Crusty DM Techniques

Never played paranoia, have you? Making time feel fleeting and every moment count ramps up tension so fast the G force might blow your eyeballs out

This. If my character has two functioning eyes then he can tell if the creature is scaly or hairy or whatever. I can get not calling the creature by its monster manual name, and actually like going with what the party decides to call them, but the GM should provide a visual description when prompted and the characters aren't somehow hindered.

Because of Elementary school textbooks, internet, and Animal Planet. Things that clueless newbie adventurers don't have.

Asking what it looks like is essentially taking an action to look at it more closely. The alternative is to react immediately and do something to it without properly considering the situation.

I know your type. You don't ask for a description when an encounter comes, you pull out your monster manual and say 'page number?'

That requires the DM to be infallible in conveying what a character sees with the first description. Describing a scene flawlessly and completely that is taken in with a glance. It's a tall order (I'd say impossible, really).

That implies your character somehow has a perfect perception of every single situation he finds himself in.

No. I'm entirely okay with not knowing what monster I'm facing, but I I'm not okay with the GM refusing to tell what my character sees when Iexplicitly requested a description (and my character isn't somehow impaired). The GM is the UI between the players and their characters.

Not really. The DM just starts with a description of the most obvious things that draw your character's eye. If you want to know more about something, ask - if you want to see something that's trying not to be seen, roll. The point is to use a bit of uncertainty to create tension instead of letting the players in on every variable in a scene right off the bat.

OP here, i'm really not doing the technique justice. Skin colour and stuff would occasionally come into it but you would never get a direct description. If it was green he'd say that it 'blends against the foliage' or 'is stark against the pale wall' and the exact colour would seldom be important. Eventually, you stop asking what things look like and start really paying attention to what is said. It was a completely unique experience and it was a lot more fun that squeezing him for exact descriptions that would immediately spoil what we're facing and ruin the game.
Like, should we try magic against the thing at the wizard's tower? Maybe not if it really is a golem. We aren;t sure. If he said 'its a golem' well then it would be a lot less fun. Rote, actually.

The DM doesn't know what a character might be looking for, and some details are so obvious (like size or general outward appearance) that failing to provide this information from the start is just bad DMing.

It's like the old "You hear a sound."

Well, what kind of goddamn sound? A click? A whoosh? A voice?

People can tell beast-folk from orcs.

I don't know about you, but functioning eyes let someone tell if the humanoid figure in front of them is a furry monster, or some green-grey-skinned dude.

I should also mention that the goblin/kobold/gnolls were encountered in the dark and everything alive is orange or red under infravision, blue if not. That's how we knew for sure it wasn't ghouls.

You seem to be asking for a point-by-point exacting description of every square inch of the NPC.

>You see a bipedal creature standing at three feet tall. It has 18 inch arms with oversized hands on the end. It has splotchy, dry grey skin. It has ears that are triangular in shape and flop as it turns its head. It has a muzzle, from which it protrudes a dark tongue to lick it's chops. It looks around and moves in a jerky scurrying motion.

Yeah fuck that. It's like those old TSR modules that describe every room like the players are running around the world with tape measures. Let's go with a description that has some life to it instead.

Can they? Really? Orcs used to be little more than pig-men, you know.

You're from a rural, isolated village. You're not a scholar of lore, extremely educated, experienced, and wise. You don't have access to books about every detail of every creature in the world.

You see a big, hairy, snarling beast. You remember vague tales about great beastly monstrosities, savage and barbaric.

Yall niggas are boring, unimaginative, and petty.

Basically, it's as if the DM just said "Your eyes perceive something. Do you want to know what you're perceiving? Takes 5 seconds, though."

The DM didn't use tokens and a grid, did they?

What your DM did was called "theatre of the mind". Sometimes it's done well, sometimes it's not. You got very lucky.

You know what's a shockingly effective plot hook? Giving the players a locked box, or some other container they can't open on their own. No amount of doomsday plots or evil tyrants will get players half as invested as wanting to know what's in the fucking box, in my experience. If you do it right they can become obsessive.
Of course, you can't use it too often, and you have to make sure the payoff is worth the effort.

