Session 4: My Worst Experience as a Player

We've all had some bad experiences playing ttrpgs (some people have had some truly horrific ones). It's inevitable. You're playing with other human beings who have personalities (sometimes lacking in one), preferences, and their own issues to deal with. My worst experience as a player was in the very first D&D game I ever played, but I think that experience helped me be a better player and a better GM all the same.

The Setup

Post COVID, the world is desperate to get back to normal, get back to doing things with people and despite being an introvert, I too wished for this. I wanted to play some in-person D&D. Looking around, I'd found a local meetup group that helped put available GMs with available players. There were four different GMs that advertised what they were looking for.

The GM we (we meaning me and my wife) managed to get paired up with was a very charismatic guy. He said he'd been playing as a player since 3.5e and was excited to jump in as GM, that he had stories to tell and wanted us to join with him. The perfect pitch. It all feels like foreshadowing now.

We were told we'd play a short 6-8 session of a premade campaign while he finished up his homebrew. So, we started with some "throw away" characters as we dove into the Mines of Phandelver starter campaign. I only wish I knew about this campaign more then, like I do now. One of these days I'd like to run it and run it right...or at least more "right" than I thought it was run with this group.

Our group of people was relatively diverse, more women than men (I will spoil it now to say that there were no gender issues within this group during our entire time together, that is not where the red flags came in). Here's the breakdown (I do not remember all of the character names so we'll stick with placeholders).

• There was me, the newbie: playing a Yuan-ti Rogue (rogues are my videogame default class so it felt comfortable to me for a first time).

• My wife, who'd played once before: playing a Halfling Druid / Cleric that did not have enough intelligence to know how to read (the druid...not my wife, she can read).

• A medium experienced player, J: he played a Tiefling Bard in every way that you'd expect a bard to be without the overdone libido.

• A medium experienced player, L: she played a Eladrin Barbarian that more or less wanted to fight whatever got in her way.

• A higher experienced player, M: she played a Gnome Wizard that was definitely the "reasonable" one of the group.

We had a session 0, we set rules and we planned our characters as a group of mercenaries led by my character, Isel, to keep a carriage of mining goods safe on their way to town.

Initial Issues

Surprisingly, there weren't many initial issues that I would have spotted, only until I look back now do I see them. To start, M was our note taker. (My wife has now become those stereotypical crazy note takers which works perfectly for me because I'm terrible at it.) M would always give the synopsis perfectly of the previous session and we would dive into the next one. We all might have leaned on her more than we should have, but she seemed to enjoy it and K definitely appreciated having someone on hand to call out NPC names.

The DM (K) was fair and humorous. He liked to reference things A LOT, though, and we all found that we would spend between 30 minutes to up to an hour of our overall, hard-stop 3-hour sessions just listening to him reference pop culture. Eventually, it started turning our sessions into having our characters rush through something just so we could "keep pace" with the campaign. The idea of 6-8 sessions of this had long gone out the window.

Soon, we also started to notice that K was very particular on the rules in an odd way. He'd reference frequently back to the "Unforgiving nature" of 3.5e and how "easy" we had it in 5e. All the same, though, he'd make fun of us if we left a room "full of treasure" just because we forgot to say we wanted to look around (despite all of our characters having two perfectly good eyeballs on their faces). I even tried to ask him about using our Passive Perceptions if he was going to insist applying a mechanic to it. At one point we found ourselves at a complete dead end only for him to tell us after the session that we'd missed a clear set of footprints in the snow. "How can we miss something we didn't know about?" "Well, you never asked."

That was the strike one for me.

Next, we found ourselves suddenly leaving the town and thus leaving the campaign entirely (it never got finished). Whisking ourselves off to Neverwinter because, "If you try to trade those treasures here, you'll ruin the town's economy." What an odd thing to say.

Fine, we're now in Neverwinter, bumbling around from business-to-business looking for something to do. I think the overall intent was to have us search for the lost Crown of Neverwinter, but there was never anything concrete enough to move us in that direction. Something that we began to notice, though, was every time we walked into a business, no matter what, the shop keeper hated us. It made no sense. We could come in as civil as possible, saying we want to buy something, and they would act like we'd just set fire to their home. K did this with our very first shop keeper back in the village and we'd thought it was somewhat funny then as we were being typical chaotic adventurers in a shop but...he never quite gave up the joke after that.

It's not fun playing in a world where everyone thinks you're annoying without actually interacting with you.

