Same Page
Paladin is a bit of a jerk. He is the lawful stupid alignment. He made Necromancer cry that one time. But lest we forget, Necromancer creates flesh-eating abominations from the remains of desecrated dead people. Homegirl ain’t exactly innocent. That’s the thing about relationships. It’s usually a two-way street, and learning to communicate with the other party is just as important at the gaming table as it is on the battlefield. Nowhere is this more evident than in theater of the mind style description.
Today’s warning against linguistic ambiguity comes courtesy of a recent trip to Doskvol. Like so many campaigns in the time of COVID, this one plays online. And even if Roll20 is great at representing the pseudo-Victorian metropolis of Blades in the Dark at zoomed-out scale, we’re down to verbal description when it comes time for tactical heisting. That’s exactly where we find our b̶r̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶o̶e̶s̶ dastardly shits in today’s story.
So no shit, there we were. We’d done a bit of asking around and so discovered the location of a secluded smuggler’s cove. It was located near a deserted park in an unfashionable quarter of the city. We even knew when our quarry was set to arrive. Unfortunately, there was going to be a lot more of them than there were of us. Running with a three-man crew meant we had to play it smart rather than plotting a straightforward ambush.
The plan was simple. Our Cutter would start some fracas with the smugglers. At the earliest opportunity he would bail on the fight, turning tail and running through a set course which I (the gang’s sneaky-ass Lurk) had set with booby traps. These inconveniences would slow the presumable-enraged pursuers, giving our fighty-boi just enough time to reach the race’s finish line. That’s where the third member of the crew would come in. Our Whisper would set a ritual in motion to summon up some hungry ghosts in the area. They’d dispatch the smugglers for us while we looped back around to take that precious cargo.
There were three points where things went wrong. All of them came down to miscommunication.
- The Cutter was instructed to bloody our enemies’ noses a bit before retreating. The trouble was that the plan included one little caveat: “If by some miracle it looks like you can take them all, then go for the kill and save us some trouble.” In consequence, the Cutter was beat half to death by the time he remembered that Plan B was not Plan A.
- As the trap-laying Lurk, my ideas were simple. I’d pay off a cabby to pull out from a blind alley on my signal, giving the fleeing Cutter a head start in the chase. Once he made it into the alleyway, I’d rig one of those nice alley fences to swing open for him but latch shut for the pursuers, forcing them to climb over. The only problem was that I’d overlooked the “you’re in a city park” part of the plan. There were no alleys in sight.
- Finally, when things started to go south and the Cutter was getting beat to a pulp, our Whisper invoked her Tempest ability to call down lightning on the enemy combatants. As we realized later, however, she was the entire width of the city park away. There was no way she could see the fight in the ‘secluded smuggler’s cove’ from her location.
In all cases, a simple clarifying question could have resolved matters: How long should I fight before retreating? Are there any alleyways in the area? How close is the ghost ritual to the cove?
Just to be clear, these are all relatively minor issues from an otherwise successful session. The plan worked out, and we got away with the goods before our own summoned ghosts could kill us. But in the same vein as Necromancer’s ‘raising a family’ oopsie, getting on the same page as your partners is always worth getting right. Part of the responsibility lies with the GM: when it comes to theater of the mind, describing positional relationships and distances is an acquired skill. But by the same token, players have to step up and make sure that their assumptions are accurate.
And so, in the spirit of better interpersonal communication, I now turn to all the Heroes out there with today’s question of the day. When has your mental model failed to match the GM’s? How could you have avoided the issue? Tell us all about your most unfortunate misapprehensions down in the comments!
ARE YOU AN IMPATIENT GAMER? If so, you should check out the “Henchman” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. For just one buck a month, you can get each and every Handbook of Heroes comic a day earlier than the rest of your party members. That’s bragging rights right there!
I was running War For The Crown with a party with… let’s call it interesting morals. Now, technically, Inquisitors have the benefit of not being bound to their deity’s tenets- that’s why they’re Inquisitors, and not Clerics. But even I had to bump our Sarenrae Inquisitor’s alignment down to True Neutral when he walked up to a man who was screaming for mercy and slammed a scimitar through his skull. (Then set up a Nightmare for him in the form of a dream vision from Sarenrae calling him out and giving him a ‘this is what might happen if you continue down this path’ vision of his home city in flames, with him in the invading army.) That message took almost a month to arrive, because he used the Keep Watch spell to avoid ever sleeping like some kind of demented gargoyle.
