Playing Dungeons & Dragons or some other role-playing game with your best friends can be amazing. But play a tabletop RPG or other game with the wrong people, and things can take a very dark turn. What’s the worst RPG/tabletop experience you’ve ever suffered through?
Please mention the name of the game you were playing, who you were playing with, and the details of what made this such a horrendous experience. Thank you!
Top image: Community, “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.” Thanks to Stephanie for the idea!
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27 responses to “What’s The Worst RPG/Tabletop Gaming Experience You’ve Ever Had?”
none, because uninformatively i’ve never had the chance to play any :’-(
This one time at Community College my group play DnD with this fat kid because we felt sorry for him. I stole his sword, humped it and then raped the Ducane family,
Wow, your name sure is apt…
That’s the plot to the Community episode referenced in the article. It was a riot.
Love that episode, incredible show.
DnD 4th edition.
I played with people who had no original thought or imagination, who min maxxed and never ever actually role played. Sat on their phones during other player’s turns. I can’t say the rules didn’t help but I wondered why they came each week.
Worst group I ever DM’d for I’m glad I was paid.
It’s impossible to have a bad experience playing tabletop games because they’re just that rad.
Seriously though, attempting to play Arkham Horror as a table full of newbies was terrible. It’s not my style of game to begin with (low player agency, fiddly with lots of variance) and then the rulebook is a Lovecraftian nightmare as befits the Great Old Ones that you are trying to defeat.
Arkham “Why are there so many portals?” Horror? Good game.
Even Elder “Oh god we’re all going to die” Sign had a metric tonne of portals. Still a good game though.
Arkham “I think we just lost the game in the third round, maybe this game isn’t so great with eight players” Horror? It’s a lot of fun.
During a game of AD&D 2nd ed, one member of the group I DM’d for found out that another member had been sleeping with his gf. That led to screaming, a fistfight, a broken table, numerous broken miniatures & lost dice and 2 arrests after the neighbours called the police.
I was playing 40k with a regular opponent and good friend.I had built an unbeatable Iyanden Ghost Warrior army.It was ridiculous.Every player I knew tried to beat it,including myself,and failed.My friend became obsessed with it and painted two expensive new armies to defeat it.After perhaps 30 defeats,he excused himself from the table,returned with a hammer and calmy smashed every single figure of his to bits.That was 16 years ago and on the rare occasions I see him,he only talks about tactics he’s devised for our next game.We haven’t played since the incident…
Wraithguard can be real pains in the neck.
I have a friend who constantly make dumb melee monsters, and then tries to to player kill.
The most infamous was his Black Crusade character Gromar, as we crept into a heavily defended area he yells “Wait for Gromar!” to which bullets n plasma rain down upon us, nearly killing everyone.
You really do need to be careful about joining groups with people you don’t know. I found that out the hard way. What I’d expected to be roleplaying and storytelling, turned out to be a group of people making constant rape jokes, spouting memes, and power-gaming. I’d been invited to join my a friend of mine who knew I was interested in this kind of thing. Her boyfriend was a regular member of the group, and he seemed like a pretty normal guy. They were going to meet me at he place where the games took place.
And they didn’t show.
I go inside, and from the moment I enter I’m treated like a pariah. Being the only woman there seemed to instantly make me the butt of a constant barrage of sexist jokes. This should have been a warning sign, but I was still hoping things would settle down once we began. It was pretty clear at the time that the fact that I was really uncomfortable with all of this was only encouraging them to do it more.
The game begins, and I leave after 10 minutes when one of the players started having sex with Inn patrons for money, and the DM asked them to make constitution checks to avoid getting pregnant, while the other half of the party went to rape some orc captives.
That was more than enough for me. I packed up my stuff and left, while the party laughed and laughed like they’d won a victory.
I get that for some people, that’s just the way they like to play, that is what roleplaying to them. I don’t have to understand it, or like it. I think their behaviour was disgusting and immature. The biggest issue is that’s not how the game was advertised to me. I’d never have gone if I’d been honestly told what the people were like, and what type of game they were playing. It cost me a friendship, and nearly killed my love of tabletop gaming. So I’ll reiterate that warning – Only play with people you know!
Yeah, there is nothing worse than being ‘the new guy’ in a group that has been playing together for ages. At the minimum, I think you’d need a good DM (who knows how to keep players in line) and also know at least one of the group.
