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I've had it happen to me a few times AS a DM. Mainly it's been more tough lessons about how the PC's do what they want to do, and not what you want to do xD.
In a one-shot I did I wanted to start it out with a bar brawl, getting the PC's a couple of NPC's that might stick around (Depending how they handled it). So the PC's, newcomers in town, get some drinks at the local tavern and what do you know two miscreants approach them. Walks up to the Dwarf Samurai and starts trying to pick a fight.
Of course my player plays it off real coolly and says something along the lines of "This isn't your fight, lets enjoy a nice drink and continue with our day". Not happy with that answer the miscreant smashes his mug across the dwarf's head. Player says "I hope you've released your anger and we can continue amicably with our drinks" O.O
I did end up provoking him into a fight, but still feel that I really should have left it at that. It was a great moment.
When I play with inexperienced DM's the answer is all the time, though not on purpose. One example I can think of off the top of my head, I had just met a group at a local book store with a new DM who I had never met. I cast major creation to do damage and it blew this DM's mind. When I told him how much raw damage I was doing to the bridge we had just crossed he turned white and accused me of cheating. Thankfully my fellow players helped to show him that I was in the right. But after that I learned that this DM wasn't capable of running high level characters. His tactics were atrocious and he had no idea what to do when the players went off the rails. But he was still learning so I reigned myself in and just accepted that what we were doing were low level adventures with pallet swaps and higher numbers. It was actually a pretty good campaign after that.
In games I play under more experienced DM's the answer is almost never. A good DM knows the rules and has a general idea for what your character can do. He's going to be more prepared. However, there was this one time that the party defeated the BBEG and we were expected to destroy the evil artifact of near infinite power and I, being a cleric of a goddess of the night and darkness and cold, decided to instead use it to destroy the sun. The DM didn't really know what to do after that so he called the session early and we waited a few weeks before he was finally ready with a solution.
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First time playing I'm a drow samurai. Well, as we are playing we stumble across a room full of magical artifacts, so i take a look around. Dm says i find a mirror of drow origin, so take a look see. Turns out to be a cursed mirror that sucks me into it (naturally). He explains that it seems to me like I had spent an eternity in this void. Outside the void, skeletons just start pouring into the room, and my warforged friend turns towards the mirror and picks it up and smashes it. I come sprawling out naked as my name day and dm makes me do a "reality" check. Nat 20. I snatched up my sword and ended up killing the most zombies in my party, naked as all hell. Good times...
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When I play with inexperienced DM's the answer is all the time, though not on purpose. One example I can think of off the top of my head, I had just met a group at a local book store with a new DM who I had never met. I cast major creation to do damage and it blew this DM's mind. When I told him how much raw damage I was doing to the bridge we had just crossed he turned white and accused me of cheating. Thankfully my fellow players helped to show him that I was in the right. But after that I learned that this DM wasn't capable of running high level characters. His tactics were atrocious and he had no idea what to do when the players went off the rails. But he was still learning so I reigned myself in and just accepted that what we were doing were low level adventures with pallet swaps and higher numbers. It was actually a pretty good campaign after that.
In games I play under more experienced DM's the answer is almost never. A good DM knows the rules and has a general idea for what your character can do. He's going to be more prepared. However, there was this one time that the party defeated the BBEG and we were expected to destroy the evil artifact of near infinite power and I, being a cleric of a goddess of the night and darkness and cold, decided to instead use it to destroy the sun. The DM didn't really know what to do after that so he called the session early and we waited a few weeks before he was finally ready with a solution.
Forgive me, but how does one do damage with Major Creation?
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Rocks fall, everybody dies? Granted, a stone bridge wouldn't take much damage, but a wooden bridge would be turned into splinters. Casting time is long though.
It sounds like those DMs are terrible railroaders. How do you put up with that?
So once, in the Shackled City campaign, we spent an entire session crawling through the sewers because we had to look beneath the cauldron. The DM just made it up on the fly. It ended with one of the partymembers skinnydipping in the lake, and being caught by the guards.
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Rocks fall, everybody dies? Granted, a stone bridge wouldn't take much damage, but a wooden bridge would be turned into splinters. Casting time is long though.
Except that you can't do that with Major Creation.
A creature or object brought into being or transported to your location by a conjuration spell cannot appear inside another creature or object, nor can it appear floating in an empty space. It must arrive in an open location on a surface capable of supporting it.
