For me it's a toss up between:



and

nope, I can't think of much worse than those two.
Unless it's -It's pitch black and there is a Grue in the room with you.

Those two are awesome.

I don't like things like, "If you try that, it'll work."  I don't want to know that until I try.

Sure it will work.. but what else will it do?

"I can't run this game any more."

In reply to bigbadron (msg # 5):

yeah that one is bad - but better than the GM just vanishing.

Die roll, smiles, and does nothing else. Freaked me out every time when I was younger.

"So what exactly do you wear under your armor?"

with no warning or preamble
Roll a Saving Throw.

"Sure, you can do that!" with a too-happy grin that looks far too excited for me to do said thing.

1. Anything is better than silence and disappearance.

2. "Don't bother me any more." But it turns out that that was a good thing, saving me much irritation.

"Looks Clear" and "Hey guys, what's tougher than a Tarrasque?"

The phrase "Because I said so!"

Specifically in a situation where they don't want you to do something, but can't or won't justify saying 'No' due to rules or story necessity.

"You're playing your character wrong."

Which a GM actually said to me once because I was running a pacifist cleric and wouldn't kill undead that were trapped in 20 foot pits with no way out, even though my chosen god had no problems with the undead and I'd told him I was going full pacifist at the start of the game. I pretty much quit at the end of that session.

"You suffer X because you didn't specify that you were doing Y."

Where X is a trap, poison, attack, or whatever, and Y is something anyone with two brain cells to rub together would be doing in the situation. Examples include "You get hit by a fireball because, after the last two booby-trapped chests, you still opened this one from the front because you only said 'carefully' and not 'from behind'," and "You are surrounded by an angry mob in the middle of the night because you didn't say you stopped looking into windows after the first ten people started following you around and before I rolled the second die."

Yup. Not a fan.

That one just crawls all over me the absolutely wrong way.

When he doesn't say anything, just ducks behind his screen and rolls dice and you don't know why.

Actually, I found out years later he was just doing it to make us nervous.

"Are you REALLY sure you want to do that?  Okay..."

In my experience, those words are usually followed shortly by the words, "Here...start making another character..."

"You remember that blond barmaid back a couple months back in that village? you think you see her, coming this way across the square. She is wrapped up in a short cape in spite of the sun. She has five guys with her, they are All BIG, and Blond."
This message was last edited by the user at 09:22, Fri 22 Apr 2016.

"Oh-kay!" and he just reaches up to the miniatures shelf and starts putting figures on the board. Big, powerful-looking figures. Lots.

"Which of you is walking farthest to the rear of the group?"

"Where are your spellbooks?"

"Your character is standing where again?"

"Um, how much HP did you have left?"

"Roll a Will save!"

Anytime the GM winces after rolling dice, I get a knot in my stomach.

"I don't have enough dice, can I borrow some d10's?"

"Just... whatever you do, don't roll a 1."

Was after a big battle and we the players were still amped and rather healthy:

GM)"Okay how about Morghuls?"
players hear) 'how about more ghouls?'
GM sarcastically sings) "Oookkaaayyyy!" (7 5+ level characters, henchmen, 2 NPC's get
   hit with 30 6 hit die undead creatures that also cause rot)

GM proceeds to hand us our apricots!!

Weird. A tough battle is usually fun. Why wouldn't I want to hear about one?

The worst thing a GM can say? "No," in response to a player idea.

That's kind of a common thing to hear these days, but the GM is totally allowed to say "no" on occasion.  It shouldn't be a frequent response, but blocking isn't an unforgivable sin.  In fact, if more GMs said "no" at character creation, a lot of games wouldn't die as horribly or quickly as they do.

They're allowed to do a lot of things. That doesn't mean all those things are good ideas.

