ITT: Things only shit DMs do

>As for perception, use passive perception, having everyone roll perception all of the time slows the game to a crawl.
How so? It's just a single dice roll. people enjoy rolling dice.

It also means they know something's coming or you make them roll even when there isn't to keep them guessing; either way it's better to have passive perception.
I incorporate that shit into literally every game I run, regardless of whether it exists or not, makes everyone's lives easier.

Because even if they fail the roll, they'll know that something is up and will metagame until whatever the fuck is sneaking up on them actually attacks them.

>people enjoy rolling dice.
He must be new.

Hm, I never actually had a problem with perception before, I think. I'm not really sold.
If the players are actively searching for something, don't you want to let them roll some dice? Maybe let them try to find shit they couldn't otherwise?

You're a bit judgemental, my lil grognard. Most players feel engaged when they're allowed to use their abilities.

I once bought an anti-mimic knife.

The knife bit off my finger :|

There is a reason it's called PASSIVE perception.
As above, rolling dice takes time, so why not cut down on time taken with things that need not be rolled?
Also .

>Asking martial for multiple checks in order to perform a simple stunt, forcing them to just forget about it and go with a regular attack

>"Uummm, it doesn't work. Because I said so!"

>The deity your Paladin worships is displeased and strips your character of their abilities.

Run D&D or derivatives

If your players are actively searching for something, that's when you DO roll, they're using "active" perception, they're actively looking for it.
You use it for noticing things without having to say they're searching every nook and cranny, or for noticing something sneaking up on them they're unawares of.
(It also gives you the opportunity to fluff the dice if you need to and are that way inclined.)

so you'll just take 10 and add their stat? would you roll for sneaking monsters or just take 10 for them too?

Defenders always set the passive DC that Offense has to beat, it's why people roll against AC to attack someone instead of both sides rolling opposed attack rolls.

>Party checks in at an inn
>Fighter goes to his bedroom and lies down on the bed
>Bed opens up in the middle and swallows him whole
>Damn those random mimics again!

>so you'll just take 10 and add their relevant mods?
Yes.
> would you roll for sneaking monsters or just take 10 for them too?
You roll for active acts. Someone trying to sneak would have to roll the relevant skill, but creatures also have passive perception.
This changes if someone is being an active look out or is searching for something, then you roll.

>I see new gm's in particular make this mistake all of the time.
Thats new gms though. Many people struggle with making a "fun" game when starting off. Thats not to say someone who has been running a wile and knows how to engage players shouldn't world build.

sounds reasonable actually.
I'll try it, and if it suits my tastes I'll keep it in.

Just when you think you're safe, the mimic strikes. It's how they getcha.
I'm still sad we never got a bonfire mimic in Dark Souls because of this. The bonfire is when I'm safest, it's the perfect time for a mimic to strike.

well but it's true what he said.
A gross oversimplification, but not wrong.
I design my worlds bottom-up, and that generally works. But top-down will always lead to a horrible mess.

>mage goes up to his room
>nothing in it
>Perfect nothing this DM could do to catch me off guard here
>ceiling eats him

>It's pretty useless
I respectfully disagree. Worldbuilding is how I COME UP with quests. Why is anyone interested in the PCs spirals into deep amounts of worldbuilding and fuels all the ideas I have for things the players can get involved in. It also makes the players realize that even though they're the focus of the game there are other things going on in the world.
Understanding your pantheon, your planes, that country in the corner, who your monsters worship and their society helps facilitate roleplaying and creates organic quests.
I can understand not needing to world build EVERY detail but worldbuilding in general is a powerful tool that engages players who pay attention.

Doesn't this just lead back to perception rolls? Every group I've ever played with or dmed for has had an active lookout while traveling and sometimes even while in a town. Generally the ranger or druid are the ones doing and sometimes the wizard with a familiar.

Not him, but some people work really hard on a high passive perception. The Obersvant Feat for 5E is meant for that.

