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In response to a post on the topic," Your Players Did What?" elsewhere on this forum, I would like to introduce this topic. So share your horror stories with us. What has a GM ever done that made you feel like force feeding him all your dice, strangling him, or just give up gaming altogether?

antowas wrote:This was an old Palladium fantasy campaign I played in. The GM had created a villain who could transfer his essence from one body to another upon death. Essentially, the only way to trap him was to have a ruby gemstone of cut with a specific number of facets near him when you killed his host body. The understanding was that the complex cuts of this nature were impossible for a jeweler to create as the knowledge was long forgotten.

In the process of hunting down a suitable gemstone and having 2 of them destroyed right in front of us by his minions, we caught up to the villain. We did not have a gemstone at the time and I made the suggestion that we should beat this host body within an inch of his life and imprison him until such time that we could locate another gemstone. The entire time combat was taking place, the GM was sweating, likely because I figured out a way to keep this elusive foe from giving us the slip. As we moved through the order of initiative (at 5AM in the morning with 8 players) one of the players dozed off after his previous attack and with the villain at 5 HP (the GM just said "He looks like he is about to fall over dead at any moment.") The player who has dozed off comes up in the initiative order and we realize he is asleep. Rather that skip him at this pivotal moment, the GM awakens him by shouting his name and saying "Your turn!" The player snorts, raises his head and says "I kill him!"

The GM then forces the player to make the attack roll despite the protests of all the players ("He was asleep! He had no idea the villain is as injured as he is! He knew the plan. His character would not attack him.") The GM ruled that since he said that he was going to kill him, he had to make a strike roll. The player, a bearman fighter, rolls and deals 12 points. The room was silent.

I'm actually kind of ambivalent about that one. He did announce his action, but I think you might have caught the GM flatfooted like you said. I would have had him swallow something like a cyanide capsule after you captured him, myself.

Captain Shiva wrote:I'm actually kind of ambivalent about that one. He did announce his action, but I think you might have caught the GM flatfooted like you said. I would have had him swallow something like a cyanide capsule after you captured him, myself.

Just like I would believe the the guy that confessed to both the Son of Sam killings and the September 11th terroist attack plans after 90 hours of torture

Sleeplessness and duress are not qualifiers for an informed decision. The game should've been called hours ago.



I was playing 3.0 D&D and my buddy was going to kill this Demon. He'd cast a spell that allowed him to take abit of damage and then add damage (he'd take 1d6 to add 4d6 or something; could be done over the course of 4 rounds for an addtional 20d6 damage - I forget the name but this was a legit WotC 3.0 spell) and used his smite attack (he was a paladin) to lay-low this very annoying demon villain. Mathematically he dealt enough damage to kill it twice over (we checked after), but the DM then said, "...he's still alive and flies away. He's got levels of fighter and stuff..." my buddy was like "WHAT?! How many? Like 10? 'Cause that's what he'd need"
That game had problems

Another time we were playing D&D (again) and we'd gone down a useless hallway checking each door for traps. This was taking hours of real time because our DM was like that. simply farting on the door (this was 2nd Ed, where fart was an acronym for "Find And Remove Traps" re: farting) wasn't good enough. This corridor btw was 400 feet long and had 4 doors, and it literally led nowhere. Well at the time (when we didn't know how long it was) at the forth door I was getting sick of this and wanted something to happen. I said to the group "This is bunk - there are no traps here, he's (the DM) just wasting our time".
Next door had a trap.

