Hi! Me and my boyfriend joined our first DND group at the beginning of this year. The guy running it means well we think, but it's been odd and increasingly frustrating. Here is why :
- We are all first-time players, with a first-time DM. He is seemingly allergic to research on how the game is actually played. I tried many times to show him how to use DNDBeyond, sent reference podcasts and YouTube videos on game play and DM advice, and said things in person (i.e. explaining what Advantage on a roll is). All from his own asking for references on the game, too.
But the dude just smiles and nods and then does nothing with the information. He is too set on making it entirely homebrew, but then doesn't actually make anything, like a character sheet, for these niche NPCs.
- He uses "memory checks" to give us any information. No other skills are really ever used. Nor any narration past annoyingly intricate descriptions of people's appearances? Again, allergic to research on how to actually play the game, and it drives me insane! We all have our characters on DND Beyond and never get to use 80% of our stats because the dude just doesn't care to learn the skills & abilities or play past his idea of the game.
- He punishes us very randomly. One of my friends in wanted to scope out the camp away from the group, and was punished by a random snake popping out of nowhere and biting him for 30HP, no chance for combat or dexterity check or anything. My boyfriend plays a Rouge and is never given the chance to use stealth, gets ignored when he asks if he can find a place to hide. Another friend wanted to playfully smack a child on the back of the head for stealing, and got almost killed by another NPC for it, no combat, just "take 50HP"
- There's no turn order, just 7 players (too many) all trying to talk over each other, and he just picks one person to go on a tangent with, and then assumes everyone follows or just ignores people's ideas. It's a cluster fuck.
-We have no sense of the world past that NPCs are suspicious of us and/or too busy to care about us, and we have these weird homebrewed magical items with abilities we can't even use on them.
Gave us a mirror that has Project Image on it but when my bf tried to use that ability, DM said we "couldn't use it like that" even though bf was reading the ability straight off DND Beyond.
- It's really hard to RP when we can't get a sense of how our characters would fit into the world or what we're supposed to be doing in it. DM just seems low-key miffed we haven't read his mind about the storyline and don't catch the tiny crumbs of lore he puts within long, monologs of describing outfits and other BS.
I would correct him more, but I don't want to backseat DM and I would be saying something like every 5 minutes or less if I wanted to suggest a game mechanic he isn't using.
Two other players who had DND experience dropped out very early on in the campaign, and now I can understand why they did. This kind of sucks, and is not really DND.
Thoughts and stories welcome 🙏 wanted to rant and hear opinions about the situation. We think we're going to leave the campaign, but bf is still on the fence about it because he's giving DM more grace than me lol.