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what about a dm that favors a character more than any other. My party is in a city and we are apart of a kind of known group not to widely known at all, our half orc barbarian decides to go up and clobber a guy over the head for spitting at our rouge member for trying to steal his coin pouch. He does and the guards come over and asks him questions, all the while there is a gnome in a sack over the half orcs back and hes wiggling around plan for anyone on the street to see. The half orc reaches back around to the gnome and smacks him hard enough to make him stop moving in front of the guards, then when the guard tells him he should be in jail for hurting a civilian, he challenges the guard to a duel. the guard accepts(surprising i know) and they have a bet that if he wins the half orc goes to jail if he loses the half orc goes free. So of course the half orc wins by a landslide and walks away Scot free. I even say its BS and the Dm says No its fine cause its a Barbarian CAPITAL CITY. HELP ME PLZ
My pet peeve isn't about a DM (because I am the DM for my group), but the player who tries to backseat DM. Like, seriously, if you argue with me at session zero that the other player's warlock has to be evil because that's the stereotype and keep arguing for an hour and a half then you just volunteered to not be there when we actually start playing.
The biggest thing I dislike about DMs? Being inconsistant with the rules! It's one thing to have homebrew. It's another to apply it on Monday, but, not Friday.
certain situations though i can imagine bending the rules. like we had a spell that couldn't flow through water (it's an electric spell) and they had a really clever idea they were in a bar and through alcohol on the crowd attacking them and tried to cast that spell they argued it wasnt water it was alcohol and because it was clever and very interesting I let it slide. (good dming or bad dming?
My peeve: "My Precious Thing" Whether it's a favourite player, favorite villain, of setting, they pick this one thing and it gets the benefit of every doubt. This precious thing can't be hurt, defeated, changed, or captured. It's resistant or immune to attacks and certainly also the laws of physics. It's a complete lack of respect for everything and everyone else, and a disregard for balance, fairness or agency. Gah! Hate it.
in one of my current campaigns I had a my precious thing. it was a divine curse on one of the PC's, his hair was magically glowing pink at the brightness of a torch. I made it immune to cutting, it had immunity to magic and basically was impossible to get rid of. the player did eventually get it cured, by asking the god who cursed him for forgiveness and paying a decent amount of gold to their temple, but it kind of became a thing when ever he'd get hit by an attack "did it at least damage my hair?"
My pet peeve is when DM's don't let you ability check hardly ever! Or let you use the strengths of your character. I ran a half-elf sorcerer that had 20 CHA by lvl 4, proficient in all of the CHA abilities/skills and the group would pretty much always let me talk to the NPCs first since I was the 'charismatic' one of the group. I would often talk to NPCs in their native language if my character knew it to get on their good side and I was definitely into the roleplaying aspect. The DM would hardly ever let me do a persuasion/deception/intimidation check. I would get instantly turned down or told NO by NPCs without any kind of check. I am not one to 'ask' the DM... "Could I at least make a persuasion check?" but it got to the point where it felt I was useless unless I reminded the DM and he would get annoyed. What was the point of being charismatic and being proficient in those skills if I never got to use them? I am sure some feel this way when they have created their characters to REALLY benefit from things like deception, history, nature, survival etc but the DM never gives you a chance or never asks for the check.
What the heck kind of DM doesn't let you ability check? If my player asks for an ability check, I grant it (whether it makes sense to do it or not). I also occasionally let players know if a certain action might require Ability Checks in order to accomplish (climbing a rope, pushing someone, lying to an NPC, etcetera). What I don't allow is "repeated checks on the same thing". If you don't spot anything with a Perception Check, I'm not going to let you keep rolling one until you do spot something. Especially not with the reasoning, "I'm going to look extra hard this time". A player needs new information or a new thing to do, in order to make the same check again. Still, I've never heard of a DM who doesn't allow ability checks. That's like half the fun as a DM is letting players try things and watching them succeed or fail.
I'd say that the worst DM I ever gamed with (not counting myself in elementary school) was this dude who couldn't seem to tell the difference between in-character and OOC behavior. It was the first time I had gamed with this guy, so I wanted to stick to basics and made a typically gruff traditionalist dwarf. Because of that, he decided I was a problem player. At one point, he took me aside and said he felt like he was walking on eggshells with me and I needed to chill out. To this day, I have no idea what he was talking about. Later on, a suspicious ship showed up at the town we were at. When I started asking for clarifications of what was going on (the kinds of things I'd be able to see if I was looking at it) he accused me of demanding all the answers instead of trying to get them in-game. Then he proceeded to railroad the party into an ambush that everyone saw coming, but was still a "surprise" because he shut down everything we tried to do. He was visibly relieved after that, saying we'd nearly found him out, but he was able to get us in the end. Then he asked me not to come back, which I was happy to oblige.
What a Dumb nut DM. Its all about Role Play.... getting in Character... its not a video game. I hope you have found a better DM and good game. I have been playing for 35 years and still going. Cheers!
When a player isn't there and you still want them to support the group, just say they are drunk, have a head-ache, feel a bit sad or any other reason why they shouldn't be very active. Generally only let them do things if the party asks him/her to or if something is REALLY in their street (Making a history check when that character is clearly the best at history, for example). In battle, the players can ask him to something. If he doesn't get any orders, just employ some basic tactics. I think that's usually a good thing to do, because that way the party still has access to that characters skills.
As a DM: I don't play a player's character if the player isn't there. I will generally make some explanation as to why they're not there. I also don't have player roles. If there's no cleric, so be it because someone else finds some other way to heal players. Plus I try not to be an antagonistic DM, but I don't want them to win so easily.
the only time i've can remember taking control of a PC, we ended the previous session with the PC in a dragon's gut, the player had a sick kid so they wouldn't show, so i took control of the PC to get them out of the stomach, and then had them hide in a magic house. i gave the PC a flaw of something to the extent of "fear of dragons" that the player took a few levels to over come. i originally wasn't going to give him the flaw but the Player was actually the one who suggested it.
our team didn't have a cleric and i went to buy a belt of healing in 3.5 the gm said we had to wait i paid extra to get it quicker, we get the belt only 2 charges doesn't refill the charges god dammit gm i asked for 1 thing
If you don't have a healer the DM could always tweak the setting so health potions are more available. They're useful but not the best for healing, so stocking up on them wouldn't be too hard or game-breaking and if players forget to buy them, SOL.
Noah Mehringer I do add more healing potions if there are no healers. However the healer is the easiest role to do without in 5e D&D. Paladins have lay on hands. Bards, Paladins, and rangers have access to healing spells, and fighters can heal themselves with second wind.
You can kick the door in, you can burn it with acid, OR you can just Leave It Be. Not everything faced needs to be tackled. Run away from the horrifying monsters, go lick your wounds, Talk you way through or out, or just say eff it and go on a Different adventure.
In a recent session that I DMed, I kind of expected the party to do just that, running away from the big nasty that can petrify people. Instead, they proceed to pellet it with arrows and spells and then eventually use environmental effects to blow up the entire dungeon. That was an interesting session.
"Bad" DMs don't learn. So if you aren't one, this video won't affect you. If you learn something, you are just like the rest of us: A person with more to learn.
I think mine had to be by the book DM. He followed the challenge rating to a T, he awarded magic items as such, and when our party grew from four players to seven players, he pretty much stuck to the same formula. (We were playing Pathfinder.). The game just dragged on and grew stale. Next to no challenge and we were still level 2 after a few months of playing once a week. I eventually left the game.
I'm a believer in tricameral balance between the DM, the players, and the dice. Whenever a game leans toward one of these too much, it's probably a bad game, and the DM bears most of the blame. A DM that prioritizes setting and takes away player agency is often singled out as an offender, but to me, a DM that's driven too much by the "tyranny of fun" to please the players is equally bad, especially in a campaign setting. "Fun" is not a very clear concept - what's fun for one is not necessarily fun for others (especially if a PC is hogging the RP spotlight). More importantly, when it's all about fun and the "rule of cool", games start to resemble one another - fun gets reduced to the lowest common denominator. Plus, player actions stop having consequences. It's not really "DM vs. players" if some players consistently make dumb choices, and suffer no consequences. That makes a mockery of player agency. Throwing in dice as an element of randomness actually forces the DM to improvise, rather than letting fun (i.e. that which players want) carry the day. Of course, overusing dice can also derail games, but a good DM can usually figure out a way to make anomalous or bad die rolls work to make the game more and not less interesting.
My biggest DM pet peeve is probably the stat ignorer. The most common example of this is the DM who ignores social attributes and skills... but I see it with intelligence/ knowledge-based skills and abilities too
The basic "bad" DM or player is, I think, usually caused by a fundamental misunderstanding of the game, that DnD is about CO-OPERATIVE STORYTELLING. If you as DM are trying to control everything or are taking away the ability to make meaningful decisions, you aren't cooperating. If you are actively killing the players, you aren't storytelling.
I'm in a campaign where my character was enslaved and had to watch her whole family get murdered as a part of their backstory. As such I was playing the skeptic who didn't really trust anyone but themselves, we'll my dm has this recurring idea of visions and dreams and essentially used that to manipulate my character into trusting the party. This type of stuff really bothers me, I had a whole backstory that still had lasting implications to my character that I was wanting to be their story and all of it was essentially ripped away. There goes any potential for that aspect of my characters identity to go through an arc where they may get over this and eventually learn not everyone is evil. That still makes me mad.
In my DnD session (I'm typically the DM) I also have a PC; but, it is relegated to a supporting role. Whenever approached with a trap / puzzle, I offer no input. However, let the other PCs use my spells / abilities during such times. I also intentionally hamstring myself by making somewhat bad choices regarding stat points. During the last session, I played as a Dwarven Bard with more points into Con and Str than Cha. In another game, I played as a one-armed Goliath Sorcerer (I couldn't use an off-hand or two handed weapons).
I'm glad I don't tick these boxes. As a Dm, the last time I fudged dice was a fortnight ago, a heavily wounded character caught a Dragons breath and instead of counting out the damage I muttered it with each roll, it should have eliminated his character but I called the damage at 3 points off, so that he could roll death saving throws - the character failed them. I'm looking forward to a Player pet peeve episode.. I've got one guy that always plays the same concept and he never works it into a backstory; the reluctant, chaotic neutral, non-magic Ranger. I'm just thankful for the Spell-less Ranger (Unearthed Arcana).
I don't really know what to call it but my worst kind of DM is the DM who cares so much about the numbers and the mechanics they take away from the overall experience.
A dice lord. the dice are the game and when I roll that you die, you die. When the real purpose of the DM screen is to allow the DM to hide that hes been rolling ALL 20's all night.
@@fhuber7507 Rolling in the open gives players the most agency--they know that if they proceed without a plan or act stupid they could die. It is a GAME not narrative story writing. If it were--just sit down and write a book together. Its a game and the GM should be a ref in the game world while the players create their own story. People who want GMs to flub dice so everyone "can have a good time" are the same people who don't know that without risk there can be no true victory. Without challenge their can be no honor.
Let's see 1) Players are enemy, CHECK 2) DM Player Character CHECK 3) Over Bearing DM CHECK I've had all of them and keep seeming to only find them. I think there is a reason they have openings in their group and looking for new players. :P
I know, like i get it, we're having fun and shit, but i spent fuckign 12 hours working on this week's bit of the story, and they spend more than half of the play time talking about if they should order pizza or chinese and then watching fucking youtube videos they found during the week.
This is why I have the rule of "no cellphones at the D&D Table. Same rule with meals. You can have drinks and snacks, but if we're going to have lunch, everything D&D goes away while we eat, and it comes back when we're done. We also have periodic breaks every time the players get to an inn or take an extended rest, where they can view their cellphones for a few minutes. Penalties for cellphones at the D&D Table include: Gaining less XP from combat (since you're not playing, how are you gaining experience?), less loot (same question), losses of turns (if it takes you more than 15 seconds to decide what to do on your turn, or to decide whether or not you want to take your turn, you lose your turn. Exceptions are made for players who are obviously thinking about what to do and can't decide easily), and finally, removal of your player and character from the game if it goes on long enough. If you're only here to socialize with people who aren't here (or to socialize with computers and youtube and crap), then I don't want you here. We're here to play a game together, have fun together, and not be rude shitheads. Don't waste my time as a DM. It's a lot of work to build the next adventure you players have decided on going on. If you didn't want to play it, let me know. Or, if you're bored with D&D, let me know. If you no longer want to play it, let me know. There is no reason to humor me by continuing to play something you never really wanted to play to begin with. We can either fix it so it's to your liking again, or we can disband the group if nobody wants to play anymore, so I don't have to waste my time creating adventure hooks and dungeons and encounters and NPCs and everything else. If you're just going to waste my time, I'd rather go do something else that would be fun to me, than have my time be wasted and be bored.
For real. I'm running a campaign for some new-ish players. One of them wanted to play a dog. I eventually allowed it after we agreed that the dog was intelligent and the victim of some supernatural something-or-other, to be elaborated on later in the campaign. So the adventure goes on, and they come upon a goblin fort. The dog (playing a rogue, btw), has the idea of using disguise hit to masquerade as a goblin and infiltrate. They are small after all! I thought it was kind of a stretch, but i let them roll because I didn't want to railroad. Nat 20. Laughs were had as the dog in an impossibly convincing goblin costume waddled in on its hind legs without a second glance from the bugbear guards. It was a genuinely funny moment for everyone. Flash forward 3 sessions later, and now that is their answer to every problem they come across. Stopped from entering the governors mansion? Disguise as a guard captain! In the middle of a fight with a sorcerer? Disguise! They're beating the joke to death and it seems like the player is only engaged when they can attempt to make a joke of the situation. I went into the game knowing they aren't the combative type, but the other players trying to properly weigh options and take action while they hang in the background until "disguise kit lol!" is getting old...
Easy way to solve that problem. Guard animals. Guard animals can smell that he's a dog. Disguise doesn't work against them. He's got to play more carefully from then on and actually SNEAK if they're wearing a disguise... There's any number of ways to break the habit of wanting to disguise constantly. Including having guards "pat down" people entering locations, including other guards. Or, having the guards try to talk to the dog, and bring him in for questioning if he doesn't answer at all. Don't just allow "free reign" when someone rolls a 20. I always have a "consequence" to that 20, unless it's in combat. I had a guy use Intimidate against a shopkeeper to try to get a better deal. Natural 20. I gave him everything he asked for, for free... But, then delivered the caveat that he was no longer allowed in that shop or guards would be called next time. A Natural 20 isn't a "I can do anything I want" card. It's a "This is what happens as a result of your Natural 20". Meaning, it can be anything the DM wants it to be. All a 20 has to be is a "critical success". Maybe the disguise works against the first set of guys, but they have to roll subsequently for each new set. And, why wouldn't they have to roll against everyone's perception individually?
My first and as of now last GM put me off the hobby most likely for good. He lied about the type of campaign he was running and forced his own agenda into my character's backstory after we started playing. He also played his own character that was consistently antagonistic toward the character he'd insisted I play and allowed other players to do so as well. I tried talking to him about this on multiple occasions and he just couldn't be made to listen. As I'm sure you know I'm not playing with him anymore.
That...sounds like a really bad DM. I wouldn't let that turn you off from trying the hobby again though. Just with a different group. I hope that DM was new to DMing, because that sounds like a bad case of both Railroad DM and DM as a Player.
Blah. Sounds like you had the misfortune to enter into a super heavily established group where his players are all used to his style and he isn't changing it. Not very welcoming to newcomers. In short, you need a new group.
Most may have an established group, but I have not encountered too many that are so set in their ways and exclusive. I would at least give it one more chance before deciding it isn't worth messing with. The one you encountered seems like a pretty extreme case. I would certainly hope I'm not like that to my players. The group I am currently DMing for consists of 4 people (and a 5th who is a sometimes-er). 2 of those 4 are my coworkers who I know and like. The other 2 are their friends--one is the friend of one player and the other the friend of the other. I had never met those 2 before we started our campaign. And those 2 didn't know anyone except the friend they came with. I and my players (particularly the ones who DID know me and each other beforehand) have gone out of our way to include everyone as much as possible and the group is meshing really well and everyone is getting along and, I think, feeling included. This is despite the fact that some of these people would probably have never chosen to hang out together if it wasn't for D&D. My experiences with D&D have all been more along this vein. I'm sorry you first try was so bad, but please don't think for a moment that all, or even most groups are like that. If it just turns out tabletop RPGs are not for you, then that's cool. It's not for everyone. But I have loved it so much I would really recommend giving it another earnest shot before giving up on it. If you find a group you can mesh with and enjoy the game it is totally worth it.