I'm not talking about character creation. I'm talking about play, in which the players are onboard and bought in and want to make the game better. Or, as I like to call it "play," since people who aren't onboard, bought in, and don't want to make the game better shouldn't be blocked, they should be asked to leave. Fortunately, that's usually pretty easy to notice at the character creation stage or, ideally, earlier.

I'm happy to discuss this further in another thread.
This message was last edited by the user at 19:16, Tue 26 Apr 2016.

"You're playing a Human?"
- Start of a Golarion/Pathfinder Campaign

 - terrified me to no end.

"Remember those M&Ms and how I said not to eat them?  Yeah, those were your Hit Points."

- Really!??

*pouts*

'You need to tone down your character'

Either in play, or the third time at revising a character. It is hard to keep interest in a game when it is already dying and I am told I cannot play my character's personality.

You can't take that major power, it's too weak.

I've never had a GM say it to me, because I don't make my characters that way...but in freeform games, "Sure, make whatever character you want."

That declaration inevitably winds up with a long string of characters that absolutely push the bounds of plausibility into some new pocket dimension, where you end up with pilots flying cutting-edge technology...but somewhere along the line, they've also had the time to not only learn how to fly it, but be intimately familiar with every aspect of its design and construction.  You wind up with enemy-race characters trying to find some feasible storyline to explain why they should be on the same team as everyone else.  You wind up with characters who come from an extremely limited-tech society who somehow have more advanced technology than ANYONE in the game, including all the GM's NPC races.

I'm all for letting players 'stretch their legs' and come up with unique character concepts...but not at the expense of the game.  There comes a point where a GM needs to say, "That doesn't fit this game."

"I haven't read the rule book really well or much."


context:
This admission usually comes after recruiting people after raving of how good this rpg is, and stating that "he would focus using the rulesset, but adopt the setting a bit to his own view."
End result:
And thus a grim and gritty 18th century game about imperialism turned into a freeform elves rpg in middle-earth.

I was in a decently active game once and having a lot of fun with some of the other players/characters (and doing some genuine bonding), but then the game got caught up on a "major" scene which turned out to be tedious and unexciting. Getting posts out of the otherwise engaging players felt like pulling teeth, nobody was motivated, and it was basically just awful. After months of slowly plodding along with the same scene, I talked to some of the others and we came to an agreement that the best thing to do would be to 'reset' the game. Skip the rest of the scene, jump to sometime in the future - something along those lines. I brought it up to the GM and he agreed. Only, as he told me, I would not be continuing on because he was dropping me from the game.

That, I think, is the worst thing a GM can say to someone. I was gutted.

In reply to PhatJackal (msg # 33):

I think that's really crumby. I had something similar happen, being dropped from the game (well sort of).

---

Spoiler for the story: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)
I was the note taker and appointed leader of the party (which was really not fun). I would do OOG work, note coordinates of the battlemap in between sessions that had combat carry over, bring extra dice, food, stuff like that. I was very engaged.

Well, the GM got very jealous of me, but relented that because I was "new".

Well, he came up with this master plan of his enemy. Basically a way to have a grand scale war happen in a D&D game, which is largely micro scenes, not  supposed to be hundreds of tokens on battle map the size of table.

I said "Yeah, I'm not drawing all that. Sorry, that's your job here Ethan" And he said "Okay, well, your character loses his paladinhood and 10,000 XP" I was shocked, but was willing to play on as a 2nd level fighter, for the sake of the other players. Then while the combat took place, over about 20 hours, it was clear no one was having fun. WE were all gabbing about out of game stuff. So the GM said "Okay we need restart." So he called for vote. Some play6ers dropped immediately, for various reasons. I agreed. Ethan said "Not you V. You were part of the problem"

---

TL;DR
I had done player activities to make the game easier for the GM to run. GM started mass combat D&D game without mass combat rules. I said "I'm not drawing out four hundred coordinates. That;s on you" He ran the mass combat. No one was interested. WE called for reset. I agreed, I wasn't allowed to be in the reset since I was "part of the problem"

That's very niche though. So it's not exactly something that I expect to be quotable. Your comment about the "yeah, we need to reset...but without you."

