Sorry guys this is going to be a bit of a long one. I F24 have played dnd with this one group for four years now as the same character. She’s the only healer as the other cleric didn’t learn any healing spells.

We agreed at the start of campaign planning that we would break the arcs of the campaign up so each character had a big main quest we all did together and meanwhile the other characters would have side quests throughout the main quest to drop hints at their characters’ backstory and/or have character development to get ready for their main quest. We made pretty clear boundaries because this group formed after a big argument broke up a first campaign and we all left together sans some others who quit playing.

I knew going in the DM’s girlfriend (F23) who I’ll call Trina didn’t like me (I don’t like men and she knows that so no man stealing here and no one could figure out why she hates me so much so all of us were at a loss as to why but figured she’d mellow out once the tension from the last campaign fallout settled…she didn’t). This becomes relevant.

For the first year of playing Trina tried to sabotage my character which wasn’t too successful since she was also messing up other people’s gameplay and getting flack for it. In year two of this campaign after a full real life year of playing together Trina started trying to use psychosis of her character to try to off my character as a justified pk(player kill) since we have rules about pking but she never seemed to realize my characters dexterity is too high for her to land hits. (For anyone who doesn’t play dnd my character could dodge well).

In year three our DM(M24) who I’ll call Ernie separated Trina and I on different quests or spaced us out in the initiative list(aka the list that determined the order we went in to play) and the quest area so our characters couldn’t interact so she’d stop creating conflict without Ernie having to confront her since they were in on a lease together. Outside of her behavior towards me she was completely normal and Ernie didn’t want to break up since they had been together half a decade and tbh it was never even a consideration for him. At this point we were so far into the campaign since we had all dedicated three years of our lives into it that we all decided to try to do this spacing as fairly as possible without letting Trina catch on to what we were doing and try to figure out her deal with me in the meantime to fix everything . This is where it starts getting genuinely unwelcoming and the forced meta gaming began.

I’d miss main quests when Trina’s character was there if she wasn’t having her own dedicated backstory sessions. If I had to be there for story progression of a main quest at the same time as her it didn’t matter if I rolled a nat 20 on initiative and she rolled a nat 1 all of a sudden Ernie would do “reverse order initiative” and Trina would loot or destroy anything my character would be able to interact with. She blocked my character from doing any side quests related to my character’s backstory or with other PCs even when she was playing a main quest. The other players got so tired of it since they couldn’t confront her without giving her more ammunition to hate me that I basically had to start meta gaming all the time to move stuff along or I’d get fussed at for being in character because it was inconvenient that my character didn’t know information from side quests or even main quests I was excluded from (and if I tried to get the information from other players in character Trina would try to off or maim me and it would make a dungeon that should take twenty minutes last three sessions).

All this is to say that the game when interacting with the other pcs around her was ruined. I held out because Ernie kept promising we’d be incorporating all of my characters dedicated side quests on this one planet and using them to transition into letting me have the next main quest where Trina would be given side stories that would keep her from sabotaging me. To this day after four years I haven’t had a single side quest or even backstory exposition when even a part time player who only attends maybe twice a year has gotten a dedicated side quest. And we’re basically done with the main quest on said planet so I don’t see a side quest or main quest happening.

The only thing I’ve enjoyed and has kept me going in this campaign is creative magic use and the npc interactions when the other players aren’t there since I can rp with no pushback and at least work on her stats. One of the PCs (we’ll call him knife) decided he needed a stats boost however and permanently cursed my player to have essentially randomly backfiring magic to get said stats boost, which has eliminated one of my last points of investment in this campaign. I let behavior go from this person before when they did similar things because I basically got told I was violating a boundary when my character reacts violently to knife when all the other characters got to beat knife halfway to Sunday when he did similar to them, but I know that it was an excuse then because this character was around Trina’s a lot.

This time however I pointed out that based on my character sheet and backstory it wouldn’t make any sense for her to at least not yell at him or to react negatively at least, especially since she hasn’t had any character development in that area and we clearly have to stick to those traits on our sheets since knife was. I figured if it was justified as necessary Ernie would take steps to separate Trina’s character and knife.

Even before I brought it up to Ernie in pms that I was going to be reacting next session I knew he was avoiding it. He also definitely knew before the curse happened what that other player was planning because leading up to that action and after suddenly if I was last in the initiative line(which I always was with him doctoring the order) we ran out of time for my turn, and while if it was anyone else they’d get to start first next time, conveniently I couldn’t with no explanation.

I missed three sessions worth of turns(two of which were after the curse) and Ernie’s mysteriously been sick for two weekends after those three in a row while attending work with no issue when he has unlimited paid sick leave. He left me on read when I tried to nicely explain over pms that I really wanted to quit meta gaming and that I wanted to play like everyone else got to since if we really were about to get to my side quests then I really should get back in the swing of real rp and I’m not the problem when I’ve been actively accommodating her for over a year now and passively for even longer.

After that pm I was getting no response from some of my friends who he must have told about my request or just one word answers besides a couple exceptions who are equally as confused. I think I want to confront Ernie during the next session and see if he’s going to help me or give me what he promised for my concessions and why he keeps ghosting me out of the campaign, but if it makes the campaign fall apart because he refuses to let me stop meta gaming(I’ll quit if he refuses because this is just miserable for me at this point and my friends who are also confused would quit in solidarity even if they would be super upset about it bc he made the mistake of actually making them plot necessary so no more campaign without them) I’ll have ruined four years worth of some of my closest friends world building and hours of time they’ve invested in making art for it, and some of them are trying to keep me included and not meta gaming against my will so they really don’t deserve it, but I’m miserable.

So Reddit, Would I Be The Asshole if I confronted my DM?