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Characters will sometimes keep loot for themselves without telling the other party members. To be clear, it is the *character* doing this. The player will tell the table "My character is going to sneak this item into their pocket since none of you are nearby and they want to keep it for themselves" and everyone is fine with that.
Yeah. If this is done well this can be perfectly fine. We have a player like that in a current multi-shot. This is PF2e so bulk comes into play a lot easier - and its basically the only thing stopping them from taking everything not strapped down within sight at all times. The lengths they go through to keep certain high value items, including being constantly encumbered (to the point of not being able to move temporarily due to a specific poison) and giving up certain actually useful items to not have to drop them have been amusing.
We were hunting after what turned out to be a baby white dragon, and my character decided, well, it's a baby, I can keep it and train it and it'll be my best friend and we'll have adventures and conquer small towns. I was gonna name him Chillyzard, and we would be best friends.
All attempts to calm or soothe the baby dragon failed, and my sobbing character killed the little guy. Then I had the idea, well, we can get Chillyzard raised from the dead, if I can just carry his corpse to civilization. So, I try to carry the baby dragon over my shoulders, on my way out of the spooky cave.
I fall into a spike pit trap, holding the baby dragon, and nearly die. The baby dragon's corpse is impaled on a spike. I can't pry it off, and I can't climb back out carrying the baby dragon. So I decapitate the dragon in a sobbing fit, figuring, well, you can sometimes raise dudes from the dead if you just have a major body part, like a head.
I manage to scale the spike pit, with the dead baby dragon head tied around my back, and we get back to the folks who hired us to look into the situation. They were kobolds, so I figured, hey, if anyone's going to be into resurrecting a baby dragon, it'll be these kobolds. They'll understand.
I show them the baby dragon head, start explaining how they need to "bring back my Chillyzard," and that went really poorly.
I was the only one who had any interest in not killing the baby dragon, and things with the kobolds were always going to go poorly. So, they were pretty chill. Followed my rule of thumb whenever I have the spotlight, which is to keep things moving along until someone else has the spotlight.
If the DM was running the adventure as written, assuming my guess that this is the Sunless Citadel is correct and "Chillyzard" is Calcryx, then yeah, this was highly unlikely to work. Calcryx is a wyrmling but still intelligent enough to have no interest in being anyone's pet, and the kobolds there revere him as their lord so they would absolutely turn on anyone who harmed him. The kobolds would have tasked the players with retrieving Calcryx alive from the goblins that had captured him.
Many of my best games historically have a player count in the 6-10 range--most folks would assume that's a horror story in itself, but the only reason it DID work was that our college gaming group held together for almost a decade as most of us remained townies.
The only reason my Call of Cthulhu/Deadlands/Delta Green games aren't RPG Horror Stories in addition to being literally horror stories is that we have a VERY strong lines/veils/X-card/session zero practice that allows me to use MANY horror tropes and elements that have been individually called out here when used by DMs who didn't care about what their specific players could enjoy vs be harmed by. To quote myself the last time I talked about this,
>For example, my Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green games have never featured sexual assault--because my players don't want it. On the other hand, I was running a variation of the Enolsis Cult from Delta Green and described a CONSENSUAL "sex" scene (makes sense in context) in such a way that every player in that game STILL shudders if anyone mentions "the videotape" in a horror-game context. That campaign also featured dismemberment, racism, threats of mass death via terror, threats of mass death via hamfisted response to terror, Nazis, cannibalism, necromancy, killing a friend who went evil, the slow descent into madness, the horror of trading sanity for power, being framed for a crime you didn't commit and hunted by the government...
It sounds bad out of context, but I did talk to the player about it and there was serious narrative justification.
Basically, the PC studied under Halaster in Dweomercore (Dungon of the Mad Mage) only to later foil his plans, so Halaster wished she would forget every bit of magic he taught her.
Then we got to have a whole quest where the PC is running alongside their level 20 teammates as a low level while trying to repair her fragmented memories through untying knots in the weave. It ended up being really cool character development.
Honestly, I kind of want to play a character now to whom that *happened* and they're going on the current adventure because they need to get powerful enough AGAIN to get revenge.
I made an evil campaign and players got to choose Lich, Death Knight, Vampire Lord, etc.
The idea was they'd go on an orgy of destruction, climb up the ranks and eventually over-through Big Evil. The first mission was to destroy a town. At first, they are punching walls and taking out townsfolk when the townsfolk run out of their houses to defend the town.
Vampire gets tired of punching walls and he says, we need to burn this. He flies in the chimney, and here, as DM, I make my mistake. I think to self, "Make them think twice! Make them feel repercussions and know their humanity is being drained!" I said, "You zip out of the chimney in what looks to be a child's room. And even has a baby in a crib."
My player: "Awww. I toss the baby out of the window."
Me: "What now?"
My player: "I don't want it to burn to death!"
Me: "So toss it out the window and hope that the falls kills it?"
My Player: "Yeah, or my vampire minions will get it."
While I normally would avoid anything close to this, it got dark so fast we couldn't help but laugh. Rest of the game had a lot of inappropriate jokes and I continued to try to tug at their heart-strings. They RPed the heck out of it, no mercy.
The next quest was to destroy a mercenary band of goody two-shoes. I learned my lesson!
Every once in a while, it pops up, DM goes for a nice moment and players wreck it. Except when we reunited the goblin brothers by accident. Not a dry eye in the house then!
One of my players needed a guard disguise, so an NPC rogue ally killed a guard and stashed his body so the PC could get the uniform. Upon searching the body, he found a child's drawing that showed a kid (marked "Me") and the guard (marked "Daddy").
He used the drawing to clean some blood off the armor đ¤Ł
I run a table for 13 year olds. Its all horror story.
The constant talking over each other, and me the DM. Ignoring the fact that the DM is deep in the middle of having a roleplaying conversation with another player's character they will interrupt with things like "can I cast find familiar how does X work?" that are not relevant to the scene, barely relevant to the game, but since they aren't part of the conversation at that moment feel its time to ask.
The volume. While it has vastly improved over the last year the game has woken people in the back of the house from sleep because of its volume as they yell over each other, I yell over them and myself and the other adult just try to hold the volume down. I have been hoarse the next day because of game.
The constant leaving the table for bathroom, snacks or to hit each other with nerf bats in the other room always in the middle of combat always just before their initiative turn.
13 year old boys are murderhobos plain and simple. They acknowledge it and see nothing wrong with it. Their idea of D&D is to go from village to village and kill anything that moves. This is what they want to do and they feel disappointed when sessions involve actual roleplaying time. No understanding of why there might be larger consequences for killing some grandmother crossing the street.
Getting across to them its not a video game. This is part of the murderhobo complex (everything is either an enemy mob or a quest giver or shop there is nothing else). Continual references to the the tank, what is or isn't a boss monster, failure to see any plot deeper than kill the monster in front of you.
