Oh man, one of my friends first-time DM'd. They intentionally told us all different versions of what the campaign was going to be, with the end result being they broke a cardinal rule of DMing; make sure you're running the same campaign as your players.
Needless to say I wasn't very amused when my wholesome non-combat character, made for a wholesome social campaign - who had not killed a single thing in three campaigns, was pitted against the God of Pestilence.
Lmao
So I gave a bloody lieutenant's debriefing on how much of a clusterfuck that was and he took those lessons to heart. Fast forward to 2021 when I get invited to play an NPC in a 1to1 campaign he was doing with another of our mutual friends. Spend about an hour doing a South-Wharf North-Wharf gang feud that saw our friend's gentlemanly character embroiled in Jimmy's yardy boy gang business. After a great deal of blustering that our friend was capable of summoning a sharknado, which was a credible enough threat given the circumstances, Jimmy, the wizard-turned-gangster and their rival boss Sampson agree to meet at a fountain. Negotiations go smoothly with both Sampson and Jimmy finding common ground for working together to dominate the "tax free business" when we're attacked by a god with 500 HP that hits for 250 damage. Sampson and Jimmy are both lvl 5 fighters, the player char was lvl 8 warlock and we were joined by another lvl 8 NPC bard played by a friend who joined later that evening.
It took 2 hours to kill this thing with copious cheesing, but it wasn't challenging or interesting so much as it was just Mugabe levels of number inflation.
We spent a good hour and a half just roasting how he managed to get even worse, like he managed to distill the worst elements of all DND into DND Vodka. It reached a headway where the DM had a shocking revelation when he said it was the warlock player's fault for not choosing the powerful choices before him, and I told him "Do you hear what you've become? You're criticizing him for not min-maxing a wizard?" And he replied "Oh my god what have I become."
The bard player tried to be diplomatic but after 30 minutes of roasting joined in too until everyone was crying and making GOKU POWERING UP SCREAMS AHHHHHHHHHHHH I'M NOT STRONG ENOUGH TO DEFEAT THE ENEMY I HAVE TO POWER UP AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH
So yeah, old habits die hard. Apparently in my absence these bad habits have full on become his style. It got to a level of satire which shouldn't even be possible when I compared his setting to Blacksun Deathcrawl, a gaming system which is only theoretically playable and is an engine of depsair meant to simulate depression. Yet every time I brought up something like "he'll probably have you fight an abstract concept of hopelessness that forces you to kill every NPC you grew attached to" or "you'll fight a god backwards through time across a hell dimension and be forced to kill its innocent origin point in order to maintain causality" the Warlock player said he'd alreay done those.
I was that specific, and
he'd already been forced to play that. The DM cackled like an evil hag every time I brought up some impossibly grimdark exercise in cock and ball torture and the warlock player said "yep did that last sesh." It got to a point where I was reading out how chars in BSDC are unable to truly die until they give up hope and Warlock player was all "yeah my char can't die for good unless they get succ'd into hell, death is no escape," and I had to yell grimBINGO
Warlock player was laffin like nuts, left the discord but had to come back to laff some more. Wondering how his char meant for a low level city campaign about mid level crime and respect was supposed to deal with the Mugabe inflation thousand armed Shakti world devouring gods coming after him, each one more powerful than the last.
A year ago I told him make sure you know what campaign you're running. If your players and you have agreed that they're running a campaign about opening a muffin shop in detroit don't drop vengeful Kali on them
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Topic: Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: COBRA!!! (Read 920817 times)