What is with the entitlement? (shadzar stay out)

[Shadow Balls]

This probably isn't about what you think it is.

A lot of players on other boards run around saying things like the DM should not kill the party. If they meant that the DM should not intentionally set out to kill the party that would be a fine and noble point to make. After all, all pulling a rocks fall and everyone dies scenario proves is that your "rocks" have not fallen and you should take a few years off D&D to fix that chronological mistake.

But that is not what they mean. What they mean is that no matter how mechanically inept the characters are or how poorly they are played, the DM is a terrible person who is out to get them if they should ever die. So when someone dares the Hill Giant to punch them in the face and they do indeed get cold cocked by a fist the size of their head it isn't their fault for being stupid, it's the DM's fault for not having the giant throw the drink they didn't have five seconds ago in their face instead. Or perhaps have it meekly apologize instead of smashing the puny person that just taunted it.

There are two words to describe that, and the first is bull.

You and your party are murdering hobos. If they aren't up for the job then someone will kill them and take their stuff. There are problems with this for sure, but the alternative they're aiming for is some story lawyering, lazy, basket weaving extreme metaish bullshit in which taking a Monk along is actually incredibly helpful - because it means all of the enemies will now be so weak that they cannot knock the Monk around like a ping pong ball so naturally the rest of the party will have no trouble.

As with any other basket weaver, this mindset comes about due to the inability to meet any sort of objective standard, so they instead shunt the responsibility of making a character who can draw his sword without jumping into it like a retard to someone else. So I'm not posting this to ask what their motivations are for their idiocy, I already know. I'm just venting some nerdrage at one of the biggest things wrong with tabletop gaming, and then opening the floor to see what others have to say about this.

[icyshadowlord]

It's very easy to get mad at the guy who can basically say you all die just because he felt like it. He SHOULDN'T do that, but he CAN, and you KNOW that. If the odds turn against the players, they usually don't have anyone else to blame except the DM, even if the DM himself would point out it was the player's own mistake that doomed him...example, if the player started to yell about how much of an awesome goddess the Lady of Pain is in the middle of Sigil.

And that Hill Giant example is something only a mentally retarded player of the worst degree would blame the DM for, seriously. Have you actually played with someone that stupid? (I ask since I find it hard to believe such people would actually exist)

[Lago PARANOIA]

This comes from basically two features of modern D&D:

1.) Battles are too lethal. As the current fluff and mechanics go, there's no incentive for the vast majority of NPC opposition to do anything but chop your party up into little bits if they win. Even if the PCs lose one person there's a good chance of them being gee oh enn ee GONE, raise dead or no. If you don't want to have a TPK the PCs can't lose that many battles.

2.) The game encourages a lot of attachment to PCs. If nothing else, the time investment required in making a PC causes people to see their creation as 'there's' in a way Kobolds Ate My Baby or Dwarf Fortress doesn't. I've seen people take hours to create the absolute perfect PC. Even on a purely fluff level, there are a ton of options and add-ons that serve to flesh out a character at the 'cost' of emotional investment. Cost is in quotes because emotional investment in a PC is usually good for the health of the game... until it comes time to pay the piper.

[Shadow Balls]

It's very easy to get mad at the guy who can basically say you all die just because he felt like it. He SHOULDN'T do that, but he CAN, and you KNOW that. If the odds turn against the players, they usually don't have anyone else to blame except the DM, even if the DM himself would point out it was the player's own mistake that doomed him...example, if the player started to yell about how much of an awesome goddess the Lady of Pain is in the middle of Sigil.

And that Hill Giant example is something only a retarded player would blame the DM for, seriously. Have you actually played with someone that stupid? (I ask since I find it hard to believe such people would actually exist)

I have seen players like this. They are most common in basket weaver havens, as you might expect. Go to a forum like Myth Weavers or Giant in the Playground and you will find plenty. They don't make it into my games, because I am very selective about who I accept in large part because of this. I don't want to get into specific examples and turn this into a cross forum war or anything so I will just leave it at that.

