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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Demmero" data-source="post: 1060519" data-attributes="member: 13641">I am the evil/softie/reviled (?) DM of Kastil's game.  I'm going to post some of my side of the story, and then let the membership weigh in with their opinions.  For being a softie, I have unusually thick skin (+7 natural bonus to AC), so feel free to rip into me if you must.First, Kastil's gripes and points are all valid, and second, the player in question did not do anything special behind the scenes to earn extra XPs (but see below).My side of the story:Yes, I'm a softie.  Guilty as charged.Yes, I try to avoid player vs. player arguments/disputes/duels.Yes, I suck at giving out XPs regularly (but I'm slightly better than in past campaigns).Yes, Kastil and her husband deserve to be out in front in the "XP Race," and I sort of went out of my way to give the other players a chance to catch up.Here are my reasons why:#1.  The previous campaign.  Kastil and her husband were the only ones who posted to that game's message board, and mainly as a result of those bonus XPs (and some good RPing), they led the XP parade.  Not a bad thing, in and of itself, but the two other players with solid attendance records feel uncomfortable posting--whether that's due to lack of time, lack of creativity, lack of confidence, I'm not entirely sure--and they fell behind in XPs.  At times, it feels like I'm running my D&D campaigns for Kastil and her husband, with the others merely along for the ride.More about the previous campaign: I put in a decent amount of work into that baby, and it was very serious in nature (for the most part, but I'm a goofball at heart and occasional can't resist the impulse to get a bit goofy).  Many of the players, however, were not taking it as seriously as myself (weird characters, goofy names, lots of mid-game joking/chattering/shaky attentiveness), and for a short while I was so frustrated that I considered ending the game.  The players weren't playing my game the way I'd intended it to be played!  But I genuinely like my players as human beings, and enjoyed the sense of camaraderie that had developed in the group...so I swallowed my pride and own wishes and came to an understanding with myself that the players were more important to me than the game itself.  From that point on, the game's been more of a social get-together to me than a hard-core D&D game.  I am now among the worst of the in-game jokers.#2.  The new campaign.  We started anew at 1st-level.  Before we started, I warned the players that this campaign would be more serious and deadly than past campaigns.  I have a preference for low-level games, and had noticed that I'd been using the same monsters over and over again (goblins, slavers, and bugbears come to mind), so I wanted to branch out a bit this time.Well, when it came to leveling up to 2nd-level time, some of the party members had enough XPs to level, others were a bit short.  At this point, I believe the 6-person party had 3 2nd-levelers, 3 1sts.  Awkward arrangement for picking their next set of foes...but I stuck with the general storyline I'd prepared and had them walk into a veritable grove of twig blights (18 of 'em; I still get EL rants from the players to this day! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.  I figured this was one of those "easy if handled properly" encounters hinted at in the DMG; the things only did 1-2 hp dmg with a hit and were slow-moving with no intention of pursuing the party out of their grove.Well, the party missed their Spot checks, the twiggies won the Init, the party was quickly surrounded.  I still figured the party wasn't in too much danger; once they killed a couple of the twiggies (or decided to risk an AoO or two to break the twiggies' "ring of death," they'd be OK.  Unfortunately, bad party dice rolling ensued, and no one though about breaking loose from the twiggies until two characters were down (both 1st-levelers, IIRC) and several others were very low on hps.  Mr. Softie here didn't go for the TPK, blamed himself for the high EL of the encounter, and moved on.Now we come to the point where characters are ready to level to 3rd...but only two of them have made it: Kastil and her husband.  The others were apx. 500 XPs behind Kastil, even two of the regulars who'd shown up just as faithfully, week after week.  My mind screamed "That's like 20% less than Kastil and Thazar (her hubby's character)!  How can that be??!!"  Kas and Thaz's players were scheduled to go on vacation the following week, so I decided (rightly or wrongly--you be the judge!) to run a combat-intensive session for the other players that week so they'd catch up, and hopefully we'd avoid any potential mixed-level near TPKs like the twig blight incident.Three of the 4 other players showed, and they wandered to a ruined town that I'd sketched out vaguely for a future adventure.  The two monsters I'd decided long in advance that were present in the ruins were a yellow musk creeper and its zombie minions and a pair of spriggans.They got the yellow musk zombies...a few at a time.  The zombies came at the party at the rate of about 1 per round, and the group was fighting from between 1-4 of the things at any given time.  