my worst gaming experience was when a player wanted to substitute gm a game of mst.i gave him all the material at the end of the last session and we had agreed to meet to play a week later.

now il explain a little about the system. the game is scene based not round/turn based. there is no equipment system. there is no combat system. there is a magic and science system that is much different than any other game.

ok back to the pregame. i would ask him if he had read the rules and if he had any questions about any of it. he claimed that he understood the mechanics and would have no problems. i asked him about the magic system and he said the same about it. ok so it seems like all is good. i let him to work on the game.

the time to play roles around and we get everybody together. we start the game and everybody is automatically separated from the start. everyone has their own mission to accomplish unrelated to the others. as time goes on everything seems fine. i dont remember who started but as a whole the gm railroaded us constantly we were all forced to fail our missions regardless of our actions or rolls. the gm also didnt know the rules so instead of letting the players call certain actions he handwaved that they failed.a few examples when a few players tried to talk to or interrogate people they would turn violent and the characters would kill them without the players choosing to do so. the worst example was. gm: when you try to speak to him he ignores you and tells you that he will kill you. player: ill subdue him i wont even draw a weapon.*opposed roll player succeeds* gm:you pull out your sword and cut his arm off then the man turns to ash.

stuff like that happened over and over again. all the players we fed up with it. we all just wanted to finish it up and move on. after we all failed our objectives he decided to give us epic loot. stuff that didnt conform to the rules at all and was extremely over powered. also his character that wasnt even in the session at all was also given a god item for no reason. all in all the experience was garbage. the session was horrible in concept and execution. now that gm runs an sr4 game on occaision but still has a bad habit of handwaving and not knowing the rules.

Well, I had a world of darkness game completely meltdown but that's a story for another day, a better story is why I now hate paladins (from D and D)
I've never liked paladins that much in the first place, they always seems too "goody-goody" but hey, I'm playing shadowrun, so i guess that kinda goes without saying. And in addition their alaignment stuff always seemed to restrictive. The thing was, this was all just annoying, the worst time I ever had though, was with my friend playing a paladin who interpereted "Lawful Good" as "Lawful suicidally stupid" The problem was of course, he wa also really lucky and managed to get away fine whenever he did something stupid that should have gotten him killed.
It was back when I was playing some 1st edition with my friend (the paladin). We were going on a classic adventure, "Journey to Castle Ravenloft" While he did a host of other things, two inccidents really stand out in my mind. Things went well until we found the bones of a dead paladin inside the castle, so he decides, "I'm going to go out into the woods around a vampire's castle at night to go bury the body in the middle of an adventure!" He was attacked by a pack of wolves but was lucky with dice rolls and I think he had boots of striding and springing so he got off scott free. Next inside the castle we heard a voice saying "Help me! Help me!" at this point we also knew one of the vampires in the castle was an ILLUSIONIST, but my friend, not caring, went after the "helpless person" As I predicted, it was the vampire creating an illusory cry for help and we were lead into an ambush. I was nearly killed cause I rolled poorly and he managed to kill one of the vampires by consistently rolling really well.
Later, there was another campaign we were in in which we were facing off against a force of half giants, or quarter giants, i'm not sure, that's not the point, the point is that, he decided, "Oh! I see three of them, rather than staying with the group I'm going to charge them!" Needless to say, at less 4 he was pounded, very luckily, just enough to get knocked out, but not enough for him to start bleeding to death.
And that, my friends, is the story of why I hate palidins.

Is it bad my most prominent thought after reading this was, "Wow, you turned someone to ash with your sword" XD But seriously, that is some terrible gming, but what is MST, I'm curious, besides, of course, Mystery Science Theatre, cause if they made that into an rpg, I'd totally buy it.

Moral of the story, your character has a sleep regulator, you, do not.

@ Maelstrome what game were you playing?

Indeed. A Sleep Regulator or a hit or two of Longhaul is standard kit for my characters these days.

-paws

to everyone asking what the game i was playing(mst). it is maelstrom storytelling. i made a post about it awhile back. might not be around anymore. i have all the books in dead tree format but i have the revised core book and a setting source book pdf if any of you want to take a look. the game itself is very smooth and fast. what would take 3 hours sr can happen as fast as 1/3 the time. character creations is very quick. i have a few house rules on character creation to give a little more depth. if anyone is interested i was actually thinking of starting a play by post either here or somewhere else for me and my friends.

I can't remember if this it was a module or something the DM made up, but this was back in the early 1990s and a friend just loved the Ravenloft campaign set for DnD.