I had a DM that combined both the DMPC and the DM vs PC into one, he would inject his DMPC into the group where it made no sense. for example, we were playing a group of characters set in a world overrun and controlled by the undead, the party decided to play as revolutionaries and insurgents in this world and played a good party set out to rid the world of the undead scourge!!! His DMPC was an undead diplomat, the only thing that prevented us from killing his character outright was because he asked us not to. Same game, he constantly set us up against powerful enemies meant to bend our wills to his. Only by insanely lucky roles and clever use of situational manipulation did anyone survive a single session much less a campaign (and this included his overpowered DMPC). When he was finally bored of the campaign he engineered a party wipe and ended the game with a whimper. On a different note. My personal games I will typically run a large cast of complex NPC's and simple NPC's. Usually, there is one or two NPC's that will accompany the party on their quest. They are there to fill in plot holes I might've missed or need to reinforce, go on stupid errands that the party needs to do without splitting the party, and as reinforcements, in case they have exceptionally bad roles or I misjudged the power of an enemy. I have them as background characters and they change according to what makes sense for the story. At times these NPC's have been a great boon to the party, showing up in the nick of time to help at a critical moment, other times I kill off a well-liked NPC to provide motivation to move toward a goal, and rarely I'll have them turn on the party. Most of the time I use NPC's like this to fill in a role that the party is missing, or adjust for the fact that one of the PC's couldn't make it to the game. I really like the way that this has played out in my games throughout the years, and I hope that it will help some DM's who are struggling with a few things in their own game. My specific rules for these NPC's are: 1- All NPC's are expendable, period. If they die they die. 2- They cannot help the party solve a problem unless directly asked, and they have zero capability for sudden insights. 3- They have a limited world knowledge, there perception of a situation might not be the accurate one. 4- Most are neither brave nor an adventurer, they have their own reasons for helping the party... once those reasons are complete, they need to leave! This isn't everything but you get the point
One of the worst GM experiences: We're starting a Twilight 2000 campaign. My character is a Latina former Ranger turned drug dealer who starts the game with a Godwa amount of cash and equipment. (All rolled by game rules.) Now I am the kind of player who likes to give the GM backstory to work with. So I invented a former lover who was also my Ranger captain, now retired. I thought the GM could use my NPC for hints, plot hooks, etc. First 10 minutes into the game, my former tutor and lover shows up as a now neo-Nazi skinhead who takes over my gorgeously crafted hide out. Why this is wrong: If you don't want to let my character start out as crazy rich, just say so. Don't let me spend hours in creation of something you'll take away in 10 minutes. 2) I gave you my backstory lovet
I'm a new D&D player and my first adventure is The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. Most of the gaming group is really inexperienced and the game has become like was mentioned in this video, every fight and encounter just feels like we are just barely surviving by the skin of our teeth, on top of that the whole dungeon feels like it's out to kill us and we had a jerk rouge assassin who keeps trying to steal and kill anything and anyone he finds, in our party, that is until the halfling cleric he was picking on the most eventually cast glyph of warding on stone shoved it up his butt when the rouge was paralyzed after a fight against an electric eel and then blew him up. Trial by fire.
Where you aware of the difficulties of this module at session zero? If you are feeling overwhelmed, I would highly suggest asking the DM for a bit of a time out at the beginning of the next session to talk things through and raise points regarding the module difficulty and the other player's behaviour. Just try not to make it confrontational. The best way to do this is to simply ask for help. "I feel this is too hard for me. I don't know about anybody else but things are a little overwhelming. I'd super appreciate any help with playing this game." Or "I really don't know how my character will handle this character that seems to want to disrupt stuff. It's a bit jarring to my experience. Can you help me try to figure out your character and why he seems to be disruptive to the adventuring party?" Nice people are willing to help. If you ask for help, and the group (and DM) is silent that gives you an idea to the sort of group it is. Just remain respectful and talk to people to come up with solutions in the gaming group.
The "All your flaws take effect now" GM. Playing Vampire the Masquerade and knew i wanted top play an interesting yet flawed character with a rich backstory. Session one, every single flaw came right at my character in the middle of a combat. 2 Mid ranked enemies ( I dont know remember the details perfectly), My characters sire, ( i had pissed him off by telling the to bugger off instead of complying instantly like he wanted), and the mundane cops (someone, the GM, threw in police record because of the sires anger)... needles to say... that character died 2 rounds after these parties showed up to the fight that he was already in with his squad.
lol, had a GM that covered ALL of these issue in a game I was playing, 1 player was turned into a changling from out of the blue, her back story was completely unraveled by session 4, so her entire character and backstory were completely obliterated. he treated charms and confusions as dominates, that last full duration with no follow up saves to break. mary-sued an orc we captured. and constantly complained about how "Hard" it is to kill players.
For me, it will always be the railroad DM. I enjoy an open world that is alive and breathing and the players get to interact with that world in various way, which is where the fun and/or drama comes in. If you're forced onto the railroad train, that interaction is very minimal and starts to not be fun. As a DM, I usually get signs from the players that my DM habits are turning into that playstyle (stacking of dice, drawing on character sheets, pulling out the phones, etc...), and when it happens, you just need to take a couple steps back and rethink your goals at the table.
This one kind of depends on what your DM has time for. If you don't want to play a Railroad type game, you need to find a DM who has more time. Some DM's really only have time to flesh out enough of the game for one or two days a week and they aren't terribly great at improvising. That being said... When you remove player agency to railroad... That's a problem.
Probably the worst time I've had was with an over bearing DM. This was his world and you had to play his way, with the limited number options that he said were available in his setting. Examples include the following. Everyone had to be human. you could not be a Druid, Bard, Barbarian, or a Warlock. There were restrictions on backgrounds, and a personal pet peeve was that since it was set in vaguely middle age Europe then that meant that there were only people of European decent, if you catch my drift. Which did not sit well with me. For reasons why look to my profile pic.
There is evidence of the presence of people from Romanised North Africa in Roman Britain.(43 to 410 AD) Archaeological inscriptions suggest that most of these residents were involved with the military. However, some were in the upper echelons of society. Analysis of a skull found in a Roman grave in Yorkshire indicated that it belonged to a mixed-race female. Her sarcophagus was made of stone and also contained a jet bracelet and an ivory bangle, indicating great wealth for the time. Historical records indicate the presence of a very small African population in Britain dating at least as far as the 12th century. In 2013, a skeleton was discovered in Fairford, Gloucestershire, which forensic anthropology revealed to be that of a sub-Saharan African woman thought to be an unpaid bonded servant or slave, who died between the years 896 and 1025. *TLDR?* Even if it was middle age Europe black people wouldn't be impossible, just rare. Sounds like your DM didn't care about historical accuracy as much as he did about recreating the T.V. version of the middle ages. The rest of the restrictions are nothing special though. Limiting classes is very common if annoying to people who just want to try out all the options. He did pick some odd classes to restrict. What edition of D&D? Or was it a different game?
No, not very subtle at all. I talked him into letting me be who I wanted. I mean jeez, I have to be human let me pick what kind of human. But it bugged me that I even had to that.
It was a modified version of fifth edition D&D, but the story and setting were his own creation that he had been running for 30+ years. He was just overall very controlling and over baring. On your other points about history, I have to admit that it is very interesting and that I didn't know any of that. I knew there were Africans in the Roman Empire but I had no idea that they were as far away as the British Isles. So thank you for the quick lesson. My only argument at the time was if magic can be real why can't I be non-white. LoL
I had this DM recently who just killed everything. Every time we tried to save a person or city or fought in a battle with NPC troops everyone would die except us. It made me feel like we were doing nothing positive. Sure the bad guys were dead but so were all the villagers so in the end their was no point. Often times main NPC characters would be killed in Cut scenes so we could do nothing to help them all we could do is watch as a NPC we had befriended and invested time in was killed by the DM. In the last session before 3 of us quit he tried to murder our cleric by locking him in a Prismatic Shield with an enemy boss keeping the rest of the party out of the fight. The Cleric luckily outsmarted the boss and DM by using Hold Person to paralyze the Boss. But even after wailing on the Boss for 30 minutes it stayed up. Turns out the DM had given the boss over 1000 health to fight a single lvl 14 cleric. The only reason the Cleric survived is because the DM continued to roll terrible the whole time even after Hold Person wore off the bosses attacks continued to fail.
My first major campaign I made a lot of errors as the DM, but I think my worst mistake was being the overbearing DM and forcing a few of my players who came into the campaign a few weeks late into certain classes in order to try to help balance the party. One of the players took to the class and had fun, but the other really wanted to be a heavy hitter and was miserable playing as a rogue. He never really wanted to sneak around or use the rogue abilities, he just wanted to run up to things to cut them down and be the big hero. I've since looked back through that campaign a lot to fix my faults and I've since let my characters choose their own classes and let them figure out how to balance their shortcomings. While old me felt this would be a terrible time for them, they actually have a lot of fun figuring out ways to get around challenges that they're not suited for in any way.
My second biggest failure that campaign was not moderating the party very well when it was revealed that one of them was evil, and working against them the whole time. I should have stopped the game there, and had the group talk things out out of game, but instead I let things play out and PCs died and the quest they had been on for months ended as a failure. There were a lot of people who were angry and the campaign died out after that.
This is the first d&d characters for my party and myself, we are about lvl 5. Anyway our DM just decided that magic items should be super rare now and didn't warn us in any way. so my team mates and I have collected magic weapons, potions and items from our quests (I got a alchemy jar), we were also allowed to buy common and uncommon magic items off the shelf but we had to barter for them and we could roll once a fortnight to see if our desired rare item was on the shelf, if it was we could barter for it (using this I bought boots of elven kind , robe of usefulness, bag of holding and a rust bag of tricks) I should also note I was the only one who cared to buy items only because we seamed to only get magic swords which my character couldn't use {rock gnome cleric}. Ok now for the story for the last 2-3 months we have been preparing to defeat this mindflayer that was preventing us from mining adamantite, we all believed we had enough power to kill the mindflayer because we got two spell scrolls that could stupefy him. We set off but when we entered the cave he was in he had a magic obsorbing battery there which turned all our magic items into ordinary items including our potions, my characters God was unable to reach me or talk to me we were also stripped of all our weapons/armor. For 4-5 hours in real life and 1-2weeks in game time we had to destroy the battery and escape, when we destroyed the battery all magic items on the planet became ordinary. When my characters God finally connected with me again she simply said "oh there you are" oh we did kill the mindflayer because our DM had a beholder help us. He then told us he decided magic items should be super rare so he stripped the world of them. I still feel railroaded and I think this may have caused my character to turn from chaotic good to chaotic neutral being that the entire time my character was praying with no responce
My pet peeve is when the DM leaves crucially important things down to unvoidable dice rolls over role-playing and sound common sense. We briefly had an issue with some custom Wild Magic sorceror nonsense, but after we the players made our concerns known he revamped it with a great deal of work to make it more to the group's liking. In my opinion it has never been better. We get tense whenever the DM announces "Wild magic surge" but the worst that can typically happen is that we need to adapt on the fly to some wacky effect.
Rules lawyers , and the story driven dm where his story is more important than the characters and players and most of the adventure is a cut scene had a guy like that and I nearly beat the piss out of him
I feel your pain. My last GM thought it was his job to elevate the bad guys, mooks and minions included, to a level that made the PCs feel worthless. If it was in one game or setting I might could have waved it off as the flavor of that particular milieu but it was literally everything he ran. Plus he has ongoing mental issues that would continually bubble to the surface and ruin games. So glad I don't game with him anymore. But to be fair I have played with several GMs that used the game as way to inflict their mental issues onto those around them. I love this hobby but damn it just seems to attract the mentally ill.
my worst time playing was a game where the DM started me and another player off in a different location than the rest of the party. we had to wait for them to get to us. it took the entire game session for that to happen. the game ended when the others got too us. at the end of the session, the DM awarded me 1 point of XP for playing. the other guy (who was waiting with me) got 1000.... cause he asked a question while waiting.
I think my pet peeve would be railroading. The worst RPG experience I had was playing Aces and 8s with a friend of mine. Back then she was brutal-the opening encounter was 5 vs 2, 4 of said enemies having range advantage AND protection. From then on, we were basically slaves of the big bad, and when I killed his minion during a mission, I got punished. What, did you expect for us to take all that abuse and give us a target and NOT do something? Come on!
I've been an "antagonistic DM". My error was not to clarify that my intention was for the campaing to be rather dark... So there was an active effort on my part to make my pcs suffer. Still, I don't think I'll go that hard on that route again.
DMPC - I've seen this go right and wrong so many times. The best ways to make it work are to run the DMPC's like mercenaries. they don't solve problems, but you can ask them stuff. I like to start quests off with a "the guy sent to grab the part" so i can have a foot in building the party's team dynamic a bit, but i usually also make sure that character is killed off pretty early on in the story. Helicopter DM - if you need a party to have a specific class... give it to them as an npc that takes part of the loot. as for the "charmed players controlled by the DM" well is it a charm or a control spell? if it's control, the dm should have more direct hand in what the player does. if it's just an influence, let the player pick how they do it, just make sure they do what they are told. finally the "changing a character" if the story calls for it or you think it's cool, to get people to elect the general as their leader (george washington?) or maybe taking a player to the side and saying "hey i know you wanted this but do you think you can do this, i'll give you ___" as long as you aren't dictating to the player what they must do, i don't see the harm in giving them options. but if they say no and you push it, you probably need to grow up. DM vs PC - depends on the campaign. if you are playing in a high death campaign. it makes sense. if someone fudges dice and cheats to kill players, that's a real immature dick move. but I've played with plenty of groups who wanted the challenge of a high death no second chances campaign. and as long as it's something that you go into willingly, it's some of the most fun i've had in DND. also is this a reupload? i feel like i've head the whole "general to king" , "necro to pally" and the "6x1 -roof = wipe" parts before.
They've told those stories before. You're not imagining. But this is a different video, I think. The trade off for a DM *almost* killing the party over and over is: "Is the juice worth the squeeze?" I have a DM right now that, every session, we have had a few too many opportunities to wipe. Part of it is some shtick rolls, but the encounters have been variants of very difficult to feckin' deadly. But we all started coming more prepared to feed potions to each other or pack some more heal spells. We have adapted so it isn't only dumb luck that gets us through. But, seriously, sometimes dumb luck gets us through. That's usually after luck had not been a lady with us for the beginning/middle of the session
Ya Im also not a fan of the Dominating DM, the type of DM that has to have control over everything. Im in this one campaign where our DM is like that. She constantly segways the main story to have one of her own PCs be the focus of a session. As an example, we did a one on one downtime session and she had my character go threw some training. This was fine and all, however there were times that I didnt get to decide the fate of my character and She just rolled for me. And at the end of that session it turned out that the NPC i was training under what just a time skipped version of that same character she keeps placing in almost ever single session we do now a days. There were a few other thinks like how she completely One shot killed my near max health character with that same NPC but that's a different issue. She also has NPCs do 90 if not 98% of major damage to a single boss instead of letting her players do that damage. So far we have gotten into 4 boss like battles...and each time an NPC one shoted the boss after only a single round or 2 of combat. Though by far not the worst game ive ever been apart of, its still bad DMing and its slowly driving me and several other players away from her campaign.
On DMs playing party members. I love having players who come up with amazing craziness to get through their adventures, and I've now had two occasions where a player hs hired an NPC as a supporter for the party (in one case calling a favor from an old friend in her backstory, and another buying off a wayward sellsword who could lead the party into an abandoned temple full of bizarre artefacts.) I never intended them to be more than one offs, but the players loved having them around, so they just wound up travelling with the group, getting into barfights, breaking into ancient alien vaults and slaying kobolds. But while they became pretty badass in their own right, I always did what I could to make sure the spotlight stayed on the PCs. I'm honestly still not sure it's the best call, but, time'll tell.
