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WORST Moments in Tabletop Gaming
DeVryGuy
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Registered User regular
In the spirit of having an antithesis for the Great Moments thread, or just a place to bitch about the lousy session or stupid mistake you made, I am creating this thread.
In the spirit of getting things rolling, here is how I got hosed by the DM at tonight's D&D game.
We had a Forgotten Realms game going for awhile, but then we decided to take a break. Tonight we started up again, but decided to start over with level 1 characters. Personally, I went with a Sun Elf Wizard.
The session goes like this: The DM dictates that we are all sitting in a bar in the middle of nowhere and we all know each other already. He then says "Some men walk in the door. Everyone make a will save." Numbers are across the board, including some as high as 19. I suspect this was a "Save DC Plot Device" spell, because everyone still failed and fell asleep.
Being an elf, I was unaffected by this, but decided to go with it in an attempt to escape later. I failed the bluff check and one of them takes a swing at me, but misses.
Out of other options, I dive away and hit the lug with a Color Spray. He, of course, makes the save. Next round, three other toughs move in. My only option is to try and get past them and get outside. So I 5-foot and hit them all with another Color Spray. One fails the save, all the rest make it. (We're talking a Save DC of 16, which is pretty good at this level, but I digress). I get clucked upside the head for 8 nonleathal damage and go unconscious.
When we wake up, we're in a cage, in a cave, no idea where the hell we are. To boot, we've been stripped of every bit of equipment and items we had, left only with basic clothes. So I figure this is a 'find a way to escape, find your goodies, and take out your captors.' kind of adventure.
The DM then drops the bomb. "Just scratch all your equipment off, your not getting it back." Now while this does inconvenience everyone, it just fucks me over completely, since after I finish using my spells from today I cant get any new ones.
To boot, as we worked through, there were literally no weapons I could make any use of, and at the end of the night, we had just discovered that there are multiple levels to this cavern. He wants to play a 6 hour session on Friday, and I'm having some trouble mustering any excitement about playing a 6 hour session where I will likely only be able to say "I'm holding the torch" every combat round.
I suppose it would have been more bearable if there were any options to what was going on, or he allowed us to roleplay at some point during the night.
In the spirit of getting things rolling, here is how I got hosed by the DM at tonight's D&D game.
We had a Forgotten Realms game going for awhile, but then we decided to take a break. Tonight we started up again, but decided to start over with level 1 characters. Personally, I went with a Sun Elf Wizard.
The session goes like this: The DM dictates that we are all sitting in a bar in the middle of nowhere and we all know each other already. He then says "Some men walk in the door. Everyone make a will save." Numbers are across the board, including some as high as 19. I suspect this was a "Save DC Plot Device" spell, because everyone still failed and fell asleep.
Being an elf, I was unaffected by this, but decided to go with it in an attempt to escape later. I failed the bluff check and one of them takes a swing at me, but misses.
Out of other options, I dive away and hit the lug with a Color Spray. He, of course, makes the save. Next round, three other toughs move in. My only option is to try and get past them and get outside. So I 5-foot and hit them all with another Color Spray. One fails the save, all the rest make it. (We're talking a Save DC of 16, which is pretty good at this level, but I digress). I get clucked upside the head for 8 nonleathal damage and go unconscious.
When we wake up, we're in a cage, in a cave, no idea where the hell we are. To boot, we've been stripped of every bit of equipment and items we had, left only with basic clothes. So I figure this is a 'find a way to escape, find your goodies, and take out your captors.' kind of adventure.
The DM then drops the bomb. "Just scratch all your equipment off, your not getting it back." Now while this does inconvenience everyone, it just fucks me over completely, since after I finish using my spells from today I cant get any new ones.
To boot, as we worked through, there were literally no weapons I could make any use of, and at the end of the night, we had just discovered that there are multiple levels to this cavern. He wants to play a 6 hour session on Friday, and I'm having some trouble mustering any excitement about playing a 6 hour session where I will likely only be able to say "I'm holding the torch" every combat round.
I suppose it would have been more bearable if there were any options to what was going on, or he allowed us to roleplay at some point during the night.
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Dismayed By Humanity Since 1992.