Oof. Alignment debates are perhaps the epitome of this issue. My personal take is to ask the GM how they handle alignment and then go with that. I may not agree 100%, but I’d rather play in the same world than have a pseudo-philosophical pissing contest.
The upside is, we both agreed what he did was fucked up. He eventually made his way back to neutral good over the rest of the campaign, but for a while even the other PCs were wary of him.
(Made for some good moments of npcs recognizing who they were and shitting themselves, though, since one of WFTC’s subsystems is a fame/infamy system.)
Now I’m beginning to wonder if the reason alignment debates are such a thing on forums is the lack of specific context. You and the inquisitor were able to align your visions in your own game. But when you present your resolution to others on the web, their frame of reference is “how I would do that in my game,” which misses the point of “Inquisitor and I both talked and agreed.” At that point, a third perspective doesn’t really add anything to the conversation.
I think it’s partially that, but also partially different ideas on what the alignments mean.
I generally use good/evil as a selfless-to-selfish scale, rather than overtly ‘this action is objectively good’ except in cases where it’s fairly obvious like murder, etc.
For example, my Lawful Good Sarenrae cleric and my Lawful Evil abadar cleric actually have very similar outlooks on life- both are of the opinion that the world is harsh and dangerous, and that the weak need the help of the strong to survive.
The difference in their worldviews is that the Abadar cleric believes the weak need to earn the mercy of the strong by being useful, while the Sarenrae cleric believes it’s the duty of the strong to protect the weak.
I take that for granted. It seems that no two gamers agree on what alignment means. And if that’s the case, the most important thing is aligning GMs’ vision of alignment with their players’. It’s akin to coauthors deciding the thematic significance of a story beat. Outsiders can interpret that significance for themselves, but GM and player have to get on the same page to move forward (or at least agree to disagree).
Being the GM more often than not myself, this happens very rarely personally. But in the group, it happened often enough in the early days that we quickly acquired a habit of asking “is there an X” or “What does Y look like?” before we started off on any crazy shenanigans that involved X or Y. Part of it is that the DM is only human, but a substantial part of it is that the players are looking for fairly small details key to their plans, details that the DM wouldnt even think to describe unless they were already expected to come into play.
As far as it goes, i think “never assume” has been one of the better takeaways from this group.
Yup. In my case, the thought process was, “We are in a city. There is always an alleyway.” But because Blades in the Dark relies on a retcon mechanic where you explain your clever plan mid-heist (think Oceans 11), that opportunity to ask didn’t appear until the oopsie was playing out.
I’m sure it’s a matter of getting used to… And lore than a little of me adapting to being a player again.
There is a mental image in the DMs mind. He is imagining things as visual “A”.
In the players minds, they are each imagining things slightly, or even wildly different. They have visual “B”, “C”, “D”, etc in their heads.
These visuals may not be entirely different, sometimes just variations on a theme, but one thing that is true (unless you know someone that is psychic, and if so, I pity them) – no one is in the other person’s head. Everyone is “seeing” a different thing.
This is why visuals are so important. Simple things. A mini for your character, or a drawing or other visual representation (our group uses HeroForge to craft our minis, just for the visuals, tho we have not had on actually printed yet). Also for scale differences. We have been dealing with a lot of giants and to actually see a scale image of how big these giants are compared to a typical humanoid has been helpful if giving us the idea of what we are really up against. (Similarly, I did a scale image of just our characters to show the difference between our 5 and a half foot elf and our nearly 8 foot tall goliath! as well as the rest of the group).
“Simple” maps of the space you are in. I know some people think that just seeing a map means BATTLE AHEAD, but if you get your group used to seeing a basic map of the area at any given time, then they never know when that map might become a battle space. As to the “simple” of it all, it doesn’t have to be accurate down to the inch, but a basic layout can help immensely to show where the turns and crosses are, how the layout of the rooms and passages effect line of site, where the doors and such are located. These things help a ton to cement the “space” that the characters are in.