You covered my least favorite. The Mary Sue DM. I played a game with a new DM who thought it would be cool to roll up super human stats for the characters. Through some bazar method I ended up with a sorcerer with a 28 charisma. That was a bad sign but I wanted to see where this went. Besides, he let me play the one race no other DM ever let me play. A kobald! So the other players did not show or just strait up dropped leaving me and the DM playing a character. We went into a library where my character intended to find definitive proof of a lost advanced kobald civilization. Each room had a guardian of some sort and each combat went something like this. The DM's character wins initiative, kills everything, sometimes before I could get a spell off. Alright. May be this library has a clue that will lead me to this lost civilization. Nope. The library definitively stated in numerous books that kobalds never had more than scattered tribes that would sometimes become minions to dragons. So not only did I not find a plot point, but he also crushed any possible story hooks involving my characters goals. To be fair I did the same thing when I was a new DM. I had a 3rd level fighter helping a level 1 party. BIG mistake. But this guy took that failure to a level I've never seen before or since.
I'm not talking about physics not making sense in like a logical way, I'm talking about when the gm goes out of their way to invent physics that exist without cause to the point where you can't trust walking down the street without the ground turning against you. For example I remember playing a game on the moon, where all water was violently explosive.
The game I currently play in, our DM made like almost a dozen extra npc characters that live in our HQ each with their own stats, unique abilities, etc. This sounded fun and once in a blue moon we would bring one or two as followers on adventures until they started to become too important. Its fun and changes things up while letting the party tailor strategies or whatever based on our missions should we choose. However it started going bad and it's getting to a point where we'd reach a total dead end or the possibility of solving a scenario was made almost impassable if we didn't happen to have particular followers with us at those times. Even two instances where a particular follower happen to be the perfect counter to the way a combat encounter was set up and the npc would steal everyones thunder. And another puzzle/obstacle where the DM flat out said "we'd be done with this long ago if you brought [insert name] along." I like the way Matt Colville described playing a character (actually more of a follower) who had a predetermined motivation and approach to problems, his example was a Dwarf who was always willing to charge into combat seeking a glorious death in combat even if the fight was suicide.
I've often used my own pc to help my games. Often noone wants to be a healer so I make an oc who plays a cleric or sometimes a paladin(had a group who all wanted to be three mages, two sorcerers and warlock). I do try to keep them as none intrusive as possible when it comes to plot. Sometimes having him spend big plot points in his gods temple.
the thing that annoys me the most is a DM who over exponates everything. I've had a session where the DM had to explain every single little detail in a town, it's political sittuation, it's NPCs everything... now... having a nice detailed backstory and everything is nice, but let the players find out about it over time. Spending 2 hours just listening before the first roll is too much...
I did do a party wipe once...BUT half the players were absent that day so my encounter against 6 was against 2. When they did get together again, they faced the same situation and triumphed.
a current campaign i'm running started as a high death campaign. so in the first 3 session i had a kill count of about 25. (each player had a handful of back up sheets) but since the start we've brought in a few people who are either new to DnD in whole or new to 5e (and lost a few of our veterans) so we changed to a more story campaign, sadly that meant we had a party of like 4 barbs, a monk a druid 2 pally's and a rogue who sold his soul (and 6 levels) for a ring of perm-invisibility. since that first 3 session most of the PC kills have either been PCvPC or suicide. (one of our newbs picked up the habit and we're trying to break him but when ever he thinks he's going to die he finds a way to kill himself)
Your suicide newbie might be attempting to protest something he doesn't like about the game, but is unable to articulate due to inexperience or some other reason. For many newbies, it doesn't occur to them that they can just quit from a game that isn't a good fit or them, and so they start to feel trapped and desperate. Have you tried to talk to him to find if there are any underlying issues? Having 9 players can cause certain difficulties. Also, allowing PvP can make for a very not fun environment for players who aren't into it.
It requires a lot of discipline because realistically, if the DM wants you to lose, you lose. The DM controls the rest of existence, so no matter what they can bugger you.
and it's something you have to come into knowing this is how it's going to be. high death is fun, but you can't come in thinking you can dick around in a high death.
If the Dm wants to kill you, you die. If the Dm wants to maim you, you are maimed and might die. There is a difference between having a hard campaign, and an antagonistic campaign.
How do people feel about the 'cold as ice' DM who seemingly treats the PCs with indifference, never tries to save them, etc, for the sake of realism or fairness?
gotta agree with Dave here.I only put NPCs in a solo party, and those are typically people/baddies they bought/acquired. they don't always level as quick and the PC always had final say for decisions, but they're there to cover gaps and who gets taken is up to the PC. my wife and I have a solo campaign I've run for a while now, and she enjoys having her pick of party members for drama and variety. Now I'll still make powerful NPCs, but they're there for a purpose. that amazing hero at the top of the guild escorted them to a dungeon he couldn't enter, so they'd see what they'd become and have something to strive for, and a greater pride when they end up past him, knowing what they've accomplished. or that wizard in the east, or witch shopkeeper. the difference- they DONT outshine the party. the superhero doesn't stay with them, he decimates something strong on the way to the dungeon and thanks the level 1's for going where his oaths forbid him as he leaves. the shopkeep's powerful sure, but they only interact with him as a shop that sells what they can't make. yeah the dragon's strong but he's giving them quests, not solving them. The GMPC just doesn't work XD
My first ever time RPing. The DM spent a few weeks hyping the game up. Getting me and another friend who's also never played, super excited. The first session arrives at long last, and it turns out that all he had prepped was: "4 skellies attack the tavern you're in." Followed by; "4 more skellies are just outside the tavern." And that was it. Game done.
I think I've got a wonderful example of killer dm. We were playing the game normally the dm had a Co-dm and sometimes he would bow out to play as a a sorta ultimate character in his world because he basically had everyone's backing within almost all cities. Now us regular players were at a lake sleeping out and we wake being attacked by these swarms of frogs. The dm and his personal friend had been sleeping in the woods at almost 120ft away now during combat they wake up and start heading to us the dm plays a centaur paladin 1 sorcerer 5 first thing he does he throws a fireball at all our characters and the frogs by the way since the frogs were in the lake they had a nice reduction while we took full blast for the most part he did this and shot 2 fireballs taking us all out and the frogs barely touched where the frogs then killed us and ate us in the lake. The next session after we made new characters one of us builds a wizard and uses the spell leomunds tiny hut to avoid some of the dangers of being on the road the dms first reaction to the first time he has ever seen this spell is to throw 1 storm giant per hour we sleep in the hut this is not even including the fact storm giant are good creatures and we are only lvl 6 needless to say we all die and a couple of us rage quit after and when we came back he demanded for rage quitting that we write a 200 word apology letter to him. And to think he runs a dm meet and talk and charges 3 lbs ahead when he acts likes this with his players
My worst DM experience was this one time I was with a group, I was playing the stereotypical paladin, and we were about 5 sessions in. We'd made it all the way from level 1 to 7 and things were going really well. Now the trouble, I think, started around our 3rd or so adventure. We'd uncovered a plot by one of the king's Jarl's to basically sell the kingdom's land to an enemy kingdom. When we called the dude out on it the DM tells us he challenges me to a trial by combat for his honor. So, the DM makes it really apparent that I'm about to get my ass kicked, but he didn't account for sheer, dumb luck. The battle starts, I win initiative, I roll attack. Nat 20. I roll to confirm. Nat 20. Now the DM starts sweating because we were playing by a house rule where if you rolled two Nat 20s in a row on attack and confirm, you rolled a third, and if IT was a Nat 20, you instantly killed your target. You can guess what happened on my third roll. So my like, level 5 Paladin kills this 10th level fighter and by the law of the land, I inherit all his lands and wealth. Needless to say, our quest to reclaim the lost holy mcguffin got sidetracked as I now had a castle and bannermen to manage. Rather than just adapting his script or whatever for this unexpected change of plans, he just has our original quest giver show up, tell me I'm not serving the gods anymore and strip me of all my paladin levels after two full sessions of running my new Jarlship and putting down a rebellion by the old Jarl's son and we were finally about to get back underway on our original quest. DM tells me to roll a new character and be better about roleplaying my alignment this time. T___T
Easy: Arbitrary rules! Just joined a campaign and in the first session: Making attack spells Insta hit, immunities to Hex based on a whim and two things far sillier. One player was out so the DM played as her. Second turn, had her do a spell that only hit the party and didn't backtrack when he realized it was a mistake. Then, next turn, had her do an impromptu 360 sweeping attack that hit the entire party (we were only facing one enemy... Then, on a critical fail, instead of it missing or using the roll table, made it so the sword flew the opposite way it was swung, 20 feet, and chop someone's foot off............ That person critically swung again and this time it chopped two people's feet off. It was painful to endure (the game... My feet were safe).
Regarding DM's trying to kill you...when I was a player in a retro 1st edition campaign (maybe last year) the DM misread the module monster stats. I figured this out because after he threw a totally impossible encounter at at us we were all kinda miffed and he argued that "its in the book, its beatable!". Being me, I knew I was right and he wasn't and looked it up later. The module said something to the effect [and I can't remember exactly] of "eight guards 2 8, 2 5, 2 4, 3, 2". What it meant was there were two with 8 hitpoints, 2 with 5, 2 with 4, and one with 3 and one with two. What we got was eight guards each with 28 hit points because he thought it was saying 28, 25, 24...and then was incomplete. So we were four 1st level characters fighting eight guards with 28 hit points each. I pretty sure he also gave them all platemail because he remembered the encounter being easy and wanted to 'step it up and make it hard'. --___-- Also, one of the four characters was his DM controlled. lol.
We have a small group so the dm will usually run a pc character in the group just to help the group have an extra character and more skills and abilities available. This also allows the dm to have a means to "save" the group if something goes horribly wrong with the planned event. The character cannot be a main part of the campaign, such as in making decisions for the group, leading the group, or be over-powered and/or overshadow other players' characters and their actions.
I would just like to throw out this one that I encountered with an Earthdawn campaign. The unkillable NPC. In the campaign we had a windling NPC that was the GMs favorite get attacked. Short version, said NPC was helping other NPCs try to kidnap one of our party members. So, party member attacks, gets critical hit, and rolls tons of damage. Something that should be fatal and pins said windling to the ground. Somehow this tiny fairy creature with essentially a spear through it's guts manages to pull itself off the arrow and be only minorly wounded, just because it was the GMs favorite. Suffice to say, that's the last time our group played Earthdawn.
When I DM I kind of go off the philosophy that I am playing FOR the players, not against them. I don't make it too hard, but just challenging enough to be fun. I'm there to provide the conditions for the players to make their own stories and feel like heros (unless the campaign is themes differently than a typical one). That being said, I've had players tell me that can come off as I am being TOO nice, but most of my players have a good time so I guess it's fine
When I'm a DM and I HAVE to have an NPC in the party as a guide, tutorial, what have you, I have a simple solution to his involvement. Make him so eccentric that his solutions to problems are circumvented by the players' own imaginations. My gnome magus guide views Floating Disk as the answer to all life's problems. Even when my players come to expect it, they still have to make it work with their skills. For example, the party needed to infiltrate a building that had guards patrolling around it, so they used Floating Disk to help get onto the roofs. I thought that would be the end of it, but the healer got it into his head to use the FD as a hoverboard to clear the gap between buildings. He did not voice this plan to anyone in the party, but if he did he would have learned that FD stays 3 feet from the ground. What followed was the most beautiful near-miss I'd ever narrated. His fingers managed to find the ledge, but the rest of his body found the wall.
See! I've been saying for years that you should never take away player agency and you should never go after a party with the intent of killing them, because that makes you a bad dm, and nerdarchy openly agrees with me! took em long enough but better late than never.
but are there ever times you could take away agency? possession? mind control? alignment breaking? loss of humanity in WoD? what if it makes sense and can add some fun? like telling the barbarian that the guy bumping into them in the bar caused them to enter a free rage? or telling a druid that they failed a fear roll but instead of running they turned into something that could hide?
I'd like to disagree on a single point. "Never go after the party with the intent of killing them". This removes agency from your monsters as well as incentive to have your monsters play well against PC's. If monsters are going to fight your PC's, they should be doing so with the intent to kill them. As efficiently as possible. If it becomes obvious that they can't win a fight, they should be surrendering or running away (provided they don't have some philosophy of fighting to the death). In what world would someone ever attack you, if they didn't think they could beat you? They should absolutely think they can kill your PC's and be taking steps to do so. If you have a wizard dressed like a wizard... Smarter enemies should be dogpiling that player to put him out of commission quickly due to his DPS. Things of that nature should make combat compelling and interesting. There is, however, a fine line between the DM trying to kill the players, and the Encounter trying to kill the players. This is usually distinguished by whether or not the DM pulls stuff out his/her bum in the course of the game. A random bandit shouldn't be pulling a magic sword out of his bum to suddenly be doing 3 more damage to a PC than he would normally. Reinforcements shouldn't magically show up for no reason. Etcetera. But, if you have encounters that play like they have brains and intelligence, then you make the players make tough decisions. Do you kill weak and fleeing opponents who have given up? Do you execute foes who have surrendered? Do you give chase to fleeing opponents? How do you respond to the enemy ganging up on a single player? Do you prioritize targets in combat as well, to take care of the biggest threats quickly? That's not to say your players shouldn't be getting total victories every now again. It also isn't to say your players should be just barely winning every single combat. It's just to say that encounters should flow realistically. The DM should be playing an encounter with the intent to win it with the resources allocated to it, within reason (enemies aren't generally going to endure being stabbed in the back constantly while dogpiling a wizard, etcetera). You don't want combat to be too difficult or too much like Chunky Salsa. If a player thinks they could die from combat, they have a vested interest in playing like they want to mitigate damage done to them while maximizing damage done to enemies. The players I have, once they saw my style, adopted combat maneuvers and tactics. They adopted formations and roles in combat. Sometimes, they even get creative and create an environment that is hostile to the encounter I'm running by making the floor slippery or covered in acid, or knocking out stone blocks from the ceilings. Without a sense of danger, your players won't ever really do anything cool or interesting.
why on earth would you think that alignment breaking or loss of humanity are reasons to take over someone's character or otherwise affect agency? as for the rest, no. never try to play their characters for them.
For me, the last minute "Oh, i houserule that differently" DM. You know, the guy who changes a ton of mechanics in his head, but never tells the players until it actively comes up.
Git a really good point with the DM/Player PICK ONE argument. Grinds my gears when the DM has a PC in the party- No matter what anybody tells me, the DMPC will always be a key element in the party... I am even guilty of doing this, but to be fair the party recruited those NPCs and One of them happened to be Ireena from Ravenloft- I couldn't really do anything if they decided to have her join lol. Never had them get items, take loot, I let the players make all the choices, if they looked for them for help- they might offer a hint or advice but never a 'Better solution' just a different way of going about things.
I had a DM have a another player run my character when I was out one week. The other player ran my character out of the normal for the character, the rest of the group was dumbfounded. With the actions taken and reflex save was failed and my character was crushed under a rock fall trap. DM allowed me to continue to play the character with a lingering injury give a Dex stat loss.
One of the worst things I've seen people complain about online is a variation of the DM vs the Players where the DM is Nerfing the player's class abilities because they are "too powerful". One guy said he wanted to stop playing a wizard because the DM kept restricting what his spells could do because she thought the spells were too powerful. Another guy was running a barbarian and the DM gave every enemy psychic swords to neutralize his damage resistance but the swords turned into normal swords when the enemies were beaten so he couldn't even get a cool magic item from that BS.
Well, if one character is too powerful, can't be challenged, is stealing all the spotlight from everyone else, one thing that can be done is modifying the character a bit. It makes sense that you don't want to have a party with too much difference in power. The psychic swords that are only cool as long as the enemy has them is bullshit though. Unless the enemies themselves apply magic/psychic ability to the swords during battle.
