Worst gaming experiences, Share the guilt, the shame, the stories Options

[Chrysalis]

Greets,

I was thinkign about worst gaming experiences and several other rants.

I have had a few worst gaming experiences. I think the worst was when I was 22. It was June, I had come back from a night club at around 5 AM and I was still hung over at 10 AM. We were supposed to start a new GURPS game that day, so character making was the thing.

There were two guys who I have played with before and one other who I did not know. Anyways, I pulled out my books and did some work on my character. The conversation was really lurching, as in it would start get really entusiastic and then peter out. I was starting to wonder if I was wearing garlic, dead albatross or someone's head around my neck by the way they were looking at me.

They were being super creepy and I felt really uncomfortable. Especially when the new guy pointed out how empty the university was. The tension in the room was palpable. At that point I made a phone call to a friend asked her to phone me back, pretended there was a full blown emergency going on and I picked up my books and left.

Anyone else had similar experiences, which would fal under the heading "worst gaming experiences"?

[BlueMax]

Long ago, in the land of my youth, we had a gamer flip out on us.
In the middle of a session he proclaimed "You are all evil". It was out of context for the game and after some clarification, it was clear he meant the players and not the characters. Out came a laundry list of reasons why the rest of us were scum and he was a righteous dude. The details of our evil would only derail this thread but let us suffice to say the backing of his claims was religious in nature. Being that we had been a group for a handful of years, we tried to talk with him but he just kept getting worse. It was at this point that I invited him to leave and not return. And then, I had to follow it by getting up and making it clear that the invitation aspect was only an attempt at politeness.

In the years since, I have been threatened by a gamer with a fork and knife at Denny's, encouraged to do mind altering drugs to "fit in" and offers to gain carnal knowledge of entire gaming groups ("Uh, no thanks. Not gig. I'll be going now...) . As freaky as all those had been, they pale in comparison to the day a young man I know for 5 years flipped the fark out and lost it. The experience certainly hardened me for the future.


BlueMax

[SincereAgape]

The name of the game is Cyberpunk 2020.

This took place a few years ago at a local gaming convention in Central New Jersey. This was my first time coming back to table top Roleplaying Games in six to seven years. I sat down with four other players and one game master. Each player selected an archtype. There was a nomad, street samurai, a doctor, and a face. The game begins with all four characters waking up in an abandoned hospital. We look outside and see that the surrounding city is a post apocalypse wasteland (Think the movie "24 Days Later"). Our four characters went down into the parking garage of the hospital and discovered a zombie. The street samurai (Shotgun) and the nomad (pistol), whom were the only characaters with firearms blew the zombie away. We then get into a ambulance to try and get away.

Nothing big so far right? Good.

So the four characters get into the ambulance. The street samurai takes the wheel, nomad rides shotgun, and the doctor and I (<---- The face). Get into the back of the ambulance. The closed parking gate into the underground garage begins to rattle as hundreds of zombies begin crying to eat our brains. They burst through the gate and begin chasing us. We begin to make our getaway, but alas we're surrounded! Zombies begin chasing the ambulance, litteraly on our asses.

The nomad, being a great team player, tries to shot them, and then asks the street samurai to pass his shotgun to us in the back so we can use it to decapitate zombies. The street samurai promplty says "No" as the player physically acts out what the character is doing, which is holding the gun away from the rest of us as if it was his firstborn child and we were a pack of blood thirty wolves.

The nomad gets frustrated, and tells the GM he is attempting to make a roll to disarm the street samurai and pass the gun back to the doctor and face. Nomad critically glitches!!! We're fucked. Wait, we get even more fucked. In response the street samurai PC tells the GM he would like to make a roll to shoot the Nomad. He acts this out by pointing a pencil to the Nomad's head, OOC. Critical Success. >_<

The game master looks at the Nomad PC and tells him. "You're dead." The doctor and I stare in disbelief. The Nomad PC gets up from the table, and leaves obviously pissed off. He tells off the street samurai PC. I start laughing to myself, trying to keep in my laughter because I was a immature douche bag at the time. There is a moment of uncomfortable silence. The doctor looks at all of us and says.

