DMing help: helping a poorly performing player

[meto30]

Hello. First of all let me inform you of the status of the campaign we're running:

- It's FR (with a lot of custom content thrown in, but I think it's still FR and not FR-based homebrew world, because nearly everything is still the same)
- It's 3.5e, with the core rulebooks, Complete series, MM2~4, Draconomicon, PHB2, DMG2, FRCS, Player's Guide to F, Dragons of F, Magic of F, Races of F, Exalted, Vile, Champions of Valor, Champions of Ruin, City of Splendors, Epic, Unapproachable East, Silver Marches. I might've forgotten to list some volumes. We have a bookcase full of the sourcebooks, and we use them all.
- The campaign is heavily emphasizing both the Gaming and RPing factors of D&D, but we do tend to tip towards RPing.
- I have a long history with FR, but this is the first game I'm DMing.
- The campaign began on October, 2010, and we play two to three sessions of six to eight hours a week. That's a lot of playing time, I know. We're pretty immersed in this campaign right now. Most interesting thing I've ever done.
- Most of the time is spent role playing and conversing with NPCs or amongst ourselves(both IC and OOC). The campaign is funny and serious at the same time (sometimes we alternate, but sometimes we really are both)

You can read or not read that spoiler block above me. What I need help with has to do with balancing the combat difficulty in non-standard circumstances.
Here are the details of the situation itself. If you want you can skip through the entire description and get to the question itself, just don't open the block, because it's long.

I have a player who isn't performing very well in the gaming sector of D&D. He is a fine thinker and an above-par roleplayer (although his characters tend to be very similar, but we like his style) but he has a sad tendency of making very obvious mistakes in many combat situations, to the point that he is losing and recreating a character on average once every three sessions.

(On a side note, we're using an unorthodox gaming design in which we have more characters than we have players and we decide which party to play before the session begins) Also, on many of the above occasions, the party survived despite losing a member, except on two cases, where his mistakes caused the death of all his comrades. As such, we feared he might be falling into a abyssal spiral in which failure caused loss of confidence, loss of confidence caused failure, ad infinitum.

The other players and I convened an emergency meeting about two months ago and decided I the DM (being the most experienced D&D player in the party) should provide a tutorial-like mini-campaign to the lacking player in which he would be babysitted with tactical advice and predetermined options and allowed to experience multiple types of enemies without any real danger of dieing from defeat. To accomplish this I had one of his characters (a female dervish that had become something of a fan favorite among the other players) become an agent of a powerful Emperor and do his bidding.

Well, I was pretty confident that this combat would be pretty much a tutorial-level cheesy-easy one, and I pitted the party against them. Only, the party was massacred. I did play-test the combat before the session, with a different character to be honest, but the point is I at least expected the party to last a bit longer than they actually did, which was three rounds. I asked around the table at the time to ask if the players thought I miscalculated the difficulty rating and it was too hard, but all the players (including the lacking one I mentioned in the spoiler block) agreed that there was nothing wrong with the design. I shrugged and continued the campaign.

But this question kept bugging me: is my sense for difficulties flawed? As I said the players said otherwise, but then I get this feeling that they just said that to keep my hearts up, because I'm a friend and not just a DM. I keep telling them to ignore my person-ness when discussing my DMing (I always hold a one-hour discussion after a session to recieve feedback) but then that's not always easy. So I decided to allow third party observers to see the combat and tell me what they, you, thought about it. So here is the combat situation. Summarized, of course.

The player party consisted of only two characters. I will not go into the story details right now. One was an NPC, and another was a female human fighter6/dervish2 named Rhea(I will refer to her by name for convenience) whose player I just mentioned above. The other players watched and only gave tactical advice for reasons I explained above. Rhea had very good beginning attributes, 18/15/12/16/12/9 (result of a series of lucky dice rolls), and she had possession of an intelligent +3 holy keen greatsword which she inherited from her mentor when the mentor was murdered (as I said the campaign is RP heavy) and also had possession of a belt of giant strength +4. Although we know the dervish class is designed around the scimitar, the player chose the greatsword mainly due to RP reasons. The NPC was a drow cleric/fighter/sworddancer(from Faiths and Pantheons) of Eilistraee who was interested in having Rhea join her faith and was tagging along in an effort to persuade her. The NPC also gave Rhea five flasks of potion of cure critical wounds.

The enemies were a group of fanatics devoted to serving Alasklerbanbastos and aptly named 'the Death Wish squad'. They consisted of 8 human barbarian2's all holding greataxes and a leader, human barbarian5/frenziedberserker1 holding a maul(2-handed hammer) and gauntlets of Ogre Strength. I decided they shouldn't have any tactical sensibility, so I had them charge when possibble, power attack to half their bab, and do nothing but attempt to get as much swings at Rhea and the drow cleric as possible. The terrain was urban, and there was this nice statue on a large elevated platform that the party could climb up to for height advantage. None of the characters involved had a ranged weapon to use.

Due to the amount of buffing, both Rhea and the drow had AC between 20 and 25, and the statue meant that they could always maneuver around it to prevent barbarians from charging or flaking them. The street was about a hundred feet wide so barbarians had lots of room to move around in, but that also meant that Rhea could use her dervish dance more easily. All in all I figured Rhea would massacre the enemies in about 9 rounds and recieve healing to continue on to the next battle, but instead the drow got killed by being flanked (because Rhea refused to move and got herself surrounded, and the drow ran in to save her) and Rhea dropped into negative hitpoints before I employed DM plot shield and had mysterious watchers intervene, pick her unconscious body up, and leave the scene (Rhea was Faithless, and this is FR).

So, back to the question: was this battle too hard? If so, what was I doing wrong? What assumptions must I drop, and what can be done to improve the battle? This campaign had been running for a year, and we already lost something like 60 characters in that time, so I fear it is likely I make things too hard :(

EDIT: The topic of the thread shifted to ways of helping the player mentioned in the OP; the title has been changed to reflect this.

[Cespenar]

You had lots of glass cannons as enemies. That is not a very good choice when trying to balance a fight, because either their charge hits and they do massive damage, or they miss/can't charge etc. and look pretty weak.

Heck, the barbarian leader could have one-shotted any of the two higher level characters in case of a lucky charge.

What I would do, when preparing a beginner-level battle, is presenting more defensive opponents. Five guys with shields and a supporting cleric, for example. The cleric would mainly heal the soldiers (let's keep it easy), so the player should have had to realize that guy was to be killed first. Sticking the cleric at the back of a formation would mean the player would have to be reminded of the Attack of Opportunity rules if she were going for him, etc.

[meto30]

You had lots of glass cannons as enemies. That is not a very good choice when trying to balance a fight, because either their charge hits and they do massive damage, or they miss/can't charge etc. and look pretty weak.

Heck, the barbarian leader could have one-shotted any of the two higher level characters in case of a lucky charge.

What I would do, when preparing a beginner-level battle, is presenting more defensive opponents. Five guys with shields and a supporting cleric, for example. The cleric would mainly heal the soldiers (let's keep it easy), so the player should have had to realize that guy was to be killed first. Sticking the cleric at the back of a formation would mean the player would have to be reminded of the Attack of Opportunity rules if she were going for him, etc.

Hm, yes, that would've been much better and easier battle. And I see that with the cleric, this would involve some tactical thinking, which would allow Rhea's player to feel as if it was a more difficult encounter than it actually was. Story reasons forced all the attackers on that session (the Ides of Ches session as we refer to it now) to be poorly equipped in armor (they smuggled everything in, using mostly non-magical means, and so bulk was a problem) but I guess that's just me trying to defend myself. I'll see what i can do to implement this advice next session.

Well, more ranting on my part :smallwink:
I did carefully arrange the berserker leader's bonuses and feats to make sure the maximum damage he could every inflict on either Rhea or the drow was never more than half their total hp. Oh, and yes I did forget to mention this, but when that lucky one-shot actually did happen a while back (I think sometime around february) the players and I voted unanimously to house-rule critical damage to not scale the modifiers and only multiply the number of dice rolled. Way less dmg for all involved, and we thought this made battles longer, which equaled more fun on our part.

What' I'm trying to achieve here is multi-purpose, though. Build up Rhea player's confidence, but at the same time expose him to multiple types of enemies that all require different tactics to defeat. I did fill the entire battle with glass cannons, with the objective of teaching Rhea how to deal with those. Perhaps I was too early.

And Rhea's player is not exactly a beginner now. He already has about forty sessions under his belt. The big problem is he lost 16 characters in those forty sessions.

[Cespenar]

And Rhea's player is not exactly a beginner now. He already has about forty sessions under his belt. The big problem is he lost 16 characters in those forty sessions.

I see. So the case probably is that he cares little about the tactical aspect of the game, rather than being willing but incompetent at it?

[meto30]

I see. So the case probably is that he cares little about the tactical aspect of the game, rather than being willing but incompetent at it?

I don't think it's the former, because he really does put a lot of effort into not repeating his mistakes, at least tries to put a lot of effort, but wait, that's not exactly logically correct. The other players seem to think Rhea's player has poor talents in keeping a lot of ideas swimming around in his head at the same time.

It's like this. He keeps saying to himself he shouldn't make the same mistake as the last four characters he lost, but about three rounds into combat he makes a very simple mistake that he already made five characters ago. These are not extremely simple things, but still simple enough that I'd assumed anyone would see them after playing the game for a while: such as that standing still in a place where two rogues could reach you next turn and double-sneak-attack you is not a good idea. Which he did sometime in november. While playing a wizard. Who didn't memorize a single spell that buffed his AC.

Or a druid forgetting that the enemy is a fire savant who loves fireballs and doesn't protect his valuable Winter Wolf ally with energy protection spells. Especially when he had one on a scroll for that occassion inside his bag, and decided to leave his bag at camp before entering the dungeon. After seeing the scroll inside the bag.

Perhaps he's very forgettful about things. But the other players and I really want him to enjoy the game as much as we do (he seems to be enjoying it but we'd like to be sure) and so we came up with the idea of training him. Except that training killed him :smallfrown:

[Darthteej]

Seems to me like he needs another player coaching him, giving tactical advice and all that nonsense. That way it takes the burden away from you and makes sure that his characters survive.

[bloodtide]

You might be too cutthroat. You have the idea that there is only one way to play: your way. And worse, you as the DM make the whole world your way.


such as that standing still in a place where two rogues could reach you next turn and double-sneak-attack you is not a good idea.

Sure it's a bad idea in theory. But how do you know who is a rogue and who is not? How do you so 'automatically' get away from a rogue anyway? Most rogue's have good movement, so your chances of just 'moving' and being ok are slim. But more importantly, why do you feel that rogue's must sneak attack strike(like the 4E crazy idea that a rouge is not a sneaky character but they are a front line 'striker' doing massive damage). Why can't a rouge just attack?


While playing a wizard. Who didn't memorize a single spell that buffed his AC.

So, in your view, a wizard must use AC buff spells? A wizard can't do anything else except buff up AC? So every encounter, every monster will target the wizard? Would the AC buff even help the wizard much? A +4 maybe would really help vs. an attack? So a wizard in your view can't use the old 'I'll just kill them before they get close' and not worry about AC.



Or a druid forgetting that the enemy is a fire savant who loves fireballs and doesn't protect his valuable Winter Wolf ally with energy protection spells. Especially when he had one on a scroll for that occassion inside his bag, and decided to leave his bag at camp before entering the dungeon. After seeing the scroll inside the bag.

I hate this type of railroading. I know it's common, I just don't like it. Where the DM gives you 'plot item A' and 'plot handwave B' so that you can do 'plot action C' is just so annoying.

So I see the basic problem of 'your playing type A game' and he is playing 'type B'. I'm sure he could say ''the troll hit me with a roll of 19 so if I had my AC buffed all the way up to 18 it would not matter at all'' or such.

[meto30]

So I see the basic problem of 'your playing type A game' and he is playing 'type B'. I'm sure he could say ''the troll hit me with a roll of 19 so if I had my AC buffed all the way up to 18 it would not matter at all'' or such.
I would be railroading if he hadn't purchased that scroll himself about four sessions before that one upon finding out the wizard was a fire savant. The other player noted this fact upon the Winter Wolf's death as well : Rhea's player (when playing that druid) purchased the scroll himself, precisely for that purpose, and didn't use it because he didn't remember it. Also do note that protection against fire is in the druid spell list. He was the only spellcaster in the party. The party did manage to defeat the savant, using some well-planned double up tactics and helped by lucky rolls. Could have been easier if he'd prepared some of those defensive spells. Which the party's tanker (the barbarian/fighter) needed badly. :smallfrown: But we didn't blame him for not preparing that spell. That's his character, what he does with it is his freedom, and the results are his to reflect upon. What I'm saying is that all these mistakes are weighing down upon his characters and himself, and we're trying to figure out ways to alleviate, and perhaps eliminate this problem.

About the two rogues, the problem isn't with his not buffing his AC, not moving out of move range, etc. No. A wizard is a class with a myriad of possible ways to play, which I know first-hand, as I spent most of my time as a player with a wizard character. The problem is that he got killed in that battle by standing in the exact same spot while doing nothing(he did not cast spells that round), got flanked by the two rogues (who he knew were rogues when they sneak attacked the party's animal companion and I rolled sneak attack dmg in front of him), recieved two sneak attacks, miraculously survived, then forced the issue by withdrawing out of the square only to be AoO'ed on exiting the second square of his movement. He died from bleeding out. The problem isn't with his not doing 'A' when it is expedient or 'B' when I or some other player expects it. It is with his not doing ALL of the above. You would be entirely justified in saying I'm being too cruel or pushy if I made it so he either did A or died. It wasn't. And yet he manages to push all sort of buttons the wrong way (even things I did not foresee) and get himself killed. This doesn't happen always, but when it does, he makes some spectacularily disastrous mistakes. I'd rather not go into the details, as they require way to much explanation, but trust me, he does miss a lot of things.

On a side note: We've all come to the conclusion that he is at his best when controlling a melee character able to dish out lots of physical damage, yet he seems determined to prove himself capable of playing a wizard. We never stopped him. We did disencourage him, asking if this was really what he wanted, but he did ask for it so we always allow him to create wizards. Which never survives more than three sessions. But we never blame him for it, we just tell him what chain of events led to the demise, and we give him our opinion on what could've avoided it.


PS: Second side note. I only noticed now that we share avatars. I thought I had double posted on mistake :smalltongue:

PSS: On the sneak attack thingy, it is in the class description, and they're hired to kill the party, and moreover they're trained professionals who know what they're doing? I think that's reason enough :smallconfused:

PSSS: I think I can't restate this enough. I'm not complaining about my player, I'm talking about a method the party and I have devised to HELP that player. And the very reason I asked the question is that I was shocked when even the HELP killed him. Which probably means you're right. ...Oh.

[meto30]

shortened

I might have gotten carried away writing the last post. I do tend to get overly defensive about my campaign, a trait one of my players (who is usually the party leader by default, even when we designate someone else to take up the mantle in the end it's usually him that calls the shots) pointed out once. I'm sorry for the agitated tone.

If the above post offends you, I'll delete it immediately.

The third 'help' session is starting in a few hours, when that player arrives. The second one, unlike the first, was a success, and Rhea overcame the challange without trouble. I've planned today's session to center around the power of diplomacy and other non-combat skills. As a dervish, Rhea has maxed out perform(dance) skills, but until now the only use that skill has seen outside combat is in earning pocket change. I plan to show him other ways that skill can come in handy and then see if he can build on the lessons and use it to convince a fey guardian to become more friendly. Of course, any other method is fine, as long as it works. I just hope he doesn't resort to just attacking.

[NichG]

Did the barbarians ever crit the PC? High variance is the bane of controlling the difficulty of a situation, and large numbers of foes with high crit multiplier weapons have a tendency to produce occasional and surprising damage spikes.

Honestly, numbers are a tricky thing to balance in D&D. Large numbers of weak foes can either be very lethal or utterly trivial. If, for example, someone has a low enough AC that the weak foes don't need a 20 to hit, then every point of AC they're down multiplies the damage output of the enemies. If they need a 19 to hit they do twice the damage you intended; if they only need an 18 its three times, and so on.

Furthermore, either the party/PC has a way to take out swathes at once (at which point they very quickly weaken since their damage output is proportional to their number), or they can't in which case the PC is exposed to the enemy's full force for multiple rounds.

Contrast this with a single powerful enemy, whose damage output remains roughly constant throughout the fight until it drops, and who is likely to be able to hit the PCs on something other than a 20 already, leading to a reduced damage multiplier in case of a miscalculation.

[meto30]

Did the barbarians ever crit the PC? High variance is the bane of controlling the difficulty of a situation, and large numbers of foes with high crit multiplier weapons have a tendency to produce occasional and surprising damage spikes.

Honestly, numbers are a tricky thing to balance in D&D. Large numbers of weak foes can either be very lethal or utterly trivial. If, for example, someone has a low enough AC that the weak foes don't need a 20 to hit, then every point of AC they're down multiplies the damage output of the enemies. If they need a 19 to hit they do twice the damage you intended; if they only need an 18 its three times, and so on.

Furthermore, either the party/PC has a way to take out swathes at once (at which point they very quickly weaken since their damage output is proportional to their number), or they can't in which case the PC is exposed to the enemy's full force for multiple rounds.

Contrast this with a single powerful enemy, whose damage output remains roughly constant throughout the fight until it drops, and who is likely to be able to hit the PCs on something other than a 20 already, leading to a reduced damage multiplier in case of a miscalculation.

The barbarians indeed did crit Rhea, twice for that matter. The killing blow on the drow was also a crit. As for the hit rate, the high AC on both members of the party meant that they were supposed to be unhittable unless on a 20, but then Rhea got surrounded, and flanking bonuses ensued.

Rhea had cleave, but (I found this out only after the battle) not great cleave. She also had access to the dervish dance class feature, but she stayed still the first two turns on total defense and got herself surrounded, after which there was no room to dance. The drow did total defense the first round to survive the initial charge, and I think Rhea player first imitated the NPC, but the next round when the cleric proceeded to attack, Rhea did not follow suit, and after that I already explained above. She did wipe out more than half the lower level barbarians on the following two rounds, but she was already down to single-digit hit points by then and the drow died while trying to reach Rhea (the drow dropeed combat expertise to get a better chance at making the second swing from full-round attack connect, but that proved fatal when the berserker landed both of his blows on her).

