Creepy Players, Killer GMs, and Int 8 Wizards: Gaming Horror Stories

[Libertad]

It's obvious that he wants to depower women thoroughly in his games, but I notice that the +8 Charisma bonus can be horrifically abused with some good min-maxing.  Just slap on some area of effect spells and save or lose spells, combined with Paladin's Divine Grace and a Cloak of Charisma, and this "realistic female character" should be outclassing the manly Dwarf Barbarian PC in combat and have awesome saving throw bonuses.

His attempt at keeping women in the kitchen failed: he just made sorceresses some of the most powerful people in the setting.  I'm strongly tempted to make a build to post on their forums to illustrate this, but it'd be a waste of time.

[Sinfire Titan]

How about this asshole, who Disjoined a fellow party member?

[Libertad]

Creepy Dude:  "I'm tired of people treating sex like it's icky!  There's nothing wrong with introducing erotic elements into D&D!"

His first night of gaming: "I wildshape into a panther and rape the prostitute!"


And you wonder why people get squicked out when you talk about sex?

[Tiltowait]

Creepy Dude:  "I'm tired of people treating sex like it's icky!  There's nothing wrong with introducing erotic elements into D&D!"

His first night of gaming: "I wildshape into a panther and rape the prostitute!"


And you wonder why people get squicked out when you talk about sex?

This thread is making me very glad that I already have a solid gaming group as it is seriously discouraging me from meeting any new people in the hobby.

[Whisper]

"I'm tired of people treating sex like it's icky!  There's nothing wrong with introducing erotic elements into D&D!"

Sounds perfectly reasonable...

His first night of gaming: "I wildshape into a panther and rape the prostitute!"

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii... what the actual fuck?

[veekie]

"I'm tired of people treating sex like it's icky!  There's nothing wrong with introducing erotic elements into D&D!"

Sounds perfectly reasonable...

His first night of gaming: "I wildshape into a panther and rape the prostitute!"

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii... what the actual fuck?

Its whats wrong with introducing erotic elements into a game. Some people suddenly metamorphose into terrible people who would shove their fetishes into your face at every opportunity.

[SneeR]

"I'm tired of people treating sex like it's icky!  There's nothing wrong with introducing erotic elements into D&D!"

Sounds perfectly reasonable...

His first night of gaming: "I wildshape into a panther and rape the prostitute!"

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii... what the actual fuck?

Its whats wrong with introducing erotic elements into a game. Some people suddenly metamorphose into terrible people who would shove their fetishes into your face at every opportunity.

Yeah! Just imagine the intra-party conflict that would arise between my character and the druid if I introduced my high-heel kitten-stepping fetish into the game!

[Libertad]

Not so much a horror story so much as a horror story waiting to happen.

It might just be me, but I tend to notice that gamers who complain about other people being "afraid of introducing sex into D&D" often have creepy fantasies.

So there's this guy who made a fictional organization of knights dedicated to sexually "liberating" women from the shackles of sexual repression.

And by "sexually liberate," I mean kidnap and then brainwashed to become some warped version of a free love devotee, willing to screw any adult without any form of romantic or emotional connection.  Oh, and for women who resist, well they're not allowed to be chaste.  They have to have sex with one of the knights, like it or not.

Now, there's a lot of sick and evil villains in RPGs who do horrific things, but what caused the downward spiral of the thread was when the author started making excuses for the knights and expressing his personal views towards sex, consent, and what is and is not natural.

We get such lines as "It's not rape if she enjoys it," and "Enchantment spells are non-coercive."  When the entire board turns on him, he tries to backtrack, claiming that he was merely acting "in character," pretending to be a rape apologist, and that the creation of the knights was done in the spirit of light-hearted humor.  Nobody was buying it.

He also plays the Troll card when he mentions that he viewed the ensuing fracas as an "enjoyable conversation," meaning that he was either completely oblivious to what was going on or just did it for kicks.

[StreamOfTheSky]

Man, that thread isn't nearly as old as I thought it was...

You forgot the part about how he had "Knight of the Scarlet Woman" as his status message for basically the entire time.

I still think the worst part of that whole debacle was the unfair shellacking the site owner took and as consequence, the draconian sex/rape discussion rules changes that were made.  Gods forbid in a game where you commit mass murder and armed robbery and call yourselves the heroes that the villains commit rape (in regards to how any of that applies to a message board, you can talk about the former in threads about gaming exploits, but now cannot mention the latter when talking about how you've built up the big bad).   

[bruceleeroy]

I'm pretty sure that Kevin_Video's games trump most of these stories that don't involve actual, physical violence.

