De canistro textrinum

[Username17]

Being below the expected power curve is a burden on the DM and on the other players because it restricts the play space. Being above the power curve is awesome because it increases the play space.

Essentially I accept that your players were unhappy that they failed to beat an Ogre, but do you think they would also have been unhappy if they had succeeded at killing an Orc?

No I do not. The players know what a 3rd level monster is. They know when they are having softballs thrown at them and they don't feel powerful when they defeat enemies they know are weak. When you condescend to the players, they know and can feel, and get pissed off by the condescension.

The "play space" is exactly as big as the DM decides it is. If your level 5 party wants to fight Demogorgon, then the DM writes up a level 7 version of Demogorgon and then you do an awesome adventure in the Abyss and kill Demogorgon at the end.

That is an awful lot of work for the MC. Also, the players will figure out that you are fucking with them and it will piss them off when they do. As it should, because you are fucking with them.

You are advocating the MC spend a whole lot of effort to write a whole new monster manual that is full of fakery and bullshit, and sooner or later the players are going to see through the ruse anyway and they are going to feel cheated. Because they have literally been cheated.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

That, and shoehorning monsters into a narrower power band isn't going to be palatable for every group, although given how popular the old "high levels are borked" sentiment seems to be I'm not sure how big of a deal that would really be.

[K]

The "play space" is exactly as big as the DM decides it is. If your level 5 party wants to fight Demogorgon, then the DM writes up a level 7 version of Demogorgon and then you do an awesome adventure in the Abyss and kill Demogorgon at the end.

That is an awful lot of work for the MC. Also, the players will figure out that you are fucking with them and it will piss them off when they do. As it should, because you are fucking with them.

You are advocating the MC spend a whole lot of effort to write a whole new monster manual that is full of fakery and bullshit, and sooner or later the players are going to see through the ruse anyway and they are going to feel cheated. Because they have literally been cheated.

Cheating them of what? The chance to die and feel like shit because they couldn't take on an straight MM ogre with their half-orc Monk and never were going to be able to?

Players just want challenge. If they have a tough fight with a "Red Ogre" that you made up from the Orc stats and it actually is a tough fight, then players feel good. Being able to kill the MM stuff would be ideal, but I've never been at a table where a "DM Special" monster caused anyone to complain that they were cheated out of a published monster (but I have seen groans at weird crap out of MM IV that never should have been published).

I don't think there are many players who honestly think that DnD has some kind of objective difficulty considering the near absolute power that the DM has over monster actions and encounter design. Everyone knows that the DM is setting the difficulty and that's why orcs don't attack while everyone is sleeping.

I also don't think that the "killer DM" is something that any but the most jaded players enjoy. Most people just want to do cool stuff and be a part of stories and would be insulted if you told them that you were going to kill their characters if they didn't make them powerful enough for your taste in difficulty.

It'd be great if the game just made it so that people can't make really weak or really powerful characters and this problem didn't exist, but I haven't seen that game yet.

[Username17]

K, if you were right that players wouldn't feel cheated by having bullshit monsters skinned as powerful monsters so that they could break open pinatas that happened to look like actual high level monsters, then players wouldn't be offended by Gas Spores or Gazebo encounters.

-Username17

[Desdan_Mervolam]

So, if the party has an encounter which proves a challenge to them (That is, it takes a noticible amount of resources including spells, hitpoints, magic items and so forth to complete and recover from) you expect them to call bullshit on the game anyway because the GM isn't instituting encounters that will kill the party?

[Red_Rob]

Or to put it another way: I have played with a guy who really wanted to play a TWF ranger and another guy who really wanted to play a Halforc monk. These characters sounded awesome to them. But when we were wiped out by a group of ogres, that really wasn't what they wanted at all - even though it was fairly inevitable based on their choices. What they actually wanted was for the rules to make characters who fit the descriptions they wanted to be as awesome as they sounded in their heads. Which in 3.5 they are not and do not.

-Username17

Frank, stop making reasonable arguments that sound similar, but not quite the same as, Misty's retarded arguments.

Yes, everyone agrees that the rules should not present as viable options things that are not in fact viable. This has been discussed before and we all agreed it is bullshit that ruins players fun and punishes new people.