IIRC, we took a group of some of our favorite characters and were exploring some odd mists off the shore. So, we were on a boat. I believe something occurred and we were in Ravenloft now. Well, the DM's younger brother, who didn't like one of the players (which happened to be my best friend at the time) pushed him overboard in plate armor. So, my friends sheds his armor as best as he can and when he gets back on-board, the DM rolls some dice and says that his hair is growing really long and gnarled. Any attempt to cut it and it grows right back.

They get into some words, because again, this is like his favorite character. The DM's brother likely knew this would happen (the DM didn't really like my friend all that much either), so didn't stop it. So, my friend, having lost his armor and getting the wild hair decided to jump in again and go for broke. Ended up getting disproportionate arms and legs to go along with his wild hair.

My friend never came back after the one session. I felt bad cause I didn't think that personality conflicts out of game would carry over, but I was young and naive. I played a bit longer, but eventually, Ravenloft was not my cup of tea. And really has turned me off to those types of settings since.

Huh, weird. I never played much Ravenloft, but the few times I remember folks mutating like that, it was those who did evil, not just those who fell into some friggin' water. Seems to me like it should've been your GM's little brother (who was shoving folks in plate mail overboard) who started to get twisted and turned inhuman by the supernatural, evil, nature of the place.

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0202.html

Damm. I just wasted a few hours.

I learned the lesson, long ago and painfully, that if you RP with people who have an antagonistic relationship in RL, it's like being drunk. The social filter comes off and every attempt to be a dick toward the target of their aggression surfaces.

I know what you mean, I read OOTS too and when I read that story arch I thought the EXACT same thing as roy does in the last panel here: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0209.html

I have stories - one self inflicted, the other not.

1) I am running a Vampire The Dark Ages campaign and we started a new campaign with new characters. I was aiming for a relatively high powered campaign.

Now due to an interested backstory I allowed one player to make up a 5th generation elder. He was well acquianted with the game lore and rules so I didn't see an issue with it. Another player, who is more of a power gamer wanted to make one of the same age/potency and I declined. My mistake but I thought being adults they would both cope with the difference in power levels if they were more interested in the plot. I was woefully mistaken and about to learn a very important lesson.

Anyway, this power gamer got upset and decided for vengeance he would give himself additional XP to advance his character in silent protest. It wasn't until I caught him with Disciplines waaaay above what they should have been.

He yelled at me for being unfair by not having him start at the same level. I said he's self serving prick. It degenerated into a massive yelling match. Long story short - I stopped roleplaying with that group ever again and stopped playing for a year as the experience left me so embittered and distrusting of players and sucked out any fun I got out of GMing.

I learned the hard way that all players should start at exactly the same power level and while its nice to trust your players, its more important to verify what they are doing.

2) New group. New campaign. I join in a general World of Darkness campaign. I'm told its a very high powered game mixed with Vampires, Mages, Werewolves. I'm told that the GM has a very different idea of how these entities would interrelate and that his world view is non-canonical. That should have given me a tell tale sign right there but anyway... (at least I was warned).

I find we're part of some super collective of insanely powerful supernatural beings basically called on to fight threats to the world. The best way I can describe it is basically DC Heroes using WoD rules.

It degenerated out of control very quickly.

I've managed to block out my memories of most of the evening, but I distinctly remember a Malkavian methuselah PC who had two players for the one character, both acting as the voices inside his head. The GM had a particular bias/love affair towards this PC that was nothing short of sickening. I recall said PC distinctly tearing vampires apart with his bare hands and using bloody stumps to club other vampires NPCs into submission.

I still play with this GM (the above player no longer games with us thankfully) and I've forgiven him since for this abomination of a campaign. Occasionally he offers to run Vampire/Mage for our group but I've since told this GM while I've forgiven him, I will never play in a Vampire of WoD game with him at the helm again.

"A game of personal horror" - Indeed...

- J.

Ignoring (for my own enjoyment) the rest of the paragraph -- this sentence alone? That sounds like it could have made for a pretty cool, memorable, character.

It's too bad it was in the game it was in, and went the way it did.

This reminds me, though not in a bad-memory way, of an RPGA event some years ago, in which the six players took on the roles of the six characteristics of the one PC. Also, there was the one, RPGA again, in which the six players played the roles of the one PC and his five, self-aware magic items.

It wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the GM love. The primary player was EXTREMELY egotistical (even puts me to shame), prone to sulking if he didn't get his way, and always wanted god-like characters and be the utter center of attention - and god forbid if it ever came off him for a second. The GM completely pandered to this player. Every action he did trumped the other PCs, his character was exceedingly powerful. Everything everyone else ever did was redundant in the face of this character, because whatever you could do he probably did it a turn before you and did it better.

We used to play in this dickhead's house too which compounded the issue. Then I realised just how much shit he used to give the GM (who did nothing wrong except run a bad game) so then I started to just give the player shit in his own house. He started shutting up when we he realised we weren't going to take his crap with a smile. So he went off and sulked and eventually stopped gaming with us when he hooked up with some Canadian mail-order bride and his life went further downhill from there. Funnily enough, the quality of the games and our enjoyment picked up immensely when he left.

So yes, in the end - it all worked out well in the end.

- J.

One of the way to play Bloodlust RPG is to have half the players play the characters and half of them play their weapons. Very fun game.

Not sure I could pinpoint an absolute "Worst" gaming experience, but I tend to have a bad one whenever someone besides me tries to GM (Though I have played in many successful Rifts and DnD games with good GMs). This me saying that I think I'm the only good GM in the world...but amongst most of my firends I am... and not by choice, I usually get forced into the job because none else wants to.

For instance: DnD game (Oh no! D20 is the devil...lol) and I get to play a Dragonkin ( basically a humanoid, human-size dagon guy...wings and all) and he is a sorcerer. Not only does the DM have absolutely no idea what he's doing, but most of the other players don't either (most were new gamers, so I can forgive that). We were sent against a creature that was nearly 3 times our level and demolished most of our party immediately, and all because the DM said he wanted to give us a slightly more challenging encounter. Keyword there: Slightly.

Suffice to say, my character was the only to survive, only because he had wings and coul fly away really, really fast.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) for me though...I tend to GM the games that my fineds and I play...so all goes (relatively) well...

That game looks awesome. Is it available in English? From the looks of that page, it's French and German only.

Worst gaming experiences...

Well, I've only got one, and it happened when I was acting as Keeper for Call of Cthulhu with an adventure called "Mr. Corbitt"...

The game was going great, once my players had gone into the house while Corbitt was away, I managed to ramp up the tension and they were really getting into the game. One of my players even shot the empty crib on the second floor thinking something might be in there (they hadn't gone in to check it out, so I never told them it was empty).

By the time they got down to the basement, it was great. They argued about who would go first, refused to touch anything for fear they would regret it, and made damn sure to keep in a group instead of splitting up for fear something would get them (this was after finding the journals).

Anyway, they find the false back to the closet in the basement that frees Corbitt's 'son' (a ghastly creature which is basically a fleshy mass with surgically added arms and legs, roughly 15 of each).

At this point, my group stops taking the game seriously. They couldn't think of a moving pudding with arms and legs as anything but hilarious. I tried my damnedest to make the creature seem important, but all that happened was they ended up fighting it, and quickly dispatching it on account of some lousy rolls on my part.


So yeah, that went down in history as the biggest letdown in my history of GMing. Luckily Shadowrun hasn't let me down.

I don't know if it's available in English. Maybe there's some unofficial translation somewhere on the Internet? (The original French game is in the P2P networks with the blessing of the creator).
There's a new French version coming up, but from what I was told a lot of fans are disappointed by the direction it's taking (it seems to be far more serious than the old edition).

Has anyone ever sat in on a game where a "losing" player flipped the table over like an angry gunslinger or something equally dramatic?

Closest I've come to that is in wargaming, when someone threw a pewter miniature across the room, used his arm to sweep the rest of his hundreds-of-dollars army haphazardly into his case, and stormed off, shouting expletives.

I've seen something like that.

There was a guy I knew back in the 90's that would throw his miniatures across the room regularly when the "displeased him". Not just as a display of anger (which I have see too). Just whenever they didn't perform well.

-paws

By the time I was seven or eight years old, I was beating my brother, older by nine years, regularly at chess. Once in a while the frustration got too much for him and he would toss the chess board and pieces. It made the victory both less appealing and more savory.

At other times he would brag about my chess skill to his buddies.

Brothers.

I've got a couple more, replying to the getting physically angry. I didn't think of them as "worst" experience cause from my POV, they were quite funny.

