Have you ever just said "To hell with this" and left a campaign?

[Ragitsu]

Kinky.

"Who's your baddie? WHO'S. YOUR. BADDIE?"

[SteveZilla]

This is one of those times when putting a shock collar on the GM, and then giving the control to the PCs, would have improved the game immensely. One way or another.

Kinda like this?

http://www.hulu.com/watch/29856/the-...ersion-therapy

[Ian Mackinder]

Kinda like this?

http://www.hulu.com/watch/29856/the-...ersion-therapy

Couldn't watch ('US Viewers Only') but I know the one you mean.

(Man, I love that scene - nearly kill myself laughing every dang time I watch it)

[Ragitsu]

"Worst session ever. Well, we were playing in a Forgotten Realms campaign. It started off pretty good. The DM made some fun encounters that I enjoyed, though the story surrounding them was a little stilted. It got progressively worse as the sessions ground on. The worst one was right after we all voted on where to go next (from a list composed by the DM). I voted to go to this ancient city (from that ancient civilization with flying cities that crashed and burned) that I thought held the best chance of explaining the position our characters were put in (we were "important" for some seemingly inexplicable reason). That was a mistake.

So we go to this place, and it's not what I would call fun. We sneak our way into this ancient city, and we find that it's really quite advanced. We open into a sort of subway system, and we start coming under attack from sniper attacks. Apparently there are custom-designed iron golems with custom sniper rifles (I shit you not) that can literally one-shot drop our characters. The golems have sniper nests set throughout the city. We get into a fight with a couple of these golems and they nearly kill us. Basically, the game comes down to the DM punishing us enough to make us regret coming here, but allowing our lame plans to work for no good reason. Don't ask me, for instance, why my illusions worked on golems, but they did, just long enough for us to get the information we needed (which was nothing useful in any practical sense, and basically what we knew already with a little more history, iirc). Then we ran away as fast as we could.

That would have been merely stupid and annoying, but then I was talking to the DM after the game, and he basically tells me that he didn't want us to go there yet (even though he created the online poll we all voted on, I didn't even choose any of the options), and that he was kind of irritated that I convinced some of the other players to vote with me. That pissed me off because that means I basically just walked into a trap for no good reason.

The game didn't last very long after that. In fact, after another non-gaming related incident with that guy, we stopped hanging out with him."

--- --- ---

"Mine was when I was in a group that had agreed to rotating GMs (50% of the group are still going as my current group). I ran two month long run of Arabian Nights (essentially Al Qadim without meta-humans and played with a modified 7th Sea rules set) which everyone seemed to dig. I was looking forward to showing up to the game with no preparation (we played a significant distance away, but the cute Nepalese wife of one of the players -the one that later turned out to be gay- was always so hospitable to us that we always felt totally welcome and that the commute was worth it).

We made characters using the Tri-Stat system. "Slightly altered." I'm not sure how much was the GM and how much was the system, but we started the game (a Cowboy Bebop ripoff) with characters that varied wildly in power level. I played a catburgler: the best in the solar system. I maxed out all his skills appropriate to breaking and entering, but he was still a (slightly better than average) human being. My friend made a vat-grown clone-ninja with the mentality of a 5-year old, but ridiculous physical stats. We figured it would be a fun roleplaying challenge to keep this fully grown super-toddler at bay and teach him morality.

The game starts and we are immediately railroaded into a mission. Okay. I'm alright with that. The problem arises when we realize that any contact we try to interact with has twice the stats of ourselves, no matter if they are the godfather of the Mars Mafia or a homeless guy on the corner. In fact, we're being verbally assaulted by just about everyone we try to talk to. Look up "de-protagonization" and you'd see a picture of us sitting around a table trying to find out any background information about our assigned mission.

Okay, apparently all the homeless people on this planet are former special forces troops without any particular debilitating mental conditions... Whatever.

The plot calls for someone to penetrate an enemy building and acquire the information that talking to people has failed to reveal. Hallelujah! The thing my character is designed for.... Only, wait... the vat-grown uber-clone has a better chance of succeeding unskilled at the infiltration attempt than my superhumanly skilled cat burglar.

