Woman Discovers Her Friend Secretly Stole and ‘Tortured’ Her D&D Character for 15 Years

We all know that moment when a fun, nostalgic reunion suddenly takes a dark and uncomfortable turn. For one tabletop gamer, a simple virtual get-together revealed a chilling 15-year secret. The original poster was excited to reunite with her old Dungeons & Dragons group for a special high-level campaign.

She brought back her beloved Half-Elf Bard, Aoife, ready for a night of epic fantasy and shared laughs. But the nostalgia shattered when a former friend interrupted the session with a disturbing announcement. This wasn’t just a simple misunderstanding over game rules; it was a bizarre case of boundary-crossing that left the entire friend group horrified and scrambling for answers. Curious how it all unfolded? The full story is right below.

Woman Discovers Her Friend Secretly Stole and 'Tortured' Her D&D Character for 15 Years

‘Actually, I’ll be playing your character.’

Scene-setter: A sprawling fantasy world sets the stage for what was supposed to be a heartwarming reunion of veteran adventurers.

So this is gonna be a long one. Buckle up. The critical event actually happened a couple of years ago, but I was just told some information that re-contextualised it...

In my twenties I was an apprentice in London, and I made friends who were just as geeky and cash-strapped as I, who all played DND together. There were 6...

We were all young and fairly inexperienced in DND, so these characters were not groundbreaking or overly experimental. Condensed background for Aoife, as it will be important later. Half-elves are...

Her parents were big-fish in a small pond of Elven village politics, moved to a big city and, as you do when you’re trying to make your way in corrupt...

They didn’t believe it was possible for an ‘abomination’ to be conceived when they were such perfect beings, and only realised the truth when Aoife popped out with stubby ears...

She fled home and met a Bardic mentor, who unfortunately turned out to have a deal with a devil. Aoife killed her mentor, getting a fetching depigmentation scar around one...

She is kind, sarcastic and has little respect for authority/hierarchy. Sex-positive, loves theatrical makeup and clothing, great with kids and animals. She does have self-destructive tendencies, could over-indulge in drink...

She still has a deep seated fear of oblivion, but decides that if this is all she gets she’ll live unashamedly. In terms of looks, she’s as if a Botticelli...

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They became fully rounded characters through adventures, in-jokes, and shared trauma. Eventually we all went to different cities for work and life stuff. But if a few of us ever...

Even when we’re all playing completely different people, DM will drop in mentions of our old characters. In short, the OG crew was a feature in our game universe. A...

Why don’t we have another game with the original crew? A 20 years later, ‘we’re putting a team together’ story. DM had been wanting to do a level 20 campaign...

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Tension heightener: The cheerful anticipation in the virtual room instantly evaporates, replaced by a baffling and deeply uncomfortable standoff.

We didn’t have a Session Zero, but we had a shared Google doc to agree on which of past stories were canon, and DM had separate docs for each of...

It began with Druid discovering animals fleeing the heart of the forest. Some darkness had sprouted from beneath the earth. Druid managed to make out something that chilled her to...

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With that intro we went around to bring people up to speed on what our characters were doing. Paladin described his life, Rogue detailed his thieves guild, and I was...

' 'No, I’ve been playing Aoife just as long as you, so I’d like to do this to give her some closure. ' Everyone, again, was kind of stunned. She’d...

That she had given up travelling and music, had gotten married and had several children. Paladin spoke up, saying that if he came across someone like that using Aoife’s name...

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Where was this coming from? Wizard again said that she was playing Aoife, as I’d 'done nothing to give her a real arc or anything interesting, she’s still just a...

DM, not liking the tension, took Wizard to a breakout room to try and sort it out. I won’t lie, I felt hurt as well as confused, and we waited...

It was a tad awkward at first, but DM is great and we got into the swing of the story eventually. Two weeks go by, and we have the next...

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DM was making it clear the Wizard had been killed by the enemy and it was a cowardly, ignoble, permadeath. This was genuinely shocking, as DM is a sweetie, and...

I got a charming message from Wizard, accusing me of poisoning the group against her, and not deserving to play my own character. Then I was blocked on everything.

Ironic contrast: A game built on collaborative storytelling had secretly been twisted into a solitary exercise in psychological punishment.

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Just this weekend, I found out why DM was so angry. Druid, DM and I were part of a group staring a new Vampire the Masquerade game. DM went into...

'Oh, that’s cause of that shite with Wizard after what she did to you. ' She went on to explain that the 30 min break out room had revealed that...