I am currently running a game with 7 players. They are roughly the same group I've been playing with for years, and they've constantly said how they want to work towards getting better at role playing and not just roll playing. I have introduced a few sessions ago the idea of a character (not always the same character, but SOME character) who goes around with them so that during moments of quiet where they otherwise wouldn't be talking to each other that character can try to strike up conversations and get the group talking. By doing this I've been able to get them role playing because they think it's an NPC doing all the work when in reality the NPC usually asks a quick question to one of them who starts talking, then someone else asks a question and another and another and before you know it we've role played a four hour carriage ride worth of conversation. Do I use this all the time? No. I use it when it feels like they are ready to take a break from ::roll:: "damage" ::roll:: "hit points". So far it's working out pretty well for us.
the worst DM for me was one guy who thought the game was him telling you what you character does and you just roll the dice to see if the actions he picked for you work. we told him thats not how RPGs work so he tried letting us decide for our characters but he would just say you cant do that" when you tried to do anything . for instance our group was up on a ledge and had to move across open country so i had my mage cast fog between us and the bad guys. he said you cant do that. I figured i could cast fog to conceal our movement but in his mind that cant happen. needless to say we only played the one game and all the players bailed out..now thats a bad DM
I am planning to GM&PC with my folks. It'll be my first time GMing and a party of three sounds a bit better than a party of two - but the main reason is when I suggested it they sounded really positive about the idea. But I'm determined to go against all the common pitfalls that could come from that. Once they decide their characters I'll give them a choice from a tavern of who to take along with them and they can spend as long as they please talking among them and selecting between them. But whatever kind of character it ends up being I'll play a largely-clueless background support role most of the time (whether that means a shy character speaks when spoken to, or a blustery character learns a lesson quite quickly about the fact they can be wrong about stuff). Figure that mitigates most bad habits. Basically if I'm doing the bad thing I'm wanting to turn it into a good thing and play like that. Obviously, also playing pretending like I have no knowledge of anything (which is actually helping me consider the headspace of a player at each stage of the adventure I'm crafting). Between the character being either immediately or fairly quickly open to instruction, picking a progress path to complement the party rather than achieve badassery of their own, and them having chosen who to bring along in the first place... I think I can pull this off? I don't think I'd even be considering it if it wasn't for the circumstance of two new players with one new GM doing a custom adventure. I agree that in general it's just a plain bad idea. My adventure is more of a social/puzzle thing since the players aren't as interested in the combat side of the game. So I'm hoping to use the combat side of the game as infrequent events that mean something to them because of what they're fighting for due to the rest of it. Thinking back to my own aversion to shooter games until I started to play one of them that actually had deep story behind it (Mass Effect)... and that made the shooter bits actually enthralling. Trying to harness that in a tabletop setting.
I play with a group of friends, We mainly play 3.5e (With heavy homebrew more often than not) and out of the four of us we have had a lot of fun. There is one guy who does like to DM, the only problem is that he will constantly state that he has played back since the beginning and will often argue with us about little things. His worlds are often very well built and fun to play in but most of the time he shows a level of favoritism towards people that is hard to manage. in one campaign i was the favorite, I got a +10 weapon and some enchanted armor... at level 11? i think. It was insane and then he started throwing stronger monsters that were beating the other players into pulp. We stopped that game early. He also is a overbearing player that constantly is reminding the DM of rules and of little things that the DM already knows. He will also backstab anyone to get a power boost in game. Doesn't matter if it is his loving mother. He builds his characters for neutral alignments and actively tries to break the game. But with 3.5 and homebrew we have that issue often. Anyway, Boiled down my pet peeve is, A DM who wants to be a player, often goes back on his word the next game, and for the love of the heavens can't not have a more open mind about his worlds.
worst experience - doing a game like a dungeon crawl. we fought a boss that we determined to have more then 600 hp. there were 7 players 11th level. it was hard but we made it through. not to mention it also had the use of magical items. 3 floors later we are fighting another boos like creature. half of us were about half dead during the corse of the fight, the dm also tried to deny my ability, Hurl through hell, we also determined that we had done more that 900 damage and that's when it got dumb. in 1 round. the monster used an ability that did over 60 damage to most of the players, the dc being 26, healed for the damage delt, and summoned the boss from 3 levels prior... I left.
I had a DM hit my tent with lightning 3 times during a sandstorm. I was a level 1 druid. the first bolt knocked me out, the second hit my animal companion, while the final strike finished me off.
On the point about antagonistic DMs: I've never considered having every battle being a struggle to stay alive as antagonistic. In fact, if there is ever a battle where my players aren't desperate at the end they complain that it was boring and too easy. That's why my battle CRs are always deadly and bosses are double to quadruple deadly. That's the way my players like it.
I miss having Nate's input in these videos. Salute him for me. One of my pet peeves is the "I'll make absolutely sure nobody ever dies" DM. I need that Sword of Damokles hanging over my head because without tension there is no drama. If battles or other conflicts are not dangerous I lose interest in the game. I mean what's the point of planning and strategizing if you know you are going to survive no matter how silly your decisions?
There are two times I'll take control of a PC, and those are any invasive influence (A rogue AI, possession, etc.) In which case I have saves to break loose of that control; and in the case of player absence, in which case I have notes on the characters and play to them. There have been clutch moments in the former case, and some nice hand offs in the latter.
My pet peeve is what I call the Railroad DM, you guys call it the helicopter DM. We originally started the campaign about 2 years ago in pathfinder with a 4 person party. I was playing a Swashbuckler and we had a Fire cleric, a druid and a paladin who almost never showed up to the sessions. From the first session we became "The Chosen Ones" and were marked with a mark of an ancient group dedicated to stopping a world ending god from coming to power. Part of this included the fact that like 11 different nasty gods were suddenly pissed at us and that basically amounted to the DM throwing whatever nasty shit she wanted at us and saying it was because "Gods". At that point in the game we were level 1 or 2 and had this grand future ahead of us but our DM felt we had to have at least 2 encounters per session and because we were so low level none of these encounters could really be related to this grand quest. Long story short, we basically got forced in to encounters with ever more difficult types of rats. No joke, our first 4 levels consisted almost entirely of fights with rats. We took about a 8 month break due to real life stuff then came back and swapped the campaign to 5th edition and the Druid and Paladin dropped out and were replaced by two new players playing a Warlock and a Ranger. The first few months the campaign really felt like it was on rails and we had no control over what we could do. The worst session I remember is we had acquired a ship and sailed to a small island out in the ocean. We'd brought our ship in to a cove and anchored it then gone ashore and did our business there. A huge storm was brewing (Thanks to a god who was angry at us) and we rushed back to the ship, dropped an extra two improvised anchors and battened down the hatches, took down the sails and made ready for the storm. Once it hit the DM started having us make checks to react to things that happened and basically just kept forcing checks until we finally messed up at which point she broke our mast and rudder and forced us out to sea. I literally had about 9 successes in a row and should have been able to keep the ship under control but she just kept forcing checks until we failed. It has gotten much better since then but I remember being actually angry irl and going in to the other room to vent.
The only time I'm usually okay with a DM playing a PC in their party is when they're trying to help them get used to everything, not just shoving their character in like "oh lol, and my random-ass Half-elf paladin is there in that bar too"
Falling in line with the GM/Player line crossing I hate the Runway show of NPC's that can take over a game until you start to wonder why the PC's are even there. Esp if the NPC's start talking to each other for more then a few minutes and you end up watching a puppet show the GM is putting on.
I have played an all rogues 1st game, an all fighters 1st and an all Archers 1st games each was pretty funny as well as entertaining. In many of my games Clerics are tied to a local Church and can not go adventuring Wizards are rare outside of a College, and need huge inducements to leave their studies. Druids are only found out in the country side and usually require a favor to assist the party
6:40 What I would have done in the situation is have the NPCs decide that they want the player as their king. Kind of revenge for when players fall in love with random NPCs.
I have some characters come with the players especially small parties. Sometimes they meet a character of legend that guides them for a bit. I use them mostly as well a guide show them the world and how things are what boundaries are safe to live in. I find that at times this is preferable over a TPK when they take on the local militia that asks them to stand down.
Totally on the side of the DMPC being my pet peeve! Have one DM who constantly has NPCs in the party doing various things, these NPCs almost always are the ones to figure out puzzles, they are usually 2-5 levels above every member of the party, and even usually have some great secret the story revolves around. This drives up the wall with annoyance. To me as a player, it is almost an offense, like we are not skilled enough to make it through a dungeon on our own so we have this OP NPC to hold our hands through the whole thing. This is by far the biggest nuisance to me as a player that I could see as completely avoidable.
I agree, though to an extent, I'm currently in a game where I'm technically DMPCing a character as the group was tasked with guarding the prince of a monarchy while he traveled the land to get some experience in the wilderness and to teach him about the world, he's 3rd level Eldritch Knight Fighter, started out as a regular guy, but the wizard and fighter decided to try and teach him to fend for himself, so he took a level in fighter, then became an Eldritch Knight in the last session, and the rest of the group is 6th level, about to hit 7th. He purposefully takes a backseat on puzzles because he's your average joe with INT and is just that, a DMPC. It's just people that take it too far that I have the issue with. DMPCing is a nifty tool that can be used to help project a character that has some kind of appeal to the characters and the story. DM's that feel a DMPC is a front stage flag-barer are just bad at using them and don't understand that the game is a story that's based on the player characters and not the DM.
I sometimes feel the need to use a DMPC. Why? Because, if one of my players fell into a pit and I remind the other players that they have rope, then they ask me what the hell they're supposed to do with rope. One thought that she was blind because it was dark, so we had to convince her for nearly 5 minutes to use the light spell.
It's part of the overbearing DM but I hate when the DM doesn't allow a flaw (which, to me and a lot of others, is the part that makes each character interesting and unique.) to be detrimental. I can understand not wanting some barbarian's flaw to be something like "sometimes, I go into a rage out of nowhere and try to kill anyone nearby" but you shouldn't force a player to pick an awful cliché flaw that will affect a bit of dialogue at most.
So a question for DM's, a noob chooses to play cleric of the life Domain. flies off a cliff with the carriage and several organic creatures to the waters bellow in heavy armor. Survives the fall and makes what the DM describes as a meat paddle boat. (DM's choice I wanted to just raise a horse. DM's new to their was some confusion with how magic worked at the time. rolled a 20.) should there be a repercussion for this or smaller offences? (and would you guys make the player choose between necromancy with a new shiny spell or healing the party? As in they can no longer cast healing spells on anyone.
Can I get a ruling on an issue in my current campaign? I have a first time player who chose to be a cleric, but is not enjoying it... He likes his characters back story but is constantly trying trying to play them as a fighter and isn't really enjoying his lack of stats due to particularly poor rolls during the character creation. I set up a trap where his character vanishes in a puff of smoke and he became a dwarf instead of a halfling, and his stats were much better balanced to how he seems to enjoy playing his character (I know there isn't really a way to do this, but I follow the rule of cool). I gave him an optional quest where he received a relic which he could use to turn back or to sell for a huge amount of gold. He used the gold to buy better equipment and played as a fighter, but I wonder if anyone has any suggestions on how to deal with a situation like that that could have easily made a person not enjoying the game break and walk away from it entirely.
If you are doing D&D, I would definitely give that player the option to switch to Paladin if he wanted to keep the same character and backstory (I probably would have let him redo the stats but not changed the race). Make it a sort of divine awakening to his true calling. I general, if you have a player who is really not enjoying their character or the game, talk to them to try and find out what it is they are not liking and try to work from there. With your example, where the player just didn't like how his character played, it's fairly easy to just let them start a new character (or modify the current one). Other issues may be more involved. Try and work with them to change things so that they can participate. The nice thing about being the DM is that you can always change anything--including the classes. Your Warlock wants to fight in melee but Eldritch Blast is basically always his best attack option? Make up an "Eldritch Blade" Cantrip that lets him make a melee attack with added magic damage/effects (probably equal to that done by Eldritch Blast), but replaces Eldritch Blast. With the player's agreement of course. The main thing is to try and find out what isn't working and work with the player to address it. The fact that you show interest and are trying may be enough to convince them to stay at least a while longer and give it another shot.
I feel it really depends on the group too. If you have a group that likes hack n' slash and isn't too involved in character background, then they may enjoy a Dark Souls style difficulty where their characters may die and they can just make new ones - I think for some players it is more about strategy than RP and deaths are part of that strategy. But again, both players and DM have to be on the same page if this is what they are going to enjoy. For myself, who likes heavy RP and extensive BG, that is definitely one of my pet peeves. It's inhibiting if I feel the DM is trying to kill us because it makes me not want to take risks because I don't want to lose a character I've put so much work into or have to work in another one and thus as a player I become less interactive in the game, which is no fun for anyone. I'm not saying pull punches, because death is a part of a story, but if you go in with the mindset that you will defeat your players and "win" then I feel your losing sight of what the game is about, or at least my style of the game, which is about creating a story in which the PCs are the main characters and have a story to tell. To a lesser extent, a pet peeve of mine is permanently maiming characters. For instance, I had an arrogant extremely vain character who was hit by a scorching ray and nearly died. Knowing my character, the DM thought it would be funny to have all his hair burn off and his face become permanently scarred, however, this put him in opposition to his character concept and he didn't encourage or like the realistic interpretation of what this would have caused in my character (depression, loss of identity, a struggle to cope with the loss of what he felt defined himself), instead, the DM was dismissive or in some instances turned it into even more of a joke. In the end, we worked it out as he realized it did bother me so I was able to use regeneration to heal, but the loss of agency in my character's story stung. I feel like a better way to handle drastic, permanent changes like this are to give players an option - they can choose to have a permanent disfigurement or other character altering effect from something truly harrowing and you can work with them to decide on what that is going to be, or they can choose not to and you as a DM can come up with a reason that, that happens. I wasn't against have a lasting scar from the event, but more not having a say in how my character's story and personal appearance changed (because it was a core of his story). Another instance of this was with another player who lost an eye in one of our first sessions. She was also given penalties along with her disfigurement making it actually detrimental to her character and made her really question whether she wanted to continue to play that character or not because, again, it was a loss of agency in her character design and concept.
My pet peeve is the babying DM, who constantly babies the characters, gives them exactly what they want, the pc's never lose. Played these games for years with several different DMs, I was NEVER in danger, we always won. It got old, I now enjoy a more dangerous game, as long as the DM is honest it can be a good battle of wits.
Monty Haul to Kill em all.... I noticed that most beginner DMs start out Monty Haul, handing out excess loot. Then they get into Kill em all, ripping the players apart. Hopefully they mature into good balanced DMs, but it takes some time. Nobody is an instant perfect DM first time they try. The DM's purpose is to provide the realm and the challenges. The player's job is to tear up the DM's plans, kill the bad guys and walk away with the loot.
The thumbnail makes me think of a mechanical spider. That being said, what's your take on monstrous warforged? Such as draconic, gnoll, or other monstrous machine type of player characters? I think it would be interesting. Imagine an army of mechanical murder hobos or even an army of orcs whom have turned their bodies into living machines of war to rule the world.
DMs who only act as judge of rules but don’t facilitate etiquette, fair play, fair share of time or allow the quiet, shy player an opportunity to shine. Also, DMs who create a story that will continue to develop with or without the presence of their PCs.
Sometimes, in some times and places, it was just difficult to become a general without the risk of becoming the King or the Emperor. See several Romans and also Conan.
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what about a dm that favors a character more than any other. My party is in a city and we are apart of a kind of known group not to widely known at all, our half orc barbarian decides to go up and clobber a guy over the head for spitting at our rouge member for trying to steal his coin pouch. He does and the guards come over and asks him questions, all the while there is a gnome in a sack over the half orcs back and hes wiggling around plan for anyone on the street to see. The half orc reaches back around to the gnome and smacks him hard enough to make him stop moving in front of the guards, then when the guard tells him he should be in jail for hurting a civilian, he challenges the guard to a duel. the guard accepts(surprising i know) and they have a bet that if he wins the half orc goes to jail if he loses the half orc goes free. So of course the half orc wins by a landslide and walks away Scot free. I even say its BS and the Dm says No its fine cause its a Barbarian CAPITAL CITY. HELP ME PLZ
My pet peeve isn't about a DM (because I am the DM for my group), but the player who tries to backseat DM. Like, seriously, if you argue with me at session zero that the other player's warlock has to be evil because that's the stereotype and keep arguing for an hour and a half then you just volunteered to not be there when we actually start playing.
The biggest thing I dislike about DMs? Being inconsistant with the rules!
It's one thing to have homebrew. It's another to apply it on Monday, but, not Friday.
certain situations though i can imagine bending the rules. like we had a spell that couldn't flow through water (it's an electric spell) and they had a really clever idea they were in a bar and through alcohol on the crowd attacking them and tried to cast that spell they argued it wasnt water it was alcohol and because it was clever and very interesting I let it slide. (good dming or bad dming?
If i interpretet cody sams right, he would say you are good dming, as long as you apply that on multiple scenarios using that very same concept
My peeve:
"My Precious Thing"
Whether it's a favourite player, favorite villain, of setting, they pick this one thing and it gets the benefit of every doubt.
This precious thing can't be hurt, defeated, changed, or captured. It's resistant or immune to attacks and certainly also the laws of physics.
It's a complete lack of respect for everything and everyone else, and a disregard for balance, fairness or agency.
Gah! Hate it.
Mike Gould oh yeah that one thing that has +10 plot armor. Totally gets my goat as well.