Wait. Stop. F**k this system!

The game never carried on beyond that.

I ended up regrouping the gamers for an X-Crawl game. When I finished, we played Shadowrun and the guy that ran that horrific Cowboy Bebop game quit the group while his ex continued.

That Tri-stat nightmare was the first time I've wanted to quit a game before a GM has wanted to quit running it."

[James Gillen]

Wait, the Nepalese wife was gay, or the player?
If the latter, did you ask if it was an open relationship?

JG

[Ian Mackinder]

"Worst session ever. Well, we were playing in a Forgotten Realms campaign. It started off pretty good. The DM made some fun encounters that I enjoyed, though the story surrounding them was a little stilted. It got progressively worse as the sessions ground on. The worst one was right after we all voted on where to go next (from a list composed by the DM). I voted to go to this ancient city (from that ancient civilization with flying cities that crashed and burned) that I thought held the best chance of explaining the position our characters were put in (we were "important" for some seemingly inexplicable reason). That was a mistake.

So we go to this place, and it's not what I would call fun. We sneak our way into this ancient city, and we find that it's really quite advanced. We open into a sort of subway system, and we start coming under attack from sniper attacks. Apparently there are custom-designed iron golems with custom sniper rifles (I shit you not) that can literally one-shot drop our characters. The golems have sniper nests set throughout the city. We get into a fight with a couple of these golems and they nearly kill us. Basically, the game comes down to the DM punishing us enough to make us regret coming here, but allowing our lame plans to work for no good reason. Don't ask me, for instance, why my illusions worked on golems, but they did, just long enough for us to get the information we needed (which was nothing useful in any practical sense, and basically what we knew already with a little more history, iirc). Then we ran away as fast as we could.

That would have been merely stupid and annoying, but then I was talking to the DM after the game, and he basically tells me that he didn't want us to go there yet (even though he created the online poll we all voted on, I didn't even choose any of the options), and that he was kind of irritated that I convinced some of the other players to vote with me. That pissed me off because that means I basically just walked into a trap for no good reason.

The game didn't last very long after that. In fact, after another non-gaming related incident with that guy, we stopped hanging out with him."

--- --- ---

"Mine was when I was in a group that had agreed to rotating GMs (50% of the group are still going as my current group). I ran two month long run of Arabian Nights (essentially Al Qadim without meta-humans and played with a modified 7th Sea rules set) which everyone seemed to dig. I was looking forward to showing up to the game with no preparation (we played a significant distance away, but the cute Nepalese wife of one of the players -the one that later turned out to be gay- was always so hospitable to us that we always felt totally welcome and that the commute was worth it).

We made characters using the Tri-Stat system. "Slightly altered." I'm not sure how much was the GM and how much was the system, but we started the game (a Cowboy Bebop ripoff) with characters that varied wildly in power level. I played a catburgler: the best in the solar system. I maxed out all his skills appropriate to breaking and entering, but he was still a (slightly better than average) human being. My friend made a vat-grown clone-ninja with the mentality of a 5-year old, but ridiculous physical stats. We figured it would be a fun roleplaying challenge to keep this fully grown super-toddler at bay and teach him morality.

The game starts and we are immediately railroaded into a mission. Okay. I'm alright with that. The problem arises when we realize that any contact we try to interact with has twice the stats of ourselves, no matter if they are the godfather of the Mars Mafia or a homeless guy on the corner. In fact, we're being verbally assaulted by just about everyone we try to talk to. Look up "de-protagonization" and you'd see a picture of us sitting around a table trying to find out any background information about our assigned mission.

Okay, apparently all the homeless people on this planet are former special forces troops without any particular debilitating mental conditions... Whatever.

The plot calls for someone to penetrate an enemy building and acquire the information that talking to people has failed to reveal. Hallelujah! The thing my character is designed for.... Only, wait... the vat-grown uber-clone has a better chance of succeeding unskilled at the infiltration attempt than my superhumanly skilled cat burglar.