"Guys. I've never left a table before but I believe I'm going to leave this one. The game has a really eery feeling to it, and it's really weird. I apologize ahead of time, btu I can't have fun in this atmosphere." The doctor leaves. The game master looks at me and says, "Yeah. I agree. I can't run this module anymore."

The game promptly ends. Welcome back to roleplaying games SincereAgape.

All was not a lose though. Later in the night, I ran into the GM at the hotel bar. He was spending time with Michael Stackpole (Special Guest of the Con). We chill for the rest of the night and pick Stackpole's brain about his creations as he offers both of us tips on writing and gaming. The GM and I are really close chummers now and will always have this disturbing story.

-Here is to Michael Stackpole. Here is to Cyberpunk 2020.

[SincereAgape]

Long ago, in the land of my youth, we had a gamer flip out on us.
In the middle of a session he proclaimed "You are all evil". It was out of context for the game and after some clarification, it was clear he meant the players and not the characters. Out came a laundry list of reasons why the rest of us were scum and he was a righteous dude. The details of our evil would only derail this thread but let us suffice to say the backing of his claims was religious in nature. Being that we had been a group for a handful of years, we tried to talk with him but he just kept getting worse. It was at this point that I invited him to leave and not return. And then, I had to follow it by getting up and making it clear that the invitation aspect was only an attempt at politeness.

In the years since, I have been threatened by a gamer with a fork and knife at Denny's, encouraged to do mind altering drugs to "fit in" and offers to gain carnal knowledge of entire gaming groups ("Uh, no thanks. Not gig. I'll be going now...) . As freaky as all those had been, they pale in comparison to the day a young man I know for 5 years flipped the fark out and lost it. The experience certainly hardened me for the future.


BlueMax

You run with a pretty rough crowd.

-Here is to Blue Max.

[eidolon]

I once tried to play D&D 3.x.

Yeah. I know.

[Bert]

We were playing Rifts at a friends house. I vouched for a friend of mine to tag along, as he had never met my gaming group before. We all rolled up our characters and he asked if he could use my friends phone. My friends' dad, who is probably one of the nicest guys in the world and a gamer to boot, said "yeah, no problem. But we only have one line so keep it short if you could."

My friend who I vouched for then proceeded to call his girlfriend and talk to her for an HOUR AND A HALF. After he finished his call he then sat back down to the table like nothing happened. Last time I ever brought him to THAT group. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

[Critias]

Gencon 2007.

I'll leave the name of the group out of it partially because I can't be bothered to go look them up and partially at a half-assed attempt at not ratting them out or ruining their livelihood or whatever. The game was a Serenity/Firefly LARP. My random character draw was to be the Captain of a rag-tag ship, and my crew and I -- all strangers -- totally hit it off OOC as well as IC. All should have been right with the world.

Alas, it was not to be. My instincts first warned me something was amiss right during their breakdown on how their home-brewed system worked, when they mentioned you could make a cash donation to their gaming troupe in order to get extra character points. I was further worried when they went on to explain the precise money-to-xp ratio, for those that wanted to attend their games at other cons, to advance characters in between sessions (not just with an up-front payment there, face to face). Sirens began going off in my head when they described it as a living universe/campaign, populated by their own personal characters.

I did my best to ignore all that, to socialize with my "crew," and to spend my several hours of gaming getting my money's worth (from core Gencon ticket prices only, I refused to hand over extra cash for better stats). For the most part, the evening was a good time, until I actually called on one of their GMs for something. I asked OOC for them to come join us and referee a staredown that might turn into a gunfight...and instead of overseeing our rock-paper-scissors game as my pilot held a gun to a rival pilot's head and I initiated some social skill rolls, the GM suddenly went IC as her character, "The Sundance Kid," who just happened to be the sheriff of the town our game was being played in.

