Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I've recently with the quarantine finally gotten into my first relatively frequently played RPG campaign (weekly for the past month of quarantine, monthly for the 6 months or so prior to that) and I've been toying around with making characters based on my only consistent RPG gaming experience in over a decade. I'm not entirely enamored with the ruleset as it's a highly tweaked for science fantasy dnd3xx clone (Starfinder) but it's passable and gets the job done in most circumstances. I've found thought that the idea/experience of accomplishing nothing in my turn really annoys me and I've been consistently tweaking the character as he levels up to mitigate that risk. I'm basically playing a melee space warpriest who started out with an axe for melee and relied primarily on spells for ranged combat. The system is odd in that NPCs have ridiculously high attack and damage bonuses compared with low level PCs with 1st level generic NPC thugs having the d20 equivalent of dex 20, full BAB, and weapon focus and specialization and I started to try and even the odds due to so many full rounds in a row accomplishing nothing with low to mediocre rolls. I started to buff my attack stats when possible, picked up an animal companion to get a flanking bonus, and added a magic fusion to my axe to allow me to throw it ala Kratos in the recent God of War game. I still had my spells so I tried to make it so that I at least had some possible tactical options in most circumstances so as not to be left able to do nothing even before relying on the luck of the dice.

The character isn't min-maxed per se as I could easily get a higher attack and damage bonus with my primary axe weapon (that I use for both melee and ranged) with a different class/race build and my velociraptor pet has become a full fledged party member in spirit as well as a campaign meme. It's more about having options and trying to accomplish something each turn rather than maxing out one thing (like hit chance/damage rolls) but I'm still ultimately at the mercy of a single die roll. That's the part that I find most annoying. I can sit there and describe how my cleric is channeling the power of his wargod boosting his melee attack with mystic energy (i.e. spending a spell slot for added damge) while the ultimate predator, his loyal raptor, circles around the prey (i.e. flanking) in anticipation of the kill.. and my character swings with all his might... and I roll a 3. Nothing accomplished at all other than wasting a resource.

I've been kitbashing a virtual 3d model of a different type of character and for fun I've been building him up to 7th level. He's basically a mechanic type build who uses lots of drones/robots to assist him (and is actually a robot himself). The primary attack that he and his minions would make would be with a plasma cannon but if that were the focus I could easily make a soldier with a higher hit chance, more damage, and a higher save DC against the splash damage with the exact same weapon. Instead I've found it intriguing to see how many little things he can try to accomplish with action economy so that the character (and utlimately my enjoyment) isn't entirely dependent on a single d20. The main character will get his full suite of actions, the primary drone with get his limited subset, and even his minicomputer AI will get a tiny subset of things to choose from to do (mainly bluff, diplomancy, intimidate... only verbal interactions with NPCs). I figure my turn will be a flurry of action with my actual character buffing the drone's plasma cannon attack while alternately hacking something or firing off its own pistol whereas the AI will verbally harass/debuff/buff as necessary. In effect, I'll be mitigating the risk over three dice rolls so as to be able to finish my turn and almost always say that I accomlished SOMETHING for my efforts even if it's only a successful YO MAMA! joke by my in-game Siri/Alexa/Cortana that made an NPC feel bad and get distracted (i.e. become flat footed) after my pistol and plasma cannon both whiffed. Again, I could easily come up with a character whose likelyhood of hitting would be signifcantly higher as well as the average damage dealt being buffed but I'd still be dependent on that single all encompassing die roll to determine success or failure regardless of bonuses.

This is all still theory though as I obviously have never played the character but I am curious. So... what annoying but not deal breaking pet peeves do you all have with your current or former games and how did you try to overcome them?

I'm a lot like you. I hate failing frequently, or at least doing nothing.

Single die systems have a lot of swinginess. You can get rid of the swing by using D&D5e's Advantage mechanic. Roll 2d20 and take the best. But that might be unsatisfactory because it may make the game feel quite a bit easier.

An alternative is to introduce Hero Points or Action Points like in Eberron. Normally, you have 5 + (half level) and they replenish every story or when you level up (RAW is actually only whenever you level up, but we do it every story too).

One Action Point allows you to either a) reroll a failed check or b) roll 1d6 and add the result to your d20 result. The first gives you a second chance, whereas the latter nudges up a result that almost succeeds.

APs make Eberron so much more enjoyable. Warhammer Fantasy RP has something similar with Fortune and Resilience points.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Some neat house rules for Action Points here: https://www.tribality.com/2018/02/14/action-points-revisited-hero-villain-points/

Yeah, it's not a matter for me to do the max possible in a given turn but rather to simply have options and not end up doing nothing at all. There is a ready made mechanic for possible rerolls (resolve points) in Starfinder and I was surprised that isn't an option for them when I first looked at the rulebook. I once asked about it and the response I got from players was that they're also used for healing/not dying and people might blow them all on rerolls constantly and then have to nap for 24 hours to regain them so as not to bleed out with the next critical hit that drops them. My reply was that you could limit that particular use to max once per combat/encounter.

 warboss wrote:
I've recently with the quarantine finally gotten into my first relatively frequently played RPG campaign (weekly for the past month of quarantine, monthly for the 6 months or so prior to that) and I've been toying around with making characters based on my only consistent RPG gaming experience in over a decade. I'm not entirely enamored with the ruleset as it's a highly tweaked for science fantasy dnd3xx clone (Starfinder) but it's passable and gets the job done in most circumstances. I've found thought that the idea/experience of accomplishing nothing in my turn really annoys me and I've been consistently tweaking the character as he levels up to mitigate that risk. I'm basically playing a melee space warpriest who started out with an axe for melee and relied primarily on spells for ranged combat. The system is odd in that NPCs have ridiculously high attack and damage bonuses compared with low level PCs with 1st level generic NPC thugs having the d20 equivalent of dex 20, full BAB, and weapon focus and specialization and I started to try and even the odds due to so many full rounds in a row accomplishing nothing with low to mediocre rolls. I started to buff my attack stats when possible, picked up an animal companion to get a flanking bonus, and added a magic fusion to my axe to allow me to throw it ala Kratos in the recent God of War game. I still had my spells so I tried to make it so that I at least had some possible tactical options in most circumstances so as not to be left able to do nothing even before relying on the luck of the dice.

