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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shilsen" data-source="post: 1877017" data-attributes="member: 198">When I was in India over the summer, one of the newer players to the group started DMing. He'd apparently been DMing much longer than I've even played D&D (5 yrs), but it turned into a disaster and he quit. Another guy took over, who'd apparently been working on his homebrew world and campaign for 4 years. Lots of railroading, uber-NPCs, and so on (or so I heard over email from the other players). When I got back, we had three sessions in his campaign, culminating with the following situation:Our PCs are on the deck of a small ship, sailing across an incredibly huge lake. We know that it's supposed to be a dangerous area, so we specifically mention that we're keeping a careful watch, with two PCs on either side (plus the usual NPC sailors, lookout, etc). Six seacats sneak up on the ship and then leap straight up and out of the water to a height of between 15 and 20 ft, over the PCs and the ship's rail, to land in perfectly placed formation (on the deck that they couldn't see from the water) around us. Before our jaws finish bouncing off the floor at the feat of the ninja seacats, the DM says, "And I don't want anyone to ask how they did that, because I'm not doing this by the rules. I just think it's cool."The situation presumably got even cooler as the DM soon realized that six seacats (CR 4 each; EL 9 total) are a little more than a match for 3rd lvl PCs (mine was 2nd). We ended up with only 1 PC dead because the sailors, who turned out to all be at or higher level than the PCs (the party in this campaign invariably included more NPCs than PCs, even when the PCs didn't want them along), distracted the seacats. Even so, two of them died, and in order to save the party, the DM decided that each seacat would grab whoever it killed and jump overboard.At the end of the session, when we explained that his idea of "cool" and ours might not match, he defended himself by saying that it just made the game more realistic, that he couldn't use less seacats since the MM said that there were 5-12 in a pride (suddenly the rules were of paramount importance), that low-level PCs should always travel with more powerful NPCs since the PCs aren't strong enough to handle anything they might encounter, and when you're low-level you can't expect the story to be about your PCs since they're not important enough.End of story - I'm DMing now.</blockquote>

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