Pet peeve thread

>About a dozen distinct human nations with enough lore to give them flavor
>Three extensively detailed elven societies divided along high/wood/dark elf lines
>Exactly one dwarven nation with all the flavor/detail of "they're dwarves"
>Every other race has exactly one country with even less flavor than that

>It's fantasy, wacky shit can happen for no reason.
Get out, Matt Mercer. This shit attitude is why RPGs are going to shit nowadays. This whole "LMAO nat20" attitude, fueled by tumblr screenshots of Veeky Forums posts where some faggot rolls a nat20 to seduce the orc guardsman into sucking his cock. Don't even waste my time, you aren't playing a roleplaying game and I expect to be paid for my time when you invite me to this bullshit then it turns out to be a poor man's Cards Against Humanity game, except in D&D. All this "rule of cool" and "be a fan of the players characters" shit, I used to be on board with it. But now it has been reduced to this utter autism where the fat roasties who join the game will shriek autistically whenever a 1 in 20 event happens, which is inevitably once or twice a session, and they act like they are having a fucking orgasm over it, I literally can no longer play D&D anymore because whenever I roll a 20 I feel this slight surge of hatred.

Fuck you faggot. Stop playing games, you are infecting the hobby with your "lolzrandom" idiocy. You probably play Dark Souls, too.

Holy shit man, who hurt you

...

immersion is a shared responsibility. You 'wacky things habben!' faggots just compensate for your inability to create interesting believable stories with randomness.
protip: needing to include lolrandom shit means you've failed as a GM.

idk what the fuck are you talking about faggots, that looks like a man stating a reasonable thought out opinion.

I'm going to keep running my games this way

They're most likely trying to deflect that the wacky idea of "LMAO nat20/1" is shitty by making that user look ass blasted. The words he uses does make it look like he's salty, for good reason, but I've seen far worse and at least he's saying as to why he hates it.

As far as D&D goes I have no issue with a single dwarf nation. Considering dwarves are inherently lawful it makes sense they'd all stick together in one organized nation, as long as it's suitably big enough to justify that.

nobody gives a fuck, post your diary entries in your tumblr instead

You might be on the spectrum chap. But allow me to point out the glaring issues with your argument:
1. How am I supposed to prepare for the irrational? You aren't! You can't! That's what makes it horrifying and exciting. Have you ever read Lovecraft? Jojo maybe? If you say you dislike that, I'll understand. I get that you want stability and being able to prepare, but that's not life is it, life ain't predictable. Do you want your games LESS lifelike? Are you the proverbial 3.pf wizard who prepares for every occassion way in advance and cannot be surprised? Tough luck!
2. Why choose wacky at all? My character might die! Yeah, that's the exciting part isn't it! Do you dislike adrenaline? Your hands sweating and your body shaking as you're depending on a critical hit or a DM bad roll to survive are not unlike what you get while climbing boulders or jumping into the water from high up. Do you hate exhilaration user? Besides, your character is just some writting on a piece of paper. You've made others and you'll make others. But you can't make fun with just a character, need a DM and a group, usually.
3. I assume in presenting the setting, the DM will tell you what is reasonable and not to happen. Maybe not. Maybe not EVERYTHING you've been led to believe is true, kind of like real life. Are there giant robo mechs in real life? How about aliens? Dinosaurs? No, there aren't. But there could be! That's why it's fantasy. A staple fantasy which at no point makes you rethink what is true and what isn't (as pertaining to that world) is no fantasy at all, it's just real life. It's WORSE than real life. Do you think characters in fantasy novels, when meeting something fantasic they never heard of never rethought reality? And I know what you're gonna say "yeah but I have the meta knowledge of what can happen or is likely to happen in this world". Sure, but does your character? All those fantasy novel characters also thought they had their world figured out.

Why are you calling Dog?

That third point is basically what got me thinking you're on the spectrum, since you value stability and routine so much, or at least it appears to be so.
4. Where does the line get drawn? Well, you have to discuss it with your DM, and if you're good friends, as you probably should be, you trust him not to be lolrandumb xd and make sensible explanations for "wacky" stuff that happens. Or maybe not, if he's going for a "you can't comprehend/weren't meant to know" jib. However, you are always free to walk away, and you should be able to discuss this with the players and find those of like mind, and protest against such antics. I'm sure the DM won't mind losing a player, but 3-5 out of 6? Unlikely.

