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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Von Ether" data-source="post: 1943745" data-attributes="member: 15582">Hmmm. From the title, I thought it was more of asking for general dissatisfaction compared to just the poster's problems. Am I dissatisfied? Pretty much, I quit GMing period and stopped playing d20.Long story, short. I had a couple of players who are control freaks. If they play, they constantly barage me with loopholes and seemingly innocuous questions that lead to another loophole. But as GMs asking for even one "special favor" was an instant accuasation of min/maxing. A sort of "Do as I GM, not as I play" motto, which stung me since I ran games the way I'd like to play them -- larger than life characters to doing larger than life things. I used to be a story orientated, hide the rolls behind the screen GM until they came along. Every game was just a puzzle to crack and lord over. In the end, I had to become a dungeon crawl GM. I wasn't having fun and didn't have the time in my life anymore to GM.As a player, all the games I see other people commited to are essentially the same. The GM barely converts an old AD&D module for his "campiagn" (a thread bare excuse to hop from one module to another). All the players bring tons of books so they can reference each feat they need. All the characters are designed as an arms race, who can do the most damage, have the highest AC, etc. Not interested.Scary enough, I am a big fan of the Champions game I am in now. We spend several sessions doing detective work, no combat and last night the GM knew the combat was going to be so quick that he didn't bother taking out the mat or figs. The rooftop fight between us and some vampires took less than half an hour.On die rolling:Welcome to DnD. To some it's a bug ... It's one of my pet peeves of d20 as a GM. For most players, it's a feature. They can accurately guage the danger of the encounter and plan according to "win."I found that an "action dice" mechanic goes a long way to keeping the tension and drama up and still lets you roll out in the open. Essentially "tension and drama" are meta-game stuff, and you can play off some of gamer's quirks to play it up. You want to make a player nervous, watch him fail a Listen check and then just grin at him. It also helps if you make do these rolls occaisonaly, get a high number and tell him there's nothing there. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> If he knows you do random rolls to keep them guessing, it's as good as hidng the roll.</blockquote>

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