The Bard Hostile Campaign

Hello everyone! Previously I wrote a vent post called: “I’m gonna have to start making demands or an exit” where I went over the problems I had with my DM and their (apparently unintentional) Bard hostile campaign. Since I had a different, shorter story about the same DM read by HFD and got some affirmation I didn’t realize I needed, I decided to put my original post here! I’ve updated the grammar and spelling and added some extra context that I only mentioned in the comments. I’m also going to add a (not very) small update.

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I’m in a campaign with a DM that is very kind outside of DnD, but while we play… it’s been rough.

Basically our campaign started with a slightly niche, open word campaign setting that everyone in my group of friends was excited for. We all were very stressed with life at the time, so we all discussed that we wanted to let loose and have some fun. We were all excited to have fun with the silly and potentially criminal tone that came with the premise! One of our friends (DM) stepped up to DM for the first time- they brought out some wonderful craftwork and supplementary book after book and we were amped that when they said they “knew” they was a more classic DM, which we didn’t really bat an eye at (at the time) and we created our characters.

I was really passionate about my character concept - and had several hour(s) long conversations with the DM about them. As a player, I typically end up leading the groups I play in because I can be very decisive when everyone else is talking in circles. I try to make sure to spread the spotlight around so I’m not “that guy” and make sure to support shyer players to make sure they feel included. But being particular to Bards and being the defacto RPer … or the only person to talk outside of combat (in several particularly shy parties) got a bit stale for me. I worked with the DM to create a silly character that knew a lot about niche subjects that would be useful in the setting, but shot their intelligence down to Six so that other players would have to support them in some RP and General Intelligence matters. I never planned to be incredibly annoying with it, only to push other players to step up so I wasn’t making every Investigation check and generally RP a bit more with me (I also made their wisdom very high to counterbalance so they weren’t completely clueless and would know enough not to be too obstructive). I went into session one confident I could play a silly character without much responsibility for once, but I should have known there would be issues.

Before that, I thought DM worked with me well, and they were also very appreciative since I was the only player who “consistently communicated”. DM went with a lot of bits I proposed and approved everything in my build and backstory. A few days before session 0/1 they asked if my character could read, and I assumed it was for a bit. I said my character, being a bard that knew several languages, should be able to read - but likely reads slow and is dyslexic (like me). DM also approved potential multiclassing down the line, as I had two potential builds for my character that would be fun and thematic (and definitely not optimal). Feeling great and feeling like we did an incredibly through job, I waited in total suspense for the first session.

First session- I found out in the character introductions that every single other person chose to do a silly character. This would be fine - we had agreed to do something silly and fun and it wasn’t like we needed a secure voice of reason. I figured since I had gone over my history with DM, they would have warned me if we thought it would be an issue. After stetting and character introductions, the DM went into a speech about how actions will have consequences and how he was… not afraid to kill everyone? We players figured DM wanted to set a tone that we can’t be silly 100% of the time and we didn’t really say anything. Within the hour a player almost got killed by ghosts that as lvl ONE characters we had no means to handle as a “consequence” for …only asking general questions about the area and not specifically asking if a place we were never expected to go (DM mentioned it offhand but made it sound interesting) was haunted. We attempted several things, but DM would always acknowledge that the proposed solutions were clever or creative- but never worked. Thankfully the player lived via deus ec machina and we moved on to joke about it. We relaxed a bit, but that day DM established a dynamic where we were expecting to cater to their style when DM rarely catered to the players.

In the next few sessions we found out a few things:

-DM ruled that RP superseded Charisma rolls to the point where they … never happened. If we needed to persuade someone on something, even if it was small or mutually beneficial, we would have to give a complex argument following sometimes impossibly specific logic every time. The best we could do on persuasion checks was to do the a similar thing, but even if we managed to get a god-roll, the best we could do in a few (most) situations was “convince the other party that you believe what you're saying is the truth”. (The example given was if you lied about stealing after being caught, a 30 might make the guard believe you are crazy or dumb but you’d probably still get arrested). If we tried to speak as a party to debate what to say, or said something that could be twisted even slightly the wrong way (ex. Since the world is a mishmash of supplements and base, we could innocently insult ppl because we don’t know what DM’s Fey are like.) NPCs would immediately become incredibly rude or hostile. I have rolled Charisma checks less than ten times in this campaign… we are nearing 50 sessions.