My character, something of an accomplished gunslinger according to his character bio, according to what we'd been told our numbers scaled towards, etc, etc...was promptly and soundly beaten in an initiative test, then forced to "dance" while her two-gun pistolero shot at my feet and demanded my surrender, all IC. When a member of my crew attempted to shanghai her using their ambush rules (since he'd been lurking to protect my character, albeit not planning on protecting me from a GM), she then beat him despite being caught flat-footed and distracted, and a second GM suddenly came IC behind him and soundly trounced him in a social/intimidation roll to send him running away.

At which point I went back IC long enough to gather the rest of the crew together and just hang out with them for a while, fly off-planet, and the lot of us walked away from the game to go eat some Steak an' Shake.

Fuck those guys. Fuck their greedy schemes to snatch up money from lazy gamers. Fuck their campaign where their characters rule and their paying customers -- in my case, just the ones shelling out money for the advertised price of the game -- are just a rotating list of suckers and guest stars, to be one-upped by their superheroes as they swagger from episode to episode.

[PBTHHHHT]

After reading all y'alls posts... wow, I'm pretty happy with basically all of my gaming experiences.
The worst experiences I have is nothing compared to these.

[paws2sky]

One of my worst gaming experiences was entirely self-inflicted.

It was Marcon 29, the first con I really had the opportunity to go to for more than a day. For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to not sleep. At all. I'm still really not sure why I did this. (It might have been due to the fact that we had an overbooked hoitel room and I didn't feel comfortable with all those other people crammed in there).

Anyway... about 38 hours in, I lost all perception of time. Minutes seemed to stretch into hours. I got stuck playing the most agonizingly long game of Magic ever. I mean, the guy I was playing with was a "long turn" anyway, but his normally 5 minutes turns seemed to take forever. I recall wandering aimlessly around the convention center early in the AM - I didn't want to sit down for fear of going to sleep. Around 48 hours in (maybe more?), I started hallucinating. Mostly, I was hearing sounds. People talking. Stuff like that.

A friend walked up to me as I was examining a newly constructed Magic deck (I had just gotten into Magic and was fascinated with it). I'm not sure what he said to me (probably "hi"), but I replied, "H? What about H!?" Apparently, I got irrationally angry about it, like I he'd just badly insulted me.

He went and rounded up some friends who flatly told me to got get some sleep because they were concerned about my health. I told them I no longer needed to sleep. It was, as I hazily recall, very much like an intervention. I still don't know how they convinced me to go up to the room. I'm told that they came back to find me sprawled across at least three cots. I remember getting up, going around the corner, leaning up against the wall, and falling back asleep.

And to this day, anytime I mention Marcon, I'm reminded of that fateful con. Usually, by my old buddy who will quote, "H? What about H!?"

-paws

[Wesley Street]

So the lesson here is don't play RPGs with people you don't know.

Or sometimes with people you do.

Friend got a dog. Dog was abused in a past life. Dog growled and snapped at everyone, even when I stood up to use the toilet. My fiancee and I never returned to that house after that night.

Crate your dogs.

[Adarael]

Man. Y'all are reminding me why I never game with people I don't know or have many friends vouch for. Chrysalis' post is easily the creepiest, though, just for the "This had no explanation for it" factor.

I don't think I've had a bad gaming experience... But I did have a really FUNNY gaming experience that others probably qualified as "bad".

I used to play in the Camarilla before I exhausted every World of Darkness character concept I could think of. I used to play regularly in the Sabbat vampire venue - a sect of crazy religious fanatics hell bent on kicking the crap out of everyone who wasn't them. We'd picked a fight with the local werewolves, and basically agreed to throw down on them and wipe them out rather than have them pick us off one by one. It was a huge game. Maybe 50 players, and about 20 GMs and people running NPCs. Most of the people running NPCs were regular players in the werewolf venue, and had been tapped to help us because they knew the rules.

Because the vampire players were vicious, smart people - because most of them played Shadowrun with devious GMs - the vampires were winning. Not without losses, but they were winning. Vicious combar resulted in many fatalities on all sides. About 3/4ths of the way through the brawl, one of the people running the NPCs starts to cry. A couple of the others are looking grim too.

