Oh. I was really just addressing it to the conversation as a whole.
And Kobal2, if you don’t want to risk the vampire getting zapped on the first turn by the cleric’s Mace of Disruption, then it’s your responsibility to make sure that’s not possible. Either don’t give the cleric the mace to begin with, or have the vampire sunder it immediately, or have him cast a Positive Energy Protection spell beforehand, or make sure he has a means of staying outside of melee range.
But you also shouldn’t really be too worried about the possibility of something like that, because most of the greatest RPG stories come from something completely unexpected happening. Just take a look through this thread: You won’t hear anyone saying “And then we got to the BBEG, and he was a vampire, and after a long, grueling fight, we finally managed to wear him down. It was so epic, the DM even had a soundtrack for it!”. But if the cleric had managed to off him with a single hit from his Mace of Disruption, your players would still be talking about it today.
In my experience, splitting the difference is where the magic happens.
A random lucky crit offs the big bad in one anticlimactic round? Feeeeh.
Worse, the opposite–my +3 enchanted shield, the most powerful magical artifact I own, being shattered by a critical fail on a shield bash against a no-name minion-class orc? Double feh.
The DM takes away my crit because he’s got this totally staged encounter? Triple feh.
On the other hand, my harrier/marksman character takes five sessions, on a hunch that we’re fighting an oni, to amass a white jade arrowhead, carve it into a masterwork arrow, craft a brand-new masterwork bow, get a void magician shugenja to bless and empower it all, then wait (and forego xp) for 10ish combat rounds until the Oni appears, THEN hit a bunch of “tens reroll and add” to get a cumulative 170hp of damage (and a one-shot kill by nearly triple!) on 7 damage dice?
Yeah, I still talk about that shot. And the demon hunter still talks about hurling her ancestral axe into the oni’s chest as it’s getting sucked back into the netherworld just to say she laid a hit on the damn thing, too. It was the perfect combo of DM scripting something epic COMBINED with luck and player prep to derail a portion of the epicness.
In one game I participated in, we agreed that assigning a 5% chance to a spectacularly lucky or unlucky result was unrealistic, so we made it a house rule that on D20 rolls, 1 or 20 meant you rolled again to see whether your luck was merely remarkable or downright miraculous. (For example, we agreed that without either magic/fate or extremely high skill stats, Bard the Bowman would have had to roll 20 twice to hit a fast moving aerial target the size of a quarter )
Meh. I’d rather get bogged down in figuring out what works and doesn’t work with my scenario from a storytelling & characterization perspective, how to work in specific elements for each player and each character and planning out the 5 billion “Hmm, what if they do this ?” sub-cases - of course, they’ll do something I hadn’t planned anyway, of course - and fighting writer’s block than getting bogged down in rule supplements and picayune mechanical miscellanea. You only get so many hours of prep time per session, and at some point the effort/result ratio becomes a turnoff. Burnout lies that way.
Besides, it’s a mug’s game. Just as certainly as a group of PCs worth their salt will concoct a plan that is at the same time fiendishly clever, borderline retarded and coming completely out of left field ; a good munchkin will figure out a way to turn my planned challenge into so much mush, spot an angle I haven’t covered, an obscure spell I overlooked or a doodad/ally/domain/owed favour I had handed them 12 sessions ago that I clean forgot about. They’ve got 3-to-6 brains chock full of deviousness and build optimization, I’ve only got the one and it’s not that good at figuring out mechanical loopholes anyway. Rolling with the punches is for suckers, I’m rigging this fight until I don’t get punched in the first place.
If they do set out, as in Zeriel’s story, to make an intelligent and concerted in-character effort to wreck my boss’s shit, then by all means they should get a chance to wreck his shit good and proper. Wrecking his shit by coincidental whim of the dice ? That’s not satisfying for anyone, I don’t think.
Which is where “alternate presents” and “damn the rules” come in - because it’s not always as easy as fudging the dice, but it goes without saying that the vampire who’s killed the countless hopeful would-be vampire slayers whose corpses you’ve been stumbling upon all night had cast Protection From Whatever Cheap Fuckery You Were Doing off-screen. You would have known this had you cast a detection spell first. But since you didn’t and I’m an outstanding liar, you can’t prove I’m full of crap. He taunts you for your trouble.
Or it turns out you were fighting a Simulacrum/projected image/polymorphed minion all along and the real vampire makes a dramatic-er entrance right about now. He taunts you for your trouble.