Lord Mistborn is saying that the response to players making these characters is to CRUSH THEM and LAUGH IN THEIR FACE until they LEARN TO PLAY RIGHT NOOB!!! It's the worst kind of XXXTREME SPORTS macho bullshit and it is terrible for D&D and RPG's in general. There are any number of reasonable responses to someone making a mechanically bad character, but "making an example of them" is the absolute worst option. You can explain to them why their character is deficient and help them remake it, or you can talk to them about why they want these options in particular and see if anything else fits that theme, or if they are adamant they want to play this character as that is what will make them have fun then you structure the game around that. Because in the end the only point to any game of D&D is for 4 or 5 people to have an enjoyable few hours. And if you can't make that happen you have failed as a GM.

[Username17]

Frank, stop making reasonable arguments that sound similar, but not quite the same as, Misty's retarded arguments.

Only when people arguing against Mistborn stop saying things that are completely retarded in order to attempt to smite him.

K was literally and specifically saying that it was OK for players to be woefully underpowered on the grounds that the DM could always go behind their back and rewrite the entire monster manual so that all their challenges were made out of paper and armed with reskinned nerf bats. And you know what? No, that's not OK. Sure, it might work on people who have never played the game before might get fooled into thinking that those were the real numbers and abilities that monsters had, but even in that case they are eventually going to go back and look at the real numbers and realize that their DM had been condescending to them and lying to them the entire time.

Yes, everyone agrees that the rules should not present as viable options things that are not in fact viable. This has been discussed before and we all agreed it is bullshit that ruins players fun and punishes new people.

You'd think so. But possibly just to be contrarion assholes, on this very thread you literally have Kaelik and K coming out and saying that shit sandwich options like the Monk are OK because the DM can always sandbag hard enough that the players win anyway. And of course, nockermensch has been saying from the beginning that no amount of character power could ever possibly be actually viable and the DM is required to intervene by secretly nerfing all the opposition. And then Fuchs is in there with his usual player entitlement bullshit that if the players want to play something shitty then the entire universe should be stealth errataed to be just as shitty rather than calmly and honestly explaining to players how shitty options are shitty.

Lord Mistborn is saying that the response to players making these characters is to CRUSH THEM and LAUGH IN THEIR FACE until they LEARN TO PLAY RIGHT NOOB!!!

And he's saying that on a Nockermensch thread. Where get this through your fucking head: that is in fact the correct answer.

Nockermensch's fundamental setup is this:

• The players and the DM agree to play in a certain style with a certain difficulty.
• Later in the game, events conspire to give one of the players a setback of some kind.
• Suddenly the rules of the game get tilted and the players win anyway by having the dice fudged and events retconned so that no setback happens.

And you know what? The correct answer to that bullshit is to let the characters fucking die and if necessary burn their fucking basketweaving bullshit character sheets. Because they fucking agreed to a game where they could fucking die and the time when the dice comes up with that actually happening is the absolute last time in the fucking world that you should attempt to renegotiate the social contract.

You do not play without a net and then retcon in a net the moment you fall. That is fucking bullshit. You play with or without a net. Trying to do both is simply doing neither - it's not playing a game at all.

-Username17

[Slade]

K, if you were right that players wouldn't feel cheated by having bullshit monsters skinned as powerful monsters so that they could break open pinatas that happened to look like actual high level monsters, then players wouldn't be offended by Gas Spores or Gazebo encounters.

-Username17

Pretty sure, the issue with gas spores is they don't leave candy when you break them but blow up leaving only damage.
They are a "gotcha" monsters for chargers.

[Kaelik]

You'd think so. But possibly just to be contrarion assholes, on this very thread you literally have Kaelik and K coming out and saying that shit sandwich options like the Monk are OK because the DM can always sandbag hard enough that the players win anyway.

No. Bad Frank. Read the actual words not the ones that are most convenient to make fun of.

I mean, yes K is almost but not quite saying that. But I am not even close to saying that. Besides that fact that neither K or I have said anything about it being okay for Monks to be written in the books, we both know that they were, and that some people absolutely refuse to play with a Tome Monk, or not play a Monk, no matter what you explain to them.

And what I specifically said is that if they do not agree to play the game at a specific level of facing monsters of their CR, then you damn well don't tell them "well we are going to play at that level anyway, fuck you." You do in fact play at the level where they can beat encounters.

Or you walk away, which I might very well do, but the point is that if the PCs knowingly refuse to play with characters that can keep up, you don't murder them with CR.