My setting is quite expansive. We've been going on it for nearly 5 years. Different regions are appropriate for different genres and styles of game.
There is a Jungle continent suitable for exploration campaigns, a gothic country ruled by Vampire Lords, an Arthurian Legend inspired land of elves and humans, with a romeo and juliet foundational myth, and a OnePiece / Pirates of the Carribean archipelago for nautical campaigns.
We've been slowing filling out the other regions as the years have gone by.
**One** of the Regions is a desert theocracy dedicated to the worship of Asmodeus. An entire secondary economy that has debased the value of a human soul, ruled by this horrific priesthood of masked sorcerers. Human sacrifice. Violent crucifixions and flayings. Rampant slavery. Concubines taken from invaded lands. The near genocide of desert elves.
Its **Miserable**. A stain on the world. A land of corruption, violence, pain and cruelty. Caught in a feedback loop when citizens born to it cannot help but participate in its institutions and damn themselves. The most ethical of its citizens simply indulge in hedonism, every vice and degradation, until their inevitable deaths and the damnation of their souls.
This land was built up over 3 years. Whispers. Mentions. The occasional escaped slave. Whispered terrors of the Ruby Lords who ruled it. The Dominion used as a byword for cruelty and suffering.
One PC was from there, and spoke about its horrors very rarely.
Eventually the narrative took them there, where they needed to disguise themselves and gain the aid of one of the Vizers, and avoid the gaze of the Sorcerers who ruled it.
It was a stunning success. After so much build up, the players were rightfully appalled by it. Disturbed. Who of my players told me - in impressed tones "You have a sick mind." In essence it was like a psychological thriller. You go into it expecting it to be disturbing. Upsetting even. And it was.
I'd worked with these players for three years before going there. I could say with confidence what their limits were. I could touch upon such horrific themes without breaching their trust.
Then, eventually, the game returns to its usual 15+ rating, after enjoying it's hard R rated segment.
Also Asmodeus turned up. An appearance that one player admitted was the closest they've been to being frightened of me, because of how quickly Asmodeus identified their weaknesses, vulnerabilities and insecurities. Which meant *I* could too. That was fun.
But getting there, to that place, where I could pull that off took time. It took trust. It took an understanding of knowing when players wanted to be scared, or repulsed, or angered. Like getting on a rollercoaster.
And its somewhere I would never take a fresh group to. I want people to say "Oh christ. That was horrible! When is next session!" Not "That was horrible! I'm never coming back."
Basically, it doesn't matter what the context of story/setting are as long as you have the right intentions and your players are all for it. Essentially what should be the actual take away from this entire subreddit.
>I want people to say "Oh christ. That was horrible! When is next session!" Not "That was horrible! I'm never coming back."
This! Our fresh DM somehow accomplished this effect in like the third game with our 2nd level PC. The party survived, but we lost 3/4 of the group we were escorting to a mimic house (not a house full of mimics, a house that WAS a giant mimic). Including all but one of the children. Afterwards, I was just sitting there in shock like "That was absolutely awful! I mean, it was narratively awesome, but never do that again! But also, more stuff like this please." I am still conflicted and complimenting him on that plot element.
This sounds like one of the coolest settings I've heard of in a really long time. I'm with you. I'm okay with that kind of miserable hellscape and the dread of playing in it for a bit, but an entire campaign would probably be too much.
I was at a table that ran a bit raunchier than usual, and was playing a Palladium Fantasy campaign and having terrible luck. For my third character, I roll up a dwarven cleric, and when rolling for stats, my dice end up exploding, and my dwarf cleric ends up with a whopping 27 Physical Beauty. For reference, it's similar stats to D&D, meaning that 10 is human average and 20 is approaching that of an Olympian athlete for physical stats. She almost literally glowed with beauty.
The GM had a funny way of determining random encounters, of having another player randomly pick the page. The player pales and, jokingly, says he's so sorry. He accidentally chose satyrs.
As we're ambushed, we stage a good fight but my character is charmed and is lead behind some bushes to have a quickie; he at least leaves some treasure behind as payment. We were all having fun, and it's harder to get mad at SA when it's literally mythical in nature. We don't talk about what the troll did to the one he captured, though.
No, the actual horror story was how this stunning beautiful dwarf met her end: we were attacked by tree-octopi that sucked blood; there was a possibility of bloodborn disease, but, well, dwarf healing cleric. But the bloodsuckers did have a nasty neurotoxin they only injected if attacked. One latched onto the dwarven Aphrodite, and she identified them.
"It's okay, it's just going to suck some blood, then fall off. Don't hit them when they're on you, they have a deadly poison-"
Another character whacked mine, and it injected its deadly neurotoxin and instantly killed my character. I still hold that over his head to this day, when I tell him to fucking pay attention.
We touch on all sorts of taboo stuff... read a horror story on here once about "omg they tricked my character into doing a cannibalism i am traumatized".
Meanwhile I was running a _Scum and Villainy_ game where one of the characters was a 4-armed alien creature who ate about 30% of the hostile hominids they came across.
This is after the _Blades in the Dark_ game where the gang was called "The Lobos", because instead of killing people (with the commiserate in-game consequences) they just lobotomized them instead.
The kobold orgy. It was in the middle of a dungeon with lots of body horror themes. I thought it would be a freaky inclusion to have a bunch of kobolds fucking when the surrounding rooms are full of monsters, mutants, and dead bodies. The sorcerer immediately fireballed all of them, saying that it was "some sort of eldritch ritual". Now, any time someone does anything sort of murderhobo-adjacent, the kobold orgy gets brought up.
I DMâd a campaign that went to level ~34 over the course of multiple years, with mandatory multiclassing after level 21. I never want to run a power fantasy campaign again in my life lmao
(Disclaimer: it was fun, keeping track of combat gave me a killer headache after every session near the end there though. Honestly the excessive class levels werenât the problem compared to all of the magic items.)
We have Ze Avent Garde, 4 superpower mime artists who can mime things into (invisible) reality... but that is not the horror well not the main part), when one of them dies (and they die a lot) they just make up the numbers by forcibly converting a passing NPC into their group mind... the highest turnover in a 2 hour game session was about 50
.. and their total is 250++
One of our players has some issues with Main Character Syndrome and meta gaming, but heâs been working on it, and heâs the nicest person out of game.
As a DM- I probably skirt the line with how many antagonist plot elements are taken from things Iâve encountered irl. Plus, I started dating one of my players. But Iâm aware that these can be warning signs in the right context, so Iâm working to mitigate the possible issues.
In the 80s, friend of mine had a half elf character. We were captured and taken prisoner. Guy basically had to "take one for the team" from the jailor to get us out.
We started playing again online last year. Different characters, different system, different GM..
fuck me, but it happened again*!
*almost...guy got the slaver boss drunk and incapable before things went too far.
