Getting hosed by the DM [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

danzibr

2013-03-10, 12:58 PM

Ever been in a party that just keeps getting hosed?

Right now we're level 2, four of us, and man, we get our donkeys handed to us regularly. The guys we're fighting don't seem like they should be that bad, but we get knocked unconscious again and again. We have a Cleric 2, Barbarian 2, Sorcerer 2 and Samurai 2 (I'm the Samurai), and I seem to be the biggest contributor most of the time.

We climbed up a cliff to enter this mine and got attacked by two skeletons. These skeletons seemed to have DR half/bludgeoning (like, they took half damage rather than shave the first 5 off) and could cast Magic Missile, doing 2 darts, and started the battle with 4 rounds of Blink. The only way we didn't have a TPK was for an NPC to heal us over and over.

Then we entered the mine and some really hot snakes (there were 4) breathed fire at us, knocked the Sorc out in one hit (he failed his Reflex save). Other people got knocked out, some tree spirit came out and healed us a few times dodging another TPK, the Sorc when healed did a Color Spray after I killed a hot snake, knocked the 3 survivors left and CDG'd them.

Your stories of getting hosed?

Bubzors

2013-03-10, 01:10 PM

We were investigating a mine controlled by Thoon mindflayers and noticed that an enemy we had never seen before was wandering around as guards. They looked to be aome sort of construct. After successfully spying on this mine and retreating, we.decide to test these new enemies and lead a patrol into a trap. So we set up an ammbush that would force just three constructs to tiny us in a cramped space in our favor.

We did everything right in planning and ended up whooping on these clowns. However, aswe never fought then before we did not realize they blow up when they die... We did not have resist energy up, so needless to say one blowing up caused a chain reaction with the other two and a few saved reflex saves later the whole party is dead but the bard who was pelting them with arrows from afar.

We were all kinda stunned. The one time we are sneaky and plan and it bites us in the ***. The DM revealed that if we had fought the first group in a big field earlier like he had planned we would have seen the explode and avoided being so cluttered. It was very disappointing

Phelix-Mu

2013-03-10, 01:16 PM

Wow, the DM seems to have either seriously overestimated your abilities, or you wandered into a part of the map intended for much more talented parties.

I try not to hose my players, but occasionally things happen that I wasn't expecting.

As far as getting hosed by my DM when I'm a player (starting to feel pretty Canadian here, with all this hosing going on...), it doesn't happen half as often as I'd expect (frankly). But occasionally, stuff happens. Like the entire legion of custom monster that have a fire-resistance penetrating fire attack (a bunch of cannon shots from their arm-cannons as ranged touch attacks). So this is, as you might expect, very dangerous. So our party looks for a work-around. Our solution after the first few encounters (when it becomes obvious that 95% of the damage that we are going to take will be from these arm-cannons) is the druid spell fireward. It shuts down pretty much all fire attacks (magical and non-magical) inside the area.

But it doesn't work. Not sure why, but the attacks seem to deal fire damage that isn't damage from a fire effect. Or something....:smallannoyed:

Anyway, next encounter, several party members should be sporting some friendly fire defensive buffs, and we'll see if the creatures' "fire immunity" counts against their own "fire that isn't fire" attacks. :cool:

Madcrafter

2013-03-10, 01:21 PM

That seems like just the hassle of being low level. My group started a campaign just a few weeks ago, and for the first three levels, there wasn't a single fight where I didn't get knocked unconscious. We had an NPC channeler (DM made homebrew) and one of the party has fast healing 1 from race, which have saved us many a time. At this point we don't die in two hits anymore (lv 4) but in four or five, and we've had a couple of lethal encounters along the way.

We've only had one fight where we didn't have at least one person bleeding out, and that was against a foo lion ghul. I cast a spell so it gave me its weapons, and then one of the party pinned it and we just hacked away until it died.

There have been several occasions where I have missed with ranged touch attacks that would have completely swung the fights, and the DM sometimes has ridiculous critical sprees (he rolls in the open, I've seen him get over ten natural twenties in a single battle, in the middle of which I gave him a new d20).

