Players who think out of the box

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

You should have put a stop to things long before the players had planned and calculated for 2 hours, real life engineering simply doesn't add any value to D&D. You should have asked the players to explain what they wanted to achieve, proposed how to resolve that mechanically and then called for a skill check or several to find out if the characters can pull their plan off.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

You should have put a stop to things long before the players had planned and calculated for 2 hours, real life engineering simply doesn't add any value to D&D. You should have asked the players to explain what they wanted to achieve, proposed how to resolve that mechanically and then called for a skill check or several to find out if the characters can pull their plan off.

Maybe - depends on the table. If the players at our table were all having fun making this plan, and I as DM have a reasonable way to work it into the story and make it work mechanically, then I'd certainly let it go. Sometimes it's nice as DM to sit back and watch the players coming up with an interesting scheme. It wouldn't really be what I had planned for that session, but as long as everyone is enjoying it, then we have a game situation that stories might be told about fondly years from now.

Of course, that's not what happened to the OP, so your suggestion is certainly a valid one to keep things moving.

 

[Krachek]

Like I said long story short, they got to this point by scouting out the keep, and determining the Lords chambers, and then proceeded to create an avalanche.

Avalanche!. Nice. Don’t forget to fire the architect who design the keep.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

"Assert your authoritaaayy!!" (insert police officer Cartman picture here).

Your players are behaving like...uh..."insert insane group of people here". They want the full effects of "reality" to be used...except when it's bad for them, then it's RAW. They want to be able to use their REAL LIFE modern knowledge of engineering/biology/chemistry/whatever to full potential...except when it's bad for them or goes against their 'story'; then it's RAW only. They want to be able to say "Well, he's a genocidal human-supremisist demi-human'ophobe who hates anyone of a different religion! We should be allowed to dethrone him and toss him in the dungeon, no trial! DOWN WITH THE EVIL KING!" in one sentence...and then say "He shouldn't' be allowed to just ignore the law and throw people in jail with no trial! POWER TO THE PEOPLE!" in the next. You know...insane people.

When dealing with such insanity, in a roleplaying game, there is only one thing to do; bring it up at the beginning of the game and make the players decide HOW they want the rules of the game to run. Ask them..."Do you want to use 'real life' expectations and knowledge as the basis for rulings? Or do you want to stick to the more unrealistic stuff as found in the game now? Like, falling 300' onto a pile of boulders...dead, or 20d6 damage?". Same thing goes for Poison, Assassination, and a few other "you loose, do not pass go, do not collect 200gp" things. What you are looking for is to get an understanding of the type of game they want to play in...the type of game you are willing to run for them...and the answer's they give as "precidence", or "contractual" or otherwise "But you guys said...".

Honestly though? It sounds like your players just want to "win" without any serious drawbacks to their PC's. They want to be able to wade through a burning city, slaying demons as they leap to and fro, and walk out the other side with a few soot marks on their faces and slightly smoking clothes; no damage, no burns, no singed hair. They want to be SUPER Heroes but in a fantasy world.

If you aren't willing (or would have no fun, same thing I guess) to run such a game for them, and they insist on being 'insane' in what they want...hand the DM Shield over to one of them. If nobody wants it...then say "Oh, ok then. But I'm running the campaign in a way that is fun for ME as well as YOU...which means all that stuff we just talked about? Forget it. Not gonna happen. Not fun for me. Well, I guess you guys could pay me, say, $50/hour...then I'd run the game exactly how you want".

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Here is my frustration, they completely slipped past 2 weeks of planning for a big showdown with this NPC. When I told them I would have him autofail the save to avoid the boulder and I gave them 15d10 dmg for coming up with such a good trap. They lost their minds saying he should be dead. I tried to reason and asked how they would feel if I sprung a similar trap on them, only to be told I would be pety and doing so would ruin the fun of the game. For what it matters the party is made up of of 5 8th level characters. . A cleric, fighter, Druid, rogue, and a bard.

Im not sure how to proceed, I don’t want my game to stop and implode because they feel I’m being unfair. Should I have just had the bad guy die on the spot?

Improvising damage according to the DMG:
10d10 Crushed by compacting walls, hit by whirling steel blades, wading through a stream of lava.
18d10 Being submerged in lava, being hit by a crashing flying fortress.

Sounds pretty much where it should be to me. Maybe you could have done 10d10 bludgeoning and rolled separately for a bombs (fireball might work), but that would average out to precisely half a point more damage than just doing 15d10. So let me revise my statement--the damage is spot on exactly where it should be. Auto-failing a save is being generous.

