The "bitch about your GM" thread

While we're on the subject of "grossly overpowered bosses", here's to the DM who put his players (us) against a Balor... at level 15.

Apparently the fact that we were gestalted was supposed to make it fair.

For those who don't know why this was a phenomenally stupid move on the DM's part, Balors have at-will spell-like abilities. And one of those abilities is Blasphemy. Which has cumulative effects depending on the relative hit dice of the subjects to the caster. All nonevil creatures in range with as many hit dice as it has caster levels are dazed. All nonevil creatures in range with fewer hit dice than it has caster levels are dazed and weakened.

All nonevil creatures in range with five fewer hit dice than it has caster levels (us) are paralyzed and helpless for 1d10 rounds. And this spell allows no save.

The DM used this attack. After a few minutes of talking about this, he actually realized what he had done and backed up. He shouldn't have had to back up, he shouldn't have made the decision to do this in the first place. He should have had us against something that a party of our level can actually fight, especially since we had basically no alternatives to fighting this guy. I mean, do what, Diplomacy? Bluff? It's a freaking Balor and it wants us to die in painful ways, there's no talking our way out. And then add in the demon it summoned, and the Dominate Monster that almost made me kill the wizard, and the Power Word Stun spam that had the entire party incapacitated at once on occasion, and the fact that our healer fell to the vorpal sword... the fact that we survived, having only two characters standing for half the fight, was nothing short of miraculous, except where it was probably also caused by some fudging of some rolls.

edited 11th Jul '10 2:09:09 AM by Ezekiel

Guy at my school wanted to teach people how to play Dungeons And Dragons. Five people showed up when he expected four, so he boosted the HP and AC of the shard golem we were to fight, and gave it backup in the form of some sort of electrified scorpion. Then one of us had to leave unexpectedly, and he didn't downgrade it any. When he had to leave, his buddy took over as DM and dropped the monsters down in power slightly, because they were pretty much slaughtering us before that. I checked the golem's HP later—my rogue would have had to sneak attack it four times to kill it with average rolls, assuming he could hit it, which was no mean feat in and of itself (gigantic golems should not have that high of a Reflex score.) Plus it had (and used) a hard-to-resist ability that dazed everyone within five squares of it, and the scorpion had grappling abilities, poison, and I think stunning as well. I'm about to start a campaign DMed by that buddy of our original DM, but I don't think I'll play under the original DM anytime soon.

Some sort of electrified scorpion, you say?

Dear DM,

You're a cool guy, but your campaigns are boring as hell.

The meetings mainly consist of rolling dice, with maybe two lines of dialogue if we're lucky.

The only reason I come is so I can get to make friends.

Let's have a toast for the second edition DM who decreed my Fighter (please note - not a Paladin) switched from Lawful Good to Neutral Good, losing a badass magic axe and access to all the gifts the party received from its patron deity... for telling a single lie. And then specified that in order to regain all that I would have to complete what might as well have been a suicide mission - fortuitous indeed that the campaign ended first.

The one and only thing a DM should never do:

Play with players who you just know are not going to enjoy your D Ming style.

Most any complaint about "This DM did this!" is really about a DM having a specific style choice that the complaining player just doesn't like. And the solution is, fortunately, the result of those situations-the player gets fed up and leaves. The DM's responsibility is to pay attention to player preferences, and when he isn't willing or able to adjust his game and style to make sure everyone's happy, allow people to walk away with no feelings hurt.

Though, obviously, there are some cases of simple incompetence. But I think most concerns about Railroading and GMPCs and things like that are really essentially equivalent to Complaining About Shows You Dont Like.

Of course, I say that as Tomu the Train Engine. CHOO CHOO!

Actually, never mind. Most of the stuff you guys are bitching about here is just blatant DM incompetence. CARRY ON.

You would have had to sneak attack a golem five times to bring it down? Seeing as how it's a golem, I guess that'd be 4th edition. But it sure sounds like it was a solo boss to begin with, so I guess that's the majority of the encounter's XP. You're upset that your character can with average rolls take down the majority of the encounter's XP in four rounds? I think I'm missing something here.

I think that, there are certainly cases of overpowered monsters. But, unless A.) A fight is not the last fight of a "day" (as defined by an extended rest) or B.) You only win because of ridiculously good rolls, there's no real point in complaining an encounter was overly difficult. The fact that you won (assuming you did win, and the DM didn't have to nerf-on-the-fly) means that it was a winnable fight. The real question is, how much challenge do you want from your game? Looking at 4E, they decided "Players want more challenge than existing monsters currently give." So they ramped up monster damage values.