I agree that nockermensch's position of retconning the net in is stupid, but I am specifically talking about the players refusing to walk the tight robe, because they don't want to, and they will instead use the rope bridge. It is easier, but it is obviously easier, and spectators aren't going to be impressed, but you don't cut half the robe bridge while they are on it leaving them with the tightrope they originally refused to walk on.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

So, what do you do then, if a player (Let's make the not-unreasonable assumption that this person is a friend of yours in some capacity, otherwise why would you either remain in that group or allow this person to remain in your group) comes to you and says "I want to play a half-elf bard"? No amount of arguing that choosing this is bad and unsatisfying is going to sway this hypothetical person. Half-elf is an option in the game and Bard is an option in the game and by the gods, we are going to see how these two tastes taste together.

I'm asking because it really is seeming here that there are people saying that it's alright to be petty, vindictive and dickish to their players in this scenario, despite the fact that these people are, in all likelyhood, a friend of theirs.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm asking because it really is seeming here that there are people saying that it's alright to be petty, vindictive and dickish to their players in this scenario, despite the fact that these people are, in all likelyhood, a friend of theirs.

Look, the point is that you as the DM are upfront and honest. You do one of these three four things:

• Flat-out ban character concepts that you think are underpowered. No one would really fault someone for banning people from playing a level 3 commoner as a PC. Or a tiefling at all. If someone wants to play a monk or a half-elf or whatever, you just tell them 'no'. You may or may not make your own homebrew revisions to the banned options.
  
  Seems like it should be a show-stopper, but it's really not. Not even D&D players think that just because some optional is in an official D&D book means that you should blindly allow it as-is despite any perceived or actual potential problems. Well, there are some players who think that, but we don't use polite words to describe them.
• Let the player run the character the way they want without commentary. Half-elf bards are underpowered but they aren't catastrophically underpowered the way that, say, a monk is. They will be sucking more than they could otherwise if you ran the game according to the popular assumptions but it's probable that they won't even notice. If the game gives you some leeway within the rules to assymetrically benefit players you may choose to do this. Of course you run the risk of damaging players' WSoD if you push it too far. But that's a discussion for another thread.
• Warn the player (and any other players considering suboptimal options) ahead of time that half-elf bards are underpowered when running the game according to the given assumptions. Give them the option to take back their choice. Not giving someone a chance to walk back a potentially bad option that you know is bad is you being a dick.
• If the player insists on running the character as-is, I would (subject to majority vote) ask the other players in the campaign how they would feel about me lowering the difficulty either subtly or directly. If they want cheat codes turned on we'll have a frank discussion about which ones they want. Do they want a lowered difficulty for monster encounters? Do they want the bard to get extra class features? Do they want a more generous treasure payout? Do they want more favorable tactical situations? Two or more of the above? Something else?
  
  If the majority vote is 'run the game as intended' and the player insists on playing the half-elf bard or whatever, then on their head so be it. Under no circumstance do you turn the cheat codes back on. While the previous option makes you a dick, this one makes you a deceitful dick. I personally would play another game with someone else who did option number 2 (with some hesitation), but if someone did option 3 to me that is a total 'quietly finish the game, drop out of the campaign' moment.

Now I'm aware that some (a lot of people) simultaneously want the cheat codes turned on behind their back and also want you to somehow stop them from allowing them to realize that you turned the cheat codes on. But there's really nothing you can do for or with these people. And due to the vagaries of real life social politics that'll just be something you have to deal with. Sort of like lying about your real religious affiliation (I'm not a filthy atheist, I'm a Unitarian Universalist) in front of coworkers.

But ideally? You do one of those three four things.

[Kaelik]

I assume that is directed at Frank?

As I made clear, I lower the EL or effective EL of encounters to account for it after I have confirmed that this is what they want.

[Dr_Noface]

There is some sense of objective difficulty for groups who play modules or adventure paths. Having characters who perform at an expected level can cut down on work for the DM in this case.

[Whipstitch]

Personally, I'm upfront about sandbagging CR when faced with a lower powered group but for the sake of transparency I don't reskin any existing monsters although I may introduce the occasional Steve. I really only consider something to be "cheating" if you're shuffling numbers around behind people's backs and therefore I prefer that when players see Orc Warrior #4 they can rest assured that he totally is an orc with orc numbers that fights in a manner consistent with orcishness. Basically, I think there's a difference between condescending to a group and having everyone agree to play a round with just your short irons.

[Slade]

[*] Let the player run the character the way they want without commentary. Half-elf bards are underpowered but they aren't catastrophically underpowered the way that, say, a monk is. They will be sucking more than they could otherwise if you ran the game according to the popular assumptions but it's probable that they won't even notice. If the game gives you some leeway within the rules to assymetrically benefit players you may choose to do this. Of course you run the risk of damaging players' WSoD if you push it too far. But that's a discussion for another thread.

