D&D General The Player's Quantum Ogre: Warlock Pacts

[Micah Sweet]

That's fair. Everyone should play at tables that support their own preferred play style. I, for example, don't want to play in a game where every warlock must hit the exact same narrative beats in every story, or where every possible plot hook must be on screen and relevant in every campaign.

I might, for example, want to play a warlock whose patron is the vestige of a dead god, sealed away in a prison beyond time and space. Through a confluence of mystical circumstances, I'm the only being in existence who can access the prison, and my patron is completely at my mercy. It teaches me ancient magical secrets so I can one day restore it to life using epic-level magic. In the mean time, a cult of the dead god wants to capture me and siphon off my mystical connection to their deity's prison.

But, of course, that narrative contradicts the flavor text some DMs require of the warlock class (Faustian bargains with patrons currently active in the world), so I can't play that character at every table.

I noticed how your description of my opinion is substantially less flattering to me than mine. Also less accurate.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It SHOULDN'T be normal. But personal experiences and whole subreddits full of DM horror stories that say it's less uncommon than it should be. And frankly, I feel the movement from DMs having mechanical justification to screw with their players (ie classes where role-play can have mechanical consequences) is helping disarm a lot of bad DMs and bad DMs-in-training.

I don't miss the whole "my DM took away my paladinhood again" discussions from 3e and earlier.

Love to see the DM side of those almost certainly player-instigated discussions.

 

[VHawkwinter]

About warlock pacts...

If the idea of making a pact with some supernatural power in exchange for power is a key part of the fantasy, why are so many warlock players vehemently against the notion of that pact ever being a part of the actual fiction of the game?

For example, if the patron makes a request or demand of the PC, the player can and will refuse. Or if the patron even threatens to undermine the PC's power, the player gets mad.

The pact is treated as entirely one-sided and permanent and anything suggesting otherwise is rebelled against or attacked.

When the Warlock was introduced in 3e, IIRC it was that the Patron gave you a minor spark of magic and made you like, an Artificial-Sorcerer. Everything after that was you yourself building upon what you got. It was a small one time payment for services rendered. A lot of people don't like the more recent change to making them Devil-Clerics.

So which is it? Is the pact the central theme to the character and should be included in the fiction of the game or is the pact simply a light coating of irrelevant story over the game mechanics that we should never really bring up?

IMO it depends if your player wants to be an Artificial-Sorcerer or a Devil-Cleric.

Personally, I would rather eliminate the class, and tell people to roll up either a Cleric or a Sorcerer, and adapt some Pact options to the class they pick, but that's an off-label application of the rules.

 

[WanderingMystic]

I only have 2 horror stories between the DM and his players, one in d&d and one on Warhammer. On Warhammer the DM put us in a tomb with an unkillable enemy from which there was no escape. We were later told that their was a secret chamber which by the time we entered the tomb was sealed and could never again be entered held the only way we could defeat our enemy.

The other time was a d&d game where the DM insisted on 40 hours per level down time with a higher level npc per level to level up, so 40 hours to level from 1 to 2, 80 to move from level 2 to 3 and so on. That in and of itself was not bad, but our home village was raised to the ground, our party was hunt d non stop by enemies and could not get to appropriate trainers. I was a Solomnic Knight and had to return to Solomnia to level up which I was told by the DM wa practically impossible. I had enough for a level 8 character but we had the stars of a level 4-5 character.
The dm focused on what he felt was a focus on the setting and fluf overrided the players fun in the experience. (We also didn't know our abilities, skill modifiers, saving throws ect since a real person doesn't know that type of information.)

Both time the DM placed what he thought would work thematically over the mechanical rules of the system and both times it cause the players to quit the group.

Now I personally loved not knowing my stats only a vague 1-6 rating of best to worse and during 3rd Ed I insisted that players needed to find a way in game to gain a prestige class however if a player told me that they wanted to join one and it made sense for the second thing they would find someone who could teach them. This differs from other games where I might say I wanted to become a knight at character creation only to find that the knightly orders were no where near where our characters would be.