Psycho Streams D&D, Steals Content, Backfires Horribly

content twitch and live stream fails this is a story about a guy who proclaimed that he was going to create the next critical role only for it to end in flames just before we get into this story i want to thank our sponsors for today world anvil do you play table top role playing games well i do a problem that i've personally been battling since my first campaign is the uphill battle of note management sometimes i went the tedious route of meticulously tracking each document and other times i went the difficult way of writing to my heart's content only to have to scramble to find the relevant note when i need it that's why world anvil is my weapon of choice when it comes to world building and managing my dnd games interactive maps timelines hyperlink functionality and easy to use tag and search systems world anvil has many more amazing features but just the ones mentioned already take a huge weight off of our shoulders and make world anvil worth it so go to worldanville.com crate crab and give it a shot you won't regret it because they're offering all crabs a whopping 30 off of any annual membership link in the description that aside roll post the characters are not their actual names of course joey the streamer the owner and yours truly back in my college days i used to frequent the lgs in my city to play magic one day the owner approached me and asked if i was interested in playing a dnd homebrew mini campaign meant for beginners i agreed the dm was a guy named joey at this point i had only played three sessions of lost mine of fan delver so there was a session 0 for character creation that i decided to play a wood elf druid we played session 1 a week later and it was alright even though i thought it was kind of weird that he did all the narration while his fiancee did literally everything else but eh to each their own i guess i couldn't make it to session 2 since i was busy with a few term papers and work so i approached joey about this he assured me that his fiancee and her best friend would run the same campaign again next week they also assured me that they were going to do dnd now every wednesday so the next wednesday rolled around and no sight of the fiance her friend or joey for that matter so i asked the owner if they canceled it he just shrugged i'm telling this story because it's a red flag for later i got really bummed out by that since i had a ton of fun playing d d so when my next paycheck rolled around i decided to start dming myself i dm'd every wednesday at the lgs until the pandemic hit i met a lot of really cool people through that with whom i'm still friends to this day even after i moved across the country cut to a few months later joey started hanging out at the store again he mostly did that on wednesdays before my campaign one day in the summer he announced that he was going to run a one shot the players were meant to be determined by chance but weirdly enough four out of the six player spots were occupied by joey's friends the fifth one was the owner's daughter for some reason so basically only one person got in by chance it was supposed to be played with pre-written characters that were meant to be disney princesses as the store dm i was invited to play but i respectfully declined since i didn't get along with a few of joey's friends i didn't hate them but they were the kind of people i didn't want to be at the same table with one of them was a power gamer and always had a patronizing tone when speaking to you imagine the tone some people take when they explain something to a child after the one shot which was definitely politically relevant because it had jokes about the mcguffins being called epstein and weinstein the owner's daughter approached joey and said well that was fun you should start streaming d joey and his fiancee were completely hooked on the idea joey wanted it to be you guessed it the next critical role so they asked the owner if they could use the store for streaming to which he agreed to if they managed to get a test stream going the owner got burned badly on something similar before which led to him basically throwing away 3 000 bucks the problem with joey is that he is not a great dm i've had a few conversations with him about his dnd philosophy which is basically if you have players that act like crap that means you haven't given them enough loot so next time you have shitty players at your table enable them this might be a splash of cold water to anyone out there listening to this who streams d or wants to stream dnd but look you're not going to be the next critical role and nobody will be because critical role already exists there are lots of genres that are underserved enough to where blatantly copying somebody else can carry you pretty far but the actual play market is so packed and competitive nobody's going to break through without some serious innovation because few people are going to take a chance on a new show for three hours an episode there will be some new awesome actual play shows in the future but there will never be another critical role or dimension 20 or adventure zone roll post but the worst part was his world building i'll call his setting joey's world the actual name is the name of a french sci-fi comic series but one letter is changed nothing from this setting was original in any sort of way usually i have no problem with that but please bear with me he stole a bunch of stuff from five ebooks including names he had a country called tetheria forgotten realm says tethyr for example which is literally beau claire from the witcher 3. there were also places like the dune desert and the ice mountains also he combined some of the eberron and forgotten realms into one for his creation myth instead of eberron and khyber it was tiamat and bahamut he also thought it was brilliant that he put fandolin in his world as the starting town so joey's world was basically as original as sonichu joey and his fiancee then actually wrote a proof of concept and a business plan rolled into one if you have a business you know that this is a complicated thing you have to write stuff like business expenses and such something like this would take you about 30 to 40 pages i guess according to the owner it was written on three pages of a school notebook by the way they refused to show this to anyone but the owner so according to the owner the business plan had nothing about income or expenses on it just short mid and long term goals for their project so it was basically one start streaming two i don't know and then three profit their concept was also interesting they wanted to start something called a