Vulnerable to Fire's page

I don't understand all the insinuations that I am a cruel DM. The last "rocks fall everyone dies" in my campaign wasn't conducted by me. It was set up by my players as a trap, and the resulting avalanche let them safely kill a pair of dragons far above their CR. That's because when you have plans that don't revolve solely around running up to a monster across an open field and slashing it with a sword, you can accomplish more than someone looking at your character sheet and typing numbers into a spreadsheet would expect.

Sounds like your players aren't very clever then. Might explain your haste to criticize my "intelect".

In game solutions rarely work. Have you tried sitting down and talking with the offending players?

And no offense, but unless you are making combat more than hack and slash (ie, usage of environment, combat maneuvers, etc), or having more ways to gain XP besides combat, cleverness won't get them very far. The burden of rewarding cleverness is always on you, the GM, so you have to encourage that kind of play. Or else the game won't evolve past killing the orc and taking his pie.

And really, no matter how clever you are, a level 1 bard with +8 Diplomacy will do diddly squat to anything CR 12+.

Any GM who doesn't do such things has no business being a GM. Clever play is the soul of the game.

A level 1 bard with +8 Diplomacy will only do diddly squat against anything of CR 12+ if the bard's only plan is to stab it with a sword.

It only makes them useless if the extent of their cleverness is to say "I full-attack" and hope that's enough to solve every problem. Cunning and creativity are and have always been ten thousand times more important than class features. And as I said, it's very easy to catch up very quickly.

I audit their builds to cut down on their cheese, though they don't like it and I eventually was forced to ban the gunslinger class outright after seeing one too many stupid builds with two pistols they shouldn't even be able to reload. But there needs to be a major deterrent to getting your ranger killed just because your favored enemy is undead and you've been fighting orcs lately or whatever else passes for a reason to murder a character.

Eventually, I got sick of players deliberately killing themselves so they could come back with some absurd build deliberately minmaxed to peak at their current level or just because their attention span was too short for them to bother playing a single character for more than a few levels before getting distracted by some other shiny feat or something. So I brought back the oldest rule in the book:

New characters are new characters. They start at level 1 with starting equipment.

This also makes death scary. Even with this edition's insanely easy access to guaranteed resurrection, at least it makes recovering the body important - and removed the ridiculous scenario of "Oh no, our eighteenth-level cleric Bob just died, he was the best cleric in the entire land and we're running out of time, wait what's this, here comes another high-level hero of whom we've never heard before despite his supposed power and importance, goodbye verisimilitude forever."

It's tough, but fair. Low-level characters need far less experience to level and get more experience than their high-level allies, so they catch up in levels quite quickly, especially if they go off on a sidequest. Besides, to players with actual cleverness and imagination, their most powerful weapons aren't what's written on their character sheet, and even a first-level character can be a powerful asset to a twentieth-level party. And it just makes sense; you shouldn't have a high-level character if you haven't done anything with that character yet.

But when I reintroduced this rule, a couple of my players started to grumble. Yes, they were munchkins, and I explained to them that it was my game and my rules and they could take it or leave it, but I wonder if any of you have had similar reactions?

kmal2t wrote:

But I've seen enough examples of the things people have said on here and games I've seen in person to know it's not just people trolling or anecdotal incidents. Players now are beginning to feel like they should have much more control over their characters than they ever used to have.

It's one thing to have control over your character, it's another to have your character control the world. Your character is yours, you can do what you want with him and that's fine with me. Go ahead and build that whip specialist fighter if that's what you want to do. But don't get angry with me when your fighter has to track down a master leatherworker who can create that masterwork whip you want, while the barbarian who uses a plain old axe can find a sufficiently talented blacksmith with ease because he uses a much more common weapon. Or that I make you hunt down and kill your own dragon for that dragonhide armor you want.

I won't disallow you from getting the things you want, but I might make you work for them. You may be a hero, and get preferential treatment from NPCs at times because of that, but I'm not going to hand everything to you on a silver platter just to fit your character concept. And just because you're in town doesn't mean that the local shops will have what you want in stock. You might have to travel to get things, or wait for them to be custom made. I'll make concessions here and there, but I won't let you try and reshape the world specifically to fit your character.