Paizo (who does Starfinder and Pathfinder) got really obsessive about the 'system math' recently, and unfortunately they didn't do it very well.
One of the original conceits of D&D (which Paizo built on for their systems) was that the PCs were heroes and the enemies were not- encounters often involved largish numbers of easily defeated enemies (warbands or packs). 3rd edition pushed that down (4-5 heroes often ended up fighting 4-5 monsters) but 4th & 5th edition and Starfinder and Pathfinder 2 really pushed that even farther. The assumption is often that you fighter fewer enemies with even more HP and higher numbers, and fights drag out for literally hours of game time. Plus the general sentiment of heroes outnumbering the enemies and playing 'dogpile the wizard' never feels heroic.

I'm not sure why this design change came about, but its really annoying. Goblins (more or less the bottom tier) in pathfinder2 wander out with a +7 to hit, which is crazily ridiculous for a creature that started its existence at (effectively) +0 and both systems still use a d20 as the basic resolution die (against AC that is somewhere typically between 11 and 18 at level 1, even translating from the backwards AC and THAC0 of early editions). It should be painfully obvious that the math involved is VERY different, but the designers don't seem to grasp what that means.
The current modern versions of D&D (4th and 5th) and its spinoffs make me miss 2nd edition, and that actually makes me angry. 2nd edition felt like a mess even at the time, and to make worse games 30 years later feels like egregious incompetence.


---
Personally, my biggest gripe with Starfinder is the weapons are absurdly awful. The setting is 'pathfinder future' but a laser pistol does... 1d4 damage. A laser gun. Its basically a ranged dagger in a land where people use to run around doing 1d12 or 2d6 damage (plus bonuses) on the regular. And hit points went up! A Pathfinder1 ghoul has 14 hit points, and a Starfinder ghoul has 18! And they're both listed as appropriate challenges for first level characters. With a laser pistol you're going to have to shoot and hit the ghoul about 8 times before it drops. And you'll miss about 25-30% of shots even on a well built first level character.

That's terrible game design, and worse, its boring.

I didn't mean for this to be a rag on Starfinder thread but rather open to folks posting their pet peeves and how they got around them... But I obviously chose Starfinder myself in my typo riddled post above (sorry...I'm pecking away at a tablet with very aggressive and sneaky autocorrect!) and agree with the sentiments you expressed. The CR1 thugs I mentioned had something similar that bothered me too although that has somewhat abated at the mid levels (6th) we are currently at. Ironically now the issue is the other design mechanic you mentioned in that for my tastes as a longtime former GM/DM we're facing too few enemies with too many hp each. They typically feel like bullet sponges to borrow a video game term; I've mentioned it during a chat and the GM wasn't bothered by it not did he feel that he should add extra enemies instead of buffing the hp in the official adventure. We have up to 6 players depending on the session so he typically increases the hp. No other players backed me up when I brought it up (though I suspect they did not want to ruffle any feathers which I'm not adverse to doing potentially though not on purpose nor needlessly). When a massive hp sponge single enemy only has one attack, you mind of feel like you're being picked on when you are the front line combatant like my character of the other in the party. For example, we had a combat where the other multiplayer was grappled with no recourse due to the disparity in bonuses by the monster in an acid pool for 5+ rounds while the rest of us just plinked away at the creative's massive hp pool. If instead it had the normal amount of hp and was backed up by several of the smaller versions of the creature the encounter would have felt significantly more challenging for all of us and the grappled player maybe less helpless.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
As for the feel of laser guns, I've found it helps to think of the game setting as specifically science fantasy (which admittedly is what Paizo uses frequently) instead of scifi. That mentally makes firing your space laser using the exact same mechanics usually as a medieval bow in dnd feel a bit more satisfying. YMMV.

This is pretty broad but inconsistency in characters, especially based in meta-gaming.

Examples:

Cleric that hid around the corner avoiding a medusa's line of sight even though the PCs had no way of knowing anything about a medusa or that they had a gaze. Two people died because they couldn't get heals because the cleric wanted to stay out of line of sight of something he didn't know about but the player did.

In an area with Yaun-Ti that were trying to kill us constantly at one point got a surprise round on a group and one of them ran from the fight. Several chased it down after dealing with the main group and even spent time trying to find her after she morphed into a snake, killed her in the ensuing brawl, revived her to gather information (even using intimidation and threats), and then kept the Avenger Paladin from killing the evil Yaun-Ti because they suddenly were friendly pacifists and didn't want to harm her.

 Ahtman wrote:
This is pretty broad but inconsistency in characters, especially based in meta-gaming.

Okay, the first thing simply isn't meta-gaming. At all. For reasons which The Angry GM explains very well: https://theangrygm.com/dear-gms-metagaming-is-your-fault/ but is more or less common sense when thought about. The fault for those deaths lies solely with the GM for designing an encounter that relied on their players not knowing what one of the most common mythical creatures is all about. You don't even have to play D&D to hear "Medusa" and think "oh feth, that thing will turn you to stone if it looks at you", you just have to have read a book, or taken a primary school history class.

You simply cannot divorce player knowledge from character knowledge - it's impossible, or at the very best challenging and inconsistent. At what point is a character "allowed" to know something? Like one of the examples in the link says: how many spells must a wizard waste on a troll before being allowed to throw a fireball at it? All it does is punish players for a DM's inability to accept a basic fact: players know things. If you want to throw a shapechanger at a party with a veteran Druid player, you check for Moonbeam. Throw a werewolf or troll at a party of players even vaguely clued up on general fantasy knowledge, and you plan for cries for silver, and fire and acid from the start. If you want to throw a Medusa at anyone over the age of 10, you plan for them to know to avoid looking at it. If the entire encounter relies on every player not knowing a single piece of information outside your control - like having played the game a lot, having any fantasy grounding whatsoever, or just having heard of Ancient Greece - it's a badly-made encounter, and 100% on the GM.

