What ever happened to "role playing?"

[Minicol]

Hi, all.

I'm new here, but not new to D&D. I've always loved it, but since the release of 3rd edtion, and especially 3.5, I've encountered one large, glaring problem:

Roll Playing.

My question is, what happened to DMing? What happened to stories? Why is everyone (the last 8 DM's I've played with) so concerned with rules rather than playing? Is it just me? Is it bad luck? Or, is this a growing trend, the wave of the future for D&D?

Your Dm is bad.
He is concentrating on the wargaming part of the game only, not on the storytelling. With that kind of guy, any rules system will suck.

He also shows lack of experience, your two spells can be dramatically useful for avoiding harm at low levels.

Having orc brigands with fighter levels is not so bad, depending on the adventure. I always found that the fodder approach of previous editions was bad. It was a wonder there was ANY creature left on the world, since they were such pushovers. Now, the idea that a whole group macho orc grunts would agree to take off their armor for stealth, without a major bungle happening is stupid I agree. Now a few scouts to backstab you while the main horde charges....

The blizzard part is showing a lack of experience in DMing : you should have received plenty of warnings about it. It just seems he has low imagination and he wanted to railroad you into the one and only path inside.

Now as for the rules, 3.5 is not balanced : if you just use the basic monsters against even moderately experienced players, they will get trashed, even if they have several CRs more than they should. So if you have that kind of players, you are quickly tempted to enter the arms race against the players by using bizarrely twisted monsters, through templates or character classes.
Your friends want unusual characters with plenty of powers, and they still want to be challenged, so you indulge them by raising the power level.

There is no good solution to this. The only one with a chance of working is having a DM that says clearly he doesn't want that kind of nonsense on his table, and enforces it, by removing troublemakers if necessary.

 

[Zappo]

Roleplaying is stronger than ever, actually. If you have met 8 such DMs, you are on a string of bad luck (or maybe they have all learned from each other, if you're always in the same area it happens). Check the Story Hour forum for lots and lots of examples of good roleplaying.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I have never understood the urge to submit the PCs to encounters they just can't win or even escape fom.

I am the GM, of course I can set up situations that will kill the party. And an author can write a story where the hero gets hit by a bus and killed on page three, does that mean that anyone will buy the book or want to play in the game?

'The ceiling falls down, you all die. muwahaha!'

Why is that fun?

I have even encountered a DM (and played in his game once) who had a house rule that no one got experience unless at least one PC died. He also insisted that players start at 1st level, no matter how experienced the rest of the party was. Guess what? Usually the new character died. Whoo! What fun!

And this was in AD&D 1st edition. So no, the roll players, rules lawyers, munchkins, and killer DMs have been with us since the beginning. (Don't believe me, go and read Tomb of Horrors...) In a lot of ways 3.x has made the game a wee bit less about killing things, adding coherent rules for social encounters as well as combat.

And a bad DM tends to have bad games, and bad players.

The Auld Grump, hope your game gets better...

 

[Elf Witch]

I think you are having a bit of bad luck. But I can understand your frustration I have had some great DMs who encouraged role playing and picking more than just the powerhouse cool spells who still managed to make your pulse pound with scary encounters.

I have also walked out of several games in the last few years where the DMs did what you described and the players made over powered munchkins.

I do think that 3.5 encourages some of this and in the hands of munchkins and killer DMs you end up with scenarios like you described.

I enjoy a battle that challenges me and makes me think on the best way to approach it but I hate it when I feel the DM has stacked the deck all that does is cause anger and sucks the fun out of the game.

A lot of novice DMs do this when they are trying to come up with an encounter that will challenge their players. As a DM use the cues your players are sending you. Are they throwing down their pencils in frustration, do they look grim and even when they manage to defeat a baddies do they make no sounds of joy do they start doing stupid rhings like they don't care anymore. There are more but you get the drift.

To me a good DM can see that his players are not having fun and should take steps to rectify the situation.

 

[BSF]

Greetings and welcome Lokishadow!

You found a DM that doesn't match your style of play. It sounds like you have found several, actually. Roleplaying is alive and well, but it is not what everyone wants and plays the game for. Find a DM & a group that matches your style better.

 

[Felon]

it sounds like your DM was a dink.

It sounds to me like your DM needs to take a chill pill.

The game isn't the problem; It's the GM.

