Shotaro
2012-03-03, 12:22 PM
OK,
First of all a disclaimer: I do not know if the DM reads these forums or not. If he does I apologise this is merely here for me to vent and get it out of my system since what happenned (and more specifically what hapenned afterwards) did, frankly, **** me off. This is not personal but I need to rant a bit.
So, on with the show. For the past few weeks we have returned to an older campaign. The campaign is "low arcana" mages are nerfed pretty heavily and a lot of spells are not readily available. Divine magic has been left alone but I can cope with this really even though I play a Wizard and we have a Druid in the party. We have a couple of magic items (one which is thunderstrike(?) 1d6 electrical + 2d10 on a crit, and another which has extra cleaving.) Our party has been sent into once fertile lands that have been struck by a blight on an exploratory mission. Myself and the party's Theurge are hoping to find some spell books to boost our own repertoires and hopefully recover some spells that were thought to be lost. My Wizard is CG and the Theurge is CN and a worshipper of the god of KNOWLEDGE by the way (but more on that later).
Anyway onto last night. We were fighting some creatures that were a mix between CR1 and CR5. We are a 7th level party with 8 members. We annihilated them, even the higher CR monsters who had HP between around 50-100 and spell resistance. I cast stinking cloud on one group and used the wind (coming from 4o'clock at 8 squares per round) to trap his other mooks in it as it followed the wind across. It took out about five or six mooks and then, at the end of the round, the cloud was set to move. I drew it 8 squares away in the appropriate direction and highlighted the creatures that needed to make FORT saves. Suddenly the wind dropped and changed direction so that it was moving DIRECTLY TOWARDS the party (bearing in mind this is AFTER I've re-drawn the bloody thing) None-the-less we dispatched the mooks without much trouble. Our Theurge did get hit once but that was it; any other damage taken was to the Dwarves who both have something like 100hp.
On to the city we were sent to explore. We found ONE standing building. Surrounded by two overlapping auras, one gold and the other white. Spellcraft and Knowledge (arcana) rolls a plenty later and we are unable to figure out what the hell is going on. My wizard steps up to the plate I can enter the gold aura, but the white resists me enough for me to step back. This is the temple of the god of Law so in my mind it stands to reason that the gold aura is "good" and the white aura is "law". I step back, joking about making popcorn because I know the Theurge will play his character and try to enter. The guys stood at the entrance of the temple are stoic and refuse to reply to us. Only to say that they cannot drop the auras around the temple. The theurge pushes into one aura and is asked to roll 2d4. The result is 6. On the Third Will save the Theurge fails and is dealt enough damage to kill him outright (he had 30 hp total, took 8 damge in the fight and 39 from the various and varied dice rolled by the aura, putting him on -17). Only two characters in the party can even enter the temple (out of 8) since they are the only two LG characters. The Theurge player is annoyed, but says oh well. I need to introduce my backup a Bard. The DM says, no. You can play the LG NPC ranger as is or you can roll a paladin.
To me it seems as though he killed the most morally dubious character in the party in order to force us to take a Paladin. Here's the kicker. Two weeks ago I called the DM and offerred to retire my Wizard (it's not much fun when the Druid is casting 140 square metres of spiked stones and taking out entire fights whilst I am still buffing and/or using the only offensive spell I have available in stinking cloud) and roll a Paladin. We had a Theurge in the party so we wouldn't have lost too much arcane casting ability. This has really annoyed me to be honest and has caused the DM (who I thought to be a really great DM) to drop massively in my estimations. He seems to fudge every enemy and every fight to ensure it takes us to the absolute brink then responds with it was only CR9! (a seven headed serpent with seven POISON attacks per round that have a DC18 AND do 1d10 damage and failing the poison roll results in 1d8 con loss is NOT CR9 even if it *only* has around 120 hp!!) I will be going back next week I think. The guy who played the Theurge isn't until he can play a character he wants to play.
Rant over, comments etc are welcome but this really is more of a rant that anything else. This is not supposed to be an OMG my DM SUXORS! thing, just a story I needed to share so I could move on from it.
