The "bitch about your GM" thread

I don't agree with anything you just said, Drunk. Characters are avatars for people to have fun. Nothing more, nothing less.

I've had way too many stupid arguments (both from GM dickery and player whining) over what's "realistic" and what isn't. You say characters aren't supposed to be good at "one" thing because it's "unrealistic", but the argument can easily be made that trying to be a Master of None is equally stupid.

In a game, giving someone crap about something not being "realistic" is pointless, because none of us have sampled enough of reality to know how it'd work in a fictional context. And in your scenario, a Munchkin is inevitable because they need to be good at everything.

edited 25th Nov '12 10:36:36 AM by KingZeal

What's important is to distinguish between "realism" and "believability." Realism is, if you fall 100 feet, you dead. "Believability" is about willful suspension of disbelief.

A character should flow narratively speaking in a way that makes sense-but that's different from being built in a realistic fashion.

I should note that specialization is also not realistic. If your setting has magic, for instance, then people specialize to be more effective-that's where the incentives lay. So the wizard's a class cannon? Well, he'll have to hire a fighter. Party formation in Dungeons and Dragons is merely a study of the economics of comparative advantage in international trade.

edited 25th Nov '12 10:41:29 AM by TheyCallMeTomu

Yeah, I can agree with that, but in that case, it helps if the GM has a good understanding of what you want from the game. I remember a GM that flat out refused to allow anyone to have water-based abilities because she thought it was stupid and unrealistic to "kill someone by making them wet".

And yes, if the RP is party-based rather than solo-based, then specialists teaming up is a good idea. I'm not denying that part. I just have a personal hatred when unimaginative G Ms go "Oh, so you made your character a hand-to-hand specialist with no magic, huh? Well it just so happens this cave you walked into has a bunch of necromancers with control magic, your wizard is silenced, and there's rocks blocking the exit. Have fun with that."

I've encountered such G Ms way too many times.

edited 25th Nov '12 10:55:17 AM by KingZeal

Well, I once had a player ragequit because he was basically a melee only unit and the boss fight had auto-immobilize necromancers.

But there was no cave.

And I made it pretty clear from the start that teleportation (these were basically grabs) is a good idea. And this is paragon, mind you. There were plenty of options to not be a melee only unit.

And really, that's what it is in the end-options.

I mean, that's fine. From my experience, if I tell my RP group that something is a "good idea" and only one person doesn't listen, I have roughly the same reaction. But, if half or most of them don't want to do it, then I'm either going to not GM the campaign (since they obviously have a different idea of what's fun than I do) or I'll try to find a middle ground.

I don't exactly want to coddle my players, but I hate vindictive or apathetic G Ms all the same.

I concede I used to just build encounters and think about what my P Cs could do after the fact. In my latest campaign, I build encounters specifically tailored to my P Cs.

Characters may be avatars for people to have fun, but defining "fun" as "steamrolling everything one way, repeatedly" is a bit constraining, and won't be accurate for many people. People are looking for different things out of their play. In my years playing and GMing, I have encountered several activities/events that increase fun for different players. I'll just cover ones that relate to challenges.

1. All reasonable paths lead to victory.
2. Significant loss is unlikely.
3. Loss is likely, but victory can come through clever play.
4. Victory depends entirely on tactical play.
5. Victory requires thinking outside the box.
6. Loss comes from character flaws.

(There are of course more, but these are the ones I have most seen with my players.)

Category 1 loves challenges tailored to their characters. Category 2 likes it, but doesn't mind if they have to do something else, so long as there aren't horrible consequences. Categories 3 and 5 hate it. Category 4 doesn't mind challenges that match the characters so long as they remain challenges. Category 6 cares more about challenges relating to the characters's personalities and stories, and doesn't care about the mechanical build as much.

Throwing in challenges that match the character just serves maybe half of those people, at best. At least half will hate it. If your group likes playing steamrollers, or at least always encountering nails when all they have is a hammer, there's nothing wrong with doing that for them, but that will also be disappointing for a lot of people.

And, of course, you must always watch out for players who make their characters really good at something so that they don't have to focus a lot of time or effort on it, and they can get back to what they really like. There are players who will make their character an absolute beast at combat so that the fight scenes resolve in 10 minutes and they can get back to that political maneuvering/character drama/wacky hijinks that they actually love.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

Just piping in to say that characters and avatars are not really the same thing. If you want to run or play a hack-and-slash or whatever where there's little story and less character interaction, that's all on you. But characters are indeed supposed to be people; that's what the word means. This isn't necessarily a thing where somebody's playstyle is wrong, because fun is subjective and opinions exist, but don't look at a given word and say, "no, the actual definition of this word isn't what it's supposed to be." Vocabularies need to be expanded, and new terminologies need to be hammered out. Then people can bitch at one another about which way to play is better.

Mura: -flips the bird to veterinary science with one hand and Euclidean geometry with the other-

For the most part, yeah, that exactly.

My point wasn't that "steamrolling" = fun, but I disagreed with what Drunk was saying.

edited 25th Nov '12 8:32:09 PM by KingZeal

@Zeal: you're free to. My point was that I have an idea how things ought to be and I pick players who agree with me. There's no point in trying to run a game with people who want something out of it other than what you are offering.

