GM announces X doesn't exist in setting

Happened to me.
>DM makes a huge point of dragons not existing in his setting, being extinct for thousands of years
>Which is why he forbids Dragon Sorcerer
>First session of the campaign
>Dragons are back!
You could have waited for at least a session or two to make it at least a little dramatic, you fucking twat

>the quirky NPC turns out to be a god in disguise

>the god turns out to be a quirky NPC in disguise

Not that user, but...
>Nowhere in the OP is it stated that the GM said it OOC.
>>GM announces
The GM announced an announcement, not an npc.

>So the problem is execution.
>If the GM builds it up well and builds a consistent world where X isnt expected to exist, only to then twist it, the twist works.
So execution, like:
>So the GM can't surprise players, but of course a persona could

The GM can have NPCs say X doesn't exist and be wrong.
The GM can say X doesn't exist and then have the world change so that X now exists.
If the GM says X doesn't exist, and then X suddenly always existed, then the GM is a lying douchenozzle.

>GM announces humans doesn't exist in setting
>Has a human skeleton appear in the very next session and expects it to be an incredibly dramatic and terrifying twist and or revelation

>>not collaboratively worldbuilding during session zero
If a group chooses to play that way, that is fine.
More power to them.
If a GM encourages his players to play this way, that is fine & more power to them.
If players encourage the GM to play this way, this bothers me. That is fine and I can deal.
If players insisted to me that we play this way, they can die in a fucking tire fire.

desu most players refuse to worldbuilding

Destroy All Kenders

I'm off topic but, continuing from the second thing.
>it turns out mage hunters have been sabotaged by powerful necromancers who've been stealthily enchanting their blades so that they channel the souls of these powerful children into distant dark magic rituals. First sign of this is thin dull light streaking by in the sky away from the place where the baby is killed, only barely visible on overcast or moonless nights, or if one can detect magic.
>the necromancers have spent their time well and mastered the art of making ash zombies from the cremated dead in addition to their infiltration of high places: discovering that some old ashes are missing could rile up some paranoia if the players mistakenly let it get out, while efforts at locating them could lead to finding hushed rumors of men dressed as mage hunters carrying the ashes to the woods south-west of town: they can pursue and find spilt ash at the entrance of hole tucked into the side of a cliff face. Deeper they find actual ash zombies and other evil critters.
>healing magic, a supreme weakness of things undead, is now viewed as being closely related to necromancy due to the quiet manipulation of information by these necromancers, who're secretly influential in academic institutions: efforts to source this information give a string of academic aliases that are all anagrams of the forgotten names of some of the necromancers from the war, whose other contributions are largely derivative works that were probably just to get them some credibility: attempts to locate them end in a rented room on the first floor of a quiet inn. Under the floorboards there is a hidden dug out chamber with clear signs of dark rituals having been performed there.
>Add in clues subtly linking the public persona of one of the leaders of the country, and an obvious red herring, make a proper map for dungeons and give them some other goals in the kingdom, and then let it all unfurl
Thank you for the ideas I've stolen user.

>The quirky NPC is """secretly""" a bad ass
>This applies to every single quirky NPC
>The GM does nothing but quirky NPCs

I've only had one experience along those lines, and it was fuckawful

>Fantasy setting
>Resurrection magic does not exist in setting.
>Secretly, it does, it's just ridonculously rare.
>GMPC can do it.
>Our party starts off having been in a burning tavern, and "rescued" by GMPC plot guy.
>Secretly, we all died but he was able to raise us.
>This has certain consequences, a kind of magical linking between us and GMPC
>For unrelated reasons, we are being chased all over the place, and we notice that Kassin, the GMPC, emanates a strong magical signal at pretty much all times.
>One of the bounty hunters we dispatch has these magical cuffs that dampen the wearer's magic, used to help transport spellcasting prisoners.
>Hey, maybe they're trying to track us through Kassin's emanations. Try these cuffs on, will you? We might be able to shake them.
>GM thinks for a moment, then announces we all died, because we interrupted the magical link keeping our characters in one piece that we had zero fucking clue existed, in part because you're not supposed to be able to bring people back from the dead.

