It's a "DM nerfs your character so you have to solve their puzzle one way" episode

>DM's spending more than 20 minutes making a location unless it's an explicitly stated railroad campaign

I feel bad for them, but they should have known better.

This is stupid as shit.

As a GM if I worked that hard on a place and they decided to go somewhere else, I would take the same fucking places and put them in the village they WANT to go to without saying anything.

The illusion of agency is often just as important as actual agency. You need to know when to go with each.

How fucking hard is it, people.

Fucking this.

Just take the town you made and put it where the players want to go.

This is only possible if your players are wandering around blind. They should know where they're travelling to and why they're going. They should probably ask someone about their destination before going there.

You haven't taken away the players' agency by switching the villages around, because their choice of village was meaningless to begin with.

>These types of GMs make me sick.
Heres some demons faggot.

Fair enough point I guess, but unless you're playing in the Forgotten Realms with a bunch of lore nerds there's literally no reason you shouldn't be able to use your same plot with the names and whatnot changed to compensate for what they knew about the other place.

You might have to do some ad-libbing and maybe change your plans a tad, but any GM that's worth a fuck should be able to do that without telling the players that they went against his plans.

Frankly speaking, Gygax wasn't worth much as a GM. He had a couple of good trends but the guy was way too autistic about way too much. Playing anything with its creator will give you that.

I’ve seen this argument a lot, and I think that it’s short-sighted.

Do you want freedom of choice? Sure.
But unless you’re in a totally sandbox style game, you will probably visit most locations your GM comes up with, because they designed the adventure you agreed to take part in and it will make sense to go to those places of your own volition in order to get things done without requiring prodding.

I see why this is a generally valued idea, but the same argument applies. Sometimes giving your players real choice means they choose to do the things you made, but maybe not in a specific order. Flexibility in letting them take on the problems you provide in whatever order makes sense to them is also important. As long as they know what is at stake.

Why would you spend 4 hours making a puzzle that you know the party can easily bypass?

It very much depends on the players, some will go off on completely random tangents and abandon any sense of the adventure they agreed to take part in.

>This is only possible if your players are wandering around blind. They should know where they're travelling to and why they're going. They should probably ask someone about their destination before going there.
Not that user, but you'd be surprised how little people actually do this

>party goes to explore ancient fortress
>comes across a locked door with a simple riddle, go pour water in the two urns at the left and right
>party cant be arsed to do that, just break down the foot thick stone door with an adamantine weapon
>proceed to do this again for another puzzle that was supposed to be overarching to point them into rooms so they can learn about the history of the place while solving puzzles and dealing with ancient warforged enemies
>naw fuck that we're just gonna go into this obvious boss room by tearing down the door
>proceed to just casually stroll in and start asking where the loot is at
>there's an illusory wall ahead of them that should be obvious because that wall looks fresh and new
>tell them there is nothing visible in the room
>"well if there's nothing here then this was a waste of time."
>they proceed to leave roll20 and go play world of warcraft

What the fuck?

I implication is that the GM themselves is an idiot. When you get caught up making something and you feel really clever, it's easy to over-look something that an uninvested person might notice.

Yeah, improv is an important part of the GM toolkit. Sometimes players will want to do things out of order. But what and are describing is a GM that is literally incapable of just pretending that everything went as planned. He's so shit at what he does that he actually complains to his players that they're messing with his plans.

Players have agency, but unless you are explicitly running a sandbox game they should always feel like they have more agency than they actually have.

It tweaks my autism when I see people accuse GMs of wanting to write books. Because it's entirely possible to have book-tier segments of detail and interaction and lay those segments out for the players in a way that actually engages them and makes them feel they've really been the driving force without blatantly or obviously railroading them.

A little bit of improvisation, a little bit of actually going completely 100% along with them down an ad-lib path when they're doing something totally awesome, a little bit of Mardi Gras in my life...it's honestly not that hard to be a good GM if you plan the skeleton of a story and sequences ahead of time.

4 hour is not the point. The point is the dm ia trying to make the player think out side the box by hampering some of the spells.

These honestly just sound like miserable people to be around. Not sure what to do about them.

>unless you're playing in the Forgotten Realms with a bunch of lore nerds there's literally no reason you shouldn't be able to use your same plot with the names and whatnot changed to compensate for what they knew about the other place.
It depends on what kind of campaign you're running. If the party is just going from one place to another and you want something fun to happen while they're passing through town, then sure.