Now, granted, I agree-daze spam is a pain, and ridiculously high defenses are not the best way to make a challenging encounter. It just makes the PCs feel useless, especially when you stun-spam. But daze and stun are parts of the game, and generally, I tend to find that, except with the most exceedingly optimized groups, if an enemy really was using too much daze and stun spam, everyone would be dead.

Of course, if the DM had to nerf the boss mid-fight or fudge rolls or whatever, all bets are off. The numbers no longer speak for themselves.

edited 10th Jul '10 2:11:44 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

As for the Balor that Blasphemy'd you into non-existence, well, Balors are, what, CR 20ish or something? 22? I mean, for a party of 4 gestalt characters, I'd expect you to be able to reasonably handle a CR 21 threat. The problem is that 3E's basic mechanics for-well, basically, everything-were NOT trustworthy, so it's an understandable mistake that came from short-sightedness and too much trust in the game engine.

4E is a bit better than that, though it has a few huge gaping holes in it in that retards too.

Actually, yeah. Gestalt 15th level characters probably could have easily killed a balor had they won initiative and were well power gamed. Once again, the real problem is DM's who have misestimated their players in one way or another.

edited 10th Jul '10 3:59:59 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

I guess I should clarify, regarding the golem, that we were all using prebuilt characters, and mine did twice as much damage with a sneak attack as everyone else did with a basic attack. The dazing effect made it hard to even get into position for a sneak attack. In the DM's defense, some of us had knockback attacks, and we were clearly supposed to knock the golem into a pit of fire halfway across the battlefield, but that would have taken a lot of successful hits, and again, this thing had a much higher AC and Reflex than could reasonably be hit. Plus the scorpion tried to grapple the cleric every turn and usually succeeded, and our mage's spells weren't really appropriate for the encounter, so it was pretty much just me and the fighter against the golem, occasionally taking time out to help the cleric escape the scorpion's grasp (so he could get grappled again on the next turn.)

Uh huh. So, how did you survive? Did you:

A.) Spend more resources than the fight reasonably should have taken. B.) Get insanely lucky or C.) Wipe/get the DM to adjust the battle on the fly?

It occurs to me that due to resurrection mechanisms, the "A fight isn't too hard if you can legitimately survive" mentality isn't always correct, but I mean, the bottom line is, if you win legitimately, then it's not necessarily an unfair fight.

Granted, the concerns about daze and high defenses are legitimate ones: I'd much rather arbitrarily give a boss too much HP than just have it have too high defenses. Not from a "this boss is too challenging" standpoint, but from a "this boss is fun to fight against" standpoint. But still, I think players on the whole tend to complain about difficulty when, in reality, at least until recently, the game has really been "too easy" unless your DM likes Gauntlet based gameplay.

Oh, and I suppose I should ammend that by saying that I avoid low level gameplay. Dn D has been about resource management for a long time, though more or less so depending on the edition. So, even if you technically survive a battle, if you have 3 battles left to go and that battle took up all your daily resources, we can conclude that the battle truly was too difficult. But, to the extent that the battle was won, I'm not sympathetic to concerns that it was too hard-after all, you beat it, right? So it clearly wasn't impossible.

If anything, it's a problem of the DM not gauging how much challenge his players want, which is, you have to admit, an easy mistake to make. However, if this was supposed to be a *demonstration* then it's probably exceedingly foolish to do anything but err on the side of being too easy.

Once again ,though, it sounds like rather than the battle being too hard, the battle was just too frustrating. It's important not to confuse the two concepts. An enemy you can only hit on a 20 but that dies in one hit is not a hard battle. It is a frustrating battle.

He was teaching us how to play. Most of us had never played a tabletop game in our lives, and didn't know proper tactics. He just told us a little about the rules, and threw this thing at us. And the replacement DM did weaken the monster—we would not have survived if he hadn't. The scorpion would've killed the cleric, and the golem would have killed everyone else.

FAIR ENOUGH! I got ahead of myself in my "D Ms must be defended from the ire of players who don't understand the trials of D Ming" and missed some of the intricacies of the situation until *it was too late*.

My humblest apologies. I have a weird psychological disorder where whenever anyone is complaining about something someone else did that is even VAGUELY REMOTELY SIMILAR to something I once did in an alternate universe, I have to respond AS IF it is a complaint about MY VERY ACTIONS and leap TO MY OWN DEFENSE with the gratuitous use of ALL CAPS!

Well, not all caps. More like unnecessary use of caps for poorly timed emphasis.

Tomu, I believe you missed parts of my post as well...