Or better yet, he's probably going to challenge your wits and creativity. This is where you make the most of your surroundings. Literally.
"Jeff, run something new."
"What?"
"Well, X & Y(Names not disclosed) don't know what's going on."
"Yeah, cause you two missed practically every session."
"We don't care. We don't know what's going on. Run something new."
"I don't... I don't have anything new."
"Make something up."
I end up playing the worst session ever- The PCs met Jesse Custer from Preacher after the Apocolypse, abandoned him, and went into the woods just outside of town (I had previously told them most wilderness was eviscerated) where I proceded to steal my friends adventure ver batim... until I realized we didn't finish that adventure.
I've got more, that's just my starter.
I don't have sympathy for people who miss lots of gaming sessions. Personally, I would have told them to go fuck their mothers. If theyre lost cuz they missed the game, boo fucking hoo. They can be lost or get lost.
And yet I can't be stern with people who make it to games, but make the games SUCK. odd.
Suddenly we're attacked from all sides by skeletons!
Then Zombies!
Then Ghouls!
Then Shadows!
Then Wights!
Then Wraiths!
Then Skeleton Warriors!
Then Revenants!
Then Giant Skeletons!
Then Abominations!
Then Death Knights!
Then Liches!
Then Dracoliches!
We're a thug-nasty team so we fight our way through with various members dropping out as their weapons cease to be effective (we didn't have much magical gear) until only the mage (moi!) and druid are left with spells that can injure the dracolich. We figure that the DM MUST be about to run out of undead SOMEtime. But he isn't. He just keep having dracoliches show up until we die.
Then the Naughty Sorceress brings us back to life and says "whoops! sorry bout that, left the security system on." Horseshit I say. Horseshit. Narrate the scene if you must, but don't expect us to kiss and make up with someone who just poured monsters on us til we died.
Someone had the bright idea to play a Ravenloft module. We assemble our party at the GM's house, and set-up shop in the basement. It helps at this point to mention our party makeup:
Myself (male): Standard Fighter class, level 11
Player A (male): Some flavor mage, level 12
Player B (female): Thief/Fighter multiclasser, level 9
Player C (boyfriend of
Midway through the night, player B says something about going to the store, she'll be right back. We decide to take a small break, play some SNES. Player C makes a joke about going to take a crap upstairs (while there was a perefectly functioning, and clean, bathroom right down stairs). 10 minutes later, I decide to go upstairs to get a drink. I walk up the stairs... to catch players C deep-dicking player B. On the GM's new leather couch.
They haven't been back since.
My favorite part about that is the font of infinite liches and dracoliches. It's not like either of those things are a) destroyed or b) created without much time, effort and thought.
I had a friend that used to do that with his G.I. Joes.
[spoiler:b74f80e5a5]He was five years old at the time.[/spoiler:b74f80e5a5]
1. In 5 hours, we spend 30 minutes doing actual combat, 20 minutes picking mushrooms, 20 minutes doing miscelaneous rolls, and 3 hours and 50 minutes arguing about rules.
2. As expected, my role ended up being carrying the torch through all of the combats, and throwing rocks at a -8 modifier for throwing into melee and using an improvised weapon. For a total attack bonus of -6.
3. At one point someone found a scroll. Yay! Something I can do! The scroll ended up being (I am not joking) "Arcane Seduction I: Unbuton/Unzip"
4. What little magic I had left consisted of the Cantrips: Dancing Lights, Message and Ghost Sound. We had a situation where there were a bunch of kobolds on the other side of a pit trap throwing sling bullets at us. I decided to use Dancing Lights/Ghost Sound to make it sound/look like lantern-bearing, heavily armored folk were marching into the cave from the far cavern. The DM's response was "Alright... the kobolds attack you again!"
After about 3 hours I seriously considered just writing a note down that said "I'm carrying the torch" and going in the next room to play guitar hero.
Why didn't you just not wash your hands after pooping, then hand him your dice?
Last semester the gamers guild at my college was going to run Shadowrun, it was a good time for me, I didn't have class immediately afterwards so I would be able to play for full sessions. So I'm getting kind of excited about getting in a group again after so long without any rpging at all.
