Rat bastard DM or just the norm? Share your stories.

[DM-Rocco]

Find a new DM

Well, I enjoyed the first session, it was small and fun to play and a small party. I think I could enjoy playing with him in the future, but not if this continues. He makes us roll for attacks against ourself, which is kind of fun, since then it is real us killing ourselves with bad rolls. I guess I don't mind that, but I think you may be right. I don't mind hard adventures, I don't mind challenges, but I think the last one was stacked against my PC from the beginning.

 

[EvilGM]

I'm the DM!

First of all, I told you when you started (and numerous times after that, including every session and at the end of your last session) your group of two would be "wooshed" to the other party's location as soon as the two different adventure groups could make the same day. Everyone was fine with that.

You knew you were diseased. The cleric was out of spells and wanted to hit town, but you wanted to explore a few more rooms in the ruins/dungeon. It was filth fever (which I believe is the weakest disease). The wound was healed, but was still tender and red, and the cleric confirmed you were diseased. Three days later, you failed your Fortitude save (I rolled secretly) and took minor damage (-1 Dex, -2 Con).

The campaign is set in the Wilderlands. Everyone is playing a gestalt character with 80 point buy (starting at 0, 1 for 1, min 3, max 18 before race adjustments).
Everyone was informed it is mostly wilderness... not newbie zone wilderness, but real wilderness - the kind that will kill you.

Regarding the sage's death - now that was hilarious! Everyone else was dead or invisible or had run really far off, and there is the sage standing within 30' or so. Ouch!

Regarding your warrior's death - that was pretty hilarious too! Level 1 warrior charges a hill giant. That can't end well.

 

[tenkar]

Why are they even encountering Hill Giants at first level? Thats not fun, or even funny... its overkill.

To each their own I guess, but I always tailored the challenges to the party's abilities. I took no pride or joy in killing PCs.

 

[EvilGM]

Despite lack of knowledge and generally not being very savvy, they ventured over 50 miles from a big city into the wilderness. They're basically wandering around with nfc.

Why they're not sticking close to town, you'd have to ask them. Its certainly not for lack of things to do.

As to why they encountered a hill giant... that's his territory. They've encountered him twice, the first time he was out for a stroll and didn't notice them.
They've had really good luck on wilderness encounters, except for getting the giant twice. Oh well.

There is no magical forests just full of bunnies... there be bears in them woods too.

 

[riprock]

First of all, I told you when you started (and numerous times after that, including every session and at the end of your last session) your group of two would be "wooshed" to the other party's location as soon as the two different adventure groups could make the same day. Everyone was fine with that.

You knew you were diseased. The cleric was out of spells and wanted to hit town, but you wanted to explore a few more rooms in the ruins/dungeon. It was filth fever (which I believe is the weakest disease). The wound was healed, but was still tender and red, and the cleric confirmed you were diseased. Three days later, you failed your Fortitude save (I rolled secretly) and took minor damage (-1 Dex, -2 Con).

This is a good example of why I always try to avoid using monsters with diseases and poisons. If the characters are going to die, I prefer that they die in a gory fight.

When I have characters who are doing obviously stupid things, I usually pause, look them in the eye, and say something like, "You do realize, of course, that you're proposing a suicidal course of action. Don't you want to reconsider?" If they have a god, I might allow the god to telepathically tell the characters they ought to stay alive to serve the god. If they only have a mortal NPC patron, I might say, "Remember, you have to complete the patron's mission, and you can't do that if you're dead."

In rulesets with intelligence checks, I often have the party roll an intelligence check. Those who succeed get told privileged DM information so that the party doesn't die. Here peer pressure among players often keeps the party alive and functional. And, yes, I often fudge the intelligence check -- no matter how badly they roll, I tell at least one player some privileged info.

All the same, I've had players go ahead and do suicidally stupid things despite my warnings. In D&D, I have no problem saying, "Look, your old character is dead, select from these pre-rolled ones or roll a new one." In other games, there are other ways.

 

[Imperialus]

why not woosh the two characters wandering aimlessly through the forest into the dungon that you had prepared instead of into a forest where they had nothing to do but continue to wander until killed by a wandering monster?

There are better ways to get a party back on track than to have a hill giant start killing them off at first level. Perhaps encountering a band of much more experianced adventures who are obviously the worse for wear. Said adventurers could look at them incredulously and say something like:

Sir Railwaystation the Fighter: "What do you think you are doing here? You're lucky that that (insert nasty beasty here) hasn't found you. We almost lost Bob our cleric yesterday and are heading back to town. You better come with us unless you want to be (nasty beasty) dinner."

