D&D Story: Worst Games I've Played In 2 || Awkward Beginnings

in playing d d for as many sessions as i've had i've collected my fair share of bad d d stories this one in particular was my top rpg horror story hands down whenever a conversation would come about awkward dnd sessions i go guys you gotta hear this and this was my go-to ace in the whole session which why have i not told it yet so settle in [Music] i had an old fourth edition dungeon dragons group that i played with for a while when i first got into the hobby one of the dm's had invited me to play in a special dungeons dragons game when i asked what exactly made this game special he explained our dm was interested in getting together what he called an all-star d d group together he wanted to have a more cinematic game experience he didn't want to spend an entire session walking to a town spending one hour role playing six hours fighting with players just not remembering their abilities he looked at me and said hey ben i'm making a responsible game for responsible people and you you look like you're a guy who's who's got all his [ __ ] together and who doesn't forget his spells and takes it most uh seriously serious and someone who comes with character concepts that are not super lame and uh doesn't tack out a character and a super smart big brain having person and these are all very true things that he he said to me and if you've seen my other videos you you can confirm that these are all uh uh factual statements that are not incorrect or wrong in any way shape or form basically joking aside he was inviting me to a game of d d that was trying to be more serious surprisingly i was one of the more serious people playing at the time our table was kind of a goofball group we made jokes we talked [ __ ] i at least paid attention during his info and lore dumps i couldn't remember any of it but at least i tried when we would have super long combat sessions people would often tune out and need an update on what was going on and i get it i really do i think anyone who's been playing d d for any length of time knows that well you want to have this low out of the rings experience you usually end up at the shire with players debating about gardening for three sessions with a dm trying to get somewhere but it keeps getting undercut by people talking out of character and everyone becoming distracted by minor thangs and whenever you watch a movie the characters are like wait i got a plan and then it cuts to some high octane chase scene you don't watch a movie where you have the characters debating for an hour before nothing happening plus we were a group of seven people he wanted to try dming for a smaller table so i said okay that sounds like fun i'm in we were told not to bring our own characters because he wanted to make our characters in session zero the day of the game i show up and there's two people that i haven't met before one is a new player and the other is his girlfriend i started talking to them asking oh you guys play d the new player goes what's d and d i was just invited to play a game turns out the dm was trying to surprise him so he explained nothing about what he had planned for today there's supposed to be another new player but he hasn't shown up and he's not going to come because he had to bail at the last minute we asked the girlfriend hey do you want to play she shrugged maybe the dm butted in she has to play the dm explained that in dnd there are four roles leader defender striker and controller he suspects that the reason we've been having so much of a problem in the other game is that we've doubled up we've got duplicates of each one in order to fix this we're just going to have one of each of the four player roles four players four rolls oh no i know where this is going usually with me as a player um i usually don't like going into games where people are like oh come on wednesday and we need you to bring a cleric or bring this specific class the reason i don't necessarily like that is usually because they aren't just asking me to play the class they're asking me to play it in a very specific way really when they say come on thursday and bring a cleric what they mean is we need a healer you know we need you to outfit your character so he has he healing capabilities or if they're like bring a rogue on this thing they want me to find traps they want me to sneak they want me to steal stuff um and so whenever people are asking me to make a specific character they're usually asking that because they want me to play it in a very specific way and i lose that freedom so already i can kind of tell where this is going we sit down because these are new players the dm has to explain dnd to them so he starts going through the general introduction of dnd's a role-playing game each player assumes a persona one of the characters blah blah and then eventually we get to the character creation the dm pulls out a stack of blank character sheets and pencils and i immediately panic and pipe up wait a second we're making making characters by hand yep uh we've got we've had some new players here uh do you really think that's a good idea if maybe you want to do pre-gens or hey why don't we use that online character creator yeah just to explain in fourth edition there was an online program which you could use to make your character for you unlike dnd beyond where you have to pay for each book you use this program was a seven dollars per month thing but it had every single book and every supplement and there was a lot of options it was nice to have everything in one place between players handbook one two three the world books all the dragon magazine options it was great for new players and even veterans because as you were making your character it would tell you what you were qualified for and what you weren't if there was an error or something it would prompt you hey you changed your class you can't use this weapon anymore so that's why i had to ask why are we not using the character builder because they need to learn how to play d d the right way he handed them a pencil and a blank character sheet the problem with our old group he felt was that his players would just go online pick powers at random print off their character sheet and use their powers willy-nilly his players he suspected weren't really digging into the meat of how their abilities work he argued that if they at least took the time to write everything down you'd at least know what's going on it you're not gonna have this situation where someone picks a doppelganger as their race and then four sessions in finally reads the ability and goes wait a second i can change into other people how long have i had this that person was me and i feel