>Oh, the Xs are called Ys in this setting, for logical in-world reasons
>Sixteen sessions later, an actual X shows up
It was fun pulling that one, even if half of them expected it.

>Nowhere in the OP is it stated that the GM said it OOC
The guy you're responding to here. It looks like this post caused some kurfuffle on this point so I'd like to clarify. I took
>>GM announces X doesn't exist in setting
to mean that the GM announced that X didn't exist in setting while in the persona of the GM, because there was no information to indicate otherwise, and the available information implied that it was the GM announcing the information without the addition of an NPC.

As my original comment stands, though, it is still accurate, and doesn't directly refer to OP anyway.

>DM says humans don't exist in this setting
>Ask why
>Says his world is a utopia so how could humans exist?

>when your GM says out loud that X is extinct in the setting
How long can you expect it turn out that X isn't extinct after all?

>Dwarves no longer exist, as they have all been slaughtered or disappeared from the face of the earth. All that is left of them are folklore
>Our campaign has nothing to do with them, do our own adventures
>Stop an Ogre Warchief from taking over an entire region
>Kill a mummy and a skeletal dragon in a shrunken world on a paper boat
>Find some good ol' artifacts on our adventures
>After several real life months, we find a strange wand with runes we've never seen before
>Get cursed, our souls are stuck inside the wand and die if we get too far away from it
>Our new mission is to remove this curse
>Go to the most experienced wizards in the world, find out that the wand is some world-class item, but unidentifiable
>Wizard helps us to track the wand to its origins, north
>Go on our way to north as we're now chased by all kinds of demons
>It takes us five sessions to travel north to the edges of the world, find a temple
>After exploring the temple, dodging traps and outmaneuvering one of the many demon packs chasing us, we find a stairway leading beyond the horizon
>At the end of the stairs there is a great hall with several statues, each holding an item of their own
>Except one
>Player feels our cursed wand quivering, places it on the statue's hands
>DM has us roll for something
>One of us fails and starts screaming in pain, changing into something else
>The halfling turned into a dwarf
>Apparently we just brought dwarves back into the world
It was pretty neat.

That feels too random.

>they're the God of something either weird and abstract or less useful than you'd like, like pranks or rainfall

Yay rule people who actually understand rule zero:

ie this is supposed to be fun for everyone don't be a dick.

I left out alot of details, as I've forgotten most of them.
We only realized we were cursed when our group was about to split up and sell the loot, there was no flash of light or any hint that the curse got us before.
Our characters never actually found out what the wand was or what it did, but the DM often described it as "something divine, like a blessing" despite the fact that we were bound to it.
I assume that we got cursed by it because we were incompatible with it, not dwarves. The hall with the statues felt a bit weird, but I guess it was some sort of divine hall of creation with each statue representing a different race.

Either the dwarves had disappeared from the world because the wand was removed from the statue or this was some sort of failsafe to revitalize extinct races.
All we knew about the demons was that they wanted the wand.

Maybe the dwarves became demons, and needed the wand to be returned to their old forms.

>dm has us create characters for historical campaign
>allows only 1st level humans, raised together as orphans and all martial characters
>two player joins next session
>one is a demon and the other is an elf wizard

What gets me is that this has happened more than once.

The only time I find "X actually existed all along" appropriate is when X is what the plot is completely about. I don't mind the GM going "Dragons don't exist in this setting" and then making a campaign about a large dragon conspiracy to hide their existence from the world and controlling it behind the scene. What gets me is if the GM goes "Dragons don't exist in this setting" and the campaign isn't about dragons at all but then a dragon appears because the GM decided it would be cool.

So yeah, it's all about execution.

Conversely, I once ran a low fantasy campaign where resurrection was completely impossible, and then when one of the characters died, the player someone got convinced that I was holding out on them and resurrection would be a big reveal and convinced the rest of the party to spend a couple of sessions looking for a way to bring his character back. That was annoying.

>Whothefuckdoesthis
>Not making the god in disguise the normal quiet person.

What is this, amateur hour?

