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

5ekyu said:

I dont need to police my players. My players expect to be playing the results of their choices in game, not resolving them with meta-game fixes.

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Then don't play using Backgrounding?

So why create so much fuss about something that has zero impact on how you will continue to play your game?

Lanefan said:

I could see how this would be quite possible by 1e RAW, e.g. a stealth group gaining all their xp for treasure and problem-solving and bypassing encounters while getting little or none for actual combat.

But 3.5? How the ...?

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It was a city campaign and the PCs were law enforcement. The players decided to "bring them in alive" as a credo. There was a lot of subdual damage done and the arcane casters concentrated on investigation, battlefield control, and buffing the martial combatants.

5ekyu said:

I dont need to police my players. My players expect to be playing the results of their choices in game, not resolving them with meta-game fixes.

My players would expect that the advantages of the t rex in combat would also mean other issues such as having to figure out how to deal with it when the story moves into towns.

Just like the wizard might prepare non-fireball spells when in a town but fireballs when more open scenery is expected.

They don't expect these issues to turn on or off scene to scene, scenery change to scenery change just cuz they made a meta-game deal.

Moreover, they would expect that a trex could be trackable, rather unique and so be attachable if the party left it alone outside town and would be rather ticked off if I told them "nah, he got to a town so that gets his t rex backgrounded, so you lost the trail."

Similarly they would not expect the backgrounding of tracking the trex defense when they got to a town.

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Wait, what?

Why would any NPC have anything backgrounded? This isn't a class power and it certainly doesn't apply to NPC's. Why on earth would a DM have to background anything? Unless, your party is somehow tracking the PC druid for some reason? I'm rather confused.

And again, you are stating that a T-Rex needs to be balanced against the inconvenience of having a T-Rex. That having a, say, wolf companion is somehow weaker. That's patently not true. Your animal companion for a druid gained hit dice, hp, and attack bonuses. The T-Rex gains none of that. IOW, a wolf companion for a, what, 17th level druid (IIRC that's about when you could get a T-Rex as a companion) would have about as many HP and deal as much damage as that T-Rex. The mechanics are already balanced.

Look, you don't want to use this. Fine and dandy. But, from the arguments you are putting up here, it really looks like you are not understanding how this works and are arguing against elements that you pretty clearly don't understand. The only thing is, I'm not really sure how to make it any clearer.

pemerton said:

You seem to have confused a player declaration of effect with an ingame event. (And this rule is from 4e - one of many aspects of 4e that carry over into 5e.)

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Not confusing those things at all. In the game the PC has already hit and killed the opponent. Then, AFTER the player has found out that fact, the player can suddenly have the PC time travel back to before damage was rolled and decide to knock out the opponent. The player should know before the swing if he wants the PC to knock out the creature, so there's no time travel needed for a knockout to occur. It's a silly rule.

I ask again - do you regard it as RAW that a king's champion must mete out death, or must have meted it out, such that a PC fighter whose player uses the drop-to-zero rules such that the PC doesn't kill anyone is implementing a house rule, or breaking this fighter rule, or whatever?

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It's a white room scenario [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]. Knocking out the 20 goblins killing the townsfolk does nothing as the will just get back up and kill more. What is the party going to do? Leave them out in the middle of the forest to wake back up? It's not feasible to carry them to town. Carrying them to town will just result in the town killing them anyway, which will introduce the fighter to meting out death indirectly.

I already posted some examples upthread - mercenary soldiers (pp 30-31 of the DMG).

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That's not much of an example. If they were not capable of advancing in level at all, then the Captains and Lieutenants would be level 0 still. At some point they were capable of gaining experience and advancing in level, but for game balance reasons, Gygax halted them at the level they had already progressed to. Also, what happens if the PC makes the 7th level Captain a henchman? Henchman can gain levels and advance, yet the NPC is still also a mercenary Captain which cannot gain levels an advance. Will he or won't he be able to gain experience again?

Hussar said:

Sorry but after all the hullabaloo that you've gone through about RAW and following the rules and nit picking every single example, you most certainly don't get to cherry pick rules now. Stick to the game not your house rules.

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There's a rather marked difference between my stating that I am going to house rule something, and you giving an example that shows you changing changing a rule and insisting that your change isn't a house rule. My example is just a comment about what I will be doing for my game, and is not being used in the argument about RAW, so it's just fine. Your example is a comment about RAW, and is not just fine in an argument about RAW, since it's a change to the rules.

Hussar said:

Why do you assume your players will always act in bad faith? Why do you feel the need to police your players?

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Perhaps for the same reason you treat DMs as if they will abuse their power and act in bad faith.

Nagol said:

But you weren't talking RPG characters specifically. You were making wide statements to justify RPG character roles and behaviour. Galahad is a character that violates not just one but all your expected tenets. He was untrained, inexperienced, not a killer and yet he was the king's champion.

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I was talking about RPG characters specifically. The discussion was entirely about the fighter fluff in D&D, which makes it entirely about RPG characters.

Maxperson said:

I was talking about RPG characters specifically. The discussion was entirely about the fighter fluff in D&D, which makes it entirely about RPG characters.

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In that case, you can't make any sweeping claims what any role would require as it would depend entirely on the game engine and people at the table. Certainly, I've had king's champions that have run the whole ranges from inexperienced to highly experienced, low skill to high skill, no body count to high body count and I'm a single GM.

I’m just glad people in this thread aren’t running the games I’m in.

cmad1977 said:

I’m just glad people in this thread aren’t running the games I’m in.

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I don't know, it isn't SO bad. You could play a dissociative identity disorder champion, where one personality has not killed and the other stands aloft waves of butchered folk. Your champion character would have a pet T-Rex that has been backgrounded, possess a motor bike that may be stolen, and there'd be a 50% chance his/her father is a murderous psycopath (which make sense given your PC's mental fragility), all the while serving a deity of your choosing in Eberron who may or may not interfere depending if it is a DM-driven or player-driven story respectively. Such compelling storytelling does not come easy.

It could be worse, really.