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I remember playing (probably) 2nd ed AD&D where the PCs all started at 5th level (or the equivalent xp of a 5th level fighter, or whatever). The party was up to around 11th/12th level and a new guy joined the group. He put his foot down hard about starting off his new PC at 5th level "because that's where PCs start in this game", and no amount of telling him that new PCs start at the average party xp would shut him up. You see, once the game is started, you have to earn your levels same as everyone else or it's just loving around. Or something. So the DM relented and let him do it. Predictably, the PC died in the second or third encounter, trying to stand on the front line and keep up with 2 level 12 fighters. Next character was the same story "no, you told me that everyone started at 5th level, so PCs start at 5th level, so I'm starting at 5th level". Literally arguing that there was no way he was going to start at 11-12th because that's not how this game works, everyone else started at 5th, no free lunch, immersion, earn your levels, the challenge of roleplaying a less skilled PC, etc. He still didn't actually do anything that "a less skilled PC" might need to do to survive, and from memory died when a heavily telegraphed AoE went off and hit most of the party. Three 12th level PCs, two save, one take maybe a third of his HP in damage, and the 5th level guy is knocked down to something approaching his hit point total, but negative. The other unarmored/low-hp PCs got out of hte way and were telling him to also get out of the way. He quit after that, which was just as well because it'd gone from funny the first time to just very very frustrating. I can see the appeal in playing something like that as an in-joke / comic relief / occasionally useful thing, but this dude was super serious about wanting to earn his fun or whatever the gently caress. e: I can't remember if it was the same guy or a different guy who wanted to run a game at 10th level and made everyone make level 1 PCs for it. I didn't play in that game, but a friend thought there was gonna be a prologue or something and went along with it. Instead of a prologue, prequel, or flashback, the level 1 PCs explored a dungeon that was a linear series of rooms, each containing a carefully gradiated monster worth enough xp to bring the party to the next level, each of which had 1hp left and for some totally legitimate reason lost initiative. They also had just the right kinds of treasure to equip a level 10 party. Like, you can't just start at level 10 and all geared up, that would be cheating, so... e2: Thinking back, it was a different guy. So maybe this is way more common than you'd hope. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Dec 22, 2016 |
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Dec 22, 2016 00:28
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That's something that the DM I mentioned last page was into too, for whatever idiotic reason. New character? Level 1. Everyone else in double digits? Level 1. It was 3.5, which meant that standing around with a thumb up your rear end for a few encounters would rocket you through the early levels, but you'd never fuckin' reach parity with the rest of the party, and you'd still have half a dozen levels worth of math to do after the first session.
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Dec 22, 2016 00:52
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Bieeardo posted:That's something that the DM I mentioned last page was into too, for whatever idiotic reason. New character? Level 1. Everyone else in double digits? Level 1. It was 3.5, which meant that standing around with a thumb up your rear end for a few encounters would rocket you through the early levels, but you'd never fuckin' reach parity with the rest of the party, and you'd still have half a dozen levels worth of math to do after the first session. It's 3.5, so a sufficiently-twinked out level one caster can take out enemies in the double digits.
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Dec 22, 2016 00:56
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I interviewed with a group from meetup that said they were at seven now an that's where I could start but any deaths an you start at level one. When I said "nice to meet all of you, but I don't think this will work" I think they were stunned from me breaking the nerd social fallacy. I was pretty put out about driving 25 minutes across Dallas for that experience.
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Dec 22, 2016 01:37
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Be the luggage guy until you've hung around for a few sessions without contributing. Such a bizarre concept.
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Dec 22, 2016 01:41
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As someone who had to grind though dozens of hours of Septerra Core just to catch-up party members who had fallen behind because the game tracked XP and levels individually and characters that got no play got no advancement, I can hardly contemplate the thought of continuing that behavior in a where there isn't a gun being held to my head forcing me to do this.
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Dec 22, 2016 03:03
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gradenko_2000 posted:As someone who had to grind though dozens of hours of Septerra Core just to catch-up party members who had fallen behind because the game tracked XP and levels individually and characters that got no play got no advancement, I can hardly contemplate the thought of continuing that behavior in a where there isn't a gun being held to my head forcing me to do this.
