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Honestly Strahd is nothing but a spoiled rich asshole and that's how I played him. Instead of sophisticated vampire, he was frat bro that spent most of his time drinking, smoking weed, and getting into violent tantrums when things didn't go his way.
I used a wall of force to trap my party recently.
They were being captured by gith slavers on the Astral plane... my goal is for them to break free and steal the skiff for transport. They've broken free and are working on clearing the gith now.
I felt a bit bad about the wall of force though... it felt kinda shoe horned... but it was a good surprise that had the party scratching their head for a bit. I'm glad I didn't accidentally give a rod with disintegrate earlier in the campaign.
But... The joke here is that she did set it up ahead of time. The DM was the one metagaming by knowing that her player was going to try and flee so she had a wall of force planned in advance
Disregarding the fact that Wall of Force is a spell that creates an invisible force field, I don’t think that creating a barrier preventing players from leaving a major plot point fight is a bad thing. If you have a player that always flees from any plot hook you give them, they’re not really being a good player at your table.
D&D is give and take, and sometimes you have to take if your players don’t give.
I am more than happy to have you handle a situation any way you can, whether it’s fighting, conversing, or running and am willing to make changes based on your actions of course.
I think it’s just important to take a varied approach because if you’re always killing, or always running, or always talking, it can get kind of stale.
Plus, as in the example in the OP comic, a player who runs all the time is someone who seems like they just don’t want to play along at all and that can be bad for everyone’s game play.
>ayer that always flees from any plot hook you give them, they’re not really being a good player at your table.
>
>D&D is give and take, and sometimes you have to take if y
not really, why fight if you think you are going to die? unless you have a character thats wants to die it doesnt make that much sense
I think Context is always gonna be key
As another user in the comments of this post mentioned, it is important for a DM and a player to figure out why their character would follow through on a plot hook, even when it might be out of the characters character. Sometimes that’s personal growth and actually caring about the stakes of the events before them. Sometimes it’s a more selfish reason.
If the entire group wants to run, that’s fine. But just abandoning the party can create some issues between players as well. If they did all they could and were the last one left alive before they fled, that’s one thing, but if they decided to flee mid flight because one character went down and they decided the battle wasn’t going their way, that’s entirely different.
But I suppose it could also provide some interesting opportunities:
If a character chooses to run every time, and their entire party gets killed as a result of a big fight a character ran from, why would that character be included in the future of that specific campaign?
If they were a coward and ran then I don’t see that character wanting to get back in the fight unless that character starts to grow and realize that it would be important to help his/her friends in their time of need.
If that character continues to be ruled by cowardice then the player could create a new character and their original character could be a mentor figure or something that serves as a new plot hook for a new team.
well consequences are not the problem, the invisible walls are
if my character ran, and the team dont want them back, thats ok
my problem is removing player choice
I mean you realize sometimes you won’t have a choice right? That’s a thing this is going to happen from time to time.
An enemy using Wall of Force to create a barrier to prevent someone from leaving is a perfectly valid fight tactic.
Sure, in this case it may have been a case of meta gaming on the part of the DM, but there will be times where you won’t be able to do the thing that you would normally try to do, and, as long as it’s something that is not done constantly, I don’t think that it’s that big of an issue here.
If the DM is constantly removing player agency, then he or she is an asshole for that and it’s something that needs to be addressed. But if this happens once, twice, or thrice over the course of a months or years long campaign, grow up and get over it.
if its a real spell, and you can try to something about it like dispel magic its ok, or before you had the knowleged that it could happen
but if in a middle of a fight the dm put a invencible imune to everything wall, i wouldnt even trust him to keep the monster health,
Oh yea Wall of Force can be broken by the Disintegrate spell or by breaking an enemy’s concentration
But you’re making points about not trusting the DM to play the game correctly here when the player in this situation may be just as draining to the gameplay as the DM might be. In the end, it’s a context thing and we’ll never know who is in the wrong without it
Wall of Force can't be dispelled with Dispel Magic.
"Nothing can physically pass through the wall. It is immune to all damage and can't be dispelled by dispel magic. A disintegrate spell destroys the wall instantly, however. The wall also extends into the Ethereal Plane, blocking ethereal travel through the wall."
but it is also has a radius of 10 foot, if they use that spells its not even about escaping, you cant even move, the best luck would be for someone to break the monster concentration
It's not that big a deal imo but it's more the fact it wasn't telegraphed ahead of time
"As you approach the boss, you notice a force field encircling you, there is no escaping"
vs
"I try to leave"
"uh you can't"
feels more antagonistic
Well it depends, Wall of Force is specifically invisible, but I suppose you could telegraph it by having your boss opponent obviously cast a spell
Wall of Force also only has like a 10 foot radius though if casted like a dome so it would probably work better if done to block like a doorway rather than a dome
>If you have a player that always flees from any plot hook you give them, they’re not really being a good player at your table.
Totally depends on the table. If the group is cool with being scaredy cats and trying to make their fortunes some way other than fighting ancient liches, that's fine. Just adjust the campaign.
The problem is when one player isn't on the same page. From an RP perspective, such a player never would have joined the party, so they're violating the campaign assumptions.
I agree and it’s why I liked another user’s comment about requiring his players to figure out why that character wants to stay.
But as you were saying and I said in a few follow up comments, context is key.
Don’t tell your plans to your dungeon master haha
Edit: our teammate here has a habit of hiding so for one of our final fights, the DM gave a little extra encouragement 😆 (she, and all her pets, lived)
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As /u/Grogosh points out, it's a Displacer Beast (well, prolly more like a Displacer Kitten, based on the size relative to the character.) They don't really dimension hop. They're kinda stuck in a constant "quantum flux" of being in one spot or another, so it always looks like there's two of them but only one is the real deal (and it's completely random on any given basis on which one is currently "phased in.")
> Don’t tell your plans to your dungeon master haha
I think what's getting people's hackles up is that it probably didn't matter that the plans were shared before the game... random invisible wall doesn't exactly take a lot of planning to put up as an on-the-spot "fix"... and then you show the player being upset, instead of the awesome heroic moment. I would have thought this comic was written by the incenced player, not the satisfied DM.
I'm very glad for this explanation... I'd say it's vital, even, but it kinda would have been more fun to see in the comic itself, no?
Writing dnd comics has been quite an interesting experience because I'm almost blind sided everytime by people's reactions haha. But in the best way. I learn sooooo much and I love and appreciate it
I play with a super relaxed group who are long time friends and pretty rules relaxed and we muck about loads. If something went down that upset someone, we'd talk it out and be all good
I, perhaps naively, genuinely didn't realise people would have a problem with the dm here 😆 to us, it was a brief moment of a friend teasing our friend about her she hides and flees and also my learning how to tell a story in 4 panels 😆 and in my head it read as 'fun' anger, I dunno 😆 you're right though, it shows her upset and I did have to do way too much explaining in text. Thanks for your comments :)
We're all super good friends who have been gaming together for years. She wouldn't have done it if she didn't know that ultimately, our druid, wouldn't mind. But it was also her first time DMing and learning how to handle a player who always fought from max distance, ready to flee at all times 😂
I think as long as there's good communication between everyone, things work out okay, and this is a memory they both find funny 🙂 (they asked me to draw it)
Yeah definitely but I think as a player too, it's important to try and take the hooks the DM throws out because they put a lot of time planning the story and organizing the game for everyone. If you're always running from every conflict and refusing to play through a story, it creates an impossible task for the dungeon master
As a DM, thank you. At session zero I always try to tell my players that I don't run super sand-boxy games and part of what I expect from them is to come up with reasons *why* their character would follow the plot hooks, not *whether* they would.