• DM would change elements to characters without notice. They were never too big (ex. an absent father changing into a good dad/a distant pet changed from a dog to something setting specific), but the very small amount of pushback was completely ignored. One of these was my PC being able to read. The DM would mention it, I would make it clear I was able to read (and that DM had agreed in character creation) and DM would nod and just bring it up again later. Along the same vein, I wasn’t allowed to use my Charlatan background abilities because of the above and my low Int. When I argued forgers often don’t need to understand language to forge it (it helps but there’s dozens of examples of historical figures forging things in other languages they don’t know) DM dismissed it. Finally, DM hadn’t told me (until a week ago) is that because my Bards intelligence was so low, they were “off putting” and their max Charisma was essentially nullified when talking to NPCs- which explains why the vast majority of NPCs would insult or belittle my character before he ever did anything silly. They apparently realized this was bad and gave me the opportunity to drain several points off my Strength stat to raise my Intelligence to 8 and NPCs treated me nicer afterwards.

-I was the leader… again. The after the DM threatened to kill a PC to “consequences” for the third time, I mentioned we needed to avoid them. I began suggesting/insisting on alternatives to obvious traps and DM made a point for NPCs to have rare moments of non-combativeness to agree with most of these. When I pushed other allies into RPing NPCs would yell at me for “being rude” and when I suggested other players take on the role, DM asked if that “was the smartest decision” and it intimidated other players into just not. Basically whenever I tried to make my character sillier and less responsible like I said I planned to, PCs almost died every time. Eventually a friend joined and took up the role, but I never really could be silly since DM shifted the tone to be even more serious soon after.

-DM would threaten to take away any and everything. I received a good bardic magic instrument from a loot table and DM threatened to break it if I ever abused it. The DM threatened to tweak the rouges sneak attack to make it trigger only one per combat on each enemy after getting some major damage. DM took it back and is now much kinder but we still rarely use our items to this day.

After months I got stuck. As a good friend, I tried to support DM by always showing up to games (players often got busy or frustrated) and trying to subtly explain why DMs rulings were …unpopular. After playing in a campaign for the first time in a while themselves, they got much better, however I was just constantly frustrated as the campaign progressed into being.. on top of everything (unintentionally) Bard hostile. Along with RP bringing rare bc of the constant threats made in the early game, I truly got screwed nearly every step of the way.

Why would I say this? Well, here’s another list:

-Most encounters were undead or incredibly unintelligent creatures- which were always resistant or fully immune to not only my psychic damage, but also the effects of most of my bard spells that allow for setup. No cutting words or vicious mockery here- just AOE thunder damage or rapier strikes. This lead to a horrible multiclass situation where for combat I needed to have the spells from my Bardic instruments for survival but needed to be able to do some damage and then was later pushed into a third class at lvl 5 for story reasons. DM and players alike commented on how messy it was and players were able to convince DM to let me readjust my levels and streamline it a bit more.

-My charm spells at best made enemies slightly more hostile than average NPCs- and they would refuse to work with us or give us any info. I very rarely used them, since we’ve had conversations out of game of Charm spells being highly unethical or the most unethical if you think about it. Enemies also always seemed to know when someone was charmed, even if it was 50 feet away and they were sword to sword with a barbarian at the time (Enemies seemed to generally know what all their allies knew/what magic we were casting anyway but still). Considering my Bardic magic instruments gave disadvantage to the save for my Charm spells, they also saved often enough to be suspicious. Of the three times I used Charms, 3/6 enemies saved- which is probably a coincidence but I’ll throw that in there.

-DM would render all my utility spells useless. Silent image could only work in the most specific of circumstances, enemies perfectly saw all of my wind created from my wind spells and avoided them, enemies always knew where my Silence spells started and ended, and proud enemies fully ran from battle when I tried using Darkness- even though they outnumbered us significantly and it they had several covered positions they could still see around. Multiple players who have never played with these spells blamed me for these outcomes since DM also would often narrate several of these situations as incredibly stupid or misguided. It’s much better now, but I’ve had to write down the exact spell description’s examples so I can defend myself.

Recently, after being fed up and our party losing its main healer, I decided to change my character. The DM wanted us to have secondary characters we could swap between for story reasons- so I decided to give up on my passion project PC and just make a Life Domain Cleric since we were getting into combat where 60% of the party would go down every other turn. The decision was inspired by a combat where my Bard could only heal and even then the entire party was unconscious at least twice- and a player only had three turns in the eight rounds of one combat because they kept getting knocked down as soon as I brought them up. I talked with DM, and was approved almost immediately. Two issues.

I wanted to give my current character either a dramatic and/or RP heavy reason to be out of commission since they were not the type of character to stop adventuring unless physically stopped. I also wanted to give my new PC a curated moment to show off a bit and have a reason to join. My main ideas were to have either PC1 be captured by that arc’s BBEG or to have PC1 fall ill to a story related illness. PC2 would show up to check in, find the situation dire, and join the party organically by either pleading to help a loved one or by curing a disease like it’s nothing and helping while PC1 is on bed rest. DM didn’t read any of my messages until the day before the session PC2 was introduced. DM refused both even suggestions after I pushed or offered compromises - realistically refusing to engage with my request for a planned intro since it was “unnecessary” and that it made sense to DM that PC2 would show up. If it was not for other PCs that knew my frustration and choosing to be uncharacteristically not paranoid, my new PC would have had to silently fight for trust for several sessions.