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Dec 22, 2016 03:17
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Yeah, I can't imagine playing a game like D&D where a difference in character levels can mean having to sit out participating in an adventure, and then not being at parity with the rest of the group.
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Dec 22, 2016 03:26
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Played a Christmas version of Monster of the Week. Our cast was A truck driver, a government "cleaner" (with a cover identity as a janitor), and Bellona, Roman Goddess of War. Somehow, we were all equally helpful in saving Malmart, destroying an army of Elfs on the Shelves, and defeating Krampus*. *Bellona defeated Krampus. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Dec 22, 2016 |
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Dec 22, 2016 05:17
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JUST MAKING CHILI posted:I interviewed with a group from meetup I'm sorry, but I'm really having a hard time ditching the mental image of you putting on a suit, putting a gaming resume and a couple character sheets in a folder, and sitting down across the table from a trio of nerds. What exactly happens in a gaming interview? I only ask because literally all of my games where I've joined or been joined by new people have involved something along the lines of "Oh, hey friend, you wanna play D&D?"
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Dec 22, 2016 14:38
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So I saw a meetup posting that was somewhat nearby and messaged the guy that posted it. He said that the rest of the group would be meeting at a coffee shop later in the week and if I wanted to come by and see how I clicked with the group they'd love to meet me. I drove across town and we talked about their game, my (limited at that time) experience with tabletop gaming, and what I wanted to do with a character.
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Dec 22, 2016 15:53
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ItalicSquirrels posted:I'm sorry, but I'm really having a hard time ditching the mental image of you putting on a suit, putting a gaming resume and a couple character sheets in a folder, and sitting down across the table from a trio of nerds. What exactly happens in a gaming interview? I only ask because literally all of my games where I've joined or been joined by new people have involved something along the lines of "Oh, hey friend, you wanna play D&D?" If anything legitimizes sounding the murky waters of a potential gaming group before you put in time and effort, it should be this, the catpiss thread.
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Dec 22, 2016 16:04
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ItalicSquirrels posted:I'm sorry, but I'm really having a hard time ditching the mental image of you putting on a suit, putting a gaming resume and a couple character sheets in a folder, and sitting down across the table from a trio of nerds. What exactly happens in a gaming interview? I only ask because literally all of my games where I've joined or been joined by new people have involved something along the lines of "Oh, hey friend, you wanna play D&D?"
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Dec 22, 2016 16:48
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ItalicSquirrels posted:I'm sorry, but I'm really having a hard time ditching the mental image of you putting on a suit, putting a gaming resume and a couple character sheets in a folder, and sitting down across the table from a trio of nerds. What exactly happens in a gaming interview? I only ask because literally all of my games where I've joined or been joined by new people have involved something along the lines of "Oh, hey friend, you wanna play D&D?" I've almost always met with the DM of a game separately before the next session to see if they are a normal human being or some kind of pigman in disguise. And they always meet with me, I assume, to ensure I'm not there to powergame the rest of the group into non-relevance. Plus its just a chance to hang out at a starbucks or a bar for a bit. I am in the US south though so games aren't as easy to come by which leads to a lot of being invited to games though the internet, which may taint my experiences.
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Dec 22, 2016 17:00
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I met with my one gaming group at a quick lunch at some casual dining restaurant to get an idea of what sort of people they were before I committed to hanging out with them for a few hours.
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Dec 22, 2016 17:26
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ItalicSquirrels posted:I'm sorry, but I'm really having a hard time ditching the mental image of you putting on a suit, putting a gaming resume and a couple character sheets in a folder, and sitting down across the table from a trio of nerds. What exactly happens in a gaming interview? I only ask because literally all of my games where I've joined or been joined by new people have involved something along the lines of "Oh, hey friend, you wanna play D&D?" It's really not a bad idea. I just played a brief one-shot with some people for two hours last night, and if I had met some of the people beforehand I probably would have declined to play with them because I don't like their playstyle. By that I mean dicking around with other players and killing them.
