How should I respond to my DM?

[rexartur]

Non-helpful reply but it makes me giggle.
DM: I hit the re-set button. You're all level 0.
Players: What?!?! At least we have gear, right?
DM: Each of you has a stick.
Players: *sigh* Are we at least in some cool setting?
DM: You are all stuck knee deep in mud. By the way there's an angry group approaching you. They all have bigger sticks and want to know why you are messing up their mud. I'm gonna go get a beer from the fridge. When I get back tell me what each of you is doing.

 

[Waylander the Slayer]

Sounds like a personal vanity project:

From reading through this thread, its apparent that:

1. You've created the "story" with your character as the uber power who cant be touched and who defines what can and cannot happen.

2. You asked one DM to run this; thankfully for his sanity, he stepped aside.

3. You asked another DM to run this; he tried to actually challenge the party; after all a DM does know more of what is going on than you do, since you are playing in "his" setting (if he is running it, it is his setting, and therefore liable to his input).

4. You have a problem with Step 3 above because it's not running according to the course you plotted for your character, plus "others" (i see little mention of your "non gods" who are more powerful than gods), and came here to claim subversion of rules by your GM (heck, if you subsumed the negative energy plane, it could very well subsume you and make you into "planscape"), of killing of all the gods, and from what i can gather, the final scene being a "f you" to your characters daddy (i am not going to read into this more than that).

5. Since you have it plotted out as well as you have, just run it for yourself, or together, and kill things and "win." Sort of like playing video games in god mode- i think the issue you have with this is that you won't "win" unless there is a semblence of someone to "defeat." Not sure what i can say about that.

 

[Naoki00_]

Sounds like a personal vanity project:

From reading through this thread, its apparent that:

1. You've created the "story" with your character as the uber power who cant be touched and who defines what can and cannot happen.

2. You asked one DM to run this; thankfully for his sanity, he stepped aside.

3. You asked another DM to run this; he tried to actually challenge the party; after all a DM does know more of what is going on than you do, since you are playing in "his" setting (if he is running it, it is his setting, and therefore liable to his input).

4. You have a problem with Step 3 above because it's not running according to the course you plotted for your character, plus "others" (i see little mention of your "non gods" who are more powerful than gods), and came here to claim subversion of rules by your GM (heck, if you subsumed the negative energy plane, it could very well subsume you and make you into "planscape"), of killing of all the gods, and from what i can gather, the final scene being a "f you" to your characters daddy (i am not going to read into this more than that).

5. Since you have it plotted out as well as you have, just run it for yourself, or together, and kill things and "win." Sort of like playing video games in god mode- i think the issue you have with this is that you won't "win" unless there is a semblence of someone to "defeat." Not sure what i can say about that.

you do have some points correct, we all had been wanting to run a 'take over the world' game for quite a while, when the original DM suggested my character being the central one seeing as it's the most likely one out of ours to actually do it. Now that you mention it I am a bit disappointed in myself that I didn't mention the team more, most of them are pretty broken, characters that have been around for years and have beccome insanely powerful, such as the first DM's characters, a pair of samurai brothers that one became a vampire politician and the other a Demi-lich that can do an epic level kamikaze spell at anytime at will, which then teleports him to anywhere he wants afterwords (with a phylactery surrounded by thousands of bodies), DMC's Dante as a character, the DM's catfolk, a 4 armed titanic undead, a vampiric draco-lich who's bones are made from star-metal, and the familiar of my character who is played by another person...pretty all-star cast.

and as was stated in some of the former posts, the current DM WANTED to run this one, he's the one that said "you know what, we still want to do this stuff, I'll do it!" before checking over our characters again and saying it was good. Also we talked about the setting, it's a version of the DnD cosmology that I made myself, designed it and wrote the timeline and story out myself over a few years, all the while while we played in this universe, it's more of my setting that he's using, just like how using the planes in DnD is using wizards' settings...(which I do not own and simply used for creative license..I love you wizards don't eat me lol) and of course I can be touched, why do you think I have to hide and play it safer? The more powerful you get the more a threat you are to the bigger fish and for challenging us well we've gone over that but..I'll say this, a challenge is fun, inventive, and a welcome addition to any game...he never challenged us, he stalled us while he tried to think of how he could stop us from doing what we already knew how to do within the rules of the universe.

