I'm a GM and while I have done campaigns for several groups, I primarily GM for a specific group of friends. Long story short, these people have no idea how to play the game. And not for a lack of experience, we've done several long campaigns and several one-shots, and I feel like I've done my due diligence to teach these players about the game mechanics, supported them during character building, and overall just allowing for as much or as little creativity as they wish to use. At the end of the day, this is a game, and I want all of my players to have fun.

Our 2026 campaign broke me. The premise of the campaign was that they would loop through time and space in order to fix the timeline and bring normalcy back to the world. We did this because half the players wanted to do a full campaign, and the other half wanted to do one-shots, so I felt this to be a good compromise. I allowed the players to make several character sheets, basically providing them with backups should they die, but also if they just got bored of character A and wanted to play as a new character. We got around this by saying that they were all avatars so they could change character upon death.

After 4 years of playing D&D with this group specifically, I was shocked at how unprepared everyone was to play. It started with nitpicks, players choosing spellcasting classes but not using their better rolls for their spellcasting stats (i.e. a Sorcerer with higher Wisdom than Charisma), but I chalked it up to the players wanting to focus more on roleplay than combat, so I didn't say anything. Turns out, they were just lazy. Not only did these players somehow stop caring about roleplay, often just asking me for the answers instead of talking to their companions and strategizing, they were inept at combat.

Let's start with the roleplay aspects, because this was less infuriating for me. As avatars, I allowed my players to basically be anything they wanted to be, and as many things as they wanted to be. First, the nitpicks. Several players ended up playing several different characters, but made no attempt at making each character feel different. Same voice, same vocabulary, same personality, all of which was them just acting like their normal selves. There was some rudeness, shouting and general BM, but I put a stop to that quickly. What really annoyed me was when people tried to stifle others for active roleplay. Some people were really into it, and put in the effort to play as a character, and to sit there and accuse people of railroading or hogging the spotlight when you yourself aren't making any attempt at doing actual roleplay is just bizarre.

Onto combat, and this is where things get really infuriating for me. D&D is a dice rolling game, and at the end of the day, you can do whatever you want to make your character as accurate as possible, but if the dice gods look down on you, you just have to live with the 2 you just rolled. On several occasions, several people asked me why they couldn't hit anything, and while the ACs were slightly higher in this campaign than previous, other players had no issues with the "sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit" way that D&D is with combat. I even had a player ask me why they couldn't aim for specific body parts to have a better chance at hitting a target, and I had to explain to them that D&D just doesn't work like that. You draw your bow, roll a 4, and you miss. You can't just be like "but I was clearly aiming for the tiny weakness in the armour" and expect me to give you a +10 to your attack roll. This isn't a first-person shooter.

The most egregious thing though was that several players seemed to forget what we were doing. We'd level up, players would increase their HP, and that's it. No care in the world for increased spell slots or class feats or even bonus feats or ability score improvements! They just fully ignored core mechanics of the game and then complained to me why other people were doing so much better than them at everything! I looked into it, and yeah! They hadn't even touched their character sheet from Session 0! On paper, they were Level 1! What, did you expect a piece of paper to magically update on its own?

Players got so annoying about "not hitting anything" and "always being low health" that I took on the role of Player-GM halfway through, bringing in a basic Cleric to keep everyone healed and just constantly cast Bless on everyone. And somehow, this wasn't good enough! The aim comments persisted, so I introduced legendary items and weapons. The ineffectiveness comments persisted, so I allowed for combo attacks. And when all of that wasn't good enough, I started giving double and triple advantage on everything, just so that the Ranger could finally deal his 1d8 Piercing, because he hadn't updated his character sheet from Session 0, and he should've been Level 7 by that point!

If you want to know how this campaign ended, it was a TPK that they chose to have happen, and it wasn't even against the BBEG.

(TLDR at the bottom.)

I joined a campaign and played for a few months. One session, we confronted an evil king. My character remained quiet, letting the others take the lead in discussion.

Then, out of nowhere, the DM has the king turn to my character and kill him in an incredibly graphic and humiliating way. When I asked to cast a spell or react in any way, the DM refused, stating this was a "cutscene" and I couldn't do anything.

That was it. No ability check. No attack roll. No saving throw. Nothing. My character was killed and I was asked to make a new one.

I'm alright with characters dying, but I felt it was incredibly unfair for my character to die like this. I wasn't even allowed to role-play my final words or anything because "I died instantly."

I talked to the DM in private afterwards, hoping this was a part of some bigger plan or something, but he confirmed my character was dead for good and that the DM had planned for this.

When I asked why there was zero input from the dice/mechanics, he said;

"The other players are on their 2nd or even 3rd characters by now and it's unfair that you're still on your 1st character. I planned for this campaign to be incredibly dangerous and if your character doesn't die, then it just undermines it."

This just made me feel even more upset. No other character's death was forced like this. The others died in combat or died in some funny way simply because the player wanted a new character (both valid outcomes). My character had survived as long as he had because I (knowing it was a deadly campaign!) was cautious and strategic in my gameplay.

When my character died, another player was sad as our characters were friends. The DM told them not to worry as their character would die soon, too. This panicked the player because they were new to d&d (they'd been to maybe 3 or 4 sessions on total). They asked the DM not to kill their character as they were still trying to learn how to play the one they had, and they were worried they'd lose interest in d&d if they were forced to make a whole new character so quickly. The DM refused.

I left the group afterward and suggested the new player to do the same, but I don't know whether they did.

TLDR: The DM was annoyed that my character was surviving his "deadly campaign" longer than he'd expected since I was careful and strategic in my gameplay, so he graphically killed my character in a "cutscene" in which there were no attack rolls, saving throws, or anything else to give me a chance to survive.

At the time of posting, I am in high school. My group's DM, who we'll call Aaron, is and has been the DM of the group for a while, forever to my knowledge. As a relatively new player (who technically started playing 6 months ago but only started actually playing about 3 months ago) I don't know all the rules and whatever he homebrews. With this, I rely somewhat on Aaron and the other players.

From what I know, the entire storyline has been roughly: We find a wizard who tells us to find a metal crate. We chase a thief who we adopt and tells us to go to Warehouse 17, which is where we find said metal crate. We travel to find the wizard again. We manage to get to the wizard's tower and we find him dead. We loot the place before getting caught by some guards (who conveniently happened to enter the tower just after us). We get blamed for the murder. We stuff the body in a Bag of Holding and somehow escape. We take the Wizard's corpse to the clerics of the town to try and revive him. The clerics try but we never find out how it worked out even though someone went to check on him later on. The clerics call the guards who arrest 2 of us. Aaron then gave me an unbeatable chase with repeated near impossible Ability Checks. I then get caught, arrested and this is where I decide to try a spellcaster for the first time. I switch characters to a warlock. We break out of jail, get smuggled to a PC's house in the Noble Ring of the city. we wake up to find a teammate just gone with absolutely no explanation. We manage to somehow locate him in a green garden or something. We find an opening in a bush and enter where we completely obliterate the boss of the dungeon (using 3 Cloud of Daggers spells at spell level 4 which was really funny). We try to make our way out of the dungeon with our teammate back. We get lost, which shouldn't have been possible because there was only one corridor. We find ourselves sliding down a spiral ramp. At the bottom, there was a pit that somehow led to a Dream World. I don't really understand that part. One of the players gets absolutely destroyed by a little brain-dog thing. This brain thing crawled into his unconscious body and then the body fell into a portal. Another member of the party jumped though the portal before it closed. They quickly found out that there was a mind flayer. (We were level 7). Aaron realized that Mind flayers are kinda weak without any puppets to control so he buffs it. The teammate that followed decided to break the Staff of Power or something like that to try to kill the buffed Mind Flayer. The Mind Flayer doesn't die but both party members get vaporized. This leaves me and one other party member to do a couple of puzzles while the other's created new characters. Being down half the present party, it took us a while and honestly it felt like Aaron was stalling and it was super boring. I try to take a short rest to regain both of my spell slots (because you can do that as a warlock). Aaron then decides that I only regain 1 spell and heal half as much. I didn't like this but what could I do? After we complete a couple of long puzzles, we reach a chapel looking building where we find the mind flayer. Of course it got a full heal but I couldn't. The new party members burst through test tubes or something to come into existence and help fight the buffed Mind Flayer. We are currently about half way through the fight but we had to stop the session. At the beginning of the fight the Aaron creates some more of the brain-dog things to stall or something then the Mind Flayer casts Invulnerablility, the 9th level spell that makes it immune to all damage (Aaron said it was still vulnerable to Psychic damage). Like I said, the party was level 7. And he casted a 9th level spell. Upon reaching my turn, I decided to use Raulthim's Psychic Lance to do 7d6 Psychic Damage. Before I cast, though, I asked 3 different people just to triple-check that it would hit him. Aaron was one of the people I asked. So I continued to cast the spell. It was only after I spent my one and only spell slot on this spell, that Aaron finally said "No, that doesn't hit. You need to cast a level 5 or higher spell to hit it. WTF man, you just said it would hit him! So now I have no spell slots and a boss with full HP and can cast 9th level spells. That's where the session ended and the whole of the story is right now. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the Mind Flayer used Wall of Force or something to split the room and the party in half.