1) My buddy Dave came to visit one weekend, bringing his copy of NBA Jam with all his custom players. We played it all weekend, with Dave winning most games because of his high "level" custom players. It was a few hours before he was getting ready to head out, so my roommate and I challenged him to another game. We had been upping our newly created custom players over the weekend and we thought we had a chance. The game was close at right near the end of the game, Dave was getting ready to score a basket to put the game out of reach when we blocked his shot. He got it back and shot again, but we grabbed it off the rim (which is legal in the game). This happened a couple times, but finally we got the ball down the court and scored to bring it within 2 points. Dave took it out and we stole the ball at mid-court (we were never able to steal the ball from his player all weekend) and at the buzzer hit a three to win. Dave was livid. He threw the SNES control at the TV, cursing. He broke the controller, which wasn't his, so we told him he owed us a new controller. Even more pissed, he walked over to the couch where his friend was (that also came down to visit for the weekend) actually kicked him and told him to hurry up cause they were leaving. Needless to say, it was hilarious. Dave's friendship with the guy on the couch ended, as I heard he berated and argued with him the whole drive home (about 2 hours).

2) Dave again...this time Matt, Dave and I were finishing up a heated battle of Eurorails in Matt's basement. No one had been talking for the last 15 minutes, as we were all on our last runs and the first one to drop off their payload would likely win. Well, Matt drops off a payload and we all sigh, thinking he just won, but he didn't. He needed to drop off another one, so pulls from the deck...and what comes up? An avalanche card. Basically, an area on the map gets all built tracks erased and any trains in that area lose a single payload (at the other players' choice). Dave is in the "kill zone" and is furious, but...he looks at us both and admits to cheating his last move and moving 3 spaces too many, so he shouldn't actually be in the kill zone. Matt and I are taken aback, as Dave just said he cheated. Anyways, we don't let him move back...basically saying that he cheated so he is going to have to live with that mistake. He calls bullshit and then says fine. Looking at where he is at and where he is going, we then pick the payload for him to drop...we pick his big moneymaker, basically costing him any chance of winning. He gets insanely irate, swipes his hand across the board, curses and then storms out of the basement and actually leaves to go home! Again, pretty funny to me...I think Matt and I finished the game as best we could and I ended up the winner, but even if I didn't still a great moment and still gets brought up to this day.

That is the funniest thing I've read today.

<James Earl Jones>"You have displeased me for the last time little inanimate pewter figurine." </James Earl Jones>

Yeah... pretty much just like that.

-paws

Here's Team Fortress 2 story...

A couple weekends ago, my son - who's probably too young to be playing TF2, honestly - was doing his usual thing as engineer on some random 2Fort server. At some point, he comes into the laundry room and asks me if I can help him build a sentry. That's extremely basic stuff, that he's long since mastered, but he seems upset so I decided I should see what's going on. I sit down and some guy is shit talking at me because he's pwning me. blah blah blah. Typical, immature trash talk. At that point, I was kind of glad my son is still wokring on reading. *cough*

I go out to the courtyard and start building a sentry, covering the battlements and courtyard. One of my usual spots. Spy drops cloak, headshots me with the Ambassador (an unlockable pistol), and saps my sentry. More trash talking.

So, rather than do the obvious thing and switch to pyro to flush him out, I switch to spy and disguise myself as one of his teammates. He's still just standing there, disguised. As me. So, I backstab him and get revenge. He gets pissed. Calls me a nub and starts threatening me.

I start wandering around the base, backstabbing to my heart's content. Then I see a spy, again disguised as me, wander underneath the grate room. I wait a second to make sure no one is following him in, then drop down. Another backstab. More threats and cussing. A few more backstabs on the same guy and I'm dominating him.

He comes back as a pyro. Another backstab or two and he get so pissed he switches to my team to scream at me on voice chat. Of course, I keep voice chat at 0 volume except when I'm playing late at night so I don't hear a thing. People are telling him to shut up.

The admin (who was on my team) kick/bans him after about a minute. The notification of why lists Mic Spam, Racism, and a couple other things.

I lol'd.

-paws

Here's my favorite DnD 2nd Edition story ever:

I ran a lot of solo games with my best friend early in my gaming career. We each had a couple characters and we got to really high levels. Well, a couple of my friends, also DMs, but with different circles of gamers, also had high level characters, so there was always fun chat about how "my character could beat yours".

Anyways, my friend and one of other DMs always butted heads. The DM was certain that his character could destroy anyone...he was an psionic which I banned in my games early on and was just super overpowered of a class anyways. But, so be it. He had a large ego, so I figured he'd accept the challenge from my friend, who was much lower level.

