[5e] [advice]

Roadblocking DM?

So some friends of mine and I have been a part of a campaign for about 6 months now. Party of 5 plus a DM. This is the first campaign for 3 of the players. Started at level 3 and we’ve leveled up twice.

The players are all starting to feel really frustrated by our DM. It feels like no matter what we do, we always fail. We’ll discuss what kind of story we want to explore and we try to peruse it, but the NPCs seem to block any progress every time.

Try to get jobs somewhere? They’re not hiring. Try to sell one faction out to another? They find us untrustworthy. Complete a transaction we were asked to accomplish? It gets disputed because we used magic. Try to talk to a crime boss? The guards won’t let us in to see him. Kill some drug dealers because we are asked to clean up the town? Arrested for murder. All skill checks seem to require unnecessarily high rolls for success.

And these are all situations we have discussed with the DM that we want to play. It really feels to me like he’s more focused on gameplay over any kind of collaborative story telling, so the only real story we have is how shitty we are at everything. We will make plans between sessions on how we want to accomplish things and they are always immediately squashed. The DM is privy to these conversations so he is able to plan accordingly.

We are all getting really frustrated that we just can’t do anything right. It’s not like we are murderhoboing around, we always try to avoid combat but it feels like we are walking on eggshells constantly because we are punished for like everything we do. It kinda came to a head at today’s session with tempers flailing and players (literally and figuratively) attempting to burn it all down. Are we wrong in being butthurt? What should we do? Is the game even salvageable?