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Dec 22, 2016 17:59
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I never game with strangers for exactly that reason, anybody sitting in a game I run has to either be somebody I already know or somebody who has been vouched for by an existing player. Had too many bad experiences with creeplords.
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Dec 22, 2016 22:35
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To be fair to those players - as a one-shot, our lives were apparently expendable and the GM had replacement characters at the ready. To be fair to me - the GM did not inform any of us that this was an expectation, and the only information I had to go on was one player who died and left the game right after that. He actually had to leave early, but he neglected to tell anyone at the table about this except the GM (who he passed a note to about this). So when one of the players just decided to up and kill me, I was miffed because I thought she was basically forcing me to leave right after I had a pretty awesome battle/climactic moment in our brief story. LuiCypher fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Dec 22, 2016 |
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Dec 22, 2016 23:04
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Mister Bates posted:I never game with strangers for exactly that reason, anybody sitting in a game I run has to either be somebody I already know or somebody who has been vouched for by an existing player. Had too many bad experiences with creeplords. I hear you. Keeps things from getting awkward.
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Dec 24, 2016 07:36
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Mister Bates posted:I never game with strangers for exactly that reason, anybody sitting in a game I run has to either be somebody I already know or somebody who has been vouched for by an existing player. Had too many bad experiences with creeplords. I've had it go both ways, the first on line group I had fell apart due to creepy kinky girl and her sexually messed up character. Her character was burned by a nobleman, and she was looking for revenge, that revenge took a rather nasty turn which left everyone very unconmfertable - everything described in loving detail. I had to have "the talk" with her. A week later two players left the group she left becasue "There is to much combat" the other left because "There is to much Roleplaying." i.e I had the balance right. The current group is made up fo goons and is awesome, even from session one when we had never even spoken to each other before then! You pays your money, you takes your chances....
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Dec 27, 2016 09:39
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Grey Hunter posted:I've had it go both ways, the first on line group I had fell apart due to creepy kinky girl and her sexually messed up character. Her character was burned by a nobleman, and she was looking for revenge, that revenge took a rather nasty turn which left everyone very unconmfertable - everything described in loving detail. I had to have "the talk" with her. I have a great group that I've been gaming with since college, over ten years ago. I think the differences between the players makes whoever is GMing at any given time balance things out nicely. Some of the players could take or leave combat, but they like roleplaying. But we also have a couple of players who are pretty quiet and consequently much less interested in roleplaying. They like tactics and systems, though, so they like combat for the mechanical challenges it represents. Our GMs have to run enough combat to please them, but not so much that the others get bored. And it works. Some sessions do a lot of one and less of the other, but everyone in the group trusts that things will balance out eventually. It took gaming with a lot of random crazies in college to put this group together, but it was totally worth it. For every two or three crazy grognards I played with, I found a good player that is in this current group. If you're in college or in your 20's, just keep playing with random people. Stay in touch with the good ones, because once you're out of the confined space of dorm living or whatever you're doing, you can build a great group from only the good players from your previous games, and none of the bad or crazy ones. It's awkward to kick people out of games as they are happening or if you live a couple doors down from them, but that won't last. Just wait until the bad games die, and scoop up that one good player from that game. Invite them into the next game, and do the same. Eventually, you'll have a good group that plays well together.
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Dec 27, 2016 12:52
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JUST MAKING CHILI posted:I interviewed with a group from meetup that said they were at seven now an that's where I could start but any deaths an you start at level one. 
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Jan 2, 2017 13:59
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Our Barbarian, the lizard with the hammer, decided to get involved in a tavern's arm wrestling league. He made it all the way to the champ.