No tokens, no grid, certainly no miniatures.
I was also struck by how often monsters would flee. I'm used to things fighting to the death all the time.

I don't doubt you had fun and agree that the method brought uncertainty and excitment to the game, but it just annoys me if GM goes out their way to avoid describing things. 'Melding with foliage' can mean many things, but if I ask what makes it meld the GM should tell me 'because of its green color' instead of making me play 20 questions.

Inside is another locked box.

If he'd said melding it would mean a whole other thing. I'd be apt to think the thing was turning invisible.

I'll share now a technique that I hate, employed by the worst DMs and saw a spate of use after it was recommended in an article in Dragon (or Dungeon) magazine. My first DM was furious at the article and swore against the technique.

It was just a short paragraph that said similar to 'to make PCs fear your villain, simply have him slay all the characters at the start of the campagin. Then the players will know to treat him with respect when they have rolled new characters.'

Absolutely hideous suggestion and the both of the other campaigns running at the school D&D club instantly fell afoul of it within a matter of days of each other. They both disintegrated as each first session amounted to a double-length character generation session.

I don;t know what issue it was, sorry. I just read the DM's copies when get brought them.

Infra-vision? Can you explain this?

I'll also add to this further and say even if you could see them clearly, in the heat of an ambush, the details of what they look like might be scarce when you're focused and not getting stabbed or having your throat opened.

That depends on the situation, doesn't it? If my character has all the time in the world to observe a thing then yes a point-by-point description is in order. In the OP's case the description was basically 'a small snarling thing', and refusing to further from there which is annoying, because there are lots of small snarling things. I have no difficulty telling an angry cat from an angry dog even though both are small and snarling, but the GM in question was refusing to tell further details that would let the player tell the difference (and that's silly).

In the olden days, demi-humans would see in the dark by 'seeing' hot and cold. Your vision was still pretty good, as air currents would delineate the shape of things, especially if they were moving, but you couldn't read by it or anything. If something was warm (or alive) it would be orange or red, really hot things would be white, and cool or unalive things would be various shades of blue. I know this sounds ridiculous to the ears of modern adventurers who are used to darkvision and the like, but it was perfectly normal at the time.

This is like an old school thing I think. Gygax would run dungeons where every player best bring a bunch of sheets because of instant-kill death traps and the like. Like, you couldn't save against death and reaching 0 HP meant you actually kicked the bucket in the olden days too. Player characters just didn't have the plot armor they do now.

It's a grognard thing.

It was in the night though.

Yes, but the DM was being deliberately very vague because the characters didn't know what the fuck they were dealing with, so he made sure the players didn't either.

Think about it like this: if the party fights something that the DM describes as looking "like some sort of wolf-man hybrid" the players are going to have a hard(er than normal) time to not metagame and bust out the silver weaponry.

If the DM describes it as "some sort of dog-man" the players are probably going to assume it's either a Werewolf or a Gnoll, so somewhat better but still likely to let the players know more about what they're fighting than their characters.

If the DM describes it as "a hairy beast-man with thick fur, a snarling mouth full of sharp-looking teeth, and wicked claws at the ends of muscular arms" the players won't know what the fuck they're dealing with. The characters know it looks wolf-like, but if the characters have no idea what a Werewolf is then I can see why the DM would also want the players to have no idea that's what they're fighting.

I'm not saying it's the best way to do things, but I can see why someone might choose to do it that way.

That actually sounds pretty cool. There's a lot we can learn from the older editions even though they're pretty wonky as a whole. Wrote that down on my docs to maybe use for later.

>"a hairy beast-man with thick fur, a snarling mouth full of sharp-looking teeth, and wicked claws at the ends of muscular arms"

And there is no way you could mistake this for a green dude in hide armor.

No one cares what you think you shitposting buzzkill.

Except if you ask "well, are the ears long?"
>You can't tell
"Is it wearing armour?"
>SCREEEEEE
"does it have a weapon of some kind or is it using claws and teeth?"
>you wouldn't know

I've got one for OP:
Once, we all failed a DC35 perception check (we were like level 3).

