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RebelRogue
2011-03-01, 07:05 PM
Tonight I had one of the worst/most boring RP sessions I think I've ever participated in. It's a D&D 4e campaign, but it hardly matters here. I've previously been slightly disappointed by the DMs style: a lot of the plot is very much on rails (which I don't mind too much - I usually follow any obvious plot points anyway - as long as I have some illusion of choice and feel like the PCs are important somehow), and he has an annoying tendency to spend long passages on narration, dictating what our characters do between scenes. It bothers me, but not enough that I cannot roll with it and have some fun with the game anyway; we're all good friends and even when it's not optimal it's still an evening of relaxation. However, today's session just seemed pointless to me

To recap, at this point in the campaign we're in the capital of the setting, and (for various reasons) we know that vampires will probably be a threat to the general public as part of a larger alliance of various malign creatures. In the beginning of the session, the city was disturbed by an earthquake with some areas being more peculiarly affected that others. For once, we actually seemed to have some real choice, not being railroaded to the next scene - nice, I thought. Turned out I was wrong...

We know that some kind of archmage - probably corrupted by the powers of the Shadowfell - lives somewhere under the city, but not where he lives exactly, so suspecting him to be responsible, we investigated the sewers under one of the strangely affected sites. Nothing there. Ok. We investigate more stuff around town. Nothing shows anything interesting or conclusive. Ok, I guess, except that it is laid out like we have a choice to investigate, yet nothing of real interest shows up when we actually do so (and it took a lot of time IRL).

However, the next game day the DM goes back into narration mode, more or less: a young girl is found crucified on a wooden cross in the streets, bursting into flames as the morning light comes. Since we expect vampires to be involved with the overall plot, we suspect she is one of the undead, and that she has been put there by some kind of vampire hunter. More people meet similar fates the next days. We spend some time doing actual investigation of this, getting some allied NPC wizards to help with divination rituals cast on the victims' remains and a nail used in one of the crucifictions. We gain some information from this: that the person crucifying the vampires seem to be a vampire himself, ordering the victims into position, but we learn nothing of his identity other than that. That's the closest thing to getting any helpful information from anyone during that entire session!

At this point, people are getting a bit restless. Not because there has been any combat yet (even though many of our sessions are heavy on this), but because everybody feels frustrated - like the classic puzzle problem, where there is one specific solution to problem/situation proposed by the DM, and the game halts until it is solved, and where alternative approaches yields no results or clues.

So in short, we just want something to happen! From previous sessions, we've learned that one member of a prominent family in the city is probably a vampire, but we have no proof, and we're not sure exactly who is undead as there's several suspected family members. But in desperation, we decide to follow this lead, going to their house and kicking in the front door! Sort of stupid, I know, but at this point we just felt like we neede to do something (and to be fair, the 'I kick in the door' was sort of meant as a joke, but the DM took it literally, so we rolled with it).

Naturally, we meet one of the sons of the family (clearly not a vampire, as it's daytime) who is not terribly appreciative of us breaking his front door and stating clearly false names when asked (we're sort of a silly group, so that was actually one of the funniest moments of the night - claiming to be Nicholas Cage, Anastacia Beaverhausen, Cinderella and a local TV celebrity respectively). So of course, he calls his private guards. We're sort of uncertain whether we should initiate a real fight, possibly killing innocent bodyguards, but as things progress we do end up doing so (some of us deal non-lethal damage, but our Infernalock is a rather cruel character, so she ends up blasting some of them with fatal consequences), finding out that the encounter is grossly underpowered for our level (10), consisting mostly of minions. Between the lines, this very much felt like the DM telling us 'this is obviously the wrong thing to do'.

