The Worst DnD Game
I Have Ever Played
Here is my tale of the single worst experience I've had playing D&D.
Be warned, it's cringy, and is probably nowhere near as bad as I think some of you would expect.
The beginning
Our story begins in early 2015, when I was invited by a friend to fill a slot in one
of his friends' D&D campaigns.
I say friend; to be honest, this guy (who we shall call "Bill") was more of an acquaintance
who I talked to on occasion about tabletop gaming.
5e was relatively new at the time, and I hadn't really played D&D since 4th edition dropped.
So, I thought I'd give 5e a shot, and agreed to join this campaign.
Bill was ecstatic, but he did give me a rather mysterious piece of advice.
"So, uh, don't worry about buying any of the game manuals, but be sure to bring a blank
character sheet and at least fifty bucks."
He wouldn't elaborate on why I needed to bring fifty dollars, but, eh, maybe this "DM friend"
was a paid DM?
That was my reasoning at the time, and I wish I had grilled Bill on this further, because
it would have saved me two months of pain.
So, a week or so later, I show up at the address Bill gave me, and ring the doorbell.
I'm slightly late, but I have a blank character sheet, and I've bought $100 (as I thought
I'd try and give a good first impression and have enough to cover for a player if they'd
forgotten their fee).
The door is answered by another of the players, who owned the house we were playing at.
We'll call him "Phil".
Phil invites me in, shakes my hand, and brings me into the dining room where the other players
are waiting.
This is where the problems begin.
The problems begin
So, I'm introduced to the DM, who we'll call "Bob".
After the initial introductions are complete, Bob asks if I've played D&D before.
I tell him that I've played 3e and 3.5e in the past, but haven't played 5e.
Then he begins to run me through character creation.
He hands me a copy of the PHB, and tells me to flip through to find a class I think looks
interesting.
I settle on Paladin.
Then, the bombshell.
"Right, so, uh, that'll be $15 for the Paladin class".
For a moment I'm convinced this is a practical joke of some sort.
I look around.
Bill looks apologetic, and Phil is trying not to make eye contact.
The other player- who I'll call "Arthur" for the sake of naming everyone, although he doesn't
really come into this story at all- is busy texting on his phone.
I ask why Bob wants fifteen dollars to play a specific class.
"Oh.
You weren't informed?
Yeah, I treat all of the overpowered classes as premium content.
You have to pay to play them."
I'm baffled.
This is honestly where I should have quit, but there were two things that stopped me
from walking away and excusing myself.
First, I had spent an hour on the bus to get here, it was a ten minute walk down the road
to the bus stop back the way I came, and it was pouring with rain outside.
Two, I didn't want to offend Bill, and since I enjoyed talking with him, I didn't want
to ruin our semi-friendship.
Finally, I reasoned that I could always play something else.
"Which classes do I not have to pay for?"
Turns out that the only two classes that Bob didn't require a deposit to play were the
Fighter and the Beastmaster Ranger.
Not knowing the system, I picked Beast Master ranger, upon which I was handed a pre-made
character sheet.
I asked why I was required to print out and bring a blank character sheet.
Bob told me that he didn't have a printer, and so he needed people to bring character
sheets so he could generate new characters if our old ones died.
Later, Bill would explain that the "fifty bucks" was in case I wanted to play one of
the classes Bob priced higher, like Wizard or Sorcerer (both of which were around forty
bucks), and apologized for leaving me in the dark about these peculiarities.
His excuse was that Bob had told him to be as vague as possible about the house rules,
to avoid "scaring off new players".
I can honestly see why Bob would do something like that, in retrospect.
In any case, I was slightly annoyed that I wouldn't be getting taught about how to generate
characters in a system I'd never played before; and that most of the class options weren't
available without paying; but, hey, maybe things would get better?
Things do not get better
In fact, things got decidedly worse.
The campaign we were playing was basic as hell.
We were in a magical jungle filled with monsters, and we were just exploring.
That's it.
There were no towns, no NPCs to talk to, no way to buy new items, just random encounters,
most of which were combat-based.
It wasn't the worst experience as far as campaigns go.
I actually enjoyed it at first.
We'd decide where to go, we'd fill out a map with new terrain and stuff, and when we hit
an encounter, there'd usually be something good to find.
