Pushover DMs

[Renaissance Man]

As a counterpart to Raistlin Majere's thread on Heavy Handed DM's - what about those DM's who are utter pushovers? You know the ones I'm talking about. They can't be bothered to confirm the limits of the character's abilities, so they end up extending them the benefit of doubt, often to absurd extremes. For example, I use detect magic to determine if there are magical traps on the door to the treasure room, the DM responds that there are, and further divulges their location and the specific effects of each before I can say another word. C'mon, make me work for it! And don't get me started on the contents of said treasure room...

Is this an absurd complaint? Or are there others out there who feel similarly?

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

A DM at GenConUK (who later told me he was just starting out) who let my Paladin's Detct Evil work more like the radar in Aliens. Through all forms of stone. All the time. Without concentration. To a range of...who knows?

It was like wandering around with a HUD..."bing! bing! Evil at 60 ft...bing!...bing!...50ft...bing! bing!...30ft!...bingbing! Bingbing! 5ft!...bingbingbingbingbing! THEY'RE COMING THROUGH THE WALLS, MAN!"

Ok, not quite like that...

 

[Piratecat]

Tallarn, I had someone just like that once! It was weird.

 

[Renaissance Man]

Okay, here's what we BUMPed into in the afore-mentioned treasure room: nothing, really. That is, the DM refused to describe the contents, even after I made several attempts to index the loot, repeatedly scanning for magic, etc. In the end, we were simply told to pick out five magic items each from the DMG, no one of which could be worth more than 76,000gp. Not a bad day's work, for 11th level characters! Oh, and we also received 10,000gp each, presumably to keep us from bragging about this episode on the ENWorld message boards...

 

[Wormwood]

My current DM will never, *ever* let a character die.

Ever.

We're all effectively wearing Rings of Plot Protection, just like the Important NPCs and Important Villains.

God forbid something, anything happens that isn't in his precious script.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

My current DM will never, *ever* let a character die.

Ever.

We're all effectively wearing Rings of Plot Protection, just like the Important NPCs and Important Villains.

God forbid something, anything happens that isn't in his precious script.

Try killing yourselves?! Can the DM legitimately stop a character from falling on his own sword?

 

[Creamsteak]

Just want to establish I'm not a Pushover. I allow players unlimited freedom of choices, plots to follow, races, classes, weapons, armor, and the like; but, I never seem like the nice guy. I'm quite a bit overly-confident that at least half the characters will go to -5 or better (notice I use the word better), at least twice a session. This not being the true cruelty.... the true cruelty is playing Trolls like they have a 23 INT and have mastered fighting styles of Jit-kun-do and are Shinobi...

But I regress..... once I had a DM award 3rd level characters Pagasus Mounts for no particular reason (paying about 200 gp), then watched them slay an adult black dragon, and in the end they had amassed the largest assortment of custom-created magic items of invulnerability ever. Took only 1 session of DMing to repair his campaign, however.

 

[Kal Torak]

Took only 1 session of DMing to repair his campaign, however.

Whas it the Big T or a great red wyrm?

 

[Cerubus Dark]

But I regress..... once I had a DM award 3rd level characters Pagasus Mounts for no particular reason (paying about 200 gp), then watched them slay an adult black dragon, and in the end they had amassed the largest assortment of custom-created magic items of invulnerability ever. Took only 1 session of DMing to repair his campaign, however.

LOL, sounds like what I did almost a year and a half ago. I had to terminate the whole group because of wildly diffrent alignments and the abuse of magic items. After I disposed of the old group we started playing in my homebrew campaign setting. The Group has gotten to 13 level but they are still deathly afraid of dragons.

"Never trust a woman who wears red and smells of sulfer" MIlo Halffut former halfling now dragon chow.

 

[Creamsteak]

Whas it the Big T or a great red wyrm?

Actually it was a Black Adult.