DM Schticks That Grind Your Gears

[jester47]

The backstory so you can get at the players is messed up. I like my players to have relatives that come looking for them when they don't come home. I think a lot of the witholding information and impossible riddles and such is DM Ego. I am regretfully guilty of the 300 rolls to climb down the cliff syndrome. I had not yet developed abstraction and granularity concepts.

 

[jester47]

I firmly believe that if you have put somthing in the game that is essential to move forward you should have a way of getting it done without havig to withold it. If its a riddle, and the players don't know the answer, tell it to them and roll to see what character solves it. If its important information, and no one has rolled high enough on Gather info, give the info to the person that rolled the highest. Eventually you are going to run out of ways to give them the info with the dice, so if they are not getting the info, just give it to them.

 

[Montague68]

Here's one that I'm sorta reluctant to include because I'm not sure how common this is. One of my DM's from my early gaming days (who was a fan of the Incredibly Convoluted Mystery) I felt was guilty of this but I had no real proof, just a very strong suspicion.

The Story Does Not Remain The Same

For once you've solved the Incredibly Convoluted Mystery early. You've taken studious notes, connected the dots, and a scenario that makes sense has arisen. The party plans out a strategy, executes the plan... and fails utterly because all the underlying assumptions have shifted 180 degrees. Once the party finds out The Real Truth (tm), they find it is something that is completely different than the clues suggested in the early portion of the game and there was no way in retrospect that the party could have figured it out. In short, it looks suspiciously as if the DM has changed the mystery instead of allowing the PC's to uncover the secret.

 

[jester47]

Yeah, I've seen that one. Did it a couple of times in fact. What I think causes that is that the DM feels that since the players figured it out he must not be smarter than them, and so fears that his players will have found him out and replace him. The thing he does not realise is that few people actually want to DM.

Here's one:

The "How the Party Meets" adventure at the start of the campaign. The DM solos with each player up until they all come to the same physical space. While he's tooling with each player, everyone else is bored and fidgeting. I find this really annoying.

I prefer to have the players state how the characters make their living when not adventureing and what their relationship is to the other players. This allows you to get started pretty quickly.

 

[Agent Oracle]

horses will inevitably get killed by Fireballs ...

In the former, the GM flat out told us that, if we use horses, don't make them attack. (We were low level, so horses could match us in terms of combat ability.) Otherwise they'll get shot or eaten. He kept his word that he wouldn't kill them if we didn't attack. We didn't have them attack, and they didn't die. Something similar in Modern, but not quite so heavy-handed.

I can understand that kind of a deal, but when playing in Faerun with the saddleborn background feat, as a Knight with the Mounted Combat bonus feat on top of that, nothing like putting max ranks in Ride and being able to take two seperate checks to change the horse's AC per turn to help the horse survive.

Also, a former GM actually had one-hit-kill cannons being carried by ogres. to kill off horses. He rolled a scatter die instead of damage

 

[Raven Crowking]

I can understand that kind of a deal, but when playing in Faerun with the saddleborn background feat, as a Knight with the Mounted Combat bonus feat on top of that, nothing like putting max ranks in Ride and being able to take two seperate checks to change the horse's AC per turn to help the horse survive.

Also, a former GM actually had one-hit-kill cannons being carried by ogres. to kill off horses. He rolled a scatter die instead of damage

There are times when horses should be targetted. First off, lots of unintelligent animals will target horses more often than riders (think mountain lions here). That's a good time for your Mounted Combat feat to kick in.

Secondly, sometimes it makes sense to target a horse. If an NPC was making mincemeat out of the PCs due to high mobility (i.e., a horse), and the PCs were having trouble hitting the NPC, what would they target? You bet your sweet beans that intelligent NPCs would come to the same conclusion.

Of course, sometimes PCs cry out "Don't hurt the horses!" because they want them for themselves, either to ride or for trade value. NPCs should make the same kinds of decisions.

RC

 

[Set]

Two weeks later you're enjoying yourself when RAWRBLAM!!! a Super-Duper BBEG from out of nowhere utterly destroys the entire region. Your background and knowledge of the local region are now completely worthless as the entire game devolves into chasing after the BBEG, never stopping long enough in one place to actually portray your character in any meaningful sense.

This describes just about every Vampire or Werewolf game I've been in. *Always* sold as being political and thoughtful and 'an exploration of the lupine's spiritual nature' and blah-blah-blah, and often by the end of the first session, degenerated into maxed out Celerity and Fortitude with dual pump-action flame-thrower spouting modified shotguns.

So. Much. Hate.

I argue that Werewolf in particular is for combat-twinks and psychopaths, and I get beaten about the head and shoulders that 'oh no, it's deeply spiritual, and blah-blah-blah' and I fall for it and join their game to find out that it's a blood-soaked carnage-fest that makes Doom II look like Casablanca, by comparison.