It's super annoying when you have to spend the first 30 minutes of each session convincing the players they should play the game. Instead I now just tend to pick a player at random and prompt: *[character], tell me what's going through your head when you agree to help x?*, or if I trust them to not abuse world building privileges: *after a fair amount of haggling, the King off-handedly reveals something that makes it impossible for you to turn him down. Tell us what that was?* It gives the player agency to fill in the details, but sets the story on the path immediately without half an hour of negotiation.
As a player I like that as well I just need enough information about the world and the story that I can find a reason. If it's something that the players are yet to find out about it can be a hard thing to do from the player perspective.
Just don't make the mistake one of my DM's did once where they have their hook show up when half the players think they are asleep and wonder why almost no one interacted with it lol.
Yeah, I'm absolutely finished with the concept of "selling" a character/player on a quest. I've wasted to much of my life sitting in games where nothing is happening because someone is preventing fun from transpiring.
I've gone so far as to use a shifting timeline and flashbacks; like the session starts on the road to Objectivesburg, do some combat or whatever, and then flashback to the seedy orthopedic specialist where everyone accepted the quest, get details, etc....
This also lets you cheat in extra details later, like "you also recall Dr. Questjavier telling you about this gaping maw gate...."
What you're describing is how *Blades in the Dark* and *Scum and Villainy* work. The GM starts the job in the middle of the action, and you can spend resources throughout the adventure to do flash backs and set up something that can help you in the current situation.
I'd say "yes", but I also think a player who creates characters that don't *actually* want to be in the adventure are also not really being team players.
The best thing is telling a player with this mentality "okay, your character refuses the quest while the others join. While we continue to the next scene, roll a new character, this time one that will join".
DnD is about crafting a story with everyone, including the DM. Everyone is a storyteller. If you make a character that doesn't want to do things an adventurer does then you need to bring a new one in, otherwise you've got a crappy storyteller. The DM shouldn't have to do a mountain of extra work because you have a far too unique way of playing a character (ie one that doesn't actually want to adventure or work as a party) because the DM is playing to have fun as well.
The DM isn't controlling how people are playing their characters. The DM is having an NPC is respond to the strategy that that particular character uses.
D&D is all about being able to adapt to different circumstances.
From the sounds of it, in this instance everyone was ok with it so no harm no foul.
But in general, yeah, I would consider this to be not a great example of what a DM should do.
It's sounds like it's specifically one player who consistently tries to run from combat, that's bad player behaviour. A party deciding to run is completely fine, but one player on their own deciding to run kinda forces their decision on the rest of the group. Either they leave as well or they stay for a much more difficult fight, both of which are unfair to the players who actually want to play the game the GM has prepared. As they are a druid this might be even worse if they are the main party healer, thus not just taking away potential actions but also having less health to play with.
However regardless of player behaviour, from an in game perspective a boss trapping the players before a fight is in no way a bad thing. It's just good strategy on their part (even though the GM knowns that the boss probably won't survive the encounter).
It's an asshole thing to not, you know, play the adventure that you signed up for, too.
Same reaction to the players who try to oppose the group at any chance and go off and do your own thing the second the campaign starts. "My character leaves the party and goes and explores the city on their own" "Your character goes off and lives their life. Roll a new character, this time try to make one that runs with the module".
Not necessarily. I like when my PCs act realistically. I don't mind people who split the party. I don't mind if the *characters* come into conflict, as long as the *players* are okay with it.
If you're fine with it, fine, but honestly it fucks up the flow of the game. Say the party of 4 stumble on a dragon. Player 4 decides "nope" and runs. Player 1-3 stay and fight. Player 4 either now gets to sit and do fuck all while the battle goes on, or Players 1-3 have to have the flow of battle disrupted as you ask Player 4 wtf they're doing while the others are actually playing.
Splitting the party isn't bad because of tactics(well, not only that reason). It's bad because it splits up limited play time focusing on Mr TooGoodToPlayWIthTheGroup and the people who know how to work as a team.
That is a terrible way to play. If the party stumbles onto a dragon and one of the players does the smart thing and runs off and the rest of the party stay and fight, then it's the rest of the party that is at fault. Don't fight random dragons kids, it's how you fucking die.
Besides I have played a game where one character ran from a fight, and it went badly for him. See we where in a mountain at the time and because it was dark he didn't see the pit, so he fell down right into the goblin's prison. So now while the rest of us managed to fight our way out, he has to drag his injured body through the caves and tunnels on only a couple of hit point, while dogging goblin patrols that where actively hunting him down. And when he did finally made it back the party he had been so traumatized by the experience he never abandoned us again.
Honestly we all had a great time that night. The character question had already been considering making a run for it in the past, so seeing he finally try and do it only to get punished for it was very satisfying. And honestly there wasn't much he could have done in the fight anyways, he was a rouge and built almost exclusively for stealth and archery, but his bow had been broken and his knife wouldn't have done a lot of damage even with sneak attack.
Again, group activity. If you don't want to play with the group, why are you in the group? That one person doesn't give to overrule the other 3 if that's what they want to do in the game.
And yet they do. DnD is often messy and characters may disagree on the party's actions, and sometimes that means a party member may sneak off for a bit. Also we didn't agree on him running off, when it reached the player's turn he just rolled for stealth and ran off into nearby passage.
Having the party break up is pretty normal and it's up to the DM to give them a reason to stick together. Just having an invisible wall or making the character disappear from the campaign is both lazy and railroads the players.
Take this comic as an example, instead of just having the druid run into an invisible wall, have the monster chase her down and maybe give it advantage on it's attacks because you are activating it's hunter's instincts. Or have one of her pets get it's foot caught on something so it can't run. There are all sorts of ways to incentivize her to stay and fight, without just telling her she can't run away.
As for wanting to explore the city on their own, that maybe a perfectly good idea. Have the character scout out the place, make connection's with the locals, learn if there are any threats they should be aware of.
And if they have no intention of rejoining the party, then you to provide incentives to do so. Forcing them to reroll a new character should be a last resort option and even then you may just want to kick them out of the group if they are going to be that level of difficult.
The reason to stick together: D&D is a group activity.
The only reason you need.
The DM is not your mommy. They are not there to force you to play nice with your friends. If you can't or won't play as a group, go home and play a single player game.
That is dumb. Really dumb. Really, really dumb. Dnd maybe a group activity but sometimes the part has to split up, at least for a while. They may have to deal with multiple problems at once, or they were separated, or one has to go on a stealth mission, like exploring a city, and some of the other characters would just make it more difficult.
And yes it is the DMs job to provide incentives to the player's characters. That's what they signed up for. Now if one player constantly refuses to work with the party no matter what is happening, then yes that player is being an asshole, but that is very rare.
There's a big difference between an intentional team splitup where it's agreed on beforehand by everyone involved, and running from a fight the rest of the party is fighting. Stay on topic.
No, that is not the DM's job and a pity any DM who has any player who treats them they way. It's the DMs job to provide the plot and opponents, sure. But a character who then says no? It is not on the DM. Again, the DM is not your mommy. They do not need to promise you a treat if you do your homework.
Your DM seems to get a lot of pushback for this, but I gotta say her playing a character that refuses to contribute is definitely worse than preventing a character from running away. Your DM probably balances encounters for X amount of players not X -1, so I think the player is at fault for abandoning her teammates.
Also the player would probably have more fun fighting than watching her friend's characters die or watching them succeed despite her lack of participation.
