aboyd
Explorer
For what it's worth, D&D 3.5 edition has at least 1 feat that give you bonuses for collecting ears or teeth. So it's difficult to break people of the desire to do it when the game rules foster it. It doesn't sound like your players were familiar with that feat, though.It is taking ears and or teeth off the most resent encounter. Typically its goblins or it can be wolf pelts. Pretty much this lasts for a game or 2, then the novelity wears off. It is pretty much a give away its the player's first D&D game, so I don't give them that hard of a time about it.
Yeah, I experienced this as a DM. The player was a 300 pound virgin. At least he backed up the character concept using game mechanics -- maxed out Charisma & Diplomacy. So if he legitimately got an amazing roll that would change the disposition of an NPC, I'd usually roll with it. However, the player had a very difficult time understanding that some things couldn't be changed even with an amazing roll. A guard might look the other way for something plausible, but the odds that he would abandon his post & lose his job because a pretty girl told him to? No, sorry. Likewise, convincing a vampire to cease combat and enter into a dialogue, maybe works... but convincing said vampire to allow the cleric to immolate it? No.One of my biggest character pet peeves is the "slutty rogue" often played by the nerdiest guy in the room. The assumption being that the character can saunter up to any NPC and seduce or charm needed information/action out of them at all times (with no rolls involved).
This utterly perplexed the guy playing the pretty female character. I even tried to put it into real world terms for him: "If a pretty woman asked you to rob a bank for her, would you?" No, he says. "If a pretty woman asked you to stand still so I could disembowel you, would you?" No, he says. "So why do you think being pretty in D&D is different?"
He still wasn't getting it, and replied, "But my PC is really hot."
*sigh*
I've experienced similar. I had a house rules post on the forum for my game. If you printed the post, it was about 1 printed page of bulleted house rules. Almost nobody read it, and of those who did, they insisted that it was too much to remember. I sorta looked at them incredulously and said, "So you remember the book and page number that skill tricks are on, but you can't handle a single page of house rules? Really?"I don't know what it is, but most of the people I play with can easily recall or whip out some obscure rule or similar, proving they read the literature in depth, but when I give them a one page primer for a campaign which clearly spells out what kind characters not to make they show up with that very thing and look at me like, "wha?".
Over the last few years, I've ended up rewording most of my house rules to work as benefits that only work if the player speaks up. So that if players whine that the house rules are too extensive, I just shrug. Then they get surprised when other players take advantage and have a better time of things. If players can't handle reading a single page after going through 2000 pages of game books, their loss.