Know what we failed to notice?

That the sky above us - we were outside in the daytime - had suddenly turned from blue to neon purple, and a gigantic thunderstorm was materializing above us.

That's right. That was something he considered would be extremely hard to see... turns out it's because he usually looks down at his feet as he shuffles, himself, and never up because he'll trip.

seems to me the player AND character knowledge was artificially lowered significantly below what the character ought to be able to make out.

If you're not even allowed to know the big thing in front of you is humanoid and green, This shit has gone too far.

Honestly, have you seen some of the get-ups you can make with fur?

I once fought this guy (real life btw) that i swore at a distance was a motherfucker of a boar, and by distance i mean about 25 feet, broad daylight.

I refer to this as the Jukebox effect. Applified in LOW LIGHT situations, and if you don't have detail vision (like what happens when you one have infrared to go on) you are generally swinging at a mass of warm that has fur.

Totally could be a bear for all you fucking know.

Except for facts. The facts care, because he's right.

>Dark.
>Non light based colored vision.
>Heat sight.

Yeah, that red blob coming at me kinda looks like an orc... or maybe it's a moose, fuckit hit it with the sword.

>can't tell difference between moose and not-moose

You DO realize though that characters DO have at least a basic amount of knowledge; because they've lived for years? They may not know the names, certainly not the page numbers, but they at least know that things with two legs have two legs, and things that look like a cow look like a cow. Because they know what a cow looks like.

The human brain in fact SEEKS these similarities instinctively. It's even why small animals with big eyes are something we find cute.

Alright, new adventure, and the fact the reality is unrealistic.

I am aware of how the human brain works, but obviously you are not. Do you know what surprise, combat stress, and sleepiness do to the brain?

Wired shit.

Imagine, you're tired, it's bitch black so you need to use your heat vision to see, and in literally half a second you notice a little thing stealing shit from you. How much detail would YOU gleen from such a moment?

I've been that guy, and let me tell you, you only get enough to know to smash/shoot/yell at it

It's also implied that though they know what a monster is, they (the characters) are fucking noobs, and can't tell a goblin from a kobold. Both have two legs, two arms, and make fucking annoying noises, but they can't tell which is which right off the bat. Why? because they havn't seen one before. They havn't killed one before. Sure they've lived around cows all tier life, but they ran into a hippo.

Imagine wandering through Africa, normally used to say, cows, and you see a goddamn hippo.

Wtf is a hippo. oh god it's eating us. why can it throw that green log thing in the air. WHY DOES THE LOG HAVE TEETH.

Hippos are strange fucked creatures and unless you've seen one before, you don't know what the fuck you are looking at. They also blend in with the night to add to the unknown horror your cow seeing ass gets to experience.

This is what the GM did to them, and i applaud him for it.

You seem like a power gamer that doesn't want an adventure, but a game to play through. at least how i see it.

and again, darkness, the DM did actually do a good job, people just don't like when things don't work the way they want to.

I'm curious, are you literally autistic or just shitposting?

If it's the first, this thread probably isn't for you. There are ways of doing things that aren't 100% accurate descriptions of things, because it's possible the DM will prioritize something else (like immersion).

If it's the second, kill urself my man.

user, not clearly telling the players they're facing goblins is *required* for the players to not know what they're facing. And players not knowing what they're facing is how this GM immerses them in the role of newbie adventurers who don't know what they're facing.
There's not much difference between an enemy you can only see fragments of and an enemy you can see but cannot identify. It works, even if it requires some GM/player interface-screwing. I think it's acceptable for the sake of fun and immersion.

>to make PCs fear your villain, simply have him slay all the characters at the start of the campaign.
>Then the players will know to treat him with respect when they have rolled new characters.
I can see this working on two conditions:
1. You outright tell your players they'll be making one-session characters who can and will probably die at the end
AND
2. You let them kill the villain if they exhibit a genius plan and great teamwork. (In which case it'll make a great campaign in its own right.)

The line you quoted is a description of a monster that could be a werewolf OR a gnoll, just like how the thieving vermin they faced could have been goblins OR kobolds. What's green dudes got to do with this?

