The "bitch about your GM" thread

This thread scares me as much as the other complaint thread

Well, it seems like I might get chance to play a P&P game on this week and GM seems reasonable so shouldn't be much of problems in that end...

Things that piss off gms: Derails, Uncomfortable NPC situations, Bad rolls

Things that piss off players: UNAVOIDABLE DEATHTRAPS IN RESPONSE TO ABOVE

Seriously I don't care what players do to monster of the week, How many crits are rolled. If you give a statistically impossible to survive and avoid death trap. You are being a dick.

Death traps should be puzzles. Put on your Professor Layton caps, everyone!

Well I don't have huge issues with my G Ms 'per-say,' but sometimes they kinda pull dick moves.

For this Shin Megami Tensei game we have been playing, the group started with 5 of us (now 4 due to our only female, a better party face then the party face, studying abroad). I had my character specialize in blunt weapons and some minor healing. By the fourth session, I upgraded a baton of 1d4 to a crowbar of 1d8.

I haven't gotten an upgrade for four months. I lost my only ability to summon a demon, as well as my passives keeping me alive, a month ago (Both realtime). By the GM offered to fix it through sketchy means, it was too late and the character had to say no.

As for alignment issues, character lost most of his family to demon tamers. Wife survived, and the angels offered their aid (and his daughter's life) in exchange for working for God. Even gained some minor, like a fairly accurate Hama (expel a demon) and an angel guide. Due to reasons, within a session the angels left without providing any other help, my character was sinful, and has been left effectively helpless while the Chaos guy has had his own sessions for a month and gained ultimate power. Really.

I've finally had the character get to angels again, but at this point it doesn't even matter. The GM has already effectively told me he won't be giving me really anything for siding with the angels again. I get that Law isn't the greatest ally in SMT, but seriously throw a dog a bone. When you give us the whole 'pick a side, your story' spiel a the beginning and then punish me for actually developing my character and roleplaying, it kinda sucks. Especially when the GM complements my roleplaying.

As for the undead mess that is the Dn D campaign, ugh. Of the four of us, 3 have never played a tabletop game before and are freshmen (including me). We were all strongly encourage NOT to be an arcane caster. I went Paladin with a 2-handed club. Other freshies went Rogue (guy gets bored during battles now) and Monk. Experienced player went Ranger->Order of Bow Initiate (I think? It was a long name), and now hits an absurd amount of time, has almost as much health as me (the Paladin) and higher AC. His only weakness is absurd DR which, surprise surprise, is EVERYONE's weakness.

You may have noticed that we don't have a cleric. Don't worry, we have a "squad leader" and npc healer. The Leader is a spear-using fighter who has missed lots of attacks, while the NPC cleric...let's just say the GM didn't spec him competently, let alone normally. This healer apparently never considered fighting undead. Ever. So he is completely unprepared to really fight them. It wasn't an issue until the GM decided my paladin was doing to well overall and had a Lich grant 3 negative level. Seeing as we are a) underleveled as is and b)Fighting undead this is bad.

I'd complain more, but this is going on for waaaay too long.

"If you like to be rail-roaded like Thomas the Choo-choo train, you'll probably like my way of running a game, if not, well..."

At least he gave us a warning, but it would have been nice if he told me before I spent the time going to his house. It's not really that bad, just more of a nitpick on my part.

Yep, if you're a railsy DM, you need to advertise that fact. I mean, *I* always do!

Him: "You guys aren't leveled up enough."

End of the game session

Him: "Everyone gets 200xp."

Me: "325?"

Him: "No! Why?"

Me: "Hey, you're the one saying we're not leveled up enough."

Him: "... Shut up. 250xp then."

Thanks, dude. Really. You're the one who started us at level 2 and made our first combat encounter have us outnumbered against guys with better hit bonuses than anyone in the party, resulting in two party members in the negative-but-not-dead range before your NP Cs came to the rescue (lazy bastards).

This calls for min-maxing.

While relatively minor, my GM seems to be only capable of two types of combat encounter: one-round curbstomps, or long, drawn-out affairs that take up nearly the entire 2.5 - 3 hr session and possibly spill over into the next.

Part of the problem (I think) is that our group's fighter has ridiculously lucky stat rolls and the rest of us... don't, so anything that's more than a speed bump for him is well above everyone else's ability to do any meaningful damage to.

And that is why you don't roll stats, people. It's a trap.

Not as horrible as some stuff on this thread, but my first time playing Dn D, our GM had us collecting a half-dozen or so enchanted weapons as sort of a sidequest. The idea was that we would be able to put them together to create some sort of super-powerful weapon that it was hinted we might need later on.

We finally found the last one in the middle of a climactic battle and put them all together... only to have them summon a pet NPC of the D Ms (who we had met earlier) who took out the Big Bad in one shot. We didn't get to do anything but watch.

Same GM, much smaller quibble: if you *have* to have one player do literally nothing for an entire session and a half due to their player being held hostage and you *know* that's going to happen and which player it's going to happen to, the least you can do is warn them so they can bring a book or something.

And to my current DM- if your players are all far, far more interested in one of your subplots, to the point where they can barely remember what the main objective is and keep running off to go work on the other plot... maybe it's time to drop your main quest?

I'm a bit annoyed at the fact that I never manage to play as a wizard because after the gamebreaking madness of 3.5 they got way too nerfed in 5th for a noob like me to play them with selecting spells by "it sounds cool". But other than that it's fine. I actually wanted to bitch about myself because I'd like to try D Ming but I keep backing out of having to buy the manuals and I think I'll just try something other than D&D but we already have like one session a month 'cause highschool and if I split us even more my DM will try to force choke me. It should get better with summer but octopath traveler is coming out and I wanted to play it together since I like videogames way too much. And when I tried designing an encounter that was pretty noticeable because the first thing I tought about was a bait and switch boss with an animated armor that once gets defeated seems to be leaning on it's sword way too much. Because that sword is floating." I wonder why?" I was also thinking that the sword might take some damage while it's being used by the armor when it gets blocked but that might be too much. Anyway I can't see a way to justify a CR 1 monster as a boss unless they're just starting but then I don't know how to justify it within the story. And I'm worried I'm going too videogamy on it and that I should try a game design class and leave D&D to someone better. Plus I'm not sure I can think of a decent story and handle the roleplaying. I don't want my NP Cs to be all the same but they might get TOO weird.