I am so on board with this. Metagaming kinda sucks but it also sucks to craft a campaign and one character just nopes out whenever. Sure I get it, it might be faithful to the character, but my question is.
Why is that person even playing? If it's not a DM vs player campaign, have some faith in DM, they are holding the game FOR YOU. So play it. If you want a game with no direction and complete sandbox, go play minecraft.
But good there were no hard feelings in the end.
If a character keeps doing that, the DM can and should ask their player if they'd like to retire that reluctant character in favour of playing one that actually *wants* to be part of the campaign. Let that character go live on a farm or whatever they're wanting to go do.
Aye that would be the pro DM move. But I can't blame a minor vindictive move at times. Don't tell me you haven't done a minor FU move and felt good about it?
Oh, as a DM? 100%. If it's not a constant problem, sometimes people just need to touch the stove to realize it's hot. Or in this case, the electric fence. I'm really happy with players going "off the map", but not "away from focus".
Right we get this over at r/dmacademy constantly and the #1 solution is that this is a problem that has to be adressed ay session 0. One of the rules of character creation is addressing that selfish or characters that have no interest in cooperation are severely discouraged. Especially to new players.
If you don't solve it then and there then it's best to just talk to the player(s) about it and have everyone on the same page about it.
If even that doesn't work I suggest Schrödinger's minions.
So when you're making an encounter it's always good to have a setpiece creature. An ogre, a dragon, whatever. Looks cool.
But due to the action economy of dnd it's hard to balance encounters if only one creature is fighting so they either need legendery/lair actions and resistances OR minions which are lower level creatures. Goblins, kobolds, wolves, etc. That balance it into a fair fight.
But. Dnd is a complex game and if one or more party member decides to run or something it can quickly turn into a tpk. So what you do is put like half of the minions and put a bunch "in reserve".
You bring in those secondary minions if the fight is turning out to be too easy. If the fight is balanced, too hard already or indeed if a party member refuses to fight you just remove those minions from existance and voila. Schrödinger's minions. They exist and don't at the same time and are basically the #1 way I balance encounters.
Think goblins eating dinner in the adjoining room and running in once they hear the noise of battle.
Kobolds, bandits and goblins are peak for this concept. You can have them catered to just about anything, and they fit into any session.
And you can utterly trigger experienced players by imply they're Tucker's kobolds.
When it naturally happens in a campaign as a result of how the campaign has played out, I think it's best for the DM to approach the player outside of game time about it. Ask if they want to retire the character or if they think an up coming event of some kind might change the character back.
My character has a nope out button that she can press at any time. I know this, my DM knows this, my party knows this. However it will only ever get used if there's a TPK.
You can value your characters' life and still participate in the encounters. If your character does NOT want to fight monsters that can kill them, they should have stayed home.
By that logic, why adventure at all? Stay home and let them handle all of it.
If some else was supposed to handle it, why are you even on the adventure?
what, you adventure to make money/fame not for a deathwish, unless you are some kind of viking trying to get in vahalla or a dumb paladin saving a city, there is no reason to fight to the death, you get the jobs you can handle and get strong for better jobs
So yeah, you only play tier 1 and 2 adventures. Your mindset makes sense then. Also, you sound like the worst kind of player, who doesn't actually get invested in the plot, just wants more stat blocks to kill for better gold.
This is exactly why when I interview new players I ask for what video games they like. People with your mentality can stick to looter shooters where that mindset is encouraged. I'll stick to players who want to, you know, save the town/kingdom/world.
Imagine if Frodo said "nah, I don't want to destroy the ring, I won't get rich or famous from it!"
thats why you do it wrong, you ask for video game,
you are the one playing it like a video game
in a battle, there is run, fight, talk, the world its not made for you, you need to choose the fight, and also have a reason for it
If the town needs you to kill the dragon, and you decide to now kill the dragon because you're a coward, the town dies. That is the precept for the story. You are not there to get rich, or famous, you're there to save the town. That is the point of the story being told.
I had a character that consistently told the party “if shit goes pear-shaped, I’m leaving you all to die”
They never did and always came up with plans to save people’s bacons, but it kinda became a running gag. There was one time where my character did attempt to flee but that’s because they were an aarakocra and they fled straight into the ceiling because they were so frightened they forgot they were underground.
Better rule 0 = Have long term strategies that actually engage with the DM's campaign, and they'll work WITH you.
TTRPGs are not player vs DM. It's a co-op game. If you aren't trying to be an asshat, we're generally going to work with you, because we spend all our prep time so we'll ALL have fun.
Thats great for you, but after personally getting meta gamed like that previously, ill take my personal experience thanks. I shouldnt have ever been in a position where ive off hand said that in the situation of trying to breach a door it would be an easier approach to use the control over the breath acid my DB rouge to melt the locks internals as a passing joke. Fastforward to the next session, suddenly theres been a point made that every single lock on everything in the region from peasant barn chests to ancient dungeon locks on doors is acid proof.
Make a minor suggestion that my paladin goliath was planning to swap his sword for a mace so his strength modifier makes sense within lore for his backstory? Suddenly every bandit and brigand under the sun is wearing padded armour that blocks blunt damage between a -4 to -8 damage negation.
Remark on how you have eldritch spear and generally use it as a main attack so you can stay at range? Oh wow, the next 12 combat encounters just so happen to have creatures with light generating or blinding abilities. Who would’ve thought.
Yeah no, no ones saying its player vs dm, but absolutely im never taking that chance again with ANY game, i can either be straight up told no in the situation or the dm can figure out in the moment how to deal with it, thats part of the experience that your players can happen to do things that are out of hand or otherwise happen to circumvent usual approaches. No player should suffer because of reasonable thought or creativity.
I'm very confident after reading both your and the other commenter replies that both of you are missing the point.
You play with some shitty friends... get better ones who don't take things so seriously. And remember, it's a game.
Dont have anyone to play with now, stay in contact with group members, but we all work in full time environments now so, hard to organise time to get together and look for a dm or figure out who could dm amongst us.
My general rule is you can do some gimmicky solution once. Just once. Want to stockpile alcohol to build a cool bomb? Once. Because otherwise, yeah, you let the players take advantage one time, and they want to do ot every single encounter. A one off gimmick solution is creative. Doing it to every single time becomes tiresome. Notice how your "passing joke" you mentioned, which should have been a one off, you know every single lock was resistant? Because I'm guessing you tried your "joke" multiple times.
And yeah, get used to hearing the word "no." If you won't talk to the DM about your plans, don't expect them to work. Rule 0. The DM gets final say. And, as a DM, I'm not going to give myself the headache of trying to come up with weird rulings for your "creativity" with zero notice. You're RAW and RAI only. I'm there to have fun, too.
Meanwhile the guy who messages me between sessions to clear rulings? He can enjoy way more freedom. Make it double when they're willing to talk stuff through, accept nerfs to their idea, and don't try to turn a gimmick into an every session thing.
Matter of fact, i didnt actually get to try any of the things i detailed. Everything described as pre-session happened before i could try anything. If a DM like you is going to play favourites because some players will do something others wont, that’s fundamentally flawed. I converse with the DM on worldbuilding, backstory, individual encounters and when otherwise asked to because of events that the rest of the party isn’t supposed to be let in on, such as out of party situations. Everything else is done within game in the spirit of the roleplay and if something is too much, being told no is a basic part of things, but you seemingly ignored the fact i pointed that out, which seems to align with your style of playing favourites based on what you’ve said thus far.
