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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 6093617" data-attributes="member: 6677017">My response as a DM depends on context. I try to build adventures which will produce a certain experience that I hope will be enjoyable for all concerned. I don’t like to customize challenges to the PCs in such a way as to invalidate my adventures should they get creative, but I can’t plan for everything. Here is an example of fun had by all: The party was fighting a black dragon, and doing poorly. The wizard had managed to get himself into melee, and wasn’t able to teleport away (I assume he had cast his spells already, since he usually prepared it). But he did have an amulet of the planes. Using said amulet, he touched the dragon and teleported them both to the Elemental Plane of Earth. The next turn, he teleported himself back, leaving the dragon encased in earth. I still remember that trick fondly. I hadn’t anticipated anyone using an amulet of the planes as an attack. There’s no reason I’d have to forbid that in the future either. Here is an example of less than fun had by all: Same campaign. The party had been directed to see a certain NPC in the Endless Dread Dire Swamp (which was truly endless, since it was a small planet—yes, basically Dagobah). My plan was to have the party travel through this swamp filled with giant XP-rich critters to power-level up the party for a wise purpose I have since forgotten. Unfortunately, the same wizard decided that instead of spending our nights getting ambushed by raptors and dire animals and black dragons, he’d rather just spend an hour staring at the ground, planeshift us to the Outlands, teleport us near the Elysium gate-town to the comfy home of the half-celestial in our party, let everyone have a good night’s rest, and then in the morning planeshift us back to the swamp and teleport us back to the (now familiar) location from the night before—then continue our journey. This rather destroyed the mood I was going for, and I don’t think having the destination NPC insist that they actually physically travel both to and from the location of the herbs he sent them to gather before he would assist them really did much to fix it for either me or the player. I think that may have highlighted a difference in interest there. If the player really wasn’t going to have fun slogging through the swamp having a good ol’ fashion hack n’ slash I should just accept that and let him short circuit it. I also like to allow the chips to fall where they may when it comes to broken creative solutions, the first time. After that I tend to have the Reality Police close the loopholes so it doesn’t continue to be an issue. For that reason, I’m pretty liberal in what I will allow at the table. I just reserve the right to come up with an excuse for why it won’t work again if players want to abuse it by overusing it to the point where it seems absurd or no longer fun. As a player I’m sometimes frustrated when I don’t feel like my choices allow me to increase my chances of success. See, I play as a defensive “turtler.” The DM I’m playing with tends to enjoy presenting us standard encounters that would be treated as “difficult” in the DMG, topped off by truly nasty boss battles. I’ve realized that there is simply a disconnect between the level of challenge I enjoy on a regular basis and the level that my DM enjoys (even when he’s a player). So to counteract that, I put a lot of resources into trying to lower that challenge. What frustrates me is when he simply escalates his challenges to respond to my preparations. And I don’t do cheesy preparations, I promise. I’m generally simply thorough. Like making sure everyone has the right mundane equipment, in redundant quantities. Or planning mundane methods of communication that don’t involve making a lot of noise. Or expecting that the prevalence of things like shops you are looking for or amount of treasure in rich manors would actually make sense rather than being scanty because too much of it would make it too easy for us. I don’t like having the feeling that I’m only getting a 10% increase in effectiveness due to my creative choices when I should be getting a 50% increase based on in-world believability. Going through all this, it makes me realize that my DM and I should probably discuss this so we can work out a way of dealing with it that we can both be happy with. So perhaps it all (the topic of the thread) comes down to a matter of player-DM communication. The assumptions for the game need to be made clear and agreed upon, and there needs to be some way (outside of people just getting upset with each other at the table) for anyone to send the message to the rest of the group that something going on just isn’t adding to the fun. It’s all social contract, which D&D at least, is woefully inadequate at actually addressing in any formal manner.</blockquote>

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