D&D; rule lawyer players and a crappy DM?

Question

My friends and I play Dnd every now and again. One of our friends has Dm'd our sessions for a really long time; he's not very good. He doesn't follow basic rules (which is okay I guess since he IS the DM, but it's way too frequent, and it is with the most basic of rules). He doesn't prepare anything for our encounters/sessions. He "makes it up as he goes" which usually involves one of us dying every session and an illogical sequence of events. One of our friends has died 5 times in 5-6 different sessions. We're really getting fed up with the lack of effort he puts in the game (we don't even bother putting in character backgrounds or stories into our characters anymore because we know they will just end up dying soon). His lack of effort and lack of actually reading the handbooks/rulebooks has led us to read the rules and correct him on a lot of things; so most of the group are rule lawyers. No one wants to DM though, because we like playing a character.

What do we do? We can't just kick the DM out because he is our friend, but we are really getting fed up with his lack of effort and our constant effort to remaking new characters.

Answer 1

If you are not willing to DM, then you are stuck with the one you have. However, try setting up a joint world and you and your friends could take turns DMing. That way everybody gets to play a character most of the time and DMs some of the time.

Answer 2

Since you're reading the rulebooks and you know the rules better than the DM, just ask to start a new game with someone else as the DM and him as a Player. It sounds like you're not enjoying the current game and that you'd like to give a different campaign a try, just try suggesting to him that maybe you can be DM next week because you thought of a campaign you want to give a try. Maybe he'll be a better player than he is a DM.

I hope this has been helpful, I know it's not always easy to confront someone like that, but maybe if you present it as something you've been wanting to try for a while, and he'd get a chance to be a character.



I've had plenty of DMs who run a character in the game, and I've seen characters that were just part of the party, and I've seen characters that were important plot devices. We had one DM Character who was with our group for WEEKS and he was the leader of our small group, we relied on him to be the most trustworthy character and only after something like a month of playing and knowing this character we learned that he was actually an evil shapeshifter who was trying to kill us! It was CRAZY! And the DM didn't play him as evil, he just played him as a part of the party who had his own goals separate from our own. It just turned out that one of those goals was to lead us to his boss and have us get killed.



In another game the DM created a sidekick to one of our heroes who was just a kid. She was our companion and didn't do a lot of fighting, but it was our job to keep her safe. Which made her death really, really hard for our group. She was used by the bad guys as a human sacrifice in an attempt to summon a monster, and it worked and it took control of her body and none of us could bring ourselves to shoot her because she was "ours". She wasn't just a monster, she was "our sidekick". But she was also a horrible monster, and we let her go. I still wonder what the DM had planned for her, and if she still exists somewhere in the background of that world.



Being the DM isn't just running the game, it's very common for the DM to have a character and use that character sometimes as a cattle prod to move the story forward and sometimes just have the character be part of the group.



I hope this has been helpful. I know you don't really want to be a DM, but it's a totally different experience and totally worth trying out at least once.

Answer 3

Tell him he doesn't get to DM any more. Be honest and tell him he stinks at it and explain why, otherwise he'll never change. The rest of you take turns to be DM, so everybody gets to play most of the time and nobody's stuck being DM all the time. You can play and DM at the same time if you're scrupulously honest about not "allowing" your character to know anything he's not supposed to know.



Once the friend sees how a real DM operates and how much more fun it is for everybody, maybe you can give him another chance at DMing.

Answer 4

I know its weird and i'll get some sh!t for it, but when I played years and years ago, my DM actually ran a character. he was able to stay completely neutral and not affect the story. it kept him interested and if he pissed us off we could mess with his character in the game.

as for the rules, I don't know what rules he isn't enforcing, but I was always for looser rules. there are just so many and some can really inhibit gameplay. my DM made them up as he went along too. maybe talk to him, tell him to lay off the character killing as its getting in the way of your enjoyment.

we yelled at my DM once and he started to really enforce them and it sucked, my 20th level wizard failed a teleport save roll and teleported into the middle of a mountain.

we were a monty haul/hack and slash crew.