One of the vampire players says, "Hey, what's wrong?"
Girl says, in an anguished tone: "It's just NOT FAIR!"
I say, "What's not fair?"
She says: "That these vampires are WINNING!"

And then she and two of the other people who are running NPCs go off about how the good guys - the 'noble warriors of Gaia' - are supposed to win, not these evil blood drinking vampires.

I laughed in their face, because that statement was so insane I had to. Which makes girl cry harder, and her friend starts to sniffle, too. Queue cries of "It's not FUNNY!"

I left and went OOC shortly thereafter, lest words come out of my mouth that I could not take back.

[Backgammon]

There's an old, old thread about this somewhere - may even have been on a previous incarnation of DSF. Wish I could find it cause that had tons of stories that make you go "I can't believe that". Well, with one exception. I won't even mention what it was. It was seriously disturbing.

[Critias]

I will, without hesitation, believe any story anyone tells, ever, about how seriously World of Darkness players take their games. My eyes were opened on that score -- just the sort of crazy person that can be drawn to those games like a moth to an otherwise benign flame -- when I met a guy at my campus LARP who had branded himself with the Wendigo tribal symbol from Werewolf: The Apocalypse.

Not just gotten a tasteful tattoo, mind you. Physically branded himself one night, in a ceremony he saw as a coming of age rite.

[Wesley Street]

I'm not a LARPer. But it sounds to me that the middle-of-the-road, Joe Six-Pack WoD players are fleeing that game in droves and are leaving the crazies behind. A friend wrote a long, scathing note to the Cam leadership about corruption in the sanctioned Indianapolis-area group storytellers along with examples of how the players had become a depraved, intolerable lot with poor standards of grooming and behavior.

The Cam's response was to ban him instead. I suppose no one likes the rabble roused.

What's funny is that the ban is unenforceable. What's even funnier is that the official letter was marked CONFIDENTIAL. He posted it to his Facebook page for the world to see.

[paws2sky]

Some of us rats saw that particular ship sinking a loooong time ago and abandoned it accordingly.

I could go into details about the Camarilla and One World By Night games in OH, but its nothing worse than has already been mentioned, really. Blatant XP whoring (often literally), revolving door Inigo Montoya characters, and so on.

Okay, I have to share this one: I remember one guy going through four (or was it three?) character is a single night. I believe he actually came prepared with multiple characters because he knew his actions were going to result in multiple deaths.

-paws

[ravensmuse]

Playing Maid: the RPG last year in Gencon with a table full of other guys.

One kept looking at me a little too closely.

*shudder*

Edit:

I should add last year's Gencon True Dungeon experience too.

The set up was that there was this cursed item, blah blah blah. Get your party through all of the traps and combat, face off against a maelevolent demon while another party simultaneously tries to figure out the puzzle to unlock item that cancels it out, or something. I don't remember all of the details.

Here's the catch though: you can't talk, can't even interact, with the other party. In anyway.

So we do our business, kill the demon, and then have to wait for this other party to figure out the puzzle. We stand there for about five minutes while they desperately try to solve it until the timer goes off and everyone fails. Nothing for killing the demon or even getting this far, you're just told, "oop, you fail" and the bunch of you are escorted out.

This was mine and my so's first experience with True Dungeon and it'll be awhile until we do it again. That was just not fun.

[Adarael]

I'm not a LARPer. But it sounds to me that the middle-of-the-road, Joe Six-Pack WoD players are fleeing that game in droves and are leaving the crazies behind. A friend wrote a long, scathing note to the Cam leadership about corruption in the sanctioned Indianapolis-area group storytellers along with examples of how the players had become a depraved, intolerable lot with poor standards of grooming and behavior.

The Cam's response was to ban him instead. I suppose no one likes the rabble roused.

What's funny is that the ban is unenforceable. What's even funnier is that the official letter was marked CONFIDENTIAL. He posted it to his Facebook page for the world to see.