Light doesn't work that way. When I blink I am able to see after a fraction of a second. What the fuck kinda eyesight do you have?

Not being able to tell if an enemy is long-eared, armed or wearing armor is totally justifiable in, say, a dark cave, where even a torch won't light up the enemy long enough to let you make out the details.
What your DM pulled with the sky was a dick move though, unless there's fuckery at work to inhibit people's reactions to sudden unusual things.

A PC's ability recognize, say, a troll on sight thanks to legends and popular knowledge can vary depending on the setting.
It solely depends on whether the GM wants to have honest battles that do away with metagaming vs. challenge the player with an unrecognizable enemy. (Of course, the middle ground of "it's a troll, but you don't know that" is shit.)

Concentrating to look at something takes time though, and when the seconds count, that's a turn.

I think I would be able to spot the fucking difference between a scale-covered lizard creature and one that has long ears, spindly arms and no scales to speak off very well while hitting it with my sword.

In my opinion, the second round is when I recognize "oh, it's a kobold/goblin/troll" wothout having to conce trate really hard on thinking about what the shit that is

I would say the DM just kinda derped on the sky thing, but that's because he assumed his perspective and what would surprise him would also surprise others.

Common mistake that he seems to not always make, judging by the evidence.

The second round is still dark. darkness washes out colour. and heat vision.

I mean, panic probably set in, and no one seems to have 'I take a turn to calmly look at the situation'

ie; they are panicking, in no light situation, being beaten and slashed at. They would not be given information in this scenario, they'd have to earn it by being more clever than they were.

They also, by admission, didn't know the names or have explicit descriptions of the creatures before hand IE; they don't know the difference between a seagull and a albatross before they saw a albatross and went 'Sea Flying bird with white coloring, is a seagull'

"small thing with spindly arms, annoying voice and knives that likes to steal that we didn't get to see the colour of because dark. Probably a goblin."

"big furry thing that hangs out with goblins. Orc in fur i guess?"

And now for the OP's technique done in the worst possible way.

I can get past the 1st one so long as the PC's themselves are describing their characters as walking forward immediately after the trap was disarmed. Although the GM should have specified that the trap wasn't truly disarmed as it was just "set off safely" or whatever. The 2nd one would be ok if he allowed the PC to role perception after the first hit. Although that's what he may have been waiting for anyway. The 3rd one is complete ass, I would walk out if that happened to me.

Something makes me think this might have been a fairly common style in the olden days because I have memories of one of the Wizardry games not even showing you a picture of what you encountered until it had been identified by one of the party. It just showed some amorphous blob until then, iirc.
I think it was Wizardry V but I am not sure.

I once heard from a guy that he ha a DM who used a house rule called double initiative. Basically, you had to determine the order in which characters rolled their initiative by a series of strength checks. Whoever did the best, rolled first.
Apparently there was some reason for this according to the DM but he never revealed it to his players and to this day I can't imagine what could have been going on.

Darkvision would let me see if a creature is covered in fur, scales or regular skin. And in OP's example, the creature did not immediately attack, it was just stealing from the party.

I also do not agree that adventurers that are not freightened would be panicking and could not therefor discern something that is blatantly obvious such as a crature having fur and weapons and armor.

And if these creatures are pests that the local people know about, why would an adventurer of all people -not- know about them??

Never seen that in a CRPG.

What's considerably more common (and probably comes from early D&D, although I wasn't around) is unidentified items, which are near-universal in Roguelikes.

Well, yeah. We're in agreement there. Poe's law, I guess.

the players were panicking. the PLAYERS. so maybe, just maybe the characters were too.

Obviously the party didn't ask the locals. I mean, do you know the name of the most invasive pest in toronto? like the moment you get there, without talking to anybody, right now?

Now imagine that the world didn't have instantaneous transmission of information.

that's a real fantasy world. Misinformation, lies, and general stupidity.

Also it's Tiger Muscles and bed bugs.