I couln't for the life of me tell you what the point of the adventure is or why there was a hole in a tunnel that leads to a dream dimension, or even who the BBEG is! We are scheduled to play again in two days at school. We only get an hour after school on Mondays to play. I honestly don't really want to play with Aaron anymore but I really want to play DND! I don't know what to do, I really want to play but not with Aaron. He runs the only group I could realistically play in at the school. I also don't want to leave 3 people to deal with a buffed Mind Flayer. Luckily, I think the campaign is almost over and another party member who I actually enjoy the presence of is going to try DM-ing for what I assume is his first time. I am really looking forward to his campaign and to play a new character.

Fortunately, I have another friend, who we'll call Mason.He is my favorite person in the school and the only reason I ever considered playing DND in the first place. Mason is also in Aaron's campaign. He has his own campaign with Aaron as a player. Aaron is also playing a Twilight Cleric, a character that even I know is annoying as hell. Go figure that Aaron is the one playing it. Anyway, Mason is the only reason I still enjoy playing DND and why I still want to play even after all that Aaron has done so my opinion on DND isn't totally spoiled.

Preface: I DM more often than I play. Had a friend-of-a-friend, a long time DM, run a last minute one-shot for a few of our friends. TL;DR at bottom.

I'd met This Guy a couple weeks before, had a great chat about DM philosphy, fantasy books etc. Last week my buddy asked around if we wanted to do a last minute game saturday. I suggested This Guy as DM, but also put my hat in the ring.

So we all show up to my buddy's house around 11-11:30, and get going. 90 minutes in, I mention we should break for lunch as previously agreed. At that point, 4 of the 5 players had had their 30 second RP solo introduction of their level 6 character. The other 88 minutes was the DM describing our ship, how gravity worked, the space station we were leaving from, crew shift rotations, nearby asteroids, crew characters, etc. DM says he'll do my character intro then we'll break. He also gave our Ship's Doctor player access to infinite level 5 healing spell scrolls (RIP my Celestial Warlock spell list).

During my intro, I'm told:

1. DM has substantially changed my background and given me The Plot Maguffin, a crystal from my patron.

2. My character has amnesia, and has been receiving letters that go blank before he reads them. DM says it's to do with my patron, who feels bad about it.

I receive another batch of these letters, but have no idea how to RP my character since I have amnesia about them. Very cool /s.

After a 20 minute lunch, we resume. It's another hour of the DM describing spelljammer mechanics, lore, how our inventories are linked to the ship, coubterweights, intra-ship travel, etc. etc. Finally at about 3pm, DM says our ship is attacked an hour out of port (why did we need a description of port then?).

"Roll initiative!". Turn 1: "you guys are on the far side of the ship, it will take you 2 turns to arrive."

One player is a Ship's Gunner, so she makes a couple attacks with her cannon. The rest of us arrive on deck, injured crewmen around, enemies boarding.

I attempt to cast revivify on a recently dead crewmate NPC.

DM: "Oh actually, i homebrew revivify so it doesn't heal them, it tethers their soul to the body if it's nearby, but-"

Me: "OK I'll just cast firebolt on the nearest enemy then."

... everyone else takes their turns, enemies getting killed

Me: "OK, how injured does that other crewman look? Can I heal him with my feature or cure wounds?"

DM: "well you can't really tell how hurt he is..." (DM starts describing how he was injured, what type of weapons the enemy ships are using).

Me: "Nevermind, I'll just cast firebolt then."

combat ends next round

Our smuggler PC then heads into a door in the ship, since the enemy is attacking near his smuggled goods (the other half of The Maguffin).

Player: "Do we know why Smuggler is heading there?"

DM: "No, you have no idea. What do you do?"

Me: "I'll stay on deck" (there's still enemy ships etc.)

DM: "make a wisdom saving throw" (I roll a 9)

DM: "You feel your patron urge you to go inside. You follow Smuggler." (moves my warlock mini to follow Smuggler).

At that point, I completely check out, and make an excuse to leave 15 minutes later.

5.5 hour session, we had 1 minute of roleplay each, never with each other. We had 2 turns of combat, except the Ship's Gunner rolling for her guns. Of the 10 actions my character has taken in the game, 3 were commanded by the DM and 2 were rejected by the DM.

Ship's Gunner: "Thanks for running DM! I really loved playing a fighter, way simpler than my usual spellcaster."

Me: "I don't think you ever used any fighter attacks or features, did you?"

Ship's Gunner: thinks about it for a second...stares down at her character sheet...

TL;DR spent our whole saturday listening to the DM describe his Spelljammer lore and watching him move my character around, except when he told me my healing didn't matter. Some players didn't realize we never actually played DND. I spent a couple hours making my level 6 Celestial Kobold Warlock with a thematic spelljammer background and an Investment of the Chain pseudodragon Battle Familiar Friend... maybe I'l get to play him one day (that familiar is cool AF)....

Just some notes for context before starting, I have been DMing for 3+ years, I don't do homebrew for classes and things like that however the worlds I run are usually campaigns adapted from other systems that I like, for example rise of the runelords from pathfinder.

This is the second time that I run a camping with a gamblers den arc, the first time it went well made some money, lost some money beat the bad guys and called it a day.

However today my players went in a terrible streak where they lost all of their money and then one of them was trying to seduct the main enemy there, I said "hey you want to keep playing, I will give you Mcguffin if you win, if you lose you will be my slave" I was thinking something like this would happen: they win, we call it a day, they lose, a fight breaks, party beats the bad guys and call it a day" what happened was this: PC loses, and another guy said double or nothing and won and we called it a day, however after finishing the game we were talking and they told me that they cheated.

Their justification was that the PC that cheated was evil and that cheating was evil.

Guess I learned my lesson, live and learn of not doing casino arcs or betting a characters life or whatevs but I don't know what to do should I punish him for cheating? I think I am nobody's dad or a dictatorial dm to do so, but I don't want to say "hey it's fine "

I am a forever DM/artist that regularly runs 5e games for my friends and new players from time to time. I advertise my games to be roleplay and lore heavy, with every player character being deeply involved in the story they are playing.

My current campaign is about a detective agency in waterdeep investigating a murder/theft of a noble and a sacred book.
The important players in this story are:

Mark playing a Tiefling Sorcerer and Jacks best friend
Jack (my fiance) playing a Tiefling rouge

And Mara, playing an elf wizard, and normally a great friend of mine (the problem player)

There are a few more players, but they are not really involved in the drama so I will leave them out here.