The second thing, though, I agree with; inconsistency in character is stupid, and that example simply doesn't make a lick of sense outside of the vengeance paladin. I wonder what would've happened if the paladin had killed it anyway - which they're wholly justified in doing, given it's the entire shtick of a vengeance paladin and if the party/GM didn't want to deal with one then they should've brought it up earlier.

The other side of the metagaming issue, especially for D&D, is these folks are professional adventurers. Risking their lives against crazy monsters is literally life and death. Finding out what these critters can do is a basic and fundamental survival strategy.

It may not work with critters from beyond space and time, but things that have been in the world and are common enough that they're their own race or species? You better believe people in the world have some idea of what they can do, and the folks setting out to fight them for profit and glory are at the head of that list.

They're also growing up in a world where these critters are known entities. This isn't 'the Village' where the elders are actively hiding knowledge of cars and cell phones. These creatures are part of the world these people live in.

Voss wrote:
The other side of the metagaming issue, especially for D&D, is these folks are professional adventurers. Risking their lives against crazy monsters is literally life and death. Finding out what these critters can do is a basic and fundamental survival strategy.

It may not work with critters from beyond space and time, but things that have been in the world and are common enough that they're their own race or species? You better believe people in the world have some idea of what they can do, and the folks setting out to fight them for profit and glory are at the head of that list.

They're also growing up in a world where these critters are known entities. This isn't 'the Village' where the elders are actively hiding knowledge of cars and cell phones. These creatures are part of the world these people live in.

2 things to this.

1) There is a massive difference between what an adventurer knows from experience and what an adventure MIGHT hear about. Did you make your characters level 1? Then they don't know gak about vampires, lycanthropes, mimics, carrion crawlers, and basically everything. They probably know what kobolds and goblins are and they probably heard about how their lairs are caves but thats the extent of it. What they HEAR about could be full of misinformation. Despite us having the internet there are still flat earthers and anti vaxers in the world because... yeah. So lacking world wide knowledge bases the character your playing knows the stereotypes and rumors including all racist misinformation about what few things their local farming community can tell them about. I very much doubt your lowborn orphan thief met anyone who could tell them the different between a gelatinous cube and a black pudding. Let alone the tips and tricks to detect and deal with a mimic. Especially not with any kind of accuracy.

2) How many of your characters are professional dungeon delvers by backstory? I have both never played that as a character and never played with anyone who played that as a character. "Adventuring" is what we end up doing by happenstance. But the characters are mercenaries, soldiers, missionaries, scholars, and thieves. Very rarely is anyones job to know about the bizarre ecology of the underdark or crypts.

 warboss wrote:
I didn't mean for this to be a rag on Starfinder thread but rather open to folks posting their pet peeves and how they got around them... But I obviously chose Starfinder myself in my typo riddled post above (sorry...I'm pecking away at a tablet with very aggressive and sneaky autocorrect!) and agree with the sentiments you expressed. The CR1 thugs I mentioned had something similar that bothered me too although that has somewhat abated at the mid levels (6th) we are currently at. Ironically now the issue is the other design mechanic you mentioned in that for my tastes as a longtime former GM/DM we're facing too few enemies with too many hp each. They typically feel like bullet sponges to borrow a video game term; I've mentioned it during a chat and the GM wasn't bothered by it not did he feel that he should add extra enemies instead of buffing the hp in the official adventure. We have up to 6 players depending on the session so he typically increases the hp. No other players backed me up when I brought it up (though I suspect they did not want to ruffle any feathers which I'm not adverse to doing potentially though not on purpose nor needlessly). When a massive hp sponge single enemy only has one attack, you mind of feel like you're being picked on when you are the front line combatant like my character of the other in the party. For example, we had a combat where the other multiplayer was grappled with no recourse due to the disparity in bonuses by the monster in an acid pool for 5+ rounds while the rest of us just plinked away at the creative's massive hp pool. If instead it had the normal amount of hp and was backed up by several of the smaller versions of the creature the encounter would have felt significantly more challenging for all of us and the grappled player maybe less helpless.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
As for the feel of laser guns, I've found it helps to think of the game setting as specifically science fantasy (which admittedly is what Paizo uses frequently) instead of scifi. That mentally makes firing your space laser using the exact same mechanics usually as a medieval bow in dnd feel a bit more satisfying. YMMV.

Sounds like the gaming group might be a poor fit, sadly. When I GM, I listen to my players, and I hate being a player where the GM doesn't listen to the group. We tried a game of WFRP1e at a gaming store recently, and the GM was very railroad-y. He'd hacked together a ruleset from 1e and 4e without reading 4e properly and created every character beforehand. Then he pulled me aside, told me what would happen to my character and how I should respond. It just wasn't fun.

Your example is more to do with game flow but it's the same basic principle. If someone isn't enjoying themselves, it's the group's responsibility to help them have fun. Everyone should be listened to or they won't come back.

It may not be a deal breaker for you, and I hope so, but it might be worth trying to explain again how this effects your experience of the game. Maybe there's a compromise.

 Lance845 wrote:

Voss wrote:
The other side of the metagaming issue, especially for D&D, is these folks are professional adventurers. Risking their lives against crazy monsters is literally life and death. Finding out what these critters can do is a basic and fundamental survival strategy.

It may not work with critters from beyond space and time, but things that have been in the world and are common enough that they're their own race or species? You better believe people in the world have some idea of what they can do, and the folks setting out to fight them for profit and glory are at the head of that list.

They're also growing up in a world where these critters are known entities. This isn't 'the Village' where the elders are actively hiding knowledge of cars and cell phones. These creatures are part of the world these people live in.

2 things to this.

