Don’t listen to the people saying you should just quit. Talk to people first, especially the DM. Tell them about what kind of game you’d like to play. This is something that groups should generally do before they start a campaign (in what some people call session 0), especially if they’ve never played together. It’s possible that the DM isn’t consciously designing the sessions like this and is willing to change it up. Maybe they’re even happy to get some feedback and the other players might also enjoy some more roleplay. Maybe the DM can’t see themselves running a game like that, but another player would love to.
If it becomes clear that the kind of game they want to play and the kind of game you want to play are incompatible, then it’s perfectly fine to say “this isn’t for me” and stop playing with them.
This all turned out a bit rambly, gonna send it anyway. I hope you can get some positives out of it if you do decide to read it. The last three (real) paragraphs are more structured, so if you’re only gonna read part of it, make it that part.
I have noticed that playing on Foundry (or roll20 or any other VTT software) often leads to more video-gamey/war-gamey campaigns. VTTs assist the DM and players with a lot of the gamey aspects, but offer much less assistance, if any, for the other aspects of ttrpgs. This leads to a lot of the potential issues you described. In my experience, having virtual battle-map after battle-map (or a single large one) thrown at you leads to reduced creativity, especially in newer players who do have experience playing computer games.
It takes both time and conscious effort to realize that what’s in front of you is not the actual game being played but just a projection. This counts for both sides of the DM screen. Some people will never clear that hurdle or even realize it’s there. That is fine for some people who do love the video-gamey aspects but not for others who want the opposite, or at least more of a balance.
For example, personally I also DM a Pathfinder campaign on Foundry and I constantly have to remind some of my players that they don’t need to click on all the relevant buttons the system already has programmed in. They can just say what they’re doing and do a naked roll if finding the button takes more than a second.
In regards to your last paragraph. You did get an in-game reason from your DM, although they were a bit indirect with it. Your DM telling you you might have to roll up a new character also means your in-game reason is: “I feel like I might die if I try this.” My advice in that specific situation would be to lead by example and roleplay your character going through those thoughts/emotions. I know it can be awkward, might even get a giggle or two from the other people around if nobody else has done any roleplaying yet this session or campaign, but someone has to make the first step.
Also don’t forget that the players have a lot of power in shaping the game. You do not have to explore a huge cave. You can walk out at any time, go to a town and talk to people instead. It’s kind of a dick move though if you let your DM prepare this cave for days, letting them believe that’s what you were interested in, only to then not engage with it. Of course that requires all the players (or at least a good number of them) to be on board. To find out what you all want to get out of this game together, communication outside the game is required.
I’m gonna be devil’s advocate for the last three paragraphs of my rambling response:
Do you actually KNOW that the enemies you’re fighting are arbitrary? Do you know there is no explanation for the mimic and the gelatinous cube? No explanation for the moths and larvae? No explanation for the Morlocks? Is it possible that your characters just haven’t found those explanations? I’ve placed enemies in my games before and the players never found out WHY they were there (the characters never even bothered thinking about it in some cases) but there was always a in-universe reason. And even if your DM didn’t initially have a reason, I would assume they will be able to come up with one on the spot.
For example, Mimics are described as: “A mimic can remain in its alternate form for an extremely long period of time, sometimes remaining disguised in a dungeon chamber for decades. Regardless of how long it waits, the mimic remains vigilant and alert, ready to strike at any moment.” They do seek to ambush adventurers so hiding in a cave that would be attractive to adventurers is the #1 thing they’d do. It could’ve wandered in 10, 20, 30 years ago, biding its time. Saying something like “I investigate the area around where the mimic was, trying to find any hints whether it has moved recently” after combat could lead to you learning more context about how the mimic got there. Same with the moths and larvae, you could try finding out if they’ve been born and died in this cave? If something made them flee their previous homes (especially “easy” if you have anything to converse with animals), etc. I don’t think it’s the DMs responsibility to give you context unprompted. It’s their responsibility to give you context once you’re looking for context, and even then, you still might need to pass certain rolls to get context. In the end, most of the time, the DM shouldn’t and wouldn’t give you any info your characters wouldn’t have.
This also extends to other areas you complained about. If you want more information but your DM doesn’t immediately provide it, prod them for it through character actions. “What is this Morlock I’m fighting wearing?” “What’s the color of the stones here?” “How high is the ceiling?” “Can I hear anything at all?”
I think you’re on the right track with your Update though. Best of luck!
I might be able to shed some light here. See, I generally DM in a way that generally appeals to players like your friend. I’m going to try and explain my reasoning and it might help you understand what he’s looking for.
In my games, the PCs generally succeed in their broad aims. We play to find out, not if they can, but how they do it, and what does it cost them. Character death is rare, and if I can help it, it’s never due to a single missed roll. Players get the opportunity to adjust their plans, sneak out when they are obviously outmatched, and are able to make miraculous escapes in the nick of time. When things go really wrong, are knocked unconscious and left for dead, or are captured. (If you are wondering how to run this, look at fate points in wfrp 2e, the idea is you give them a negative consequence and take them out of the fight instead of killing them outright).
