Indeed. There’s definitely a place in the world for GMs who aren’t rules-monkeys, but I suggest that place isn’t with D&D, just like there’s a place in the world for deaf judges, but that place isn’t in a music competition.
If I found myself in a situation in which I knew the rules a lot better than the DM, I think I’d catch up with him after a session and say something like, “Hey, I’m a total rules nerd, and I wonder if it’d be helpful for me to act as the reference librarian during gameplay. If you want to know whether something provokes an AoO, or whether a spell affects everyone or just enemies, or whatever, I’m happy to look that up real quick. Also, there are a few rules calls you’ve made that I wonder if we could talk about…”
Otherwise, there’s no way I could stay in the game.
I was with a group that was similar, except I don’t really get why the DM wanted to cripple arcane casters. It just seemed like any ruling came out that way.
Now, I wanted to play more of a non-direct-damage caster, the kind that has a lot of utility spells and doesn’t just zap things. Unfortunately, ruling after ruling came that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. I understand that things can’t always go my way, but the DM always had an excuse why what I wanted to do couldn’t work. Illusion, charm, Tongues, Grease… they all became useless. Finally it basically came down to using just combat spells, but because his campaign never seemed to have very much in the way of spells available for sale, I was basically stuck with Fireball and cantrips. Once that happened, Fireball would always be too dangerous to use – there were always flammable objects that made it impractical. He particularly liked putting gunpowder around in configurations so I couldn’t ever fireball enemies without blowing ourselves up. So I largely packed that away too and basically swung around with a dagger and threw rocks for a few sessions. We all got some cursed item that we couldn’t drop but that for some reason had mega-abilities, like +2 to our prime stats, or bypassing damage reduction, or whatever… but my ability was “sudden extend spell once per day”. I got a double-duration spell once a day. And the only spells I had that had meaningful durations were.. you guessed it… illusions, charms, tongues, grease…
Finally, we attacked a pirate den and I basically had nothing to do the whole time. Everything was just a melee brawl. We get to the end and we’re supposed to .. I don’t remember, kill the pirate boss or whatever, because he was going to attack some town with his ships. We found the armory and the team wanted to loot the gunpowder, so we seized a ship and took a bunch, but there was still tons and tons left.
I said, “So how much gunpowder?” The DM insisted it was far more than we could ever take, but we couldn’t destroy it because we would blow ourselves up, so we’d have to confront the boss.
“Let’s push all the powder into the bay.” “The containers are watertight…” all these excuses.
Finally I said, can I have a map of the room. I pulled out several barrels of gunpowder and started putting them in a line. Each one would just barely encompass the next if it exploded. I then got the whole party on a ship, sailed into the harbor at the maximum range for fireball to the outermost keg.
DM wasn’t real happy but the party was so thrilled that he didn’t come up with an excuse that time.
The next session I leveled up and took energy substitution: sonic so I could now sonicball instead. I never really got to use it much though because at that point he brought in his 10 year old son (without asking) and suddenly all our adventures surrounded his kid’s character. I’m not even kidding, like our characters suddenly ‘decided’ to follow this orc warrior around for no reason and then ALL of the loot was basically awesome fighter drops and then crap for everyone else. Wow, we found this weird exotic weapon, it just happens to be the one he specializes in, and it’s +5 flaming and gives a +4 to strength and con as well, when everyone else has +1 weapons!! By the second session he was already ridiculously overpowered compared to the rest of the group and I wasn’t having any fun. I bowed out of the group.
The sad thing in my situation was that I’m pretty sure the DM wasn’t being malicious, he was just being ignorant and/or lazy. Essentially, he seemed to be assuming that the basic rules worked pretty much like they had in previous editions, instead of carefully reading the new rules to see what had changed.
I used to play in a game with a great GM - except for one thing. Any time a player came up with an idea, he had to come up with a reason it wouldn’t work, or wouldn’t work as well as the player wanted it to. It was automatic for him.
The thing that really brought it into focus for me was when my character wanted a better magic sword. The one he had was a family heirloom that was pretty tightly tied into his backstory. Over the course of the campaign, he’d saved up quite a bit of gold, and the campaign world was fairly high magic - it had been established that one could buy magic items in most large towns. So, I ask him if I can find an enchanter who can improve the spells laid on my sword, increasing it’s enhancement bonus, and maybe adding a special ability to it.
The GM says no. But what I can do is sell him the sword I have, and he’ll give me the sword I want, less the cost of the sword I gave him. This plan would have cost my character exactly the same amount of money, and given him exactly the same advantages, except I wouldn’t have my heirloom sword. But he had to tweak it, just because it had been my idea, and he simply could. not. say. yes to a PC’s idea.
To his credit, when I talked to him about it (using that specific example), he agreed that it was a bad habit, and started trying to be more accommodating. But shortly thereafter, he had a kid, and then dropped off the face of the Earth. I hoping to catch up with him again in sixteen years or so.
I think my best D&D trick was when we’d plane-hopped into a more modern setting, and been tasked with killing a politician. While the target was giving a speech, we managed to get the party up on top of the building behind him. Clean line of sight, no archers, but we had me, the wizard. No problem, right? Magic Missile, no problem. Except I didn’t have Magic Missile. I’d specialized in Chromatic Orb, got a sweet bonus once a day, cast as though I was two levels higher (which much later resulted in one-shotting a baalor when I got insanely lucky and beat his magic resist and he failed his save). But Chromatic Orb has a maximum range, and it was shorter than the distance from our rooftop perch to the politician. Go through the list of spells, didn’t have combat spells with the range, or may have vetoed them for collateral damage reasons (though I doubt it, considering how many people our party killed “because they were in the way”). Finally I was looking at the spell description for Mount…
I summoned a donkey a few feet in front of me, and dropped it right on his head. From several stories up, so it was moving very quickly. And mounts disappear immediately when killed. So The onlookers saw a grey blur turn the politician into a messy splat before the blur vanished.
