Hey y’all, I’ve got a fairly short but pretty bad story for you.

I’m, as of recently, a first time player of D&D but a long-time watcher of Critical Role. I love the show so much, and as such decided to dive in and give D&D a try. I was directed to r/lfg to find a game, and found one with a new DM looking for players. Perfect!

I message them, and he’s excited to have another new player. We talk a little bit about potential characters, and he seems a little confused by my reference to the Menagerie Coast of Wildemount, where I plan to have my pirate character hail from. A red flag, but I don’t think much of it and continue on with making my tabaxi swashbuckler rogue.

A few weeks pass with only a bit of communication between us, and then it’s time for our first session! Here’s where things start breaking down, and it’s quickly apparent that the DM has not done his research on the setting, and seems to be making things up whole cloth. He starts our campaign in a town called ‘Riverstall’, an apparent river town that I’ve never heard of before. A quick search on the Critical Role wiki confirms that no such place exists, but I bite my tongue, willing to let it slide.

After a fairly generic start in a tavern introducing the party to each other (I’ll not bother telling y’all about the rest of the party as they’re not super relevant), the DM turns it to us to decide what to do. I declare that Neyari Claw, former pirate, has heard tale of a powerful drow wizard in the Xhorhas Empire, Essek Thelyss, and wishes to travel to meet him.

This is where shit hits the fan - the DM, out of nowhere, aggressively tells me to not just invent stuff without clearing it with him first (?), and that the Xhorhas Empire doesn’t exist. I quickly pull up the wiki page and link it in the campaign’s Discord, proving that it, in fact, does. At this point, the party tells me that we’re not using the official setting, and that apparently the DM is just making stuff up as he goes. I tell them that they should have been extremely upfront about playing some makeshift version of the actual game, rather than deceiving players.

This is when the DM tells me that he’s kicking me from the group, and removes me from the Discord. Not a big loss, I guess, since I’m looking to play real D&D, not whatever that was, but what a waste of time.

Edit: I guess Critical Role isn't really D&D? Thanks for letting me know about the other ones, though, I'll check out their podcasts.

Double Edit: Thanks for the gold, I guess? Lol.