And I stand by what I said. People who make specialized characters and then whine when their speciality isn't helpful all the time can eff right off as far as I'm concerned. I've been G Ming for almost 20 years now and the whole "this is how I have fun and you need to accept it" excuse has lost all credibility it ever possessed.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

I trend towards systems that don't really have "real" specializations. I mean, 4E is basically combat, and not-combat, and you can't really specialize in not-combat at the cost of combat.

Now, you can deliberately make a shitty combat build but that's another issue altogether.

My DM is showing blatant favoratism to his wife in the campaign we're in. He's generally been pretty okay with that-even to the extent of overcompensating-but in this campaign, she's just absolutely ridiculously broken. She just picked up armor that negates the damage of the first vAC or vReflex attack, not to mention she picked up a weapon adds +1d8 damage to her sneak attack damage.

What is everyone else getting?

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Well the Ranger just picked up a +4 weapon (I'm using +3 gear) that lets him use a minor action to make a ranged basic attack at the start of his next turn whenever he hits twice with Twin Strike, and a Shotgun that deals 10d6 as an encounter power (no attack roll necessary) in a close blast 3.

In addition, said weapon gives him a +3 bonus to hit with vAC attacks, and ignores 10 points of resistance. It also triggers fey vulnerability, which is kind of like a damage type vulnerability, but it triggers to certain weapons. I have a Crystalline Sword that can trigger fey vulnerability, but it's basically just a flat +3 weapon with no other features.

The Warlord just recently got an artifact sword that gives him like, +5 to hit on vAC attacks, and lets him roll his attacks twice-in addition to giving him an encounter attack power that heals on a hit.

As is, the 9th level thief (the DM's wife) can do well over 100 damage in a nova round. This doesn't require any daily resources either.

edited 27th Nov '12 5:37:59 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

Sounds like you are next in line to get some overpowered piece of equipment.

The DM has explicitly said that I'm not in line to get any such equipment until Paragon tier.

We're 9th level now. So that's months away at least.

Wait, you guys get that kind of stuff on heroic?

Eesh, that dm doesn't know a thing about balance.

Well, I can't stand by the shotgun or the minor action RBA or the like. However, I can say that the reason we get +3/+4 weapons at heroic is because we're using a different framework; that is, we've removed feat bonuses to attack and damage rolls. Therefore, instead of weapons going from 1 to 6, they go from 1 to 10.

Much of that sounds suspiciously homebrewy.

Don't expect balance from homebrew, kid. Most people aren't as good as you at maths.

Mura: -flips the bird to veterinary science with one hand and Euclidean geometry with the other-

I'm the one that developed the system.

The +3 vs +4 etc isn't really what I'm concerned about. I've done the math, that's all very solid. Most everyone gets gear "ahead of when it's needed" as it were, but that's not that big of a deal. It's the riders-the +1d8 SA damage type things" that are a bit disconcerting.

edited 28th Nov '12 3:52:44 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

Well, math is not my strong suit...but if the DM is giving cool shit to some players while making other players wait months (assuming the DM gets around to it, "it'll happen eventually being a favorite game-master excuse), that's not particularly fair. Especially if the person getting the cool shit is the game-master's girlfriend. You have to watch that shit. Players notice.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Sadly, or happily depending on how you look at it, his campaigns are admittedly badass enough that people (self included) are willing to put up with a lot of bullshit.

And it's also true that I'm not really ineffective. It's just kind of annoying when he heaps awesome upgrade upon awesome upgrade. I mean, gear is kind of her thing but there's got to be a limit!

Well, I got a badass implement of my own, so the DM just likes trolling me apparently.

Like how we just faced an enemy that killed me without any reasonable chance on my part to prevent it (there's a theoretical series of tactical decisions that could have helped, but not unless we'd known the power worked like that to begin with).

I and the defender got REALLY pissed at that battle.

On the subject of encounters that pissed off the players:

Our gaming group consists of a bunch of guys that are far too busy to be regularly meeting, so more often than not, only two players and the DM show up. You'd think that isn't much of a problem. After all, all the DM needs to do is get rid of a few enemies, right? Well, he does that, but he kind of forgets to rebalance everything else.

Like that one time where he had the bright idea to place a trap that fired off a very accurate dazing attack every turn, along with a bunch of enemies that were immune to the trap and had ways of immobilising us. Now, the trap was the biggest problem, and should have been somewhat easy to remove if we had a full party. But we only had two guys getting swarmed by a bunch of other enemies, and the end-result was the most aggravating encounter ever. We only survived because I miraculously did not get dazed or immobilised for one turn, which I then used to dodge four attacks of opportunity, make one guy accidentally kill himself*

, healed my buddy, and killed another guy.

By the end of the encounter, I was very, very angry at the DM, and made him promise not to pull that kind of bullshit again.

So, the very next encounter against a solo and an elite unit, he used a ridiculously accurate dominate attack, save ends. Against a two-man party. And the power was rechargeable. This time we had to openly cheat to get out of there alive.

Again, everyone was pissed, dm would never do that again.

Next session he used a trap that fired off a dominate effect (save ends) every two turns. Against a two-man party.

I'm giving him one more chance before I perform a hostile take-over on DM duties.

edited 29th Jan '13 1:18:09 AM by Kayeka

In my campaign, each character has a 1/encounter "make a saving throw to end a save ends or short duration effect at the start of your turn" ability.

I forget they have that when I do encounter design though, so the various saving throw progression type enemies are pretty useless.