I will *happily* play a Freak Legion-style splatterpunk orgy of destruction. Just tell before I write up a Toreador art teacher or Stargazer philosopher-priest... (Honestly? I kinda prefer the carnage-fests, but only when I've got a twinked out Brujah or Get of Fenris Ahroun or something!)

The Grinder
Encounters end up dropping at least one party member to unconsciousness and everyone else almost out of spells and low on hit points, so after each and every encounter you have to rest. This also result in The Rocket when characters go up a level after each session (usually only 3 or 4 encounters) due to the high CRs of the opponents.

Oh, my exact experience in World's Largest Dungeon. EVERY single encounter leaves us dying, and in some cases, dead. We get up, we enter a room, we fight, and less than five minutes later, we need to sleep for eight hours to get our spells back and often need to spend several days recouping lost Attribute points from all the darn poisons and blood drains (Six seperate Stirge encounters at 1st and 2nd level and no Restoration spells means a lot of downtime.)

No exagerration, we've been in the dungeon for three days, and we've slept so that the Cleric can regain spells *eight times*... (Yes, that's right, in three days of dungeon-delving, we've spent eight whole hours actually AWAKE.)

Yes, a desperate bleeding edge barely-pulled-it-out encounter can be a great climax. But really, I like some foreplay before my climax.

 

[GandhitheBFG]

Only two things, really.

A. DM's that don't describe things properly, and then attack you with them.

B. DM's that use D&D dragons as slavering monsters. All the time. Unless they're silver. It makes them easier to kill, and I'm all for Reign of Fire-esque dragons in certain games, but in D&D, they're fiendishly intelligent (generally) sentient beings. They should act like it.

C. DM's that don't use tactics. Ever. Similar to the above.

Three things. Just three.

Though I've only ever really gamed consistently with one DM, and it's still pretty fun. Just a few minor niggles, really.

 

[tonym]

Maybe, he was in the bushes with you!

Gah! If figurines had been used, I'd have known he was in the bushes!! haha

Man, it was like that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the two soldiers are guarding the entrance to the castle and they see Lancelot running towards them in the distance. He is far, far away. Very far. I'm talking far. Them BAM! He's right there, sticking his sword in one guard's spleen!

Oh! One more complaint. This mini-shunning DM never let my PC overtake any NPC that was fleeing!

Once my PC was going to attack a guy in a bedroom of a tavern. Before I could close the distance and stab him, he runs to the window, throws open the window, casts a spell and turns into a bird, then flies away. My PC pulls out his bow to shoot him, but the bird is out of range. How big was that dang room?! There wasn't a map or minis, so who knows?

If the situation was reversed, I would've been stabbed as I crossed the room, stabbed as I opened the window, stabbed as I cast the spell, stabbed as I flew away, and then shot with twenty arrows before I flew out of range.

So, yeh, I abominate the DM shtick in a mini-shunning campaign where the DM decides all PCs are slow and all enemies are fast. I guess DMs who do that think it makes the game more cinematic or some crap, but I don't like it.

Tony M

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I can understand that kind of a deal, but when playing in Faerun with the saddleborn background feat, as a Knight with the Mounted Combat bonus feat on top of that, nothing like putting max ranks in Ride and being able to take two seperate checks to change the horse's AC per turn to help the horse survive.

Also, a former GM actually had one-hit-kill cannons being carried by ogres. to kill off horses. He rolled a scatter die instead of damage

Eventually the horse just dies, though (someone is going to hit unless the knight has a +10 Ride bonus item), unless he's using some option to make horses not suck, like Wild Cohort. And even then, does he really need to waste time having the horse attack? It'll probably miss, and it's damage value is pretty lame, too.

(If a mount has Wild Cohort, now the GM can target it because it's not going to die so easy, and so it doesn't look like the player's horse is being picked on. Still, I don't want to turn a mount into another character. This goes doubly at lower levels when a warhorse might actually outfight some of the PCs. Shouldn't they be taking away XP or something?)

In any event, fewer horses means fewer map problems. Since I'm not running DnD anymore, I don't need to deal with 90 foot monks zipping all over the place

Of course, sometimes PCs cry out "Don't hurt the horses!" because they want them for themselves, either to ride or for trade value. NPCs should make the same kinds of decisions.

When feasible. The NPC shouldn't hold back on dishing out Fireballs unless they've got some equally nasty way of defeating the PCs without hurting the horses. Unless the NPCs are bandits, of course.

B. DM's that use D&D dragons as slavering monsters. All the time. Unless they're silver. It makes them easier to kill, and I'm all for Reign of Fire-esque dragons in certain games, but in D&D, they're fiendishly intelligent (generally) sentient beings. They should act like it.

There are DMs who don't like the way DnD dragons are presented.