1) There is a massive difference between what an adventurer knows from experience and what an adventure MIGHT hear about. Did you make your characters level 1? Then they don't know gak about vampires, lycanthropes, mimics, carrion crawlers, and basically everything. They probably know what kobolds and goblins are and they probably heard about how their lairs are caves but thats the extent of it. What they HEAR about could be full of misinformation. Despite us having the internet there are still flat earthers and anti vaxers in the world because... yeah. So lacking world wide knowledge bases the character your playing knows the stereotypes and rumors including all racist misinformation about what few things their local farming community can tell them about. I very much doubt your lowborn orphan thief met anyone who could tell them the different between a gelatinous cube and a black pudding. Let alone the tips and tricks to detect and deal with a mimic. Especially not with any kind of accuracy.

2) How many of your characters are professional dungeon delvers by backstory? I have both never played that as a character and never played with anyone who played that as a character. "Adventuring" is what we end up doing by happenstance. But the characters are mercenaries, soldiers, missionaries, scholars, and thieves. Very rarely is anyones job to know about the bizarre ecology of the underdark or crypts.

Depends on the setting, certainly some are. Happenstance farm kid turned adventurer is a hackneyed cliche. Professional adventurer is actually a thing in most RPG settings. Certainly for D&D and Pathfinder I'm struggling to think of a setting where it isn't. FR, Eberron, and Golarion have dedicated organizations and/or chartered adventurers (that function much like privateers). Greyhawk & Mystara simply assume that adventuring is something people do, a more socially acceptable class of viking. Dragonlance doesn't, but dragonlance is a weird cludge of a committee-designed setting that's functionally a post-apocalyptic nightmare world where the gods actively murder large numbers of people out of spite.

But, frankly, at lot of the learning can easily come from downtime periods, reading, listening to bards, talking with veterans and others (soldiers love telling stories). There is no reason for this to be restricted, secret information.

The important thing, however, is the PLAYERS will have a lot more fun not playing incompetent fools that can be proactive rather than perpetual victims for the DM to screw with until he decides he can't (until the next one).
Plus I'd rather character have reasons to go adventuring. Just normal folks that happenstance on adventure would nope on out.

The DM didn't screw with anybody, being competent doesn't mean being omnipotent, and all the characters had started at level 1 and, while not farmers, had no reason to be knowledgeable of creatures they didn't know existed.

 Ahtman wrote:
The DM didn't screw with anybody, being competent doesn't mean being omnipotent, and all the characters had started at level 1 and, while not farmers, had no reason to be knowledgeable of creatures they didn't know existed.

You cannot divorce player knowledge from character knowledge. That the player knows it exists is the reason the character does. If the player knows something, their character knows it, the same way an Int 1 character might be able to figure out a complex maths problem that an Int 20 character might not, because the Int 1 player is good at maths.

The DM might not have directly screwed with anybody, but it's still their fault it happened.

Hell, I'm DMing for completely new players at the moment, and while talking them through a level up an hour ago, one of them mentioned the Deafness/Blindness spell would be cool if there was Medusa. If I turn around and tell them their character wouldn't use that spell because why would they know to, I'm a dick. Objectively. I'm taking agency away from that player and punishing them for an issue I created, instead of acknowledging that it's stupid to enforce something like that and creating the encounter with this knowledge in mind.

There are two outcomes, really:
- You enforce the (dumb as hell) idea that players need to arbitrarily "forget" things in order to make encounters work "realistically".
- You plan for player knowledge and build the encounter accordingly.

One requires players to never be sure of what they actually know or what they can do, and that they might fail at things purely because the DM's idea of realism trumps player agency.
The other requires a bit more creativity with encounter design, and a lot less "you're winning wrong".

If the entire idea of the campaign is realism and everyone goes in knowing they'll somehow have to become more dumb - or, even more somehow, more clever - than they actually are, then fine, everyone's agreed that's how it works. Otherwise, tough, the DM needs to plan better.

Voss wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:

Voss wrote:
The other side of the metagaming issue, especially for D&D, is these folks are professional adventurers. Risking their lives against crazy monsters is literally life and death. Finding out what these critters can do is a basic and fundamental survival strategy.

It may not work with critters from beyond space and time, but things that have been in the world and are common enough that they're their own race or species? You better believe people in the world have some idea of what they can do, and the folks setting out to fight them for profit and glory are at the head of that list.

They're also growing up in a world where these critters are known entities. This isn't 'the Village' where the elders are actively hiding knowledge of cars and cell phones. These creatures are part of the world these people live in.

2 things to this.

1) There is a massive difference between what an adventurer knows from experience and what an adventure MIGHT hear about. Did you make your characters level 1? Then they don't know gak about vampires, lycanthropes, mimics, carrion crawlers, and basically everything. They probably know what kobolds and goblins are and they probably heard about how their lairs are caves but thats the extent of it. What they HEAR about could be full of misinformation. Despite us having the internet there are still flat earthers and anti vaxers in the world because... yeah. So lacking world wide knowledge bases the character your playing knows the stereotypes and rumors including all racist misinformation about what few things their local farming community can tell them about. I very much doubt your lowborn orphan thief met anyone who could tell them the different between a gelatinous cube and a black pudding. Let alone the tips and tricks to detect and deal with a mimic. Especially not with any kind of accuracy.

2) How many of your characters are professional dungeon delvers by backstory? I have both never played that as a character and never played with anyone who played that as a character. "Adventuring" is what we end up doing by happenstance. But the characters are mercenaries, soldiers, missionaries, scholars, and thieves. Very rarely is anyones job to know about the bizarre ecology of the underdark or crypts.

Depends on the setting, certainly some are. Happenstance farm kid turned adventurer is a hackneyed cliche. Professional adventurer is actually a thing in most RPG settings. Certainly for D&D and Pathfinder I'm struggling to think of a setting where it isn't. FR, Eberron, and Golarion have dedicated organizations and/or chartered adventurers (that function much like privateers). Greyhawk & Mystara simply assume that adventuring is something people do, a more socially acceptable class of viking. Dragonlance doesn't, but dragonlance is a weird cludge of a committee-designed setting that's functionally a post-apocalyptic nightmare world where the gods actively murder large numbers of people out of spite.

