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It Sat Rap
2015-08-22, 07:12 PM
Hello Guys,

I am currently GMing an all-newbies campaign and it is pretty interesting to see how newbies approach the game. Sometimes they do really silly goofs, but they can also have really smart ideas a veteran would not have because he is so stubborn in his perception how the game is meant to be played. So I want to hear your best newbie stories! Both the dumb and the genius moments of course!

I will start: We play Pathfinder, the players entered a small village. The people there seemed pretty stressed, so they asked a commener what is wrong. He told them that a few days ago two people from the village have been kidnapped by boggards that live in a nearby swamp. My players immediatly said: "That sounds like a job for us, let's go and save these poor people or at least revenge their deaths!" They entered the village a minute ago, and now they turn around and leave the village again heading to the swamp. We have a quest, hooray! After a hour in-game-time they reached the swamp. Now they don't knew what to do and seemed pretty clueless, just standing there at the edge of the swamp.

I asked them: "Well guys, maybe you should have gathered some information before running into the wild?"
Players: "Yeah, we acted a little hastily, didn't we?

They didn't even asked who was kidnapped! They are on their quest to save person A and person B, not knowing their names, how they look like, etc. Imagine them meeting some huntsman or whoever in the wild: "Hey you, over there, have you seen, ...eeeerr, two people that looked likeeeeeee, hmmmm.... being kidnapped by boggards?"

They also have no information about the boggards, the swamp, the circumstances of the kidnapping, nothing! All the information they needed was in the village, they only had to ask a few questions to the villagers. So the characters turned around and headed back to the village. It reminded me of a video game where you have a blinking spot on your map so you know where to go. But I'm pretty sure the newbies will learn that this doesn't work in pen-and-paper games.

Rakoa
2015-08-23, 11:19 AM
"The man tells you that recent Goblin attacks have been getting worse and worse ever since the Goblin King began to rule. He also mentions that the local Magistrate is offering 500gp for the Goblin King's head."

"I cut off the Goblin King's head and bring it back. What now?"

"...."

Yes, this actually happened.

Thisguy_
2015-08-23, 06:05 PM
I started in 4E. A really seasoned player built my character with me - a known (not quite to me, but known) munchkin. I told him I wanted to poke things. He built the character that God would use to stab someone.

For the first session, I had no idea how to do. We started fighting a boss, and I thought to myself, "Why would I want to get up near that thing? I'm squish." So I just sat there shooting it with arrows, and watching them all go *tink*, *tink* off of his armor.

Khaelo
2015-08-23, 07:48 PM
Newbie made a character with a character generator to test it out. Unlike the other testers, she put a lot of thought into the character she made. She liked her character so much that she didn't want to play the character because "he might get hurt!" :smallsigh:

ArcanaFire
2015-08-26, 03:07 AM
I have had the pleasure of being the first DM many of my players have had, including both of my younger brothers.

One of them, the older of the two, started playing with us when he was 14, but he wasn't always around when the game started because of his soccer schedule. So we would play and when he walked in he'd either sit down and wait or come up with some wacky way to enter the scene.

Once he came in right when we were getting to the end of the dungeon. I don't remember exactly what the one-liner he delivered was, but when questioned by the half-dwarf artificer as to how he'd gotten in here, he just said he'd taken the back door.

-/-/-/-/-

The other brother decided he wanted to DM for the first time around Thanksgiving. Mind you he was about 11 at the time and we were playing a hot seat campaign (aka we would take turns DMing / being in the hot seat) so this wasn't really unusual.

We decided to go ahead and let him give it a shot. He made us fight a giant turkey, that then proceeded to explode into smaller turkeys. In spite of the fact that he didn't have the best grasp of the rules ever, it was actually a pretty engaging combat encounter and we all got a good laugh out of it.

-/-/-/-/-

The first time a friend of mine, we'll call her S in case she doesn't want the story getting out, DMed a campaign, she pre-rolled all of the characters with a stat array so that they would be on the same level. I wasn't actually wild about the idea of playing a character I didn't make myself, but to this day the elven sorcerer I was handed is one of my favorite characters.

Anyway, she printed out character portraits for all of us and at one point the DMPC cleric she was playing was saddened by the chaotic actions of the party and to show him frowning on his character portrait she cut out some papers and held them up to his picture but it looked more like he was growing a white moustache than frowning.

At another point in the campaign someone accidentally froze the artifact we were supposed to be retrieving and another character tried to pee on the ice to thaw it out.

At that point we were more playing ADHD&D, but it was a fun time none the less.

It Sat Rap
2015-08-26, 04:04 AM
I'm not part of this group, but a friend of mine was the GM and he told me about one of his newbie players. This girl likes point-and-click adventures very much, and that seems to be her strategy in pen and paper, too. She did things like:
-The group finds some treasure, part of it was a potion and a golden statue. She poured the poition over the statue to see "if something will happen".
-Tries to bribe monsters with stuff they might like. "Hey Dragon, I give you this rubber ball if you let us through!"
-Pushing things around in dungeons to find secret doors. Doesn't sound too bad, but you have a spotcheck for this, remember?
-Casting spells on items to trigger some effect only she was aware about. "I will heal this sword to find it's hidden power!"

If all the players would have the same mindset, I, as the GM, would actually go for it and would build a campaign for that style of play! :smallbiggrin:

Hawkstar
2015-08-26, 10:44 AM
At that point we were more playing ADHD&D, but it was a fun time none the less.

ADHD&D is the best edition.

noob
2015-08-26, 11:04 AM
I remember the first time I player I wanted to be a wizard but the GM said there was too many wizards and told me to choose one other class and seeing there was no monk I decided to play a monk.
It was an horrible error since the GM was generally not giving a lot of money and considered monks were equipment independent(which is not true but is hard to guess because of the fluff)
So finally I had enough of playing a monk(notably because I was playing an unoptimized mundane and screwing with a monk build prevents him from doing anything else than watching the battle and prevents from doing stuff like building a plan for blowing up a prison by making fall a net full of 500 grams spiked balls from orbit) and when he got killed I stopped playing for a while then I played again but with a wizard.

Milodiah
2015-08-26, 12:09 PM
I was playing a halfling, and the entire party was clearing the rooms of a great hall one by one. We had found a sizable treasure chest earlier, one which I had insisted on opening from ten feet away with the blade of my glaive. The monk ignores me, pops it open, gets cracked in the face by a Jack-in-the-Box from Hell.

Anyway, I've been insisting on pushing this damn heavy reinforced chest around, in front of all the doors we're about to open. Everyone laughs. Then they open a door that is trapped with an absolute hail of poisoned darts. They all have to make a damn high Reflex save to get out of the fatal funnel (a concept I had tried in vain to explain to them earlier), and most of them fail the Reflex then the Fortitude and are paralyzed on the ground.

Me? I make the very easy Reflex save to duck my head down a bit. I had been standing in the empty chest, with the lid propped open sitting between my upper body and the door. All that was even exposed was a small sliver of halfling face, a bit of helmet, and a heavy crossbow.

Now everybody pays attention to the fatal funnel.