Calm down dude, you don't have to play with those kinds of players if you don't want to. Just discuss it beforehand. And if it's a one time beer and pretzels thing just loosen up and have fun. You don't hate fun, right?

Lovecraft is not whacky at all. Jojo is somewhat whacky in a over-the-top way but it's also internally consistent. Either you don't understand what people are talking about here or you seriously think that your wacky dm antics somehow invoke Lovecraft and Jojo.

Not at all, I don't do such things, nor do I DM (I had like two solo sessions with my DM as the player and that's it). What would be wacky for you then, since we seem to assign different definitions to it.

Also JoJo is far from internally consistent, but that's not what constitutes wackiness at all.

This might be a failing of me as a GM but I get a little annoyed when everyone has their own personal objective in a "long quest" type of campaign and the interest for said long quest is clearly low. Makes it hard to create any real cohesive game out of it.

I pray for a day when all my players actually converge on one single objective rather than three different stupid things. All these stories about shit GMs getting derailed? I fucking relish them. Just please, derail it in ONE DIRECTION.

>ITT: Post things that aren't necessarily wrong, but just rub you the wrong way when gaming
Exalted

>Games where once combat has initiated both PCs and their opponents will relentlessly fight to the death, to the last man, before ever considering breaking and running at any point, and retreat is never treated as an option by any side involved.

I fucking hate this

it was actually pretty well described in If your 'Ugly King' is not a Mind Flayer but something from the void beyond the stars that seeps into our reality and just happened to take a shape of the unlucky vessel who opened the door into a wrong kind of nothingness (and he was a Mind Flayer) -- that's Lovecraft. When you cast a spell at this 'Mind Flayer' and your fireball gets sucked into *something* dark and horrible behind it's flesh-mask instead of exploding -- that's unpredictable and horrifying and defies all your preparations -- but it's not lolrandom.

The 'gold dragon disguised as a cow who flew around the room breathing fire'? that shit is.

my party has a habit of dismembering any villain above clear mook-grade fodder to prevent anyone from raising or animating the corpses (in the setting with no functional raise magic at that). They have some contrived explanations for this activity and I don't want to deny them their fun so I don't call them on it but it grates.

(didnt prevent me from docking a couple sanity points from them for this shit though)

>The player who is wrong about literally almost everything and misinterprets corrections that then have to be corrected that are misunderstood and then have to be corrected and on and on and on and on and fifteen minutes later I'm trying to make him understand something that has nothing to do with the original point he was wrong on.
It's not just in games, it's in almost every interaction I have with him. The pure fucking autism of some people drives me insane. We had a massive argument yesterday that could have been ended in ten seconds if I had ignored him when he said he'd looked in the book and checked it.

No npc to react to their barbarous way?

They usually don't fight anywhere where there will be witnesses and the party uses disguise heavily. The town guard in a couple of cities are on alert for the dismembering psychos but there are no clues tying the massacre sites to the traveling party of a jolly monk and his companions.

It's not so much barbarous as it is macabre tbqh.

>turn off your brain LMAO
Kill yourself.

This is the worst about worldbuilding. At what point does a group's lore get too much attention?

>docking sanity points
Are they doing it by hand and taking hacksaws to the corpses or something?

>I tend to get a lot of complaining, even if it was agreed on at session 0.

My pet peeve too

it's a fantasy setting and group does not have a mage so basically yes. Cleavers and mallets more than hacksaws. Burning is also their thing, in addition to, or instead of dismembering.

Hmm, I'd actually be ok with dragon cow as long as there are reasons behind it. They may be pretty stupid (like dragon being a chronic alcoholic) but in the end they should lead to some new development in the game.

Overall internal consistency and median tone of the game should stay more or less the same. You absolutely can have humour even in horror stories but it should not transform the game into a stand up comedy and vice versa.

This shit right here is obnoxious, and partially why the d20 gives me ass cancer. If it were a minute chance of it actually happening, it would not bother me so much, but there's a FIVE. FUCKING. PERCENT. CHANCE. that shit will happen on either end. That is 10% of all rolls turning into something so WACKY AND FUCKING CRAZY.

