Free Will and Story

[Majoru Oakheart]

But in your scenario, in any even, it is another player who has done this, not the GM (unless I misunderstood who did what). There are abilities in 4e that permit this - for instance, the 22nd paladin utility "Gift of Life", as written, doesn't have a "PC consent" clause to it. Again, this strikes me as a "social contract" issue: if the player doesn't want his/her PC resurrected, why is the other player nevertheless doing so?

Yes, it was another player. Though, she was given godlike power and then told "The only thing you're allowed to do with them is bring your friends back to life" I gather she couldn't really tell if they were joking or not about not wanting to be brought back to life since they were overdoing the roleplaying on "We hate all gods now, since we were killed by one. We refuse to accept gifts from gods. How do we even know you're our former party member and not Misha pretending to be her? We're going to tell everyone in the afterlife how big of a jerk you are."

I think she was just tired of hearing them complain and realized we were now in the middle of a battle with a powerful demon with over half the group dead(or an incorporeal being of infinite power who wasn't allowed to use it). So, she didn't want to see the rest of the party die in combat, so she brought them back to help.

I'm personally not the biggest fan of this sort of "plot device" - what exactly is it meant to add to the play of the game?

Well, I think it just followed naturally out of the storyline. There was a machine that turned people into gods. She activated it....so she became a god. Though, she didn't realize she was activating it. Plus another god had sworn us all not to touch it or use it. She forgot about the promise since it was so many months ago in real time.

 

[sheadunne]

I think that's pretty contentious. I wouldn't want to play with a GM who took this view.

Agreed.

 

[Starfox]

Sorry to say, I feel this is an edition issue more than anything. Editions and rules expectations. Different editions are good for different things, and 4E doesn't seem to be suited to this campaign. This is not a fault with 4E (I am NOT edition-bashing), it is just a bad match what what the DM wanted to do. A motivation-centered game like FATE might have been a better fit.

* Overall, 4E is the most "fair" or "boardgamey" issue of DnD ever. It is about even power between DM and players and about rules that cover every situation and requires little "DM as arbiter" play. The DM is one player among many, the guy who controls the monsters and sets the scene. It is not really suitable for a storytelling DM who takes the "allmighty" approach.

* And even gods in 4E fit in the 30 level scale (with maybe a few extra levels on top just for them) - the STANDARD adventure path from Dungeon featured the death of a major deity at the pcs hands. Misha as a god drained of power should be a level 25-somthing solo in 4E. Of course, if you all were level 13, that still means you would be defeated by her - but NEVER in one round in the 4E paradigm. Nobody except a minion ever dies in 1 round.

* The fact that 150 hp PC damage != (does not equal) 150 hp monster damage is not an easy thing to wrap your mind around unless you are deep into rules.

So, Jim is expecting 4E play, while the DM is running a storytelling game where rules are there for standard situations - when the story comes around rules no longer matter. There is a mismatch of expectations. Neither is at fault.

As for resurrecting a PC without consent, no, I'd not do that. I could return him as an undead/demonic mockery of himself, but in this case it really is not the PC at all - it just looks like it is. If the player doesn't want their PC to return, it should not truly return. of course, with the player so miffed, he DID come back as a mockery of his former self, at least in motivation...

The other questions about infinite power - yes. Especially at the end of a campaign a DM can do anything at all to the setting and to the characters' powers (but not to their personalities, see above). I've run campaigns where I blew up the world in the last session, no sweat. But it would have been a lot more interesting to present it to you as an option - a boon only one of you could get. Five heroes, only one get to be a god. Do you fight for it? Intrigue? Backstab? Vote? Reach a consensus? All back away from it? That would be interesting. Now it was essentially random (who touched the gem first) and not a role-playing decision. A story opportunity lost. But then, as the situation was with the miffed dead players, I can see how the DM wanted to gloss that over and get to the "happy ever after" part (even if that subsequently failed).

 

[Ahnehnois]

I ran several sessions where one PC was a full-fledged deity and the others were not. It went fine. There's no rule that says you can't do that.

I've also had times where much smaller issues than that did cause disagreements.

Conclusions: context matters, and the players and the DM need to be on the same page.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I think your DM can definitely improve. The desire to DM is clearly there, he either needs to learn the rules a bit better, or, if that's not something he can manage, use a more rules-lite system than 4e. His other problem is that he's too railroady - he seems to often push the players towards a particular course of action, such as running from the zombies, or the warlock-god being directed to raise the other PCs from the dead.