Wait. Stop. F**k this system!

The game never carried on beyond that.

I ended up regrouping the gamers for an X-Crawl game. When I finished, we played Shadowrun and the guy that ran that horrific Cowboy Bebop game quit the group while his ex continued.

That Tri-stat nightmare was the first time I've wanted to quit a game before a GM has wanted to quit running it."

With that first one, sounds like the Ref desperately needed to put some more thought into the overall set-up. Also, if he put up the Lost City as an option, it is his own dang fault. At the very least, he could have said outright "You don't want to go there yet because you really don't have the levels for it. Trust me on this.". If the PCs opt to go regardless, then by all means bring the thunder and hope their next set of characters are smarter.

Second one, sounds like the Ref was so impressed with his home-brew that play-test was deferred until actual play.

[Arkham]

With that first one, sounds like the Ref desperately needed to put some more thought into the overall set-up. Also, if he put up the Lost City as an option, it is his own dang fault. At the very least, he could have said outright "You don't want to go there yet because you really don't have the levels for it. Trust me on this.". If the PCs opt to go regardless, then by all means bring the thunder and hope their next set of characters are smarter.

Second one, sounds like the Ref was so impressed with his home-brew that play-test was deferred until actual play.

Actually, that second one, aside from the thing with every NPC being more skilled than the PCs, is true to the Tri-stat system. Stats are everything, skills are an afterthought at best. Roll 4-keep 4 ( untrained with a 4 stat ) will almost always get you a better result than Roll 6-keep 2 ( Average stat 2, 4 skill being highly trained ).

[Ragitsu]

"Zero Tolerance Bob

The game is champions: superheroes. Champions/HERO is points based and has the kind of versatility that other high-detail systems lie and pretend they have. It's also highly vulnerable to exploitation. I kept a pretty firm hand on things, but at the end of the day, they were still playing superheroes. They were very powerful.

Bob's character was a guy in a powered battlesuit. In champions a 'limitation' like a focus (item) nets you a discount, so of course bob used such a build often. His suit was enormously strong, supremly resistant to damage, could fly, and had a full life support system. That's total life support, keep that in mind, it will be important later.

A bank robbery is in progress! Alarms blare, police radios come alive, and the three super-heroes make for the back to stop said robbery! Bob's character gets there first, by dint of not doing any roleplaying and hence not having to change into his superhero guise (it would be innefficient, donning the suit takes a short while).

He steps into the bank, and finds it filled with a thick, blue smoke! I describe to him a short, thin, 'weedy' looking figure, a silouette in the smoke, who is running for the door with a duffel-bag in one hand, and a small smoke-spewing rod in the other!

Bob swings into action, by which i mean he swings one of his enormous servo-augmented fists. And this is not just a punch, oh no, this is a special combat manuver called a Haymaker, doing 150% of normal damage, which for Bob's character was quite large. I try to warn Bob and ask him to reconsider, but he's adamant.

Let me explain how strong this motherf**ker is. He can bench 100 metric tonnes. In HERO, that's not THAT big a deal by default, but he's still punching with the same kind of force of an artillery shell. Again, it's not a killing attack, but it's still doing enough BODY damage to kill a normal human outright.

Billy smith, the innocent dupe of an evil wizard, never new what hit him. Having robbed the bank to pay a ransom on his abducted good wizard parents, he doesn't even have time to see Bob's armor-plated fist coming before is slams into his suddently concave chest, sending him flying back through the side window of the bank, through the wall of the cafe next door, and into an early, tragic grave.

Now, this is a common detail in these stories- bad player ruins game, derails it early. After this I learnt to never let a bad player derail the game. Its a stupid thing to do and anybody who does it is a bad GM. If somebody ruins the game, just hand-wave and put it back on track. If they keep acting up, talk to them about it. Giving players agency does not mean they get to nuke the plot, least of all in it's earliest phases.

But, I was young, and sorta horrified, and- then the other heroes turned up, disabled bob, and handed him over to the cops, who did not look kindly on a power armored psycho killing a kid. Bob's PC was sent to trial, and the alter-ego of one of the heroes was the DA. He was found guilty of several crimes, including the operation of an unregulated fusion reactor.