Secondary Issues

We were coasting at that point and I was getting tired of playing Isel, especially as K kept trying to force a character arc on her that I had made clear several times I did not want (that's a whole other thing). But then M announced she was moving and we were suddenly down a notetaker. The send off was fine, I even took the opportunity to have Isel go with her wizard as a way to retire the rogue. K, of course, didn't like that as he claimed he had "10 pages of campaign" planned for her. I will never believe this to be true given future discoveries, but we moved on and my wife and I invited a friend of ours to fill M's place. I rejoined the group as a Human Monk / Barbarian and our friend joined as a Dragonborn Sorcerer.

Now what? Well...right about now was when we all had started to ask K about implementing some of our character's stories into the campaign. We'd all worked on something, we'd all presented something. All of us...except for one: L. L had about one sentence written for her backstory: she wanted to find her father back in the Feywild.

Side commentary: as a GM, I appreciate when players have expectations for their characters but allow me the freedom to plan things for the future.  And in such planning I will reach out to them from time to time to ask questions and get feedback on how their character might act.  L, though, is my pet peeve of a player.  Someone who claims to know the game perfectly but provides no effort on the part of their character.  When I (or any GM for that matter) are planning and plotting an entire campaign, telling your GM "I'm fine with whatever" while expecting a novella is the fastest way to be put at the back of the character arc line.  I've already got a lot of work on my plate...I'm not planning something from scratch just because you won't do the effort.  As a player you are responsible for your character, that means mechanics and whatever story you want to tell with them.  Giving me the information to apply that to the campaign is your responsibility.  That's it.

Onward to the campaign, K decides to suddenly have us see a pair of Eladrin that reveal there is a Feywild portal nearby. No really, he just kind of spawns them in out of no where in the middle of a session (yet another sign that he never prepped anything). Okay. Whatever, we're changing location again, that's fine with me. Only now is when the cracks start forming as we start every new session rocky, inconsistent, and generally lost. What happened to our clear narrative direction?

At this point in time, both my wife and I have been starting to discuss our frustrations with the other players and they agree with us about reaching out to start asking for some additional guidance, some rough battle maps, better descriptions on locations, etc. I still don't think it was a lot to ask for, especially as I had started running my first campaign with another group of friends by this time. Sure, it required some work and maybe a Saturday or two of preplanning, but it wasn't a lot.

Very quickly, K acknowledges our concerns and tries to start applying it for at least a little while. But again, we'd get a session or two of solid playing where he'd tell us "just wait until I get Roll20 set up" or "just wait until this Kickstarter I donated to comes in" only for things to get rocky again and we'd end up lost. Thinking we were heading in a solid direction only for it to become a very sudden dead end.

My biggest tell of this was when we finished a session after a combat where we'd captured a guard of the Winter Court and told K we would be interrogating him next session. He had all week to plan for something, to make this random buy know a thing or two. Instead, we came into next session where they guy knew nothing except a hunters lodge in the opposite direction we were going and then magically had a cyanide pill in his mouth that killed him instantly. WTF. We bird fed him a way to provide lore and information and he just did nothing with it.

Now, I get work gets busy for people and life gets busy for people but preparation is part of the GM job.  If you do not have time to prepare for sessions (whether it's way ahead of time or the day before), then perhaps you don't have time to be a GM.  Taking a step back and being a player is perfectly reasonable and frequently it can help you feel more inspired to try GMing again.

Anyway, we decide it's time for some table talk. Right at the beginning of our next session we all sit down at the table and air our grievances. Oh boy...get a load of this...

We tell him we're struggling to find the direction we're supposed to be going in this story and he tells us the craziest thing I've ever heard from a GM: the current session cohesiveness is based on how good our summary is at the beginning of the session. Once we give our summary, he adjusted the session to whatever we remembered. What? It then that everything comes into focus. The moment we lost our notetaker, he no longer had a solid plan as to how to run the session, meaning instead of being prepared with a direction for us to go beforehand he was hoping we would remind him. The big issue here was because we hadn't been taking notes like M, our summaries weren't as complete and so he didn't have as good of a base to improv the session from. K tried to claim this was his way of not railroading us, as if notetaking is a mechanic for our characters. He then does admit it's been difficult for him to correct every time. Immediately, we all tell him that's a bad idea and to stop. That we want him to tell a story (just like he'd originally pitched to us) and we were happy being guided on a cozy railroad if that meant having some sort of direction. We even offered the idea of trying another premade campaign again to shake off the bad juju, which he completely rejected for some reason.

He would try to do better after that talk but kept making the same excuses that he wouldn't have time for prep or that we were "too much of a wildcard to bother preparing." That was strike two.

Moving to virtual

Virtual? But I thought you wanted this to be in person? You are 100% correct, my friends, but suddenly K announced he was moving across the country. We should have used that as an opportunity to call it quits then, but instead we said we could manage it virtually. My wife had enough cameras and microphones with her work that she could set up a mini "actual play" table for the rest of us and K would DM from across the country.