>dm says we'll play a standard fantasy campaign
>3rd session
>dm says our characters will be transported to the world of Undertale

>the quirky NPC turns out to be the DM's waifu in disguise

I've done this, except they're actually a lying devil claiming to be a god instead

In the sense of 'he was planning all along to have two quirky non-human characters join', or in the 'two more people wanted in later, and he lacked the will to tell them to play something that actually fit in to the fucking campaign'?

>a campaign about a large dragon conspiracy to hide their existence from the world and controlling it behind the scene.

This is part of my game, which encompasses much more. What sort of ideas and things featured in the game would make it work for you? Any suggestions? I'm curious for your perspective, as you mentioned something this specific.

Pleb taste

Fizban is the shittiest NPC in the entire history of roleplaying games.
He's only cool in the original version of the War of the Lance adventures - at which point, he's not canonically Paladine. Fuck, even the version of events in which he's linked with Paladine has the god shoved awkwardly into his head. But thanks to the shitty books, he's the most obnoxious quirky character ever, who conducts the worst railroad of all time.
Worse than anybody in the fucking Realms.
Worse than Sam Haight, or Sascha Vykos, or Any Scorpion from L5R.
Worst.
NPC.
Ever.

>something this specific
Sorry man, it's just an example I came up with on the fly (just changed the traditional lizard aliens conspiracy to dragons, to make it more Veeky Forums), no dragon conspiracies have happened in any games I've run or participated in.

However, in general when such reveals have happened and have been satisfying to me, I noticed a couple of trends I tend to incorporate into games where I intend to have reveals.

First, with any setting information you give to the players (maps, documents, etc.), you need to emphasize that it's knowledge that their character would know and not 100% GM facts. Basically, any worldbuilding you do, keep all the facts to yourself and give the players only what the characters would know. Now, don't actually tell them that, but rather drop unsubtle hints throughout it all. For example, if you're making maps, don't give them maps like a satellite photo, instead make them shitty maps drawn from incomplete information (pic related). In any setting documents you give them, include quotes by fictional authors and include facts that they can later find out are wrong or biased like "The barbarians to the north are hairy, man-eating savages," but it turns out that they're just regular folks that don't shave and don't care much for cities. Basically, prime them with small reveals before the real big reveal. This will put them in the right mindset to question any facts you give them.

Man, am I the only person in the world who had elves finally go from "dying" race to "dead" race without having secret conspiracies and last-of-his-kinds wandering everywhere?

Instead, the souls of the elves managed to get caught in a tear between Dream and the Far Realm, where they were twisted over centuries into insane fey obsessed with beauty.

Second, the actual hard part, would be to start dropping hints of the conspiracy really early on in the game, but you have to make it something subtle enough that they won't actually think much of it, but memorable enough that when they finally get to the big reveal, they'll remember those early sessions and start piecing stuff together. As the game progresses, the hints should start getting both more obvious, and harder to find, possibly coming as a secondary reward to large, hard quests. Maybe that Lich is somehow, tangentially involved with the whole thing and sorta forgot to burn an important document detailing supply deliveries from a mysterious backer or something. Really depends on the story, get creative. Important thing is to start alluding to it early, but in such a way that it doesn't come together until you actually get to the reveal.

Now, I wrote this spiel, but you have to understand that this very much depends on your players. Some players just won't get it no matter how hard you try. Your players have to care enough to actually bother remembering details from previous sessions. If they're at your table just to roll some dice and bash some orc skulls for shiny treasure, you're best off not bothering at all, because it's going to be disappointing for everyone involved.

So yeah, knowing your players are up for this kind of game is perhaps the most important part of it all. If they play along, even if you suck at it, they'll have fun.

Fizban is shit and Dragonlance is shit. I hope you're joking.

This is good advice. I followed your second piece of advice more than your first in the past, I've heard of both of these bits of information in a way. Except, instead of inaccurate historical documents or maps I included NPCs that didn't understand, didn't know or didn't agree with established things so they misrepresented them. Unfortunately I play with people that don't understand the concept that NPCs don't know everything and whine when they are lied to, or given the wrong info.

Thanks for your posts, I will try to incorporate what you've said now but I think it's too late, the groundwork wasn't there at the start for a lot of this.