This does not mean characters never die. A campaign that doesn’t end without a pc sacrificing themselves for the greater good is boring, but this makes it a conscious choice of the player.
This does not mean the PCs can just fail their way to success. They get plenty of opportunity to figure out a strategy that gives them the upper hand, to out-talk, out-plan, out-number or out-think foes too powerful to take on head on. But if they are dead set on doing it the stupid way, and I am satisfied I have provided enough information telegraphing the way it will end, then yeah, TPK away.
Adjusting the game to fit your table is the hardest challenge of all unfortunately. There are some players who don’t fit certain tables and DM styles and it’s your job to either make it work or tell them to find another table.
I think in your case you can make it work, but you’ve got a lot of work to do since you’re trying to accommodate a carebear happy fun time player at a table you want to run more and more as “hardcore-lite” experience.
I think two ideas I would have for you are to present your hardcore challenges as optional / non lethal challenges in a arena type colosseum. This lets you design difficult encounters but sandboxes them from consequences. If you want there to be consequences you’re going to make the carebear sad.
Another option is to come up with a McGuffin for the carebear that acts as protection for their character. E.g they fail there death saves and they turn into a rampaging monster due to some story reason. Lots of bad things happen to the party, but carebear wakes up the next day fine. You can use this to change the dynamic of “carebear” go frontline while we hit badguy. The big problem here is protecting the carebear leads to possible resentment from the other players so doing something like this is dangerous overall, but it can work depending on your players and how you do it.
For a TLDR I think you want to run more hard core games and your “carebear” player no longer fits at the table you want to run. In short you have to accommodate the “carebear”, change their mindset, or create a table of people ok with a more hardcore game.
I’m a newer DM who started a campaign 3 years ago during COVID with my brothers. Take my advice with a grain of salt because it may be different from others. My campaign is based around a group of characters that go from start to finish. My campaign revolves around some star wars fanfic I wrote back when I was too poor for college classes, yet knew my writing needed work. Thus, as a DM, I’m the one unwilling to allow player character death.
I am extremely lucky to have very mature players that mostly don’t try to cheese the game. I usually give them a time limit for a mission to be completed, either explicitly from the quest giver, or implicitly where “bad things” will start to happen the longer time goes on and the mission isn’t completed.
Could my players take more long rests? Absolutely, but that could cause them to fail that quest. Could my players take a long rest in the middle of the day right after waking up that morning? Absolutely, but they better have a plan for what they are going to be doing that night when all the shops are closed, it’s dark, and NPCs want to be left alone. And besides, it’s tough to fall asleep once your circadian rhythm is off… It would be a shame if characters needed to start rolling constitution checks to see if they can fall asleep to get that long rest for the next couple of days, and imposing exhaustion levels for not getting a long rest if it goes on long enough…
You’re NTA, but your friend is also NTA in my opinion. There is a lot of communication that needs to happen here and they also need to be able to trust that you’re not “trying to kill them”. You, as the DM are trying to tell their story in such a way that they feel epic, yet balance that by in-game consequences. It might be a good idea to try and sprinkle in some consequences for constantly resting, like the insomnia/circadian rhythm mentioned above, or maybe an ambush from bad guys that figure out the heroes location and prevent a long rest from happening. Forcing them to flee and hide after the ambush, wasting the rest of the day, might help them get moving. Those ambushes should be scary enough that they would go to great lengths to avoid a repeat.
And one final thought is to possibly think of your campaign like a movie. Yes, you’re telling their story, but you’re not telling every moment of their story. You’re not forcing their characters to stop for 3 meals a day, go to the bathroom, and occasionally wash their clothes and take baths. No, you’re hitting the important parts of the story, and filling the gaps with downtime where they can fabricate things, work “jobs”, etc,.
I hope something I’ve rambled about helps you out!
It kind of sounds like your friend won’t enjoy the kind of D&D you like to run, and that’s okay. You are allowed to enjoy running a challenging campaign with metered resources and meaningful stakes, and he is allowed to enjoy playing a shining hero that doesn’t worry about restraints and desperate measures. Both of those games are perfectly fine as long as everyone is having a good time.
Oh noes! Final proof that D&D iz da demon worships! Burn da witchez - burn dem - buuuuurrrrnnn dems!!111!!
I am old enough to remember the first time around the d&d is devil worship bouy and had this existed back then there would have been burnings at the stake…
It would have been fun to use the Crowley reading for the book of many things, but that wouldn’t be much fun from a game play mechanic.
You said in another comment that you enjoy DMing a game that has unpredictable results for the DM as well. A lot of good advice has already been given, but might I suggest giving your players more agency that you’d most likely see falling into the realm of the DM usually, so they create unexpected events for you as well?
Say you have the character of your friend destroy said Annis Hag, but blast! she had a curse prepared to fall upon anyone who would dare defy her to the point of death. Now instead of throwing your idea of a punishing burden on the player, you could instead go: “You can feel an evil magic engulfing your very being. It muddles your senses and try as you might, you are incapable of escaping its grasp. As it burns itself into your very bones and soul, you feel one of your abilities weaken. Which ability is affected?”