communal art project so joey wanted a bunch of minions who literally do all of his work i know critical role has people working behind the scenes but they get paid so joey just wanted to pay people in exposure mind you the people in there were writers translators dms me included and artists all of these people were meant to do joey's work while he gets to sit his ass down every friday and just play the game and take credit for other people's work and everything that was created in the project would also belong to him this is where the trouble starts first of all joey gets it in his head that he wants everything that goes on in the store to be under his control yes everything we had a few dudes who had their own youtube to review the latest warhammer stuff they didn't even know about their luck because they were supposed to be a part of his network now he wanted to own literally any piece of internet media that would be produced in the store and he called it the streaming monopoly ah yes the streaming monopoly why has nobody had this idea yet i've never heard of a more laughable concept than everybody who makes content owing their creative work to somebody else for free people like joey are trying to become content landlords and it is hilarious to watch them fail during all of this joey also started doing what he called a stream preparation campaign which was basically meant as a prequel for the entire campaign it featured an act of magical terrorism enacted by a group only consisting of dragonborn his idea was to portray a society of persecution and discrimination considering his dm style this could have been insanely risky they also gave each of the players strict character creation rules to prevent quote weird furry stuff since this is a serious campaign that deals with serious topics also his fiancee was going to be one of the players in the stream campaign and he told me how proud he was of her character concept a half awesomer half tiefling assassin rogue for him it was an incredibly deep character concept since it was dualistic this could have easily turned into another spousal fanfic horror story all by itself i know that it's unfair to judge so early but i'm gonna call it right now that the fiance has a chronic case of main character syndrome that the dm will play into 100 i just wish that was the worst thing that was going to happen but it gets worse my wednesdays of local game store dming were all supposed to be home brewed and take place in joey's world because once we start streaming i as the store's dm will be the quote public face of the streaming campaign the dude legitimately thought that after we started streaming people would go crazy and do something like beatles mania he also wanted me to be his co-author which i declined because i was still very busy with college and i was glad that i noped out of there early mind you at this point he didn't have any of the necessary equipment to start streaming that means no lighting no sound and most important no cameras the store also had a discord where the joey's world project was discussed joey started posting work requests on it requesting that the team of writers changed the names of all of the places in his setting right after that was done he deleted everything that might hint at someone else being involved in the name creation that's when they started seeing the first red flags his power gamer friend was the first one to confront him about that joey just said yeah i deleted it because that work step is done i don't want anyone to steal my setting before i can publish it in a book this joey character is not only a failed content landlord but also a terrible author too if he needs a whole team of other writers only to axe all of them from the credits in an attempt to look like he did it all himself but i suppose that's all that's been happening in this story one scummy failed businessman desperately trying to profit from other people's work roll post and then the bickering started the room the owner set aside for the stream was to be cleared out of old furniture i helped anyway since again the owner is a good friend of mine joey said that he was going to be there with belzon the only other person that showed up was the powergamer powergamer understandably was really pissed after that i don't know all the details since i mostly prefer to stay out of drama but at the end of 2019 joey put the entire campaign on ice because of creative differences early 2020 powergamer dropped out of the project joey used this as an excuse to save face and also canceled the entire project he claimed that powergamer was trying to sabotage the project because he didn't get to be a player on the stream my theory joey must have realized that equipment is really expensive and preparing something like this takes a lot of time which he didn't have since he also had to study for his final college exams but he managed to throw powergamer under the bus blaming the failure of the entire project on him alone powergamer might not be the nicest guy but he didn't deserve that this failed attempt at streaming destroyed a lot of friendships at the store and turned joey into a laughing stock joey contacted me a few months later also trying to pawn off his old group on me with whom he also got into a fight he lovingly referred to them as a bunch of min maxers i'm just glad that my wednesday group survived how sleazy does somebody have to be to do all of this and still find a way to blame somebody else they'll take all the credit for all the work but if anything happens it's somebody else's fault but where this guy slowly revealed his true colors after an extended period of time this next guy went insane almost immediately at the session zero real post i am lucky and have never had a problem with in person games however with the pandemic i've turned to online games i now run my games on roll 20 and use discord for chat i've had less fortunate luck and keep finding bad players this is the story of how i had to kick a player in my most recent session zero to set the stage an old college friend of mine and decent dm tried to run a homebrew campaign but just could coordinate his players to get the game rolling he told me about the campaign setting and i immediately asked if i could run it though i asked him to play he told me that he knew too much about the world and didn't want anyone to think he was meta gaming so he declined the homebrew was based on isekai anime a world existed where humans could be drawn into portals from earth and brought into this world the world was populated by all fantasy races except for humans who only came from earth and were the minority race of the