Worst gaming experience

[Dominique]

Thinking back on my many years of gaming, there have been a few low points. What's your worst experience during a game?

[Captain Xenon]

the worst? well...

 

back in college, there was a group who played AD&D. these guys made the knights of the dinner table (and the black hand) look good by comparison. One of them always played a drow assasin. another, had a CN mage who always wandered off alone, the rest of the party unconsious bleeding and polymorphed, to fight what just kicked our collective butts.

 

one game of rolemaster, it went really bad. first, the drow (CG alignment) kills my character with a level 50 poison. his only explanation? i wasnt 'doing enough'. so then we go on with the quest, and meet a dragon- who will let us take all the treasure, minus a couple items. one guy has his character (some kind of dancer), attack the dragon. big fight- the drow sits there and defends, my char gets thretened at swordpoint by another party member, and the fight goes poorly.

then the dragon gives us a chance to surrender. the wolverine-lemming, of course, refuses, so we get hit with a powerfulll spell and all die except the drow- and my new character who had enough healing magic to survive. we lose all our gear, and the campaign ends mid-qeust. and the guy who started it? left mid fight and didnt come back.

 

same group, the drow would often have his character commit suicide around 1 or 2am, when he got bored. the gm- well, he was just as bad. i had a lightning bolt BOUNCE off of a t-rex in AD&D. i eventualy failed my saving throw- he made me roll about 20 of them, one for each time it bounced between me and the dinosaur.

 

the last game i played with that group, and the reason i quit playing D&D for several years- a group of 10 players, 1 evil, i was good, and the rest were chaotic neutral. went downhill from there.

 

whats more- the drow player? out of character, he made death threats to me, that he would one day be a hit man, and kill me first. yes, really. not a nice guy.

[lemming]

Well there was the one Con game that the GM was wearing spandex and a cape for. 20 years later, I still wake in the night screaming.

[Rook]

The worst I can remember was the first convention I attended. I had signed up for a day-long game - a mistake - and the GM did not have pregenerated characters. When it was time to break for lunch, some people were still working on their characters. Needless to say, I decided not to return for the afternoon session.

 

Another low point was an Ars Magica game I played in. It would probably have been best if I had had the sense to not play, because the GM and I were not a good fit. I'm the kind of player who likes to make things up hoping that the GM will run with it, but the GM liked everything scripted to the letter and relentlessly railroaded us to the point that I felt that I couldn't affect the outcome of events in any meaningful way. It all came to a head when the GM felt that my character needed to be gotten rid of for the good of his campaign. Our characters were granted an audience with the king (I can't remember why) and in his presence when the following exchange occurred (I remember most of it word for word):

 

Me: A thought balloon appears above my head, "The king is a goblin-sympathizer!"

 

GM: You say that?!?

 

Me: No. I said "a thought balloon appears." I was thinking it.

 

GM: Well if you thought it, you probably said it.

 

Me: No. I thought it.

 

GM: Well, you probably muttered it under your breath.

 

Me: Who's playing my character here, you or me? I said I thought it.

 

GM: Okay... You notice an amulet around his neck. He's read your mind!

 

End of character. And end of my involvement in the campaign. It still makes me laugh, though.

[SirViss]

Two campaigns come to mind:

 

There was a supers game where we were still learning the mehanics (we including the GM) and the campaign wasn

 

Sponsor: "Well team, to save the world we must got to another dimension. Your going to Hell..."

 

Considering that we had gotten beaten by normals, the players thought the GM was nuts, and the campaign ended that night.

 

The worst though was the Shadowrun game where the PCs just stood around as the GM showed off how bright and powerful his NPCs were.

[Lord Mhoram]

Don't have time to share mine, must go to work, but here is one I ran across the same day I saw this thread. This is from RPG net....

 

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12210

[Korvar]

My worst gaming experience was a game of Star Wars. The game up to this point had been fairly unpleasant, as the GM insisted on rolling every. single. thing., and following the published modules precisely. What this meant is that we never, ever, succeeded a Climbing/Jumping roll, and thus generally ended up held together by Medpaks.

 

Anyhoo.

