D&D General Times You've Wanted to Kill Your Players

tetrasodium · Jan 15, 2022

I have a player who will regularly agree that Pershing x is the group's best option, spend a session or two doing that & then dig his heels in refusing to do x without plot fellatio and bribery by npc to appeal to him if I'm not prepared to immediately come up with a new adventure. Somewhere along the lk e I gave up and noticed last time I just declared his character does x with everyone else and when he said his cjstscyer didn't like it I just said it was as delicious to him as everyone else before immediately moving on.

Levistus's_Leviathan · Jan 15, 2022

When my table started playing D&D (5e is our first edition), one of my players had a Paladin. He had the Smite spells (branding, thunderous, blinding, etc), and would use them all the time. He had misread them, not realizing that the extra damage from the spells is supposed to only trigger one time. He thought that they were like Hex or Hunter's Mark, dealing extra damage to every single creature he hit for as long as he concentrated on them.

It was over 6 months before I realized why he was taking on monsters several CRs above his level on his own. I had heard that Paladins were powerful, and thought that this is what people meant when they talked about how effective they are.

When we figured out what we were doing wrong, I was pretty frustrated. Might have contemplated wringing his neck once or twice. Ever since then, I've always had to double-check what any spell that he wants to cast says just to make sure he didn't read it wrong again.

Lanefan · Jan 15, 2022

A couple of times, both long ago:

One was when an in-game incident blew up into a very out-of-game argument that, in the same manner a nascent World War drags in more and more countries, eventually dragged in everyone in both groups I was running at the time plus some other random friends as well. That one wasn't fun.

The other was much less stressful: the party knew in-character there was an adventure out there somewhere. They knew it. But could they find the bloody thing? No. Not without me leading them by the nose*, anyway, and this was at a time when I was specifically trying to cut back on a fairly bad lead-'em-by-the-nose tendency I'd developed; and so for about four sessions they wandered aimlessly in the woods before giving up and heading back to town.

* - which would have had to be blatant; I couldn't just have them find and follow tracks as a) they were looking for a planar gate that hadn't been used in ages and b) the gate was on an island in the middle of a small lake. The nearest they ever got was the lakeshore, looking across at the island; but it never once occurred to them they maybe ought to try going there even though between their magic and a conveniently-placed rowboat the water crossing was really no impediment.

overgeeked · Jan 15, 2022

One of the first times I ran a game the entire plot (yes, I had a plot) hinged on the players doing the one thing (yep, it’s coming)…and so of course they did not do the thing. I was so pissed. I had to run the whole rest of the session on the fly. Did I mention the one thing was literally the opening two minutes of the game? They had to do the thing in the first two minutes of the game. Or the whole plot went bye-bye. They didn’t. And I has to improv the rest of the four hour session. I wanted to kill the players. But as soon as I walked away from the table after the session I realized it was my fault. I’m literally never making the “I have a plot” mistake again.

R_J_K75 · Jan 15, 2022

Shiroiken said:
A quick interrogation revealed that the host had found the notebook, and they'd both read all of it in preparation for the adventure.

That sucks that all that time and work went to waste. My story is similar but yours seems on another level because you created it personally; my story concerns a pre-written module that I could really care less about.

I had a similar incident occur. I ran a game where another player and I both traded off DM duties. The FR boxed set Lands of Intrigue came out and we sat down to play, and I was running the Castle Spulzeer module. You know that Castle Spulzeer, the one that other DM happened to buy and give to me because he knew I wanted to run it, the same other DM who read it before giving it to me. It didn't take me long to figure out that he read the adventure and I had to do some quick adjustments on the fly. He freely admitted to me after the game that he had read and said to me "you didn't run that adventure anywhere near as it was written", I said "Gee I wonder why"? I got my revenge on him and his character when I ran the Ravenloft sequel adventure The forgotten Terror the following week.

Quartz · Jan 15, 2022

DND_Reborn said:
I have one player right now who keeps wanting to add his proficiency bonus to damage as well as his attack rolls.

So charge him an invocation and let him (q.v. Agonising Blast). Or make it an alternate class feature (add PB instead of Str / Dex mod - but not both). You know, the old warrior may no longer have the strength he once did but he sure knows how to land a blow!

DND_Reborn · Jan 15, 2022

Quartz said:
So charge him an invocation and let him (q.v. Agonising Blast).

Because the last thing 5E needs is adding yet more damage to what PCs can do.

Quartz said:
Or make it an alternate class feature (add PB instead of Str / Dex mod - but not both). You know, the old warrior may no longer have the strength he once did but he sure knows how to land a blow!

I've thought about this in other situations, but the issue isn't using one or the other, it is doing both. The player already adds STR/DEX as appropriate, but also keeps adding proficiency.

Seramus · Jan 15, 2022

I had a player who would treat his wife like absolute garbage. We gamed at his house, and he would snap at her for interrupting the game, yell at her to be quiet if she was making too much noise in another room, and just be visibly irritated if she even entered the room. We couldn't fix his marriage, but we were able to switch houses to give her some peace and quiet.

A different player would prank his cat, and sometimes it drifted into the realm of the cruel. Like throwing cold water on the cat, jump scaring the cat, or squirting hot sauce in its mouth to watch it freak out.

DND_Reborn · Jan 15, 2022

Seramus said:
A different player would prank his cat, and sometimes it drifted into the realm of the cruel. Like throwing cold water on the cat, jump scaring the cat, or squirting hot sauce in its mouth to watch it freak out.

I would have reported such a person for animal cruelty. I can't stand people like that and they don't deserve to have the responsibility of a pet.

R_J_K75 · Jan 15, 2022

DND_Reborn said:
Because the last thing 5E needs is adding yet more damage to what PCs can do.

I've thought about this in other situations, but the issue isn't using one or the other, it is doing both. The player already adds STR/DEX as appropriate, but also keeps adding proficiency.

IME some players just dont have the ability to fully understand or remember the rules, but yes its frustrating. Sometimes its just not their fault. But if its a case of them trying to exploit the rules in their favor, refusal to try and learn the rules of their character and actually read parts of the PHB then lay the smack down on them at times.