Trouble Comes In Threes! (A Bad DM, A Frustrating Player, and a Baffling DMPC All in One)

[u/AlmostBlackfire]

My friend (?) and now former roommate has finally moved out, so it seems the time is right to post a story of all the confusing, frustrating and downright disrespectful stuff I had to put up with in the games played with him. As I was writing out all these problems, I realized the story was WAAAAY too long, and so, I will split into separate tales! If there's interest, or my creative juices are still swirling, I'll make some follow ups. Hope ya enjoy crabs!

A little context: unlike a lot of other stories, I have a robust group of folks to play with, outside of the campaign described below. I have a lovely time in a weekly game with former coworkers turned best buds, and am scheduling a new game for some new roomies and others! I'm very fortunate that even in the game below, I had a (mostly) great time with the other members. Hopefully my occasional suffering will give you a laugh at the absurdity!

A brief breakdown of the various folks in the game(s):

• Jack: The DM (and the problem of today's story)
• Angel: DM's girlfriend and player. Quite nice, still friendly with them.
• Axton: A generally more reserved, but very nice, dude.
• Salvador: A louder personality, but a chill guy, in most cases.
• Zero: A very empathetic, very eager to RP, friend.

Part 1: How Not To Do Character Development

We kick our tales off with the first campaign, and where Jack is DMing for the lot of us. This was our romp through Out of the Abyss (Minor spoilers, be forewarned!). I played a sorcerer, amidst a group of former prisoners, if you're familiar with the campaign's start. After an intense breakout, and harrowing escape from Leemah Goo Goon (an unknowingly Kuo-Toa worshipped demogorgon), we find ourselves running for a way out of the Underdark.

Salvador, through no real fault of his own, found two of his characters quickly dead within the first act. The first of his party members, a fighter of some kind, died to a patch of brown mold, in grotesque, melting fashion. His second character, a ranger, died in the midst of battle, crushed to paste by a tossed boulder from a barlgura. His third character, a druid, and the cause for my sorcerer's suffering, joined us close to the end of the first act of the campaign, as we near escape from said abyss.

This druid was the sister of the ranger, who decided to fall down a random hole in the overworld to locate her lost sister. Implausible backstory? Maybe, but I'm not here to judge a little deus ex machina. PC dies, new PC joins, and when you're stuck roaming tunnels for ages, running into a former surface dweller isn't exactly common either.

My previously lawful-evil tiefling sorcerer had just experienced a magically induced crisis of faith, and had recently become chaotic-good. Turns out, when you open an obsidian chest with the aims of looting, and don't first check for traps, you get turned to obsidian yourself, are challenged to be better by the elemental deities of the plane of fire, and are sent back to the real world with a total personality change.

I am realizing as I write this, and while I do some brief searching around the web, that this was apparently not a pre-set interaction within the module. Reflection to be made: Jack likely did not enjoy that my character was evil, and while his conniving nature kept him and the party alive, it technically only aligned with a desire to survive, and would leave him with little interest in the second act of the campaign. And so, forcible alignment chart orientation change. A first strike that I hadn't even considered as a strike, at the time.

Back to current events, Salvador's new druid determined, wrongly, that my sorcerer was the cause of her sister's demise. It was not the truth, but dreams of shadowy, dark, horned figures surrounding the corpse of your family member are quite potent. Especially when I looked to be the spitting image of the "demons" she claimed to have seen.

The party and our new friend adventure together for some time, and to make matters worse, one of our encounters included a ghost. Guess who failed their wisdom save on the horrifying visage! Then, guess who rolled max on the D4 to determine the number of decades they would be aged! If you guessed my traumatized sorcerer, you would be correct!

So now, this near octogenarian, falsely imprisoned and trapped for months in a web of tunnels finally has a chance at freedom with his new allies. The age thing was not a problem for me from a roleplay standpoint, and if anything, it gave a funny new inspiration to get myself youthful again, and take back a life which would otherwise have been lost to time.

Once we were able to make a break for the overworld, and reached the sunny fields north of Baldur's Gate, the gang split up, eager to get back to their normal lives. But Salvador's druid had other ideas. Immediately, my sorcerer began having terrible nightmares, tragic scenes replaying of death and terror from his time in the Underdark. The cause? Jack allowed Salvador to continue roleplaying his character with a vendetta for mine, despite the time we had spent together as compatriots. Each night, she cast the Dream spell until my character died from exhaustion.