Or he’s not really a vampire, but some weirdass creature from a third party splatbook that happens to look like one, but really isn’t, it’s a Demi Fiendish Draco Direlich, honest. Those are not disruptable. He taunts you for your trouble.
Or he’s simply too old and powerful an undead to be one-shot zapped by your puny mace and I take away a bunch of hitpoints and/or a layer of buffs behind the scenes instead. He winces, but finds it in him to taunt you for your troubles. Etc, etc…
As long as you can’t catch me in a [del]blatant lie[/del] storytelling device, as long as I’m not guilty of total cheese myself, and as long as I can get you to really hate that smug vampire jerk, then game on brother. What do you do now ?
Works both ways, too. If Not-Sam Spade bollocked his Search roll or didn’t think to look under the pillow for the evil figurine that was hidden there, well, maybe it was in the cupboard he’s searching now all along. Schrödinger’s Clue, as it were. I’m not going to make it easy for you, but I won’t let you stumble around that stupid crime scene and getting increasingly pissed for half the evening either. Nor will I be waiting on you to have the right idea as written in my scenario or to get the non-crappy roll or tangential hook you’re stubbornly not giving me to work with today. We’ve got other things on the to do list for tonight, folks.
Get Clue, ponder Clue, make up harebrained theory to explain Clue, follow insane theory like it makes sense, watch the DM frantically try to connect his dots with your dots: that’s the fun part. Figuring the exact brand of insane troll logic the DM expects you to follow and clicking every metaphorical pixel before he rewards you with Clue, that’s playing an old Sierra adventure game. And rolling until Clue happens, well, that’s playing a particularly cheap slot machine.
Now, you can’t always get away with that sort of thing all of the time. As with all [del]confidence tricks[/del] creative endeavours, you can’t let yourself fall into a recognizable pattern or let them suss out which pocket you’re hiding the rabbit in. Every clever trick goes stale if you keep on using it, and that they will whinge about. And sometimes you even have to hand them the bullshit unsatisfying win, if only to throw them off your scent or remind them why they don’t want the bullshit unsatisfying win in the first place.
But as long as you can make them believe the shell game is legit, I say cheat your ass off whenever and however it makes things more interesting. That’s why there’s a DM screen in the first place.
Besides, players are willing dupes most of the time: suspension of disbelief is not just for the movies and as mentioned before, you’re only doing all this to make the story you all deserve together. If they do think the shit you just pulled was complete bullshit, or if they suss out where you hid the rabbit, they’ll let you know.
In case you haven’t noticed, this thread is called “stupid D&D tricks”, not “your most awesome RPG moments” or “your fondest RPG memories” ;).
Of course fuck ups, over the top silliness and plain :eek: moments are memorable, and they always make for a good time when recounting them - but that doesn’t mean they’re always a good time at the time they’re happening, or that it’s the only thing players keep from their games. It’s like life that way.
S’why I didn’t go into too much detail with the oni-slaying (I think I put it on the TVTropes Crowning Moment of RPG Awesome page though, when it happened. =P).
From the same (Legend of the Five Rings) game, and riffing on the discussion:
So the group has been trying to figure out why there’s very little evidence for the motives of the bandit group we’ve been hunting, and we have an idea that the group has supernatural help, when we stumble upon evidence that the point man handling the coverups is an actual honest-to-god ninja (which, in this world, is a full-blown evil spirit of trickery, deception, and death). Naturally, it’s a red herring thrown by the bandits to blow us off the scent.
Except it’s too good, and our void magician botched a detect roll, and we have two dedicated demon hunters in the party anyway and a specialized anti-ninja operative. We are on this ninja case like stink on shit.
What was supposed to be a red herring, after the DM finished privately pulling his hair out, turned into a real ninja that materialized in his notes midway through the second session of serious anti-ninja work, and I think we took a good 5-7 sessions to resolve the whole damn thing and run it to ground.
After which, the DM took a deep breath and said, “You realize I was mostly winging that, there wasn’t any damn ninja originally, but you were ALL so EARNEST about it…”
Well, speaking of L5R, and riffing on the theme, there was this time my players seemed to be doing everything in their power to keep me from making Clue happen.