During the fight, my character specfically says, he wants to punch a guard in the stomach, using the wooden end of my halbard. He tells me I hit him in the groin, and that he fall to the floor, stunned. That's ok with me - I managed to take him out if the combat without killing him, which was the idea. What absolutely made me lose all hope was the point after the battle, where I decided to interrogate the very same guard, asking a simple question he should have a good chance of knowing the answer to ('where is the family's middle brother'), threatening to hurt him even more. Intimidate is a trained skill for my character and I rolled a natural 20. His response: he's so stunned he cannot communicate! At all! WT*? If the DM doesn't want Intimidate to be a useful skill in the campaign, he ought to tell us so, but this just seemed unfair to me: wanting to give away nothing after an entire session of awarding us just about zero rewards (information-wise) for the initiatives we'd taken. To make matters worse, three rounds after the real battle ended, the city guards arrived! Talk about a 'Last Action Hero scenario'!

I realize what we did in the end wasn't exactly smart, but everything in this session just seemed so inflexible to me.

Sorry for the rant, I just needed to get it out!

Am I being unreasonable here? Should I confront him with this? I'm going to take over the DM chair soon anyway.

mint
2011-03-01, 07:23 PM
Yes, you should confront him. You are not unreasonable. What you describe is poor DMing.

CapnVan
2011-03-01, 07:27 PM
Concurred. There should always be alternative approaches available to solving a problem, particularly an investigation.

Also, when in doubt, I always kick in the door.

RebelRogue
2011-03-01, 07:29 PM
I do realize, that this is only my side of the story, which is not the absolute truth, but my wife felt it was more or less accurate, so I guess it's actually a real problem. So yes, I probably ought to tell him this, but critiqueing friends can be a delicate thing to do. I'm not to sure about how to approach it.

mint
2011-03-01, 07:34 PM
Yeah, it can be really tough. I really think you'll both be happier for it though. More likely than not your DM was super frustrated as well during the session when you couldn't figure out what you were supposed to do and he had to resist telling you to keep the game "intact".

Meanwhile I always wondered what Anastacia Beaverhausen's class was.

RebelRogue
2011-03-01, 07:44 PM
Yeah, it can be really tough. I really think you'll both be happier for it though. More likely than not your DM was super frustrated as well during the session when you couldn't figure out what you were supposed to do and he had to resist telling you to keep the game "intact".
I guess so... I guess it's best to do through an email (we usually don't meet that often between sessions). Though I could make it public for the group at our own internet forum, but that will take a lot of diplomacy. Probably not a good idea.


Meanwhile I always wondered what Anastacia Beaverhausen's class was.
Drunken Master has to be in there, somehow :smallwink:

Land Outcast
2011-03-01, 07:53 PM
Yep, been there, both behind and beyond the screen.

From my experience behind the screen in those situations -luckily its a long time since the last- I can tell the same mint did, he probably was as frustrated as you were. He could have dropped a hint though, you know, some spot check, some informer, some call for help.

But about the intimidate check that was bad, and I would -quietly- confront him about it. It is bound to be a critique, which is always painful to swallow, but if he's an ok guy he might understand the point.

Amnestic
2011-03-01, 07:55 PM
Also, when in doubt, I always kick in the door.

If there is a door, it must be kicked!

And yeah, from that description it sounds like you need to have a few words. Do so in private so he doesn't feel like he's being ganged up on though.

Privateer
2011-03-02, 12:15 AM
How come you guys continue to pursue this quest if you are so frustrated by it?

IMHO, you can't expect to eventually succeed no matter what you do. He set up a puzzle, you guys tried a few approaches and didn't find a solution. Perhaps he made it too hard or perhaps you just were unlucky. Whatever the cause, if you are not having fun, you always have the option of doing something else instead and thus steering your DM to take the adventure in a different, less frustrating direction.

Don't take this as criticism; more like a suggestion and a genuine not understanding on my part. I just figured that if everyone was as frustrated as you, at some point during the session a conversation like this would take place:

Player: "Ok, guys, screw the vampires, let's go snoop around taverns and markets, see if we can find out something else someone needs doing."
Other players: "Yeah, let's!"
DM has to come out of character: "But, guys, I don't have anything else prepared, let's continue with this quest."
Players: "Sorry, man, we've been at it for an hour, I don't think we can crack it."