 

So we started the game about noon one weekend (ah, student life, when there was so much spare time...). Blah blah blah game game and so forth, until we get to the point where we learn that we have to help defend a planet from invading Imperials. With our starfighters.

 

Pity #1: only two of us have starfighter piloting skills

 

Pity #2: the GM decides to take the module's suggestion that you use the Star Warriors game to run the space combats. So instead of the D6 Star Wars quick'n'fun spaceship combat, we use the Star Warriors tedious wargame instead.

 

So the majority of the group sat around for uncounted hours while the other two actually fight their space battles. The fact that one of the battles had a "even if you win, you lose this bit" kicker in it was merely icing on the cake.

 

In the end, we all decided to man gun turrets for the final battle, even though one of us was playing a Kid (I'd put a child in charge of a a gun turret, really I would), and I was playing an [ahem] Ewok Jedi (look, if a little green dude with pointy ears can do it...) who was all peace-loving and stuff. But dammit, we wanted something to do!

 

The game finally ended at 8am. So 20 hours of gaming, about 15 hours of which was utter tedium.

[Blue]

My worst gaming experience is one where I got petty, mostly because like most people I tend to delude myself that I'm above such childish behavior.

 

I had a friend who was a *great* call of cthulhu GM. After discussing what game we'd play next several players challenged him to run a D&D game. So he did! First one we'd played in years.

 

The idea is that because he hates low level characters he'd morph us up to a medium-low level (like 3rd? 4th?) before putting us into the "real world". We went through a sort of training camp for adventurers.

 

So we are put in a no-win situation as part of the training. In it, we are 1st level characters facing a dragon turtle. It was supposed to teach us that some things can't be beat. We were supposed to avoid it for several rounds then be freed; of course we don't know that's supposed to be the result. But my character, a cleric, was too heroic for that. She worshiped a god of valor and felt that it was her sworn duty to her god to draw the turtle's attention. So she manages a miraculous save the first round then on the second round she's fried to a crisp.

 

I didn't take it well. It was only a 1st level character, and easily replaced (except that 1st ed D&D often took hours to make a character if you didn't do it every day). So they suggested I roll another character and I said, "why bother" and left. I guess the GM felt really bad about it and realized maybe it was a bad idea to put 1st levels in a lethal no-win scenario, which was kinda true. But I feel bad about it, not because the character died--after all, she died doing what she was designed to do and she died roleplaying. I felt bad because I acted like a brat afterward.

[Polaris]

Wow...

 

After reading some of the experiences here.. I guess I haven't really had any (I just need to stop complaining when the minor problems come up).

 

Captain Xenon.. I have to ask why you stayed with the group as long as you did?

 

Polaris

[Brandi]

Oh... you people have no idea...

 

Go over to RPG.net and read this, this, and this....

[rayoman]

With the exception of beating the dog, this was the funniest rpg moment that I have ever read. Poor dog.

 

Originally posted by Lord Mhoram

Don't have time to share mine, must go to work, but here is one I ran across the same day I saw this thread. This is from RPG net....

 

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12210

[ChuckB]

One relatively bad experience is actually kind of funny

now.

 

This game took place almost 20 years ago.

 

The GM was running a Champs game in the then-current Marvel Universe. Our first adventure involved Count Dracula and a bunch of vampires raiding blood supplies.

 

There was an issue of X-Men where Drac blocks a punch by Colossus. The GM somehow figured that Colossus had a 100 STR and that because Drac was able to block his punch that meant that Dracula had a 125 STR (the other vampires were all around 100 str).

 

We eventually defeated the "Kryptonian Vampires" (as I nicknamed them) , but it was not easy.

[winterhawk]

I have bored the learned panel with so many "bad gaming stories" over the years, I will not repeat them (and the crowd goes wild *YEAH*). The one thing that all of them have in common is the "cattle call". That's one of those cards posted on the FLGS/Comic Store "Looking for Players" corkboards. If you post one, good for you, but be prepared. There is a reason whoever shows up doesn't have a regular game, ranging from social retardation to rules lawyering to body odor so bad, you'd jump into a pile of manure just to forget it.