[McBeardly]

I don't know after a certain point the binder of shame stuff ends up being worse than our old friend video.

[Libertad]

I don't know after a certain point the binder of shame stuff ends up being worse than our old friend video.

Linky.

[Libertad]

Squizzle's Sad Story of Crazy Jay:

For the two years I was stationed in San Diego, I went on a seemingly endless string of godforsaken gaming experiences. At the heart of these "worst" gaming experiences was a GM known as Crazy Jay. (I tried to describe Crazy Jay at length on the creepy gamer thread some time ago, but I have no idea what post number it is.) I know that this thread is probably supposed to be about our single worst role playing experience, but something would be lost in translation if I tried to explain things that way- you might say that my "worst" gaming experience really comes from the synergy effect of several consecutive bad experiences all run together.

Here are some "worst" highlights from those dark days of Crazy Jaydom:

1. The default setting for Crazy Jay's games was a realm called Jayland. If you were ever in great trouble, you could pray to Jay, the patron deity of Jayland, and he just might swoop in to save you. Naturally, the sole purpose of all of Crazy Jay's adventures was to railroad the party into situations where we either had to pray to Jay, or face TPK. Fortunately, we always went with TPK. Obviously this setup creeped me the Hell out then, as it still does.

2. Crazy Jay would sometimes randomly act like the various monsters we encountered in the game. This was supposedly for some kind of demented dramatic effect. However, these "acts" would go on for far, far too long. In most cases (like when we ran into orcs or such) I could live with it. The night he began rolling around on the floor, bubbling and snatching at our legs like the gelatinous cube we just encountered was the last straw, though.

3. Crazy Jay loved playing game sessions in public places, which I hated. Re-read #2 again to see why.

4. Jay was always trying to dupe non-gamers into playing along with us in his games. This never ended well.

I could go on and on. Basically, just mix these ingredients around with a constant stream of nonsensical plots, severely demented NPCs, a motley crew of AB3-esque fellow gamers, and you might begin to get a sense of what made these game sessions the "worst" when you add them all up.

Here's a "typical" example of play showing how these game sessions usually went:

The game was AD&D2E, and I was really excited about this character idea I had; A neutral good fighter who pretended to be a deranged sociopathic henchman. The concept for this character was that he was a kind of "professional informant" who carved out a living by gaining the confidence of various unsavory types, and then selling them out to the authorities just before something big was supposed to go down. The other characters in the game were all scummy cut-throat types, so this would put me in secret conflict with the rest of the party. This character idea was approved by Crazy Jay a day before the game was to take place with an approving "that's cool!", and I was looking forward to the joys of subterfuge and subtle inter-party conflict.

You can probably guess what happened instead.

The game starts out with our characters arriving into port on a ship. Within the first five minutes, my character is bragging (in character) to another one of the PC's (who do not know that my character is a spy) about all the glorious dirty deeds done cheep he has done, and looks forward to doing once we make port.

___________________________________

ME: Arrr, matey! That's when I slit his throat and pillaged his estate as well as his five daughters, yadda, yadda, etc…

JAY: Okay, I'm dropping your alignment to Neutral Evil.

ME: W.T.F.!?

JAY: You just admitted all this evil stuff you've done. There's no way you could be neutral good.

ME (Through gritted teeth): It. Was. Part. Of. My. Cover. Story. Remember?

JAY: Well, I'm still changing your alignment.

ME: !?!

JAY: Lying to your own party members is an evil act.

ME: ….

OTHER PCS: What!? You're a spy!?!

ME: Yeah, but there's no way your characters would be able to know that yet…

OTHER PCS: We keelhaul this sorry S.O.B.!

JAY: Okay! Awesome!

(Crazy Jay then wallows around the room in what I can only assume to be some kind of melodramatic performance-art rendition of a keelhauling. For three long minutes.)

JAY: You're dead. Roll up another character. This time, why don't you just make him evil so you can fit into the adventure like everyone else?



Yeah. So imagine that every drat scene of a role-playing session is just as dumbfounding and Kafkaesque as this example. One after another after another. You might see why I have difficulty trying to pinpoint a single "worst" gaming experience from the lot.

I could go on and on and on, but my mind is Jello. I hope this post made some sense and wasn't too long.

[ImperatorK]

I would punch Jay in the groin.

[Whisper]

"I'm tired of people treating sex like it's icky!  There's nothing wrong with introducing erotic elements into D&D!"

Sounds perfectly reasonable...

His first night of gaming: "I wildshape into a panther and rape the prostitute!"

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii... what the actual fuck?