really bad about it in 40 writing a character sheet by hand was particularly troublesome because so much of combat relies on these powers which often have secondary effects so he asks us which player is going to be which role we already know there's four players for four rolls we can't double up i decide to pick last the new player picks striker the girlfriend picks defender my friend picks leader and i pick controller we then each pick a class the striker role picks the rogue class our defender role picks the fighter class our leader class picks the war priest and i as the controller pick the wizard class we then went on to character race the dm explained to our fighter fighters have to have high strength and constitution so you could pick a dragonborn dwarf or human or one of the other ones i pipe in there's a whole whole set of races you could play as the dm shook his head no we're not having mismatched class races made this mistake once before we're not making it again because this is going south so quickly i keep offering some suggestions but they keep getting shot down i'm saying stuff like why didn't we use pre-gens or let them pick whatever they want or use character building program or just skip over this section but it's not working have you ever gotten so embarrassed that you just wanted to blend in with the wall and fade away that's me right now i'm sitting on the couch and every time we get farther into character creation i notice that the new players are getting more and more frustrated and i'm sinking a little bit lower and lower into the cushions getting more embarrassed as this goes on because the new players obviously to me aren't having fun getting told what to do the dm would be like okay time to figure out stats you can have this number this number this number there are lots of different options you can have and you can adjust your stats however you want but since you're a fighter your primary stats are strength and your secondary stat is constitution so you want a 17 or 18 in your primary and 17 or 16 in your secondary once they make their choices question mark we have the long arduous task of filling in all the boxes reflex willpower attacks picking powers armor gold i can tell the players are not having fun they go over all the options just for the other two to tell them which choice is actually the best one the dm thinks he's being helpful which he is but it's it's also not that much fun although let's be frank character creation's not much fun when you're a new player while the new players were talking i remember one of them said something like wow in d and d there's all these different choices to make but like they kind of don't all matter that much and it's it's a lot of paperwork to do before you actually play the game also the girlfriend she's not a native english speaker i can't remember how long she'd been learning english but i do remember that she was quiet and kept having to get things translated by her boyfriend and she seemed really really lost and i don't know if i can help her because she doesn't recognize a lot of english words like constitution reflexes armor class finally after four hours of tutorials and character creation our characters are set up the dm is totally happy with our characters i'm playing as a child wizard named kevin our other veteran is a tempest war priest and a noble our dragon board fighter is big and our halfling rogue is a rogue that is a halfling that's all i can remember about them we start off and get into a fight there's some role playing going on but it's just between me the dm and the cleric the two new players are just watching us with this what's the [ __ ] look on their faces i know i as the character should be trying to include them more in the dialogue but that would require me to make eye contact with them i'm just i'm so embarrassed i just i just can't besides after what we put them through if they want to sit out i'm fine with that during the roleplay i ended up doing a little skit my character got stabbed and it led to this overly dramatic thing where kevin has burst into tears if i was gonna die the pain was horrible the cleric healed him but he continued to whine about it the dm explained to the new players dnd is at its core a storytelling game you need to not worry about the numbers stats damage actually i prefer not to use the term role-playing it's a bit misleading really it's acting you are actors trying to convey the emotional highs and lows and focusing on the story is the most important part after the session was over with 30 minutes of play the dm started giving us pointers fighter really you should think about using a voice try going a bit more deep you're a dragon board for crying out loud cleric you are a noble try being a bit more respectful a bit more refined i guess you could say and ben the bit you did with kevin where was crying like was okay but you got to tone it down a bit like it lasted too long he's just he's a bit too innocent don't you think after that was done we finally finished up the session four hours making characters 30 minutes playing the dm ended it okay we'll be finishing it up here see you guys next week the two new players got in their car left and the saddest part is i never saw them again that was the first and last time i ever met with them and the one thing i regret is i never got to tell them how very sorry i was about how that game went down i found out afterwards that our dm wasn't happy with the way our regular group had been running he felt that we were playing our characters too sub-optimal and that's why the fights were taking an ungodly length of time which is why he was interested in playing d d the way it was intended the way it was represented in the book with four roles one character from each role at the appropriate levels with the appropriate class and race but part of the difficulty comes down to mathematics like the enemy has 200 hit points and the players can dish out only about 20 points of damage in a round excluding missed attacks that fight is going to take 10 rounds no matter how much you slice it i've kind of wanted to make four e stories for a while but i couldn't really make a video on some of those earlier games and always decide against it because what would i do a lot of them were just flat boring it's easy to make fun of bad but boring's a lot tougher what kind of video would i make after all if i were to make that video it would just be me on the screen going we fought goblins for eight hours and then cutting the video right there [Music]

Channel: Puffin Forest

Views: 1,221,821

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Id: 7T2y6wspRXE

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020