I've published this about 3 years ago when I've just started watching Critcrab on youtube, and only recently thought to myself "Wait. Critcrab might have their own subreddit" and so here I am posting the same story again. Though I will re-write it a bit.

In my group, we play BECMI edition D&D) (I pronounce it like "Bechmi"), like one of the early versions, like from the early 80's, but quite homebrewed as well to allow PC to survive a bit more than the books intended (permadeath at 0)

A friend of mine started the group, and he was the only one who played the game before, so all of us new players of course wanted a chance at GMing. So we took turns, and the story is about the last one to pick up the mantle, whom we shall name Cornelius.

As Cornelius is a week or so away form GMing his first session, he asks about the rules. I tell him to read the Game Master book, which is like 48 pages, half of which are just monster descriptions (he claims to be able to read at like 600 words per minute).

Then we make sure he remembers our homebrew rules. First sessions comes up, it's a funhouse dungeon. Solve different weird puzzles in each room, sometimes there was combat, reset all spells and health between each room. A bit uninspired, but we had a good time, all things considered. We had to save extremely powerful creatures from something we could defeat at level 1. The whole premise was so silly that it was fun rather than frustrating.

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When it came to his second adventure, though... oh where do I even begin.

Before we even get to town. We wake up all of a sudden near a cave opening of magical darkness - we lob a torch into the cave and the torch disappears, no light to be seen, and so we thought "Well, not going in there that's for sure."

A wight comes out and says "Come inside.." then laughs maniacally (in BECMI wights level-drain is permanent, no saving throw). We try to leave the cave area, but see a force-field, that damages us if we touch it. We spend probably around 30 minutes trying to go in all directions, but there is nothing around us save for a small rock formation with a hole, and sand as far as the eye could see.

Eventually the aforementioned force-field starts shrinking down until we were forced into the cave, where we magically fall asleep. In the morning a passing caravan offers us a ride into town. They speak with a heavy accent, and say that foreigners are often mistrusted, so we should watch our step.

Cornelius wanted us to have characters form other countries or continents, I assume specifically for this hook. With which, on the surface, there is nothing wrong.

Going about trying to find any information is met with hostility from NPCs as they do not speak our language.

After, probably, another 30 minutes of frustration at the fact we have no indication on who has any mission for us, or which NPCs might be important, we suddenly understand everything and can read the books and signs - Cornelius informed me after the session that we were supposed to look for secret doors in the inn and activate the translation machine.

... What?

I asked him "Would the owner just allow us to look for secret doors in his inn? If I had something to hide, I wouldn't like it if people went around touching my walls looking for it... And if he has that machine, why not just activate it for us?" - Cornelius bluescreened.

Anyway, back to the story:

So now we speak the language, but we still look foreign, so we are supposed to find the tower of a famous wizard. A huge tower that dwarfs other buildings in this city, yet we can't see it since we are surrounded by 2-3 story building. Alright, fair enough. One player decides to try and climb the buildings from outside, but the city-watch puts an immediate stop to it.

And that's when my friend who plays the Mage triumphantly casts Levitate, (In BECMI, low level wizards are basically useless, they become Extremely Destructive Glass Cannons later on, but this was at level 3, pretty useless still, so cool to find a use for Levitate!). So he says

"Well, I walk around the streets until I find myself alone somewhere, then I pop up to rooftop level with my levitate, take a quick look around the skyline, and then come down to the ground before the City Watch can go all Bows & Arrows at me."

Take a guess at what happened next:

Did you guess "The city watch is immediately at you and holds you down"? If so, wrong!
The real response was "You do not see the tower."

So, we are looking for a tall, spectacular and invisible tower.

Well, in lieu of not being able to find it ourselves, we put on our best "Sorry for being foreign in your fine country" face and ask for directions. Finally some progress.

Cornelius smiles as he tells us we follow the directions, and find an area full of homeless people.

Do we see the tower now that we are closer? No.

We ask the people around there, but alas, they are of no help, and a little bit of roleplaying there we find out we were given the wrong directions and the tower is nowhere nearby.

... What?

Ok, the innkeeper is the only NPC who was not immediately hostile to us, maybe we can ask him for help. And so we ask the innkeeper who told us to wait for a guide who shall arrive "tomorrow". Finally some progress.

We RP our characters having a chit-chat in the inn, go to sleep and look forward to continuing our journey with the guide. (I feel the need to point out that at this point we've been playing for about 3-4 hours and still have not even a slight indication of why we even need to meet this wizard.

So we wait for the guide in the morning, and noon, and evening, and the following day, and the following day, and no guide shows up. The innkeeper lied about the guide.

... What?

I wish I could tell you, dear reader, how we eventually find the tower, but I don't actually remember how we found the tower, but we did.

The local guards inform us that the tower has a guardian who will ask us a riddle. If we fail to answer the riddle, we will die, as did 20 guards who came knocking who failed to answer the riddle.

We arrive at the door, we are asked the riddle, and of course we are reluctant to decide on an answer. We ask for permission to discuss the answer before we give it. Permission granted. While we discuss it, we name a lot of possible answers, but we don't decide on anything. Suddenly Cornelius says "Oh you said the answer, that's correct" so our random guesses only counted when they were correct (to advance the story I suppose). Good thing our wrong answers didn't count or else we'd be dead.

We then find the absolutely most powerful wizard to ever exist, so powerful he cannot be killed, and can cast any spell at any moment, and can identify magical items by just looking at them. For some reason, this nigh omnipotent being needs the help of a bunch of level 2's and 3's characters to do stuff. But whatever, the story has to continue.

We finally make it to the dungeon which is built into a mountain. The dungeon has levers and buttons and the likes. Each time we interact with anything, it damages us slightly, so naturally we stop, but eventually we find out there is no other way to continue. Each search for a secret door damages us. Honestly, the dungeon was not too bad, just featureless and mostly empty.

We finally find the big bad boss, which does such weird damage. If the combined level of the characters hit is equal to a certain number, it does X damage, and if it's different then it's Y damage.

We eventually defeat it, and leave the mountain, as we come back to town, we see the same monster fall from the sky and unto the mountain completely annihilating it on impact. Yes, the entire mountain. The city is untouched because Cornelius forgot about shock waves, but whatever, at that point we were just glad it was over.

I'd say this wasn't Cornelius' worst attempt at GMing, but I didn't want to start off with my best story.

After the game, he asked us for feedback and we were honest. We feared we might have to do this again, and he claimed that it seemed we just wanted to play a certain way, while he was trying to do something new.

...

...

...

... What?