The “players as gear” was the exploit I didn’t want to look up, lest it ruin the fun. I hadn’t realized about the weight limit, though, which would have tripped them up - as I recall, they didn’t have any invisibility spells stronger than the basic version. It was not, generally speaking, a stealth-oriented party. The cleric in question was a cleric of Gorum, god of destruction. Gorum would only grant his cleric healing spells in the thick of combat, a restriction that could be circumventing by socking the target in the jaw while casting the spell.
It seems to me that Gorum would heartily support the idea of using a mammoth as an invisible flying troop transport way cool, mainly because the idea will almost certainly end with “destruction ensues.”
Props to you for (1) letting them do it, and (2) giving them a sound track.
In one deliberately silly campaign I ran, the cleric was an evangelical priest of Ilmater. The player habitually made a “mitre” out of a bandanna and spoke in-character in an over-the-top televangelist imitation–“Suff’rin’ on earth puts jools in yer crown in HEAVEN!” Consequently, his faith would not allow him to deprive anyone of their suffering. As a practical matter, though, adventurers often need to be healed on the spot.
His solution to this dilemma? His healing spells worked instantly…but they compressed all of the pain of the entire healing process into that instant. Days of intensive-care-level pain in less than a second. I made them make Constitution checks every time he healed them to avoid passing out. (As compensation, every time they passed one, I awarded the character a willpower point that could be spent to ignore stun from massive damage, automatically pass a system shock roll, or even skip the Con check on a healing.)
I have never seen a party with a cleric spend so much gold on healing potions.
To be clear, by the way: If I were DMing the invisible mammoth scenario, I would have allowed the “passengers as carried gear” interpretation for the sake of Rule of Cool, and would never have even looked up the spell, and thus would have failed to remember the weight limit (which is almost never relevant, after all). If I had remembered the weight limit, though, I’d have pointed it out to the player before he cast his spell-- I believe in giving the players the benefit of the doubt when the rules are ambiguous, but the weight limit is pretty clear.
Agreed all around, particularly with letting players take back actions if they were unaware of a rule that makes their action useless or counterproductive. I generally assume that a character, who has spent years training and studying to pull off a particular trick (such as casting a spell, or a complicated attack maneuver) isn’t going to forget what he can or can’t do - while a player who spent an hour rolling up a character and doing bong hits is likely to have poorer recall.
I have been known to bend the rules to accommodate the Rule of Cool. For an invisible, flying assault mammoth, I would have made some dodge available to get around the weight limit. I wouldn’t have handed it to them for free, but I would have dropped some kind of hint that this time was special, and they’d get away with it if they could come up with the right justification. Find a ley line or a pocket of wild magic, stick a (Nose) Ring of Feather Fall on the mammoth’s trunk, steal a very large balloon from a parade, cast Enlarge on the mammoth’s ears and rename him Dumbo…
I might be persuaded to go along with any of those, but it’d have to be the players’ idea, not mine.
As for “the character knows their abilities better than the player”, agreed, but it can lead to some awkward situations where the character would know that what the player is planning is a bad idea, or the character would be able to pick up on some clue that the player is ignoring, or the like. You want to give them a hand in that situation, but at the same time, it needs to be a gentle hand, lest it become you playing the character, instead of the guy who rolled him up.
Like I said, I wouldn’t hand it to them, they’d have to find something. I’m also not above planting “relief valves” ahead of time, even early in a campaign–odd items, places, or people that can be used to facilitate a one-off CMoA. It’s up to the players to remember them, though.
Of all the perks, positive traits, qualities, or whatever you want to call them from all the point-buy systems I’ve ever played, I think my favorite is the Shadowrun quality “Common Sense”. It allows the GM to tell you, legally and at their discretion, “Your character thinks that’s a really dumb idea.”
This was 2nd edition. Don’t know if the rules specifically disallowed it, but I don’t remember seeing it.
I used to spend a fair bit of time at a forum dedicated to the creation of independently published RPGs. There were some awesome articles about how to make and run different systems. One of the tips I specifically remember was “Say yes, or roll dice.”
