Animism
Poor Goldie. She’s a great magic item when it comes time for balls-out combat, but it’s no easy task sneaking around with shining golden cutlery strapped to your hip. As such, Goldie spends a lot of her time locked away inside Thief’s bag of holding. No wonder she’s going a little stir crazy.
You see, when you lock your ideas away in isolation, they tend to drift and shift and get a little funny. It’s a problem for sentient items, but I find that it’s also a problem for gamers. This is a tough concept to spell out, so let me start out with a few examples. You remember the time Sorcerer thought he could rocket-jump using fireball? Or when Monk tried to steak a vampire? Or when Druid mistook Allie for a carry-on item? In each case, it’s easy to imagine the out-of-game conversation that led to the error in judgement.
- A fireball is just a big explosion, right?
- Can you kill a vampire by staking it through the heart?
- How many creatures can a broom of flying carry?
In each case, the hypothetical player has a desired outcome, but they’re not communicating it effectively to their GM. What you’ve got to remember is that, when you ask your GM leading questions, you’re probably not going to get the answer you want. That’s due to the simple fact that GMs aren’t psychic. Sometimes we don’t know what you’re getting at, and so we inadvertently shut down your plans before they can get off the ground. In other words, it’s much easier to approve of actions than hypotheticals.
Here’s another example. Suppose that you’re on a tropical island adventure. A mischievous monkey has just stolen your favorite magic item and scampered back into the trees. Being an animal lover, you don’t want to fry the little thief, but you certainly want your stuff back! Happily, being a wizard in a nautical setting, you’ve got the amusingly-named monkey fish prepared today.
“What kind of monkey do I become when I cast monkey fish?” you ask.
As the GM, I’m left to look at the spell text, look at you with a quizzical expression, and explain that the spell has nothing to do with becoming an actual monkey. And so you wind up frustrated since you just wanted a little bonus to your parley-with-monkey check. Had you actually said the words, “I want to cast monkey fish so that I can communicate more effectively with the monkey,” it’s much easier for me to follow your thought process. I might not allow the action, but there’s at least a chance that I’ll be amused enough by the creative idea to hand out a bonus to the check. I can’t do that when I don’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish.
Have any of your guys encountered this sort of interaction before? What were you trying to do? Tell us all about the player / GM miscommunications you’ve encountered down in the comments!
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My go to story on this topic harkens back to the first time I ran Anima: Beyond Fantasy. I had written my own little quest because the prequest required a degree of system mastery I didn’t feel any of us had at the moment. The party had helped a traveling noble by fending off some bandits, and the Noble allowed them to stay at her Estate as long as she was in town as thanks. While they were there, the Noble’s young ward (Specifically not her daughter or little sister) let out a scream in the night. The party rushed to the room to find that strange men had scaled the building and were climbing in the girl’s window with daggers drawn. Shouting a battle cry of “The Witch must die!”, the cultists declared it was a fight. When the cultists start losing, they use their ace in the hole. They release the evil creature bound in one of their daggers, a minor demon called a Night Terror. The party repels the cultists and Night Terror and here is where the mistake in question occurs.
The Knight player declares “I will not let the demon rest, don’t worry. I will hunt it down and slay it!” I nervously glance around as the rest of the party declares it a good plan, and decides to stay at the Estate in case the Cultists return. So the Knight goes out…alone…to look for the creature who is a threat to the whole party. I glance down at the creature’s stealth, decide its wounded and avoiding combat, and tell the PC to roll a Search. I describe him going through a couple of different locations in town, searching for the demon but finding nothing. Then I ask “So how long do you look for the demon?” The player utters the fateful words of “Until I find it!” Thinking he has a goal to impress everyone by facing the thing in single combat, I describe him eventually catching movement in the darkness and spotting the creature’s black spiked form on a nearby hill.
The player then declares “I didn’t actually want to find it!” At which point me and every other player give him the “But…you said…” Stare.
I’m with you on this one. Having read through twice I still don’t understand what the player wanted to have happen.
I’ve definitely had a player who never read beyond the little blurb describing the spells’ effects, and never actually read up on each individual spell his character knew before we started playing.
The big offender was Command. This being Pathfinder 1E, Command gives you a short list of command options like “Approach”, “Flee”, or “Drop what you’re holding”. You have to pick from the list. This player was rather frustrated when he learned that he couldn’t make up commands like “Commit suicide”, and that a mere 1st level spell was definitely not going to be able to force his enemies to kill themselves.
I think he was looking for Death Urge:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/deathUrge.htm
It must be right around forty years ago that I first got hold of a copy of the blue-book Basic Set. I still remember my skepticism at some of the spell names. “Cure Light Wounds? Like, burns from a medieval laser beam? How often does THAT come in handy?”
