Character has a home base stocked with supplies and fully guarded be powerful guards

You mean you haven't heard of Dan "Get in the Van" Schneider?

>He hasn't heard of Dan "the hymen collider" Schneider

>person who is by default aware of everything in the setting)

False.

HE CANT KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT

...

Post the collage of people with some shit written in their feet.

Okay, I'll bite.
Who?

They're the gamemaster. They're supposed to know everything about the game, all characters (including PCs) and every NPC/location in the game.

Instead of being passive aggressive or a cunt, why not voice your complaint?
"Hey gm, I don't like how you overrule us with bullshit NPCs that seem to have no consistency/seemingly no place in the gameworld".

If you don't like it? Fuck off. Literally. Find a new game?

Tell him you're going to try and Jump from your position to literally anywhere hundreds of miles away, and then try a whole bunch of times until you roll a 20 and by default succeed, causing you to fly into space.

Dan "She's a Fighter, Hold 'er Tighter" Schneider

What?

The GM is aware on a meta level of everything happening in the setting, even if it hasn't happened yet or isn't actually written. Eg., your character doesn't have secrets from the GM; if you have some big secret backstory, it doesn't exist in the setting unless the GM says it does, which is awfully difficult when you haven't told him.

It could be a good way to make understand the GM, even after you told him.
I had a GM who constantly screwed up with me on surprise, traps, ambush and shit, when I had a perception so high I could detect everything, even passively. I talked to him, he kept going but a little less.

Then, when he made a character in my game, I did just the same to him, completely undermining one aspect of his character with bullshit reasons, giving the same excuse as he did. We had a talk after the game, and then it never happened again in my game or his.

So, if you do it to actually make them understand the problem, it's not a bad idea I'll say. If his NPC can't even do the required check to pass the traps, he might see why it's bad to make them pass it juste "because"

For a second I thought this was a D&D campaign from the BBEG's perspective and then it turned into a dumb thread.

This one?

Post map when done.

>Never provides any description for anything and wonders why we forget that they're apparently plot important
>Combats are grossly underchallenging
>All enemies, no matter what they are, act exactly the same and will either run when we're clearly losing or will throw themselves on top of us when we're winning
>Doesn't let us pay for our mistakes (ie, my character in Only War tries to make a last stand against two bloodletters and he just has a DMPC one-shot them)
>'You just level up when I say you do'
>Acts all high and mighty because he's apparently the only one willing to run something (He isn't)
>Gets almost cartoonishly furious if you bring any of this up

EP for a ton of Nickelodeon's sitcoms. Famous for being an unpleasant prick and constantly placing underage female characters (even if a lot of the actresses playing them aren't) in uncomfortably lewd situations

Oh...
Thanks for the info, I guess

Yeah, there's a reason people hate on him so much, and it isn't JUST because all his shows fucking suck

They have better teleport spells that ignore your traps. The GM is always right.

A gm who plays like that is one you should probably beat up and kick from the group though.

>You just level up when I say you do'
I don't have as much of a problem with this one, because I have seen many DM's do this very well.

This is great

A player holing up with everything his character could care for or about in an unassaultable impregnable super base and waiting out the end of the world rather than going out on adventures, biting on hooks, exposing their vulnerable side, and taking risks should also be kicked.

>Drake & Josh
>Kenan & Kel
>All That
>The Amanda Show
>GOOD BURGER

You wot m8

Honestly, this sounds fun as hell. Trick would be convincing my players to try it out.

It makes me feel good that I would ask the player to do this if they wanted to.
I might still want to run it without the player there though.
Just by myself go through the infiltration with the trapless map, noting precautions the enemies would take, then read through the traps, make rolls, and next session describe what the PCs find when they return.
That way they don't meta too hard and get the experience of searching a broken into base, not knowing if the intruders are still there...

>my character in Only War tries to make a last stand against two bloodletters and he just has a DMPC one-shot them
I hate this, I'm playing this game to do cool shit, if I wanted to feel like an idiot I'd can just lay in bed and think about my life choices.

>Slavishly follows the published adventure to the letter
>No deviation
>Anything you do attempt is shut down immediately and has no ultimate effect
>Let's you roll for something but has no intention of letting you succeed no matter what you roll
I'd rather you just flat out tell me "this will not work" before I bother rolling dice.

>hostile npcs get auto success on their acrobatics or sneaking
>GM: "It's more epic that way"

There's no such thing as doing "leveling up when the GM feels like it" very well. It's just something you do.