Okay, our "party" did consist of four gestalt characters.

One was kidnapped before the start of the campaign without even a roll to decide it, in a cage we couldn't get at for the entirety of the fight (which had to do with someone having been missing on the first day, then someone else the next - the first was switched out for the second as the one in the cage).

We weren't just facing a Balor, either, because it did summon a creature that we had to deal with first - and while two of us were pinned down with the aforementioned spells, the cleric/paladin tried to engage the Balor and got a vorpal sword to the vitals for his troubles. So we were left up against a Balor with - NOT FOUR! - two characters, and casters at that - a Warlock/Rogue and a Sorcerer/Wizard. And we weren't going into the battle in top condition, since we had to battle our way up an evil tower first. Not really a fair fight.

Do not tell me we should've been able to take it, because no, we shouldn't have under those circumstances - we got lucky when I was able to make a retardedly difficult Will save against a Dominate effect (I incorrectly identified it as Charm earlier without noticing, that's been corrected) that was trying to force me to kill the wizard, and it would have been a one-hit kill; even with all the modifiers the situation warranted and my good Will save I was still looking at a DC I could just barely make on an 18. I had to outright cheat at one point to escape certain vorpal swording, partly because there wasn't enough room to maneuver.

And the core complaint remains that the DM should not have been in a position where he had to backpedal. This isn't some newbie, it's an experienced DM who knows our group, and he wasn't trying to dump us into a TPK yet because the campaign hadn't even properly started yet. This was an idiotic move on his part, and I lost some respect for him as a DM over it.

...if I seem to have taken inordinate offense to your post, well, it's because I did. This is a topic for talking about stupid things a DM has done that made you mad, for sharing, for venting, for whatever; I posted here because my DM had done a stupid thing, and now it sounds like someone's pointing a finger at me, blaming me for the DM's mistake which (to his credit) even he doesn't deny was stupid, telling me it happened because I'm not good enough. So of course when posting my response I skip over anything that was said after that, reasonable or not.

Also: I happen to like 3.5.

edited 11th Jul '10 2:30:34 AM by Ezekiel

The GM for my current Spirit Of The Century is actually pretty good. But he's... ambitious, to put it one way. Loads And Loads Of Characters is an understatement, and he'll just add to them with each session. The plot is also rather complex at the moment.

I'm more sympathetic to D Ms who screw up in 3.5 just because 3.5 had such horrible balance in so many ways. Blasphemy is just the most obvious example. There were so many ways to tweak blasphemy to the point where, by the time you get it, it can autokill basically everything.

But yes, you are correct: as I qualified in my posts, if the DM *does* have to adjust the encounter on the fly, then the DM made the mistake. Though I also missed the part about "Lulz your party got kidnapped." THAT is just a deplorable action. Mostly because it removes a player from gameplay. Of course, if the DM and the player arrange that ahead of time, it's all okay.

Once again, I suppose I should apologize for my vehemence in defending D Ms. I explained my RETARDED PSYCHOLOGY above, as needed ;x

We got another absurdly overpowered fucker thrown at us in L 5 R. Complete with "Oh no, not this kind of bullshit again!" remark from me. At least this time nobody got floored, because thanks to me and Blue Oni getting the same initiative fight looked like:

• The enemy, who has absurdly high initiative, decks me.
• Blue Oni patches me up with a healing spell with appropriate number of raises.
• I deck the bastard right back.
• Osaka follows, decking the bastard for the second time.

And I managed to get an incredibly lucky first shot: due to being stuck in a narrow hallway, we had to use wakizashi. I quickly spend two Void points (basic Phoenix technique), raise twice and plow through the guy with 10k6 dice (roll ten D10s, keep the best six, reroll and add any tens). I score a hit granting me two bonus damage dice (6k2), roll two tens, reroll one to another ten, and to another ten, and then to 8. Guy was quickly brought down to like 25% health and only due to his idiotically high Armor Class we couldn't nail him for three turns.

I'm in a campaign that's rather special. The DM and I are the only participants, and it's DELIBERATELY set up in such a way wherein I powergame my entire party (5 characters-all created by me) to be as insane as possible, and the DM has to find some way to challenge me despite this set up. Which is fine and all.

But for some reason, when he had minions who blew up for 40 damage (20 necrotic, 20 poison-stacking, rather than overlapping) and a couple of zombie dragons with +31 initiative, I kind of got the sense he wasn't really being creative about it.

But like I said, I can't really complain. That game is *intended* to be completely batshit crazy.

