[Channel Teaser]
How the Terrible Dungeon Master Can’t Improv,
At All
A game I was in recently, dissolved.
And the parts of the group who got along elsewhere,
re-formed.
We're something like 85% through Rise of The
Runelords, but I just couldn't take the DM's
sheer lack of investment, effort, and storytelling
anymore.
As a preface, this is not some newbie DM who's
doing the best they can with very little experience.
This person has been running games for more
than a decade, and has run large swaths of
this specific adventure path at least 4 times
in the past.
I was involved in one of them, and it was
beat-for-beat, line-for-line exactly the same
despite a wildly different group of PCs and
players alike.
But I'm getting ahead of myself…
When this campaign started, I wanted to do
something unique that would tie into the themes
of the adventure: being big damn heroes, fighting
evil wizards bent on world domination, all
that.
So I opted to put together a paladin.
I got permission to play an aasimar, and went
for the version of that race that can pass
for human.
Then I took it a step further, and gave him
a literal Red Right Hand.
The son of a noted crusader in a theocracy
half a world away, he was chased out of town
one step ahead of a witch hunt because his
right hand started changing as he hit puberty.
Now it's a black-nailed, red-scaled monstrosity
that he keeps concealed beneath a gauntlet.
Said gauntlet has gone black and grown vicious,
thorny spikes just from its constant exposure
to this "corruption".
This was done as a deliberate attempt to mirror
the villain of the first book of the campaign,
a piece of meta knowledge I had, and discussed
with the DM beforehand.
The villain is an aasimar who's purposefully
trying to corrupt herself through the worship
of an evil goddess, and her left hand and
arm are twisted and demonic.
The idea was that, thematically, if he could
save her, then maybe there was hope that he
could save himself from whatever this curse,
affliction, etc. is.
The entirety of the first book is just painting
by the numbers.
I didn't notice at first because I figured
it was just my familiarity with this stretch
of the game.
But the paladin and his party fight to protect
the town, only kill enemies when they have
to, and they capture a majority of the named
NPC bad guys to bring back to the sheriff.
We get no cooperation or RP out of them when
we try to interrogate them, but sure, whatever.
Then comes the fight with the first book boss.
Not only is she overpowered in a fairly epic
duel of light v. dark, good v. evil, but the
paladin manages to take her alive.
He has her bound and stabilized, ready to
take back to town, when out of nowhere an
explosion of teeth and tentacles devour her
right out of his arms.
I've checked with other players… this isn't
part of the module.
That was when I started noticing other things.
Like how NPCs would only ever deliver lines
that were written in the book, or be characters
you could interact with if it was specifically
written in this book of the module that they
had a role to play.
If you tried to find them and interact with
them other than during those periods, you
got curt responses, if you could even find
them at all.
And once we handed bad guys over to the law,
they just vanished into a black hole.
Couldn't talk to them, never found out what
happened to them; they were out of sight,
and out of mind.
Nothing else was written about them in the
book, and it was too much to ask the DM to
roleplay with us after they'd had their screen
time, apparently.
It was several years of campaign, but I'll
list some of the things that I felt were big
red flags that should have made me leave a
lot earlier than I did.
Getting visibly pissy when we wouldn't interact
with haunts.
For those who don't know, a haunt is basically
a ghost-based trap that usually requires a
Will save and does bad things to you… they
also tend to be pretty obvious.
Room full of bloodstains, moaning, visible
ghostly entities, etc.
If there was nothing we needed in that room,
we shut the door and kept walking instead
of putting our foot in the bear trap.
Constantly bitching about how OP we were,
yet refusing to change any aspect of the pre-written
combats to reflect who was actually across
the table from her.
Pre-written battles aren't perfect, but if
you have a 1 versus many fight with an evil
anything when the party head is a paladin,
don't be surprised when it gets its face pushed
in.
I suggested everything from changing the shape
of the arena, giving the bad guys more room
to maneuver so we couldn't just gang up on
them, to adding bodyguards and minions -- in
my opinion, the best strategy for increasing
challenge without risking too big of a total
party kill threat -- but was consistently
ignored.
No changes would be made, but the complaining
would remain.
Regularly forgetting / getting mad about party
abilities: I've lost count of the number of
times this DM would try to force a fear check,
and glare at me when I reminded them my PC
was immune to fear, and had been for more
than a year and a half out of game.
As to specific things, there were three big
incidents that I feel finally put a stake
through my patience, and willingness to see
it through to the end with this DM at the
helm, other than the one big story cock block
already mentioned above.
The First
My paladin literally walked away from his
faith at level 5.
His archetype traded in spells, and his alignment
maintained, so his other class features stayed
in place, which was the whole reason I entertained
the idea of turning his back on his god, since
having a deity at all was more for flavor
and background than actual mechanical need.
I didn't do this subtly, either.
I made a big song and dance of it as he buried
a man he'd been forced to kill to protect
others, who was being driven mad by ghoul
fever.