What was wrong with Fizban?

I am guilty of this.

Guilty of this once per campaign but everyone knows who it is so it's not meant to be a surprise or cute, it's just tradition.

My sympathies.

Read the books again and tell me it doesn't look like a sign of bad DMing. I liked him when I was 12 but was so disappointed when I went back to those books at 25.

SaGa 1 did this wayyyyyyyyy back in the 80s. See this dapper-looking eccentric guy? He's the creator deity.

>DM says white people don't exist in setting
>There is still civilisation

That's nice. See this chainsaw?

This is very poor bait, friend.

I mean it's either that or your dm thinks elves are gay

Happened to me the other day, never dropped a group so fast in my life

Elaborate?
what did DL say then immediately shove?
It's honestly been a while
I still like it though please no bully

There's no divine magic in the setting until the elf Somethingmon discovers the Disks of Mishakal (sp?) and becomes a healing cleric. It wasn't instant, but it did happen in the first book if I recall correctly.

Right, right. Wow, it's been so long since I read the first book I completely ignored that point this entire time.
Much better story without that worthless information, really.

God of rain is pretty good, make sure crops grow or flood your enemies

You forgot one really really important thing for running mystery/conspiracy games
You really have to run sessions regularly, if you go too long without a session players will start to forget the more subtle clues.
As long as you can run once a week you'll be fine and you can have the odd week off but when you start regularly going two or three weeks without a session you're in trouble

I love that

you see it in so many myths and legends

>GM announces X doesn't exist in setting
>Not expecting GM to produce X the very next session

My precious summer child. There are two reasons a GM might say X doesn't exist in his setting:

1) X will be goddamn everywhere almost immediately
2) It was a former player's fetish and it got real weird

This is one reason I like to use my own setting: if you dont mention X, then players wont think about it. When they ask, you can say that nobody's seen X and that most people find the concept outlandish, meaning they genuinely wont expect it. I did this with the lost heir to an empire. I did this with The Bloodless. I did this with The Maw Hive. It works every time.

That's not true. Whenever I run a setting, high or low fantasy, I always remove Gnomes from the world. Never had a bad player use them (because they have always been removed) nor do I ever intend them to appear.
I think they're a bit of a cop out between Dwarves and Halflings and fill no meaningful niche by themselves.

...

Really? Worldbuilding is pretty much the only part of DMing I really enjoy, if I could throw in my two cents as a player, that'd be nirvana.

I would like to point out that I put more effort into finding this reaction image than you did your bait, so I guess I am the loser.

>not disguising your gods as animals

Usually this yeah

>3.5
>DM wants to run a realistic real world game
>In 3.5
>Tells us to not play anything that uses magic because it's real world stuff.
>So we roll martial characters
>In 3.5
>First words out of the DM's mouth come game time:
>"So you're standing in your house and it gets teleported to a magical fantasy land. You're under attack by Wizards, roll initiative."
>he seemed a bit upset that we had a problem with that. Even more-so that we lost and "ruined his game" by losing to a group of min-maxed 3.5 Wizards as noncasters.

Sounds like he wanted to trick you guys into playing an Army of Darkness game without realizing you can't do that with D&D.

I've done that for a lot of discovery campaigns.

Like;
>Small isolated village, never heard of magic or any real technology.
>suddenly gets attacked by incomprehensible monsters, the party is the people who managed to survive the attack.
>Go on a trip to find other life, now that their village is burned to the ground.
They was not allowed any magic at chargen, but got access to it at the second town they got to.

At first, despite the description of the isolated village, people still wanted
>PRIEST WHO WORSHIPS A GOD AND CAN TOTALLY HEAL AND REVIVE AND SHIT
>LEARNED MAGE WHO CAN MAKE FIRE BALLS AND CONTROL LIGHTNING
I think too much DnD makes people retarded sometimes.

>take turns DMing campaign
>go first
>establish people can't be transformed, assassinated with a single attack, sent to other dimensions and other instant kill stuff
>guy after me introduces magic that ignores that

I mean, collaborative DMing will probably always have conflicting narratives but it still pisses me off.