Am I missing something?

icefractal
2011-03-02, 01:07 AM
Am I missing something?Well, if the DM wasn't able to improvise a slight variation to his puzzle so to clear the roadblock, then he's probably not going to be good at improvising an entire adventure. The resulting sitting around in a tavern and/or fighting some random filler encounter doesn't seem like much of an improvement.

Now if there are some side things that the players can do without new material from the DM - intra-party RP, or stuff that's been previously set in motion - then sure, go for it.

Privateer
2011-03-02, 01:20 AM
Well, if the DM wasn't able to improvise a slight variation to his puzzle so to clear the roadblock, then he's probably not going to be good at improvising an entire adventure.


If the DM truly is bad at improvising this obviously wouldn't work. My assumption was that it's not a case of can't, but a case of won't, which I'd agree with. I don't think a DM is obligated to give out hints to the challenge just because players have trouble locating the clues previously placed. Sometimes the bad guys win. So long as the loss only hurts PCs' ego and not their life or purse, it seems perfectly acceptable once in a while. But only if there is an alternate adventure they could go on. Nobody will enjoy being on a railroad adventure that's impossible.

Fuzzie Fuzz
2011-03-02, 01:25 AM
You said you were taking over as DM soon. If it really will be soon, and not just "some time in the indefinite future once we wrap up what we're doing now," then I wouldn't confront him. Confronting him here would do nothing but create hard feelings. That said, if he was going to continue DMing indefinitely, I would reccommend talking to him (in person, preferably) because this is a problem that needs to stop, one way or another.

Sith_Happens
2011-03-02, 01:27 AM
I don't know much about 4e, is teleporting halfway across the continent an option? If so then I think that would send a pretty clear message about not liking how narrow the rails are.

calar
2011-03-02, 01:33 AM
I can understand your frustration. It sounds like your DM has fallen into the trap of making his campaign too static. He probably has events set in stone of how things happened, and is unwilling to alter these events to help the party. While this can be nice plot-wise since it prevents plot holes, it can be annoying to play since only certain actions have any chance of progressing the story. I call it the real life syndrome since events progress like they would in real life, but with that comes the real life frustration of being able to get a handle on events. D&D is meant to be an escape from real life, not a simulation.

Vangor
2011-03-02, 01:38 AM
The DM needs to work on his ability to improvise. My campaigns would be largely boring despite my efforts to provide bountiful details, dynamic worlds, and numerous ways without working from the material players unknowingly give me.

Have to play off of the players. If the answer given to a riddle is correct but not the one you want, this is a problem with the riddle. In a game of words such as D&D where descriptions can turn the players all directions, the inability to accept the answer given is a huge problem with the campaign.

RebelRogue
2011-03-02, 03:40 AM
We did spend some time doing other stuff, like me rallying the townspeople into rebuilding some stuff, doing streetwise checks (which obviously only provided us limited information, even when they were through the roof - where have I heard that before?) and do some interparty stuff: this group is not heavy on deep RP, but my character and the bard tend to annoy each other (strictly characters, not players), so a few pranks and sarcastic remarks happened throughout the session, all in good fun. The infernalock is a sort of cartoonish, evil pyromaniac (though not annoyingly so - she hardly ever acts out on those impulses except in combat) etc. Nothing too deep, but enough that we constantly rp (and joke) based on it. I've been in more serious campaigns, but this fits the current group, and I don't mind it.

As for teleporting, that's not really an option in 4e (there are some rituals, but we don't have them available). It wouldn't do us much good anyway, as the campaign is set on a gigantic floating island (we're not really sure what exactly it is floating in) and the overarching vampire plot is threatening the very existence of the entire island/world, so it's not like we could just go to the tavern and forget everything (that said, at least two of the characters do spend a lot of time at taverns anyway...)

