So, just read the entire thread, and having nothing else to do, decided to post. Holy crap. I must be one of the worst DMs ever! Since no one ever complains, though, I wouldn't know it. Lessee: No notes? Check Optimization? Check DMPC? Check, all the freakin time. But a reason. Significant other? Check, but also, for a reason. Umm..Uhhh...Lessee...? ALL THE TIME! Don't want to bother goin through everything else, and on to the biggest one: Ohh Shiny? BIG ASS CHECK! Holy crap. I can't go on without more freakin items and power. One example: The campaign I'm running now has, as house rules: Feats every level, Gestalt, all books alowed, +5 LA for free, and LA Buyoff. AND (Sarcastic better not read this): Spoiler:Show
We are gonna be demigods at level 10 (with IH rules) come end of this adventure
Also, homebrew from any site you want is allowed. Not really any questions. AND I have to make new characters every 5 seconds. It's fun for me though. Now for the Reason: My player base is 2 people. Me and my girlfriend. No one else can meet regularly or anywhere near anything. So, we each play 2 characters and gestalt. Also, unlike what many people see DMPCs as, my characters are just as vulnerable, if not more vulnerable, as everyone else. Just my views on the topic. And Sarcastic, I'm so sorry I'm such a bad DM!
That was the important line. That I could handle, though I must admit I'd throw it down a well at the first opportunity. Over the years, I've discovered I have a definite distaste for hardware that talks back.
Another day, another three or four entries to my Ignore List.
I have played under a DM who is very keen on DMPC's, but for the opposite reason to what seems to be the norm.
They have them in there so that if things go pear shaped, and we need someone to make a last stand while everyone else legs it, or if we need to sacrifice someone for any reason, there is a candidate that doesn't require a player to give up their character if they don't want to.
The players are still free to choose to volunteer to be the hero, they just do not have to.
I know I'm railroading you and you know I'm railroading you, so lets just enjoy the scenery passing by.
We played for three hours. There was a bar. We got drunk. We received plot hook. It hurt. We walked to plot hook giver. We talked. We surprised the DM by not accepting his reason for why we would want to do this. We left town. There was barren plains to our left and right. We came to another town. It had one bar. We left. We discovered next town. We searched all of it, except the tavern. Found tavern had plot hook. We quit game.
And we (players) had more fun berating the railroadiness of the plot than playing the game. And his ego deluded him into thinking we were having a good time. The fights we got into weren't fights. We took maybe five damage over three fights.
The sentence above said by the DM to a player. In an attempt to show of his craftiness to the players, they reveal crucial plot points, monsters, or traps the PCs will encounter before the session, while expecting the one player they tell to not leak the information to his allies and sitting smirking, knowing the Beholder-not the Medusa everyone predicted- is what's really behind that door. A less drastic version is the teasing DM who gives cryptic hints to single players, usually impossible to decode without having the DMs own logic.
"You knew he was a vampire?"
Above said while bringing an Anne rice novel to the session. This player usually is a fan of a genre of fiction, Vampires for example, though Werewolves, Cthulhu-esque creatures, or ghosts are fine. outside sessions they talk about their favorite subject, to the point that there is little to no suprise in the players when this creature or fictional archetype makes its appearance. To further upset anticipating players, the weaknesses of the creature in question, or having a character prepared swith feats and skills intended for combating thise creature, are prohibited, because the PCs had no reason to beforehand.
The players would'nt metagame if you weren't so predictable.
"Don't tell anyone, but I'm gonna..." The sentence above said by the DM to a player. In an attempt to show of his craftiness to the players, they reveal crucial plot points, monsters, or traps the PCs will encounter before the session, while expecting the one player they tell to not leak the information to his allies and sitting smirking, knowing the Beholder-not the Medusa everyone predicted- is what's really behind that door. A less drastic version is the teasing DM who gives cryptic hints to single players, usually impossible to decode without having the DMs own logic. "You knew he was a vampire?" Above said while bringing an Anne rice novel to the session. This player usually is a fan of a genre of fiction, Vampires for example, though Werewolves, Cthulhu-esque creatures, or ghosts are fine. outside sessions they talk about their favorite subject, to the point that there is little to no suprise in the players when this creature or fictional archetype makes its appearance. To further upset anticipating players, the weaknesses of the creature in question, or having a character prepared swith feats and skills intended for combating thise creature, are prohibited, because the PCs had no reason to beforehand. The players would'nt metagame if you weren't so predictable.