You might appreciate the hover-over text on this one: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/literal-magic
Ha! Those are awesome; I’m stealing half of them for Churrik, the…differently eloquent ratfolk merchant I mention further down this thread. He will absolutely think Flame Strike is what happens when contract negotiations break down with Sella’s summoned fire elementals.
Churrik already DOES think the name of the spell you referenced in that comic itself is “Expletive Runes”. Stands to reason, since we first encountered the spell in the form of a profanity-laced screed written by an angry necromancer, which detonated in our paladin’s face as he read it aloud to the group…
This reminds me of a story about a new Shadowrun player whose character wanted to move from the roof of one building to another. He looked through his equipment list, and then said: “I rappel across to the other building on my Sleeping Tiger line.”
Sleeping Tiger is a fashion line of tailored, high class armour. Not any kind of rope.
lol
What’s with the tiny shield for mice?
What do you think a feather token looks like?
To be fair, until I saw the feathers I thought it was an arrowhead. Could have been for a silver/mithril arrow, I suppose.
Thief should really get a handy haversack, then Goldie can be just a move action away.
And give up the extra loot-carrying capability? A good Thief needs a good swag bag.
An experienced and discerning thief carries both. The Handy Haversack for tools of the trade and important items like Potions of Hide from Undead, Tanglefoot Bags, and Wands of Silent Image and also a Bag of Holding for Loot. Because the Bag of Holding and Portable Hole are the only Extradimensional spaces with their weird interaction rules, you can even keep one in the other.
Look at Ms. Muscles over here with her ability to hold two different bags. Some people have encumbrance issues, OK? 😛
Strength was her dump stat.
My wizard STR 8 carried a handy haversack (for most things), efficient quiver aka. the golfbag (staves, wands, rods etc), and spring-loaded sheaths with his favorite wands. He was prepared for anything, and as it was pathfinder, creating him at 15th level was the largest excel project I’d done to that point and took about 6 hours.
Point being, money + magic > muscles.
Naw man. We can reduce that equation. Muleback cords > muscles.
once in a game the group got a powerful sword, powerful, sentient, intelligent, animated sword. The sword also got claustrophobia, making the act of putting it in his scabbard and very fun and terrible occasion. His screams, pleas and cries where a symphony pf pleasure to me. Just happens that was the result of asking the DM to give the sword more “personality”. Good thing it wasn’t me who screw that wish 🙂
I met a sword like that once. I believe her name was Dawnbringer.
Our sword was other, not that one. It was a steel sword, sharp and curve edges, and it speak through many mouths formed on the blade. Kinda like the illustration of the “Blade of pain and fear”, D&D 3.5th Edition, Libris Mortis The Book of the Undead, page 63, less evil looking through. If i recall correctly it was suppose to be some sort of eldritch abomination in the form of a sword, but the idea was scrapped together with half the campaign. So it ended as a colorful note on the campaign 🙁
There’s a charming (or inane depending on how you feel about it) reoccurring joke along these lines in Androids and Aliens podcast (by the GCP). It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but worth a listen if you haven’t.
So… I may have written my thesis on the GCP. >_>
I had a character who was infamous for making misconceptions like these in-world. Churrik was a warren-dwelling ratfolk who idolized his merchant uncle, one of the rare ratfolk who had traveled extensively on the Surface (or at least claimed to.) Churrik himself was visiting the Surface for the first time in search of trade opportunities when he fell in with our motley crew of adventurers.
When our sylph air kineticist (and expert meteorologist) warned that a storm was coming, Churrik was torn between curiosity and trepidation. He had no real idea what a storm was, but he vaguely remembered reading that a powerful storm could lift a person bodily into the sky! So that night, when a hungry drake swooped down on our campsite, Churrik raised the warning. “It’s the Storm! The Storm is attacking!”
After the fight, the sylph patiently explained what a storm actually was…but though Churrik was quite bright, he was a conceptual packrat who would never willingly give up an idea once it was in his head. So while he now knew that a storm was a meteorological phenomenon, a storm was ALSO a great scary flapping thing with wings and teeth, and if he warned you about one on the way, it was important to discern which he meant.
(One player drew a wonderful picture which, in-world, was from a ratfolk childrens’ book written by Churrik’s cousin, based on his interpretation of Churrik’s letters home. It showed our adventuring party…kind of. The cousin had drawn the kenku as a giant chicken, the sylph as a whirlwind, the strongman monk as a sort of sasquatch thing, and our wizard, who’d had an unfortunate streak of problems with fire spells and dry forests, as a living brushfire in a very fashionable dress.)