*edit* and if the wilderness is supposed to be so nasty and dangerous for first level characters why are you setting the campaign there at 1st level? Is it concentric rings of progressively nastier badguys the further you get from town? Is it supposed to be a city adventure? How have you introduced plot hooks to keep your players from wandering off into the wilderness? Chances are the PC's left town thinking they were following a plot hook or perhaps in search of one.

In my experiance at least, players tend to pick up on plot hooks without too much goading. They are (or at least should be) comeing to play an adventure you've prepared. If they wanted to get lost in the wilderness they could just drive to the edge of town and start walking away from the road. If the players are purposely ignoring your plot hooks perhaps you need to have an OOC conversation with everyone about what their goals are for the game.

Personally I find that introducing hooks that are a happy medium between painfully obvious (like two NPC's named Plot and Hook press ganging the party into service) and too obscure is one of the most difficult things for me to do well as a DM. After all no matter how obvious a plot hook is to you your players may not recognize it as such. This can easally lead to frustration on my part since it pretty much forces me to ad-lib (which I hate) or get mad at my players and "punish" them. It seems like you are doing the latter, severly outclassing your PC's because they didn't follow the plot that you wanted.

What I found worked best for me, was to at the outset of one campaign shotgun as many plot hooks as possible at the players and then after the session ask them how many of them they recognized as plot hooks. This gave me an idea of A) what interested them and B) how obvious my hooks needed to be to get recognized.

 

[Rothe]

why not woosh the two characters wandering aimlessly through the forest into the dungon that you had prepared instead of into a forest where they had nothing to do but continue to wander until killed by a wandering monster?

.....

My first thought as well. Still many other reasons one could come up with to give a warning since the entire reason to whoosh them away is pure metagame. "Your characers have an oveririding premonition somehting is wrong and they should head back to town." Where they are whooshed away later. Maybe the casting of the healing magic is that final magical straw that rips the fabric of the universe and whooshes them away.

Hey I'm all for whooshing aways and meshing schedules, but it is so far fetched a solution to the problem that allowing them to get back to town first is not a big deal. An alternative is always a portal in the dungeon, they uniknowingly walk through into this other deadly wilderness. The ruins were not unexplored afterall, it's just no one ever came back.

 

[DM-Rocco]

This is a good example of why I always try to avoid using monsters with diseases and poisons. If the characters are going to die, I prefer that they die in a gory fight.

When I have characters who are doing obviously stupid things, I usually pause, look them in the eye, and say something like, "You do realize, of course, that you're proposing a suicidal course of action. Don't you want to reconsider?" If they have a god, I might allow the god to telepathically tell the characters they ought to stay alive to serve the god. If they only have a mortal NPC patron, I might say, "Remember, you have to complete the patron's mission, and you can't do that if you're dead."

In rulesets with intelligence checks, I often have the party roll an intelligence check. Those who succeed get told privileged DM information so that the party doesn't die. Here peer pressure among players often keeps the party alive and functional. And, yes, I often fudge the intelligence check -- no matter how badly they roll, I tell at least one player some privileged info.

All the same, I've had players go ahead and do suicidally stupid things despite my warnings. In D&D, I have no problem saying, "Look, your old character is dead, select from these pre-rolled ones or roll a new one." In other games, there are other ways.

I often do the same thing myself, giving the PCs a lot of chance to figure out they are over matched, usually a wisdom check. Sometimes a sense motive check (my way of giving some character types a slightly better chance at gauging the situation)

When you think about it, your character INT, especially those like Wizards with and INT over 16, are going to be more INT than you in real life. Most of us probably have somewhere around a 11-14 INT with 14 being about a 140 IQ. Your PCs should be smarter than you, so I allow some rolls from time to time when PCs are about to do something stupid.

 

[DM-Rocco]

why not woosh the two characters wandering aimlessly through the forest into the dungon that you had prepared instead of into a forest where they had nothing to do but continue to wander until killed by a wandering monster?

There are better ways to get a party back on track than to have a hill giant start killing them off at first level. Perhaps encountering a band of much more experianced adventures who are obviously the worse for wear. Said adventurers could look at them incredulously and say something like:

Sir Railwaystation the Fighter: "What do you think you are doing here? You're lucky that that (insert nasty beasty here) hasn't found you. We almost lost Bob our cleric yesterday and are heading back to town. You better come with us unless you want to be (nasty beasty) dinner."