When did this game become about playing heroes?

I thought thats what marvel super heroes, DC, Champions, and Heroes Unlimted was for.

I keep reading about how this game is all about heroes?

when did that happen?

Good to see some sensible DMs here.

How in the hell is a 1st level party supposed to do anything but run away from an adult dragon? Though I get the feeling you wouldn't even allow that because I'm sure you'd have the dragon wake up chase down the party and have a snack.

Now who's strawmanning? Don't be a jerk.

WHAT KIND OF GM RUNS 1ST LEVEL CHARACTERS INTO A DRAGON's DEN? I would get up and leave as soon as the encounter happened because just the idea of it is so friggin asinine.

The dragon's den exists in the world. It's not the DM's fault if the PCs stumble upon it, it's not the DM's responsibility to fiat away the dragon and replace it with a baby goblin, and it's certainly not the DM's fault if the 1st-level characters decide attacking the dragon head-on - instead of sneaking around, or running away, or poisoning it, or doing pretty much anything else - would be a wise course of action.

Does your world just not have dragons until the PCs hit a certain level, at which point dragons suddenly spring to life fully-grown?

In the words of Jean Paul Sartre:

One of the complaints most frequently made about The Ways of Freedom can be summed up as follows: "After all, these people are so spineless, how are you going to make heroes out of them?" This objection almost makes me laugh, for it assumes that people are born heroes. That's what people really want to think. If you're born cowardly, you may set your mind perfectly at rest; there's nothing you can do about it; you'll be cowardly all your life, whatever you may do. If you're born a hero, you may set your mind just as much at rest; you'll be a hero all your life; you'll drink like a hero and eat like a hero. What the existentialist says is that the coward makes himself cowardly, that the hero makes himself heroic. There's always a possibility for the coward not to be cowardly any more and for the hero to stop being heroic.

Player entitlement becomes a factor when the player believes that their PC has "PC" stamped on his forehead, that he is guaranteed to be a hero, that he cannot die an ignoble death so some goblins due to foolishness or poor fortune, because merely by virtue of existing he is intrinsically the hero and the world will warp itself to make sure his deeds are heroic and successful.

But that's not how the world works. You are not born a hero, you become a hero - or perhaps you don't become a hero, or perhaps you do become a hero but later fall and become a coward, or perhaps one of a hundred other things happens. But the dice fall where they may, your owns skill will determine your fate, and you most certainly don't have plot armor to protect your heroic heroness.

There's a feedback loop. Change the rules to make magic more common and give each character absurd powers, and you make the playerbase expect this, and attract a playerbase that wants this. Next time you change the rules, you follow what your playerbase wants, and so you get even more common magic and powers. Repeat for a few cycles and you get monks who can teleport just by meditating really hard and a CR system where players are assumed to survive and win constantly instead of needing to be worried.

Pointing to the number of magic-using classes and saying that that proves magic "should" be commonplace is a fallacy, and the same goes for any other faced of the current rules. The current rules are a reaction to what modern players want, which is apparently fifty flavors of wizard (all far stronger than the original wizard) and a brute who can somehow chop spells in half just by swinging an axe really hard.

The changes made in the moves to 3.0, to 3.5, to Pathfinder reflect what new players wanted more and more and what publishers thought would sell. Rules and culture have shifted together in the direction of superpowers, and roleplaying suffers for it.

See and your snide little comment here is based on a false assumption. "Magic is a wonder". If that's what you want then this isn't the game for you. More then half of PC classes have magic and if you count SU abilities (which are magic.) then close to all do. Magic is not rare to anyone but commoners and PCs are not commoners.

I can't think of anything that proves my point better than the fact that players now want to take the magic out of... magic.

And if everyone's having fun, why change it?

If everyone stopped reading Shakespeare and started reading Twilight, that would still be bad no matter how much they like Twilight.