 

[Umbran]

5: You are a goddamn thief. Admitting to stealing PDFs.

And you are rude. Cut out the name-calling, please.

T
5- stealing PDF's?...last I checked Wizards doesn't really care if someone makes a PDF and puts it on a free sharing sight of a book edition no one makes anymore.

They have cared in the past.

Moreover, EN World does not condone or support copyright infringement, and we don't allow the site to be used to trade in blatantly infringing materials.

It isn't forbidden to say you do it, but that doesn't mean it is socially acceptable.

 

[Naoki00_]

They have cared in the past.

Moreover, EN World does not condone or support copyright infringement, and we don't allow the site to be used to trade in blatantly infringing materials.

It isn't forbidden to say you do it, but that doesn't mean it is socially acceptable.

don't worry, I wouldn't dream of doing something like that, as for them caring, I'll definitely have to look into that more so I can advise..others I know. I do apologize for mentioning it however.

 

[CuRoi]

I'm going to be horribly unfair and not read the other responses. I can imagine what most of them say, I might even be retreading some ground here. It's a wonder you are still here reading this if you are.

First - you left rules behind long ago it seems. If your DM is starting to make frequent use of the whole "Rule Zero" thing, well, it is pretty much the inevitable outcome of putting the rules on the back burner.

Also, I doubt your DM was a "by the book" DM, ever. This isn't an attack on him by any means. It's just given what you have described he seemed very lax with the rules. So, either your DM changed (skimmed the posts and see that may be the case) or he is in the process of becoming a "by the book" DM.

Here's the issue - you either let him be the one who adjudicates the story as he is supposed to, or you find a new DM. Again, I'm not judging anyone here, but if you continue playing this way, your game will wrap up, your group will start arguing, and you may not be playing DnD much longer.

Another option is to find a new RPG for your group. You can use some more freeform RPGs with more open rules that place collaborative story-telling before rules/numbers (please, no hate mail from people about DnD doing this or not. My point is if you want a game where you can be completely open with the rules and bend and twist them whichever way to fit your story, DnD isn't maybe the best choice.)

At any rate, you should talk about this as a group. Just scratch your next session and call a meeting of your gaming group. Let the DM know what you dislike and what you like about the game. Tell them what you liked and disliked about the old game, as a group.

Most importantly, keep gaming. With dice, and pencils and paper and imagination

 

[CuRoi]

Slogging through the thread I saw this:

OP Says:
"I made this character years ago. she started as a level 1 human with the paragon template (this is because again, child from Ao himself)..she got the rest over the 8 years of playing in games where she appeared as the villain, gaining power as she went. "

This "PC" sounds suspiciously like an NPC now, IMO. You say you are a DM sometimes, you say this PC got power in games where she appeared "as the villain". You weren't running said games were you?

Some people do this all the time, so keep in mind this is my personal opinion here. For me, DM's playing "PCs" is a DMing cardinal sin for the very reasons you are describing. Translating whatever events or power level that PC attains into someone else's campaign ALWAYS problematic.

Also, I've never yet met a DM that can treat a "PC" they are personally playing in a game in a completely unbiased fashion. Never. In fact, it's quite impossible because, well, as the DM you know everything. Blundering your "PC" into a trap, killing them off, not acting on plot info only you know would just never happen with such a PC.

Given that bit of info, I'd also strongly suggest (aside from talking with your DM) either running a game where your "PC" in question becomes an NPC again and will have the full array of powers you envision them having. Or else you should start up a new character tailored made for the campaign you are currently playing in.

 

[Zelda Themelin]

As far as D&D 3ed+ rules or some 2nd edition stuff goes I really like them. They give such cool ideas, and you feel you can use so much things, with all feats, and monsters and classes and everything else. Most systems don't have so much content. Or if they do, they tend to have less *fantastic* content (like powerful magic).


I don't think any system is cooler just for system. Sure there are many options, but they come with theme of their own. If you want play universe with epic magic, hordes of monsters, and greek-like gods plus Evil undead, devils and demons, there is really not many games out there that do it better.

It is true, that once D&D gets around lv 13 it starts to break apart. Usually for DC progress and for AC first in our games and then falling to other stuff. 20 sided dice doesn't just do enough difference when scores get bigger. We actually ended up using d40 and then d100 and various other methods. With actual D&D rules there are only two kinda epic battles, the grindy one, that might never end. And the horrible fast I win iniative, fail to save and die battles.