If you've played, say, an Elder Scrolls title or a Bethesda-made Fallout game, this is basically
what we were doing, minus any questing.
Most of the rewards we got were meager.
For example, my first encounter with the group involved us defeating a horde of undead zombies
in a ruined fort.
It was pretty simple, and we got a handful of silver coins (which we couldn't use because
there were no vendors), a handful of basic non-magical weapons, a couple of healing potions,
and some arrows.
Now, I assumed at the time that this was to let a new player ease into the system, and
to get a feel for the combat and gameplay.
And, true enough, this was a pretty good introduction to how to play the game.
If I can give Bob credit for something, he was a pretty good encounter designer, and
a lot of his encounters were pretty fun and unique.
But when it came to rewarding us with XP, another problem came up.
Bob had tallied up the XP, and it was time to doll it out.
But then, Phil pipes up with another bombshell.
"Hey, uh, I want to double the XP for this encounter".
Bob looks at something pinned to his DM screen.
"That'll be five dollars".
That was pretty shocking.
What was more shocking was that all of us had to give five dollars, or all of the XP
would go to the people who paid money to double it.
I was floored.
This was about as scummy as you can get.
But when I asked about this, dumbfounded, it turned out that Bob had "optional" microtransactions
for pretty much everything.
Low on health?
Two bucks, and you're back to full.
Out of arrows?
Again, two bucks.
Out of spell slots?
Two bucks per level of slot, per expended slot.
Magic items weren't distributed based on which player needed them the most, but were instead
auctioned off by Bob to whoever bid the highest.
If you were playing a spellcaster, a large portion of spells were pay-to-learn.
If you died- as in, were downed- you didn't do death saves.
Oh no, why would you do something like that?
Instead, you had "revival points", which you had three of when you created a character,
and which you had to pay to get more of, or loot from encounters.
Worst of all, if you failed a saving throw or ability/skill check...you could pay more
money to get a bonus to your roll that could possibly pass it.
If Bob worked at EA or Activision-Blizzard, he'd be an employee of the millennium.
Hell, he'd probably win some sort of promotion, or get put in charge of something.
But, fortunately for gamers worldwide, Bob was some sort of general manager, and probably
hasn't gone into the game industry in the intervening seven years since this game.
And I was an idiot for not quitting once I found all of this out.
The issue was that, despite all of this being genuinely disgusting, I didn't quit the game
and leave.
Part of it was that I was somewhat invested in the gameplay of 5e that had been left untouched
by Bob and his shitty pay-to-win "house rules".
I still play 5e to this day, in spite of this awful first experience, because it's a genuinely
fun RPG.
Another part was that, at this point in time, I had developed what I would definitely call
a friendship with Bill, which- spoiler- didn't last (mainly due to me getting a job at another
company, and us falling out of contact).
I didn't want to rock the boat, and I also didn't want to have to go and find an unfamiliar
group of players to hang out with on Saturday afternoons.
So, I kept playing, trying to pay as little as possible while still enjoying the game.
I still ended up paying a lot of money to play with this group, and while I can't give
an exact number on how much, that $100 in my wallet was pretty much all gone by the
third session, and I was spending as little as humanly possible.
The end
To cap this off, there really wasn't any sort of dramatic end brought on by Bob's terrible
DM'ing.
The game went on for about eight sessions with me there, and then we sort of just drifted
apart.
People had work and family obligations, there were issues getting to the sessions, and eventually
the game sort of went on hiatus and never came back.
I don't miss it.
Far from it.
By that point, I'd figured out that I was going to have to get out of that game sooner
rather than later if I wanted to not have the hobby ruined for me.
So it was fortuitous that I didn't have to make an exit that I would have felt guilty
about later.
But, if there's one thing I can credit this sordid experience for- two months of my life
and hundreds of dollars I will never be getting back- it's that it has made me extremely wary
of microtransactions in non-tabletop games, and that, I think, has saved me from wasting
a lot of money.
I guess learning about the terrible nature that is microtransactions can be the silver
lining of this story.
What kind of monster adds microtransactions into roleplaying?
Tell us what you would do if someone tried to charge you for in game perks.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel, All Things DnD.
Stay tuned for more amazing Dungeons & Dragons content!