Key Item
This is a second-hand story, but it made an impression on me. It comes courtesy of Laurel’s college days, and it involves the Dark Sun setting.
If you’ve never heard of Dark Sun, you should do yourself a favor and give it a look. It’s a dark fantasy, planetary romance with Dying Earth overtones, and the art kicks more ass than a tarrasque with caster levels. For purposes of this conversation however, the important point is that the bleak wasteland of Athas is a desert setting.
It was a college gaming club, and Laurel had made an elf PC. The class doesn’t really matter, because elves get “desert craft” as a freaking racial ability. You see, Dark Sun elves are a nomadic lot, and they make their living either through herding, raiding, or trading out in the wastes.
“Is there anything else anybody wants to do before you set out?” says the DM.
Nope. They were all set to trek through the desert and kill its inhabitants.
“OK then. You sleep peacefully the first night, but wake to catastrophe! All of your water has evaporated due to the extreme heat of the desert!”
I wasn’t there, but I like to imagine the players looking at this schmuck like the “His Master’s Voice” dog.
“What… What do you mean ‘evaporated?'”
“I mean that you are in danger of dehydration. Make a Fortitude save.”
The way Laurel tells it, this DM expected the party to bury their water. You know. So it wouldn’t evaporate through their water skins.
“Wouldn’t my elf know to do that? I mean, ignoring the fact that we aren’t carrying water around in open containers, I’ve lived in the desert my whole life.”
“Then you should have declared that you bury your water.”
Lesson learned. Don’t be like that Dark Sun DM. Assume that the PCs are at least somewhat competent. Because “Gotcha” DMs suck, and you should strive not to.
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Urgh, i played with such a DM once, and then never again. It slows the Game to a Never ending, exhausting frustrating, crawl. This DM being very mean also hat a “D20 Destiny” Dice, which almost always rolled baldy and which he rolled like every 5 minutes.
Rolling badly with this “Destiny Die ” meant, hey even more Stuff thats against you, bad luck bad luck. Stuff like, you Rob someone in an ally, hey just THAT moment, Law Enforcment shows up what are the Odds? Hey it’s a gigantic Storm! You are searching for Shelter? Roll Destiny dice. And so on and so on,…
Oh you didn’t roll baldy? No Worries I’ll let you roll again, in 5 Minutes.
We completed the Game, but it wasn’t fun, that was a DM who just played against the Players not with them.
As a Player he was a massiv Power Gamer. Luckly that one time where he DM was the last Time i had to play with him, because after that we kicked him politly from the Group.
There’s a reason it’s PvE, player versus environment, not PvOOOPCEDMG, player versus omniscient, omnipotent, over powered chaotic evil dungeon master god. The DM is supposed to provide an environment for the players that they enjoy playing in, not do everything he possibly can to make the game an absolute nightmare for the players. I mean, unless the players like it that way, but I’m pretty sure most don’t.
This is the main reason I’ve stopped bothering with the D&D Group on-campus. The DMs I’ve dealt with have been extremely “Players vs. DM”.
My roommate had similar experiences as I did: He played a Bard who focused more on the personality part, and decided he wanted to do various minstrel things in his down time. The DM said “Well sorry there’s already a Bard here. An autistic bard that hates competition.” For EVERY TOWN. This was the same autistic bard (Which, by the way, is moreso why I left that group, being a person of Autism myself), in every town we came across. There was also a recurring thief who would show up about every other hour. Even after we killed him. Twice. And that isn’t even mentioning the time when he made me give up my paladin’s hand to a pile of supposedly inert purple ooze because one of the other players made it “smell appetizing with prestidigitation”, made us all roll a will save, and I happened to be the only one to not make it.
In the newest game I had joined, I was thrust into the middle of a Castlevania-esque gothic vampire setting. I though, alright, cool, this ought to be fun.He put us up against a fucking Vampire Lord. At level 5. It’s not like we really had much of a choice, either. We were railroaded into it, and sure enough, five 5th-level adventurers barely made it past three at-level encounters without rest. And by the way, we’re trapped in there. No doubt if I leave the group he’s gonna spin it as “oh Dio killed you in your sleep kufufufu”. Yes. He put us up against Dio. And yes. Every time said “Dio” is on screen he goes “Kufufufu”. It isn’t even funny, it’s so fucking dumb.
Needless to say, I’ve lost faith in the public around here to have any sort of fun tabletop gaming. I’m in a private group now and besides one fucking edgelord who keeps producing evil furry characters who are more than willing to screw everything over, everything’s going alright. So I’ve got that going for me… which is nice.
