Epic Fail for shared imaginings

This game we play relies on a lot of shared imaginings, and sometimes our shared visions are not in sync. Two examples of this came up in our last game session:

[We play a round-robin campaign – each player takes a turn DMing an adventure.]

1.
We PCs were talking about the logistics of us navigating through a flooded dungeon tunnel, and I mentioned my heavy shield. The DM commented, “When did you get a shield?”

My war cleric wears full plate armor and a heavy shield, and wields a “bastard warhammer” (basically a hammer version of the waraxe/bastard sword – I have the feat to use it one-handed). This has been my character for our weekly game for almost a year. My character is directly and exactly based on my [url://http://www.totalbullgrit.com/images/HHH.JPG]painted metal miniature[/url] that sits on the battle mat all game session, every game session – the mini has a big honkin’ shield and a big honkin’ hammer.

I have often described missed enemy attacks as “deflecting off my shield” (and/or armor). I have even many, many times described tucking my hammer under my shield arm when I need a free hand for something. This has been a big (to me) issue with trying to cast spells – I just recently bought a “hook-thingy” for hanging my hammer, and I thought I made a fairly big deal out of having this new feature.

All the other Players at the table knew my character used a shield and hammer. But the DM thought I used a two-handed hammer, and had no shield.

Considering all this obvious evidence to my character having a shield, I’m stunned to hear someone didn’t know that I have a shield.

2.
The DM described the flooded dungeon tunnel – from our current position, the tunnel steps down into water. [This is moment when the above tale happened.] The PC barbarian decided to go down and swim along the tunnel. He would swim half as far as he could hold his breath, then turn back if he didn’t discover a way back up and out of the water.

The DM asked for exactly what he was wanting to do, and then described the swim. The barbarian came up out of the water at his halfway point. He quickly looked over the area and then went back under water and swam back. [The barbarian has a glowing magic sword for light.]

Then he decided to check the other tunnel out of our room, which the DM described as the same as the previous tunnel. So the barbarian again went under and swam to investigate. But this time when he came up, he came up in the middle of a group of zombies. He fought them while the rest of the party waited for his return.

One Player/PC was saying we should go help him. I said we couldn’t see what was going on (and the barbarian Player agreed) and so shouldn’t act on knowledge our PCs don’t have. The DM said yes we could see the fight. It was at this point that we all started discussing the scene and the tunnels, and we found out that we had all been thinking totally different descriptions.

The barbarian’s Player and I thought the tunnel went down, ceiling and all, below the water line (and we even quoted what we heard the DM say) – that’s why the barbarian swam underwater to investigate.

Another Player and the DM said the water was only 3 feet deep and we could easily see down the tunnel to the extent of our lights (and they even refuted our quote of the DM’s description) – they were both confused as to why the barbarian wanted to swim underwater down the hall but they just shrugged and didn’t question for reasons.

The other Player in our group said he thought the tunnel was flooded almost but not completely up to the ceiling.

So there we were, 5 people at the table with 3 distinctly different understandings of the scene described. Each of us was absolutely sure we had heard and understood what the DM said. The DM described X, and one Player heard X, another Player heard Y, and two other Players heard Z.

* * *

How does this kind of thing happen? Have you any examples of a player or group completely failing on the shared imagination concept?

Bullgrit

If you were to assume that 80%+ of situations leading to DMs complaining about stupid players were due to poor DM-player communication (including, especially, DM descriptions), you would not be wrong. At 95%, I'd start to wonder.

In other words:
If the players do something stupid, DMs, get the players to describe the situation. Correct them/retcon their actions if needed.

Regarding 1, did you have "shield" written down on a character sheet? Not everyone uses minis as wysiwyg. When you said "deflecting off of shield and/or armor", maybe he only heard armor.

I can't think of any specific examples lately but there have definitely been a few "Oh, wait... huh?" moments in my campaigns over the years. Whenever it happens I give myself a mental slap, and lose a DM'ing kudos point from my dwindling stash.

Having said that, sometimes a single word or turn of phrase evokes something so strongly in the players' imaginations that they make their mind up about what they can see without paying enough attention to what the DM is saying. As a player, when you get an image in your head, it can be difficult to shed it. I've seen this happen, and I've had it happen to me.

Life on the D&D firing line, I guess. Battle-mats and minis definitely alleviate the problem, especially if you can scrawl outlines on your maps, but since I only do that sort of thing when combat is inevitable, it never goes away completely.

Perhaps somewhat tangential to this discussion but ...

Once, while waiting in a fast food line with my wife and a friend, all three of us witnessed a hit-and-run car accident. This truck plowed into this car from behind, and after the passenger got out and looked at the car they had struck, sped off. Discussing this rather strange event afterwards, we were all shocked to discover each of us had a different recollection of what color shirt the passenger in the truck had been wearing. One thought red, another blue, the third white.

It gave all of us a taste of the frustration police probably have to deal with when figuring out what happened at crime scenes, and is probably a good indication of how much we assume we saw/heard but really missed and just filled in the gaps.

As for this type of stuff at the table, this has happened to my group several times over the past years. Situations like flooded rooms seem to trigger this a lot; everyone assumes something different when they hear the room is flooded. Lots of 3D movement seems to be problematic as well; I think my group can simply handle descriptions that limit themselves to 2D features better. Any use of relative modifiers can be problematic, something being close or far away can vary from player to player.

Do you keep some scratch paper around at the game table? I think a quick 20 second sketch of the scene would have cleared this up.

wedgeski said:

I can't think of any specific examples lately but there have definitely been a few "Oh, wait... huh?" moments in my campaigns over the years. Whenever it happens I give myself a mental slap, and lose a DM'ing kudos point from my dwindling stash.

Having said that, sometimes a single word or turn of phrase evokes something so strongly in the players' imaginations that they make their mind up about what they can see without paying enough attention to what the DM is saying. As a player, when you get an image in your head, it can be difficult to shed it. I've seen this happen, and I've had it happen to me.

Life on the D&D firing line, I guess. Battle-mats and minis definitely alleviate the problem, especially if you can scrawl outlines on your maps, but since I only do that sort of thing when combat is inevitable, it never goes away completely.

Click to expand...

Mostly this. I've played with/GMed several groups during my gaming lifetime and I'm pretty sure its happened at least once in each, and usually several times. Which is why I claim that battlemats are one of the best inventions for gamers ever. They may not solve all the problems with descriptions, but at least everyone knows where everyone else is!