This still only helps when you are trying to describe things that do not exsist, but it is a lot better than having nothing to go on, but the descriptions of the DM, who will inevitably forget some important detail that they have in their head, that will be important to the scenario coming up for the group (and vice versa).
As to when the theater of the mind has failed to indicate something that became important later? Flying. Always flying. I can’t tell how many times one of us (or one of the enemies we are fighting) has been flying and there has been a vague description of “how high”, only to lead to an argument as someone is grabbed or hit while flying and they don’t think they should have been. Or they fall from flying when KOd and the DM starts rolling for fall damage followed by the player saying “Oh, but I was only like a couple feet off the ground”. Similarly, the player thinks they are 50 feet above everyone, but the DM says later “The ceilings in here are only 20 feet high”. Etc.
Always… flying.
Laurel and I got into an argument about climbing, reach, and ceiling height in in our last “Curse of the Lady’s Light” session. Understanding just how much area an large creature with a 10′ reach can effect is crazy when you add in the third dimension.
It could have been worse, Paladin – it could have been your dad as well. Or whoever your racials come from.
I worry about who’s body the ‘kid’ belongs to, though. Paladins brother?
I’ll have to ask Laurel on that point. I’m guessing little brother, but that is some white boy hair on that kid.
No reason that the relationship was fully a blood one – Paladin/His possible-brother might not have been adopted. Why, adopting a waif and stray in need of a Lawful-good upbringing is just the sort of good deed a Lawful-Good household might easily do.
She really puts the ‘nec’ into romance.
Are you remarking upon the length of her neck, or mimicking the sound of a stooge?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/72/e7/3c/72e73cb15bdf5980b2a331687d4ab9a8.jpg
My guess is that it’s a play on words on necromancer, or romancer if she didn’t put the “nec” into it.
Yep. You can’t spell necromancer without romance.
I was travelling yesterday. And thus, sleep deprived, I misread the original “romance” as “necromancer.” Bleh.
I think one instance of miscommunication I recall having is an argument on what is a ’round’ (i.e. first round of combat) versus a ‘turn’ (i.e. player A’s turn), during combat, or for spells with weird cast times.
Oh man… The difference between a surprise round and “readying an action outside of combat” drives me up the friggin’ wall.
This used to bother me a lot, until I came to the conclusion that “readying an action outside of combat” isn’t a thing you can do.
Ready is a special initiative action, and initiative isn’t a thing outside of combat (or similar situations), so thus you can’t take special initiative actions outside of combat.
This also fits with how initiative checks, and surprise, being a representation of who reacts first (with no more than split second differences between even extremely high and extremely low results).
Are we talking PF1e? Came to the same conclusion.
But in my last 5e session, I had to bite my tongue when our (generally excellent) DM gave the fae noble we were fighting a free “everyone make a save” to start combat. We were in conversation. We were all aware of each other. Why does she arbitrarily get a freebie outside of initiative?
I chalked it up to “boss fight” and “dramatically appropriate,” but it still bugs the crap out of me when it comes up.
Yeah I was talking PF1, it is my instinctive language of dnd style gaming.
Though in 5e “ready” is also not a thing outside of combat (barring house-rules, rules not rulings yada yada), in this case because it exists solely on a list of “actions in combat” and relies entirely on interacting with “turns” and the initiative system which is (normally) not in use outside of combat.
The free “action” to start combat is a phenomena I have seen people use a lot, including in systems with no readying mechanic what-so-ever. A lot of people seem to like whomever says they do a combat thing first just automatically getting to get the drop on everyone else no matter what and only determining imitative afterwards. I don’t really get why.
(there’s also a phenomena where people seem to unconsciously apply that principle stronger for NPCs than for PCs, but I do see it happen the other way too, meaning that it only really screws over people that try not to resort to violence).
Seems like we’ve come to the same conclusions on this one. I do have a theory though: Sucker punching someone is the logical “inciting incident” for combat. If combat only begins when someone breaks the first beer bottle over that first drunkard’s head, how does it make sense for everybody else to act before that blow is even struck?