 

If you show up for a "cattle call" game, good for you, but be prepared. There is a reason this GM needs players. It could be that he needs more fodder for his "agent-level" NPCs, who are refugees from from Krypton. Or it could be that he likes to have someone "who's not a friend", so he can pile on you while his "friends" wander off to find the Swords of Slaying and the +2 Plate Armor.

 

I'm sure someone out there has had a good experience from answering a "cattle call". If you have, good for you. For the rest of us...Be prepared.

[LadyChaos]

Oh, wow. Worst gaming experience ... would have to be when I first started gaming (long before there was dirt). I was new and didn't know what to expect. Had signed up as interested in a D&D-type game at the FLGS. The DM was a kid about 5 years younger than me. The players were all guys from about that age to around 20.

 

I didn't realize how rare women in gaming were (especially back in the olden days). I rolled up a half-elven spellcaster of some sort. The 20 something guy kept reciting the exploits of his Anti-Paladin to me the entire time. "Anti-what?" I had no idea what he was talking about.

 

I soon found out. We all "met" at the local tavern. The anti-paladin breaks into my PCs room that night and rapes her. My PC was given no opportunity to resist or fight back in any manner.

 

No one had a problem with this behavior. The player bragged how his PC could get away with this because he was a "paladin" and no one would believe my PC. (Does this sound like a bad LIfetime movie or what?)

 

Did I kill his PC? No. I had a first level nobody and his character ranked up there in the teens. I took him to court where everyone believed his PC. Until I pointed out that my own PC had "detect lie" and found three other clerics in town who also had it. His PC sang a different tune on the rack and subsequent execution.

 

I never played with this group again, but that's not the end of the story.

 

The player followed me home, swore his undying love. I told him to get lost. He then stalked me (parked outside my house nearly every night for hours, etc.) for several weeks. I finally had a "friend" talk to him. The stalking stopped, but then he went to the FLGS and wrote five pages of obscenties about me in the gamers' interest notebook. After that, the store never allowed that sort of sign-up again, which was too bad.

 

It's a wonder I kept gaming. This guy was a poster child who proved just about everything the anti-gaming wackos howl about. Luckily, I met other people who showed me just how much of an anomoly this jerk was.

[Chris Goodwin]

Worst gaming experience for me was a GURPS Horror game, in one of the prepublished modules. The party was split, and my half was exploring a cave. GM rolls some dice, says to me "You go unconscious, I'll get back to you later," and switches to the other half. He never got back to us. The session ran another two hours after that.

 

(Btw, this should probably be moved to General Roleplaying.)

[Rook]

Originally posted by Blue

I had a friend who was a *great* call of cthulhu GM. After discussing what game we'd play next several players challenged him to run a D&D game. So he did! First one we'd played in years.

 

The idea is that because he hates low level characters he'd morph us up to a medium-low level (like 3rd? 4th?) before putting us into the "real world". We went through a sort of training camp for adventurers.

 

So we are put in a no-win situation as part of the training...

 

I used to do the same thing when running a Cthulhu-influenced D&D game years ago. The campaign started out as a regular D&D game but during one session the players faced an unnamed horror they had no chance of defeating. At first, they mistook the thing for a mountain. They put up a fight and later tried to run, but all were eventually slaughtered.

 

As the players were packing up and leaving, the group's cleric woke up screaming.

 

I had several dream sequences that they played through from time to time during the course of the campaign. Each one revealed a little more about what they would eventually face "for real." Each dream ended with every PC dead. The situations were unwinnable, but with no real lasting effect on their characters, the players accepted them. (Except while playing through the first, naturally.)

[ShelleyCM]

Most of my awful gaming experiences centered around a "gaming spouse" who really didn't want to be roleplaying -- she just didn't want hubby to be doing something without her. There were the tantrums...the pouting...she wasn't content until the evening was ruined for all of us.

 

Case in point: we were playing a GURPS Black Ops game that her hubby was running. He asked me to make a role or two for the situation the character was in - and his wife interjected with, "I want to make a roll, too." He tried to ignore this, but she inisted. Finally he said, "But your character isn't even there." She said, "Fine. If I can't make a roll, then I'm leaving." (The game was in her house.)

