Horrible Game Starts

Horrible first sessions for tabletops. Allow me to begin...

>Be me, join group for tabletop rpg
>Group is like 15 people, some have never played tabletops, GM is barely active in days before game.
>Dem characters
>Edgy Anime Girl with necromancy and sadism
>Elon Musk (literally just Elon Musk with an airship)
>Mind-flayer, but friendly.
>Etc.
>Ask if I can play a space/time mage
>Lel, like they're ever gonna approve that
>GM approves

>Weird, but fine
>Make space/time mage, is as stupidly overpowered as it sounds
>Can reverse any bad decision by just going back in time

>First session comes around
>All players are screaming manchildren
>Fuck.jpg
>Stay because why the fuck not
>GM appears, says that everyone is in the party because they work for elon musk to get plot device.png
>Party boards Elon Musk's airship
>Edgy anime girl does edgy anime girl thing
>Running around with knives threatening to stab people
>Girl is IC 8 years old
>Kinda annoying but not actually doing anything so leave her alone

>One guy NOPES right at her
>"Ain't gonna be threatened by a damn little girl!"
>He draws gun
>Everyone points out that he's literally gonna shoot a child
>"Dun' care!"
>Shoots child, child dies
>Me, facepalming so hard
>Reverse time, push shooter off ship before he can shoot girl
>Wow user, why u such a powergamer?
>You just don't like fun
>You're so evil
>Everyone talking over one another about OPness
>I literally warned everyone that I should not play such an OP character beforehand

>Shooter says he had a nuke hidden under trenchcoat
>Shooter explodes
>Airship explodes
>Party wipe


Yeah... Needless to say, I did not go back there.

>Group is like 15 people
Stopped reading there
and you should have stopped writing there

>Very very first time playind DnD, back in 1987 or 88.
>Roll up a fighter.
>Get a 17 strength, yay!
>Get 2 hit points for starting at level one, less yay.
>On our way to the adventure site
>Climb down a ravine
>Come across a door to the dungeon.
>It's not even locked, it's just stuck.
>Try to shoulder ram it down, since I have the highest strength.
>Fail.
>Take 1d3 damage
>Die.

What system were you using? Were you even using one at all?

>thinking any story on Veeky Forums is real

>rolling for stats

Ha

I still prefer this to modern level 1 characters who can take out entire encampments of armed men, whilst leaping ravines and running headlong into spike traps without breaking a sweat

>modern level 1
You mean 4e? Because in 5e, that is NOT a thing.

Not him, but if you would ever in your life played a game during a convent or similar event, you will know the joys of having caller in your group.
Or two.

Welcome to old D&D! Oh, wait a minute...
Welcome to D&D!

Different user, but if you know a thing or two about 0D&D and 1e AD&D, you would understand the difference between them and anything that followed.

>assuming every story on Veeky Forums is fake

>roll up a paladin
>everyone else is evil but DM rules I cannot sense their evil presence for whatever reason
> Stop them from committing evil acts as I see them because apparently my character still doesn't realise they are evil
>take down bandit lair gaining a heap of gold.
>turns out bandits were hired by an even bigger evil
>We hole up and take watches to make sure they don't attack us when we are asleep.
>Rogue announces on his watch that he plunges his dagger into my characters throat, because he wants my share of the gold
>Dm rules that it instantly kills me because I am sleeping. He then says that I can roll a new character next session but I can't participate in the rest of this session.

Seriously bullshit. I found out later that they didn't want me in the group. They could have just told me instead of being passive aggressive.

How didn't they stabilize you? An owlbear almost instagibbed me, but I was stabilized on the same turn with -9 health. Shit was dangerous and it got lucky.

>expecting from bunch of neckbearders to muster enough courage to say to someone to get out
How the hell you think most content in That Guy/That GM thread comes to life?

AD&D didn't have a 0 to -9 buffer. 1 hp out of 1000 hp, you could technically perform full efficiency, but lose that single hit point and you die.

That dying step in-between was an improvement brought to you by 3rd edition.