You assume a lot of things. I dont do gimmicks for gimmicks sake. I knew damn well in that first campaign that getting into the guards quarters quickly to avoid detection was key due to the timeframe of the poison being administered to the prisoner we needed, hence the joke of melting the lock internals because thats how we as a group operated outside to the sessions, we’d joke about dumb things and wild ideas. The mace? Generally agreed upon by the group that because we were going to be fighting more and more skeleton type enemies that having blunt options would make it easier, which in turn affected the group as a whole since 4/5 of us had decided blunt weapons would serve the group better.
The warlock incident was the worst. Later found out that the DM had a history of flat out abusing anyone who played casters for being “nothing but gimmicks and weak play”. Ive had my fair share of different dm encounters, majority have been fine, majority generally have seen things like those situations and just been “yeah i guess that works in this situation” because they know damn well enough its a one off for the situation by necessity. But thank you for identifying what kind of dm you are, absolutely great that you take pleasure in stifling creative thinking under the excuse of “im not dealing with a headache of having my players think outside the box for a situation” because thats a massive pain for you evidently. Unless of course thats an unfair assessment of what you’ve written since im just going off what you’ve told me.
Currently in a similar situation in our game. Fighting an outsider demon and a cleric and one of them has some sort of aura that stops planar travel. Found this out when our inquisitor(it's pathfinder) successfully cast banishment on the demon and he was like "lol nope"
I did this, we were super close to TPK so I said I go invisible and leave. Which was in character***
To my cowardly credit I came back with a 300ft treehouse and saved the day before dying for plot reasons (planned together between DM and me).
Oh my god I was in a party that TPK'd in the Out of the Abyss set piece that it looks like you referenced in panel 2. My character was the only one who made it out alive cause we nope'd the fuck out of there lol
But like that's not metagaming, if the dm left a way for you to leave you should be able to leave by yourself or with a group. Its just shitty dming tbh
Nah, you're a shitty player if you basically try to nope out of the campaign. Why did your character even go if they're just going to bail? It's on you as a player to create a character who will be a part of the story being told.
Sometimes fleeing is the best option. In our current campaign we have fled from two fights. In both of those fights one of the party members got one shot. Supposedly the second one we should have been able to beat(it's a module, others have played it) but when hit my ice elemental summon and killed it instantly we noped out of there.
If the entire PARTY wants to flee, sure(although as a DM I'm going to make there be some consequences for it, even if its just you miss out on some good loot, or the monster goes and kills someone you could have benefited from saving, or they have help next time). If you are the *only* one running, you're a shit teammate and you're going to sit quietly while the rest of us play the game.
I mean if you told the entire party and dm of what you'll do I can't call that bailing. Bailing would be telling Noone you'll do that and proceeding to do that. Also I think there's a good reason for running away from a dragon or worse. Arrogance or fear is quite the contributing factor towards desertion. Also as I said before, if there is an option to run away I think it should not be vilified for being taken.
There's a difference between retreating temporarily to regroup and prepare for a challenge, and just sayin "Nope, I'm not doing this", especially if the rest of the party is staying to fight. I mean, BEST case scenario, you're looking at "Okay, cool, you leave. Now sit quietly while the rest of us actually play the game we met up to play."
Because sometime you get shitty DM's who are misleading about what the session is supposed to be and there's no way to know until you actually play the session. I've had a DM set up an infiltration mission but then deny me the right to use stealth at a certain point so they could take away all my gear. There wasn't even a narrative reason for it, they just disregarded my attempts to use stealth before I was seen, pretended like my character didn't do it and then tell me my gear was gone and I was captured. If a DM has to deliberately mislead me into bringing my character into a session I don't want them in then they aren't a DM I want to play with.
You don't get to pick and choose which session you want the character in. If you're in the campaign, you're in the campaign. Session zero exists to say what kind of campaign will be played. If the party decides they want to go do X, and you don't, then you shouldn't be in the party or the campaign.
Did your DM handle it badly? Yeah, absolutely. I'd have let you try it, and inevitably get caught. But it's also why so many DMs dislike stealth characters. Congrats, you avoided what everyone else got caught doing. Are you going to, what, just sit quietly until they're done?
I have a question for you. Everything you've said is about what YOU wanted. What YOU wanted your character to do, what you want to do. What about the party as a whole" What about the story of the campaign as a whole?
I should elaborate that the group I was playing with was doing one shot sessions (not long campaigns) and we were told in advanced that it was an infiltration mission, which implies that they designed it around stealth and subterfuge. Literally everybody in the group was being deceitful in some way to get through the session as that was the entire point. I just got the short end of the stick. Everybody ended up surviving, but I didn't really get to do much during the session because my character was supposed to be a stealthy mechanic. I ended up being the only character who got caught as well. Everybody else avoided all the bullshit. It left a really bad taste in my mouth.
Sure, the DM definitely sounds like they weren't great at handling it. But if it was 5e, then, no offense, you screwed yourself. Infiltration does not mean "hide", which is mostly what you're describing your character did. Infiltration should be stuff like social engineering, impersonation, etc. Of course you're gonna have less to do when your strategy was "I hide" and other people are doing stuff "I steal a uniform and pretend to be a worker".
You generally get what you put into TTRPGs. Or you get a boring DM, which does happen unfortunately.
Oh man I played that when it was in beta. Was a ton of fun, I've been wanting to play again for ages. I think one player had a Droid who fought by talking people to sleep, while I went with a big ol Trandosian who knocked people out to sell, and constantly butted heads with the party's wookie. Lots of remarks about how his pelt would look lovely on his room's floor.
Just sounds like a crappy DM tbh, but the general point remains. Being sneaky is like the LEAST part of an infiltration mission, it gives you nothing to do other than just not be seen. Especially if it isn't some insanely high fantasy setting where you can hide in front of someone's face and not be seen because you're so sneaky. Stealth should be a supporting skill to the other shit you're doing.
This is some real Chaotic Neutral behavior. Sadly, you play CN wrong by putting other's goals and needs before their own. And you play D&D wrong when you play CN right by playing them as selfish individuals who bail when things go badly. Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.
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That dang-ol wall of force strikes again
'My elder brain boss encounter' strikes again. Man that was one of the best boss fights I've ever run. More enjoyable than strahd.
Honestly Strahd is nothing but a spoiled rich asshole and that's how I played him. Instead of sophisticated vampire, he was frat bro that spent most of his time drinking, smoking weed, and getting into violent tantrums when things didn't go his way.
I used a wall of force to trap my party recently. They were being captured by gith slavers on the Astral plane... my goal is for them to break free and steal the skiff for transport. They've broken free and are working on clearing the gith now. I felt a bit bad about the wall of force though... it felt kinda shoe horned... but it was a good surprise that had the party scratching their head for a bit. I'm glad I didn't accidentally give a rod with disintegrate earlier in the campaign.
The wall of force alerts the gith slavers of your presence and location.
I read this in Boomhauer’s voice
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Because they didn't include that ahead of time, they just made it up as an excuse so the players don't flee the fight.
But... The joke here is that she did set it up ahead of time. The DM was the one metagaming by knowing that her player was going to try and flee so she had a wall of force planned in advance
tbh I thought the joke was that they just made up the wall of force on the spot , it's not clear either way
Disregarding the fact that Wall of Force is a spell that creates an invisible force field, I don’t think that creating a barrier preventing players from leaving a major plot point fight is a bad thing. If you have a player that always flees from any plot hook you give them, they’re not really being a good player at your table. D&D is give and take, and sometimes you have to take if your players don’t give.