*edit* and if the wilderness is supposed to be so nasty and dangerous for first level characters why are you setting the campaign there at 1st level? Is it concentric rings of progressively nastier badguys the further you get from town? Is it supposed to be a city adventure? How have you introduced plot hooks to keep your players from wandering off into the wilderness? Chances are the PC's left town thinking they were following a plot hook or perhaps in search of one.

I guess this is what happened to the last party, they went to a ladies house and found out that her husband was missing in the wilderlands, in a cave. To be honest, given the warning that the DM had laid out saying that all of the wild are very dangerous and you will encounter very high level monsters there, I would have told this lady, sorry, your husband is dead or soon to be dead, maybe when I am level 20 I'll look for his bones. However, I was not part of that party when they made a foolish choice to go into the wilds and I would have told them, "good luck, I'll find your bones later and have you raised later."

There seems to be plenty of things to do around the city they started in, including exploring the sewer, which could hold dangerous things, but sounds like a safer choice than the wilds.

Bottom line though, I never was given a choice of where to warp to and from the general concenus of this thread, the DM should have allowed a short trip into the city first and then a warp, preferably to the next nearest city to the other PCs, not foolishly into a wild land no man has a right to be in.

 

[DM-Rocco]

First of all, I told you when you started (and numerous times after that, including every session and at the end of your last session) your group of two would be "wooshed" to the other party's location as soon as the two different adventure groups could make the same day. Everyone was fine with that.

...and I told you it would be better if they were whooshed here to our location as we ahve an established area for first level play. I also said before that happened, even before the rat bite, that I wanted, in fact that I needed to hit the city for shopping and making scrolls. So don't make it sound like everyone was completely happy with being whooshed away to a certain location.

You knew you were diseased. The cleric was out of spells and wanted to hit town, but you wanted to explore a few more rooms in the ruins/dungeon. It was filth fever (which I believe is the weakest disease). The wound was healed, but was still tender and red, and the cleric confirmed you were diseased. Three days later, you failed your Fortitude save (I rolled secretly) and took minor damage (-1 Dex, -2 Con).

Yes, I wanted to go on, cause we were not in great need of healing, the cleric has a wand of cure light wounds and I had plenty of spells left and the day was young, but that doesn't really matter. I feel it was poor DMing on your part to throw me into the wild lands when not even given the choice. If the other PCs wanted to run crazy and try to avoid the hill giant and sneak under the watchful eye of the Red Dragon in the area, let them, but my character was a bit more careful with his life than that and would not go where they did. Even if you warped all of us into a town, I would tell the other PCs that I was not into suicide missions and wished them luck in the wilds, but that I would remain in town and find another way to level.

The campaign is set in the Wilderlands. Everyone is playing a gestalt character with 80 point buy (starting at 0, 1 for 1, min 3, max 18 before race adjustments).
Everyone was informed it is mostly wilderness... not newbie zone wilderness, but real wilderness - the kind that will kill you.

All the more reason to not through first level characters into the middle of wilderness. They went there, again, I would not have.

Regarding the sage's death - now that was hilarious! Everyone else was dead or invisible or had run really far off, and there is the sage standing within 30' or so. Ouch!

The sage would have just run, but he spent a two rounds healing his master, one round successfully calming his masters mounts and then a round trying to flee on the mount per his masters instructions. Who would have thought that the DM would rule that you need a DC 20 control mount in combat to spur the mount away from battle. That DC is set aside for taking the mount into combat, not fleeing combat. The horse, as stated in the books, unless trained for mounted combat or a war horse, will naturally flee from combat, the exact thing the sage was trying to do. You just wanted him dead cause it was inconvient for you as a DM to have a NPC under the PCs control with local knowledge of all regions per your own admission. Congrates, you killed him, happy.

Regarding your warrior's death - that was pretty hilarious too! Level 1 warrior charges a hill giant. That can't end well.

He didn't have a choice, appearently when an obscuring mist forms over a spell caster in 20 feet in all directions, the common thing for a Hill Giant to do is throw rocks into the center of the mist rather than attack creatures he can see. So, yes, he charged the Hill Giant cause he had to by his master time while the sage shoved a healing potion down his masters throat.

The first few sessions were fun, but that last one was not. I don't think it was a fair situation, given no choice on where to start or a chance to buy gear.

Hey, you wanted me to post this thread, so go ahead, defend yourself somemore.