After the intro, we faced two combats that went uncharacteristically well- if one PC went down, they could be healed enough to not fall after a single hit. Multiple people could be healed at once! We could use bonus actions that weren’t taking a potion for the first time in what felt like months! Combat finally felt more balanced and less stressful. DM also feels the shift! DM says they can …finally hit harder …even though most PCs still get downed in two-four hits and DM is able to consistently roll to hit 95% of the time. Since most big enemies DM runs have multi attack and DM has especially avoided using anything we resist, most PCs still can be downed in two turns or less.

I do still have fun playing, most of the players are still having fun, and DM is both improving as a DM and balancing a very large group of inconsistently scheduled players is frustrating and difficult. While I have to acknowledge it, I am just so close to either blowing up or taking a break from DnD in general. I have left out some major incidents and the several good things for some brevity and deniability, but I’m also worried about being sensitive and ruining the one consistent night/activity where I see most of my friends.

UPDATE:

I’m still in the campaign, but things are… stressful. The players have all talked privately and we are going to confront DM soon about a few issues- but since we all are very inconsistent with our schedules it’s hard to find the right time. If we aren’t able to get together soon, I probably will just confront them myself or we will just write out the messages we want to send together. DM has gotten much better in terms of general kindness and flexibility, but there’s a new hitch in the alignment system and some drama with a mechanically player hostile magical item that we need to straighten out.

Recently I realized that, though DM has told me that they didn’t realize they were running several Bard-hostile mechanics and combats, they might have been at least a little malicious. In the past few sessions we have rolled nearly two dozen Charisma checks and fought several battles with creatures that are directly weak to Psychic attacks and a lot mainly wielded damage my Bard was resisting. While I didn’t want to give any space to the thought that the DM was directly against my Bard or hostile towards me in particular… multiple players pointed out that “(Bard) would have crushed” or “really helped out” and the DM fully laughed and just said “Yeah”.

I’m truly going over my relationship with DM since they have repeatedly ignored my input and I’m questioning everything. Part of me (and some weird phrasing from their partner) leads me to believe that it’s (at least lately) retaliation?

In a short campaign that got shelved for scheduling, DM was incredibly rude and generally a “That guy”. They would refuse to interact with the world, made everyone (NPCs and PCs alike) uncomfortable with how direct and dismissive they were (despite claiming that their character was agreeable and helpful), and generally acted in a way that would get a PC killed at their table. In combat, I allowed them to have a broken build (I wanted to run a chiller RP heavy game and allowed for power fantasy combat because I wanted to contrast with the “main game”) but they seemed surprised that monsters particularly attacked them… they were the tank that stood at the front lines and actively boasted about being the biggest threat. They said they were annoyed afterwards, saying that in their games they spread the damage around equally/“fairly” (which leads to the tanks not being able to block damage and squishy players running around trying to keep themselves up as the two tanker people struggle to do damage and keep away). I mentioned that my monsters were not all part of a hive mind (like their monsters basically are) and all acted independently. They went for the biggest threat who had boasted about being so enough for them to hear it. DM was not solely targeted, but DM was the only one standing in plain view and never even had to heal themselves- they got low but were not in danger of going down. I rolled decently high, but I managed to hit 50% of the attacks made to their 18 AC character. Overall, with the rewards and plot hooks that were presented I wasn’t too worried about it, but now I’m genuinely concerned the DM is holding a grudge from months ago.

Since then, my 23 AC character has gotten hit 80%-90% of the time they are attacked and we have had several at best annoying (at worst hostile) systems/mechanics shoved at us. DM when describing or playing as my Bard plays them as ridiculously stupid and annoying when I literally couldn’t do so when I played them without retaliation. When I suggested reviving the campaign I ran when the “main game” was on a break, a newer DM that DM had “coached” (they have ran several oneshots, but are probably not ready to run their own campaign since they do not know how most rules work in practice and DM with argue with them about rules that DM had set because they felt they were “unfair”) announced they were starting a new campaign during the same slot.

I’m hoping that we are both just being in our heads and miscommunicating. We are both autistic and several members of our party are also autistic and ADHD, so I’ve definitely over thought several things and let others go too easily. When we get each other, we get it- when we don’t it can be bad. DM has been so incredibly caring and supportive out of game so I do want to support them, but I might just quit the campaign if confronting them goes south. ———————————————————————

TLDR: My DM unintentionally made a Bard hostile campaign that was not advertised as one. Changing my PC made the DM promise to make campaign even harder. Considering making a fuss or leaving for a few weeks to permanently depending on how DM handles player critique.