Smart Players vs Regular Joe GMs
Veeky Forums I would like to ask you about your opinions on a subject that many GMs have probably encountered once or twice. When players are smarter than the GM. Like introducing chemistry into fantasy - making concrete or revolutionasing trade by combining desalination with create water in order to get cheap salt for sell.
How do you resolve such events. Let it run rampant or going into alchemy is not chemistry argument?
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Does their character have that knowledge?
For real? A fucking fantasy world doesn't run on real-world science. Even if a game is set in the real world, the only thing that should matter is what their character is mechanically capable of. If their character has enough points in whatever-the-fuck knowledge then they can do X, their fluff justification doesn't matter even slightly.
looking shit up on wikipedia is not "smarter", unless the game premise Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the word you're looking for is "cunty"
Tell the players no and to stop meta gaming.
Knowing =/= having the means to use it.
Like making enough metric tons of concrete to change anything is not at the reach of anyone. And even that, only concrete? With only concrete they are going nowhere.
That kind takes more than a guy with an idea. Takes factories, big collective effort and additional innovations they are not smart enough to add when they say something like "we invent concrete"
I'd be wary of players who open Wikipedia and then tell me their character knows how to make nitroglycerin, but I try to be indulgent if they've got the stats and skills to support it, as long as the players are being reasonable and not trying to do atomic physics in a low fantasy setting. If someone premised their character on 'mad inventor' I might be more willing to let them get away with things, but probably only after dangerous experimentation. I try to go by the "yes but" philosophy but if it got ridiculous I'd just tell them no.
A lot of the time you can reasonably think of a bottleneck that would stop them going too crazy. It's all well and good if you know how to make an assault rifle, but you still might not have the tools/metallurgy/materials available to follow through, and those things might be prohibitively time consuming/expensive..
>Like introducing chemistry into fantasy
If you're running a game where the world is literally composed of equal parts Elemental Plane of Water, Air, Earth, and Fire, and you lock up in blind panic after letting some jackass declare that his PC can make concrete and gunpowder, you have only yourself to blame.
I had a player invent metal folding chairs and revolutionize how my kingdom viewed seating.
His chairs were a phenomenon.
I hate him.
You talk to the players and tell them not to be dicks. I've had a GM that pit me up against a Fey that I attempted to trick, so I talked to him outside the game about what my plan was. He hadn't even considered the wordplay I used when the Fey and I made a contract, so I helped him get around it in a way that would leave the choice ultimately to him whether it worked or not (though I will admit that I had a multilayered plan and only told him the first part of it). Being smarter than your GM doesn't mean that you have to make his life more difficult.
I make them spend the effort, time, and resources to do the research to make the thing.
Like, where did they get the idea for concrete? How did they come up with the right proportions of materials? Where are they getting the idea to look for those materials?
Unless we're playing some kind of fantasy steampunk setting Mad Scientist is an actual class and Lunatic/Eldritch Inspiration was a perk they took, I'd make them work for it.
It took centuries of trial and error to get the basic ingredients of the Industrial Revolution, as well as decades of directed research to rediscover certain lost technologies, and that's even assuming that they had the right confluence of ability, inspiration, material availability, and economic factors.
I've never had that happen and never heard of people seriously trying that shit until people started talking about it online.
If it did I would just ask my player "what the hell are you doing?" because I don't GM sitting around with my friends refereeing whatever freeball fantasy stuff they can come up with. I feel like what stories like that are true come from GMs who basically have no control over their group and end up with shitty games.
simple.
no, you cannot have that innovation.
the problem comes when you have a historian who invests in craft skills. like the guy that burns shells to make lime, or makes burning feather smoke-bombs(ancient tear gas used in china). or they take finely ground pepper and fill an old whistle with it(close order pseudo-pepper spray)
best answer.
wrong answer
because
>A fucking fantasy world doesn't run on real-world science.
is wrong
you have to make certain assumptions as a player or else you have to expect a novels worth of setting back-story from the GM. you cant decide that some chemistry works and some doesn't without cocking up all the trades crafts or existing technologies.
and the GM might just say "no you cant do that" and be done with it.
my man, have you ever played games with a machinist, carpenter, welder, pharmacist, or engineer?
