Stop being so paranoid

[Barastrondo]

Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who says it is not adversarial and that the outcome should not be determined in advance, is a fool or a liar.

You roll hardcore when you pretend to be an elf, or you don't roll at all.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

I have to say Grumpy, I must play a very, very, very different kind of D&D then you. I literally cannot think of a single instance where I as a DM (or a player) has been intentionally adversarial.

Sure I may as a DM create a challenging encounter or situation for the PCs but beyond that, I am doing my damndest as a DM to help my players through situations and to keep the story going. Since well for our group that is what is important, not always worried about having the PCs killed off, but worrying about the bounty on their heads or the stolen artifact or the murders going on in the city.

 

[The Grumpy Celt]

...I am doing my damndest as a DM to help my players through situations and to keep the story going.

Then you arn't a good DM.

 

[Hussar]

Not the paranoia, the experts bit.

" I don't judge my players on whether or not they're acting like a highly-trained military squad, and they don't play like it."

That only seems to run until combat comes up, at which point the team is expected to play just like those highly-trained military squad. Hell, the whole point of 4e is "YOU'RE THE HEROES!" But all that seems to vanish once the combat ends.

You're equating a few things here that don't add up though.

Playing cooperatively =/= highly trained military squad. 4e fosters cooperative play. It does not require you to be Sun Tzu.

Heroes =/= highly trained military squads. Again, you can be a hero and still make tactically unsound decisions. The advantage of 4e is that a single bad decision likely won't get you killed because monsters can't kill you in one round.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

You are suppoed to put the screw to them at any time and in any way you can. Unless you already got a "winner" selected...

Nah, that's boring. And as the DM, I feel it is my job to get entertained by the antics of the players. And the best entertainment I get tends to come from springing surprises on them which seem really obvious in hindsight, but which none of them had anticipated because they were distracted by other matters.

Consider the typical horror movie. Just springing one monster attack after another on the protagonist would be boring. There need to be periods in which the protagonists relax and do other things than fend of attacks, false alarms ("cat scares"), and so on - just so that they are actually surprised by the attacks from time to time.

And the same is true for gaming sessions. Constantly applying pressure to the PCs would just numb the players. And numb players are no fun to terrorize at all.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Then you arn't a good DM.

Your continued adversarial tone in this thread is unwelcome. You may have a particular (idiosyncratic) style of playing D&D but that doesn't give you the right to tell other people that they are wrong, or are poor DMs.

As a result, you're banned from this thread.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

Not the paranoia, the experts bit.

" I don't judge my players on whether or not they're acting like a highly-trained military squad, and they don't play like it."

That only seems to run until combat comes up, at which point the team is expected to play just like those highly-trained military squad. Hell, the whole point of 4e is "YOU'RE THE HEROES!" But all that seems to vanish once the combat ends.

Thanks for the clarification.

I still fully disagree, though. If my players started behaving like a highly trained military squad, I'd wonder when the dopplegangers took over.

I agree with Hussar - being Heroes =/= tactical genius and co-operation. And out-of-combat, they tend to act like a group of people that just happen to be together. So, in my experience, paranoia is over-rated.

 

[amethal]

Sure, that's a possibility.

More like a certainty, at least with every group I've ever DM'ed for.

But then at least you have a potentially fun fight instead of an evening of non-fun checking of every room for non-existent traps.

I agree, the fight will be a lot of fun.

And, of course, the fact that the party is apparently willing to slaughter another adventuring party in cold blood might have plenty of moral and other consequences... which any DM worth his salt should be able to exploit. Which, again, is more fun than checking every floor tile for traps.

Having the next encounter be a fight with the local militia, and the encounter after that, and maybe the one after that as well, is not what I find fun.

 

[vagabundo]

I tend to burn my group every so often and they become paranoid for a while. But I dont press it too much, I hate a game bogged down in trivia.

 

[Stormborn]

You see, my problem isn't that my players are too paranoid or aren't paranoid enough. It's that my players are paranoid when they shouldn't be, and aren't paranoid when they should, despite the blatant clues I give one way or another.

Yep. This is my experiance as well. If it was all one way or the other I could plan for it. But it rarely seems to work the way I will expect it to.