The reason we have hit points instead of auto-kills is that the character has a chance to take some sort of cover, avoiding the worst of the damage.

Now, as far as giving the opponent 120 hp, if that isn't something that makes sense and gives your players a feeling that if they were at a similar level of skill (maybe 12th-14th level fighter) as the bad guy they would have about 120 hp, well then everything I say goes out the window because you aren't treating the PC side of the equation and the NPC side of the equation equally, so you're going to have problems until your group makes up some sort of rules for exactly how this stuff is going to be done. In this case, you might need those rules to be explicit and written down.

But it will probably make it go a lot easier for you if you just make PCs and NPCs follow approximately* the same rules, so the players can know what to expect, know that they and equivalently skilled NPCs can survive the same sorts of scenarios, they and NPCs can pull the same basic sorts of stunts, etc. It doesn't sound like they want you to tell them a story. They want you to present a playground for them to explore and do what they want to in it. You'll have to decide if you are interested in doing that, or if they are interested in switching to story mode. Or, you can make different parts of the game do different things. For instance, it could be that during defined stories (which you would tell them are defined stories) you make stuff up for the story and it doesn't have to be consistent or make sense, and during the exploration mode (again, defined) the world is designed to make sense and have PC/NPC equivalence. But that's difficult to do in one campaign.


* That doesn't mean you have to build all the NPCs with PC classes, but if there is no way for PCs to get roughly equivalent abilities to NPCs (and vice versa) any sort of world verisimilitude flies out the window, which isn't what it sounds like your players are wanting.

 

[Ratskinner]

I see this in my group all the time. Shoot, I do it with Charisma type things myself. In this case, I have no qualms about mentioning that while the players may be engineers, the characters aren't. Since we switch GM duties, its easy to ask if they would mind if my next character invented gunpowder or something.

That said, good plan, make some super hard Int checks, a series of Strength, Stealth, etc. (Modern engineers often grossly underestimate how difficult and time consuming physical labor of this type is, IME.) Its a lot harder to fight off those guards who spotted you when you're all exhausted from dressing a boulder for this scheme.

But! Make all the checks, somehow ensure that the BBEG is on his throne instead of torturing a peasant somewhere...sure. Rocks fall, castle goes boom.

But IIRC, the Bene Gesserit say "Never believe reports of a man's death unless you have seen the body. Even then, you can be mistaken."

 

[Ancalagon]

D&D combat is part of a game (because D&D actually is a game, it's easy to forget that, at times, because it's such an open-ended 'infinite game' in concept, and such a technically poor one in mechanics).

Treating a game as a war is...
...inappropriate. Yeah, ironically, even in a wargame. ;P Going all Kobayashi Maru on every scenario defeats the purpose of the exercise, in the first place.

I disagree with that. Part of the game is being *creative*. Not "let's all cast buff spells before we attack the orc village" but "let's trigger an avalanche on the orc village" or "let's attack that ettin and make it chase us right into the bandit's camp! Two problems solved".

That's all perfectly feasible within the rules of the game and is fully using the wonderful flexibility that a live DM can provide.

CaW/CaS is thus mis-stating things.

Previous lines being said... I think you're right that CaW vs CaS is not quite the problem here.

 

[ccs]

So the villain was a Custom build. He had about 120 HP. They rolled low on their damage roll 70 something points. So he was messed up but not dead. I did mention to them that what they were doing may not work the way they thought. I have never been a fan of save or die rolls. They have a track record of turning moments that have such great lead ups into intense disappointment. I figured they would be happy, jump down and finish him off, not complain about the fact that he survived.

Your error was in revealing how much damage he took & that he was still alive.
They want this info? Let them earn it via spells, excavation of the wreckage, etc. Meanwhile your BBEG can slink away to lick his wounds & return for vengeance, step out of the smoking ruins & shank one of them, or anything else.

And never ever allow the engineer types to calculate anything or argue you into decisions based upon those calculations.

That said? As the DM you've also got to be ready to scrap a plan at a moments notice.

 

[Mercule]

NEVER let your engineer players calculate anything in any game.

Corollary: Never challenge the GM's math when he's the only engineer at the table. (Said as a software engineer who likes statistics.)

 

[Eltab]

If your engineer player wants to design something that takes two hours of IRL work to get the blueprints ready, ask him to do it at home between sessions and bring it in next week.
For purposes of play, he can describe with words and a rough sketch what he wants to accomplish.

That is the mistake I can see.

P.S. Have you considered asking the group to rotate DM duties? Being the DM for a while gives a player a new sense of perspective. (I learned that if I can't describe mechanically what my clever plan should do, it's not ready to pop on my DM yet.)