I'm not really into this memo that 1/2 Elf Bard is bad, but bards are awesome: a. spells, b. Inspire Courage, c. good skills (UMD, Diplomacy, etc)

[Mistborn]

Only when people arguing against Mistborn stop saying things that are completely retarded in order to attempt to smite him.

...

And he's saying that on a Nockermensch thread. Where get this through your fucking head: that is in fact the correct answer.

DOUSH- Mo bad Misty! That's the third time you've used that meme and only you thought it was funny the first time.

So anyway I had to reread some of the posts since to make sure that they're for real. Level 7 Demogoron seriously if feel bad for responding to this it feels like I'm strawmanning by doing so. Levels mean something, they have too or you're just giving people busywork by tracking XP. This is why I was adamant on theRPGsite about LWQW

If people beat your CR 3 Vrocks and then look up Vrock on the SRD they are going to feel lied too and condescended. If people catch on to the fact that they are constantly facing weakened opposition due to the DM lowering the difficulty they're going to be put off. I also find it hard believe that people will actually request "easy mode" when I subjected my players too enhanced difficulty they never asked for "easy mode" even as the bodies hit the floor because to them it would feel like losing.

What people actually want is to beat encounters even "hard" encounters. That's why that want to MTP, so they can "win" even without anything that can allow them to "win". The reason that people rage at optimizers is that they prove that you can "win" without MTP. Basketweavers can not accept this, see also this thread. This is why I say DMs should let basketweavers die rather than allow them to MTP. It helps counter the attiutudes that are responsible for so many problems int TTRPGs

[Fuchs]

And then Fuchs is in there with his usual player entitlement bullshit that if the players want to play something shitty then the entire universe should be stealth errataed to be just as shitty rather than calmly and honestly explaining to players how shitty options are shitty.

Why the fuck should I not adapt the game to my players? Newsflash, Frank, we're talking about a makebelieve universe. Power is relative, not absolute. I find it far easier and less work to adapt the universe to my players' PCs than the other way around.

You really sound like LM when you suddenly care about what exact powerlevel a group of PCs is supposed to be in a fictional universe that the GM can adjust on a whim.

[Username17]

[*] Let the player run the character the way they want without commentary. Half-elf bards are underpowered but they aren't catastrophically underpowered the way that, say, a monk is. They will be sucking more than they could otherwise if you ran the game according to the popular assumptions but it's probable that they won't even notice. If the game gives you some leeway within the rules to assymetrically benefit players you may choose to do this. Of course you run the risk of damaging players' WSoD if you push it too far. But that's a discussion for another thread.

I'm not really into this memo that 1/2 Elf Bard is bad, but bards are awesome: a. spells, b. Inspire Courage, c. good skills (UMD, Diplomacy, etc)

Bards are quite playable at low levels, where being kind of OK at a couple of things adds up to something good. At higher levels they get insufficient spells to accomplish dick, insufficient melee output to accomplish dick, and buffs that don't mean dick compared with what Clerics and Druids are throwing around with their back end spells.

The only way to be half-way OK as a Bard at mid level is to pull some expansion set bullshit where you trade your half-assery in several categories for being actually level appropriate at something. There's a reason why every high level bard in Dragon Magazine had the prestige class where you trade out all your combat abilities to actually get high level casting. But there's also snowflake wardancing to be halfway decent in melee and a couple other more obscure options. But even then, I don't think there is a single thing you can do to not be something of a drain on party resources at level 7.

Of course, as a Half-Elf Bard you could always just abuse the fuck out of Diplomancy and its weird interactions with Charm. That would get you pretty far, at least potentially. But of course, you could do that comparably well with essentially any character class because the resource expenditure to push Diplomancy off the RNG isn't actually very much.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

You really sound like LM when you suddenly care about what exact powerlevel a group of PCs is supposed to be in a fictional universe that the GM can adjust on a whim.

The reason the Frank is agreeing with me is everyone else is frozen fast.

Are people just still butthurt from Roy's latest escapades or is this just the Den's default state.

[Kaelik]

You really sound like LM when you suddenly care about what exact powerlevel a group of PCs is supposed to be in a fictional universe that the GM can adjust on a whim.

The reason the Frank is agreeing with me is everyone else is frozen fast.

No, the reason Frank is arguing with you is because his but buddy is saying stupid things, and he treats everyone who is not K as a bit player and doesn't pay attention to what they are actually saying.

(Also nockermensch is being retarded, but that goes without saying.)

Do you revoke your stupid bullshit "If they want to play weak characters, knowing they are weak, I still TPK them for great justice!" yet? Or are you still being stupid as well?