We were playing Deadlands (the Wasted West) and our Marshal had laid out an adventure (that I found out was his D&D adventure from the night before) and we went through it. I had the bug-wings mutation, and my buddy had horse-shoes up his arse, and used those horse-shoes to get regeneration (if you consumed the flesh of a certain creature there was a 1 in 26 chance you'd get regeneration (drawing one of the jokers from the deck) but otherwise you were straight-up dead). Well we came across this tower in an old amusement park in a deadland. These guys from the tower drugged and kidnapped us and forced us to play "the game". We woke up in a forest wearing medival gear (kinda like that episode of Reboot, where they were rival teams of adventurers, and Bob was the thief); we had a two warriors, a thief, and a mage (couple of vengants, an anti-templar, and a doomsayer). Not to mention the Cyborg that got the princess treatment

So we're progressing though this adventure and we make it to this tower. In the tower we get trapped and the floor begins to start on fire, so we were literally climbing the walls; I could fly and the cyborg had spurs that could punch right into the wall, but the three other people we had couldn't. They latched onto me, but I was slowly falling. So we all shed as much weight as we could; lost the chainshirts, weapons (except the thief's knife*), and still couldn't progress upwards. Then we got the brilliant idea of cutting the limbs off of the guy who could regenerate - this floored the Marshal (he was speachless at the out-of-the-box idea), and allowed it to work. We left the guy with one arm (so he/we had something to hold on to) and I slowly flew upwards (at like a pace of 1).

Some time passes, we do a bunch of stuff, and along the way we were supposed to retrieve this amulet. Well ol' stumpy wasn't doing anything as we combatted some vampires so he crawls over to the pedestal and grabs the amulet, putting it on for ease of carrying. We duked it out for in-game 5 minutes with this vampire, literally trying to saw it's head off with the only *knife in the party as he was also trying to kill us. Anyways, we end up at the big, bad enemy where we find out that only the amulet wearer can kill this thing (it was a dragon basically). I'm the only one that had both the chips and the strength to even bother attacking this thing, so we go to get the amulet from our limb-less friend; it's stuck on him and we can't take it off
So I give him the knife and I fly him in so that he can try and stab this thing. It's size 20 and has 2 levels of armour. This means that we got our damage dice reduced 2 steps (meaning the knife did nothing, and was all strength for damage). I'm flying and dodging fireballs, and we move in to attack in this hopeless battle. It literally looked like we couldn't win (everyone was low on chips; I only had a white and a red, the red I used to negate some fireball damage), but thankfully the horse-shoes kicked in.

On his 3rd ace (at 30 damage from the single d10) we were all (including the marshal) hovering over his dice.

We watched him roll 10 straight 10's to kill the thing in one hit. The "your GM did what?!" of this story was that he made the amulet stuck to stumpy.

Our GM in an old Rifts campaign introduced some sort of magical sword which could bypass armor and do it's MDC damage as MD to living beings, regardless of whether or not they were MDC or SDC. I think he was inspired by Phase Swords but went a step further. This wasn't too big a problem initially since our group posessed it. It was a higher power game and we used this power wisely. But when War got ahold of it and unleashed its true potential to do 2d6x10 MD (it only did 4D6 MD when we posessed it), the party got screwed pretty fast.

Dog_O_War wrote:

Captain Shiva wrote:I'm actually kind of ambivalent about that one. He did announce his action, but I think you might have caught the GM flatfooted like you said. I would have had him swallow something like a cyanide capsule after you captured him, myself.

Just like I would believe the the guy that confessed to both the Son of Sam killings and the September 11th terroist attack plans after 90 hours of torture

Sleeplessness and duress are not qualifiers for an informed decision. The game should've been called hours ago.

*****

I was playing 3.0 D&D and my buddy was going to kill this Demon. He'd cast a spell that allowed him to take abit of damage and then add damage (he'd take 1d6 to add 4d6 or something; could be done over the course of 4 rounds for an addtional 20d6 damage - I forget the name but this was a legit WotC 3.0 spell) and used his smite attack (he was a paladin) to lay-low this very annoying demon villain. Mathematically he dealt enough damage to kill it twice over (we checked after), but the DM then said, "...he's still alive and flies away. He's got levels of fighter and stuff..." my buddy was like "WHAT?! How many? Like 10? 'Cause that's what he'd need"
That game had problems

Another time we were playing D&D (again) and we'd gone down a useless hallway checking each door for traps. This was taking hours of real time because our DM was like that. simply farting on the door (this was 2nd Ed, where fart was an acronym for "Find And Remove Traps" re: farting) wasn't good enough. This corridor btw was 400 feet long and had 4 doors, and it literally led nowhere. Well at the time (when we didn't know how long it was) at the forth door I was getting sick of this and wanted something to happen. I said to the group "This is bunk - there are no traps here, he's (the DM) just wasting our time".
Next door had a trap.