As for the DM being bad at improvisation, that's probably true, which is probably why he's done so many 'then that happens, then you do this' types of railroading in the past - those kinds of things seem to work better for him. As I said in the OP, that's sometimes annoying (being told what my character does), but at least it progresses the plot and we get some action of one kind or another. In the session, when we went to literally kick in the door, at least he could have provided us with a properly challenging combat encounter instead of that silly 'you easily slaughter the professional bodyguards, 'cause obviously what you're doing is wrong!' scenario. But I suspect that even that is a little frightening for him to make up on the spot.

Shyftir
2011-03-02, 05:34 AM
I'm not being constructive just commiserating.

I know the feeling. My regular IRL game jumps from DM to DM very often so we do many a couple months long campaigns that never finish. One of our DMs gets a lot of inspiration from video games, which is fine. Unfortunately instead of making the game work the way it should we just gad about following the rails and fighting things that would be way to hard for us if he didn't make them easier.

Last campaign we fought a Tentacled-something or other. My character was too slow to catch the thing swimming and just in general I was bored to tears with the fights because there was no illusion of possible failure. He gave us all a hefty supply of what amounts to "Pheonix Downs." and well it just wasn't any fun for me despite really liking the character I'd made up.

Anyway I don't really wanna play with my group that much anymore but I like my friends and there are other reasons why we never get anywhere with the game. Yadda Yadda Yadda.

I feel your pain, brother.

BTW I AM really enjoying the campaign you are DMing here. I wish it would move a bit faster, but there seems to be a loss of steam as it were. Still i really don't want it to die.

RebelRogue
2011-03-02, 08:09 AM
Thanks for the compliments on the campaign (though a little off-topic). It's hard to keep up the pace, and I'm pretty busy at work, so it's double hard to keep things active :smallfrown:

Eldan
2011-03-02, 08:22 AM
Tip: while it might not help with all your problems (such as that intimidate thing. Seriously. Wft.), point your DM carefully to this article (http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/three-clue-rule.html) on the three clue rule of mystery adventure writing.

obliged_salmon
2011-03-02, 08:34 AM
My advice is to try to subtly influence your DM while playing. When you as players say "we try to find out info about X by doing Y," try asking questions of the DM, such as "what do I need to roll on my gather info check to find out this info?" That will cue him in somewhat.

He may tell you you can't roll high enough, or that you're looking in the wrong place, or that no one knows anything yet, and you just have to wait a few days. Either way, a question like that sends the DM an ultimatum, lets him know that you don't want to chase geese that won't lay eggs.

Tyndmyr
2011-03-02, 01:26 PM
Yes, you should confront him. You are not unreasonable. What you describe is poor DMing.

Pretty much. I agree with the OPs assessment that the system is not to blame for this. It sounds like the DM has some story he wants to tell, with the character chipping in the appropriate actions at some point. So, basically, instead of doing a RPG, you're playing "guess what the DM wants us to do". This is not generally a very fun game.

I advise talking to him, however, my first reaction would be ditching him as DM, and having someone else take over the role. Also, I've gotten to the point that I'm quite comfortable calling out significant deviations from rules(like ignoring intimidate entirely). I understand not following RAW entirely, but when things get made up on the fly to entirely invalidate reasonable character abilities, it's less justifiable. Your fellow players may feel the same way, and are just waiting for someone else to speak up.

RebelRogue
2011-03-02, 02:35 PM
We're rotating DMs periodically, but his arc has taken a long time now. I'm next in line, and rather busy right now, so I'm not too eager to take over atm (in a few weeks perhaps, but not now). Plus he's built up to this, so in any case, I think it's still for the best to let him finish the current arc.

As for the RAW thing, I'm all for twisting it when running non-combat encounters in 4e - I actually think it's sort of essential to make sense of things (even though skill challenges are a good chassis to build on/be inspired by, I personally rarely run them 'as is'). But I don't think he's using any of the guidelines for that anyway - it pretty much runs like a (bad) 3.5 game in this regard.