That way the player retains agency, can pick the least punishing option (in their opinion), have consequences but it doesn’t feel like they just got punished for doing well or making a choice just as much as you simply deciding “That’s how it is now. Enjoy!”. Could also add an element of chance and put it down to a roll of the dice, but that might again feel too arbitrarily punishing to that character.
The curse then mightn’t just have that main effect, mind you. But at least the worst one is more down to what the character feels and fears rather than what the DM wants to dish out. It will also give you something to ponder and think about in how to work with whatever the player chose or came up with. You could let them describe how the curse alters their appearance, do they suddenly have a mark on their skin? If so where, what size, shape and color? Now you have a PC with an odd mark of their own imagination and you can build on that. Or the player might come up with horns sprouting from their head, etc. Using this, you can have NPCs react to these changes and really play into them.
Player Agency might help alleviate the feeling of it being a punishing campaign, by giving them some room to breathe in all the pressure and stress.
This seems like a neat idea, although I worry that if it’s not executed right it seems like I’m just making up weird stuff to make the game harder. As it stands, I stick to the RAW pretty closely so that I feel like I’m being reasonably fair. I tend to doubt myself a lot when I homebrew mechanics that work against the player.
I think I mentioned the word in the post but didn’t elaborate: dilemmas. It seems like this is a big part of what you’re suggesting: letting the players take part in deciding what negative consequences they suffer where there is no answer that is strictly positive for the players. I do feel like I have failed to present my dilemmas in a way that gets perceived as fair, it just seems like the players assumed that there must be time to loot the vault and escape from the demon without consequence, when I was trying to make it clear that they can either get away quickly, or loot the vault and have a powerful enemy catch up to them.
And to be honest that’s kind of been the most fun I’ve had is when I offer a choice between safety without maximum reward, or taking a risk that requires a clever solution to escape from. I feel like I telegraph the danger but I can’t overcome this underlying assumption that I’m not actually going to follow through on the threat.
Yeah, alright. Can you provide an example of how you present the choice during a session? Maybe it’s really as simple as being far more on the nose with how you say it?
I’ve found my players often really do not grasp implied information and it just leads nowhere. But I get the feeling you’re already really clear with how you approach it.
Would be more useful if they weren’t visually distinct and obviously unfair. Also, if you have to take into account the surface as well, this is just fully misleading.
The computer-designed objects called trajectoids follow a predetermined path when rolling, and usually look somewhat like peeled potatoes. Examples of trajectoids
I haven’t seen a trajectoid with an obviously arbitrary, complex path, such as someone’s signature (as opposed to demos of epicycles), so there may be limits to what lines can be made.
I think the similarly-looking gömböcs are cooler: convex, uniform objects that always return to one stable orientation when laid on a flat surface. gömböc gif
Not entirely irrelevant to D&D. Now we know that a skilled scholar could sculpt a boulder to roll in a specific way (for an Indiana Jones-style trap) without casting spells. Still, adjusting the terrain is a more productive way to do that.
But they’re not useful as dice. Nobody ever uses a die’s trajectory shape to determine a random in-game outcome.
A gömböc could technically count as the most rigged die – only ever rolling up one number – if the only requirements for a D&D die were for it to be a convex object with uniform density.
I dish out some damage with the warpick and usually throw it at an enemy or simply drop it in the middle of combat. Sometimes I throw away the shield too or use it to grapple, like topple an enemy and then use the shield to pin them down as a ‘grapple’. I try to flavor it differently, depending on combat situation, as not to make it too boring for everyone while just going “Imma grapple them”.
I mean, if your DM is letting you grapple with a shield definitely keep doing that lol.
But apart from that, remember the old grapple-shove combo. A prone creature cannot stand up while grappled. So if you can do both to the same target, they can’t move until they beat you in 2 athletics contests, and they have disadvantage on attacks while prone.
He only lets me do it when I have one hand free to technically ‘grapple’ and I have to topple/shove them to make them prone. But thanks for the reminder!
I try not to do ‘unrealistic’ grappling and try to use the tools I have to grapple. For example, use the pick to pierce their limbs and keep them in place or pin them down with the shield when prone. But always with a hand free to make the condition to grapple legit.
It’s pretty decent. On top of the grappling bonus action, it gives you proficiency with improvised weapons. This helps when you’re using your shield as an improvised weapon because your other hand is holding someone.
I just found my next feat I think. “Fey Touched”. I know it’s only once per long rest but get this: You get Misty Step AND another 1st level spell from School of Divination or School of Enchantment. School of Enchantment has “Hex” as a first level spell. Imma hex them, choose either STR or DEX, depending on the description of the enemy from the DM. Since I can’t cast two spells in one round, I’m gonna use Misty Step the next round and do a teleports behind you nothing personnel, kid - move, then use Action Surge to do the shove / grapple combo. Fuck, I already look forward to the next level up.
dnd
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.