Bob stood before the judge as he read out the sentence- five years in prison, supermax. Bob spoke up, and made a request.

"Your honor, I will accept the court's decision, but I ask that I be allowed to continue to wear my (awesomely powerful, bulletroof, flight enabled) powered armor suit while I am in jail."

Why, asked the judge, would be possibly allow such an absurd request?

"Actually your honor, you have no choice. If you don't let me keep the suit, it will count as cruel and unusual punishment."

Why, asked the judge, would depriving you of your awesomely powerful murder-suit/get out of jail free card be cruel and unusual punishment?

"Because your honor" - and he points to his character sheet, where it shows that his armor includes Full Life Support, that means he has life support vs not only, radiation, vacuum, intense heat and cold, and so on, but also life support VS eating, sleeping. . . and Ageing.

"If you take my suit off me, i'll age at the normal human rate! Clearly that is an unacceptably cruel punishment!"

The judge was not swayed."

[James Gillen]

"Zero Tolerance Bob

The game is champions: superheroes. Champions/HERO is points based and has the kind of versatility that other high-detail systems lie and pretend they have. It's also highly vulnerable to exploitation. I kept a pretty firm hand on things, but at the end of the day, they were still playing superheroes. They were very powerful.

Bob's character was a guy in a powered battlesuit. In champions a 'limitation' like a focus (item) nets you a discount, so of course bob used such a build often. His suit was enormously strong, supremly resistant to damage, could fly, and had a full life support system. That's total life support, keep that in mind, it will be important later.

A bank robbery is in progress! Alarms blare, police radios come alive, and the three super-heroes make for the back to stop said robbery! Bob's character gets there first, by dint of not doing any roleplaying and hence not having to change into his superhero guise (it would be innefficient, donning the suit takes a short while).

He steps into the bank, and finds it filled with a thick, blue smoke! I describe to him a short, thin, 'weedy' looking figure, a silouette in the smoke, who is running for the door with a duffel-bag in one hand, and a small smoke-spewing rod in the other!

Bob swings into action, by which i mean he swings one of his enormous servo-augmented fists. And this is not just a punch, oh no, this is a special combat manuver called a Haymaker, doing 150% of normal damage, which for Bob's character was quite large. I try to warn Bob and ask him to reconsider, but he's adamant.

Let me explain how strong this motherf**ker is. He can bench 100 metric tonnes. In HERO, that's not THAT big a deal by default, but he's still punching with the same kind of force of an artillery shell. Again, it's not a killing attack, but it's still doing enough BODY damage to kill a normal human outright.

Billy smith, the innocent dupe of an evil wizard, never new what hit him. Having robbed the bank to pay a ransom on his abducted good wizard parents, he doesn't even have time to see Bob's armor-plated fist coming before is slams into his suddently concave chest, sending him flying back through the side window of the bank, through the wall of the cafe next door, and into an early, tragic grave.

Now, this is a common detail in these stories- bad player ruins game, derails it early. After this I learnt to never let a bad player derail the game. Its a stupid thing to do and anybody who does it is a bad GM. If somebody ruins the game, just hand-wave and put it back on track. If they keep acting up, talk to them about it. Giving players agency does not mean they get to nuke the plot, least of all in it's earliest phases.

In one of the Adventurer's Club issues there was a scenario specifically intended to deal with "killer" or careless PCs. The bankrobbers all had superpowers but they still had less defenses than tissue paper. And they all had gold themes to their costumes. Thus the scenario was called "The Gilt Complex."

But, I was young, and sorta horrified, and- then the other heroes turned up, disabled bob, and handed him over to the cops, who did not look kindly on a power armored psycho killing a kid. Bob's PC was sent to trial, and the alter-ego of one of the heroes was the DA. He was found guilty of several crimes, including the operation of an unregulated fusion reactor.

Bob stood before the judge as he read out the sentence- five years in prison, supermax. Bob spoke up, and made a request.