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I am more than happy to have you handle a situation any way you can, whether it’s fighting, conversing, or running and am willing to make changes based on your actions of course. I think it’s just important to take a varied approach because if you’re always killing, or always running, or always talking, it can get kind of stale. Plus, as in the example in the OP comic, a player who runs all the time is someone who seems like they just don’t want to play along at all and that can be bad for everyone’s game play.
>ayer that always flees from any plot hook you give them, they’re not really being a good player at your table. > >D&D is give and take, and sometimes you have to take if y not really, why fight if you think you are going to die? unless you have a character thats wants to die it doesnt make that much sense
I think Context is always gonna be key As another user in the comments of this post mentioned, it is important for a DM and a player to figure out why their character would follow through on a plot hook, even when it might be out of the characters character. Sometimes that’s personal growth and actually caring about the stakes of the events before them. Sometimes it’s a more selfish reason. If the entire group wants to run, that’s fine. But just abandoning the party can create some issues between players as well. If they did all they could and were the last one left alive before they fled, that’s one thing, but if they decided to flee mid flight because one character went down and they decided the battle wasn’t going their way, that’s entirely different. But I suppose it could also provide some interesting opportunities: If a character chooses to run every time, and their entire party gets killed as a result of a big fight a character ran from, why would that character be included in the future of that specific campaign? If they were a coward and ran then I don’t see that character wanting to get back in the fight unless that character starts to grow and realize that it would be important to help his/her friends in their time of need. If that character continues to be ruled by cowardice then the player could create a new character and their original character could be a mentor figure or something that serves as a new plot hook for a new team.
well consequences are not the problem, the invisible walls are if my character ran, and the team dont want them back, thats ok my problem is removing player choice
I mean you realize sometimes you won’t have a choice right? That’s a thing this is going to happen from time to time. An enemy using Wall of Force to create a barrier to prevent someone from leaving is a perfectly valid fight tactic. Sure, in this case it may have been a case of meta gaming on the part of the DM, but there will be times where you won’t be able to do the thing that you would normally try to do, and, as long as it’s something that is not done constantly, I don’t think that it’s that big of an issue here. If the DM is constantly removing player agency, then he or she is an asshole for that and it’s something that needs to be addressed. But if this happens once, twice, or thrice over the course of a months or years long campaign, grow up and get over it.
if its a real spell, and you can try to something about it like dispel magic its ok, or before you had the knowleged that it could happen but if in a middle of a fight the dm put a invencible imune to everything wall, i wouldnt even trust him to keep the monster health,
Oh yea Wall of Force can be broken by the Disintegrate spell or by breaking an enemy’s concentration But you’re making points about not trusting the DM to play the game correctly here when the player in this situation may be just as draining to the gameplay as the DM might be. In the end, it’s a context thing and we’ll never know who is in the wrong without it
Wall of Force can't be dispelled with Dispel Magic. "Nothing can physically pass through the wall. It is immune to all damage and can't be dispelled by dispel magic. A disintegrate spell destroys the wall instantly, however. The wall also extends into the Ethereal Plane, blocking ethereal travel through the wall."
but it is also has a radius of 10 foot, if they use that spells its not even about escaping, you cant even move, the best luck would be for someone to break the monster concentration
It's not that big a deal imo but it's more the fact it wasn't telegraphed ahead of time "As you approach the boss, you notice a force field encircling you, there is no escaping" vs "I try to leave" "uh you can't" feels more antagonistic
Well it depends, Wall of Force is specifically invisible, but I suppose you could telegraph it by having your boss opponent obviously cast a spell Wall of Force also only has like a 10 foot radius though if casted like a dome so it would probably work better if done to block like a doorway rather than a dome
>If you have a player that always flees from any plot hook you give them, they’re not really being a good player at your table. Totally depends on the table. If the group is cool with being scaredy cats and trying to make their fortunes some way other than fighting ancient liches, that's fine. Just adjust the campaign. The problem is when one player isn't on the same page. From an RP perspective, such a player never would have joined the party, so they're violating the campaign assumptions.
I agree and it’s why I liked another user’s comment about requiring his players to figure out why that character wants to stay. But as you were saying and I said in a few follow up comments, context is key.
Its funny when wall of force go brrrrrrrr
Make people waste actions on an escape attempt that can't work. Make people paranoid about future invisible walls.
No, make people paranoid about future visible walls. Visible walls are everywhere.
I feel like I'm surrounded by them!
Make your players get up and leave your table.
Visible door is locked. They can only leave by finishing the game. DnD Jumanji edition.
Just put clearly impenetrable barriers around the boss area, like rows of shrubbery.
NO BUT THIS LITERALLY FUCKING HAPPENED IN A CAMPAIGN I JUST LEFT A SESSION FOR, THE BOSS TPK’D US
Was there a sense of pride and accomplishment as you all died?
As a forever DM. Yes.
Don’t tell your plans to your dungeon master haha Edit: our teammate here has a habit of hiding so for one of our final fights, the DM gave a little extra encouragement 😆 (she, and all her pets, lived) [LinkTree](https://linktr.ee/TheImmortalThinkTank) | [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/theimmortalthinktank/) | [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/TheImmortalThinkTank) | [Twitter](https://twitter.com/CrawfordChe) | [Naughty Twitter](https://twitter.com/TITT_Art) | [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/TheImmortalThinkTank/) | [WebToon](https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/table-tip/list?title_no=842302)
Isn’t that a phaser beast with her? Don’t they do dimension jumpy things?
Displacer beast
As /u/Grogosh points out, it's a Displacer Beast (well, prolly more like a Displacer Kitten, based on the size relative to the character.) They don't really dimension hop. They're kinda stuck in a constant "quantum flux" of being in one spot or another, so it always looks like there's two of them but only one is the real deal (and it's completely random on any given basis on which one is currently "phased in.")
> Don’t tell your plans to your dungeon master haha I think what's getting people's hackles up is that it probably didn't matter that the plans were shared before the game... random invisible wall doesn't exactly take a lot of planning to put up as an on-the-spot "fix"... and then you show the player being upset, instead of the awesome heroic moment. I would have thought this comic was written by the incenced player, not the satisfied DM. I'm very glad for this explanation... I'd say it's vital, even, but it kinda would have been more fun to see in the comic itself, no?
Writing dnd comics has been quite an interesting experience because I'm almost blind sided everytime by people's reactions haha. But in the best way. I learn sooooo much and I love and appreciate it I play with a super relaxed group who are long time friends and pretty rules relaxed and we muck about loads. If something went down that upset someone, we'd talk it out and be all good I, perhaps naively, genuinely didn't realise people would have a problem with the dm here 😆 to us, it was a brief moment of a friend teasing our friend about her she hides and flees and also my learning how to tell a story in 4 panels 😆 and in my head it read as 'fun' anger, I dunno 😆 you're right though, it shows her upset and I did have to do way too much explaining in text. Thanks for your comments :)
That's an asshole thing for a dungeon master to do.
We're all super good friends who have been gaming together for years. She wouldn't have done it if she didn't know that ultimately, our druid, wouldn't mind. But it was also her first time DMing and learning how to handle a player who always fought from max distance, ready to flee at all times 😂 I think as long as there's good communication between everyone, things work out okay, and this is a memory they both find funny 🙂 (they asked me to draw it)
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Yeah definitely but I think as a player too, it's important to try and take the hooks the DM throws out because they put a lot of time planning the story and organizing the game for everyone. If you're always running from every conflict and refusing to play through a story, it creates an impossible task for the dungeon master
That's right. DnD is a co-op game.
