What the heck is "Unfun"?

[Gallo22]

No. Monsters that might do terrible damage to the world she lives in if she doesn't defeat them make my character afraid. Being as I'm playing a game, no monsters make me afraid, though some make me bored and/or annoyed.

If this is true, your not gaming with the right DMs!

 

[Cadfan]

Please indicate where I have slammed others, not disagreed....strongly even...but slammed an individual. You won't find it. If you do, I will issue an apology immediately. If you don't find evidence of my mean spiritedness, then admit your use of hyperbole in describing my position.

I consider your statements, beginning in the opening post of this thread, to the effect that players these days have a "sense of entitlement" and a need for "instant gratification" to be slamming other people.

I consider your constant use of straw man reasoning in which you conclude that because someone doesn't like one particular aspect of randomness, that they must obviously hate all randomness and just want to play make believe, to be a not very well veiled effort at being insulting. My opinion on your conclusion that anyone who doesn't like complete and dictatorial DM control must really just want to play crazy anything goes campaigns with no internal consistency to be similarly insulting, though you did graciously backtrack on that to a more reasonable position.

And the backtracking, of course, just makes it all the more frustrating: you knew when you originally posted about unreasonably players demanding warforged in settings other than Eberron that a DM could, if he chose, make an exception without destroying his game world. But still you chose to denigrate that player and to insist that the effects of permitting an exception to the general rules of the game world would be disastrous, until you were called on it.

If you do not believe these comments are slamming people, then I am sure that you would not even think to find it the slightest bit insulting if someone were to call you a tyrannical, ego maniacal DM who puts his own fun above his players, views them as his vassals, and denigrates their contributions to the game. These statements are, of course, analogous to insisting that players these days are instant gratification junkies with an undeserved sense of entitlement who don't properly understand and respect a DM's contribution to the game.

Really, that statement above is not an accurate reflection of my opinion of you. Just to make that clear. I don't think you're an ego manical DM.

What I think you are is a person who enjoys playing an ego maniacal DM on the internet.

 

[Simia Saturnalia]

Hold Person. A save every single round.

It went from being a feared spell to being a never even taken spell.

This, this I'm with you on. And Command being reduced to five 'tactically balanced' words? Terrible choice.


My 1e books share space on my shelf with the 3.5 stuff - at least until 4e arrives. The skin-of-your-teeth, sometimes good people die stupid deaths, think first style appeals to me as much as or more than the dragon-humbling, magic-slinging, world-shaping style of 3e. I do, however, think 4e should reach out to those playstyles with the broadest appeal among the potential gamer population, so as to grow the brand and keep the dream alive. We can all run our tables the way we want, so why not bring as many people to the game as possible?

 

[Dragonblade]

QFT, sir. There are plenty of challenging, scary monsters (demons, devils, dragons) without having to fall back on poorly designed creatures with strictly METAGAME abilities like level-drain. Creatures like this, along with the Rust Monster, and my least favorite, the Ethereal Filcher, have no other purpose other than to screw PCs.

I can scare my PCs with any number of creatures; I love using weak monsters like kobolds and hobgoblins with tactics that strike terror into their hearts. But those metagame monsters exist solely for the purpose of shortcutting; they are the ultimate "lazy DM's" path to 'challenging' players. Instead, however, all they do is actively encourage an adversarial relationship between DMs and PCs.

Double QFT!! And bolded for emphasis! Well said!!

 

[Sundragon2012]

In your opinion, that's cool.

Ah, 4.0, the "complainers edition". Sorry, all I'm reading is how unfun means adversity that must be overcome by playing smart, prepping, or whatever.

I guess it's unfun to fall in a pit and all your group forgets to bring rope. Whoops, maybe we should eliminate pits too. This is all just so silly it's laughable.

-DM Jeff

LOL

[Jovial Sarcasm]Sucks to have to worry about proper provisioning for a life threatening expidition to the underworld where you are guaranteed to be attacked and likely injured and perhaps even killed. Oh NOEESSSSS!!!!! Bad, Sucky, Mean DM for not allowing me to come out as a great hero with bundles of gold! If you allowed me to provision using my belt of endless adeventurer's supplies this never would have happened!

I joke of course and not everyone is saying that (see the smilie ), but there is a segment that represents such an IMO odd and, in an adventure game, parodoxical point of view. On one hand they want to be heroes who face endless threats, because rest time is UNFUN but I shouldn't be able to be killed by a stray arrow, a random critical hit, a spike trap, a medusa's gaze, a gorgon's breath, powerful necromantic magic, falling into lava because their dex isn't so good, falling rocks in an unstable cave, dehydration in a desert, drowning at sea when a Kraken takes down their ship, drow poison crossbow bolts, and on and on and on.....

Oh yeah, they still want to be heroes but risk nothing and have to put no thought into preparation for their undangerous, undeadly, unheroic adventures. And if they die because they have a sucky DM who undermined their heroicness, they can always get cheap and easy access to resurrection because after all they are heroes and heroes don't die except in cool, prepared, cinematic ways..... The crit of a bugbear can never shatter the adamantine skull of a hero. [/Jovial Sarcasm]


Sometimes it seems that this attitude is more akin to the old serial action movies where the hero would seem to die at the end of the movie but next weekend it would show how he heroically escaped. This is D&D not as Tolkien or Howard but D&D as 4 color superhero comic....old school comics before people died in them.



