You’re a very positive person and reading your stories is always inspiring! But I’m curious, do you have any negative roleplaying experiences to share, or any regrets that you’d be comfortable talking about? Would be very interesting to hear how you have handled that. Oh, yes. When the FRP hobby was young, there were many DMs who thought the game was "how to kill all the characters in sadistic, entertaining ways." Every session. If you could really upset the player by how their character was offed, bonus. Ugh.
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 30, 2019
And I recall an early D&D Open where a DM deliberately mis-described the surroundings in order to TPK in five minutes (eliminating all of the players from a tournament) so they could rush off to the exhibit hall and buy a hot new game product before said product sold out.
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 30, 2019
I also recall a D&D Open adventure that began with the PC party approaching a "haunted" castle by night, where the DM triumphantly announced, to begin play, that as we'd all spent the night in the open we had to make Constitution Checks. All fails = System Shock Survival Rolls…
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 30, 2019
…and of course, all failed System SSR = death. Killed half the party before described play had even begun. When the survivors (2 thieves and 2 fighters, now shorn of all spellcasters in the party) decided they wanted to turn around and head for home with the bodies rather…
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 30, 2019
…then attempting the castle with no magic/healing available at all, the DM had the castle explode and rain down its boulders onto the survivors, who all took (not kidding) 100d20 damage, each. So, TPK.
So yes, I've experienced my share of humans being humans. ;}
Usually in…— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 30, 2019
…situations where the miscreants were NOT going to entertain appeals to reason. What I did at early cons was whip out a fun game and suggest we go off and play that instead, to turn a big dark disappointment into a "plus" time. Life is too short for IMAGINED disappointments.
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) May 30, 2019
Thank you for the stories, and I definitely agree with you. It’s interesting to me that most of your bad experiences have been at cons – you’d think that people would be eager to give good impressions of both their games and the hobby as a whole in “public” venues! Heh. You'd think, yes. But as my father used to tell me: "Try not to make the mistake of applying logic to human behavior too often. So much craziness is just humans being human."
— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) June 1, 2019