Iceforge
2011-03-02, 05:45 PM
Tip: while it might not help with all your problems (such as that intimidate thing. Seriously. Wft.), point your DM carefully to this article (http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/three-clue-rule.html) on the three clue rule of mystery adventure writing.

That article is so great, made me really want to start plotting out a mystery game for a one-shot with some old friends :D

Thurbane
2011-03-02, 09:10 PM
I am going to go against the flow here, and say that I don't see anything so terrible in what the DM did (about the guard, anyhow).

I know from other DMs I have spoken with, that capture and interrogation of prisoners can be one of the toughest things to DM. You don't always know in advance exactly what the captured NPC actually knows, and you don't want him to blurt out something that will be a spoiler or otherwise wreck the fun of an adventure.

Sure, saying he was too stunned to answer might not be the best way to go about it, but maybe the DM didn't really have a chance to think about exactly what this guard would or wouldn't know. If he gave a away a key plot device early than was intended, it could cause problems for the adventure. On the other hand, if he said he knew nothing, but it later turned out that he should probably have known something relevant, the players will call the DM on cheating, even if it was a simple mistake.

I've occasionally had a captured NPC refuse to talk when captured, or blurt out gibberish because they were so sacred. I don't do it every time, but it has been known to happen. Same with other DMs I have played under.

There are other things to consider: how much would Joe Blow the mook guard really know? If he did know something, would he be more scared of the consequences of revealing the truth than he is about the guy Intimidating him?

Personally, I don't believe Intimidate and other social skills should be the be all and end all of manipulating NPCs in a game. Heck, if you played Diplomacy strictly as written, you could end up running the country before 3rd level.

Anyway, my 2 cents. Basically, I can sympathize with the DM, and I don't think what he did with the guard was all that terrible (perhaps could have been handled a bit better).

RebelRogue
2011-03-03, 10:12 AM
I see what you mean, and considered the same thing. However, would it be so hard to let him say 'I don't know! Don't kick me in the nuts!"? The way this was handled explicitly felt like DM punishment for 'wrong' actions. To be fair, he didn't ask for the intimidate check, I just rolled it.

As for Diplomacy, there's no way it can destroy anything in a 4e game!

mikau013
2011-03-03, 01:06 PM
<snip> finding out that the encounter is grossly underpowered for our level (10), consisting mostly of minions. Between the lines, this very much felt like the DM telling us 'this is obviously the wrong thing to do'.

During the fight, my character specfically says, he wants to punch a guard in the stomach, using the wooden end of my halbard. He tells me I hit him in the groin, and that he fall to the floor, stunned. That's ok with me - I managed to take him out if the combat without killing him, which was the idea. What absolutely made me lose all hope was the point after the battle, where I decided to interrogate the very same guard, asking a simple question he should have a good chance of knowing the answer to ('where is the family's middle brother'), threatening to hurt him even more. Intimidate is a trained skill for my character and I rolled a natural 20. His response: he's so stunned he cannot communicate! At all! WT*? If the DM doesn't want Intimidate to be a useful skill in the campaign, he ought to tell us so, but this just seemed unfair to me: wanting to give away nothing after an entire session of awarding us just about zero rewards (information-wise) for the initiatives we'd taken. To make matters worse, three rounds after the real battle ended, the city guards arrived! Talk about a 'Last Action Hero scenario'!
<snip>

First I'll side with your dm a bit :smalltongue:

I wouldn't really read into the encounter is too easy thus it is obviously the wrong thing to do, maybe there are other reasons why the encounter was easy.

And I think that the npc being so badly intimidated that he can't react properly is actually a nice in rp way for the dm to act it out. Sure it didn't give the result for what you wanted but the dm probably has his reasons for that.

The town guard thing is quite logical though that they appear quickly in a disturbance situation


But I would advise talking to your dm, why? for the simple reason that you don't have as much fun as you think you can have if things went slightly different.
If you don't talk to him he might not even know that you don't enjoy his current style.

