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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6695410" data-attributes="member: 6787650">This isn't exactly the same as your example, but I did play for a while with a group whose DM was mostly into trying to tell epic stories. He had no problem doing things like subverting the destination of Teleport spells to make his story better, or describing epic historical cutscenes where the lich we're up against cut down armies but then when we actually fight the thousand-year-old lich it turns out to be weak (bog-standard lich) and played stupidly (doesn't change tactics even when it is losing; dies in a fist fight to a PC with Globe of Invulnerability IX up). He had an NPC he was trying to get us to hate, who was unkillable because he would always get away even when he lost the fight, just like a video game cutscene villain[1]. I value TTRPGs to get away from linear, videogame-like gameplay, and while I'm sure that DM would have characterized his own game as anything but videogamey, to me as a player that's how it felt like: I felt disempowered and prisoner to his vision of how things would play out. I felt like no matter what choices I made, what reconaissance I did or what dirty tricks I arranged for emergencies, there would always turn out to be an "appropriate challenge" with level-appropriate villains in a fair fight scenario[2], and there would be no way of avoiding the fight and going off to do my own thing if I felt like it--something would have dragged me back into the fight, but still without giving me an actual non-metagaming reason to be involved in the fight. In short, that DM and I had incompatible styles, and I eventually left. I felt bad about it because he and I are friends in real life, and it hurt his feelings so badly that he unfriended me on Facebook for a while... but it was still the right decision.[1]  One time we killed him and I methodically dismembered his corpse in case he was playing dead, but it eventually turned out that he had switched places with a PC via psionic illusion and the corpse I dismembered was "really" the paralyzed PC while the bad guy was secretly a member of our party. The switcheroo was not at all plausible given how he "died"--pulling it off would have required cooperation amongst groups of bad guys who had no plausible reason to be in cooperation, and who could have killed us much more easily via direct action. [2] Or something intended to be a fair fight, anyway. The one valuable thing I learned from this DM--my first exposure to 5E--was that you can throw ridiculously deadly fights at the PCs by DMG standards and they will usually win, even if the players don't know what they're doing, because the threat baseline is so low. Even a double-Deadly is usually still mechanically tilted in the PCs' favor. I believe this is a deliberate choice on 5E's designers' parts.</blockquote>

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