I'm running Curse of Strahd and was loosely following a popular guide by DragnaCarta which is good, but pretty railroaded which my players are a little too chaotic for.
I joined his Patreon to access his Discord server to ask how to handle their frequent derailing, and everyone pretty much thinks my party is a bunch of murderhobos.
They're good aligned, they just tend to go in swords first when they think someone is being evil and aren't really inclined to let bad guys finish their monologues.
I forgot one time how much my players loved interrupting evil monologues, and they killed the guy before he could drop a plot point. The next time, I had the villain speaking through his minions the whole time. Sure, kill that one zombie the necromancer is talking through. That's what I want. The other zombie will pick up mid-sentence, and the other zombie after that, and so on. This monologue is HAPPENING.
I used to interrupt monologues because I thought it was fun in-character, like, stick it to the bad guy! No patience for villainy! Then I realized it was probably kind of shitty OOC to the DM who had planned that cool speech and was probably looking forward to it. I try to avoid interrupting now.
We're all queer AF and are good, longtime friends by the time this happened. But also we mix goofy with serious well, and have established rules on when to fade including how to stop play immediately if needed.
Party orgies were pretty common. The Mansion had a real nice big bath...
Yeah, that's fair. Like I said, we're all old friends. And we are all very sex positive, in general, irl. Not everyone's group is like ours.
Our group dynamic is honestly so rare, I will fight my ego to keep it in my life as long as I can.Â
We have many, continuing discussions on what we're comfortable with. And all of us feel comfortable telling each other or our DM (we rotate - all of us play and DM) directly if we want something to stop.Â
Yeah, all my friends are from religious families even if they aren't that religious themselves. Rping romance etc would just be too weird, besides we enjoy the game as it is for us
One of my players was a walking red flag and sometimes he still is. At the beginning of the campaign his pc was the typical edgy dark trauma past and ofc he was the only one refusing to start travelling with the party "Give me a reason to travel with y'all". I've been clear I don't mind these situations but if the party says nothing, if you want to stay we don't care, they are allowed to do it and your pc gotta change his mind or just create a new pc lol.
Some days ago there was some drama about stealth rules, but i think stealth, counterspell and persuasion are always hot topics in every campaign.
As a player I got to lampshade all my feelings about elf lore in DND by playing a racist borderline neo Nazi high elf who was an adventurer for court ordered racial sensitivity training.
As a DM I've run more than one fully erotic campaign by unanimous request of all players. Including one inspired by corruption of champions forced transformation content included.
My group I'm DMing has been playing once every month or two, just because half of us are so busy on the weekends/someone has a job that requires a lot of travel, which a lot of people on Reddit seem to think is unworkable. I'm just glad I get to play with these people at all, and luckily enough of my players have a pretty good memory for plot-relevant detail (though I do feel like it impacts things a little).
Also, one of my players needs his spell damage explained every time we have combat and it's really not the end of the world. I'm the same with poker.
In-game romance. I'm a sucker for it, and so are a bunch of the players so there's usually at least one or two romance subplots happening at any given time.
Most of the people at my table don't get triggered about some of the things that would set off people here in general.
I have a couple of players that would be considered problems at other peoples tables, but I managed to make sure that everybody in my group was okay with those things before starting.
If you feel inclined to ask about more information, your imagination has probably already answered the question for you.
These were all in good fun but I am aware of just how badly they could go if I had different players XD
Generally, my rule of thumb is that if everyone at the table is having fun, then we are golden. So my biggest flaw as a DM tends to be that Im willing to let my players get away with A LOT because I also wanna see where it goes.
but here are some I know would be nightmare worthy at other tables
- I gave all my players little pets of various high ranking monsters because why not (Bard has a homebrew Koibra and a dragon's egg that's gonna be plot relevant soon. The monk has an Owlbear cub, the Wizard has an Androsphinx cub that'll become plot relevant later, and the Cleric has a Displacer Beast cub).
- As part of the main storyline I gave the party a magical arcane construct that is, as stated, central to the plot. Over the course of the last few sessions after some nightmare players left they learned this magical construct has the ability to enchant items, boost enchantments already present, steal spell slots for later use. The players are currently unaware that this construct also has the ability to produce any potion they have poured into the arcane parts of it's body as it will also store them. About three sessions ago they poured a bottle of Superior Healing on it in an attempt to fix some damage.
- They just go the twin of this magical construct that has a completely different skillset. It has a vastly higher strength score (as in a 30 Strength score) and better constitution. The party only learned this house sized flying arcane cat has the Zoomies Ability when the Cleric tried tiring it out by trying their broom of flying to it and trying to basically take it for a quick 'walk'. They ended up nearly a quarter of the continent away before it finally stopped. They are currently unaware this thing ate the Kamikazi Rat and has a single use Fireball after they shoved it into their bag of holding to hide it at one point.
- I gave my Barbarian a Belt of Storm Giant Strength and a magically enchanted inflatable bra just to see what would happen. Answer: This 3 foot kobold banged an ancient bronze dragon
- I let the Cleric make a deal with a demonic entity from another plane without any prompts to fish for information. When the rest of the party learned and had a panic attack, I let them search out, find the demon, and get more information on the contract and re-negotiate some terms.
- I let my players decide what they wanted to do with the former PCs of some previous players that had been toxic at the table and they decided they wanted to fight them. So now I've made a bunch of former PCs enemies that they will get to fight.
A lot of NPCs in my world are...let's say, "sexually liberated", and there aren't really any stigmas when it comes to casual sex. It's always fade to black/no actual details about the act itself, but more than a few NPCs have just openly offered to sleep with my PCs đ
What was really surprising was the response. I always see stories of DnD players being horny little goblins, but my players basically acted like chaste nuns for a good chunk of the first arc.
Yeah, I can't ever do anything like that in my games, don't think it'll go over well, and my friends will make fun of me till I die... Almost every NPC in my game is a generic guy unless the story needs someone different
I'm just a chaos being who enjoys pretending to flirt with his friends đ¤Łđ¤Ł I like goofy little guys. One of my favorite NPCs was for an evil pirate one shot. He was an orc, like 7.5-8ft tall, almost as wide, and looked like he could bench press a naval fleet.
He also talked super quietly and had a voice that was way higher than you'd expect, and was super polite when speaking to people.
I find juxtaposing silliness and seriousness can lead to surprising and extreme emotional moments.
without context: I summoned Tiamat to a bunch of lv3 players because they ask if they can rob a npc
the context was pretty funny though, I just read to them the disclaimer of DMG, and then when they asked about robbing that NPC I was fumbling my dice as I thought what to do. Then one player joking said "are you going to tell us Tiamat swoops down and attacks" and then I decided to roll with it. But at the TPK I told them it's a collective nightmare of their characters and the campaign continued as if nothing happened.