First of all a disclaimer: I do not know if the DM reads these forums or not. If he does I apologise this is merely here for me to vent and get it out of my system since what happenned (and more specifically what hapenned afterwards) did, frankly, **** me off. This is not personal but I need to rant a bit.
So, on with the show. For the past few weeks we have returned to an older campaign. The campaign is "low arcana" mages are nerfed pretty heavily and a lot of spells are not readily available. Divine magic has been left alone but I can cope with this really even though I play a Wizard and we have a Druid in the party. We have a couple of magic items (one which is thunderstrike(?) 1d6 electrical + 2d10 on a crit, and another which has extra cleaving.) Our party has been sent into once fertile lands that have been struck by a blight on an exploratory mission. Myself and the party's Theurge are hoping to find some spell books to boost our own repertoires and hopefully recover some spells that were thought to be lost. My Wizard is CG and the Theurge is CN and a worshipper of the god of KNOWLEDGE by the way (but more on that later).
Anyway onto last night. We were fighting some creatures that were a mix between CR1 and CR5. We are a 7th level party with 8 members. We annihilated them, even the higher CR monsters who had HP between around 50-100 and spell resistance. I cast stinking cloud on one group and used the wind (coming from 4o'clock at 8 squares per round) to trap his other mooks in it as it followed the wind across. It took out about five or six mooks and then, at the end of the round, the cloud was set to move. I drew it 8 squares away in the appropriate direction and highlighted the creatures that needed to make FORT saves. Suddenly the wind dropped and changed direction so that it was moving DIRECTLY TOWARDS the party (bearing in mind this is AFTER I've re-drawn the bloody thing) None-the-less we dispatched the mooks without much trouble. Our Theurge did get hit once but that was it; any other damage taken was to the Dwarves who both have something like 100hp.
On to the city we were sent to explore. We found ONE standing building. Surrounded by two overlapping auras, one gold and the other white. Spellcraft and Knowledge (arcana) rolls a plenty later and we are unable to figure out what the hell is going on. My wizard steps up to the plate I can enter the gold aura, but the white resists me enough for me to step back. This is the temple of the god of Law so in my mind it stands to reason that the gold aura is "good" and the white aura is "law". I step back, joking about making popcorn because I know the Theurge will play his character and try to enter. The guys stood at the entrance of the temple are stoic and refuse to reply to us. Only to say that they cannot drop the auras around the temple. The theurge pushes into one aura and is asked to roll 2d4. The result is 6. On the Third Will save the Theurge fails and is dealt enough damage to kill him outright (he had 30 hp total, took 8 damge in the fight and 39 from the various and varied dice rolled by the aura, putting him on -17). Only two characters in the party can even enter the temple (out of 8) since they are the only two LG characters. The Theurge player is annoyed, but says oh well. I need to introduce my backup a Bard. The DM says, no. You can play the LG NPC ranger as is or you can roll a paladin.
To me it seems as though he killed the most morally dubious character in the party in order to force us to take a Paladin. Here's the kicker. Two weeks ago I called the DM and offerred to retire my Wizard (it's not much fun when the Druid is casting 140 square metres of spiked stones and taking out entire fights whilst I am still buffing and/or using the only offensive spell I have available in stinking cloud) and roll a Paladin. We had a Theurge in the party so we wouldn't have lost too much arcane casting ability. This has really annoyed me to be honest and has caused the DM (who I thought to be a really great DM) to drop massively in my estimations. He seems to fudge every enemy and every fight to ensure it takes us to the absolute brink then responds with it was only CR9! (a seven headed serpent with seven POISON attacks per round that have a DC18 AND do 1d10 damage and failing the poison roll results in 1d8 con loss is NOT CR9 even if it *only* has around 120 hp!!) I will be going back next week I think. The guy who played the Theurge isn't until he can play a character he wants to play.
Rant over, comments etc are welcome but this really is more of a rant that anything else. This is not supposed to be an OMG my DM SUXORS! thing, just a story I needed to share so I could move on from it.