Stealth Buffing

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Mon Aug 06, 2012 3:58 pm

Spoke with one of the old players from that game.
* Buffing players is not good: they chose a certain power level and you're negating their choices by doing so, and giving everyone a +4 to everything (or whatever) makes their characters different
* Nerfing monsters, including outright fudging dice rolls so they fail: DM's prerogative to ensure a fun game, Rule Zero
* Playing suboptimal: Their choice, obvious proof they're not fixated on numbers but on what looks/sounds cool
* 15th level fighter doing 300dmg in one round: PCs aren't supposed to have a kill switch, decisions/control of encounter results are the DM's job
* Warlock Overpowered?: Because they have spells AT-WILL. No PHB-only character/class can do that; no wizard/sorcerer can fly or be invisible 24 hours at the levels a warlock can. That is the first and ONLY argument needed.

...ugh[/understatement][/endrant]

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Mon Aug 06, 2012 4:08 pm

Holy Necromonicon batman!

But that being said:
Those guys are retards.

Waaah you buffed my character, you made him more powerful and stomped all over my fun factor, you jerk.

That's actually the dumbest argument I've ever heard. I second. They are RETARDED.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Mon Aug 06, 2012 4:18 pm

Earlier in this thread

FrankTrollman wrote:Being lied to by the DM isn't fun. Sure, you might get some satisfaction when the enemy dramatically misses with what should have been the killing blow and then blows his save to a hail mary Save or Die off a scroll with a bullshit save DC - but when you eventually find out that those rolls behind the screen were fudged and were not real, it robs the accomplishment of all meaning and turns the taste of victory to the taste of ash.

Included in the above information, literally, they WANT the DM to lie and encourage their sense of entitlement.

They outright state this contradiction of playing 'hard mode', get smug at people like Frank & I because they don't need to cheat to win, and of course the DM is supposed to outright lie or change numbers mid-combat to make sure they win.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Mon Aug 06, 2012 4:23 pm

Whoa old thread! You should summarize how this game went/ended, Virgil.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Mon Aug 06, 2012 5:24 pm

Reminder: a DM makes a monster that is so powerful and frustrating to fight, one player outright leaves the game for that session, and the entire party is literally incapable of defeating it. The setting makes retreat or surrender a non-option, it's fight or TPK, and they can't fight it. I use my most powerful trick to end the fight by killing the monster in one round. I am henceforth the only one at fault for that encounter being crap. The DM was merely exercising his right, and NO ill will is given for throwing a monster literally incapable of being beaten, and if I hadn't intervened, they would've been upset at the bull he pulled; but would later forget about it and not care. I, however, am still reminded of my badwrong shenanigans of even having the option of doing that to a monster, let alone going ahead and using it.

As for the Council of Thieves thing I ran, it came and went. I'd have to look at old notes to remember the final scene (saved city, exiled), other than the fact they reused the characters as NPCs in their next major Adventure Path.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Mon Aug 06, 2012 6:59 pm

So, uh, yeah. Whatever you just said, it was pretty self-contradictory*, confusing, and without a lot of needed context. But I get the sense you're bitter.

*Literally incapable of beating it =/= but _I_ killed it in a round.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Mon Aug 06, 2012 7:05 pm

Sorry, I meant to mean that the rest of the 10-player party couldn't beat it. Except for me, only two other characters were numerically capable of hitting it; the cleric's cohort and the barbarian. We couldn't cast any spells on it with its SR 46. Their damage output after the DR and crit-immunity would've made it so that they could do a combined total of ~50 damage per round (1000hp, I think). Its own offense was enough to kill ANY of us with a full-round action, and it got two per round; but usually just had the second full-round spent to ready an action to teleport away if attacked. It also had an aura, so just standing next to it would cause you to die within three or four rounds.

The original context is this: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=50636#50636

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Aug 07, 2012 6:04 am

virgil wrote:* Warlock Overpowered?: Because they have spells AT-WILL. No PHB-only character/class can do that; no wizard/sorcerer can fly or be invisible 24 hours at the levels a warlock can. That is the first and ONLY argument needed.

I hear this shit from my friends. They do, however, think that the fact that warlocks are so limited balances it. I'm pretty sure they've never played a warlock.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue Aug 07, 2012 9:09 am

Did you try calling him a retard

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Aug 07, 2012 10:23 pm

No, but I might tell him he has to play a warlock in the next game I start... Object lesson and all.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Thu Aug 16, 2012 3:20 pm

Found an old post that described the ending of my Council of Thieves campaign, forgot I had put it in a different thread

Ugh, Council of Thieves was a freakin' nightmare at the end there. The encounters were alright for the first half, except for the occasional extreme issue like vampires or thinking tiny CR 1 golems could even think about doing hit-and-run anything against a level 6 party.

In the second half of the AP, there were routine attacks of half a dozen level 4 rogue NPCs all the way up to level 12, though they did get a level 11 assassin to join them in the end. After the third fight, I excised them from the damn campaign because they were so useless and time consuming.

At least three NPCs has four to six levels of aristocrat (a rogue, a cleric, and a fighter) without any accommodation with CR. I assure you, a cleric 6/aristocrat 6 IS NOT a CR 11 threat where you include long-term tactics and crap like "will attempt to flee if reduced to 10hp or less."