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Jan 3, 2017 01:29
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My players, man... my players.  The session started off normally enough: After beating a hasty retreat back to their house to avoid getting killed by a fairly high-level cleric, they heal up, rest up, and get their mail: a pile of cash that is definitely totally not from being drug suppliers, along with some tickets to the Race of Eight Winds. There, they meet up with their House Tarkanan employer and discuss the freakishly cheap magic item they bought and how it is tainted with some manner of dark power. They watch a guy who is both (a) a very unknown newcomer, and (b) trying way too hard to to look like a stereotypical "mysterious dark knight" type guy actually win the race. The PCs tried to whip up an angry mob but unfortunately angry mobs are bad at Will saves, as is the party Factotum. The victory is speech is as short as it is unsettling, and everyone is invited to a party in the woods outside the city! Certainly this will be a good time for all, with nothing unfortunate happening. After all, that previously mentioned high-level cleric and her brother who just won the race wouldn't dare to do anything terrible, would they? When they get to the swamp party, they are just in time to watch the first part of a ritual end (which causes a lot of party-goers to drop dead) and the next part begin, filling the immediate area with ozone and dread. Combat happens, horrible monsters are summoned, and the party is unable to take out the guy leading the ritual, which promptly tears a hole in the fabric of reality. Fortunately for the party, only that cleric managed to make her reflex save to avoid getting sucked in. Those cultists who got sucked in also failed their will saves to not get pulled through the tear. Unfortunately, the party also failed their reflex saves, and the Factotum got sucked through. Planning to regroup at home, the Archivist casts Dimension Rift, escalates it to get back in one shot... and rolls a total of 104, indicating that instead of their destination they end up somewhere else. Next week is gonna get real weird.
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Jan 3, 2017 17:39
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When last we left off the Tanicus campaign, the party was attempting to head to the northern tip of the evil Sidh nation of Ancellyon in order to summon an army of Fey to stop the Ancellyn from invading the rest of the mainland. In order to bypass the border forts and cities, an ancient giant who had literally hammered the continents into existence told of us that the Old Lady of the Mountain who lived atop the Balancing Rock could get us into the country… ** The trip to Mount Waylourn required going through some underground mines. But these weren’t ordinary mines. These mines had once contained the veins of ore that had been removed and shaped by the first Fire Giants to comprise the continents and islands of the world of Tanicus. The mines were so massive that one could barely make out the walls and ceilings with our party’s light sources, and it took us a solid week to traverse them. The only creatures we saw along the way were tiny spiders who scuttled away as soon as they saw us. Around the fifth day, my Sorcerer and our Favored Soul began to notice something…weird. We were still in the Prime Material Plane, but another plane was starting to overlap on top of it. Our best guess was that we were traversing a portion of the Elemental Plane of Earth, but honestly we had no clue what it was. On the morning of the eighth day underground, our party reaches the elevator that leads to the exit from the mines. Not a normal people-sized elevator, but a freight elevator for giants. The trip from the bottom of the shaft up to the top would end up taking the better part of a day, and involved turning a “hand” crank meant for being much larger than ourselves. Everyone except our Greensidh and our Halfling take turns on the crank. As we start to ascend, we come to find out that we’re being followed. By spiders. Normal-sized spiders at first. Then spiders the sides of birds. Then spiders the size of dogs. Then spiders the size of pigs. They’re just sitting on the walls watching us as we pass, but once the elevator passes we see that they’re scuttling up the walls underneath us. They’re not threatening us or being malicious, and the last thing we wanted to do was pick a fight with a horde of spiders. Near the end of the day as we get closed to the top of the shaft, the elevator begins to slow down as if someone’s hanging heavy weights on the bottom. Our Rogue, Cullus, is brave enough to peek over the edge at the underside of the elevator. What he sees are all of the spiders spinning a web to slow the elevator down. Eventually, the weight is enough to bring the elevator screeching to a halt about five floors short of the exit. The spiders all crawl up onto the elevator before making a beeline down a nearby tunnel, forming into an arrow pointing into the darkness. With no other options short of fighting a horde of spiders and possibly lighting the elevator on fire, we head on down the tunnel, taking care not to step on any of the spiders. Eventually, the tunnel opens up into a large room covered with spider webs. In the middle of the room, sitting on the largest spider web, is this…thing.  