The plant had originally been scheduled to have 9 zombie servants, but Mr. Softie here was gonna cut them off whenever the 3 heroes seemed to be in danger of annihilation.  Well, it was a tough fight, and one hero went into negative hps for a while, but they handled all 9 of the plant zombies (1,350 total XPs; over 400 each!).  Two more of the players leveled, and those two who didn't had missed several sessions, so even Mr. Softie here had no regrets about where the game and the PC party stood.  All was right in the world with me; I knew that Kastil and her husband would soon pull back into the XP lead and the party seemed well-prepared to face the mother plant (a CR 4 baddie for a party with 4 3rd-levelers and 2 2nd-levelers).  All the zombies had come from the ruins' lone stone building, one covered with vines, leaves and pretty flowers (the YM creeper itself), so they probably should have known the plant was there and should've taken it out easily, probably from a safe distance.Well...one dead PC, one zombified PC, and one brain-damaged one (Kastil, the character, not the player <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> later....  I was left wonder what went wrong.  More EL grumbling from the players.  The dead PC was one of the 2nd-level PCs, and his player has since decided to take a break from the game.  I shudder to think what might have happened had I not run the combat- and XP-intensive game against the YM zombies and two more of the PCs were merely 2nd-level for that encounter...a TPK would've been a real possibility.  One of the first things I did after that session was to cut back on the number of spriggans lurking elsewhere in the ruins from two to one.  One CR 3 beastie, a fair foe for a party now consisting of 4 3rd-level PCs and one 2nd-leveler.Well...Thazar's still alive because he self-stabilized at -6 hps.  The paladin (who ate 5-6 firebombs courtesy of the spriggan's produce flame ability is at -8 and counting.  The 2nd-leveler and the other player both succumbed to the spriggan's scare power and took off running in opposite direction (almost without doing anything to awaken the others!!!).  So now a bloody Kastil faces a bloody and now enlarged spriggan bandit, who is demanding the party's treasure in return for sparing their lives.  And of all the dirty tricks to pull, Kastil goes for a Diplomacy check to try to wheedle the spriggan into not demanding their hard-earned (and, admittedly, stingily distributed) treasure.  (That's another thread in itself; besides being late and stingy with the XPs, I was really stingy with treasure and magic items in the last campaign.  I decided in advance--and told the players--that I'd be using the treasure tables in the DMG for the new campaign and randomly-determining treasure hordes; and the dice have not been kind to the party thusfar).Anyhow, Kastil knows darn well I don't know the rules for making a Diplomacy check...who ever heard of such a thing??!! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />But I know Kastil's player loves her character and made him a non-traditional rogue in some skill choices especially (there's another thread on these boards from a month or so back where Kas complains about being yelled at by other players for not finding a couple of pit traps that swallowed up the group, and the DM (me!) gets blasted by some other posters for not "thinking outside the box" and tailoring his adventures to his adventurers' skills and other abilities), so I'm going to review them this week before next Saturday's game.Maybe a successful Diplomacy check can make a nasty, evil spriggan brigand (whose only reason for lairing in the ruins is to rob passerbys in the region) walk away from his prize even though he's pretty much routed his opposition.  My inclination is that it probably would not, but I'm gonna do the right thing and check the official rules for that blasted skill of Kastil's!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Oh, and Mr. Softie will probably also try to find a way to get the two scared-off characters back into the encounter as soon as possible.  The excuse I'm considering is that those two characters wouldn't be able to flee to the best of their ability in the darkness outside the camp, so they either slowed their pace or decided to go to ground nearby and hide from the scary spriggan instead.So that's my long, drawn-out side of the story and why I did what I did.  Feel free to praise me or rip me to pieces (I'm expecting a little bit of both).  A big part of the problem stems from the fact that not only are the characters of Kastil and Thazar likely to leave the others in the dust in the XP race, but their players are the ones who are the most serious, most dedicated, most prepared, most thinking of the group.  And yeah, they are being penalized a bit for that, which isn't fair.  But the other choices I see are even less appealing: 1) drop the other less intense/active players and find some new, more hard-core replacements (which to me is not even a choice at this point; all the players I now consider to be friends, even though my campaign is of the online variety and I've only met 3 of them IRL); 2) Let Kastil and Thazar race way ahead of the others and risk more of the twig blight/yellow musk creeper "split level party" incidents; 3) Drop D&D altogether and find a new hobby like digital photography (not very likely!).</blockquote>

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