At GenCon one year, I played in a Spycraft game with a bunch of people who kept coming up with totally ridiculous ideas. The only one I remember is that one player, during a car chase, jumped out of his car at 150 kph (or whatever), leapt onto the hood of a mook’s car, chucked a grenade through the open window, and jumped back into his own car before the grenade blew.
No way I would’ve allowed that in my game. But the GM just laughed delightedly and figured out a series of rolls that made it happen.
I had an epiphany during that game: the default answer is “yes.” Sometimes you might have to say “no” to a player idea, but make that as rare as possible, even if it causes medium-level screwage with your plans, and everyone will have more fun.
fluiddruid, that bites. It seems to me you were setting up an excellent wizard character for non-combat use, and the GM just wouldn’t let you do it. Which is a shame, because player creativity makes the game more enjoyable. (And can provide plot hooks, especially when you drop tongues on a mini-boss.)
Left Hand, what you say makes sense. Allow the player to try, even if there’s no way in {local 'verse equivalent of Hell} that the plan would work in Real Life.
I’ll have to remember that one; it’ll expand the usefulness of my cleric’s “Summon Flanking Bonus” spells. I wonder if the DM will let me get away with summoning earth elementals in mid-air? “Rocks fall…”
On a similar note, I once sent a party through a lich’s backup lair, where he kept all the magic devices too unstable, dangerous, or just plain weird to keep at home. Among the other things they came across was a cracked Wand of Wonder. The wand worked, but it “leaked”, resulting in it manifesting a second effect every time it was used. This effect manifested at maximum range directly above the wand, and it was always “Summon Rhinoceros”.
They used it anyway. They just gave it to the thief, who had the best chance of getting out of the way. In a way, it was more reliable than an undamaged WoW, since they really only used it to summon rhinos. They even managed to keep the rhino alive sometimes, but mostly it was a panic button for the thief–“I can’t take this guy in melee. Rhino bomb!”
As always, of course, if the DM lets you get away with it, well and good, but I’ll just point out that the 3e rules specifically disallow summoning non-flying creatures in midair.
And if I ever DM again, I’m going to be sure to give my party a Rod of Rhino.
One of our most memorable occurred in a spy game, I think it was Top Secret. Our team of experts in various deadly and stealthy skills was sent to Ankara, Turkey, as the first leg of a long mission. IN case we are captured, we do not know anything about the rest of the mission – only that we are to meet our contact in a certain stall in the Bazaar and exchange a sign/countersign to be sure he’s the right one.
And so eventually after some adventuring, we find ourselves in some merchant’s stall in the Bazaar. Our team leader leans close to the wily old Turk and whispers the sign. The Turk twirls his mustache conspiratorially, and gives the correct countersign, positively establishing him as our contact.
Our illustrious leader pulls out his Beretta and promptly drills the contact full of holes, killing him. “Let’s go home,” he says.
We freeze. Maybe Headquarters told HIM something they didn’t tell US. Maybe it wasn’t the real countersign. “Why did you do that?!” we cry.
“He was our contract,” the leader assures us. “We got the right guy.” And suddenly it’s all horribly clear.
“ConTACT, not con TRACT!” we yell. “Didn’t you HEAR it clearly?”
“Um, I thought he was our hit contract,” the leader says. “WHY would a TARGET give us a COUNTERSIGN?” we yell. “Well, I did think that part was a bit unusual.”
So we fled, mission busted, and eventually found ourselves in a running gunfight in an underground tunnel. The leader got cut off, and we simply left him behind to die, frankly. After all, he’d already murdered one of our own agency’s covert operatives.
In the last campaign I ran, one of my players had a barbarian/cleric who had a riding mammoth. Towards the end of the campaign, the party had to assault a small army of drow guarding an island temple. Their plan of attack: everyone climbed onto the mammoth. They then cast invisibility and wind walk on the mammoth, providing them with, essentially, an invisible flying APC. I’m pretty sure, if I’d read the spell descriptions, that I could have found some reason why their plan was impossible. But, Jesus, who cares? It was too awesome an idea to rules lawyer to death. Instead, I pulled up “Ride of the Valkyries” on iTunes and had them roll initiative.
And Zeriel, you’re right: it’s not usually an unqualified “yes,” but that’s what I default to. Clear rules (no summoning nonflying creatures midair), overuse of a tactic (creating a ziggurat in a bag of holding and casting animate objects on it every battle), ridiculous minmaxing (finding two prestige classes in two different third-party sourcebooks that give always-on true seeing at 8th level when combined), and the like can lead to a different answer, of course. But aiming for the awesome almost always means a “yes” is in order, even if the rules need a little bending to make it happen.
Actually, speaking as a rules lawyer… I still can’t see any problem with the invisible flying mammoth. The only quibble would be whether a single casting also affects the riders, but you could argue that riders should count as “gear carried by the creature”. Oh, and the 2nd-level version also has a limit of 100 lbs/level, but if they had access to Wind Walk, then they also had access to Invisibility Sphere, Greater Invisibility, or Mass Invisibility, all of which get around that.
