Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
OK it feels like someone in a position of extreme power taking advantage of someone else in such a way that they degrade the target in an extreme and tangible way.... damn long sentence. that way
DM versus Players
- Thread starter pawsplay
- Start date
OK it feels like someone in a position of extreme power taking advantage of someone else in such a way that they degrade the target in an extreme and tangible way.... damn long sentence. that way
rogueattorney
Adventurer
I don't understand this attitude at all.
A threat is put in front of the party. The party engages or doesn't. The party succeeds in the engagement or doesn't. The party lives with the consequences of their actions. Am I, as DM, not supposed to put challenges in front of the party? Are all challenges to be illusory, with no real threat to the characters? Is it my job as DM to keep the pcs healthy and whole?
I don't, as DM, just start subtracting levels from the pc. First the pc has to get close enough to be hit, then I have to roll a to hit against his AC. I mean it's not like Sanctuary or successful attempt at turning by a cleric or, in many cases, Protection from Evil completely prevents level drain from happening.
If the DM is attacking first level characters with vampires, that's a DM prolem not a system problem. If the DM is railroading the players into a scenario where the only way they can succeed is engaging a level draining creature in melee combat, again, that's a DM problem, not a system problem.
The pcs I dm'ed always ran away from level draining creatures. Therefore, as a mechanic, I thought it did exactly what it was intended to do, and actually worked nicer than, for example, a CoC-esque sanity check where I had to tell the players that their pcs were scared.
Level drain as loss of identity? I just don't get it. Gobtharb the Mighty is level drained from 15th to 1st level. He still saved the princess, defeated the dragon, overthrew the dark lord, and did all the other things that took him from 1st level to 15th in the first place. He still has his friends, retainers, wealth, land holdings, army, magic weapons, and fame.
I think that's a key point, how proximate is necessary varying among individuals. At an extreme, some people will accept nothing but repeatedly informed, absolutely understood, certain suicide. For them, "misfortune" simply should not depend on dice -- and no amount of fiddling with the probabilities is going to change that.Cadfan said:
Among those more moderate, I think it quite reasonable to reflect on how much actual player-choice there is. The usual situation these days seems to me far from that for which (for instance) the original D&D rules were designed. One is pretty naturally likely to have ingrained habits -- in responses to events as much as in anything else -- adapted to the kind of campaign to which one has long been accustomed.
Breaking such habits of mind even when reason shows that one is in a different milieu can be hard. (My "old school" ways as a player certainly stood out in my first 4e sessions. Imagine actually fearing a wrathful ghost, ha ha!)
Last edited:
Betote
First Post
But if there are different ways of dealing with that situation (or it is a completely optional one) and the player chooses the one where he needs that 12, in what amount is that the DM's responsibility?
If you put a knife on a table and some dude stabs himself to death with it, I don't see how that would be your fault (providing that said suicidal dude is an adult, of course
)That's why these are always tough. Barring an absolute railroad, the players and the DM both did something that led to the final situation. Its particularly hard to recreate these things on the internet, especially with one sided self reporting from one party in the scenario.But if there are different ways of dealing with that situation (or it is a completely optional one) and the player chooses the one where he needs that 12, in what amount is that the DM's responsibility?
If you put a knife on a table and some dude stabs himself to death with it, I don't see how that would be your fault (providing that said suicidal dude is an adult, of course
But there are quite a lot of ways for the player to end up in a situation where the player "chooses" to engage the scenario, but the DM was really responsible. Maybe the DM didn't clearly communicate the player's alternatives. Maybe the DM didn't clearly communicate the risk. Maybe the DM created a situation where the player had to choose between betraying the character's personality and risking the character's death. This just begins to cover the possibilities.
Of course, maybe the players engaged in a long term, eyes open, considered course of action that inevitably led to this outcome. Hard to ever know from the internet.
But my general assumption is that players don't want their characters to die, and will act to the best of their ability to avoid situations where one toss of a die will decide their character's fate, unless the alternative is even worse for them as a player (being untrue to a character can fall into that category). My general assumption about DMs is that they do their best as well, but that as they are the primary source of information and the ones holding the most power to determine the degree to which player expectations are satisfied, that they have a more difficult, tougher task, and that failures in communication usually start with them since they're both the source of most of the communication and the arbiter of whether they themselves did a good job. Its easy to start excusing yourself because you were completely clear in your own mind, and because you, with your god-vision, knew of the ways the unpleasant gaming scenario could have been avoided. But that's a bad road to travel.
My general assumption that players try their best with what they have, and that DMs should carefully watch themselves for what is essentially a conflict of interest, tends to color my reading of threads on these topics. Other people have other assumptions, as you'll see even in this thread. Other people approach these threads looking for players with a "sense of entitlement" who... whatever. Its not an opinion I share and I don't think highly of it. But it does explain some of how these threads go. Different outlooks on RPGs, and on people.
DrunkonDuty
he/him
At the end of the day the GM has infinite resources to throw at the PCs. And I'm very much of the camp that the GM should have this power, thereby allowing them to present interesting challenges to the PCs. That way lies fun. But it does rely on a GM who realises that they should be creating fun situations, not indulging in some sad power trip. And sometimes the GM has to use all their ingenuity to stop the PCs from killing themselves. (Player: "The castle alarm is ringing loudly and the army inside is running to arms? Charge the castle!" Me: "WTF?")
If someone finds themselves in a group with a sad, power tripping GM talk to the other parties. Try and sort it out. And if you can't, well maybe time to move on. After all the GM does not have Extreme Power over the players, you can always change the situation.
Just a quick question: what is this Nintendo Hard/False thing? (I'm not a computer gamer.)
If someone finds themselves in a group with a sad, power tripping GM talk to the other parties. Try and sort it out. And if you can't, well maybe time to move on. After all the GM does not have Extreme Power over the players, you can always change the situation.
Just a quick question: what is this Nintendo Hard/False thing? (I'm not a computer gamer.)
Fake Difficulty - Television Tropes & Idioms
In short, if something is difficult because you need to come up with a good plan or else your character dies, that's real difficulty. If something is difficult because you need to roll a 14 or better several times in a row no matter what decisions you make, or because you don't get the information that would have made smart decisions easy until after you're irrevocably committed (or dead), or for any other number of reasons that don't really involve you being challenged, that's fake difficulty.
Fake difficulty can still lead to a sense of risk. A slot machine is fake difficulty. You put in the money, pull the lever, and find out what happens. There's still tension because you've got something personally invested in the outcome, and you don't know what it is. But its not "difficulty," its just random chance.
Some people feel that older school "roll X to not die" gameplay is fake difficulty. While I tend to agree, honesty compels me to note that this is a continuum. There are a lot of possibilities between walking around the corner and coming face to face with a save vs petrification, and a long, involved wargame like tactical scenario in which bad outcomes slowly encroach on the players, and the players have multiple opportunities to intelligently respond.
Some complaints -- such as against the very existence of level drain -- are simply Player Versus Game. Something simply IS (or at least [/i]was[/i], before WotC confused us twice over) Dungeons & Dragons -- or RuneQuest, or Traveller or what have you. It was designed to be like that, for people who want to play that game. If you know that going in, and your issue is with some "house" rule, then you can complain -- once -- about the GM's failure to inform you.
If you don't enjoy playing that game, then do everyone a favor and leave the people who do enjoy it to have their fun. You are free to GM your own game your own way.
In some games, such as traditional D&D, the GM is doing his or her job by including and adjudicating impartially such elements as random encounters and sudden character death or other inconvenience. It's no more a personal opposition than in the case of what designers put into computer games.
For that matter, it should not be a personal matter when an opponent crushes you in a board game. Learning to distance one's ego appropriately is one of the lessons to learn even from such childish exercises as Snakes & Ladders (which is completely a matter of chance, so that one can rationally take no credit at all for victory or defeat).
If you don't enjoy playing that game, then do everyone a favor and leave the people who do enjoy it to have their fun. You are free to GM your own game your own way.
In some games, such as traditional D&D, the GM is doing his or her job by including and adjudicating impartially such elements as random encounters and sudden character death or other inconvenience. It's no more a personal opposition than in the case of what designers put into computer games.
For that matter, it should not be a personal matter when an opponent crushes you in a board game. Learning to distance one's ego appropriately is one of the lessons to learn even from such childish exercises as Snakes & Ladders (which is completely a matter of chance, so that one can rationally take no credit at all for victory or defeat).
I see; 4e "skill challenges" look like that to me.
But the "new school" variety is not? The alternatives are:
(a) "Don't roll; go straight to dying" (common in the ToH), and
(b) "You can't die. Well, unless you want to."
What's skipped over is how a player gets to that point. There's a real problem with assessments of fairness by players who do not want to exercise strategy, have been trained not to exercise strategy, and thus have no skill at recognizing strategy even if they were inclined to practice it.
A bad DM might create a situation in which it's just random chance to avoid "walking around the corner and coming face to face with a save vs petrification". There are untalented novices -- and people who never learn -- in that department as well as in character-playing! Why should it be otherwise?
On the other hand, unskilled players are very likely to be dead wrong in so characterizing the situation as actually set up by a skilled DM. Players whose actual game experience is in line with the levels of their characters may take but a moment to point out some of the many precautions the neglecting of which is a lesson to learn in the "school of hard knocks".
