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Post by Harkovast on Nov 13, 2017 17:27:31 GMT
My main things I like in rpgs are interesting characters interractons, in interesting story and excessive over the top action sequences...probably in that order.
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Post by demonnachos on Nov 13, 2017 18:26:01 GMT
Hark you misrepresented that wizards one pretty badly. It was a planned encounter in the campaign where 3 low level wizards leap out of a bush to attack the party at camp. They were assigned Magic Missile each, which wouldn't even take down a single party member if they did a targeted volley. Spoony simply changed the spells to something less stupid, and the dice fell in favor of the wizards. Two of the party members died, which happens in DnD. He got banned from DMing because the RPGA really does not want player characters dying. Even if he was changing the spells to be a prick it makes a lot more sense for the wizards (who aren't going in to just die) to pick spells that will actually do something rather than to just leap out for the sake of dying to the party. If the wizards legitimately had access to such spells then the only one who can be complained at is the dice for letting the spells work so well. I'd rather an encounter be more difficult because the enemy made sensible choices than an easy XP boost by some painfully stupid "AI" decisions.
The "Squirt Gun Wars" was an escalation where his players found a quirk of the rules, and then he was basically forced to counter it. If your players came up with a combo that just broke your entire game, you'd do something about it right? If you were one of those corporate security firms and some jerks were tearing through your guys with squirt guns you'd outfit your dudes with hazmat suits and possibly even get some squirt guns yourself.
I am odd in that I prefer a sense of "Realism" in settings. Things like "studded leather" and people drawing their warbows and holding you at "gunpoint" with them take me out of it. Stuff like just plain bad "AI" decisions and such things break the immersion and make it harder to lose myself in the world.
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Post by TempestFennac on Nov 13, 2017 18:35:26 GMT
That does sound pretty stupid with the Wizards. As for the rules quirk, there is always rule 0 (I suppose banning things could be seen as harsh if ingenuity is involved in the rules exploit though). I'll admit I prefer players to succeed but I know that, when RPing antagonists as a DM, I have to play them as wanting to win (sadly my difficulty seems to alternate between fights being ridiculously easy or things constantly going wrong for the players).
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Post by demonnachos on Nov 13, 2017 18:39:24 GMT
A lot of that though comes from the dice. A seemingly easy encounter (3 low level wizards attacking a party of 5 for example) can turn into a shitshow with a few dice rolls. A boss encounter can also be made into a joke with a few rolls (like that executioner our dudes fought in that one-off dungeon, damn Fel and his Ray of Emfeeblement ).
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Post by Harkovast on Nov 13, 2017 19:22:18 GMT
In DnD, if you optimise the bad guys spells to kill the players, killing them is incredibly easy. A sleep spell will take out any low level characters no problem. In the course of an adventure you are meant to fight multiple encounters. If hte GM optimises every enmy to beat the players...shock horror the players will lose. Why would all wizards know really effective spells? You are meant ot have to do loads of research to add more spells to your spell book, so these guys just don't have a very good spell. That logic makes as much sense as delcaring "why would bandits attack the heroes? They would know player characters are more powerful than bandits." The bad guy wizards had no idea why powerful the guards would be, and might well have just assumed they were low level mooks.
Spoony, being a terrible gamesmaster confuses what HE knows and what hte NPCs know. To HIM its obvious what spells are needed to take out the party, and he has access to the entire book with all the spells and all their power levels so can pick exactly what he needs. The NPCs should not have access to this kind of insight, knowing they are fighting low level player characters and what spells will take them out.
Noticiable the bad guys are meant ot be tryign to b taking the captive .The bad guys however dont focus on saving the captve, or even on defeating all the heroes, they focus on getting kills. They disable enemies and then rush to cut their throats. This actually makes them MORE likely to lose the encounter, as they are ignoring still fighting enemies to finish off ones who are out of action. Its almost like the NPCs dont value their own lives and are just trying to cause maximum damage to the party before dying. You claim the wizards should care about their own lives but that is not how he plays them at all.
Almost like the Gm got laughed at and for some reason took it personally and wanted to teach them a lesson rather than remainign objective.