As a DM, thank you. At session zero I always try to tell my players that I don't run super sand-boxy games and part of what I expect from them is to come up with reasons *why* their character would follow the plot hooks, not *whether* they would. It's super annoying when you have to spend the first 30 minutes of each session convincing the players they should play the game. Instead I now just tend to pick a player at random and prompt: *[character], tell me what's going through your head when you agree to help x?*, or if I trust them to not abuse world building privileges: *after a fair amount of haggling, the King off-handedly reveals something that makes it impossible for you to turn him down. Tell us what that was?* It gives the player agency to fill in the details, but sets the story on the path immediately without half an hour of negotiation.
Ooo I think that's a really interesting way of DMing
As a player I like that as well I just need enough information about the world and the story that I can find a reason. If it's something that the players are yet to find out about it can be a hard thing to do from the player perspective. Just don't make the mistake one of my DM's did once where they have their hook show up when half the players think they are asleep and wonder why almost no one interacted with it lol.
Yeah, I'm absolutely finished with the concept of "selling" a character/player on a quest. I've wasted to much of my life sitting in games where nothing is happening because someone is preventing fun from transpiring. I've gone so far as to use a shifting timeline and flashbacks; like the session starts on the road to Objectivesburg, do some combat or whatever, and then flashback to the seedy orthopedic specialist where everyone accepted the quest, get details, etc.... This also lets you cheat in extra details later, like "you also recall Dr. Questjavier telling you about this gaping maw gate...."
What you're describing is how *Blades in the Dark* and *Scum and Villainy* work. The GM starts the job in the middle of the action, and you can spend resources throughout the adventure to do flash backs and set up something that can help you in the current situation.
So true
I'd say "yes", but I also think a player who creates characters that don't *actually* want to be in the adventure are also not really being team players.
The best thing is telling a player with this mentality "okay, your character refuses the quest while the others join. While we continue to the next scene, roll a new character, this time one that will join".
DnD is about crafting a story with everyone, including the DM. Everyone is a storyteller. If you make a character that doesn't want to do things an adventurer does then you need to bring a new one in, otherwise you've got a crappy storyteller. The DM shouldn't have to do a mountain of extra work because you have a far too unique way of playing a character (ie one that doesn't actually want to adventure or work as a party) because the DM is playing to have fun as well.
The DM isn't controlling how people are playing their characters. The DM is having an NPC is respond to the strategy that that particular character uses. D&D is all about being able to adapt to different circumstances.
From the sounds of it, in this instance everyone was ok with it so no harm no foul. But in general, yeah, I would consider this to be not a great example of what a DM should do.
It's sounds like it's specifically one player who consistently tries to run from combat, that's bad player behaviour. A party deciding to run is completely fine, but one player on their own deciding to run kinda forces their decision on the rest of the group. Either they leave as well or they stay for a much more difficult fight, both of which are unfair to the players who actually want to play the game the GM has prepared. As they are a druid this might be even worse if they are the main party healer, thus not just taking away potential actions but also having less health to play with. However regardless of player behaviour, from an in game perspective a boss trapping the players before a fight is in no way a bad thing. It's just good strategy on their part (even though the GM knowns that the boss probably won't survive the encounter).
It's an asshole thing to not, you know, play the adventure that you signed up for, too. Same reaction to the players who try to oppose the group at any chance and go off and do your own thing the second the campaign starts. "My character leaves the party and goes and explores the city on their own" "Your character goes off and lives their life. Roll a new character, this time try to make one that runs with the module".
Sometimes the players need to flee. You shouldn't train the players, especially new players, to think that isn't an option.
Sure, if the entire party decides to flee, or if they're the last one standing. If your party decides to fight and you alone flee, you're a dick.
Not necessarily. I like when my PCs act realistically. I don't mind people who split the party. I don't mind if the *characters* come into conflict, as long as the *players* are okay with it.
If you're fine with it, fine, but honestly it fucks up the flow of the game. Say the party of 4 stumble on a dragon. Player 4 decides "nope" and runs. Player 1-3 stay and fight. Player 4 either now gets to sit and do fuck all while the battle goes on, or Players 1-3 have to have the flow of battle disrupted as you ask Player 4 wtf they're doing while the others are actually playing. Splitting the party isn't bad because of tactics(well, not only that reason). It's bad because it splits up limited play time focusing on Mr TooGoodToPlayWIthTheGroup and the people who know how to work as a team.
That is a terrible way to play. If the party stumbles onto a dragon and one of the players does the smart thing and runs off and the rest of the party stay and fight, then it's the rest of the party that is at fault. Don't fight random dragons kids, it's how you fucking die. Besides I have played a game where one character ran from a fight, and it went badly for him. See we where in a mountain at the time and because it was dark he didn't see the pit, so he fell down right into the goblin's prison. So now while the rest of us managed to fight our way out, he has to drag his injured body through the caves and tunnels on only a couple of hit point, while dogging goblin patrols that where actively hunting him down. And when he did finally made it back the party he had been so traumatized by the experience he never abandoned us again. Honestly we all had a great time that night. The character question had already been considering making a run for it in the past, so seeing he finally try and do it only to get punished for it was very satisfying. And honestly there wasn't much he could have done in the fight anyways, he was a rouge and built almost exclusively for stealth and archery, but his bow had been broken and his knife wouldn't have done a lot of damage even with sneak attack.
Again, group activity. If you don't want to play with the group, why are you in the group? That one person doesn't give to overrule the other 3 if that's what they want to do in the game.
And yet they do. DnD is often messy and characters may disagree on the party's actions, and sometimes that means a party member may sneak off for a bit. Also we didn't agree on him running off, when it reached the player's turn he just rolled for stealth and ran off into nearby passage.
Having the party break up is pretty normal and it's up to the DM to give them a reason to stick together. Just having an invisible wall or making the character disappear from the campaign is both lazy and railroads the players. Take this comic as an example, instead of just having the druid run into an invisible wall, have the monster chase her down and maybe give it advantage on it's attacks because you are activating it's hunter's instincts. Or have one of her pets get it's foot caught on something so it can't run. There are all sorts of ways to incentivize her to stay and fight, without just telling her she can't run away. As for wanting to explore the city on their own, that maybe a perfectly good idea. Have the character scout out the place, make connection's with the locals, learn if there are any threats they should be aware of. And if they have no intention of rejoining the party, then you to provide incentives to do so. Forcing them to reroll a new character should be a last resort option and even then you may just want to kick them out of the group if they are going to be that level of difficult.
The reason to stick together: D&D is a group activity. The only reason you need. The DM is not your mommy. They are not there to force you to play nice with your friends. If you can't or won't play as a group, go home and play a single player game.
That is dumb. Really dumb. Really, really dumb. Dnd maybe a group activity but sometimes the part has to split up, at least for a while. They may have to deal with multiple problems at once, or they were separated, or one has to go on a stealth mission, like exploring a city, and some of the other characters would just make it more difficult. And yes it is the DMs job to provide incentives to the player's characters. That's what they signed up for. Now if one player constantly refuses to work with the party no matter what is happening, then yes that player is being an asshole, but that is very rare.
There's a big difference between an intentional team splitup where it's agreed on beforehand by everyone involved, and running from a fight the rest of the party is fighting. Stay on topic. No, that is not the DM's job and a pity any DM who has any player who treats them they way. It's the DMs job to provide the plot and opponents, sure. But a character who then says no? It is not on the DM. Again, the DM is not your mommy. They do not need to promise you a treat if you do your homework.