Collaborative DMing is the closest Ive ever seen to being cucked at the table. You just know that you're not going to be in 100% agreement on tone and the direction things should go after a few sessions, so then it just turns into Everyone Is John.

>DM introduces new villain
>Wears black rogue-y outfit and black cape
>Has two rapiers and teleports everywhere
>Talks in "XD SO RANDUM" constantly
>Named "Hex"
>DM gives him so many ablities that he is unbeatable in combat
>Only the DMNPC can ever take him down.
>Finally fight him
>"Hex" turns into a dragon at half health and flies away

also same DM

>Every single NPC is a Dr. House smartass who is better than you in every way.
>Even the shop owner is a level 20 sarcastic wizard.

But wait! Theres more!

>DM at one point tells us he has an IQ of 170-something and rejected a pre-emptive acceptence letter from Johns Hopkins.

Sounds like a guy smart enough to understand the complexities of Rick and Morty.

>>Every single NPC is a Dr. House smartass who is better than you in every way.
>>Even the shop owner is a level 20 sarcastic wizard.

This shit triggers me.

>run an Edge of the Empire campaign
>one guy who normally plays complete heroes/dogooders goes full ebil
>takes a junk trader's ship on a test run
>kicks him off in the middle of the desert and leaves him to die
>because SW is filled with convenient coincidences for the sake of drama and action, make him survive and become the pseudo leader of a sandpeople settlement
>revenge will be eventual but amusing

>time goes on, they've been introduced only once to this new nemesis
>but it's been hard to keep him relevant
>struggling with work, hand some GMing duties over to that guy who caused this in the first place
>just as I was planning to make the trader relevant again by springing a junk assassin droid trap
>give dude some notes, try to stress how important them assassin droids are even though that nemesis hasn't been featured for a while
>he ignores it
>whaddyaknow, nemesis fades into obscurity
>I reveal the big tweest later on
>guy who caused it all just continues to ignore it

Still salty.

Ive seen this story before
was the gmpc a kid?

Seriously every shop owner was basically the same person. I think he thought that it made them interesting characters but it was just annoying because despite the fact we had a collection of larger than life badasses walking around with glowing enchanted weapons some Innkeeper would mouth off at us and turn out to be a lvl 20 druid.

>The Quirky NPC turns out to be the BBEG
>The BBEG is a God in Disguise

Even more

>Be playing as illusionary Bard
>Arrive at new town
>Everyone in the party has incredibly powerful magic items except me
>Visit magical curiosity shop with a party member who already has a fucking VORPAL SWORD
>Walk in to see a strange old man running the place
>Strange Old Man shakes my hand and breaths fire in a loop around it
>Use bard magic to twist it into a little serpent
>Old Man immediately dispels all magic and laughs at my character
>ok.jpg
>Dragonborn with Vorpal Sword is given a suit of magical Berserker Hellhound Armor. Yes the same from Berserk.
>I get studded leather armor that lets me cast leap once per long rest.
>All the while the shop keeper mocks both of us and the DM gets this ridiculous grin every time he says a line.
>From that point on am always taken down first in fights and never get a single magic item.

The first one sounds like the DM playing his usual game of pointless one uppmanship but the second one I kiinda understand although the logic needs context.

See: A lot of GM's think that magic items or weapons or what have you should just be bought. That's why they have gold prices. That's also how it works in the vidyagaems so ok lets go with that.

The problem is then that players get smart and are like "Oh we can just kill the store owner and steal ALL THESE MAGIC WEAPONS FOR OURSELVES".

The DM obviously does not want this to happen so he shuts down the players by having the store run by an NPC who's objectively way stronger than any of them so trying it will result in death.

Now the obvious fix would be to say, have a store only have maybe 1 magic item in it for sale and it's kept in a safe. And if they kill the store owner then the guard will start looking for the PC's and then wanted posters will come up and they'll be hounded and jailed etc etc but it's a pretty easy newbie DM mistake to make.

>The helpful NPC turns out to be a god in disguise
I do this way too often, honestly. They try to be low key about their natures, though, because it isn't about them and they know it. The material plane belongs to mortals, so gods have to tread carefully when they get involved in that sort of stuff.