That Dio thing is pretty cringey. It especially sucks because I’ve seen that scenario work well. If Strahd shows up to toy with the PCs at mid-level, it can be a really cool moment when you see yourselves outclassed but decide to press on despite the odds. When that’s handled poorly… Well, “Kufufufu.”
I’ve got an unexpected pang of sympathy for that GM. You remember the session summary I posted last comic? The one about the disappointing triceratops? Well the only reason the party missed getting the drop on that Medusa cult was the “shit goes wrong” die. I figured there would be a 1/10 chance that the party runs into a complication, and that unlucky 1 came up on the d10. I don’t think my players were fully on board for that decision. That might have to do with the subsequent petrifaction, but I’ve still got to wonder: When can bad luck come to the party? If you’re in he middle of a shadow run heist, when do the countermeasures begin to feel cheap rather than challenging?
I DM as well, i do not use “Shit goes wrong Dice”. Actually, in my Games the Players just have bad luck around 0 to 2 Times per Session depending on how much they Screw up themselves. I don’t mind if someone rolls for that.
But there is a difference in rolling literally every 5 Minutes, and rolling once or twice per Session. Stuff like that happening once or twice? Exciting, nice unexpected, dangerous, Interesting even, if my Chracter is like No no no no no crap!
But if there is a complication every literal God damn 5 Minutes, it’s just mean. Also we had our Social Guy deliver really good convincing Speeches, however instead of the DM just telling him “well roll Social Skill”. Things always ended up badly for him unless he himself ANNOUNCED, he was rolling his skill, and rolled it. You didn’t announce that you were rolling beforehand, but you delivered a good Speech? WELL SCREW YOU YOU AUTO FAIL!
Unless i am playing Dark Heresy, and have 5 Backup Characters with me, that kind of Stuff is just the DM amusing himself on cost of the Players,
Also if you want to make the Players Fail once with a complication it’s simple. Build in more Dice Rolls, from THEM. They won’t feel helpless because your bad luck Dice just say: Lol you’re screwed! If the Fighter fails his Check for sneaking by, well then things just may be about to get loud.
Generally if the whole Group has to make one or two Checks, you are pretty much guranteed, that one of them will screw up, without the Players feeling cheeted.
Why? Failing a Dice Roll is annoying, but it happens. Getting screwed over by a “Destiny Dice”, which you just feel helpless against since you got no control over it just feels Frustrating.
And Complications without Rolling any Dice, just gameplay, well thats just the Game.
Sorry for Ranting.
Not at all. You make some excellent points. In fact, I’m sitting here reconsidering how hard the “chance for something to go wrong” needs to assert itself in my games. Players like it when their plans go off, and it’s very easy for “the unexpected” to feel like the GM just trying to mess with you.
In my particular case, the players found an evil cult ritual, retreated to another room to strategize, and then came back ten minute later. I thought that a 10% chance of a cultist moving into the wrong place at the wrong time and possibly raising the alarm if A) the players lost initiative and B) she got away, would make for an interesting hiccup. But my players don’t care that there was only a 10% chance of that happening. They just know that it happened, that the cultist survived bad paladin attack rolls, and that the last-minute triceratops fell flat on its face. All of this combined to frustrate the table, turning a cool plan into a fighting retreat. That should happen from time to time, but it should feel like the monsters are winning rather than the GM.
I took so long to reply because I’m sitting here like, Damn. The dude makes some good points. Furthermore: https://media.giphy.com/media/8QglrrcNI3sLC/giphy-facebook_s.jpg
In cases like that where character knowledge would exceed player knowledge, you should at least have the players roll knowledge checks to see if their characters remember (with appropriate DC.) If the DC is right, then you shift blame on the dice trying to kill them, and everyone already knows how cruel the dice are.
It sounds to me like the DM was trying to give the players a harsh introduction to how cruel the world is, but that method just feels adversarial and leaves a bad taste in player’s mouths.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Critical Role lately, and one of the most remarkable things to me is how nice all the NPCs are. There are exceptions, but for the most part all the NPCs are disposed to be polite to the party. Something as basic as that can really change the feel of the world, making the game’s atmosphere feel less adversarial almost as a background thing.
Does Laurel have some aversion to drawing Sorcerer? (similar to how Rob Liefeld was sick of criticizing how he drew feet so he always frames panels above the feet when possible) Every time the anti-party has shown up as of late it’s been sans-Sorcerer.