But the core of their argument is that if they make some character that cannot possibly perform in a level appropriate manner that it is somehow the DM's fault if they are unable to perform in a level appropriate manner. As if they can say that they want to be a Monk, or that they would like a Ferrari and a hottub filled with attractive women and that was enough to make them succeed at everything. They are entirely unwilling to put forth the effort to actually achieve what they want, such as by playing the Tome Monk or earning the money to buy those things.

I have seen toddlers less short sighted and more mature than them. But these are grown men and women. That is completely unacceptable at any point in time.

Edit: I don't think that's it. Because when you play a character capable of doing the things that the game expects of them, the game is still lethal. Just they are better capable of not dying, and unlike the entitled crowd doesn't get bent out of shape if the worst happens despite their efforts. Yes, too many Raises is essentially forced character retirement even if you can get them. That is why you cast Revenance + Revivify instead.

My point though is that sometimes the worst does happen despite your best efforts and while the good players take responsibility for their own actions, the entitled little prats expect their Con 8 melee to not die to the monster's bad breath (and no, I don't mean Malboros).

[Lago PARANOIA]

You can't really do anything about #2 for modern games. While ridding players of emotional attachment to their PCs would make them more accepting to defeat, it's bad for fanbase loyalty and profit both directly (can't sell them much material or it'll recreate the problem) and indirectly (if a player spends only 5 minutes between game sessions thinking about D&D then it erodes customer loyalty over time). So unless you want to remake D&D into strictly a beer and pretzels kind of game this is undesirable.

As far as #1 goes you have a lot of ways to make individual battles less lethal. If the assumption was that monsters dragged the PCs back to their lair rather than eat them on the spot fewer battles would end in TPK and thus player expectation of winning. Along with if the default assumption was that the bandits ransomed their opponents or sold them into slavery. Or if you got rid of critical existence failure and made it so that it's easier to flee than pursue. Or if the players could play some special DEM ability to be saved by the calvalry. Or if you instituted save points. You could really make a whole thread on this.

[Shadow Balls]

I have edited my post in response to yours. We are talking past each other now.

But to respond to what you have said anyways:

If you are stabbed in the face and die, and are brought back you are down 1,000 gold. If it isn't possible to do that you might be down 5,000 gold and 1 level, or might have to simply make a new character.

If enemies started to play the capture/ransom card, then defeat would be far more costly, and not less. That would not help anything at all.

If there were save points I'd have to transform into some sort of avatar of rage and go on a rampage, because if I wanted a video game I'd play NWN.

This isn't about any of those things. It's about bad players not taking responsibility for their own actions. The good ones are fine with fair deaths.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It's pointless talking about whether basket weavers or whoever deserve to tear up their character sheet for being stupid. They buy books like everyone else and like all TTRPGs a game can fall apart if just one person isn't there.

The real question you want to ask is: is accommodating them irritating to the vast majority of the people at the gaming table that saving their character from destruction will cause the others to decline another session? If not then you should put up the safety barriers. TTRPGs is already a marginal hobby, kicking people out or hurting their play experience for not playing the right way should only be done if you stand to gain more players than you lose.

[Shadow Balls]

It's pointless talking about whether basket weavers or whoever deserve to tear up their character sheet for being stupid. They buy books like everyone else and like all TTRPGs a game can fall apart if just one person isn't there.

This is a nerd rage thread first and a discussion thread second. There is always a point to mocking basket weavers. But that aside...

The real question you want to ask is: is accommodating them irritating to the vast majority of the people at the gaming table that saving their character from destruction will cause the others to decline another session? If not then you should put up the safety barriers. TTRPGs is already a marginal hobby, kicking people out or hurting their play experience for not playing the right way should only be done if you stand to gain more players than you lose.

Easy question to answer. Yes. It's an annoyance to the DM, and to any players that are not like them. And what do you gain from alienating the good players and warping your own campaign world? Someone who is demonstrably unwilling to put forth effort into their character? That's not so far away from the guy who wants to play Halo all session and still get XP and loot in the D&D game.