Gerrtt

2013-03-10, 02:23 PM

I had a DM once who did the following weird things:

If you spoke out of turn during combat you took a point of damage. If you spoke out of turn during combat to give a suggestion to someone else, you took 1d6 damage.

Once we were fighting in the woods and in mid battle a troll joined. One of the players critically missed the troll and the DM had them roll a strength check. It was successful, so the character managed to cut down a tree branch with a piercing weapon that was heavy enough to fall down and kill the troll instantly.

Once we ended up fighting ghouls. Our elf managed to get paralyzed by the ghoul paralysis. When brought up that they specifically have immunity to ghoul paralysis he said "Hmm, guess I forgot to read that. You're still paralyzed."

He once let two rogues flank and thus sneak attack a flesh golem because "they were too hard for us to fight."

The same game we all had to start as NPC classes and then we could pick player classes at level 3 (or not, if we wanted). Neat idea, except since I was the only caster I was getting a pretty bad nerf. Would have been fine if I could have convinced him to let the 2 levels of adept count towards my sorcerer caster level.

That last two are not so bad...just weird. There were lots of consistency issues in his games. But alas...it was college...there weren't a lot of gaming choices. Don't even get me started about the time he wanted to incorporate everything and anything related to Harry Potter...which would be fine other than the fact that he was also trying to run a gritty/realism/grimdark game. It was weird.

Archmage1

2013-03-10, 02:52 PM

This one is a bit odd.

So, a level 15 spellthief gets hit by a custom monster, and fails a fort save, which gives him a template(a really, really bad one for a spellthief). But ok, I was planning on retiring the character soon anyway, so we keep going.
A bit later, he encounters another enemy, who, courtesy of the template, auto dominates him, no save. He is then forced to fight the party(vs a level 14 dmm persist cleric, lvl 14 wiz/sorc/ulti mag, level 13 warlock, level 10 sorc)
After the first round, he is glitterdusted(the DM made the room dimly lit, so we pointed out that grants everyone concealment. He went with it, but then on the second round, clears the glitterdust, and gives him blindsight. This lets him ignore all concealment, and with greater invis, over the next 2 rounds he proceeds to kill the cleric in one round(200ish damage dealt), almost kill the warlock(19 hp left) scratch the mage(70ish hp left), and kill the sorc. Needless to say, the rest of the party is rather amazed at this, as is the DM. So, turns out that the sorc is not dead(somehow), and has a gem that will grant a wish if it is broken by the warlock.
Just sort of odd...
For some reason, the DM did not think that the auto sneak attacking spellthief would be able to take the party, who was prepared to fight him(they got to rest and everything)(Cleric and Wiz did have true seeing up, but trickery devotion and shadowstriking made up for it.)

PurpleSocks

2013-03-10, 03:44 PM

Okay so the party gets railroaded into the middle of some dungeon (4 level 4s wake up there complete strangers, last thing we remember a flash of light). Anywho 3 rooms of this hell hole spring to mind.

---

A room filled with about a dozen ranged kobolds, all with AC's 23, hard cover and niceley spaced out to make crowd control redundant. Now they have terrible to hits and effectively inflict no damage during this fight.

Only one of us has full base attack, couple that with a spree of truly godawful rolling and we have ourselves a 2 and a half hour long combat were nobody takes no damage.

---

3 Rooms later, a scaled man is standing in the room, we try to talk to him but instead he breathes fire on us. DM rolls high and me (the wiz) drops to -10hp, the cleric has about 2hp, and the rogue and duskblade make their saves taking no and less damage. DM fiat declares that I'm not dead as the cleric burns through a wand of cure light getting me to my feet. Duskblade and Rogue take him down by getting a few crits, high rolls and using all the daily spells

---

2 Rooms later (after a 9 hour rest), we open the door and woe and behold a ****ing red dragon. Round 1, It wins initiative, decides to breathes fire I again fail the save dropping to -27hp, the cleric goes to -something very dead, the Duskblade fails the save and drops to something low only surviving cause I decided to cast resist fire before we opened the door, rogue passes the save and I glare lustfully at his evasion class feature and high reflex save. Anywho the DM conveniently forgets about the Dragons SR, high AC, casting ability, and the need to confirm criticals and he manages to avoid a TPK.