And more often than not, it sucks, because it removes a completely legitimate incentive structure from the game.

>Player has good experience with thing
>Nuh-uh, you didn't because I said so.

anything that encourages murder hobos is bad

>play pathfinder
>literally just have 340ft on a side hollow cube of invulnerable lead kept that way via constantly rotated sets of Lyres of Building played by homunculi
>forbiddance with a caster level higher than 20 with buffs, making it impossible to dispel
>also teleport trap it that redirects to a sealed chamber inside of the cube that is also invulnerable (in case they're also CG for some reason)
>laugh at them as they are stuck in invulnerable lead box

>A babby weening himself off of d&d gives his first opinion on design structure

Let me spell it out for you: xp provides the means to incentivize certain activities.

In early editions of d&d, you got xp for gold collected, not monsters killed. This changes the incentive structure of the game dramatically.

Saying "Well you'll level up when I feel like it" robs a game of this easily communicated incentive structure and just turns it into utter fiat. It is an amateur mistake and one commonly made by GMs who fancy themselves storyfags but lack actual design knowledge.

>Instead of XP you'll level up after you finish this quest

I'm struggling to figure out what's so bad about this

Every quest?

Just the quests the GM dolls out as the "main quests"?

Note that if you're saying you get such and such xp for each quest completed, congratulations, you're agreeing with me without realizing it.

The DM gives a level up when he feels like the party has done enough to move the story along.

>inb4 campaign with any kind of plot REEEE
Are you this autistic at your table?

>I tried to convince him to get rid of this shit but the entire group outvoted me

Probably because theres nothing wrong with it. Fags like will use ridiculous examples but a DM worth a damn will use crit successes or failures to give moderate bonuses to the check/save/attack that you did/had done to you.

Climbing a smooth, damn near 90 degree, wall with absolutely no tools or equipment suited for such a task shouldnt let you do so just because you got a crit 20. But if you wanted to pick open a door quietly and manage a crit 20 then maybe surrounding ears could have disadvantage to hear it, or other tabletop equivalents like roll penalties and such, because of the small chance to do so well. But it also means that a crit fail could see a fight about to happen.

It helps to keep the session interesting as things outside the dreadful rollplaying experience, which is what it sounds like you play for, from dragging shit along in a painfully slow and by-the-book manner.

>The DM gives a level up when he feels like the party has done enough to move the story along.

This is shit and completely arbitrary.

What defines "the story"? The plot the GM had in mind? We normally call those railroads. Games take on their own life and follow their own courses in ways that nobody at the table truly can foresee until the game is played. XP incentives exist for the GM to highlight what will be important and incentivized.

had a gm that gave us 2d6 damage from daggers that when we got them they turned into 1d3 shit daggers

>playing D&D 5e
>fighting skeletons
>they quickly overpower the party
>we're 6th level
>thisisprettyspooky.png
>the skeletons put us in a cage and push the cage off of a cliff
>no saves, no rolls
>DM "that's for making me buy pizza for the night"
>I bought the pizza
>it's at my house
>this asshole killed us for no reason
>DM "yeah but I paid you back"
>I never asked him to, even denied the money once.
>he doesn't undo what just happened
>we all take an hour to reroll and start investigating a fallen cage with 4 corpses
>another cage falls
>skeletons pop out and capture the party because "the cage didnt break this time"

>The plot the GM had in mind? We normally call those railroads.
Holy kek, do you think GMs literally improv everything? No, people have plans in mind beforehand and see how you interact with set pieces he has set up.

>Games take on their own life and follow their own courses in ways that nobody at the table truly can foresee until the game is played.
Yes, it's called an adaptable story, still has milestones though.

>XP incentives exist for the GM to highlight what will be important and incentivized.
I just have players level up once per five sessions rather than track XP. They know exactly when a level up is coming.

In other games I have done it different. In one they leveled up each time they killed a mythic creature. In another it was generals of an opposing army.

In another it was entirely story based, with large milestones being decided by me because I'm not an autist nor do I play with autists who can't recognize a milestone.

Tracking XP in my mind is tedious and unnecessary as opposed to most other methods, especially for campaigns that do not focus on combat as xp rewards for non-combat encounters in and of themselves become arbitrary.

>this is shit and completely arbitrary
so is the experience gained from killing monsters. so is the experience handed out for completing encounters. so is an sort of experience whatsoever. why are you so shit at pretending to be retarded?