So, being my best friend, I wanted to help, so I looked around and found a few things that I thought might work. Between our four characters, we had some bags of holding, an amulet of the planes, a portable hole and a ring that allowed one to go with air for several days. So, using information from the DMG (basically item descriptions) and manual of the planes, we set the plan in motion.

We let my DM friend choose the "battlefield" and I would ref the thing (we actually did this as a 3-way phone call). So, initiative was rolled and the DM friend won, doing some sort of self buff. My friend ended up pulling out his portable hold, which I had one of my characters in, wearing his amulet of the planes. We opened a bag of holding and dropped it in the portable hole, which had some language stating that everyone would be sucked into a vortex that dumped them on the astral plane. My friend and I immediately use the amulet to get back to the prime material plane, and based on RAW, it was something like ever 6 seconds on the astral equated to 1 year on the prime...so we arrived back about a year after we started the fight, no big deal.

Anyways, I described to the DM friend what he saw. Basically, my friend opening up the hole and bag, seeing another humanoid for a split second and then both blink out of existence. He didn't really know what to say, as he didn't have anyone to attack. I told him that I figured he would figure out a way to get back, but it probably would take some time, which he agreed with. I let him know that time on the prime was several hundred years into the future when he returned, but he didn't really care.

That was the first and last time I ever did a player vs. player type encounter, solely based on two people hating each other. And when I look back on it, I think it was a lot cooler for my friend, than anyone else, cause I doubt anyone else really cared. But, if I was the psionicist and got screwed from playing my character in a campaign I wanted to be in, I'd be pretty pissed at this outcome.

I only have two experiences I would call bad.

The first one was when I was running Changeling: The Lost. I had recently moved and this was the first game I ran for this group. My previous group had been big into role playing and would often go through whole sessions without bringing out dice. They also worked together without being told they needed to. This group was... different. After a few months of complaints about changelings not being powerful enough (they didn't make any pledges) I finally agreed that they could make new characters from NWoD during the next down time in the story.

I ended up with a changeling, a vampire, a werewolf, a mage and a promethean. So they all are in a run down bar when their reflections sort of morph together and pours itself out of the mirror behind the bartender. The next scene reveals to everyone that they aren't the only supernaturals around. After the fight, the promethean steps outside and starts drawing large symbols on the front of the building. When asked what he was doing, he said that he was warning others that there were vampires, changelings, mages, and werewolves in this town. Of course, they didn't like this. The promethean kept saying "this is what we do, we leave tramp marks for each other" the changeling flipped out shrieking that "changelings hate people knowing about them" the vampire thought it would be a good time to try feeding, and the werewolf went garu. The mage sat back to "record" it all. I called the game and took a four month break from WoD. I started back up, but I only invited two of those players to the next attempt.

The second bad experience happened just a few days ago. I have been wanting to play shadowrun for the better part of a decade now, but I haven't been able to find anyone else interested in it. I finally found someone who is willing to run it, and my excitement couldn't have been greater. I spent nearly two months working on a mage, with the help of the fine folks here at dumpshock. Then the day of the game is upon us. I sit down and ask what the other two players are playing. I normally like to build characters together, but it didn't happen this time. One says he is going to play a sammy and the other one responds "I don't know, what are the classes in this game?" Appearantly two months wasn't enough time for him to read the book. So we spend some time trying to explain to him the system, and I am not really helping because remember, this was going to be my first game.

We finally convince him that he can't play a guy who is a technomancer in the matrix and a mage in the meatworld, so he pouts and says he will just use the premade combat mage. I am a little leary about their being two mages and no one who has any tech skills, but I figure I will see what happens. Then the guy who said he was playing a sammy says, "Hurry up with the book, I need to make my character too." No game that night. Oh well, I figure next week would be a rousing game, and I even manage to talk the gm into letting me switch to a technomancer so that we can have some tech support.

Unfortunately, next week was gencon, and the gm was going. Fine, more time to fiddle with the tech stuff and figure out the matrix. Then last sunday we were to try again. The session starts out with the guy who had grabbed the pre-made calling to tell us he wasn't going to make it. I am hopeful that we can do a little bit with just the sammy and I. Then the sammy asks for a character sheet. Appearantly he lost his character in the two weeks between sessions and wanted to make a new character anyway. So, I have made two characters and sat in two sessions... and still haven't played shadowrun.

That is pretty awesome.

The closest thing I've ever done was knife-kill a guy on Soldier of Fortune II who had been cursing me out for using the M590 and going on about how I wouldn't be shit without the M590. So I snuck up behind him next spawn and knifed him.