The AP's BBEG (vs lvl 12 party)? A cambion duelist; you remember that shitty PrC, right? The one Paizo saw in their infinite wisdom to nerf. His 'cohort' was a hamatula with 7 levels of cleric. This was listed as an EL 15 encounter, so the party was given lots of warning that it's going to happen; despite the fact that with warning, they can easily prevent the signal from being given to the brain-dead population to summon reinforcements, but the AP assumes the party doesn't do this and only describes ONE way to fight the BBEG...while his entire army is within sight and so focused on playing pretend to not notice their boss getting attack for at least four or five rounds. I'm not even told what the army does when the BBEG's killed, they're never mentioned again.

That last adventure was crap, and while I could've fixed it without it looking slap-dash, Paizo doesn't deserve it. If I did, my Paizo-lovin' players would associate the fun with Paizo (ignoring that I had to excise Paizo). Besides, it was part of their original request for me to run Pathfinder and they were less than interested in an adventure that I designed.

As a reminder, after the fact they had candidly stated I should've made more changes to the AP to make it more fun; and just sort of stare at me when I mention the list of changes I advocated to solve the issues they flat-out refused. I was apparently supposed to understand back then I was supposed to make spot changes to the encounters to nerf/buff them as appropriate, up to and including outright fudging dice rolls and changing HP in the middle of combat; but not make their Improved Trip also give the benefits of Improved Disarm and Bullrush, or other powerups I tried to give them. They also cannot remember ever stating that they wanted the adventure as given and not stuff I would design; which is what would happen were I to improve the last adventure in the path, since it just needed to be wholly scrapped.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Aug 16, 2012 5:33 pm

virgil wrote:As a reminder, after the fact they had candidly stated I should've made more changes to the AP to make it more fun; and just sort of stare at me when I mention the list of changes I advocated to solve the issues they flat-out refused. I was apparently supposed to understand back then I was supposed to make spot changes to the encounters to nerf/buff them as appropriate, up to and including outright fudging dice rolls and changing HP in the middle of combat; but not make their Improved Trip also give the benefits of Improved Disarm and Bullrush, or other powerups I tried to give them.

To play devil's advocate, I've played in campaigns where the GM has resorted to occasional fudging and I've played in campaigns where the GM has introduced house rules on the fly, and I've usually preferred the former to the latter (although neither is ideal).

virgil wrote:They also cannot remember ever stating that they wanted the adventure as given and not stuff I would design; which is what would happen were I to improve the last adventure in the path, since it just needed to be wholly scrapped.

I've also played in adventure paths where the GM has rewritten particular encounters, and my experience in such cases has almost always been negative. YMMV.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Thu Aug 16, 2012 6:41 pm

I hate doing on-the-fly house rules. It had been my intention from the beginning to just plain make their feats, classes, and even gear do more than written before the adventure path even started; just enough to make them more powerful than a party full of monks. I had tried to introduce a couple changes via consensus throughout the campaign, rules-wise, but the only ones they willingly accepted were my nerfs (eidolon Strength, specifically) and never the buffs. I still had some DM authority, as I would veto nerfs they themselves asked for.

I say a party of monks because that's what their power level was in the beginning before the TPK. They were a party of five level 5 PCs; a paladin, an archer, a rogue, a cleric, & a barbarian. They fought two shadows that killed their paladin before they could finish escaping the room; who was replaced with a wizard afterward. Later, a Large water elemental took an in-game minute+ of hair-rising combat that required one or two of my very few dice fudgings.

I know I can make good encounters, as proven by other players besides that group. There was even a three-session side-quest they went through that I made whole cloth because they needed to level up a couple times for the next part and there weren't enough provided encounters; and they thought it was written in the adventure and enjoyed it. I hadn't told them the truth because they had proven that they will dislike something solely on the grounds that I advocate it. There were even some egregious items that I had changed, but it was predominantly by just plain removing them (half of the rogue encounters in the last three levels) or changing tactics so one of the bosses wouldn't instantly vaporize on a glance; and there were a handful behind-the-screen dice fudgings throughout the AP, which were to keep PC deaths from being instant.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Fri Aug 17, 2012 12:28 am

It sounds like they're mostly just averse to seeing how the sausage gets made!

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri Aug 17, 2012 3:45 am

are you the only DM in the party? 'cause they seem to treat you rather disposably.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Fri Aug 17, 2012 4:10 am

Nah, I was normally the player in that group, and I had ranted about them as such quite extensively a couple years ago (look for Cynic's Tamarask thread). I was a DM for the Council of Thieves for them though. It was the only way I could actually be a DM for them, running something that was explicitly not created by me.

Only three of them had ever been in the regular game I DM'd, and only for a session or two. Two of them left because they were douches to my other players on two separate occasions: the first, they left my regular players' characters (knocked out) to die on the battlefield solely because they sounded awkward to carry with them during the escape (tall and thin, short and fat respectively). The second, they had their characters threaten to kill if they weren't healed by the player after escaping from the city guard they picked a fight with (for acting authoritatively). Those two stopped coming to my game because I openly disapproved of those kind of actions, and had to actively warn them to not follow through on the threat for the second part; my main rule, outright stated with all new games/players, is NO PLAYER KILLING without active consent between involved players.

The third player left because he disagreed with the philosophy of my style, specifically the scenes where there was a pit fiend that regularly bought scones in Sigil, and the one where there was a beholder negotiating with some neogi for slaves at a tavern (that last one in particular). He just didn't like the idea of beholders being stable enough to negotiate, or the idea of any evil monster (fiends especially) not eating babies or explicitly furthering the cause of eating babies.

I've since moved away from that neck of the woods a year and a half ago, and only passingly converse with them on a social level. There was a recent conversation that brought up some of the old events (hence the necro), which got me in a ranty mood.