This is Ur-Goth. Ur-Goth is the third-oldest being in existence, after Io (Order) and Kaos (Chaos). The reason he’s the third-oldest is because both Io and Kaos created him in order to weave reality into existence. We’re sitting here in an abandoned mine of giants looking at the literal Weaver of the World, a being so ancient that the concept of good and evil are beyond it to the point where the Paladin’s Holy Avenger is going “I THINK we should him, but none of us would survive, myself included.” The gist of the conversation our Eldritch Knight. One of the assumptions that we’ve been working under this campaign is that the prison holding Kaos to prevent him from unmaking Tanicus is slowly breaking down, and there’s enough of his power seeping out for him to collect followers, form cults, and pursue an agenda of getting the actual twelve keys, one from each god who assisted in locking him away. Ur-Goth however mentioned that as far as it knew, Kaos was still out there in the cosmos. It could feel Kaos’ presence, and not just a little tiny sliver. So there’s a chance that the being locked away in a prison built for Kaos…isn’t Kaos. As we’re soaking in THAT revelation, Ur-Goth “sniffs” the air with its legs. “I smell…fate.” It pushes forward through the rest of our group…to my Sorcerer. “You smell of Riva,” it says before plunging a talon into my chest…through my chest…and into my soul. The rest of the party can only watch as Ur-Goth proceeds to pull a golden thread out of my body – the same thread with Riva, the God of Fortune and Destiny, placed into my body WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY back when and told me not to tell anyone else about it. So Ur-Goth finishes pulling the thread out and weaves it into a little ball before putting it in one of its sacks. In my head, I hear its voice say “Interesting. You are Riva’s back-up plan.” The thread that was in my soul was a portion of Riva’s essence. If something happens to this universe (ie, our party loses, the gods died, Kaos comes back, so on and so on…we really are kinda [BLEEP]ed if you think about it), then Ur-Goth, being older than the universe, gets to weave a new one. And the golden thread ensures that Reva is going to be a part of it…as well as my PC, since Ur-Goth pulled out a little tiny piece of my soul as well (leading to Cullus’ player to say ”The virgin in our party is going to be the baby daddy of an entire universe”). Of course, none of the other gods know about this little trick Riva is trying to pull. Except for Annwn, the Goddess of the Dead, because she held my soul in her hands for three days while I was being resurrected. ** Ur-Goth allows us to leave, and we exit the mines near the top of Mount Waylourn. It’s an easy climb to the top of the mountain, which turns out to be a relatively flat surface surrounding the peak in the middle. Sitting atop the peak, perfectly perched, is what we recognize as the Balancing Rock. A flying castle. And the Old Woman of the Mountain is a beautiful elder Storm Giant, who is only “old” to a Fire Giant who’s been around since the beginning of the planet.  Along with her castellan/son, she agrees to fly us as close to the standing stones as she can – the Ancellyn have been getting very aggressive with their patrols as of late and she believes that it’s only a matter of time before they come after her and her son. So we’re in a freakin’ FLYING castle, and Aiena, our bouncy and child-like Favored Soul is just eating it up. Cullus debates peeing off the side so he’s “taking a leak on the Ancellyn” before the Castellan reminds him that at this altitude it’ll freeze the second it comes out since he’ll haver to…stick it outside the shield keeping the castle aloft. We pass over the border of Ancellyon, well above the clouds, and plan to make it to the standing stones with nearly three days to spare before winter turns into spring. Which is when an old enemy shows up.  Early in the campaign, our group fought a black dragon and his seneschal, a black Dragonborn warrior. We managed to kill the dragon (it took two fights and some divine intervention at our level) and battle the warrior to a standstill. In return for letting us go/letting him go, the warrior promised us that one day, when both he and our party were full rested, we would resume our duel. Well, today was that one day as the Dragonborn warrior shows back up on the back of an Emerald Drake. The Drakes were tasked with killing the Storm Giants and causing the casting to crash, while the Dragonborn was tasked with taking out our party. And he’s brought a friend.  Septimus, the Revenant pledged to murder Aiena.