Now I think you and I might agree that it’s “gunslinger rules” rather than “bar fight rules.” There’s a tense standoff. Everyone is eyeing everyone else to see who makes the first move, and then things seem to happen near simultaneously in that first split second of action. But for a lot of people, making the paradigm shift from “bar fight” to “gunslinger” is a leap too far:
— “I punch ’em”
— First Punch Man has crappy initiative, and everyone else somehow acts “before” the inciting incident
— The guy First Punch man was originally going to punch to start the combat has already been dropped by the time he finishes swinging.
If ever there was a “mental models not lining up” moment, this is it.
I guess it’s on my mind since we just ran into this in Starfinder as well. The crew tripped an alarm, and they knew that some evil cultists were coming to investigate.
“I post up in the doorway,” says the soldier, “And I ready to blast anyone who comes into the hallway.”
As the GM in that game, my mistake was letting the phrase “I ready an action” pass without comment. I should have asked him to roll stealth (or perhaps Profession [soldier]) opposed by the cultists’ Perception. Dude was pissed when I didn’t want to give him his readied action, and I was annoyed that he was “trying to get a free shot” outside the structure of the rules. Bad business all around right there.
This is completely off topic, but this is a really interesting hypothetical situation on a lot of levels. Your romantic interest has raised some dead. Some of them are quite close to you, to say nothing of your romantic interest.
Do the Smites come out hot and furious? Are you confronted with the idea that the sanctity of the dead is more taboo than it is actually good or evil? Where do you end up falling on the entire spectrum of ‘what do’ here? I’ve only ever really seen this dilemma posed by Shawn of the Dead interestingly enough, and ultimately I liked the answer there-he did what he thought was right, but as a man, was just too flawed to apply that perfectly consistently.
Communication SNAFU’s… I can’t think of a single situation in which a communication issue came up in a particularly negative way other than straight up invalidating a proposed action. ‘You can’t do that because this, that, and the other.’ Then we’d usually have a laugh, someone apologizes for not being quite clear enough, and we move on.
These problems are heavily mitigated through using maps and tokens. It’s not perfect obviously and things are still wrong, but the everyone having a consistent vision helps a lot.
Dawn of the Dead and the zombie baby were all about that trope.
I do love me some visual aids as well. The only problem is that they take a lot more prep time than the theater of the mind.
I guess to be fair, I don’t like most zombie flicks, so I turn ’em off before they get to those sorts of things. The writing just doesn’t hold me. Sorta’ like trash can robots from a certain long running sci fi series, even I think conceptually said series is pretty great.
As for visual aids, I have a personal rule for prepping that kind of stuff. If I’m going to the trouble, I plan for one visual piece to be used at least three times. Asset management is a life skill!
I really ought to look into going through some bestiaries systematically with the token maker:
https://rolladvantage.com/tokenstamp/
Doing that mess piecemeal before every session gets old.
I use the ancient and arcane power of the Adobe magi, Powerword: Photoshop. Usually to do what you do with Tokenstamp basically, but I like my custom borders a little. It’s good editing practice as well.
And I also like using token packs from various R20 creators. There’s a few people on there who make really fantastic stuff and have authored enough of it so you can have a coherent world vision.
But I can’t hammer this enough. Asset management. Save your assets. If you take the time to make something, make sure you have reason to use it more than once. With filters, color corrections, opacity adjustments, and even good old fashioned directly painting on the image, you can also make variants of the same thing that seem like new assets.
Or you can give your big bad bosses a visual Phase 2 like I sometimes do. 😀 Like… I made a Colossal Wendigo boss for them, and if they met certain conditions, the giant dream spirit monster caught on green fire-sort of like how Bloodied worked in 4e.
It’s been about a year since then. People are still talking about that boss fight.
Failure to be on the same page:
Me: „we drive to town to dispose of cursed dead thing in church.“
5 minutes later:
DM: „anything you want to take to town?“
Me: „we drive to town to dispose of cursed dead thing in church.“
5 minutes later:
DM: „anything you want to take to town?“
Me: „we drive to town to dispose of cursed dead thing in church.“
15 minutes later at church:
My Character: „hello holy person, we want to dispose of cursed dead thing in your church.“
DM: „you didn’t say you bring cursed dead thing along“
but maybe the DM was just being a smartass:
The two homebrew campaigns I participated in devolved into grimdark, so it’s entirely in character to not let us dispose of the cursed undead thing to explore the outcome of that according to the AP.