I'm more or less the opposite of this. If you see an Ann Rice book at the table with me, probably the last thing you'll get is a vampire. My placement of monsters tends to seem random, but does have it's own internal consistency.
For example, the last campaign, they started off with a sample group of Minion-level Kobolds, with a Warcaster. Nothing unusual, except they were like that in a population center. Players called me on it, and were told that if they're inside the walls, there was a reason.
Lo and behold, there was. The kobolds were raiding from the basement of a house, which had a tunnel leading to a Lair. Nice lair, well-built, lots of space. Loads of kobolds, and very few rats.
Why is that? Most people try and keep the temples clean, and Kobolds are no exception. They had a young White to worship. They get a note at the end about a bunch of Slavers operating in a city that taxes the village.
A week to get there, and a group of Goblins, two groups of Kobolds, and a bunch of Gnolls later, and people are starting to wonder again. "Why would Goblins and Kobolds work together?" Answer: They're being paid, and they're more afraid of their Human bosses than they are torqued off at the other guy. Hobgoblins, Goblins, Humans and Kobolds in the next dungeon.Oh, and Rats. Mostly to be served as food.
Next place: Keep high in the mountains, overlooking a river. They expect to see Gobbies and Kobolds now (although they've pretty much exterminated all the Kobolds of any value).
They get Orcs, Gobbies, Devils and Sahaugin, with two combat teams of Warforged, a mixed bag of Humans, and a very low-end Drow Solo (custom created to give them a hard time, and did), with a variety of undead.
The Drow for the area under the keep wanted something inside it (the NPC they'd had along to balance what the party needed in damage output), and staged an invasion using Teleport Circles and the contents of the Crypts below. The Warforged had been there since the Keep's founding, and reactivated by our Drow buddy for causing a ruckus.
Mind, this is *not* Eberron, but a region from a custom campaign world. Humans are the extreme newcomers, having crashed a colony ship and watching in horror as the damage racked up. Modern materials still have to be made of something, and the ecology won't handle strip mining. Mineral-rich enough for everybody to make swords and the like, but not enough to make large-scale mining and etc a possibility. Therefore, Humans adapted to the things they could do, and the old stuff is buried deep down.
Fantasy campaign with the occasional bit of high technology tossed in when it could be fun to make a side-trip or whatever. These Warforged, fluffed hard to stereotype, took a whack out of the team the first time. The second, they learned.
The Cheater tended to metagame because I couldn't be exactly predicted. At one point, he tried to write the encounter for me. Betting you can guess how well that went over. This is the same campaign where I up front banned Deva and Shifters, Groused about the Goliath, and wound up dropping the Teifling because the players argued how they made no sense in the Campaign as fluffed in PHB.
Players don't get to ad-lib t3h r00lz, and demand the DM stick to RAW. RAW says it's the other way around.
You guys got your teeth kicked in by this guy last time. Now you're fighting THIS MANY of them.
Also works with overpowered enemies, this DM refuses to acknowledge that the encounters are simply too difficult. That, or he acknowledges their difficulty, but refuses to adjust it. A great example is when, in Pyramid of Shadows, we fought the ettin marauder (w/e it was called, it was an ettin something) and it was pretty much auto-hitting everyone, even the fighter, and it was impossible to get flanking EVER because every time we tried, it got an opportunity attack, and once again, instantly hit, and pushed whoever was moving.
We were able to kill the rest of the monsters, but it wasn't until everyone was dead or dying that he finally decided to have the ettin run by everyone so we all got opportunity attacks, then assumed that we all criticaled, and assumed that we killed it in one round. We hadn't even bloodied the thing, and we'd been fighting it for over ten rounds. This was a really unnatural way to handle the situation, and it pretty much killed the game then.
The Book Hoarder Keeps his very own set of books, and demands that no one read them. Does not let anyone look at the MM, because he seems to believe that people will go through the trouble of memorizing every creatures AC, HP, and weaknesses. If, God forbid, someone get a book he doesn't have, he either outlaws its use, or demands that he keep it.
The Nazi Human fighters only. Nothing else. If some one tries to play, say, a half-elf, he will say that there are no half-elves in the area, or give the player all sorts of disadvantages.
One Of This And One Of That... This DM demands that there be one controller, one defender, one leader and one striker. In a party of five, the odd player out will be forced to play a human cleric.