>Not wanting to fight a treasure vault filled with mimics

An entire campaign where you have to defend the Earth from Mimic-Space, the eldritch realm where all lies come from.

You can either choose to roll or choose your passive.
The difference is between having 1 person roll at a time, and having 3-6 people needing to roll.

>Lurker above
>Trapper
>numerous Living Walls
>all objects are mimics
The whole building is the encounter

>quantum ogres
What are those?

Encounters that are irrespective of the player's decisions.
Essentially,
>You see three paths leading north, east, and west.
>[players go west] You see an ogre. Roll initiative.
>[players go east] You see an ogre. Roll initiative.
>[players go north] You see an ogre. Roll initiative.

No matter what, the superposition collapses and an ogre materializes, because the DM wanted an ogre fight.

Isn't giving players the illusion of choice something halfway decent compared to only giving one path and railroading? As long as the players BELIEVE there were other things planned out had they gone another way?

Yeah of course. You shouldn't be letting multiple people do the same check anyway. They're almost always going to pass it if that happens.

>I can understand not needing to world build EVERY detail but worldbuilding in general is a powerful tool that engages players who pay attention.
This. Worldbuilding is like any other part of game design - if you focus on it to the exclusion of other elements, everything sucks. But if you integrate it, it's great.

It's also quite useful for players who are determined to go off the rails. You know the guy, who starts the campaign in the Southern Empire, was born in the Southern Empire, and serves the Southern Emperor, and is sent on a quest in the Southern Empire, and then decides "fuck it, let's go to the Northern Empire" for no reason.

You could play speed chess with him, but it's easier to just have rough plots going on everywhere they could possibly go that try to catch their interest... And send some Southern Empire Paladins after him for being a cock who deserts his Emperor.

Also good for yummy flavor. Always nice to have goings-on and gossip to throw in as the players wander the royal court for whatever reason. "Did you hear? King X is having an affair with Countess Y! Count Y must be so ashamed!" "Oh, he doesn't know!"

And if they decide their mission in life is to avenge Count Y's cucking, well, there's your plot right there.

>Complains of mimics
>Clearly doesn't bother to inspect chests before opening them
>Too obsessed with "Sweet lootz"

You're the problem

I'd prefer a railroad. At least I know what I'm getting and I'm not being lied to.

...Isn't that good DM'ing, though? I mean, assuming for whatever reason you haven't mapped out the dungeon and the patrol routes of the guards and positioning of the camp followers and otherwise autist'd it up... Quantum Ogres sounds like video game logic. Which works well enough for players who aren't total autists.

>not making your players feel the paranoia their characters are likely feeling by asking for random perception checks

That being said, I almost exclusively use passive Perception until someone says they're actively looking. My players are hopeless and I sometimes have to remind them of this fact, but I find it works pretty well.

>Playing favorites
>Lets players do whatever if its lol so random enough but denies basic requests
>Traps that instantly kill, no rolls
>Roll for character and said characters are homebrew
>Punishes the entire team for something another party member did on their own

The trouble is that players can backtrack without even meaning to try and dick you over.

I like to ditch perception and just an appropriate skill or class instead.

Quantum Ogres are maybe the most blatant example, a straw man if you will.

In reality, most GMs don't have infinite resources to work on the game, so they can just roll the concepts around and have similar encounters / scenes with different flavors instead of planning a hundred scenes that never happen.

The fact that you don't have to plan everything on the fly makes the game much more enjoyable because you only need to design the nodes.

>Traps that instantly kill, no rolls
Now this is nonsense. Tbh I wouldn't even use a trap that kills instantly at all unless the players have been warned their underleveled for the area (subtly of course; better to say "The door is guarded by Minotaurs riding tamed Dragons with mithril armor. Your studded leather seems paltry by comparison." than "You're underleveled you shmuck.") in which case alright fuckers let's play some Roguelike.