After storming off in a huff, the next day she had sent DM a nearly 20 PAGE DOCUMENT of her version of Aoife’s development. Development that included APOLOGISING to her...

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Apparently they 'taught her to give up her poor lifestyle choices. ' She had basically tortured and Stepford-Wived my character for more than a decade. Druid said she’d never seen...

DM confirmed it was all true, Wizard had also included detail of how Aoife had become 'fat and matronly' as punishment for her vanity, and was still under the devil’s...

I talked with her for hours during Covid when she was stuck all alone, and I was the only one awake when she couldn’t sleep from stress related insomnia. So,...

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The bizarre behavior displayed by the former friend highlights a severe phenomenon recognized by clinical professionals as boundary dissolution and parasocial projection. In collaborative storytelling environments, players often pour their own emotional baggage into the fiction. However, hijacking another person’s creation to inflict trauma points to a troubling need for control.

Mental health consensus notes that when individuals secretly rewrite a peer’s narrative to include severe punishment and suffering, it is rarely about the game itself. Instead, it reflects deep-seated interpersonal resentment or unaddressed psychological distress. By subjecting the Half-Elf Bard to systematic degradation, the offending player was acting out a disturbing proxy fantasy.

The Dungeon Master’s immediate decision to implement a zero-tolerance policy was the safest and most appropriate response to protect the group. For anyone navigating tabletop dynamics, establishing clear consent and boundaries during a Session Zero is absolutely vital to prevent imaginative play from turning into emotional abuse.

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Community Opinions

Reddit came in hot, nearly unanimous in their horror over the situation, with many praising the Dungeon Master for swiftly protecting the original poster.

u/shoe_owner The fact that she simply asserted, at the table, that she would be playing your character, with no preamble, no discussion, no understanding between she and either you or...

u/flockyboi
Thank god, finally a story where the dm and the other party members speak up, defend op, and actually cut the bad player out before they cause more harm

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u/NatashOverWorld Jesus, that's one way to find out one of your table is mentally ill and obsessing about a character you made for 15 years 😶 The DM is completely...

u/No-Assumption-1738
Sounds like wizards a very unhealthy person , it’s super illogical , how’s a ‘get the band back together’ storyline going to work if they’ve stole someone else’s character? 

and that if she tried to sing or dance she suffered horrendous pain was she in the quiverfull cult? the duggars had weird rules like that.

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u/CrypticCryptid
The thing to keep in mind: Your character wasn't violated or invalidated in any way.
That was all head canon of a person with severe mental health issues.

u/Tanaka917 Rape as a life lessson/teaching moment. Yeah I'd ban this person from every facet of my life too. The notion that being raped should be taken as a lesson...

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u/albiondave All very strange and i'm sorry your long term character was 'violated' in that way. How strange not to have had a conversation all those years ago along the...

u/Lacho236 Man... I've had my characters "stolen" for petty revenge fantasies and seen it happen to others multiple times, but this is really next-level insanity. Edit: Like some of the...

u/Sensitive_Speaker_65 Why did Wiz think she would be able to get away with playing your character with the OG group? Like you even said the DM was working with her...

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u/Cricetinus ...what the entire chocolate-coated... I think the weirdest thing - and that's against some SERIOUS competition - is Wizard thinking you, the DM, or the rest of the group...

u/BarbariansProf Holy tap-dancing codfish, that one's a piece of work. I cannot even imagine how they thought that move was going to play out. That's a horrible thing to face...

u/CrossSoul
I'm glad you didn't back down from playing your character.
All the other stuff was super f*** up of course, but your tungsten spine was the good part.

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u/Peter_E_Venturer This wizard character is a moral absolutist who claims that her ideas and morals are superior to everyone else’s. When she got the chance to play your character, she...

u/DMfortinyplayers Can you clarify- was Wizard playing Aoife in games with this DM or any of the players from this original group? It's super weird that she and DM talked...

A few commenters even pointed out the chilling real-world implications of someone obsessing over a fictional proxy for over a decade.

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The line between immersive storytelling and unhealthy obsession can sometimes blur, but this situation clearly crossed into alarming territory. The swift action taken by the game runner preserved the safety of the table, though the emotional confusion for the original creator naturally lingers. Do you think the former friend was projecting real-life resentment, or did she simply lose her grip on reality? And how would you handle a fellow player trying to hijack your character mid-session? Share your hot take below!

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