It was softened a lot by the fact that two months later I inherited the game. The GM got overwhelmed doing all the things I was doing and also running his "Faerun is at war" theme. The other players talked to me, and I offered to continue. So I got to stay involved with the characters even if my character was now an NPC that was lower level than them and also unwilling to atone for something he thought overly capricious of Torm.

---

That was not the worst thing a GM has said to me. The worst is creepy and I won;t put it here. But the worst thing that's appropriate for community chat had to be when I was told "You're making multiple 20th level PCs." to whcih I asked "We'rew not playing these characters are we, Greg?" "Dude, you get to make 20th level characters. Your characters are going to be intergal to the world" ... "Okay, so your characters are all affected by..." let me paraphrase this "You make a single st level character. The characters you made are my NPCs....you have to fight them too....when you get high enough level"

I quit, and I have done that only ten times in my life. I just outright quit at the onset of the game. I took my character sheets too. Fruit that!
This message was undeleted by the user at 13:13, Thu 28 Apr 2016.

While not the worst said to me, V_V post reminds me of a gm I dealt with. Almost everything my character did 'Did not match the tone and setting of the game.' Yet the other players he bent over backwards for their actions to make sense. This was to the point of metagaming and he did not care.

The absolute worst GM I can recall at a table top game had a bunch of new players (there were like 12 of us there), he told us all that he would roll ALL the dice, even for character creation cause Everyone cheats.
Then he metagamed all the NPCs and made everyone feel like crap.
When we broke for lunch, all the players left and did not come back. I met some good players there and some of us went off and made our own gaming group. (that one lasted until the end of the collage term as most of them were in collage at that time.)

Round the table "I've elected my brother to be the groups leader, captain etc"

Online "........." Absolute silence for weeks before you get a message saying the game is being deleted

This message was deleted by a moderator, as it was against the forum rules, at 16:57, Fri 29 Apr 2016.

Not the worst but nonetheless, a phrase that got me thinking about this thread:

A recently a fellow player was just exploring as usual, looking around a corner.

Out of the blue, GM asks for a 'd20 roll'.

She rolled, frowned, and replied, "2".

GM laughed and held out his hand, "let me see your character sheet."

Afterward, the rest of of spent about 3 hours of misadventure trying to save our fellow (and ourselves) from an overwhelmingly-powerful enchantment that basically turned her character (and later, 1 other ally) into Golem.

In reply to mofo99 (msg # 39):

All sorts of nope for that game.

It doesn't take too long to realize that "scouting ahead" in D&D is essentially saying "I want to go stumble face first into something and then try to deal with it without backup".  Even if the DM is being above board about it, bad rolls do happen.

In reply to Lord_Johnny (msg # 40):

Oh, it was totally above-the-board. I didn't mean to sound like I was griping about the GM.

We're doing an adventure called Rappan Athuk and just about everything there kills us on a regular basis. The session actually turned out to be immensely enjoyable for everyone (and nobody even died) - one of the most fun we've had in a while.

I just mentioned it because those words... when I heard them I physically felt that sinking feeling in my stomach.

EDIT: Come to think of it, perhaps the worst thing I've ever heard a GM say was, "How would you guys like to play a campaign called Rappan Athuk?"
This message was last edited by the user at 18:56, Fri 06 May 2016.

In reply to swordchucks (msg # 41):

Absolutely agreed. But...not sure that THAT level of change is something I'd be comfortable DOING, let alone having happen to me.

Muwahahahahahahaha*cough*... sorry, that just sort of slipped out.

Note to self: Many of the other PCs are just as well suited to scouting as mine. And they would surely make better golems.

LOL, a true evil moment. "Screw this golem thing, you go first!"

Regarding, I suspect,  Rappan Athuk

Once upon a time...oh, never mind, the end.