The "bitch about your GM" thread

Because the irritating type usually don't, and that's part of why they are hated so much by narrative focused players.

Never once played with someone like that, TBH.

That's probably because you've been getting successes in your choose the right players roll, you lucky bastard.

Clearly you've never played with a master gunslinger battlefield alchemist Templar artifact expert whose polyglot sidekick wields an ancient sword. The other party members were a socially-focused cultural anthropologist and super-sneaky carnie. The player didn't understand why the other three of us thought that his character concept was all over the place.

I only play in 4E.

And gee, sounds like those three were a buncha Underwater Basket Weavers :D

edited 27th Oct '12 4:30:52 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

Apparently my character is so horrifically broken that the GM of our Star Wars 2nd edition campaign is now having to cheat to counter me. This involves inventing brand new never before seen or explained force skills on the spot, and telling me as much.

"that's.....not a real skill" "it is in my book because fuck you"

I suppose I should take it as a personal achievement that when he fills a dungeon with enemies that are at best a minor inconvenience to me, they would be a final boss to the rest of the party. Its when he creates the stuff that does pose a serious problem to me that it becomes apparent he's just plain cheating.

Uhhh...

Well, here's the issue. Personally, I'm on the "nerf the power gamer, not the non-power gamers" side of things. Basically, it makes more sense to say "Your character is broken, let's work together to fix it" than making the rest of the party useless by making the threats deadly enough to match. Now, there is the competing ideology, which is to make the threats deadly enough and BOOST the rest of the party, but that tends to turn into lobbing nuclear devices, which I usually try to avoid.

I recommend sitting down with your GM, discussing potential nerfs, in exchange for the scaling back of the threats you face. Better that then the powergamers nuclear arms race.

To be fair, the GM can never cheat for they have the final word (or rather, they are cheating only when they are making the game less fun for most of the players). I'll say that they made a mistake by letting you play such a broken character in the first place.

Edit: Pretty much ninjaed

edited 12th Nov '12 12:35:11 PM by IraTheSquire

The supposed trade-off would be that I really only shine in combat. The rest of my party is broken as fuck in other areas. We have a demolitions expert who can blast our way in and out of a bunker. Our charisma character (who is now force sensitive) can charm the skin off a snake even if he rolls a 1. We just got a tech specialist who, despite being several levels lower than us, hacked the defenses of a military base and got us our own personal droid army, as well as the full layout of the base. We are all stupidly overpowered in one way or another, my way just happens to be combat.

Now that I think about it, the better gripe would be that we do nothing but dungeon crawls so I'm just the one who gets the most opportunities to shine.

I'm reminded of why I love 4E Dn D so much-there's very little tradeoff between skill mastery and combat mastery, so you don't get bizarre situations like this.

As I said: the GM made a mistake for allowing that to happen in the first place, even if the rules say that players can. There IS a reason, after all, Pun-pun is never allowed in almost all games.

Besides, in situations like that the GM can alway split the group and force each character to go through challenges that they are not that good at.

That sounds like a terrible idea. Why punish a player for the way they built a character?

If your character excels at combat, then how is this a problem? Let him excel at the thing you apparently built him to do. I would offset this with traps or enemy abilities that affect the rest of the party as a whole, so that even if you kill everything relatively efficiently, you still risk losing or failing to protect an ally.

I'm assuming that this was Saga Edition? Beyond mid level you have to actively hinder yourself to not break that game. Even without Force users the high level talents, boosts and weapons still turn the game into a curbstomp unless the DM buffs every Stormtrooper into Rambo.

Zeal: For many campaigns, combat is the challenging portion of the campaign. While characters can excel in other areas such as skills or what have you, when it comes to the game actually having "make decision making in order to not fail/lose," combat is the defacto area where that applies. Ergo, having someone be Totes Awesome in combat but not Totes Awesome in other areas is not a balance, because the impact of combat versus non-combat is not even.

I think that is more a problem with how players usually approach challenges and how campaigns are designed. I've seen people bluffing their way through a battle by pretending to be on the other side and causing confusion.

@ Zeal: It's not a punishment. It's setting up a challenge to the players to come up with a solution. Eg, they can always find ways of getting back together when separated. That's a challenge itself. Or they can go "Screw it, I'll fix this myself even when my character's not geared towards it."

It's impossible to excel at every facet of combat. By its very nature, every strength in combat is also a weakness.

I personally advocate figuring out how to do that rather than blaming the player for making a character excel at one thing.

Zeal: how familiar are you with the system in question?

A suggestion like that makes no sense without an understanding of the system. I'm not familiar with the system, so I really can't comment.

Obviously, combat from a narrative standpoint isn't the same thing as combat from a game mechanics standpoint. You may be a 999th level jedi who can slash through hordes of enemies, but that doesn't mean you can pilot a tie-fighter. However, we're not talking about tie fighter battles, we're talking about "Combat" as traditionally defined by the game in question.

Also, I think "the game system is broken-we really need to address this game imbalance that your character has introduced" being responded to as "don't punish the player!" reeks of "the game books are always perfect" and player entitlement-though, to be fair, this is the Bitch about your GM thread.