But, frankly, at lot of the learning can easily come from downtime periods, reading, listening to bards, talking with veterans and others (soldiers love telling stories). There is no reason for this to be restricted, secret information.

The important thing, however, is the PLAYERS will have a lot more fun not playing incompetent fools that can be proactive rather than perpetual victims for the DM to screw with until he decides he can't (until the next one).
Plus I'd rather character have reasons to go adventuring. Just normal folks that happenstance on adventure would nope on out.

My "main" character is a farm boy. He was lazy and distracted easily and basically unsuited for the farm life.

His parents took him to town for a festival that amounts to a job fair where people took apprentices. He was passed by by pretty much everyone until a soldier took him under his wing. The parents thinking this would teach him discipline agreed (along with the fact that they get a small payment up front for the boys labor).

The soldier was in fact a old, drunkard, dragon slayer. Who taught him mundane tips and tricks for hunting dragons. A fire retardant coating for his cloak. A mixture that burns out his sense of smell so that he isn't distracted by a dragons legendary stench. Polearms, lighter armor because being slow will get you killed. etc etc...

After they killed a younger dragon together he sent his cut of the hoard home to his parents. Then they got a second 9 months later. A big chunk again, went home. His parents now own bigger swathes of land and pay farmhands to work it. The character mostly travels around slacking off until he starts to run out of money and then takes mercenary work.

His profession is not "Adventurer". If he had a title it would be Wyrm Slayer or Dragon Slayer. But hes actually mostly a free loader that barely works at all. You don't need a ton of money to survive when you are not doing much. And his roots is "farm boy".

Avatar 720 wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:
The DM didn't screw with anybody, being competent doesn't mean being omnipotent, and all the characters had started at level 1 and, while not farmers, had no reason to be knowledgeable of creatures they didn't know existed.

You cannot divorce player knowledge from character knowledge. That the player knows it exists is the reason the character does. If the player knows something, their character knows it, the same way an Int 1 character might be able to figure out a complex maths problem that an Int 20 character might not, because the Int 1 player is good at maths.

Yes you can. It's called role playing. And people who are interested in playing a role playing game will restrict their character knowledge to the characters knowledge.

The DM might not have directly screwed with anybody, but it's still their fault it happened.

Hell, I'm DMing for completely new players at the moment, and while talking them through a level up an hour ago, one of them mentioned the Deafness/Blindness spell would be cool if there was Medusa. If I turn around and tell them their character wouldn't use that spell because why would they know to, I'm a dick. Objectively. I'm taking agency away from that player and punishing them for an issue I created, instead of acknowledging that it's stupid to enforce something like that and creating the encounter with this knowledge in mind.

As the DM it's your job to foreshadow the information so the character can learn it. Not turn a corner and find a medusa. Clash of the Titans never puts the hero into a situation he didn't have a chance to prepare for and as the DM you should be doing the same for your players. That doesn't mean there can't be surprises. But it DOES mean that the CHARACTER should be learning, growing, and experiencing so that the player has opportunity to play their character.

There are two outcomes, really:
- You enforce the (dumb as hell) idea that players need to arbitrarily "forget" things in order to make encounters work "realistically".
- You plan for player knowledge and build the encounter accordingly.

See above. Option 3. You DM better.

One requires players to never be sure of what they actually know or what they can do, and that they might fail at things purely because the DM's idea of realism trumps player agency.
The other requires a bit more creativity with encounter design, and a lot less "you're winning wrong".

It's easy. The player asks the DM "Would my character know _____?" And then you either say yes, if they obviously would, no if they obviously wouldn't, or roll a knowledge check if you are unsure. The game allows for characters to know things even when the player doesn't. It doesn't take a decades long player with encyclopedic knowledge of Fearun to play a bard in the forgotten realms. A newb can do it. They just ask questions and get answers.

If the entire idea of the campaign is realism and everyone goes in knowing they'll somehow have to become more dumb - or, even more somehow, more clever - than they actually are, then fine, everyone's agreed that's how it works. Otherwise, tough, the DM needs to plan better.

Or again. Play a role playing game.

Roleplaying pet peeves?
Players who seem to think that everything found during an adventure belongs to "the group" (ie, them), and then never help with searching for treasure or provide meaningful contributions elsewhere.
Case in point, in a recent adventure after defeating a monster, my character starts searching through the muck a gore of its lair for treasure. The entire adventure already, he's been more than pulling his weight - a rogue with the soldier background (ie a scout), coming up with tactics to overcome greater numbers, dealing good amounts of damage via sneak attack, scouting ahead etc, and being basically the only one who even tries to look for loot - usually not finding much, but every little bit helps, right? Nobody really cares about this stuff...

Now in this lair he finally hits the jackpot -everybody else is just standing around- and suddenly everybody wants their share. So he just turns around and says "I don't see anybody else digging through the muck. Why should I?"

Bran Dawri wrote:
Roleplaying pet peeves?
Players who seem to think that everything found during an adventure belongs to "the group" (ie, them), and then never help with searching for treasure or provide meaningful contributions elsewhere.
Case in point, in a recent adventure after defeating a monster, my character starts searching through the muck a gore of its lair for treasure. The entire adventure already, he's been more than pulling his weight - a rogue with the soldier background (ie a scout), coming up with tactics to overcome greater numbers, dealing good amounts of damage via sneak attack, scouting ahead etc, and being basically the only one who even tries to look for loot - usually not finding much, but every little bit helps, right? Nobody really cares about this stuff...

Now in this lair he finally hits the jackpot -everybody else is just standing around- and suddenly everybody wants their share. So he just turns around and says "I don't see anybody else digging through the muck. Why should I?"

