DM Schticks That Grind Your Gears

[Sejs]

You just gave me a great character Idea! Thunk the Half-Orc Paladin of Pelor with an Int of 6!

Why do I immediatly get a mental image of Tom Cullin from The Stand?

P-E-L-O-R, that spells Greyhawk City. *nod*

 

[Shadowslayer]

Sounds like a good campaign. Sh*t happens in the real world and world-shaking events can make a wonderful adventure.
Again, expect the unexpected should be par for the course for adventurers.

Fine then say to the players "here is your starting region. You came from here. Don't get too attached to it".

Don't make them do elaborations unless there's a payoff. Maybe some believe the elaborations ARE the payoff, but I don't buy it. There's gaming, then there's wasting people's time.

 

[Kapture]

5. Players seem to fail when being creative. The shop keeper that magically can cast spells and fight. It just alway's seemed that when I tried to have "fun" like trying to rob a bar keep, inn keep, or bank that I would alway's fail.

Basically if it was me doing something none main adventure necessary my wings were clipped like Icarus.

I love it when my PCs try to do something fun. I hate nothing more than PC's starting barfights or rob the local junk store. Dull. Dull. Dull.

 

[Chimera]

The Moral of the Story - Back during my 2e days one of our DMs (who mainly ran Shadowrun) would go out of his way to PUNISH characters for doing something the DM thought was not-so-nice. One member of our Shadowrun team was a AWoL spec-ops guy (or somesuch) who focused on Sniping. This particular Ork would on occasion tag innocents on purpose to heighten chaos during Runs. Naturally this DM thought it appropriate to haunt the characters with "Ghosts of the Past".

Ugh. I played a Shadowrun game with a long-time gamer/first time GM who pulled this kind of crap on me. I was a Physical Adept, martial artist type. A gun bunny and two shaman round out the group. We're sent on a mission to hijack a truck. We get to the guy, attack him and knock him down, injured. He then orders his truck AI to kill us. Mind you, my nasty PA is standing over him while he's laying injured on the ground. I attack, roll exceptionally well, and do enough damage to kill him.

GM asks if it was subdual/non-lethal. Nope. Are you sure? Yes. I KILL HIM. GM gets all quiet-like and begins to think bad thoughts about me (the player) as a human being.

Has my character haunted by the man's ghost. Constantly harangues me in and out of the game about how I shouldn't have killed the guy.

Dude, this is ShadowRun. We're not Lawful Good Paladins. This is grim and gritty CyberPunk and my character is a badass kung fu mercenary.

 

[Montague68]

"If the DM mentioned it, it must be important"
Almost the opposite of the previous one. The DM gives you all the pertinent information, but that is all he gives you. If you walk into "A darkened room, lit by a candelabra", the safe money says that that candle holder is in some fashion important. Forget about actual furniture or detritus cluttering the room, everything that gets mentioned is either treasure, a clue, or the activation for a hidden door.

Luckely, these mistakes seem to be done more often in new DMs. A little work usually gets them on the right path.

Your post reminded me of Chekhov's Rifle, a dramatic technique that doesn't really apply to a single room but does in an adventure or campaign. The concept comes from Anton Chekhov, a Russian playwright (no, not Mr. Chekhov from the Enterprise...) and states more or less "If a loaded rifle appears in Act One it had better fire in Act Four."

What that means is that in a play if a character, item, place, etc is introduced in Act One and then disappears offstage it needs to have a crucial role later in the play. Many novice DM's make the mistake of spending a lot of game time with NPC's that don't prominently figure in the plot, since the first advice they get is often "Make your NPC's interesting!" Or they overly describe an area that has no value to the mystery at hand but yet the PC's keep going back to it since the DM went into such detail.

 

[Wolv0rine]

Your post reminded me of Chekhov's Rifle, a dramatic technique that doesn't really apply to a single room but does in an adventure or campaign. The concept comes from Anton Chekhov, a Russian playwright (no, not Mr. Chekhov from the Enterprise...) and states more or less "If a loaded rifle appears in Act One it had better fire in Act Four."

What that means is that in a play if a character, item, place, etc is introduced in Act One and then disappears offstage it needs to have a crucial role later in the play. Many novice DM's make the mistake of spending a lot of game time with NPC's that don't prominently figure in the plot, since the first advice they get is often "Make your NPC's interesting!" Or they overly describe an area that has no value to the mystery at hand but yet the PC's keep going back to it since the DM went into such detail.

Ah yes, Mr. Chekhov, who clued us in that to leave dangling plot threads dangling is bad form.

As for the rest of the thread, most of those things I also find aggrivating, except for the DM PC. That used to bother me until I encountered a DM PC that really Was a PC that just happened to be played by the DM. The character was a fully-functional member of the group, a core member of the group, who was RPed, developed fully 3-dimensionally, made mistakes, got himself messed up a few times, the whole 9 yards.

(That character was Greg, one of the Iconic characters from Year of the Zombie, as played spot-on by the good Warlord Ralts.)

Now, to actually Add something, a DM practice that makes me want to break out the pimp-slapping gloves is the "My world is the shiz-natz, you're just a PC trying to get a nut" attitude. This guy is so hopped up on the uber-coolness of his world, his NPCs, and his dungeon that if you manage to mess something up, beat one of the NPCs, slice through the adventure because it just wasn't really that bad, or whatever... the DM will treat you like you just sodomized his dog or something. I've seen guys like this actually call the game and refuse to run any further because the group didn't play by what he expected it should have gone.
It's so much worse when it's the only game in town, and he's the DM because no one else wants the job.