But if you're running a sandbox campaign with a reasonably narrow focus, then a huge part of that is giving the players enough information for them to plan what they want to do. If you don't, the players will just wander around unsure of what they want to do and get bored. That's a mistake I think a lot of people make.
That's why old D&D modules always have rumour tables. The rumours are the primary mechanism for giving the players choices. Do we want to go see the mayor of Wimblebury about his Bugbear problem or search for the sunken lighthouse of Flump? etc.

This is a retarded argument that has been going on forever because the answer is literally 'Don't be a fucking cock', and it applies to both players AND the GM.

It's a matter of give and take. Compromise between player and GM, and you should not need to ask for this. Lord knows I never have. It should be a fucking given, a fact of the medium, that compromise between player agency and DM planning happens, because that is where the game lies. That is literally it. On one end, you have the GM writing a novel. On the other end, you have players freeform RPing. Neither of these is an ideal scenario, and it's all well and good to go 'hurrrr fuck railroading' or 'hurrrrr fuck lolrandum players', but the entire point is to find a place where those two streams cross to create something greater than the sum of the parts.

God fucking damnit.

Had me going up until the last two lines, 6/10

Go find more reasonable players then. Or try to improve your group.

I ran one pure sandbox campaign. Literally never again. Rumor tables were the only way to keep them invested because they didn't want an overarching plot. It was really fun for the first couple of months, but by God does that style of gameplay get boring fast. I tried to engage them in roleplaying, local intrigues, and even fucking beach episodes. But it was all just number-crunching.

The argument I had made literally was what you're saying, you dweeb. The illusion of agency and actual honest-to-God freeform agency needs must cooperate. A good GM knows when to go 100% along with something the players are doing because it's rad, and when to not tell them that the village they're in and its plot hooks are transplanted from sixty miles North because they wanted to go South instead.

Just because the players are walking into a village full of pre-planned plot hooks and events doesn't mean they don't have freeform agency to effect those events and maybe even completely override some of what was planned because they came up with something more clever than I did.

It's on the GM to provide necessary information.

If that's what you're going to believe, that's fine. It doesn't change the fact that I have a shitty fucking gaming group, which sucks because they're actually pretty cool people irl, but holy FUCK they got triggered to shit by the thought of having to rub two braincells together.

The saddest fucking part is that they were here following an adventurer's journal of some dwarf who went missing, it literally had ALL the solutions written in it that they could consult if they got stuck or confused.

Im sorry for once I cant fall for the bait, I refuse to believe people that stupid or shitty can exist

>spoiler
I've always been afraid of running puzzle rooms because it might shatter the flow of play, but that's a brilliant idea for ensuring that they can get it done if they get stuck.

Stealing.

>Ok, you teleport to the other side of the door where 6 skeletons were waiting. Room initiative while everyone else is working out the puzzle

That's fine. I understand that Veeky Forums has this weird fucking phobia of believing anything posted, that fear that some dude's gonna jump out from behind their monitor and go "Gotcha faggot!" and shoot them in the head or something.

Yeah. It's pretty cool since that means the players can feel satisfaction for being able to solve shit on their own and they're not completely stuck if they have trouble. It was written so that it's from the dwarf's perspective, writing down what he did to solve each room and some notes about stuff he has seen.

A lot of people are buttmad about this but shouldn't a security-conscious individual that knows that magic exists take measures to block it?

Why wouldn't a mafia boss (for example) contract for magical countermeasures in building his hideout?
Doesn't this go back to the "invisibility doesn't mean the dog can't smell you" thing?

>PC can do X
>every enemy now is resistant to X

>player spent XP so he can speak the language of country Y before the party goes there
>magic bullshitery makes everyone now understand the language of country Y once the party goes there

>PC has rare ability Z that will rarely come up during the game
>on the one instance that it comes up, the GM rules that it doesn't work because of something badly defined

None of those things apply to that particular scenario.

Interesting point but yes they do ya fuckin dweeb

Yes i does. Why in a magic world would a tomb not have protection from magic?

Yeah I got that, I was just reinforcing your point because there are people who still don't get that the entire medium is just a long series of compromises between two sides which cannot exist without the other/

I don't think that second one is necessarily a bad thing, since lost in translation games aren't fun (and are even worse if the one guy who can speak the language can't make the session).

I'd refund the exp the guy spent on it, or maybe give him bonus opportunities to reward him.

Holy shit, this. So many things make no sense otherwise. For instance, why would anyone have a bank vault in a system where people can teleport? That's just actively making money less safe because now there's a big amount of it in one place! For that matter, why have locked doors? How does a mage get imprisoned? Anti-magic should be assumed to be a basic part of even low-level security construction and design.

Oh so you guys have the opposite of ACTUAL problems that happen and exist.

