[Channel Teaser]
When A DM Ran Curse Of Strahd Claiming It Is His Homebrew
Hi everyone.
All Things DnD is back with another story.
Forcing your players to play classes and races they don’t want to is one of the worst things
a DM can do.
Making them league of legends characters is just salt in the wounds.
Listen to one of the worst DMs ruin DND for these players.
This one will be a bumpy ride, so buckle up.
As any other good horror story, this one starts a few months ago.
I stumbled upon a small advertisement in our local lfg about “roleplay heavy game”
and decided that I have enough spare time to give it a go.
I’ve been invited to a discord server with only one other Dude.
Server was too big for a regular game, and soon I figured out that a few games were running
here by a few DM’s.
The DM invited us to voice chat and started explaining his homebrew world, and then announced
that the game will be The Curse of Strahd.
It wasn't mentioned in the advertisement, and the DM started explaining that the game
will be in fact homebrew in his homebrew world, he just needed a name for a big vampire villain
and didn't want to use Dracula.
The other Dude left immediately as he didn’t sign up for a module, and I should’ve followed
him, but I really wanted to play some of my characters in a roleplay heavy group, so I
stayed.
Stupid past me.
DM then went on a rant about how the Dude was wrong, and his character idea was stupid
anyway, he wanted to play a Forge Cleric, what kind of concept is that amiright?
(Well, this was the biggest red flag, and at this point I realized, that this will be
some bullish game, and even if I wont be able to have a good game, I will be able to have
a good laugh.
So I kinda knew where we were going, but I didn't know how badly we would get there.)
Then the DM asked me for my character concepts.
I offered him 4 or 5, he said they all didn’t fit his world.
I exclusively play small races, but he doesn't have any in his world.
No kobolds, no goblins, no gnomes, no halflings.
Anyway only people who minmax play halflings, there is no other reason.
Ok, I have three beloved concepts at the moment and they are not small, but still don’t
fit – no dragonborns, no monks, no artificers, bloodhunter is okay, but I won't let you play
it, its underpowered, who even play feylocks?
At some point he sends me some character reference and asks “what if it would be a Nordic tiefling
ranger?”
Okay, So we have my character – Tyra, DM suggests a few character traits and reasons
why she’s not in the North right now, we establish her connections.
DM tells me she should have some kind of blinking? and it's important to the plot somehow.
I agree and pick Horizon Walker subclass.
So we started our session one (of course there was no session 0).
The cast: DM – he is just that;
Tyra – my girl; Paladin – owner of the server and DM of
another game, where our DM and Bladelock are playing;
Bladelock – very special elven woman and sister of Paladin;
Feylock – young and curious girl; Artificer – some old friend of DM.
Well, he told me that he doesn't want any artificers, but here is one.
Maybe she just had a better character concept.
From the start my Tyra is assigned as a bodyguard to the Artificer, I’m okayish with that.
We meet as a party somewhere 3 hours into the game, and it's going pretty well actually.
Players are great, the DM is a good storyteller and he puts a lot of effort into visuals and
music.
Fun so far.
I’ve made Tyra a little bit brutish, but putting a lot of nature related metaphors,
our interactions with Artificer are fun as well.
We all are going to Artificer's old mansion, and when we find it I realize it's a Deathhouse
(I’m not running a module he said).
So yeah, Artificer is the last of her family, others were slain by Strahd and this is her
mansion.
We enter and explore all floors, but there are 0 encounters.
There is some bullshit in the basement, we kill it.
The DM tells us we can't stop the session until we finish.
We are at almost 7 hours of play.
At the end he says: “you did a bad job”.
Our party is unbalanced, we have only one frontliner, who gets obliterated in two rounds.
Somehow only my character did okay, or so he says.
Only one of us got downed in combat but he wants everything to be very realistic so if
you don’t patch yourself immediately after being hit – you die.
The roleplaying part was fun, though, so I’m still on board.
We all stay to talk after the session, and the DM says “I want to play D&D with friends
so we all must become friends.
Every evening we sit in chat, come sit with us.”
