Oh man, I am so bad at these. I would have to say yes and no. I do believe that there are creatures out there that you simply can not intimidate. (emphasis on the period.)
Is a vampire one of those creatures... ..
Objectively no, subjectively .. ... maybe.
I think what is really at question here is how you handled your decision, not so much the decision itself. If you wanted your creature to be immune to intimidate there is a plethora of ways to handle that in the D&D universe.
So, I will end my posts on this thread with yes, I think your ruling was fair, however - I think your execution was.. ..um... ..less then stellar.... ... .. .
A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
Like in the OP's case, I would've asked the player for a secondary skill first like Bluff, Insight, or a knowledge skill, to determine whether or not the player had successfully found the angle they needed for leverage. Fail that check, and you can't roll intimidate, or at least I'd set the DC very high.
Who's burden is it to ask for a secondary skill? As a player, I always try figuring out an angle before intimidate. So I naturally do some info gathering first by explicitly telling the DM that I'm using insight/history/streetwise/bluff/etc. Sometimes I'll even avoid the secondary skill for the surprise factor. Is it the DM's duty to ask for secondary skills if a player tries to use intimidate? In my example I, as a DM, asked for the roll. Is this situation different?
...Look at it like this, if a group of 7 year olds walk up on me and tell me to go buy them some cigarettes or else - I do not care what they "roll" I am not going to be intimidated... does that make any sense..?
That depends on just how intimidating those 7-year-olds are, doesn't it?
The average 7-year-old, maybe not.
These 7-year-olds, however...
Remember that you're playing a fantasy game, where heroic muscle-men bend bars and lift gates, extremely wise men speak directly and literally with the gods, intelligent men of great learning are smart enough to break the very laws of real-world physics and chemistry, and so on... you're dealing with exceptional people in the person of the PCs, and in the monsters!
Trying to solve out-of-game problems (like cheating, bad attitudes, or poor sportsmanship) with in-game solutions will almost always result in failure, and will probably make matters worse.
Gun Safety Rule #5: Never point the gun at anything you don't intend to destroy. (Never introduce a character, PC, NPC, Villain, or fate of the world into even the possibility of a deadly combat or other dangerous situation, unless you are prepared to destroy it instantly and completely forever.)
Know your group's character sheets, and check them over carefully. You don't want surprises, but, more importantly, they are a gold mine of ideas!
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It's a problem if the players aren't having fun and it interferes with a DM's ability to run the game effectively; if it's not a problem, 'fixing' at best does little to help, and at worst causes problems that didn't exist before.
"Hulk Smash" characters are a bad match for open-ended exploration in crowds of civilians; get them out of civilization where they can break things and kill monsters in peace.
Success is not necessarily the same thing as killing an opponent. Failure is not necessarily the same thing as dying.
Failure is always an option. And it's a fine option, too, as long as failure is interesting, entertaining, and fun!
"Broken or not, unbalanced or not, if something seems to be preventing the game from being enjoyable, something has to give: either that thing, or other aspects of the game, or your idea of what's enjoyable." - Centauri
I DM'd a non-combat encounter with three vampires. Each of them had different backgrounds. One of them, Chantal, happened to work for the king (she does not mention this), who the party is trying to get an audience with. Vampires being vampires, they mess with the PCs to test their limits since they see them as inferior. As a verbal warning/defense, the PCs mention that they killed someone that night, and that they have an audience with the king. The last part makes Chantal interested since she should know about this.
Chantal decides to give her vampire friend a treat: if one of the PCs agrees to "grab a bite" from her friend at the club, she'll expedite the process to get an audience that same night. PCs refuse and one of them says "better let him go, or else the king might hear about this". I ask him if he's trying to intimidate or use diplomacy. He's not sure so I say "roll an initimidate" (because or the "or else " part). Following what I remembered of "The negotiation" skill challenge example from the DMG, I say that the NPC refuses to be intimidated, regardless of the check (success). I give them a chance to react to her getting offended and try to fix things, but nobody jumps in so I say that she frowns, tells the party that she'll make sure to get their audience request "lost in the mail" and they eventually leave.
The player then complains that a sucessful intimidate check is supposed to make them back down. I told the player that some individuals do not like to be intimidated, and that should he have used intimidate on Chantal's friend (who did not have a position of power), that would have worked, but he doesn't buy it. Was my ruling fair?