Everything fades to black, we are told not to roll new characters...

---

Suffice to say we haven't played his campaign since.

winter92

2013-03-10, 05:30 PM

Our party is advancing through a large, deep marsh. We're carrying some Con damage from bloodmotes already, but aren't in bad shape. Four leech/eel things come out of the water and begin grappling us. Con damage every round we're grappled and they failed precisely 0 grapple checks (even against the fighter and samurai). Being small, they have +8 AC, so we can't hit them even while they're grappling. We get off one or two hits over 4-5 rounds, and it starts to look like it will be a long, vicious fight but we'll eventually make it out.

Then, without warning, a hag of some sort pops up from ruins we couldn't possibly have reached yet. "I need fort saves from everyone." Three of six party members fail and take strength damage - in every case, so much damage that we are now immobile, underwater, and drowning. One guy still has a leech on him. The samurai, who has two leeches attached, proceeds to critically fumble (double ones). Roll from the fumble list - "You attack yourself, auto-hit and crit threat." 27 damage later, he dies outright. The only thing that kept us alive was the DMPC pulling of a mysterious single-attack kill on the hag, and the ruling that the swamp creatures were summons who immediately vanished.

Squirrel_Dude

2013-03-10, 06:03 PM

I once overestimated my parties abilities to fight, and almost TPK'd them with a mindflayer.

It snuck up on them in a dark area... when they were in a line... mindblast... yeah...

Story

2013-03-10, 06:18 PM

Sounds like a common risk. I remember talking to a DM once who said he accidentally TPKed with a Mindflayer. He expected them to have a decent shot thanks to action economy and flanking, but he forgot about the mindblast ability.

Twilightwyrm

2013-03-10, 06:21 PM

I cannot say this was necessarily the fault of the DM (as he didn't design the module after all), but the raptor from Kraken cove in the Savage Tide campaign nearly TPKed our group. It was a Half-Elf Bard (me) a Desert Half-Orc Warlock (my friend) and what I believe was a Dwarf Fighter (NPC) and a Poisondusk Lizardfolk Ranger (NPC). First round the raptor charges me (somehow identifying me through a sheet of thick silk, even though the warlock and dwarf were standing in plain view) pounced and took me down to half life, won initiative and dropped me (I only lived due to the fact that the silk gave me 50% concealment on the first pounce). It then focused the Warlock, who also went down in two rounds. We only ended up living because the dwarf was able to tank it long enough for the lizardfolk to force feed me a potion to wake me up so I could Glitterdust the damn thing, and we could slowly cut it to pieces. Luckily I made both fortitude saves against is disease, as did the warlock. The dwarf was not so lucky. Some impromptu untrained surgery (by which I mean I literally hacked away the infected part of his shoulder with my short sword while using what healing I had left to keep him stable) let him last long enough to get back to our ship, but I doubt he'll be using that arm again (a shame, as he was a TWF). That one encounter forces us to retreat for the day.

Prince_Ornstein

2013-03-10, 07:13 PM

I was playing my first real 3.5 campaign with my friends who really had never played before but we all had a genuine interest and really got into it in the first and second session.

there was only 1 person who really had any knowledge and experience of the game and he was the DM

there was 5 party members a gnome bard, a halfling rouge, a human paladin, a elven druid and a human barbarian.