I dislike elves and elf-kin too, but if that was an issue you should have made Wizard a Gnome.
Also: Sleazy voice Woo Barbarian, take it off!
I asked her over lunch.
“It’s weird. I’m not in love with his design, but of all the anti-party I’d most like to play him. Come on. He’s a half-elf sorcerer. That is so me.”
Otherwise, it’s a restriction of our single panel style. The panel gets crowded when you try and throw in more than three figures.
Closest I had to this was the GM who introduced me to D&D, Shadowrun and WoD… Shadowrun, especially, since he would pull out every dirty trick he could think of to make our runs turn South. It didn’t help that we were all Marines, so we kitted out with really impressive hardware… So he upped the ante on the subterfuge.
A decade and a half later, and I’m still jumping at shadows with my other GMs. 😛
Our Shadowrun group had eight players, and planning would take for freaking ever. Meanwhile I found myself sitting there like, “Things are going to go wrong. That’s the game. Let’s just pick one of our fifteen plans and execute.”
It’s tough when the game itself encourages unexpected surprises on the GM’s part. Still not sure how to make that mess feel fair. :/
As I was more into roleplaying than most people in my groups, I tended to drag things down this way as a player, particularly when I first started out playing D&D. After me stopping the party for something like the third time before we left town to make sure everyone had their requisite number of ration-packs, water purification tablets, bedrolls, pints of lamp-oil, lengths of rope, etc etc etc, one GM had the group suddenly and surprising find a magical vending machine.
It was a little pouch that you drop coins into and pull out food. A copper coin gave you a loaf of bread and a cup of water. A silver coin was a 3-course meal (soup or salad, entree, & desert). A gold coin was roast-beef with all the trimmings or a stuffed turkey, etc.
So yes, I was being so anal-retentive that the DM got tired of hearing about how my character had resorted to foraging again or was crafting torches that he gave us a magical item to help speed up the process of getting back to the real encounters he was designing.
I’ve toyed with the idea of inventing “forge elementals” to streamline the crafting process. You pay them in gold for their services and they imbue your sword with magic while you craft it.
I say: go for it. The crafting system in 3.5 was a load of bollocks anyway. I don’t know if Pathfinder managed to do it better, but IMO it would be hard to do much worse.
I think if you’re going to be encountering a specific type of hazard, it’s worth it to require the players to at least mention they are thinking about it.
If you’re traversing a temperate forest, then yes there are probably enough streams and rivers and such that water isn’t going to be an issue. But if you say “desert” the first thing that most people think will probably be “no water” so the players should at least mention they are considering what to do about supplies. Otherwise the game turns into a version of retroactive-common sense:
“Of course we bought water for the desert journey!”
“Of course I bought the snake-bite kit for our journey through Death-serpent canyon!”
“Of course I stocked up on 20 flasks of alchemist’s fire before we went off to fight the trolls!”
At what point do you draw the line?
This is where I think a GM prompt is more than a courtesy. It’s a necessity.
To put it in video game terms, my very first CRPG was The Final Fantasy Legend for Game Boy. I didn’t know how to equip items. No one told me, and that was a pretty stressful experience. Whether it’s at the tabletop or in front of a console, I think that, “It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this!” is preferable to, “You should have known to get the sword before trying to play the game you dummy.”
I have a name for this based on the most common instance at my table:
I call it Schrodinger’s cart. (name stolen from some GITP member describing my scenario)
In the evil viking campaign that I’ve probably mentioned here before, the PCs had a cart full of dragon hide, unicorn meat, and whatever other pillagings they’d picked up along their journey. Of course, I would only very rarely remember to ask them what they were doing with the cart, so it was always a matter of narrative ambiguity whether they had it with them or had left it back on the ship. Of course, if the terrain that they eventually encountered after a couple days’ travel was cart-navigable they had it, but if there were rivers or canyons that the cart couldn’t cross then they’d obviously left it behind at the ship a week ago.
It used to drive me mad.
That wasn’t a cart. It was a brilliant plan!
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/brilliant-planner/
As a GM, I draw the line at Skills. You know, those things Pathfinder doesn’t really pay attention to. If you have at least a few ranks in the survival skill, you know you need to stock up on water before leaving for the desert. If a party member doesn’t specify this, I will mention it to that party member. The other situations are closer to Knowledge: nature or Knowledge: Geography, but the game actually has this covered if you just pay attention.
