I am part of the most incompetent adventuring group.

[Morpheus]

My Warforged Barbarian/Fighter +7 to hit, I can't hit the broad side of a barn. I don't hit very often.

Not true...You hit fairly often. It's Krieg that can't seem to hit anything. The fight against the Dire Ape lasted about 10 rounds longer than it should have because he was the only one up fighting (and not hitting or being hit). Plus, how many 3rd level PCs have 46 hps? Not many...So stop with all the poor rolls...You get your share...

 

[Saeviomagy]

The thing is the Guy didn't ruin our stakeout. We literly sat at the table for 2 hours thinking of ways to get into the party. The gnomes got a small posse together and told us we have to get moving. I mean 2 warforged, a priest and wizard standing in front of a house for a couple of hours will draw suspicion. We just went to inn to kill some time waiting for the party to be over. Then the ambush happened. We actually beat the 4 goblins down, they did crit me and it took like 6 rounds for our party to defeat them.

Did you not know about the party until you got to the house? If you did know, I'd assume that the "discussing a plan" bit took place somewhere other than outside the target. This is the sort of stuff that the DM should really just gift to you unless he wants his game to devolve into a ridiculous comedy. And from what you said, I assumed that you'd gone to the inn because it was conveniently across the road, and you could watch the party from there. Ie - you were on a stakeout.

A bunch of people in a tavern drinking will probably be overlooked unless your target is particularly wary. A bunch of people having an armed combat in a tavern will not. So sending random goons to beat you up ruins the stakeout.

I've read too many recounts of "how stupid my players are" to actually believe for a minute that even half of them are caused by stupid players rather than the DM supplying insufficient information and making flawed assumptions about what the PC's do.

 

[hazardjsimpson]

Ouch!

Ouch.

Maybe time for new dice. I know that, in terms of physics, that doesn't mean anything, but psychologically it might just feel better.

Warrior Poet

I know my group has a similar affliction with our dice. What I like to do is set out 4-5 d20's I'll be using for the night, and set them out with the ' 20 ' facing up.... That way, I can imagine that gravity is slowly allowing the molecules of the die to settle and weigh that damn thing in my favor...

Dunno if it works well, but it FEELS good to see all those 20's staring up at me, just... settling...

 

[Lord Pendragon]

2. Your DM is out to get you. I can't think of another reason (as a GM) that I would interrupt someone's stakeout, especially with something as non-plot related as "a bad guy who already beat us up and took our stuff".

As a DM, I tend to always have an "emergency combat encounter" waiting in the wings. Usually at some point early on in the campaign, I set some group/organization against the PCs, so that the PCs can expect repeated attempts by this group to kill them.

Then I stat up an appropriate group of NPCs to make for a good combat encounter, and leave it waiting in my notebook or on my laptop.

Pacing is a funny thing. A DM can try to guess how long the players will spend on any one aspect of a planned session. Good DMs will often guess correctly. But occasionally the players will fixate on something, and your pacing will be thrown askew. (I had one session where my players fixated on a large pair of double doors in a sunken complex. Eventually, after 15-20 minutes of them trying to figure out how to open them, I had to straight out tell them there was nothing on the other side of the doors but solid rock.)

Now say I've planned a particular session and, to my surprise, the front part of it takes far longer than I'd anticipated, leaving the party far away from my next planned combat encounter as the session nears its end. This is where my "emergency combat encounter" comes in.

In my mind, it's better for the game if I toss in an "unrelated" combat every now and again to keep things exciting, rather than letting the players spoil a session for themselves by fixating on something that soaks up all of the session time and leaves the players feeling like they've accomplished nothing at the end of the session.

YMMV, but I didn't think the goblin ambush was particularly out of place. I do feel for Dagger75, though. It's hard to feel like a hero when the goblins are always beating on you.

 

[Rel]

As a DM, I tend to always have an "emergency combat encounter" waiting in the wings. Usually at some point early on in the campaign, I set some group/organization against the PCs, so that the PCs can expect repeated attempts by this group to kill them.

