wedgeski
Adventurer
Fascinating. Thanks for the frank insight into your game here Sagiro.
What surprises me here, and believe me I mean no disrespect to you or any of your players by saying this, is that after all this time your guys didn't give you the benefit of the doubt?
Great campaigns are successful collaborations between player and DM, so “Sagiro was going to have his battle no matter what we did, and so we blew a ton of time and resources for nothing” seems an uncharacteristically prickly response from a bunch of people who have forged such an incredible game together.
Still, I can totally understand how their disappointment at failing to protect themselves adequately spilled over into criticism of your handling of the situation, implied or otherwise. That's just what happens when you play D&D at this kind of level, and it would be extraordinary in the extreme if you all made your way through to the end of the campaign without once feeling hard done by.
On the player-DM level, players at some point have to realise that they're pitting their multiple brains against the DM's one. That's several players, all of whom know the game and their characters intimately, conniving (and I mean that in the best way possible!) to out-fox anything the DM throws at them. Great DM's will be up to the challenge a lot of the time, and you've certainly shown yourself to be more than a match on most occasions, but sometimes, rarely, the DM should be able to say, in answer to how the PC's sixteen-stage defensive preparation was breached, that it just was. Bad luck. Trust me when I tell you it wasn't easy, but they did it. Now roll initiative and let's fight! (I say that even knowing that wasn't the case here, although it might have seemed that way to them at the time.)
Perhaps, when dealing with villainy of such vast power and resources (comparable to their own in fact), the time simply comes when the PC's have to accept the fact that they aren't gods, and that there is essentially no plan they can put into motion which agents of equal cunning can't outwit. The only recourse now is to confront the threat, head-on, winner take all.
The alternatives aren't very pleasing at all. The PC's become so powerful, and their players' command of the game so complete, that there is essentially nothing the DM can do. He's beaten. Either that, or the campaign devolves into a battle of one-upmanship with the winner the person who can find the most obscure spell loophole first. I don't really like the sound of that.
What surprises me here, and believe me I mean no disrespect to you or any of your players by saying this, is that after all this time your guys didn't give you the benefit of the doubt?
Great campaigns are successful collaborations between player and DM, so “Sagiro was going to have his battle no matter what we did, and so we blew a ton of time and resources for nothing” seems an uncharacteristically prickly response from a bunch of people who have forged such an incredible game together.
Still, I can totally understand how their disappointment at failing to protect themselves adequately spilled over into criticism of your handling of the situation, implied or otherwise. That's just what happens when you play D&D at this kind of level, and it would be extraordinary in the extreme if you all made your way through to the end of the campaign without once feeling hard done by.
On the player-DM level, players at some point have to realise that they're pitting their multiple brains against the DM's one. That's several players, all of whom know the game and their characters intimately, conniving (and I mean that in the best way possible!) to out-fox anything the DM throws at them. Great DM's will be up to the challenge a lot of the time, and you've certainly shown yourself to be more than a match on most occasions, but sometimes, rarely, the DM should be able to say, in answer to how the PC's sixteen-stage defensive preparation was breached, that it just was. Bad luck. Trust me when I tell you it wasn't easy, but they did it. Now roll initiative and let's fight! (I say that even knowing that wasn't the case here, although it might have seemed that way to them at the time.)
Perhaps, when dealing with villainy of such vast power and resources (comparable to their own in fact), the time simply comes when the PC's have to accept the fact that they aren't gods, and that there is essentially no plan they can put into motion which agents of equal cunning can't outwit. The only recourse now is to confront the threat, head-on, winner take all.
The alternatives aren't very pleasing at all. The PC's become so powerful, and their players' command of the game so complete, that there is essentially nothing the DM can do. He's beaten. Either that, or the campaign devolves into a battle of one-upmanship with the winner the person who can find the most obscure spell loophole first. I don't really like the sound of that.
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