halfway through our third session we were in a tavern that was the local "hot-spot" of the town we were in and there was a mysterious and beautiful woman always sitting in the corner ,staring into an empty tea cup, who never wanted to talk to anyone, every time one of our chars decided to strike up a conversation with the woman in the corner we always had to make a will save, once the will save was out of the way and failed every time "because nothing ever happened" the bartender, who was always described as a very nice gentleman who was always very kind, would come up and force us to move along and leave the lady alone, we agreed as it was his tavern but there came a time where i (gnome bard) eventually rolled a natural 20 on my will save and the beautiful young woman turned into a nasty old woman who looked very ill and evil and then turned right back into a beautiful young woman seconds after the transformation. i reported my "viewing" to the rest of the party asap and we agreed to confront the woman when the bar was emptying that night, once empty we confronted the woman and she just gave us blank stares i grabbed the tea cup and smashed it against the wall when she would not talk to us, this enraged the tavern keeper apparently as he jumped over the counter and was between us and the woman in a matter of a second or 2. he then produced 2 scimitars and tpk'ed our entire party of 5 lvl 4 chars without even being scratched.

we never got an explanation of who the woman was or why the tavern keeper was a lvl 18 ranger who specialized in 2 weapon fighting. needless to say we never went back to that campaign and we started a new campaign and i volunteered to DM. that DM no longer plays with us....

Rhynn

2013-03-10, 07:27 PM

We climbed up a cliff to enter this mine and got attacked by two skeletons. These skeletons seemed to have DR half/bludgeoning (like, they took half damage rather than shave the first 5 off) and could cast Magic Missile, doing 2 darts, and started the battle with 4 rounds of Blink. The only way we didn't have a TPK was for an NPC to heal us over and over.

That'd be baneguards (skeleton + blink + magic missiles), straight from Monsters of Faerûn without 3.5 conversion (they had standard skeleton "immunity" to damage, i.e. half damage from piercing and slashing).

Sounds like your DM isn't great at judging enemy difficulty (and doesn't understand edition differences and what book is what edition). Although two baneguards (CR 2) is EL 3, which is easily within parameters (average partly level -4 to +4), they're probably a bit under-CR, at least for low-level PCs (blink is pretty damn snazzy, and so is 2d4+2 infallible damage every 3rd round).

It happens. It takes some time to get a feel for encounter design in 3.X, and it's never a sure thing. Maybe your party needs to fight better? It may have been an issue of tactics.

Sounds like a common risk. I remember talking to a DM once who said he accidentally TPKed with a Mindflayer. He expected them to have a decent shot thanks to action economy and flanking, but he forgot about the mindblast ability.

I've intentionally done it. 4 PC party, including druid and bear, level 6 or 7. They wrecked a bulette, but a single mind-flayer destroyed them. Granted, it was a psionic one, and those guys are semi-invincinble cheese factories. ("Oh, you wore down my 40 temporary hit points through my 25 AC? I'll just teleport away.")

Story

2013-03-10, 07:57 PM

All that cheese and they didn't have immunity to Mind Effecting or stunning up?

danzibr

2013-03-10, 09:14 PM

I was playing my first real 3.5 campaign with my friends who really had never played before but we all had a genuine interest and really got into it in the first and second session.

[...]

we never got an explanation of who the woman was or why the tavern keeper was a lvl 18 ranger who specialized in 2 weapon fighting. needless to say we never went back to that campaign and we started a new campaign and i volunteered to DM. that DM no longer plays with us....
What a disappointing story. I want to know what's up with the chick. Sounds like she had some spell to hide her true form going on which only your char saw through. Interesting. The tpk on the DM's side was total crap though.

Warior4356

2013-03-10, 09:34 PM

Here is a story of a party where we hosed our dm
Ok so this was a 6 level party and at one point they got a magic iteem that had the effect of heal with no limit if they spent time to track down the pages of the book that was the magic item well thier job was to destroy the phlactory of a draco litch so an epic level party could kill it well our cleric had gotton a potion that let him and only him be immune to and unable to deal damage for 1d4 rounds. But our dm had ruled that he could heal as a full round action and concetration through the potion. Basic
Y we went throught this whole thing we keep asking him to use the book and he keeps refusing over and over and we are close to the point of forcing him too after we go through the mini boss and when we get to the cross roads he goes to the other party and says we got the dracolich and our dm is like WTF you are going to die but the other party agrees and we go in it laughs and says it will let us be its slaves and live our cleric agress then says he has a tribute for it and walk up with the book then he takes it down to a hit point and hits it with a mace our dm raged for days

Greenish

2013-03-10, 09:48 PM

All that cheese and they didn't have immunity to Mind Effecting or stunning up?I think he meant the psionic illithids are cheesy, not the PCs.

