What's the worst DM ruling you've had to suffer through?

[glass]

Matthew Downie wrote:

If the bad guys are aware of you and you aren't aware of them, they ought to be getting a surprise round, so you shouldn't be acting at all.

Yes, but the mechanic for that is rolling our perception vs their stealth, not rolling inititive and hoping the bad guys don't roll too low. In the cases I am talking about, we had already passed that stage (or possibly skipped it entirely - as I say there are many instances of this against multiple games and editions).

Matthew Downie wrote:

But if you can act before the enemies appear, and you don't have a useful general-purpose 'Haste'-type spell to cast, you can either Delay until you see an enemy, or ready an action to attack any enemy who appears.

Spells are a limited daily resource - at lower levels very limited. I do not want to waste a haste spell if it turns out that our ambushers are three slightly-arthritic kobolds. Conversely, if I am high enough level that I can chuck third-level spells around with abandon, and the big bad and her three toughest lieutenants just walked in I might want to use something more dramatic. Similarly, given near-zero information, I cannot word an appropriate readied action. If I wanted to gamble, I would be playing Blackjack not RPGs, so I am limited to delaying and whatever resources I spent on getting decent inititive area wasted.

And not all games are as flexible as Pathfinder when it comes to messing with the initiative order. Shadowrun for example has no delay option for example IIRC.

And even if none of the above were true, we would still have the fundamental truth that initiative roll represents how fast you react to something. You should never be in the position where the GM cannot tell you what you just reacted to!

_
glass.

[Isaac Zephyr]

Oh! It wasn't Pathfinder but I remembered one from a White Wolf game.

I'm a note taker. Our storyteller had us go through some foresty thing and had one player roll a specific check to navigate. Later in the story we had to return to the area, just a few of us while the others tended to their own business.

So I rolled the check from the prior time, which I had written down from that session. Nothing. Try again. Nothing. I'm guessing maybe not enough successes or whatever, so we keep going and he's tossing us every which way. Eventually I confronted him. "Oh that's not the roll you need to be doing."

I literally had it written down from the prior session. So I ask if it was something specific that player had that let them use that check instead. Nope. He claimed they never made that check.

He jerked us around for the full 3 hour session, trying to argue I was the one who was wrong. When I not only had it written down, but I could prove the only dice pool on her character sheet that had the number of dice in question was the check in question. So he jerked us around 3 hours as punishment for wanting to do some roleplaying and needing to get through an obstacle we'd tackled before.

This was a man by the way who wanted people to pay him to run sessions, coerced us into playing this particular game in the first place (which it's now one of my favorite games, so I guess it's not all bad for me), and I learned later his "custom adventure" was just the premade from the main book. I'm still convinced the reason he jerked us around was because he didn't have anything prepped outside of the railroad of the premade (despite the fact I had talked to him for more than a week prior about wanting to do this particular course of action), and was stalling.

[JoeElf]

Lucy_Valentine wrote:

I have something similar happen playing a diviner wizard. We get ambushed, a surprise round happens, and I'm acting in it... but I still have no idea what we're up against, because the enemy are still concealed. I can't even usefully shout a warning because that's a feat.

Speaking = warning, and is a free action you can normally do out of turn (though not when you are surprised). If you beat their initiative, but fail the perception check, you are correct that you cannot speak the warning. But that isn't due to lacking a feat; that's due to failing the perception check. Unless I am missing something?

[Matthew Downie]

You can speak a warning, but that doesn't help your allies mechanically without a relevant ability such as:

Quote:

Lookout (Combat, Teamwork)

Your allies help you avoid being surprised.
Benefit: Whenever you are adjacent to an ally who also has this feat, you may act in the surprise round as long as your ally would normally be able to act in the surprise round. If you would normally be denied the ability to act in the surprise round, your initiative is equal to your initiative roll or the roll of your ally –1, whichever is lower. If both you and your ally would be able to act in the surprise round without the aid of this feat, you may take both a standard and a move action (or a full-round action) during the surprise round.

[Lucy_Valentine]

Matthew Downie wrote:

You can speak a warning, but that doesn't help your allies mechanically without a relevant ability such as:

Quote:

Lookout (Combat, Teamwork)

Yeah, that. And I can't really afford a feat on that character, especially since she's in PFS and there's little chance she'll find anyone who shares it.

I have a in mind my own personal worst ruling, which is not the worst because it has the most mechanical impact, it's the worst because it's so prevalent. You go into the room, the enemy sees you and attacks. Aha! You are surprised!

Why? Why are we surprised? We were expecting a fight when we opened the door. We came in with weapons drawn, ready to fight. We weren't having a beer and gossiping. So how is this surprising?

I don't mind it so much when there's concealed enemies. But even then a) I find the idea that you can break concealment and cross twenty feet to melee someone and catch them flat-footed a bit off, and b) if you enter a room expecting trouble, and the wizard tells you there are invisible hostiles and throws a spell at them, how come it takes everyone else so long to react?

But there are times it happens without concealment. EG: the corpses stand up and attack you! Surprise! Why? We knew there were lots of undead around, that's what the plot is about and we fought some already. So how did we end up stood in the middle of a room with corpses on all sides without checking to be sure they'd stay down?
Or like: the guy attacks you while talking to you! You are surprised! But... I literally rolled sleight of hand to draw a dagger during this conversation, because I said I expected him to attack me.

Gah. It's a trope that annoys the t~+$ off me. Surprised while cooking dinner? Fine. Surprised because nobody can see the invisible monster? Okay. Surprised because we were busy shipping the venture captain and not paying attention to our surroundings? Fine. But surprised when we're expecting a fight? It really seems that should be a bit more limited than the enemy getting two attacks off while we're flat-footed.

The absolute worst example I've encountered didn't happen to me, it was in a podcast. The PCs go into a room full of goblins. They know there are goblins there. The goblins are eating dinner. The PCs are armed and have weapons drawn, but try and talk. The goblins put down dinner, pick up weapons, and attack. PCs surprised!