But at least let them roll to die.

If they backtrack the ogres are already dead. Or not.

Or maybe they come across the corpses of the Quantum Ogres, simultaneously in three rooms at once unless being observed; the campaign suddenly becomes Call of Cthulhu as the players are attacked by squads of Quantum Ogre Interdimensional Spec Ops and the players must close the divide between the third and fourth dimensions, locking the QO away using time itself.

>Playing favorites
Guilty. It's too easy when there are objectively better players who feed me ideas and are constantly engaged. If the druid wants more quests and things centered around him, he needs to solidify his backstory and goals a bit like the wizard worshipping a dead god.

A random mimic is fine only if it's one of the first encounters. Then, you never use a mimic again. You put the fear of a mimic into players but never inconvenience them with how shit they are

wow, you sound like a fun guy

Absolutely this.
Some of my players actively say "While we're here in this location that's related to my backstory, I want to go say hi to a person" or "While we have some down time, I'd like to go looking for someone that can track down this missing person from my backstory"

while others are like "I guess I'll just buy some stuff and then sleep for a week."
Like, you want interesting roleplay? Throw me a bone ...

When I say plays favorites I just don't mean having a season centered around a guys backstory as a quest or he has better contacts then others. What I mean is the GM gives them better items over other players, goes easy on them during battles if things don't go right or not punishing them when they do something stupid.

Once had my players get invited to dinner by a person who they knew was a vampire but was sure they could defeat.
They all sit down at the table, playing along til they saw their chance. The moment every last one of them had sat down, the vampire basically said "Seeya, suckers!" and teleported his way outta there.

Every single item in the room was animated. The chairs, which unceremoniously dumped the PCs to the floor. The tables, trampling wildly. The knives, the forks, the spoons, the bowls, the plates, the candlesticks, the potted plants, the pots the plants were in, the rug, the ornamental armour, the tapestries on the walls, the doors out of the room, everything.

By the time they were done, two of them were KO'd and the entire room was just rubble and splinters. Probably one of the more enjoyable encounters I've ever put on for that group.

Every single one of them said they had a feeling something was up when I mentioned suits of armour (animated armour) but they sat down anyway

>encourage emergent backstory
>collaborative worldbuilding
>failing forward
>any lgbtq/poc grandstanding
>NOT playing favorites (i.e. not lighting a fire under a players ass who needs it)
>fudging dice
>milestone levelling

>milestone levelling
Pretty bad, but worse is
>experience point based levelling
>but only gives combat experience
>also gives experience regardless of what was killed
>actively rewards murderhobos
>wonders why players keep killing everything

>Letting players play non-humans

>>any lgbtq/poc grandstanding
I got short comment about this. When I had to describe an NPC I used the word foreigner as that NPC wasn't around here. I got a strict warning not to use that word again later.

>>wonders why players keep killing everything
A gm who doesn't know why his group keeps doing a thing when he is the only reason why they do it is both funny and frustrating to watch.

You made the joke worse.

>As for perception, use passive perception
On one hand, I agree with this because the second you say "roll perception? Okay nothing happens" you get those players that "suddenly" decide to go on the defensive out of nowhere and start carefully investigating everything around them.

On the other, there's no greater joy than doing that when nothing's actually going on just to watch them twitch.

>sjw faggotry
goddamn user, i would have either stopped playing or kicked that faggot right out. was this adventure league or a con or...?

One of my players always manages to amaze me, in how they're paranoid about the little details in my description but miss the big, glaring red flags.
They were convinced that a group of trees (that I described no more than 'there are trees' in the middle of describing the area) was going to suddenly come to life and kill them so they rolled perception and rolled poorly, then after I told them "they're just trees" they decided I must be lying because they rolled badly and avoided the trees entirely.

Then later they ran through the middle of combat to grab a big, shiny chest sitting on a dais and triggered a trap that nearly killed everyone.

