This is very much a thread necro from a while back. I had some more thoughts on this issue and I figured I'd bring it back up now that I have calmed down a bit after the initial discussion. I still feel that people are assuming that their own personal styles appear to be the "One True Way" and there's been a lot of that in this thread. I've been told that I'm a bad DM repeatedly for not following precisely what other people want in their games. I'd like to state for the record that I don't think that's true. People like different things in their games. But all of the suggestions here that I'm a 4th or 5th string DM that no one would play with unless their life depended on it are pretty insulting. I'd prefer to avoid that if this thread continues.
Having said that...moving on.
This is where, for all its detractors, Forge-speak can come in handy. I suspect MajoruO's players have different expectations from a D&D game than yours do, or mine. I wouldn't be surprised if his players are fully in the mode of "the DM provides a challenge for us to overcome" and are more concerned with "fair play" than "story".
How best to explain it? Yes, we believe the DM throws out challenges for us to overcome. However, we almost believe in "fair play". The idea is that we get challenges, but they will always be within our capabilities. The DM will give us the tools we will need to succeed at the challenges when he expects us to face them.
That means we might run into a bad guy who is undefeatable once but we will likely encounter him again later with an item that evens the odds or after we've gained a bunch of levels so we have a chance now.
But we also play for the story. Or at least, most of us do. Some are interested in WHY the bad guy is doing his evil plot. Others don't much care and just want to roll some dice and see if they beat the bad guy. Not everyone is super hardcore about the game.
My sense, given the player's complaint that triggered the OP, plus other posts in this and other threads, is that the challenge element isn't at the heart of [MENTION=15142]Maj[/MENTION]oruOakheart's game. (Eg as best I recall, but perhaps I'm wrong, he favours the use of GM force/fudging to avoid a TPK.) I think "the experience" is at the heart of the game - turning up, playing your character within the broad world and plot confines that the GM dictates, and experiencing whatever it is that the GM serves up. This will require overcoming some challenges, but my sense is that the experience is more important than the overcoming.
It's a combination of both. The player in question likes to feel powerful. He plays the game because he likes the idea of being a super badass character who can kick everyone's butt and barely break a sweat. He doesn't like the idea that he might lose. He thinks that's unfair.
This is my guess as to why the player in the OP didn't like the food-critic scenario - because it is a long way from the D&D experience of exploring places, beating up monsters, and finding out how many hit points you lose in the process (which isn't ultimately about challenge if the GM will manipulate ingame events to make sure that you never all drop below zero all at once).
That's at least part of it. But it's not entirely that. The player in question has almost entirely played 4th edition D&D from pre-written adventures. He learned how skills work from skill challenges. I likely mentioned it earlier in this thread but there was one time in a 4e game we were running that he walked up to a door that was magically locked and said "I use arcana to open the door". The DM told him that Arcana didn't open doors but it told him that it was magically locked and he'd need to find a way to shut down the magic. He got rather angry and said "But I succeeded in a DC 20 check! I just turn off the magic with my Arcana skill."
He'd been rather used to adventures we ran where there were magic locks that were turned off by a high enough Arcana check. Since that worked before, he wasn't sure why it didn't work this time.
Many of these adventures were written in such a way that a high enough die roll accomplished any challenge. If you rolled low, you just searched for the second or third roll you could make in order to bypass the challenge(since most of them are written in such a way that you don't know what kind of group will go through them, they were written with explicit ways how different classes could successfully navigate them. That means if the Wizard fails his Arcana check, the Rogue can just make a Disable Device check instead. If that doesn't work then searching will find a lever that disables the trap. If no one can find it, you can just smash the trap.)
As I mentioned before. His issue is just that he expects everything to be handed to him on a silver platter. He expects that he picks up a die and the DM then tells him the answer because the DM wants him to succeed.
I want people to succeed but I want it to be because they came up with the answer on their own. I want someone to say "Hey...maybe there's a lever to disable this trap. I look for it." instead of "I make my Knowledge(Dungeoneering) check. Tell me how people disable traps like this."
In the case of the magic lightning in a jar scenario in that adventure, the adventure assumed the players would solve the problem using their own intelligence. He didn't want to do that. He wanted his character to solve the problem for him. Which is to say, he wanted to pick up a die and let the die tell him the answer.
It is really a question of whether you want to tell a player "Yeah, your character figures out based on all of the clues in the room that the lightning jumps to the nearest people who have things from the forest on them. You figure if you had something from the forest on you and stood close to the person currently getting zapped that it would jump to you. If you had the tooth on you, it would trap itself into the tooth." or whether you just give the players clues such as "The first person who gets zapped has an oddly colored bow" and let the players figure it out on their own.
The player in question doesn't like figuring things out. He wants it spelled out for him. He doesn't really want any kind of difficulty. The "story" parts of the adventure are just there to be told to him, not to interact with.
More recently, he has been complaining nearly every week about the difficulty of the D&D Expeditions adventures. He shows up week after week and each time an attack hits for near max damage he says things like "Wow...who wrote this adventure? These monsters are stupid! They did 30 damage in ONE hit? That's over half my hitpoints. Are you sure you aren't reading it wrong? These authors are insane. This is stupid. What's the point of playing if they are just going to cheat by using overpowered monsters?"
Ironically enough, he's NEVER died during a single adventure. Each time he complains, the PCs beat the encounter and the entire adventure. But each week one good damage roll sets him off again and he goes back to complaining about how unfair it is.
Because I use a lot of modules, I have views on what makes for a good one. A good module presents interesting situations (in D&D this means interesting locations and antagonists that are both thematically and mechanically interesting). And it should be reasonably easy to strip these situations off the module-writer's chassis (which almost inevitably will assume some sort of plot sequence) and re-arrange or re-deploy them as makes sense for the game actually being played.
I just run them as written. Plot sequence and all. I enjoy the plot of these adventures. I want to find out what happens next. That's why I play D&D. Who is the enemy behind the plot? Why did he do it? Where is he and how difficult will he be to fight? Does he have any cool tricks up his sleeve? Are there any interesting plot twists? Is the guy who hired us secretly a doppleganger? Is there hints of what might happen in a future adventure?
These are the things that make me want to come back next session.