Nerdarchist Dave
in one of my current campaigns I had a my precious thing. it was a divine curse on one of the PC's, his hair was magically glowing pink at the brightness of a torch. I made it immune to cutting, it had immunity to magic and basically was impossible to get rid of. the player did eventually get it cured, by asking the god who cursed him for forgiveness and paying a decent amount of gold to their temple, but it kind of became a thing when ever he'd get hit by an attack "did it at least damage my hair?"
My pet peeve is when DM's don't let you ability check hardly ever! Or let you use the strengths of your character.
I ran a half-elf sorcerer that had 20 CHA by lvl 4, proficient in all of the CHA abilities/skills and the group would pretty much always let me talk to the NPCs first since I was the 'charismatic' one of the group. I would often talk to NPCs in their native language if my character knew it to get on their good side and I was definitely into the roleplaying aspect.
The DM would hardly ever let me do a persuasion/deception/intimidation check. I would get instantly turned down or told NO by NPCs without any kind of check. I am not one to 'ask' the DM... "Could I at least make a persuasion check?" but it got to the point where it felt I was useless unless I reminded the DM and he would get annoyed. What was the point of being charismatic and being proficient in those skills if I never got to use them?
I am sure some feel this way when they have created their characters to REALLY benefit from things like deception, history, nature, survival etc but the DM never gives you a chance or never asks for the check.
What the heck kind of DM doesn't let you ability check? If my player asks for an ability check, I grant it (whether it makes sense to do it or not). I also occasionally let players know if a certain action might require Ability Checks in order to accomplish (climbing a rope, pushing someone, lying to an NPC, etcetera).
What I don't allow is "repeated checks on the same thing". If you don't spot anything with a Perception Check, I'm not going to let you keep rolling one until you do spot something. Especially not with the reasoning, "I'm going to look extra hard this time". A player needs new information or a new thing to do, in order to make the same check again.
Still, I've never heard of a DM who doesn't allow ability checks. That's like half the fun as a DM is letting players try things and watching them succeed or fail.
I'd say that the worst DM I ever gamed with (not counting myself in elementary school) was this dude who couldn't seem to tell the difference between in-character and OOC behavior. It was the first time I had gamed with this guy, so I wanted to stick to basics and made a typically gruff traditionalist dwarf. Because of that, he decided I was a problem player. At one point, he took me aside and said he felt like he was walking on eggshells with me and I needed to chill out. To this day, I have no idea what he was talking about. Later on, a suspicious ship showed up at the town we were at. When I started asking for clarifications of what was going on (the kinds of things I'd be able to see if I was looking at it) he accused me of demanding all the answers instead of trying to get them in-game. Then he proceeded to railroad the party into an ambush that everyone saw coming, but was still a "surprise" because he shut down everything we tried to do. He was visibly relieved after that, saying we'd nearly found him out, but he was able to get us in the end. Then he asked me not to come back, which I was happy to oblige.
What a Dumb nut DM. Its all about Role Play.... getting in Character... its not a video game. I hope you have found a better DM and good game. I have been playing for 35 years and still going. Cheers!
Hahaha, "You guys don't see the 300 goblins massing right in front of you. No you don't get to make perception rolls. You are ruining the surprise!!!"
When a player isn't there and you still want them to support the group, just say they are drunk, have a head-ache, feel a bit sad or any other reason why they shouldn't be very active. Generally only let them do things if the party asks him/her to or if something is REALLY in their street (Making a history check when that character is clearly the best at history, for example).
In battle, the players can ask him to something. If he doesn't get any orders, just employ some basic tactics. I think that's usually a good thing to do, because that way the party still has access to that characters skills.
As a DM: I don't play a player's character if the player isn't there. I will generally make some explanation as to why they're not there. I also don't have player roles. If there's no cleric, so be it because someone else finds some other way to heal players. Plus I try not to be an antagonistic DM, but I don't want them to win so easily.
the only time i've can remember taking control of a PC, we ended the previous session with the PC in a dragon's gut, the player had a sick kid so they wouldn't show, so i took control of the PC to get them out of the stomach, and then had them hide in a magic house. i gave the PC a flaw of something to the extent of "fear of dragons" that the player took a few levels to over come. i originally wasn't going to give him the flaw but the Player was actually the one who suggested it.
our team didn't have a cleric and i went to buy a belt of healing in 3.5 the gm said we had to wait i paid extra to get it quicker, we get the belt only 2 charges doesn't refill the charges
god dammit gm i asked for 1 thing
If you don't have a healer the DM could always tweak the setting so health potions are more available. They're useful but not the best for healing, so stocking up on them wouldn't be too hard or game-breaking and if players forget to buy them, SOL.
Noah Mehringer I do add more healing potions if there are no healers. However the healer is the easiest role to do without in 5e D&D. Paladins have lay on hands. Bards, Paladins, and rangers have access to healing spells, and fighters can heal themselves with second wind.
You can kick the door in, you can burn it with acid, OR you can just Leave It Be. Not everything faced needs to be tackled. Run away from the horrifying monsters, go lick your wounds, Talk you way through or out, or just say eff it and go on a Different adventure.
In a recent session that I DMed, I kind of expected the party to do just that, running away from the big nasty that can petrify people. Instead, they proceed to pellet it with arrows and spells and then eventually use environmental effects to blow up the entire dungeon. That was an interesting session.
The worst is when you're the only one who isn't playing a "Joke" Character, and all the other players, and the GM, hate you for it.
why is that a bad thing?
each comedy needs a straight-man
I'm not sure if I should watch this. What if I'm a bad DM?
Nevermind. I guess I'm not that bad.
Even if you were a bad DM learn from it 😋
Now I kind of want to make a video titled that.
-Nerdarchist Dave
Malyssa C #truth
Nerdarchist Dave
"Bad" DMs don't learn. So if you aren't one, this video won't affect you. If you learn something, you are just like the rest of us: A person with more to learn.
I think mine had to be by the book DM. He followed the challenge rating to a T, he awarded magic items as such, and when our party grew from four players to seven players, he pretty much stuck to the same formula. (We were playing Pathfinder.). The game just dragged on and grew stale. Next to no challenge and we were still level 2 after a few months of playing once a week. I eventually left the game.
The Challenge Rating is meant for a party of 4 players. Of the party had 7 players, he should probably increase the challenge rating
I'm a believer in tricameral balance between the DM, the players, and the dice. Whenever a game leans toward one of these too much, it's probably a bad game, and the DM bears most of the blame. A DM that prioritizes setting and takes away player agency is often singled out as an offender, but to me, a DM that's driven too much by the "tyranny of fun" to please the players is equally bad, especially in a campaign setting. "Fun" is not a very clear concept - what's fun for one is not necessarily fun for others (especially if a PC is hogging the RP spotlight). More importantly, when it's all about fun and the "rule of cool", games start to resemble one another - fun gets reduced to the lowest common denominator. Plus, player actions stop having consequences. It's not really "DM vs. players" if some players consistently make dumb choices, and suffer no consequences. That makes a mockery of player agency. Throwing in dice as an element of randomness actually forces the DM to improvise, rather than letting fun (i.e. that which players want) carry the day. Of course, overusing dice can also derail games, but a good DM can usually figure out a way to make anomalous or bad die rolls work to make the game more and not less interesting.
I 100% agree!
My biggest DM pet peeve is probably the stat ignorer. The most common example of this is the DM who ignores social attributes and skills... but I see it with intelligence/ knowledge-based skills and abilities too
The basic "bad" DM or player is, I think, usually caused by a fundamental misunderstanding of the game, that DnD is about CO-OPERATIVE STORYTELLING. If you as DM are trying to control everything or are taking away the ability to make meaningful decisions, you aren't cooperating. If you are actively killing the players, you aren't storytelling.
I'm in a campaign where my character was enslaved and had to watch her whole family get murdered as a part of their backstory. As such I was playing the skeptic who didn't really trust anyone but themselves, we'll my dm has this recurring idea of visions and dreams and essentially used that to manipulate my character into trusting the party. This type of stuff really bothers me, I had a whole backstory that still had lasting implications to my character that I was wanting to be their story and all of it was essentially ripped away. There goes any potential for that aspect of my characters identity to go through an arc where they may get over this and eventually learn not everyone is evil. That still makes me mad.
In my DnD session (I'm typically the DM) I also have a PC; but, it is relegated to a supporting role. Whenever approached with a trap / puzzle, I offer no input. However, let the other PCs use my spells / abilities during such times. I also intentionally hamstring myself by making somewhat bad choices regarding stat points. During the last session, I played as a Dwarven Bard with more points into Con and Str than Cha. In another game, I played as a one-armed Goliath Sorcerer (I couldn't use an off-hand or two handed weapons).
I had to make a PC once while I was DM (for balance purposes) but he was Brutor the barbarian, low INT, here to smash
I'm glad I don't tick these boxes.
As a Dm, the last time I fudged dice was a fortnight ago, a heavily wounded character caught a Dragons breath and instead of counting out the damage I muttered it with each roll, it should have eliminated his character but I called the damage at 3 points off, so that he could roll death saving throws - the character failed them.
I'm looking forward to a Player pet peeve episode.. I've got one guy that always plays the same concept and he never works it into a backstory; the reluctant, chaotic neutral, non-magic Ranger. I'm just thankful for the Spell-less Ranger (Unearthed Arcana).
I don't really know what to call it but my worst kind of DM is the DM who cares so much about the numbers and the mechanics they take away from the overall experience.
They are typically refered to as "Purist" or "Mechanic" GMs in my group. and we've known a few.
A dice lord.
the dice are the game and when I roll that you die, you die.
When the real purpose of the DM screen is to allow the DM to hide that hes been rolling ALL 20's all night.
@@fhuber7507 Rolling in the open gives players the most agency--they know that if they proceed without a plan or act stupid they could die. It is a GAME not narrative story writing. If it were--just sit down and write a book together. Its a game and the GM should be a ref in the game world while the players create their own story. People who want GMs to flub dice so everyone "can have a good time" are the same people who don't know that without risk there can be no true victory. Without challenge their can be no honor.
Let's see
1) Players are enemy, CHECK
2) DM Player Character CHECK
3) Over Bearing DM CHECK
I've had all of them and keep seeming to only find them. I think there is a reason they have openings in their group and looking for new players. :P
Hey I got better! only took 20 years. :) You still owe me for the pizza. :)
The pizza was bland and tasteless, much like your campaign. And I wouldn't pay for either. ;)
Sick Burn!
I started when elves were a class instead of a race : P
KingOfAquilonia I did too... We are ancient...
Gotdamn dinosaurs
Same here... tradeoff between elf and magic user do I want swords but to level slow af or get better spells quicker
my friend all say I'm a good dm but most of the time I'm just making crap up as I go
often the best games are thrown together on the fly!
For me the players have to have everything has to be a joke. I get it people want to have fun but for once I want a semi-seriouse campaign.
I know, like i get it, we're having fun and shit, but i spent fuckign 12 hours working on this week's bit of the story, and they spend more than half of the play time talking about if they should order pizza or chinese and then watching fucking youtube videos they found during the week.
This is why I have the rule of "no cellphones at the D&D Table. Same rule with meals. You can have drinks and snacks, but if we're going to have lunch, everything D&D goes away while we eat, and it comes back when we're done. We also have periodic breaks every time the players get to an inn or take an extended rest, where they can view their cellphones for a few minutes.
Penalties for cellphones at the D&D Table include: Gaining less XP from combat (since you're not playing, how are you gaining experience?), less loot (same question), losses of turns (if it takes you more than 15 seconds to decide what to do on your turn, or to decide whether or not you want to take your turn, you lose your turn. Exceptions are made for players who are obviously thinking about what to do and can't decide easily), and finally, removal of your player and character from the game if it goes on long enough. If you're only here to socialize with people who aren't here (or to socialize with computers and youtube and crap), then I don't want you here. We're here to play a game together, have fun together, and not be rude shitheads.
Don't waste my time as a DM. It's a lot of work to build the next adventure you players have decided on going on. If you didn't want to play it, let me know. Or, if you're bored with D&D, let me know. If you no longer want to play it, let me know. There is no reason to humor me by continuing to play something you never really wanted to play to begin with. We can either fix it so it's to your liking again, or we can disband the group if nobody wants to play anymore, so I don't have to waste my time creating adventure hooks and dungeons and encounters and NPCs and everything else. If you're just going to waste my time, I'd rather go do something else that would be fun to me, than have my time be wasted and be bored.
For real. I'm running a campaign for some new-ish players. One of them wanted to play a dog. I eventually allowed it after we agreed that the dog was intelligent and the victim of some supernatural something-or-other, to be elaborated on later in the campaign.
So the adventure goes on, and they come upon a goblin fort. The dog (playing a rogue, btw), has the idea of using disguise hit to masquerade as a goblin and infiltrate. They are small after all! I thought it was kind of a stretch, but i let them roll because I didn't want to railroad. Nat 20. Laughs were had as the dog in an impossibly convincing goblin costume waddled in on its hind legs without a second glance from the bugbear guards. It was a genuinely funny moment for everyone.
Flash forward 3 sessions later, and now that is their answer to every problem they come across. Stopped from entering the governors mansion? Disguise as a guard captain! In the middle of a fight with a sorcerer? Disguise! They're beating the joke to death and it seems like the player is only engaged when they can attempt to make a joke of the situation. I went into the game knowing they aren't the combative type, but the other players trying to properly weigh options and take action while they hang in the background until "disguise kit lol!" is getting old...
Easy way to solve that problem. Guard animals. Guard animals can smell that he's a dog. Disguise doesn't work against them. He's got to play more carefully from then on and actually SNEAK if they're wearing a disguise...
There's any number of ways to break the habit of wanting to disguise constantly. Including having guards "pat down" people entering locations, including other guards. Or, having the guards try to talk to the dog, and bring him in for questioning if he doesn't answer at all.
Don't just allow "free reign" when someone rolls a 20. I always have a "consequence" to that 20, unless it's in combat. I had a guy use Intimidate against a shopkeeper to try to get a better deal. Natural 20. I gave him everything he asked for, for free... But, then delivered the caveat that he was no longer allowed in that shop or guards would be called next time.
A Natural 20 isn't a "I can do anything I want" card. It's a "This is what happens as a result of your Natural 20". Meaning, it can be anything the DM wants it to be. All a 20 has to be is a "critical success". Maybe the disguise works against the first set of guys, but they have to roll subsequently for each new set. And, why wouldn't they have to roll against everyone's perception individually?
XxTaiMTxX those are some good ideas. I'll keep them in mind for my next session. 👍
My first and as of now last GM put me off the hobby most likely for good. He lied about the type of campaign he was running and forced his own agenda into my character's backstory after we started playing. He also played his own character that was consistently antagonistic toward the character he'd insisted I play and allowed other players to do so as well. I tried talking to him about this on multiple occasions and he just couldn't be made to listen. As I'm sure you know I'm not playing with him anymore.
That...sounds like a really bad DM. I wouldn't let that turn you off from trying the hobby again though. Just with a different group. I hope that DM was new to DMing, because that sounds like a bad case of both Railroad DM and DM as a Player.
JediSSJ1 he wasn't new, apparently been doing it for years and nobody ever called him on it.
Blah. Sounds like you had the misfortune to enter into a super heavily established group where his players are all used to his style and he isn't changing it. Not very welcoming to newcomers. In short, you need a new group.
JediSSJ1 maybe, but I imagine a good number of gms are like that and is it really worth the effort of dealing with another?
Most may have an established group, but I have not encountered too many that are so set in their ways and exclusive. I would at least give it one more chance before deciding it isn't worth messing with. The one you encountered seems like a pretty extreme case. I would certainly hope I'm not like that to my players. The group I am currently DMing for consists of 4 people (and a 5th who is a sometimes-er). 2 of those 4 are my coworkers who I know and like. The other 2 are their friends--one is the friend of one player and the other the friend of the other. I had never met those 2 before we started our campaign. And those 2 didn't know anyone except the friend they came with. I and my players (particularly the ones who DID know me and each other beforehand) have gone out of our way to include everyone as much as possible and the group is meshing really well and everyone is getting along and, I think, feeling included. This is despite the fact that some of these people would probably have never chosen to hang out together if it wasn't for D&D. My experiences with D&D have all been more along this vein. I'm sorry you first try was so bad, but please don't think for a moment that all, or even most groups are like that. If it just turns out tabletop RPGs are not for you, then that's cool. It's not for everyone. But I have loved it so much I would really recommend giving it another earnest shot before giving up on it. If you find a group you can mesh with and enjoy the game it is totally worth it.