OP wasnt asking about someone wiki-searching for game breaks. he was asking about smarter players, or players that come up with alternate solutions.
this also works most of the time
the matter of scale is another thing. though it could also be a reason to go out adventuring, to gain wealth enough to fund your concrete and masonry empire.
what this means is that you are smarter or more knowledgeable than your players.
see, I'd allow that, and then I'd either require he make a new character so his old one could stay at home and run the buisiness.
OR
I'd have such a simple device so easy to copy that he gets no real profit out of them.
using economics to defeat artifice
>And even that, only concrete? With only concrete they are going nowhere.
Never seen what the Romans did with concrete then, have you?
My players TRY this on me
>the players recover an intelligent staff that is the regalia of the Sea Queen
>staff communicates with them and idly suggests that the mermaid PC can make a claim to the River throne
>I, as the GM, emphasized that they would be making a CLAIM
>player asks me whether the claim will be recognized
>I say yes, the claim will be seen as official
>Player marches up to the Fae Kingdoms
>Arranges a meeting between the kings and their armies
>Makes the claim
>The kings exchange glances
>"You and what army?"
>He holds up the staff
>"You and what army?"
>Players chased off by the kings who had weaker claims but bigger armies
>"Waaaah, how come you didn't say that the kings would be jerks?"
Fucking hell. AND the player has read ASoIaF, so he knows the true value of "symbolic" shields.
the romans did that with tens of thousands of workers over hundreds of years.
whats a 4-man party gonna accomplish over the course of even a long lifespan?
he should have challenged them to some sort of duel, or just fireballed them. This is legit tactic
The GM who runs my groups weekly veto's any attempt to think outside the box since he can't cope/plan around things he doesn't understand
As usual "basic social skills" is the answer.
You tell them that you don't want to tell a story about guns, because you don't want to tell a story about guns.
Also you make a counter offer that pick up his interests in a way you are comfortable with.
Like giving the players the ability to craft fireworks.
Not OP, but I'd like to ask what should I do in a situation where a player wants to make something like pic related? I play with two engineers and one of them is playing Artificer. So they have the knowledge to make something like this and the resources, but it's for the most part pretty game breaking. The main problem is that when I try to explain that some things work out a certain way because of game balance they get upset and argue even more.
If they aren't going to listen and instead opt to be total faggots about it, let them make it and then have them get shot with one. Or just don't play with them, because they're brainlets who have to remind everyone that they're an engineer at all times to make them feel like their dicks are tiny. I run into their kind all the time, and sometimes you just can't reason with their ego.
5/6ths of my gaming group is engineers. None of us do this because we aren't also cunts.
>okay, your character has to spend 40 years of dedicated research and thousands of GP trying to make weak gunpowder
>now your character has to spend 10 years and thousands more GP trying to make a barrel, bullet, and material that actually fire and don't explode
>congratulations, your characrer has a 10lb weapon that causes 1d4 damage at a maximum range of 50 feet and takes 5 rounds to reload
>you can reasearch for another 5 years for every stat that you wish to increase by one point
So is groging a bunch of "NUH-UH MUH SETTINGS DIFFRENT SHUTUP I DONT HAVE TO EXPLAIN REEEEEEEEEEE!"
Whoops, that weapon actually weighs 60lbs
Oh, and lets not forget that you have to roll for a DC of 25 against INT for every year of study, else you have to repeat that year.
Have fun :^)
okay
1.) the cage material rusts/rots/degrades and the arrow goes off in the quiver taking whatever its stored with, with it(or the person carrying it)
2.) the arrow is dropped and the arrow goes off wasting the work
3.) the assembly process has a high DC because that is a lot of very small relatively high precision parts that are hard to make without machining tools and on a fairly high percentage chance it kills the maker. using remote methods isn't precise enough so no telekinesis-assembly or long tools
4.) the wooden retaining stick fails to break a percentage of times and the arrow does no damage
5.) no artificer will willingly make such an arrow because if the inherent dangers of making it
6.) the Spring-gonne illegality clause(see; Discworld, specifically the Fifth Elephant)
and I bet that works great for your group.
