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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 1532421" data-attributes="member: 8158">Wow, is it time for another round of "bang on the DM" already?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />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? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> 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.</blockquote>

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