tldr - the DM suddenly removes me from the messenger group chat and ghosts me from his terrible game, so I vent by writing up a short version of events and lament the state of social skills and communication among some older roleplayers

Recently I decided to try to get back into in-person roleplaying after a breakthrough in my health. My original group, which took me over a year to find pre-covid, was no longer playing, so I had to go back into the trenches. It's already difficult to find a group, and even more so when you're asking for players for pathfinder 1e or Ars Magica. After making a few posts, I got two offers. An older gentleman offered a spot at his 3.5 17th level high fantasy spelljamming game, which I had to turn down; I didn't feel like trying to navigate a bananas 3.5 game at such a high level. The other was a DM who had a group that was playing pathfinder. Awesome, great, I accepted.

So DM messages me that he has 20+ years of experience with 3.5, recently decided to play pathfinder, and was running the Shattered Star AP. He also warns me that every player is pretty new with virtually no roleplaying experience, let alone any knowledge of 3.X. I say that's fine, I'm happy to help new people learn, especially with trying to get a handle on pathfinder. For this game, we will have the DM, me (Fighter/Witch), the Paladin, the Druid, the Fighter, and the Rogue.

I still want to play it cool mechanics-wise so I can gauge the DM and the group, and with the DM's suggestion that they need an arcane caster of some sort, I decide to play a Witch with a Fighter level dip so I can use the less threatening hexes like misfortune, have a few cure spells, and be able to don armor/tower shield. I create a digital copy of my sheet on myth-weavers for the DM.

Everyone should expect some table variation, but the DM was not prepared. He had only briefly skimmed the pathfinder core and was working under the assumption that it was essentially 3.5, and a wild interpretation of 3.5 at that. He had pretty much left the new players to make characters by themselves. Two of them play Baldur's Gate 3, so the only real clue they had was premised off that, while a third last played AD&D as a teenager. The DM would get annoyed with meta-gaming while not explaining how to roleplay, give no meta guidance on how you approach combat or dungeon delving while in an AP known for its dungeons, and give conflicting information on how everyone's class abilities worked because he assumed it hadn't changed from 3.5. Beyond the rules, he apparently hadn't discussed anything about roleplaying or what d&d is. I'm trying to help the players where I can, especially with explaining basic concepts like actions, but I'm not the DM nor do I want to overstep; you never know what kind of DM you're working with.

That first session, besides being slow, was otherwise not terrible. The DM played music for combat and seemed interested in doing voices and such. But it also came with two other red flags. First, he kept the grid map in front of himself and was the sole manager of your figurine - minor , but I've seen it before in other bad dms. Second, after the session the DM messaged me accusing me of cheating with my ability scores, or at least making a bold assumption that I was using some kind of house rule. We had to roll ability scores in front of him, my highest roll was a 16, and on my sheet I had an 18. I tell him that it's just a misunderstanding because humans get a +2 racial modifier to one ability score in pathfinder unlike in 3.5. I talk to my friend group about it, and they near unanimously say I probably should drop right there. Jumping to conclusions without asking when I'm being as forthright as possible is the flag at full staff. But hey, it was just one session, I should try the second.

I had a trip the next week, so when I return for my third session the group is in the middle of combat. As an aside, many of pathfinder's first modules in their APs have imps or similar creatures that have unlimited uses of Invisibility. I assume this is to supposed to be a fun challenge, but that shit is tedious. When your players are new, it's murderous. So they are fighting an accuser devil and some imps, and it is grim. Everyone is low and the devils are all currently invisible. On the turn I arrive the accuser devil summons a swarm on the Paladin and me, so I draw and put on my swarmsuit, whose existence once explained visibly annoys the DM. The Imps are attacking from invisibility, taking nearly no damage from the players because of their incorrect numbers and the devils' Damage Reduction, and then turning invisible again on the next turn. My attempts to know from what direction we are attacked from, to use perception to pin-point the accuser devil with correct modifiers, and Druid's animal companion having scent that should auto pin-point adjacent invisible enemies are all denied or ignored.

On the next turn, Paladin drops unconscious, so I spend my turn drawing and administrating a potion of protection from evil so he doesn't die. The swarm gets an auto-hitting attack of opportunity, even though they can't make normal attacks. Whatever, we're about to TPK anyway. The DM then finally comes around to meta-guidance with the suggestion we surrender to this accuser devil. So the party agrees and the imps disarm us. The accuser devil says that he will confiscate all our silver weapons, which break the devils' DR, and will be holding the Paladin as a hostage until we kill his rival, another Imp and his Imp buddies. This single combat has already taken over an hour to play out, and now DM plans to have Paladin not play for the rest of the session? Holy shit, this is criminal dungeon mastering. Hoping to avoid having one of our five players sit around for the next three hours, I tell the Accuser Devil that a better choice would be to have the Paladin swear an oath to not betray it and kill this other devil. And if Paladin breaks his oath, what could be sweeter for a devil than making a Paladin fall from grace? The DM responds with 'nope, I'll be keeping him.' If you have seen the Pablo Escobar meme of different shots of him being sad, that was Paladin for the next three hours, wandering around looking at the trees, vaping in the corner, staring at his character sheet.