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Jan 4, 2017 21:07
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It has been far too long 
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Jan 5, 2017 04:00
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I am slowly weening off my frustrating group, finishing off the campaign but have more great stories of how ridiculous it gets. Its shadowrun and one of the players is awesome and we get along well. I play a russian OCD Hipster DJ, Vanya. One character is a burnt out runner that has been wearing the same suit for a decade, Lenny. Then there is the slay everything street samurai Joshua and the Obsessed Rigger Cordel. Well of course the street samurai has an blood raining sword that speaks to him and told him there is a CEO vampire in one of the main security corporations. My character suggests we dont do anything since he is 1.) Very powerful 2.) Lives and never leaves(apparently) his secure office in a corporation headquarters which is the equivalent of breaking into the pentagon. 3.) Has showed zero interest in harming us. 4.) We have a ton of other stuff on our plate. Of course, the samurai and rigger think going in there is imperative. I think of a pretty logical reason to meet in there and try to brainstorm a way to sneak our weapons in there on this pretense. But nope, since we killed the local mafia we can call a meeting there and they will TOTALLY be okay with us logging in machine guns in their building. We meet up, i have an idea of bringing in knock out gas in the compartment of our street samurai. Turns out, vampires are immune to it so we have to shoot them up. Apparently no one is in pursuit as we try to find the vampires lair. We execute people we meet with "theater of the mind" which lets us dispatch with no threat of harm. We fight the vampire we all fail the willpower save and become violent to one another. Lenny almost dies, I throw a grenade which luckily -for some reason - an NPC that also failed the save jumps on the grenade and dies. We eventually win the encounter and my character is adamant that we need to leave immediately but, they take their time looting and hording as Lenny is bleeding out. Yet, we have to save the blood slaves as a literal army is coming in on us and Lenny is dying. My character hot wires a car to take him to the hospitial. They go to free the blood slaves but, because Joshua has the vampires orb the whole corporation is now at his command? My character gets nurses to incinerate Lennys suit as he is being worked on and buys him a whole new wardrobe. Lenny reinvents himself and emulates Vanya's playboy mentality which includes hiring muscle to follow him around and wasting all his savings on lavished items and parties. While our characters spend the downtime enjoying life, of course - cordel and joshua spend their entire free time working on their cars and making their weapons better. Like a whole week of nothing but "working" on items. For the cherry on top the next session was us fighting literally 300 gangers which involved "I throw a grenade, one hit." "close enough you kill 18 gangers" "I hit a ramp and shoot my machine gun at a bunch of gangers" "you kill ten of them" meanwhile Vanya and Lenny hide out because there are 300 gangers shooting the place up.
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Jan 5, 2017 15:21
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Almost a decade ago me and my buddy were still playing Warhammer 40k. This was in 3rd or 4th edition, I don't remember. We were both working jobs with irregular shifts, so we decide one sunny Wednesday afternoon to go play a nice game of 40k. We go to our FLGS early in the afternoon. The gaming hall was of course completely empty. About an hour into our game, me with Tyranids and him with Imperial Guard, a massively goony goon walks in. Smells bad, wearing a leather jacket several sizes too large for him. You know the type, there's a couple floating around your FLGS. He quietly observes our game for a while. My friend then uses his Autocannon to shoot one of my things. I don't remember what, but I do remember it had a 3+ armor save. He hits, he scores a wound, and I ask my friend what the armor piercing value of the Autocannon is. He says it's four, so I get a save. The goon then breaks his silence, and announces that it is, in fact, 3, and I do not get a armor save. My friend tells him that he's pretty sure it's 4. The goon, seemingly insulted by being corrected, tells us that he's been playing Imperial Guard since second edition, and that he drat well knows what the AP value of a autocannon is. My friend is a little taken aback by his reaction, and checks his rulebook. Sure enough, it's 4. The goon becomes red in the face, and storms off without saying a word.