So in come two of the girls in the guild, now normally I don't ahve anything against these two other than their horrible taste in anime, (like omgz InuYasha is teh most awesome shit evar!), but then they started to detail to me the pets that the GM was letting them have.
A tiger and a rideable size dragon...
The next day I withdrew my character from the group.
aren't SR dragons incredibly smart and devious and take to being ridden like a hamster to electrified flooring
and couldn't you say that since they're getting that shit, you want the best assault cannon in the game, then proceed to kill their characters
or tell the gm that he's a fucking moron and that you're taking the reigns, then proceed to run the SR game like paranoia and kill their characters with a truck at the start
Once was enough.
I was tempted, but I don't have any Shadowrun books so I doubt it would have gone well...
Still it was kinda hard not to tell him he was being a fucking moron.
There are a couple that are friendly toward humans (the one who owns the club in Seattle comes to mind) and a couple who are pretty much "owned" by Aztlan. But I'm pretty sure they don't give out piggyback rides. And I'm sure one of the more "Dragons are Royalty" group would eat them.
== GM TRYING TO GET LAID
I packed my shit up there and then and went and got very, very drunk.
Quite right. Dragons and Shadowrun are pretty much verboten in any campaign I've ever run, or been a part of. Even if a dragon were somehow involved in the goings-on of a typical shadowrun party, you'd never know it.
However, if you really want a flavor of what it's like to deal with a campaign run and sanctioned by a dragon (Ghostwalker), grab the Year of the Comet sourcebook and Survival of the Fittest source book, and have an experienced GM take you thorugh it. I think I rolled 5 characters during that stretch. And we still never completed it. It's only 3rd edition, however.
Back on topic, though: as far as other bad moments in gaming, and keeping with the Shadowrun theme: ever have "that guy" in one of your games that insisted on being a decker or rigger? And everyone else had to take a nap while they did whatever it was they wanted?
I find that minor dragons are okay but the majors should always be hinted at.
The worst Shadowrun experance was a group of idiots who decided they would try to pick a fight with Lofwyr. For those of you who don't play Shadowrun...how does one discribe the sheer stupidity of this. Imagine picking a fight with a D&D dragon. Who will be played by a brillant and evil DM to the absolute best of thier ability. And who also owns a ton of magic items.
And Spec Op teams. Did I mention the damn dragon would have his own army of highly skilled people? Yeah. My street sammi sat that one out.
Along those lines: a GM'ed for a mixed group of players (new vs. regulars) and, being they liked DnD. They wanted to kill a dragon. "Good luck finding one, let alone getting close to one."
"Hey, the penality for blind-fire is only TN +8! Hey, I got 1 success"
<silence>
They were mostly new people, so I decided to start them off with a randomly-generated dungeon for a bit of experience and whatnot.
Anyway, the non-new person was my brother, who was quite familiar with the running joke of me saying "a dragon eats you." whenever a player is annoying me.
So, they explore, and I get to describing the last room they find.
Player 1: "What's in the room?"
Brother: "I bet it's a dragon."
Me: "Actually, it is a dragon."
Player 1 to Brother: ".... I hate you."
It was a wyrmling.
That would be a rather awkward exercise in hearing to just how many bishonen names she's willing to shout out in bed.
Worse if it was a threesome and they got into one of those "omg and then remember the ep where they were like-" "oh yeah that was like so awesome!" raving fangirl conversations and all the GM can think of is "...is anything I'm doing even necessary at this point?" :?
Hearing something along the lines of, "I can't believe we got to kill a dragon in our first dungeon...and then another one two levels later!" and getting to see the grins on their faces as they skinned them and though about making dragon armor and other such things...it was nice.
Then I slapped them with a magical, talking mouse and living illusion people, one of the characters/players got drunk and depressed, and the party got wiped out. Good times.
Did you just say that you had the party attacked by Mickey Mouse and cartoon characters?
How is this a WORST MOMENT in tabletop gaming if everyone seemed to enjoy it? I mean, I guess petering off into BLAH kinda counts...
The mouse's name was actually Tonpete, which was a realy obscure Cosby reference. The illusions looked like humans and thought they were real people, they weren't cartoonish at all. It was a part of the plot where an 'evil crazy wizard' had figured out how to make the most powerful illusions permanent (doesn't have to actually work in the system, it was DM Magic). And he was making things to amuse him...because he was nuts. The illusion people were a party of adventurers he made to fight with him, so he'd have something to do. The mouse was like amusing comic relief.