If you want to kill the party, its real real easy. If your NPCs know the exact composition of the party and get specially chosen stuff to counter hte good guys...yeah smashing the party is simple. I can beat the party with a single goblin. Hes a suicide bomber with dynamite strapped to him. Boom. I win. I mean the goblin knows he cant beat the party cause he knows goblins have low hit points, so he goes for suicide bombing for maximum damage. Rathe r than attacking the party he sneaks into their bedroom at the inn before they arrive and hides under the bed (he knows what inn they are going to stay at because hes my NPC and I want to win.) Thats quality GMing.
While spoony seemed to think he had done some proud service to gamesmastering...he seems to over look questions like "did everyone have fun?" cause it sounds like he was giggling to himself while pissing everyone else off. Watch any counter monkey story and think about how spoonys antics felt to other people. They often seem to involve him being the only one enjoying himself. If you games master and people dont enjoy themselves you failed. ITs like hosting a party where eveyrone leaves unhappy. You are a bad host if you do that.
In teh squirt gun thing...I wouldn't let there be a system where hte players usee dumb ass shit like that and I have to contrive things to top them. I've played a lot of games and never had anything like that. The idea that as gamesmater I have to think of plans to out wit their cunning plans in some kind of arms race...thats just totally alien to me. That's like the referee in a football match realising the players have found a way to cheat on a technicality so he has to come up with a contrived plan to counter this. Its just a silly situation that shouldn't happen. A games master isn't trying to "Beat " the players. At least not in my understanding of these things.
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Post by Canuovea on Nov 13, 2017 22:00:17 GMT
To be fair, Shadowrun was broken as all hell. Probably still is.
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Post by zaealix on Nov 13, 2017 23:23:04 GMT
I...Have to admit, one big thing that to me I keep thinking of in terms of this was the scene with Linally and the doorway to Vengence. TBH...From a character/narrative perspective, the wrong choice was to leave the priests to the goon mob. Linally had a personal stake, with how much she expoused her views about the corrupt ruling class she was clearly emotional about it...But I personally took one look at that and thought: 'They're gonna die, no need to put myself at risk', but I ignored Linally's viewpoint on the matter. At best, I would have been trying to 'frame' it as growth, as not taking a risk that was unneeded. Another thought that comes to mind was the scene with that traitor beak guy from chapter 7. I couldn't put my finger on WHY I distrusted him, but something just felt...off. Which is why I ended up going along with it and getting blindsided by the betrayal. In hindsight, I think it was that while Wo Dao WAS shady as crap, I didn't actually see her betraying everyone, things just kind of went wrong about that time. And with beak guy being the only other dude, I was caught in the middle... Out of curiousity's sake Hark, what would have been your reaction if I DID successfully figure him out?
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Post by Harkovast on Nov 14, 2017 0:08:15 GMT
Oooh I dunno. I think you guys getting lead into an ambush wasn't essential to the narrative, so you probably could have turned the tables. Actually you got pretty close to etting kileld as you were fighting when the other warriors with you had surrendered so I remember you were skirting pretty close to getting over whelmed.
Linally just flat out murdering all those priests was one of my faovurite bits. Not gonna lie, I loved that. "We're all such smug assholes who are profitting from everyone elses misery. Glad we wont get any comupance for this..."
If you hadn't murdered them they might have escaped, or helped organise more actions against the good guys (since they were all super wealth and had lots of the churches goons they could call up.) Not to mentioned being religous leaders, they could have made some big statement about how you were all heretics and the new empress was a fraud or whatever. Killing them off when the chance arose was definitely for the best.
I think I also liked that it was just a weird scene. Normally the bad guys are attackign the good guys, but here most of them weren't a direct threat and were just trying to escape. But they were all such terminal assholes who had done so much bad shit behind the scenes that I didn't feel any pity when the personification of all the poor, oppressed people of the city bursts in and beats them all the death with metal balls on chains.
Good times.
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Post by TempestFennac on Nov 14, 2017 5:34:14 GMT
To be fair, while not knowing exactly the right spells to counter the PC's party does make sense, going for effective ones does for characters with high Int or Wis (with Sorcerers you could justify them getting completely random spells due to how they learnt magic, but that may risk making them unplayable), so taking a spell which can KO people instantly over one which does feeble damage can easily be justified. Going to Demon's comment about the fight with Fel's Ray of Enfeeblement, I can't remember exactly what I was thinking when I was deciding what he did but I probably decided he'd figure that debuffing the enemy's ability to hit people effectively was a good tactic being as he was a large melee fighter ( www.5esrd.com/spellcasting/all-spells/r/ray-of-enfeeblement/ is the spell in question for anyone not familiar with 5E D&D). As for Spoony's DMing, that really doesn't make sense unless the NPCs have death wishes for some reason. Even then, if they treated all fights like that, it would suggest that they should have been fired before the PCs got to them.