[Phaederkiel]

first and foremost: I really like your wish to improve upon yourself.

there are some things which i think could contribute.

1. Let the player make Cards for all his options. He can then look at them and evaluate them at a physical level (good -> pile to the right. bad -> pile to the left).

2. Ask him what he thinks the three main reasons for him dying are. Perhaps you will be surprised about what he thought happened. It could easily be he just thinks he is unlucky.

3. Get the wizard a big shield. Who needs to be proficient? It only affects your bab and your skills. For little money you can eliminate nearly all spell failure from shields.

4. Help him with a little "optimisation". Start with: get a Con score of 16. 12 is not enough. perhaps show him the template i like most: mineral warrior. Yes, that gimps casting. But it gives Damage reduction and a burrow speed. Spending some time underground can give some nice cover.

5. Why do the other players not help him? Even if they stay in character, they should be able to shout some advice. Like "take cover, ye daft fool!" or
"don´t get surrounded!". Even you can help him. The character would surely not forget that he has class features. So give him a little prod.


I know that it is fun to be tactically clever as a dm. It adds to the realism.
But some people are simply bad tacticians. Ask him if he enjoys playing the way you guys do. If he says yes, you are doing everything right.

[meto30]

first and foremost: I really like your wish to improve upon yourself.

there are some things which i think could contribute.

1. Let the player make Cards for all his options. He can then look at them and evaluate them at a physical level (good -> pile to the right. bad -> pile to the left).

2. Ask him what he thinks the three main reasons for him dying are. Perhaps you will be surprised about what he thought happened. It could easily be he just thinks he is unlucky.

3. Get the wizard a big shield. Who needs to be proficient? It only affects your bab and your skills. For little money you can eliminate nearly all spell failure from shields.

4. Help him with a little "optimisation". Start with: get a Con score of 16. 12 is not enough. perhaps show him the template i like most: mineral warrior. Yes, that gimps casting. But it gives Damage reduction and a burrow speed. Spending some time underground can give some nice cover.

5. Why do the other players not help him? Even if they stay in character, they should be able to shout some advice. Like "take cover, ye daft fool!" or
"don´t get surrounded!". Even you can help him. The character would surely not forget that he has class features. So give him a little prod.


I know that it is fun to be tactically clever as a dm. It adds to the realism.
But some people are simply bad tacticians. Ask him if he enjoys playing the way you guys do. If he says yes, you are doing everything right.

On the beginning sentence: Thank you. I hope this effort does work out.

on #1: You mean, something like a TCG card? Maybe theoretic 'cards'... I'll tell him to do this, and see what comes out. Or perhaps your advice is about organizing his capabilities into cards for easy sorting and visualization. Talking of visualization, our campaign depends heavily on the Google Docs office-like toolset, which provides real-time synchronization and simultaneous editing, a big help for managing our game. I've noted thought that Rhea's player's laptop computer has a small screen, and on some of the wider spreadsheets (like the combatants list that accompanies the combat map) he has to scroll left-right as well as top-bottom. Perhaps... his poor memory for his own abilities has to do with this narrowness of vision?

on #2: I'll do that once he turns up for today's session. You may be right. I might be assessing the situation the wrong way.

on #3: Well, the entire party was really big on not exceeding the medium load threshold unless you were going to wear medium armor. The wizard I was talking about had a STR of 9, and he already carried around a light crossbow, and you'll already know the situation. He had barely anything on his body when he died. The party fighter had to carry even the wizard's gold bag, too.

on #4: I'm afraid Rhea's CON isn't changing any time soon :smallfrown: due to story reasons. But I will tell him to be on the lookout for CON-buffing items. On the part about optimizations and giving him guidance: I once used to supply lots and lots of help to my party, especially near the beginning, but after a while one of the players filed a complaint saying since so many of the players are listening to me and doing as I tell them to do, the whole game is turning into a DM's own private show. Ever since then I am refraining from giving my players any sort of help besides correcting errors and ruling on rules interpretation, but instead encouraged players themselves to help each other.
Cooperation between players is a big theme in our game, especially since the overall campaign is around the players gathering clues about the 'big bad thing' as they adventure around the world and joining the heads to do some deductive reasoning figuring out how the evidence interconnnects to form the big picture.

on #5: On the wizard session, they did give him tips, but were also very busy protecting their own PCs and keeping them alive. It was a very difficult (and my players say one of the most memorable) encounter, and by the time the wizard's most fatal mistake (staying near the two ambushers without any protection and seperated from the rest of the party) became apparent, the faulty move was already a round ago.
On Rhea session, since it was a Rhea only battle and I'd already told them I estimated it to be easy, all the other players concerned themselves with designing new characters the replace the ones they'd lost over the last month. After combat concluded the other players made their assesements and talked with Rhea's player about his mistakes at length; one notable comment from a player was 'you allowed yourself to get seperated from your other party member by total defensing ten feet away from her'. As due to reasons stated above I kept my silence, except to make the observation that he could've used the statue obstacle in the middle of the plaza to limit the directions from which his enemies could attack Rhea.

I believe that #2 is something I genuinely need to do, perhaps not just with Rhea's but with all the players. I thank you sicerely for this advice.

[Velaryon]

I would be railroading if he hadn't purchased that scroll himself about four sessions before that one upon finding out the wizard was a fire savant. The other player noted this fact upon the Winter Wolf's death as well : Rhea's player (when playing that druid) purchased the scroll himself, precisely for that purpose, and didn't use it because he didn't remember it. Also do note that protection against fire is in the druid spell list. He was the only spellcaster in the party. The party did manage to defeat the savant, using some well-planned double up tactics and helped by lucky rolls. Could have been easier if he'd prepared some of those defensive spells. Which the party's tanker (the barbarian/fighter) needed badly. :smallfrown: But we didn't blame him for not preparing that spell. That's his character, what he does with it is his freedom, and the results are his to reflect upon. What I'm saying is that all these mistakes are weighing down upon his characters and himself, and we're trying to figure out ways to alleviate, and perhaps eliminate this problem.

I believe the part I bolded is a problem, one you might not have considered as such up to this point. Consider: you've said that Rhea's player is poor at tactics, has difficulty remembering his options, and neglects to buff himself before combat. All of these contribute to make him a poor spellcaster. I don't know what the other PC's are, but if he's the only spellcaster then that suggests they are mostly martial or skill-based types.

Have you considered having another character switch (perhaps temporarily) to a spellcaster PC and helping to lead by example? They will remember buffs where Rhea's player will not, and seeing buffs and battlefield control spells in action should provide good tutoring for Rhea's player with regard to magic-based tactics.

When it comes to martial combat, I agree that throwing large numbers of glass-cannon enemies at Rhea is going to be too hard. The absolute worst thing Rhea could do in that situation is try and stay on defense. For one thing, boosting one's AC can take up a pretty big chunk of a character's resources, and even then isn't a perfectly reliable defense no matter how high you scale it because you'll always be hit on a natural 20. You might encourage Rhea's player to invest in something that gives a miss chance, or perhaps to go on the attack and eliminate enemies before they can hit back. As the saying goes, "the best defense is a good offense," and that's doubly true when you're fighting enemies who can hit for a lot of damage.

[meto30]

I believe the part I bolded is a problem, one you might not have considered as such up to this point. Consider: you've said that Rhea's player is poor at tactics, has difficulty remembering his options, and neglects to buff himself before combat. All of these contribute to make him a poor spellcaster. I don't know what the other PC's are, but if he's the only spellcaster then that suggests they are mostly martial or skill-based types.

Have you considered having another character switch (perhaps temporarily) to a spellcaster PC and helping to lead by example? They will remember buffs where Rhea's player will not, and seeing buffs and battlefield control spells in action should provide good tutoring for Rhea's player with regard to magic-based tactics.

When it comes to martial combat, I agree that throwing large numbers of glass-cannon enemies at Rhea is going to be too hard. The absolute worst thing Rhea could do in that situation is try and stay on defense. For one thing, boosting one's AC can take up a pretty big chunk of a character's resources, and even then isn't a perfectly reliable defense no matter how high you scale it because you'll always be hit on a natural 20. You might encourage Rhea's player to invest in something that gives a miss chance, or perhaps to go on the attack and eliminate enemies before they can hit back. As the saying goes, "the best defense is a good offense," and that's doubly true when you're fighting enemies who can hit for a lot of damage.

The players chose what characters to build and bring to that session, and I respected their choice and let them roll with it, but yes, that's a problem one of the players also noted and commented on. The thing is, no matter what I say, two of the players (Rhea's and another RP-heavy player) always have their own idea on what character they want to play, and as a rule me and the players don't push others' taste, no matter how bland. On that particular session, we had a druid, two rogues, and a fighter. I know how hellishly unoptimized that sounds like, but they're all characters built months ago, whose adventures all brought them together in the front of the dungeon, and the players wanted to go through with the session despite my warnings that it will probably not work out. And when players want something they can get their hands on, I usually comply, which I did. Voila.

I think I mentioned this above, but I do agree with your assesment that a spellcaster is not the best choice for Rhea's player. But he disagrees, and keeps creating wizards (or similar) only to get them killed in a few sessions. And he's been doing that for a long time, which is now something of a running gag amongst me and other players. His first character was a spellcaster, and the newest is another one, an abjurer. I respect that he really wants to be the sage archetype (he always RPs his spellcasters as sages), but then nowadays I think I might need to stop him.

Another player is right next to me as I write this. He seems to totally agree...

[bloodtide]

If the player is simply forgetting little details, there is an easy fix. Give the player a DM Oracle. The best way is an intelligent item, but a ghost or such works fine. The idea is simple, the oracle gives him advice and reminds him of things and such.

I use this all the time with players that need it and it works great.

If you need to, you can even hide the advice. A great way to do this is with an annoying oracle, that will say stuff like ''sure run off to fight that red dragon and I'll sit back and watch it burn through your fire protection spell and cook you alive and then who will polish me!'' See how the item 'annoyingly' told the player about the fire protection spell? You can also do the evil oracle that gives bad advice or lies or such, and the trick is that the player has too see through them: ''Red Dragon's breathe acid, so make sure to protect yourself from acid''. Or even the item that hates the character -''will you hurry up and walk into battle with no protecting spells on and die!''


If he wants to be a spellcaster type sage, an oracle is a great way to give him 'sage advice and information' that he can use to role-play with. And as long as it gives him good advice, he will keep the oracle around.

Some Famous Oracles from my game:

*Puck-a pocket dragon(a dragon reincarnated as a pesudodragon to 'put right what once went wrong')
*Oort-Another pocket dragon
*Happy-a book that knew a whole librarians worth of knowledge and could write and draw all the information on it's pages
*D'arth-a skull of an almost destroyed lich
*Maybe-an orb that knew everything, but often answered questions with 'maybe'.
*Tons of intelligent weapons/items

[meto30]

If the player is simply forgetting little details, there is an easy fix. Give the player a DM Oracle. The best way is an intelligent item, but a ghost or such works fine. The idea is simple, the oracle gives him advice and reminds him of things and such.
Thank you for staying on this thread and helping me despite my post. However, today's happenings shifted the table somewhat, and I believe I should report of the details.

Third help session ended a few hours ago, a success by most standards (Rhea accomplished her mission, but more importantly, found out some critical information about the mysterious faction she was infiltrating), and a new turn of events convinced me that the DM oracle, which would've been a very fine thing to do only a session ago, was no longer such a good idea. I think Rhea's player caught on that the last two sessions were aimed at teaching/encouraging him, possibly because they were specifically designed to play to Rhea's strengths(at least the second one was). I think so because now he's not making any choices on his own.

Three players were participating today, and the other two PCs (whose players are in on the tutorial scheme) defered to Rhea, saying that Rhea was the leader of the party(story reasons) and they (who were her assigned underlings) had no authority to decide. But Rhea, who until recently was RPed as a take-no-b******t headstrong shrew with zero respect for other people's opinions (which I believe resulted from his a bit extreme interpretion of the alignment 'Chaotic Evil'), was strangely docile as a sheep and consulted her commanding officer (an NPC) far more often than was required in the military outfit she was part of (it was a semi-clandestine group of specialists who are given a mission but not instructions on how to accomplish them, a style I implemented to give players as much free room as possible). When the officer proved unwilling to give any definite advice, she started asking other players what to do. When even they didn't provide much, Rhea's player asked me, the DM, on the meta-game (we strictly divide our conversation between in character('game') and OOC('meta-game'), what to do.

I asked him why he was looking for advice on such simple matters, and he explained Rhea's joining the unit was a life-changing event, and he wanted to shift alignment to NG, which was more to his liking; it was a respectable story-driven reason that I was compelled to recognize. But I believe there was an additional meta-game reason, that he's lost faith in his own ability to think and decided he'd let others decide for him, believing it would be safer.

If I get him a DM oracle now, or at least a book of tricks and good advices, than I fear I will permanently break his ability to think for himself. But then again, looking back at choices he'd made, having him follow advice explicitly might actually improve gameplay for the whole party, and might even be beneficial to Rhea's player's enjoyment as well, as he will be failing less. I do not know what to do. I had been of the opinion that following orders all the time isn't an enjoyable way to play D&D at all, and I personally am against the DM joining the party in any meaningful way other than disguising a villain as a DMPC(whose ploy will have to be uncovered by the PCs), but Rhea player's game history provides evidence to the contrary.

[Alienist]

If he/she is a good player that isn't getting the tactical game there is a really simple solution:

Let the player describe what they want to do, and then have another player move their piece for them.

That way they still make the high level decisions, but avoid the icky and strange rules. To be honest the 3rd ed combat rules are kind of crappy and frequently make little/no sense.

The thing is, you have to then not get too hung up on the systems mastery. Oh, he wants to vault over the table and attack the ogre? But the rules for jumping don't quite let him get that far? Screw the rules. Go by rule of cool instead.

edit -> Now that I think about it some more, I think the problem is that you have someone who is a good role-player, and you are trying to shoe-horn him into being a good war-gamer as well. Which I think is doomed to failure. Amongst other things, he has obviously twigged to the fact that you are mucking things around in order to manipulate what he does. It's like reverse psychology, it works real well in the sitcoms, but in the real world people catch on real quick.

My new suggestions: either (a) throw him out of the group and go find yourself another boring wargamer/munchkin to play who will optimise everything the way you like, or (b) change yourself.

The problem is that you want him to be something he isn't. Hence you try to change him. Doomed to failure. But the only thing you really have control over is yourself, so just change the way that you perceive the game and his participation in it. You're frustrated because he isn't something you want him to be, so just choose not to be frustrated.

Disclaimer: I use the male pronoun, but if I had to bet on the gender of a good role-player/bad war gamer combo I'd bet female. Sorry if anyone is offended. Pronouns is tricky little beasties.

[pwykersotz]

What I'm about to suggest might not work at a lot of tables, but it's worked for several gamers I've seen.

Metagame.

Encourage him to discuss his ideas with the other players at the table and make sure they know to not stamp on his ideas, but rather to give gentle correction. In a game I play in currently, one of our gamers who is in his 50's plays a rogue with us. He has gamed on a weekly basis for over two years and still misses a lot of fundamental aspects of the game.

However, since we encourage a certain amount of metagaming, we are able to head off nonsensical ideas before they get too far. Most of these stem from assumptions he is making based on life experience that simply don't work in fantasy games.

This is unlikely to ever go away completely, it's most likely a fundamental difference in approaching the game. But you can increase his confidence like you are trying to. One of our main approaches is to let him use his solution if it will work. Just because the Wizard or the Druid could do it better doesn't mean he shouldn't get a chance to shine. However, we only know about the ideas if we metagame it since it allows us to all share our thoughts.

Like I said, not for everyone, but it could help.


Edit: Hmm...missed the OP's last post before I wrote this. Just remember, sometimes taking advise and relying on your party members is more fun than causing wipes.

[Phaederkiel]

@alienist:

I think you are by far too harsh with meto. From what he has written so far there is a nice emphasis on role play, if he has written enough to judge these things so far. (I for one would not let a character shift from chaotic evil to neutral good in one go, but it is his table).

And I see no shoe-horning, but the earnest wish to help the player. Where is it written that a good rper shouldn´t be able to let his party live?

@meto

oof. thats not a nice development. I would go with honesty here. Tell him you were concerned with his tactical abilities and decided to throw him a bone.

Tell him too that you wanted to bolster his confidence in making good decisions, not stop him from making any. Tell him what you like about his role-playing prowess. And then tell him that you (and the other players) do not really care if he messes up. That is the important part.

Ask him if he liked to handle combat better. If he doesn´t, go with the ideas of other players playing his guy in combat.

[Madwand99]

I don't find Rhea's loss to your barbarian horde surprising. According to the d20 encounter calculator (http://www.d20srd.org/extras/d20encountercalculator/), 8 ECL 2's and 1 ECL 6 make for a "Very difficult" encounter (EL 9), against an APL 6 party (due to the fact there are only 2 of them). Combined with the fact that Rhea's party had very low AC (20 and 25 are not enough for that encounter) and were up against some very high damage-dealing glass cannons, I would expect a player victory only if the players used very very good tactics and/or were much better optimized.

My advice? First of all, a "tutorial" game should have easier opponents. As mentioned previously, create opponents that are more defensive than offensive. A fight between glass cannons is always short and bloody. Barbarians make bad enemies for this reason. Personally, I regard Frenzied Berserker as a prc that should never see play, for different reasons, by either PCs or NPCs. For NPCs, it emphasizes the "glass cannon" aspect of enemies, which is bad. Either way, it leads to TPKs. Second, use that d20 encounter calculator!

If this was a tutorial session, why not rewind the combat and try again, letting the player try again with new tactics until he succeeds? The point is to have him learn, yes?

[killem2]

I'm curious has the guy tried a full-on ranged variant? Maybe some sort of super strong class, and focus on a item familiar driven composite bow. Craft master work arrows or whatever and have them enchanted.