I had a DM that combined both the DMPC and the DM vs PC into one, he would inject his DMPC into the group where it made no sense. for example, we were playing a group of characters set in a world overrun and controlled by the undead, the party decided to play as revolutionaries and insurgents in this world and played a good party set out to rid the world of the undead scourge!!! His DMPC was an undead diplomat, the only thing that prevented us from killing his character outright was because he asked us not to.
Same game, he constantly set us up against powerful enemies meant to bend our wills to his. Only by insanely lucky roles and clever use of situational manipulation did anyone survive a single session much less a campaign (and this included his overpowered DMPC). When he was finally bored of the campaign he engineered a party wipe and ended the game with a whimper.
On a different note.
My personal games I will typically run a large cast of complex NPC's and simple NPC's. Usually, there is one or two NPC's that will accompany the party on their quest. They are there to fill in plot holes I might've missed or need to reinforce, go on stupid errands that the party needs to do without splitting the party, and as reinforcements, in case they have exceptionally bad roles or I misjudged the power of an enemy. I have them as background characters and they change according to what makes sense for the story. At times these NPC's have been a great boon to the party, showing up in the nick of time to help at a critical moment, other times I kill off a well-liked NPC to provide motivation to move toward a goal, and rarely I'll have them turn on the party. Most of the time I use NPC's like this to fill in a role that the party is missing, or adjust for the fact that one of the PC's couldn't make it to the game.
I really like the way that this has played out in my games throughout the years, and I hope that it will help some DM's who are struggling with a few things in their own game. My specific rules for these NPC's are:
1- All NPC's are expendable, period. If they die they die.
2- They cannot help the party solve a problem unless directly asked, and they have zero capability for sudden insights.
3- They have a limited world knowledge, there perception of a situation might not be the accurate one.
4- Most are neither brave nor an adventurer, they have their own reasons for helping the party... once those reasons are complete, they need to leave!
This isn't everything but you get the point
One of the worst GM experiences: We're starting a Twilight 2000 campaign. My character is a Latina former Ranger turned drug dealer who starts the game with a Godwa amount of cash and equipment. (All rolled by game rules.)
Now I am the kind of player who likes to give the GM backstory to work with. So I invented a former lover who was also my Ranger captain, now retired.
I thought the GM could use my NPC for hints, plot hooks, etc.
First 10 minutes into the game, my former tutor and lover shows up as a now neo-Nazi skinhead who takes over my gorgeously crafted hide out.
Why this is wrong:
If you don't want to let my character start out as crazy rich, just say so. Don't let me spend hours in creation of something you'll take away in 10 minutes.
2) I gave you my backstory lovet
Sorry posted before I was done.
It's a scumbag move to take my NPC and totally rewrite him as everything that hates me.
I'm a new D&D player and my first adventure is The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. Most of the gaming group is really inexperienced and the game has become like was mentioned in this video, every fight and encounter just feels like we are just barely surviving by the skin of our teeth, on top of that the whole dungeon feels like it's out to kill us and we had a jerk rouge assassin who keeps trying to steal and kill anything and anyone he finds, in our party, that is until the halfling cleric he was picking on the most eventually cast glyph of warding on stone shoved it up his butt when the rouge was paralyzed after a fight against an electric eel and then blew him up.
Trial by fire.
That's based off of an old school mod and they could be like that.
-Nerdarchist Dave
Where you aware of the difficulties of this module at session zero? If you are feeling overwhelmed, I would highly suggest asking the DM for a bit of a time out at the beginning of the next session to talk things through and raise points regarding the module difficulty and the other player's behaviour.
Just try not to make it confrontational. The best way to do this is to simply ask for help. "I feel this is too hard for me. I don't know about anybody else but things are a little overwhelming. I'd super appreciate any help with playing this game."
Or "I really don't know how my character will handle this character that seems to want to disrupt stuff. It's a bit jarring to my experience. Can you help me try to figure out your character and why he seems to be disruptive to the adventuring party?"
Nice people are willing to help. If you ask for help, and the group (and DM) is silent that gives you an idea to the sort of group it is. Just remain respectful and talk to people to come up with solutions in the gaming group.
The "All your flaws take effect now" GM.
Playing Vampire the Masquerade and knew i wanted top play an interesting yet flawed character with a rich backstory. Session one, every single flaw came right at my character in the middle of a combat. 2 Mid ranked enemies ( I dont know remember the details perfectly), My characters sire, ( i had pissed him off by telling the to bugger off instead of complying instantly like he wanted), and the mundane cops (someone, the GM, threw in police record because of the sires anger)... needles to say... that character died 2 rounds after these parties showed up to the fight that he was already in with his squad.
lol, had a GM that covered ALL of these issue in a game I was playing, 1 player was turned into a changling from out of the blue, her back story was completely unraveled by session 4, so her entire character and backstory were completely obliterated. he treated charms and confusions as dominates, that last full duration with no follow up saves to break. mary-sued an orc we captured. and constantly complained about how "Hard" it is to kill players.
For me, it will always be the railroad DM. I enjoy an open world that is alive and breathing and the players get to interact with that world in various way, which is where the fun and/or drama comes in. If you're forced onto the railroad train, that interaction is very minimal and starts to not be fun. As a DM, I usually get signs from the players that my DM habits are turning into that playstyle (stacking of dice, drawing on character sheets, pulling out the phones, etc...), and when it happens, you just need to take a couple steps back and rethink your goals at the table.
FUCK, my player's stack dice sometimes!
This one kind of depends on what your DM has time for. If you don't want to play a Railroad type game, you need to find a DM who has more time. Some DM's really only have time to flesh out enough of the game for one or two days a week and they aren't terribly great at improvising.
That being said... When you remove player agency to railroad... That's a problem.
Probably the worst time I've had was with an over bearing DM. This was his world and you had to play his way, with the limited number options that he said were available in his setting. Examples include the following. Everyone had to be human. you could not be a Druid, Bard, Barbarian, or a Warlock. There were restrictions on backgrounds, and a personal pet peeve was that since it was set in vaguely middle age Europe then that meant that there were only people of European decent, if you catch my drift. Which did not sit well with me. For reasons why look to my profile pic.
LOL He wasn't being very subtle.
There is evidence of the presence of people from Romanised North Africa in Roman Britain.(43 to 410 AD) Archaeological inscriptions suggest that most of these residents were involved with the military. However, some were in the upper echelons of society. Analysis of a skull found in a Roman grave in Yorkshire indicated that it belonged to a mixed-race female. Her sarcophagus was made of stone and also contained a jet bracelet and an ivory bangle, indicating great wealth for the time.
Historical records indicate the presence of a very small African population in Britain dating at least as far as the 12th century. In 2013, a skeleton was discovered in Fairford, Gloucestershire, which forensic anthropology revealed to be that of a sub-Saharan African woman thought to be an unpaid bonded servant or slave, who died between the years 896 and 1025.
*TLDR?* Even if it was middle age Europe black people wouldn't be impossible, just rare. Sounds like your DM didn't care about historical accuracy as much as he did about recreating the T.V. version of the middle ages.
The rest of the restrictions are nothing special though. Limiting classes is very common if annoying to people who just want to try out all the options. He did pick some odd classes to restrict. What edition of D&D? Or was it a different game?
No, not very subtle at all. I talked him into letting me be who I wanted. I mean jeez, I have to be human let me pick what kind of human. But it bugged me that I even had to that.
It was a modified version of fifth edition D&D, but the story and setting were his own creation that he had been running for 30+ years. He was just overall very controlling and over baring. On your other points about history, I have to admit that it is very interesting and that I didn't know any of that. I knew there were Africans in the Roman Empire but I had no idea that they were as far away as the British Isles. So thank you for the quick lesson. My only argument at the time was if magic can be real why can't I be non-white. LoL
YIKES.
I had this DM recently who just killed everything. Every time we tried to save a person or city or fought in a battle with NPC troops everyone would die except us. It made me feel like we were doing nothing positive. Sure the bad guys were dead but so were all the villagers so in the end their was no point.
Often times main NPC characters would be killed in Cut scenes so we could do nothing to help them all we could do is watch as a NPC we had befriended and invested time in was killed by the DM.
In the last session before 3 of us quit he tried to murder our cleric by locking him in a Prismatic Shield with an enemy boss keeping the rest of the party out of the fight. The Cleric luckily outsmarted the boss and DM by using Hold Person to paralyze the Boss. But even after wailing on the Boss for 30 minutes it stayed up. Turns out the DM had given the boss over 1000 health to fight a single lvl 14 cleric. The only reason the Cleric survived is because the DM continued to roll terrible the whole time even after Hold Person wore off the bosses attacks continued to fail.
My first major campaign I made a lot of errors as the DM, but I think my worst mistake was being the overbearing DM and forcing a few of my players who came into the campaign a few weeks late into certain classes in order to try to help balance the party. One of the players took to the class and had fun, but the other really wanted to be a heavy hitter and was miserable playing as a rogue. He never really wanted to sneak around or use the rogue abilities, he just wanted to run up to things to cut them down and be the big hero. I've since looked back through that campaign a lot to fix my faults and I've since let my characters choose their own classes and let them figure out how to balance their shortcomings. While old me felt this would be a terrible time for them, they actually have a lot of fun figuring out ways to get around challenges that they're not suited for in any way.
My second biggest failure that campaign was not moderating the party very well when it was revealed that one of them was evil, and working against them the whole time. I should have stopped the game there, and had the group talk things out out of game, but instead I let things play out and PCs died and the quest they had been on for months ended as a failure. There were a lot of people who were angry and the campaign died out after that.
This is the first d&d characters for my party and myself, we are about lvl 5. Anyway our DM just decided that magic items should be super rare now and didn't warn us in any way. so my team mates and I have collected magic weapons, potions and items from our quests (I got a alchemy jar), we were also allowed to buy common and uncommon magic items off the shelf but we had to barter for them and we could roll once a fortnight to see if our desired rare item was on the shelf, if it was we could barter for it (using this I bought boots of elven kind , robe of usefulness, bag of holding and a rust bag of tricks) I should also note I was the only one who cared to buy items only because we seamed to only get magic swords which my character couldn't use {rock gnome cleric}. Ok now for the story for the last 2-3 months we have been preparing to defeat this mindflayer that was preventing us from mining adamantite, we all believed we had enough power to kill the mindflayer because we got two spell scrolls that could stupefy him. We set off but when we entered the cave he was in he had a magic obsorbing battery there which turned all our magic items into ordinary items including our potions, my characters God was unable to reach me or talk to me we were also stripped of all our weapons/armor. For 4-5 hours in real life and 1-2weeks in game time we had to destroy the battery and escape, when we destroyed the battery all magic items on the planet became ordinary. When my characters God finally connected with me again she simply said "oh there you are" oh we did kill the mindflayer because our DM had a beholder help us. He then told us he decided magic items should be super rare so he stripped the world of them. I still feel railroaded and I think this may have caused my character to turn from chaotic good to chaotic neutral being that the entire time my character was praying with no responce
My pet peeve is when the DM leaves crucially important things down to unvoidable dice rolls over role-playing and sound common sense. We briefly had an issue with some custom Wild Magic sorceror nonsense, but after we the players made our concerns known he revamped it with a great deal of work to make it more to the group's liking. In my opinion it has never been better. We get tense whenever the DM announces "Wild magic surge" but the worst that can typically happen is that we need to adapt on the fly to some wacky effect.
Rules lawyers , and the story driven dm where his story is more important than the characters and players and most of the adventure is a cut scene had a guy like that and I nearly beat the piss out of him
I feel your pain. My last GM thought it was his job to elevate the bad guys, mooks and minions included, to a level that made the PCs feel worthless. If it was in one game or setting I might could have waved it off as the flavor of that particular milieu but it was literally everything he ran. Plus he has ongoing mental issues that would continually bubble to the surface and ruin games. So glad I don't game with him anymore. But to be fair I have played with several GMs that used the game as way to inflict their mental issues onto those around them. I love this hobby but damn it just seems to attract the mentally ill.
my worst time playing was a game where the DM started me and another player off in a different location than the rest of the party. we had to wait for them to get to us. it took the entire game session for that to happen. the game ended when the others got too us. at the end of the session, the DM awarded me 1 point of XP for playing. the other guy (who was waiting with me) got 1000.... cause he asked a question while waiting.
I think my pet peeve would be railroading. The worst RPG experience I had was playing Aces and 8s with a friend of mine. Back then she was brutal-the opening encounter was 5 vs 2, 4 of said enemies having range advantage AND protection. From then on, we were basically slaves of the big bad, and when I killed his minion during a mission, I got punished. What, did you expect for us to take all that abuse and give us a target and NOT do something? Come on!
I've been an "antagonistic DM". My error was not to clarify that my intention was for the campaing to be rather dark... So there was an active effort on my part to make my pcs suffer. Still, I don't think I'll go that hard on that route again.
You guys REALLY deserve more than 42k subs. Wish I could sub more than once...
DMPC - I've seen this go right and wrong so many times. The best ways to make it work are to run the DMPC's like mercenaries. they don't solve problems, but you can ask them stuff. I like to start quests off with a "the guy sent to grab the part" so i can have a foot in building the party's team dynamic a bit, but i usually also make sure that character is killed off pretty early on in the story.
Helicopter DM - if you need a party to have a specific class... give it to them as an npc that takes part of the loot. as for the "charmed players controlled by the DM" well is it a charm or a control spell? if it's control, the dm should have more direct hand in what the player does. if it's just an influence, let the player pick how they do it, just make sure they do what they are told. finally the "changing a character" if the story calls for it or you think it's cool, to get people to elect the general as their leader (george washington?) or maybe taking a player to the side and saying "hey i know you wanted this but do you think you can do this, i'll give you ___" as long as you aren't dictating to the player what they must do, i don't see the harm in giving them options. but if they say no and you push it, you probably need to grow up.
DM vs PC - depends on the campaign. if you are playing in a high death campaign. it makes sense. if someone fudges dice and cheats to kill players, that's a real immature dick move. but I've played with plenty of groups who wanted the challenge of a high death no second chances campaign. and as long as it's something that you go into willingly, it's some of the most fun i've had in DND.
also is this a reupload? i feel like i've head the whole "general to king" , "necro to pally" and the "6x1 -roof = wipe" parts before.
They've told those stories before. You're not imagining. But this is a different video, I think.
The trade off for a DM *almost* killing the party over and over is: "Is the juice worth the squeeze?" I have a DM right now that, every session, we have had a few too many opportunities to wipe. Part of it is some shtick rolls, but the encounters have been variants of very difficult to feckin' deadly. But we all started coming more prepared to feed potions to each other or pack some more heal spells. We have adapted so it isn't only dumb luck that gets us through.
But, seriously, sometimes dumb luck gets us through. That's usually after luck had not been a lady with us for the beginning/middle of the session
Ya Im also not a fan of the Dominating DM, the type of DM that has to have control over everything. Im in this one campaign where our DM is like that. She constantly segways the main story to have one of her own PCs be the focus of a session. As an example, we did a one on one downtime session and she had my character go threw some training. This was fine and all, however there were times that I didnt get to decide the fate of my character and She just rolled for me. And at the end of that session it turned out that the NPC i was training under what just a time skipped version of that same character she keeps placing in almost ever single session we do now a days. There were a few other thinks like how she completely One shot killed my near max health character with that same NPC but that's a different issue. She also has NPCs do 90 if not 98% of major damage to a single boss instead of letting her players do that damage. So far we have gotten into 4 boss like battles...and each time an NPC one shoted the boss after only a single round or 2 of combat.
Though by far not the worst game ive ever been apart of, its still bad DMing and its slowly driving me and several other players away from her campaign.
On DMs playing party members. I love having players who come up with amazing craziness to get through their adventures, and I've now had two occasions where a player hs hired an NPC as a supporter for the party (in one case calling a favor from an old friend in her backstory, and another buying off a wayward sellsword who could lead the party into an abandoned temple full of bizarre artefacts.) I never intended them to be more than one offs, but the players loved having them around, so they just wound up travelling with the group, getting into barfights, breaking into ancient alien vaults and slaying kobolds. But while they became pretty badass in their own right, I always did what I could to make sure the spotlight stayed on the PCs. I'm honestly still not sure it's the best call, but, time'll tell.