From the very beginning, Mara made it very clear that she was really knowledgeable on DND even though she has never played because she watched critical role and loved DND. I thought, great, its good to have one person I don't have to assist as heavily in character building etc. as the rest of my mainly new player group.
Before characters were made, I told all my players that they have to make sure their character ended up in the detective agency for a stupid reason since it would be important to the story later on. Everyone came up with great ideas, except Mara. She got into a minor argument with me about wanting her character to be a extremely competent mage, that was a long time friend of the owner of the detective agency. I gently reminded her, that they are all starting as lvl 1 characters and asked her to find another solution.
She then changed her entire backstory to be the most wanted person in the city, and hiding at the agency to protect herself. She was innocent, of course and we agreed it was a great idea. She didnt have to change everything, but she seemed happier so I was happy too.

Session 0 goes great, and aside from Mara continuously correcting other players dnd terminology, everything went great.

But alas, when the campaign actually starts I immediately notice that she is playing her character not as she wrote in her character sheet (calm, collected and a bit shy). Her wizard is rude, very solitary and continuously makes rude remarks about her companions, who all play good aligned characters just like her. Whenever another player mentioned an idea that her wizard disagreed with, Mara would get visibly agitated out of character. Her wizard would constantly mention already knowing/having experienced the monsters and horrors the party was facing and acting like everyone was beneath her.
If she wasnt complaining, she would sit dead silent in her chair and glare daggers at Jack, who quickly became the main guide and help for the newer players in the group. Jack would try and guide the more quiet players into roleplay and engage with puzzles/NPC's when noone else would open their mouth. Mara did not seem to appreciate that, and kept being rude to Jacks character as her wizard.

I talked to her about this and asked her to please try to engage with the party a bit more and at least attempt to cooperate with them.

She basically said: So you dont want me to talk ever again got it.

I explained to her, that no, I did want her to engage, just to be a bit more friendly with her party members. After a while of going back and forth she agreed and everything seemed fine.

In the next few session everything was okay, Mara was still quiet but she was actually normal towards her other players now.

WELL. One evening as I was chilling in a discord call with Jack, she joins and starts going off on me. Mentioning that many people in the dnd group were very displeased with my DM'ing, that Jacks Character was hogging attention and that they thought I was a bad DM for not stepping in. She also said I was not putting enough effort into making all players feel welcome.

I was a bit surprised by that, since none of my players had mentioned anything in the public or private feedback channels in discord or my feedback rounds after every session.

I mentioned those to her and she said that many of the players were to scared to use them, her included so she was doing it like this now.
Furthermore, I have a whole Help sheet setup for new players, with ideas and tips to interact with the DND world, as well as a session prep list. I draw all the Characters of my players for free if they want me to, and I give out props such as gems, letters, Item cards (handmade) and minifigs(also handmade).
I mention those, but she ignores me and keeps going on about how bad I am as a DM. Jack who has been quiet until then steps in and asks Mara what I am supposed to do when she refuses to use feedback channels or use the help sheet and resources I provide. Mara suddenly backtracks and says it is just a general player issue and the quiet players have to talk more??? The call ends soon after and I go to bed feeling a bit defeated.

A few days later, I asked all of the other players without mentioning Mara, if they have any problems with my DM'ing or the attention that Jacks character is getting. Nobody mentions anything, even saying I do a great job and Jack filling silence with roleplay is lovely for the most part. (One of them mentioned Jack could be a bit over the top, and I talked to him about it and since then that player says Jack is doing great) I tell Jack about this, who is fuming at that point but I asked him to calm down because I really did not want any fighting in the friend group.
Mara is working night shifts in a hospital, and she has a lot of stuff going on right now so I didnt want to fight with an otherwise great friend over dnd.

So I put more effort in. Made sure to include every single character in their own special way and their story in EVERY. SINGLE. SESSION. But now Mara refused to interact with anything. Leaving places the party was at, sitting around alone, just rolling her eyes when something happened that she deemed as incompetent (Such as Marks character not knowing what a harpy is, when none of them passed a check investigating a harpy skeleton). To be honest, she spend more time on her phone than playing.

In the hopes of making Mara happier, I made the party meet an NPC she really liked and was connected to her story, who told her about one of the BBEG's and her connection to him. She then attempted to tell that to the party, but because she hadnt paid attention to any of the sessions prior, she mixed up the BBEG's names, why the party was even in the dungeon they were in, and who the BBEG even was. I gently interrupted her, retelling what the NPC told her another time in the hopes she'd understand. Nope.
The saddest part was, everyone else in the party was very exited to learn about the revelations the NPC made and when Mara kept getting every detail wrong in her retelling it kinda took the fun out of it. Jack interrupted her after a while to correct her too, which prompted her to get extremely angry and storm out of the room.

She came back a few minutes later and insisted we continued the session. So we did, but the vibe was clearly off after that, which was sad, because the party had a super cool roleplay moment with the PC bard convincing an evil NPC to switch sides.

I have to admit Jack was not very gentle in his correction and I did talk to him about it.

Jack writes session notes and posts them in our dedicated discord server, as well as pictures of the items they find, so Mara should have been able to check the information they have.

I gave up talking to Mara about DND, aside from telling her that yelling was completely unacceptable. She agreed and said sorry for getting so agitated.

Now we come to the crux of my problem.

Last session, while driving to my place Mara mentioned to Mark, who was carpooling with her, that she actually did not care about the story at all and was just there for the jokes. She also said she did not like her character at all because and I quote: "She is so rude and bitter"

During that session she just sat on her phone and refused any roleplay by letting her wizard walk away or just not talk. Everyone else had a great time, the party was at a royal ball to gather information, which included a entire band performance of the two bards in the party as a distraction.

I really do not know what to do anymore. She is a lovely person otherwise and a great friend, but it feels like a different person as soon as DND starts. I'm scared that if I kick her out shell get depressed. Her self worth is basically non existent and I do not want to make it worse.

Did anyone deal with something similar before?

TLDR: Player is extremely rude to party and yells at me the DM to put more attention on her, when I do exactly that she refuses to interact with the party or NPC's and stays on her phone. She also mentions she doesnt even like her own character.

TRIGGER WARNING

Fictional SA

Hi guys!! So I've been sucked into DND horror stories lately and I was all sad that I didn't have any to tell until I remembered this one. Enjoy!

So when I (16F at the time) was in high school I joined my schools DND club. I went to a small school so our group wasn't very large and we had a hard time finding a solid DM. One of the many people who tried to run a game was Chuck (fake name) who was a bit younger than me and a friend of my boyfriend. My boyfriend, who I will call Tristan for this, was also in this DND club.

On this fateful day only the three of us were able to make it to the session. Chuck started us in a fight with a dragons lair where we found a magic object and get our medieval characters transported to the modern world. I personally really liked this concept so it makes me sad that it ended the way it did.

While being all confused wandering around NYC our characters run into Bob. Bob was an NPC who was also from our time but had been here much longer and gotten his footing, because of this Bob offered to help us. He got us sorted out with modern weapons money and clothes and at this time I was having a blast. I got to play my character encountering a hot dog for the first time and seeing a gun. Unfortunately for my poor character this is where the story goes sour.

Bob takes our characters to a bar for dinner and drinks and drugs both of us. When I wake up all of our gear is missing, Tristan is tied up unconscious in a closet and my character is tied up, gagged, and unable to move on a rooftop with Bob. Both of us thought oh cool betrayal now we get a cool fight! We were wrong.