[John Magnum]

I am not a fan of the "Keep everything on Normal Difficulty until someone fails, then secretly switch it to Easy Difficulty behind the scenes" mode of play. Either be upfront at the beginning that you'll play on Easy Difficulty, or let me take my lumps on Normal.

Some people may not want to play on Easy. Do you think it's then okay to trick them into playing on Easy by not telling them and hoping they won't notice?

[Mistborn]

Do you revoke your stupid bullshit "If they want to play weak characters, knowing they are weak, I still TPK them for great justice!" yet? Or are you still being stupid as well?

Still frozen fast I see. How many time am I going to have to say the easy mode is fine if the party specifically requests it.

What I've been saying it that isn't what the basketweavers actually want. nocker and his ilk want is for the DM to brew some magical tea and fudge the dice so players are handed victory even when by all rights the should be crushed. This is what I've been arguing against.

[Kaelik]

Do you revoke your stupid bullshit "If they want to play weak characters, knowing they are weak, I still TPK them for great justice!" yet? Or are you still being stupid as well?

Still frozen fast I see. How many time am I going to have to say the easy mode is fine if the party specifically requests it.

If that is true, then you wouldn't fight so damn hard to refuse to ever take back your demand that we TPK people who want to play against lower CR opposition.

If you really believed that, you would have just said "Yes, I take it back." instead of insulting people for asking you if you take it back.

[Mistborn]

If that is true, then you wouldn't fight so damn hard to refuse to ever take back your demand that we TPK people who want to play against lower CR opposition.

If you really believed that, you would have just said "Yes, I take it back." instead of insulting people for asking you if you take it back.

You know what fine. I'll be the bigger person here and let you "win"

"Yes I take back my demand that people who want to play against low CRs should be TPKed."

People who want to MTP should still have their baskets burned though.

Are you going to keep being frozen fast or are you going to let this drop now?

[K]

You'd think so. But possibly just to be contrarion assholes, on this very thread you literally have Kaelik and K coming out and saying that shit sandwich options like the Monk are OK because the DM can always sandbag hard enough that the players win anyway.

No. Bad Frank. Read the actual words not the ones that are most convenient to make fun of.

I mean, yes K is almost but not quite saying that. But I am not even close to saying that. Besides that fact that neither K or I have said anything about it being okay for Monks to be written in the books, we both know that they were, and that some people absolutely refuse to play with a Tome Monk, or not play a Monk, no matter what you explain to them.

And what I specifically said is that if they do not agree to play the game at a specific level of facing monsters of their CR, then you damn well don't tell them "well we are going to play at that level anyway, fuck you." You do in fact play at the level where they can beat encounters.

I literally wrote the Tome Monk so that people would not have shit options because that's the only way to handle the problem where some characters are powerful for their level and some are weak for their level, but that doesn't change the fact that the whole party fighting above or below its level doesn't mean anything for the game.

There are already multiple version of Demogorgon in the official published sourcebooks. There is a CR 23 in the Fiendish Codex, a CR30 in the BoVD, and a CR 9 version in the Miniature's Handbook. A CR 9 version! Even with the published material there are few stories or adventures that you can't do with a party that is roughly at the same power level as each other.

Even if you are too lazy to write up new monsters, there are five books of monsters, most of them suck, and no one has them all memorized. Pick something the party has never seen and fight with that. (And no, a Gas Spore is not a good pick because it's a "fuck you for playing" monster and not a weaker beholder... this is why people hate it.)

There is no reason to make encounters that the PCs can't win. The game doesn't get more fun when people die or you show that their character was too weak. They just feel bad and they care a little less about their next character and probably make a new character that they like a lot less.

When I hear people say "Yeh, I kill all the noob PCs and bodies hit the floor," the truth is that all I hear is "I'm way more concerned with looking good than with the enjoyment of my players, and I'm too selfish to let other people enjoy their free time with me."

Seriously, punishment does not make better players. It just makes people too scared to go outside of the parameters of an accepted character build. You can see it all the time with veteran DnD players who literally can't imagine solving a DnD problem if the answer does not appear on their character sheet. The poor saps are so used to using the same set of accepted tactics that trying anything different is deeply frightening to them because someone crumpled up their character sheet every time they tried to make a fun character.

I'll going to actually go so far as to say that players don't actually get better in most cases because lots of people just never get the hang of thinking tactically. For example, DnD players have literally been choosing to play Fighters for decades and still haven't figured out that DnD was always for Wizards and it always will be.