How do you remember stuff at the right times?

[mhacdebhandia]

a) Blur was on me, so the monsters had a 20% miss chance.

b) I have Mobility, so one Aoo should have been vs. me with +4 AC.

Both of these are "remind the DM when you are attacked" things, and I forgot to remind the DM.

In your example, it's been my experience that I would handle the first myself and only remind the DM to take the second into account.

In other words, I would be the one rolling d10 and declaring that the monster misses my character on a 1 or 2 if he were under the effects of blur, but I would have to say "Remember, my AC's 21 for that attack of opportunity, not 17" if I had Mobility.

I don't find it difficult to remember the various conditions my character's under - I keep a scratch pad with me to record current hit points and check off spells anyway, so it's just part of how I play.

 

[Bad Paper]

A physical reminder on the mat helps, e.g. we always put invisible characters inside a bottle cap.

The best way I have found is to basically rewrite everything I need for combat on a separate sheet of paper, and not look at the relatively overwhelming character sheet.

So my cheat sheet has the following stuff, spread out into useful blocks of information with lots of whitespace between them:
+18/+13/+8 greataxe d12+14
SHIELD OTHER with Belvin 50'
BLUR
137 hp
DR 2/-
AC 24/12/21
IMPROVED UNCANNY DODGE
ST: +15/+8/+11
RAGE (rounds)

And that's it. If I need to know what consumables or other weapons I have, I go look on the busy sheet. There are only eight pieces of information on my sheet, and when they are arranged logically, I can see what's important, no matter how drunk I get.

Though, I admit, blur and displacement are the easiest things to forget. It's worse when I'm DM.

 

[Wraith Form]

Now try being the DM and remembering all that stuff for someone that you will probably only use for one combat. In the session last night I kept forgetting that fiendish locathah have spell resistance. I rolled it after the fact without telling the players and got high rolls so it didn't matter (at least in my mind) but it was very frustrating to say the least. On top of that I forgot that the BBEG had a potion of Enlarge Person that I forgot to use. I don't think that it would have had a huge effect on the combat but it still annoys me.

I also forgot that 2 players were sickened for 4 rounds. I'm not sure whether they remembered to take that into account or not. I have bought the EN Publishing Status Cards just for that type of situation. I've printed them out but unfortunately I haven't gotten around to cutting them out and laminating them yet.

QfT. I'm feelin' that pain, brother, trust me. I'm a n00b DM (who used to occasionally DM in AD&D 2nd Ed days) and 3.x has a layer of complexity that, while not overwhelming, is certainly challenging for someone unaccustomed to the rules.

*shrug* I do the best I can, and my players - some of whom know the rules much better than I - trounce me in combat every once in a while.

And yeah, I'll be getting buying Buff Cards, using index cards, whatever it takes to help me.

 

[Oryan77]

Uhg, the session I DM'ed last weekend was ruined because of my idiot brain. The players didn't feel it was ruined, but as a DM, you other DM's know what I mean

It was the final "big boss" encounter of the underwater adventure I ran. The players finally learned what the deal was with the backstory and were shocked & surprised. The had time to buff up before the encounter, and they planned to send in the cleric PC invisible and get a surprise attack. They didn't realize that water still displaces around an invisible person, so when he swam out for the attack, the bad guys saw him coming and were not surprised.

So what do I do 2 rounds later when the BBEG just took a pounding from the cleric and is 1 round away from dying? I try to figure out how to keep him alive rather than attack or dispel the clerics buffs. I think to myself, "Brilliant! I can turn invisible, and swim out of range and then I'll have a few extra rounds to dispel magic AND make some attacks!" So the BBEG goes invisible and swims away. Two initiative counts later and a player says, "Wait, don't we still see where the invisible guy swam to since the water is displaced?" For one, this BBEG was over a 1000 years old, born underwater & lived underwater all it's life, & used to be powerful enough to rule an entire civilization...she never would have turned invisible & moved like that. And second, I just explained the displacement rule 20 minutes earlier!

What a joke....I turned what was supposed to be a really hard encounter into an encounter that was easier to defeat than the shark encounter they had a few sessions before. The BBEG only cast 1 out of 3 fourth lvl spells...I curse this stupid brain I have!

