Most people don't share their d&d amazing stories because "man we played d&d and my DM did a super cool story" doesn't catch the attention the same way "my DM stabbed me "

Yeah, my DM slipped my character (canonically gay) a lust potion (a homebrewed love potion but different) and described it as my character having this irresistable urge to (you know what) with another party member. I brought up that I was uncomfortable with this and it happened anyway. Suffice to say, it made dnd awkward and I refused to play with that particular DM again

I've always loved the quote:
I didn't ask "how big is the room?" ... I said "I cast fireball."

That scenario with “have you seen JoJo’s” is exactly what I put my first DM through and I’m still sorry to this day

When I first got into DnD, I got really into the backstory of my very first Paladin. The short of it was his reading about the myth of Excalibur as a child was the driving force to protect innocence and become a Paladin. My DM read it over and asked me to make a different character. I was so gobsmacked but I didn't know any better, so I did without arguing. Turned out that he stole my character, changed his entire campaign to be based around "his NPC", and played as him throughout our quest to find Excalibur.

If i had a nickel for everytime Jacob told the story about outing his secret assassin player during an RPG Horror Stories video, I’d have 2 nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

An 8 man party playing descent into avernus?  That's one way to survive the first encounter.

Horror story template:
Step 1: Start with 9 players.
Step 2: You’ll fall asleep before this step

I love how it starts with "man, this was so bad. I made such an ass out of myself. I did [normal D&D things]", and then we get to the first complete horror story - ignoring the creeper in the store. that one was actually unnerving - and it starts with "this wasn't all too terrible" lmao

We were doing an Underdark campaign, and I (the DM) described an area filled with mushrooms near the myconid colony the party was supposed to be going to.  Instead of being like, "cool description" and moving on, two players literally spent an HOUR talking about how they found hallucinogenic mushrooms, while myself and the other three players became increasingly frustrated.  When they finally moved on, I gave them some combat penalties for being high.  This promoted one of the two to go off on me for favoritism and unfairly singling her out.  I kid you not.

What used to kill me, way back in my first group, was that we didn't just have no-shows, the person would wait until the last minute to call. My excitement would be building all week and, an hour before we started when I was completely psyched up and foaming at the mouth to play, someone would call and say, "Yeah, this couch is pretty comfortable. I think I'll just skip it today."
Then, I would beg the DM to do it anyway and he'd say, "I'm kinda busy too. Let's just do it next week."

That bard charmed one is probably because they though horror story meant bad in game situations

Had a good DM, nice group.  Every character the DM's wife makes is literally, "My character's a bitch, and if your character doesn't cater to her whims she's going to be a bitch to you."  Every party in-character interaction with her is walking on eggshells, or her character throwing a fit because our characters aren't putting up with her shit.  She also can't separate herself from her character and is IRL upset, snippy, and silently fuming.  Also she has Main Character Syndrome because DM is her husband.

I was a player in a one shot where we started as prisoners chained together inside of a warship, and he asked us beforehand to decide what crime we committed to get us into that position so no one would be uncomfortable.  That's how that kind of situation should be handled, not forcing a situation onto a player that they aren't comfortable with.

My first ever game of D&D, the DM made a big jigsaw-like puzzle that we had to solve to open a door to proceed. As in, we had to use our actual brains. Long story short, we never solved the puzzle, and resorted to attacking the door with our brand new low level characters. We spent a 3 hour game fighting a door. Because this was supposed to be a one-shot, the DM just moved the loot from the end of the dungeon and pretended the door was the final boss.

My DM husband once planned a whole campaign that I finally got to be a part of (my crazy work schedule kept me from playing most of the time, so I usually told him to just plan campaigns without me). I worked really hard to plan my character out for this campaign and was so proud if her. My husband was super excited too and helped me out with her.

The first session finally commenced. Five minutes into the session, one of the other players randomly decided to be a murder hobo and stabbed my character. I failed my rolls and she died. Five minutes in. After months of planning. My husband stormed out of the house. When he came back, he made us start the session over.

To be fair, the other player is a good friend and he felt really bad. He thought he was just being funny. He didn't think I'd DIE lol for the startover session, he didn't stab me again so that was nice.

I haven't suffered anything "horror story" worthy, but my current campaign has been on hiatus for months because the players' parents decided to get in a feud over a comment on a Facebook post and now none of us are allowed to hang out until it is settled which is probably never 🙃

This is a campaign I've spent years writing and it's my first major campaign with a unique setting, I've poured hundreds of hours into this game tailoring it specifically to this group of 3 players, my 3 best friends. Needless to say I'm a little pissed and if this doesn't work out I probably won't play dnd ever again

I actually have the opposite of a horror story! My friend was DMing for a huge group of me and other friends, 8 people. A few sessions in after seeing how hard it was for us to get enough time to RP and have meaningful combat, he split the party up. Half of the characters ended up betraying the other half (me being one of the betrayed) and trapping them on an already collapsing bridge to die. My group, the goofy betrayed ones, now had more motivation and investment in the story in trying to figure out why we got betrayed and had a greater goal to work towards when we were just goofing off before. Sessions felt way better after that and we did actually reunite in a big session a couple times. Sadly it fell apart due to scheduling issues with many of us going into university, but it was fun while it lasted and a very clever idea to make things more interesting.

