Ok, so a few months ago, I had truly gotten the thirst to play DnD and was downright desperate. I kid you not, I wrote up five characters, played each one and DMed the whole adventure, rolling the dice and writing in character every interaction to post almost in story format on an app called the Amino.
I nearly jumped out of my chair in eagerness every time someone so much as gave me a notification in hopes that maybe it was an invite to a game. I made a lot of mistakes in this time. Accepting and playing with a lot of people and groups that simply ended up to be pure trouble. I’m hoping I don’t have to tell you that this is one of those times.
It was late, VERY late. I work 12 hour shifts, but occasionally on my days off I stay up way too late and screw up my schedule. I was about half an hour away from “bed time” Which was just the minimum hour needed to get to bed and still get 6 hours of sleep.
So I was just winding down, ready to shower and hop into bed when I got a notification, a private message. I opened it up and my heart soared. It was a well constructed invitation to a game. One of those fancy like half in character lore filled sort of invitations to a game as the person had read a lot of my content and seemed excited to have me and my imagination along for the ride.
So, I eagerly ate up every detail. 5th edition, theme was some sort of book the person liked and while it was a certain taste of fantasy I’ve never read they informed me that everything was allowed and the story was going to be great.
I said goodbye to bedtime and dove into it, reading up on what I could of the story and throwing together a character when something happened, something that should have made me, almost did make me just drop it all and walk out. There were a few warning signs first, like the discord server we came to had nothing set up and there was a lot of back and forth before I just googled how to get the dice bot and install it into the server. Little things like that.
This person who had invited me in started asking me details about the story, and I told them that I’d just have to figure it out when they started the adventure. The response was a confused. “Huh?”
Come to find out, they had intended ME to be the DM.
Needless to say this made me a bit angry, who the hell invites someone chooses the story, limits, and everything but then just voluntells someone to DM. It’s like inviting someone to a party and telling them that they have to bring the cake, music, party games and snacks.
But I was desperate for a game, so I just cursed about it under my breath and agreed. But I knew nothing about this setting they had so I told them I’d have to wing it, and that it would probably have to be tomorrow because I had already stayed up too late making characters and setting up. They begged and pleaded for me to stay up, “the adventure is just right there, come on, lets do this!!”
There were three or so others there as well, including one VERY nice player who had a very interesting character and showed a LOT of impressive talent with role playing her character. The sort of immersiveness that you just grow to love. And, well all of the other players were excited as well, even if a little angry at the organizer for just throwing their duties on me hen they were the one inviting people into “their story”
So I toiled for a few hours throwing together a whole bunch of stuff and checking people’s characters giving them tips and hints, for some reason even to this day, no matter what game I’m in, there’s always one person with less than 10 AC.
But finally, I am so close. I have a story up and running, I’m almost down writing the opening for the whole campaign where we will all get introduced to the quest and get dragged into it without being too forceful and giving the party lots of options.
And then it happens….
The host contacts me. “Hey… I’m going to go to sleep, can you keep working on it. I expect the story to be messaged to me and waiting in my inbox by morning. Don’t let me down.”
Then, they quickly went offline before I could even answer them.
I did not keep my cool, I informed the gathered players of what had happened, and together, we griefed the discord channel and left some rather unkind comments in their inbox.
I then blocked them and invited the players themselves into a different campaign I would put together the next day. Only the really talented person accepted which was good.
I was not too surprised to see someone with the same name and avatar but with a new account messaging me the next day demanding the story I wrote and an apology for what I did to their discord server, which really wasn’t much.
I blocked them again and went on my way. They had cost me a LOT of sleep and I don’t know about you, but I call that a crazy dick move. And to no one’s great surprise, they made a new account and tried again, and again. But they stopped after the third try thankfully.
Thankfully, my next campaign ended up being one of the best I’ve ever run and I still to this day play with and keep in contact with those I ran it with.
But I’ll never forget the time someone invited me to a game, tried to force me to be the DM then after I sacrificed hours of sleep to try and put a game together and demanded I give it all to them while they sleep. The excessive lack of awareness was baffling.
Still wasn’t the worst set of events, but still…. damn…
[zombify_post]
0 Comments