This is so he stays so far out of combat, he's almost a sniper. Not saying this will be 100% effective but if he's quite a long way away from the combat scene, then maybe he might live a lot more.

[DrDeth]

I thought you had other players giving tactical advice, yet they both did FC round 1, then the main PC did FD round 2 also???? If I read this correctly then your other players gave VERY bad tactical advice. Veraryon is correct “The absolute worst thing Rhea could do in that situation is try and stay on defense”. Madwand’s post also gives good advice and he is generally correct.

Finally, yes, you should allow a rebuild, giving the PC a higher CON.

[Velaryon]

The players chose what characters to build and bring to that session, and I respected their choice and let them roll with it, but yes, that's a problem one of the players also noted and commented on. The thing is, no matter what I say, two of the players (Rhea's and another RP-heavy player) always have their own idea on what character they want to play, and as a rule me and the players don't push others' taste, no matter how bland. On that particular session, we had a druid, two rogues, and a fighter. I know how hellishly unoptimized that sounds like, but they're all characters built months ago, whose adventures all brought them together in the front of the dungeon, and the players wanted to go through with the session despite my warnings that it will probably not work out. And when players want something they can get their hands on, I usually comply, which I did. Voila.

I hear that. My own party in my campaign is a bit weird as well ( human hellfire warlock, centaur fighter/knight, elf swashbuckler/duskblade/bladesinger, human dread necromancer) and tends to be high on offense, low on defense, and low on magic (especially of the divine variety), so I'm not unfamiliar with parties that aren't balanced in the traditional sense. I also have a player who, despite playing for about 9 years, still can't handle his own character without significant help from the other players. In his case it's more a question of not learning the basic rules of the game than it is a bad tactical sense like you're dealing with, but I think some of the experience is transferable to this situation anyway.

I definitely wouldn't want to step on a player's toes and make them play something other than the character they signed up for. You could always invent some excuse for one player to temporarily replace their PC ("I'm taking a couple weeks off of adventuring to attend my brother's wedding" or whatever), and then temporarily have them play a spellcaster.

Or if nobody wants to do that, then how about next time Rhea's player rolls up a caster, give them a solo adventure (part of the official story or not, whatever works better for you). Rhea needs to spend time alone, either to deal with an emotional crisis or because of getting physically separated from the others with no way to rejoin them immediately. Have the other players make temporary allies to fight with Rhea in that one session and they can helpfully model the types of behavior you want Rhea's player to learn.

Also, Phaederkiel's advice is very good here. If Rhea's player didn't already know that the last few sessions were a gentle attempt at helping him to make better decisions in combat, that should be made clear. Emphasize that you're not trying to stop him making decisions, but merely help him foresee the consequences of his tactics so he can make more informed decisions. Doing so blatantly and being careful not to patronize the player (not to say that you are patronizing them) should allow you to get to the heart of the problem without having to beat around the bush or trying to disguise your actions.



Personally, I regard Frenzied Berserker as a prc that should never see play, for different reasons, by either PCs or NPCs. For NPCs, it emphasizes the "glass cannon" aspect of enemies, which is bad. Either way, it leads to TPKs. Second, use that d20 encounter calculator!

I know it's not really germane to this conversation, but I also don't like the Frenzied Berserker much, and would love to hear your thoughts on why it's bad for PC's as well. If you don't want to post off-topic here, I'd happily discuss it in a PM.

[DrDeth]

I agree- FB can lead to PvP, which can lead to hard feelings. Face it, one of the “unspoken rules” is that the party consists of whatever PC’s the players want to run. But in reality, no sane group of adventurers would choose to run with a FB (well, unless they had careful plans to send him out to get killed, etc).

[bloodtide]

If I get him a DM oracle now, or at least a book of tricks and good advices, than I fear I will permanently break his ability to think for himself. But then again, looking back at choices he'd made, having him follow advice explicitly might actually improve gameplay for the whole party, and might even be beneficial to Rhea's player's enjoyment as well, as he will be failing less. I do not know what to do. I had been of the opinion that following orders all the time isn't an enjoyable way to play D&D at all, and I personally am against the DM joining the party in any meaningful way other than disguising a villain as a DMPC(whose ploy will have to be uncovered by the PCs), but Rhea player's game history provides evidence to the contrary.

This is why I mentioned the anti oracle. In most cases giving a player an intelligent item with a 'just listen to the item and let me play your character for you' don't work out so well. But giving the player an item that hates them, gives bad advice or is only half helpful often works out great.

Take the case of a ghost trapped in a ring...all it wants to do is return to life. And it can be trusted as a source of information only as long as you work toward returning it to life. But even then the ghost is quite evil and shady.

There are plenty of ways for an anti oracle to mislead and still give advice and information and make the players think. Say the group is attacked by some hammer dwarves for 'no reason'. The oracle can then say ''it must have been the church of Tyr that sent them, his symbol has a hammer'', but the players might think that the church of Moaridan as they were dwarves after all(and a hammer is part of his symbol too) and that makes more sense in the game context(for whatever reason). So the oracle did not tell the players the answer directly, just gave the hint that they should look at the symbols.

You should not be so against the 'DM joining the party'. Most of my groups have at least 2-5 NPC's tagging along. The trick is to make them characters, and not make them DM puppets. So the NPC's don't 'know everything' the DM does, they are just characters.

[meto30]

Thank you all for all your input into the problem. Your profound insight will aid greatly in planning the upcoming sessions. In fact I have been busy writing the plans for the next few, and I hope to incorporate as much of the promising ideas you have presented me as possible.

Due to the way I selected the multiquote buttons, the answers are in reverse order respective to the order in which the replies were posted.


This is why I mentioned the anti oracle. In most cases giving a player an intelligent item with a 'just listen to the item and let me play your character for you' don't work out so well. But giving the player an item that hates them, gives bad advice or is only half helpful often works out great.

~shortened~

You should not be so against the 'DM joining the party'. Most of my groups have at least 2-5 NPC's tagging along. The trick is to make them characters, and not make them DM puppets. So the NPC's don't 'know everything' the DM does, they are just characters.
A bad oracle is an idea I frankly haven't really considered, because bad or not bad, information is still information, and I used to be a staunch believer in 'you only gain what you earn' philosophy. But that was when I was a player. After a year of DM I now begin to see the wisdom in having such interaction, as it gives me a way to introduce plot points more easily without degrading into railroading (I hope). In fact, the story accomodates it. I don't remember if I had mentioned it in the OP or not, but the greatsword Rhea owns is intelligent and can/will act as some sort of an advisor to Rhea's character. I can have it act as the bad oracle as you described it.


I agree- FB can lead to PvP, which can lead to hard feelings. Face it, one of the “unspoken rules” is that the party consists of whatever PC’s the players want to run. But in reality, no sane group of adventurers would choose to run with a FB (well, unless they had careful plans to send him out to get killed, etc).
I think my answer to this isn't really relevant to the discussion, so I'll put in in a spoiler block. :smallbiggrin:
We used to have a FB PC on one of the sidestory parties, sort of a foil character meant more for laughs named "Gilbert Gillbert Sr." who has a grandson named "Gilbert Gillbert III". He was a very elderly human, aged 64, with a starting STR of 14(17 -3 because of age). His most famous line was the battle cry he used whenever he went into frenzy: "Respect your Elders!!" I was wary of the frenzy's PK capabilities at first but I trusted my party to be grown-up and tightly knit enough to withstand such a possibility. In fact, our party came to a test in the "Siege of Esmeltaran" session when Gillbert caught a stray arrow, entered frenzy, and proceeded to kill two PCs before being subdued. That was one of the times the entire party, including myself, laughed so hard we nearly knocked the table over. Yes, we laughed over it. I thought at the time that with friends like these the campaign could never go wrong.


Or if nobody wants to do that, then how about next time Rhea's player rolls up a caster, give them a solo adventure (part of the official story or not, whatever works better for you). Rhea needs to spend time alone, either to deal with an emotional crisis or because of getting physically separated from the others with no way to rejoin them immediately. Have the other players make temporary allies to fight with Rhea in that one session and they can helpfully model the types of behavior you want Rhea's player to learn.

Also, Phaederkiel's advice is very good here. If Rhea's player didn't already know that the last few sessions were a gentle attempt at helping him to make better decisions in combat, that should be made clear. Emphasize that you're not trying to stop him making decisions, but merely help him foresee the consequences of his tactics so he can make more informed decisions. Doing so blatantly and being careful not to patronize the player (not to say that you are patronizing them) should allow you to get to the heart of the problem without having to beat around the bush or trying to disguise your actions.
Rhea is currently already going on solo adventures. Due to real world circumstances there are lots of times in which he(Rhea's player) is the only player available for sessions, which I decided to capitalize in when I designed the tutorials.
I am not yet fully decided on wether to break the truth to him or not, but at this moment I think he already knows most of it. So I may do that. Thank you for the advice.


I thought you had other players giving tactical advice, yet they both did FC round 1, then the main PC did FD round 2 also???? If I read this correctly then your other players gave VERY bad tactical advice. Veraryon is correct “The absolute worst thing Rhea could do in that situation is try and stay on defense”. Madwand’s post also gives good advice and he is generally correct.

Finally, yes, you should allow a rebuild, giving the PC a higher CON.
I should have been more clear in that post. The other players were present and were giving advice as usual, but on that particular battle (the glass cannon carnival), which was the third battle of the day, they refrained from saying much. Vhibals' player (whose character is the dead one mentioned in the OP and thus had no-one to play at that time) was playing a game on his cellphone, TOM and FMT were discussing what to have for dinner, and KBK was reading the new sourcebook I had acquired only recently, the Magical Items Compendium. If I remember correctly the only advice actually given in relation to that battle was "I'd go behind the statue if I were you" by HFS(Vhibals' player). So, I guess they weren't giving poor advice, only they werent' giving any at the time.
I know we were ultimately proven wrong, but the basic atmosphere of the party until round 2 ended was "Rhea has 5 potions, buffed AC of 31(27+ 4 from combat expertise), damage reduction 5/magic, and a very big sword, so she'd cut through them quickly and move on". I had promised HFS that his character will be back to life by the next combat, and DRM(Rhea's player) was eagerly waiting for that moment as well, so we didn't pay much attention to what was happening at the time (me included - I really did not expect what did happen to happen and so I already had the stat blocks for the next combat open and ready). I guess that puts us all to blame. Yes, we really didn't see all that failure coming. Besides, most battles we do play are much harder than that.


I'm curious has the guy tried a full-on ranged variant? Maybe some sort of super strong class, and focus on a item familiar driven composite bow. Craft master work arrows or whatever and have them enchanted.
I have actually recommended such a build to DRM(Rhea's player) a long time ago, I think that's the time when DRM wanted something he never tried before. He said "I don't like bows" and I therefore moved on. Among the characters he had created, only 3 are melee combatants (which includes Rhea, now DRM's main character and his designated 'Hero character'), 1 was a stealthy rogue/shadowdancer that got killed when he attempted to jump a 50' wide chasm despite everyone else screaming "don't!", 1 was that druid who lost his winter wolf friend to the fire savant and is still active as a PC, some ten or so characters I don't seem to recall right now, and the rest, which is about 15 or so, were all wizards. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. And I think I am saying this a lot of times, but they all did not last more than 3 sessions. Somehow they get killed, sometimes for very strange reasons. He once targeted an empowered fireball through a window, hit the wall instead, and died in the explosion, while two PCs around him (a monk and a rogue) succesfully evaded. That was a time when I did not worry about him yet and merely told him there was a chance he'd hit the wall instead of the open window and not advise him that hitting the wall is a definite possibility he'd not want to risk because the spell would kill him.


I don't find Rhea's loss to your barbarian horde surprising. According to the d20 encounter calculator (http://www.d20srd.org/extras/d20encountercalculator/), 8 ECL 2's and 1 ECL 6 make for a "Very difficult" encounter (EL 9), against an APL 6 party (due to the fact there are only 2 of them). Combined with the fact that Rhea's party had very low AC (20 and 25 are not enough for that encounter) and were up against some very high damage-dealing glass cannons, I would expect a player victory only if the players used very very good tactics and/or were much better optimized.

My advice? First of all, a "tutorial" game should have easier opponents. As mentioned previously, create opponents that are more defensive than offensive. A fight between glass cannons is always short and bloody. Barbarians make bad enemies for this reason. Personally, I regard Frenzied Berserker as a prc that should never see play, for different reasons, by either PCs or NPCs. For NPCs, it emphasizes the "glass cannon" aspect of enemies, which is bad. Either way, it leads to TPKs. Second, use that d20 encounter calculator!

If this was a tutorial session, why not rewind the combat and try again, letting the player try again with new tactics until he succeeds? The point is to have him learn, yes?
Rhea's full AC at round 2 was 27 if I remember correctly, and the drow was at 25, I think. I thought that was enough at the time...
I will pay more attention to the difficulty rating on the calculator from now on. I was aware of it and used it often, but until now the primary use for me was to calculate average loot value.
FB already saw use in the campaign before (see the spoiler block above for details) and I didn't consider it as problemetic. I guess our party is different :smallwink:



oof. thats not a nice development. I would go with honesty here. Tell him you were concerned with his tactical abilities and decided to throw him a bone.

Tell him too that you wanted to bolster his confidence in making good decisions, not stop him from making any. Tell him what you like about his role-playing prowess. And then tell him that you (and the other players) do not really care if he messes up. That is the important part.

Ask him if he liked to handle combat better. If he doesn´t, go with the ideas of other players playing his guy in combat.
I might do that. I am not fully decided, but I am considering it. Perhaps I should ask other players and see what they think before making that decision. Thank you for your advice and complement, it means a lot to see my efforts being appreciated. My players also give me good feedback, but I couldn't really trust them since we're friends.


What I'm about to suggest might not work at a lot of tables, but it's worked for several gamers I've seen.

Metagame.

Encourage him to discuss his ideas with the other players at the table and make sure they know to not stamp on his ideas, but rather to give gentle correction. In a game I play in currently, one of our gamers who is in his 50's plays a rogue with us. He has gamed on a weekly basis for over two years and still misses a lot of fundamental aspects of the game.

~shortened~

Edit: Hmm...missed the OP's last post before I wrote this. Just remember, sometimes taking advise and relying on your party members is more fun than causing wipes.
The rest of the party had been giving him a lot of advice. They saved DRM's character's life more than once, and DRM's a good listener, albeit poor at remembering what he listened to. They don't always give clear advice, so that they don't have to worry about being wrong(a type of ass-covering I guess), but I encourage them to cooperate on all levels.


Now that I think about it some more, I think the problem is that you have someone who is a good role-player, and you are trying to shoe-horn him into being a good war-gamer as well. Which I think is doomed to failure. Amongst other things, he has obviously twigged to the fact that you are mucking things around in order to manipulate what he does. It's like reverse psychology, it works real well in the sitcoms, but in the real world people catch on real quick.

~shortened~

The problem is that you want him to be something he isn't. Hence you try to change him. Doomed to failure. But the only thing you really have control over is yourself, so just change the way that you perceive the game and his participation in it. You're frustrated because he isn't something you want him to be, so just choose not to be frustrated.
I maybe pushing him too hard, yes. However, he had stated on more than one occasions he wants to become better at the gaming aspect of D&D, and I really only want to help him. It's not like I'm angered at his poor performance. He'd been this way for the entire year and we happily play with him still. It has to do more with our combined worries that all the failure might start having bad effects on DRM's ability to enjoy the campaign.

However, it is very possible that the tutorial isn't what DRM wanted, and I am simply feeding him semething he doesn't want to eat. You know what, I think I just might need to be honest and ask him about it...

[meto30]

(I for one would not let a character shift from chaotic evil to neutral good in one go, but it is his table).

We have a sort of an alignment spectrum system that I shamelessly copied from Neverwinter Nights 2. When a PC does something that affects his alignment, I assign a score to that action and add those values up on a large table containing all the players, their alignment scores for both the LC axis and the GE axis(huh, what's the plural for axis?), and records of such actions and the scores I've assigned to each. The axis are scored from -100 to 100, and no single action can have an absolute value larger than 30. So what he and I meant by 'I want her to be NG' is that he'll deliberately commit actions that will probably recieve scores that move Rhea on the right direction.

PS: At the beginning of the campaign I strictly stated that all alignment, code of conduct, and faithfulness related decisions are to be made by the DM only, a house rule players agreed upon on starting. So that's why I'm assigning scores, and not the players themselves.

[Slipperychicken]

Since he's playing a high-intelligence character, you could give him tactical advice in the form of Int or Knowledge checks. For example, if he's going to do something stupid, give him a check, and if he passes say "You remember from your tactics lessons at [wizard school] that if you stand too close to assassins, they can flank you and perform devastating sneak attacks".

[Phaederkiel]

Slipperychicken


Since he's playing a high-intelligence character, you could give him tactical advice in the form of Int or Knowledge checks. For example, if he's going to do something stupid, give him a check, and if he passes say "You remember from your tactics lessons at [wizard school] that if you stand too close to assassins, they can flank you and perform devastating sneak attacks".


Now thats a really good idea. I second that on every level.

my take on it:

1. Make him write down all his abilities and spells on gaming cards. This is really helpful.

2. Give him Knowledge checks. according to his sucess, point out a couple of cards which you think could help. (plus, if you dare, some painfully obviously wrong choices). Lets say for each point over ten, you take one card away from the pile containing 5 good and 5 bad options. I think this is a way i will use next session to help MY weak strategist.

3. Make HIM come up with the explanation why his wizard thinks the tactic he chooses is the best. This should be really roleplay-friendly (especially, if he later chooses to do something hilariosly stupid) and should make him think about it.


velarion said:

I hear that. My own party in my campaign is a bit weird as well ( human hellfire warlock, centaur fighter/knight, elf swashbuckler/duskblade/bladesinger, human dread necromancer) and tends to be high on offense, low on defense, and low on magic (especially of the divine variety), so I'm not unfamiliar with parties that aren't balanced in the traditional sense.

I feel with you. I play in a party / dm for a party of a mineral warrior Knight / fighter / crusader, a centaur cleric and a rogue / factotum.

