So my game exploded last night, and over something I thought was pretty innocuous. Universal condemnation...

Business more than politics, but yeah, he's the head primarily because he can get along with everyone and he's a clever enough negotistor to artificially inflate prices if you want a spell cast on your behalf.

Not sure. First time GMing, and only my fifth session with them. Don't know them hugely well, LGS crowd.

Noted

Have you tried getting a party that isn't fully comprised of autistic people yet?

Now this I'd like to see.

Gut gud faget

Okay there's *gotta* be more to this than that, since it makes no sense whatsoever. What their objections were, exactly?

>Not sure. First time GMing, and only my fifth session with them. Don't know them hugely well, LGS crowd.

THERE is your problem.

Okay, OP. try not to take it personally. Its actually kind of miraculous that you got 5 sessions out of them.

You have to understand that the sort of players you pick up at a LGS are, by definition, the people that have no other group to play with. While there are certainly ordinary souls mixed in with them that just don't have friends with nerdy interests or are shy or whatever, you also are going to get people that just don't have the social skills or self awareness to survive in an establish game group for long. The sort of people that sperg out and crash games.

That could explain what happened here. It also sounds like they operate on the implict assumption that power = authority and vice versa. So the idea of someone being in a position of authority without also being the best angers and confuses them.

Which is weird, because when you think about it, how often is the king the most powerful warrior in the kingdom? Usually its just some guy. Maybe a very wise or noble guy, but not exactly a level 100 badass.

..., or have any of them flunked out of mage school?

>> one of them counters with "why don't you come yourself?
>> "oh, young Angus is more skilled in the art than I ever was, I'd only slow you down"
I thought that was a masturbation joke.

>LGS crowd

Don't feel bad. This type of group is always a crap shoot. In this case, it's not you. It really is the players. You really should DM a game with some players who are just getting into it. You need to explore the game with people who won't try to corner you on anything.

Also, all my patrons are severely disabled. The old man w/one arm. Wizards & Wheelchairs.

How do you function normally in society with a mind like that?

Wait, hold the fucking phone.

Your players wanted the guild head to be super-powerful AND to come adventuring with them? Your players WANTED a super-powerful mage to babysit them? What the everloving fuck? Why are they even playing if they're willing to hoist everything off on to a fucking overpowered NPC?

Foist, user.

To foist is to give an unwanted gift.

To hoist is to lift something using a rope.

Goddamn my southern uppbringing and their casual misuse of expressions, words, and damn near everything else. Thanks user.

I can only think of one explanation from the player's perspective. They rolled a Persuasion check, maybe above 25 or 30, and you still didn't have the guy go, and that upset them because they feel like you don't respect social rolls and just railroad them no matter how they try to diplomance.

Is something like that going on, or are they just autists?

> implying that he wasn't

There's always the possibility that OP was using an established setting and the players were autistic about a minor change.

>I know for a fact that Felonious Tabernackle is the guildmaster of Bedrockington and is supposed to be a level 15 Wizard with *these* spells and you said Angus is more powerful and this Angus faggot isn't in the books anywhere you made him up and you're screwing up the canon and REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

You got a shit group, happens.

this is the most generous explanation for the players behavior, and it still makes them into assholes.

OP, try again, you got a bad group and it seems like your trying to improve, which is the most important attribute for a new GM.

Not really. It was a shouted barrage, mostly about how

>that's stupid
>That's unrealistic
>Why would they listen to a shit mage?
>How can he use the Talismans* if he's a low level guy?

And one guy who kept going on about how every time you have a weak king and a strong vizier, the vizier tries to seize power.

*Talismans are a type of homebrewed magic item that involve burning a spell slot to achieve some effect. The primary one he uses is for long distance communication.

I only really offered for reasons of versimilitude. Even their "best guy" was going to be two levels lower than they were and mostly focusing on divinations and dispels. Guildhead was 5 levels lower than the party. I think it was just a reflexive, "GM offers you an inch, try to take a yard" thing, but that's a guess from an admitted newb.

Nope, no diplo rolls at all.

'Fraid I'm going to have to torpedo that theory as well. I just slapped together a fairly generic setting McSetting.

Will do. I suppose this brings things to question #2.

How do I get good at screening people?

Did you tell them that the guild master was a noncombatants specialist?
I mean they sound like complete cocks but I'm trying to find something in their favour. Anything.

Fairly interested in talismans too, I like hearing about magic systems.

