After all your years as GM, what's that one thing that still makes no fucking sense to you?

fun is for faggots

Pretty much half my group falls into this

Why do people play "tanks" instead of "melee weapon user that happens to wear heavy armor" especially in systems where there's no such thing as an MMO-style taunt?

>luchadors kitsune dragons or water elementals cant be adventurers
you are that gm

...

Why do people need 20+ special snowflake races?
Why do people have to lean on options to write down on their character sheets to make unique characters?
Why do people sign up to play a game and miss every session after the first 2 or 3 but keep saying they will be there next week?

there is such a thing in pathfinder, it's called area control and attacks of opportunity.
you are right, that faggot just threw the fishing pole into the water talking about odd races like they aren't allowed to go on an adventure because theyre not allowed. I dont know why I even responded to something that stupid

Why can't they just fight the monsters and talk to the NPCs instead of trying to talk to the monsters and fighting the NPCs?

Lady luck's gambit, shes a bitch but when everything lines up right, she works like a charm.

Don't you ever reply to me again unless you're contributing to the thread.

Stay butthurt pathfag.

That's not the same thing as the player who says "I'm wearing the heavy armor, why doesn't everything just attack me?"

What you're talking about is what I always referred to as battlefield control, done melee style.

>Why do people have to lean on options to write down on their character sheets to make unique characters?
Because they believe that the stuff on the sheet constitutes everything about their character and have not learned to think beyond that.

That's why they think humans are boring as a race choice, because they don't see anything beyond the game stats as part of roleplaying. A fun little visual comes into their heads when they think "elf" or "warlock", but not when they think "human" so they decide that all elves or kitsunes or whatever will always be more interesting than all humans.

The first is D&D's armour class mechanic, wherein armour makes you harder to hit rather than reducing incoming damage. That has never made sense to me and it never will.

The second is how the very fucking instant I ban something, one player will always want to play that banned thing more than anything else in the entire world. It doesn't even have to be a douchebag That Guy player, I've seen this shit happen to otherwise level-headed and reasonable people. It's this weird childish "I want what I can't have" contrarian instinct that seems to surface completely at random when people are told that an option is unavailable. It's fucking bizarre and I hate it.

The complete and total lack of trust for sleeping and the distrust of npcs.

I have yet to betray them with a npc or attack them in their sleep. They do anything they can to try and sleep the least with the fewest down for the night. The also will not trust a npc, which has fucked them over several times in the last few years but they still will not trust one.

I do not even care any more if it is some weird form of trauma from another gm or game. I have been the one running the majority of sessions for the last 8 years and they still act like I am going to drop body snatchers on them at midnight.

Furthering off that
>I want to make a character who's really really good at [one thing] but utterly horrible at everything else!!
What the fuck why. You must realize this will condemn the character to performing their one maneuver over and over, and being totally useless when that maneuver isn't applicable to the situation?

>The first is D&D's armour class mechanic, wherein armour makes you harder to hit rather than reducing incoming damage. That has never made sense to me and it never will.
What?
A sword in your eye isn't going to hurt less because you've got a codpiece on.
Meanwhile if they stab the codpiece instead they aren't going to punch straight through solid metal and you're not going to take damage.
AC = armor stops the blow
Armor doesn't really dull blows that much. A stab through your gambeson is going to be about as bad as a stab without gambeson. It's far more usual for total invalidation than dampening of effect.

because armor class represents things like durability, dodging, skill, etc all rolled into a simplistic number, the end result of passing armor class has never been "you hit, but otherwise wouldn't have" it's "you hit well enough to do damage to the creature" damage reduction has always represented a higher version of that, that even a decisive hit was not as damaging as it would be to the average person/creature/etc

Fair enough. I still don't like the mechanic.

Just be glad it is better than the replacement mechanic in Unearthed Arcana.

which one? There's been several "variant" AC mechanics over the years in D&D

how does that work?

It might be that they think their paranoia is actively working for them. Unless you've clearly stated that they don't need to worry that hard about sleeping, they might be assuming that there are body snatchers waiting for them to let their guard down and the only reason they're safe is because of their precautions.

The not trusting NPCs thing, though, is really a mystery. That one should be a lot easier to figure out.

He said melee, not archer

this isn't off topic you twat monger. I did contribute to the thread about traditional games by pointing out that your shitty ideas of how adventuring works are retarded, and that no ammount of being a kitsune or a faggot prevents you from being an adventurer.