Yes, tabletop gaming is marginal. That is all the more reason to be perturbed by bad players getting in the way and having to be worked around in order to get a good game. If that causes them to leave, that is also a good thing as it means that they can take their entitlement nonsense to a pay to win MMO such as DDO or something and go tick off the elitist jerks there.

[Winnah]

I tend to be a little proactive in character generation and advancement as a GM. I also try and inform players what my expectations are in addition to finding out what theirs are. I don't always give people exactlywant they want, but I try to provide a game people enjoy.

I try not to tell people what to do with their characters, but I do make suggestions and ask questions. Sometimes even invoke houserules if someone is completely clueless and wants to play using flawed options, like the monk.

I've only ever has one player like what you are describing though. The guy refused to educate himself about the game he was playing. Instead he spent a great deal of time trying to tell other players and I that our method of play was wrong. In hindsight, his Gnome fighter grappling a Beholder was pretty damn funny. He ended up excising himself from the game after about a couple of months, fortunately.

[RadiantPhoenix]

1.) Battles are too lethal. As the current fluff and mechanics go, there's no incentive for the vast majority of NPC opposition to do anything but chop your party up into little bits if they win. Even if the PCs lose one person there's a good chance of them being gee oh enn ee GONE, raise dead or no. If you don't want to have a TPK the PCs can't lose that many battles.

I think that changing this is the way to go; if getting defeated means nonterminal bad things, such as:
* You are now a slave to the Hobgoblin clans. Your primary skill is being a murdering hobo, though, so I'm not quite sure what they do with you.
* A local kingdom pays an adventurer's ransom for you. You are now in their debt and have to do quests for them pro bono.
* You now a tiny janitor for a giant. You have to clean the giant rats out of his giant pantry.


You get the benefits that:
* Defeat has a more perceptible cost; you don't just roll up a new character.
* The DM can let the players lose when they do something stupid or the dice don't go their way without setting someone's investment in their character ablaze.

[Shadow Balls]

All of this stuff about defeat not killing your character, but instead doing something worse to them. Stop it. It has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. At best, it causes the entitled crowd to go from complaining that their level 8 character was molested by Illithids that they should have had no trouble with and they were then forced to make a new character who presumably is less Japanese schoolgirlish to complaining that their level 8 character is now forced to be the star in SUPER TENTACLE HENTAI PORN which gives them far less or no opportunity to correct their mistakes and instead rubs their own ineptitude in their face a while longer. While I don't see anything wrong with basket weavers being humiliated, if they are not given the chance to stop weaving baskets and start contributing then you are not helping.

What more likely happens is that the entitled crowd bitches a lot more, except you have now given them legitimate reasons to do so, and the good players that still screw up have to get derailed for far longer before getting back to business. This in no way solves the problem, and in every way makes it worse.

But back to the topic. I am not a heartless DM. If I see someone making a clear mistake in character generation I will point that out to them and make recommendations on how they can fix that. Some are obvious, such as low Con or low Fort/Will saves on anyone, lots of spells like Fireball on an arcane caster, etc. Some are not so obvious, such as operating on the erroneous belief that D&D has concepts like tanking. To even get to the point in which their inept murdering hobo could be easily murdered in turn, they would have had to ignore that advice. Multiple times.

I see such as not unlike the classic here there be dragons sign. Or that part of Uninvited where you are warned several times not to descend a ladder because there is a giant spider down there, and it will eat you. Guess what happens if you do so anyways?

[virgil]

And that Hill Giant example is something only a mentally retarded player of the worst degree would blame the DM for, seriously. Have you actually played with someone that stupid? (I ask since I find it hard to believe such people would actually exist)

I had a woulded player standing in front of an orc with a greataxe, only a level 1 rogue. He was feeling stupid confident and decided to punch the orc, after I explained to him how AoOs work. I then proceeded to roll the dice in front of him, and I got a critical hit, which killed him. He got pissed.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I was in a low-level party with some people, some of them were new; one of the new players was a Rogue. We ran into some ogres. The Rogue tried to sneak up on them, but failed his sneaking check. He tried to climb a tree to get away from them; it didn't work.