Its whats wrong with introducing erotic elements into a game. Some people suddenly metamorphose into terrible people who would shove their fetishes into your face at every opportunity.

I call that a people problem, not a game-elements problem.

I find it kinda weird that people in this culture are so attuned to violence that they can emotionally detach from the in-game slaughter of thousands or millions, but when something sexual happens... heads asplode.

I tend to have these elements in games I run when they would normally occur. I've twice had female PCs, played by females, raped by NPCs, because they were in a situation where... well, that's what would happen. No way around it.

One of them was handled with particular adroitness by the player in question. Situation was, whole party and their airship was captured by a crew of sky-vikings, who were especially pissed to find that their sailing crew was made of animated skeletons (Vikings hate necromancy.)

The character in question had put a lot of points into physical attractiveness. (It was a points-buy type RPG).

So I took her aside and said: "You know what's probably gonna happen, here, right?"

She nodded with a slight wince. Then had an idea. "I'm gonna to pick out the biggest, baddest Viking of the lot and start making eyes at him.", she said.

I saw where she was going with this. One successful vamping-skill role later, several other Vikings are nursing broken noses and she's in his cabin.

I glossed over it with "Your evening isn't precisely ideal, but it's a lot less rambunctious, and less crowded, than it would have been otherwise. I'm awarding you X bonus experience for quick thinking. Now, does anyone else wanna do anything before the next day?"

[SneeR]

Tell me, Whisper, would it have still gone that way if she hadn't wanted her character to be raped?
Because I think that once you start raping PCs, you start to discourage playing female characters as well as violating your players. I mean, some people go nuts over their characters not getting an equal share in the gold! How do you think it feels for a character you are emotionally invested in to get raped?

I think that raping PCs is just wholly unacceptable, especially if you say "That's what would realistically happen," because people play to have fun, not not have the avatar for themselves get violated. Imagine if one of your PCs got raped. Would you just say, "Okay, if that's what would really happen!" I think that raping PCs is just a sick way to exert power in a world where you have total DM control.

The only exception is if someone wants their character to get raped. Good luck having that happen.

[Libertad]

Well, in Whisper's case, it sounded like the player was hesitant at first by the wincing.  I don't think that he realized this, even though she said "alright, I do this."

But one more reason why rape in RPGs shouldn't be allowed is that well... some gamers use table-top games as a poor attempt to disguise their creepy fantasies as a game session.  Once you say "Are you okay with this?" with regards to such a subject, things can go south even then: what if one of the players appears to be enjoying it?  Wouldn't that color your opinion of him/her as a person?  What if one of the players interprets this decision as an open invitation to indulge in unwholesome fantasies?

I have another story from Something Awful that's related.  It's an extreme example, but highlights the problems listed above:

This is as good a time to tell this story as any.

I guess I'll be honest. My Worst Roleplaying Experiences weren't the ones involving Dragoz, the Master Of Dragonic Fate (and a vampire himself). They actually occurred long before that, at the tender age of 14.

You see, I lived in a small rural town and there wasn't another person in the entire area who played RPGs. In fact, the nearest store that even sold RPG books was three hours away. So when a guy on WebRPG offered to send me a bunch of World of Darkness books if I would play in his WoD game on another program, I jumped at the chance. He sent me the books, I made a character, and he told me to download...

...Furcadia.

The complete stories of the horrible poo poo that happened in that New Bremen style game would be terrible*, but all this talk reminds me of a specific incident that happened that actually made me quit in disgust for a while.

The majority of players and STs played Werewolf exclusively, with the exception of a few mages, vampires, and one wraith, everyone was on the Apocalypse train. That meant that the game had a pretty consistent structure - the Werewolf players would do self-contained story-lines against NPCs, and everyone else would plot against each other and avoid the werewolf characters.

This was all well and good until the Werewolf ST's decided that it would be a great idea to do a "mature story" with a more "thoughtful theme" for the werewolf players. They decided all of the werewolves would be "possessed" by an aspect of the Wyrm and have to find a way to get rid of it.

Of course, all of the werewolf players decide they are reppin' "The Defiler Wyrm" which meant that It Was surprise sex Time. (I mean, it's bad enough that werewolf had the "Primal Urge" trait**, but this went a big step farther).

The first step of their "plot" was to rush into the town to try to surprise sex any character that wasn't a werewolf. I quit the first day they did that and just put it out of my mind.

It went on for three weeks before everyone who didn't play werewolf started to systematically murder any character remotely involved, one by one. For two months afterwords if someone made a character and even joked about sex, the game became an elaborate contest to see who could kill off the character first.