TopCheese

2013-03-11, 07:11 AM

During my first actual game of D&D 3.5 (yeeears ago) where I got to pick my class and make my character I chose Druid. I asked the DM what the druids casting stat was since in 2e wisdom and charisma was prime abilities. I didn't have the book with me since another player was using it, but the DM said "Charisma".

So the 18 I rolled went into charisma and the 10 went into wisdom (I wanted to play a caster druid)... Only to find out that Wisdom was the casting stat the second session since a power gamer looked over my sheet.

DM wouldn't let me change my ability scores. Seriously, he ever went as far as blaming me (total newb) and saying I was trying to cheat...

Well a player said I should just get rid of my character and roll a new one... So I put myself in Danger constantly but the DM wouldn't attack me with monsters cause "I was to charismatic".

So I polymorphed into a bird, went 200 + ft up and changed back... I got to roll the falling damage... damn well near max XD

Macros

2013-03-11, 07:21 AM

Hmm, nice DM there. Giving wrong informations, then blaming the player for it ? Classy.

I'm not sure my story belongs here, since it was in 4e, but we (a swordmage - me - a warlord, a fighter and an healbot cleric) had this sudden encounter against six assassins / rogue types (and by that, I don't mean we were ambushed, I just meant we opened a door to literaly stumble on those guys). They won initiative, literaly all ran around the three front-line fighters to stab the cleric at once. He went from full health to truly dead even before acting. Needless to say, he was less than pleased with that.

Andreaz

2013-03-11, 07:30 AM

We were on a boat(a pinnace, quite cramped), and the dm made an encounter in zerg-style against our level 3 party of four.

The zerg-crabs were CR 3. All thirty or so of them.

Rhynn

2013-03-11, 08:27 AM

All that cheese and they didn't have immunity to Mind Effecting or stunning up?

I think he meant the psionic illithids are cheesy, not the PCs.

Oh, I wasn't calling the PCs cheese factories, sorry. I meant the psionic illithids are cheese factories. Even just the 1st-level buff powers like vigor for 40 hp and force screen and inertial armor for +12 AC or so get a bit crazy, and then you've got the actual psionic blast and the tentacles. They're hideously powerful opponents... I had actually expected the PCs to do better, but I did go all-out on using their psionic powers.

I guess I was the DM doing the hosing there. :smalleek: But the whole point was that it was a campaign of tough combat challenges with rotating GMs (party goes up a level, GM changes; usually a single session would have enough fights, and tough enough fights, to level the party up). I think I lost 2-3 PCs by 8th or 9th level myself (one at 2nd level to an orc barbarian critting with a greataxe, taking my dwarf paladin tank down from full hp).

The party (3 PCs + animal companion bear) wrecking a bullette in one round wasn't really cheesy IMO, it was just a natural consequence of my forgetting the basic rule that single monsters just can't keep up with multiple PCs unless they can control the encounter.

navar100

2013-03-11, 09:17 AM

Yes, but not in combat per se. Bad guys don't stay defeated. Information we learn one game session is suddenly revealed not to be true one or two game sessions later. If your character has a child he/she will be kidnapped. We get set to go on a particular mission then on our way circumstances warrant via NPCs we don't need to/can't go on that mission anymore and now we're on completely different mission sometimes literally half across the world or another plane. Every once in a while we're in a combat and doing well enough, then the bad guys get reinforcements. We are overwhelmed and uberpowerful friendly NPC coincidentally happens along and rescues us either by teleporting us out or defeating the bad guys.

TopCheese

2013-03-11, 11:44 AM