As it turned out, we managed to beat them, but it was a near thing, which left almost the entire party at negative HP.

He explained later that he thought the ogres were Shrek-sized, not actually large.

[Swordslinger]

This comes from basically two features of modern D&D:

1.) Battles are too lethal. As the current fluff and mechanics go, there's no incentive for the vast majority of NPC opposition to do anything but chop your party up into little bits if they win. Even if the PCs lose one person there's a good chance of them being gee oh enn ee GONE, raise dead or no. If you don't want to have a TPK the PCs can't lose that many battles.

This is mostly because of older editions getting fixated on the -10 death threshold as an arbitrary number. 4E, M&M and plenty of other systems have designed death systems that are far less lethal than 3E. Hell, even Shadowrun has less lethal combat than 1/2/3E.

So now you just need a good reason to capture heroes instead of kill them, you could just treat them like nobility in real life. It was often common practice to ransom nobles for money instead of just killing them. So doing the same with the PCs seems like something you'd want to do.

[Shadow Balls]

This comes from basically two features of modern D&D:

1.) Battles are too lethal. As the current fluff and mechanics go, there's no incentive for the vast majority of NPC opposition to do anything but chop your party up into little bits if they win. Even if the PCs lose one person there's a good chance of them being gee oh enn ee GONE, raise dead or no. If you don't want to have a TPK the PCs can't lose that many battles.

This is mostly because of older editions getting fixated on the -10 death threshold as an arbitrary number. 4E, M&M and plenty of other systems have designed death systems that are far less lethal than 3E. Hell, even Shadowrun has less lethal combat than 1/2/3E.

So now you just need a good reason to capture heroes instead of kill them, you could just treat them like nobility in real life. It was often common practice to ransom nobles for money instead of just killing them. So doing the same with the PCs seems like something you'd want to do.

That's two derails in a row, and this time it's my thread.

No, you don't do any of that crap. You don't do any of that crap because it does nothing to prevent incompetent characters from failing, it simply changes what failing means. You don't do any of that crap because you have made the consequences for failure worse, and given validity that they would not otherwise have to their complaints that you are in the wrong for making them sit out of the game for a while. You don't do any of that crap because in addition to it doing absolutely nothing to help with the problem at hand, it also creates all manner of new problems. Problems that bother the players that are not being lazy.

Last I checked, the board for design solutions that do exactly the opposite of what they are supposed to do and cause all manner of unintended problems on top of that is spelled P a i z o and not T g d m b.

If you insist on continuing to discuss how capturing (doesn't) work, then do it in another thread for that. But it is entirely irrelevant and pointless here.

[Swordslinger]

No, you don't do any of that crap. You don't do any of that crap because it does nothing to prevent incompetent characters from failing, it simply changes what failing means.

Which is actually pretty important. Many DMs are actually reluctant about having a TPK because it means the game ends.

I'm technically not sure what the point of this thread even is, if not to discuss variants in PC defeats, unless you're waiting for someone to take the side that says PCs shouldn't lose at all.

[Shadow Balls]

No, you don't do any of that crap. You don't do any of that crap because it does nothing to prevent incompetent characters from failing, it simply changes what failing means.

Which is actually pretty important. Many DMs are actually reluctant about having a TPK because it means the game ends.

I'm technically not sure what the point of this thread even is, if not to discuss variants in PC defeats, unless you're waiting for someone to take the side that says PCs shouldn't lose at all.

Aside from nerd rage, the point of this thread is that:

There is a subset of player that is completely unwilling to learn the game, and yet not only plays it anyways but expects to be just as good at it as those that are paying attention. This subset becomes quite angry if the DM implements the natural consequences of their actions, be it by having the troll they recklessly charged do the claw claw rend thing and quite literally rip them to pieces or have their character arrested by the town guard and spend the next month lap dancing for Bubba.