He tore off the holy symbol he'd worn since
childhood, and threw it in the grave with
the man, telling him he'd get more use out
of it, symbolically burying his faith along
with the man.
The DM had zero reaction, and when asked about
it later claimed they hadn't noticed / didn't
remember despite me drawing the whole table's
attention to it, and bringing it up in later
emails I sent.
The Second
I'd originally left big gaps in the character's
ancestry and history for the DM to fill in
and play with to tie him closer to the game.
When it became clear that wasn't going to
happen, around level 11-12, I filled them
in myself.
The character had gained infernal bloodline
sorcerer powers through a particular feat
tree, a touch that could leave one shaken,
and the ability to summon hellfire, and he'd
taken the aasimar feats to grant him steel
skin, wings, and a blast of blinding sunlight.
But for flavor, I'd been saying that he can
transform these features, the steel layer
is beneath his normal skin a la Terminator,
his wings manifest only when he wishes, etc.
The DM shrugged and made no objection, and
around this point I found a portrait of the
archfiend Belial.
This creature is half angel, half demon, and
given that my paladin's "corruption" had been
spreading, when he was full-on in fighting
form, he looked like a smaller version of
this archfiend.
Belial was also a natural shapeshifter, playing
right into the flavorful mutations and regressions
my paladin had been displaying.
The idea at this point was that his bloodline
is so potent because it goes back to one of
the major powers of hell, and no one ever
told him… if they ever knew.
I wrote up a whole dream sequence deal about
the powers of hell becoming aware of him,
and laid it out specifically to give my DM
a chance to tempt him.
In this case I spelled it out; offer him belonging.
A home where he'd be valued and wanted, free
from judgment, and where his place was assured.
That would have been a serious temptation
for someone driven into exile, always leaving
town before people can find out about his
demon claw.
The arc directly after this incident was going
into a parallel dimension filled with evil
wizards -- evil wizards who could have taken
one look at him and thought, "What the hell
is a servant of Belial doing here?
What does it want?"
But that discussion was never had.
None of these evil wizards so much as tried
to address this glowing, steel-skinned, one-angel-wing-and-one-devil-wing
herald of destruction.
Even when he tried to speak to them, they
just flung a spell at him.
For the record, none of those fights lasted
very long, because that PC may as well have
been built to slay evil wizards.
Which was why I sort of handed the DM a way
to make them social encounters, as we weren't
there to kill these wizards; we were there
to acquire a particular weapon.
We could have just taken it and gone, leaving
them in peace if they'd been willing to actually
talk to us.
The one that really stuck with me in this
section, and that left me staring at the DM
going, "Are you serious?
That's what she does?" was the encounter with
the succubus.
Belial is the Lord of Lust, and with an Int
of 18 and being an extraplanar creature, this
wizard would recognize at a glance where the
paladin's bloodline comes from.
But rather than offering hospitality, thereby
binding the party to the laws of being good
guests, or at least putting them on their
back foot, or offering to tell him more about
his great sire when he looks confused as to
what she's talking about and the titles she's
addressing him by, she reaches for a whip
and goes toe-to-toe with him.
The enchantress succubus, who can feel the
combined auras of good and lust emanating
from the Warrior of The Holy Light, took one
look at him and thought, "Yeah, I'll hit that
guy with my whip.
That will work out well for me."
She was dead in one turn, as was any trust
this DM had built up with me over the years.
Third -- The Final Straw
At this point, I just wanted to finish the
campaign.
Scorched earth, salt the ground, walk away
and not play under this DM again.
But the incident right after all of these
wizard fights was the straw that broke my
camel's back.
We were in the wild northern mountains, and
heard the cry of a Wendigo.
Me, the player, knows that's a high CR monster.
My character knows jack, and is simply told
it's a powerful evil spirit of cannibalism
and the north.
My character solo'd a demon one CR below his
level about a month ago, and didn't even get
hit before blasting it back to hell.
He then proceeded to beat the brakes off the
lich who'd summoned said demon in a mid-air
smash fest that looked like the cover of a
Meatloaf album.
Being told, "There's an undead creature looking
to start shit," it is met with a sigh and
an equivalent of, "Sure, why not, I'll pencil
him in later."
We then proceed to walk through a haunted
mining camp, blasting through every save we
were asked for, and once again ignoring the
haunts that are so obvious it's comical.
The DM starts getting actively snippy with
us for not taking this seriously, at which
point I asked what the last save DC was.
It was about a 17.
Not only was I immune to fear (and granting
the party +4 bonuses just for being near me),
but that save had gotten crushed by everyone
there.
No, we're not afraid of this.
We've spent this entire campaign fighting
armies of ghouls, staring into the eyes of
demons, and going toe-to-toe with evil wizards
of legend… getting scared about ghostly
moanings nearly 30-year-old bloodstains is
stupid at this point, and expecting us to
act afraid when we have no reason to be is
ridiculous.
Were the player’s expectations too high
for the DM or was the DM half-assing it?
I’m sure for every great DM out there, there
are 10 bad ones.
Please tell us of your experiences and comment
your reactions below!
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