>GM makes a mystery expecting us to be able to solve it with our super human abilities as players taken into account.
>None of us use said powers and try to play it like Gumshoe
>Get fed up and just spoon feeds us the answer because we're too retarded to cast Charm Person or Zone of Truth to make the suspects confess.

>I'd refund the exp the guy spent on it, or maybe give him bonus opportunities to reward him
You're okay user. You're okay.

Fuck, that's thinking too small. Why have castles? Do kings, dictators, presidents etc have bodyguards, or do they not bother knowing any random whackjob who doesn't like his policies can appear out of thin air and launch a fireball at him before anyone could reasonably be expected to react?

I'm really enjoying this bad GM thread. So many idiots crawling out of the woodwork to defend objectively retarded scenarios.

I mean, if the guy spent character resources on something that everyone else gets for free, I'd sure as fuck reward him for it.

Off the top of my head - the magic shenanigans aren't a perfect translator/can't handle things like body language so this guy's picking up on a lot of subtext that everyone else is missing, or maybe the way he learned it gives a link to more opportunities - his teacher was a diplomat, so when they meet up he can give them an in at the palace, the language manual he used was written by a political dissident and no one bothered to check it because magic bullshit exists, so there's all sorts of encoded information in it, stuff like that.

Not very great ideas, but again, off the top of my head.

I had a dm make these elaborate dungeons without coming up with any story as to why we should enter or care. We just walked past all of them on our merry way. Until he started kidnapping us for no reason into his dungeon. We were still level one because no xp and died fighting eleven invisible trolls immune to fire. We left and never played with that faggot again.

I got you, homes
>the door is filled with alchemist's fire
>the door is spiders

>having an elaborate mechanical device as a trap when a jar of alchemist's fire balanced on the top of an ajar door works 100% of the time

This is one of the things I hate about most (all? Eberron sort of gets a pass) of D&D and Pathfinder settings. They make a world that doesn’t make sense given the mechanics. You can say “well sure, magic is rare” but in many of them there’s explicitly plenty of wizards running around and magic items are relatively cheap.

It's on the players to seek out information and not expect it to be handed to them on a silver fucking platter

DM hides his dice. Every fucking attack he makes hits and does max+ damage. Half the characters die every session, resulting in players picking just min/maxed combat freaks in attempts to survive just one session. DM complains about how he hates 'powergamers'.

This may sound outrageous however, your answer may be "Don't play D&D"

DM hates magic users, so he insists on all mage characters randomly rolling for their spell selection. Points out how useless the mage character is (due to the god awful spells he has) as a reason to why he hates them.

I dislike puzzles in D&D for other reasons. A puzzle can be aimed at the player or aimed at the characters. If it's aimed at the characters, the player says "Okay, I roll Intelligence/Logic/Wits/whatever to solve it," and then they either do or don't. If I'm aiming it at a player, then it's not really a roleplaying game anymore, it's me giving the player a puzzle to solve, and that's not everyone's cup of tea. It also breaks immersion because the smartest player in the room could be a barbarian, so there's a discrepancy.

Autistic as fuck DM running Babylon 5 game. We get a mission where we are to defend the station from an imminent invasion of evil griblies through the nearby stargate. We solve it by crashing a tanker into the stargate, destroying it. DM ragequits because we fucked up his planned six hour session of moving a gazillion cardboard counters around a hex map.

Players don't control what information they get. It's up to the GM.

>I refuse to believe people that stupid or shitty can exist
Oh you sweet, naive boy

If I had a lair I was worried about spellcasters Scry-and-Dying their way into, I'd pay someone to put some antimagic fields up.

Doesn't sound so far fetched, why whine at the GM for something that sounds reasonable?

I just use abrubt jaunt
>Doesn't work, anti-magic field
Abrubt jaunt is EX not SU
>..still doesn't work because no magic or similar shit works!
So why the evil caster is casting?
>Your character dies
Literally happened to me

Antimagic field is a 6th level spell that has a radius of 10 feet and lasts 10 minutes/level. No, it's not reasonable.

That is a terrible excuse to not try at all to seek out information. This isn't a fucking MMO, NPCs aren't going to vomit out their entire life's story and everything to know about everything at the slightest provocation

>immediately jumping to hyperbole
Typical.

Fucking bullshit. Players at LEAST have some agency over what they choose to look into or not. Yes, the players can't read the DM's mind, but they can ask questions.

>If I'm aiming it at a player, then it's not really a roleplaying game anymore
Is the player not playing the role of a character solving a puzzle?
I'm not sure I completely get this argument. Taken to its logical conclusion it means that the a fighter's player shouldn't be making choices in combat or the rogue's player shouldn't decide how to infiltrate the compound because their character is better at that than they are.

