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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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