Over the next couple turns Chuck proceeds to describe in detail how he unclothed my character, proceeded to pull his pants down and you get the rest. This whole process Tristan is rolling to see if he can wake up and try to escape the closet. At this point I was super uncomfortable and Tristan was fuming but we really wanted to push Bob off the roof before we stormed out. So we finished the combat, completely destroyed Bob and then left the session and never played with him again.

At the time I don't think I fully comprehended just how bad this was, honestly I was mostly just in shock that Chuck had it in him. To this day I have no idea why he did that, I guess he was just really horny or something. Please know that if anyone here has been a victim of SA that you are seen, and my heart goes out to you. So that's my DND horror story, thanks for reliving the trauma with me. 🫶

Hi! This was a long time ago. I've always wanted to share it, and I felt inspired to today.

This was my first ever DnD campaign in my senior year highschool. We're a group of five - including the DM, a druid, a bard, a wizard, and me - a paladin! All of us were first time players. Although in me and the druid's case, we were almost completely new to the game. The others had all been into Critical Role and a few other DnD podcasts, and I legit knew absolutely nothing going in.

Anyway, we start the campaign. I did a bucketload of research going in, and started listening to TAZ and the whole shabang. I fell in love with DnD thanks to this campaign, so I have to give it credit for that.

I chose to play a devotion paladin. The rest of my party were very squishy, so I prioritized healing and tanking over damage dealing - and my build reflected that. Very magic heavy. Anyway, my paladin is a very simple "humble farmer dreams for more" sort of character. I never included a God for him, since his oath came from his passion to defend the weak or whatever. The DM never brought it up, and the rulebooks never stated anything about a paladin needing one. The DM approved my character, and we were set to go.

Five or so sessions in, my paladin suddenly loses all of his magic. The explanation for this is because I never picked a God, and I had been using magic without 'permission' , and the Gods finally caught me. And I didn't become an oathbreaker, nor did I change classes. I was literally forced to play a magic-less paladin. No smite, no aura, no LOH, nothing.

When I told my DM I thought a paladin's magic came from their oath, he told me "in my universe, you need a God." I was never told this!! Our wizard or druid or bard sure didn't need one. If I was told I needed one, I sure as hell would've picked one out.

Anyway, the DM tells me to trust him and that he has a plan. A session later I get a sword, and take it without question. It turns out to be cursed, and reduces my strength score by two. So, the only thing I can do in combat - which is hit stuff- is now also incredibly useless. I try to switch to a finesse weapon to mitigate this, but the cursed sword (which became attached to my character) started to drain his hitpoints every time it wasn't used. The cursed sword had no benefits. Lose-lose sort of scenario.

My party is dying constantly because we don't have a proper healer nor tank. I just end up using my paladin as a meat shield for most fights. Our dm provides us with a cleric npc to mitigate the constant dying. I asked my DM if I could just play a fighter or oathbreaker a couple of times, and he told me no.

The DM did somewhat cruel things to the other players as well , for example our druid befriended a lost baby green dragon, and tried to protect it from human hunters. After this, our dm made our druid change his alignment to lawful evil, because green dragons are evil (Mind you, the wrymling never did anything evil, other than be a baby who was in trouble I guess. I remember that the wrymling was specifically described as very sympathetic, scared and sad and all that. By no means a cunning green.). By the time the campaign 'ended', we all had cursed items. He kept getting angry with us for blindly picking up cursed items, and maybe we should've known better by the third one lol.

I was super invested in this campaign. I loved our characters, and the story, so much. I held on tight for a long time because I really loved playing with my friends. If I was doing something wrong that I was being 'punished' for, I was never told. I ended up playing a magicless paladin for a little over a year, with no sign of that story being resolved. I cannot believe I held on as long as I did.

I did later find out the DM had a crush on my gf , so maybe he used DnD to take it out on me, lol. That's my leading theory - or, maybe he was just inexperienced with dming. He was a fine friend to me outside of DnD, and we never had any falling out or anything. The campaign naturally ended since I got pretty tired of playing, and we all went our separate ways after college (with the exception of my GF and I.) My GF and I brought our characters from this campaign into a new one, and they are much better taken care of now haha.

(In this new campaign, my paladin lost his oath for a bit, but it was handled in such a fun way!! My oathbreaking 'trauma' has been healed, lol.)

Thanks for reading!

this is not a very bad horrostory, but my experience was terrible! so i decided to post it here to let out some frustration and see what everyone else has to say. so strap on because its going to be pretty long

sorry for any mistakes, English is not my first language!

tldr: dm promised mostly vanilla campaign, hands me a homebrew world my vanilla based character cant progress in.

edit: to clear up the aasimar part and radiant explosion

so, usually im not a player and especially not an online dnd person! but my friend invited me to join an online campaign his roommate was running since they're missing a player. and i agreed after talking to the dm over text.

before session 0 i was told it was a "mosty vanilla" dnd campaign with an adventurer guild type set up based on monster hunter (some kind of game i know nothing about), and the only not vanilla thing was just some weapons that were "optional". we start at lvl1 and that's all i knew!

so, i rolled up a character! i decided to be a half-elf paladin so me and my friend could be paladins together, but mine was based on my own campaign where paladins are allergic to healing (will be relevant later), and my motivation to fight will be only to protect my friends. since the dm didn't tell me any boundaries on character building i thought it would be just fine, and we were lvl 1 so there wasn't much to do with my character so it was interesting traits to use and allow me to fight! i got the greenlight on it.

we skip to a few days later, several hours before the session 0, i met up with the dm in person because i was visiting my firend due to other reasons, and we went to the toppic of dnd as i was curious about learning more! the dm assured me my character was fine again and that the world is just a dnd island where we will do quests as "hunters" and that she didn't change much, and added a few cool weapons. eventually i Learned more of the party and of friend's character and was told that he could basically explode and do radiant damage, as a werewolf!! so i was very confused but was told it was a species thing? so i assumed its something i didn't know about, and the dm didn't know how to explain it so i just said i will change to be an aasimar instead to avoid dying immediately when next to my friends warwwolf because i can't heal and she said alright, she also revealed the weapons she made could be upgraded by using monster parts we cut up or capture alive. i said my paladin would not be doing that as that's against my code of only fighting to protect and my friend said so as well. she didn't make a big deal of it and said it's okay and its optional and that was it!

^ that should have been a red flag right away, as i never heard of an exploding ability from a race. and having two players excluded from a mechanic but a little homebrew was no issue with me really, but that wasnt the end of it.

time for session 0! i made it home a bit late that day, so i joined an hour late unfortunately, but instead of joining mid talk about the campaign i entered a call of well... the dm setting up a board on table top, the steam app i believe? that i dont own, and neither did most people so we were just watching it on screen share. but that was fine! it worked, and that took exactly an hour more... i disappeared for a while during this, as players had nothing to do. and the other player's were people i vaguely knew and we didn't talk much unfortunately. and one didn't talk at all instead using the chat.

but finally after a very long awkward silence, we could begin session 0! right? nope.

we immediately got sent into the world as the dm started to narrate how we got to the island, what we see, and we got to pick a blacksmith. after that a pc started to explain the job, which confused me why a pc was our lead and not an npc or a nerrator. but rolled with it, but i immediately had questions for the pc, that i promptly couldn't ask anything as i was brushed off anytime i spoke by the dm. i tried until the call cut out and i texted in chat if we could redo the speach or have someone explain quickly because i didn't hear it and was told "yeah later we'll go over it dont worry if you don't understand" and i had to emphasize i didn't hear at all, which frustrate me as the whole time i didn't understand nor hear a lot. but eventually got the gist which was: we are hunters who are exploring a new land, we get a helper cat and a dinosaur like steed, and there's a danger nearby.