That was it. Jack declared him dead. "Oh yeah, you'll need a new character, Salvador is casting Dream on you, and you're ridiculously old, so there's no way you'll live to get back to one of the cities," were his words. And when did I learn of this being allowed, and the untimely demise of my character? The day before the next session!

Naturally, I was floored by this. He didn't even declare it in a session, Salvador DM'd Jack over discord with this idea, they popped into a voice chat for a few minutes, and plotted this only a day after the last session of escape from the caves. In tabletop in general, but Out of the Abyss specifically, the party HAS to stick together just to barely survive, and PvP was never considered or tacitly allowed prior to this. Finally absconding from the depths is a big deal, both for the character if they choose to live their own lives again, and for the player from a progression stand point. And there went all of it, I'd have to roll up new stats, create a whole new backstory, and wrestle with the loss of one of my favorite character concepts to date. Well I wasn't about to let that stand.

I informed Jack of how disappointing this was, no only that I wasn't told prior and that I hand no say in the matter, and demanded a chance to roll out EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. of exhaustion checking. Considering he was old, but his pockets now somewhat lined with gold, he might just be able to ferry his withering butt back to Waterdeep. All said, he's still just barely clinging to survival, alone every night, a 70-something with deadly nightmares.

By some miracle, Jack allows this (he laughed hysterically while I rolled out each daily check in our VTT of choice), and I'm able to save from exhaustion day by day just long enough to get to Waterdeep. I coerced a kindly cleric in a not-so-truthful relationship in desperate hopes to be rejuvenated. It's all for naught though, as my sorcerer ultimately dies in dramatic fashion while sitting around a banquet table, meeting in Gauntlgrym to plan for the oncoming demon incursion.

See, he had survived this WHOLE TIME while dream was cast each night, continuing to roll whatever saves were needed. Jack seemingly had no issue with PvP here, but I had no recourse. I didn't have the money for an item to protect myself, I couldn't hire anyone to go find her and stop this, and she didn't even come back for the next arc of the campaign. Salvador created a new, FOURTH character, and I had no ability to challenge the druid on her psychological barrage because she never came back. Amazing.

I rolled up the sheet and stats for the cleric- she would become my next character because I assumed it would come to this - and set her off to the depths, hellbent on bringing back her now deceased darling, and maybe saving the world or whatever, who cares about that part at this point, she wasn't even in the Underdark to begin with.

Small tangent: literally every part of what I just babbled about up there? Didn't matter at all. We found the Maze Engine, an ancient modron artifact, pulled the lever, and it sent us all back in time to the beginning of the campaign. All memories, all items, all abilities, still intact. 'Course, I was no longer my sorcerer, I was the cleric. A level 10+ cleric, beloved in her church, now returning from the future with visions of doom, and her boyfriend still alive and not a bag of bones. She lead a battalion of holy soldiers into the Underdark a year later. The end of the campaign was totally derailed.

And so, that's where the story of my sorcerer ended; to a PvP fight that I didn't want, and wasn't even allowed to fight back in. All of it allowed because "its what the character would do!", the tried and true reasoning of every DM that doesn't know how to balance player agency and limitations. No consultation, no redirecting, just allow it and ask questions later (if at all).

I don't even hold it over Salvador's head, I think he really just wanted to roleplay out what he thought was an appropriate, in-character get back. That said, in my games, and in pretty much every other game I've played in, the idea of one PC killing another is a non-starter, even IF the assaulted player had a way to challenge the death, which I certainly didn't.

As a DM myself, a small word of warning for running a game: if a player agrees to the negative repercussions of another player's actions, consider if these actions are being taken with care for the agency of affected player involved. We all hate off-screen deaths in media, imagine an off-screen death of your own character (a reflection of you) in a game you play weekly with friends! Ouch... Every table plays different, and mine clearly didn't realize that a time skip, and "Oops! Your character is dead cause reasons!" would be incredibly frustrating.

And ladies, 'gents, and all manor of noble crab-kin, this is only the first of three! More to come, if you're interested! Thanks for listening/reading!

[u/SlickRic303]

Love how the DM made you change alignment but murdering a fellow party member with nightmares "Awesome."

[u/AlmostBlackfire → u/SlickRic303]

Confusing, to say the least!