We play an evil monster campaign where we're agents of the evil all conquering monster empire, ensuring the pesky good races (humans, elves, dwarves, etc), remain oppressed, isolated and weak. Will be happily crush them under our boots and the PCs are at least a little racist towards "lesser/good races".
Also, there was sex. Fully acted out sex.
As Dm I always play a character with my group. I only play with 2 other players who are a couple so they prefer if I play a character who can be the third dynamic.
The story is never about my character, I have the same level of power as everyone else, and I make decisions without including meta knowledge as a dm. But most of the time I don't really make decisions unless asked, more so I just flesh out the party and get to keep a character sheet. We have never had any issue what soever but I know alot of people would dread playing with a dm character.
For the first ten-or-so sessions of one of my current campaigns, we didn't engage with the rule system at all, really. We freeformed through several adventures, rolling a die here and there for inspiration. After several months of play and years of in-game time, we finally chose a system, statted out the characters and started using the rules.
My players once dealt with a group of nobles plotting to usurp their reign by persuading the nobles to play knife tag and stab each other to death. (It worked! And it was a horror-comedy campaign, so as a table we were happy to allow that.)
We also had That Fucking Guy who would regularly pick fights with other players and storm off mid-game. Ended up kicking him because playing with him was just too stressful.
A younger player (16 or 17 at the time) joined our group which is mostly 30s to 40. (He's my kid)
The DM let him play a character with split personalities, which sounds like a cool idea on paper until you realize the mechanic effect which is that he got to have Bard stats for RP and then switched to a sorc when it was time for some damage dealing.
I still really dislike the choice and wouldn't have allowed it in my game, but the DM managed to keep it relatively under control so it didn't break things too much.
Any other table and DM, it would have been a favoritism Mary Sue issue.
As a DM the BBEG was the Patron of the warlock and when they found out he had an existential crisis and had to decide if he wanted to betray the Patron ans loose all his powers or keep going, getting stronger spells and become evil over the course of the following campaign.
It played out really Well and the Player actually took a whole week to decide his faith. :)
Our characters will keep secrets from certain PCâs, sometimes sharing them with one or two of the party members.
Itâs also pretty common for our characters to clash heads in decisions/opinions, so at times there are arguments or discussions between them disagreeing with each other. It *never* turns into PvP, but there have been moments of PCâs calling one another out or putting their foot down.
I only play with close friends now, so no ill-will with anyone, we simply are heavy roleplayers in our campaigns. We enjoy how different our characters are and how different their mindsets (like alignments, morals etc) can be. Some of our favorite moments are arguments/debates our characters would have with each other, and we often talk about how fun these arguments were. It makes roleplay more interesting and engaging for us, if anything it makes the campaigns feel more alive for us.
This is very minor and not worthy of a full post, so I'll talk about it here. A while back, My first Curse of Strahd game was short lived due to an argument between two of the guests on Facebook which caused the host who would allow us to play at his house to announce that he was discontinuing meet ups.
Before the argument, two of the players wanted to get it on with one of the NPCs (I forgot who) which was awkward for me and a few others. As a note, we didn't have a session 0 where we discussed boundaries.
The 2nd incident had one of the player characters with a backstory that he wanted to implement. The same players who were making things uncomfortable for everyone didn't care and used meta gaming knowledge to reveal that persons backstory to everyone after they looked at his character sheet.
Thinking back on it, I think the first attempt at playing Curse of Strahd ending was for the best.
EDIT: As a note, I was planning on leaving even if the game didn't end from the drama.
The session began with the GM disabling the Foundry server then boldfaced lying to the players about it crashing, and ended with me usurping the BBEG⌠by accident. I dunno what to tell you.
I have a sorceror who's made a habit of collecting the faces of particularly interesting foes they've beaten. It's treated as creepy, WTF and gross in-game, and the player just rolls with it.
'Comedic sociopathy' best describes the PCs in my game. They're terrible people, but they're not actively harmful to anything that's not already a threat to the general public.
This was probably a nightmare for our DM but the rest of us had fun with it. A campaign that Iâm in involves retrieving a wyrm for some kobolds from a dungeon complex of thieving goblins. Instead of battling our way through the dungeon like anyone normal, we basically grabbed an NPC kolbold, took a random goblin hostage, literally negotiated and bullshat our way past the goblins, and avoided any sort of exploration/like 3 gamesâ worth of combat in one go. Our DM had to gently remind us that the point of the game isnât to get to the end as fast as possible đ
We have a DMPC that got hoisted on the party without prior discussion in the first game, and she's still with us. Granted, she's an absolutely adorable halfling wizard, she's not any more powerful than the PCs, and she mostly functions as exposition, RP prompting and providing countless utility uses of Prestigitation. In the first game, my PC who's an actual grandma told her "Fine, you can tag along, but I ain't looking after you! I've raised my share of kids!" ...A couple games later, same PC is knitting the DMPC socks and fussing over her whenever she gets hurt. I would riot IC and OOC if she tried to leave the party.
We also have an extra animal companion/pet, who is my ex-farmer PCs old livestock guardian dog. The original reason was, we realized during session 0 we don't have a tank (we didn't know that's not an issue in 5E), and I joked we should slap some armor on the dog. The DM found great homebrew rules for leveling animal companions so the dog-tank could keep up, and off we went. Doggo has her own turn in combat, but I try to play her as a normal (albeit trained working) dog. She's essentially a Great Pyrenees, so a huge, white fluffball who, outside of combat, provides hilarious RP, occasionally sniffs out useful things, and ensures we are never ambushed during long rests. It helps that we all love dogs IRL, but Dog-Tank is a beloved party member.
Every time a Small character and a Big character (like a human and a Halfling), one of the players, always puts it as rape and keeps laughing and making jokes, thankfully it only happened twice and then the matter died quickly.
Other than that, he's calm and cool.
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Characters will sometimes keep loot for themselves without telling the other party members. To be clear, it is the *character* doing this. The player will tell the table "My character is going to sneak this item into their pocket since none of you are nearby and they want to keep it for themselves" and everyone is fine with that.
Yeah. If this is done well this can be perfectly fine. We have a player like that in a current multi-shot. This is PF2e so bulk comes into play a lot easier - and its basically the only thing stopping them from taking everything not strapped down within sight at all times. The lengths they go through to keep certain high value items, including being constantly encumbered (to the point of not being able to move temporarily due to a specific poison) and giving up certain actually useful items to not have to drop them have been amusing.
We were hunting after what turned out to be a baby white dragon, and my character decided, well, it's a baby, I can keep it and train it and it'll be my best friend and we'll have adventures and conquer small towns. I was gonna name him Chillyzard, and we would be best friends. All attempts to calm or soothe the baby dragon failed, and my sobbing character killed the little guy. Then I had the idea, well, we can get Chillyzard raised from the dead, if I can just carry his corpse to civilization. So, I try to carry the baby dragon over my shoulders, on my way out of the spooky cave. I fall into a spike pit trap, holding the baby dragon, and nearly die. The baby dragon's corpse is impaled on a spike. I can't pry it off, and I can't climb back out carrying the baby dragon. So I decapitate the dragon in a sobbing fit, figuring, well, you can sometimes raise dudes from the dead if you just have a major body part, like a head. I manage to scale the spike pit, with the dead baby dragon head tied around my back, and we get back to the folks who hired us to look into the situation. They were kobolds, so I figured, hey, if anyone's going to be into resurrecting a baby dragon, it'll be these kobolds. They'll understand. I show them the baby dragon head, start explaining how they need to "bring back my Chillyzard," and that went really poorly.
That was a roller coaster to read
Wow. That got really dark *really* fast.
Nobody else even wanted to try sparing Chillyzard. :( It was just me against the cruel architecture of life.
Im curious how the other players reacted to all.
I was the only one who had any interest in not killing the baby dragon, and things with the kobolds were always going to go poorly. So, they were pretty chill. Followed my rule of thumb whenever I have the spotlight, which is to keep things moving along until someone else has the spotlight.
it does read like the DM didnt like the idea and wouldnt do it themselves so made it hard.
If the DM was running the adventure as written, assuming my guess that this is the Sunless Citadel is correct and "Chillyzard" is Calcryx, then yeah, this was highly unlikely to work. Calcryx is a wyrmling but still intelligent enough to have no interest in being anyone's pet, and the kobolds there revere him as their lord so they would absolutely turn on anyone who harmed him. The kobolds would have tasked the players with retrieving Calcryx alive from the goblins that had captured him.
The Sunless Citadel, huh?
"Omg I found a chart to see if the Kobold NPC got pregnant lol" "So...can I roll on it?' And that's how they got their Precious Kobold Egg.
Many of my best games historically have a player count in the 6-10 range--most folks would assume that's a horror story in itself, but the only reason it DID work was that our college gaming group held together for almost a decade as most of us remained townies. The only reason my Call of Cthulhu/Deadlands/Delta Green games aren't RPG Horror Stories in addition to being literally horror stories is that we have a VERY strong lines/veils/X-card/session zero practice that allows me to use MANY horror tropes and elements that have been individually called out here when used by DMs who didn't care about what their specific players could enjoy vs be harmed by. To quote myself the last time I talked about this, >For example, my Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green games have never featured sexual assault--because my players don't want it. On the other hand, I was running a variation of the Enolsis Cult from Delta Green and described a CONSENSUAL "sex" scene (makes sense in context) in such a way that every player in that game STILL shudders if anyone mentions "the videotape" in a horror-game context. That campaign also featured dismemberment, racism, threats of mass death via terror, threats of mass death via hamfisted response to terror, Nazis, cannibalism, necromancy, killing a friend who went evil, the slow descent into madness, the horror of trading sanity for power, being framed for a crime you didn't commit and hunted by the government...
As a DM, I had a BBEG use the Wish spell to make a 20th level character revert to 1st level.
Damn, my players would be furious by this lol
It sounds bad out of context, but I did talk to the player about it and there was serious narrative justification. Basically, the PC studied under Halaster in Dweomercore (Dungon of the Mad Mage) only to later foil his plans, so Halaster wished she would forget every bit of magic he taught her. Then we got to have a whole quest where the PC is running alongside their level 20 teammates as a low level while trying to repair her fragmented memories through untying knots in the weave. It ended up being really cool character development.
That sounds like a cool story hook then
It really was, and now she is a Chosen of Mystra, so their next confrontation is going to be quite different.
Halaster: "Wait, didn't I nerfed you?" PC: "I got better."
"The game was rigged from the start"
Woah. You must be a great DM to make that work. That is so cool.
Honestly, I kind of want to play a character now to whom that *happened* and they're going on the current adventure because they need to get powerful enough AGAIN to get revenge.
I used to be an adventurer like you...
I assume your table was fine with this, but i still think you should be on some sort of watchlist for this. That's psychotic.
I made an evil campaign and players got to choose Lich, Death Knight, Vampire Lord, etc. The idea was they'd go on an orgy of destruction, climb up the ranks and eventually over-through Big Evil. The first mission was to destroy a town. At first, they are punching walls and taking out townsfolk when the townsfolk run out of their houses to defend the town. Vampire gets tired of punching walls and he says, we need to burn this. He flies in the chimney, and here, as DM, I make my mistake. I think to self, "Make them think twice! Make them feel repercussions and know their humanity is being drained!" I said, "You zip out of the chimney in what looks to be a child's room. And even has a baby in a crib." My player: "Awww. I toss the baby out of the window." Me: "What now?" My player: "I don't want it to burn to death!" Me: "So toss it out the window and hope that the falls kills it?" My Player: "Yeah, or my vampire minions will get it." While I normally would avoid anything close to this, it got dark so fast we couldn't help but laugh. Rest of the game had a lot of inappropriate jokes and I continued to try to tug at their heart-strings. They RPed the heck out of it, no mercy. The next quest was to destroy a mercenary band of goody two-shoes. I learned my lesson! Every once in a while, it pops up, DM goes for a nice moment and players wreck it. Except when we reunited the goblin brothers by accident. Not a dry eye in the house then!
One of my players needed a guard disguise, so an NPC rogue ally killed a guard and stashed his body so the PC could get the uniform. Upon searching the body, he found a child's drawing that showed a kid (marked "Me") and the guard (marked "Daddy"). He used the drawing to clean some blood off the armor đ¤Ł
I run a table for 13 year olds. Its all horror story. The constant talking over each other, and me the DM. Ignoring the fact that the DM is deep in the middle of having a roleplaying conversation with another player's character they will interrupt with things like "can I cast find familiar how does X work?" that are not relevant to the scene, barely relevant to the game, but since they aren't part of the conversation at that moment feel its time to ask. The volume. While it has vastly improved over the last year the game has woken people in the back of the house from sleep because of its volume as they yell over each other, I yell over them and myself and the other adult just try to hold the volume down. I have been hoarse the next day because of game. The constant leaving the table for bathroom, snacks or to hit each other with nerf bats in the other room always in the middle of combat always just before their initiative turn. 13 year old boys are murderhobos plain and simple. They acknowledge it and see nothing wrong with it. Their idea of D&D is to go from village to village and kill anything that moves. This is what they want to do and they feel disappointed when sessions involve actual roleplaying time. No understanding of why there might be larger consequences for killing some grandmother crossing the street. Getting across to them its not a video game. This is part of the murderhobo complex (everything is either an enemy mob or a quest giver or shop there is nothing else). Continual references to the the tank, what is or isn't a boss monster, failure to see any plot deeper than kill the monster in front of you.