1) That sounds like the Cam, all right.
2) Most of the Joe Sixpack WoD players I know have run right back to Mother Church - the First Unified Church of Shadowrun. Which is how it oughta be.

[Wesley Street]

whoring (often literally)

That was mentioned in the letter.

Most of the Joe Sixpack WoD players I know have run right back to Mother Church - the First Unified Church of Shadowrun. Which is how it oughta be.

And the congregation says, "Amen."

That would also explain the plethora of WoD books I find in the Half-Price Books stores. It makes me sad that a game with such a (questionably) interesting setting is ruined by its players.

[BlueMax]

And people always wonder why I don't LARP. This thread will be bookmared.
Not saying what I do is any safer but I don't need anymore headaches than what I get!

BlueMax
/who may stand up and act but does not LARP
//split hairs

[Adarael]

Don't get me wrong, BlueMax. I LARPed for years and years and for the most part, it was awesome. It's just that in such a public game, you open yourself up to the occasional experience that is awful.

[Chrysalis]

We did a LARP ages ago called Pohonjanmaa by Night. A Camarilla delegation was coming north to find some Antideluvians. They found them, but things went sideways. I was supposed to play their Camarilla contact (usually they nailed me to barn door when I gto uppity. There was everything from half-mad vikings, to a redneck family. Half way through the game they even had mass.

The group that represented Camarilla were your traditional WoD players from down south. One or two of them got the humor side, the others didn't. We found it nonetheless vastly amusing.

Welsey, could I have a link to the letter. You piqued my interest.

EDIT:
Worst gaming experience though was with RPGA. We ended up having a module which we were opening up for the past time. I remember blurting out to the gaming group five minutes after we started playing, "I bet that the couple who hired us are actually the evil cultists and that the rest of the adventure is about us black washing the honest clerics as we supposedly figure out the origin of this plague." The DM then gave me one of those withering looks, and asked if I had looked at his notes. I looked at the rest of the group and said I have not even been on his side of the room! You know what was the worst part? That was the plot.

So far RPGA modules I have played in and once GMd were consistently bad.

-Chrysalis

[Wesley Street]

Chrysalis,

Though I don't think he'd care, I've blurred my friend's name to protect his privacy. The rest is untouched. Enjoy.

EDIT: Oh, that's the letter he got from the Cam. I'll have to dig a little more to find the one he wrote.

Worst gaming experience though was with RPGA.

Yeah, those Living Forgotten Realms or what-have-you D&D game modules are predictable as hell. Each one I've played: Monsters roll into town. Townsfolk cry for help. Players save the day.

I think you need to take an ethics test to be an RPGA DM. I hear too many stories of DMs running a module then playing it at a con, knowing fully where all the loot is.

[paws2sky]

Though I don't think he'd care, I've blurred my friend's name to protect his privacy. The rest is untouched. Enjoy.

I actually LOL'd. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)

And I got some strange looks from my coworkers. (Not like that's never happened before.)

-paws

[BlueMax]

What you describe is a Living XXX problem. Years ago, when RPGA was just about playing and not about power gaming it was an entirely different affair.
As for predictability, sometimes its good. We did a marathon gaming session this holiday weekend. One could call it an at home con, and during the parts where everyone was tired we ran Tunnel Vision.


BlueMax
Now, get off my lawn.

[Warlordtheft]

The worst game I ever had was at my FLGS waaay back in HS (almost 20 years ago, god I feel old). There was one player who insisted on the fact his character could invent anything.

Worst Game design-an RPG mag-I forget the system but it was Cathulu like-had an adventure that was supposed to revolve around us figuring out who trashed a lab a killed a couple of scientists. I asked-"what do the security cameras show?" To which the GM said-crap-it aint covered-and said the leadscientist standanding next to us transformed in to monster trashing the lab.

Not as bad as some people's experiece.

OT-I larped in HS for a year or two. In college I took up Fencing (foil mostly) and after college-paintball.