I like a LITTLE bit of thinking around the box. it makes the game more fun.
is an extreme case, and that does not make the game more fun, at least in my limited opinion.
you're actually reasoning with the "sunk cost fallacy" at work.
we've spent so much time and effort and money to get the degree that we have to think about how to use brain power as much as possible to reduce required muscle power.
yup, the cost of development in money and time is too damn high for a single person to innovate hard enough and most GMs encountering the gunpowder problem dont seem to realize it.
Folding
Metal
Chairs
Let's break this bitch apart. Do they have access to fucking aluminum? Do they know where to mine it? How to smelt it? Shape it? Do they know to make it out of hollow tubes? Because if you just make a chair out of pieces of iron, you have a folding, I mean sure, let's give them that, that's simple mechanics - heavy iron fucking chair. And it being rather fucking heavy I'd say negates the folding bit.
I mean it's kind of a funny story, sure, but in a more serious game this wouldn't fly, I'll remind you that for a time in istory, aluminum used to be more expensive than gold, and in recent history too, before we figured out exactly how to refine it.
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>heavy iron fucking chair
son, have you never used the older steel folding chairs?
you should instead be asking about making thin gauge sheet steel and spot-welding
My players
>player tries to Macgyver some adhesive to get out of a sticky situation
>let him because he has +20 to Macgyver checks
Your players
>Hurr can I invent glue, sell the patent, and be like super rich?
>No lmao glue doesn't exist in this setting
Okay but seriously. Tell your players it'd take a huge investment in laborers, time and money and that maybe adventuring is how they'd go about financing such an operation. If that's the direction they want to take the game then that's the direction your game is going in.
>Cheap salt
I imagine that that create water spell slot is more valuable.
If it isn't, fuck them with economics. Have someone else figure it out what they're doing and do it cheaper. There's always going to be someone with more rescources that can benefit for economies of scale.
Like the concrete thing. If they figure it out, how long do you think they have a monopoly? There Mason's guild gets their secret, or figured it out by experimenting. With a thousand journeymen and existing contacts and experience they do it better then the PC's could in a lifetime.
You're a shit GM for not giving them a clue about consequence their character would know.
I tell my players that I'm not running that kind of game. My games are normally adventures and kind of railroady. I tell them up front that it's more like a final fantasy game rather than an open world sandbox game.
oh man, dats some tasty bait 9/10, but only cuz I didn't fall for it.
though its actually clear that you did.
here is your
>(you)
DESU Pic related is fine so long as the PCs have some basic knowledge of thaumaturgy.
It's 10,000ish gp worth of magical items for a one shot ranged attack that forces a dx save vs death/banishment in an aoe. It's not gamebreakingly powerful, it's very magically expensive, and it relies on fantasy metaphysics not modern chemistry/physics.
>magically expensive
One of them is playing Artificer. This means they get a bunch of magic items for free. They do only get one shot at using it, but they could still one shot a campaign villain with this if the rolls are in their favor.
That is very easy to fluff consequences for. Make them never want to use it
>Players use the arrow three times in a short time span
>Make note that every time they do it the explosion is bigger and more chaotic
>Any time they do it again, spawn aberrations
>Describe that punching holes in the planes in such a violent manner is damaging the walls between the realms
>If they keep it up, make drastic consequences, such as portal storms where holes spontaneously tear open and monsters start spilling out, or a god sending an emissary telling them to quit poking holes in the realm
Alternatively
>"If you start powergaming then I will too. Have fun overthrowing the king when his entire band of archers has at least two of these each"
Actually yeah that seems like it work pretty well.
you can make folding chairs out of wood. In fact they did historically which is why the story is stupid.
they could possible one shot the villian. The villian will just get sent to the plains but the players could get unlucky and he gets sent to the Feywilds and manages to find his way back eventually.
wow I don't know what happened while I was typing this.
They could possibly one shot the villian if he gets sent to the plane of air, or they could get unlucky and he just gets sent to the feywilds and manages to find his way back eventually
>lol the arrow container rusted even though you've literally never had to deal with rust under normal circumstances ever
>lol the arrow went off despite the fact that you installed a safety mechanism
>lol the literal metal cage you made is too complicated to build so you might just fucking die if you make it
>lol nobody in the world is going to want to make you something as complex as a piston attached to a bird cage
Never DM. The arrow most certainly needs DM intervention but your methods of dealing with it are dogshit
>Bag of holding
>Lowest level weighs 15 pounds
Yeah you're not attaching that thing to an arrowhead. You might be able to modify the design to let you hammer-throw it but good luck managing that in the middle of a combat
There are no rolls against an imploding bag of holding in 3.5, man. You just automatically die.
well, someone seems to be pretty salty.