It was probably fair enough, but it sounds like it wasn't satisfying to the players, and the players are the largest part of your audience, and often, satisfying is just as important as fair.
Yesterday, I started reading the fantasy books that inspired the Game of Thrones TV series. In the first few pages, there was an exchange following an execution, between a boy named Bran, and his father, Lord Stark, that, paraphrased, went something like this:
Stark: What did you think of the execution? Bran: One of my older brothers says the executed man was brave, the other said he was afraid. Stark: What do you think? Bran: Can a man be brave if he's afraid? Stark: That is the only time a man can be brave.
Just because the PCs successfully intimidated the vampires, doesn't necessarily mean they are going to get everything they want from them... in many ways, people and other animals or monsters can be more dangerous when they are afraid and backed into a corner.
Just remember, however, that what you are aiming for is to help tell a satisfying story - it's probably not going to be very satisfying for the players if they've gone through the trouble of building an intimidating character, rolled a decisive success at intimidation, and still fail to get anything out of the deal - they will feel cheated, and rightly so!
It could not at all have hurt your story to have the vampires back down, give the PCs what they were demanding, and then tell them on the way out the door that they will be sorry... and have the intimidated, humiliated, proud, and vengeful vampires come back later behind the protection of summoned devils and that sort of thing, to play the part of recurring villains... always keeping out of reach of the PCs because they are afraid of them, but nevertheless driven by their nature to resist the PCs from a safe distance....
Trying to solve out-of-game problems (like cheating, bad attitudes, or poor sportsmanship) with in-game solutions will almost always result in failure, and will probably make matters worse.
Gun Safety Rule #5: Never point the gun at anything you don't intend to destroy. (Never introduce a character, PC, NPC, Villain, or fate of the world into even the possibility of a deadly combat or other dangerous situation, unless you are prepared to destroy it instantly and completely forever.)
Know your group's character sheets, and check them over carefully. You don't want surprises, but, more importantly, they are a gold mine of ideas!
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It's a problem if the players aren't having fun and it interferes with a DM's ability to run the game effectively; if it's not a problem, 'fixing' at best does little to help, and at worst causes problems that didn't exist before.
"Hulk Smash" characters are a bad match for open-ended exploration in crowds of civilians; get them out of civilization where they can break things and kill monsters in peace.
Success is not necessarily the same thing as killing an opponent. Failure is not necessarily the same thing as dying.
Failure is always an option. And it's a fine option, too, as long as failure is interesting, entertaining, and fun!
"Broken or not, unbalanced or not, if something seems to be preventing the game from being enjoyable, something has to give: either that thing, or other aspects of the game, or your idea of what's enjoyable." - Centauri
Like in the OP's case, I would've asked the player for a secondary skill first like Bluff, Insight, or a knowledge skill, to determine whether or not the player had successfully found the angle they needed for leverage. Fail that check, and you can't roll intimidate, or at least I'd set the DC very high.
Who's burden is it to ask for a secondary skill? As a player, I always try figuring out an angle before intimidate. So I naturally do some info gathering first by explicitly telling the DM that I'm using insight/history/streetwise/bluff/etc. Sometimes I'll even avoid the secondary skill for the surprise factor. Is it the DM's duty to ask for secondary skills if a player tries to use intimidate? In my example I, as a DM, asked for the roll. Is this situation different?
Well, like I said, if you've trained in Intimidate then I'm sure you've got a justification for how you generally use it already prepared. What I'm saying is, if I'm skeptical of that justification, whether I'm skeptical that your usual method of intimidation would work, or if your coming up with something completely out of the box, then I as the DM would ask for the secondary roll to determine how successful the approach could be, to determine the actual _potential_ of that approach.
So, say a player knew that physical intimidation wouldn't work, so came up with an angle based on the politics of the region and knowledge of the vampires allies and the goals of those alliances, I'd ask for some kind of knowledge or Streetwise, or even Dungeoneering, check to determine if that is a valid angle or not. It take the ruling out of my hands. It's all on the dice now. If your narrative of how you plan to do something seems thin, I leave it to the dice to decide before we even go to the Intimidate roll itself.
It's an extra level of resistance, and resistance is texture. That's all.