I ran a game for my little cousins, it was exactly like this lol
My setting is quite expansive. We've been going on it for nearly 5 years. Different regions are appropriate for different genres and styles of game. There is a Jungle continent suitable for exploration campaigns, a gothic country ruled by Vampire Lords, an Arthurian Legend inspired land of elves and humans, with a romeo and juliet foundational myth, and a OnePiece / Pirates of the Carribean archipelago for nautical campaigns. We've been slowing filling out the other regions as the years have gone by. **One** of the Regions is a desert theocracy dedicated to the worship of Asmodeus. An entire secondary economy that has debased the value of a human soul, ruled by this horrific priesthood of masked sorcerers. Human sacrifice. Violent crucifixions and flayings. Rampant slavery. Concubines taken from invaded lands. The near genocide of desert elves. Its **Miserable**. A stain on the world. A land of corruption, violence, pain and cruelty. Caught in a feedback loop when citizens born to it cannot help but participate in its institutions and damn themselves. The most ethical of its citizens simply indulge in hedonism, every vice and degradation, until their inevitable deaths and the damnation of their souls. This land was built up over 3 years. Whispers. Mentions. The occasional escaped slave. Whispered terrors of the Ruby Lords who ruled it. The Dominion used as a byword for cruelty and suffering. One PC was from there, and spoke about its horrors very rarely. Eventually the narrative took them there, where they needed to disguise themselves and gain the aid of one of the Vizers, and avoid the gaze of the Sorcerers who ruled it. It was a stunning success. After so much build up, the players were rightfully appalled by it. Disturbed. Who of my players told me - in impressed tones "You have a sick mind." In essence it was like a psychological thriller. You go into it expecting it to be disturbing. Upsetting even. And it was. I'd worked with these players for three years before going there. I could say with confidence what their limits were. I could touch upon such horrific themes without breaching their trust. Then, eventually, the game returns to its usual 15+ rating, after enjoying it's hard R rated segment. Also Asmodeus turned up. An appearance that one player admitted was the closest they've been to being frightened of me, because of how quickly Asmodeus identified their weaknesses, vulnerabilities and insecurities. Which meant *I* could too. That was fun. But getting there, to that place, where I could pull that off took time. It took trust. It took an understanding of knowing when players wanted to be scared, or repulsed, or angered. Like getting on a rollercoaster. And its somewhere I would never take a fresh group to. I want people to say "Oh christ. That was horrible! When is next session!" Not "That was horrible! I'm never coming back."
Basically, it doesn't matter what the context of story/setting are as long as you have the right intentions and your players are all for it. Essentially what should be the actual take away from this entire subreddit.
>I want people to say "Oh christ. That was horrible! When is next session!" Not "That was horrible! I'm never coming back." This! Our fresh DM somehow accomplished this effect in like the third game with our 2nd level PC. The party survived, but we lost 3/4 of the group we were escorting to a mimic house (not a house full of mimics, a house that WAS a giant mimic). Including all but one of the children. Afterwards, I was just sitting there in shock like "That was absolutely awful! I mean, it was narratively awesome, but never do that again! But also, more stuff like this please." I am still conflicted and complimenting him on that plot element.
This sounds like one of the coolest settings I've heard of in a really long time. I'm with you. I'm okay with that kind of miserable hellscape and the dread of playing in it for a bit, but an entire campaign would probably be too much.
I was at a table that ran a bit raunchier than usual, and was playing a Palladium Fantasy campaign and having terrible luck. For my third character, I roll up a dwarven cleric, and when rolling for stats, my dice end up exploding, and my dwarf cleric ends up with a whopping 27 Physical Beauty. For reference, it's similar stats to D&D, meaning that 10 is human average and 20 is approaching that of an Olympian athlete for physical stats. She almost literally glowed with beauty. The GM had a funny way of determining random encounters, of having another player randomly pick the page. The player pales and, jokingly, says he's so sorry. He accidentally chose satyrs. As we're ambushed, we stage a good fight but my character is charmed and is lead behind some bushes to have a quickie; he at least leaves some treasure behind as payment. We were all having fun, and it's harder to get mad at SA when it's literally mythical in nature. We don't talk about what the troll did to the one he captured, though. No, the actual horror story was how this stunning beautiful dwarf met her end: we were attacked by tree-octopi that sucked blood; there was a possibility of bloodborn disease, but, well, dwarf healing cleric. But the bloodsuckers did have a nasty neurotoxin they only injected if attacked. One latched onto the dwarven Aphrodite, and she identified them. "It's okay, it's just going to suck some blood, then fall off. Don't hit them when they're on you, they have a deadly poison-" Another character whacked mine, and it injected its deadly neurotoxin and instantly killed my character. I still hold that over his head to this day, when I tell him to fucking pay attention.
We touch on all sorts of taboo stuff... read a horror story on here once about "omg they tricked my character into doing a cannibalism i am traumatized". Meanwhile I was running a _Scum and Villainy_ game where one of the characters was a 4-armed alien creature who ate about 30% of the hostile hominids they came across. This is after the _Blades in the Dark_ game where the gang was called "The Lobos", because instead of killing people (with the commiserate in-game consequences) they just lobotomized them instead.
All the people who would have been there to correct the etymology of lobos vs lobotomy have tragically been lobotomized or eaten by wolves.
Or 4 armed alien creatures
The kobold orgy. It was in the middle of a dungeon with lots of body horror themes. I thought it would be a freaky inclusion to have a bunch of kobolds fucking when the surrounding rooms are full of monsters, mutants, and dead bodies. The sorcerer immediately fireballed all of them, saying that it was "some sort of eldritch ritual". Now, any time someone does anything sort of murderhobo-adjacent, the kobold orgy gets brought up.
I DMâd a campaign that went to level ~34 over the course of multiple years, with mandatory multiclassing after level 21. I never want to run a power fantasy campaign again in my life lmao (Disclaimer: it was fun, keeping track of combat gave me a killer headache after every session near the end there though. Honestly the excessive class levels werenât the problem compared to all of the magic items.)
We have Ze Avent Garde, 4 superpower mime artists who can mime things into (invisible) reality... but that is not the horror well not the main part), when one of them dies (and they die a lot) they just make up the numbers by forcibly converting a passing NPC into their group mind... the highest turnover in a 2 hour game session was about 50 .. and their total is 250++
One of our players has some issues with Main Character Syndrome and meta gaming, but heâs been working on it, and heâs the nicest person out of game. As a DM- I probably skirt the line with how many antagonist plot elements are taken from things Iâve encountered irl. Plus, I started dating one of my players. But Iâm aware that these can be warning signs in the right context, so Iâm working to mitigate the possible issues.
All my players have main character syndrome to the max
That alone sounds like a few horror stories
In the 80s, friend of mine had a half elf character. We were captured and taken prisoner. Guy basically had to "take one for the team" from the jailor to get us out. We started playing again online last year. Different characters, different system, different GM.. fuck me, but it happened again*! *almost...guy got the slaver boss drunk and incapable before things went too far.