I have some neurotic problems with coming to places I wasn't personally invited to,
so I announce that, letting them know I can come, if you will announce the gathering in
some way.
We all leave.
I text the DM after the game asking if I can change my subclass so it will fit melee play
style more, and he is okay with that.
But he mentions that I will still need “blinking” for plot reasons and he will make me a feat,
that I must take.
Ok, I guess?
Session 2 comes, we all sit in a Deathhouse, drinking tea and making plans on how to renovate
this place to live here.
The DM says that we can't stay here, we need to move to Barovia.
So we go.
We get there, meet Istmark, he tells us about the place and about Ireena.
We are totally not playing a module here.
He changed things a bit, to be honest.
Irina and Istmark are lovers now.
We, totally not according to the module, escort Ireena to Vallaki.
I have a great time interacting in character, but Paladin is mostly silent.
Feylock meets her patron, and its League of Legends character.
The DM praises LOL for characters being written well as often as he can.
We end the session and the DM says to the Feylock player in a disappointed tone: “I
expected your character to act differently”.
Weird to hear such things, oh well.
The DM starts ranting that nobody came to voice chat to be friends, and we all leave.
Artificer PMs me, to discuss our characters relationship, and we talk a little bit about
our characters.
She says, oh, you have Nordic ranger with blink.
I played this character in DMs previous game, she has a nice story.
W-T-F?
She says that she played with this DM before and she played Nordic rogue with some blink,
and it was a lot of fun.
I find it disturbing that the DM just decided to give me someone's story, despite me being
proud of my backstory, but I decided not to call him out.
Session 3 we fight some random centaurs on the way to Vallaki, DM says that we are doing
bad (none of us was downed), so he makes the last centaur run away.
We reach Valaki, this is certainly not from a module.
Izek gives us a bad time, and the DM is pushing us to fight him.
Bladelock, at this point, is our party face, so she does most of the interactions with
NPC’s.
All of them pressure her not to kill Izek, but remove him somehow.
We get there and start fighting guards in a small hall, but we all roll badly and can't
kill a single guard in 3 rounds, so some rebels arrive and we go up a small stairs to floor
two, Izek is standing in front of us.
Here everything is going to shit.
So, I ask the DM if I can transfer my Hunters mark on Izek, he says no.
I was running a whole minute on a 40 ft stairs.
I don’t object, I don’t like to argue with the DM in the middle of the game.
So we start fighting.
Me and Paladin frontlining, I cast zephyr strike to leave Izek’s melee range, as I
don’t have much HP left, and throw axes from afar.
Then I ask the DM if I can pick up one of my axes near Izek, he says sure.
I come in melee range and leave, he says, “He will make an attack of opportunity.”
“I still have zephyr strike on me, I don’t provoke opportunity.”
“He has this special ability, so you do.”
“Can I read the ability?”
“No, I didn’t write it down”
Okay, so he hits me and I’m unconscious.
Bladelock, who was told like 40 times by some NPC that we need Izek alive asks if she can
throw a knife to his knee, to make her ranged attack not lethal.
He doesn't allow it, so she comes closer and hits him in melee, misses, as she had shitty
bonus to melee.
Izek crits on her brother, leaving him one eyed (of course we had injuries in our roleplay
heavy game).
We eventually win, but everyone is frustrated.
Tyra insists on cutting Izeks arm off with necessary medical preparation.
The DM says OK, but Artificer and Bladelock players start arguing that it's not realistic,
and if he can die to a dagger to the knee, that he certainly can die to the arm being
cut off.
So DM ragequits.
It could have been a good ending to this story, but he comes back to apologize a half an hour
later.
He gathers us all and announces that two characters will die next session.
I say “Lol, me and Paladin of course, we are the only melee”.
The DM says, no, it won't be Tyra.
We all sit silent, like is it OK to plan the death of a character in a roleplay heavy game
in session 4?
I don’t think so.
Artificer calls the DM in a private voice call, to ask him not to kill her character,
because she likes her, and she is going through some stuff IRL and doesn't want any more stress,
only to figure out that he plans to kill Artificer and Bladelock.