But then I’m also one of those GMs who spends ten minutes of Session One looking over everyone’s character sheets and writing down notes on characters like Saves, Perception Checks, Languages Spoken, Race, Class, Physical description, Charisma score, and any specific modifiers (+2 vs Illusions) that I need to know about in case I need to make a roll for the players, say in the instance of a Trap or Illusion save that the party doesn’t know is an Illusion. (Sometimes I will also just request an unmodified D20 roll and add the modifier myself so that players don’t know what they are rolling. )
Good on ya for writing down conditional modifiers for behind-the-screen use. Them’s the “eat your vegetables” of GMing. I know it’s good for me, but I don’t wanna.
The closest thing to this that I have encountered is when the party went through a serious change-up, with three players leaving (real life reasons, anticipated in advanced, no hard feelings or anything) and three new ones joining. One of the leaving PCs was our Cleric, and another was our utility Sorcerer. In the shuffle, we didn’t transfer our big stack of wands and ended up, at Level 8, out in the wilderness, an in-game week from civilization, in a town of ~200 people, with no magic healing. No spells, no channel energy, just a couple of potions. That was rough.
I can just hear hear a Bronx wizard going through this mess.
“This town sucks! They got a gas station, a stop light, and zero heals. Last time I go adventuring upstate. C’mon Joey. Let’s go and shake down that cow for reagents.”
Perhaps the funniest bit was when our Gunslinger tried to buy a Beneficial Bandolier. Yeah, it’s only a 1000 gp item, but no one in the area even had firearms in the first place. The place was so uncivilized we were amazed that the peasants weren’t packing Barbarian levels.
After five years IRL and one year in-game, I finally upgraded my megadungeon’s small town into a large town. I rather naively expected my 13th-level players to be excited about the opportunity to search for 2,000 GP items. They took their half a million [sic] gold and started a dozen constructions projects instead.
If the town is too small, just make the town bigger!
So assuming that this is still Pathfinder, and the holy character is Paladin, why doesn’t he just cast “Create Water”? It’s on his spell list.
Going back to the Planescape game I’ve gone on about in length, we came back to our base once after a mission to discover that we’d been robbed of some of our wealth. The Beholder’s (one of the party members) horde was untouched (due to traps), but the others were not so fortunate. When asked, the GM said that we didn’t specify that we didn’t lock the doors.
Now granted, the setting was Sigil, the City of A Thousand Doors, the City at the Center of the Multiverse, and if anywhere would be prone to petty crime, it would be such a city. After that incident we never left the base without saying “WE LOCK THE DOORS!”
Did you lock the interior doors? IIRC any door in Sigil will act as a portal under the right circumstances, even if it’s not intended to
We locked every door. We also kept a bag of chickens to test if our door became a portal to another plane.
Pathfinder? Heavens no! This is an internally consistent fantasy world unrelated to any particular game system.
*bluff check*
Can’t Paladin and Oracle cast Create Food and Drink? Or are Oracles a “Spells known” caster? (Based on 5E, so maybe I’m completely off base since HoH is Pathfinder based)
If Paladin can’t, does this mean the anti-party is below level 9?
Paladin can cast it as a first level spell, but they also forgot to declare that they were buying Nalgenes.
Ah. 5E doesn’t do the “It’s a level X spell for you” thing, every spell simply has a set level with Create Food and Water being level 3, so it’s available at 9 for half-casters.
Also the 5E version’s water comes in containers.
https://www.dnd-spells.com/spell/create-food-and-water
I’m not sure that spell creates containers. I read it as “containers that are in range when the spell is cast.”
FYI, I do play quite a bit of 5e. Warlock in Out of the Abyss and paladin/rogue in Strahd at the moment.
The human (or gnome or half elf or whatever) body can be a container within range. More precisely, you can aim for the stomach, since it doesn’t have to be a container within line of sight.
That’s what I would say if the GM is giving us grief for not buying water in town anyway. I’m not sure to what extent I actually believe my own logic.
The Paladin didn’t prepare the Spell beforehand and the Oracle doesn’t know the Spell, since she is a spontaneus Caster that means she thought other Spells more importend.
Which one though i wonder?
In Dark Sun, any spell that creates food or water does not work. Magic is breaking down in that world, and pretty much all “make survival easy” spells do not exist.
Y’know, the more I thought about it, the more I have a problem with the “all your water evaporated” story- there are multiple ways it doesn’t make sense.
I find it hard to believe that it’s hotter during the night than during the day, and you certainly can’t bury your water during the day, so how do you ever carry more than 1 day’s supply of water?
I’ve read of several desert creatures that bury themselves in the sand to keep cool, but that’s usually during the daytime when the sun is up.