*In my first few weeks of playing, someone emailed my parents and offered to buy me for $4,000. It just got worse from there.

**For anyone who isn't familiar with Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Primal Urge was basically a skill that let you immediately force any character to immediately try to have sex with yours. And the book specifically spelled out that it wasn't some generic "seduction," either.

I get the feeling that these guys are so fucked up that they'd somehow manage to be creepy in a game without stuff like "primal urge," but allowing such an option in the first place is a lightning magnet for the worst kinds of players.  Incorporating elements of rape into RPGs is a risk not worth taking, otherwise you attract more creeps and/or make everyone feel uncomfortable.

[McBeardly]

It's the same reason we don't like intentionally unbalanced systems, the sort where one character is supposed to just be more powerful than others. Can it be done well and maturely? Yes of course it can no single subject or rule is so heinous to be impossible to use well, but these things tend to attract certain very unpleasant subsets of the nerd community and tends to bring out the worst in otherwise decent players and GMs.

[Whisper]

I find myself reiterating my puzzlement at the notion that rape is an exception to the ordinary social mores that govern how we handle bad things happening in RPGs.

Characters can, on occasion, get shot, blown up, stabbed, set on fire, eaten alive, diced, enslaved by illithids, turned inside out, etc. Players are expected to deal with these with a modicum of maturity, so long as they are consequences of failure, and not something that they are simply railroaded into.

Now, I agree there's a problem with GMs that get some sort of thrill by *making* rape happen in their games. In the same way that there is a problem with GMs who love inescapable death traps, or describing your character's death to you in great detail. The GM's proper job is to create a gameworld that is challenging, has verisimilitude, and is engaging, rather than telling an immutable story that gives *him* vicarious thrills.

But I morally uncomfortable with the notion of denying a PC's agency. (Agency: the quality of being able to make choices, and take risks, and being responsible for the outcome thereof.)

I am reminded of another major villain I once set PCs up against... Cassandra of the Axe, a pirate queen who hated men, and was in the habit of having any that she captured castrated and then released. Now, it so happened that they managed to take her down without any PCs being captured, but had this happened, and had they failed to escape in a timely fashion... well, hope you can cast Regenerate.

For the risks the PCs take to be meaningful, and the game world realistic, negative consequences must exist, and they must be roughly what they would be in sort of world you are creating. Now, because it's game, and not a novel, the players are allowed to act in any way that they realistically can, and can think of, to avoid such fates. However, there is no special "PC stamp" on the foreheads of characters that automagically exempts them from the things that are happening to NPCs around them. 

Now, let us examine the case of a female PC who encounters a ship full of Vikings on a raiding expedition. This person has options. Fight and win. Flee. Bargain. Fight to the death rather than be taken. Hide. Bargain. But fail to do any of those, and I am not going to suddenly turn the game into a Neill Gaiman story, where all the Vikings are gay, or a Disney movie, where everyone just sings a song about having a dream.

[SneeR]

I find myself reiterating my puzzlement at the notion that rape is an exception to the ordinary social mores that govern how we handle bad things happening in RPGs.

Characters can, on occasion, get shot, blown up, stabbed, set on fire, eaten alive, diced, enslaved by illithids, turned inside out, etc. Players are expected to deal with these with a modicum of maturity, so long as they are consequences of failure, and not something that they are simply railroaded into.

Difference is this: once the physical scars are healed in game, you only have a sense of revenge, perhaps. There is no physical wound form rape, only a psychological one. It is a totally different assault from all of the above.

In one situation, the player can say, "Once I heal, that wizard is dead!"
In the other, the player gets to sit awkwardly while you describe their PC made helpless in an action that actually has no rules RAW, so functions exactly as the DM desires. I would personally feel extremely angry at the DM, not the NPC.

Chopping off your genitals is no different than chopping off your hand where magical healing is concerned.

Now, let us examine the case of a female PC who encounters a ship full of Vikings on a raiding expedition. This person has options. Fight and win. Flee. Bargain. Fight to the death rather than be taken. Hide. Bargain. But fail to do any of those, and I am not going to suddenly turn the game into a Neill Gaiman story, where all the Vikings are gay, or a Disney movie, where everyone just sings a song about having a dream.

What about having these cruel pirates torture all the PCs equally?

That is the best course of action, in my opinion: treat the female PCs exactly the same as the male PCs.
The only exception is to have the male NPCs react to the female PC's feminine wiles when she is trying to use her feminine wiles.

Rape should only be in a game if everyone ahead of time agrees unanimously that it can be. Otherwise, someone eventually might feel like they are being forced to act out the DM's weird fantasy.