Um, another WORST MOMENT to get this back on topic...uhm...
Oh, god, yes. We have a resident White Wolf fanboy friend. He has all the books, and just reads them for the setting, hardly ever runs/plays. But we had played some Vampire and Mage with someone else, so he wanted to run an adventure where we each played a character from one of the systems, together in a party.
So I was a Changeling, there was a Mage, Vampire, maybe even a Hunter I think. The fuckup was the Werewolf. Our GM was, as said above, not vey experienced/good. He also loved the Werewolf backstory, history, the flavor from the books, etc. So he put us up against some Werewolf villains.
The werewolf villains and our werewolf hero were such combat monsters that we had nothing to do half the time. I think he got six attacks or so a round. Again, this could be bad GMing. I remember our Mage had a gun and a computer (that group) and I had some knives. We could barely formulate a plan or get to the bad guys before the werewolf ripped into all of them with his Totem(I think?) that was some aluminum (silver maybe?) baseball bat that seemed to kill everything way too fast.
My most exciting moment was getting a tattoo at the fair we went to.
There's no way you should expect a mage or vampire to be anywhere near as combat-ready as a wolf at equalish levels (IE, a high-rank Werewolf will still usually stomp a low-gen vampy, too.)
As soon as the berzerkers charged into his IG, the kid started picking up the guy's guardsmen (it's general courtesy to let a player handle his own models). His reason for removing them before rolling any results? "Your models don't have any close-combat weapons on them so they all die automatically.
Of course this was rubbish (not only for auto-wounding with no armor saves, but all a model needs to fight back is a weapon skill, initiative, and number of attacks to fight, and I can't recall a non-vehicle unit that lacks them. A troop unit doesn't lose its basic profile just because it doesn't have doodad extras glued on yet). So the guy asks the kid where in the rules does it say that's how it works. The kid simply throws a handful of the guy's guardsmen onto the floor (he might of stormed off, or threw a fit then and there, I wish I could recall but it certainly wasn't pretty). A couple of them ended up broken.
I don't know what was involved in the aftermath, as several other 40k horror stories I heard involved such things as fistfights and those I'm confusing with eachother. But this 'kid' definitely threw his opposing player's models because he didn't get away with automatically removing them from the board.
Now I said 'kid' because that's how his opponent labeled him, but later was described as being 15 or 16.
Nothing is more ammusing though, then when one of the more sissy player types (like say... a boggun) is able to kill an uber powerful wyrm minion (like say... a nexus crawler).
But for crappy table Role playing stories (not including that time at summer camp with the gm who'd flip to random pages in the monstrous manual and say "your fighting this!"), nothing quite tops a PBP post game that was run last year on another forum I frequent.
Amongst other things, the GM wound up firing off an emp that took two of our characters completely out of action (one was a ghost in the shell style cyborg and the other (one of two that I had in the RP) had a cerbral implant). Interestingly, he did this after he had our characters transformed into gargoyles and stuck on a mesa with no way off except flight.
That's just the tip of the ice berg though.
http://nice.purrsia.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=35;t=003307;p=1
2: I wouldn't be surprised if some of my other players bitched this fucker out over at RPG.net
I wish I could be more eloquent about it, but my mind just sees someone pick up another person's models and screams, what the fuck?!
And the worst is that the offenders are usually other modelers, generally ones that don't care that much for making their own look decent. I have never had someone who doesn't play tabletop games pick up my models--they're just afraid of breaking it or smudging the paint or something.
Only this GM decided that our first scene would involve a run-in with the Sodomy bikers. In the absence of any real system it was basically presented that nothing any of us could do would even make them flinch and that we would be destroyed for calling attention to ourselves.
The game lasted half an hour and we never let that GM back into our gaming group.
Y'see the model he tried to grab was my Escher Gang Leader, with Needle Pistol.
Made with real needles. :whistle:
Strangely enough, it never happened again...
(Not that I'm philosophically opposed to people looking at my stuff you understand; if they ask nicely, they get a friendly warning about sharp points.)
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