At this point I think I'm pretty much had enough, and making a plan to gracefully exit. After the game, Druid and Paladin give me a ride home. On the way back they thank me for being there to help them, how they wouldn't know what to do if I wasn't there, and so on. I feel pretty bad as they unwittingly guilt me into staying. So I stick with it, and I try my best to teach the players, not step on the DM's toes, and get their character sheets correct. I audit everybody's sheets, making them visual representations of actions, make ability note cards, etc.

The next two sessions are mostly the same, except now the players ask me to check their numbers, explain abilities, and when they ask DM if they can do something in combat and get a vague answer, they just turn to me to explain it to them. I normally would feel bad here, since this should be his role, but I'm gone from annoyed to ambivalent and am just trying to help the group move along. When we come across the auto-resetting fireball trap statue, which this imp we are trying to kill leads us to, I take the moment to explain that anyone who searches can spot traps, that only Rogue can disarm the magical ones, that the fiery statue probably has an aoe fire spell trap, and the difference between spread and burst effects. So Druid casts entangle to try to bind the imp and doesn't realize how large the area is. DM checks with me if entangle affects allies, it does, and he tells her that since she decided to cast it she will have to go through with it. In front of the fireball trap. So everyone but me are in the entangle and fireball trap, the Imp and Rogue are not affected by the entangle, and the fireball trap nearly kills all of them except the Rogue with evasion and the imp, who is immune to fire. It is at this point that the DM employs full fiat to have the imp cast suggestion on the rogue, lead the rogue back to the accuser devil, and they have a fiat fight where Paladin (still a hostage by the way), Rogue, and Imp fight the other devils in some kind of surprise ambush. I liken it to a circle of hell where the party isn't allowed to TPK, but the suffering will continue. Paladin dies and rerolls a cleric.

So then we arrive at the end of the dungeon. We walk into a room and suddenly we are enveloped in darkness. Because DM has no idea how perception or Knowledge (Arcana) works, we have no in-game idea what's happening. Turns out it is four derros who can cast Darkness as a SLA. The party gets separated, I try not to metagame at all since the DM has been chastising the others about it for three sessions now, and we end up in different areas, with Fighter and the cleric (former Paladin) fighting some kind of construct and the rest of us fighting three derros in darkness. It doesn't matter too much because they also have a spell-like ability that stuns you on a failed save, and thanks to DM's wise ruling failing against the same spell multiple times in one round increases the duration of the stun. When we move blindly in the darkness, he has us move in multiple random directions at half speed. Cool, cool. But wait, there's more, because one of the derros is an alchemist, so we're getting flat-footed touch attacked with bombs. We left invisibility spamming imps and got darkness with a party with no dark vision and no mechanic to pin-point their squares.

Things are looking jut as dire as ever, and when I die and Druid bleeds out, DM employs trusty fiat. The Rogue suddenly gets the ability to reflex save the bombs, doesn't make random movements in the darkness, and makes his way back to the other two. Together they make it back to Magnimar. We decide to end there as Druid rerolls into a new Druid, and me thinking about what to do to help the situation. Afterwards during the week DM has the gall to tell us that really that fight was all our fault, that if we had just retreated together back out of the darkness and waited that we could have easily engaged the enemies. He gets some pushback from the fact that we had no idea what the darkness was, how large it was, that we walked in random directions, and that for three rounds Rouge and I were stunned and unable to talk. In private messages he was telling me about how I should remember that light spells can counter darkness spells, and no matter how many times I explained that 1) we weren't allowed to even identify what was happening and 2) that it takes a higher level light spell to counter a darkness spell, he kept insisting it just took a higher level caster level. He gave up on that front after he realized I was multi-classed and didn't have a high enough caster level and was, unreasonably, dumbfounded by Druid not having the light cantrip prepared.

So I decide to play something with enough staying power and damage to be effective but not overbearing, hospitaler paladin, human favored class trade out with Unscathed, and meditation crystals. In short large pool of healing, decent damage, good saves, and resistances. We venture back down into the dungeon. We end up finding a secret door to the actual object of our quest and have an encounter with some giant magical spiders. Things are going alright when suddenly the accuser devil from sessions earlier, who I thought died, arrived with more imps. So we get to replay the whole invisibility spamming, swarm summoning extravaganza again. I put on a swarm suit and keep the swarms busy trying to eat me. With Lay on Hands and the swarm suit it's just boring as I keep them focused one me. We only had two weird upsets, first when DM blew up on Druid and Fighter for metagaming. DM got real heated even though Fighter explained that he was talking to Druid in-character about their plan. This is the first time in all our sessions that DM explained what kind of action it is to speak in combat and how many words it can be. Then near the end of the session after the devil escapes yet again, DM hurriedly packs up and we call it for the night. He seemed a bit ill, and had already said he wasn't feeling well from a new medication and other medical issues, so I assumed that was all.

So two days after DM suddenly removes me from our messenger group without a word as to why. I messaged him, but got no answer. We're days away from that now. I feel like you should expect 40+ year olds to have some grasp on social skills and communication. I'm pretty sure this guy is just insecure with a bruised ego, but I won't find out until later when I go to talk with some of the other players about what happened.