"Your honor, I will accept the court's decision, but I ask that I be allowed to continue to wear my (awesomely powerful, bulletroof, flight enabled) powered armor suit while I am in jail."

Why, asked the judge, would be possibly allow such an absurd request?

"Actually your honor, you have no choice. If you don't let me keep the suit, it will count as cruel and unusual punishment."

Why, asked the judge, would depriving you of your awesomely powerful murder-suit/get out of jail free card be cruel and unusual punishment?

"Because your honor" - and he points to his character sheet, where it shows that his armor includes Full Life Support, that means he has life support vs not only, radiation, vacuum, intense heat and cold, and so on, but also life support VS eating, sleeping. . . and Ageing.

"If you take my suit off me, i'll age at the normal human rate! Clearly that is an unacceptably cruel punishment!"

The judge was not swayed."

In my group's long-running Champions game (before I was actually in the group) a friend described how one other PC, a Jedi clone, had ended up killing somebody and was put on trial for manslaughter. Supposedly the other PCs convinced the judge to let this guy continue using his sword while under community service on the grounds that he was useless and defenseless without it.

JG

[Ragitsu]

Tony Stark Syndrome!

[Ian Mackinder]

The judge should have bitch-slapped Bob for wasting his time with that request.

[Ragitsu]

The judge should have bitch-slapped Bob

With an I-Beam, perhaps? The punishment ought to "fit the crime" after all.

[Ragitsu]

"I tried to introduce two new players (a couple). They were completely new to RPGs, D&D 3.5 in this case, and we rolled up some 1st level characters.

I ran the "A Dark and Stormy Knight" module. Three of the four players (Dwarf Cleric, Dwarf Paladin, Half-Orc Fighter) were adventurers asked by the town noble to check out that gravesite where eerie sounds had been emanating from at night lately.

Now here's the clunker: the New Girl wanted to play a Drow. F**king Drizzt books. I allowed it cuz it was the first time she'd ever played and why the hell not? We didn't even know if they'd like it, so there might be no second time.

Her background was that she was arachnophobic and so fled the Underdark as an outcast. Simple, but at least there was some effort to not make it a complete Drizzt. So the party finds her sheltering at the cave entrance, trying to pick the lock. She proposes to help them if she can keep some of the loot. Paladin (her bf) casts Detect Evil, but she's CN.

Cleric is still wary and occasionally makes an IC snide comment, which gets an equally witty repartee from the Drow player. We do the adventure, fun is had by all, have lots of laughs, blah blah.

A few days after that, I find out the Cleric's player has posted on the Wizards boards on "how to deal with a Drow PC". He couldn't reconcile himself with the idea that he couldn't flat out kill her. He also complained about how they'd walk into every town with a Drow in their party and how this would not be cool. Never mind that in the ONE time they'd played they hadn't brought the Drow anywhere but that damn tomb! Did he really think I wouldn't attach some consequences to hanging out with a Drow?

And you know what? F*** it. If he really wanted to kill her even after the Paladin found her to be NOT EVIL, I would have allowed it. There'd be consequences IC, but sure.

Turns out he just didn't like banter. The girl was pretty good at it, and he wasn't. Therefore he didn't want to play any longer."

--- --- ---

"There was this AD&D group I got sucked into at the university. I had been trying to find a game and a friend of mine said he knew some guys who had a pretty good one going. I wasn't in love with AD&D (I'm so old this was 2nd ed) but I figured what the hell.

So it's me, my friend, his girlfriend, the DM who looked like Gollum and one guy who in most context would have been weird but for an RPGer was fairly innocuous. The game kicks off and almost immediately we get saddled with not one but two "NPCs" who were basically the DMs pet characters, several levels above the party and who basically started leading us around by virtue of having such a higher level of competency/resources that to *not* let these guys take a lead role would have been difficult to justify.

