Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Olaf the Stout" data-source="post: 4005625" data-attributes="member: 13703">Well this topic has certainly generated a lot more discussion than I thought it would!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":eek:" title="Eek!    :eek:"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":eek:" /> Just thought I might clarify a few things here.Both players had been playing in the campaign from the beginning (about 1 1/2 years).  All players began at 3rd level and had worked their way up to 10th level when the whole Druid/dinosaur situation came about.Raven Crowking, I think you are a little off base when you are suggesting that it is ok for the players to be demand that they have +10 Plate at 1st level or be Superman with all the powers.  The Druid character was not breaking the system in that regard.  He was a 10th level Druid.  At that level he had the ability to Wildshape into a Dinosaur.  As a 10th level Druid it was also within the "rules" (for lack of a better word) to take the Bloodstriker Dinosaur as an animal companion.  The MM3 also had a small section about riding the Bloodstriker as well as using it as a Druid's animal companion.So from a rules perspective, a 10th level Druid is well within the rules to have a Bloodstriker as an animal companion.  Now whether or not the DM should allow a PC to take such a creature as his animal companion is a totally different question, and obviously an answer that will vary from DM to DM.  If the Druid had been played from the start of the campaign then I would not have allowed him to take the Bloodstriker as an animal companion.  The party had not encountered any dinosaurs in the campaign at that point so there would have been no opportunity to gain such a mount.However the Druid PC was not in the game from the beginning (although the Druid's player was)  The Druid's player had decided that he had achieved all he had wanted to with his previous PC (A Fighter specialising in Archery) and wanted to try something new.  He came up with a few concepts and eventually settled on the Druid.  He wanted to have a dinosaur as an animal companion and have some dinosaur wildshape forms and I didn't really think it was that far out to deny it.  The Druid was 10th level.  I thought it was fair enough to assume that he had travelled around a bit and had encountered dinosaurs before.Up until this point in the campaign dinosaurs had not been brought up and I hadn't really considered whether or not they existed to be honest.  None of the players had asked if there were dinosaurs in the campaign world and the party had not encountered them.  The campaign world is rather vague due to me not having the time to detail it.  I didn't have anything against there being dinosaurs in the campaign world so I allowed them to exist.Here is a rough campaign overview of what the party has done.  The first half of the campaign was spent in the Green Ronin city of Freeport as we played through the Freeport Trilogy of adventures.  Adventures then moved to the mainland as I ran the group through a couple of Dungeon magazine adventures.  The last couple of levels had been spent with the PC's trying to solve the mystery of why every summer 3 young girls had been getting murdered in a particular city.  Overall a lot of the campaign has taken place in urban environments and a lot of fights have been against classed humanoids so it is not really surprising that the PC's haven't encountered any dinosaurs.  There are a whole host of creatures that the party is yet to encounter.  Does that mean that they are also so strange as to freak out about?The Druid was not introduced to the party in the middle of the wilderness.  The party first met the Druid just outside the town gates of Penmough (a town where they had just solved the mystery of murdered young girls).  The Druid was introduced to them by the rescued gir'sl family as the young girl's Grandfather.  The family did think of him as a bit crazy but he was a softie at heart. (the Druid treated the dinosaur like it was his child, calling it Mr. Cuddles).  When the party had rescued the girl they inadvertantly released a bound demon onto the world.  The Druid wished to accompany the party on their mission to deal with the demon as thanks for rescuing his grand-daughter.The Druid PC was quite strong from a powergaming perspective.  The player in question tended to create pretty effective PC's in general though.  When he was playing the archery specialising Fighter he was the strongest PC in the party.  The rest of the party was probably a little underpowered in my opinion.  I thnik that the fact that the Druid was strong from a game mechanic perspective may have been part of the reason that the other player quit, despite him saying it was all to do with the dinosaurs.In the one combat we had with the Druid in the party I was surprised at how strong he was.  It did happen in the middle of a forest so the Druid was in his most favourable environment.  Even still I talked to him about it straight after the session and said how I was worried about how strong his PC was in relation to the other PC's.  He was happy to tone down his character so it wasn't as strong.  That never happened though as the player quit before that could happen.If I really wanted to rectify the situation and keep the quitting player (and his friend that also left) in the group I think that I could have.  However I personally think that it is for the best that he has quit.  We were both aware that we had different preferred play styles.  I like to uses the rules as rules when I DM, he prefers to think of them as guidelines when he DM's.  He would quite often get frustrated when he wanted to do something, but the D&D rules said that he couldn't.  I really think that D&D isn't the game for him.  I think he would be a lot happier playing or running a more rules-light game.  However, because there aren't a huge amount of players where we live it is almost a matter of playing D&D or not playing at all.Olaf the Stout</blockquote>

Verification