a way to deal with lax players?

[StreamOfTheSky]

Fireball is generally considered weak in 3E, far as I knew. And magic missile is useful, and certianly helpful to finish the job (one of my favorite arcanists liked to ready an action to MM the boss monsters when they looked to be near the breaking point, in case they tried to flee barely alive ). But, best level 1 spell? No way. Silent Image, Color Spray, possibly the lesser orb spells..all better than MM. Heck, even Enlarge Person, Unseen Servant, and Mage Armor are arguably as "useful." And I don't buy into it, but Sleep is widely considered the best level 1 spell at character level 1.

 

[Particle_Man]

Oh, getting back to the OP. If the players are happy with repeating spells, maybe they would be happier with other classes. I suggested Warlock, but there is also Warmage (since he likes "blow em up" spells) or even the phb Sorcerer. For the Cleric, there is the Favoured Soul, which is kind of the Sorceror for Cleric route.

Another option is a big juicy carrot. Let them find special magic items of chaos that give them some bonus if they don't prepare the same spell twice that day. Like an extra spell per level or something. The bonus has to be big enough to tempt them, but not so big that it offends your sense of game balance. Maybe give equivalent magic items to the others (some bonus to fighters when they use a second, different special attack maneuver (so if they trip one round, disarm the second, they get a bonus to disarm)). That sort of thing.

 

[krupintupple]

I missed that part. My campaign has a game every other week, and we've only been playing for 6 months. Yet we're at level 5. The leveling system is part of the fun of the game, and withholding it from the players for long periods is going to sap some of the fun away.

it is slow, because we have so very little time. we all don't even live in the same town and live the life of boring adults, sadly. each session may literally be one encounter, social or otherwise. i actually doubled the xp for a few sessions, but then realized that they're not exactly going to master higher level skills without realizing what they're doing with lower level ones.

ironically, as we speak, they're at level 7. sadly, they've seemed to somehow ignore all the old crazy woodsmen, worried town guards and retired adventurers who've tried to warn them away from Adult Red Dragon Mountain (not its real name); they have quite a few hold-overs from 2e.

 

[krupintupple]

8 Character deaths seems like tons to me. Enough that I wouldnt bother getting attached to my characters, or trying to develop them or enrich their histories. Why bother when the DM is going to kill you off once every 3 levels or so.

i realize this too. i'll explain the last 5 character deaths. also, two of our group of five have never died. one has died once. the remaining two have 7 deaths between them and they are the...cleric and mage

1. Whilst setting an ambush for some bugbears who were working for a turncoat aristocrat in a mining town, the party becomes dangerously close to some hostile druid's territory. ranger makes a (nature) check and insists on leaving this hornet's nest. fighter/cleric, with no ranks in (nature) decides that he should use the skin of a local animal to intimidate said druid into leaving them alone, should said druid show up. Said Fighter finds a Red Tiger (Forgotten Realms) which is a CR7 lion and attempts to solo it. I ad-hoc'd that the tiger took the kill and left, as it easily could've killed the rest of them for his mistake. He was a Ftr2/Clr1

2. Party raided a nearby barrow of undead and shadows, mostly destroying all of them. they beat a hasty retreat and decide to return the very next day. the rogue decides to stay back to "ensure that no undead came out during the night"; party thinks he's crazy and leave him. rogue tries to sneak back in to get some loot. with no reliable way to deal with shadows and a Str of 9, he didn't really last long.

3. Dwarf jumps off 250' gorge and attempts to use wand of featherfall. I explain to him that unless he has it on his list, he can't use it. He's a Fighter and plummets to his death. Another character warned him that the game wasn't 2e and not anyone with a "command word" could use it; he claims he should be able to because he mimiced the command word that the bard did.

4. Someone watched Shark Week on Discovery channel and thusly felt that real world mechanics apply to D&D. I explained to keep it fair, we use d20 rules and reality, such as necrotic shark microbiology and tidal feeding paterns, don't really come into the game. Character dies while trying to grapple a shark with a "I saw it on TV" maneuvre.