Personally, I really dislike virtual ttrpgs, both playing and running.  Cameras or not, I find virtual gameplay can make roleplay difficult and it's a lot harder to "read a room".  Plus, with virtual there tends to be a lot more opportunities for people to get distracted or be less involved when it's not "there turn".  But, I know people can make it work, it's just not for me.

It worked for a bit. Even helped with the battle map problem as he was now able to stream virtual maps that we could draw out on a whiteboard on our table. We even added a new player virtually too, a Kenku Ranger. The perfect sort of thing for a Feywild adventure. Except, two sessions after he joined we left the Feywild, still following some sort of trail after the Barbarian's father. We ventured into Waterdeep, still looking for her father. My wife changed characters to a Sea Elf Fighter, while still looking for the father. She and I tried to start roleplaying out an "enemies to lovers" relationship, while still looking for the father. The constant following of a trail to a dead end, only to be suddenly redirected to another trail, was getting exhausting.

K sent us across two more cities after the so called "Dad of the Year" before landing somewhere where we were told "Your father is here 100%." At this point, a lot of us were going through the motions rather than engaging. i think we all were thinking we were close to the end of whatever this campaign had become and would use this as a way to call it quits. Except...when we walked into the room where the father "had to be" he was gone. Vanished down yet another trail we couldn't find.

Now, the only context I haven't given you all on this rollercoaster is an actual measurement of time so let me add that into the mix. We played (3) times a month, roughly, where we'd play (2) weeks on and (1) week off so we had lots of game time to keep moving things forward. That's a lot of sessions and a lot of opportunity to make progress in a typical campaign. Curse of Strahd, for example, with that same frequency of sessions, we were able to start at level 1 and finish at level 12 in about a year. It took us about eight months IRL to get through some of the Mines of Phandelver (which we never finished) and arrive at Neverwinter by level six. The time it took for us to leave Neverwinter, go to the Feywild, reach level 8 and supposedly find dear old dad was TWO MORE YEARS IRL.

Holy shit, imagine chasing a dead end for two years and getting absolutely fucking nothing at the end of it. That was my strike three.

Being vocal

At this point, I had been GMing my own game for over a year now. I'd worked through my own issues but I'd come to really understand the importance of preparation and listening to my players when they voiced concerns or wants that they'd like for their characters. I'd even been trying to feed K some of the resources I was using for putting together session notes and setting up challenging combats and overall becoming a better GM. But he wouldn't take it and instead just continued to lean on "not having time" while also making time to poorly improv a session every week.

After realizing it had been 2 years of nothing, I reached out to him that I was done with the campaign and would be stepping back. We were hosting our side of the virtual game at our house so I knew there was a chance that would end the campaign entirely but I noted I'd be happy to join for one more session to have my character ride off into the sunset. Instead of that, K nuked the campaign. One discord message and three years were gone under the guise of "you all clearly aren't having fun anymore". I felt bad about it, especially as the other players probably didn't understand where it was coming from but I couldn't keep forcing myself into a 3-hour game that I wasn't enjoying.

What did I learn from all of that?

During all of that I found myself creating my own list of rules that make sure I never treat my players the way K treated us.

1. Good sessions come from preparation. You can prepare several sessions in advance or the day of, but you have to prepare something. Stumbling only gets you so far for only so long.

2. You're creating this story with your players. You have to take in your player's feedback. If they're hoping to weave in their character's arc, you need to help provide the vessel for that.

3. Don't hide lore behind dice rolls. There's a difference between hiding special information and hiding all of the information behind a perception check. If there's a chest sitting in the middle of the room, then you can see it.

4. If you're not having fun, walk away.

Games are meant for fun. Even if the theme of a ttrpg is gritty and dark, there's still fun being had. One of the major things I noticed while in this group is that we should have called it quits sooner and that K, honestly, just wanted to be a player rather than a GM. I could see it in how he played his NPCs and how he would actually act out our character's actions if we were absent or to create a certain punchline (I couldn't find a way to fit this red flag in but he did roleplay our characters frequently to drive his narrative. Big no, no.).

If you all find yourself in a similar sort of game or you're getting that same "ick" vibe of your GM or fellow players always know you can back out and should back out. Why? Because no D&D (ttrpg) is better than bad D&D (ttrpg). Since this first experience I've run three more campaigns (soon to be four) and played in another three with three different groups. Groups that started just as strangers wanting to play ttrpgs and have now morphed into real friendships.

What are some of your ttrpg horror stories? How did you get out of them? Have you ever realized you're the problem GM or player?

Looking forward to your sentiments.

I'll see you next session.

Julia