world with compelling NPCs, or balanced, fun combat encounters, or story arcs that put the spotlight on all the players.
@@carlchristopher7015 Well I hear about all these dnd horror stories, so shit seems to happen to a decent amount of people in their game, so I would say it's fair that I can appriciate that the DM I have keeps open communication, and is proactive in making sure his players are comfortable, feel included and such. Like I get one shouldnt have to thank someone for not, as mentioned, have your character charged with sexual assault out of the blue, but I can still appriciate that they make sure everyone's having a good time nonetheless
Not sure I'd call it a horror story, but we nearly had a stampede of wild animals in the Waterdeep Dock Ward. Our Druid was basically a fantasy vet and wanted to free the animals on the circus ship, so while our Warlock went to have a meeting with the captain she Wild Shaped into a spider and snuck on to the ship. A few rounds later, she nearly got caught and my Barbarian and the Monk had to perform a fake fist fight in order to draw the crew's attention. Luckily she didn't free the animals and cause absolute chaos, but my Barbarian did suplex the Monk right as the Warlock came over to see what was going on.
A friend of mine was wanting to run a game for a decently large group of players and decided he would write his own campaign. We were all fairly excited because it’s not every day someone volunteers to DM. I built my bladesinger wizard, and was hyped to start playing.
15 mins. in, I figure out that this mf is running *Cave Story* as a campaign. To the letter pretty much, he didn’t even rename NPCs, locations, anything. We didn’t keep playing.
Bonus, one of the other players said “your character is too similar to [famous stream game wizard]. it’s unoriginal, you should be more creative with character creation.”
1. the only similarity was that I was playing a wizard in D&D
2. that’s just needlessly mean
3. this guy was the second person to say he was going to play a changeling bard during character creation, even picking the same subclass as the first guy
I’ve got a 2 sentence horror story:
8 DM’s in a 70+ person High School Club of mostly new players. With at least one new person each week.
Aw, I wish there would be a part 2 for the stories, cause I have a spicy one that I would love Jacob to read it
Why are you EXCITED to share a HORROR story?! If it's TRULY a HORRIBLE thing then it should NOT be celebrated, it should be REMOVED from the hobby!
And I do NOT mean that for about half of these stories, most of these are things that just SUCK, they are NOT horror stories! Though there did start to be some as he progressed!
@@JacksonOwex I mean, they already happened right ? The only thing that we can do now is laugh at these absurdities
I was playing a game with a DM when I realized I had no autonomy, so I kept trying to fight all his level 20 NPCs (which were basically DMPCs) and yet they still never killed me or even treated me differently.
"Have you seen Jojo's Bizarre Adventure"
That segment just hit me right in the soul. I was exactly like that when I first was a player... and first time being a DM lol.
The horror stories about schedule conflicts just reminded me about the game I played back in school. All the other players were in PhD programs, so they were physically present year-round to work on their research and stuff, but my Master's program involved summer internships so I was always gone for those 2-3 months. I worked with the DM to have a plot-relevant reason for him to take over my character (surprise, turns out he was the BBEG!) but because the story got dragged out, that big reveal didn't actually happen when it was supposed to and I ended up playing as the villain-in-disguise for the entire next academic year.
(Not a horror story, but yeah -- if schedule conflicts are a thing, figure out how to play without that guy!)
I loved that groan of disappointment when he read “it’s what my character would do” 😂
As far as the “too many players” issue goes, I’ve DMed a lot for like school clubs and stuff like that and every time we always have like 9 people in the party, which I’ve just had to deal with. One time I did have like 10 people in a home game and ended up saying I couldn’t run it anymore cuz of burnout, before inviting my closest friends from that campaign to start a new campaign. I still feel a little bad about this but also I like my sanity.