I hope that experience didn’t sour you on RPGs in general.
I was raped multiple times because i annoyed the DM with my constant thievery checks.
Wow, that’s a bad DM.
in his defense. i WAS doing thievery checks FOR EVERYTHING possible.
Battlestar Galactica – currently the only game (of many, many gaming sessions) that the entire table has unanimously decided to stop playing part way through because it had become a miserable experience.
It’s a game that’s tough going by nature and we messed up a few rules along the way. Would it have been a better experience if we’d gotten everything right? Difficult to say, but I’m sceptical and not particularly inclined to sit down for another long, long game to find out.
To pre-empt some comments that are likely incoming, I did quite enjoy the couple of doomed Dead of Winter games that I’ve played.
Oh man, I could talk for days about this. Like how in Warmachine there was one player so bad that he almost caused several people to quit the game. He wasn’t a bad player, but he always stretched the rules and his measurements to get victories. One girl almost quit because he said his unit of Trollkin were defense 14 instead of defense 12. For every game I had with him he always stretched out measurements. His model would charge at 12 inches despite the fact that my model was 13 inches away. When he put his model back, it magically moved forward a full inch.
The worse was when I dropped some cloud effects in front of my remaining army, he charged right through to a model with his Warlock. I called him out and when he moved his model back, it someone shifted 2 inches to the side so that it could have line of sight. Then he started attacking my models, where every time he killed one he gained a Fury point and could spend one Fury point to move 1 inch. I placed my models about 2 inches apart from each other to prevent him from bouncing over the place, instead he was shifted 2 inches around them all. Then on his final move he moved around a wall to attack my Warcaster, then saw he was out of range. So he moves back, gained an inch, moved around to the other side, and suddenly he could reach me. Dead in one hit.
He was so egotistical, every victory was him being better, but every loss was nothing but luck. Every time he would lose he would scream, carry on, bitch about OP models (this guy also regularly plays League of Legends). He actually ragequit a couple of times during tournaments.
Finally the CO had a talk with him and he quit altogether. But now he’s showing interest in MK3.
There was also another player that joined a League, except he didn’t bring any models. Instead he made all of his models out of pipe cleaners, stones and bark. The only list he played was by sheer ‘coincidence’, the most OP list in the game at the time. A list so bad it was nerfed after many complaints. At the end of the event he gained store credit, but somehow managed to get full money for it instead.
Also, if you were following some of my posts last year from D&D then you would know some of the events that occurred in game. The first problem was a player who took everything too literally, that problem was hard to get around. But the real problem was another player who was incredibly selfish about the game. He didn’t care what happened to other characters, so long as he got a laugh out of it. He was regularly backseat GMing and would go to extreme lengths to backstab the other players. One event resulted in half a city blowing up and he blamed it everybody else. Whenever we tried to get rid of him, he would react with, “But your characters have no reason to distrust me!”.
At one point he even invited a girl along to play D&D since she was interested in the game. Turns out he was only interested in sleeping with her. He was creepily nice to her in game, then eventually became a dick that was planning to assassinate her.
Holy crap, I’d love to see pics of an army made of pipe cleaners, stones and bark.
Every time I had to calculate THAC0 in AD&D.
Monopoly. Every single time.
Straining relationships since the 1930s
Flames of war. Honestly can’t remember the people I was playing with as I was tagging along with a friend. One guy flipped out and threw everything off the table (including other peoples gear) as he lost a squad over a few millimeters and stormed out. Even had three other non players go over it after he appealed, clearly not in his favor. That was the first and last time I ever played that game.
A few occasions:
1. Playing a wrestler and having to explain the grapple rules of D&D3.5 to a skeptical audience in in the heat of a fight;
2. Developing a somewhat deserved reputation as a power-gamer and then having people question my character build even when it’s quite vanilla;
3. Any time real world physics are brought up during a game of D&D;
Played a 6 hour game of The Game of Thrones board game. 2 of the guys playing made an alliance… that never ended. No backstabbing. No betrayal. We played for 6 hours and in the end the game just ended… No one could take them on because they had huge armies with no distrust toward each other. Felt like a waste of 6 hours in the end. Its important to play to the essence of the game.