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Post by demonnachos on Nov 14, 2017 5:55:27 GMT
The Leaping Wizards are wizards, and thus are not stupid. They were ambushing the party, so they knew at least a little about the party before hand. This means that they would have be great fools to choose just Magic Missiles (and they were not a great fool, thus they could not choose the wine in front of them). You are also ignoring just how poorly the dice fell for the party. It took the fighter far longer than it should have to drop the two dorks bonking him, who were getting in way more hits than they should have. The dice are a fickle mistress after all.
You shouldn't go full ham for every encounter of course, but you shouldn't go full chicken either.
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Post by TempestFennac on Nov 14, 2017 6:37:30 GMT
Come to think of it, why were they ambusing the party? If they had been hired to specifically attack the party I can see your point if the party had been around the area for a while or were famous.
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Post by demonnachos on Nov 14, 2017 6:56:01 GMT
They were trying to rescue someone who was captured by the party.
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Post by TempestFennac on Nov 14, 2017 7:09:44 GMT
So they did have a reason to look into the party's capabilities. How easy would getting that info be though? (Realistically it would require people who have a decent amount of experience to watch the PCs fighting and doing other stuff to know their capabilities).
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Post by Harkovast on Nov 14, 2017 19:27:02 GMT
Theres no particular reason they should know about the party. Yes they technically could know. The same way my goblin suicide bomber could technically know in advance which inn you will stay at. You can justify that kind of thing easily, doesn't mean you should.
If the party was just normal low level guards, with one dice of hit points, a hail of magic missiles would kill or badly injure three of them, leaving them weakened enough that they would run away or surrender. MAybe theyve done this before and most normal guards see three wizards and just run away rather than risk scarey magic.
But for some reason the bad guys knew these are not regular guards but players characters with better stats. This seems rather liek the Russian general goign "wait dont send just two guards. That's Rambo and his names in the title! He's clearly going to be harder to kill!" Magic missiles are only a bad choice if you know the composititon of hte party, and theres no particular reason that bad guys would know that. Spoony knew that, and because hes not a very good gamesmaster he confuses his knowledge and motivations with those of hte NPCS. Its also similar to the bad guys going "DOnt threatenn the good guys with arrows. You cant kill a figter with a d6 damage arrow!" People in the world aren't meant ot think in game mechannics unless its ORder of the Stick. Magic Missiles, like arrows are meant to be a dangerous lethal projectile so the idea of threatening someone with one makes sense unless you characters are mysteriously aware they are inside an roleplaying game. Yes you can justify the bad guys having perfect knowledge and ideal tactics, doesn't mean you should. While SPoony was clearly very pleased with himself, it doesn't sound like the players were having any fun while he did this.
Also, the bad guys actually ignore rescuing the prisoner they are there to get, and instead focus on murdering incapacitated party members. They treat this as more important than their mission and even more important than disabling the party members that are still standing ,showing that killing the players means more to them than their own safety. Why do three random low level wizards have such a strange obsession with doing the party long term harm above all other factors? Again, Spoony confuses what he wants and what the NPCs should be doing. He got butt hurt and spoiled the game for everyone else so he could feel like he won.
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Post by demonnachos on Nov 14, 2017 21:05:42 GMT
They know they were strong enough to capture the "princess" and that they are wizards with one "zap" and that is all. Magic Missile is not something you take at low-level when you have access to something like Sleep or Hold Person (When playing the AD&D DOS game Pool of Radiance I've never even considered Magic Missile because one "zap" is not nearly as useful as crowd control) and have to pick just one.
Sleep only lasts a little bit, and trying to get rid of the captors before they get up and murder you is a good idea. Remember, these are 3 dorks with sticks who aren't exactly great at physical stuff. They know that once these jerks get up they are gonna get whacked so instead of trying to fumble with unlocking the prisoner's chains when the baddies can get back up at any second it is better to try adn deal with the problem before it becomes a real problem.
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