5. The then 4 PCs are wandering through the woods and hear drumming and chanting and come across barbarians. They're wildmen, like vikings, but friendly-looking. One notices the PCs and approaches, hand out and unarmed. They kill him. His friends react angrily and a short melee breaks out leaving two PCs dead. Player of now-dead PC claims that "...these couldn't have been the woodsmen that we were told to meet up with, because they're barbarians. Those two things are totally different."

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Wow...I guess you could either TPK them, or find some way to accomodate them so the game keeps going. The former requires no real work.

For the latter...
1) Make it a wyrmling red dragon and count on them being too clueless to notice the difference? Sometimes stories of great monsters are exaggerated...
2) Make it a mature adult or better, overwhelmingly powerful, and jsut have it laugh off their attack, use lesser geas on the lot of them, and send them off to handle some task the dragon considers too trivial to be worth its time.
3) The dragon takes them alive as slaves. Let it play out for a while, until they find an opening to escape.
4) Another heroic NPC just happened to have gone off to slay the dragon just before them. He falls to it just as the PCs arrive, but not before reducing it to very low hp, making it easy pickings (and lower xp and treasure* appropriately) for the party. Best if said NPC has some kind of subtle story set up to make sense that he'd go, rather than just being random.
*Alternatively, if they're a bunch of goody-two-shoes, the enormous loot can be partially used to raise said NPC.
5) "Your princess is in another castle." After fighting through a bunch of gruelling "random encounters" to arrive at the dissapointingly empty former dwelling so you still get a session out of it, of course.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

i realize this too. i'll explain the last 5 character deaths. also, two of our group of five have never died. one has died once. the remaining two have 7 deaths between them and they are the...cleric and mage

1. Whilst setting an ambush for some bugbears who were working for a turncoat aristocrat in a mining town, the party becomes dangerously close to some hostile druid's territory. ranger makes a (nature) check and insists on leaving this hornet's nest. fighter/cleric, with no ranks in (nature) decides that he should use the skin of a local animal to intimidate said druid into leaving them alone, should said druid show up. Said Fighter finds a Red Tiger (Forgotten Realms) which is a CR7 lion and attempts to solo it. I ad-hoc'd that the tiger took the kill and left, as it easily could've killed the rest of them for his mistake. He was a Ftr2/Clr1

2. Party raided a nearby barrow of undead and shadows, mostly destroying all of them. they beat a hasty retreat and decide to return the very next day. the rogue decides to stay back to "ensure that no undead came out during the night"; party thinks he's crazy and leave him. rogue tries to sneak back in to get some loot. with no reliable way to deal with shadows and a Str of 9, he didn't really last long.

3. Dwarf jumps off 250' gorge and attempts to use wand of featherfall. I explain to him that unless he has it on his list, he can't use it. He's a Fighter and plummets to his death. Another character warned him that the game wasn't 2e and not anyone with a "command word" could use it; he claims he should be able to because he mimiced the command word that the bard did.

4. Someone watched Shark Week on Discovery channel and thusly felt that real world mechanics apply to D&D. I explained to keep it fair, we use d20 rules and reality, such as necrotic shark microbiology and tidal feeding paterns, don't really come into the game. Character dies while trying to grapple a shark with a "I saw it on TV" maneuvre.

5. The then 4 PCs are wandering through the woods and hear drumming and chanting and come across barbarians. They're wildmen, like vikings, but friendly-looking. One notices the PCs and approaches, hand out and unarmed. They kill him. His friends react angrily and a short melee breaks out leaving two PCs dead. Player of now-dead PC claims that "...these couldn't have been the woodsmen that we were told to meet up with, because they're barbarians. Those two things are totally different."

...Can you please post stories of ALL the character deaths in your game so far? They're freaking hilarious!