 

[Dagger75]

Dagger75 seemed to be talking about this in the same genre. His quote was "Didn't this wizard hire us in the last game you ran." I really don't see why this is bad. In fact, I find it better to do this if I am running games that have a shared world because it helps increase the sense of verisimilitude and helps the players connect to the setting. Plus it offers a unique way to display more than one side of a complicated character. The kind (but Lawful Neutral with tendencies both ways, though she views herself as Lawful Good and pragmatic) benefactor of one PC is the puppetmaster pulling the strings in another game, and she hired a Rogue PC's mentor from a third game to pull off the heist for her.

Maybe its not bad per se but I had a wizard who I made way back in 1st Edition. He started in Dragonlance game. Asked the Pc's to do stuff. Game ended.
I used the Same NPC excpet changed him from Red Robe Wizard to a normal wizard, also hired the party to do stuff. After that game ended I used him in a Planescape game, this time he was looking for godhood and had the party searching for stuff to help him achieve it. That game never really ended.
Finally he appears in 3ed and a few of the players rolled thier eyes at seeing this guy again. So I amtrying not reuse them. I used a few of the same cities and at least the players knows Entmintal has the Wizard academy in it, like the last 3 games it was in.

This was just one of MY pet peeves, that doesn't mean its wrong.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

But it's not about riding off with them. Horses are expensive items, and unlike magic items, there are a lot of people in the world who want them. They're probably almost as liquid a commodity as gold and gems.

Maybe my games were just different. PCs didn't go around looting dungeons. An adventure such as "let's go raid that dungeon for loot" never happened. Loot was just a reward as part of the adventure, which was about taking down the NPCs and saving the village/kindgom/etc. Getting stuff was just a side reward. (It was necessary strictly for the purposes of game balance. For my Modern campaign, where wealth and balance have nothing to do with each other, wealth rewards for adventuring have to be quite low.)

Same for the NPCs. They weren't "adventuring" for the purposes of gaining loot. If they gained loot, good, but they weren't going to hose themselves for the purposes of gaining loot. If they're getting paid, it's probably through a contract or because they're employees of a villalin.

So yeah, they know a horse is worth a lot of cash, but they're too busy trying to defeat the PCs in order to appease their deities, their superiors, to worry too much about that kind of financial gain. If they needed horses, they probably stole them from easier targets, too. Unless they're bandits, in which case they have no reason for attacking the PCs other than taking their loot or horses and would obviously try to preserve them.

For most NPCs it is not a fundamentally different decision than whether to Sunder a weapon or not.

So you can guess my stance on NPCs using Sunder, right? Honestly, the only reason they almost never used that tactic was for a purely metagame reason - I didn't want to break my PCs' weapons because that causes all kinds of annoying balance issues. Certainly any NPC with Improved Sunder should use that tactic - I just didn't make them because of the balance issues. In Modern, it's not an issue as long as you follow the mastercraft guidelines (things about +1 are plenty rare). Replacing your weapon is easy, and you can get one of equal quality off your opponent's dead body, so sundering suddenly becomes a viable in-campaign option.

Even the first time was patently foolish. The dragon skeleton in the SRD has 19 Hit Dice and is CR 8. Assuming the Paladin is level 8, making this battle a routine and easy encounter (which it seems it was not), the Paladin would turn as a level 5 Cleric, meaning if he got a really lucky roll that totalled 22 or higher he could turn a 9 HD opponent.

Even if I ignore the metagaming, the turn undead rules don't work. That was a wonderful example of why they don't.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Maybe my games were just different. PCs didn't go around looting dungeons. An adventure such as "let's go raid that dungeon for loot" never happened. Loot was just a reward as part of the adventure, which was about taking down the NPCs and saving the village/kindgom/etc. Getting stuff was just a side reward. (It was necessary strictly for the purposes of game balance. For my Modern campaign, where wealth and balance have nothing to do with each other, wealth rewards for adventuring have to be quite low.)

Same for the NPCs. They weren't "adventuring" for the purposes of gaining loot. If they gained loot, good, but they weren't going to hose themselves for the purposes of gaining loot. If they're getting paid, it's probably through a contract or because they're employees of a villalin.

So yeah, they know a horse is worth a lot of cash, but they're too busy trying to defeat the PCs in order to appease their deities, their superiors, to worry too much about that kind of financial gain. If they needed horses, they probably stole them from easier targets, too. Unless they're bandits, in which case they have no reason for attacking the PCs other than taking their loot or horses and would obviously try to preserve them.

That's a difference, then. I don't assume that all NPC opponents work for the BBEG. My PCs run into bandits in the forest, orcs out on patrol, goblins trying to kill the orcs lairing nearby that make the mistake of thinking the PCs might be allies if they go over to their camp and talk to them en masse, etc. Not everyone who meets the PCs immediately susses them up and pegs them as Level X. Lots of NPCs underestimate their opponents for the first round or two....and sometimes that's all there is.

In the aforementioned goblin encounter, one of the PCs rode a stag animal cohort and tricked out riding feats and the Ride skill to be very effective doing so. At first, when things went sour, the goblins focused on the PC. After a couple of rounds, though, they were working pretty hard (and without success) to bring down that stag. A few rounds later, they were working pretty hard (and mostly without success) at Running Away.

It wasn't that my PCs refuse to talk to things, either. They've become quite chummy with orcs, and not so long ago used their cure spells on an orc NPC rather than their wounded PCs because they quite liked the fellow (my orcs are LE or sometimes LN, in general...a once-honorable that is slowly being turned toward NE and CE by addiction to a drug, zurgash, made from a fungus grown on the bones of their ancestors).

RC

 

[d20Dwarf]

Hey, that's my girl!
Due to the DM's practice at roleplaying high charisma NPC's; he excels at whooing both men & women outside of the game. I have lost many girlfriends to smooth talking DM's when he gets into his Aasimar Bard persona at a party.

This might be the funniest thing ever posted to a message board.