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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 9046138" data-attributes="member: 6787650">One of the nice things is that it can preserve a sense of fairness and trust in the GM, and willing suspension of disbelief.I had the experience a few weeks after picking up 5E of playing alongside a truly awful player who made his 20th+ level character (Wizard 11/Cleric 10 or something, loads of magic items) less effective in play than our 8th level characters. At one point he wandered off alone in a huff because other characters weren't treating him with Gandalf-level reverence, and wound up meeting the BBEG of the dungeon, an ancient lich whom the DM had already described via legend as killing armies and IIRC blowing the tops off mountains.Idiot player proceeds to make some grandiose pronouncement and then attack the BBEG, on his own. I'm expecting him to get nuked. (Oh BTW this BBEG had appeared onscreen before to save us from a potential TPK against four mind flayers and a Balor by paralyzing everybody with a single word of power, so his immense power had already been established both offscreen and onscreen.)Instead he lets the PC upcast Globe of Invulnerability to level 9 (the only moderately good use of his 9th level slot I ever saw from the player), and then... starts to melee him, after the player points out to the DM that he's immune to paralysis because of some ring. So they stand there in the Globe of Invulnerability trading blows until the BBEG dies!That really broke my sense of the world as a place where stuff "really happens", and was a factor in my leaving the campaign a couple of sessions later.If I had known that my GM were the type never to invent contrivances during play--if there were notes dating back to 1986 showing that this particular lich never retreats so much as 10 feet, or waits 60 seconds for an enemy spell to end before engaging--then I would say, "Wow, what a stupid lich. I'm surprised nobody has killed him already," but at least I wouldn't have felt like the DM was cheating to keep the player alive. I wouldn't have left the campaign.There's the virtue you were looking for: more trust in the integrity of the setting. It's not the only way to earn trust but it's definitely a valid way to earn trust.</blockquote>

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