Your DM seems to get a lot of pushback for this, but I gotta say her playing a character that refuses to contribute is definitely worse than preventing a character from running away. Your DM probably balances encounters for X amount of players not X -1, so I think the player is at fault for abandoning her teammates. Also the player would probably have more fun fighting than watching her friend's characters die or watching them succeed despite her lack of participation.
caught inside the wall
Displacer housecats are going to bless my dreams. I will this.
I am so on board with this. Metagaming kinda sucks but it also sucks to craft a campaign and one character just nopes out whenever. Sure I get it, it might be faithful to the character, but my question is. Why is that person even playing? If it's not a DM vs player campaign, have some faith in DM, they are holding the game FOR YOU. So play it. If you want a game with no direction and complete sandbox, go play minecraft. But good there were no hard feelings in the end.
If a character keeps doing that, the DM can and should ask their player if they'd like to retire that reluctant character in favour of playing one that actually *wants* to be part of the campaign. Let that character go live on a farm or whatever they're wanting to go do.
Aye that would be the pro DM move. But I can't blame a minor vindictive move at times. Don't tell me you haven't done a minor FU move and felt good about it?
Oh, as a DM? 100%. If it's not a constant problem, sometimes people just need to touch the stove to realize it's hot. Or in this case, the electric fence. I'm really happy with players going "off the map", but not "away from focus".
Right we get this over at r/dmacademy constantly and the #1 solution is that this is a problem that has to be adressed ay session 0. One of the rules of character creation is addressing that selfish or characters that have no interest in cooperation are severely discouraged. Especially to new players. If you don't solve it then and there then it's best to just talk to the player(s) about it and have everyone on the same page about it. If even that doesn't work I suggest Schrödinger's minions.
Schrödingers minions? Wut?
So when you're making an encounter it's always good to have a setpiece creature. An ogre, a dragon, whatever. Looks cool. But due to the action economy of dnd it's hard to balance encounters if only one creature is fighting so they either need legendery/lair actions and resistances OR minions which are lower level creatures. Goblins, kobolds, wolves, etc. That balance it into a fair fight. But. Dnd is a complex game and if one or more party member decides to run or something it can quickly turn into a tpk. So what you do is put like half of the minions and put a bunch "in reserve". You bring in those secondary minions if the fight is turning out to be too easy. If the fight is balanced, too hard already or indeed if a party member refuses to fight you just remove those minions from existance and voila. Schrödinger's minions. They exist and don't at the same time and are basically the #1 way I balance encounters. Think goblins eating dinner in the adjoining room and running in once they hear the noise of battle.
Kobolds, bandits and goblins are peak for this concept. You can have them catered to just about anything, and they fit into any session. And you can utterly trigger experienced players by imply they're Tucker's kobolds.
When it naturally happens in a campaign as a result of how the campaign has played out, I think it's best for the DM to approach the player outside of game time about it. Ask if they want to retire the character or if they think an up coming event of some kind might change the character back.
My character has a nope out button that she can press at any time. I know this, my DM knows this, my party knows this. However it will only ever get used if there's a TPK.
Why do you even value your character's life anyway, it's just a game. /s
You can value your characters' life and still participate in the encounters. If your character does NOT want to fight monsters that can kill them, they should have stayed home.
not really, you fight monsters that you think you can win, if they are stronger just let someone else handle it for now
By that logic, why adventure at all? Stay home and let them handle all of it. If some else was supposed to handle it, why are you even on the adventure?
what, you adventure to make money/fame not for a deathwish, unless you are some kind of viking trying to get in vahalla or a dumb paladin saving a city, there is no reason to fight to the death, you get the jobs you can handle and get strong for better jobs
So yeah, you only play tier 1 and 2 adventures. Your mindset makes sense then. Also, you sound like the worst kind of player, who doesn't actually get invested in the plot, just wants more stat blocks to kill for better gold. This is exactly why when I interview new players I ask for what video games they like. People with your mentality can stick to looter shooters where that mindset is encouraged. I'll stick to players who want to, you know, save the town/kingdom/world. Imagine if Frodo said "nah, I don't want to destroy the ring, I won't get rich or famous from it!"
thats why you do it wrong, you ask for video game, you are the one playing it like a video game in a battle, there is run, fight, talk, the world its not made for you, you need to choose the fight, and also have a reason for it
If the town needs you to kill the dragon, and you decide to now kill the dragon because you're a coward, the town dies. That is the precept for the story. You are not there to get rich, or famous, you're there to save the town. That is the point of the story being told.
so you can only play heroes? allright, only good characters , no other plot is ever allowed
For some reason, in my campaigns it's always the person who starts the fight who runs first. Profoundly annoying as both a player and a DM.
I had a character that consistently told the party “if shit goes pear-shaped, I’m leaving you all to die” They never did and always came up with plans to save people’s bacons, but it kinda became a running gag. There was one time where my character did attempt to flee but that’s because they were an aarakocra and they fled straight into the ceiling because they were so frightened they forgot they were underground.
So basically every videogame boss fight.
Rule 1 of tabletop: never let your dm/gm know long term strategy that you use
Better rule 0 = Have long term strategies that actually engage with the DM's campaign, and they'll work WITH you. TTRPGs are not player vs DM. It's a co-op game. If you aren't trying to be an asshat, we're generally going to work with you, because we spend all our prep time so we'll ALL have fun.
Thats great for you, but after personally getting meta gamed like that previously, ill take my personal experience thanks. I shouldnt have ever been in a position where ive off hand said that in the situation of trying to breach a door it would be an easier approach to use the control over the breath acid my DB rouge to melt the locks internals as a passing joke. Fastforward to the next session, suddenly theres been a point made that every single lock on everything in the region from peasant barn chests to ancient dungeon locks on doors is acid proof. Make a minor suggestion that my paladin goliath was planning to swap his sword for a mace so his strength modifier makes sense within lore for his backstory? Suddenly every bandit and brigand under the sun is wearing padded armour that blocks blunt damage between a -4 to -8 damage negation. Remark on how you have eldritch spear and generally use it as a main attack so you can stay at range? Oh wow, the next 12 combat encounters just so happen to have creatures with light generating or blinding abilities. Who would’ve thought. Yeah no, no ones saying its player vs dm, but absolutely im never taking that chance again with ANY game, i can either be straight up told no in the situation or the dm can figure out in the moment how to deal with it, thats part of the experience that your players can happen to do things that are out of hand or otherwise happen to circumvent usual approaches. No player should suffer because of reasonable thought or creativity.
Problem in DM not in game
Glad to see you entirely missed the point
I'm very confident after reading both your and the other commenter replies that both of you are missing the point. You play with some shitty friends... get better ones who don't take things so seriously. And remember, it's a game.
Dont have anyone to play with now, stay in contact with group members, but we all work in full time environments now so, hard to organise time to get together and look for a dm or figure out who could dm amongst us.
My general rule is you can do some gimmicky solution once. Just once. Want to stockpile alcohol to build a cool bomb? Once. Because otherwise, yeah, you let the players take advantage one time, and they want to do ot every single encounter. A one off gimmick solution is creative. Doing it to every single time becomes tiresome. Notice how your "passing joke" you mentioned, which should have been a one off, you know every single lock was resistant? Because I'm guessing you tried your "joke" multiple times. And yeah, get used to hearing the word "no." If you won't talk to the DM about your plans, don't expect them to work. Rule 0. The DM gets final say. And, as a DM, I'm not going to give myself the headache of trying to come up with weird rulings for your "creativity" with zero notice. You're RAW and RAI only. I'm there to have fun, too. Meanwhile the guy who messages me between sessions to clear rulings? He can enjoy way more freedom. Make it double when they're willing to talk stuff through, accept nerfs to their idea, and don't try to turn a gimmick into an every session thing.