It was with a bunch of randos at a game shop. And said guy was the GM. For some dumbass reason I decided to put up with the group for a few more months and pretty much all of them fall under the same political spectrum with the political jokes they keep cracking all the time or the facebook memes they read aloud. And only one of them was a good player.

>worldbuilding is bad

Implying I don't exclusively worldbuild through dungeons, encounter & loot tables, and class features.

But more seriously
>telling characters what they do/think/feel

I dislike this consensus on Veeky Forums. Players are not going to roleplay being terrified of a dark and terrible being, so forcing them to make rolls to resist the urge to fear isn't necessarily bad. You're still telling them "how they feel" but it's important because players aren't going to do it themselves.

Threw my party against an Elder Mimic like this once.

>Stop at an inn by the side of the road
>Innkeeper speaks weirdly(think GMan), but offers free room and board if they deal with a pest problem
>Go downstairs and find some the rats. They've very weak and barely move. One player notices they're trying to run, but their tails are partly rooted into the floor.
>Go up to inform the innkeeper they've dealt with it.
>Rogue player leans over the bar to sneakily rob the man(as he did to basically every NPC), notices he has no legs. In fact the innkeeper's entire lower half is some growth coming out of the floor
>tries to run, the door slams itself shut
>the entire building creaks and shakes as it drops all pretenses
>cue fight with the entire building
>the innkeeper's body swings around trying to knock people out, pieces of the desk break off and fling themselves at the party, parts of the floor turn jagged to stab people's feet as they walk over

Ended up being a fun encounter, though my party never trusts random inns by the side of the road ever again unless it's on a map.

Only thrown 2 other mimics at the party, and one was a custom friendly variant that they, at one point, tried to find a few of so they could start a farm of them, so they never got paranoid at every treasure chest.

I only had one DM throw an instant kill trap at us, and that was only because he put a "Banshee Wail" spell trap there without looking at how much damage it did.

He almost retconned it out, except we rolled while he was about to and everyone ended up saving against it anyways. SO he just went fuck it and left it in, and gave us exp for it(which was enough to level us up by itself).

>telling characters what they do/think/feel

So you are okay with players deciding that their characters are just blocks of ice who cant ever be negatively affected by their emotions?, you might as well just remove charming monsters too since its practically the same thing.

I'ts basic story telling. Never tell the reader how they feel about something. Of course like any rule there are some exceptions but not many.

>the thread is a mimic

Genuinely curious new GM here, but how do you use mimics well? They seem like genuinely cool monsters, but I can see why punishing players for looting a chest would be shitty.

My DM has never thrown a mimic at us. I still check every chest without fail

>When I had to describe an NPC I used the word foreigner as that NPC wasn't around here. I got a strict warning not to use that word again later.
Ignore this level of liberalism. There's a certain level of PCness I expect in all my games, but it basically comes down to "don't be a total faggot and curse out the black player just because he's black". If someone tells you not to use an innocuous word like "foreigner" just because it hurts their feefees, especially in-universe where everyone is super racist, fuck them.

Not being a dick != fellating faggy minorities

An enemy from the Immortals handbook

why even stat it?

I will follow the rules of a table out of respect for the flow of a game but not because I agree with them. I know there is a difference in saying a word and being a hostile dick and wondering why everyone hates you.

>Being mad at the guy who came in with an Ice elemental Character in order to break out of the usual humanoid mold
Meh, I'd love to see someone play a block of ice for once.

>player spends the whole session speaking entirely in ice puns.

Because why not, you might as well give a concrete idea of how powerful it is, just writing "you lose" in the statblock is lazy and overdone and still brings up the same ammount of autism it was trying to prevent.