That doesn’t seem to be “not being on the same page” as much as “DM willfully being obtuse”.
Seconded.
yeah, that’s what figured, but what’s the best way to call a DM out on BS like this?
Otherwise he’s a pretty darn good DM.
[crossing my fingers I typed the email correct this time]
Not sure if this counts, but there was one instance in the local game shop game.
I don’t remember all the context, but we were planning an ambush for some bad guys. We knew they’d be travelling down this road because it was basically the only road in the region.
The druid and wizard scouted ahead, one turning into a giant eagle and the other being gnome-sized enough to hitch a ride. As is typical, a random encounter happened, specifically a fight with some manticores.
Once it was over, the DM asked for some Perception checks to find the road again. The players protested that it was a road, it’s not that hard to lose. The DM said it was just a winding game trail, so it was in fact easy to lose.
Literally everyone at the table remembered the DM calling it a road, though, and the premise of this trip doesn’t make sense unless there’s an actual road for us to ambush the bad guys on.
I’m not sure if the DM was bad at communicating what was going on, or if he was just trying to think of something to discourage us from using such cheesy tactics as scouts in the future.
I think GMs get in this headspace where, “I have to challenge the PCs! Otherwise is will be a boring combat!” But rather than adding some mechanical bonuses to even things out, they wind up finding workarounds to void the PC’s hard earned tactical advantage. That’s my take on this situation anyway.
I’m going to second Colin here, but I don’t think it’s for that reason.
As the GM, you’re the only player at the table who’s job is to lose (Colin did a blog on that I think), and when you’re sitting there losing all the time, it can be really frustrating even though it’s your job. This is all the more true with newer GM’s.
^ definitely an element of that as well
I’m in an PbP where the GM constantly fails to accurately describe things and refuses* to post maps until asked, so yes, yes, I’m well versed with “the Player’s mental model and the GM’s mental model are askew”.
Also in this group there are many, many, many Players who can’t be arsed to remember what was described four posts above the one where they are posting, so at least half of the frequent confusion is not the GM’s fault.
He’s busy, I get it, but then if you’re not posting a map, be precise with your description.
Can you give us an example of “vague description” vs “useful description?” Is it all about adding units of measurement to your exposition?
Specifics? Okay, example:
The group is mucking about in the sewers and maintenance tunnels under the city, and we hit a t-junction. One way is described as leading to a room with light*, the other to a room but the passage continues past it and curves.
To minimize our “6s” the party splits and two go to the “room at the end of the tunnel, not the the one with a curve past it”. They kill the two enemies in there and rejoin us at the ‘t’. We go and clear the other direction all the way to a locked gate. We’ve cleared a bunch of enemies, and are loaded up with loot, so we call it a day.
Later we come back to secure the area and turn it into a “base area” and discover that the first room at “the end of the tunnel” wasn’t at the “end” of the tunnel, the tunnel //continued past it//. For quite a ways, to another gate and a stair down.
And that’s just the first instance. I’ve taken to describing the area back to the GM every so often to see if my description matches their mental image… because their descriptions sometimes don’t match their mental image.
Now, I think part of the problem is they’re using random dungeon builder charts and sometimes don’t make a map on their end (it’s PbP), so when we retrod old ground the details sometimes get lost in the fog of (the last time we were there IRL was 2 years ago, despite it having been 2 weeks for the PCs.
But we’ve had tunnels with no branches described suddenly spawn side tunnels that we’ve traveled past without knowing they were there.
.* The vagueness here was the tunnel was never described as continuing past the room, or ending there. However in the other direction the tunnel was clearly described as continuing past side room and having the tunnel curve. So we Players took it as “the room with a light is at the end of it’s tunnel”. Whether that was always a mix up, or became a mix up later when we returned there and got a new description (and a map†), I have no idea.
.† I posted a map for a few other Players who were confused about where things were, how much space we’d have to set a ‘base’ there, etc, and was told my map “was close, but wrong in a few spots”. One of those spots was the tunnel that didn’t end where I thought it did. (I always make maps for the games I’m in, just what I do.)
I have a weird example in which both parties were in agreement but also wrong.