Sorry, I can't hear you over how salty you are with no argument for what any of those races have that prevents them from adventuring.

I think you misquoted, but that's okay, I still love you.

Melee is far superior for doing area control, not that ranged attackers are incapable of doing it, but it takes way more feat specialization for not much better effect

That players always hold up a sandbox setting as the ultimate holy grail of adventure design, yet whenever placed into a situation where they're given complete freedom of action they shut down and wait until I jam a plot hook in their faces.

I've honestly never seen anyone fall so hard for bait as stale as "don't ever reply to me again". Thanks, user.

I absolutely did. Whoops.

yeah user, choke on that bait.

You more or less halve all ac bonuses and but also give everyone an dr dependent on the type of armor it is. This also applies to natural armor to a degree. With a heavy guy in plate having like +4 to ac but dr/4.

It takes players all of 1 session to realize that you can just put hitting to the way side and just deal as much damage as possible.

How to balance a fucking encounter.
I seriously still don't understand how to do it.
I more often then not end up adding reinforcements or toning down abilities during a fight because it quickly becomes obvious that either the PCs are completely chumpalumping a simple encounter or a minor disabler will, through sheer dumb luck, cause a cascading party failure that will lead to TPK.

I've tried and tried, both with systems that have a suggested balance system and ones that have none at all, and I still have to resort to tweaking to produce enjoyable encounters.
What the fuck is wrong with my brain

From the other GMs I have talked to, balancing encounters on the fly is used by most of them, though only occasionally.

Speaking as a player, there's not much wrong with this. Breezing through encounters can be fun so long as you don't breeze through every encounter. Same goes for seemingly easy encounters that turn deadly. If all your encounters are balanced, things start to get predictable.

Same here. I've had many different players tell me that they want a heavy sandbox game and then when I plop them down somewhere in the world and tell them what's going around them they simply sit there. Maybe they bum around in town for a little while before going off to kill things in the woods. Not uncommonly they start killing eachother. Sometimes they just resign themselves to running a small shop in town. Then after the session the same player will tell me he wasn't sure where the main quest was.

Fucks who do not know what game they are running and try it run it like the first system they ran.

I can understand glossing over some things. I can not understand not knowing how fucking combat turns work when you have been running the system for years.

Or shit like when they say core rules are optional or work completely different then how the book or anyone else who has ever run the system have used them.

Just because one system is poorly executed doesn't mean that the concept, itself, is flawed.

The problem with that is that it plays badly, making people in heavy armor seem more dodgy than unarmored folks. And then there's the case of a giant's sword or a boulder that clearly shouldn't just glance off your armor.

Why do people think critical failures should have results like accidentally slitting your own throat?

Taking all gear from players in games that revolve around gear.

This always stuck in my craw when I played 3.5 and actually got me to leave the table for 2 years when a gm tried it in shadowrun then acted like we could do anything else with characters he kept poor then stripped.

Worst game I was ever in had us start at 10th level, with nothing. No spell ingrediants, no spell books, no foci or the like. Martial had no armor or weapons. He gave us quarter staves in the first session then dropped a corrupted angel followed by a lich on us. Two games later, we find magical gear and have spell casting crap, then a ship he refused to move the plot along without went down and we got teleported to some realm that stripped all gear from us and we had to start again.

Only idiot bitch fuck retards think that and I wish people would stop playing with them and indulging their stupid fucking ideas and dumbass assumptions

>I plop them down somewhere in the world and tell them what's going around them they simply sit there
Even really good players are going to struggle with this. The trick to getting a sandbox up and running is making the first arc not a sandbox at all. Once people break in their characters and get some more context for the world, they'll know what they want to do.

Because they like memes and also, like 90% of people in this hobby, they have never actually opened the books and play like their group.

Kinda like the idea of Advantage, like in 5e, came from a core rule of 3.5 in the DMG that no one used.

>Melee is superior for anything
>Pathfinder
You are shit even with your shitty pet system

Which rule are you referring to fro 3.5? I can't remember that, but 3.5 had such specific rules for specific situations that it got hard to remember them all. I only remember circumstance bonuses.

He's talking about a casual mention in the 3.5 DMG to give +/- 2 to rolls

The only reason I think Pathfinder is still a thing is because it's harder to acquire the 3.5 material. Pathfinder breaks more than it fixes and is still less satisfying.