>Never prepared
>Usually starts making everything the day of the session
>Never attempts to keep conversation on-topic and we might get 10-15 minutes worth of in-game progress in an hour if we're lucky
>Someone leaves to go to the bathroom, answer a call, or pick someone up from work every hour (which is understandable)
>But instead of roboting their character, as they say is okay when they leave, DM just waits for them to get back which has us waiting even longer
>Every NPC is a sassy asshole and always explains in a matter-of-fact way even though it's obvious we have never been to this new area
>Pop culture references in every important story oriented conversation

Gotta love game day.

good exercise for new players / DMs is to do nonstop dungeon crawl with rotating responsibilities.
>DM : DMs the crawl
>cartographer : maps out the dungeon and places traps
>encounter chart : some one makes the random encounter table and loot tables
Ext.
each person takes a turn being 1 of them until everyone has done everything at least once. new players might not hold responsibilities there first time through but it will help

The PCs can decide to go kill monsters. The PCs can decide to go complete quests, which I assume is what you actually mean.

The PCs cannot decide to follow an incentive structure that exists purely within the GM's brain that he doesn't feel like sharing in any meaningful sense.

For a guy so eager to call people retarded, you sure are brainless when it comes to understanding the literal simplest incentive structure; the carrot.

>Tracking XP in my mind is tedious and unnecessary as opposed to most other methods

It all boils down to this; you are lazy, so you don't want to do it.

Which, I mean, sure, not everybody wants to set up a standardized incentive structure for their campaign. But it is what it is; laziness.

>videogame addled millennial needs his skinnerbox "progression" to have fun.
I find the incentive of having fun to be much preferable to some artificial point system to be gamed.

The game shouldn't be about hitting points on a list to level up. If all your players care about is leveling up through an incentive system then something is wrong with the campaign. If the only reason I'm there is to kill things I normally leave the game as pure combat does not interest me nearly as much. Leveling up serves to make the rest of the game more fun as it shows one's growth. I think XP tracks and the like take a lot of the magic out of it, because you might end up having a goblin be what pushes you over rather than a dragon or other story relevant thing.

So I don't aware XP and instead set charater and player goals. Like they have an idea of what will level them up, but leveling up should be a moment of character growth after a great labor, not just the peanut from the push button.

You can generally fix that by offering outcomes that don't cause everyone to stand around with a thumb up their ass just because they failed the "move the plot along" roll.

Crits don't add anything to the game except that you'll always have a 5% chance of succeeding even when you're otherwise inept at the challenge or a 5% chance of failure even though you're more than well suited for the job.

I'd rather succeed because I built my character to be a good climber than to succeed only because of blind luck.

Oh boy here we go, strap on your helmets, we got high horse rider here with another amazing display of RAW prowess and superiority ready to take you on a one way vacation to numbertown, leave the fun at home.

>muh laziness muthafucka

XP is a flawed concept for the majority of systems, always has, always will be. Plan on running a hex crawl with random encounters? Well, you can enjoy the party either over or under leveling just from dice rolls alone dictating if they get the magical abstract numbers shoved into their souls so they can power up. Don't run anything of that sort and plan on running something narrative driven? Again, unless you plan on altering NCE xp awards (which would also probably qualify as laziness under your guidelines) it can either bring the overarching vision and direction of the game to a grinding halt or become an unenjoyable elevator where players fly by meaningful progression. It also doesn't account for the type of players that I'd assume you are; who instead of playing for the sake of playing would just invite metagaming to the table and "hey GM can I go grind some skeletons for xp to level up?" style of play befitting MMO players.

>you are lazy, so you don't want to do it.
Not him but when I started I didn't use xp because I had enough stuff to juggle as a new GM and the system offered me no advantage. The game was much easier to control and game plans much easier to make with me as an arbiter rather than a full-time calculator. I wouldn't call this laziness so much as "a good decision." Some of my players were also completely new and even small combat sessions could take hours, so progression by the xp system would have taken something like a year between levels. I tried to switch to xp recently because I'm getting to the point where I want my numbers all nice and tidy and known, but my group rejected the proposal because they realize they're still moving at roughly 3x rate of what combat xp alone would give them as we have a lot of sessions without combat and players sometimes miss a week. Even accounting for "story xp" the gap isn't easily filled. Predicting ten sessions ahead to adapt every level's xp rate accounting for player absence, combat, story milestones and character development, etc, isn't just a lot of work, it's impossible. Laziness is hardly the only reason to avoid using the system.