At the end of a long session, we defeated a boss. The GM showed us that the boss had a cool but not overpowered weapon and then everyone went home. The next week, we had another session and the characters walked into the next room, which had a puzzle. The answer to the puzzle was “use the key in the boss’s pocket to activate a thing.” Simple enough.
…Only we didn’t have the key, because we hadn’t looted the boss. The GM had merely shown us the stats of his unique weapon. And neither we the players nor the GM realized that we had not looted the boss, because everyone remembered checking out that weapon. So we thought we’d gotten everything he had and the GM also thought we’d gotten the key, but we hadn’t. It took an agonizingly large number of unsubtle GM hints that we should use the key before the GM finally figured out that we did not have the key, did not know it existed, and thought we’d already looked in the spot where it was.
So that was a pain.
Trying to keep things fresh between sessions is its own difficulty. If I end on an RP moment, I try to make it a point to go back and sort of “replay” that scene, doing the exposition bits a second time. The effect is sort of a like a “last time on” before a TV episode.
What a jerk, she reunites him with his long lost mother and he complies. Not cool dude, not cool 😛
I like how you write Paladin so that even when he would be the victim ends up as the bad guy 😀
I like how your like my writing. 😀
I notice her [eyeliner/mascara/whatever I don’t know makeup] is fixed, does that mean this is a flashback?
How does she walk out of this one un-smote?
She has a bit of goop below the eyes still. I think it’s just slightly lesser because she’s happy in this makeup.
Mood makeup should be a thing though… Kind of like Rorschach’s mask, shifting from panel to panel to reflect mood. Of course, being a dude, I lack the vocabulary to describe that very well.
I’m guessing Paladin is about to be overwhelmed by a graveyard full of family reunion.
“Ah. It’s so good to see them hugging it out.”
And Necromancer skips merrily along in a cloud of her own obliviousness.
If Sowflake weren’t so caught up in her own bullshit she might be able to help DevoPal give chase. That said NecWiz is trying to make up with him rather than make him suffer: What spurred this change?
My personal headcanon, which I will quickly type before Colin can contradict it with actual canon, is that she had some introspection after her island adventure and the conversation in the alt-strip on this strip.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/tropic-of-evil-part-2-5-kaiju
After that she realized that she wanted to try to reach out and patch things up (and maybe change his mind by the bonding experience involving her special interest that he wanted to remove, if she could make him see it as a good thing).
As DM, I had planned for the party rogue to fight a tougher NPC and take his dagger, a fighting knife with insane bonuses to sneak attacks (similar to a sword of subtlety) but with crap melee stats otherwise. I’d built a backstory for this weapon into the campaign akin to Jim Bowie’s legendary “Sandbar Fight,” and had a description of this heavy dagger in the style of an Arkansas toothpick. I was pretty pleased with my creation, but after the session, or perhaps at the beginning of the next, the Marine who played our rogue said he liked the magic item, but wondered if he could change the description to a karambit style fighting knife. I looked at him and realized three things: a) I have never been in a knife fight, b) the flavor text has no bearing on the game stats, and c) I really didn’t want to know why he was so especially keen for his character to use that particular style blade.
“Sure,” I said. Problem solved, save for my own chills when the player coolly announces the rogue has switched to “Backbiter” for a little precision work.
Always nice to let the players’ vision shape the world. It can ruin the illusion when it happens to often, but there’s nothing wrong with a GM being the one to adapt their mental model.
Also, this video does make them sound kind of interesting from a blood and guts and disembowelment perspective:
https://www.bladehq.com/cat–Karambit-Knives-Tactical–2710
I don’t have any grand tales, just am quite familiar with my mental model not being the same as a GMs.
I’m always thrilled to hear more people playing Blades though. Hope it was a good experience for you.
I do think it’s funny you guys managed to find yourself in one of the few positions where a retcon or a flashback don’t solve an issue though.
Dude’s a newer GM and I’m trying to find my feet as a player after years as forever GM. Learning to communicate all over again is the name of the game, and no amount of flashbacking can do that work for you. 🙂
It’s a good game so far. The Grave Goods crew are Hawkers, selling magical aphrodisiac derived from leviathan spawn to the upper crust of Doskvol. We’re looking to expand our market to include the city’s undead and demon populations. And from a Lurk’s perspective, it’s been great fun doing the whole death-defying stunts in an urban environment thing.