The knight cannot be hurt by anything that doesn´t kill the other two outright. They have lvl 3 spells at lvl 11. dm'ing this is quite difficult...

Ahh, but a centaur knight... this sounds dangerous. let me guess, he challenges everyone then runs away and kites the enemies (who cannot catch him) down one charge at a time? Terrain his only weakness?

[meto30]

I decided to be frank, and I asked DRM (Rhea's player) what he wanted to be in our campaign. To my utter surprise, he answered.... he wants to be a good tactical gamer. ...Huh? Then we talked a bit more and I've learned a lot of things about him. Here's a summary of what he said. I also made a voice recording to reference it afterwards.

When he first joined the game (among the 6 players he joined last) he thought he wanted to do the 'gaming' aspect of D&D, i.e. optimization and tactical thinking. This did not have anything to do with his prior experience with the game, because he didn't have any. Instead, he was an avid player of computer games, and he always thought of himself as a skilled gamer. That explains what he told me when he joined: "I want to focus on 'gaming' and less on 'role-playing'."

But then he quickly came to realize how different D&D was from those computer-based ones. One difference he had most difficulty adjusting to (according to him) was the huge number of choices he continuosly faced; how in everything he did there seemed to be more than a thousand factors he needed to consider. He found himself ill-equipped to do so much decision making in a short amount of time, and so he 'retreated' into roll-playing. But then he found that not what he expected as well. He tells me that in games he is used to, there is something you must do, which is difficult, and has one answer you need to get good at finding. You find it after trying hard, clear the challenge, and enjoy the story that follows, watching it like a movie. He never expected to be thrown into the stage and told 'do what you want to do.' He tells me the most shocking he's ever heard was the first time I told him "The DM will not give you directions, because that would be railroading." He finds no clear path to follow, and he doesn't want to do all the 'trailblazing' the other players are doing with their respective characters. As I understand it, he's the case who actually wants that 'railroad'.

Then he started talking about the amount of responsibility he's facing with his Rhea. On other characters, who are more of like supporting cast that the players control, there isn't much fallout from a mistake, because they weren't doing something big. But Rhea is one of the Seven Heroes, the main cast of our campaign, and anything she does, it has an effect that can be felt. So much of what's happening in the world revolves around the Seven, and suddenly he feels overburdened. He tells me that in a computer game, if you don't do something you were supposed to do, you get a game over screen and you load a previous save. But with Rhea in our campaign, you can't do that because 1) there is no save file to load, 2) you can't find out about the results before they actually grow out of hand(well, you can if you are watching carefully, but that involves more decision making), 3) there is no 'right choice' in the first place. Moreover, the whole party is in the same ship, so whatever damage he causes effects all the 6 players. He tells me he'd been dealing with that stress all the time.

I went into a discussion with him on how to solve this stalemate. He tells me he doesn't want the responsibility to simply go away, because he says he things this is something he needs to overcome, if not for his sake, then at least for the party's sake (this is something he actually said). He also doesn't want Rhea to stop being one of the Seven Heroes, because, that Hero status is now an integral part of Rhea's history, and moreover, he knows that if he relinquished the Hero slot now I, the DM, would have to go through another 200+ hours of coming up with an explanation. In summary he asked me to continue the game the way it had been run.

So I told him stop thinking about what others might want and tell me what YOU want. We all know what we want so we can handle whatever baggage you throw our way. He suggested giving away Rhea to another player, but that's an option we explored before, and nobody wanted to play her(saying Rhea cannot be defined by anyone other than the designer, DRM). And we had agreed on another conference not to give any Hero slots to the DM, as they are the main cast. When I said that, DRM says now he wants to kill off or forsake all other characters so he could concentrate on Rhea. I told him that sounds more like 'giving up' than 'hopeful solution', but he tells me that's what he wants.

Well, my characters might have sense motive maxed, but I myself sure as hell has 0 ranks in that skill. I am absolutely terrible at reading minds.

I told him I will convene a meeting on this topic to buy some time. I didn't know he was being pressured this much, but I also don't want to do what he suggested I do. But as the DM I believe am the one who usually has to take responsibility, and also the person who has to fold when opinions clash. I am open to suggestions, even harsh ones.

[meto30]

Since he's playing a high-intelligence character, you could give him tactical advice in the form of Int or Knowledge checks. For example, if he's going to do something stupid, give him a check, and if he passes say "You remember from your tactics lessons at [wizard school] that if you stand too close to assassins, they can flank you and perform devastating sneak attacks".


1. Make him write down all his abilities and spells on gaming cards. This is really helpful.

2. Give him Knowledge checks. according to his sucess, point out a couple of cards which you think could help. (plus, if you dare, some painfully obviously wrong choices). Lets say for each point over ten, you take one card away from the pile containing 5 good and 5 bad options. I think this is a way i will use next session to help MY weak strategist.

3. Make HIM come up with the explanation why his wizard thinks the tactic he chooses is the best. This should be really roleplay-friendly (especially, if he later chooses to do something hilariosly stupid) and should make him think about it.

So, the DM basically becomes his 'Intelligence'? :smallsmile: Would work, considering that many of his characters come from an educated background. It's something I had been doing (more for laughs) with Link, KBK's Hero character, who had two mentors: Elminster the town sage taught Link magic, and Storm Silverhand the town healer taught Link swordmanship. (For you FR lovers, yes, those are those two you're thinking) Anytime Link would do something, somehow he remembers a painful (and hilarious) episode with either of his two mentors, i.e. he suddenly remembers that the correct temperature for Black Tea is very close to boiling because he once served lukewarm black tea to Elminster and got hit on the head with his staff for it. I will look for a way to implement it right away.

I hope it does take away some of that 'free choice chaos' that DRM feels burdened about.

[king.com]

Just wondering but has this campaign started at level 1? Seems to me from the description you gave about the player is that you put them into a world where they are not only the centre of it but also responsible for multiple characters which need to do many different things with the endless lists of factors that exist in 3.x to begin with. As someone who has roleplayed for few years now I still look at 3.x as something utterly unappealing due to those kinds of factors.

I personally recommend a change in your game. Everyones a simple level 1 adventure using core races/classes/feats etc only. Have them do something simple, something cliche for a roleplaying adventure. Something like the party hunting down a band of kobolds harassing a town. Give the player a simple decision to make with clear outcomes. Perhaps a townswoman had her necklace stolen by these kobolds and the player finds it and has to opportunity to keep it and sell it (perhaps and offer by a merchant in the town before they leave) or return it.

Slowly expand, let the level 1 experience take a few sessions, let the players slowly progress, meet new people and get a reputation perhaps, run the stereotypical adventure. Let the player slowly pick up abilities and items one by one as they grow, and introduce different kinds of threats as a part of the natural adventure lifestyle.

You want the player to learn about using terrain? Have a cave collapse while hunting the kobolds, they are trapped but within a choke point, the horde that was chasing them before was more dangerous but now the player can face them in a limited amount. Do this if the player gets to far away from the rest of the party. They can learn that things change at any moment AND the usefulness of the environment.

Videogame learning systems are designed to naturally teach in a manner that reflects what the player's goals are. They are taught to shoot a gun BEFORE they fight an opponent. Similiar teach a player what a power attack is good for BEFORE he runs into an opponent where it becomes vital to implement that skill. Have opposition include lots of low level weak enemies, something the player can deal with and then recognise a more powerful opponent between the two.

One new opponent type at a time, one new power at a time, begin the game with nothing. That way, by the time the player reaches the point Rhea is at, they have learn't the class naturally, their role in the game and how to best keep themselves alive. Then you could also introduce the character into the main story and the slowly building importance of the originally insignificant adventurers connect to the more significant world around them.

Perhaps also teach the player that running away is sometimes the correct option.

You could be doing this already for all I know but thats how I would want to learn D&D if I would play it. It means you get to slowly build upon things and like a videogame, lets you step by step incorporate new abilities into your play style.

Since your running FR this can be easily equated into the following: What makes Elminster cool isnt that hes a high level spellcaster. Its that a level 1 wizard, learning how to cast magic missile can look at him and say, "One day im going to learn everything he knows and become even greater than him."

[illyrus]

2) you can't find out about the results before they actually grow out of hand(well, you can if you are watching carefully, but that involves more decision making),

To me this looks like the main issue the group has been seeing with the player. Personally I might change my GMing slightly to give hints.

For example with the 2 rogues within striking distance of the wizard:

GM: Ok [wizard], you notice the 2 rogues have centered their attention on you and are within a few strides of being within striking distance. Your turn.
Wizard_player: Oh huh, I forgot about those guys, I move away and cast [spell].

Its simply a piece of descriptive text that draws the attention of the player. The character would probably notice those things while the player just sees a bunch of minis on the board. I'd reserve it for the more sizable threats and it should actually save time as rolling up a new character takes much longer than you speaking an extra sentence.

Encourage the player to ask questions or pose issues. Using the same example as above:

GM: Ok [wizard], you notice the 2 rogues have centered their attention on you and are within a few strides of being within striking distance.
Wizard_player: I don't know where I could go to get out of their range.
Player2: If you move 3 squares to your right you should be fine.
Wizard_player: Ok I'll move 5 squares to the right just to be safe and cast [spell].

And the standard GM "Are you sure about that?"

Wizard_player: I move onto the rope bridge.
GM: The one suspended over the lava with 50 mph winds swinging it back and forth, that rope bridge?
Wizard_player: On second thought...

[killem2]

What aspects of the computer based games does he enjoy? Surely with the number of books D&D has and homebrew options out there that, there isn't some sort of conversion.

[bloodtide]

I decided to be frank, and I asked DRM (Rhea's player) what he wanted to be in our campaign. To my utter surprise, he answered.... he wants to be a good tactical gamer. ...Huh? Then we talked a bit more and I've learned a lot of things about him. Here's a summary of what he said. I also made a voice recording to reference it afterwards.

But then he quickly came to realize how different D&D was from those computer-based ones. One difference he had most difficulty adjusting to (according to him) was the huge number of choices he continuosly faced; how in everything he did there seemed to be more than a thousand factors he needed to consider. He found himself ill-equipped to do so much decision making in a short amount of time, and so he 'retreated' into roll-playing. But then he found that not what he expected as well. He tells me that in games he is used to, there is something you must do, which is difficult, and has one answer you need to get good at finding. You find it after trying hard, clear the challenge, and enjoy the story that follows, watching it like a movie. He never expected to be thrown into the stage and told 'do what you want to do.' He tells me the most shocking he's ever heard was the first time I told him "The DM will not give you directions, because that would be railroading." He finds no clear path to follow, and he doesn't want to do all the 'trailblazing' the other players are doing with their respective characters. As I understand it, he's the case who actually wants that 'railroad'.


Some players, and this is a lot of players, love to ride the Railroad. A lot of players don't want to think about what they want to do, they just want to react. This type of player often loves video games, as they are heavy on the railroading. They love to be on a 'quest', where they know exactly what they have to do. They are not so much 'role playing a character in a fantasy world', as much as they are 'just playing a game'.

So you could just make his life a bit more simple. Make his Quest a bit more easy and direct. Just alter the world a bit.

You also can go easy on him in general. Don't have the optimized monsters attack him with uber cool tactics. Have his foes make mistakes or otherwise be 'less then average'. Now don't tell him, or the other players this(''Bob sucks at playing so I'm gonna treat Bob like a baby'' will not go over well), just do it. And be sneaky. For example, have a wizard 'just' cast a damaging attack spells, but not ''crazy optimized battelfeild control'' ones. Have the fighter type 'just' melee attack without using a five feat mega combo. Have foes make bonehead mistakes, like stop attacking and pull a bottle out of their backpack and drink a potion while threatened. Have his foes 'forget' to spread out so they can get hit by one spell all at once.

Unless your in a super over optimized crazy game, no one should notice.

[meto30]

Thank you for your input. It is good to have people to talk to about DMing. I always expected DMing to be hard work, but I never thought it could be this lonely.


Just wondering but has this campaign started at level 1? Seems to me from the description you gave about the player is that you put them into a world where they are not only the centre of it but also responsible for multiple characters which need to do many different things with the endless lists of factors that exist in 3.x to begin with. As someone who has roleplayed for few years now I still look at 3.x as something utterly unappealing due to those kinds of factors.

~shortened for readable length~

You could be doing this already for all I know but thats how I would want to learn D&D if I would play it. It means you get to slowly build upon things and like a videogame, lets you step by step incorporate new abilities into your play style.
Yes, the campaign started at level 1. But DRM(Rhea's player) joined when the campaign was already well into its 5th month (my journal says February 2011) and I don't remember precisely but I think I had DRM create characters around level 4, except for his very first character, which I had him create at level 1. That first character was Theseus the abjurer, which after about four sessions of continuous epic fail and being rescued by fellow PCs (also at level 1, rolled up so others could play with DRM while he learned the basics), was killed by a volley of bolts fired at point blank range because Theseus approached the militiamen to attack them with his quarterstaff.

...Perhaps I sound harsh, but in our party even DRM himself jokes about that incident, because it was a series of "wow" "whoopsie!" "what the.." that was way too hilarious to have any serious impact. To us, losing a character is not an anger moment. Or maybe that's just me thinking. Nowadays I'm not so sure, as DRM is having so much trouble.

Anyways, back then the rule of thumb with the characters was that the first character you create will be your Hero character and the rest will be the supporting cast. Thus, Theseus was supposed to be a Hero, but after seeing his abjurer run into solid walls all the time he requested he be allowed to move his 'Hero slot' to his newest character, Rhea (who was Theseus' little sister), which I granted. Rhea was different in that at the time she was the only non-spellcaster he ever created (everyone else had at least some spellcasting ability and a lot of knowledge skill ranks), and after having initial success (huge success, I'd like to add. Back then Rhea's in-party nickname was Overpowered Tsundere) he started creating more non-spellcasters. However, due both to his mistakes and some genuine misfortune, most of them did not survive to today.

As on your suggestion on a simpler story to get used to the game, we already went through that part, but thanks for telling me about it, as it gave me the idea of putting some of that not only at the beginning but also in between, as a sort of a 'relaxation period'. Of course I fully intend to tell them that they've been in suspension for nine nine nine nine nine.... nine.. niiiii$@$%%%%.

Don't get alarmed if you don't get the joke. If you do, look at that framed picture on the wall and stare at it. :smallamused:


To me this looks like the main issue the group has been seeing with the player. Personally I might change my GMing slightly to give hints.
There used to be a time when this worked. I tell them to take caution, and they take caution. Then it came to the point where they would debate for FIVE hours how to capture a midget criminal with their discussion running around in circles, then one of the players picked up the 1.8 liter bottle of Pepsi we were drinking at the time and pointed at its label, which read "CHALLENGE NOW", in bold lettering. After that session, that sentence became the party's unofficial motto, and nowadays they charge in despite whatever I say. I refrain from giving absolute advice, too, because as the DM I am then either spoiling what's out there or lieing, and I don't like both.

...I still give them hints, though. But then, this doesn't always work, as was proven in some session we had a while back. Once upon a time they were pursuing a fleeing informant, and the informant had his lackeys block the path. The party ignored the lackeys and just kept on running, which proved to be effective as none of the lackeys were aptly trained (that is, weak) and could not land a single hit on the PCs (well, one, but the character just ignored the damage and went on). Then there was a slightly similar situation in which the perpetrator of the Ides of Ches terrorist attacks was running away, and the PCs again faced multiple foes blocking their path. They tried the same tactic, only this time the foes were both more powerful and well-trained, which meant that they were smart enough to grapple or trip the PCs, and thus the perpetrator was able to get away. On both occassions I gave them the same advice: if your defenses prove inadequate, such rash maneuvering can lead to failure. On both occasions they ignored me yelling "Challenge Now!" but I think you'll get the point. The point being I can't give effective hints without giving them metagame knowledge, and if I avoid metagame knowledge my tips stop being effective.


What aspects of the computer based games does he enjoy? Surely with the number of books D&D has and homebrew options out there that, there isn't some sort of conversion.
Amongst the games he mentioned, the only ones I recognized were Minecraft, Dungeon Crawl, and Diablo. I once recommended the Neverwinter Nights series, especially 2, as our campaign adopted the NWN2 story as in-house canon, to DRM, and gave him my CD, but I don't think he ever installed that.

[meto30]

So you could just make his life a bit more simple. Make his Quest a bit more easy and direct. Just alter the world a bit.

You also can go easy on him in general. Don't have the optimized monsters attack him with uber cool tactics. Have his foes make mistakes or otherwise be 'less then average'.
Thank you again for your excellent advice, bloodtide. I'm sorry about the late reply, I must've missed your post while writing my last one.

I will most certainly make his game more straightforward and only armed with few well-defined and clearly understandable forks that appear only on major plot points. As alienist has pointed out, I should stop wishing my players were someone else. The players are doing me a favor by letting me tell this story, and participating in it so it becomes more fun and interactive, so I should do them a favor and make sure they enjoy it. Since DRM would like a more laid-back attitude in his gaming, I'll cut out some not really neccessary branches and allow him to focus, especially with Rhea.

I fear however that on things relating to the Overcampaign (which is how we refer to the overarching plot that runs through the entire campaign) I will have to stay virtually the same. Everyone is in the same overcampaign, and one of its primary foci is how the clues are spread out all across the campaign both plot-wise and geographically and the players have to play smart and obtain as much clues as they can. If I allow Rhea to pick apart her portion of the mystery too easily I might ruin the fun the others (especially KBK, HFS, and TOM, who were together responsible for nearly all the progress the party had made in the deductive reasoning department) are having with it. I poll every month what aspect of the campaign they love and hate the most, and every time the top position goes to 'the story being told' (DRM always votes 'tactical challenge' as his favorite, for whatever reason). It would be betraying them if the key factor of the story was removed or made easier.

On a side note, most of the time the thing they vote as the most hated aspect of the campaign is 'overall game length'. The Overcampaign was divided into 7 Major Campaigns and 12 Minor Campaigns, which at start I estimated would take about 2 years to finish. We've been playing for 14 months, and we managed to finish 1 Major Campaign and 1 Minor Campaign. So I finally agreed something was wrong with game length and started shortening things. And still we expect this game to not finish until at least 2014. :smalleek:

[illyrus]

On both occasions they ignored me yelling "Challenge Now!" but I think you'll get the point. The point being I can't give effective hints without giving them metagame knowledge, and if I avoid metagame knowledge my tips stop being effective.