This enemy is meant to be the endboss of an adventure of Universal proportions.
Trying to take this thing on with the typical fantasy party would be like trying to take on the Death Star by throwing rocks towards it from the surface of a planet.

three words: fuckload of Allips. Wisdom drain the fucker to unconsciousness, and most effects won't hurt them because they are incorporeal

d20srd.org/srd/monsters/allip.htm

also, this thing could totally be the stats of Super Tengan Toppan Gurran Lagann,
just replace the netronium or sciency terms with MANLY SPIRIT and DRILLS

You only know you're being lied to if you cheated and read ahead in the source material.

That's the entire point of the Quantum Ogre dialog.

You mean like in 3.5?

Worldbuilding is fine as long as said worldbuilding has impact that players feel and interact with, and reinforces the mechanics at play.

>epic history of some church that never shows up again
Bad World Building.

>epic history of a knightly order the players are now the last members of, which frames the evil necromancer villain and provides secret knowledge to the players
Good worldbuilding.

NeverGM here. How about

>Epic history of a """knightly order""" that's basically the Emperor's sekrit police
?

Or

>Epic trade history used as a casus belli between Elves, Humans, and Dwarves in the weird, sometimes three-way sometimes tag team sometimes-the-dwarves-swap-sides-halfway-through war the three nations have been fighting for the last 70 years
?

Neither is good.
Worldbuild for the players, not dumb useless shit. The players aren't going to care about why are war is being fought, unless that "why" is something they can influence.
If a war is being fought because some shit that happened 70 years ago that is no longer relevant and the war is just going on through sheer momentum then fuck off because your players can't work with that through anything but backstory.

Well even with a source of constant ability drain, the gold could still lightspeed away before they get into touch range.
At this scale, the golden would probably burn vast swathes of warp demons without so much as a scratch.
Also, aren't even incorpreal things affected by the divine fire this thing radiates all the time?

You're not going ot put ME in the COOLER

Get to the CHOPPER

You don't even need a "fuckload."

If the Allips aren't hurt by the golem, you actually need only 1 Allip (whatever the fuck that is-chinese fruit??)

According to some rules, you die when you get 0 wisdom,

So the golem thingy could get destroyed by 1 alalpaicp or whatever

dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Ability_Score_Loss

No, the golem would probably just have infinite nightmares and sleep.

Just have them roll perception periodically during their travels, even if nothing's up. Then they'll either get paranoid or stop being paranoid as nothing happens after a few. Either makes sense for a character traveling through an uncertain area: they either get the jitters or they begin to let their guard down.

Does divine fire damage not count as magic? Wouldn't the Neutronium golem's attacks count as magical since it is animated by magic?

whats wrong with failing forward my dood?

It only works until someone figures out what you're doing, then it becomes tedious because it feels as though the DM is arbitrarily wasting your time just to make his campaign seem more exciting than it actually is.

Plus, paranoia tends to make people think that everything you present to them, even innocuous shit, is actually some secret ruse designed to fuck them over the moment they let their guard down, which also encourages them to ignore blatant plot hooks or assume that any OoC information you give them is false or designed to lull them into a false sense of security and it becomes incredibly frustrating when you're trying to run a game and everyone's trying to subvert everything you do and tiring when you have to think around their thought processes just to get them from points A to B.

If I ask them for a perception check, it's generally to determine whether or not whatever's attacking gets a surprise round or not or to see if they notice something interesting.

This might be cool for a "dead but dreaming" thing. Minus, of course, being caused by a low level alpaca that couldn't reasonably be able to effect the neutral.

Cleverly. Mimics, for all their intelligence, are still living and fallible beings. Capitalize on this. Make it move a little and have a spot check, as an example. Or have a bug or something stuck to the outside, in just such an unfeasible manner. listen checks to hear it breathing, or moving ever so slightly.

Mimics are great, and fine. You just need to make it so they are avoidable so that when push comes to shove you can say you gave the party a chance.

Like, there's no save for the wisdom damage, all the thing has to do is just roll a crit and hit the thing. Confirming it would have it be like 2d4 wis damage

This is why I said a fuckload of them, he can only attack so many