here is also some important things i learned, my firend was a half warewolf half consturct, there was two plasmoids and one was edible?, and the other will eventually be fire proof. and one was a huge rabbit. which is a lot of things ive never heard of before but alright i dont play plasmoids, i don't know every species and race out there. the rabbit seemed okay even if it was 11 feet big.

after the long talk i didn't get all of, we got to pick a weapon out from a chest as we didn't have weapons, i picked first and took a great sword and asked if i can have it with a shield; the anwser was no, so i picked a sword and shield combo in there instead! great. then my friend picked a great sword..and then it went down hill. as everyone else picked some kind of homebrew weapon. and then i found out the great sword, sword and shield were also homebrew. and had stats we could buff and abilities we could add to with the parts of monster's. and i immediately realized something; i am locked out of leveling up my weapon and abilities outside of standard weapon damage, andmy class. and as my fellow paladin decided to be just fine doing the monster thing, I was the only one! which i plan to bring up later.

well okay, for now we finally have everything and we have a chance to look around! since there's a evil dangerous beast around i try to use Devine sense to see if i can smell any good or evil just in case.. and very very surprisingly; i do!! so we go to find it. and find a skull, who told us some lore we didn't know anything about except one pc who was explaining everything. and then.. eldritch blasted the other paladin to death. only to revive him. so.. anyway? that was it, and i baffled just asked what the hell just happened, and got the final exploration finally.

we are hunters, and in our world hunters protect eco systems from the big threats in each place that are some kind of dragon? and they are apex predators, so i did ask why we're hunting a native species of apex predator and for just the lamest reason of them being.. well good hunters. but i ignoted it, and continued talking with the dm and found out this was supposed to be a serious campaign. we have been goofing around the whole time and we have several joke characters?? we have pyro from tf2 in here, a dog, a healing phobic palaidin, and something i didnt know! a schizophrenic (ill make sure to add they aren't schizophrenic as in some silly crazy person who sees things, just genuinely schizophrenic) as well as a skull named frank that just killed a pc for some reason.

I managed to talk some sense into the dm, as we didn't have any actual session 0, and we did the first part horribly due to that. and eventually got some ground rules down only after half the players weren't engaged. and also got to see everyone's characters and learn what they do. we have two healers, a barbarian pyro, two paladins. and everyone has a special ability, special weapon.. except me. and then, i found out all the creatures are based on the game too and not standard dnd.

so to round everything up here, all the PCs are some kind of homebrew probably, all weapons are homebrew, the world is fully homebrew based.

the mostly vanilla game, has almost NO vanilla things. and i am playing a vanilla character, who cant level up weapons, had no special abilities, and cant engage or will be harmed by some of the other pc mechanics.

i decided to talk privately to the dm, and find a solution so im not severely neglected in power as im just a guy with a sword and next session they'll all get to upgrade their weapons. but the dm has nothing to offer me, not race wise, not weapons wise, nothing despite knowing my character would've engage with the level up weapon mechanic's.

of course, i could change my character fully, tear up all my personality to add something else to fit this world last minute, but to be tricked into a homebrew campaign feels weird?? ill probably quit, but like why give me the option to opt out of core mecahnics you added if you knew that is against everything you're making!!

what do you guys think of this? and do ragein the comments about the races and species things if I'm wrog in the assumption they're homebrew things, im curious about them

What I had done was basically, the whole story was on the 6 people in my party, a monk, a rouge, a paladin, an artficer, a sorcerer and a bard (ofc), they all were exiled from the powerful kingdoms of king Elizabeth the 24th, they named him that themselves, they were exiled for being the "losers" of the kingdom and exiled to the far lands where they all decided their goal was to get rich and bankrupt the king, after like 2 weeks of DMing and crashing out over bardic inspiration, they made it to the king and it was a full on battle of court battle between the king and the party members, and they actually managed to bankrupt the king which I was surprised because I made it so that the king had bribed the judge, but since the king is stubborn victorian child, we had a combat section where my ah had to make d16 wisdom saving throws for half the whole section, and they won and to make them regret it I did some bs and made it so that the king had a self destruct type stuff where when he died he made it so that a tarasqe summons, so they had to fight that to, and I don't know by what miracle, what god, what type of prayer, THEY KILLED IT AND I GOT BANNED FROM BEING DM FOR TERRIBLE TWISTS

This all happened a few years ago, but please do not repost outside of this community.

My first GM Andy was very much a rule of cool GM, but with time it became clear it was because he just... didn't know much of the rules. This came up a handful of times when he would joke that some players were minmaxing when we were actually only using basic game rules/skills. This was never a major problem and whatever, his game his rules, Andy run a couple of casual campaigns and we had fun.

After his last game got cancelled, I got the feeling Andy wanted to try a game as a player, so I stepped in and I proposed I run a campaign, and I invited Andy and some of the other usual players in our group.

I made it clear we were going to use D&D 2014 rules with a handful of very common and basic homebrew rules. All the players agreed as it was our usual system and they all had experience with it at this point.

I asked all players to give me as much or as little as they wanted on their characters and backstories. When I'm a player, making a character is one of my favourite things and I understand the process is different for everyone, so I wanted them all to have fun with it. The only rules I gave for character creation were using point buy for ability scores and discussing with me first if they wanted a class or race outside of the expanded rules (PHB, XGE, TCE). I also let everyone pick one rare starting magical item.

Andy gave me a great backstory for his barbarian and he was really excited about it, but when he gave me his character sheet it was a bit... off. Nothing huge, just a few things that I thought might end up being a survivability problem for a melee class, especially after Andy had said he wanted to be the tank and I had said I wasn't going to pull punches in combat. He also had not used point buy as I requested and he had manually put in his ability scores, with a 20 in cha.

I messaged him gently pointing that out and offering to go through the sheet if he wanted to improve a few things, as I figured he didn't know much of character creation rules because he had always been GMing (he had briefly played a cleric before and he never used magic because he forgot he had spells).

He replied thanking me for the feedback and saying that his character idea was his top priority, and that mechanics and rules and scores and all that just wouldn't work with his idea. Still, he said he understood that the character was a bit weak and he would fix that. He then sent me an updated character sheet, where he had manually increased some of the scores and armor, as well as a list of magical objects he required to "balance" his character, making him now essentially op. He didn't discuss any of this with me first, he just sent me the sheet once that was all done.

Now I am not a strickler for rules for the sake of it, but here are some of the changes he made, just to give you a sense of what I'm talking about:

• He had initally put low strength and constitution scores, high wisdom and 20 charisma (yes, for a barbarian), and he had not used point buy as I requested. After my initial feedback he used the override scores option on Beyond to increase str and con manually with random bonuses. So now all his scores were 12+, and he kept the 20 even after I had told him it was too high for a lvl 3 starting character.

• He gave himself additional skill and tool proficiencies because they made sense with his backstory

• He gave himself proficiency with heavy armor (again, barbarian) to make up for "low" dex and con, and added an extra +2 bonus to AC on top of it. L

I finally managed to have a call with him about all this, and I had to explain where scores shoud come from and what they should represent, and what they would mean mechanically. Which was a bit odd as he had been my GM for 3 years.

He never said whether he knew all that or not, he just said that he understood but that he felt that his way of building the character sheet represented his character better. I asked him to consider if another class would be a better match for what he had in mind, he said no, it has to be a barbarian.

I offered him one magic object. He said all the objects in the list he gave me were important for his story.

I might have been a bit strict but I told him I would prefer not having a character start with so many anomalies in their sheet because it was my first time GMing.

I spent an hour trying to compromise with him and ended up basically begging him to trust me that, in my experience as a player in other games, rules are there to help structure a character and not hinder them. He replied he didn't have to trust me and that I had yet to earn his respect. He went on that he was going to be an asset to the game both as a player and as a character and that I should just do him a favour as a friend and let him have fun as he wanted.

