DM's What won't your players do?

[jollyninja]

show any ammount of restraint in the face of a diety. the paladin said "well you know what, i'm kind of drunk right now, come see me tomorrow." to his diety after an adventure left him without his paladinhood. they attack the central villian who recently attained minor diety status every time they see him.

 

[the Jester]

I found out last Sunday that they won't strip at the table.

Mine have.

 

[S'mon]

My players won't have their PCs enter any towns.

Of course this is a Midnight game and all the towns are occupied and heavily garrisoned by orcs.

You could have added

"Negotiate with Orcs threatening to CDG the important NPC"

 

[Steverooo]

I have a PC who absolutely refuses to join with anyone met along the road, for "safety in numbers". Both times he has done this, he has been transported elsewhere, and attacked by the Half-Orc party member (a different one, in each case). If he meets someone along the road, he will refuse to join up with them, and even go so far as to leave the road altogether, if they press the issue.

 

[StalkingBlue]

You could have added

"Negotiate with Orcs threatening to CDG the important NPC"

I might have if I'd thought that you thought she was the important one.

 

[Nasma]

Give up on something that obviously isn't working.

One time, the party were trying to capture the leader of a group of bandits. So they shoot the sentry with a crossbow, but he doesn't quite die, and manages to yell to the rest of the camp that they are being attacked, he is then killed.

Rather than realise that the alarm had been raised, one of the character tries to pick up the bloodied body of the sentry, move his arms and legs around from behind in an attempt to make him look alive while yelling "just tricking". Now while it might seem obvious to anyone that the dead, bleeding body having its arms waved around would not fool anyone, i gave him a generous bluff check, which he failed.

The next step astounded me.

He then said, attempting to impersonate the sentry,
"look at this guy i've killed, I can make it look like he's alive"

 

[Eye Tyrant]

My players (well, some of them) won't learn the rules.

Every session:
Them: How do I figure my grapple bonus? Me: Base attack plus strength. Write it down!

Me: You cast charm person on the orc. What's the DC? Them: How do you calculate that again?

Them: You add your strength bonus to damage, right? Me: (thinking) How many times do I have to tell you?

*sigh*

Ozmar the Long-Suffering DM

Same here... lazy bastards!

It's pretty tiresome too... especially when there is another copy of the PHB right in front of them.

Oh yeah, that's another thing. Not only are they lazy bastards, but they're cheap bastards too. They refuse, with the exception of that one extra PHB, to buy anything other then dice (and it's a surprise when they do that).

 

[jmucchiello]

In our group, it's horses. Nobody will put down gold for a horse since we know whatever dungeon we end up heading toward, the horses are going to end up either dead or cut loose. (A habit one of the DMs had all through our 2e days.)

So if a patron wants use to ride somewhere, he pays for the horses and gets us new mounts whenever we need them no questions asked or the deal's off.

 

[Creamsteak]

Damn that's funny (referring to Nasma's post). All those movies and cartoons where someone uses a corpse... and your players think to "impersonate the impersonation..." That's awesome.

My players never buy mounts, never waste time searching for anything, and every last one of them likes to be the center of attention resulting in some sessions bogging down to each player having their own "turn" for 10 minutes straight till the four hours of time have passed.

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

We never take prisoners; basically, any of our opponents have to die or run away before we kill them, because they have no other choice.

Like with jmucchiello's group and horses, it's just something we were trained to do by prior GMs. It was very effective aversion therapy: any time we tried to keep an enemy captive, we got screwed over thoroughly.

It was even worse if we tried to interrogate them. Immediately upon being captured, all enemies would turn into smug little bastards who knew the answer to every question we asked but could never under any circumstances be compelled to reveal anything. It didn't matter if he was the most weasely, cowardly little dope to ever face us, as soon as he was stripped of his weapons, tied up securely, and was totally defenseless, suddenly he was an iron-willed tower of strength. Silent and resolute, he could withstand anything, until such time as he could make an amazing and completely unpreventable escape or until someone in the party just killed him. Hours of game time could be devoured by that crap, and nothing would ever come of any of it.

The same GM used to run cop games, and we'd get the same effect with punks we arrested. On the streets, they'd shake and beg and plead and respect our authoritay, but if you actually arrested any of them and took them back to the station they would suddenly be completely calm and have an unshakeable defense strategy at the ready. Eventually we started taunting criminals into violence just so we'd have an excuse to shoot to kill.


And the sad thing is, I think that GM has improved since then. He's no longer so fixated on having all his NPCs be in complete command of every situation. He's willing to have some of them be weak-willed losers who are capable of failure. But it's too late for us, because he did such an excellent job of training us to expect the opposite. So now we will never take prisoners, and will never expect interrogation to provide us with even marginally useful information.

We weren't born ruthless, vicious killers. We were made that way.

--
i blame society
ryan