#3 is the only one where I sort of question that his character should have been aware he had no clue how to use an arcane wand. But apparently another player warned him and he wanted to do it anyway so...dwarf pancakes, yay!

 

[aboyd]

...Can you please post stories of ALL the character deaths in your game so far? They're freaking hilarious!

I agree that the players sound hopelessly dense. However, let's assume the opposite. Let's assume krupintupple portrayed the stories in a way that minimizes his culpability. Maybe some critique from that perspective will help krupintupple to see ways to aid the players in future circumstances.

Fighter finds a Red Tiger (Forgotten Realms) which is a CR7 lion and attempts to solo it.

This could be the player's fault, certainly. However, did you (krupintupple) describe the lion properly? I mean, a 3rd level character might think that he could solo a lion, if he doesn't know anything about a lion's stats. Then on top of that it's a more-powerful-than-normal lion. So, did you explain this? I mean, something simple like this should suffice: "The beast is menacing, dangerous, with a hungry look in its eye. Even with your weapon drawn, the creature is undaunted. You get the strange feeling that he views you less as a person and more as food."

the rogue decides to stay back to "ensure that no undead came out during the night"; party thinks he's crazy and leave him. rogue tries to sneak back in to get some loot. with no reliable way to deal with shadows and a Str of 9, he didn't really last long.

Hey, maybe the shadows hadn't done a lot of strength draining while the characters were there as a team. So of course the rogue would assume that there would be very little strength draining! I mean, we just don't know what went down before the rogue... went down.

(Yeah, OK, I'm stretching it here. This one is hard to defend.)

Dwarf jumps off 250' gorge and attempts to use wand of featherfall. I explain to him that unless he has it on his list, he can't use it. He's a Fighter and plummets to his death.

Wait. You explained it to him and still had the character fall to his death? I'm in the habit of explaining game mechanics and then letting players rethink. You could say, "OK, so you know that you need to be a spellcaster to activate that wand. You sure?" And if the player says, "Not sure, can I take it back?" then the DM says YES.

In addition, maybe the fighter had UMD. Did you at least give him a roll?

Character dies while trying to grapple a shark with a "I saw it on TV" maneuvre.

While it was good of you to explain that game mechanics don't mirror TV, if the character had a decent explanation of what he or she was doing, and it seemed to be based off some real-world logic, then I think you owe it to the player to reward such smarts with a +2 circumstance bonus. Maybe it would have made the difference if you'd played along a little bit.

The then 4 PCs are wandering through the woods and hear drumming and chanting and come across barbarians. They're wildmen, like vikings, but friendly-looking. One notices the PCs and approaches, hand out and unarmed. They kill him.

Let's play this out.

DM: You come across some chanting barbarians. One sees you and approaches.
Player: Oh, crap. Can I get a swing in? Are we in initiative? Does he have surprise?
DM: Really? Damnit. Fine, you get in a swing, and he's dead. He was unarmed, unarmored, and had his hand out in a gesture of friendship, you idiot!

Of course, telling the players how friendly the barbarian was after they've already done the killing is useless. The DM needs to describe the scenarios up front.

(One should note that almost all my rebuttals were made tongue in cheek. However, if krupintupple really did present these 5 character deaths in such a way as to make the players look dumber than they were, I'd hope that maybe even my goofy responses provide food for thought.)

 

[roguerouge]

Just playing DM's advocate to your DM's advocate, here:

This could be the player's fault, certainly. However, did you (krupintupple) describe the lion properly? I mean, a 3rd level character might think that he could solo a lion, if he doesn't know anything about a lion's stats. Then on top of that it's a more-powerful-than-normal lion. So, did you explain this? I mean, something simple like this should suffice: "The beast is menacing, dangerous, with a hungry look in its eye. Even with your weapon drawn, the creature is undaunted. You get the strange feeling that he views you less as a person and more as food."

Well, the character had no ranks in Knowledge: nature and ignored the PC ranger's advice...