Also, the containers have to be at least marginally water-tight or they couldn’t have held water in the first place. If the temperature is so hot that it’s raising the temperature of the water sufficiently to boil it, then I think the party has other issues.
I think that Laurel’s GM might have mis-interpreted something he read somewhere, or possibly the rules were just flat-out wrong about how real-world stuff should be represented.
If you are about to depart on a long journey, then it might make sense to cache supplies (such as water, which is heavy) along the route so that you don’t have to carry them the whole way and can retrieve them on the way back. Have to bury water every night to prevent evaporation raises a host of logistical and environmental issues though.
This would probably be my knee-jerk response to something like this: pile on so many questions that the GM either gives up or admits they made a mistake somewhere, and/or never tries anything like this again so I we don’t end up playing 20 Questions instead of D&D.
I’m not sure 20 Questions is quite accurate. This was a gaming club, so the would have more likely defaulted to Catan. 😛
If we’re playing D&D then I assume we’re playing a fantasy game, and everyone agrees to let little things slide so that no one breaks the world for gits and shiggles.
If the GM wants to use “real world” phenomenon to dick me around, I’m going to demand he teach me a full set of courses in biology, ecology, geophysics, astronomy, and anything that might be a problem so I can stop being dicked around. I’ll play by the rules, but I want to know the rules, first.
I’m perfectly willing to burn down a character, a game world, and even a gaming group if it means I don’t have to put up with this kind of crud.
Spite is my super-power.
I feel like every GM, even myself, occasionally pulls that kind of thing. Hopefully unintentionally. Not really shocking that the GM who is in control of the world is going to think of things the players who are focused on their characters are not.
Being a good GM means that when the players point out they’ve done this, the GM considers it and goes “you’re right, it doesn’t make sense your characters don’t know how to survive in a world they’ve lived in for two decades/centuries the moment you took control” or whatever the common sense/specific knowledge a character would have is.
As for water evaporating out of your waterskins…. Did that GM understand what a waterskin is? If something is water tight it doesn’t matter how hot it gets… unless I guess it gets so hot the water inside all turns to gas with enough pressure to burst it’s sealing. Which either means shoddy workmanship or the PCs have bigger problems like that fact they’ve effectively decided to take a stroll from the desert into the elemental plane of fire.
As I understand it, burying your water is so that it’s cool and thus helps keep your body temperature lower. I guess it hydrates you better than hot water but certainly not making the difference between it counting as no water for the purpose.
So, as expected of THAT KIND of GM, it’s both a dick move AND is nonsense based on something they probably heard once and misunderstood and decided to enforce without bother to do a single minute worth of research.
I like to give my GMs the benefit of the doubt whenever I can. It’s hard holding the machinery of an entire universe inside your head, and inconsistencies are bound to crop up from time to time. After all, a desert adventure where water management is a major theme is interesting as a conceit. Getting there by kicking all semblance of verisimilitude in the teeth is bad wrong fun.
Exactly! If this is a rule I expect to see it printed somewhere!
There’s being helpful and there’s being challenging. The problem with the latter is if players weren’t told ahead of time to expect it, making it feel unfair. In your case it also sounds like the DM knew something about desert survival and expected the other players to know or was waiting for them to “screw up” and rub in your faces how much smarter he is plus being a dick.
I’ve been looking through homebrew and adventure league adventures to have some things ahead of time for my players to do and since they’re starting in a desert it’s something that has come up in at least one. “A huge sandstorm is headed your way and you only have 1 round to do anything! What do you do?” is one of the obstacles presented and the consequences of it are rather harsh considering the amount of time to do anything much less think. The ideas it gives to help out feel in line with the comic since they’re specific to the terrain and situation. Definitely going to be tweaked when I finish reading it.
As for 5e it seems as thought they have a good amount of items and options to have hunger and thirst fall to the wayside. Bead of Nourishment/Refreshment, the Create spells, and plain ol’ rations are there to use. Homebrew is one of those things where you can make a ring that gives you the optimal amount of sustenance while wearing it as an example. As long as it’s something that the players think is interesting it’s all good because let’s be honest, tracking how much food or water you drank everytime a short/long rest goes on is boring.
Now see, i really enjoy setups like that, but the one round thing seems bizarre. I would think that one minute would be more appropriate. Or else the party notices the storm approaching as they’re negotiating another challenge, so they’ve got 1d4 rounds to choose between finishing off the monster/hazard/puzzle and preparing to take a sand blaster to the dome.