There was a murder to solve during a tense inter-Clan winter stiffly polite diplomatic shindig slash give-us-an-excuse-to-invade-you-next-Spring-I-double-doggy-dare-you. Big official cut from top-knot to belt in his private quarters. Guards suspiciously off duty that night, incriminating evidence up to the rafters, lords on both sides take the matter as a personal slight, Words are Had. War is brewing even if the fact that it’s a total setup is plainly obvious to everyone. So, pretty high stakes, especially since I had players from both Clans involved who were not particularly fond of the idea of having to maybe slice each other up over this pile of crap.
But they manage to thoroughly cock things up from the get go. First they piss off the local magistrate, who bars them from interrogating possible suspects & witnesses further. Instead of, oh, I don’t know, politely asking the local lord to overrule him (or to give them permission to investigate the crime on their own on account of their impressive “special inter-Clan task force, Jade Magistrate approved” credentials), they decide to go behind everyone’s backs and investigate the crime scene on their own through the power of bluffing their way past the dim guards. And get nicked by the not so dim after all guards, of course, what did they expect ?!
Finally, their Shugenja gives me a ray of hope: he decides to use that overpowered spell they get, the bane of every *L5R *DM : Speak with Kami. Hallefuckingluja.
Did I mention that spell is the bane of every *L5R *DM ? Now, for all of you not familiar with that game, *L5R *is based in large part on Japanese mythology, including the Shinto belief that most everything has a conscious spirit in it. Old trees, hot springs, bamboo groves, castles, swords, the wind: you name it, there’s a spirit for that. And shugenjas (read: wizards) can summon them anywhere, anytime to chew the fat.
I don’t need to tell y’all that asking the supernatural, omnipresent genus loci what’s what kinda cheapens any serious investigation. So what happens is that you, the DM, have to find ways to curtail the disproportionate power of that particular class feature that every Shugenja gets at rank 0, some more clever than others. You have to. So over the scenarios, you arbitrarily decide that the earth spirit can only describe a guy’s shoes (albeit in great details !) for example. Or that this particular kami is feeling mischievious today and feeds them bullshit, or requires them to play elaborate games before… not giving them answers haha ! Or he’s pissed at being rung like a common manservant and simply refuses to speak unless they perform some arbitrary mollifying tasks and rituals (which may or may not involve shrubberies). Anything that comes to mind to a) not have to simply hand the shugenja all the keys to your scenario but b) not completely write off that power, else the shug’ will whinge. Sometimes, thankfully, the shugenja himself is kind enough to make up reasons not to use his I Win button.
But that one time Speak with Kami was my own precious little get out of jail free card, and that air kami turned out to be the most observant, loquacious son of a gust of wind you have ever met. It puts every neat little Clue they missed so far in a neat bundle, wraps a ceremonial bow around the lot and serves on an ancestral silver platter. No no, really, no rice ball necessary, it’s more than happy to help.
So of course, after all these months of being dicked around by [del]a railroading DM[/del] self-important to downright useless supernatural entities, they assumed this one was being much too suspiciously helpful, disregarded everything and bitched at me for once again denying them one of their on-paper legit investigation tools. What’s worse, when later they happened upon some of those same Clues by other means, they assumed it was the kami messing with them some more and tossed them aside. Again.
So, um, yeah, sometimes Clan wars happen. Can’t be helped, I guess.
Better still, you let the sudden kill work, then demonstrate to the players that the vamp wasn’t the real problem–it was his plan, which is still in motion without him, or even just a side effect.
To that specific case, in one high-level campaign, the DM had a master vampire we’d pissed off assault our stronghold. He misdirected our magical wards, sent a small force of mindless undead out as a distraction, then infiltrated with everything he had that could become invisible/intangible/ethereal/whatever. The first PC he encountered was my (Oriental Adventures) monk, who was puttering around in a clichéd fashion in the conservatory. Since my monk was alone, the vamp figured he’d pick me off himself while keeping his minions hidden. Unfortunately for him, I made my check to notice him, and as he materialized to attack…
“Improvised throwing weapon, ash bonsai tree. Called shot, heart. -8 to hit.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Roll it.”
“Natural 20.”
“<sigh> You hurl the potted plant at the shroud of coalescing mist. Even as the vampire’s form solidifies, an ash stake (backed by several pounds of dirt and fancifully painted ceramic) slams into his chest, piercing his evil heart. A look of disbelief twists his face as he crumbles into bone fragments and grave-mould. The other chill presences retreat at once, scattering in all directions.”