My response would be:

"Good idea digging through that muck, we'll have to be more thorough in future. This adventuring party operates on the basis of equal shares, if you don't like it, feel free to find another. That loot belongs to us as a group, the fact that you have been doing your job, doesn't change that, and you wouldn't be in the postion to find that loot if it wasn't for the whole party. You can share it and like it, share it and not like it, or we can bury you in the muck instead."

There many things that are deal breaking for me with role-playing games, but as pet peeve?

Voice acting. Namely, poor voice acting. A long time ago, in a different world, I was in theatre. While not a tremendous actor myself, I was competent...but listening to people in groups and online try to do voices poorly is cringe-inducing. I appreciate the handful of people (most often GMs) who are competent at it...but 90% of the time it's cringe-inducing awful. Like watching auditions in high school.

I'm also not one of the "for the lulz" type of role-players. I enjoy jokes, and hijinx...but not just a meme-laden meta-game with "let's not take this seriously at all!" kind of attitude. This normally goes hand-in-hand with awful attempts at voices and voice acting.

If you're competent? Cool. If you're not...please...just stop.

 harlokin wrote:

Bran Dawri wrote:
Roleplaying pet peeves?
Players who seem to think that everything found during an adventure belongs to "the group" (ie, them), and then never help with searching for treasure or provide meaningful contributions elsewhere.
Case in point, in a recent adventure after defeating a monster, my character starts searching through the muck a gore of its lair for treasure. The entire adventure already, he's been more than pulling his weight - a rogue with the soldier background (ie a scout), coming up with tactics to overcome greater numbers, dealing good amounts of damage via sneak attack, scouting ahead etc, and being basically the only one who even tries to look for loot - usually not finding much, but every little bit helps, right? Nobody really cares about this stuff...

Now in this lair he finally hits the jackpot -everybody else is just standing around- and suddenly everybody wants their share. So he just turns around and says "I don't see anybody else digging through the muck. Why should I?"

My response would be:

"Good idea digging through that muck, we'll have to be more thorough in future. This adventuring party operates on the basis of equal shares, if you don't like it, feel free to find another. That loot belongs to us as a group, the fact that you have been doing your job, doesn't change that, and you wouldn't be in the postion to find that loot if it wasn't for the whole party. You can share it and like it, share it and not like it, or we can bury you in the muck instead."

Agreed. The greed referenced there is out of proportion to the laziness the party demonstrated. Will his rogue have even been alive to search that muck without healing from the cleric either that encounter or maybe the prior one? Or would he have died if the hit that the fighter tank took by virtue of purposely putting his or her character out in front to draw attention while the rogue was sneaking around setting up his tactics was instead directed at the rogue? On the OOC side, you agree generally to split up loot and that's one of the easiest ways to create interplayer resentment in addition to intercharacter tension. I was once in a group where the GM was unwise enough to put a single piece of rogue specific loot worth more than EVERYTHING multiple players owned when grouped together... and the rogue found it on his own when no other characters were around and didn't ever tell us (and was careful enough and built his character specifically to hide those types of things so that it was incredibly difficult to notice in character). He basically had triple the wealth by level than the rest of us for a while and, while the rest of us gave him multiple in character opportunities to fess up and share the loot, he chose not to true to his character's alignment. We played it in character but I told him first privately that I didn't appreciate it and that I as a player was out if he as a player did anything like that again. You generally agree to a social contract when you play in a communal RPG and if you want to play a cut throat winner takes all cut-throat campaign then it should be agreed upon by all ahead of time. If that's your thing, I fine with those who want to do that as a group and support you having fun in your own way... just don't foist it on other players because you feel like it. To his credit, when I explained that his character when he got the ring put literally everyone else behind the curve for wealth by level and him two levels above it then he was more sympathetic as he didn't realize the impact in his glee about getting the item and, while he never admitted it in character to the party, he never did something like that again. He really is/was a nice guy IRL and was just playing his character to his chaotic neutral alignment without realizing the trickle down effects.

The same applies to the other players, Bran. If the rest of the party really is just there for the combats and don't contribute to roleplaying before/after and that bothers you then you should discuss it player to players instead of being passive agressive with the party loot (and it absolutely is the party's loot). If they refuse to change and you continue to resent it (the resentment is reasonable IMO if that's the situation) then you should re-evaluate if playing in that particular campaign is worthwhile. I once had to leave a campaign after two games that was filled with all neutral characters on paper that were being played consistently as evil with intraparty figurative (not literal) backstabbing like secretly hoarding loot (not the same thing as the example I gave above). I don't mind greed and backroom dealing with NPCs but I don't appreciate it between party members. Having the face negotiate a side deal with the NPC quest giver for a private cut of rewards specifically taken away from the public negotiated party awards isn't my thing nor is hinding/hoarding loot and sleight of hand stealing from fellow (unconscious) party members.

 Lance845 wrote:
Yes you can. It's called role playing. And people who are interested in playing a role playing game will restrict their character knowledge to the characters knowledge.

No, they won't, and it's incredibly narcissistic to assume that, but it's good to know you're around to tell people how to play the game. I bet you're great fun with Parties.

As the DM it's your job to foreshadow the information so the character can learn it.

Yes, and do you know what that fulfils? The requirement for a DM to deal with issues like this first. Y'know, one of the things I said was important. So, thanks for proving my point, I guess?

See above. Option 3. You DM better.

See above. It more or less falls under option 2 - which is also basically "DM better".

It's easy. The player asks the DM "Would my character know _____?" And then you either say yes, if they obviously would, no if they obviously wouldn't, or roll a knowledge check if you are unsure.

That's not easy. That's stopping the game at arbitrary points so I can ask the DM to enlighten me about my character. Where's the line? At what point can I stop asking the DM what I can and cannot know and actually play the goddamn game with my goddamn character? I might as well be playing a puppet. If a character obviously knows something, you tell them, you don't wait for them to ask. If they don't, and they ask, you go through the motions if it's important to do so. (I.E. Will not knowing this have consequences? If yes, roll, if no, you tell them no. If you're rolling because you're unsure then you aren't looking at the issue correctly - if there's no consequence to not knowing something then what's the point in rolling? Just decide if they logically should or not, because it makes no difference.) If they come out with something you didn't expect, you roll with it, because that's how D&D works. So a player knows trolls are weak to fire and acid - and you should've really assumed that to begin with - their reward is overcoming an obstacle under their own steam, not overcoming an obstacle in spite of it when you decide they can't do that.

