My first ever DM had a raging case of being-an-idiot. This was a guy who got his high-school girlfriend pregnant and while they told every one they were married, they never had a ceremony or got a license, and he bragged abut how he did that on purpose so she couldn't leave him and demand alimony. Their family was on food stamps and he would spend at least $15 every day on magic cards and fast food. He was 19 but didn't look a day under 30 because he drank so heavily. But the worst thing about him was the arrogance. He always thought he was the smartest, most clever person in the room despite the mountain of evidence suggesting otherwise, and consistently dismissed anything that challenged him as "being stupid", and he made every one call him Katica.
Why did we let him be DM? Because I was so deep in game-compulsion at the time I was just desperate to play. Plus, everyone else either didn't want to or wasn't experienced enough to do it. So, we had no choice, he was at the helm. Not figuratively, he had a DMPC who owned an impossibly expensive adimantine airship that he invented in a world without airships, but I'm getting ahead of myself. First let me explain his world: The setting is basically Earth in the middle ages, with elves, dwarfs, and the like, but no magic (yet
) but their was psionics. The only problem was that he wasn't familiar with the psionics system. He thought it was only telepathy and telekinesis, and to make up for this, he said we could use caster classes as long as the spells we were using could be explained as being because the character was psychic. But I latched on to the idea of psionics and went out and bought the XPH (which I soon fell in love with). He had every one (all
seven of us) start out in different corners of the globe promising to have events transpire to bring us all together. This took three sessions and, believe it or not, we actually had the most fun with this part. We were having a blast figuring out how our characters were linked. My con-artist bard character, for instance, was nearly killed when a bunch of guards stormed a bar he was playing in looking for a guy from a wanted poster who turned out to be one of the other PCs. I then wrote a song called "the man that almost got me killed" that I preformed at the IHOP we were holding it when our characters met specifically because it embarrassed every one there. I was later attacked by another PC who was a samurai who's master I had run afoul of (me:
he told me to go to his cache and grab what I could carry as a reward. him:
you completely cleared out his cache! me:
is it my fault he didn't know I owned a pull-cart?).
But, all good things come to an end and he rushed through these parts to get us to his story. I should mention that he had THREE DMPCs, each of them were at least two levels higher than any of the PCs. He tried to justify this by having another guy be the "co-DM" saying he would trade off duties with him so the DMPCs they were playing would trade being PCs. At least that's what he said. What ended up happening was he made this poor guy do all the work. He was a nice guy but was a bit of a doormat. The third DMPC was a half-lillend woman his character seduced into tagging along. He then set up encounter after encounter tailor made for his character. There
was a PC who he allowed to be at the same level as his DMPCs, his wife's, and boy did he bend over backwards to make her character relevant. Not that it mattered, she was barely paying attention because, like the rest of us, none of her choices mattered. In fact, that was more true for her since since he built her character and wouldn't let her choose her own level progression.
Hey while were talking about level progression, lets make an awkward segue to that topic. He got rid of entry requirements for PrCs. Actually, that's not quite right. He gave you the requirements when you entered the class. This led to some of the most broken characters I've EVER seen. A gishing cancer mage, a barbarian/drunken master without monk levels, ect. ect. When he finally skimmed through the XPH, he decided that the PP per manifestation limit was dumb which led to more broken psionic characters. But the PCs were still nothing compared to his characters, so the players started getting bored. To fix this, he let people make multiple characters, adding more PCs to an already huge party. It's at this point that most of us quit.
I'm actually a bit grateful to Katica, without him, I may have never discovered psionics, and I now have a long list of things to avoid as a DM. And remember how I said that he bragged about how his wife could never leave him due to the fact that they weren't actually married and she couldn't get alimony? Well, she did leave him, and does get alimony; it turns out Texas has common law marriage, and since he told everyone they were husband and wife, she got an actual divorce.