We were playing Deadlands (the Wasted West) and our Marshal had laid out an adventure (that I found out was his D&D adventure from the night before) and we went through it. I had the bug-wings mutation, and my buddy had horse-shoes up his arse, and used those horse-shoes to get regeneration (if you consumed the flesh of a certain creature there was a 1 in 26 chance you'd get regeneration (drawing one of the jokers from the deck) but otherwise you were straight-up dead). Well we came across this tower in an old amusement park in a deadland. These guys from the tower drugged and kidnapped us and forced us to play "the game". We woke up in a forest wearing medival gear (kinda like that episode of Reboot, where they were rival teams of adventurers, and Bob was the thief); we had a two warriors, a thief, and a mage (couple of vengants, an anti-templar, and a doomsayer). Not to mention the Cyborg that got the princess treatment

***

So we're progressing though this adventure and we make it to this tower. In the tower we get trapped and the floor begins to start on fire, so we were literally climbing the walls; I could fly and the cyborg had spurs that could punch right into the wall, but the three other people we had couldn't. They latched onto me, but I was slowly falling. So we all shed as much weight as we could; lost the chainshirts, weapons (except the thief's knife*), and still couldn't progress upwards. Then we got the brilliant idea of cutting the limbs off of the guy who could regenerate - this floored the Marshal (he was speachless at the out-of-the-box idea), and allowed it to work. We left the guy with one arm (so he/we had something to hold on to) and I slowly flew upwards (at like a pace of 1).

***

Some time passes, we do a bunch of stuff, and along the way we were supposed to retrieve this amulet. Well ol' stumpy wasn't doing anything as we combatted some vampires so he crawls over to the pedestal and grabs the amulet, putting it on for ease of carrying. We duked it out for in-game 5 minutes with this vampire, literally trying to saw it's head off with the only *knife in the party as he was also trying to kill us. Anyways, we end up at the big, bad enemy where we find out that only the amulet wearer can kill this thing (it was a dragon basically). I'm the only one that had both the chips and the strength to even bother attacking this thing, so we go to get the amulet from our limb-less friend; it's stuck on him and we can't take it off
So I give him the knife and I fly him in so that he can try and stab this thing. It's size 20 and has 2 levels of armour. This means that we got our damage dice reduced 2 steps (meaning the knife did nothing, and was all strength for damage). I'm flying and dodging fireballs, and we move in to attack in this hopeless battle. It literally looked like we couldn't win (everyone was low on chips; I only had a white and a red, the red I used to negate some fireball damage), but thankfully the horse-shoes kicked in.

On his 3rd ace (at 30 damage from the single d10) we were all (including the marshal) hovering over his dice.

We watched him roll 10 straight 10's to kill the thing in one hit. The "your GM did what?!" of this story was that he made the amulet stuck to stumpy.

I have always found it to be a good idea to keep a supply of No-Doze on hand for gaming purposes.

Ajax wrote:In a Rifts game, my GM had a mutant monkey (one of the ones from lone star) working on a CS observation team, run up and hump my character's leg while it placed a tracer bug on his armor.

Both the GM and the monkey should have been spanked.

I had a Gm who's husband was playing a Psi-Slinger/Psi-Stalker with all the powers of both. He could also use Mind Bond due to a home rule that wasn't shared with anyone else in the group. Needless to say said husband never had any problem finding the badguy. He would usually find some way to grab ahold of a badguy and then mind bond and murder them. Meaning that no one else in the group got to know anything about the badguys but what the husband said. As some of the other players were playing characters that were straight from the Official Rifts rules that were rather powerful without any house ruleing the GM gave her husband the Deciver from the Palladium Fantasy book Island at the edge of the world without the uber-rare(as in rune weapons are common compaired to the class of magical device the deciver belongs to) Magical Items Atunement period. Not only that but the GM trated the devices powers like at will abilities without saveing throws.