You cannot conjure a rock in mid air and drop it on someone/something, nor can you conjure a rock on a surface incapable of supporting it.
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Well for starters, the amount of rock that a 10th level major creation would make would overload a 10th level floating disk, so you'd have to reduce the amount of rock.
So what you are doing is:
1: Crossing a Bridge
2: Casting floating disk
3: Spending 10 minutes casting major creation to create a 1000 lb rock
4: You wait 10 hours for the floating disk to wear off or cast dispel magic to dispel your own floating disk
5: 1000lb of rock drops 3 feet onto a bridge and likely does NOTHING. Because from 3 feet, 1000lb isn't going to deliver enough force to bust a bridge unless it's some rickety rope bridge.
The thing that comes to my mind is not dropping rocks, but creating enough acid to cover the bridge, on the bridge (though granted, you could probably do it with minor creation too).
With a long bridge, or a wide bridge, the damage adds up quite fast.
Where exactly does acid fit into the following categories:
Vegetable Matter
Stone, Crystal, Base Metals
Precious Metals
Gems
Rare Metals
Under vegetable matter, for me, but you could probably get the same effect by coating the bridge in pure potassium (rare metal) and then applying create water.
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You can't dismiss a spell unless it's dismissible. Floating Disk is not dismissible. You either have to wait 10 hours or cast dispel magic on it.
Also, 1000 lbs is 1/4 a car, not 1/2 a car.
Thanks for the math, but my point was that you're not going to be sitting there in game calculating out the impact force.
If I was DMing a game, and someone was like, "I create a big rock 100 feet in the air above the bridge and let it fall" I'd probably just go, sure, that would break the bridge.
But you can't do that. Instead, we're arguing about dropping a big rock onto a bridge from 3 feet off the ground.
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Under vegetable matter, for me, but you could probably get the same effect by coating the bridge in pure potassium (rare metal) and then applying create water.Where exactly does acid fit into the following categories:
Vegetable Matter
Stone, Crystal, Base Metals
Precious Metals
Gems
Rare Metals
Acid is NOT vegetable matter.
Rare Metals is Adamantium, Mithral, and Alcheical Silver. Not things like Potassium.
And you drastically overestimate the reaction between potassium and water. It would do no real damage to a bridge. It's not C4.
Also, how does your medieval character know about the reactions of potassium and water?
And does potassium even exist in Golarion?
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You can't dismiss a spell unless it's dismissible. Floating Disk is not dismissible. You either have to wait 10 hours or cast dispel magic on it.Which is why I said many gm's allow you to do so... The prospect of the fact you can't dismiss a bless whenever you want seems asinine to many
And yet, that's the rule. The prospect might seem asinine, until you're trying to do soemething that wasn't contemplated by the spell, like for example using a floating disk to drop heavy objects as an offensive ability.
Also, 1000 lbs is 1/4 a car, not 1/2 a car.Incorrect. This is only true for the larger cars and the older ones because they were made of solid iron or steel at the time. Nowadays most cars are made of lighter and less material. Furthermore, most tests that give you the average weight of a car include "trucks." These are usually well above the weight of other cars driving the average up. So no, I might give you 1/3 but there are many of the more compact vehicles weighing in at under 3k.
The average American car weights 4k according to sources I was looking at.
Thanks for the math, but my point was that you're not going to be sitting there in game calculating out the impact force.Actually, I love math, but point taken :P
I noticed!
Which oddly enough, materials depending and certainly size of the bridge depending would still be enough. These bridges weren't exactly usually built for semi's to drive over them. They really didn't need to be unless they were expected for armies to cross them regularly.If I was DMing a game, and someone was like, "I create a big rock 100 feet in the air above the bridge and let it fall" I'd probably just go, sure, that would break the bridge.
But you can't do that. Instead, we're arguing about dropping a big rock onto a bridge from 3 feet off the ground.
Well, obviously it's a situational thing. My point was more along the point that ultimately you're trying to make Major Creation do something it wasn't intended to do in a very convoluted manner.
Heck, if I was GMing, I probably would have been like "Rather than go through all this fuss, why don't you just use Major Creation to make an Adamantine Greathammer and sunder the bridge?"
Under vegetable matter, for me, but you could probably get the same effect by coating the bridge in pure potassium (rare metal) and then applying create water.Where exactly does acid fit into the following categories:
Vegetable Matter
Stone, Crystal, Base Metals
Precious Metals
Gems
Rare MetalsAcid is NOT vegetable matter.