Off we go to a fairly generic evil temple, things die, loot is being carted back. For some reason we encounter a woman in the wilderness who asks for our protection, we figure what the hell. During the night the DM goes through the process of having her put the moves on every male member of the party and asks whether we succumb to her wiles. I should point out that he made us roll randomly for age during character generation so I was playing a 16-year old thief, and I figured a 16 year old offered sex rarely says no, so with some trepidation I said "sure, why not." The DM fortunately did not describe the encounter but did take great joy in informing those of us who had succumbed to temptation that our characters now had crabs. This was not exactly the high fantasy I had been used to in D&D but I assumed it was going somewhere.

After that session I asked my buddy what he figured was up with the STD chick and he said that this was just the kind of thing that Gollum liked to put in his games 'for flavour'. So, just a typical random STD-giving wilderness whore, then. Every game has those.

It was becoming increasingly clear that I was not going to dig playing with this group, and the final straw came in the next session when the girlfriend's female elf character (somehow, can't remember) got turned to stone. We do have some kind of potion that will fix her up, though. At this point the up-till-now innocuous dude asks if he can use it "just on her *****" so he can, to put it bluntly, rape her and argues that the character can't even be mad because she wouldn't know about it, being otherwise turned to stone and all. The DM gleefully declares that this will work just fine.

I already know this is going to be my last session so I decide to at least attempt to go out in a blaze of glory and hand a note to the DM that says "Hide in Shadows". Miraculously my novice thief succeeds while various creepy s** is going on. Next note: "Position for backstab" - to me this is entirely justified, the elf was our cleric and anyway apparently this other member of the party is a psycho. Unfortunately I didn't even get to roll - the DM had one of his "NPCs" miraculously step in and prevent the backstab taking place; he explained afterwards that he had to do it or the creepy rape dude would have freaked out if his character died. I explained as calmly as possible that I didn't think I was going to have time to play as much as I had thought and wouldn't be coming back.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my buddy's girlfriend also exited the game shortly thereafter, followed (no fool he) by my buddy. Eventually I got a Shadowrun game going that was certainly more fun from my perspective.

The final part of this (longer than anticipated) story is that I ran into the DM at a pub a month or two after leaving the game, and he insisted on telling me about his plan for the game, had it not come to an end - the "NPCs" he saddled us with were of course villains who were plotting against us the entire time, and he gloated about how "you guys were totally falling for it". So, not only DMPCs, but DMPCs plotting against the party.

That, for good or ill, has been the very last time I have played D&D."

--- --- ---

Kyle Rayner, on the other hand ... was a civilian artist, IIRC.

I wonder: what would a military artist be like?

[Ian Mackinder]

Y'know. There are times when I am almost relieved that certain people play RPGs, if only because it keeps them too busy to do anything else.

[SteveZilla]

"I tried to introduce two new players (a couple). They were completely new to RPGs, D&D 3.5 in this case, and we rolled up some 1st level characters.

I ran the "A Dark and Stormy Knight" module. Three of the four players (Dwarf Cleric, Dwarf Paladin, Half-Orc Fighter) were adventurers asked by the town noble to check out that gravesite where eerie sounds had been emanating from at night lately.

Now here's the clunker: the New Girl wanted to play a Drow. F**king Drizzt books. I allowed it cuz it was the first time she'd ever played and why the hell not? We didn't even know if they'd like it, so there might be no second time.

Her background was that she was arachnophobic and so fled the Underdark as an outcast. Simple, but at least there was some effort to not make it a complete Drizzt. So the party finds her sheltering at the cave entrance, trying to pick the lock. She proposes to help them if she can keep some of the loot. Paladin (her bf) casts Detect Evil, but she's CN.

Cleric is still wary and occasionally makes an IC snide comment, which gets an equally witty repartee from the Drow player. We do the adventure, fun is had by all, have lots of laughs, blah blah.

A few days after that, I find out the Cleric's player has posted on the Wizards boards on "how to deal with a Drow PC". He couldn't reconcile himself with the idea that he couldn't flat out kill her. He also complained about how they'd walk into every town with a Drow in their party and how this would not be cool. Never mind that in the ONE time they'd played they hadn't brought the Drow anywhere but that damn tomb! Did he really think I wouldn't attach some consequences to hanging out with a Drow?