 

Sad, but even though he was a good friend, when she finally succeeded in severing their relationship from us altogether ...well...I wasn't overwhelmingly heartbroken. Gaming was much saner afterwards.

 

-Shelley

[TechnoViking]

I remember once back in college we were playing Champions in the campus student union. I was running my regular group of 5 players, and had two new people show up that heard about the group. One of the new people seemed twitchy.

 

About a hour into the game, we were in combat and the twitchty guy was stunned for a phase by an attack. The guy started yelling saying there was no way he could be stunned. I showed I had a rolled 4 to hit and near max damage.

 

The guy did not say anything, so I assumed he was not going to agrue any more. I started running the combat again, when one of friends yelled "Look Out!!!". A swiss army (big one) flew past my head (missed by a foot), blade out, and stuck in the wall behind me. The twitchy guy and his friend were close to the door and bolted as fast as they could.

 

We did not call the police, since we only had their first names, and figured the only thing that would happen would that the RPG club would get banned from campus.

 

I never did see that guy again, but I did keep the knife.

 

Mike

[Rage]

well its not my lowest but the most infuriating at the moment is listed on my site under the Sub heading Rhys

 

http://www.thenakednic.tk what are you waiting for? use my shamless plug to read my story... Or umm bump my hits.

[Lord Mhoram]

Well, back from work, so I can drop some of mine.

 

Rolemaster game. The GM was also our champs GM, and he was taking a break from supers. This was a college game, and the GM played favorites. In champs he had no upper DC limit, and mixed 250 pt characters with 500+, and didn't work to get us involved....So characters I ended up playing, unless I really Minmaxed were effectively useless (the favorite was a good player, and retired his powerful character so we could have more fun). That is background.

So in rolemaster, everyone is on even footing, and I'm playing a sorceror and he does well for months. Never hurt badly, contributed to the group, and we got attack, he was hit with a 00 E crit, and died. Just like that. Extremely frustrating, but that is part of rolemaster the chance to get a nasty crit, but getting to roll such things on the bad guys.

 

My other really bad moment was also a rolemaster game. The GM was trying some new rules, ones that due to my background with Champs I saw could be abused mightily. And I wasn't over being a powergamer- so I did. However I really roleplayed the characters and while they had the capacity to be totally obscene, they never were. So a situation developed where one of my characters wanted to do something (he was a fightermage and potentially a better fighter than the primary fighter) and he was 5th or 6th level. Due to my abuse of his changed rules, and some mighty fine tactics, I beat a 15th level fighter one on one. At which point the GM asked for my character sheets, and I gave them to him. He said "You could take over the whole party with these two" to which my responce was "Yeah... why would I want to" and he was totally flabbergasted. So I should have seen the next thing coming....

We were at a climactic fight, and one of the players get really lucky and scores an open end crit on the main bad guy and drop him in the second round. GM is visibly annoyed. Next session he said _he_ was going to roll all rolls, including all character rolls, behind the screen from then on. I said "Well if you are going to roll my characters stuff, you might as well play them too" handed my characters to him and left.

[CrosshairCollie]

Hmm ... oh, where oh where to start ... hmm, absolute worst.

 

Well, on a personal level, there was a fairly recent D'n'D game, where one of the players said, and I quote 'call me when the fight starts' and left the room to go dink on the host's computer. Then he complains about why he has fewer XP than everybody else ... (side note, there was no fight that game)

 

More annoyingly is his 'UberNPC' habit, wherein the party is accompanied by a high-level NPC with ridiculous amounts of ph4t l3wt (forgive the leet), as an excuse for him to throw a ridiculous fight in front of us. For example, in a World of Darkness game, our fledgling group of 3 werecritters and 1 mage encountered about 24 Black Spiral Dancers. But never fear, our GM is playing King Albrecht (the lord of the werewolf nation), so he takes on 23 of them by himself 'off-panel'. Playing D'n'D and a PC gets ready to do something remotely dangerous? Here comes NPC-boy! He's done this so many times that they've all blended into a combined Worst Gaming Experience.

