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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iron_Chef" data-source="post: 944070" data-attributes="member: 4530">The DM must have at least one big fight per session or he gets bored. Although I enjoy sessions where it's all RP and hardly any dice are rolled, I recognize that these will be few and far between. I'm okay with one big fight per session, maybe two. Our sessions are around 6-8 hours each, so that seems reasonable. While I'm a RP-junkie, the other player (DM's brother) is a puzzle solving junkie and unless he gets something complicated to keep his brain active and engaged, he turns into an idiot and starts making obnoxious noises and dumb comments, when he can be bothered to even focus on what's hapening at all instead of talking about Morrowind or zombie movies or something else irrelevant. He also enjoys big fights, but pretty much sucks at RPing, not that he doesn't make some attempt at it, but never consistently. The kid is an absolute genius at solving puzzles, riddles, figuring out trap mechanics, and coming up with the most diabolical ways to screw over our enemies (from as few as one guy to an entire city full). As long as we can keep him engaged, he's a rtemendous asset. His brain is extremely sharp when it comes to the above. When I DMed and he said he was gonna be a rogue, I tailor made the first few adventures to show off his abilities and he amazed me and his brother doing things we could never pull off. His brother, the DM, just went to sleep and let him figure out everything while his character slept in the "safe" corner of the dungeon! LOL, his character hates dungeons and traps and yet whe he DMs, he runs a major dungeon crawl that his character would never go on in a million years? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" /> Not to say that he didn't RP his character correctly; his character dragged his feet and complained worse than any of us, and then we get punished for listening to his character's advice---who's supposed to be our spiritual advisor! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f621.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":mad:" title="Mad    :mad:"  data-smilie="4"data-shortname=":mad:" /> The DM likes RPing (he's great at winging it) but is awful at traps and puzzles (I'm good at designing them but not so great at figuring them out), but he is a combat junkie. He starts us off on every campaign with wonderful RPing opportunities and fun battles... then EVERY TIME, when we get to around 9th/10th level, he BLOWS IT by running an epic save the world dungeon crawl railroad, completely killing the campaign we've all worked so hard for; often times, he's even the one that pulls the plug, sying he doesn't have time for it anymore. He's not used to running games at these levels of play and has a hard time figuring out appropriate challenges. Normally, he goofs up and kills one or more characters by overestimating our abilities to handle threats. What can we do?I try to make his life easier by making up tons of stuff (whether he asks me or not), including ENTIRE CITIES with every building numbered and detailed, and he uses maybe 10% and takes us away from the location he asked me to write for him and it's never used again! WTF? It's gotten to the point where I refuse to do anything more, because he doesn't use them to their full potential. He's been made aware of my feelings in this regard, and yet he still screws me over and makes me waste days/weeks of my life designing stuff for nothing. I'd DM, but he can't play worth a damn, LOL, and I prefer not to DM long-term. What can I do? He's my best friend and we've gamed together forever.I'm gonna talk to him again about CotSQ. He is so stingy with XP and treasure and then wonders why we can't fight tough monsters when most of us don't even have a +1 weapon at 9th level, LOL. Then, we complain, and he hands out like 5,000gp each and a couple nifty magic items each but throws us into a meatgrinder still woefully unprepared. *sigh* Why must all our campaigns self-destruct at around 10th level? Is it D&D's fault? The system really does seem to break down at high levels of play (it always did, even if 3e is a little better at maintaining balance).</blockquote>

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