>durrr
just because pathfinder isn't balanced doesn't mean you know anything about how area control with ranged works. feat for feat, and the base abilities alone, all make ranged a terrible option for most area controlling needs

That's the circumstance bonus rule I was talking about. Advantage is MUCH better.

I've never gone so far as someone slitting their own throat, but I do occasionally use critical fumble tables with results such as stabbing yourself, stabbing a teammate, shattering the weapon, or throwing it 1d100 feet. I only ever use these tables though for casual hack n slash dungeon crawler one shots.

One of the rules for skills, and could be applied to combat was the rule of +x or -x was considered one of the dms best tools.

Generally, it meant you give the players a +2 or -2 depending on what situation they are in. They are winning a fight, attacking a clearly inferior foe or climbing a rope because lava is coming for them and give them between a +1 to +20.

If they being over run by enemies, the house around them is burning down or they are badly hurt, apply -1 to -20 to what they are doing.

Also, 3.5 does not have that many rules. The rules for work place fraternization in my office is longer than the phb and dmg combined.

Best control options:
1) Spells
2) Snap Shot
3) End of list for anything that's not a corridor

3.5 grogs confirmed for worst grogs

I once played with a "thief" who wouldn't play unless we allowed his thief to have "supernatural trap sense" as he called it, which meant all of his dex savings throws act as natural 20 is special (read: all) scenarios, based on some weird flavor reason that didn't make sense. We let him play this way a couple times and just avoided putting him in situations where he could abuse it, but when his demand for accommodation started bleeding into his hit/dodge rolls, we kicked him out. Basically, I'll never understand why people who want to godmode their self insert character exist.

That's the circumstance bonus rule. I prefer advantage since I don't need to make a number on the fly.

I never met a 3.5 DM who did not know about circumstance bonuses though.

nah, that will always go to 2e fans.

Imagine something as inane as that guys post, but he spams it in every thread like it was the gospel of christ.

It's about twice as good, really.

How Mage: the Ascension mechanics work, and specifically Paradox. Seriously, what the fuck?

Numerically, advantage fluctuates between +1 and +5 based on how much of a chance you already had to succeed. It gives the highest bonus when the target number on the d20 is 10 or 11.

It's much better in my opinion because you don't have to arbitrarily make up a bonus or penalty number on the spot. I don't think adding +2 is hard but I've seen it slow down too many people.

>snap shot
>lets you take attacks of opportunity in 15' reach
>requires 5 feats to do what a melee person with a spell can do out of the box.
>gets you shit all for spells that boost your ability
>CMD nearly entirely useless with ranged attacks.
You have no idea how tanking works in pathfinder. The only ranged attacking controller is the arcane archer build.

See all that great shit you put xp into?

Well, if the st had a bad day, you will not be using any of that without him fucking you with realities barbed cock of correctness.

If he is high as shit, you become a god.

"The campaign is going to be about X."
"I WANT TO MAKE A CHARACTER FOCUSED AROUND Y WITH ZERO ABILITY OR INTEREST TO PARTICIPATE IN X!"

If you do this, kill yourself.

>Ran away in a benchmark playtest for characters so GM could calibrate the combat

>remembers that she's playing GURPS; combat is fucking dangerous

So yeah, what said.

Also, stop playing with D&D fucktards

Ignoring fringe cases that are almost certain to fail or succeed (long shots or sure shots), and looking at rolls within the more common 25% to 75% success range (before being modified), advantage grants you an average bonus of +4.5, a bit more than twice what you get from a +2 adjustment.

This 100%

>We've agreed to start a game trapped on an island
>My character has no reason to be on that island in the first place, so I'm not on that island I'm elsewhere.

Great, make a new character that has a reason to be on the island, or I will make you one.

>A wizard teleported you to the island

I try to be more creative than that, and I encourage my players to be as well.

Reverse of this burns my ass.

>we are playing a game focused around X
>10 sessions in and we have never run into X and we have planer traveled half of the fucking surrounding planes

I had this one guy who always had to be a ninja.

Shadowrun? Ninja.
D&D? Ninja.
Western? Half demon Ninja.
Any 40k game? Ninja.

Fucking why, you godforsaken cuntbag.

sometimes people need to be deus ex'd into playing along for the sake of the game.

You're not wrong and I didn't contradict you, but you entirely missed the point.