Also, there was racial cap to level up, except for humans, which did not have ANY perk otherwise. So campaigns ended when the dwarf and the elf reached level 14 and you never saw your human fighter reach 15.

Initiative was either "all heroes" / "all foes" OR spells and weapons had specific speed factors.

A lower Armor Class was a good thing. An unarmored human with no Dex bonus had an AC of 10. A low level fighter had a "THAC0" (To-Hit-Armor-Class-Zéro) of around 18, meaning that to hit an Armor class of -1, he required a 19.

As if rolling stats wasn't bad enough, someone with 16+ in ALL his class' prerequisite stats (STR for fighters, DEX for rogues, DEX+STR+WIS for rangers) also received +10% XP.

Only the fighter classes gained XP for killing foes. Clerics and Wizards had some for learning / casting spells, rogues for looting gold (legally or not).

Point-buy simply wasn't a thing. It was:
> Roll 3d6
> Can't switch stats around
> You haven't got a 13 in strength AND a 17 in Charisma? Too fucking bad, you simply CAN'T play a paladin.

And don't get me started on saves!

Kinda shitty. But why did you play a 'din in a evil campaign

>Only the fighter classes gained XP for killing foes. Clerics and Wizards had some for learning / casting spells, rogues for looting gold (legally or not).

That sounds kinda cool really. Gives everyone a simple goal. rather then kill everything that moves. I use story xp, but it really feels just when I want them to level up rather then them earning it.

>> You haven't got a 13 in strength AND a 17 in Charisma? Too fucking bad, you simply CAN'T play a paladin.

This too makes paladin's more speical. if I remember the 'dins where much better then the stranded classes.
I kid you not here is how one of my old groups did stats
>4d6 drop the lowest
>rerolling the 1's first though
>roll an extra stat to swap out
>roll a second set just like that
>pick one of these
>don't like them
>swap one or two numbers from each list

Fake.
> No mention of the game being played.
Pure freeform / retarded homebrew doesn't count as a TTRPG.

>Group is like 15 people,
Any group, no matter how neckbearded the manchildren are, would divide in 3 groups.

>All players are screaming manchildren
Out of 15? Really? You can't even come up with a single annoying couple or stoned guy to add some variety to your story?

>Make space/time mage, is as stupidly overpowered as it sounds
A starting character shouldn't have stupidly overpowered abilities by default.

>Can reverse any bad decision by just going back in time
Okay, definitely not Mage: the Awakening. Care to flesh out what resource it required, what was the mechanic?

>Shooter says he had a nuke hidden under trenchcoat
Airship, nukes, magic, Elon Musk and friendly Mind-Flayers

> Only the fighter classes gained XP for killing foes. Clerics and Wizards had some for learning / casting spells, rogues for looting gold (legally or not).
> That sounds kinda cool really. (...) I use story xp
Sounds good, until your rogue wander off in hopes of finding the dragon's hoard before the dragon, or you wake up in an ambush with nor armor on and no spell to cast because not using all your spell slots before going to sleep means you waste precious XP.

> This too makes paladin's more special.
Yeah... we ended up rolling 4d6s, allowing stats exchange, rerolling if you did not get at least X total stats and ended with barely playable characters matched with what seemed like demigods.

Don't misunderstand me, hard stat prerequisites with a bell curve distribution of stats is a nice narrative, but you can achieve similar results with stat-buy. Of course, heroes won't be evenly distributed along the bell curve, but they're SUPPOSED to be the exception anyways, so who cares?