You know you could always make magic weapon smiths available to the PC's, that would solve a lot of problems.

Rather than some wacked out world where there's a ton of magic items lying around in the hands of the bad guys but somehow adventurers can't commission them at a fair price.

Oh good, let's remove all the wonder from the world and have everyone purchase magic items in a shop like rations. That sounds like an amazing fantasy world full of wonder and excitement.

First, the sense of entitlement is true of the entire generation, not just tabletop roleplayers.

Almost certainly true. I am fortunate enough to be able to avoid contact with the younger generation outside of gaming.

Second, players have ALWAYS complained when bad things happened.

Not to the same degree. The culture has shifted, and for the worse.

I'm sorry, I'm all for "realism" but this is a fantasy roleplaying game, there really should be a sense of escapism for the players that you seem to be missing. I don't want to play some scrubby farmer with a rusty shortsword, I want to be the hero of the story.

Thank you for proving my point. Players today want to sacrifice verisimilitude in favor of totally owning all the demons.

It's not strawmen. Every single thing I listed is a thing players complain about. Hell, the last time a paladin in my game fell, his player stormed out of the room. That's what happens when your paladin starts executing (unarmed, helpless) prisoners instead of being a proper paladin.

Nowadays, players always seem to think the world revolves around them. It used to be that if some orc with an axe got a lucky crit and took your head off, you sucked it up like a sir and rolled a new character. Now? They'll complain about how the game is so unfair and you get demonized as a GM - and that's even with the new change to -CON. It's like they don't want life fighting monsters to be dangerous.

If you send monsters at them that they can't beat? You're a bad GM. If the dumbass fighter overspecializes and spends five feats that only work with some obscure weapon? Apparently everyone in the world is supposed to suddenly start using that weapon and drop new ones for the fighter, otherwise you're a bad GM. As if you forced the fighter to take Greater Weapon Specialization (Whip), or as if goblins would really have a +4 whip lying around. If you make players track rations and arrows after level 1? The way players today act, you may as well have killed their dog.

The game seems to cater to this sense of entitlement. d8 hit dice for rogues? Raise Dead guaranteed to work with no XP penalty? Wealth by level? Magic loot should be special; you can't put it on a tight schedule like that. But if you deny the players the +3 armor they're totally entitled to at level 9 or whatever, somehow that makes you the bad guy. Should the game world notice that the characters have hit level 9 and spontaneously generate a large pile of cash in their bank accounts? And that's not even getting into magical healing becoming so easy to get now.

Players weren't always like this. Once upon a time, the DM was god, and the players loved it. If the random encounter table gave them an ancient red dragon, they ran away, or they died, but they didn't complain about this CR junk. Poisons were deadly, traps were deadly, combat was deadly, bringing people back from the dead wasn't a matter of routine. Life was cheap, and players didn't think they were action movie heroes entitled to kill all the baddies and save the world with their specialness. Please. Give me a break.

Nobody appreciates what a true GM goes through anymore. I spend hours creating a living, breathing world, of which the PC's are merely one small part. The world doesn't revolve around you. If you walk into a dragon's den, it doesn't spontaneously turn into a kobold because a dragon would be too hard. Traps don't magically stop existing just because you all wanted to play fighters with fifty special snowflake "feats" so nobody bothered to be a rogue. You're not special, you're not heroes, you're some average people who picked up swords, and you're not entitled to anything. That's what gives my game world verisimilitude: it's not just a game or a story, it's a real world that exists for reasons beyond mere gameplay. Whether you find save or die spells "fun" is of no consequence; magic exists, so those spells will exist, and if one kills you, man up, because that's how life works.

But for the WOW generation, the only real fun comes from maximizing your damage per attack to mow through faceless mobs, and even a mild inconvenience ruins the game forever. Face it, sometimes goblins kill people; if you can't have fun roleplaying one of them, maybe ROLEplaying games aren't for you.

My point is: when did everyone suddenly decide that the point of games was for the DM to create a cardboard world to cater to the players' warped, shallow perception of "fun"?