It's not enough that it merely causes me to miss the attack or fail the saving throw, no the arrow clearly also has to deflect off of a callous on his ballsack and pierce my ally in the forehead, or I spontaneously start vomiting and ejaculating because the color spray must've overloaded my system.

I fucking hate tables that do this shit. Why can't a miss be a miss, and a failure just simply be a failure?

I agree that dragon cow is acceptable if there are good reasons for it. I don't buy that stupid reasons are ok -- because they only dig you deeper into nonsense if you think about them for a second.

What topicbringer user (and I to some extent) is ranting about is when we are asked to accept the no-reason or stupid-reason because 'it's fantasy whacky things happen'. When you see a dragon cow you feel that examining all those grimlok corpses for telltale signs of mind flayer feeding was a complete waste of time. It then follows that no action of this kind will ever be worth it because it's the dumbfucking alcoholic gold dragons all the way down. And that leads to why even bother making Int a non-dump stat if you're not playing a wizard -- and voila, might as well be playing miniature skirmishes. That's the harm in the lolrandom and that's why some people are agitated about the issue.

Anyway, /rant. Goes without saying that some groups and DMs are targetting specifically the wacky random nonsense, good for them. It shouldn't be a given though.

Thank you for the post man. My thoughts exactly.

Come on, King Flying Firebreathing Cow is awesome.

if you're 8 years old and this is your first DnD session

Those would be the creative writing program rejects. Or, worse yet, the ones who got accepted....

Agreed. A thousand times agreed. I don't see it as a grognard problem so much as a whiny millennial fag problem.

What creative writing program are you in?

Fuck yeah!

I stopped playing with people who demand muh realism. It's fucking fantasy. You have no problem with a dragon or a mage,but why does that guy have a fucking katana???

Piss off, rejects.

The problem with wacky shit isn't verisimilitude, or consistency. It's tone. Jesus Christ, do you fuckers not understand the concept of tone?

Random wacky shit breaks the tone of games because by definition it has nothing to do with them. It's an abrupt shift from serious or horror or tension or whatever to absurdist comedy. And while that shit can work in small doses, having an "anything goes" approach to fantasy will stomp on any attempt at a tone besides absurdist comedy, because they'll always be waiting for the moment when the clown jumps out with a pie.

>It's fantasy, wacky shit can happen for no reason.

Funny. When Stranger Things came out, so many people got hyped because that's how they remember d&d being fun.

Maybe those 8 year olds have it right.

Most people are inherently lawful, but we still have a gazillion nations, because they have different ideas of what being lawful entails.

The one where they teach that the need to pigeonhole people who disagree with you into 'groups' so you can dismiss them comes from having no arguments in support of your position.

I think you two are arguing about different things.

>It's acceptable to have things that absolutely wouldn't work in the real world in your fantasy setting, magic can explain a lot of weird stuff and doesn't have to be "justified" like in a hard scifi game
VS.
>It's unacceptable to be a lolrandumb GM, fuck you if you go full gonzo after selling us traditional fantasy

And I'm pretty sure we can all agree with both points

Figured as much. Give me a call when you've actually published something.

t. someone who makes a living off their writing

>people who get buttblasted over unrealistic or oversized weaponry

I don't care. Strange and crazy weapons are fun.

Funny. When Stranger Things came out, it was widely agreed that although it finally depicted the game as devoid of weirdoes who murder their DM because their character got killed, it still only showcased the mindless dungeon crawling aspect.

See, I can pretend to have a power of a consensus behind me as well.

The Mighty Elephant Hammer of Khzar-Hornblaster! Long have my eyes... uh.... longed to see it!

Says a fag who can't use google apparently.

> I am doing ad copies for the 'bumfuck nowhere daily journal' => am making a living off my writing => I am immediately a god-tier DM and an authority on role-playing.
> Everyone who disagrees with me is a writing program reject

First, thanks for the laugh user, you're a riot.
Second, DMing and worldbuilding and module building require a different skillset than just writing so fuck off to your tumblr if you want to impress anyone.