The game allows for characters to know things even when the player doesn't.

Do you know how absurd that is? What's the point in even making a character? Just ask the GM to make them all and hand them out, because it's not like the player actually matters if only the DM knows what the characters know.

Or again. Play a role playing game.

Okay, I get it, you hate other people having fun wrong. Damn all those players in the world who aren't actually playing role playing games because Lance here has said so. I hope they all feel guilty.

What an absurb pile of crap. You really believe that 1) its impossible for someone to play an ignorant character? 2) its unreasonable for players to ask questions? And 3) the only way to play a knowledgable character is to have the actual knowledge yourself?

Some of my little niggles are mostly mechanical in nature:

1. Limited spell casting- i.e. memorized spells
- This makes little sense to me except as an arbitray reason to restrict spell-casting. I much prefer the Drain mechanic as creating a reason to not overcast.

2. Single dice systems
- Too swingy and characters that are really good at stuff fail a lot. I prefer opposed success tests and dice pools whenever possible.

3. Roll-playing
- Using dice rolls to make a character especially in social interactions. I at least want to know the jist or what your are trying to communicate or do. Don't just say, I am going to trick my way past the guard. I got a 19 on my deception check!


More and more I find myself drawn to rules lite systems that require a heavier narrative element than dice rolling. These foibles are unique to me and simply preferences.

People should be well versed in the folklore of where they come from, regardless of 'level'. What we know of vampires comes from folk tales, those living in a fantasy world will have stories of how ordinary people overcame, trolls, vampires, rakshasas etc. I find the 'farmboy who knows nothing' a tiresome and overused trope.

 Lance845 wrote:
What an absurb pile of crap. You really believe that 1) its impossible for someone to play an ignorant character? 2) its unreasonable for players to ask questions? And 3) the only way to play a knowledgable character is to have the actual knowledge yourself?

1) A truly ignorant one, yes. Suppressed ignorance is simply another form of metagaming - you're having to play your character in a way you wouldn't if you didn't have the outside knowledge you do. If you dislike metagaming, then you're a bit screwed. Everything your character does is influenced by you; every action they make is one you decide with the information you have. If that action requires ignoring something, then is your character really ignorant? Or are they simply waiting to be allowed to know something? They're more like an unwittingly amnesiac character than an ignorant one. Those characters can certainly be played, but not with the same ignorance of a wholly new player or someone with absolutely 0 knowledge of the game. That ship has well and truly sailed.

2) Strawman-much? Try again. Or rather, don't, because I'm not sure I'm interested enough to care.

3) Functionally knowledgeable, yes. For example, Int 20 means nothing if the player doesn't use it. Their character might "know" an awful lot of things, but unless the player makes an effort to uncover them (and thus, gaining the exact same knowledge themselves) it doesn't matter, because the character functionally doesn't know them. If they stumble across a secretly magical book and the player doesn't think it's important, then the DM either steps in to tell them that, actually, they recognise it might be important, or the character walks on by. A character will never act on information it has but the player doesn't, because the player will always gain that information before choosing to use it - noticing odd things about a trapped room with Passive Perception, recognising runes on an old book, etc. - A character won't independently refuse to go into the trapped room because it's trapped, because that takes away agency from the player, similarly so for picking up and taking the secretly magical book. If a character knows something, the player is brought up to speed ("you notice the floor is uneven", "something is glowing on the cover of the book beside you") and then decides what to do with it.

Hell, if a character has the Great Weapon Fighter feat but the player only uses daggers, then it doesn't matter that the character can swing a greatsword really well, because they aren't doing so. Knowledgeable vs Functionally Knowledgeable. You can have a knowledgeable character, but it doesn't do anything in and of itself without the player having the knowledge to use it. Consider a player asking "Would my Int 20 character know about trolls?" and the DM just saying "Yes." If the player doesn't know what trolls do, then the character is functionally no better off, despite the character knowing about trolls, until the player learns, at which point they're exactly as functionally knowledgeable as their character and everything is right with the world.

Anyway, I've stated and restated everything I care to. One last drop of this: https://theangrygm.com/dear-gms-metagaming-is-your-fault/ can do any further explaining for me, and almost certainly better.

 harlokin wrote:
People should be well versed in the folklore of where they come from, regardless of 'level'. What we know of vampires comes from folk tales, those living in a fantasy world will have stories of how ordinary people overcame, trolls, vampires, rakshasas etc. I find the 'farmboy who knows nothing' a tiresome and overused trope.

Its not knowing nothing. Its knowing legends that may be full of misinformation.

"Well my pa told me that he heard from a trader once when he was our age...."

You have heard of vampires. And maybe you heard that staking them through the heart kills them and garlic burns them. And maybe the garlic is nonsense and the steak doesnt kill them but incapacitates them in reality. Truth is you need to remove their head and burn the body. You cany know until you get out there and do gak.

Folk lore is just that. Its not science. And the player shouldnt treat their meta game monster manual datasheets as in game legends.

 Lance845 wrote:

 harlokin wrote:
People should be well versed in the folklore of where they come from, regardless of 'level'. What we know of vampires comes from folk tales, those living in a fantasy world will have stories of how ordinary people overcame, trolls, vampires, rakshasas etc. I find the 'farmboy who knows nothing' a tiresome and overused trope.

Its not knowing nothing. Its knowing legends that may be full of misinformation.

"Well my pa told me that he heard from a trader once when he was our age...."

You have heard of vampires. And maybe you heard that staking them through the heart kills them and garlic burns them. And maybe the garlic is nonsense and the steak doesnt kill them but incapacitates them in reality. Truth is you need to remove their head and burn the body. You cany know until you get out there and do gak.