>Did you tell them that the guild master was a noncombatants specialist?

Nope. Like I said, this came completely out of left field for me, and I certainly didn't try to give the guildmaster any kind of impression as anything other than being a kind of friendly grandfather type.

>Fairly interested in talismans too, I like hearing about magic systems.

There's not a whole lot to tell; I mostly cribbed the idea from the Ter'Angreal from the wheel of time setting, and I thought I could adapt it to DnD fairly well. I figure there's probably a need for and it would be easier to make a sort of magic item that would be activated or powered by a caster pouring whatever energies power his or her spells than just making a self-contained magic item.

So say you are a non-adventuring wizard. You probably have some kind of day job, in which the whole array of spells you have are probably not perfectly suited to whatever it is you actually do. I suppose you could craft or purchase a magic item to do whatever magical effect it is you need, but once it's there, you often don't need even a middling level mage to keep using it, which begs the question why not just pass it down to an apprentice or even a commoner and go on to do something else.

Talismans, otoh, create a need for spellcasters all along the power spectrum to do stuff if the item only works by casting a spell (well, not really, but you get the drift) into them to provide power to do whatever its effect is.

>And one guy who kept going on about how every time you have a weak king and a strong vizier, the vizier tries to seize power.
This entire group is retarded.
Don't feel bad.

You did nothing wrong.

I doubt the president of the AFL-CIO could work in a mine without throwing his back out. That has nothing to do with why he should or shouldn't represent miners and other tradesmen.

Out of curiosity - how did these guys fare during the rest of the time you DMed for them? Any highlights, any opinions on anythings, or reactions to what you presented to them?

So, it's sort of like a wand that contains a spell that can be used repeatedly? But instead of just being point and click for anyone they require a mage to supply magic and some form of attuning to a spell slot?

Sounds pretty legit. I can think of a couple neat things based around them.

>How do I get good at screening people?

Practice, and practical application of your people skills and common sense.

Heh

They were okayish. Reasonably adept tactically, kind of unsubtle. A lot of the adventure to that point were

>Get mission to kill X
>Go out and kill X
>Come back for reward

And then a possible side branch of

>Demand bigger reward/kill guy who gave them mission for better loot before running away from the town guard or other authorities.

Which was how they got where they were in the first place, having murdered their last employer over not compensating them enough to take out a mated pair of Beholders.

Yes, although I should be clear that unlike wands which duplicate a spell, not all of the Talismans do so. Some of that was also to create effects without poring through a dozen splatbooks looking for the right spell and then make a wand of it.

There's also usually some "trick" to using them properly (unique to each Talisman), you'd either need to have someone teach you, or make some kind of spellcraft check and a fair amount of time to puzzle it out if you just stumbled across one and had no idea how it worked.

>They were okayish. Reasonably adept tactically, kind of unsubtle. A lot of the adventure to that point were
>>Get mission to kill X
>>Go out and kill X
>>Come back for reward
>And then a possible side branch of
>>Demand bigger reward/kill guy who gave them mission for better loot before running away from the town guard or other authorities.
>Which was how they got where they were in the first place, having murdered their last employer over not compensating them enough to take out a mated pair of Beholders.
You call that "okayish"? I call that get the fuck out of my house, and never come back again.

They weren't engaging in any horror story Veeky Forums That Guy behavior. Everyone came in reasonably groomed, there were no shouting matches, no attempt to shoehorn anime characters into the game, no lolis, no obvious Magical Realms, etc.

I thought they weren't too bad, all things considered, up until that final run

Exactly, the whole point of attaining a powerful position is making it so that you don't have to lift a finger because you can hire guys who do the work for you.

OP your players are dumb. (like everyone else has said)

I don't fucking get this. Your players were actually mad you didn't hoist a hyper-competent NPC onto their party and instead demanded they use their own characters to solve their problems?

They seem to be more mad that the leader of the mage guild isn't the best mage in the guild, which is possibly even dumber.

See, any players I've ever had would've just razzed the guy for being useless then went on to do their quest. I cannot imagine the kind of person who'd actually get angry about this.

I was also thinking it was a wank joke.

See...although technically the rope isn't required. You can hoist yourself onto a ledge. Hoisting is generally lifting by the use of a device known as a hoist however, which is a series of pulleys.

Unless something else happened that you're not telling us, it sounds like you were reasonable, they're idiots, and it's for the best that they left.

Creating a new group from scratch is very hard. Especially from LGS rejects.

where do you think you are?