Yeah, as a GM, I tend to be freer with the “helpful hints” than I probably should be. I’ve been trying to rein that in, but it can be hard. A little while ago, in my current campaign, my players found the animated, severed head of a demon. The demon head could talk, and the players could bargain with it to get information about the ruin they were about to explore. The session where they found the head went great, and ended with a very good bit of roleplaying where the players argued over whether or not they should just destroy the thing immediately. I should have stayed out of the debate entirely, but I ended up guiding them towards keeping it, because it played such a big role in the rest of the adventure. I kicked myself for doing that afterwards, because it wasn’t me reminding them of something their characters should already have known, but rather, straight up meta-gaming foreshadowing. Not a good example of how I want to run my games.
So, for the next session, I resolve not to do that. No hints, no matter how cool a scene they might be passing up, just them relying on their wits and the tools they’ve accumulated to win through. And for the next two sessions, while they’re exploring that ruin, not once did any of them think to ask the head for advice. Huge chunks of flavor text, background details, and a few nice treasures laid out in the module were missed entirely, because they completely forgotten the foul-mouthed, rotting head they were carrying around with them in a sack.
Of course, once they were *out *of the ruin, they suddenly remembered the damned thing, and now every time they run into a wall in the campaign, they haul that fucking thing out of its bag and interrogate it. Never mind that it had been locked in a vault for more than a century when they found it, and therefore doesn’t have a clue about anything that’s happened in the world since then. They’re still asking it to report on the locations or motivation of NPCs who were born fifty years after the last time the head saw sunlight.
In a small campaign with some friends of mine, I played a bard. This was a pretty high-level group with the worst kind of Monty Hall loot situation going on, but my character just wasn’t very good. I basically stood around singing ballads and casting haste for the two badass regular players we had – a completely munchkined shapeshifting druid, and a halfling rogue who was also a vampire. I just couldn’t do much, though I was definitely helpful outside of content for bardic knowledge and that sort of thing.
Anyway, so we are in some sort of temple and we end up fighting a balor (a powerful demon). He is smacking the shit out of everyone and the druid and rogue are just laying into him nonstop. It’s getting desperate. The whole fight I’m just buffing and using this shitty anti-demon flute I found during the adventure (it was like 1d6 damage or something).
Finally the druid and the rogue are about to die and the demon isn’t paying me any attention because I suck so bad but they’ve whittled him down enough that I manage to get the killing blow with something like a 3 damage – while they’re at negative hit points and falling.
Anyway, they survived, but my bard was just so stoked about the whole thing. He consistently rubbed their nose in it as if it was his personal victory, conveniently forgetting the whole rest of the fight. As soon as he got back to town, he spent lavish sums of cash commissioning an elaborate series of artistic works commemorating his victory. He posed for massive paintings of him smiting the beast through the power of song, and showing him standing triumphantly over the corpse of the balor with his mighty demon-slaying flute in hand, his companions depicted as pleading him for safety from the great beast. He then purchased a bar in Waterdeep and refinished it as his personal business (mostly to display all the art). He called it ‘the Bard and Balor’ and used it to launch a relentless campaign of personal aggrandizement. No expense was spared – the crowning achievement was getting the druid to awaken (give sentience to) a giant octopus, then using his massive charisma to convince it to work for him as his bartender. He hired craftsmen to make the octopus rings granting it the ability to levitate and breathe air. He hired shills to beg and plead with him to tell the amazing story of his victory over the balor in the bar, something he set to the tune of an epic ballad, until it became a local legend. The tavern became somewhat well known and made the bard a local celebrity. From then on, most adventure hooks – much to my companions’ obvious disgust – started, “You’ve received an offer to perform at a prestigious event out of town, famous bard!”
We were all evil-aligned so I was kind of surprised that I didn’t end up dead in the harbor over this, but for the most part, we were all getting so rich and powerful that nobody took it too personally. He did eventually make a pact with a devil to become immortal (well, ‘timeless’ – not aging, but not invulnerable), but honestly this was pretty low on the evil scale for this group (the vampire’s private affairs were particularly retch-inducing by the end of the campaign).