But you ultimately level up only when GM feels like it, user. He's the guy who decides how much exp to dole out at the end of a session.

I'm pretty new to DMing and already I'm seeing flaws with the XP system. ie I want to have them be level 3 at this point here so that the casters with have access to find trap for the dungeon, but I also don't want to be padding out every twist and turn of the story with encounters. So yeah, doling out exp for completing quest objectives makes a lot of sense to me.

Is this from shittytumblrrants.com/tabletop/fallacy-ridden/wow-bogeyman/faggot?

>It all boils down to this; you are lazy, so you don't want to do it.

What's wrong with being lazy?

If I can get a two step process done in one step, why would I bother doing both steps when it's less time I'm wasting on one problem while also allowing me to focus my time on other problems?

You should be working smarter, not harder, whenever you're doing something user and dolling out level ups upon certain milestones is a way better system than arbitrarily forcing combat down everyone's throat so that everyone levels up in time for your boss fight.

The amount of GM vs players in this thread makes my inner jedi recoil a little bit

Yes reblog and gift gold if you liked it

I'm not sure how that has anything to do with crit successes or rolls. If the characters have failed to move the plot along then it's just because they haven't agreed to a task, thought a way around the task, or succeeded on the task at hand. The DM is the only one that fails to move a story along as they are the story-teller.

Just because there is a 5% chance of a 1 doesn't mean that your roll is an automatic failure. It could mean that you made a lower quality product, that you could have maybe proceeded only one tile less in your wall-climbing, or that you may have completed your check but maybe only have your bonus action and reaction next turn. It doesn't have to be a "You rolled a one so you tumble to your death" outcome but just a small penalty instead. And on the other side just because you get a crit success doesn't mean that you made a masterwork dagger with literally no skill in smithing but maybe your character will have a spark of inspiration and will be able to learn using smithing tools faster for a time because of the roll, maybe you climbing a cliff-face faster than expected and are allowed a few more tiles of movement or another minor action after the fact, or maybe you will take a quarter damage instead of half on a save.

You're usual actions will still pass on average if you made the character to complete a task they specialize in, and those that are not will usually fail. This is obvious and a 5% chance to maybe succeed or fail a little more in the task that you chose does not effect the outcome of your average rolls in that field and sometimes luck does have a major effect on the actions that you choose. Now I'm not saying its as high as the 5% chance you receive on a d20 but the strength of that boon or penalty is all dependent on the DM and if they know what they are doing it can make the game more interesting than simply rolling your dice, knowing you succeeded or failed, and then wait to get yet another heads or tails result.

Unless you roll a 1 first and jump so hard your legs explode.

oh, the old flying box-home trick? The simplest answer to that is Disjunction/cardboard box, and if you're playing that kinda high-op, as a GM i'd be sending high-op against you too. It's not a fun game if nothing can challenge you, after all.

Well, you're basically getting them to create a dungeon crawl for you to go through, and then to run it for you? Does sound nice.

Why is it that people assume that players decide the effects of their own crits? Do you get to decapitate every foe within three miles when you crit on an attack roll because you say so? Most GMs that run with them do so reasonably. As in, a 20 on your Jump gains you a couple extra feet. A 1 on your Knowledge (nature) check means you think this spikey-plated backed dinosaur is a carnivore.

>Just because there is a 5% chance of a 1 doesn't mean that your roll is an automatic failure.
>You're usual actions will still pass on average if you made the character to complete a task they specialize in, and those that are not will usually fail.

Then what's the point of criticals?

If I'm going to succeed or fail based on my bonuses, why not just let me roll and see whether or not I succeeded?

>Now I'm not saying its as high as the 5% chance you receive on a d20 but the strength of that boon or penalty is all dependent on the DM and if they know what they are doing it can make the game more interesting than simply rolling your dice, knowing you succeeded or failed, and then wait to get yet another heads or tails result.

The problem is that the game is built around that binary outcome.

Either you succeed or you fail, there is no try. You also don't get any boons for beating the DC of the challenge by a certain amount, and even the outcome is foregone after a bit.

At the same time though, if the game gives you an "I win" button for reaching a certain threshold, and reaching said threshold is supposed to be a rarity within the world, it does kinda become dubious when your level 20 fortress is being continually sacked by a dozen or so level 20 bandits who also have the means to disable your epic level traps and obstacles.

After a certain point, there needs to be an understanding that nothing in the setting can give you a reasonable challenge anymore and move on to greener pastures if you want a fair challenge. It's why most RPGs give you multiple save files.