Though to give some advice as how to handle it :
Never do something like this:
- tell your dm he is doing it wrong
- teleport to another place because you feel like you're getting nowhere
- break his campaign in anyway

If you tell him he is doing it wrong, he'll probably get defensive and instead of truly listening to you, he'll probably start argueing and feelings might get hurt.
And if you teleport away because you are frustrated you'll probably frustrate everyone for obvious reasons.

I would handle it something like this, either email or talk to him in person (don't group up on him)
Tell him something like this but in your own words: (keep in mind I am applying my own perspective of how things go (/went) as formed by your post, if I'm wrong about certain stuff then just change it, just use this to help you if you think it can :smallbiggrin: )

In the last few sessions I didn't have that much fun in your campaign, and I'll try to explain why and please let me finish my story before explaining why things happened the way they did. And in no way am I looking for additional information or other campaign relevant information.
It feels like it to me that you require certain actions from us to advance the story and that we can't really find out much if we try a different approach. Though it could just be that we missed all the obvious signs you gave us. But in that case keep in mind that you know way more about your world and how it works than I do.

To give an example: It felt great that after the earthquake we had a real choice on what to do next, with investigating the sewers and parts of the town. But it felt like it led nowhere, perhaps because we missed something obvious to you or because there was nothing to be gained, but looking back it looks like wasted time from my p.o.v.
And I had no clue where to go from there, so that is why we went with kick the door in of the npc we suspected to be a vampire.

And I think I would have had more fun if we had found some minor or big clues while investigating or at least formed an idea for what we could do next, like if talking to people on the street they could offer an idea like check out the library for some relevant information.

And the only reason why I'm bringing this up is because I like playing with you and my other friends, but I feel that if I point this out that perhaps we can all have a bit more fun. Please don't take this to mean that I hate your entire campaign, because I do have fun with it still.

Tyndmyr
2011-03-03, 02:11 PM
Though to give some advice as how to handle it :
Never do something like this:
- tell your dm he is doing it wrong
- teleport to another place because you feel like you're getting nowhere
- break his campaign in anyway

IMO, There are wrong ways to DM. There's also a time to be honest about this. Sure, you don't get all accusatory about it or get personal, but lots of people are not great DMs. It's a skill like anything else, and you typically improve those with practice and good feedback.

Sometimes, people don't respond well to direct feedback. I generally recommend that first on principle, but if it's not working, sometimes in-game responses to things can help deliver the message. Now, there's a coupla caveats to this. Make sure it's a reasonable IC action(teleporting away because a situation is too dangerous or otherwise impossible is logical). Also, discuss it with the other party members beforehand. It's one thing for a party to respond to something in a way other than the GM wants. That happens all the time. It's something quite different for a single player to try to force his desires on the party. Coordination is always good.

Gnaeus
2011-03-03, 03:46 PM
The town guard thing is quite logical though that they appear quickly in a disturbance situation

18 SECONDS later? Were they watching the door? If a servant ran for the guard the moment the door opened. And he found a guard in only 1 minute (good luck!), and the guard got all the info he needed, and rallied a patrol to help him in one minute (yeah!) and ran back to the house in 1 minute, that would be 30 rounds!

And if there was a patrol post for the guard less than one minute away, that seems like the kind of relevant detail that a DM should mention before allowing PC's to kick in a door. Unless the characters are blind, on drugs, or really, really stupid.

mikau013
2011-03-03, 03:48 PM
18 SECONDS later? Were they watching the door? If a servant ran for the guard the moment the door opened. And he found a guard in only 1 minute (good luck!), and the guard got all the info he needed, and rallied a patrol to help him in one minute (yeah!) and ran back to the house in 1 minute, that would be 30 rounds!

And if there was a patrol post for the guard less than one minute away, that seems like the kind of relevant detail that a DM should mention before allowing PC's to kick in a door. Unless the characters are blind, on drugs, or really, really stupid.

Good point, for some reason I read 3 minutes :smalleek: