BIG F@%KING SWORD

This GM is terrible at the following: - Communication - Accurate Game Listing - Encounter Design - Customer Service - Organization - Adhering to the lore of Games based on fictional works. - And they Fudge not only Rolls but whole (or parts of) Encounters. For further elaboration, read on. 1) Communication One example is that they didn't respond to any of my DMs for over 4 days and I only heard from them with less than an hour to go before my first Session. Where they wanted to go over things via Voice Chat, while they rudely ate during a meal. Another, they didn't Onboard me really at all and instead deferred to another Player to do it for them. And without their help, I in no way would have been ready for my first Session despite having a whole week to prepare, due to how non-communicative the GM was. And generally, all the Players in the Game despite being 6 Sessions deep, didn't seem to really understand much of anything going on, requiring constant clarification on even basic stuff like whether they can or can't Level prior to Session or if they had to wait. And I only found out about being Level 3 due to the Onboarding Player versus the GM, as I went into the Game thinking I was starting at Level 2. 2) Accurate Game Listing I played in a Solo Level Game and based on the Listing, it seemed fine enough. Once in the Game however, I found that the GM changed things fairly majorly. Had I been aware of such, in all likelihood, I would not have joined to begin with. They also had Rules for Flanking, Cover and so forth that I only found out about as it happened in the Game. Nothing about such in the Listing despite a specific Section for that information, nor could I find any form of information (except what I got from other Players) due to their poorly organized Discord. 3) Encounter Design So, we as a Party effectively had a TPK level Encounter. The only reason we didn't get a TPK was due to a quite open Fudging on the GM's end. Where my Character was spared defeat and a good portion, in particular, the toughest enemies just fled "because reasons". Later on, I ran the math of the Encounter and it was considered Deadly even for Players of higher Levels. 4) Customer Service When Players complained about the above, the GM's rebuttal began with "lucky i dont use this" followed by listing off a bunch of more difficult Creatures. And from there became argumentative, throwing back at us the fact that they Fudged the Encounter in the end in our favor. 5) Organization The GM's Discord is frankly a mess. We as Players didn't even have our own area, making it fairly confusing for me as a new Player, wondering who I was or wasn't playing with. And finding information certainly wasn't easy, often requiring talking to multiple Players to understand X, Y or Z as the GM was routinely unavailable. 6) Adhering to the lore of Games based on fictional works. As stated, I was in a Solo Leveling Game and the GM effectively ignored much of the lore and did their own thing, which wasn't advertised in any meaningful fashion in the Game Listing. And to make it worse, their changes effectively made the Game more difficult, which, given their poor Encounter Design, made walking into a Session, effectively expecting Player Character Death and generally, we were Railroaded to do X or else make it effectively impossible for us to progress as reasonably intended. An example of this is that the Dungeon they threw at us was entirely too dangerous for our Rank and thus, from a lore perpective we wouldn't even be able to participate in such. But even with that aside, to make it worse, if we left, it respawned Creatures which went against the lore as well and even if ignoring such an issue for a moment, mechanically things became impractical for us so far as any meaningful expectation of any measure of victory unless we followed a very strict path i.e. Railroading and even then, it mostly seemed like we marched toward a TPK best-case scenario based on previous knowledge of the remaining Creatures inside the Dungeon. 7) And they Fudge not only Rolls but whole (or parts of) Encounters. Besides what was already mentioned, they frankly seemed to fudge the whole Encounter itself or at least, a large part of it. Goblins kept hiding successfully from the Party despite high teen Passive Perceptions. They also quite frequently kept hitting the high AC Characters despite the statistical improbability and even frequently Critically Succeeded, so a Character with 25 AC would get hit, causing them to bump their AC to 27 later on. I was attacked by two Goblins from a boat, which wasn't too much of a surprise given Line of Sight but once Combat swung in our favor, a third, more powerful Goblin started attacking from that same boat as if manifested out of thin air. And that same Goblin is what scored a Critical Success on my Character, resulting in a fairly open Fudge where the GM removed most of the combatants so a TPK wouldn't obviously occur by that point. Which is to say, because they Fudged prior they had to Fudge after the fact and one must understand that they made it sound like we should have been grateful for their course correction versus what a Player might expect, which was an apology for cheating and the negativity it caused to everyone. ... There is much more but suffice to say, this was not a good experience at all. And when I decided to break down just how deadly the Encounter was, given the GM kept insisting that we were overreacting in some fashion, followed by the goodbye and good luck to the Party, as I certainly didn't want to play with a Fudging GM and knowingly walk into TPKs, my messages were summarily deleted and I was removed from the Discord. Even my message solely thanking the Onboarding Player was removed. Mind you, for perspective, we had been discussing the Encounter quite at length prior to, with no issues and generally how we were going to avoid a TPK next Session. ... Either way, that is the end of my Review. And I hope it will be helpful to both Player and GM alike.