The DM rolled with it by deciding that (since we had no idea how many minions the vamp had), there was now a small army of suddenly masterless undead, including a pack of free vampires, attacking everything in sight or rushing to hide themselves in our town. Instead of a pitched battle, we spent the rest of the session rescuing townsfolk from the lesser types, then he built the hook into a series of searches and mysteries as we tracked down the remaining vamps (who soon had minions of their own, of course). My abrupt defeat of the BBG for the piece turned a one-night battle into an arc that lasted a couple of months.
Another classic one that I’ve read about involves a mid-level party hired to take out a bunch of kobolds in a nearby cave. Of course, they felt kobolds were beneath them, and moreover, that they likely had no worthwhile loot, so they weren’t inclined to go crawling through the tunnels. Instead, the mage used a Wizard Eye (or some such spell) to map the place, crunched some numbers, and figured out that he could basically fill the entire volume of the cave with a few well-placed fireball spells. So they essentially nuked the site from orbit, frying all the kobolds without warning. And, incidentally, torching a map and some other plot hooks. The DM was displeased, so rather than just coming up with another set of hooks, he sent a plague.
See, he decided that the cave was home to the entire local bat population, and the area was, consequently, now a bat-free zone. The insects the bats had helped keep in check, including mosquitoes infected with Goblin Fever, multiplied rapidly. An outraged druid consulted by the locals ensured that everyone knew whose fault the plague was, so the party had to salvage the situation. Thus, they got tasks like capturing replacement bats alive and unharmed from widely separated populations, petitioning a contrary old goblin shaman for advice on treating the disease, and so forth.
Once they had set things right, their “reward” was copies of the plot hooks they had burned. One of the townspeople “happened” to have found them among the belongings of a traveler who had died of the plague, and he decided that it would likely lead the PCs far away and into danger…which was exactly where he wanted them.
I just wanted to mention the old DC HEROES rpg, where they built an entire adventure around this: the idea was – do we need spoilers for a twenty-five year old module? If so, skip the rest of this post – that an aging vigilante on the brink of retirement is staging a crime wave so the up-and-coming superheroes will band together as a team.
Problem is, the PCs might miss some of the planted clues and fail to connect the dots to the designated fall guys. So the aging vigilante tags along, ready to “succeed” if you and yours fail a crucial roll – because he knew where each clue was before you searched the room or whatever, and so can get the adventure back on track at will. And if you metagamingly mistake that for a hands-on Game Master railroading it, you’ll misinterpret the real clues about the character’s impossible competence – which, ironically, only appear if you screw up; if you roll well enough to find the planted evidence and draw the A->B->C->D conclusions and get the drop on those fall guys, the vigilante never does a damn thing to draw attention to himself!
For a number of reasons, that policy is not possible in my troupe.
For one, we tend to play a lot of mech/ship-heavy tactical games, and if a guy buys a mini and accompanying reference material from the appropriate line, I’m not going to tell him he wasted his $25 even if it DOES have capabilities that are inconvenient for the game I am running.
For another, we have a guy who writes his own games, and because of his hunger for knowing the state of the industry, he has a copy of nearly every book in every major RPG line and most of the indies. NONE of the rest of us buy books any more aside from the local equivalent of the base rules and/or players guide, we just borrow them from him.
New trick from this weekend’s WFRP campaign. We were defending a tower (not ours, we were just looting it) from a band of goblins - they weren’t that hard to fight in a balanced combat situation, but they were riding on wolves and there were a lot of them. We’d picked a few off with bows, but none of us were particularly proficient in archery and the goblins were getting in the odd shot here and there. We decided that we needed to take them out in close combat, but didn’t really want to take on the wolves as well as the goblins, as they would have got massive outnumbering bonuses and we weren’t that sure how powerful wolves were.
Our plan, like the best of plans, was simple and destructive. My companions feinted an attack on their base, and retreated back into the tower. The goblins followed into the main hallway, which opened into a central atrium. I was waiting on the upper landing with a barrel of lamp oil, which I dropped as soon as the goblins got near, chucking a lit torch down after it.
The GM fudged together rules for an improvised bomb, and ruled that on a 5 or a 6 the barrel would break open, and on anything else it would just bounce. He rolled a 6.
The resulting explosion killed all of the wolves and goblins over two or three rounds of burning agony. We had ducked into a side room so were merely badly hurt. We had to exit via the roof once the screaming had died down, because everything was on fire.