Folk lore is just that. Its not science. And the player shouldnt treat their meta game monster manual datasheets as in game legends.

And yet, people were somehow capable of transmitting useful information before the scientific method.

Few things more tiresome in RPGs than a pixel-bitching GM.

 Lance845 wrote:

 harlokin wrote:
People should be well versed in the folklore of where they come from, regardless of 'level'. What we know of vampires comes from folk tales, those living in a fantasy world will have stories of how ordinary people overcame, trolls, vampires, rakshasas etc. I find the 'farmboy who knows nothing' a tiresome and overused trope.

Its not knowing nothing. Its knowing legends that may be full of misinformation.

"Well my pa told me that he heard from a trader once when he was our age...."

You have heard of vampires. And maybe you heard that staking them through the heart kills them and garlic burns them. And maybe the garlic is nonsense and the steak doesnt kill them but incapacitates them in reality. Truth is you need to remove their head and burn the body. You cany know until you get out there and do gak.

Folk lore is just that. Its not science. And the player shouldnt treat their meta game monster manual datasheets as in game legends.

I think this is getting away from the original example - a medusa turning things to stone with their gaze is pretty much the iconic ability of that creature. It's one of the most basic Greek myths in popular culture.

If you want the PCs to encounter something they've never seen before it's on the DM to be creative and describe a monster they've never seen before. Not just "you open the door and in the room is a medusa, roll initiative"

It's not the players responsibility to do the DM's job creating encounters.

And from the player's perspective it's boring to have to feign being a doofus. If someone in my party walks into a certain death situation "because my character wouldn't know the giant dragon will kill them" I'm all for leaving their corpse there and the player can roll someone who knows what they're doing instead. If it's the DM with some sort of Gygaxian boner for telling PCs they don't know how to stay alive then that's not a game I'm going to bother with.

I have to agree that you can do it to an acceptable degreein a ROLE playing game without being a masterful actor. Sure, I don't expect nor do I personally put my character in an obviously stupid and disadvantgeous situation unless it's what the character always does (i.e. if you always run your melee tank right up to a monster despite the obvious harm then you should continue to do so). Additionally, most games I've played have some sort of character knowledge mechanic that you can fall back on whether it be a scientific scan or analysis in a scifi type game or a simple knowledge/lore check to see what your character knows about a given monster that he or she has never encountered. When I was GMing d&d 3.5, that's what I did for the first ever encounter with a creature and afterwards I simply let players reference their own knowledge and/or the monster manual entry for subsequent encounters. I've also used generic monsters (astral constructs specifically from the old D&D minis line) without actually telling players what they're encountering specifically beyond a general visual description unless they roll a successful check when I had a player that was unable and/or unwilling to separate player and character knowledge.

 ScarletRose wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:

 harlokin wrote:
People should be well versed in the folklore of where they come from, regardless of 'level'. What we know of vampires comes from folk tales, those living in a fantasy world will have stories of how ordinary people overcame, trolls, vampires, rakshasas etc. I find the 'farmboy who knows nothing' a tiresome and overused trope.

Its not knowing nothing. Its knowing legends that may be full of misinformation.

"Well my pa told me that he heard from a trader once when he was our age...."

You have heard of vampires. And maybe you heard that staking them through the heart kills them and garlic burns them. And maybe the garlic is nonsense and the steak doesnt kill them but incapacitates them in reality. Truth is you need to remove their head and burn the body. You cany know until you get out there and do gak.

Folk lore is just that. Its not science. And the player shouldnt treat their meta game monster manual datasheets as in game legends.

I think this is getting away from the original example - a medusa turning things to stone with their gaze is pretty much the iconic ability of that creature. It's one of the most basic Greek myths in popular culture.

If you want the PCs to encounter something they've never seen before it's on the DM to be creative and describe a monster they've never seen before. Not just "you open the door and in the room is a medusa, roll initiative"

It's not the players responsibility to do the DM's job creating encounters.

And from the player's perspective it's boring to have to feign being a doofus. If someone in my party walks into a certain death situation "because my character wouldn't know the giant dragon will kill them" I'm all for leaving their corpse there and the player can roll someone who knows what they're doing instead. If it's the DM with some sort of Gygaxian boner for telling PCs they don't know how to stay alive then that's not a game I'm going to bother with.

And while in dnd there are many medusa, in greek myth it's THE medusa. The one. The population of the world of greek myth don't know who or what the medusa is. Just like the population of the world of greek myth don't know what the minotaur is.

If your dnd world has large pockets of medusa populations then yeah. It might make sense that the general population has heard of them. On the other hand, in "general" dnd lore Medusa are supposed to be extremely rare and solitary creatures and the general population SHOULDN'T know about them. Other creatures that turn people to stone would be far more likely as they are far more common (gargoyles in certain editions as an example or a cockatrice).

If I was playing and we found people turned to stone my character would assume 1) curse 2) cockatrice (depending on the number of stone people). The reveal of the medusa would be shocking and horrifying because I would assume the character has no idea wtf hes looking at. Some kind of demon!

If I was DMing I would make knowledge checks for the players with higher results listing more rare things that could turn people to stone. Curse is the base line everyone knows. "demons" as a generic catch all for bad things just above that. cockatrice, then gargs and really high rolls could include rare creatures such as medusa and beholder.

I couldn't recall if the DMG listed them as Gorgon or Medusa so I just went Medusa since I figured most would know the reference and I also didn't realize this was going to be such a thing. I didn't give a lot of background or context as I thought we were just having a simple discussion.

The characters absolutely could do Nature and Int checks to learn about the creature, and did, but that is not what the cleric in this situation did. The player was pretty specific about saying what he was doing and why: avoiding the gaze because he knew it did something even though his character didn't.

In dnd the species is called Medusa. I knew what you were getting at. And I agree with your assessment. The player meta gamed poorly. Breaking character for tactical advantages is not what a rpg is about.