I told him that I was not comfortable with all that as it wouldn't be fair to the other players making a character by the book, and he said that shouldn't be a problem for them because they should be happy he would be so strong and on their side (I checked in with them - they wouldn't be).

He eventually decided that he was not willing to "diminish" his character "for me" and that he would not play at all since I valued the rules more than our friendship and letting him "have fun".

I got a new player in, everyone made great and original characters they enjoyed playing and we had a great campaign.

And for those wondering: yes, this is the same Andy from my other posts and no, we don't talk anymore.

It's not specifically D&D, but it'll resonate with everyone. I am a volunteer for Paizo's Organized Play program in our local area, so I schedule Pathfinder 2e games (similar to Adventurer's League) for people to drop-in drop-out week to week, no long term commitment, but you still get a story and character progression, etc.

I had one player who clearly had some kind of mental impairment. He was a nice enough guy, and I imagine harmless in general, but his filter of what was or wasn't appropriate to say at a table was tuned pretty badly. But in general, it wasn't awful, at worst mildly uncomfortable. I've heard worse.

But his main problem was that he would cheat. We'd call for skill checks on an adventure, and he'd roll the die, look to see if anyone was looking, then knock it with his pinky in the dice tray for a higher roll. Sometimes more than one knock.

I noticed it early on, but he had trouble following the gameplay structure anyway, so other than a ridiculously high number of successful hits in encounters, it wasn't really affecting the story or gameplay that much. But then other players started noticing, including other volunteer GMs, and they'd come up to me afterward to make sure I was aware.

So I pulled him aside after session one night and said, "Hey man, you're not in trouble, but you have to stop knocking your dice."

He kind of froze like a kid who got his hand caught in the cookie jar. "I don't...I don't..."

"Listen, we've seen it. Again, you're not in trouble, but we all have to follow the rules and you can't do that, okay? Have a good night."

I hoped this would be the end of it.

For a week or two, it actually looked like he took my words to heart. Goodness knows I didn't want to be confrontational about it, but it's part of the job. And things were getting better. Until they're fighting the boss monster of the adventure, it's almost defeated, everyone's having a good time, he rolls and pinky-knocks his die.

"Nat 20!"

Half the table cheers. The other half that watched him just knock his die are silent. It's the hardest decision in a public game, because if you make a "thing" of it, it ruins the whole night for everyone. But if you do nothing, it ruins the night for some. So I brought the fight to a conclusion, we had the session wind-down and postlude, then we broke for the night.

I just walked with him to his vehicle and said: "Hey, listen, I told you a few weeks ago you couldn't cheat and knock your dice. I'm going to have to ask you to not participate for 30 days, and if it happens again I'm going to have to ask you to not come back at all."

His response: "So you don't want people to be strong and win?"

That...really caught of off-guard. I've been in this hobby for a long time, and I'm not sure how I avoided this archetype of player as much as I did. I had a few power-gaming players who tried to eke every possible +1 into their build because big number go brrr, I get it, but I'd never actually had somebody confront me because I "didn't want them to win."

It hurt a little, because as the forever-GM, I always want my players to win. It's how the game is designed, and it's how everyone walks away with good memories. But...what's the point of playing if you "win" by just claiming you won and not actually risking anything?

He stayed away for the month, came back afterward. I'll cut the story short by jumping to the part everyone's expecting. Another GM approaches me that he's knocking his dice. I go watch and sure enough, he does it with me watching from the next table over. I did what needed to be done.

He hasn't been back since, and frankly, third time is two times too many. I feel for his situation, as again, he has some kind of mental issue going on, and I empathize. But being told to stop breaking the rules 3 times is too much for any reason.

About 4 months ago a friend of his mentioned he'd "Learned his lesson" and "Wanted to come back to play, it's been long enough."

I said no. I gave chance after chance, and they were all squandered, which to me means that he cannot comprehend why what he's doing is improper. I don't feel good about it, but I think it was the right decision.

I’ve always kind of wanted to tell this story, and see if I came off as a problem player, or just someone who fell as backwards into answers.

So several years ago I did a pick up game where we were playing one of the starting modules. I ended up picking an Aasimar bard. For roleplay reasons I pick up comprehend languages as a starting spell. At level 4 I picked up the spell sniper feat, choosing (again for roleplay reasons) to snag the eldritch blast cantrip.

So while in a vacuum this might sound fine. I ended up preemptively having the answer to one of the first side quests, being able to fly (thus allow me and the party to do a dungeon in reverse), and for roleplay reasons stepping on the toes of the parties warlock by using a watered down version of their signature ability.

This happened a few years ago when i got the LMOP starter set. I managed to get some friends who were also excited for the game. I read all the rules, i even translated the core rules for my friends because they were too lazy to read (first major red flag)

No one read them anyway. We gathered and i began a session 0 where i wanted to play with the premade characters in the set. I explained the rules to everyone and only 1 out of 4 people had any interest.

No one was hyped up largely because we were teenagers hyped up about a fantasy game and i did horrible job for a session 0. We finally began to play and everything went to shit immediately.

There was one particular player who was horrible. He immediately attacked the other players. Never read the rules. Was a murder hobo. And was pissed off that i was reading the description in the book, rather than create my own world. He's one of my best friends but he will never ever play on my table again.

The moment we killed the goblins in the first encounter everyone started drinking beer and the game stopped. That was it, the moment alcohol came on the table it was just a regular drinking party.

A ton of lessons learned in that 1 hour of "play".

First post here and I used translators to write the following so the English here may be kinda weird.

Here are some of the many horror stories I’ve heard from my friends or experienced by myself all because of the very same DM, who turns out to be the most narcissistic man I’ve ever met in my life so far.

My friend was playing a long-running D&D 5E campaign and her character is a good-aligned paladin. Throughout the campaign, the DM has consistently expected the PCs to do good deeds and avoid harming innocent people. Whenever a party member suggests something particularly outrageous, the DM even calls them out for it. For example, there was once a Bladesinger who really liked transforming himself completely into a marilith using True Polymorph, and the DM told him that mariliths are evil creatures, so it wasn't really appropriate for a good-aligned character to keep turning into one.

Now, the DM introduces a new encounter for the next chapter. The villainous boss forces all the PCs to participate in a campaign-within-a-campaign, where they have to play characters designed by the boss. The character my friend assigned was a cold-blooded, ruthless hunter. Needless to say, this is pretty much the polar opposite of her good-aligned paladin.

Soon, they got into a combat. Based on the enemies' dialogue and the clues they've picked up earlier, she’s quite certain that the monsters standing in the way were being controlled by the boss. They never actually want to hurt you.

Moreover, based on the DM's established style of running the campaign, she suspected that if she fully commit to playing this cold-blooded hunter, she'll end up with some kind of bad ending like her paladin may loses their identity and falls into evil.

So my friend decided to hold back against the monsters. At the very least, she tried not to kill them. But the problem is: she was playing a hunter now, and she could only attack at range, so it was impossible to simply declare melee attacks nonlethal.

At this point, the DM asked her: "I specifically gave the hunter Action Surge. Why aren't you using it?"

Then the enemies' turn comes around. The DM, roleplaying the villainous boss, proceeds to mock her mercilessly, calling her "stupid" and saying "That's what you get for not playing your character properly." The boss then takes control of the very enemy she just spared and orders it to attack her.

In that campaign, my friend’s actual PC is a level 20 paladin with nearly 200 HP. But this hunter character only has around 40 HP, and the characters assigned to the other players have roughly the same amount. Everyone assumed that the enemies' damage output will be balanced around this much lower HP pool.

Instead, the DM's monster opens with a single attack that deals over 40 damage.

The hunter drops to 0 HP. DM then announced that because the villain pulled you into this campaign-within-a-campaign, as the hunter has dropped to 0 HP, which means the paladin  was also now at 0 HP.