Perhaps this is the reason I'm more drawn towards games where the characters have a mostly relateable level of competency. Because it's easier to justify the players making their own decisions.

Stop me if you heard it before (of course you did, I post this everytime I can)
>Invited to a 3.5 game
>Ask GM about the setting
>GM just says "generic fantasy setting" and nothing more nomatter how much I insist and ask for more info
>Ask GM about the rest of the party so I can come up with something that fits, doesn't step on other concepts and fixes any holes the party might have
>Come to the conclusion they need a outdoorsy skillmonkey perceptive dude
>Roll like shit (literally 16, 12 and 10s)
>Pick scout, make it ranged and work on his perception and disable device
>GM says it's perfect and likes it
>Game starts
>It's Eberron meets Ravenloft, literally every enemy ever is either constructs or undeads
>Cool, my char is useless in combat as I deal 0 damage (because even though I deal 5d6, they are all precision damage to which those creatures are flat immune)
>Even though I have +9 to Perception and Disable device I barely discover half the traps and barely disable half of those (so only 1/4th of the traps are actually passed safely)
>Die at 1st level
>Reincarnated against my will with one leve less
>Die again several times
>Oozes, Plants and Elementals join the enemy lines
>By the time the group is 6th level I'm like 3
>Even when I try to come up with imaginative way of not being useless in every sense GM shuts them down
Worst 10 sessions of my life, and yeah, I must have been into weird BSDM to last that long

Permanency

Regaredless the Dm can break the rules as he sees fit. Even then this is just a simple example. Tomb of horrors summons demons anytime some one trys to do wacky shit. There is nothing wrong with the DM putting countermeasures to force the player hand as long as the DM does not always do it.

This, this 100 times

>I can now deal fire damage
>Monsters are immune to fire now
>I can now trip without provoking
>Monsters can't be tripped now
>I can fly now
>Every monster ever can flies and/or every combat happens in a small room in where you can't flye
>I have freedom of movement now
>Monsters generate a magical field that nullifies that specific spell/magic ring
>I see in magical darkness and cast darkness on myself
>Everybody sees in magical darkness now
And a long etc

Why did you go through 10 sessions then? I seriously can't understand you people.

>Permanency
Doesn't work with antimagic field and even if it did, the costs would be impractical because you'd need to cast it on dozens of antimagic fields because they're each only 10 feet wide.

>Regaredless the Dm can break the rules as he sees fit
Your houserules are not relevant.

Hope
I always give 3 sessions (like 3 strikes) nomatter I'm the GM or the player, after the 3rd session I asked the GM what was happening, he told me "just wait, everything will go better", this was repeated the 3rd time I died, and by the 11th session I didn't even show

>That's fine. I understand that Veeky Forums has this weird fucking phobia of believing anything posted, that fear that some dude's gonna jump out from behind their monitor and go "Gotcha faggot!" and shoot them in the head or something

Kek. Veeky Forums culture in a nutshell

>Permanency
>hurr durr just cast magic on the antimagic field

>Your houserules are not relevant.
They are not house rules. The dm can do what ever you are playing in their game.

Yes they do. If they investigate the GM is obligate to come up with replies. If they don't do anything then the GM shouldn't hand out anything.

>DM: The scroll you find is in a mysterious language.
>ME: Well, I've got like 9 languages, is it at least close to one of them?
>DM: You recognize a few similarities from undercommon and elven but not enough to draw any meaning from the text.
>ME: I cast Tongues. What does it say?
>DM: Uh...you still don't know. The language doesn't isn't close enough to anything you've seen before.
>Party *stares*
>Me: [Screams Internally]

I wouldn't mind antimagic field if the fucker were consistent, every time a GM pulls that trick the antimagic field only works on us and it renders useless anything the GM wants being supernatural/magical or not. Is just the maximum railroad feature.

Seriously. The #1 rule of GMing is "Players are retarded, so retarded in fact that they will unerringly avoid anything and everything you have planned." However, the second rule is "As the GM, your job is to make the players think they're in charge. However due to the aforementioned mental capacity of said players, they are under no circumstances, to actually be in charge."

Basically, pull an inception. Have an idea and let the players fill it in. Instead of "The players will go here and meet the bad guy who will..." you should plan on "At some point, the players stumble into Evil Dick McDouchebag," because that way, you can just interject the plot. Players decide to go on an adventure? They find a spooky wherein they find the machinations of the bad guy. They decide to go murder a city? The of the bad guy happen to be there and offer a significant challenge with a possible maguffin. Shit like that. Be flexible.

D&D is not suitable for using puzzles above 5th level, there is no point to having them because of magic.

I am not even shitposting, just don't waste your time on preparing actual puzzles.

