The first GM I ever gamed with was a stingy bastard who took delight in tormenting players.  We always seemed to get a fraction of the recommended treasure for each encounter, and we literally crawled through the levels.  NPCs refused to answer the simplest questions and seemed to take delight in being mean to us.  

On the rare occasion that an adventure was actually successful, we could be guaranteed we would soon get robbed by high-level bandits and relieved of our hard-earned treasure.  His favourite encounter was the Rust Monster, because he liked to rid us of all our metal equipment.

On one occasion, I remember him handing XP for our previous adventure.  When one of the players announced that he now had just enough XP to go up a level, the GM decided to revise the award to be 5xp lower.  We all initially thought the GM was joking, but he wasn't.  

I'm thankful we never played in a high-level game... trying to cast a Wish spell would have been a nightmare.

Quote from: Tyberious FunkI'm thankful we never played in a high-level game... trying to cast a Wish spell would have been a nightmare.

"I wish this game we're playing was more fun."

!i!

Quote from: PeteExcept for hiding all of the dice rolls, I would like to play in this kind of game.  I've never had a game where I had to worry about all that detail but, if done right, I think it could go a long way towards giving a game and its world verisimilitude and gravitas.

Trust me - it didn't.

Even with a very capable, detail-oriented, anal-retentive GM, it was just annoying.

-O

Hmm.  Nothing as crazy as everyone else here...

But I did play with a guy who whenever it was his turn to DM had worlds filled with crazy people.  Literally.  Every NPC we ever encountered was delerious, homicidal, infantile, or just plain bark at the moon crazy.  Many lived within the dungeon, often setting up little businesses there... which was also a  bit crazy.  

In hindsight I think it was equal parts Warlock of Firetop Mountain and Luke's first encounter with Yoda from the Empire Strikes Back.

The dungeons were fun -- just a bit weird.

Our gm recently we had wasn't so much crazy as he was stubborn.

Example. In his world there were not glasses, even though there was grinding stones and mirrors and elaborate devices to replicate (think photocopy) things. Yet, one of the flaws you could randomly generate would get you bad vision, and no noe, no one could get glasses.  

Fast forward several months later when we are going through yet another scripted duneon crawl when... low and behold we find a goblind wizard who has glasses!!!  Needless to say the one character in our roup with bad vision, kindly askes the gm how much glasses were and where they could be found.

The gm frowned, realizing that the pregened fluff text defeat him had the goblin wizard came at us, and our wizard cast sleep on him (he was low enough) and down he went, with the glasses, and boom they were broken. Hind sight, we should of cast hold person first, then sleep, but some how i think the glasses would of slipped of and broken or something else.

needless to say hes not running any more dungon crawls.

Quote from: Ian Absentia"I wish this game we're playing was more fun."

!i!

Strangely enough, we actually all enjoyed the game.  Of course, it was our first roleplaying experience, so we had nothing to compare it to.

At one point, one of the guys decided to start running a competing campaign.  Lured by stories of treasure and magic and XP galore, I decided to give his campaign a shot.  I had been warned that he used "slightly modified" rules, but wasn't entirely sure what to expect.

It was typical gonzo bullshit... pretty much what you'd expect from  a bunch of power-tripping early-teens.  Y'know the deal - characters wandering around with +5 magical items, slaying dragons with a single blow... that sort of stuff.  But it was the character generation that took me by surprise.  In addition to the usual stats, we were required to roll for penis size, sex drive, sex appeal, etc.  I wasn't really sure what the point of all the additional stats, until about 20 minutes into the game when we came across our first "encounter".  Basically, most of the session involved the characters hanging around bars and trying to hook up with lusty wenches.  The players were then expected to give detailed descriptions of their actions, and roll accordingly.

It was like a scene out of "Fear of Girls".  Even at the rather innocent age of 13-14, I could detect the homo-erotic undertones and got out of there real fast.  