Now, see, you had the perfect opportunity there to put your thumb on the scale without using Word of DM. Just have the head lay out its own case for why it shouldn’t be destroyed, and how much help it would be in the dungeon. Which of course would be entirely within character for it to do.
Unfortunately, a prior session had established that discussing whether or not to kill an NPC, in front of said NPC, tends to have unexpected repercussions. They stuffed the thing back in its box while they considered whether or not to dispose of it.
That’s the problem with players: they pick the most inconvenient times to learn from their mistakes.
Our current Pathfinder DM may be a little more free with hints than he should be; I think he’s a bit uncomfortable with improvising, so he tries to keep us within the parameters of the module. That’s not the easiest task, given the antics some of our party members get up to.
He also has a tendency to telegraph, though I’m not sure how aware of it he is. When he asks us to describe our characters, for instance, it invariably means that something we might be wearing or carrying can affect the encounter. Since he does this after he describes the encounter to us, and we have the better part of a century of tabletop experience at the table, it’s very hard not to metagame it.
My DM days stopped in about 198x, what I called AD&D and is now called 2nd Edition (? - I really don’t understand what happened to the gameI knew).
I had a party who had unexpectedly (to me) ***huge ***difficulty trying to get ***into ***my dungeon. They had a room with a grandfather clock in it going hickory dickory hickory dickory rather than ticking. It contained nothing - no exits- bar a well.
They for the life of them could not remember the nursery rhyme and there could not solve the puzzle to opening the secret door.
All they had to do was set the hands of the clock to one o’clock and the clock would have swung back revealing the door into giant mouseland dungeon thingie
So they lowered themselves on ropes down the well. At the foot of the well there were two giant mouse tunnels running off (which did indeed connect with various points in the dungeon but had not been designed by me for player passage as they were about 18" to 2’ in diameter.) which after much buggering around they decided they had not choice but to take.
Now traversing those tunnels with all their kit was not easy. All shields had to be left behind, the 10’ poles were cut down to 4’ poles when the arrived at the first 90 degree bend in the tunnel etc etc. Much bulky stuff had to be left behind once they had filled every sack they had and tied them to their ankles. Access to anything in a hurry was a nightmare and only the first fighter in the queue to pull or be pushed along these narrow tunnels could see anything or do anything. I tried to hint that this was ***really ***not a good idea but they insisted in persisting…
The whole thing was remembered as very atmospheric and clostrophobic but also turned out to be very deadly. Pointman Fighter soon met something big and with teeth coming towards him that simply ate him up (how could he decently defend himself?) and the party was only saved then as his body was as much a problem for their attacker as it was for them.
After many incidents (included trying to navigate similar tunnels but flooded to boot)they were eventually wiped out bar one (who was loaded with the choicest magic from all the copses that would unbalance many later games but whom despite my best efforts to kill - as I realised he would be over-magiced for his level - escaped me).
It is still remembered on occasion in the pub when they players get together (still friends and gamers but long moved on from RPG).
Second Edition doesn’t refer to AD&D as a whole, it refers to AD&D Second Edition, which came out in 1989. First Edition is the original AD&D. Basic D&D, and the original pre-1977 D&D aren’t counted in the ‘editions’ - Wizards of the Coast dropped the ‘Advanced’, because there was no longer a Basic set to be advanced from, but the edition numbers flow from there.
No argument there - I think 3e should have simply been called Dungeons and Dragons, and 4e…eeh, I have no idea what they could have called it to specify it’s not really compatible with 3e, but not implying it’s another Advanced/Basic situation. But that’s really a separate point, so I cut what I had along those lines.
Well, I don’t have any dog in this fight as I have not played for over twenty-five years (:eek:).
Sounds like I played Basic Set first (sort of thin blue booklet with info for levels 1-3), then went backwards to D&D (boxed set plus 4 supplements) as we needed more level info than the basic set gave us, then finally AD&D (first edition -then DM Guide, Players Handbook and Monster Manual).
Stopped in 1982 when went off to Uni and never touched it again. Still have it boxed up and should probably look to eBay it all sometime as it may be collectable - not the rulebooks but maybe the UK fanzines (White Dwarf 1 - 36, Underworld Oracle, The Beholder, Trollcrusher etc)?