Your Dm is bad.
He is concentrating on the wargaming part of the game only, not on the storytelling. With that kind of guy, any rules system will suck. He also shows lack of experience....

Wow, is it time for another round of "bang on the DM" already?

Loki, it looks to me like this was a basic orc-and-pie mission. And not only isn't there a darn thing wrong with that, it is in fact a classic that goes all the way back to the D&D's oldest days. Read some of Gary Gygax's articles from Dragon and guess what you'll find? Not one grandiose world-spanning melodrama-injected quest after another, but rather for the most part it was one simple assault mission after another. A lot of times a player would just show up the game table and announce they wanted to accomplish some minor short-term goal (e.g. get his hands on a rod of lordly might) and he'd coax the rest of the players into going along and Gygax would devise a dungeoncrawl on the spot.

Oh, and bro-ther would he kill characters! Ever heard of a little place called the Tomb of Horrors? Super-deadly, PC's dying like flies, and no trace of storytelling or role-playing to be found--heck, not even the reviled roll-playing for that matter ("you walk into a giant sphere of annihlation--you're dead, no saving throw"). Wow, what business does this guy have trying to DM? Where's the pathos? Where's the mise-en-scène?

Just reading from paragraph to paragraph, I find myself thinking "well, that wasn't so bad...yeah, I can see where the DM was going there". The only areas where it sounds like he made mistakes (and believe it or not, DM's are allowed to err) was in jacking up the monsters' levels too high across the board, and in failing to give due consideration to what would happen if players actually tried to make their way up the cliff that he probably figured players would regard as unassailable right away.

The fact is, you were playing with a group of nine players, and that's pure chaos. That you don't cut your DM any slack for that amazes me. The kind of heavily story-driven adventures you're looking for requires a smaller group of players (or at least a more intimate group than it sounds like you have), unless of course it's a railroad story in which case no players arre actually required and the DM can just read boxed text to himself from the comfort of his armchair. With nine players, including guys who the DM doesn't know very well, orc-and-pie is a good way to get the feel of the group. And it's not like the makeup of your party is light on muscle. You had a primo orc-killing unit.

I don't know what most of your post has to do with 3.5e really. You mention some gripe about spider-climb being 2nd-level. It's 2nd-level because the designers realized that, all things being equal, spider-climbing and levitating are just about equally effective, with one being more effective than the other in certain specific circumstances. I don't see anything more specific than that, so you may wish to elaborate. Might help if you focused on either criticizing 3.53e or criticizing your DM.

Bottom line: run your own dang game for a horde of players and see how storytelling works out when half the party just wants to kill stuff and get loot. See how well those roleplaying encounters work out when it's a 10-way conversation. And when the session's over, see how many players say "thanks for running" and how many run off to messageboards to tell everyone how their DM can't DM his way out of a wet paper bag.

 

[tetsujin28]

Man, this question comes up what, everyday?

 

[Piratecat]

Man, this question comes up what, everyday?

Which does new members what good, exactly, other than confirming that this is a repeating problem? It's good to welcome new folks; telling them "This has been posted before" doesn't really do that. I know it's tough, but I'd be just as happy if folks avoided threads that they found repetitive.

And it will NEVER be as bad as 3e "rangers got the shaft" threads.

 

[Malk]

Right o Right o PC, thats a big pet peave of mine. Everything comes up all the time no matter where you are, even normal conversations within a small group of friends.

 

[Acid_crash]

My problem with the majority of DM's I've been a player of isn't heavy combat encounters...it's the painful lack of description during the adventure.

This is how it starts, and this is how our Dragonlance campaign started:

DM: You are in the marketplace. You see a piece of paper on the board. It says that if you want a mission go see so-and-so for more information. When you talk to so-and-so, he says that the first part is 100 gold, the second part is 150 gold. What do you do?

-----

to me, that start just sucks. However, this is how 9 out of 10 D&D games have begun since I've started playing, and for the most part the majority of players don't have a problem with it.

The way I see it is that all these DM's, these players who can accept that, the only game they have played is D&D. I started with original SW d6, Werewolf from White wolf, and Rifts before playing D&D, so I started with a totally different experience then these players.

I call it the D&D syndrome, or D&D mentality. It's okay to have a lackluster start as describe above because D&D itself doesn't teach, or give advice, on how to run a game any other way. D&D is about combat, it's about the gold, it's about the xp.