We don’t talk about it much and session 4 is coming.
There are some things going on in the server, which spice things up a bit.
So there are 3 games currently: one run by Paladin, one by DM and Bladelock is gathering
new players to start her own.
She invited a few people last week, one of them is a minor who is enthusiastic and drawing
her cute druid.
The DM plays in all three games.
So the day of the game came, and I got messaged by the DM half an hour before the start, to
come to voice chat.
“Bladelock left the server” he says.
She didn’t give any reason to anyone, she left their gaming group in a messenger and
blocked the DM.
She also left all her new found players on the server.
We sit for a little bit, till Artificer and Feylock enter voice chat and we start discussing
what could have happened.
Paladin was supposed to be absent that session.
I get angry at first, because I don’t like when people ghost, but then one of her players,
the minor, says that she got a text, which explains that Bladelock said this server was
toxic and couldn’t stand it any more.
We confronted the DM, as last evening they were playing LOL together in voice and he
is the only one who could know anything.
He makes a guess:“She left because you didn’t want to be friends and never sit in voice
with us”.
We shrug, as it’s hard to believe, but he claims it as a working theory.
We discuss a few more possible reasons, as another new player, we will call him Rogue,
enters the voice and blames the DM for bullying Bladelock into leaving.
When Bladelock invited new players, the DM felt obligated to call them in voice and explain
to them, “how we play here”.
Rogue wanted to play a rogue, so DM called him, to make sure he wont steal from the party
and understands, that playing halfling rogue is dumb.
He made the young girl cry by criticizing her druid.
And every time he got in voice with Bladelock he pressured her to play her character how
he sees it.
After all, he assigned her that character.
We all sat and listened to the Rogue’s story, silent.
The DM says that all Rogue says is bullshit, and asks sarcastically: “Did I assign characters
to anyone else?”
“Yes, to me”, I said.
“And me”, says Feylock.
“And me, actually”, says Artificer.
I sit there silently.
Both Artificer and Feylock entered this game after me.
He told me no to both of these classes and then he forced someone else to play them.
DM is trying to stabilize situation, he kicks Rogue from voice tried convincing us that
we picked our characters by ourselves, but all three of us are standing our ground at
this point and trying to talk to DM and explain to him, that his actions lead to Bladelock
leaving this server and not wanting anything to do with TTRPGs any more.
He says: “Yes, it might be that, but she also might leave, because we didn’t sit
in voice like friends”.
Then Paladin shows up, he says that he bans DM from his server and reads us a message
from Bladelock, which sounds like she was bullied by the DM.
A lot.
We all leave, but the story doesn't end.
Me, Artificer and Feylock have other common server, at which we gather to discuss what
just happened.
And Artificer tells us about their previous game which also broke up, because of the DM’s
bullshit.
He apparently lied to them about his age, as two years ago he was 20 and a few days
prior to our last session he told us he had his 20th birthday.
He once even lied about his father dying to stop the session.
She didn’t know it was lies, but she figured it out later and she hoped that he got better.
When we were generating Tyra he told me about his roleplay group and showed me a few commissions
of his character.
I googled them, and obviously it wasn't his character or commissions.
I don’t know what else he lied about, but when he created another server and invited
us only Artificer joined to support his friend, just to later be blamed for the second group
breaking up because of her (as per DM).
I contacted Paladin, and he got his character assigned as well.
He wanted to play Ranger, but the DM didn’t allow him to forcing me into playing a ranger.
All the times he was silent at games, he just didn’t want to play his character.
So you probably didn’t figure it out, but all our characters were LOL characters.
My “blinking” Nordic bullshit, Feylock was Neeko all along, I struggle to name others,
as I don’t play LOL.
I just hope Bladelock will forgive us all and consider trying TTRPG some time again.
Well that may be one of the worst DMs I have heard about.
Imagine not letting your players build and play the characters they want.
It’s literally the most important thing about the game.
How in the world can you possibly want to play with a character you don’t even remotely
care about?
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