So, compared that that game... the hard-arse GM was a delight

When I first started playing RPGs, I _was_ a crazy-ass DM. This from about age 8, when I got TMNT and Other Strangeness to age 13, when I got dice and the AD&D 2nd edition PHB, upgrading from the Rules Cyclopedia. I played with the same bunch of dudes, either at recess at school, or after school at one another's houses.

1) When I was a kid, we handled combat in D&D through actually fighting with one another. I think I've mentioned that one before.

2) I didn't own polyhedral dice until around age 13 or so. Kludges until that time involved any random element of the environment, from VCR clocks to chits to that pencil-picking method you use in the Lone Wolf series (I had three of the books, and we tried using all three grids at once to mimic large rolls, except I hate breaking the spines of books, so we couldn't lay them out flat, and you had to hold one and a pencil while someone else held the other two and got stabbed in the hand by your pencil).

We also had those folded paper things, but only one dude could make them, and we kept on getting skivved because he would "load the dice" as it were by writing only high numbers on them. He insisted that he ought to be DM because he was the only one who could produce them, and we eventually agreed.

Once I got the dice, I insisted that only I could touch them, and everyone else had to pay a "dice handling fee" when they made a roll.

3) The same dude owned the only Rules Cyclopedia we had, and due to an ongoing spat between us, he would never lend it to me except for five minute chunks every twenty minutes, even when I was DMing. This meant that the only rules I knew were THAC0, the elf class, and immortal quests (also, he got the D&D book set in Glantri that deals with werewolves and whatnot and I stole it from him after a fight and thus learnt all about how werewolves work in RC D&D). Also, that we could only solve one rules dispute per recess, making for a very slow pace of play. I compensated for this by writing my own rules, which I mostly stole from the Palladium system, and which he was not allowed to read.

4) I designed an entire fantasy world around simple polyhedral shapes (like, a continent was a free-drawing of a square) in which the main god was named after myself, then insisted that this, episodes of the TMNT cartoon, Star Wars extended universe canon, After the Bomb: Roadhogs (which I managed to get a copy of), and Lord of the Rings formed a consistent mythology which we would play in.

5) I will admit that I didn't understand that there was more than one roleplaying game until I was about 11, despite, in hindsight, owning three at the time.

To be fair, I wasn't even the craziest DM in our group (the dude with the paper folding things was). Also, it was probably the most fun roleplaying experience ever.

Quote from: jeff37923The guy in Middle School who insisted we all roll for chest size on this homemade table of his. If you didn't want to roll, he'd roll for you. So, for no apparent reason, (besides early teenage pubescance I think), you could have a male fighter with a 17 strength and a 38DD chest in his game.
Ah, those early years of 0D&D.

I fell off my chair laughing when I read this!:D

Lessee: There was the Vampire GM who had a 3rd Generation Tremere SuperGMPC (diablarized down that far).. but he was actually a decent GM whenever the GMPC was offscreen...

Then there was the 2nd Ed D&D game where the paladin fell overboard in teh underdark sea, with 5 different sets of swimming/drowing rules coming out at the table, and the ruling (shouted down by all and sundry) that the necklace of adaption wouldn't prevent him from being crushed to death by the pressure... but really half of that was mucked up contradictory rules and anal retentiveness followed by a sudden, though not unusual, spate of fiating.  Like, if you kill a guy trying to sacrifice himself, it counts as if he succeeded... that sort of thing, but really not all that bad.


No, I guess the REAL crazy GM story involved the guy with his home brewed system, GMPC-who-violated-GM's-Own-Rules, where you did have to roll penis size (2d6, funniest boxcars I ever rolled...), and pulling out said penis, if it was big enough was better than rolling good social skills if talking to woman.  When the GMPC began murdering PC's who didn't go along with the 'plan', I walked.  Of course, this guy also played the party killing assassin in the Game From Hell (that was AWESOME on toast, the only game I've ever been in where the munchikens absolutely failed to have any effect on the game vs the ordinary players... ), so... I gave him The One Ring. Fuck you too, invisible assassin loner badasses don't do much since they are so busy sneaking! hahahahahahahahaha....:what: