D&D 5E What DM flaw has caused you to actually leave a game?

[Greenstone.Walker]

Is the DM just not running surprise correctly?

Correct. He is using an surprise round, where the monsters get an attack on us and then we roll initiative. I think its a 4E thing, but I only ever played that edition for 1 hour.

 

[iserith]

Correct. He is using an surprise round, where the monsters get an attack on us and then we roll initiative. I think its a 4E thing, but I only ever played that edition for 1 hour.

Oh, right, that would totally screw up your build. I'd wonder how often the monsters are trying to or able to surprise the PCs. Maybe something's going wrong there, too.

 

[5ekyu]

You still don't resolve the problem that if the player knows the result of his own fortune test, then the player has unreasonably high confidence in the presence or absence of threat - confidence that it is not clear the PC should share. If he "rolls a 20" or whatever indicates great success with the fortune mechanic, he can proceed with unreasonably high confidence knowing that there is a low change he missed something. Conversely, if he "rolls a 1", then the player can act as with great confidence that if something was present, he probably missed it and some sort of remedy should be applied (for example, now might be a time to use a charge from a wand or cast a spell). This contrasts with the a very natural interpretation of what ignorance - a very bad perception check - should actually mean, where the PC should have unreasonably high confidence in his perceptiveness.

We disagree.

When a character rolls to hit and gets a 2 and misses then rolls a 19 and gets a miss, do you accuse him of metagaming if he draws different conclusions from those attacks? If he decides after the 19 missed "better get advantage or switch things up" but didnt after the 2 missed, do you bring down the metagaming thunder?

In almost every task i have attempted and most challenging tests or tasks, i have left it with a good ferling, a goid sense of how i did.

Read that as "i saw the d20 roll".

On occasion i was wrong.

Read that as "i misread the DC".

The idea inserted by a GM that the d20 is an unfathomable mystery thing without any representstion of analog in gme is to me "the problem" - not that the player sees it.

There are a gazillion intangibles in a scene that we do not deep dive into that can cause it to be hard to or impossible to describe fully.

In my games that d20 roll is a representative of those intangibles that the character sees and we dont detail before hand.

Consider this...

A character swings his axe and rolls a 2. Do Many GMs narrate that as "for some totally unknowable reason your swing misses and you have to act in character like it hit or we are gonna have a metagaming problem"?

Nope?

Instead do actually quite a few GMs toss out say "your foot hit a slick spot on the floor and your swing went wide"?

In my experience, yes they do. (There are plenty of other narrative options and cases.)

But suddenly, when it comes to perception (and certain other checks) some GM leap on with gusto the idea of "the d20 has no in game reality analog for the character" and a player knowing that was a bad result w is a metagaming problem?

How about he rolls a 2 and gets "unfortunately a peal of thunder hit just as you were listening at the door so you heard nothing. Might do better after the thunder dies."

Or

"there is a lot of fragile tiles and degenerated stone and mortar so its not helping your first tests for secret doors. Now that you have seen that you can try other ways, might get better results."

Or

"The door opening stirred up a lot of dust, making it harder to spot things until it dies down."

In my experience most folks especially experts or folks with even,moderate experience dont walk away from a task with no clue how well it worked, how well they did - even when they dont know the outcome. They might be wrong in their guess (since they dont know the DC.)

That to me and in my game is what the d20 is and i try and narrate that for non-combat rolls same os for combat rolls.

But either way the "d20 equals objective confidence" is the norm in my game.

So, no metagaming problem.

 

[5ekyu]

I raise my hand and say I'm not comfortable with a DM who uses the term "fortune tests" to describe anything in D&D because, as far as I'm aware, there is no game term "fortune tests" in D&D.

Gotcha... Use correct jargon or you don't play there. Ok.

To each their own.

I know a gm who sometimes refer to "mages" or "priests" or "warriors" instead of using the correct classes.

She's actually pretty good.

Oh well.

 

[5ekyu]

I have a situation at the moment that has made me think about leaving a game, and that is "surprise rounds".

I'm playing character class which gets some really nice abilities on the first round of combat and some other nice abilities if I act before another combatant. Surprise rounds screw with all of those.

We've also had some situations where combat starts with the monsters right next to us. Those of us with features like the polearm master feat, and all of us with missile weapons, are being screwed over a little bit. I don't know how the player with the alert feat is feeling but if I were him I'd be annoyed that taking the feat has essentially done nothing.

As far as i can tell (in one game i play) monsters always appear at the edge of you visual range at night or the range of their gaze weapon - their choice and they are all ninjas.

I feel your pain.

At least until i fail that save vs the basilisk. Then, not so much with my 3rd level sorc. Coming soon.

 

[Greg K]

Well Crawford ain't a god, his recent ruling/clarification on Shield Mastery saw him lose quite a number of fans. If I had to follow him on that clarification I'd be doing my players in, just like you feel your DM did you in. Potato potato and all that.

The more I see from Mearls and Crawford via Twitter, Twitch, Unearthed Arcana, etc. the more I am amazed that I, actually, like a lot about the basic game.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

Hi, I am just curious, but why is an official rule acceptable to you but a rule created by your friend not? It's quite possible your friend has a better mind than the people paid by WoTC, and his rule can make the game better.

If I play a game, I want to play the game as intended by the game designer. I want the balance and the challenge exactly how the designer made it. The game is a game designer's beloved child, a lot of thoughts and combined effort went into creating it that a single person never could oversee.
I don't want to see a friend mess with someone else's child.

Also I find it quite unlikely that an amateur could have a "better mind" than a professional. In fact, if I had a friend I'd consider a better game designer than Jeremy Crawford I'd tell him not to waste his talent by messing with other people's games and instead go make his own superior game. (I actually do tell that to indie developers all the time, but that's in a different context, like Final Fantasy fan game creators.)

 

[S'mon]

Also I find it quite unlikely that an amateur could have a "better mind" than a professional. In fact, if I had a friend I'd consider a better game designer than Jeremy Crawford I'd tell him not to waste his talent by messing with other people's games and instead go make his own superior game.

Game designer is not a high status occupation. Many of us have better and more lucrative things to do with our lives. Doesn't mean we can't design games if we wanted to.

 

[Sadras]

If I play a game, I want to play the game as intended by the game designer. I want the balance and the challenge exactly how the designer made it. The game is a game designer's beloved child, a lot of thoughts and combined effort went into creating it that a single person never could oversee.
I don't want to see a friend mess with someone else's child.

You do realise that the DMG is filled with ideas on how to make the game your own (from settings, monster modification, optional & additional rules, level of magic within the campaign, designing treasures, backgrounds, races, classes, subclasses and spells...etc). This slavish desire to stick to RAW is not even demanded by the designers.

Adventure modules/paths are played differently from table to table, that is the beauty of D&D it isn't uniform. Even the designers don't necessarily follow the core rule books, and that is a fact given their communication with the fanbase.

 

[Imaculata]

There are two things that have made me leave a game immediately:

-The DM had no imagination and no preparation. Every npc had the same bland name, and he was unable to describe the surroundings to us. This DM disqualified himself in the first 10 minutes of playing.

-The DM was trying to win the game, by introducing an overpowered npc as a substitute for himself, and making all encounters and checks unbeatable for us.