So your player that is not very good tactically yells "Challenge Now!" then dies? That's hilarious and would make me laugh every time as the GM.

On topic, I feel that there is a good deal of difference in the way a completely untrained person stands and one that is trained in a sparring match. Or holds a gun, sword, bow, etc. I'd say that probably you could break it down past binary trained/untrained to a few other categories that are relative to a PC's strength. I'm not saying that its anywhere near 100% accuracy or the PCs know monster CR but I think that its enough to describe the difference between goons of little threat to the party doing a relatively bad job at blocking the door and those that have setup well to block the party.

Generally I only add in the descriptive text when they're about to do something dumb to make sure the player has the same picture painted as the character. I don't add it in when they're trying to do something that stands a good chance of working as it all becomes noise. I've never had to worry that this prevents freedom of choice, players often ignore whats presented but generally the ones that are less sure of the system heed what was said and reconsider. As they become more familiar with the system they'll heed the advice less and less (and I'll give it less and less) as they may have already taken those factors into account and have some tactic in mind to counter it.

If the players act heedless of the consequences and you are running a game with consequences then several of them dieing seems reasonable to me. I just think that you can give hints that are not metagaming but still useful.

[Phaederkiel]

well the next time one of your guys shouts "challenge now!" and goes fisticuffs with a giant, you are welcome to whip out a bottle with this as a label.


http://s7.directupload.net/file/d/2754/7lauyww8_png.htm



as to him giving up his other characters: tell him to play it cool. He can restrict himself to his character for now, but you want to be able to ask him to play another guy again in the future.

and give him some thumbs-up for his role-playing.

By the way, you seem to have a little too many chars anyway. which is probably a reason why your campaigns do not finish as fast as you´d like.

[meto30]

So your player that is not very good tactically yells "Challenge Now!" then dies? That's hilarious and would make me laugh every time as the GM.

~shortened~

Generally If the players act heedless of the consequences and you are running a game with consequences then several of them dieing seems reasonable to me. I just think that you can give hints that are not metagaming but still useful.
Caused quite a chuckle amongst the two players who never says that, too. However it stopped being a chuckle when HFS gave DRM control of one of his characters (Han Xin the wizard), DRM did his customary 'Challenge', and died two times in a single session. The two raise deads brought Xin's level so horribly low that HFS had to just abandon the character. After then nobody entrusts their characters to DRM.

With recent events I am starting to feel more need for gaming tips from me, but I still am not very comfortable with the idea, as I don't like making it easy for my players to figure out what's happening. And I am confident I am not being too harsh to the party as a whole - the party rarely fails to recognize dangers or hidden plot twists nowadays, especially when either HFS, TOM, or KBK is around. And the major part of our campaign is that problem-solving aspect, which my players (other than DRM) tell me they're really enjoying.

But I believe my newest decision will solve many of those problems. I always hoped my solutions do that, but now I think that hope is quite real.


well the next time one of your guys shouts "challenge now!" and goes fisticuffs with a giant, you are welcome to whip out a bottle with this as a label.

http://s7.directupload.net/file/d/2754/7lauyww8_png.htm

and give him some thumbs-up for his role-playing.
Did you create that image yourself?! Because it's so perfectly hilarious and perfectly accusing! I am definently going to print it out. Now's the time I answered that stupid pepsi bottle of theirs with a bottle of mine.

I had been editing many of the not so neccessary portions out of the whole overcampaign, and players had been on overall cutting down on the number of characters they have under control, so I believe the length problem to be mostly eliminated soon. The speed of our sessions have vastly increased as well, thanks to streamlining procedures discovered by TOM and general improvement in gaming skills across the board (even with DRM, at least a bit).

[meto30]

We had a small session composed of only me, TOM, KBK, and HFS. These three can be thought of as the 'core' of the party, with top performance on their respective field of expertise.
TOM is usually regarded as the party's best role-player. The level of Angst and Disbelief-filled-Rage TOM portrayed as Faelar Wood while raiding Blackstaff Tower with 30+ Harper Agents in tow was so convincing that we applauded him after the session was over. (By the way, that was the session that concluded Major Campaign 1: Splendors of the City, arc 4: Blackstaff. One of the best sessions we ever had) KBK is thought of as the mad scientist of the party, always coming up with strange (and often strangely effective) multiclassing builds, character backstories, and theories on the Overcampaign Mystery(for this achievement he is called the party's Sherlock Holmes). He is also regarded as a character hoarder because, amongst the in-house limit of 50 on number of total PCs, KBK alone controls 28 slots. HFS is often called as the party optimizer, not because he is a munchkin, but because he's the only person who ever does optimize his characters. He also creates a lot of spellcasters, mostly because the rest of the party doesn't create any, or in case of DRM, doesn't last long with any.
Anyway, after three hours of delving through the political turmoil in Cormyr over the royal succession, we conluded today's session and got to the day's real business, what to do with Rhea.

I have not mentioned this in the last post, but DRM also decided Rhea will attempt to desert her post and escape from Chessenta altogether, which was exactly what got his last Hero, Thesseus, killed. I reminded him of this, that Rhea doesnt' stand much of a chance escaping from the Talons, as they have eyes practically everywhere within the Empire. Then DRM told me he didn't care and Rhea doesn't too, because she only wants to do what her sword wants her to do and take revenge against the Talons for having killed her mentor, Sierra. (Sierra was a NPC that appeared at the beginning of Rhea's tale, a female drow wanderer who taught Rhea how to dance, and also how to wield a sword in a dance)

EDIT begin: I did not simply declare Rhea unable to escape Chessenta alive. It was more of an observation of truth; Rhea did not have any defenses against scrying, and her dragonthrall connection to Tchazzar gave him multiple options to subdue Rhea in case she does rebel against the Emperor. Moreover, Tchazzar seems to have a keen interest in the Seven Fated Heroes, and has an uncanny knack for identifying them (an ability HFS is trying to understand through magical research with his spellcaster characters. He has gained some valuable leads, but as of now his theory is nowhere near complete). The recent encounters between Tchazzar and Rhea seems to indicate that the Father of Chessenta is aware that Rhea is a Heroine, which means it would be safe to assume he has posted multiple Talons on overwatch duty on Rhea so that she does not succeed in escaping if she attempted it.
EDIT end.

The party was already torn in their opinion on the Empire of Chessenta and its Emperor, Tchazzar, with TOM and HFS declaring their support of the Imperial cause, FMT joining Sespech in its war against the Empire, and KBK remaining neutral. If Rhea was to actively fight Chessentan forces, then TOM and HFS would be forced to kill Rhea, a Heroine character and thus one of the most important persons in Major Campaign 7 (the ending campaign, the Enigma campaign, refered to as the big mystery; of which little is known to the party as of now other than that the Seven Fated Heroes are critical to success). To prevent such an event they had already agreed a few months ago never to involve their Heroes in the war, not until they had more information with which to judge Tchazzar's position in the plot; thus DRM's declaration was seen as a breech of the concord. The party discussed the possible reprecussions of this decision, and after two hours there was agreement in that whatever theory is true, they're universially terrible.

Then it was time for us to decide. KBK finally spoke and switched his position to pro-Chessenta. HFS convinced KBK that whatever I had in store for Major Campaign 3, 4, 5, and 6, they weren't going to make it if the Heroes were divided. TOM put forth the theory that DRM didn't decide to actually fight against the Empire on his own but rather decided to f*** free choice and followed the simplest option, that of blindly following the will of Rhea's sword. On this HFS and KBK agreed (HFS was DRM's roommate for two years and was considered the in-house DRM expert by the rest of the party), and the three together agreed that DRM could not be trusted with Hero slot 4(Goodwill). (Heroes are numbered from 1 to 7. The 'slots' have different roles in the endgame, and their relative importance are ordered in the same way, with #1 being most important. Players chose their Hero number when beginning the game. TOM, KBK, and HFS each control Hero slot 1(Fate), 2(Time), and 3(Secrets), respectively) For this, the three players demanded I as the DM take action and salvage Rhea the Heroine of Goodwill(#4), by ripping the control of the character away from DRM and having someone else control it. TOM stepped forward as Rhea's new owner, on the condition that he allowed to reinterpret the char as he saw fit, and also a one-time chance to rebuild her from scratch.

After about an hour of indecision, I had to accept that the three were right, and I thus granted their demand: I declared DRM(Rhea) to be no longer under DRM control and renamed the file to TOM(Rhea), denoting TOM had ownership now. DRM was given control of Hero slot 6, which currently lies empty due to BIN(a player) leaving the party on November. I saw this as a workable compromise, as DRM always asked for someone else to control Rhea (and again in the quiet conversation we had in private that I mentioned in the earlier post), and Hero 6(Sacrifice) has less of a responsibility compared to 4(Goodwill). This will not free DRM from the 'free choice chaos', but at least he will (hopefully) see less.

Some explanation on the Heroes:
Different from all the rest of the characters, whose backstories are not touched by me unless they really don't make sense, the Heroes had to be an integral part of the Overcampaign (due to the way it was designed), and thus I participated in the formulation of all their personal histories. I will not site an actual example, but suffice to say I have some control over their backstories so that they can be integrated into the story.

...
I know what some of you might think of this. I feel terrible for having made such a choice. But the set of rules we had agreed on at the beginning of the campaign allows for this, and I believe this is really all for the best. I will inform DRM of the decision at afternoon and tell him that he now needs to create a new Hero. Hopefully this also disuades him from forsaking his other characters. Some of them are deeply involved in plot lines, and all the other players were against their deletion.

PS: I forgot to mention one of the strongest reasons the three players mentioned above though so negatively of DRM's decision to fight against Tchazzar. It is that ever since KBK succesfully deduced the fact and challenged me to acknolwedge it, the party was aware of the fact that Tchazzar was the hidden Hero #7(Glory) that I had deliberately left unrevealed at the beginning of the Overcampaign. Due to this the three players were more or less in agreement that Tchazzar was a 'good-guy' in Overcampaign terms, but DRM and FMT did not change their positions due to reasons they failed to explain (they said nothing when HFS demanded their reasons, for instance).

[Phaederkiel]

why yes, naturally i made it myself.
:)

[meto30]

why yes, naturally i made it myself.
:)

I might need to resize the image a bit to fit with Korean Pepsi bottles, but this will work perfect. Just perfect :smallamused:

Thanks a lot.

[meto30]

I've notified DRM of the decision. He says he's okay with it, but no telling until next session when we see face to face. According to what he said, he only hopes TOM will do a better job keeping Rhea alive than he did, and is cool with being ripped from his character, seeing as he was trying to get rid of it.

This might be a good time to help DRM build a strong, durable, and enjoyable character. Reflecting on his past character choices and things he usually did right, I'd say DRM should perform well with a class that's hard to kill, is a spellcaster, has few roles (or one role) and fullfils them superbly, has a tight (and thus manageable) but efficient spell list, and has a lot of failsafes that allows him to rebound from a mistake without much trouble. If he asked me, I'd say he's looking for either cleric or druid, especially cleric, as DRM had a lot of trouble using wildshape properly. But that's taking only the 'gaming' aspects into consideration. If I turn my attention to his roleplaying tendencies, I see a completely different picture. DRM always portrays a silent personality, one who never speaks unless asked, and when his characters do talk they do so with straight and short sentences. He is also very slow to action and is usually passive when the party debates what to do next, which could become a problem as he might fail to act according to his deity's dogma. (This is a FR game, and thus ALL clerics must serve a deity)

The primary trait I'm looking for though is actually easiness of play. Any class with code of conduct (or something similar) might not work, I've seen him play a paladin once and it was a complete disaster. Any suggestions on what I should suggest to him? It is preferable that the class is both easy to play and strong in combat, but priority should be on the easiness. My experiences as player are biased heavily as the only classes I've ever played are wizard, sorcerer, and paladin(as sorcadin), so I'd rather not listen solely to myself. Please, do tell me what you think.

[LansXero]

Id suggest trying a warblade or swordsage next. They are decent out of the box, and there are almost no bad choices to make with their maneuver selection (melee "spells" from a very limited list). That and with the printable cards it is very simple to pick an apropriate one when required.

[meto30]

Id suggest trying a warblade or swordsage next. They are decent out of the box, and there are almost no bad choices to make with their maneuver selection (melee "spells" from a very limited list). That and with the printable cards it is very simple to pick an apropriate one when required.

...Um, it is a bit awkward to say this... but...

...I didn't allow ToB in the campaign.

[Phaederkiel]

i´d say: allow it now...

because everything LansXero said is true.

well, whatever you do, get him a mineral warrior template. absorbs damage and can burrow away if something goes awry.

most important: whatever he does, make him take his constitution at 16...

for example:

(if you will not allow TOB) a mineral warrior warmage with a big mithral shield.

(if you allow TOB) a Mineral Warrior Warblade with, you guessed it, a big shield.

I know warmage is a not-so-powerful class, but it has a limited list which gets the blasting delivered.

You could even make him make a Sorcerer (there are the spellshield variant, which lets you drop spells to prevent damage, and there is a battle sorcerer varian, but this one screws your spells). Help him selecting spells, then he has a small list of really good options. Thats much easier to play than a wizard.

see: the mailman. he delivers.

[Alienist]

Observation #1
DRM (now-ex) Rhea's player seems easily overwhelmed by too many options

Observation #2
Your campaign seems very complicated, with a long story arc, but especially the revolving cast of characters with each player playing different ones

Observation #3
Observations 1 and 2 does not seem like a good combo

Observation #4
Your combats seem extremely finely balanced. Two bad decisions = TPK. Seriously?

But I think there is a statistical problem here. If every combat was say 50:50 odds, then the party would TPK half the time (or need the DM to supply a good retreat mechanic, since D&D lacks one).
Lets say that instead of 50:50 the combat is weighted 60:40 in the players favour.

An example of this would be 4 level N enemy fighters vs a party of 5 level N player fighters (or 4 wizards vs 5 wizards if you prefer). Assuming a standard tactical doctrine of concentrating fire game theory tells us the first group has a value of 10N vs 15N for the second group. If they don't concentrate their fire though, the second group drops to 5N.

So (according to game theory anyway) the tactics employed could make a huge difference, up to 3x in this example, and even more in other scenarios.

I think you should be weighting your battles as though the DRM player wasn't there. This will make it a little less cut-throat for everyone else. As it stands though, you state that if he makes bad decisions other people die. Seriously? Why would you design encounters like that? No wonder he feels immense pressure!

To cut down on the pressure, don't make DRM be in charge of stuff. On the other hand, in order to make omelettes eggs need to be broken. I disagree with the other people who say you should babysit and second guess his decisions. Let him make stupid mistakes (like wading into melee with his quarterstaff), since that is how he learns.

Unlike a computer game there isn't a reset button, but you need to stop taking down the rest of the group with him. Punishing them for his mistake seems grossly unfair.

Have you seen South Park? Maybe let him run a character called Kenny for a while? And since you already have a good group attitude towards character death (for which I commend you on your excellent maturity) you can show him the consequences of his actions in a heavy handed way (otherwise he won't learn??). I recommend not making this recurring Kenny character a magic user though, until he has achieved a passing grade at tactics.

Kenny dies, next week there is another Kenny. This would work well if he was playing someone elses animal companion, or a cohort or something like that (maybe some "extra musle" sent by the king to help the group? That way there's always an excuse to replace him - the death of the previous one confirms to the king the seriousness of the mission and he sends reinforcements.

Speaking of reinforcements, a more radical idea to help him learn tactics is you could let him run some of the minions (not any boss that you want to be smart though). That way the boss monster can give them orders. But make sure it is strategic things like "take out the mage!" instead of micromanaging e.g. "go X squares right, then Y squares down".

Award him points for each time his minions flank or get in a successful charge or something like that. Take points away every time a minion he controls provokes an attack of opportunity.

These points don't have to mean anything, simply keeping score will make him try harder. Or, if you like, once he's learned the system well enough to bring in a 'proper' character, you may do a conversion of these points to XP to see what level he comes in at. e.g. 1 tactical point= 10 xp.

[Alienist]

...Um, it is a bit awkward to say this... but...

...I didn't allow ToB in the campaign.

One of the recurring criticisms of ToB is its complexity. Even if you allowed it I certainly wouldn't recommend it for that player until he's earned his "drivers licence" for D&D tactics

[meto30]

i´d say: allow it now...
~shortened for readability~

Hm, I will have to consider that a bit longer. ToB was one of the two books the party asked for at the beginning of the campaign that I prohibited on grounds of fluff inconsistency: In a world full of powerful NPCs (such as FR) it makes no sense (in my opinion) to have no higher-level non-player examples of the more notorious and powerful classes, which I think nearly all classes in ToB qualify as, seeing as they are the ones that 'make melee viable', according to a playground forum post I read sometime ago. That, and some other issues(also mostly fluff-related), was why I banned the use of Dungeonscape and Tome of Battle. Our campaign (and its world) is very fluff-heavy, and I'd rather stay true to that; mechanics wise, I see no reason why it can't be allowed, especially since I'm not doing anything to restrict the strength of the Tier 1 spellcasters(reasons also fluff-related; FR is a magic-heavy world, as can be seen with the extreme number of higher level spellcasting NPCs). It all has to do with fluff.

On the mineral warrior template, I was originally unaware of it, so I googled and found out. I told DRM about it, as you suggested(I was reluctant to do so since I expected a particular reaction). He asked me what changes Rhea might undergo if he applied it, and I directed him to the WotC article. He rejected it immediately upon seeing the picture. ...which was the reaction I had expected.
Explanation in Spoiler Block, CULTURAL BIAS WARNING This is Korea, near the eye of the storm of Japanese anime culture. In this environment, you distinguish good guys from the bad guys by how pretty they are. Ugly people are bad guys and/or blobs of xp points, right? I know, sounds hellishly biased, not to mention stupid, but that's the truth I have to deal with. DRM had dumped WIS in favor of CHA for exactly the same reason, too. He had other reasons for rejecting, too. For purely RP reasons, DRM had been planning to take the Sword Dancer PrC from Faiths and Pantheons, which is a divine spellcaster class. -2 on all mental attribs was something he needed to avoid.