That's fine for weekly beer and pretzel games, fuck it I'll flow with just about anything at that point.

But for a game where we've all been working on the setting together and reviewing each others characters for weeks? Nope.

I used to play with a GM that would insist on making up his own reason for why a PC was now joining the party. This was made worse by frequent character deaths, so alot of new PCs would come in often. One of the stranger ones was that someone's thief character was attempting to pickpocket an old lady in town. As he approaches her he is suddenly blinded by a flash of light and finds himself attached to a comet hurtling through the atmosphere. This comet crash lands next to the party (who were in a cave) and the PC gets up from the flaming rock to introduce himself. According to the GM, this game was supposed to be completely serious, and he got angry if people started laughing.

At least those things are adventure-esque. I swear, if that dude brings in another fat merchant with gout so he can sit on his ass and not adventure in D&D...

so why is someone's character fucked off halfway around the world if that's the case?

I wasn't arguing with you. I was just commenting. The +1 to +5 range is a bit deceptive* because it might lead people to believe that you'd usually get a bonus lying somewhere in the middle of that range--somewhere around +3--when, in fact, you're more likely to get something very close to the top end of the range.

*Technically, it's +.95 to +5 (or +0 to +5, if we're looking at a roll you have no chance to succeed), but close enough.

Anyone have a gif of that guy in full plate armour and it protecting him completely from a sword blow? People in full plate armour are like statues.

>Tzeench decided to dick with you.
>Why me out of all other mortals?
>He's Tzeench, 'because fuck you' is pretty much his only reason.

Replace deities where needed, now you can introduce an ongoing way to encourage faith based roleplay of "I'll worship you/X this Y objective/do long penance quest if you can bitchslap Tzeench for me"

Are we talking 'ninja' or are we talking highly agile stealth character?

I mean, I know that I tend to play healsluts or crafters, but I like to vary the fluff and actual character.

It's like the sonic flags that can't help but put sonic in everything they do: it's autism, nothing more or less

Because they were being lazy and wanted me to come up with reasons for why their character would be on the island.

I made a list of 20 options based off what we knew about the character. The player in question refused all of them. It eventually boiled down to them wanting their character to be the center of the plot, a notion which I, and the other players, refused.

They were smart about it though, and finally caved in to making a new character that fit the game.

>Stop asking to play a fucking luchador
I see no difference between a monk who uses grappling and a luchador, a luchador adventurer could be interesting.

I'm stealing that intro

I've wanted to play a character like this before

You could consider the higher to-hit bonus of Strenght as the attack being able to deal damage to parts of armor that would neutralize weaker blows. That's why large+ beasts and boulders usually have a decent to-hit thanks mostly to Str. An experienced fighter with a high BAB can hit more accurately a weak spot, but a strong, lower-level fighter can also deal damage by hitting the general area around the weak spot with enough force that the blow is effective.

Not that user, but I've seen several people that want to play a "luchador" specifically. Not just a grappler/wrestler type character but a "luchador" complete with mask, tight pants, and cheesy moves. I'm usually fine with it for beer and pretzels games, but sometimes the game is meant to be just a tad more serious. What really makes me dislike it though is when the player in question seems to think they are just the most cool, clever, and original person ever because they came up with such a brilliant idea.

Depends on the setting user.

>my game is super serious also why do people want to have fun fuck those people.

this guy is a fucking disarmed shield and some rebranding away from being a luchador and yet every fucker under the sun seems capable of taking him seriously in his serious movies.

Here's my experience with players who want to be luchadors:

>I want to be a wrestler!
>oh here's some advice on how to do it, keep in mind that it's not that well-supported in the system at low levels
>why am I not doing as much damage as a greataxe?!
>why can my low-level barbarian not grapple everyone at once?!
>this is dumb I want to play something else!!!
And then he left the group, which continued without him for several months.

And the second case:
>Hey user I'd love to join your game
>oh 5e core only because the other players are brand new to tabletops? I'm used to Pathfinder but okay, thanks for the PDFs
>hey user here's a 3.5e homebrew luchador class from dandwiki, also I want to be a half-giant
>what do you MEAN 5e core only
>I guess I'll play a monk then
>oh this sucks because I didn't read the monk class at all
>you know what nevermind if I can't play my half-giant luchador I'd rather not play

And then the people brand new to tabletops played every week for months on end having a blast while he continued to have no group.

To each their own user, relax.