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Jan 5, 2017 15:43
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I think my group and I just had our first cat-piss experience. To preface, my group has been playing roleplaying games for only a couple years now, so we're all relatively inexperienced. I ran our first campaign together (Pathfinder unfortunately) and though it had its ups and downs, everyone was sad when a couple of the players had to take time off from the campaign for personal reasons and we just decided to put it all on hold. Fastforward about six months, and after everyone's decided they're ready for a new campaign, a particular member of our group eagerly volunteers to DM. He is, at best, the number-crunching member of the party who loves his spreadsheets and making sure everybody's aware of just how useful his character is despite never demonstrating it. So we were all a bit apprehensive, but willing to give him a chance because he's our friend. Now we're about 6-ish sessions into D&D 5e's Storm King's Thunder, and everything seems to have gone totally off the rails. Last session, the DM introduces a longtime friend of himself and one of the other players, who no one else has ever met before. She's got experience playing D&D, and she's nice enough, and the DM explains that she'll be taking part in the session tonight. Once again we're unsure of how to feel about this but no one objects. After an hour-or-so spent reuniting the party and making sure everyone was caught up to speed on what had happened in previous sessions, we decide to spend the night in the same cavern we'd explored a few days prior, so we were absolutely certain it was safe. Regardless, our paranoid Bard casts Leomund's Tiny Hut to create an impenetrable forcefield within which we can sleep peacefully. Somehow, though, even with the party's Monk keeping watch while the rest of the party slumbered, twenty Drow and their mysteriously garbed leader appear within the cavern simultaneously and launch an all-out assault on a party of six level five adventurers. Keep in mind we have never encountered a Drow before, and were completely mystified as to why a company of accomplished warriors is ambushing some hapless murder-hobos in the night. A few of us had decided that we'd sleep outside Leomund's Tiny Hut, and that proved to be a mistake. I suppose the Monk's passive perception wasn't great enough to detect this war party marching into our cave, and all twenty of them are able to act in a surprise round. The party's Paladin, his mount, the Monk, and our Barbarian are all simultaneously brought down to sub-half HP and rendered Poisoned, Unconscious, or both. By the time we were finally able to act, we combined the strength of all our remaining magical abilities to pull our helpless comrades into the protection of the forcefield with us. And after we succeeded in that, we were able to identify the leader of our assailants. This character was meant to be played by the girl the DM had introduced earlier in the night, but when I say "played," I mean he told her what to roll and when, and he decided what all of her actions would be. I can't imagine it was a terribly entertaining experience for her, as it certainly wasn't for us. Her character didn't exactly last long either, as she was immediately Entangled and pummeled to pulp by our rejuvenated Monk. By now the rest of the Drow warband had decided to make a full retreat, and we were left in exactly the same situation as we were when we began that night, the only difference being that we hadn't been able to make a Long Rest as we'd intended. This "encounter" lasted three hours, over which time our DM had been drinking, smoking weed, and even turned on the television to have a football game playing in the background. He clearly no longer cares about our investment in the campaign, and we've begun talks of usurping his DM status.
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Jan 5, 2017 20:32
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Yeah, it's torches and pitchforks time. Viva la revolucion!
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Jan 5, 2017 20:56
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I was that guy early in my gaming career. Get him out of the DM's seat, you'll all feel better for it in the long run.
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Jan 5, 2017 21:08
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While I didn't make that particular DMing mistake, I did do some pretty dumbshit things in my first attempt at running a game. Having my players unanimously tell me "hey this poo poo sucks, we're gonna not play anymore" was a drat important lesson and it sounds like it's time for him to learn it.
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Jan 5, 2017 21:45
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I can't even figure out what the fuckup was. It started off like a typical railroad combined with "DM introduces overpowered enemy in order to grandstand with an NPC" and a twist of "DM does something dumb to impress a woman," but then the DM calls off the bad guys for no reason, his proxy ends up getting her rear end kicked, and he's smoking weed and watching football the whole time anyway? It's like a six-year-old's collage of DM mistakes - lots of stuff, but no theme or consistency.