>You also don't get any boons for beating the DC of the challenge by a certain amount, and even the outcome is foregone after a bit.

Maybe in your shitty games. Degrees of success are a thing any competent GM should be involving in games they run. I'm not following your boring argument, but this is just not true.

Nobody uses degrees of success when running a dungeon crawler in D&D.

If you or your GM does, congrats, you are an exception, not the rule.

Well, no. There is no 'upper bound', as proved by the existence of Exalted/Tengen Toppen Gurren Lagann. You can still build a story at any human-conceivable power level, the context and type of story changes. I bet you gold to donuts that I could sell you on bandits breaking into whatever security setup you care to name, but that's because I have run far too many fucking games, and more likely/better it's not bandits - it's Agents of the Seven Dragon Path, because you're part of a power-bloc protecting the western seaboard now and that puts you in conflict with their faction of the Secret War, a conflict played out across six planets and affecting billions of lives.

>Nobody uses degrees of success when running a dungeon crawler in D&D.
Sir I believe you are incorrect. I do every session.

>If you or your GM does, congrats, you are an exception, not the rule.

I can see your reading comprehension is on point.

>I assume everyone with the name "Anonymous" is the same person.

Buddy, pal, really.

>running a dungeon-crawler

That's an excuse often used by shitty GMs. I've run purely-set-in-dungeons games of dnd and had absolutely no difficulty including story, roleplaying, degrees of success, etc, so forth. Turning a ttrpg into a shitty wargame isn't uncommon, but it's not the proper or good thing, and it doesn't mean the GM doing it isn't shit.

>There is no 'upper bound', as proved by the existence of Exalted/Tengen Toppen Gurren Lagann.

Stopped reading right here.

Not because of any personal issues with Exalted or TTGL, but because in D&D there is basically an upper limit for what your character can do.

I mean, you can technically go beyond level 20, technically, but at that point you're already strong enough to beat most of the monster manual so really, what's the point?

To fight the stuff not in the monster manual? It'd be a pain in the ass to GM for but it might be fun to do once in a great while.

>Quotes half a post while ignoring the other
>you shouldn't assume I'm the same person, :^)

Hi, i'm the guy you were talking to originally. Neither of these other guys are me.

It's more to the point. Even when Simon was throwing galaxies and shit, that had less to do with him wanting to do it and more because if he didn't, everyone on earth would die. That and they took his waifu, which is just terrible.

I can recall a handful of creatures that would require more than 20 levels to beat but they're either so rare that you'll never encounter them or they're deities (or deity-like) that are so powerful that most creatures in existence are beneath their notice.

It's one thing gaining 20 levels to take on an aboleth or something that's threatening to devour the world, it's another thing to summon one just so that you could kill it.

>If you or your GM does, congrats, you are an exception, not the rule.

At fairly trivial levels of op, you can make dnd characters that have the capability of an Exalted character, in 3.X. Also, 'you fight dem monsters in dem dungon from dis book' is not considered good GMing. 'Party walks up and attacks the monster' is not why people play roleplaying games, because X-Wing and Warmachine deliver a better experience in terms of 'small-group tabletop wargaming' than ttrpgs do.

The 'point' is to tell stories. If you're sitting there using char-op vs the GM who is presenting monsters from the mm for you to fight and easily kill, why not just reach out and take each other's dicks in hand and start stroking? Same difference.

Well, i've gamed with a lot of people due to roleplaying cons and been interested in this whole thing for a long time. I've found the 'you roll dem dices and go in dem dungeons' GMs are about 15-20% of the total population of ttrpg gamers. They also tend to fit a really common physical profile, so I can spot them in a crowd, and avoid gaming with them at will.

Even if we're looking at it from a non-combat scenario, why would anyone bother taking their campaign past level 20, especially in a WotC era D&D edition?

What the hell are you expecting to do that you would even need more than 10 levels to accomplish?

>rips into us for not getting into the story and getting distracted with OOC chatter
>spends minutes at a time trying to remember tidbit X or looking for paragraph Y because he's stoned
>every NPC is annoyed at everything

>Then what's the point of criticals?

That you will either succeed or fail slightly higher or lower than usual based entirely on what the DM thinks is warranted in the current situation.

>If I'm going to succeed or fail based on my bonuses, why not just let me roll and see whether or not I succeeded?