I left because it was Obvious that it wasn't a real Rifts game but an Ego trip for the GM's Husband.

viewtopic.php?f=30&t=84709 If you want to read my own personal GM horror, click on the above link.

Gypsy-Dancer wrote:That's horrible.
My husband likes to give out intelligent weapons in the games he runs.
They are always very powerful, but the drawbacks make you not want to keep them.
For instance, he made the sword Stormbringer for Rifts.

From what i know about the person they have several personal problems that they should have been dealing with insted of literally paying $1,000's at once on roleplaying game books. Like how they complained that their neighbors sued them and won because they were not contributing to the neighborhood commity. Now I do understand what it's like to have three or more people survive on one income but...that does not excuse one from being a jerk to both ones neighbors or ones players.

Also there was one occation where the GM literally got drunk while GM'ing.I have a friend who GM's for a group that drinks and smokes pot while playing. the basic rule is that the GM gets no more than a contact high while playing. this is to avoid such things as the "We sneak the King Tiger Tank up the stairs." incident. In this case the GM incerted themselves into the game and proceded to act like a drunk stripper. I let that particular game as I've seen way too many drunken idiots in my time.

So there I was, playing an experiment with APS Stone and XPS plus some other things, running across the X-Lawn when I clothes line what I thought was an intruder. Turns out to be Morph and I have my giant foot on his relatively now tiny chest. We exchange smart ass comments and I take his arms to help him up.

My GM wanting to get me back for when I ran looking for exac wording, decides I have pulled Morphs arms off because I never stated I took my foot off.

Rockwolf66 wrote:

Gypsy-Dancer wrote:That's horrible.
My husband likes to give out intelligent weapons in the games he runs.
They are always very powerful, but the drawbacks make you not want to keep them.
For instance, he made the sword Stormbringer for Rifts.

From what i know about the person they have several personal problems that they should have been dealing with insted of literally paying $1,000's at once on roleplaying game books. Like how they complained that their neighbors sued them and won because they were not contributing to the neighborhood commity. Now I do understand what it's like to have three or more people survive on one income but...that does not excuse one from being a jerk to both ones neighbors or ones players.

Also there was one occation where the GM literally got drunk while GM'ing.I have a friend who GM's for a group that drinks and smokes pot while playing. the basic rule is that the GM gets no more than a contact high while playing. this is to avoid such things as the "We sneak the King Tiger Tank up the stairs." incident. In this case the GM incerted themselves into the game and proceded to act like a drunk stripper. I let that particular game as I've seen way too many drunken idiots in my time.

I allow people to drink in moderation in my games, and the wife and I will participate in similar groups, but no pot or other illegal drugs are allowed.
People get too fricking retarded for me to tolerate.

I forgot another dueshy move. The entire group showed up at his house at 6am looking forward to a day of D&D.
The DM never showed up. We waited for 2.5 hours
So the rest of the group brought me back to one of their houses and intorduced me to Palladium
Yay

This was an old AD&D campaign. We were tracking down a serial murderer and anytime we got legitimately close to catching him, something always happened to block us or he could make an escape in which case our pursuit was always blocked by something. The problem was that the GM wasn't willing to give up the bad guy until we jumped through all the hoops he had pre-planned for us. Basically we weren't following the script so he railroaded us.

whew wee I never had it that bad...wow.

I was playing in a friends campaign that invariably turned into one shots, just got done watching Clockwork Orange, and decided he would put them in game. Now It was a good movie and each one of the characters needed to be put through a wood chipper. But no. These were super powered CWOs in which at best we could barely win against, and only in the obscure method the GM had pre-determined.

KillWatch wrote:I was playing in a friends campaign that invariably turned into one shots, just got done watching Clockwork Orange, and decided he would put them in game. Now It was a good movie and each one of the characters needed to be put through a wood chipper. But no. These were super powered CWOs in which at best we could barely win against, and only in the obscure method the GM had pre-determined.

That's just weird.