We also spent the first hour discussing what supplies we’d need for a three day hike and buying such exotic and rare loot as a tent and cutlery - I love the Warhammer settings
Strongly disagree. I’m a tactical, by-the-books DM who uses a gaming mat and representative tokens/figurines, obsessively prepares ahead of time and meticulously tracks things like how many rounds that bless spell has left, etc, and our my gaming group… is not. We mesh well precisely because we don’t allow those (exaggerated) things to happen.
Dramatic tension is a product of storytelling, and it’s possible to be by-the-books and still tell a good story. They’re not mutually exclusive.
Combat shouldn’t be burdensome. Ours tend to flow pretty well because there’s a specific initiative order which I write on the mat where all can see so everyone knows whose turn it is and who goes next. Everyone knows where everyone/thing else is by using the mat and figurines so we bypass the annoying questions like “How far away is X from me?” and “If I cast fireball, how many bad guys can I hit?” (I even have paper cut-outs for each different sized/shaped area effect that the player can lay out on the mat to see exactly what squares will be affected) that tend to bog down combats. And there is little hand-sitting because the combats are generally challenging so anyone not currently going is either paying attention to what everyone else is doing to see how it may impact their next move or else have their noses buried in a book preparing for their next turn.
It’s the DM’s job to find the middle ground. It’s not always possible, but in my experience it is far more often than it isn’t.
in D&D - we had a thief who never checked for traps till he fell in one -
Player - ‘walk N along corridor’
DM - ‘you step on a loose tile which shatters and fall in a hole doing ?? damage’
Player - ‘climb out north checking for traps’
DM - ‘No trap’
Dumb - but the DM knew he always did this and though he would show him the why it was dumb by setting a trap after a trap - ‘Hopefully he will see what happens if he detects a trap and pay more attention’
he never and for the first time he never checked and climbed out of 1 trap to trip the next and killed his thief - sounds corny but I suppose you had to be there and watch his thief he was prowd of die…
Also played a bit of GURPS - did a Red Dwarf adventure once - the guy who played the CAT was great - every time we passed a mirror we all had to drag him away - some times we spent more time on the mirrors than on the quest - he played it spot on but we never played it again.
I don’t follow mech/ship tactical games, so I have no idea what’s practical for them or what isn’t, but to take D&D as an example - if I own only the PHB, DMG, and Monster Manual, then my players have those options - unless they want to gift me with another book..
Like I said–the “problem” with the culture of my current (10+ years) gamer group is that M. buys ALL the splatbooks–he literally is up over eight of those Ikea 3’ bookshelves packed solid with RPG books. Because he’ll loan one out indefinitely with no complaints to anyone in the group, any splatbook M. owns is considered part of the communal library unless expressly banned.
If it works differently in your group, that’s cool. I’m just objecting to your statements framing my long-term successful GM style as being the worst way to do things.
Realistically? If a guy buys a legal mini it’s hard to say “no, you can’t use that” even if it has a power you didn’t plan for–I had to rebalance EVERY encounter in my last Heavy Gear campaign on the strength of one person joining mid-stream and deciding she wanted a target designator on her scout mech (standard gear for that class, even). The previously well-constrained artillery mech synergized with that like a motherfucker and would have made hash out of a few encounters until I got a feel for it–instead, I ruled the artillerist had to take a penalty since he wasn’t used to firing with a forward observer. Totally against the book rules. But at the same time, how else to solve it?
Disallowing a very common mech with a relatively common appendage?
Retroactively nerfing/disallowing artillery mechs, despite it being the character’s baby that he’d lovingly customized?
Fudging the rules while I adapted WORKED, and it kept people happy, and it made sense in the context of the story we were telling.
I would just tell the guy before he spends his $25 that it’s not going to be allowed unless he clears it with me first. If he still wants to buy it to use with another group, or just to look cool on his shelf, that’s his business, but him buying something puts no constraint on me.
In my group, I’m the guy with all the books. I’m not going to have my feelings hurt if someone else is running and tells me I can’t use a particular prestige class.
Well, I see two things to address here. One, if this was the first time the situation came up, then making a houserule is not necessarily a bad thing - so long as you inform the players, it is applied consistently, and - if they were building based on assumptions that the default rules would apply - you allow them the opportunity to fix their character according to the new framework.
Two, if it’s standard equipment for that class of mechs, it sounds like you should have actually planned for it.
)
- and fighting writer’s block than getting bogged down in rule supplements and picayune mechanical miscellanea. You only get so many hours of prep time per session, and at some point the effort/result ratio becomes a turnoff. Burnout lies that way.