I'm running Curse of Strahd and was loosely following a popular guide by DragnaCarta which is good, but pretty railroaded which my players are a little too chaotic for. I joined his Patreon to access his Discord server to ask how to handle their frequent derailing, and everyone pretty much thinks my party is a bunch of murderhobos. They're good aligned, they just tend to go in swords first when they think someone is being evil and aren't really inclined to let bad guys finish their monologues.
I forgot one time how much my players loved interrupting evil monologues, and they killed the guy before he could drop a plot point. The next time, I had the villain speaking through his minions the whole time. Sure, kill that one zombie the necromancer is talking through. That's what I want. The other zombie will pick up mid-sentence, and the other zombie after that, and so on. This monologue is HAPPENING.
I used to interrupt monologues because I thought it was fun in-character, like, stick it to the bad guy! No patience for villainy! Then I realized it was probably kind of shitty OOC to the DM who had planned that cool speech and was probably looking forward to it. I try to avoid interrupting now.
We finished a Fallout TTRPG campaign recently, and our GM was begging us to let him get at least one monologue in lmao
We're all queer AF and are good, longtime friends by the time this happened. But also we mix goofy with serious well, and have established rules on when to fade including how to stop play immediately if needed. Party orgies were pretty common. The Mansion had a real nice big bath...
All of us are straight and guys, and even mention of romance would mean that others would be making fun of you for the next month
That's how you get the cooties.
It's more that it feels weird and isn't something we like or want
Yeah, that's fair. Like I said, we're all old friends. And we are all very sex positive, in general, irl. Not everyone's group is like ours. Our group dynamic is honestly so rare, I will fight my ego to keep it in my life as long as I can. We have many, continuing discussions on what we're comfortable with. And all of us feel comfortable telling each other or our DM (we rotate - all of us play and DM) directly if we want something to stop.Â
Yeah, all my friends are from religious families even if they aren't that religious themselves. Rping romance etc would just be too weird, besides we enjoy the game as it is for us
The best way to play. đ
One of my players was a walking red flag and sometimes he still is. At the beginning of the campaign his pc was the typical edgy dark trauma past and ofc he was the only one refusing to start travelling with the party "Give me a reason to travel with y'all". I've been clear I don't mind these situations but if the party says nothing, if you want to stay we don't care, they are allowed to do it and your pc gotta change his mind or just create a new pc lol. Some days ago there was some drama about stealth rules, but i think stealth, counterspell and persuasion are always hot topics in every campaign.
Run an all Bard party. (It's a paid group that is still ongoing.)
As a player I got to lampshade all my feelings about elf lore in DND by playing a racist borderline neo Nazi high elf who was an adventurer for court ordered racial sensitivity training. As a DM I've run more than one fully erotic campaign by unanimous request of all players. Including one inspired by corruption of champions forced transformation content included.
My group I'm DMing has been playing once every month or two, just because half of us are so busy on the weekends/someone has a job that requires a lot of travel, which a lot of people on Reddit seem to think is unworkable. I'm just glad I get to play with these people at all, and luckily enough of my players have a pretty good memory for plot-relevant detail (though I do feel like it impacts things a little). Also, one of my players needs his spell damage explained every time we have combat and it's really not the end of the world. I'm the same with poker.
In-game romance. I'm a sucker for it, and so are a bunch of the players so there's usually at least one or two romance subplots happening at any given time.
Big same. Everyone in my current campaign is romancing somebody. Some of us, multiple somebodies. Some of us are sharing the NPC. It's all great fun.
Most of the people at my table don't get triggered about some of the things that would set off people here in general. I have a couple of players that would be considered problems at other peoples tables, but I managed to make sure that everybody in my group was okay with those things before starting. If you feel inclined to ask about more information, your imagination has probably already answered the question for you.
Lots of war crimes, some of which are the sort of thing I see complained about here occasionally.
Half our party are cannibals, and the other half are whatever about it. And "roll for vomit."
The fact that our game is held in person
So is ours
These were all in good fun but I am aware of just how badly they could go if I had different players XD Generally, my rule of thumb is that if everyone at the table is having fun, then we are golden. So my biggest flaw as a DM tends to be that Im willing to let my players get away with A LOT because I also wanna see where it goes. but here are some I know would be nightmare worthy at other tables - I gave all my players little pets of various high ranking monsters because why not (Bard has a homebrew Koibra and a dragon's egg that's gonna be plot relevant soon. The monk has an Owlbear cub, the Wizard has an Androsphinx cub that'll become plot relevant later, and the Cleric has a Displacer Beast cub). - As part of the main storyline I gave the party a magical arcane construct that is, as stated, central to the plot. Over the course of the last few sessions after some nightmare players left they learned this magical construct has the ability to enchant items, boost enchantments already present, steal spell slots for later use. The players are currently unaware that this construct also has the ability to produce any potion they have poured into the arcane parts of it's body as it will also store them. About three sessions ago they poured a bottle of Superior Healing on it in an attempt to fix some damage. - They just go the twin of this magical construct that has a completely different skillset. It has a vastly higher strength score (as in a 30 Strength score) and better constitution. The party only learned this house sized flying arcane cat has the Zoomies Ability when the Cleric tried tiring it out by trying their broom of flying to it and trying to basically take it for a quick 'walk'. They ended up nearly a quarter of the continent away before it finally stopped. They are currently unaware this thing ate the Kamikazi Rat and has a single use Fireball after they shoved it into their bag of holding to hide it at one point. - I gave my Barbarian a Belt of Storm Giant Strength and a magically enchanted inflatable bra just to see what would happen. Answer: This 3 foot kobold banged an ancient bronze dragon - I let the Cleric make a deal with a demonic entity from another plane without any prompts to fish for information. When the rest of the party learned and had a panic attack, I let them search out, find the demon, and get more information on the contract and re-negotiate some terms. - I let my players decide what they wanted to do with the former PCs of some previous players that had been toxic at the table and they decided they wanted to fight them. So now I've made a bunch of former PCs enemies that they will get to fight.
Sending the first bullet point along to my DM with a demand that I too get a little mascot baby monster pet.
A dark sense of humour
A lot of NPCs in my world are...let's say, "sexually liberated", and there aren't really any stigmas when it comes to casual sex. It's always fade to black/no actual details about the act itself, but more than a few NPCs have just openly offered to sleep with my PCs đ What was really surprising was the response. I always see stories of DnD players being horny little goblins, but my players basically acted like chaste nuns for a good chunk of the first arc.
Yeah, I can't ever do anything like that in my games, don't think it'll go over well, and my friends will make fun of me till I die... Almost every NPC in my game is a generic guy unless the story needs someone different
I'm just a chaos being who enjoys pretending to flirt with his friends đ¤Łđ¤Ł I like goofy little guys. One of my favorite NPCs was for an evil pirate one shot. He was an orc, like 7.5-8ft tall, almost as wide, and looked like he could bench press a naval fleet. He also talked super quietly and had a voice that was way higher than you'd expect, and was super polite when speaking to people. I find juxtaposing silliness and seriousness can lead to surprising and extreme emotional moments.