And list of abilities tends to get way out of hand what comes to lenght. Then again, back to my old runequest days my list of magic (mostly spirit) items was equally long.
Now when I think of it, back to Runequest we got use the system rules all though the Herowars, though some stats were surely "interesting".
Magicwise runequest doesn't have as epic feel as D&D does though, and IMO warhammer battle/40000 does Chaos better.

Everyone who actually does use D&D epic rules has to re-white gods, and demons etc for those rules. Which is again much extra work.
It's often easier go skip the whole book. Though it has some good stuff in it too.

It often happens that you don't know the game goes on so long, you have to suffer rule burdens of D&D. My personal experience is that we often play up to lv 24 before we bow out of rules as written. Sure we have character sheet and might even bother updating it, usually with abilities you don't find in book and yeh, then it's kinda semi-D&D. Because it started and long played fine as D&D.

Back to AD&D times I used Primal Order-system for godly stuff, worked back then, but still less fun than D&D 3x IMO.

Really epic games are games of purer own imagination, than most systems offer. Because existing systems don't really offer it, and those that do, don't really do it well.
Unlike D&D, which kinda tries to do everything, games like let's say Fiasko try to do spesific theme. And this is problematic if you don't want focus on that theme, or psychological window or whatsnot. Still, if you feel, D&D has become too broken and burdersome, and don't want to come up with system of your own,
within possibilities you have skim through different systems, and look how they do resolutions of conflict. You can still use D&D universe for other stuff, I would.

However if you are happy just adjusting and rule-0:ing D&D there is no need to look any futher no matter what some here say. You aren't playing rpg to endose their idea of how it should be done. Some here are trying to suggest other systems though, they feel that it might be reason behind your gaming problems.

I don't think so, but it might be contributing fact why your DM is acting this way. If he in his mind wants to do it mostly by-the-book.

And if any here have read good old min-max forums of Wizards' know that actual rules are different from spirit of the rules. You can actually do lot of broken stuf quite within the rules. Some dm:s are by the book that way. Yes seen it in actual game, it was silly. Mainly because there was no real reason for that level of power and we were playing some regular dungeon adventure. Yeh "physics of real world were certainly getting in the way of D&D rules there.... like gravity".

I think CuRoi is right.

Changing character from dm to dm risks that something is "lost in translation". This is especially so powers that arent specified and written down in detail.
People often have different ideas how things should work. Heck, my dm forgets how ability he gave to character worked month ago.

 

[Agamon]

I know there are cooperative storytelling "games" out there. Maybe I'm being pendantic, but if you can't actually lose, it just doesn't seem like a game to me. Which is not to say it can't be fun. "Happy Birthday Robot" well deserves its numerous Ennie nominations and I'm looking forward to getting "Do," int he mail, personally. (Haven't played Fiasco, but am aware of it). But if there is no challenge, no way to lose,... its really just an exploratory story-telling experience.

I'm looking forward to checking out HBR, but I don't know much about it yet. Fiasco uses dice, and you can "lose," so to speak, depending on the choices you make throughout the game (my brother's character lost big time last night in our game). And while the basis of the game is collaborative story telling, if that's all it was, we wouldn't need a rule book.

Anywho, it seems to me that the playstyle is a large part of the problem. I would guess the DM wants an actual game and the others want a munchkin-fest where they get to pretend to mess over the world (or multiverse) without any actual repurcussions to their characters. They have made up incredible powers with nothing more than a "say so" but feel hurt if the DM does the same. To talk to the DM (which I guess has already happened) it is necessary to first understand where the conflict is coming from (in this case, playstyles). So yes, playstyle is relevant to the question asked unless the OP simply wants, a "Talk to him politely," answer.

Fundamentally, though, that's not the issue. Regardless of the setting or play style, there really is only a few options. Pre-game impressions were different between GM and players, so, the players adjust to the GM, the GM adjusts to the players, or the game folds. I'm surprised the thread got this long, honestly.

 

[Naoki00_]

Well we finally managed to get a sit down with everyone, so thats it for this thread. Thank's to everyone who posted and gave there advice, I really did find it helpful!