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Jan 6, 2017 00:16
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raminasi posted:It's like a six-year-old's collage of DM mistakes - lots of stuff, but no theme or consistency. Much like a bad campaign. When I started playing D&D, it was with my friend and her older, stoner friends. I was past ten but not yet a teenager, she was of similar age, and I think her oldest friend was struggling to grow facial hair. So these are just flashes of memory that have stuck with me. The games she ran usually started with our characters either naked or nearly so, one time she enforced a language barrier such that two of our characters had to speak in Unicorn because that was the only language we had in common, one game just turned out to be the Batman movie (the one with Jack Nicholson as the Joker), and at one point, she informed me that thanks to a potion her character now had a THAC0 of 4. One of her friends constantly played a jester whose only joke was "Wanna see my pee-pee?" Of course, since he rolled well, this would always send the ogres or whatever into paroxysms of laughter. My own fumbling attempts at running games were no better. I designed this cool island, and so obviously I had to get people onto it, right? Every single game I ran back then, of which there were at least three, started with their ship being attacked by a kraken, destroyed, and them washing up on the shore of this island, with a Monty Haul of loot from the ship washing up too. Notable loot included a folding boat (And wouldn't that have been useful in the shipwreck), an Apparatus of Kwalish, and a talking pony. What can I say, we were kids. I wonder if I still have that island somewhere in my D&D papers.
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Jan 6, 2017 01:41
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I remember trying my hand at DM'ing 3.5 back when I was younger, it was the Age of Worms campaign from Dungeon magazine. I don't think I hit ALL of the marks for sucking at it, but, I definitely committed a few major sins. - DMPC dual wielding bastard swords with a custom prestige class that negated the penalties for dual wielding bastard swords? Check - Legacy Weapons for everyone at level 1? Check. By god, I had that book, I was going to use it. - Ridiculous ease of access to prime magical gear? Oh yeah.
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Jan 6, 2017 02:55
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the_steve posted:I remember trying my hand at DM'ing 3.5 back when I was younger, it was the Age of Worms campaign from Dungeon magazine. Oh god, this was me too. I remember the DMPC very well - I was GMing my first game from a 3.5 campaign book, and there was an encounter with some Vrocks. I didn't have the monster manual, and there was no mention of what a Vrock was other than the statblock, so from the "spores" ability I assumed it was some sort of giant walking mushroom thing. My players, mostly D&D veterans, found it hilarious that I had jumped to that conclusion, so I doubled down and made one of them a friendly but mysterious mushroom-thing that followed them around being generally badass and saving their asses. Worst of all, one of the players seemed to really like the DMPC and was super encouraging, which made me think it was a good thing. Fortunately I eventually got the message from the rest of the table groaning whenever the DMPC did anything.
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Jan 6, 2017 14:25
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the_steve posted:I remember trying my hand at DM'ing 3.5 back when I was younger, it was the Age of Worms campaign from Dungeon magazine. this sounds like the group i am quitting, everyone gets EVERYTHING they want AND more
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Jan 6, 2017 14:30
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There really needs to be some sort of section in a rulebook about the difference between NPCs and DMPC's. I mean, I can see how people fall into the trap - "we only have 3 players, and no one wants to play X (the Cleric), so I'll just stat up an NPC." "Hmm, I better make sure (s)he can do the job, so I'll bend the rules a little in character creation" "Now I need a cool back story, and hey, I can use this character for plot hooks......" "Why have all my players left? What did I do wrong?"
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Jan 6, 2017 15:43
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Weapons of Legacy is a gigantic trap option in book form, because it sounds cool, but taking large personal penalties to empower something that can still be taken away is bad, particularly the martial weapons where you take penalties to your to-hit that are usually only barely overcome by the weapons enhancement bonus. Or the minor weapons that Peter out at level ten.
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Jan 6, 2017 16:13
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Grey Hunter posted:There really needs to be some sort of section in a rulebook about the difference between NPCs and DMPC's. My favorite was when the party rescued a dragon egg and decided to raise it, so I gave it the dragon bardic knowledge feat so it could share insights (and plot points) I had no other way of naturally getting to the party. He never fought in combat, he hid in a backpack or the warforged as needed, and provided an IC mouthpiece for me to be snarky and tell the PCs "hey consider this since you all rolled crap on knowledge checks/have no points in History (and why would you)/otherwise need a hint". Kurieg posted:Weapons of Legacy is a gigantic trap option in book form, because it sounds cool, but taking large personal penalties to empower something that can still be taken away is bad, particularly the martial weapons where you take penalties to your to-hit that are usually only barely overcome by the weapons enhancement bonus. Or the minor weapons that Peter out at level ten.
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Jan 6, 2017 17:24
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