You covered my least favorite. The Mary Sue DM. I played a game with a new DM who thought it would be cool to roll up super human stats for the characters. Through some bazar method I ended up with a sorcerer with a 28 charisma. That was a bad sign but I wanted to see where this went. Besides, he let me play the one race no other DM ever let me play. A kobald!
So the other players did not show or just strait up dropped leaving me and the DM playing a character. We went into a library where my character intended to find definitive proof of a lost advanced kobald civilization. Each room had a guardian of some sort and each combat went something like this. The DM's character wins initiative, kills everything, sometimes before I could get a spell off. Alright. May be this library has a clue that will lead me to this lost civilization. Nope. The library definitively stated in numerous books that kobalds never had more than scattered tribes that would sometimes become minions to dragons. So not only did I not find a plot point, but he also crushed any possible story hooks involving my characters goals.
To be fair I did the same thing when I was a new DM. I had a 3rd level fighter helping a level 1 party. BIG mistake. But this guy took that failure to a level I've never seen before or since.
Redfeild RE Life of a Kobald is a hard one.
My biggest pet peve is the gm that doesn't really have reasons for why things happen, and make worlds where physics don't make sense.
And its always just "magic" as to why things are the way they are
My response would be like, "I'm not a physicist. Sue me."
I'm not talking about physics not making sense in like a logical way, I'm talking about when the gm goes out of their way to invent physics that exist without cause to the point where you can't trust walking down the street without the ground turning against you. For example I remember playing a game on the moon, where all water was violently explosive.
Zeus Mcdaniels I can't come up with anything else than magic with that. I imagine he hosts ULTRA fantasy.
The game I currently play in, our DM made like almost a dozen extra npc characters that live in our HQ each with their own stats, unique abilities, etc. This sounded fun and once in a blue moon we would bring one or two as followers on adventures until they started to become too important. Its fun and changes things up while letting the party tailor strategies or whatever based on our missions should we choose. However it started going bad and it's getting to a point where we'd reach a total dead end or the possibility of solving a scenario was made almost impassable if we didn't happen to have particular followers with us at those times. Even two instances where a particular follower happen to be the perfect counter to the way a combat encounter was set up and the npc would steal everyones thunder. And another puzzle/obstacle where the DM flat out said "we'd be done with this long ago if you brought [insert name] along."
I like the way Matt Colville described playing a character (actually more of a follower) who had a predetermined motivation and approach to problems, his example was a Dwarf who was always willing to charge into combat seeking a glorious death in combat even if the fight was suicide.
keep calling it a thief Nate!!!
I've often used my own pc to help my games. Often noone wants to be a healer so I make an oc who plays a cleric or sometimes a paladin(had a group who all wanted to be three mages, two sorcerers and warlock). I do try to keep them as none intrusive as possible when it comes to plot. Sometimes having him spend big plot points in his gods temple.
the thing that annoys me the most is a DM who over exponates everything. I've had a session where the DM had to explain every single little detail in a town, it's political sittuation, it's NPCs everything... now... having a nice detailed backstory and everything is nice, but let the players find out about it over time. Spending 2 hours just listening before the first roll is too much...
I have had one pc die 3 times in 5 sessions in this adventure I am running. But two of them were his fault and one was luck of the dice
what did he do?
Only makes you a killer GM if character death was your goal.
-Nerdarchist Dave
I did do a party wipe once...BUT half the players were absent that day so my encounter against 6 was against 2. When they did get together again, they faced the same situation and triumphed.
a current campaign i'm running started as a high death campaign. so in the first 3 session i had a kill count of about 25. (each player had a handful of back up sheets) but since the start we've brought in a few people who are either new to DnD in whole or new to 5e (and lost a few of our veterans) so we changed to a more story campaign, sadly that meant we had a party of like 4 barbs, a monk a druid 2 pally's and a rogue who sold his soul (and 6 levels) for a ring of perm-invisibility. since that first 3 session most of the PC kills have either been PCvPC or suicide. (one of our newbs picked up the habit and we're trying to break him but when ever he thinks he's going to die he finds a way to kill himself)
Your suicide newbie might be attempting to protest something he doesn't like about the game, but is unable to articulate due to inexperience or some other reason. For many newbies, it doesn't occur to them that they can just quit from a game that isn't a good fit or them, and so they start to feel trapped and desperate. Have you tried to talk to him to find if there are any underlying issues? Having 9 players can cause certain difficulties. Also, allowing PvP can make for a very not fun environment for players who aren't into it.
Pcs are enemies is fun sometimes when it's an adventure, usually a one off made for it. In any other sense though it sucks
It requires a lot of discipline because realistically, if the DM wants you to lose, you lose. The DM controls the rest of existence, so no matter what they can bugger you.
and it's something you have to come into knowing this is how it's going to be. high death is fun, but you can't come in thinking you can dick around in a high death.
If the Dm wants to kill you, you die. If the Dm wants to maim you, you are maimed and might die. There is a difference between having a hard campaign, and an antagonistic campaign.
I can't imagine trying to get a player to play a class or race that they don't want to play.
ever ran into a "human fighters only" DM?
How do people feel about the 'cold as ice' DM who seemingly treats the PCs with indifference, never tries to save them, etc, for the sake of realism or fairness?
gotta agree with Dave here.I only put NPCs in a solo party, and those are typically people/baddies they bought/acquired. they don't always level as quick and the PC always had final say for decisions, but they're there to cover gaps and who gets taken is up to the PC. my wife and I have a solo campaign I've run for a while now, and she enjoys having her pick of party members for drama and variety.
Now I'll still make powerful NPCs, but they're there for a purpose. that amazing hero at the top of the guild escorted them to a dungeon he couldn't enter, so they'd see what they'd become and have something to strive for, and a greater pride when they end up past him, knowing what they've accomplished. or that wizard in the east, or witch shopkeeper. the difference- they DONT outshine the party. the superhero doesn't stay with them, he decimates something strong on the way to the dungeon and thanks the level 1's for going where his oaths forbid him as he leaves. the shopkeep's powerful sure, but they only interact with him as a shop that sells what they can't make. yeah the dragon's strong but he's giving them quests, not solving them.
The GMPC just doesn't work XD
My first ever time RPing. The DM spent a few weeks hyping the game up. Getting me and another friend who's also never played, super excited.
The first session arrives at long last, and it turns out that all he had prepped was: "4 skellies attack the tavern you're in." Followed by; "4 more skellies are just outside the tavern."
And that was it. Game done.
That's it?
That's the DM's idea of a one-shot? That's... Kinda lazy on their part.
I think I've got a wonderful example of killer dm. We were playing the game normally the dm had a Co-dm and sometimes he would bow out to play as a a sorta ultimate character in his world because he basically had everyone's backing within almost all cities. Now us regular players were at a lake sleeping out and we wake being attacked by these swarms of frogs. The dm and his personal friend had been sleeping in the woods at almost 120ft away now during combat they wake up and start heading to us the dm plays a centaur paladin 1 sorcerer 5 first thing he does he throws a fireball at all our characters and the frogs by the way since the frogs were in the lake they had a nice reduction while we took full blast for the most part he did this and shot 2 fireballs taking us all out and the frogs barely touched where the frogs then killed us and ate us in the lake. The next session after we made new characters one of us builds a wizard and uses the spell leomunds tiny hut to avoid some of the dangers of being on the road the dms first reaction to the first time he has ever seen this spell is to throw 1 storm giant per hour we sleep in the hut this is not even including the fact storm giant are good creatures and we are only lvl 6 needless to say we all die and a couple of us rage quit after and when we came back he demanded for rage quitting that we write a 200 word apology letter to him. And to think he runs a dm meet and talk and charges 3 lbs ahead when he acts likes this with his players
My worst DM experience was this one time I was with a group, I was playing the stereotypical paladin, and we were about 5 sessions in. We'd made it all the way from level 1 to 7 and things were going really well. Now the trouble, I think, started around our 3rd or so adventure. We'd uncovered a plot by one of the king's Jarl's to basically sell the kingdom's land to an enemy kingdom. When we called the dude out on it the DM tells us he challenges me to a trial by combat for his honor. So, the DM makes it really apparent that I'm about to get my ass kicked, but he didn't account for sheer, dumb luck. The battle starts, I win initiative, I roll attack. Nat 20. I roll to confirm. Nat 20. Now the DM starts sweating because we were playing by a house rule where if you rolled two Nat 20s in a row on attack and confirm, you rolled a third, and if IT was a Nat 20, you instantly killed your target. You can guess what happened on my third roll. So my like, level 5 Paladin kills this 10th level fighter and by the law of the land, I inherit all his lands and wealth. Needless to say, our quest to reclaim the lost holy mcguffin got sidetracked as I now had a castle and bannermen to manage. Rather than just adapting his script or whatever for this unexpected change of plans, he just has our original quest giver show up, tell me I'm not serving the gods anymore and strip me of all my paladin levels after two full sessions of running my new Jarlship and putting down a rebellion by the old Jarl's son and we were finally about to get back underway on our original quest. DM tells me to roll a new character and be better about roleplaying my alignment this time. T___T
Easy: Arbitrary rules!
Just joined a campaign and in the first session: Making attack spells Insta hit, immunities to Hex based on a whim and two things far sillier.
One player was out so the DM played as her. Second turn, had her do a spell that only hit the party and didn't backtrack when he realized it was a mistake. Then, next turn, had her do an impromptu 360 sweeping attack that hit the entire party (we were only facing one enemy...
Then, on a critical fail, instead of it missing or using the roll table, made it so the sword flew the opposite way it was swung, 20 feet, and chop someone's foot off............
That person critically swung again and this time it chopped two people's feet off.
It was painful to endure (the game... My feet were safe).
Regarding DM's trying to kill you...when I was a player in a retro 1st edition campaign (maybe last year) the DM misread the module monster stats. I figured this out because after he threw a totally impossible encounter at at us we were all kinda miffed and he argued that "its in the book, its beatable!".
Being me, I knew I was right and he wasn't and looked it up later. The module said something to the effect [and I can't remember exactly] of "eight guards 2 8, 2 5, 2 4, 3, 2". What it meant was there were two with 8 hitpoints, 2 with 5, 2 with 4, and one with 3 and one with two. What we got was eight guards each with 28 hit points because he thought it was saying 28, 25, 24...and then was incomplete. So we were four 1st level characters fighting eight guards with 28 hit points each. I pretty sure he also gave them all platemail because he remembered the encounter being easy and wanted to 'step it up and make it hard'. --___--
Also, one of the four characters was his DM controlled. lol.
We have a small group so the dm will usually run a pc character in the group just to help the group have an extra character and more skills and abilities available. This also allows the dm to have a means to "save" the group if something goes horribly wrong with the planned event. The character cannot be a main part of the campaign, such as in making decisions for the group, leading the group, or be over-powered and/or overshadow other players' characters and their actions.
I like what the dude in the middle said about creatity at 4:00 . I had me imagine a mage or wizard using a fireball to blow open a locked door
I would just like to throw out this one that I encountered with an Earthdawn campaign. The unkillable NPC. In the campaign we had a windling NPC that was the GMs favorite get attacked. Short version, said NPC was helping other NPCs try to kidnap one of our party members. So, party member attacks, gets critical hit, and rolls tons of damage. Something that should be fatal and pins said windling to the ground. Somehow this tiny fairy creature with essentially a spear through it's guts manages to pull itself off the arrow and be only minorly wounded, just because it was the GMs favorite. Suffice to say, that's the last time our group played Earthdawn.
When I DM I kind of go off the philosophy that I am playing FOR the players, not against them. I don't make it too hard, but just challenging enough to be fun. I'm there to provide the conditions for the players to make their own stories and feel like heros (unless the campaign is themes differently than a typical one). That being said, I've had players tell me that can come off as I am being TOO nice, but most of my players have a good time so I guess it's fine
When I'm a DM and I HAVE to have an NPC in the party as a guide, tutorial, what have you, I have a simple solution to his involvement. Make him so eccentric that his solutions to problems are circumvented by the players' own imaginations. My gnome magus guide views Floating Disk as the answer to all life's problems. Even when my players come to expect it, they still have to make it work with their skills. For example, the party needed to infiltrate a building that had guards patrolling around it, so they used Floating Disk to help get onto the roofs. I thought that would be the end of it, but the healer got it into his head to use the FD as a hoverboard to clear the gap between buildings. He did not voice this plan to anyone in the party, but if he did he would have learned that FD stays 3 feet from the ground. What followed was the most beautiful near-miss I'd ever narrated. His fingers managed to find the ledge, but the rest of his body found the wall.
So glad I found you one of guys shopping at my Wawa.. Love the videos!
See! I've been saying for years that you should never take away player agency and you should never go after a party with the intent of killing them, because that makes you a bad dm, and nerdarchy openly agrees with me! took em long enough but better late than never.
Now you can put the a group of jack ass on the internet agrees with feather your hat, lol.
-Nerdarchist Dave
Oh you're not jack asses...You're just like me >:D
but are there ever times you could take away agency? possession? mind control? alignment breaking? loss of humanity in WoD? what if it makes sense and can add some fun? like telling the barbarian that the guy bumping into them in the bar caused them to enter a free rage? or telling a druid that they failed a fear roll but instead of running they turned into something that could hide?
I'd like to disagree on a single point. "Never go after the party with the intent of killing them". This removes agency from your monsters as well as incentive to have your monsters play well against PC's. If monsters are going to fight your PC's, they should be doing so with the intent to kill them. As efficiently as possible. If it becomes obvious that they can't win a fight, they should be surrendering or running away (provided they don't have some philosophy of fighting to the death). In what world would someone ever attack you, if they didn't think they could beat you? They should absolutely think they can kill your PC's and be taking steps to do so.
If you have a wizard dressed like a wizard... Smarter enemies should be dogpiling that player to put him out of commission quickly due to his DPS. Things of that nature should make combat compelling and interesting.
There is, however, a fine line between the DM trying to kill the players, and the Encounter trying to kill the players. This is usually distinguished by whether or not the DM pulls stuff out his/her bum in the course of the game. A random bandit shouldn't be pulling a magic sword out of his bum to suddenly be doing 3 more damage to a PC than he would normally. Reinforcements shouldn't magically show up for no reason. Etcetera.
But, if you have encounters that play like they have brains and intelligence, then you make the players make tough decisions. Do you kill weak and fleeing opponents who have given up? Do you execute foes who have surrendered? Do you give chase to fleeing opponents? How do you respond to the enemy ganging up on a single player? Do you prioritize targets in combat as well, to take care of the biggest threats quickly?
That's not to say your players shouldn't be getting total victories every now again. It also isn't to say your players should be just barely winning every single combat. It's just to say that encounters should flow realistically. The DM should be playing an encounter with the intent to win it with the resources allocated to it, within reason (enemies aren't generally going to endure being stabbed in the back constantly while dogpiling a wizard, etcetera). You don't want combat to be too difficult or too much like Chunky Salsa.
If a player thinks they could die from combat, they have a vested interest in playing like they want to mitigate damage done to them while maximizing damage done to enemies. The players I have, once they saw my style, adopted combat maneuvers and tactics. They adopted formations and roles in combat. Sometimes, they even get creative and create an environment that is hostile to the encounter I'm running by making the floor slippery or covered in acid, or knocking out stone blocks from the ceilings.
Without a sense of danger, your players won't ever really do anything cool or interesting.
why on earth would you think that alignment breaking or loss of humanity are reasons to take over someone's character or otherwise affect agency? as for the rest, no. never try to play their characters for them.
For me, the last minute "Oh, i houserule that differently" DM. You know, the guy who changes a ton of mechanics in his head, but never tells the players until it actively comes up.
That is one of mine, especially when it is a rule that DRASTICALLY changes how the campaign works.
Git a really good point with the DM/Player PICK ONE argument.
Grinds my gears when the DM has a PC in the party- No matter what anybody tells me, the DMPC will always be a key element in the party...
I am even guilty of doing this, but to be fair the party recruited those NPCs and One of them happened to be Ireena from Ravenloft- I couldn't really do anything if they decided to have her join lol.
Never had them get items, take loot, I let the players make all the choices, if they looked for them for help- they might offer a hint or advice but never a 'Better solution' just a different way of going about things.
I had a DM have a another player run my character when I was out one week. The other player ran my character out of the normal for the character, the rest of the group was dumbfounded. With the actions taken and reflex save was failed and my character was crushed under a rock fall trap. DM allowed me to continue to play the character with a lingering injury give a Dex stat loss.