Jim is probably unsaveable by this stage, given that you've been gaming with him for 20 years. He just seems awful!

 

[Doug McCrae]

* Overall, 4E is the most "fair" or "boardgamey" issue of DnD ever. It is about even power between DM and players and about rules that cover every situation and requires little "DM as arbiter" play.

Don't the rules of 3e cover more aspects of the game-world than those of 4e? In 3e a player like Jim could object if a hamlet has NPCs of levels and classes not in accordance with the settlement generation tables in the DMG. Whereas he couldn't do that in 4e as it lacks such rules.

However you're right that 4e is the most boardgamey. The rules support battlegrid gamism more strongly than any other edition imo, so it seems a bit strange to run 4e, and not to use the combat balance advice and combat rules.

 

[Starfox]

I do see your point. IMO, the NPCs of levels and classes of a settlement is a recommended setting, not a rule. But views on that may vary.

Anyway, I wasn't really talking about the difference between editions, but the mismatch between rules set and the DM's expectations. This could happen in any system.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Which finally leads me to my questions: Should the DM have the ability to bring people back to life without their permission?

Yes, of course. The DM is all-powerful by definition. Whether it's wise to execute this power is an entirely different question.

Should the DM be allowed to give infinite power to a player as a plot device for the last hour of a campaign?

Again: yes, of course. The keyword here is "last hour of the campaign". Making a player all-powerful in this situation is a cool move, doingt it at any other time would bee stupid.

Should gods be all powerful or are they limited to a few interesting tricks?

If the GM says so...

You describe a very creative campaign with lots of twists and turns. It culminated in a ritual of ascension to godhood. The PCs foiled the ritual which, in itself, is reason enough to have some strange things happen. A toe-to-toe fight against a godlike being at the end of this would have been a big dissapointment in my eyes.

Judging by your story there seems to be a big difference in expectations between the GM and your friend. I don't need to take sides in order to predict that those two guys don't mesh now and won't mesh in the future.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Sorry to say, I feel this is an edition issue more than anything. Editions and rules expectations. Different editions are good for different things, and 4E doesn't seem to be suited to this campaign. This is not a fault with 4E (I am NOT edition-bashing), it is just a bad match what what the DM wanted to do. A motivation-centered game like FATE might have been a better fit.

Yes, our DM is aware of that now. He started playing with our group and had never played any edition except 4e. So, that's what he started using. However, since the beginning of his campaign the D&D Next rules came out and we've been running playtests on a weekly basis along side his campaign. He plans on starting another one in a month with D&D Next as a basis, since he's convinced it's far enough along to use it.

So, Jim is expecting 4E play, while the DM is running a storytelling game where rules are there for standard situations - when the story comes around rules no longer matter. There is a mismatch of expectations. Neither is at fault.

Yeah, and I'd agree with you entirely except that I was the one who got to listen to him complain for an hour after the game about how he had wasted a year and a half playing that game and that the ending was just as horrible as the rest of it....when, despite the problems with rules, I really enjoyed the campaign and it felt like a fresh change from our standard games. Jim has been in all of them and the rest of our old friends are similarly rules lawyers. It normally becomes a rules fest...constantly discussing the minutia of the rules rather than actually playing.

Our 3e games often resembled this:

DM: "He moves over here."
Player 1: "I get an AOO, he moved away from me."
DM: "Oh..right...Go ahe-"
Player 2: (hadn't heard the DM start replying yet) "He might NOT provoke an AOO. It depends, he might have a feat that allows him to get away without one."
Player 1: "Right, like Spring Attack or Flyby Attack..."
Player 3: "I have a feat that let's ME ignore AOOs after I hit with an axe."
Player 2: "Yeah, but he didn't attack first, so he likely doesn't have that.."
DM: "I forgot to tell you to make the attack, that's all. Go ahead."

 

[Quickleaf]

Our DM doesn't care, he says it's the last session of his campaign ever and he said 150 damage and he's sticking with it. It kills 2 party members. One of which is a cleric of Misha. He gets a little annoyed that his GOD would kill him like that. The other one is Jim. The DM re-explains that she couldn't control it because she was so weak(though, obviously, we didn't really know this in character).

150 automatic and unavoidable damage at 13th level (when a fighter has at most 115 HP) qualifies as "no save, just die" also known as "rocks fall, you die." In what edition of D&D has that ever been fun?

While I appreciate the DM portraying a fallible god, this seems like the crux of the problem. *Why* the DM dropped this bomb on the players would be worth bringing to light, however.