I ran in the exact same situation as a DM.
I intentionally made a scroll in a language the Wizard didn't understand but the dumb barbarian could.

Comprehend Languages was cast and I allowed it.

Even tho' it was not my intention it's not like it changed anything in the end.

I think the only time I talked back to my players was when one of them tried to cast Geass instantly. (and got upset at me making the warchief take the physic damage rather than obey the command)

I don't understand why a game would put a system in it just to have a spell void the system out. If their is common (also retarded) and tounges whay even have languages?

>I can cast hellish rebuke once a day as part of thaumaturgy
>no user you have to cast it before you get hit
>the casting time says 1 reaction, after getting hit
>no user you attacked last turn so you can't use hellish rebuke
>here read the book user geez
>dm says nothing at all
>I have to print off a fucking pdf explaining reaction spells to the table
>now the dm never attacks me so I can't even use hellish rebuke

That's not the main point of the reply chain. Pay attention.

You need to play with your players. That is the essence of what a GM is. You play with what your players want. You offer them dream, you offer them what they want, you offer them the story they want for their characters, and then play the consequences. YOU SHOULD NEVER RAILROAD. You sick fuck. Why is that so difficult to understand? Why do so many GMs try to write a fucking book instead of playing with their players? I can do it. It's not rocket science.

One of my players wants to play a lightsaber wielding Jedi. Problem, in that setting, lightsabers are incredibly rare and Jedi powers come with numerous complications. Build upon that. Build upon the fact that lightsabers are rare and Jedi have many social and political ties. A rival military organisation sends spies to steal his blueprints. Obvious. He has one ultra rare lightsaber, after all, people notice. He needs to register amongst the Mars' Rose, or they will fuck him deeply. Logical. He's a Jedi, and they shouldn't be left one.

The player ends the session with a smile ten kilometers long because he was involved with the story. That's basic 101 GMing.

One of your players want to play a troubled assassin: play with it, play with the archetype. One of your players want to play a naive paladin: play with that. It's easy. Do it with respect, and you will be elected best GM of the years three years in a row.

I like that. I like to create stories around the ideas other provide, and you should do it.

The issue is that many GMs are control freaks, not particularly good at that, not particularly imaginative, and frequently stupid. They can't imagine, they can't build around external ideas, they just want to dominate, control, and play a story they read somewhere with people who just agree somewhere. They aren't good GMs. They also, often times, aren't good people too.

D&D is weird and a lot of times plain stupid. There're lots of languages, LOTS, learning languages cost quite alot (2 ranks for almost every class) to the point 99% of classes won't spend ranks on it because otherwise they could do nothing else (skills in D&D sucks, everybody seems to be retarded at doing out of combat stuff but the casters who cast spells), so I think that's why tongues and comprehend languages exist

>now the dm never attacks me
Not seeing the problem here desu

Yes it is.

Then you're even dumber than I thought. Expecting the PCs to dig for information when they don't even know what they're looking for is stupid, but I guess you wouldn't understand why.

>Every enemy ever now mistically knows that something bad will happen if they attack me just starting from the moment the GM realized how it actually works
Fuck you

Tongues isn't for reading shit though. DM was right even though he worded it like a dumbass

What happens if the room is filled with faezeruss or whatever that green shit is in the underdark that supresses all magic?

Why wouldn't they know what they're looking for?

This is the last time I'm spoonfeeding you.

Why can't you defend the point you're trying to make?

As I said, no more spoonfeeding. Good luck.

Holy projection batman
>if you have an idea for a campaign you want to run your a bad person
I like running and playing sandbox games but you're a Faggot who doesn't realise gm-player cooperation is a two way street.

The onus is on you to make your argument clear. I don't understand what you're trying to say, so that means you've failed.

>there is no point to having them because of magic.
I've never understood this mindset. Oh no, the players can SOLVE THE PUZZLE. What's the fucking alternative, NOT solving the puzzle? It doesn't matter if they use magic to do it or not, the result is nearly the same. The only difference is that using a spell to solve the puzzle takes resources that might be better used elsewhere. Why should I never include a murder mystery when the Cleric can speak with the dead? Adding in that puzzle validates the character's choices and makes them feel important. The purpose of puzzles is to be solved and make the players feel validated about their choices when they overcome the puzzle, not provide a roadblock that is only passable once you hop on the railroad to get the key. Besides, a large amount of spells that solve problems only solve part of the problem. For instance, speak with dead doesn't give you a plate of hard evidence, only a magical witness testimony that might be an illusion for all the common lawman would know.
tl;dr Magic doesn't invalidate puzzles any more than a sword invalidates fighting.