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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6242539" data-attributes="member: 5143">Yeah, most of my players don't trust DMs.  They don't forgive DMs their mistakes.  I had to have the entire rules memorized from beginning to end because any mistake would be pointed out to me quickly and with a tone that says "Seriously, why are you the one DMing if you don't even know the rules?"It would cause an argument that would take too much time away from the game.  A rough example would be:"How many Orcs can I hit with my burning hands?""2""Wait.  A burning hands is a 15 ft cone.  That means it affects 1 square then 2 squares then 3 squares in front of me.  You said last turn that there were 3 orcs in melee with the fighter who is 20 feet away from me.  You said they were standing in a line.  So that means if I put the 3 squares of my burning hands 15 ft away from me, I should be able to hit all 3.  Plus, there's one in melee with me, that means I should be able to hit 4 of them, not 2."(The DM gets flustered because they weren't keeping that close track of the relative positions of all of the enemies, they were just kind of winging it and figured 2 was a good answer to how many should be hit) "Uhh...yeah, I guess you can hit 4 of them then.  Sorry.""You know, maybe we should just put down some minis so we all know where the orcs are.  It's situations like this that makes me not trust DMs."I'm not saying it isn't possible.  However, it seems out of the spirit of the game whose rules really want you to know the exact position of everything.  I had so many of the above arguments whenever I tried to play without minis that I decided it was for the best.Though, I currently run D&D Next without minis but I find it has very few rules that require you to know the exact position of everyone so there's been less issues.  I'm really happy to go back to having a game with less fiddly rules because that way players can't spend all their time throwing them in my face.I'm not saying everyone would see that problem.  But it's indicative of the attitude of my players.  And many players.  I used to run Living Greyhawk about 3-5 adventures per week with the random people who'd show up for our games days and at GenCon.  Ran an entire GenCon straight once, 7 5-hour long slots...which was exhausting, but I met a lot of players and many of them don't trust DMs and feel that DMs will do whatever it takes to kill them off.  Especially random DMs that they haven't met before and are running only at a convention.  The best way to put these people at ease was to follow the rules precisely to the letter to make sure they understood that everything was fair and above board.Err....I guess it's always possible for the dragon to roll a natural 1 on his save.  But my math kind of says that a level 9 character with an extreme amount of equipment(+6 stat booster) who started with a 20 in their prime stat and put all their boosts into it would have a 28 and could cast 5th level spells, and have a feat to increase their DCs by 1.  That would put their DCs at 25.  Given the 610 hitpoints of a Red Dragon of that CR, it couldn't be a spell that just does damage as none of them do 610 damage.  The Dragon's Fort and Will saves are both higher than +25, so he makes the saves against all spells that would kill him outright on anything but a natural 1.  Most of these spells allow spell resistance.  The Dragon's spell resistance is 30.  That means it is impossible for a level 9 character to even succeed on that roll.  Though if they somehow boosted their caster level, they'd still need to make a natural 20.So killing a dragon of that CR would require a natural 20 followed by a natural 1.  That is a 25 in 10 thousand chance to happen.Unless we are talking about a situation of DM Fiat where a PC said something like "I shoot a spell at that pillar over there, collapsing the entire building on the dragon.  I'm sure a building does instant death damage." in which the CR and rules of the game don't actually matter, since it wasn't actually a fair fight between the PCs and the dragon.As I mentioned, adding a bunch of numbers together isn't easy for most people.  It's not very fast either.  It's not super slow, but each person's turn at higher levels took at least a minute(and often 2-3 minutes) for the process of deciding what action to take, figuring out the bonuses they got, rolling multiple attacks one at a time, adding the bonuses to their die rolls, the DM looking up the defenses of the monster, figuring out exactly which monster was being hit, and minusing the damage from the monsters hitpoints and writing it down.The enemy's turn often took a minute PER enemy to do.When each person's turn takes a minute and 5 enemies take another 5 minutes, then battles took a minimum of 10 minutes per round.  Even one round battles came in over the 5 minute mark.Sorry, I'm just really trying to wrap my head around battles in 3.5e taking 5 minutes.  I'm trying to understand how it is possible.  In my 4 years of running 3.5e alone, having run about 15 battles per week for about 3000 battles total, the average always came out to 30-60 minutes with obvious outliers of monsters who died in one hit and monsters that were nearly impossible to kill taking over an hour.This is the thing I'm most curious about.  I want to know exactly how they are different.  I really can't wrap my head around what a game where most of the battles were avoidable and were avoided on purpose by the PCs would even look like.What would the PCs do?  What kind of adventures do they go on that don't require killing monsters?  Do they play business men who go to the office every day and fill out forms?  What kind of jobs do they have that are that safe?</blockquote>

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