Where did the bad editor who rejected your shit and made you cry touch you, user?

This is a nice point user, although I think that you undervalue consistency.

>For me, it's "Clear and hold" approaches to large dungeons.
I used to have this problem a lot, and the big revelation was that it was my dungeon design (and campaign design, more broadly) that was to blame. The core issue is one of players having too much control over the environment. Few thoughts:

1) Time pressure is key. Whatever the PC's are going in to the dungeon to accomplish, make sure they feel a sense of urgency. The macguffin won't be there forever, or someone is chasing them, or a hostage will die... whatever works.

2) Have areas where there is no right choice - just a lesser-of-two-evils selection. Make the consequences of their choice long-term persistent.

3) If they stop for too long of a breather, drop something on them. Ninjas, rising floodwaters, a structure fire - just add complications. Dungeons are like a microcosm of a narrative.. you want to keep ramping up the tension to climactic battle / chase / etc

I find it's helpful to think about well executed dungeon-type sequences in movies. Think Moria in LotR, right? It starts slow, building tension. You've got a few weird little scenes with treasure / traps / info. There's some fighting goblins for a bit, followed by a mini-boss fight with the troll. Then the short goblin chase sequence followed by a rugpull, the big bad balrog reveal, and then an adrenalin-pumping chase to the exit. By the end of it, your heart is in your throat. THAT'S what you're going for.

your focus on random people being (or wanting to become) a writer is hilarious, but let me attempt to reason with you.

The best world builder I know is Robert Jordan. Jordan was never in a writing program. He was trained as a nuclear engineer. Although he became famous as a writer, his worldbuilding prowess comes from him being a giant history buff, as well as travelling the world while keeping eyes open.

The best modules I've ever seen are written by Konstantin Asmolov (russianfag here, sorry). Asmolov was never (to my knowledge) in a writing program. He is an orientalist, if you google his name you find a bunch of articles in places like 'New Eastern Outlook'. No, his modules are not oriental in nature at all, just normal high fantasy stuff.

The best GM I've ever played with was a software developer by education, although he shifted his focus to education in later years. He also had zero writing training.

So yeah, when you bring up the writing programs or being a writer or editors or other shit -- my reaction is 'huh?'. it's like you boast about winning retard olympics here -- whatever, take that unrelated shit to your tumblr.

inb4 'I was just trolling'

There's definitely some value in the occasional throwaway comedic moment or moment where all the tension gets broken by something harmless. Even good horror movies have their cat scares. On the other side, horror works quite well when it's unexpected.

The key is that you have to consciously use those moments to either break up the tone while still keeping it in mind, or intentionally change the tone of your story. Random wacky shit doesn't work for either of those points, unless you want to switch your campaign into absurdist comedy for some ungodly reason.

I bring up writing programs because they kill creativity and contribute to the muh realism autism.

Enjoy saying "you want fries with that?'

Not OP but very nice points, thanks. I was having the same problem, and what you are saying here makes sense.

Is the McDonalds cashier is also a writing program reject or did you do a reclassification?

I like the underlying idea but I am not sure how to include it in the game.

>magic users have normal personalities

Warlocks who's patron is known, benevolent or unaware of the player
Reeeeeeeeeeeeeee that's not a warlock at all reeeeeeeeeeeeee

I can't help but both agree with you and be disgusted by you

magic users should all be nutjobs or whackos?

This, a thousand times. You can't clear a bunch of rooms, rest until you're in pristine condition, and then delve deeper. Even if all you're fighting is (insert generic, level-appropriate monster i.e. goblins at level 1) you'll be low on resources and still in danger by the end.
Because your enemies either won't let you afford a break (random encounters will fuck you up), or they jump on the opportunity to fortify, call reinforcements, and set more traps. Especially if you rest every 15 minutes.
Of course ticking clocks are pretty useful too, but you can't exactly afford to put rising lava in all your dungeons.

In a lighthearted setting, magic users should at least be a bit odd or distant. If the setting is meant to be dark or gritty, then they should have a limited or distorted attachment to reality or be outright psychotic. Magic shouldn't be trivialized or commodified. Getting involved in it should be an investment with permanent consequences to the user's worldview and mind.