And you know what? F*** it. If he really wanted to kill her even after the Paladin found her to be NOT EVIL, I would have allowed it. There'd be consequences IC, but sure.

Turns out he just didn't like banter. The girl was pretty good at it, and he wasn't. Therefore he didn't want to play any longer."

Were I the GM, depending upon how good of a group player the Cleric's player was, I'd ether arrange a meeting between him, the girl and myself as moderator and see if something could be worked out. If the Cleric's player started being an @ss about it and disrupting the game, then I'd possibly say "You don't like it? You can change all of that by using that wonderful invention" and point at the door.

"There was this AD&D group I got sucked into at the university. I had been trying to find a game and a friend of mine said he knew some guys who had a pretty good one going. I wasn't in love with AD&D (I'm so old this was 2nd ed) but I figured what the hell.

So it's me, my friend, his girlfriend, the DM who looked like Gollum and one guy who in most context would have been weird but for an RPGer was fairly innocuous. The game kicks off and almost immediately we get saddled with not one but two "NPCs" who were basically the DMs pet characters, several levels above the party and who basically started leading us around by virtue of having such a higher level of competency/resources that to *not* let these guys take a lead role would have been difficult to justify.

Off we go to a fairly generic evil temple, things die, loot is being carted back. For some reason we encounter a woman in the wilderness who asks for our protection, we figure what the hell. During the night the DM goes through the process of having her put the moves on every male member of the party and asks whether we succumb to her wiles. I should point out that he made us roll randomly for age during character generation so I was playing a 16-year old thief, and I figured a 16 year old offered sex rarely says no, so with some trepidation I said "sure, why not." The DM fortunately did not describe the encounter but did take great joy in informing those of us who had succumbed to temptation that our characters now had crabs. This was not exactly the high fantasy I had been used to in D&D but I assumed it was going somewhere.

After that session I asked my buddy what he figured was up with the STD chick and he said that this was just the kind of thing that Gollum liked to put in his games 'for flavour'. So, just a typical random STD-giving wilderness whore, then. Every game has those.

It was becoming increasingly clear that I was not going to dig playing with this group, and the final straw came in the next session when the girlfriend's female elf character (somehow, can't remember) got turned to stone. We do have some kind of potion that will fix her up, though. At this point the up-till-now innocuous dude asks if he can use it "just on her *****" so he can, to put it bluntly, rape her and argues that the character can't even be mad because she wouldn't know about it, being otherwise turned to stone and all. The DM gleefully declares that this will work just fine.

I already know this is going to be my last session so I decide to at least attempt to go out in a blaze of glory and hand a note to the DM that says "Hide in Shadows". Miraculously my novice thief succeeds while various creepy s** is going on. Next note: "Position for backstab" - to me this is entirely justified, the elf was our cleric and anyway apparently this other member of the party is a psycho. Unfortunately I didn't even get to roll - the DM had one of his "NPCs" miraculously step in and prevent the backstab taking place; he explained afterwords that he had to do it or the creepy rape dude would have freaked out if his character died. I explained as calmly as possible that I didn't think I was going to have time to play as much as I had thought and wouldn't be coming back.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my buddy's girlfriend also exited the game shortly thereafter, followed (no fool he) by my buddy. Eventually I got a Shadowrun game going that was certainly more fun from my perspective.

The final part of this (longer than anticipated) story is that I ran into the DM at a pub a month or two after leaving the game, and he insisted on telling me about his plan for the game, had it not come to an end - the "NPCs" he saddled us with were of course villains who were plotting against us the entire time, and he gloated about how "you guys were totally falling for it". So, not only DMPCs, but DMPCs plotting against the party.

That, for good or ill, has been the very last time I have played D&D."

I'd tell him there is such a thing as the DM not deliberately screwing the players, and doing so made him a Dick DM. And if I ever ran into him again and he still had the same attitude, I'd address him as 'Dick'.

I wonder: what would a military artist be like?

One who paints with Claymores & Mortars?