Warmage, however, is an option I had been forgetting about. I will recommend it to DRM as soon as I see him again. But there's a lot of warmages in the campaign as NPCs (Both Thay and Halruaa are known to have military units formed solely of warmages, and the Empire of Chessenta, which is my creation, employs Warmages as officers in the Legion), the party should have had high exposure to the class, although I never called them by the class name so they might simply be unaware of this detail. Wether DRM was aware of the warmage or not, he never inquired me about creating one. He just might not be aware of the contents of the Miniatures Handbook and Complete Arcane, but he once asked me if he could create a Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil, so I'm not sure about that. Anyways, I'll ask him.

Sorcerer variant might be more versatile, though, albeit much more complicated. I will see what he likes better, if he chooses amongst the two at all.


Observations ~shortened~

I think you should be weighting your battles as though the DRM player wasn't there. This will make it a little less cut-throat for everyone else. As it stands though, you state that if he makes bad decisions other people die. Seriously? Why would you design encounters like that? No wonder he feels immense pressure!

To cut down on the pressure, don't make DRM be in charge of stuff. On the other hand, in order to make omelettes eggs need to be broken. I disagree with the other people who say you should babysit and second guess his decisions. Let him make stupid mistakes (like wading into melee with his quarterstaff), since that is how he learns.

~shortened~

Have you seen South Park? Maybe let him run a character called Kenny for a while? And since you already have a good group attitude towards character death (for which I commend you on your excellent maturity) you can show him the consequences of his actions in a heavy handed way (otherwise he won't learn??). I recommend not making this recurring Kenny character a magic user though, until he has achieved a passing grade at tactics.


:smalleek:A bit of self defense first! I never put DRM in charge intentionally (well there was that time in the tutorials, but not anytime else!)! Everytime, the players decide who leads! I refuse to take responsibility in their bizzare choices :smallcool:

Jokes aside, letting him absorb the full blunt force trauma of his mistakes is exactly what we've been doing in the preceding 10 months minus the last one. It didn't work out, sadly. Neither did his performance improve, we were getting to the point where the campaign was partially breaking down because of all the wipeouts. Still, we would've continued on despite the catastrophic results some of his mistakes were yielding, if I didn't decide this was enough, and intervened. To support this decision, let me give you a brief list of the aforementioned fiascoes. They are not in chronological order.

- DRM in control of HFS' wizard char. Ignores the elaborate defense scheme set up by HFS in the preceding session and gets killed after stepping out.

- DRM in control of a blaster wizard. Protection against arrows goes down after a particularily accurate volley in a siege situation. DRM decides to break cover to shoot another fireball. The next volley nearly kills him. DRM decides to retreat, but still does not take cover. The next volley finished the job.

- DRM in control of an abjurer. Party is attacked by a mob of thugs. Thirty seconds into the fight, two hired assassins make themselves known with combined sneak attacks. I mentioned the rest in an earlier post.

- Long, so in spoiler:DRM in control of a fighter/avenging executioner. The first three floors of the dungeon is filled with traps, but the party doesn't have anyone capable of disarming them, so the party tanker charges in to set them off alone all the time. The party wizard(NPC) constantly proposed they retreat and at least hire someone for the traps, but DRM and FMT (the entire party of that session) disagree. The wizard (using invisibility) sneaks into the fourth level first and reports 12 crossbowmen waiting for them (the intruder alarm had been sounded on entering 2nd level because DRM decided to conserve their reserve of dispel magic). DRM (in his capacity as leader, as FMT never ever leads) decide they should DIVIDE THEIR FIREPOWER (don't tell me about it, I as the NPCs tried to dissuade him, he was adamant we needed to bring the crossbowmen down as quickly as possible so to do so we must DIVIDE OUR FIREPOWER. I didn't see the logic in that argument. Neither did the other players upon hearing the AAR afterwards). The party also didn't have anyone capable of healing. The tanker was at half HP. They ran out of potions. The two NPCs, the tanker and the wizard, tried to escape. FMT succeeded on a diplomacy chk to persuade them to stay. They charged in. By round #5 the tanker fell to negative hitpoints while DRM and FMT got killed from the continuous crossbow barrage. Party wipeout.

- DRM shoots a fireball at a slit window aiming at a group of hobgoblins outside the castle window. Misses the opening, dies in the blast. The party won the battle, though.

- DRM's wizard tries to stop a horse mid-gallop by jumping in front of it. I asked seven times if that is really what he wanted. He said yes seven times. I let him jump. I rolled trample check. Wizard did not survive. (Early in the campaign, wizard at level 4. CON score of 7. You know what that means)

- DRM's wizard(another) is killed by a angry dire bear. He was trying to use shocking grasp on the bear. He missed.

- DRM's wizard(again another) decides to desert the Talons of Tchazzar. He disappears from his post, walks around in the forest for 7 days, finds the nearest city, and attempts to buy three potions from a temple. Talons burst in, DRM fights back, the two Talons defeat and arrest DRM. Two weeks later DRM is nailed to a cross. (The party considered this a fiasco not because he died but because he deserted)

I hope you see the fact that I cannot let this continue on good conscience. Due to all this he practically was our in-house Kenny, as his characters rarely survive for more than a few sessions.

Um, I know I am actually hurting my position, but DRM said he felt responsibility with Rhea, not with any other character(the exact wording was "I'd not be worried if I wasn't playing a Hero char"). And that feeling resulted primarily from the story. The implications of Rhea making a bad move is huge; I had stated from the beginning that the literal World was at stake.

[meto30]

Addition:

On the CON issue, I think DRM's reasoning was that he needed a lot of skill points so he could take both tumble and perform(dancing) as fighter.

And now, it does not matter. TOM demanded he be granted a rebuild for Rhea. I granted it.

[Phaederkiel]

oh meto... you showed him the wrong image.
The Creature shown there is the base creature, a Stony with no underlying base creature.

In my Campaign, the girl who plays the stony was also concerned with Looks.
So I told her that her looks will come from her cha score. Which is 14 after the redux by the template. So she looks beautiful. Sparkling. More like Cristal and obsidian than rock.

think Xellos from Slayers, at least.

Perhaps he will reconsider :)

for the other things:

Sorcerer is NOT more difficult than warmage! More difficult to build, but once you selected your spells, your list is FAR smaller than a warmages.



Why do you not make a Handbook:

How to get God killed
(the 30 best ways to kill your wizard)

seems like you have the experience for it...

[LansXero]

Well perhaps if not a warmage, then another spontaneous, restricted-list spellcaster? Like a beguiler for example, or even a duskblade to mix spellcasting from a short list with "I attack it again".

As for ToB... maneuvers are pretty mundane stuff actually (i.e. Punishing Stance is simply "I hold my sword like this instead of like that) so it sort of makes sense that people wont differentiate warblades/crusaders/swordsages by name. The mundane ones would get lumped in with the fighters barbarians and knights, and the supernatural ones with the tons of spellcasters running around in FR. The system is pretty straightforward really, and besides cutting down on options the easy recovery mechanics mean that making the wrong choice isnt as crippling as preparing the wrong spell for the day or even worse learning the wrong spell for your sorcerer. You can just spend a round re-readying, and this lessened impact would make it easier for him to just pick whatever seems best without second guessing himself too much.

[Alienist]

Well, It seems pretty simple to me. He continues a pattern of behaviour - playing his wizard as though it were Conan the Barbarian. As long as the pattern continues he will continue to lose characters.

I have some suggestions.

Firstly, don't let him play someone elses character. Coming up with a character can be alot of work, and then it is all wasted when this guy goes to hug the next big hairy momster.

Secondly, low level wizards are squishy. There was a thread a while back where someome asserted this, and they got shouted down by the wizard lovers. Perhaps you could find some tactics from that thread and apply them to him? But a wizard with 8 con has what, 1.5 hit points per level? And a wizard with 14 con has 4.5 hit points per level? One of these has 3x as much as the other....

On the topic of hit points, there are some sorcerer variants that increase the hit points, battle sorcerer makes them d8s, and theres another one that adds +2 per level i think? You sacrifice some of your spells known, but you give up a lot of squishiness. Plus sorcerers are cha based, so that will work better as well? Combining both of them my impression is that you become a bit like a barbarian with a smattering of spells. Giving up spells known is a severe drawback, but it sounds like he doesn't use them anyway so no great loss there.

[meto30]

think Xellos from Slayers, at least.
Perhaps he will reconsider :)

Sorcerer is NOT more difficult than warmage! More difficult to build, but once you selected your spells, your list is FAR smaller than a warmages.

Why do you not make a Handbook:
How to get God killed
(the 30 best ways to kill your wizard)
seems like you have the experience for it...
Xellos...
Why didn't I think of that?! :smalleek: I will resuggest with that image in hand right away! Perhaps I'll draw a picture of an example (or perhaps Xellos) to make the option more enticing. I double as the party's official illustrator, you see.


Well perhaps if not a warmage, then another spontaneous, restricted-list spellcaster? Like a beguiler for example, or even a duskblade to mix spellcasting from a short list with "I attack it again".

As for ToB... maneuvers are pretty mundane stuff actually (i.e. Punishing Stance is simply "I hold my sword like this instead of like that) so it sort of makes sense that people wont differentiate warblades/crusaders/swordsages by name. The mundane ones would get lumped in with the fighters barbarians and knights, and the supernatural ones with the tons of spellcasters running around in FR. The system is pretty straightforward really, and besides cutting down on options the easy recovery mechanics mean that making the wrong choice isnt as crippling as preparing the wrong spell for the day or even worse learning the wrong spell for your sorcerer. You can just spend a round re-readying, and this lessened impact would make it easier for him to just pick whatever seems best without second guessing himself too much.
You seem to make a convincing case. Alright, as many of you good people seem to think ToB is at least one of the better options, the least I could do is at least consider it more fully. I will open ToB later in the day and read it thoroughly, see if it wouldn't be too much trouble to implement it. If it isn't I'll introduce the book to DRM. Perhaps Kara-Turan exotic swordmanship is a good fluff...

Introducing ToB won't make HFS happy though. To be 'fair', whenever a new rulebook is introduced, I start making NPCs with the classes described therein. So you will understand that when I first introduced the Ultimate Magus NPC, the party was not thrilled. But hey, now that the book is open everything is fair game :smallcool:


Well, It seems pretty simple to me. He continues a pattern of behaviour - playing his wizard as though it were Conan the Barbarian. As long as the pattern continues he will continue to lose characters.

I have some suggestions.

On the topic of hit points, there are some sorcerer variants that increase the hit points, battle sorcerer makes them d8s, and theres another one that adds +2 per level i think? You sacrifice some of your spells known, but you give up a lot of squishiness. Plus sorcerers are cha based, so that will work better as well? Combining both of them my impression is that you become a bit like a barbarian with a smattering of spells. Giving up spells known is a severe drawback, but it sounds like he doesn't use them anyway so no great loss there.
Warmage has a better defensive build overall in my opinion, given they can cast freely in armor. We're not playing a high optimization game, so the blaster-style spell list isn't a problem. However, given as we have less spellcasters than we have other classes overall, it is likely that whatever class DRM selects if it is a caster it's likely to be the only one in the party (unless the party includes a cleric or something similar). In that case, sorcerer works better, I think. Or bard. TOM is having fun with an armored bard :smalltongue:

It all comes down to DRM though. As it was New Year's I refrained from phone calling him, but I will make that call today, see what options he has come up with in the time. Perhaps he will surprise me, I dunno, but I will keep my hopes high just in case.

[Jornophelanthas]

What about the Warlock class (Complete Arcane)?

- It has a (very) limited number of spell-like abilities, so no overload of options.
- Eldritch Blast can do solid damage at range, fulfilling a role similar to Warmage.
- Still, depending on invocations, a Warlock also possesses some general arcane spellcasting utility.
- Despite being a ranged attacker (which your player dislikes), the class has all the fluff of an arcane caster (which your player likes).
- Better survivability than a Wizard: light armor, D6 hitdice, damage reduction.
- No great dependency on specific ability scores. (Dexterity required for ranged attack bonus, Charisma optional for save DC against invocations, leaves room for a decent CON score.)

A possible disadvantage: none of the illustrations in Complete Arcane show Warlocks as pretty.

[meto30]

What about the Warlock class (Complete Arcane)?
A possible disadvantage: none of the illustrations in Complete Arcane show Warlocks as pretty.

I haven't talked about warlock with DRM, so I'll bring that up too. Although if he doesn't like it instead of just not thinking about it, that's understandable too, as most of the time warlocks' fluff for their power has to do with fiendish blood in your family. That can be fixed though, seeing as I'm the DM and this is FR. I will suggest it to him, give him some examples and options too.

The illustration problem can be easily solved, as I'm the party illustrator. I have for more than once made a player love a character he didn't particularly like before with a simple drawing("Your character deserves more love. Look how awesome he looks in his equipment!" "Wow, you're right! I never thought it could be imagined that way!").

[killem2]

Is there a chance you can get him to roll another wizard, but this time, go full necromancer?

I was reading through that other thread about ability draining, and if they are the kinda person who really likes to just go in, maybe it might be a good chance for him to use these incredible draining abilities, (not just from necromancers but all ability drainers), and then when he goes half-cocked on some baddie, at least the strike SHOULD leave them in a really bad state.

[meto30]

Is there a chance you can get him to roll another wizard, but this time, go full necromancer?
I was reading through that other thread about ability draining, and if they are the kinda person who really likes to just go in, maybe it might be a good chance for him to use these incredible draining abilities, (not just from necromancers but all ability drainers), and then when he goes half-cocked on some baddie, at least the strike SHOULD leave them in a really bad state.

Thank you for the input. I greatly appreciate it :smallbiggrin:

If DRM did create another wizard, this time a Hero character to boot, and told KBK about it, he would try to strangle me, then send one of his PCs to PK the new hero to drive his point home. :smallsigh: Not that I wouldn't mind DRM actually learning to play wizard well. In fact, I would love it. My experiences could come in handy too in helping him out.

But DRM fares poorly with anything that adheres to the philosophy 'he who prepares well wins the day'. Most of the more minor mistakes he made while playing wizard had to do with preparing the wrong spells for the job. To save time, I usually ask all prepared-spells character owners to have their spell list ready before coming to a session, unless the party is unaware of what they're likely going to face, so we don't have to wait for the casters to decide. Nowadays that policy is not enforced with DRM, because we had experienced too many WTFs with his spell choices that we just HAD to advise him while selecting. He once had a spell list filled to the brim with charm persons and dominate persons when the party was going to fight undead:smalleek:. That said, with proper coaching even he wound't be able to mess with an optimized wizard build, but still better safe than sorry. Also, my focus right now is to find a class that is easy to master, so that he can feel awesome for a change.

...Did I just make an argument in favor of allowing ToB to myself? I think I just did! :smallconfused:

[illyrus]

Have him roll a barbarian? D12 HP is pretty nice and rage is decent. Obviously much weaker than a great deal of other classes but a bit harder to screw up (a poorly played wizard is little more than a commoner after all). Options are limited (which is good in this case) and if someone tosses his character a buff spell or two he can output a great deal of damage and have some decent defenses. A few potions could go a long way to helping him do neat stuff (blur, enlarge person, etc) on his own as needed. Personally I'd suggest a falchion for a high crit chance weapon so he can see some large numbers on a fairly regular basis.

From personal observation I've seen newbie players mess up on spellcasters and fighters but they seem to have an easy time with the barbarian and ranger (bow) classes. Just make sure he has some help from someone else in rolling it up so he doesn't have an 8 con or something.

I know these are far from the best choices I just see them as choices where you can still be decent without having to keep track of a bunch of different options. Even fighter you really need to be good at selecting the feats and knowing the math of monster attack and defense for expertise and power attack usage.

[meto30]

Have him roll a barbarian? D12 HP is pretty nice and rage is decent. Obviously much weaker than a great deal of other classes but a bit harder to screw up (a poorly played wizard is little more than a commoner after all). Options are limited (which is good in this case) and if someone tosses his character a buff spell or two he can output a great deal of damage and have some decent defenses. A few potions could go a long way to helping him do neat stuff (blur, enlarge person, etc) on his own as needed. Personally I'd suggest a falchion for a high crit chance weapon so he can see some large numbers on a fairly regular basis.

Barbarian is nice. As RPing barbarians tend to be relatively simple, some of my players use their barbarian characters to 'take a break' from intensive RPing that has become sort of a hallmark of our campaign. Intensive RPing as in actually shedding tears over the death of a beloved party member. Or at least trying to. We see our characters as a medium to portray the story we each want to tell, and we try our utmost best to have our respective audiences (the rest of the party) enjoy our performance. At least, that's the case with hardcore RPers like me, TOM, KBK, and HFS.

One aspect I have to consider as well is DRM's style of RP. DRM always plays the sage archetype. He played barbarian once, and I had to stop him mid-sentence about a hundred times to have him roll knowledge chks or point out that he is illiterate. He always wants to be wise, or at least portray the image of being wise. Yes, he ended up taking two levels in fighter to get feats AND remove illiteracy. And he put ranks into knowledge(nature).

[Alienist]

For the Warlock the feat Fey Heritage (from Complete Mage) is nice. Fey Skin will give him DR that explicitly stacks with the DR from Warlock.

Given the style of game he has played in the past, can I recommend a custom tweak to the blast? Let him sacrifice 1d6 damage to build up a more powerful attack later in the same combat - doing an extra 2d6 for each 1d6 he sacrificed earlier. That way he can plink away at the mooks, but then against the boss do mega-power-attack-hadoken.

[killem2]

Thank you for the input. I greatly appreciate it :smallbiggrin:

If DRM did create another wizard, this time a Hero character to boot, and told KBK about it, he would try to strangle me, then send one of his PCs to PK the new hero to drive his point home. :smallsigh: Not that I wouldn't mind DRM actually learning to play wizard well. In fact, I would love it. My experiences could come in handy too in helping him out.