>shady character (in our cases an Oni) doesn't actually do anything evil
I guess he liked being the mayor of a fortress with a mage guild.
The intrigue between him and the Deep Gnome Elder was interesting.

Probably. He was, and probably still is, one of those guys who thinks you can run ANYTHING in 3.5. Any attempt to point out 3.5 doesn't work for whatever it is, he just pulls out "Well I just houserule a few things and ban certain classes and it'll be fine."

He's tried to run to my knowledge...
>the Army vs Wizards thing above, failed because it's fucking 3.5 Wizards
>Spooky super gritty survival horror game. Failed because 3.5 doesn't do that well. Also someone played a Cleric with Create Food and Water and stomped all over the whole survival part
>Mystery detective adventure. Failed because someone rolled a Divination Wizard and found the culprit about 30 seconds in
>Call of Cthulu style eldritch horror. Failed because we all played spellcasters and effortlessly steamrolled everything, including Cthulu himself when the DM got pissed and threw him at us
>Monster Hunter style game, spellcasters banned because he was still pissed about the Cthulu thing. Failed because he was expecting martial characters to keep up with CR without giving us any magic items

He's also insanely predictable. Except for the detective game, every single one of those games started out as "So you're at x place and get ambushed by wizards/zombies/cthulu monsters/giant wildlife" and just kinda went on from there into being railroaded into more encounters later. Every NPC was a smug shithead who we couldn't refuse to help because ??? and were incredibly unhelpful in any way to us, even for jobs they specifically state they urgently need done.

And yes, he referred to all the monsters in the Cthulu game as "cthulu monsters." All of them.

I think people tend to underestimate how much reputation affects how people view you.
A bunch of dudes just murdered a dude for his magic item? They're gonna get at least fined, if not imprisoned or executed, depending on who they killed and who they know.
And if you rape the Princess, good luck finding anyone of repute who will hire you.

>Even the shop owner is a level 20 sarcastic wizard.

I feel like this could be funny in a less serious game with a better DM, where every magic item shopkeeper was the same person. Albeit the problem with having literal armies of level 20 epic level characters in every city just begs the question of why one of them can't handle the world saving problem you're on.

If the shopkeeper is the same person everywhere, it doesn't really matter how powerful he is so long as he can't just snap his fingers and fix everything. I mean, maybe he spends all his time crafting magic items instead of doing heroics because he's exhausted of being a hero and is taking time off, figuring the PCs will do the job better as a team than he can individually and offering them a discount/opportunity to make requests for being cool dudes.
He needs the money so he can keep making items and upkeep.

Or he's legitimately an epic level Wizard that could easily solve the problem...but due to some event that happened long ago he's incapable of leaving his shop. So he put up shops all over the world so he could still be in more than one place.

There's really plenty of ways to do that really that doesn't suck.

>people can't be assassinated with a single attack
But... why not?

>tripfag can't handle player input and considers it bad
lol

>I do this way too often, honestly.
Any amount more than zero is way too often.

>session zero
This meme needs to die. If anyone so much as mentions a session zero in our group, they are gone without recourse or explanation.

>can't handle player input and considers it bad
That's because it usually is.

But why though. It's useful to be able to hash things out before actually getting started.

>GM says X doesn't exist in setting to prevent powergaming
>gives really poor excuse as to why that is instead of just having a world without X, obvious plot twist is obvious
>That Guy points out obviousness
>GM ignores and says world has Y homebrew
>gets passive aggressive if you don't make a Y character
The campaign lasted exactly as long as it needed to for a new guy to join and take over once GM left.

That is a spooky reflection.

>It's useful to be able to hash things out before actually getting started.
Yes it is. That's why group texts and mass email chains exist.

Not him but I had a session zero for the campaign I just started and it was pretty pointless. Even though I told the players they'd be making their characters together, everyone had already decided what they were going to play and half of them had already made their characters. I also tried to do some collaborative worldbuilding using the rules from "Beyond the Wall", but only one player had any interest in doing so and the others just ignored me.

Not that guy, but group texts are fucking cancer. Meeting in person should be much more efficient and you can get it all done in one session of planning.