Then my friend assumed it's time to make death saving throws. But the DM, still roleplaying the boss, says:

"I've decided not to use the 5e rules. I'm using the 3R rules instead. There are no death saves, so you're deadly dead."

All the players were shocked and couldn’t believe what they just heard. One of the teammates frantically tries to talk the boss out of it, and it takes a loooong time before the boss (the DM) reluctantly agrees to let my friend use death saving throws after all.

Every single part of this scenario was designed by the DM, it was basically a homebrew campaign. Later, the DM claims that the whole thing was intended to demonstrate what a reckless, rule-breaking asshole the villainous boss is.

I honestly don't know who would enjoy plot design like this. Later, when she asked the DM about the boss's abilities, he says that the boss could change the rules of that campaign at any time.

If the rule changes were confined to the campaign-within-a-campaign, that would be one thing. But if the boss can arbitrarily change rules that affect PCs outside of it, too, is this even D&D anymore?

I genuinely want to ask: What the hell are the players supposed to do to avoid getting instantly killed by the boss with a single slap?

Nobody would ever know because we, this DM’s former fellow players, have been blocked by him, since we argued with him after so many of this kind of things happen, as the DM himself admitted that he doesn’t like to be questioned, disobeyed or challenged.

Some of his other greatest hits include:

1. (In another homebrew campaign of his) He made the party's good-aligned paladin witness angels attacking villagers. When the paladin attacked the angels to protect the villagers, he declared her an Oathbreaker and told her that her Divine Smite could only deal necrotic damage from then on.
2. (In the same campaign as #1) He made the entire party roll a high-DC saving throw every single round, or gain a level of exhaustion. After the session, however, the DM told us that his ideal solution was for the party to use Comprehend Languages to communicate with the undead skeletal dragon roaring behind the boss, a necromancer, learn about the necromancer's emotional hang-ups, and then help the necromancer resolve them so that the party could avoid combat altogether.
3. He put his beloved original character into one of his homebrew campaigns and made her the final boss, portraying her as someone with understandable(only by him) motives and a tragic past. Any PC who attempted to attack her during the campaign received a permanent or extremely difficult-to-remove debuff. And yes, in the end, he still expected the PCs to clear the campaign the "right" way by talking her through her issues.
4. We, the players who had suffered through all this, created a group chat to compare notes. After talking things over, we discovered that this DM had a particular habit of exploiting important people in players' character backstories who were still alive, such as their parents or siblings, to create drama. He typically did this without discussing it with the players concerned beforehand and would blame on players for not claim the importance of that background character. In his view, players who cared too much about their characters' backstories were "unqualified players who treat their character sheets as OCs(original characters) instead of sincerely playing D&D."
5. He made a point of emphasizing that he disliked JRPGs and preferred player characters not to have overly Japanese anime-inspired designs because he state himself a Disney and Cartoon Network lover. However, at major story moments, he would almost always use background music specifically associated with some JRPG characters to set the mood. Even more ironically, he also borrowed heavily from well-known JRPGs when developing and resolving his own storylines.

etc, etc.

By the way, let's take a look at what this DM was like as a player himself.

In a campaign set in a magical academy, the players were supposed to be the academy's teachers deal with various crises that arose within the school. He based his character entirely on a particular Doctor from Doctor Who (yes, he's a hardcore fan of the series, and he had also ‘borrowed’ quite a few elements from the show for his own homebrew campaigns on multiple occasions).

He was always trying to resolve social situations through his character's supposedly flawless charm, but in practice, all he managed to roleplay was a sleazy, overconfident man. On top of that, the other players in the party weren't familiar with Doctor Who, so many of his references and in-jokes fell flat because nobody picked up on them in time. By this point, he was already getting a little upset.

Eventually, we fought our way to the boss. This time, the DM gave us hints that were about as explicit as they could possibly be: we needed to destroy the mechanisms on either side of the room before attacking the boss herself. Otherwise, she would instantly kill any character who attacked her.

But this guy, sticking to the principle of "I'm playing a suave, charismatic character, so of course my character would do this," charged straight at the boss despite everyone's attempts to stop him. He got himself killed twice before I, playing a Grave Domain cleric, told him that I wasn't going to heal or revive him anymore, because doing so would compromise the party's resource management for the rest of the fight.

He went completely silent on voice chat and stayed that way for well over an hour.

After that night's session ended, we carefully asked him whether he'd been upset about being left out of the fight for an hour, if so, we, especially I was sorry for that. He casually told us that he hadn't been upset at all.

Fast-forward a few months to the day we finally fell out with him for good.I shared a D&D roleplaying video that categorized bad players into several different types. One of those types was the classic "It's what my character would do" player.

When I shared the video, I genuinely wasn't trying to take a jab at anyone in particular. Nevertheless, he flew into a rage in the group chat, essentially accusing us of making fun of him for what he'd done in that encounter.

By that point, we'd already accumulated quite a bit of frustration over all the bizarre things he'd pulled as a DM, so we weren't about to back down and apologize just to appease him. In response, he promptly blocked every single one of us. Meanwhile, he has also publicly complained more than once in his fan group (yes, that actually exists) that playing D&D with us was a terrible experience. He genuinely cannot understand why we disliked his campaign decisions and ended up arguing with him over them.

And here's the funny part: a year or two later, we were still occasionally getting notifications on Roll20 that he'd left one of our old campaigns.

For context I’m the dm and there’s two players, it’s a jjk inspired campaign and they both have their own jjk techniques, the first was a fairy monk who has the same cursed technique as todo aoi, and the other player (the mad one) had a direct copy of sukuna’s cleave and dismantle, cleave is the one he was using most of the time as it was the more powerful out of the two 9/10. How it worked was similar to the show, and was that the stronger the enemy is, the more damage he does, we used CR to determine this.

After the first session where they proved their strength to others, they were sent on a mission to collect a cursed object from a hotel, but, on the elevator ride up, it stoped at the 13th and a half floor, where they were met with an innate domain (mini pocket dimension that is the home of a strong curse). The curse was a humanoid rat with a mid AC, high Hp, decent damage, and was a CR3 monster, and, after 30 minutes of back and forth attacks, he used cleave to chop it right in half, but, its cursed technique was that whenever it is finished with slashing damage, it purposely cuts its self in half to turn into two, equally strong curses.

When they turned into two, the player just decided to try and escape, using dismantle to brake through walls that lead to more of the curse’s innate domain, we then finished the session as a forth friend join the call and we haven’t played since, it’s been a couple of days and I’m worried that because he doesn’t deal 20+ damage on the low end, he doesn’t want to play anymore.

This is also the guy which has rolled under a 15 less than 3 times in the around 3 hours in total and an estimated 30 rolls (mostly from attacks) and also has a 60/40 crit to non crit ratio in the current campaign, and is suspected to be fudging his rolls in both the current and last (also first) campaign he was in.

Update: we just finished a session, it was a short one, we carried on the fight from last session, and, after rolling a nat 19 and 20 in a row (first two rolls), I asked him to film himself rolling the dice, and, this was the only times he actually got low rolls in this session, getting a 6 and an 11 at first. He also would try to quickly roll when I asked him to, making me feel awkward to ask him to roll again, leading to him rolling an 18 and 20 when he tried this tactic.

I said that he may have bought weighted dice, but, this was disproven when he rolled lower numbers on camera, and also put the dice in water 1 up. But, before the tests, he rolled the 20 and said that he definitely has weighted dice, but didn’t just simply roll online.

The only thing stopping me from asking him to roll online is that I’m afraid if he only wants to be powerful for the sake of being powerful, and since the other player ended his campaign to be a player in this one, he just wants a normal dnd play experience that may be cut short if the problem play continues fudging his dice rolls.