Yes, there is such a thing as broken rules. Yes, nerfing exists for a reason. That's part of what GM authority is for.

edited 15th Nov '12 8:17:05 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

Some games come with the assumption that you will put characters into situations they are not optimized for. For example, the RPG adaptation of The Dresden Files suggests doing so, and by Word of God, if the player characters don't feel like they're in over their heads and need to get creative, the GM isn't doing their job right.

In general, though, always putting the PCs in positions that suit their strengths misses the point of the opposition having strengths of its own. So, sure, Ogres may be immune to magic, but if you never make the wizard fight them, does it even matter? If you as a player know that your character will never be put into a position where they are not at least decently effective, why not MixMax the hell out of the entire build? In such a situation, the greatest sin is to be broadly competent—you're not good enough at anything to dominate, but not bad enough at anything for the GM to keep you safe from it.

No, for the choice of Minimizing to matter, it has to come up. If I build a half-orc barbarian that can't even manage polysyllabic words, there had better be a time when being charming and persuasive would (normally) be the easiest way out. This shouldn't be on a regular basis, I agree, but it needs to happen often enough to feel the sting. (This is also true for Maximizing, of course—if I'm the best axe-fighter in the country, there should also be times where a normally difficult situation ends up being easy to chop my way out of.)

I can honestly say that as a GM, I have seen the best and most creative play come when characters were thrown out of their element: when the socialite is stuck in a brawl, when the Tommy-gun wielding gangster has to be stealthy, when the mad scientist has his gadgets stripped from him, when the pilot is stuck underground, and so on. It forces people off auto-pilot and makes them actually think outside the box. It makes them shine. It is to be done sparingly, of course, since they built their characters that way for a reason: the socialite wants to talk, the gangster wants to shoot, the scientist wants to tinker, and the pilot wants to fly. But when you do it, you'll either see them pull off new tricks with their old abilities, or watch them set that crutch aside, if only for a little while.

edited 15th Nov '12 11:21:37 PM by Ironeye

You can't do that exclusively though, or else it becomes hackish.

This gets to a game design standpoint. I don't like circumstances where characters are useless. That's why I hate 3.5 Dn D Golems and the like-wizards and rogues are useless. 4E did away with that. If the game balance presumes ineffectiveness as a tradeoff for power, then by all means-but I think that assumption is a bad gameplay design to begin with. Still, you have to work in the context that you're given.

edited 15th Nov '12 11:49:16 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

Oh, of course. It's stupid to regularly throw out opposition that is perfectly designed to screw over the player character(s). It's usually more a matter of having an equally powerful or slightly better opposition in the same sphere in which the character normally operates...or at least a related sphere of operation.

I also hate situations where certain classes are completely useless. (Completely min-maxed builds don't count. If you made yourself pathetic at everything else in order to become godlike at fire magic, you deserve to be crappy fighting the occasional fire-resistant/immune monster.) I've avoided playing rogues in 3.5 because of how many monsters are immune to sneak attack, and I almost quit play my beguiler because of how broadly "mind-affecting" (and thus "doesn't work on mindless creatures") was defined. On the other hand, I think 4E goes to far in the other direction: sure, maybe your favorite attack doesn't work well against a monster, but you've probably got a good number of other ones that work just fine, so it's a minor inconvenience.

I think the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle: some encounters will be difficult for some builds to approach directly, but there may be an indirect route to victory. Sure, an ogre may throw off any direct attacks by the wizard, but the wizard can still use magic on the environment in order to defeat the ogre.

That requires a lot of improvisation.

See, you say "improvisation" and I hear "ROLEPLAYING" with an accompanying fanfare (it sounds a bit like I Am The Doctor). Improvisation is where players and characters have a chance to shine.

Don't be obtuse.

Improvisation =/= roleplaying. On the same token, it is neither inherently good nor bad. It's good if everyone enjoys the results and it moves the game forward. It's bad if it creates friction during the session and grindes the game to a halt. I like to include terrain features in my 4E encounters that have pre-set functions involved in them, but I'm also okay which improvisation. But, you really need to have a good grasp of what kinds of impact you want improvisation to have, otherwise you can run into some gameplay balance issues.

"Well, if pushing people off of ladders is so effective, why don't all the badguys just push people off ladders?"

Jackie Chan logic.

Well, it always comes down to rule 0: Everybody should have fun. Everything else is secondary, right?

Because no matter how much role-playing/improvising/rule-lawyering/etc, the game can never be good if most of the people involved are no having fun. Note the word "most", because griefers (ie people who do crap deliberately to seriously upset others) on tabletops would be barred from the group anyway.

edited 16th Nov '12 5:08:21 PM by IraTheSquire

If players end up whining because I put them through something other than what their characters were "designed" for, I won't run for them again. And that's because I find the entire concept of designing a character to be good at one thing inherently stupid and unrealistic. I also won't run games in systems that encourage such behavior for the same reason.

Characters are supposed to be people, and people simply aren't that way. Even "specialists" would be more general than their pen-and-paper counterparts generally end up. All of my characters are balanced people with a general area of speciality...and while I don't end up kicking ass at one thing, I also am not totally screwed the rest of the time.