 

[Olaf the Stout]

Uhg, the session I DM'ed last weekend was ruined because of my idiot brain. The players didn't feel it was ruined, but as a DM, you other DM's know what I mean

It was the final "big boss" encounter of the underwater adventure I ran. The players finally learned what the deal was with the backstory and were shocked & surprised. The had time to buff up before the encounter, and they planned to send in the cleric PC invisible and get a surprise attack. They didn't realize that water still displaces around an invisible person, so when he swam out for the attack, the bad guys saw him coming and were not surprised.

So what do I do 2 rounds later when the BBEG just took a pounding from the cleric and is 1 round away from dying? I try to figure out how to keep him alive rather than attack or dispel the clerics buffs. I think to myself, "Brilliant! I can turn invisible, and swim out of range and then I'll have a few extra rounds to dispel magic AND make some attacks!" So the BBEG goes invisible and swims away. Two initiative counts later and a player says, "Wait, don't we still see where the invisible guy swam to since the water is displaced?" For one, this BBEG was over a 1000 years old, born underwater & lived underwater all it's life, & used to be powerful enough to rule an entire civilization...she never would have turned invisible & moved like that. And second, I just explained the displacement rule 20 minutes earlier!

What a joke....I turned what was supposed to be a really hard encounter into an encounter that was easier to defeat than the shark encounter they had a few sessions before. The BBEG only cast 1 out of 3 fourth lvl spells...I curse this stupid brain I have!

Don't feel too bad. Last session one of my two BBEG's got to cast Slow on 1 PC and Magic Missile on another PC. That was all he did before he died. He tried to cast Summon Undead IV but got hit with a Fireball while he was casting it (damn 1 round casting time!) and it fizzled out instead. The players were happy but I felt like I'd let them down a bit. So far I still seem to struggle to give the PC's a balanced fight. Most are way too easy, other harder than I thought they would be. No character deaths in about 16 sessions though.

Olaf the Stout

 

[Aus_Snow]

I'll second the Buff Cards, and Status Cards.

Sure, you can do this kind of thing yourself, but it takes a bit of time and effort, and the ones from EN Publishing are cool anyway.

 

[paradox42]

Yeah, I resemble those remarks. And I've got a much better memory than just about everybody I know, so I rarely forget things of any significance in regular life.

Since I'm currently running one Epic game and one barely-sub-Epic, my players and I have come up with some solutions for this problem- it gets worse as levels get higher, of course. The one which might be most interesting (though also most work-intensive to implement, and therefore much better/more practical for players than the DM) is this. Most of my players track their character data in electronic form, typically a spreadsheet of some kind. One of the more tactical players has actually taken to creating several tabs/pages for each of his characters; each tab is a complete copy of his character data affected (or not) by one of his most commonly-used buffs. Thus, for example, when the telepath throws up Defensive Precognition, he just clicks the tab marked "Precog" and uses the changed version. When he gets a Mantle of Eldritch Might, he uses the "MoEM" tab. He actually has combined them such that the tabs read "MoEM but no Precog," "Precog but no MoEM," and so forth- but you get the idea.

I'm no Excel expert, but I believe it's possible to make fairly simple macros that can apply formulas to entire pages and generate copies on new tabs; I presume this is how the player did what he did. He could do it for others too, it's just that he uses them rarely enough (or their effect is stand-out and singular enough, like the 20% miss chance from Blur, that he just remembers it) to not bother making tabs for them.

 

[Nightfall]

How do I remember? It's why I'm a Sage. I just do.

 

[Li Shenron]

I second the usefulness of spell/item "cards", if you can print them on colored cardboard it's even better because they can attract your attention more easily. It may become cumbersome anyway at high level when you have several buffs that affect the same stat (e.g.AC) since the various bonuses may or may not stack and are spread over different cards.

It's not easy for me even to decide what should be on the basic character sheet. Items and certain spells (e.g. those lasting a full day) are usually written into the character sheet because they're always active, but as soon as you get a Dispel Magic it's trouble... still at mid-high levels these quasi-permanent bonuses can be many, and to have each of them in a different card brings back the problem above.

 

[Nightfall]

Li,

You can take the feat "Memory like a rock". That works for me.