I love how Blades has this way of making the summary of your crew’s deal almost always sound totally insane. =)
That’s the advantage of a rich setting. The weirdness just oozes out of every unique element.
Last time I encountered one of those alley fences/gates, it was one of those fun cinematic moments you remember… sprinting down the alley in pursuit, and just went over it without slowing down thanks to a timely nat 20 on the athletics roll…
What action music plays in your head when you think of that moment? I demand links!
Happens to me a lot. I try to have maps prepared now, and assoon as a miscommunication is evident, be as clear as possible as to what I was trying to say.
Although the most notable time was a player somehow being convinced that a female boss enemy was a guy. Sprite didn’t help here, it was androgynous mage robes. Cue several rounds of ‘I attack him!’ ‘Who?’ ‘The head ritualist!’ whole table ‘She’s still a woman!’.
In the end I put a little note over her sprite on Roll20 reading ‘this mage is a lady’. Not a big deal, but pretty funny.
Makes me wonder if Wizard has to deal with this mess.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/crossplaying
I know that I got misgendered a number of times last time I played a female character (by Strahd himself no less!).
“Raise” a family, not “Animate” a family.
It’s “illustrate a family” when they aren’t moving. That’s basically Laurel’s job.
The most common problem I’ve had was not realizing the enemies were using a weapon with reach that I needed to take into account, or that they had metallic armor that I could cast Heat Metal on.
My DM is working on his descriptions, but to be fair I make the same mistakes when I’m the DM. Since we use roll20 we both have a tendency to let the token art do the talking, but sometimes, especially for NPCs, that’s not enough.
Do you think it’s best policy for a GM to say, “Are you sure you want to move like that? This creature has reach.” I mean, it’s probably obvious to a trained fighter that a halberd has reach, but knowing a [insert creature] has a 10′ reach with its barbed tail might be less obvious and require questioning on the part of the PC.
o.0
Oof. Yeah, if there was any question that relationship was gonna fail, this torpedoed the hell out of it. Paladin may be a jerk, but damn that’s a whole lot of NOPE right there.
I’ve found that unless the GM is ridiculously well prepared and has the map for whatever battles, heists, etc meticulously (and very clearly) planned out for the players to see, there’s always going to be a discrepancy between what the players try to plan around and what the GM has placed there. In a combat situation, that usually not too bad since most of the time everyone is going to be clustered together and not spread out. In a heist or thief style game, it’s a lot more trouble since all of those little details can be the difference between success, a party member dying, or a TPK. Shadowrun is a great example of this since there’s so many goddamn contingencies to worry about like the spirits on the astral plane, security drones, living guards, barriers (magical and not), cameras and other electronic security measures.
I tend not to do many heist games because they usually end up being a lot more planning and spinning our wheels on intangibles than actually playing the game, though that might just be due to the group I tried it with at the time.
Weird love knows no bounds.
You’ve heard my schtick on over-planning in Shadowrun:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unmasked-part-2-4
In theory Blades in the Dark mitigates this by relying on a flashback mechanic so that you can describe your clever plan right as it comes up, all Ocean’s 11 style. It just so happens that we stumbled into some situation where that wouldn’t quite help us out.
But paladin oaths definitely have very strict limits on what are acceptable and so do most cultures/nations.
My friend/GM and I have been leaning towards giving Blades in the Dark a shot after listening to some of the Stream of Blood and Glass Cannon Podcast’s runs. It would definitely scratch the heist game itch that Shadowrun is just too complicated to satisfy.
There was one miscommunication between the DM and my character. We’d arrived in a city via magic only to find it under attack by magical monsters (some kind of corrupted demon/elementals). At some point we went underneath the city where we found there were a lot of people living there. When negotiating with their leader we were asked to not tell anyone they were down there. The problem is, I just assumed they were hiding out from the monsters infesting the city. I didn’t realise that was actually their normal home. As such, I assumed the request to not tell anyone about them referred to not telling any of the sentient monsters where to find them. So, later on, my character told the rules of the city about the people not realising I was breaking my promise.