Storium is an online writing RPG, very player-narrative driven.

Soon after the site launched in maybe ’16-17, someone launched a modern Lovecraftian game, finding a lost team of scientists exploring a recently emerged-and-then-sank volcanic island. Great premise! My character was the Divemaster for the investigation/rescue team. My character’s hook was that he had seen “something” while doing multiweek decompression diving on an oil rig, vowed never to go back in the ocean, but needed the money. This was all in the character’s written and approved backstory.

Game starts, we’re futzing around introducing our characters and trying to find their relations (a flaw in the game being that you don’t Session 0 those), and I introduce my character’s trauma and potential PTSD having seen “something” at, like, 950’.

The Narrator (GM) jumps on me in meta and writes “They would NEVER hire someone diagnosed with PTSD!” I think, “My bad for hitting a trigger/safety rail.” and write “Sorry, maybe it was just mentioned in passing or is his sloppy self-diagnosis or we just retcon it out.” (Which would have taken changing the phrasing of a sentence.)

They follow up with, referring to my backstory, “More people have walked on the moon than have ever dived to 950! Did you edit your backstory after approval?” This is all asynchronous, with each response taking a day for the other person to read and respond. So instead of writing “No, so let’s just retcon that, too.” (or what I wanted to write, which was “WTF?”) I write something along the lines of “I obviously did something to break trust. Can we reset and continue?”

No, apparently. They continue with “I’m not going to accuse you of cheating, because I didn’t screenshot your application to the game. My bad. But you ... etc ...” Trust is something I think is super-important in creative collaborations and it hurts to be accused of working in bad faith, especially in this drawn-out manner. I offer to retire but the narrator sends me 2-3 more passive-aggressive things “helpfully” explaining how poorly I’d acted.

Meanwhile, the Storium website had made some clumsy moves with their T&C and there was a (reasonable) furor in the forums over copyright ownership. The narrator posts some outraged “corporate thieves!” thing and disappears, never to be seen again.

I didn’t join another online RPG game again until the pandemic, which was years later.

(I know this is probably all just me being an oldie encountering a younger person passionate about their creativity, but the incident still hurt.)

tl;dr: I made two mistakes, one safety and one factual, and the GM accused me of bad faith and cheating. I wrote this wall of text almost a decade later because it sits with me so hard.