I do make my players work on rust prevention over long enough times in game. safety mechanisms can fail, the pin might fall out over time in the design as drawn. the cage inst the part that's delicate or dangerous to make, its arming the device, putting in the bag and hole. and I sure as hell wouldn't want to work with something that would totally and utterly annihilate me if I screwed up the assembly process or if someone jogged my arm.
then there's this point too
Arcanum has a pretty serviceable answer. Magic fucks with some basic physical phenomena. The first few pages of the manual are good summary.
It would make cool ballista ammo
Whenever my players try to revolutionize something (especially something that would upset the economic status quo) they are instantly the enemies of every major power. Much like how inventors are killed IRL and have their shit stolen in the name of national security.
/thread
>How do you resolve such events.
Well [player] your background doesnt seem to have anything even closely related to engineering or chemistry. Assuming you'd be able to there would be a long road to the finish with you needing a reason for attempting to make this revolutionary invention/discovery, years of trial and error to understand the reasons behind why it works and how you can truly utilize it without fail or for a relatively high success rate. So then we got to talk about the currency you'll be spending on this ti- Hold up, I'm not done yet. So we'll need to do some calculations on what we think you're overall expenditure during this time period will be a- Look [player] I'm just laying it all out for you so that in the future, when you want to ask something like this again that is not supported by anything in the cores books or supplements, we do not have to do this dance again. So you're lifestyle choice for this time period that you WILL be spending away from the group, oh got you a new character sheet by the way, will affect the speed at which this project of yours will be completed by, and if you wish to have hirelings to help with this process as well it could also expedite this process but then you need to pay them for their services of course and also wonder whether or not they'll end up selling your secrets. So regular CHA checks will be necessary to stay on good terms with them and over the course of this time rumors may have a chance of spreading as well so you'll need to need to take care of that in ways you deem worthy. What ways are those? I dont know Mr. Rocket Surgeon, you're the one who suddenly had the epiphany to invent this new device with absolutely nothing to serve as the catalyst other than your out-of-character knowledge so I'll just do rolls for what I think may happen later down the line and you just hope it doesn't get found out and stolen. Theres more to this so shall I continue or will you just play the god damn game?
Our barbarian once demanded that the wizard make the salty water into salt or he'd hit him with his axe. The GM let it slide, I guess it was better than the barbarian doing it himself.
In one of my groups we have a player who thinks he is smart enough to pull this kind of stuff off, but has a rudamentery understanding of chemistry, and will often do things that don't work.
His character has the ability to turn anything into anything, so to stop a hydrolic piston, he turns the hydrolic fluid into a highly reactive acid, I forget which one, but I do remember it was one that becomes a toxic gas in normal conditions.
Thankfully he also can't read and his ability did not make any permanent changes.
Another time the same guy tried to argue that turning all the nitrogen in a large area into Acetylene would be hotter then the sun as it would react with the oxygen.
Had this happen in a recent campaign. Party killed an evil noble and thought it would be fun to defraud him by forging a new will. Several sessions later, I had the noble's surviving family challenge that claim - thought I'd throw a fun Phoenix Wright-style RPG court battle at them.
Turns out one of my guys went to law school and drafted up a ton of arguments, counter-argument, etc., and brought up a ton of things in-campaign as proper procedures and "If they don't do X, they forfeit the right to counter-examine," etc.
Sucked a lot of the fun out of the encounter for everyone else since he took it so seriously while everyone else wanted a fun "take that" court battle.
Why would a fantasy land follow the same laws as our world.
Also if they are not nobles they would be fucked in a court of law against a noble.
Peerage is important in most societies that use it.
I'M MAD!
What this guy said: 'Fuck you, I'm descended from the god-king' has a lot more mileage to it than modern contract law.
This is the use for it. Bye bye castle walls.
Veto it if there's no easy in character justification for them knowing it.
Making salt might not require any score at all but discovering how could still be too difficult for even a level 20 wizard unlearned in the field
Ever heard of engineers and foremen? Peasants provide the labour, the party provides the drawings, know-how, and leadership.