One of the worst things I've seen people complain about online is a variation of the DM vs the Players where the DM is Nerfing the player's class abilities because they are "too powerful". One guy said he wanted to stop playing a wizard because the DM kept restricting what his spells could do because she thought the spells were too powerful. Another guy was running a barbarian and the DM gave every enemy psychic swords to neutralize his damage resistance but the swords turned into normal swords when the enemies were beaten so he couldn't even get a cool magic item from that BS.
Well, if one character is too powerful, can't be challenged, is stealing all the spotlight from everyone else, one thing that can be done is modifying the character a bit. It makes sense that you don't want to have a party with too much difference in power.
The psychic swords that are only cool as long as the enemy has them is bullshit though. Unless the enemies themselves apply magic/psychic ability to the swords during battle.
I am currently running a game with 7 players. They are roughly the same group I've been playing with for years, and they've constantly said how they want to work towards getting better at role playing and not just roll playing. I have introduced a few sessions ago the idea of a character (not always the same character, but SOME character) who goes around with them so that during moments of quiet where they otherwise wouldn't be talking to each other that character can try to strike up conversations and get the group talking. By doing this I've been able to get them role playing because they think it's an NPC doing all the work when in reality the NPC usually asks a quick question to one of them who starts talking, then someone else asks a question and another and another and before you know it we've role played a four hour carriage ride worth of conversation. Do I use this all the time? No. I use it when it feels like they are ready to take a break from ::roll:: "damage" ::roll:: "hit points". So far it's working out pretty well for us.
the worst DM for me was one guy who thought the game was him telling you what you character does and you just roll the dice to see if the actions he picked for you work. we told him thats not how RPGs work so he tried letting us decide for our characters but he would just say you cant do that" when you tried to do anything . for instance our group was up on a ledge and had to move across open country so i had my mage cast fog between us and the bad guys. he said you cant do that. I figured i could cast fog to conceal our movement but in his mind that cant happen. needless to say we only played the one game and all the players bailed out..now thats a bad DM
I am planning to GM&PC with my folks. It'll be my first time GMing and a party of three sounds a bit better than a party of two - but the main reason is when I suggested it they sounded really positive about the idea. But I'm determined to go against all the common pitfalls that could come from that. Once they decide their characters I'll give them a choice from a tavern of who to take along with them and they can spend as long as they please talking among them and selecting between them. But whatever kind of character it ends up being I'll play a largely-clueless background support role most of the time (whether that means a shy character speaks when spoken to, or a blustery character learns a lesson quite quickly about the fact they can be wrong about stuff). Figure that mitigates most bad habits. Basically if I'm doing the bad thing I'm wanting to turn it into a good thing and play like that. Obviously, also playing pretending like I have no knowledge of anything (which is actually helping me consider the headspace of a player at each stage of the adventure I'm crafting). Between the character being either immediately or fairly quickly open to instruction, picking a progress path to complement the party rather than achieve badassery of their own, and them having chosen who to bring along in the first place... I think I can pull this off?
I don't think I'd even be considering it if it wasn't for the circumstance of two new players with one new GM doing a custom adventure. I agree that in general it's just a plain bad idea.
My adventure is more of a social/puzzle thing since the players aren't as interested in the combat side of the game. So I'm hoping to use the combat side of the game as infrequent events that mean something to them because of what they're fighting for due to the rest of it. Thinking back to my own aversion to shooter games until I started to play one of them that actually had deep story behind it (Mass Effect)... and that made the shooter bits actually enthralling. Trying to harness that in a tabletop setting.
I play with a group of friends, We mainly play 3.5e (With heavy homebrew more often than not) and out of the four of us we have had a lot of fun. There is one guy who does like to DM, the only problem is that he will constantly state that he has played back since the beginning and will often argue with us about little things. His worlds are often very well built and fun to play in but most of the time he shows a level of favoritism towards people that is hard to manage. in one campaign i was the favorite, I got a +10 weapon and some enchanted armor... at level 11? i think. It was insane and then he started throwing stronger monsters that were beating the other players into pulp. We stopped that game early.
He also is a overbearing player that constantly is reminding the DM of rules and of little things that the DM already knows. He will also backstab anyone to get a power boost in game. Doesn't matter if it is his loving mother. He builds his characters for neutral alignments and actively tries to break the game. But with 3.5 and homebrew we have that issue often.
Anyway, Boiled down my pet peeve is, A DM who wants to be a player, often goes back on his word the next game, and for the love of the heavens can't not have a more open mind about his worlds.
worst experience - doing a game like a dungeon crawl. we fought a boss that we determined to have more then 600 hp. there were 7 players 11th level. it was hard but we made it through. not to mention it also had the use of magical items. 3 floors later we are fighting another boos like creature. half of us were about half dead during the corse of the fight, the dm also tried to deny my ability, Hurl through hell, we also determined that we had done more that 900 damage and that's when it got dumb. in 1 round. the monster used an ability that did over 60 damage to most of the players, the dc being 26, healed for the damage delt, and summoned the boss from 3 levels prior... I left.
I had a DM hit my tent with lightning 3 times during a sandstorm. I was a level 1 druid. the first bolt knocked me out, the second hit my animal companion, while the final strike finished me off.
On the point about antagonistic DMs: I've never considered having every battle being a struggle to stay alive as antagonistic. In fact, if there is ever a battle where my players aren't desperate at the end they complain that it was boring and too easy. That's why my battle CRs are always deadly and bosses are double to quadruple deadly. That's the way my players like it.
I miss having Nate's input in these videos. Salute him for me.
One of my pet peeves is the "I'll make absolutely sure nobody ever dies" DM. I need that Sword of Damokles hanging over my head because without tension there is no drama. If battles or other conflicts are not dangerous I lose interest in the game. I mean what's the point of planning and strategizing if you know you are going to survive no matter how silly your decisions?
There are two times I'll take control of a PC, and those are any invasive influence (A rogue AI, possession, etc.) In which case I have saves to break loose of that control; and in the case of player absence, in which case I have notes on the characters and play to them. There have been clutch moments in the former case, and some nice hand offs in the latter.
My pet peeve is what I call the Railroad DM, you guys call it the helicopter DM. We originally started the campaign about 2 years ago in pathfinder with a 4 person party. I was playing a Swashbuckler and we had a Fire cleric, a druid and a paladin who almost never showed up to the sessions. From the first session we became "The Chosen Ones" and were marked with a mark of an ancient group dedicated to stopping a world ending god from coming to power. Part of this included the fact that like 11 different nasty gods were suddenly pissed at us and that basically amounted to the DM throwing whatever nasty shit she wanted at us and saying it was because "Gods". At that point in the game we were level 1 or 2 and had this grand future ahead of us but our DM felt we had to have at least 2 encounters per session and because we were so low level none of these encounters could really be related to this grand quest. Long story short, we basically got forced in to encounters with ever more difficult types of rats. No joke, our first 4 levels consisted almost entirely of fights with rats. We took about a 8 month break due to real life stuff then came back and swapped the campaign to 5th edition and the Druid and Paladin dropped out and were replaced by two new players playing a Warlock and a Ranger. The first few months the campaign really felt like it was on rails and we had no control over what we could do. The worst session I remember is we had acquired a ship and sailed to a small island out in the ocean. We'd brought our ship in to a cove and anchored it then gone ashore and did our business there. A huge storm was brewing (Thanks to a god who was angry at us) and we rushed back to the ship, dropped an extra two improvised anchors and battened down the hatches, took down the sails and made ready for the storm. Once it hit the DM started having us make checks to react to things that happened and basically just kept forcing checks until we finally messed up at which point she broke our mast and rudder and forced us out to sea. I literally had about 9 successes in a row and should have been able to keep the ship under control but she just kept forcing checks until we failed. It has gotten much better since then but I remember being actually angry irl and going in to the other room to vent.
The only time I'm usually okay with a DM playing a PC in their party is when they're trying to help them get used to everything, not just shoving their character in like "oh lol, and my random-ass Half-elf paladin is there in that bar too"
Falling in line with the GM/Player line crossing I hate the Runway show of NPC's that can take over a game until you start to wonder why the PC's are even there. Esp if the NPC's start talking to each other for more then a few minutes and you end up watching a puppet show the GM is putting on.
I have played an all rogues 1st game, an all fighters 1st and an all Archers 1st games each was pretty funny as well as entertaining.
In many of my games Clerics are tied to a local Church and can not go adventuring
Wizards are rare outside of a College, and need huge inducements to leave their studies.
Druids are only found out in the country side and usually require a favor to assist the party
Great video. The outro was perfect lol.
6:40 What I would have done in the situation is have the NPCs decide that they want the player as their king. Kind of revenge for when players fall in love with random NPCs.
I have some characters come with the players especially small parties. Sometimes they meet a character of legend that guides them for a bit. I use them mostly as well a guide show them the world and how things are what boundaries are safe to live in. I find that at times this is preferable over a TPK when they take on the local militia that asks them to stand down.
Totally on the side of the DMPC being my pet peeve! Have one DM who constantly has NPCs in the party doing various things, these NPCs almost always are the ones to figure out puzzles, they are usually 2-5 levels above every member of the party, and even usually have some great secret the story revolves around. This drives up the wall with annoyance. To me as a player, it is almost an offense, like we are not skilled enough to make it through a dungeon on our own so we have this OP NPC to hold our hands through the whole thing. This is by far the biggest nuisance to me as a player that I could see as completely avoidable.
I agree, though to an extent, I'm currently in a game where I'm technically DMPCing a character as the group was tasked with guarding the prince of a monarchy while he traveled the land to get some experience in the wilderness and to teach him about the world, he's 3rd level Eldritch Knight Fighter, started out as a regular guy, but the wizard and fighter decided to try and teach him to fend for himself, so he took a level in fighter, then became an Eldritch Knight in the last session, and the rest of the group is 6th level, about to hit 7th. He purposefully takes a backseat on puzzles because he's your average joe with INT and is just that, a DMPC. It's just people that take it too far that I have the issue with. DMPCing is a nifty tool that can be used to help project a character that has some kind of appeal to the characters and the story. DM's that feel a DMPC is a front stage flag-barer are just bad at using them and don't understand that the game is a story that's based on the player characters and not the DM.
I sometimes feel the need to use a DMPC. Why? Because, if one of my players fell into a pit and I remind the other players that they have rope, then they ask me what the hell they're supposed to do with rope. One thought that she was blind because it was dark, so we had to convince her for nearly 5 minutes to use the light spell.
It's part of the overbearing DM but I hate when the DM doesn't allow a flaw (which, to me and a lot of others, is the part that makes each character interesting and unique.) to be detrimental. I can understand not wanting some barbarian's flaw to be something like "sometimes, I go into a rage out of nowhere and try to kill anyone nearby" but you shouldn't force a player to pick an awful cliché flaw that will affect a bit of dialogue at most.
So a question for DM's, a noob chooses to play cleric of the life Domain. flies off a cliff with the carriage and several organic creatures to the waters bellow in heavy armor. Survives the fall and makes what the DM describes as a meat paddle boat. (DM's choice I wanted to just raise a horse. DM's new to their was some confusion with how magic worked at the time. rolled a 20.) should there be a repercussion for this or smaller offences? (and would you guys make the player choose between necromancy with a new shiny spell or healing the party? As in they can no longer cast healing spells on anyone.
Sometimes I think I'm a bad DM. I tend to forget to write down notes or procrastinate until the last hour and put a campaign together.
Can I get a ruling on an issue in my current campaign? I have a first time player who chose to be a cleric, but is not enjoying it... He likes his characters back story but is constantly trying trying to play them as a fighter and isn't really enjoying his lack of stats due to particularly poor rolls during the character creation.
I set up a trap where his character vanishes in a puff of smoke and he became a dwarf instead of a halfling, and his stats were much better balanced to how he seems to enjoy playing his character (I know there isn't really a way to do this, but I follow the rule of cool). I gave him an optional quest where he received a relic which he could use to turn back or to sell for a huge amount of gold. He used the gold to buy better equipment and played as a fighter, but I wonder if anyone has any suggestions on how to deal with a situation like that that could have easily made a person not enjoying the game break and walk away from it entirely.
If you are doing D&D, I would definitely give that player the option to switch to Paladin if he wanted to keep the same character and backstory (I probably would have let him redo the stats but not changed the race). Make it a sort of divine awakening to his true calling.
I general, if you have a player who is really not enjoying their character or the game, talk to them to try and find out what it is they are not liking and try to work from there. With your example, where the player just didn't like how his character played, it's fairly easy to just let them start a new character (or modify the current one). Other issues may be more involved. Try and work with them to change things so that they can participate. The nice thing about being the DM is that you can always change anything--including the classes. Your Warlock wants to fight in melee but Eldritch Blast is basically always his best attack option? Make up an "Eldritch Blade" Cantrip that lets him make a melee attack with added magic damage/effects (probably equal to that done by Eldritch Blast), but replaces Eldritch Blast. With the player's agreement of course. The main thing is to try and find out what isn't working and work with the player to address it.
The fact that you show interest and are trying may be enough to convince them to stay at least a while longer and give it another shot.
I was told past character creation it's dm vs players by a dm that's bean playing seance 1st edition
makes sense, since that is how 1st edition worked
The worst thing is inflexibility. Not being able to adjust to surprises the players present.
I feel it really depends on the group too. If you have a group that likes hack n' slash and isn't too involved in character background, then they may enjoy a Dark Souls style difficulty where their characters may die and they can just make new ones - I think for some players it is more about strategy than RP and deaths are part of that strategy.
But again, both players and DM have to be on the same page if this is what they are going to enjoy.
For myself, who likes heavy RP and extensive BG, that is definitely one of my pet peeves. It's inhibiting if I feel the DM is trying to kill us because it makes me not want to take risks because I don't want to lose a character I've put so much work into or have to work in another one and thus as a player I become less interactive in the game, which is no fun for anyone. I'm not saying pull punches, because death is a part of a story, but if you go in with the mindset that you will defeat your players and "win" then I feel your losing sight of what the game is about, or at least my style of the game, which is about creating a story in which the PCs are the main characters and have a story to tell.
To a lesser extent, a pet peeve of mine is permanently maiming characters. For instance, I had an arrogant extremely vain character who was hit by a scorching ray and nearly died. Knowing my character, the DM thought it would be funny to have all his hair burn off and his face become permanently scarred, however, this put him in opposition to his character concept and he didn't encourage or like the realistic interpretation of what this would have caused in my character (depression, loss of identity, a struggle to cope with the loss of what he felt defined himself), instead, the DM was dismissive or in some instances turned it into even more of a joke. In the end, we worked it out as he realized it did bother me so I was able to use regeneration to heal, but the loss of agency in my character's story stung. I feel like a better way to handle drastic, permanent changes like this are to give players an option - they can choose to have a permanent disfigurement or other character altering effect from something truly harrowing and you can work with them to decide on what that is going to be, or they can choose not to and you as a DM can come up with a reason that, that happens. I wasn't against have a lasting scar from the event, but more not having a say in how my character's story and personal appearance changed (because it was a core of his story).
Another instance of this was with another player who lost an eye in one of our first sessions. She was also given penalties along with her disfigurement making it actually detrimental to her character and made her really question whether she wanted to continue to play that character or not because, again, it was a loss of agency in her character design and concept.
My pet peeve is the babying DM, who constantly babies the characters, gives them exactly what they want, the pc's never lose. Played these games for years with several different DMs, I was NEVER in danger, we always won. It got old, I now enjoy a more dangerous game, as long as the DM is honest it can be a good battle of wits.
Monty Haul to Kill em all....
I noticed that most beginner DMs start out Monty Haul, handing out excess loot. Then they get into Kill em all, ripping the players apart. Hopefully they mature into good balanced DMs, but it takes some time. Nobody is an instant perfect DM first time they try.
The DM's purpose is to provide the realm and the challenges. The player's job is to tear up the DM's plans, kill the bad guys and walk away with the loot.
The thumbnail makes me think of a mechanical spider. That being said, what's your take on monstrous warforged?
Such as draconic, gnoll, or other monstrous machine type of player characters?
I think it would be interesting.
Imagine an army of mechanical murder hobos or even an army of orcs whom have turned their bodies into living machines of war to rule the world.
DMs who only act as judge of rules but don’t facilitate etiquette, fair play, fair share of time or allow the quiet, shy player an opportunity to shine. Also, DMs who create a story that will continue to develop with or without the presence of their PCs.
Sometimes, in some times and places, it was just difficult to become a general without the risk of becoming the King or the Emperor. See several Romans and also Conan.