But DRM fares poorly with anything that adheres to the philosophy 'he who prepares well wins the day'. Most of the more minor mistakes he made while playing wizard had to do with preparing the wrong spells for the job. To save time, I usually ask all prepared-spells character owners to have their spell list ready before coming to a session, unless the party is unaware of what they're likely going to face, so we don't have to wait for the casters to decide. Nowadays that policy is not enforced with DRM, because we had experienced too many WTFs with his spell choices that we just HAD to advise him while selecting. He once had a spell list filled to the brim with charm persons and dominate persons when the party was going to fight undead:smalleek:. That said, with proper coaching even he wound't be able to mess with an optimized wizard build, but still better safe than sorry. Also, my focus right now is to find a class that is easy to master, so that he can feel awesome for a change.

...Did I just make an argument in favor of allowing ToB to myself? I think I just did! :smallconfused:


I understand, as a DM with runs a wizard as a PC, I banned illusion, necro, and enchantment, and I focused severely on evocation. It really makes you have to pick from your school first and fore most.

And then if he takes the trait spell gifted which lowers all non (in their case) necro spells by - 1 CL, it pushes the idea home. You then, could suggest to them, to ban..

and I know this sounds crazy but to keep it simple

ban, conjuration, and evocation. Basically two of the deadlist damaging schools (in the hands of your person you are dealing with that is) and then let them take two flaws from unearthed arcana, to push them towards iron will, and reserves of strength from dragonlance.

The reason I suggest this is, he might see RoS as a one shot button, and attempt to use it, GREAT! let them, and he's stunned for 3 rounds. (if he maxes it) of course it will cause major drainage from the necro spell, but then since he's stunned, the rest of the party can clean up the mess. And if he doesn't, then that's ok too, because the spells are pretty clear cut. He could even summon undead to go in and fight his battles.

[meto30]

For the Warlock the feat Fey Heritage (from Complete Mage) is nice. Fey Skin will give him DR that explicitly stacks with the DR from Warlock.

Given the style of game he has played in the past, can I recommend a custom tweak to the blast? Let him sacrifice 1d6 damage to build up a more powerful attack later in the same combat - doing an extra 2d6 for each 1d6 he sacrificed earlier. That way he can plink away at the mooks, but then against the boss do mega-power-attack-hadoken.

I have been taking a rather keen interest in creating a homebrew PrC, perhaps I can put in class features like that. Make it so that he can become the Mailman, only easier and better (to the point of slightly breaking balance). The other players might object that I'm giving DRM preferential treatment if I do this, but as that's exactlt what DRM seems to be needing, I plan on winning that argument if this becomes reality.

Fey will work well. DRM seems to have great affinity for nature-themed sages anyway, so I think we can work out the fluff easily enough. One of DRM's clerics had this very funny backstory in which a nymph 'deflowered' him, so I don't think he'd have a problem with the concept of fey blood in the family. Of course, that is if he can live with the fact that he might sprout butterfly wings instead of draconic wings. ...In fact I think draconic heritage will work better, seeing as he loves dragons to a fault. His nickname DRM is a shortened form of DRagon Moe, even! But still, I'll mention the multiple heritages when suggesting warlock. D&D Dragon isn't really DRM's type of dragon, after all. And attempting to flirt with one can be very, very deadly.

[Alienist]

Fey will work well. DRM seems to have great affinity for nature-themed sages anyway, so I think we can work out the fluff easily enough. One of DRM's clerics had this very funny backstory in which a nymph 'deflowered' him, so I don't think he'd have a problem with the concept of fey blood in the family. Of course, that is if he can live with the fact that he might sprout butterfly wings instead of draconic wings. ...In fact I think draconic heritage will work better, seeing as he loves dragons to a fault. His nickname DRM is a shortened form of DRagon Moe, even! But still, I'll mention the multiple heritages when suggesting warlock. D&D Dragon isn't really DRM's type of dragon, after all. And attempting to flirt with one can be very, very deadly.

Personally I don't think D&D does justice to the Eastern style dragon.

As for their mating habits, there are enough character designs floating around with half-dragon or dragon-blooded that I think it is pretty safe to say that they will get it on with just about anything.

I leave you with this thought - half dragon gelatinous cube

[meto30]

Personally I don't think D&D does justice to the Eastern style dragon.

As for their mating habits, there are enough character designs floating around with half-dragon or dragon-blooded that I think it is pretty safe to say that they will get it on with just about anything.

I leave you with this thought - half dragon gelatinous cube

:smalleek: What disgrace of a dragon spawned that?!:smallsmile:

DRM's 'dragon' doesn't have anything to do with the chinese dragon, either. If you really want to find out what exact visual he's looking for, type in the following into google: kemono dragon. I'm a dragon-fanatic myself, but I'm the more traditional european fire-breathing dragon enthusiast. Whenever I look at DRM's fetish material, I just say ...yuck. Which is about the reaction of all the other players, really.

We have a standing agreement amongst all non-DRM players and me that if DRM ever does actually try lovemaking with a dragon in the campaign, the said dragon will proceed to simply kill him. "No hard feelings, DRM, but your fetish really goes overboard. And I told you for the umptieeth time, we're not interested in those kemono doujinshi." Yeah, like that.

[Gavinfoxx]

don't you mean Komodo dragon? Spellcheck error?

[meto30]

don't you mean Komodo dragon? Spellcheck error?

kemono is japanese for 'things with fur', which is a slang term for a particular anime/manga culture fetish. ...Just, google. You'll see.

[Gavinfoxx]

Oh wait, duh. I feel like an idiot. I know that term -- It's just Japan's particular style of furries.

http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Kemono
http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Furry_art
http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Therianthropy
http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Anthropomorphic

There are quite a few races that are viable furries in D&D... a good few are even LA+0.

And what definition are you using the term fetish with, in this case? It can mean like 20 different things, the context is a bit hard to tease out...?

[meto30]

Oh wait, duh. I feel like an idiot. I know that term -- It's just Japan's particular style of furries.

Oh, you knew the term :)

...It might satisfy DRM like hell, but some of us (including me) have problems with the idea of furry creatures traveling with us in the party. It detracts from our percieved level of seriousness of the campaign.

EDIT: The exact context-sensitive meaning of the word 'fetish' I used up there is the 'rated M for mature' kind. It also has vague connections to the words 'pleasure', 'fertility', and 'affection'.

[Gavinfoxx]

...Why is he sharing the M stuff? Geez, all those categories of things have plenty of stuff that is rated G...

And, all of those art styles can have very serious forms of art in them that isn't sexual at all. Heck, one of the primary reasons to have furry characters in a story is because it can help a story tell deep, serious, mature but not sexual themes, like stuff with racism and political subjugation and such. Haven't you read Maus or Animal Farm?

Maybe you can have a talk with him -- you will allow some form of animal anthropomorphics into the game, provided that all themes associated with them -- everything he shares that has to do with anthropomorphic animals of some sort, or all of his roleplay with them, or whatever images he shows or whatever is a.) nonsexual, b.) mature, by the definition of 'serious and handled like everyone is a mature adult', and c.) is done for valid storytelling reasons, rather than something liking of the aesthetic look of one character type over another by the player. I mean there are LOTS of serious types of fantasy that has furries -- the Elder Scrolls games have Kajiit and Argonians, for example -- and quite a few are in various sorts of literature without any fanservice or titillation or anything like that at all.

[Rimeheart]

I think another way to approach this is, Ask him how he likes to tackle combat in video games. I am assuming he plays a variety of them. of course many modern day games have viable melee weapons and are not range only. Some games even have magic esque effects, IE bioshock.

Now, another thing to ask him about, when he picks a magic class, how does he view the class, what about that class does he find fun? Basically try to find out how he views the class he picked.

I do find some of those examples given troubling. IE directly subjecting your self to a volley just to let off a fire ball. Almost sounds like he treats this like a video game still even though he knows it is different.

Does he ask questions about a situation in terms of what his character see's/ knowns to understand the situation the character is entering? I assume other players examine and consider situations at the table and talk about it outloud. Maybe that is just me being a big loud mouth. I like to figure out what my character knowns so that I can then make decisions based on that and how I have their set of decision making thought out in my mind.

I guess my long winded point is, how does think about making choices for his characters. Maybe he needs to examine that aspect of game play. What kind of video games does he play?

[NNescio]

kemono is japanese for 'things with fur', which is a slang term for a particular anime/manga culture fetish. ...Just, google. You'll see.

「獣」(Kemono) simply means "beast".　It includes animals without fur, etymology aside.

Yours sincerely,
A Japanese speaker.

[meto30]

...Why is he sharing the M stuff? Geez, all those categories of things have plenty of stuff that is rated G...

And, all of those art styles can have very serious forms of art in them that isn't sexual at all. Heck, one of the primary reasons to have furry characters in a story is because it can help a story tell deep, serious, mature but not sexual themes, like stuff with racism and political subjugation and such. Haven't you read Maus or Animal Farm?

Maybe you can have a talk with him -- you will allow some form of animal anthropomorphics into the game, provided that all themes associated with them -- everything he shares that has to do with anthropomorphic animals of some sort, or all of his roleplay with them, or whatever images he shows or whatever is a.) nonsexual, b.) mature, by the definition of 'serious and handled like everyone is a mature adult', and c.) is done for valid storytelling reasons, rather than something liking of the aesthetic look of one character type over another by the player. I mean there are LOTS of serious types of fantasy that has furries -- the Elder Scrolls games have Kajiit and Argonians, for example -- and quite a few are in various sorts of literature without any fanservice or titillation or anything like that at all.

Let me apologize if the wording of my last post have offended you. I am a fan of Maus myself, and I have no problems with furries overall. It is just that the particular type of furry DRM has affinity to is very narrowly defined, and we find most aspects of that deeply disturbing. Not to mention his idea of furry is very similar to the treatment given in most 'moe' anime/manga works; that is, they're cute and adorable but that's pretty much it.

I agree that the Khajiit of the ES series is one of the best examples of a furry race portrayed right, with its uniquely feline culture and their realistic integration inito the game world as a whole. On all ES games I always play as a skooma addict and get my hands on as much skooma and moon sugar as I can, which means I have to interact with Khajiit all the time. I'm also the RPing kind of ES player, too, so trust me, when I say "I need to find a Khajiit caravan. Fast." I really need to find it, fast. I also worship Sheogorath. :smallcool:

DRM has the habit of intentionally leaving his M-rated kemono doujin manga at the clubhouse and my room(where we hold sessions). He also tries to 'spread' his fetish to other people by talking to them about it, which universially disgusts the other person. It has become a sort of a minor problem in the clubhouse, but one we have learned to live with. The issue of him bringing those books to my house have been solved by the following edict: "If DRM brings another of those books to my home, and 'forgets' to take it back to his dorm, then I swear that a great wyrm dragon will knock on the door of one of DRM's characters and breath-attack him to death." He no longer brings books to sessions, and the implied reprecussion has never been implemented, thank God.

...Um, maybe we should get back to the topic at hand. The kemono issue is not related to this, and I don't plan on flat disallowing a furry race request from anyone in my game(we already have a half fox youkai character from Ozakura in the game as a PC). ... or perhaps there is a furry template that actually will help DRM's gameplay? In that case, tell me of it right away! I'm open to suggestions.:smallsmile:

[meto30]

「獣」(Kemono) simply means "beast".　It includes animals without fur, etymology aside.

Yours sincerely,
A Japanese speaker.

And I stand corrected. Thanks for the info, my mistake stemmed from the fact that 'ke' is hair. ...Or am I wrong on that too?

Yours faithfully, a Korean.

PS: Do you live in Japan? If so, are you perhaps interested in joining a campaign in progress? We're short a player, and we're on the lookout for people to come and join. We play mostly online nowadays, too. I'm only amateur when it comes to Japanese, with JLPT 2nd rank, but your english seems superb, and none of us has any problems with english. Well, one of us does, but he understands Japanese pretty well.


I guess my long winded point is, how does think about making choices for his characters. Maybe he needs to examine that aspect of game play. What kind of video games does he play?

According to him, vast majority are rythm games. ...which has nothing to do with this topic, so I guess you're refering to those that involve combat. I haven't known him long enough to know his past preferences, but HFS tells me DRM mostly plays Minecraft in his free time. Which doesn't have much of a combat mechanic other than clicking rapidly in succession.
Perhaps I should ask him about that. I will do so when I see him again.

PS: He once told me his favorite class is wizard, which he prefers for its versatility. And yes, I do feel the shamefully obvious irony in that observation.

[NNescio]

And I stand corrected. Thanks for the info, my mistake stemmed from the fact that 'ke' is hair. ...Or am I wrong on that too?

Yours sincerely, a Korean.

That's the etymological root. Astute observation.

Edit:
You're correct if you implied that it generally refers to animals with fur, sort of like the English "beast". Like the English word, it is also commonly used to refer to scaled animals.

I was just nitpicking, sorry.



PS: Do you live in Japan? If so, are you perhaps interested in joining a campaign in progress? We're short a player, and we're on the lookout for people to come and join. We play mostly online nowadays, too. I'm only amateur when it comes to Japanese, with JLPT 2nd rank, but your english seems superb, and none of us has any problems with english. Well, one of us does, but he understands Japanese pretty well.

I currently live in the US, and my first language is actually Chinese. Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression.

[Gavinfoxx]

Does your friend have, perhaps, a neurological, mental, or social disorder, maybe? Maybe undiagnosed?

It sounds like he desperately wants to meet local people who are as... jazzed about his main particular narrow topic of interest as he is. Which is all well and good, if he is going about it the right way. Maybe find a local furry club or forum or something? Where does he live?

[meto30]

Does your friend have, perhaps, a neurological, mental, or social disorder, maybe? Maybe undiagnosed?

It sounds like he desperately wants to meet local people who are as... jazzed about his main particular narrow topic of interest as he is. Which is all well and good, if he is going about it the right way. Maybe find a local furry club or forum or something? Where does he live?

Daejeon, South Korea. Which is the location of our college campus. Our school has enough people of all sorts of subcultures to be open-minded about most, but seeing as DRM has failed to find one who shared his 'area of particular interest' in our club, I have doubts he'll find someone in the geographic region.

For your information, our club is named "Shangri-La" and is the anime/manga culture club.


I currently live in the US, and my first language is actually Chinese. Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression.
Too bad :smallfrown: but still, thanks for the info. I actually thought that the word was made from two chinese characters, 'fur'+'thing'. So that's the etymology then? I should brush up on my Japanese, seeing as I am making mistakes like this.

[Gavinfoxx]

Maybe http://cafe.naver.com/korfurall might be a better place for him to look? I can't read Korean, do they have meetups? Also, http://www.pounced.org has quite a few people in South Korea... maybe point him at a whole mess of international-capable social networking sites for Furries? You can find lots of lists of these at Wikifur... and encourage him to stop trying to get you all into this sort of thing?


Also, for video games... has he ever played any 'very very open, lots of choices available' western style roleplaying games? Video games I mean? Like the aforementioned variants on Elder Scrolls... Ones that have lots of choice and consequences and require movement based tactical acumen and such? The sorts of ones that might or might not be inspired by or based on Dungeons and Dragons? If you want him to get better at playing D&D tactically... suggest he find the modern Temple of Elemental Evil computer game, get the latest version, and the Circle of Eight modpack (http://www.co8.org/forum/) for it, and he should play that...

[meto30]

Maybe http://cafe.naver.com/korfurall might be a better place? I can't read Korean, do they have meetups? Also, http://www.pounced.org has quite a few people in South Korea... maybe point him at a whole mess of international-capable social networking sites for Furries? You can find lots of lists of these at wikifur...

I just checked the Naver cafe, that place has 221 members, which is shockingly small compared in Korean standards, but it seems pretty active, looking at its rate of board use. The place however seems strictly non-adultrated, however, so I guess DRM won't fit in. I also get the feeling DRM would already know about that place. Perhaps he does.

[Gavinfoxx]

Still. I'd try and point him at as many local-capable groups where he might find folk who have common interests with him as possible. I find that, stateside at least, most people in these fandoms don't necessarily know about the main social networing sites that would cater to them, especially the hyper-local ones associated with a particular region or province or state or whatever.

For YOUR group at least, consider perhaps actually writing up a list of social rules, do's and dont's and repercussions for them and such, for him. Make it an actual printout that he can reference and memorize, a 'what he has to do to be a functional part of this group' sort of thing.

[Heatwizard]

If your goal is to just keep him from dying, my understanding is that nothing - short of optimal crazy wizard tricks - will keep you safe like levels in Warlock. If he ends up taking it, ensure he takes Walk Unseen, Fell Flight, and Flee the Scene. Always invisible, always flying, always teleporting. He couldn't kill himself like that if he tried.

e: At 12th, he gets the ability to craft magic doodads without the required spells as long as he passes a UMD check; whip up some wands and you, too, can have the versatility you crave in the safe, easy-to-use package you need. WarlockTech; making a better tomorrow...today.

[Rimeheart]

And I stand corrected. Thanks for the info, my mistake stemmed from the fact that 'ke' is hair. ...Or am I wrong on that too?

Yours faithfully, a Korean.

PS: Do you live in Japan? If so, are you perhaps interested in joining a campaign in progress? We're short a player, and we're on the lookout for people to come and join. We play mostly online nowadays, too. I'm only amateur when it comes to Japanese, with JLPT 2nd rank, but your english seems superb, and none of us has any problems with english. Well, one of us does, but he understands Japanese pretty well.



According to him, vast majority are rythm games. ...which has nothing to do with this topic, so I guess you're refering to those that involve combat. I haven't known him long enough to know his past preferences, but HFS tells me DRM mostly plays Minecraft in his free time. Which doesn't have much of a combat mechanic other than clicking rapidly in succession.
Perhaps I should ask him about that. I will do so when I see him again.

PS: He once told me his favorite class is wizard, which he prefers for its versatility. And yes, I do feel the shamefully obvious irony in that observation.


Well if the video games are not very combat oriented. Then I would stick with the whole idea of getting to understand how he thinks of the character choices process. How a person decided what his character will do is important.