Because your method is just that, succeeding or failing. It gets boring when that's the only thing that happens ever. I want to be rewarded or punished, or reward or punish, myself or my players in the small ways that you can with crit rolls that you can't normally. To receive/give an edge to a bad situation or a spontaneous problem in a seemingly smooth plan in the small chance that it can happen it totally acceptable by pretty much anyone that I have ever played with as it helps break the boring heads/tails cycle that you get with rollplayers and rule-lawyers.

>The problem is that the game is built around that binary outcome.

And for the vast majority of the time it will still be following that system. If 5% of your overall rolls is just too much for you to have to maneuver around then I don't know what to say to you mate. You will still pass what you are built to pass and fail what you are not built for the vast majority of the time, but that small chance is always there and it helps keep things interesting knowing that.

Knowing that the small chance exists, and when all the players and even DM are anticipating a lucky 20 to see if the RNG gods deem you worthy of surviving against the odds, it makes the session more intense and enjoyable in all. You'll still get your heads or tails outcome 95% of the time so I don't see why this seems to be so much of a problem for you.

Whatever you say user, whatever you say.

I also have to ask, how big is your sample size here? Because I can say that 75-80% of GMs are the type who go "you roll dem dices and go in dem dungeons" at the start of every session but that would only be based around my experience with seven GMs out of the twelve or so that I've had over the years.

>there's no way all these people claiming to be the exception prove that the rule is shit and weak

'Character level' is not hugely relevant to 'power level'. Power level is defined by the area you can affect, the tone and type of fight you experience, and the type of story that can be told about the character. A gritty low-fantasy game might have the same bonuses as a high-fantasy planeskipping game (like Spelljammer) to rolls, but the TONE of the fights will be different.

Nearly any plotline can be scaled to nearly whatever power level you want. It strains verisimilitude more or less, but a good GM can smooth that over. Apparently you didn't bother to read it, but I said that I could make bandits invading your uber-duper planar stronghold make sense, although that's very verisimilitude-straining - a good enough reason/presentation can make anything make sense. But things like an entire civilization with godlike powers trying desperately to restrain an ascended-AI level motive force bound to the substrates of reality that will eventually destroy the universe if certain conditions are met, and the only way to stop it that they can see is to do horrific evil is something that a level 20 character is going to struggle extremely hard to defeat.

Even fantasy fiction has situations that would challenge a level 20 character, and that's without any upgunning at all in terms of mechanics, the dark warlock doesn't have to be level 3, he can be level 17 and hey that explains where his giant undead army came from - he made it. Skeletor isn't necessarily a level 5 villain, etc. Then you've got ancient mysteries that hold forbidden secrets, competing time pressures, smart enemies that defeat you despite being weaker (Joker Bard etc), problems that can't be solved with force, so on. High-power has it's own story-space, and it can even be wider than low-power.

Over 4 cities, and about ten years... about 3000? Players and GMs. I like to discuss RPGs so I often get into a situation of discussing things with people, and I tend to end up at a lot of roleplaying conventions and gaming stores etc. Admittedly I haven't spent a lot of time in the USA or Canada - only really vancouver, LA, and NY, most of these are gamers from the UK and Aus.

It's worth noting that like cleaves to like, especially people who only game with people they know/friends of friends. You go to most 'pathfinder society' chapters and they'll be nearly 80%+ 'go in dem dungeons' GMs even when not running modules.

People who game publically at cons or stores or with lots of people tend towards the opposite. My view is likely skewed towards that (because it's fucking impossible to gather data about the traditional-spy-network cells of friends-of-friends gamers).

>That you will either succeed or fail slightly higher or lower than usual based entirely on what the DM thinks is warranted in the current situation.

So arbitrary bullshit that makes playing a martial more of a punch to the dick, gotcha.

>It gets boring when that's the only thing that happens ever.

I play D&D when I just want to run into a dungeon and see the numbers go up, it's simple and the antithesis for what I view RPGs to being but hey, sometimes you want to unwind after a grueling storyline in a more narrative game.

Not to say that D&D can't do stories but by that same token, I've also seen porn with compelling stories as well.

>Knowing that the small chance exists, and when all the players and even DM are anticipating a lucky 20 to see if the RNG gods deem you worthy of surviving against the odds, it makes the session more intense and enjoyable in all.

If you're fishing for a NAT 20 then you deserve to die, unless the GM fucked you over or something.

Why do you play with this guy?

>'Character level' is not hugely relevant to 'power level'.

Then what's the point of having levels?

>Dan "The Man With The Plan (to rape)" Schneider

Fucking hell