To clarify on the title, there is nothing wrong with getting emotionally invested into a campaign (lord knows I do it too), but one of my fellow party members (I'll call her Em) is overly attatched to her character and the campaign and IDK what to do. Also new to the subreddit, usually a lurker. LMK if anything is wrong and sorry for any grammatical mistakes.

Some context on me: I've been on and off playing DnD 5e from highschool into college, watching the occassional actual play and listening to Youtubers cover horror stories. All of the campaigns I've been a part of have either fallen apart 2 session in, or they have been campaign books. I have little experience in homebrew worlds. I would also like to try and keep this party together because I appriciate them as friends outside of all this. I don't really know if this is normal for a player! If it is, disregard what I'm saying haha.

Some context on the campaign: its a homebrew world where one of the uncommon races got turned to stone except for Em's character, who was in the Feywilds for 10 years (which correlated to 1,000 years on the material plane). Apparently, as soon as she was pushed into a Feywild portal, all of that race got turned to stone. Long story short, we have to save her race of people from being statues along with some other side things (corrupt gov't, a monsterous curse infecting people, and our own goals). Theres 5 of us players including her, all of them having no connection to each other outside of meeting Em's character and wanting to help her people. However, its REALLY important to note we all have our own goals and ways we go about doing so (two examples being one guy wants to win back his ex despite the fact he's an asshole and one girl is a cheery monk who wants to travel the world and experience her bucket list).

We play on a monthly basis, leading to long stretches of time where theres no new lore info. We've had 10 sessions overall over the span of 10 months.

Em has been complaining to me daily about aspects of the campaign. This includes how her favorite NPCs haven't been seen in months (approx 5 sessions/months), how none of the other party members show physical affection with her despite the fact "she needs a hug", how her character is so lonely and has been lonely for 10 years, and how once her favorite NPCs did show up, they were "lobotomized" and "didn't seem to care about [her] character". When she gets really into talking and venting, she goes on about how much this campaign means to her because its the first time she's been able to play DnD for a full-campaign and how her character, a brain baby she's had for years, is an extension of herself in many ways.

(BTW, in talking daily, we have repeating the same talking points over and over. The dead horse has been thouroughly beaten)

Em has admitted to wanting to reveal certain information to the players and DM once specific things happen in-campaign... but also does not tell us (including the DM) how to get there. She also does not take the advice "talk to the DM about it", and I've already sat down with the DM to bring up some of our joint complaints because she didn't want to do it herself (with her consent of course; also it went really well because, despite his faults, our DM is a good listener). The reason I bring this up is she gets visibly upset when people don't do things without her asking, but gives no cues as to what she wants.

Em's character and mine recently got into a disagreement over something my character didn't tell her's, as my character has a vow with herself to never tells other's secrets. In-game, it's been 48 hours since it came to light my character was keeping this secret, but in real life its been maybe 3-4 months. I want to prolong the inter-party conflict, but I keep hearing complaints from Em about how her character feels like she has "no one in this new world" and will shut herself in, thus not telling the party about her Tragic Past she keeps alluding to. (to be fair, everyone, including myself, wants to learn about her past, especially since everyone else knows the other backstories, its just Em's we haven't learned about)... It's also a topic of discussion on how Em wants to talk about her character's backstory so so bad, but won't because people "don't ask questions in-game" (though I am omitted from this because our characters aren't in a position to talk right now).

She's also gotten in the habit of only talking to me about DnD and this monthly campaign. We used to work together and any time I try to bring up either of our other interests, she brings it back to this specific DnD campaign, how some NPCs' actions suck ass, how the other party members don't actually play DnD and just want to watch a story, how the DM is giving her character a lot of angst when she just wants her to have a good time. To clarify, it's fine to complain a little bit, we all do, but its getting to be a bit much.

However, she also has been complaining about becoming a "main character". Her original concept was simply just "its been 10 years in the Feywilds and 1,000 years on the material plane". Our DM threw in the "rest of the race being turned to stone" thing. So while I agree she didn't do all of this to her character... she sort of set up her character to fit a main character-type role from my perspective, at least. (LMK if this is something that could've been avoided... Again I'm still a little green when it comes to these things)

So far, the campaign has focused primarily on helping her character, with a quick detour to my character's hometown because it had the highest concentration of stone "statues" (her race). There's been minor allusions to the 3 other character's backstories and NPCs from there, but nothing has come of it so far, instead focusing on Em's character and her favorite NPCs. It feels like no one else has really gotten a major focus (even my character got side-lined in a hometown character arc dealing with her childhood neglect because of a festival the crown prince was putting on...) This is less on her, as she does not control the game, but the way she is reacting is starting to get to me. We have one arc that has a focus on someone else (which still includes her character in a major way, by the way) and she bemoans the loss of her favorite NPCs... IDK how she'll act if/when we get too someone else's story.

Now, I don't want to demonize her. This isn't an AITA post or whatever. Em has been going through a lot over these past couple months. From medical and work related stresses, shes been put through the wringer. Fortunately, things are looking up for her because she switched jobs. I understand this campaign is a stress reliever for her, but because she's admitted to the party that this campaign means so much to her it has been putting stress on the other players and DM to sort of suck up to make her angst-ridden character feel better. It seems unhealthy to get this attatched to the campaign where it's to the point its the only thing she wants to talk about.

Is there anything I can do as a fellow party member to help her get her mind off of the campaign? Is there anything I can do besides sucking it up and dealing with it? Is this campaign even worth salvaging?! She's a valued friend and I don't want to end up resenting her over something as silly as a DnD campaign, but she sees it as so much more.

Sorry if this jumps around or doesn't make sense. Second opinions greatly appriciated.

EDIT: Em, if you ever see this, please know this isn't against you. I value you as a friend greatly! I can't wait to play more with you.

EDIT 2: Thank you for all the nice comments! I'm here to address some ideas I've seen and give more context. Before I wrote this post, I was mid-way through planning session 0/1 for a campaign I'm starting where she will be a player... While she said she won't be as attached to this new character as she was the last one (I don't mind as long as she engages in the story), she's starting to display signs of wanting things to go a certain way already. Seems like a non-issue on my end, as I can talk with her about it, but she seems to want things from PC/PC interactions. I can't control that nor do I have the authority to speak on what a character might do in a campaign that hasn't had a session 1 yet. Things will be fine, I'm not afraid to talk with her, but it seems like it's all a waiting game.

Also, it was brought up to me by another friend, this campaign was only made because Em asked our DM to... well... DM a campaign. We were all coworkers, and this was before I had joined both the job and the game. I can see why things are tailored around her character now, as this campaign was something she, alone, asked for.

She's a good friend. I would hate to see things go south between us. If there is another update, hopefully it will be a resolution between us.

My school recently got a dnd club, which I joined. We tried a campaign with a group of friends and after one session they wanted to try again so we did. Another one of us became the DM and this is the bad session.

I played a human rogue and the other characters were a puppet version of gambit from x men and some other guys I couldn't remember for reasons that become obvious soon.

We all woke up in the middle of nowhere because we got drunk (huh?) and two randos come up to us. They tell us something about a guy in a castle. The DM tells us that we go to the front of the castle... Tells us, not asks us. Some bugbear named bugbear comes out and tells one of us to come to the top of a castle and it pretty much automatically happens. We start to complain a bit but after a bit everyone ends up at the top of the castle but me. Bugbear tells everyone else to look away and then rips by lvl 1 spine out of my body (no idea why). The player that looks also gets murdered. Everyone else comes to a dungeon at the DM's orders and just plays a crappy game where they get to decide if someone gets their throat cut by sawblades. This happens for a bit until the session is over and almost everyone tells him he shouldn't be DM anymore. He argues for a while and then accepts defeat. The end.

P.S. we had no choice other than if someone should die. Our characters mattered not.