[meto30]

For YOUR group at least, consider perhaps actually writing up a list of social rules, do's and dont's and repercussions for them and such, for him. Make it an actual printout that he can reference and memorize, a 'what he has to do to be a functional part of this group' sort of thing.
Well, most of the actual problems arising from his fetish happened a long time ago, and none have been repeated since then, so I think this is no longer something I should be concerned with. Thank you for the advice, though.


If your goal is to just keep him from dying, my understanding is that nothing - short of optimal crazy wizard tricks - will keep you safe like levels in Warlock. If he ends up taking it, ensure he takes Walk Unseen, Fell Flight, and Flee the Scene. Always invisible, always flying, always teleporting. He couldn't kill himself like that if he tried.
I relayed DRM everything the playground has suggested, and he told me he'll make his decision by tommorrow. Thank you for the input. :smallsmile:


Well if the video games are not very combat oriented. Then I would stick with the whole idea of getting to understand how he thinks of the character choices process. How a person decided what his character will do is important.
I'll ask that question tommorrow when he comes back.


As I said above, I told DRM about the nice advice I've been getting here, at least about the caster classes. I told him 'there are some spellcaster class suggestions and then some none-caster suggestions', then he cut me mid sentence 'tell me about the spellcasters'. So I told him about warlocks, variant sorcerers, necromancers, the RoS feat, and also sorcerers in general. DRM seemed to be interested in a blaster build this time, so I also told him about the Mailman. I also recommended he'd better not try the Mailman himself, at least not for now. He did mention the Incantatrix, though, so perhaps enother evoker is in the works within his head.... I said to myself "Oh God not another wizard" but I didn't say anything aloud.

I didn't get the chance to introduce the ToB classes yet because of the short nature of our conversation (a phone call) but I plan to tell him about those tommorrow.

[Alienist]

I didn't get the chance to introduce the ToB classes yet because of the short nature of our conversation (a phone call) but I plan to tell him about those tommorrow.

I remain convinced that introducing ToB will be a mistake.

If he does look at Warlock, note that one of the powers is unlimited dispelling, so he could in theory anyway make a pretty good anti-mage mage.

But as DM you have tobe prepared for the all-flying, all-invisible, all-dispelling character, which has potential to derail any plot with magic in it.

[Heatwizard]

If he does look at Warlock, note that one of the powers is unlimited dispelling, so he could in theory anyway make a pretty good anti-mage mage.

But as DM you have tobe prepared for the all-flying, all-invisible, all-dispelling character, which has potential to derail any plot with magic in it.

Generally I have to go out and look up all the optimization fun-facts, but I don't think Regular/Greater Dispel scale well. I mean, it'll be decent at sixth if he picks it up right away, but that would mean he gives up two(!!) of the trifecta, and if he does that you should spray him with a water bottle.

[Phaederkiel]

i would be very much delighted if you put up a link of some of your character portraits...
I could share a picture of our Stony lady-Knigh, too.

As for TOB: I love the fluff. But whats even better is the mechanical aspect.

If he wants to play a caster, i would advise sorcerer, i think. but you have to help him with the spells. Afterwards, his list is smaller than any of the fixed-list casters, yet not as marginal as a warlocks.

[Drork]

One of the best ways to teach a player is not actually have it happen to them. People will more often than not believe a failing was outside their control when happening to them.
When training someone have things happen to someone else which he has to stop. For example teaching about flanking have someone getting flanked he has to try to position himself to deal with it. Solution flank his opponent to kill it quickly, or have the besieged person call for back to back standing against a wall to stop flanking.

If the player keeps forgetting things you should consider doing simple reminders, these dont always have to come from you as a DM. A few maybe subtle ways...
Have your players talk about a planned combat before it happens. Or a party member with mind link for talking mid combat.
Remind players of things as they come up like, so do you all have what you need before you head into the fire savant lair.
Encourage more talking about combat in combat. Have foes talk more to more openly display their intent. Having one rogue say to the other quick lets get to the wizard so we can take him out quickly. Leaders talking about how the fight should be going etc. This can get the players talking leading to RP in combat well reminding people to do things like get flanking and out of flanking take higher ground etc.

Ive been in a gaming group where there was a player than wanted to be a solo player very story based in a group of 5 people turned out they just under powered. I wont go into the build but after months of the DM and a few people talking about it we gave him a semi cursed magic item which altered him significantly making things a lot simpler for him well bringing him closer to the power level of the party. This particular item was a cursed armor that would eventually convert all his levels into cleric to remove his crazy splash build in 4 different classes.
Some creative educational items. A ring of wizardry that makes you lose a 1st level spell slot spell every round you are flanked. A sword that is +3 when flanking but +1 when not. Armor that makes you immobile giving you a +2 to AC for 1 round unless you move every second round of combat. With any similar items you need to be upfront with the curse. Letting the player know the boons if they use it correctly and the cost if they dont.

As a side note always err on the side of less damage more often.

[meto30]

I called DRM again, got some quick answers. First, he's building a blaster, so I guess ToB is out through the window. Also means I won't be introducing the book to the whole party, either. He's still not decided between an incantatrix full caster build and the more hardy sorcerer or warlock. I am trying my best to subtly steer him away from building another squishy wizard, but it's his choice after all.


I remain convinced that introducing ToB will be a mistake. If he does look at Warlock, note that one of the powers is unlimited dispelling, so he could in theory anyway make a pretty good anti-mage mage.
But as DM you have tobe prepared for the all-flying, all-invisible, all-dispelling character, which has potential to derail any plot with magic in it.

Ah, yes. I used to be a wizard back in my player days, but the DM was so good at designing fun adventures for us (with all of our abilities in consideration to boot!) that we hardly noticed that we were potential game-breakers. Now I'm behind the curtain, and I have a new group too, and I have to keep reminding myself never to forget the awesome powers of the spellcasters. I might call on the collective wisdom of the playground to help me in this.

I never played warlock (except in NWN2, but that's a CRPG) before, but my experiences with running warlock NPCs have taught me that they're pretty decent, very sturdy compared to most other casters and needing little in the way of micromanagement. I recommended the class to DRM mostly on those lines, too. However, it's not my call. We'll see what class DRM decides on.


i would be very much delighted if you put up a link of some of your character portraits...
I could share a picture of our Stony lady-Knigh, too.

As for TOB: I love the fluff. But whats even better is the mechanical aspect.

If he wants to play a caster, i would advise sorcerer, i think. but you have to help him with the spells. Afterwards, his list is smaller than any of the fixed-list casters, yet not as marginal as a warlocks.

I will scan the pictures as soon as I am able. Alas, I'm in Hawaii at the moment, with all my pictures at home back in Korea, so I cannot scan them now. Here are some I already have as image files, though:
Tiandriel Dracondar, NPC (https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0Bw5KWBe-CINtZDc2MzQyMzgtN2IxMC00YWE4LWEyZjItM2Q1Y2NmOWFkNG Y5&hl=en_US)
Ramas Odesseiron, PC, Red Wizard of Thay (https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0Bw5KWBe-CINtNDMzNTRhODctZDBlNi00NjE0LThhYmEtNmI1ZGNlNWY0Zj dl&hl=en_US)
John Fullmoon, PC, Cavalier (https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0Bw5KWBe-CINtOGMyNWRjNzUtN2Q2NC00MDYyLTlhNjEtZTgyOWY3NmUxOW Zm&hl=en_US)
Elminster Aumar and Khelben "Blackstaff" Arunson, NPCs (https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0Bw5KWBe-CINtNTE4MTE0YzEtMTdlZS00NGEwLTg5ZWEtOWUwN2Q0NzAzN2 Iy&hl=en_US)

Again, it's DRM's call on which class to play. He is very, very partial to wizards (which I already told you too many times, will stop now). Even after I recommended sorcerer and warlock, he asked me questions about wizards. URGH!

[meto30]

Some creative educational items. A ring of wizardry that makes you lose a 1st level spell slot spell every round you are flanked. A sword that is +3 when flanking but +1 when not. Armor that makes you immobile giving you a +2 to AC for 1 round unless you move every second round of combat. With any similar items you need to be upfront with the curse. Letting the player know the boons if they use it correctly and the cost if they dont.

As a side note always err on the side of less damage more often.

A good idea. Perhaps it can be applied together with Bloodtide's 'bad oracle'. I had been refraining from introducing cursed items until the party's wealth in magic items improved a bit(due to some unfortunate circumstances they've put themselves in, magic items are a bit lacking), but I guess one can't hurt too badly.

The unfortunate circumstances I mentioned above include that one session in which FMT and DRM attempted to jump a 50' wide chasm and failed. They were both resurrected, but their gear remained at the bottom, which the party never reached, as they escaped the dungeon.

[meto30]

OK, DRM's decided.

Race has not yet been determined, but...
wizard2/fighter4/dragon slayer10/eldritch knight4. Taken in that order, too.
Stats are 16/14/15/15/13/13.

...I know... (huddles in the corner of the room and sobs)

First, he wasn't interested in ToB. He thought it was overly complicated.
Second, he wasn't interested in Warlocks. The reason he gave me was "I think it's too complicated". ..Huh?
Third, he wasn't interested in Necromancer because he didn't like necromancy.
Fourth, he decided he didn't want to do sorcerer this time because he wanted to play as a melee combatant for a change.

He gave me what he was aiming at: Adol, the protagonist of the Ys series of JPRG. I haven't played Ys, but I've played the Rance series :smallcool: and I know Rance is a parody of Adol, so I had a rather clear picture in mind: Lightly armored, holding something similiar to a bastard sword, no shield on the off-hand, using some magic but mostly just slashing at enemies with his sword. He confirmed my image, and told me he wanted to realize that. I was cool with it so we went into specifics.

He was fixated on Dragonslayer from the beginning, mainly for fluff reasons. I thought the class was good enough, but then we noted there was a spell progression, 1 for every odd level, and so we decided to throw in two levels of wizard to make use of that. Then... the above build sort of naturally fell out.

I know that the above build won't satisfy any optimizer's standards, but we're not playing an optimized campaign, so 'workable' is usually enough. Anyways, I'd like ideas. What changes can be made to the above build to make it better? Also, what feats should this class use? The dragonslayer PrC would stay no matter what, I think, so any build suggestions will have to include that.

[illyrus]

Is he actually getting to start at level 20? If not what level is he starting at? Given his many deaths it might be better to front-load a bunch of survivability stuff for his starting level.

Have either of you considered duskblade or swordsage (might be confusing 3.5 and 4.0 with that one) for that sort of fighter/mage feel instead?

[meto30]

Is he actually getting to start at level 20? If not what level is he starting at? Given his many deaths it might be better to front-load a bunch of survivability stuff for his starting level.

Have either of you considered duskblade or swordsage (might be confusing 3.5 and 4.0 with that one) for that sort of fighter/mage feel instead?

Duskblade has not been considered, I'll make sure to mention it to him tomorrow. He'll be beginning at level 10. Maximum level we allow for character creation.

EDIT: I just mentioned it to him, he says he won't take duskblade.

[illyrus]

Unless I'm missing something he has no innate ability at level 10 to cast in armor without spell failure, is this correct? Also looked like it would be 11th level before he'd gain access to lvl 3 spells.

I think he will have to layer his defenses. A simple mage armor and shield spell are not going to cut it, but a mixture of a cloak of minor displacement (20% miss chance, always on), mirror image(spell or scroll), and stoneskin (scroll) with a blink (scroll) and/or greater invisibility (scroll) for the harder fights might allow him to live. I'd also suggest simple things like resist energy spells etc though I know that wasn't his strong suit.

Put spell storing on his weapon with a pack of scrolls of vampiric embrace (really I'd probably pick a wand with a CL of 6, 8, or 10 if possible) that he uses early and often and he should have some spare temp HPs. He should be willing to use it directly from the scroll/wand as well when he needs it.

One note for something like this he will want A LOT of copies/charges for this to work. He should not be thinking "should I possibly waste a scroll/wand charge" but rather have so many that he will always use them.

[Phaederkiel]

I really like your style, very clean. Especially Fullmoon, especcialy the faces.

about your player...wait til that guy dies his unevitable death and then help him.

[meto30]

Unless I'm missing something he has no innate ability at level 10 to cast in armor without spell failure, is this correct? Also looked like it would be 11th level before he'd gain access to lvl 3 spells.

I think he will have to layer his defenses. A simple mage armor and shield spell are not going to cut it, but a mixture of a cloak of minor displacement (20% miss chance, always on), mirror image(spell or scroll), and stoneskin (scroll) with a blink (scroll) and/or greater invisibility (scroll) for the harder fights might allow him to live. I'd also suggest simple things like resist energy spells etc though I know that wasn't his strong suit.

~edited for readability~
He could to get a mithrl breastplate with that imbuement from Exalted that gives him 10% spellfailure reduction (I think there was such a thing, am I remembering wrong?) to get the change down to 5%. Then I guess a single level dip in spellsword could set things up alright. He could even pick up a buckler and still not have spellfail then.

I am going to recommend the cloak of minor displacement to him. About the spells, I have a feeling he's going to argue with me in favor of blasting spells, but I plan on winning that arguement. I think a rod of lesser quicken would help too, so he doesn't have to spend a whole time buffing himself, how do you guys think? On the scrolls and wands issue, I doubt DRM would like taking the craft feats himself so I guess I'll have to give him lots of shopping time and/or an NPC crafter contact.

Perhaps I should replace some of the fighter levels with spellsword... what was spellsword's requirements again... Oh. 2nd level spells. That would mean either I have to do this after dragonslayer or I need to throw in more wizard into the mix. I'll talk this over with DRM.


I really like your style, very clean. Especially Fullmoon, especcialy the faces.

about your player...wait til that guy dies his unevitable death and then help him.
Thank you! I can't wait to see your pictures, too. :D

Adol's a Hero (#6), so death is not only hard to achieve, it's also a disaster when it actually happens... Maybe something lighter..

[Rubik]

If he wants a caster, have him use the Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil. Those veils are some of the best defenses he could possibly get.

Also give him a nightmare (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/nightmare.htm) (ie, flaming demon-horse) companion (and at ECL 10, it's about in line with the group's power level), explicitly the alignment that he is. Maybe a god gave it to him, or it was the result of a botched Wish. It can cast Etherealness and Astral Projection at will; so long as he always has AP up, it should keep him safe. He just needs to find some way to protect his corporeal body.

Nightmares are intelligent outsiders as well, and I believe they can speak, so it could act as his advisor. If he complains 'they're evil!' then just say, 'this one isn't,' and all is well.

Who wouldn't want a flaming steed?

[meto30]

Closing thread. DRM has left the game.

Looks like actually he wasn't looking for ways to improve himself, but rather he was wishing I'd stop throwing things at him.


In the meantime, I need some time to reflect on myself and consider if I really have what it takes to be a DM.

I feel I wanna cry...

[sonofzeal]

Closing thread. DRM has left the game.

Looks like actually he wasn't looking for ways to improve himself, but rather he was wishing I'd stop throwing things at him.


In the meantime, I need some time to reflect on myself and consider if I really have what it takes to be a DM.

I feel I wanna cry...
Ouch. That always hurts.

Have you talked it through with the others? Players do occasionally burn out, and not every game fits every player. As long as the others are happy and enjoying it, you shouldn't take it too personally.

[Jornophelanthas]

You shouldn't doubt yourself. The success your campaign has had over the past months should speak for itself.

Rather, what was the case is a bad match between a player's expectations and the campaign. This is neither the player's fault, nor the DM's fault. The player leaving the campaign is actually the best solution to such a mismatch. You have more reason to be thankful to this player for realizing this first, rather than to be left with an impression of inadequacy.

I hope that this will go down without any hard feelings on anyone's part.

[LansXero]

I got to say this though, the description of your campaign sounds like a very involved, very complicated affair. Which would be awesome to play in, for me at least, but I can see where someone could easily be overwhelmed. Having several characters (up to 50 slots I think you said? O.o), complex involved archs and and over-campaign metaplot... yeah, it can seem very heavy. So like they say, its probably different expectations on what they want out of the game and how they want to get it.

[meto30]

Ouch. That always hurts.

Have you talked it through with the others? Players do occasionally burn out, and not every game fits every player. As long as the others are happy and enjoying it, you shouldn't take it too personally.


You shouldn't doubt yourself. The success your campaign has had over the past months should speak for itself.

Rather, what was the case is a bad match between a player's expectations and the campaign. This is neither the player's fault, nor the DM's fault. The player leaving the campaign is actually the best solution to such a mismatch. You have more reason to be thankful to this player for realizing this first, rather than to be left with an impression of inadequacy.

I hope that this will go down without any hard feelings on anyone's part.


I got to say this though, the description of your campaign sounds like a very involved, very complicated affair. Which would be awesome to play in, for me at least, but I can see where someone could easily be overwhelmed. Having several characters (up to 50 slots I think you said? O.o), complex involved archs and and over-campaign metaplot... yeah, it can seem very heavy. So like they say, its probably different expectations on what they want out of the game and how they want to get it.

Thank you. I'm a bit settled down now, I think. The players want me to continue the campaign, so I guess I must go on.

After a bit of thinking I decided to remove DRM's characters from the game instead of keeping them around as NPCs. To much of a baggage for me to handle. The Hero slot will have to be reassigned, probably to either KBK or HFS. I'm now left with five players.

I'll... start writing a journal somewhere. Tell the story of our campaign. My players keep telling me I need to novelize our campaign, maybe this can be the beginning. It's a whole year worth of campaign, I think about 120 sessions, so it'll keep me busy for a while. Maybe.

Fellow playgrounders, thank you all for all the input you gave me! I will remember the advice and make use of my newfound wisdom.

[LansXero]

As far as journals go, check this out:
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=169769&page=4

It has helped me with ideas several times, and the author seems like a pretty good DM, specially because of how eager he is to ask for advice and suggestions and implementing them, and because he is always trying to improve. You mentioned "what it takes to be a DM". There is no set-in-stone skillset to make you good at it, imho, because it depends a lot on what your players want. Except for that: the desire to be as good at it as you can be. If you have that, anything else will come in time.

Good luck and have fun! :D

[Rubik]

Ooh! Ooh! And don't forget these!* (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=116836)






*Be prepared for 2-3 hours of blow-your-mind awesome.