Rhe players were stupid. If I played a craven character (why I would ever play one if I plan to go adventuring into danger is beyond me) I would understand. My point is, and this is where I strongly disagree with the GM of the story, if I am in a situation where I can SEE the fucking enemy, if I ask the GM to describe said enemy to me I expect a description. UNLESS the enemy is under a SPELL like blur or blink or an illusion that makes it very hard for my character to understand what he is seeing. I expect from my GM to answer me when I ask "I look around the corner into the alley: what do I see?" Because if he doesn't answer, he is presenting the game badly.

Both parties are at fault.

Old school DM is well within his right to describe a creature to you without saying "It's a kobold" unless your character has ranks in like Knowledge Monster or is a seasoned monster hunter in the area.

HOWEVER, as a player, if you ask what something looks like, your DM should be able to stay "four feet tall, covered in hair, humanoid" etc. If he doesn't, then ask him directly "How tall does it look" "What color is it".

Basically play Guess Who with him until he stops being a dick. I can understand if he had super metagamey players in the past, like someone who has NEVER seen a troll or heard about one in game but the player knows trolls are weak to fire and just happens to bust out the only fire item the whole party has kind of deal, but that's a different issue.

Thats probably more whats happening in the time between seeing it and yelling "OH SWEET MOTHER OF ASS FUCK WHAT THE HELL IS THAT GET UP GUYS" since people don't wake up instantly.

Well they never seemed to have asked about the amount of fur, and the DM said 'Fur hide'. It was on them, he just never corrected them since they wouldn't have the name anyways.

What difference does it make if they think its an orc or a gnoll?

This guy is 100% correct

I want to visualize what I am fighting with. It is confusing -and annoying- if I don't know how my foe looks. It's as if I were playing baldur's gate and the enemy is all blurry and pixelated: shit, basically.

>Both parties are at fault.

Oh thank god you're here RPG Magistrate, who knows what crimes against role playing would be committed if you weren't here to dispense justice.

Thanks to you I will never have to be terrorised by another veteran DM who uses creativity to make an encounters with the most common, boring, and well-trod monsters in the book not just interesting but downright fantastical for his jaded players again. God forbid he make an effort to make the most worn out elements of the game interesting again and god forbid his players meet him halfway and have a great time doing it. Fuck that, right? They're doing it WRONG.

>DM and his players have a great time.
>Both parties are at fault.

That's your thought process. The former goes into mind, the latter comes out of your mouth.

Unbelievable.

It annoys you because you are used to being told things when you are asked and maintaining that separation of character and player.
I did a similar thing to my players when they encountered a creature I had made, it was a combination of mutant spider, men, horses, and dogs.
I gave them a basic description based on some very high perceive checks, but when they started rolling knowledges, they pretty much came up empty, having only some hypothesis about the creatures based on relative size and form, some that were very wrong, some very right, and some that couldn't even imagine.

>beast-man
This right here is your first fuck up, assuming the characters know what a beastman is. At this point, you are metagaming for the players.
>sharp-looking teeth
Info expressly there to make the creature seem threatening with words, rather than deed. It's missing the point, besides.
>wicked claws
A lot of animals have claws, user, and don't use them as primary weapons.
You are altogether using descriptions to make the creature seem frightening and allowing the players to exceed their character knowledge.

>they never seemed to have asked
Are you fucking serious? Do you want to spend entire four-hour session with just the players asking every conceivable question about every little detail, because that's what you're inviting.

Are you retarded? There are people here who are arguing about wether the GM was at fault or not: do you have at least one neuron focused on reading comprehension?

In one game session, while exploring a very old sewer tunnel, the DM showed us a sketch of a ferocious-looking rat and told us that a score of thosee were crawling out of holes in the walls and attacking us.
So we fought for a bit, and these things just wouldn't die. We decided to give up on killing them and just blast the critters away with wind magic to make a retreat. The spell was completely ineffective.
It was only then that the DM revealed that each of the rats was as large as a hog.

Giving accurate descriptions fucking matters.

Isn't that what he is also saying?

It's a comment, not an argument.

Sounds like an awesome DM. I bet you, on the other hand, suck dicks for chicken strips.