Rare Metals is Adamantium, Mithral, and Alcheical Silver. Not things like Potassium.
And you drastically overestimate the reaction between potassium and water. It would do no real damage to a bridge. It's not C4.
Also, how does your medieval character know about the reactions of potassium and water?
And does potassium even exist in Golarion?
So that was a rhetorical question you asked, I presume?
I'm sorry, my GM isn't as pedantic about things... This is a world of common alchemy, it contains as many alkali flasks as acid flasks (and alkali is commonly created by tossing an alkali metal into water). Why wouldn't my PC know about something commonly produced?
Perhaps I should have said quicklime (burnt stone) and water in your case. Now unless you have something constructive to add, I'll bow out. We're getting off topic.
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It is a fantasy world. I never said it was a great argument, but it's not inconceivable that base elements that exist in our world don't exist in a fantasy world.
We don't have Mithral and Adamantium on Earth. Is it inconceivable that potassium doesn't exist in Golarion? Again, not saying it's a grade A argument, just pointing out that a fantasy world having different elements from our world isn't beyond the realm of possibility.
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As the title says: How often does your DM get surprised or thrown by something you do?
As frequently as possible.
My favorite was teleporting a monster that attacked the group out of the dungeon into the middle of a very large orc encampment that was preventing us from leaving.
Poor orcs, no weapons capable of hurting the beast. Derailed the campaigns entire plot.
(2nd edition psionist, I had a low level, short range ability similar to dimension door except that it created an actual doorway you could walk through.)
1: Crossing a Bridge
2: Casting floating disk
3: Spending 10 minutes casting major creation to create a 1000 lb rock
4: You wait 10 hours for the floating disk to wear off or cast dispel magic to dispel your own floating disk
5: 1000lb of rock drops 3 feet onto a bridge and likely does NOTHING. Because from 3 feet, 1000lb isn't going to deliver enough force to bust a bridge unless it's some rickety rope bridge.1: I'm with ya
2; I'm with ya
3: Ok then
4: alot of gm's just let you dismiss beneficial spells.
5: Look up impact force. 1000 lb's gets a lot of force, very quick. aka dropping half a small car onto a bridge does a lot unless its a very big bridge.F=1/2 M * V^2
acceleration=32 feet/sec^2
V= 32*t
Change in height 3 feet, initial velocity 0, standard acceleration
0= (1/2)*-32*t^2+0*t+3
3=16*t^2
3/16=t^2
t=3^.5/4 or if you prefer just shy of half a second or so.So V = 16 Ft/s. A lbm=lbf so
F=500*(16)^2=500*256 and you know where thats going or if you prefer metric5400 KN approximately. And for perspective lifting 1 kg (a little over 2 lb's) 1 meter (a little over 3 feet) is 1 KN
Going with your math here, that is the same as a 200 lb person dropping 20 feet. I doubt that would break a bridge.
Wow. I go to bed and look at this? I didn't post that to start a debate about major creation and I'm not going to get to far into it except to say that none of you are on the right track.
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Fairly regularly.
DM: The elevator is broken. Looking up the shaft, you can see that the next opening is about 20 feet up.
Me: I grab the rope and start lifting the elevator with the rest of the party inside.
DM: Can you do that?
Me: I can drag almost a ton.
DM: Or, you know, you all can just make the climb check.
Me: Yeah . . . but Thorngar's an idiot. He would consider this "easier" than helping the others climb.
DM: OK . . . I'll allow it.
DM: You come to an underground lake. There is a small boat in the corner
Cleric: Do we see anything in the water?
DM: There appears to be some disturbance in the water about 50 feet out.
Me: I go back and get the carcass of the bear we killed a little ways ago. I then start chopping off bits of bear and throwing it in the water.
DM: You're chumming the water with bear? O_o
Cleric: I help out!
Sorcerer: I pretend not to know them . . .
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As a GM I learned my one and only needed lesson about "that guy" in the very first session I GM'd within ten minutes of the session starting.
I had spent the day before painstakingly creating an entire ruined castle, with multiple floors and a set of underground tunnels and rooms, all populated with a carefully selected set of evil monsters just waiting for the "good guys" to come through the front door. My brother, who had only a few days before introduced me to D&D, led the party as they approached the ruined and deadly castle was "that guy". It went like this:
GM: "Through the trees ahead you see what looks like a pile of stones overgrown with years of vegetation. As you get closer you realize it is a large stone wall with a massive wooden door with brass reinforcing bands."