world during the transport though the portals all humans gain sciotic abilities in addition to their normal class skills because of this humans are overpowered as most main characters are in almost every isakai anime i reached out for players on a discord group and had a number of interested players in the end the group consisted of a husband and a wife team that we'll call husband and wife he played a life cleric and she played a spiked chain fighter another female player who wanted to play a demi-human rogue with an urchin background so we'll call her urchin and then the problem child who i will refer to as harvey he wanted to play a human warlock before session zero i spoke with each of the players outside of the group and tailored the psionic abilities of the human characters to fit their class choice the cleric got psionic healing the fighter got psionic chains and the demi-human got to play a cat race that was a modified version of a tabaxi and fully understood that she would always be underpowered compared to the other players and she was fine with that now harvey has been given the world setting and he knows he's about to get psionic powers he has already created his character and his chosen psionic power is basically epic spell casting i explained that we could modify that but i was not going to make him that overpowered at level 1. after some back and forth we agreed that he will get a psionic spell creation power that allows him to create spells with effects that are equal but not more powerful than one spell level above what he can cast still very overpowered but within the campaign no red flags thus far begin session zero i start off session zero like i always do and i explain my ground rules for the type of game i run one of the rules is that under no circumstances can one player force another player to do anything that they don't want to do i'm all for in-game role-playing persuasion or manipulation but there's no spell or ability that can force a player character to do something that they don't want to do important rule for what's about to happen this is what a session zero should look like the dm explains all the house rules and sets the expectations this will usually rut out bad players that wouldn't otherwise fit as they realize the dm will likely back up what they said earlier but alas this player is going to test his luck at being the worst player ever roll post husband and wife introduce themselves and their characters followed by urchin before urchin gets through her introduction harvey interrupts and shouts yes no literally shouts i wasn't told we could be non-humans that's not fair i paused the session i apologize if that was not clear and explained that if he would like to recreate his character there's still time for that i also explained that as a non-human race she has no psionic abilities urchin finishes her intro without further incident now it's harvey's turn and i ask him if he would like to step into a private chat and discuss player options he states that he's good and his character's already made i mentally sigh at the outburst and we move on with me thinking that he's going to be using the character that we had agreed upon of course it would not be as simple as using the agreed-upon character he introduces himself as a psionic spell casting demon lord warlock i stop him and try to explain where i would not discount the demon lord idea we needed to discuss this first honestly many plot hooks and ideas were forming in my head at the thought of a player demon lord i also explained that as a non-human he could not have psionic abilities again i offered to take this to a private chat to discuss and he again declines fine i'm not a demon lord that is not a psionic caster i could feel the air quotes over voice chat then the backstory honestly i do not understand who in their right mind as a player thinks that a dm would go along with what he's about to spew forth he explains that he's a demon lord that almost conquered the world a thousand years ago and was imprisoned by heroes from another world recently he was freed by his harem of cat girls led by our player demi human i cut him off right there this was over the line and i was not going to allow him to continue down that path i explained to him that i don't allow for players to dictate other players actions or backstories like that i once again offered to take him to a private chat to discuss and once again he declines my frustrations are starting to rise at this point i try to stay as calm as possible and explain that he can use the character that we built in the one-on-one session or we would have to have that session again with a new concept i tried to explain that i actually liked the idea of the demon lord and we could do something really cool with that but as he was describing it i would not allow that build what happened next completely shocked me i was ready for him to argue i was ready for him to get upset i was ready for a debate all things i could have worked past i think but no he attacked me with a verbal onslaught that i was unprepared for i failed my surprise check i failed all saves and could only sit there in shock as he spewed forth his insults now i can't quote everything he said partially because i was in shock and didn't hear it all and partially because it was too vulgar to post let's just say that he started out with a comment about how my mother's choice of work on the street corner led her to giving birth to the most brain dead worthless piece of smelly dog you'll have to imagine the rest as it progressively got worse much much worse and i'm not okay posting that it took a full few minutes for me to regain my senses and i booted and banned him husband just said dude wife was like wow and urchin made a sound something along the lines of uh we were all stunned the session ended and we're all enjoying a fun campaign dude wow just gets said from time to time and we all have a good laugh about it now honestly this is an excellent story to describe the power of a solid dm piloting a session zero it's not a silver bullet but your game will remain intact while the worst usual scenario is rooting out somebody who won't play along anyways if you want a horror story click the box up top for an epic glorious tale check the bottom box till next time

Channel: CritCrab

Views: 911,161

Keywords: reddit, r/, r slash, rpg, d and d, dnd, rpghorrorstories, horror, story, stories, crit, crab, critcrab, TTRPG, trpg, critical, role, critical role, CR, vox machina, vox, machina, content, matt, mercer, matt mercer

Id: 9ftSEBhtolE

Length: 20min 44sec (1244 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022