I'm so fucking stealing this

You seem to not quiet understand just how much information and education most people didn't have in Medieval times or any time before public education or anytime before the internet.

That on its self isn't a bad thing. Today campaigns are mostly about specific characters. If some of them die, it can be mind shattering because people get overly attached to them.

Some people may not like the way people like Gaygax run the game but that sort of game isn't necessarily wrong. That game isn't about the characters. It isn't about your self-insertion mary sue or about a character you particularly like. That game is about exploration, discovery and experiences.

My friends are currently playing a game where they are all crew members of a flying privateer ship. People die from time to time. And my friend said it best "This isn't a story about our characters. It is a story about our ship."

Look at war movies. Not every soldier will survive. But for the time he is on screen he will contribute in overall experience.

How do you know what an Orc is?

I can tell green-grey skin from literal fur.

DM didn't want a fag like you metagaming.

Shitttyyyyy

For example, compare Lord of the Rings and Songs of Ice and Fire (before it went to shit).

Lord of the rings is story about adventures who have plot shield and generally survive every obstacle. At the end of the story only one of them died.

Songs of Ice and Fire is about story itself. Characters die and they don't have plot shield (Unless you are Daenerys). Even when characters die we as a reader still partake in the experience of the story that is unfolding.

So that type isn't about Brave Sir Robin. It is about a group of people (character development could be only a name and 2-3 sentences about his motivations, goals and mannerism.) that entered a dungeon in search for gold. Many of them will die or get wounded it the process. At the end of story it will be about entire process of dungeon crawling.

What traps they passed. Remembering who died tragically in some of them. What discoveries they learned from deciphering old wall texts and ancient scrolls. What dangers they faced. And in the end what were the spoils of their labor.

What bout times like pic related? I have had DMs who just list monsters as they show up. Litterally roll then say 'Encounter. Two troll, nine orc, six bugbear, initiative.'

Same with treasure. '+1 mace. Forty gold. Three-hundred silver. Cursed gauntlets. Healing potion. +2 Longsword.'

Well it depends on the group. Some are fine with it. I find it a bit dry and unappealing.

>Player characters just didn't have the plot armor they do now.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Plot armor has made players more careless and shitty.

Campaigns are more fragile now in general also. The wrong character dying throws the whole thing out the window.

Thus why I play OSR's (I count AD&D 1E and 2e as OSR's, fight me). I'm not a fan of a campaign falling apart because someone's character died, and that also fuels the "can't touch me because muh plot armor" bullshit that I can't stand. Maybe I'm jaded.

Nay, i'm with you.

Why wouldn't AD&D and 2e be considered old school? It reaches back to 1977.

Different user here, but I think it's acceptable for the GM to say, implicitly, "Hey guys, I won't describe the monsters in this game, you won't be sure of what you're fighting and you'll have to make guesses", as long as the players enjoy the uncertainty and tension it creates.

Presenting the game badly here is not a dick move, it's a decision with a very specific goal, meant to give the players a fun and unusual experience, and in OP's case it worked.

Trying to play Guess Who to press your GM for information until he caves in and say "fine, it's green, small, pointy-eared with small fangs" DEFEATS THE WHOLE POINT of not using the word "goblin". It's shitty and passive-aggressive.

Do you have a problem with this kind of narration, because you don't enjoy foregoing some clarity for the sake of atmosphere? Then that's totally fine. That specific GM is not for you, doesn't mean they're bad. Some groups clearly enjoy it and they're allowed to.

If you find yourself playing with this GM or group, don't be a passive-aggressive dick, just say "I don't like this, can we do the usual thing where you say Goblins", or leave and find another group.

>assuming that real life stories equal fantasy settings
Bitch please
>assuming that people can't differentiate between a lion and an alligator in third world places
Because that is what you're arguing right now

>assuming the worst of people
No, user, you're the cancer

That's more realistic behavior for creatures once they've realized that they're fucked. They'd rather try to escape with their lives than die for a few handfuls of beef jerky. Wouldn't you?

Only EXTREMELY aggressive monsters or trained soldiers would willingly fight to the death... or things that are desperate and have nowhere to run.