Hey, maybe the shadows hadn't done a lot of strength draining while the characters were there as a team. So of course the rogue would assume that there would be very little strength draining! I mean, we just don't know what went down before the rogue... went down.

Well, you could defend this based on their experience with earlier editions, but they played 2e, which didn't give XP for gold, so... it's a shiny red button must press it now thing.

Wait. You explained it to him and still had the character fall to his death? I'm in the habit of explaining game mechanics and then letting players rethink. You could say, "OK, so you know that you need to be a spellcaster to activate that wand. You sure?" And if the player says, "Not sure, can I take it back?" then the DM says YES.

In addition, maybe the fighter had UMD. Did you at least give him a roll?

I agree if the DM didn't give the player a chance to rethink, or at least a wisdom check for the character. But if he had ranks in UMD as a fighter and neither the player nor his peers remembered, the players killed that character.

While it was good of you to explain that game mechanics don't mirror TV, if the character had a decent explanation of what he or she was doing, and it seemed to be based off some real-world logic, then I think you owe it to the player to reward such smarts with a +2 circumstance bonus. Maybe it would have made the difference if you'd played along a little bit.

There's no way players would realize that large sharks, with no arms, have great grapple scores. I mean, Escape artist, sure, they're fish. But grappling? No way. So while a +2 circumstance bonus would have been sporting, the wrestler would still be at a disadvantage.

Let's play this out.

DM: You come across some chanting barbarians. One sees you and approaches.
Player: Oh, crap. Can I get a swing in? Are we in initiative? Does he have surprise?
DM: Really? Damnit. Fine, you get in a swing, and he's dead. He was unarmed, unarmored, and had his hand out in a gesture of friendship, you idiot!

Let me add to it...

Other player: I'm the face guy, you jackass! Why am I wasting ranks in those skills if you're going to kill everyone we meet?

I agree that this COULD have been a DM presentation error. But then you look at the history and say.... probably not.

 

[roguerouge]

I have a solution: the players are only allowed ONE bottle of Mountain Dew at the table.

 

[krupintupple]

@roguerogue: I explained the red tiger appeared to be a mountain lion, with vicious eyes and a bloody sheen to its claws, but was the size of a small horse. i also explained it was watching them intently, but didn't appear as if 'on edge' or 'ready to pounce'. this is when someone decided to hurl a hatchet at it.

@aboyd: see above; also, the shadows had drained most of the party to the point of barely being able to move. the rogue claimed that he thought all of the shadows were dead (destroyed) and wouldn't pose a threat to him. don't get me wrong, i do appreciate the devil's advocate though
also, apparently this is based on real-life, sharks don't like the scent of rotting matter of their own kind, if at a certain advanced stage of decomposition. player tried to make a shark-slurry, so i said make an alchemy check. he didn't have it and said it should just be "add shark to jar. seal. open 2 weeks later" i said he should get someone with alchemy to do it for him. finally, i realized it wasn't worth the argument and let him do it. i've no idea why he got INTO the water with the shark though. he said he saw an epi of Wild Boys where Manny 'trances' a shark. i explained to him Manny is a 9th level druid then
the slaughter of the barbarian was something the rest of the group completely did not want to happen. it was in the middle of a long forest seige and noone expected that to happen. it really ruined diplomatic ties and set actions back quiet a bit. imagine an american embassidor shooting a british general in 1944, and claiming it was because he thought he looked like a nazi.

@streamofthesky: i have a rough character log, so i may be able to comb through and see if i can conjure up some of the other deaths too. i'll change all names and places, to protect the families of the deceased.

i think it's fair to say that i retold the deaths favouring me, but there's really not much wiggle room on people being dumb, or ignoring other player's or NPC's advice.

i think that ultimately, even if they don't know what they're doing, they should at least be able to see the higher levels somewhat faster than a snail's pace. so i'll add 50% again to the experience that they receive after reach session.