My first introduction to D&D was absolutely terrible on so many levels.

1) Horrible scheduling. We had a party of 7 (plus DM) and any time 2 people couldn't make it, the entire session was cancelled. We were "scheduled" to play once a week. In the 9 months of me being present, we played maybe once a month. The most sessions we EVER had in a row without cancellations was 3 which happened once. I only cancelled twice in that entire 9 month period, but some people were cancelling for months at a time. However, people also didn't give any advance notice of this. Often, we wouldn't know if the session was happening or not until maximum the morning of (but more often 2-3 hours before the session start).

2) The DM used to pressure people into roleplaying and publicly shame players at the table mid-session for not roleplaying enough. People would express that they were happy with the game and everything but they just aren't big on roleplaying, yet the DM just didn't listen. It wasn't even like deep character roleplay. it was like "buy a winter coat".

3) He was terrible at balancing his attention between players. He had one person who he considered his best friend and oh boy, could you tell. There was one session where I was ignored for over 3 hours straight, and the only character who had been involved in any plot for over 10 sessions was that best friend's character. Every single other player agreed that it was an issue and called our sessions "The [character name] Show". Half of the party didn't do anything themselves anymore because they would just wait to see what that one player would do so they could say "I follow him" simply so they could get some game time.

4) He didn't let players write their own backstories and would, without permission, change major parts or entire "chapters" of their backstory. Not even to fit into the world or anything... Just because that character's story didn't interest him and he wanted to see a different story play out.

5) The DM would guilt trip and vaguely threaten s**cide over even the SMALLEST bits of constructive criticism. As an example, he used to write these 3000+ word session recaps that literally no one read because they were so long and not very well-written (basic grammatical mistakes throughout). We repeatedly asked him to just make it a shorter bullet point list to make it easier for us to read/ quickly refer back to AND to give him less work. His response was to, again, vaguely threaten s**cide and act like we're ungrateful. There was also one instance where he literally asked for feedback on the sessions and when people gave him that feedback with a THICK layer of sugarcoating ("we LOVE your DMing and it's amazing how passionate you are about the game, but I think there should be this little tweak to balancing"), he once again guilt tripped people and threatened, you guessed it, to commit s**cide. If you said anything that could be in any way interpreted as criticism or even a differing opinion to the DM, he would straight up throw a fit.

6) Because he would become manipulative and guilt-trip-y any time you said anything even remotely critical, I as a brand new player had to take on tons of responsibilities that should have been the DM's job. I ended up writing the recaps, I ended up managing the party fund, I ended up sending out session reminders, etc.

7) I know it's bad to criticise other people's creativity, but the story was just bad. It was convoluted, the DM had gotten all his advice from Youtube videos (no offense lol) and had taken the common advice of "don't railroad players" to mean "give them dozens of dead ends and unrelated clutter and give them barely any indication of which part is the main plot". I believe what is typically meant by "don't railroad your players" is to give some illusion of choice: several options that all lead to the same place and maybe allowing your characters to affect the outcome. If you're going to try to throw in unrelated quests or deadends, you should try to introduce them in a way that lets players know its unattached/dead end nature, and if players hit a dead end, don't shame them if they struggle to remember what the last "checkpoint" of the questline was.

8) There was also another campaign that he ran on the same Discord server and they would constantly gossip about our group. Bear in mind I have literally never spoken to those people before. They said I was b**chy and argumentative simply because I had publicly disagreed with him a small number of times (3-4 times across 9 months). From that, he had gone to multiple people on the server to ask "hey, hasn't that person seemed like a massive b**ch????". Everyone whom I had spoken to said no, and that I seemed normal, but he still decided to move forward and confront me about it, throwing multiple accusations about my personality (that came from the baseless opinions of people whom I had never met or spoken to before). I left the server and as far as I know, our campaign died with my departure.

There were even more issues that I just can't remember right now (as it has been a while since I quit), but it really was a horror story. I didn't really have any issues with the other players really (except maybe with the best friend who could have maybe done more to pass on the attention or wrap up what he was doing in a swifter manner).

7:26 A game I play is a public pickup game where people come in and out, there's regulars but they're not always there for this session. The DM has to yell over the noise of a bar, and last session he had to manage an 11 player game. He did it flawlessly. Bless you Franco, you're a beast.