[Koshka]

Originally posted by CrosshairCollie

More annoyingly is his 'UberNPC' habit, wherein the party is accompanied by a high-level NPC with ridiculous amounts of ph4t l3wt (forgive the leet), as an excuse for him to throw a ridiculous fight in front of us. For example, in a World of Darkness game, our fledgling group of 3 werecritters and 1 mage encountered about 24 Black Spiral Dancers. But never fear, our GM is playing King Albrecht (the lord of the werewolf nation), so he takes on 23 of them by himself 'off-panel'. Playing D'n'D and a PC gets ready to do something remotely dangerous? Here comes NPC-boy! He's done this so many times that they've all blended into a combined Worst Gaming Experience.

 

I know the type, believe me. A few years ago, I was in an online Dark Champions game. The original GM came down with burnout, so one of the other players offered to run for a few months. That was when all of us learned that while we were built on 75 points plus disads, his GM-PC was 150 plus disads plus more XP than anyone else had gotten. The substitute GM trimmed the character down to campaign guidelines, but when the original guy was ready to run again it was with super-character.

 

Of course, in that game you only got XPs if you were still online at 1 or 2 AM (my time zone) and the GM decided to wrap up. Since I had to be up at 5:30 AM for work the day after his games, you can guess how much XPs my character ever got.

[AnotherSkip]

Ugh okies here is one that is just about as bad as a Gm supercharacter.

 

I build well rounded very character concept oriented characters. these are the kind of characters that are more likely to go wide rather than specialise. On the other hand there are two munchkin players who rather go deep than wide. To give you an idea one character (who for no particular reason on Gods Green Earth is the same"classs" as i am ) has 15 dice to pierce the umbra (we are using special rules of Gnosis+Primal Urge, Powergamer #2 is our WereWolf GM.), MAx willpower and Max Gnosis, and to top it all off is a White Howler with 5 in Past Lives. To be fair to both the GM and Player, the White Howler is a character we rescued nearly six months ago from a Black Spiral Cairn following one of my dream quests. However the Player proceeded to take MY flipping phase of the moon rather than one of the Two open phases we had so now there is a great deal of competiton. And the guy can be a real arse though it is I think unintentional. Especially after I get done teaching him 7 Rites he then turns around next session and declares that i am _Not_ his mentor.

 

This is the same guy that in ED Was a Nethermancer and Versatilitied Elemental Weaving in order to more or less out spellcast my Elvish Elementalist. In other words he has a habit of building characters that crawl up my backside. When I would rather not be going straight for Power power power I have to, to keep this guys mouth from running like a river how much better he is than me.

 

Needless to say the next time he tries to get his rite of accomplishment for Wisdom it will be challenged.

 

The Gm is just as bad, not only does he regularly kill of 20 Werewolves per story (the technocracy attacked a moot, the Catholic Church has apparently developed a Werewolf Specific SARS like attack) And i have a sneaking suspicion the Gm uses GM only info interchangeably with NPC only info. He also is a long time Shadowrunner with apparently zero desire to socialise in game. All social interaction attempts with our cairn outside of "the Gms plotted adventure"get more or less brushed aside. Even for an old shadowrunner he ignores my Contacts, my Mentor and just about everthing else aside from combat.

 

im not even sure he reads the books and he throws incorrect Vampires (my own OOC speciality) and incorrect mages (another players OOC speciality) while claiming that they are not the gift critters in the books.

 

ill take part of that back. he has read the Main second edition book (the edition we are playing) he not only states he does not have time but point blank refuses to read the other books or listen to our advice on the WW world.

[Killer Shrike]

Originally posted by Captain Xenon

the worst? well...

SNIP

 

Your kidding right? If not, why did you ever go back?

[ShelleyCM]

Originally posted by LadyChaos

The player followed me home, swore his undying love. I told him to get lost. He then stalked me (parked outside my house nearly every night for hours, etc.) for several weeks. I finally had a "friend" talk to him. The stalking stopped, but then he went to the FLGS and wrote five pages of obscenties about me in the gamers' interest notebook. After that, the store never allowed that sort of sign-up again, which was too bad.

 

The gaming story was bad enough, but this....this is ridiculous! I've been hit on, but nothing so bad (thank heaven).

 

-Shelley