That guy: "OK, we listen for any movement or noise, and then we'll approach the wall ten feet to the left of the door."
GM: "OK, you hear nothing but the normal forest sounds."
That guy: "I take out my rope and grappling hook and toss it on the top of the wall."
GM: ".... what?"
That guy: "I throw my grappling hook over the wall, does it hook on anything?"
GM: "... wait, you're going to climb the wall?"
That guy: "Of course."
GM: "But there's a door right there. You have a thief, why don't you just open the door?"
That guy: "Because that's where all the traps will be. We're going up on the roof."
I spent the rest of that session in total spontaneous improvisation as they bypassed all of my careful planning. I never again set my sessions up in a way that a player could do something "unexpected" and blow it all away.
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I have a couple players in my group like you kmal2t. I am unsure why your GM gets baffled. When I GM I like players to come up with unexpected stuff. I don't design my encounters to encompass what players "might" do. I only concern myself with what my villains and my other NPC's "WILL" do. Everything works out fine.
I am always surprising most of my GMs. I don't think I have Surprised my PbP GMs... Mainly because I haven't had time in the LotR Homebrew and didn't last long enough in the Arena. I haven't really thought about how to even try to surprise the GM in the Iron In The Snow Campaign yet.
I have been playing with the same small group since the 70s. we all DM on a rota.
We all get suprised when we DM. Despite knowing each other for decades we still cannot predict how we will act.
As the DM the trick is how you react. The biggest problem is when the players do not follow clues to the entended destination. Going in the wrong direction is less of a problem then getting stuck when they have the clues.
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And does potassium even exist in Golarion?ok logical arguments, player knowledge vs character knowledge, strength of reactions, right up till here.
ARE YOU HONESTLY SUGGESTING THAT THE ELEMENTS THAT ARE THE BASIC MAKEUP OF ALL OF REALITY DO NOT EVEN EXIST?
At that point screw it. Air is now a gelatin dessert. I'd like mine sloth flavored and if I could just get some kilobytes on the side that would be dandy.
Edit: :P (just to let you know its still lighthearted)
The elements that make up the reality of Golarion (aka the material plane) are:
Earth
Fire
Air
Water
Positive Energy
Negative Energy
Law
Chaos
Good
Evil
I have said: "Female Centaurs? Giggity! Giggity! GOO!" before...
lol at cnetarian's gazeebo situaton as well as making bear chum. That's actually a really good idea.
And it's pretty ridiculous to say that Potassium doesn't exist. Considering most life forms (including humans) require potassium to exist or could suffer horrible consequences I'm pretty sure it would be around unless the DM or setting specifically says otherwise.
Why? Why do the "humans" of Golarian need Potassium? Perhaps since Potassium doesn't exist, the "humans" there don't need it to live. Golarian isn't earth, there are many things there that are impossible under the laws of physics and chemistry. So why not "humans" that don't need Potassium to live?
One of the reasons we have humans and forests and other familiar elements intermixed with the fantasy elements is to give us something to relate to and make comparisons to. In a fantasy setting there is no reason why humans need to eat or sleep. But unless stated otherwise there is no reason for people to assume anything other than the norm. Unless you tell them differently people will assume that gravity pulls you down, that night and day exist, that fire is hot, and that potassium is required. People will assume the non-fantastic until you explain that in your world it doesn't work that way. That isn't just true of games. It's true of all fantasy.
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One of the reasons we have humans and forests and other familiar elements intermixed with the fantasy elements is to give us something to relate to and make comparisons to. In a fantasy setting there is no reason why humans need to eat or sleep. But unless stated otherwise there is no reason for people to assume anything other than the norm. Unless you tell them differently people will assume that gravity pulls you down, that night and day exist, that fire is hot, and that potassium is required. People will assume the non-fantastic until you explain that in your world it doesn't work that way. That isn't just true of games. It's true of all fantasy.
I'm still trying to figure out how you destroyed a bridge with Major Creation, cause if that's possible...well that's just something I'm going to have to do at some point.
Could you use the bridge as the materials for a Fabricate spell or such?
If you could I now have a way for my Human, Elf, and Dwarf alliance to rapidly make some Mithril Weapons & Arrows quickly to take down the Lycanthrope Horde marching on them. They can simply transform their massive Mithril Bridge into the items they need.
All else fails they can still melt it down into raw ingots to transform.