I had a rough start. About ten years ago.
There are some people whose whole life is D&D. Me and my brother heard about one such person and we had always wanted to play. This guy interviewed us before hand in a public space, it went like a job interview. He told us that he based his whole setting on some weeaboo gamebooks (way of the tiger). Then he handed is a thirteen-page booklet of house rules for 3.5, I still have this booklet and it is filled with fucking minute changes that absolutely make no difference.
> Armor check penalty affects initiative
> Called shots rules that focused on size mod
> A section on what kind of counters we should use (I’ll get back to that)
> Roll a random XP amount to determine our starting level. Yeah, I like rolling stats but we ended up three levels behind his long time players.
> Create water doesn’t work in a desert, or really anywhere that createing water is important
> Amanuensis, went from a Cantrip to a level 4 spell. The spell just copies non-magical writing onto paper. I struggle to think of the motherfucker who missed it to the point of game breaking.
I was fifteen or so at the time, I didn’t read that shit and neither did my brother. He has trouble reading on account of his crippling Dyslexia.
1/4

Then I got there, the house was in the worst neighbourhood in town (or so my brother told me) and as near as I can tell the house had only two rooms, one for books, one for the game table. On every wall was some new age crap like a mandala or acupuncture diagrams or chakras, there were bowels filled with tumbled semiprecious stones. Remember the counters we needed, I brought some tumbled quartz and some dude asked me if I stole them.
I fell in love with his book room, if I say anything bad about this man let it not be about his book room. It had everything, he was running out of fucking space for books and board games. It’s like if a hoarder could only fill their house out of a TSR catalogue, did you know the 80’s D&D cartoon had a boardgame? I love old D&D crap with all my soul but it was excessive.
We sat down in that very room while across the way they started shit. We hadn’t made our characters… I tell a lie, we made the fuck out of characters but we couldn’t use them. My Wu-Gen and my brother’s Paladin we made at home used house banned splat books. Then we got thumped with a fucking book I will never forget. Random names! A book of 10,000 random names that we had to roll in because the DM owned it and by gum we had to use it.
Percevoir Rend, or rather Sir Percevoir Rend since my brother and I switched character concepts because I was sick of spell selecting and he wanted to try the class that doesn’t let you bath.
2/4

This was my first time playing of course but we had an avenging angel. A bloke with the patince and more than enough knowhow to help us make characters that don’t suck. Guy had 3.5 memorised to the point of being able to describe any feet in the books, he was a total bro to us and I wish I hadn’t asked him why he wasn’t playing with the others, he said he wouldn’t play with that group, even though he was bff’s with the DM, then he left and I wondered.
We finally had characters, we had to wait until the snack break till they would let us into the game room. This was actually sensible, the room was so small and the game table was so large that nobody could leave unless everyone to the left or right of them did. We were placed at the apex of the horseshoe of imprisonmentTM. The game table was a hexagonal poker table filled with loose dice, and atop that was a lawn table with the game map. We had to sit on the back of our red leather chairs to see over it.
So we’re good to go right? No, nooo my sweet summer nut-baby. This was just the beginning! Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be a character in a novel who isn’t in the current scene? I know, I and my brother were to stay silent as they concluded the next segment of gameplay. We were in the crowd watching a tournament (Ugh!) between the old players and a giant.
3/4

He was a good DM, maybe not a thoughtful person but he was very good with the story telling. We just weren’t in the story. The fights culminated with their giant slaying dwarf being sentenced to an unwinnable fight, an execution in the guise of competition. All my character could do was watch. my paladin had to watch an unlawful execution on a grand stage. But by pulse pounding breath that mohawked Dwarf mini beat the shit out of some higher-level crap. Go him.
Then we were introduced. Let’s not beat around the bush here, we sucked. I brought my best drama club enthusiasm and I came up with… Glorious French Accent! I cannot tell you why, I just did, it was so bad! We started chatting and I got into my swing at last. Then the DM halted us, he sent my brother a text he was supposed to read; it was as long as this post and this was the year the very first iPhone came out, phone screens were tiny and my brother couldn’t read shit.
I read it, I read to the group his massive exposition dump in character, in French tones so off base that I slipped into a Jamaican accent at some stage. I was the mouth piece for the DM and I milked it to no end. Then it ended. Right there the session ended, this story takes place over six hours and I spent two of them playing and the last half hour in actual control of my paladin.
> In closing. He might have been the best DM I’ve ever seen. I would read a novel if he wrote it, but as a learning environment it sucked horse duck.
4/4

It wasn't an evil campaign that's the problem. The dm said make your sheets and bring them in