Then I stat up an appropriate group of NPCs to make for a good combat encounter, and leave it waiting in my notebook or on my laptop.

Pacing is a funny thing. A DM can try to guess how long the players will spend on any one aspect of a planned session. Good DMs will often guess correctly. But occasionally the players will fixate on something, and your pacing will be thrown askew.

Bingo.

Not to hijack this thread into something about GMing techniques, but this is one of those things that it took me a long time to get through my thick, tactical skull. I'm a planner by nature and I'm the guy who in times past would have us spend two hours plotting the best way to "take down our objective". I was having fun doing it but it was detracting from the enjoyment for the rest of the group. Since then I've learned to tighten things up a bit on the planning and take action sooner.

My players sometimes get sidetracked by something insignificant and that's ok. They will occasionally invent their own Red-Herrings and follow them up dilligently. I don't want to spoil the mystery by immediately correcting them but I also don't want to spend the majority of the session following up a false lead and not get to partake in any action. So I'll toss in not a "random encounter" but a "planned, floating encounter". In many ways it seems far more unreasonable for them NOT to happen.

The PC's go through a campaign beating down bad guys and thwarting their plans left and right. They're bound to make enemies and sometimes powerful ones. These enemies will likely send some kind of goons or assassins after the party at some point. I try to lace this with realism and give the PC's chances to spot the baddies that are shadowing them and sometimes they see them and some times they don't. Sometimes they even spot the ambush coming and ambush the ambushers, resulting in an almost effortless win that leaves them feeling good.

I think that having these sorts of encounters in your pocket to occasionally toss in to spice up a game that is dragging is a great GM tool and I'm glad that I finally embraced their use.

 

[Harmon]

Players that have troubles coming up with and sticking to plans, I sometimes think its because they have had so many failures in the past that they just know- “this plan is gonna fail,” so they get frustrated and flustered.

Two hours to come up with a plan is nothing. I once spent three weeks (not the whole three weeks just an hour or three here and there) devising a plan that later (at the table) I threw out because of one thing the villains did that made me realize- “this ante gonna work.”

It has little to do with people being incompetent- I believe and more to do with being “plan shy,” you have just been beaten to many times and have lost confidence in your self. Your GM needs to let you succeed a few times, avoid the monkey wrench 2 out of 3 times instead of the other way around.

Our GMs motto is- “no plan survives contact with the enemy,” and he’s right.

Should you figure out how to be competent- let me know, I would love to make this work in real life.

 

[The_Universe]

...hey.......

Now c'mon - I didn't say it was you, did I?

"So, I've got this breastplate of Command that shines with inner light constantly. I'm going to go hide in that tall grass - they'll never spot me!"

 

[Crothian]

sometimes playing less then combitant characters can be fun, especilaly if it isn't done on purpose. After all the trouble and the failure you all will be so excited and happy when you finally get a victory, much mor ethen the highly succesfful parties that assume victory and anything less is a failure.

 

[maddman75]

My motto is that "The players' plan should almost always almost work". When the players go to the effort to plan something out, things should generally work out - almost. Generally I'll go for the success + complication approach. This keeps them from getting frustrated and paralyzed when plotting something out, while at the same time they don't feel that they always succeed 100% at everything. And there's a second almost in there, because some plans just aren't going to work.

I recall one game that featured slavers kidnapping demihumans out of the slums, and for some reason they'd decided that the *human* paladin would be the best bait. After I restated that all of the victims had been demihumans, had them see several humans go out and be fine but demihumans get kidnapped, and even had an NPC suggest they look over the victims again - they still insisted on using the paladin as bait. Even after I flat out said "Guys, its not gonna work, they arne't going to take her, every one of the victims was a demihuman!" the response I got was "Well, it still should've worked"

Not always. But almost.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I've I was to average the D20 rolls of the players in the last campaign I'd wager they were around 7. I threw some of thier dice away they were so bad.