On the other hand, with 4E's latest nerfs, I voluntarily accepted to update the game for said errata, despite that the Windrise Ports nerf killed about half of my party's builds. Funny thing is, I managed to actually power up the group defensively, even though my offense tanked. Haven't managed to try them since.

I don't really recommend this style of gaming for anyone who's looking for anything other than just "let's kill some time" stuff though. It's a deliberately very oldskool video gamey type game. Like Wizardry 8 or something. Excuse Plot away!

Hmmmm... damnit. I can't really participate in this topic if I-OH!

One previous campaign that I played in with the same DM. My character was probably in violation of the rules on technicality (the usage of reagents requires two hands in practice, but the rules weren't very clear and, at the time, I was taking advantage of that lack of clarity), but that's beside the point <rant>. Point was, we go through this game, from like, level 4 up through level 20, and then fight the end boss. My character does Force, Necrotic, and Psychic damage.

Guess what three damage types the last boss had Resistance 40 to?

Can I bitch about myself here?

I just put my party against a fight with a Soldier +5 Elite. Not really a huge deal, except that, design philosophy wise, I couldn't figure out whether it was a brute or a soldier, so it sort of had the advantages of both. It wouldn't have been a big deal, except the defender-whose abilities really are designed in such a way to counter this type of enemy-was non-present. I had to nerf the fight mid-fight to compensate, even after removing a whole bunch of the AD Ds ahead of time to make the XP match up. It was really quite embarrassing. Doesn't help that one of my players is still learning the ropes. Fortunately, the party itself is pretty well optimized, so usually, I can get away with being a little unforgivable. And surprisingly, I seem to be the only one who disliked the session.

That's to be expected, isn't it, Tomu? They didn't see the panic and reworking that went down "backstage," they only saw the result: a challenging but defeatable encounter.

Unfortunately, it was only defeatable because I deliberately, say, forgot to recharge the creature's attack power, added on extra vulnerabilities once it became bloodied, etc stuff like that.

Though the PNPC used its "I take an attack for you" tech when the enemy crit-which killed the PNPC. Funny thing is, I don't think the crit would have even reduced said PC to 0 HP... yikes.

Oh well-hooray for gameplay and story segregation. Afterall, otherwise, what happens when a plot character dies in a world with no Raise Dead ritual?

Jonas Quinn.

edited 14th Jul '10 10:20:21 AM by Rotpar

PNP Cs (aka GMP Cs) are sort of style specific. If you're a more story oriented Dungeon Master, they're probably a good idea. However, for Wide Open Exploration games, it's definitely missing the point to have a PNPC. Also, from a gamist standpoint, PNP Cs make the game less competitive. Oldskool type gamers are likely to reject the idea, because back in Gygax's day, there was a bit more of a DM vs PC's attitude (Citation needed-oh, I know, Tomb of Horrors).

Long story short, the usage of a PNPC in and of itself is not the worst thing a DM can do, and if your players are complaining, ask them if they're really that put off by it, or if they're just listening to the hype. And if they answer the former, try and get specific explanations for why.

Stupidest thing I've ever done as a GM was talking about the campaign before it started. Ended up with one guy trying to derail the whole thing, and me having to do some heavy-handed railroading and make them run for their lives to keep the story going where I needed it.

I mean, I'd never run a campaign before that, so mistakes were to be expected. But that was just dumb. Honestly, I didn't think I was ever going to manage to get the game going - had several false starts where nobody even showed up to the first session. I sometimes worry it's going to happen again, because I have a tendency to talk too much when I've got game-related things bottled up - like when unexpected circumstances force me to cancel a session. So far, I haven't made any more major slip-ups like the first game...

I find players who deliberately subvert the flow of the game to just be obnoxious, and don't play with them. If someone knows where the rails are and go off of them, you have to ask yourself whether you want to play with these people.

If the answer is yes, you're probably more of a Wide Open Sandbox type DM than I am. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But I mean, you also can't beat yourself up for not drawing the line in the sandbox, saying "This is the type of game I'm going to run." Players who prefer deeply story driven gameplay and players who prefer exploration just aren't always going to see eye to eye.

Now, Dungeons and Dragons has always had a background that was more sandboxy, but my feelings at that ever since 3E (and moreso with 4E), the sandboxy element is being replaced. Just in terms of writing but also, the distinction between what characters of a given level can and can't get away with has been made more hard-coded. I consider this a good thing, but obviously, not everyone does.

OH CRAP SOAPBOX!

In all seriousness, I don't know that it's bad to talk about your game, but, the whole Schrodinger's thingy applies I guess.

He tried to kill us with a 3e bard, and almost succeeded.