Ah, yes, that’s right…+caster level (max 10).
Of course, you still can’t disarm them or anything.
For certain values of “disarm,” what the meat shield is for, isn’t it?
See, for me, the primary draw of role playing is getting to hang out with my friends. I’d feel kinda shitty about myself if I told a friend he couldn’t hang out with me, and a bunch of our mutual friends, because he didn’t make a reservation early enough.
Mind, the way my role playing group functions like Zeriel’s. We’ve got about a dozen people in the group, only about half of whom can make it to any given gaming session. Usually, it works out okay. Sometimes, everyone shows up at once, and I’ve got to run a game for as many as ten players. Sure, it slows the game waaaaay down. On the other hand, I get to spend an afternoon with a whole bunch of people I really like. Small price to pay, in my book.
Well, I play RPGs because I like having good times with my friends. If the character one of them is using is making things less fun for everyone else, then something needs to be done about that. What, precisely, that something is depends, of course, on how the character is un-fun. The fix might be as simple as crossing off a single spell on a spell list, or it might be as drastic as having him roll up an entirely new character.
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And even if something seems unbalanced with a ‘surprise player’ character for a session - so what? It’s one session. You can plan for it the next session.
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And this is why I covered that base.
I’d feel I had a pretty shitty friend if they dropped by unannounced and felt entitled to join in as a character I hadn’t had a chance to review.
On the topic of letting ridiculous dice rolls derail things…
In the first campaign I played with my current group (this was the same campaign where I got sent flying by an exploding Hellhound), in one battle, the GM had set us against a Displacer Beast…it was actually slightly too powerful for our party, nominally (there were 3 of us - my knife-fighting, illusion-and-force wizard/bard, a fire-evoker wizard, and a thief), but we should’ve been able to take it, even taking a bit of a beating.
First, maybe second round. Wizard comes up, firebombs it. The dice LOVE her. (And she got racial bonuses, due to fire-elemental heritage.) Fries the bastard. Boom, combat meant to take most of the night: over.
For the characters, it was a ‘oh, yeah, we rock!’ shake booty moment.
For the players, it was five minutes of uproarious laughter and material for teasing the GM for the next five years. (All it took was referring to a monster we were up against as a ‘displacer beast’ and you could make him go red, and crack everyone else up. But there’s been a lot of change in the group since then, so the joke’s died since only a couple of us get it any more, and we’ve mostly gotten over it, anyway.)
I’m not going to tell you that your DMing style is pretty much the worst thing for feeling that way, though.
I wasn’t talking about your feelings when I made my comments, either, so - what?
Stories about stupid D&D tricks in this thread: awesome.
Bitching about the DMing styles of people you’ll never even play with anyway in this thread: losery.
The problem with that in my group is that the players in my group most likely to bring a broken build into a game, are the ones who are going to whine the loudest if I nerf their character. In my current game (Pathfinder setting) one of my players wanted to use a fire arm, which I allowed. About three games into the campaign, Paizo released a new supplement with updated rules for guns, including a change in damage dice from d8 to d12. Which I thought would please the guy: more damage, right? Except now, he couldn’t use his “lucky” d8 any more. You would not *believe *the volume of whining this provoked. Any time he rolled less than 6 points of damage, he’d bring it up again. And he’s still dealing more damage per round than any other character in the party!
Sometimes, it’s easier to just cheat.
I used to have lucky dice, so I don’t usually care if other people do…but that’s pretty darn funny to go to that extreme. I assume if he had petitioned you to keep using the lower dice, you would have let him?
Speaking of dice, for the longest time I was convinced that using a weapon with 2 damage dice significantly raised the average damage, so I would always opt, for instance, for 2d4 weapons rather than 1d10. And then, thanks to the internet, I learned the awful truth. Curse you, math!
I’ve never had any lucky dice, but I do have an unlucky die. The first d20 I ever owned is strongly biased against 20s (and yes, I have done a large enough number of controlled rolls to be statistically confident of that).
And I just rolled it 100 times to be sure, and didn’t get a single 20. There’d be about a .6% chance of that happening with a fair die.
He did, and I didn’t. Not really sure why - I think I was peeved with him that afternoon over his general Munchkin nature. Generally, I let my players get away with a lot, but I wasn’t in the mood for it then.
Hey, Pathfinder with guns? What is this, Miller? Sounds like something juuust perfect for a Planescape campaign.
It’s the standard campaign setting, actually. His character comes from the city-state of Alkenstar. The Inner Sea World Guide has rules for firearms.
One thing I’d recommend is a house rule that you can’t enchant guns. I didn’t implement one at the beginning of my campaign, and I wish I had - enchanted fire arms can be pretty badly broken, it turns out.
I read somewhere that a strikingly large percentage (that is, well over 50%) of injection-molded plastic dice are significantly unfair. I should see if I can find the study again–I know it involved at least 10,000 rolls of d6s.
I have kept a rolling histogram for the FATE system (every roll is 4d6, on special dice that have 2 faces each of +1, -1 and 0) games I play in, and I consistently see my bell curve peak at around -1.25, over several dozen sessions and hundreds of die rolls.
I’m having a set of dice custom-machined out of aircraft aluminum and guaranteed by the craftsman to be very close to perfect. 
This reminds me of one.
My party has been given a mission by the Duke to repair a run down light house. As part of the mission, he gives us a very, very expensive replacement lens. We pack the lens in straw, and hire a cart to carry it to the light house. The lens survives a few random encounters, and our fight to clear out the light house itself. Finally, we carry it up the long, winding staircase to the top of the building, and attempt to fit it into the mount.
Only, no one in the party has engineering, and we all botch our untrained skill checks. We can’t get the damned thing to fit into the mount. So one of the guys says, “I use the pommel of my sword to hammer it into place.”
You can imagine what followed.
“What? It’s a Fresnel lens! It’s *supposed *to be hundreds of little pieces!” 
I’m surprised neither your party nor your Duke thought to hire a engineer to oversee the installation once the adventurers had cleared out the nasties. Of course, that would be one more fragile thing you guys would have had to transport and protect all the way there.
And one, unlike the lens, with an annoying tendency to wander off at the worst possible time. Never trust a DM’s intentions for a specialist NPC, especially if you have to escort him.