A tonal shift from my other stories, but here is one of a Dungeon Master in a traditional high fantasy Third Edition game not quite realizing that his party is, for lack of better words, really bad at the game, and making an ante with me they could not hold to. 

Just what does this great cat mean by "Really bad at the game.", you wonder? Let us speak to a party that is wholly unoptimized, I mean to even the practical level of say, choosing a feat that actually does something for their damage, and say not wasting [i]two[/i] feats on Endurance and Diehard. The sort of people that while every book in the game is allowed, they still bring a fighter or ranger and are confused why they are bad at everything. The sort of party who thinks clerics are only good at healing or that bards only use bardic music in combat. The level of just being impractical and nonviable.

Enter yours truly, as while I have never once brought a truly optimized character to a table, I did bring quite a few startling outcomes. Be it an ardent and psionics as a whole or just a regular warblade using material solely from the supplement. Now, you might ask, how was this an issue?

Because to put it simply, the Dungeon Master cheated. "How does a Dungeon Master cheat?", one might reasonably wonder. The reality of that is quite simple, in that he arbitrarily changed the difficulty class of some abilities, raised hit points as he saw fit on whim, or improved the enemy's defenses. Now, granted there are rules for that, he did so each round of combat depending if he felt we were doing too well and per character. As one can summarize where this is going, he took great issue with me bringing classes that were just plainly better to the table than the others. So much so that eventually I managed to catch him doing it by recording the fluctuating Armor Class of a monster and called him on it; enough was enough.

The rest of the group, being sort of tame and happy-go-lucky sorts were only slightly annoyed, but I was furious. What was the point of playing when the rules did not matter? Why do we even have character sheets, dice, Base Attack Bonuses, class features and the like if it is all entirely at the whim of the Dungeon Master?

He explained his complaint, "You do too much damage." 

I had time and again pointed out, even encouraged and taught others the ways to not make their characters largely useless, even walked them through examples in my own free time. This, to say the least, was a flimsy excuse and I was about to prove it to him to make my point. I inquired as to how and why he said that, to which he said the classes I chose were overpowered and the others books outside the [i]Player's Handbook[/i] were too strong. His argument? Only the [i]Player's Handbook[/i] material was balanced and fair to everyone. I made the typical argument that the druid, cleric, and wizard are virtually better than every other class on print and he more or less ignored it; mind you I rarely played such classes to begin with, let alone to their extremes.

I then struck up a deal, a devious plan fitting of any cat, I said, "Very well, I will make a fighter using only the [i]Player's Handbook[/i] and prove to you otherwise. The catch is, you play monsters exactly out of the book or within the rules. I will show you that the issue is not myself and that the books aren't the merit of balance."

Thinking he had his way and that his troubles would disappear, he agreed. Within short order I made a great weapon fighter, down to wealth by level, wielding a [i]+1 Holy Keen Adamantine Greatsword[/i] and a plethora of combat related feats, two of which were the go-tos. [i]Power Attack[/i] was not the stellar figure here, no, it was [i]Improved Disarm[/i] and [i]Improved Trip[/i]. My entire premise was simple, charge, disarm, trip, then dump the damage into power attack and massacre enemies. This was even easier than one imagines because the majority of creatures we faced? Open terrain, no obstacles, difficult terrain, and within sixty feet or less, with extremely rare spellcasting foes and fewer flying enemies.

In essence he signed his own death warrant, as did the sorry party. By no fault of their own, outside their laziness, they were content to plink monsters for at most, 2d6 plus a modifier or two per round on their turn, assuming they ever even hit, or cast spells that did little of anything - such as the druid attempting to bludgeon everything with a staff rather than turning into a lion, which I had wrote for them on their sheet. All the while the party as a whole tended to walk away from combat with nearly all their spells spent and only a few hit points left, usually to just be railroaded into the next event.

The following combat did not go that way the next time we played. Oh no, not this time. Held to the rules, we began fighting pirates on this stretch of the adventure and on the first charge, the Dungeon Master realized his mistake; a one hit critical strike and a cleave into downing another enemy. Fighters are not known for being power houses in this edition, but a competently made one, even so limited, wasn't a laughing matter at this table. On and on it went, most the party flailing and failing against even average enemies, orcs, ogres, lizardfolk pirates and the like, while everything I came across was soon disarmed or sundered, tripped, and summarily executed.

We cleared the entire cove of pirates in one fell swoop and went on to the boss, which of course, were more pirates and their captain. We all knew the obvious, that the boss had minions and spells, and that this was going to hurt; mind you much less where some half of the party would die in this encounter normally. However, I did not go for the glory, I spent my turns destroying the lesser foes, hoping, praying the rest of the party would actually manage to take down the pirate captain, but of course, they failed. Two of them were charmed and I was forced to make short work of them; luckily disarming them and keeping them prone had the effect of not killing them.

The Dungeon Master was infuriated. He was red in the face and obviously mad this had not gone as planned. We had a habit of annoying him, but usually it was never in combat, usually it was only when we circumvented some needlessly complicated puzzle - stories on that to come - though you can guess what came next.

He cheated and he cheated hard. How so? Suddenly my average rolls cannot touch the enemies they were regularly cleaning right through and no amount of hitting them when I did hit, usually critical hits now, did anything of merit or note. The rest of the party, whose characters could regularly not hit or do anything to save their life kept plinking away as normal. I called foul and asked for the notes, to which he sighed and turned over, part of our agreement.

It was over then, he needed to smoke and the game folded there. Needless to say, he much rather enjoyed playing in other peoples' games, but he wasn't about to Dungeon Master again for us. The moral of the story? Do not cheat your players or make accusations or agreements you cannot back up. I have plenty of stories of him, but this was the one that led into the games I spoke about of my running; a happy turn of events there.