I had a character who invented wheeled luggage (a success) and primitive roller skates (less so, but kids liked them). Granted, she was a natural-philosopher-in-training whose most valuable possession was a set of trigonometric and logarithmic tables.
The fun stuff is rarely technological, though— it’s more “lateral thinking” approaches to situations or problems. Ways to befriend, negotiate with, deceive, intimidate, threaten, bypass, or marginalize your opponents, to start with. I like roleplaying alright it’s been a long time since I actually played a game and I read Veeky Forums because I miss it because I enjoy trying to come up with clever solutions like that. It doesn’t always work, but it’s fun to try.
There is nothing smart in what you described, just annoying.
Tell your players to tone down the autism
>Like introducing chemistry into fantasy - making concrete or revolutionasing trade by combining desalination with create water in order to get cheap salt for sell.
That's not being smart, that's being an asshole.
I'm banned from playing magic users and thieves in regular games for similar reasons mostly using old con man and magic tricks and good tactics. evil campaigns she lets me run rampart not even having a plan, one time she just gave the situation on two armies one paladins one drow both enemies want the players dead and left it up to me to come up with a plan.
If there is no IC knowledge, can't use OOC knowledge. Simple as that.
Different story if a character stumbles upon new technology by mere chance. Even then it should take time and resources to understand and reverse engineer it.
Fpbp.
this fellow is correct. The players were at fault at not having a minor noble to funnel the wealth of the will too, while having dirt on the noble to insure cooperation.
Bringing "muh chemistry" into a fantasy game is most definitely not a sign of someone being smart; OTOH, I'd suggest checking for disorders on the spectrum.
>my man, have you ever played games with a machinist, carpenter, welder, pharmacist, or engineer?
I have, with most of those. What I don't do is play with cunts.
>Make glue
>To get OUT of a sticky situation
Should've given him a negative circumstance modifier.
Why are people pretending concrete of all things is supposed to be revolutionary?
It was invented by the romans, most fantasy games are set in a medieval period, so after that
As for gunpowder that people apparently have a hateboner for, the chinese knew about it since forever ago, if information flows easily, and it does because of magic, a bunch of wizards probably know about it
The trick is to tell the players that the thing they want to "invent" already exists somewhere else
>Gandalf the Russian
>His character has the ability to turn anything into anything
So why not turn the air into Stone Cold Stunners to lay the smack down on his enemies?
Because by RAW he had to be able to effect the entire mass of an object, and as I said earlier he was not as smart or clever as he thought he was.
OP is, I think. working with that. and all of those professions can and occasionally will think of alternate solutions
how are they gonna get investors?
and how long, in-game, will the campaign last?
not long enough to start seeing serious profits/benefits on the construction, if there even are any.
This doesn't work though, put a portable hole trough a bag of holding and you got a portable hole inside a bag of holding.
oh and every year, roll for something to not go wrong.
Sure its no a big chance for things to go wrong, but its still a chance.
That's not the player being smarter than the GM. That's the player metagaming modern day knowledge to get a bullshit advantage that's totally out of the scope of the actual game being played.
He probably loves watching rick and Morty.
These players are quickly removed from my games before they even get to session zero.
>When players are smarter than the GM
Time to switch gms then
So what I'm seeing in this thread is one of two things. 1) Players tend to, in settings that allow for it, try to take the historical steps that advanced our real history in these games. 2) Most of these attempts lead to GM issues.
There are some solutions that I can come up with right off the top of my head. The first, and easiest, is to remove the historical compatibility with our own history. Take your setting and make it so that there isn't the impetus to make gunpowder or industrial expansion. Or, even easier, simply make the chemical compounds necessary for higher industry rare or expensive to the point of prohibition.
Make there some monolithic cultural stance that is against the typical sciences. The best way to stop the gunpowderfags is to alter the setting you're playing in. The trick here is to allow for other types of creativity, since no one wants to be forced to play a game where they are stuck being the average retard in a setting of average retards. We live that life already, we escape that reality by playing these games. It's the GM's responsibility to run his games with a level of nuance. A firm hand over his setting must be married with a level of flexibility and preplanning that can allow the players to do what they want within the bounds of the overall setting and story.
tl;dr Alter the setting or alter the group composition.