Their motivations are also already known. That means that the floor is open for things such as:

Anecdotal examples of people dealing with similar things in their own games.
Methods of getting those lazy players out of your games, or better yet preventing them from getting into them in the first place.
Anyone with a big enough sack to man up and try to take the other side here.

Just to name a few examples. Those are all on topic.

Having the entire party die is very rarely a concern in such matters. Unless the entire party is this dumb, what most likely happens is that the piker dies and everyone else completes just fine. If the entire party is this dumb, they had it coming. It isn't rocks fall, everyone dies if some idiot thinks it'd be funny to break the mineshaft post while everyone was in it.

[Josh_Kablack]

We figure the less chance you have of getting your character killed, the more interesting (and potentially stupid) things you'll do with it.

[Swordslinger]

Anecdotal examples of people dealing with similar things in their own games.
Methods of getting those lazy players out of your games, or better yet preventing them from getting into them in the first place.
Anyone with a big enough sack to man up and try to take the other side here.

I guess I've never had that problem too much then. Since any new player, I basically tell them that my games are going to be challenging. Occasionally I find it helps being heavy-handed now and then, just so the PCs realize that you're not fucking around.

[Shadow Balls]

Josh: Who is that person?

I guess I've never had that problem too much then. Since any new player, I basically tell them that my games are going to be challenging. Occasionally I find it helps being heavy-handed now and then, just so the PCs realize that you're not fucking around.

I don't have it in my own games very often because I say point blank that things will be hard, and that if you cannot grab your sack and man up that it will not go well for you. But the reason why I do that is because so many people in general are unwilling to meet this, or any challenge. They instead blame the DM for their own shortcomings and unwillingness to make adventurers that can adventure.

[Josh_Kablack]

But to take a more verbose tack:

I think the issue comes down to two conflicting implied contracts.

Firstly: In the game of D&D, the rules explicitly lay out the chances of character death, and so it's reasonable for people who agree to play a game of D&D to expect that those rules will be followed and there will be an honest chance of character death.

Secondly: In any role-playing game, people are there because it's entertaining for them to play the role of a character. If it's not entertaining, they'll go play smash brothers or chess or cello or something that is instead. In this context, it's reasonable for participants to expect that they will be entertained and have the opportunity to play their character. PC death is often contrary to both of these expectations and so it's kinda unreasonable to expect players to be cool with it.

The easy way out is to just play RPGs that aren't D&D and have reduced or nonexistent chances of PC death - because in that case expectations are not in conflict.

[Swordslinger]

They instead blame the DM for their own shortcomings and unwillingness to make adventurers that can adventure.

Whenever they do that, I typically go through an X,Y,Z progression of various things they could have done.

I find it more of an issue in Shadowrun than D&D though, since D&D is generally a rather straightforward game.

[K]

Here's the deal: your job as a DM is to make sure the players have fun.

This often means simply setting up challenges that your players can win. Some wins will be costly and some merely scary (but not actually threatening), but the idea is that barring any blatantly risky or stupid moves you are not going to set up things that will ruin people's fun by killing them off.

In short, people who are playing heroes want to actually win like heroes. If you set it up so they can't do that, they don't have fun.

When the game itself makes your job hard, you are required to adapt to that fact. The player who makes a Monk may not actually know that your life is now more difficult because Monks suck. This means that you drop an artifact amulet on him or use a different Monk class like a Tome Monk or you just tell them "hey, Monks in my setting are full BAB and get extra bonuses to AC and to-hit, and can break DR at level 7."

Sometimes the work is as subtle as simply choosing to target the Fighter even though you can drop the Monk in one pop.

In short, setting people up to fail is not cool and not fun.

[Shadow Balls]

I'm not ignoring you, but I don't have the time for a verbose reply right now.

What if the people in question are setting themselves up to fail, despite your efforts to prevent it?

[RadiantPhoenix]

If failure is what the players want, who is Mister Cavern to stop them?