Sundragon

 

[Gallo22]

LOL

[Jovial Sarcasm]Sucks to have to worry about proper provisioning for a life threatening expidition to the underworld where you are guaranteed to be attacked and likely injured and perhaps even killed. Oh NOEESSSSS!!!!! Bad, Sucky, Mean DM for not allowing me to come out as a great hero with bundles of gold! If you allowed me to provision using my belt of endless adeventurer's supplies this never would have happened!

I joke of course and not everyone is saying that (see the smilie ), but there is a segment that represents such an IMO odd and, in an adventure game, parodoxical point of view. On one hand they want to be heroes who face endless threats, because rest time is UNFUN but I shouldn't be able to be killed by a stray arrow, a random critical hit, a spike trap, a medusa's gaze, a gorgon's breath, powerful necromantic magic, falling into lava because their dex isn't so good, falling rocks in an unstable cave, dehydration in a desert, drowning at sea when a Kraken takes down their ship, drow poison crossbow bolts, and on and on and on.....

Oh yeah, they still want to be heroes but risk nothing and have to put no thought into preparation for their undangerous, undeadly, unheroic adventures. And if they die because they have a sucky DM who undermined their heroicness, they can always get cheap and easy access to resurrection because after all they are heroes and heroes don't die except in cool, prepared, cinematic ways..... The crit of a bugbear can never shatter the adamantine skull of a hero. [/Jovial Sarcasm]

Sometimes it seems that this attitude is more akin to the old serial action movies where the hero would seem to die at the end of the movie but next weekend it would show how he heroically escaped. This is D&D not as Tolkien or Howard but D&D as 4 color superhero comic....old school comics before people died in them.



Sundragon

All I can do is clap!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Cadfan]

Oh and 5 arrows at 16th level is easy to handle. Let's see, the character has 25 arrows, then shoots 5 arrows, he now has 20 arrows. Yup...pretty easy...

Do your players generally only carry enough arrows for 5 rounds at level 16?

More likely, they have a bow which creates infinite arrows magically, or they have a magical quiver with an obscene payload, which needs to be tracked.

And they don't always attack with the full rapid shot, so it won't always be multiples of five. There's ordinary attacking, and there's multishot.

And of course if you can run out of arrows, and you're away from civilization, you'll need to salvage arrows after a combat if you can. Half the arrows you fired are reusable. So add that bookkeeping in.

 

[Grog]

I joke of course and not everyone is saying that (see the smilie ), but there is a segment that represents such an IMO odd and, in an adventure game, parodoxical point of view. On one hand they want to be heroes who face endless threats, because rest time is UNFUN but I shouldn't be able to be killed by a stray arrow, a random critical hit, a spike trap, a medusa's gaze, a gorgon's breath, powerful necromantic magic, falling into lava because their dex isn't so good, falling rocks in an unstable cave, dehydration in a desert, drowning at sea when a Kraken takes down their ship, drow poison crossbow bolts, and on and on and on.....

Oh yeah, they still want to be heroes but risk nothing and have to put no thought into preparation for their undangerous, undeadly, unheroic adventures. And if they die because they have a sucky DM who undermined their heroicness, they can always get cheap and easy access to resurrection because after all they are heroes and heroes don't die except in cool, prepared, cinematic ways.....

Okay. You say that there's a segment of players out there who want to have adventures with no risk at all.

Prove it.

Show me posts from these people saying the things that you claim they believe. And not just one or two people - on the internet, you can find one or two people saying anything. Show me... say, half a dozen different people saying that they want risk-free adventures. Not just people saying they don't like save-or-die effects or whatever, but people saying that they want absolutely no risk in their adventures whatsoever, as you claim.

If there are so many of these people out there, it should be a simple matter for you to find half a dozen or so. So let's see the posts.

 

[Sundragon2012]

I consider your statements, beginning in the opening post of this thread, to the effect that players these days have a "sense of entitlement" and a need for "instant gratification" to be slamming other people. ....snipped....

Ok, thanks for that.

I am not using absolutist statements. I have put no one down. If you find yourself insulted by me unintentionally, I apologize. You are however completely wrong about the way I DM and I would argue that I come off not as a draconian DM, but as a DM who offers his players reasonable choices within the millieu of choice and will bend things a bit here and there when I feel it necessary.

What you call backtracking I call clarifying. Your use of backtracking as a descriptor is nothing more than a negative moniker on my words to strengthen your own argument. Fine, see it that way if you wish. Your above statements are more of a slam on me personally than any comment I have directed at you. That's fine too.

However, from this point on it would be nice if you added to the discussion about the topic instead of analyzing me or my DMing style, on or off the internet. Enough with this thread derailing.



Sundragon

 

[Glyfair]

Some people might not enjoy that in a game.

And that is one of my points. The issue here isn't whether your group enjoys it, or whether my group enjoys it. It's how the D&D customer base enjoys it, and to some extent whether the designers enjoy that (since they are the ones with the decision making power).

If he has to stop playing in order to look up the cost of arrows in the PHB, then he's not organized enough himself and is causing delays himself.

So, in your opinion, being well organized is a requirement for playing D&D?