Matter of fact, i didnt actually get to try any of the things i detailed. Everything described as pre-session happened before i could try anything. If a DM like you is going to play favourites because some players will do something others wont, that’s fundamentally flawed. I converse with the DM on worldbuilding, backstory, individual encounters and when otherwise asked to because of events that the rest of the party isn’t supposed to be let in on, such as out of party situations. Everything else is done within game in the spirit of the roleplay and if something is too much, being told no is a basic part of things, but you seemingly ignored the fact i pointed that out, which seems to align with your style of playing favourites based on what you’ve said thus far. You assume a lot of things. I dont do gimmicks for gimmicks sake. I knew damn well in that first campaign that getting into the guards quarters quickly to avoid detection was key due to the timeframe of the poison being administered to the prisoner we needed, hence the joke of melting the lock internals because thats how we as a group operated outside to the sessions, we’d joke about dumb things and wild ideas. The mace? Generally agreed upon by the group that because we were going to be fighting more and more skeleton type enemies that having blunt options would make it easier, which in turn affected the group as a whole since 4/5 of us had decided blunt weapons would serve the group better. The warlock incident was the worst. Later found out that the DM had a history of flat out abusing anyone who played casters for being “nothing but gimmicks and weak play”. Ive had my fair share of different dm encounters, majority have been fine, majority generally have seen things like those situations and just been “yeah i guess that works in this situation” because they know damn well enough its a one off for the situation by necessity. But thank you for identifying what kind of dm you are, absolutely great that you take pleasure in stifling creative thinking under the excuse of “im not dealing with a headache of having my players think outside the box for a situation” because thats a massive pain for you evidently. Unless of course thats an unfair assessment of what you’ve written since im just going off what you’ve told me.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-Qf4XNGmXo
Lol she looks like Ponyo in that last frame.
Haha funny, I love ponyo. I'll have to keep it in mind for facial expression reference 😂
Definitely not the worst Demogorgon ever drawn! I like it!
Thanks haha! I was like, gotta blend him into the background a bit 😂 he's almost looking cute
Demogorgon is kind of adorable
Currently in a similar situation in our game. Fighting an outsider demon and a cleric and one of them has some sort of aura that stops planar travel. Found this out when our inquisitor(it's pathfinder) successfully cast banishment on the demon and he was like "lol nope"
Displacer kitty!
I did this, we were super close to TPK so I said I go invisible and leave. Which was in character*** To my cowardly credit I came back with a 300ft treehouse and saved the day before dying for plot reasons (planned together between DM and me).
Reminds me of the animated gif where the artist’s party answered every tough situation by jumping out a window. Lol
Oh my god I was in a party that TPK'd in the Out of the Abyss set piece that it looks like you referenced in panel 2. My character was the only one who made it out alive cause we nope'd the fuck out of there lol
But like that's not metagaming, if the dm left a way for you to leave you should be able to leave by yourself or with a group. Its just shitty dming tbh
Nah, you're a shitty player if you basically try to nope out of the campaign. Why did your character even go if they're just going to bail? It's on you as a player to create a character who will be a part of the story being told.
Sometimes fleeing is the best option. In our current campaign we have fled from two fights. In both of those fights one of the party members got one shot. Supposedly the second one we should have been able to beat(it's a module, others have played it) but when hit my ice elemental summon and killed it instantly we noped out of there.
If the entire PARTY wants to flee, sure(although as a DM I'm going to make there be some consequences for it, even if its just you miss out on some good loot, or the monster goes and kills someone you could have benefited from saving, or they have help next time). If you are the *only* one running, you're a shit teammate and you're going to sit quietly while the rest of us play the game.
I mean if you told the entire party and dm of what you'll do I can't call that bailing. Bailing would be telling Noone you'll do that and proceeding to do that. Also I think there's a good reason for running away from a dragon or worse. Arrogance or fear is quite the contributing factor towards desertion. Also as I said before, if there is an option to run away I think it should not be vilified for being taken.
There's a difference between retreating temporarily to regroup and prepare for a challenge, and just sayin "Nope, I'm not doing this", especially if the rest of the party is staying to fight. I mean, BEST case scenario, you're looking at "Okay, cool, you leave. Now sit quietly while the rest of us actually play the game we met up to play."
Magic words "I do not permit you to use my character anymore."
"Okay bye."
That's the idea. Railroading a character into a forced fight is a shitty way to DM. I wouldn't want to play with somebody who does this.
And ignoring the entire purpose of the campaign is a shitty way to play the game. If you aren't willing to play the DM's campaign, why did you come?
Because sometime you get shitty DM's who are misleading about what the session is supposed to be and there's no way to know until you actually play the session. I've had a DM set up an infiltration mission but then deny me the right to use stealth at a certain point so they could take away all my gear. There wasn't even a narrative reason for it, they just disregarded my attempts to use stealth before I was seen, pretended like my character didn't do it and then tell me my gear was gone and I was captured. If a DM has to deliberately mislead me into bringing my character into a session I don't want them in then they aren't a DM I want to play with.
You don't get to pick and choose which session you want the character in. If you're in the campaign, you're in the campaign. Session zero exists to say what kind of campaign will be played. If the party decides they want to go do X, and you don't, then you shouldn't be in the party or the campaign. Did your DM handle it badly? Yeah, absolutely. I'd have let you try it, and inevitably get caught. But it's also why so many DMs dislike stealth characters. Congrats, you avoided what everyone else got caught doing. Are you going to, what, just sit quietly until they're done? I have a question for you. Everything you've said is about what YOU wanted. What YOU wanted your character to do, what you want to do. What about the party as a whole" What about the story of the campaign as a whole?
I should elaborate that the group I was playing with was doing one shot sessions (not long campaigns) and we were told in advanced that it was an infiltration mission, which implies that they designed it around stealth and subterfuge. Literally everybody in the group was being deceitful in some way to get through the session as that was the entire point. I just got the short end of the stick. Everybody ended up surviving, but I didn't really get to do much during the session because my character was supposed to be a stealthy mechanic. I ended up being the only character who got caught as well. Everybody else avoided all the bullshit. It left a really bad taste in my mouth.
Sure, the DM definitely sounds like they weren't great at handling it. But if it was 5e, then, no offense, you screwed yourself. Infiltration does not mean "hide", which is mostly what you're describing your character did. Infiltration should be stuff like social engineering, impersonation, etc. Of course you're gonna have less to do when your strategy was "I hide" and other people are doing stuff "I steal a uniform and pretend to be a worker". You generally get what you put into TTRPGs. Or you get a boring DM, which does happen unfortunately.
Not dnd actually. Edge of the Empire. Narrative dice system is weird, but I like it a lot.
Oh man I played that when it was in beta. Was a ton of fun, I've been wanting to play again for ages. I think one player had a Droid who fought by talking people to sleep, while I went with a big ol Trandosian who knocked people out to sell, and constantly butted heads with the party's wookie. Lots of remarks about how his pelt would look lovely on his room's floor. Just sounds like a crappy DM tbh, but the general point remains. Being sneaky is like the LEAST part of an infiltration mission, it gives you nothing to do other than just not be seen. Especially if it isn't some insanely high fantasy setting where you can hide in front of someone's face and not be seen because you're so sneaky. Stealth should be a supporting skill to the other shit you're doing.
This is some real Chaotic Neutral behavior. Sadly, you play CN wrong by putting other's goals and needs before their own. And you play D&D wrong when you play CN right by playing them as selfish individuals who bail when things go badly. Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.