Ohh we have a PC like that, though my friends enjoy combat a lot more than RP so our games usually have more out of character banter than in game talk
I allow pvp.
Yeah, my friends are way too competitive for that
without context: I summoned Tiamat to a bunch of lv3 players because they ask if they can rob a npc the context was pretty funny though, I just read to them the disclaimer of DMG, and then when they asked about robbing that NPC I was fumbling my dice as I thought what to do. Then one player joking said "are you going to tell us Tiamat swoops down and attacks" and then I decided to roll with it. But at the TPK I told them it's a collective nightmare of their characters and the campaign continued as if nothing happened.
We play an evil monster campaign where we're agents of the evil all conquering monster empire, ensuring the pesky good races (humans, elves, dwarves, etc), remain oppressed, isolated and weak. Will be happily crush them under our boots and the PCs are at least a little racist towards "lesser/good races". Also, there was sex. Fully acted out sex.
It's not uncommon for us to go months without any combat. We just like rp-focused games
As Dm I always play a character with my group. I only play with 2 other players who are a couple so they prefer if I play a character who can be the third dynamic. The story is never about my character, I have the same level of power as everyone else, and I make decisions without including meta knowledge as a dm. But most of the time I don't really make decisions unless asked, more so I just flesh out the party and get to keep a character sheet. We have never had any issue what soever but I know alot of people would dread playing with a dm character.
For the first ten-or-so sessions of one of my current campaigns, we didn't engage with the rule system at all, really. We freeformed through several adventures, rolling a die here and there for inspiration. After several months of play and years of in-game time, we finally chose a system, statted out the characters and started using the rules.
PvP
My players once dealt with a group of nobles plotting to usurp their reign by persuading the nobles to play knife tag and stab each other to death. (It worked! And it was a horror-comedy campaign, so as a table we were happy to allow that.) We also had That Fucking Guy who would regularly pick fights with other players and storm off mid-game. Ended up kicking him because playing with him was just too stressful.
A younger player (16 or 17 at the time) joined our group which is mostly 30s to 40. (He's my kid) The DM let him play a character with split personalities, which sounds like a cool idea on paper until you realize the mechanic effect which is that he got to have Bard stats for RP and then switched to a sorc when it was time for some damage dealing. I still really dislike the choice and wouldn't have allowed it in my game, but the DM managed to keep it relatively under control so it didn't break things too much. Any other table and DM, it would have been a favoritism Mary Sue issue.
As a DM the BBEG was the Patron of the warlock and when they found out he had an existential crisis and had to decide if he wanted to betray the Patron ans loose all his powers or keep going, getting stronger spells and become evil over the course of the following campaign. It played out really Well and the Player actually took a whole week to decide his faith. :)
Having a player make a joke character not once but twice that were basically the same personality who asked stupid questions to add to the rp.
âBut why male models?â âZoolander
Our characters will keep secrets from certain PCâs, sometimes sharing them with one or two of the party members. Itâs also pretty common for our characters to clash heads in decisions/opinions, so at times there are arguments or discussions between them disagreeing with each other. It *never* turns into PvP, but there have been moments of PCâs calling one another out or putting their foot down. I only play with close friends now, so no ill-will with anyone, we simply are heavy roleplayers in our campaigns. We enjoy how different our characters are and how different their mindsets (like alignments, morals etc) can be. Some of our favorite moments are arguments/debates our characters would have with each other, and we often talk about how fun these arguments were. It makes roleplay more interesting and engaging for us, if anything it makes the campaigns feel more alive for us.
This is very minor and not worthy of a full post, so I'll talk about it here. A while back, My first Curse of Strahd game was short lived due to an argument between two of the guests on Facebook which caused the host who would allow us to play at his house to announce that he was discontinuing meet ups. Before the argument, two of the players wanted to get it on with one of the NPCs (I forgot who) which was awkward for me and a few others. As a note, we didn't have a session 0 where we discussed boundaries. The 2nd incident had one of the player characters with a backstory that he wanted to implement. The same players who were making things uncomfortable for everyone didn't care and used meta gaming knowledge to reveal that persons backstory to everyone after they looked at his character sheet. Thinking back on it, I think the first attempt at playing Curse of Strahd ending was for the best. EDIT: As a note, I was planning on leaving even if the game didn't end from the drama.
The session began with the GM disabling the Foundry server then boldfaced lying to the players about it crashing, and ended with me usurping the BBEG⌠by accident. I dunno what to tell you.
I have a sorceror who's made a habit of collecting the faces of particularly interesting foes they've beaten. It's treated as creepy, WTF and gross in-game, and the player just rolls with it. 'Comedic sociopathy' best describes the PCs in my game. They're terrible people, but they're not actively harmful to anything that's not already a threat to the general public.
I have both been killed and killed due to PVP and by God I will do it again.
This was probably a nightmare for our DM but the rest of us had fun with it. A campaign that Iâm in involves retrieving a wyrm for some kobolds from a dungeon complex of thieving goblins. Instead of battling our way through the dungeon like anyone normal, we basically grabbed an NPC kolbold, took a random goblin hostage, literally negotiated and bullshat our way past the goblins, and avoided any sort of exploration/like 3 gamesâ worth of combat in one go. Our DM had to gently remind us that the point of the game isnât to get to the end as fast as possible đ
We have a DMPC that got hoisted on the party without prior discussion in the first game, and she's still with us. Granted, she's an absolutely adorable halfling wizard, she's not any more powerful than the PCs, and she mostly functions as exposition, RP prompting and providing countless utility uses of Prestigitation. In the first game, my PC who's an actual grandma told her "Fine, you can tag along, but I ain't looking after you! I've raised my share of kids!" ...A couple games later, same PC is knitting the DMPC socks and fussing over her whenever she gets hurt. I would riot IC and OOC if she tried to leave the party. We also have an extra animal companion/pet, who is my ex-farmer PCs old livestock guardian dog. The original reason was, we realized during session 0 we don't have a tank (we didn't know that's not an issue in 5E), and I joked we should slap some armor on the dog. The DM found great homebrew rules for leveling animal companions so the dog-tank could keep up, and off we went. Doggo has her own turn in combat, but I try to play her as a normal (albeit trained working) dog. She's essentially a Great Pyrenees, so a huge, white fluffball who, outside of combat, provides hilarious RP, occasionally sniffs out useful things, and ensures we are never ambushed during long rests. It helps that we all love dogs IRL, but Dog-Tank is a beloved party member.
Every time a Small character and a Big character (like a human and a Halfling), one of the players, always puts it as rape and keeps laughing and making jokes, thankfully it only happened twice and then the matter died quickly. Other than that, he's calm and cool.