At least your GM uses a fucking table.
Every d20=1 in my AD&D2e game has my GM telling me LOL YOU FALL DOWN AGAIN, LOL BOWSTRING SNAPPED GL, U DROPPED UR SWORD BRO.
It's not fun playing a character that goes adventuring wearing oven mitts.

Go grind your axe somewhere else.

>immersion is your own responsibility
It literally is not though. It's never the job of the audience to be entertained, it's the job of the entertainer to give them that feeling. It's the storyteller's job to get people involved in the story, and if you can't do that that's fine but putting the onus of responsibility on what is essentially your audience just makes you seem like even more of a sub-par performer.
Imagine going to a concert where the band sounds like shit, so nobody dances, nobody gets into it, and this awful, amateurish band with no stage presence says "Well, immersion in our music is your own responsibility. No one else's." You fucking moron lol.

Pretty much, yeah. People who learn to use magic while being well adjusted and untouched negatively by it is boring. There becomes no risk to seeking the power of magic, therefore there is no reason not to seek the power of magic.

The fuck's Dark Souls have anything to do with this?

Another reject?

>the best world builder I know is Robert Jordan

Opinion discarded. Wheel of Time is one of the most badly thought out settings with the most Mary Sue characters I have ever read not to mention being almost as derivative as fucking Inheritance, the series of books aptly named "A Frankenstein's monster of other fantasy works" by some user.

When you play MTG or any other card game and you take flawless turns quickly, but your opponent thinks through each of their options for 5 minutes and shuffles the cards in their hand and they don't do anything and you kick their ass anyway.

I guess that makes sense in the pet peeve thread.
In my setting magic per se does not affect its user, this way if you go psychotic you don't have 'the magic made me do it' defense. You have to choose to indulge in the high-risk areas of Arts, or seek power beyond what is freely given to the mortalkind or to transgress your humanity in thousand little ways that Arts offer you at every step. Then things may (or may not) happen *to* you.

what do the characters have to do with worldbuilding? as for badly thought out settings, gief examples or gtfo.

No need. Your taste is proven shit.

I worldbuilt multiple orc and human kingdoms, and so far my players have interacted with a grand spaking 1 of them. Creating multiple nations is a waste of time for the most part, unless you're doing some sort of years long campaign.

have a (you)

Holy fuck, I play a soldier in a Star Wars game and even considering tactics & the use of cover (as a sniper no less) has gotten me called a coward at least twice a session. I play along with it, and the DM defends my choices, but when the jedi run into their deaths against zombie plague monsters I feel pretty justified standing 100+ meters back.

Not this guy, but the author and the audience both participate in immersion. There is an implicit contract between them: the author must work to immerse the audience, and the audience agrees to accept the premise and suspend disbelief. That's why it's acceptable quit a table where nothing makes sense, but also acceptable to boot a player who refuses to believe dragons can fly or Science Fantasy plotonium can work/exist in the setting.

People playing on their phone and then having the balls to ask what they missed.

It's okay user, I read your rational post and appreciate the levelheadedness.

Well you can establish there are several nations of everything without developing unless it became relevant. Just don't have "the dwarf kingdom", but "that dwarf kingdom". Will we see another one? Probably not, but they exist somewhere because your world isn't incredibly small.
Well unless your world is supposed to be small, of course.

>PC searches for danger/traps/hazards.
>As the DM, I announce that they conduct a thorough search but find nothing out of the ordinary, and that their character believes that it is safe.
>"Uhhh I check again."
>Everyone in the party decides to check too.

Usually there's nothing there. Why do I feel like I'm doing something wrong here?

So, my group just finished a campaign, with them foiling the Bad Guy's scheme and saving the day. Huzzah! And then one of the players pointed out how Anthalon (important NPC) was a more powerful wizard than anyone in the party, and probably by extension singularly more powerful than any individual party member, maybe even on par with the 5 of them together. This in turn led to him complaining that said guy wasn't in on the kill like the players were, because apparently having the biggest statblock is how you discover problems and solve them on the fly before they grow into major concerns.

Like, I don't even get what the problem is, other than some bizarre insecurity issue. The guy was listed as the head of a mage's college and generally busy running it.

An example?