tales from the fail

[Guizonde]

okay guys, how about an informal confessions thread? this will be to recount all of our rookie mistakes as players and dms that now we look upon with shame or with nostalgia. i'll obviously start.

i decided i was better than rulebooks and with less than 2 years of dnd play under my belt decided to do my own system with no playtesting and only chutzpah and ego to guide it. 6 years later, that "ruleset" is still going strong with my friends being dedicated players but we've seen so many of its flaws and limits it's kind of shameful this thing has been going on for so long. we're actually trying to update it now because this game is either "rocket tag" or "i'm stronger than an m1 abrams in the roman empire" in terms of difficulty. and so was born the dalarium chronicles. a messy blender of ideas with borked rules at the best of times. would i do it again? yes, but only with my current experience and hindsight, what a mess i created. at least people are having fun despite its flaws.

learn from my fail: don't try to improvise what you don't know.

[Ken Murikumo]

In my very early days of DMing, i ran a game that devolved into DM vs. one specific player. He knew the system much better than i did (3.5 at the time). His character got out of hand and turned every encounter into a god-boss fight just to try and kill him specifically and so he wouldn't end it in one round. The other players absolutely could not keep pace and very quickly became irrelevant and dependent on said player to beat the encounter.

I fault myself for letting the game turn out that way and giving in to my anger just to try and kill his character. I know now that i should have talked to him and asked him to tone it down. I ALSO fault him for doing that to an inexperienced DM and especially because he knew exactly what he was doing. For argument's sake, the other players never spoke up about it and kind of accepted it as their lives from now on.

Now, tides have turned and i have become infinitely more experienced in the system (now pathfinder with most 3.5 content ported) than anyone else in my group. I have also become significantly better at every facet of DMing.

[Mr.Sandman]

In my very early days of DMing, 3.5, there was a time where I wanted the PC's to be captured for story reasons, but I wanted to be 'fair' about it. I had them go I to combat with what I thought was overwhelming numbers. After the foes had brought in reinforcements three times the party was finally subdued, and had leveled up once and were about halfway to the level after after just that one fight.

[Batcathat]

In the first role playing game I ever played twenty-something years ago (a Swedish game called Gemini that I suspect none of you has ever heard of) me and my friends misunderstood the rules quite a bit, resulting in characters becoming pretty powerful, very quickly and it took like two years before we realized our mistake.

I was also a wee bit too railroading as a GM and abused the magic system to create some very OP spells as a player but at least I got over both of those fairly quickly.

[King of Nowhere]

i decided i was better than rulebooks and with less than 2 years of dnd play under my belt decided to do my own system with no playtesting and only chutzpah and ego to guide it. 6 years later, that "ruleset" is still going strong with my friends being dedicated players but we've seen so many of its flaws and limits it's kind of shameful this thing has been going on for so long. we're actually trying to update it now because this game is either "rocket tag" or "i'm stronger than an m1 abrams in the roman empire" in terms of difficulty. and so was born the dalarium chronicles. a messy blender of ideas with borked rules at the best of times. would i do it again? yes, but only with my current experience and hindsight, what a mess i created. at least people are having fun despite its flaws.

learn from my fail: don't try to improvise what you don't know.

had a similar experience here, where i tried to fix some problems of d&d by heavily houseruling the game. but i consider it a mixed success: the resulting system was no worse than the original, really, and i learned much.
Now I am more confident that I can improve the mess that is d&d 3.5 for my table, but i would have never learned how to do it if i hadn't barged in at the beginning. sometimes a failed experiment will teach you much more, in terms of "what happens if i do this", than any successful run.
And by the way, my brother learned to use a pc when he was a kid in the same way, and now he's a pro.

No, I think my greatest failure was bestowing this armor to the party cleric during a high level campaign

Armor of unwavering dedication
properties:
can only be worn by a good character striving to fulfill a good quest/geas (basically, you place a quest/geas on you when wearing it)
can't be removed before the quest/geas is over except by miracle/wish. Can be slept in without penalties.
+8 AC (nonmagical, full plate)
+2 supermasterwork bonus
counts as medium for encumbrance (supermasterwork bonus)
raise max dex to +5 (supermasterwork bonus)
+8 enhancement bonus
spell resistance 30
damage reduction 30/- against all elements, negative energy and magic damage
damage reduction 15/
regenerates 10 hp/round
immunity to fear, mind control, death effects, level drain
freedom of movement, true sight always active
zone of truth centered on it always active (DC 25, 3 meters)
+8 to will and fortitude saving throws
unwavering dedication

unwavering dedication: if the wearer is killed, he returns as a ghost, wearing this armor, until his quest/geas is fulfilled.
i did it because the cleric wanted his thing to be "really hard to kill", and he was mostly running support, and so i thought there would be no hard in making him effectively immortal.
enters the big boss lich with his elite lich team and his army of mid-high level liches.
and the cleric can cast mass heal. over a half dozen times per day. with a greater rod of quicken metamagic.
to make it worse, i ruled that artifacts cannot be dispelled or suppressed, so there's even no way to reduce its protection.
if we ever play again in the same world, i'll retcon that armor to something more human.

[Draconi Redfir]

i once ran an encounter with a Thin Man (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/fey/thin-man/) in a bunch of fog, equipped with a ring that let him summon some more obscuring mist a limited number of times. i was basically trying to re-create Slenderman in D&D form.

i completely misunderstood the Vanish ability, and basically ran him as invisible and undetectable. the players tried everything to locate him, even casing a light spell on a Tree. but nothing seemed to work. It became clear they all hated the encounter, so i ended it and gave them the ring anyways in hopes it would help a little bit.

We all agreed it was the worst encounter of the campaign. don't plan on touching Thin Men again any time soon.

[denthor]

I made an all time epic fail

I cast freezing sphere on water elementals. The spell says I freezes water if cast directly at water. Had a player rules lawyer me. He spent an hour finding one stupid line in the rules. Water elementals are immune to freezing. I nearly killed two players and out right killed a third with the size of this spell. The ocean froze attack stopped. Should have thrown fireball.

[MesiDoomstalker]

On my first ever venture into DMing, I decided that A) Gestalt was a good idea, B) that 4 level 4 Gestalt Orcs, with PC stat generation/gear, was an appropriate challenge for 4 level Gestalt PCs with no (magical) gear. With difficult terrain that affected the PCs, but not the Orcs (Because they were Rangers, with Rapid Shot). After 2 rounds, having realized that the Orcs had yet to take damage and the whole of the party was below 50% (even after purposefully spreading out attacks), they decided to kill them with their bare, non-proficient hands. No idea how my players didn't quit the game right there.

[Guizonde]

new fail!

judging players. usually my tables consist of trainwreck players. as in they go off the rails and kill more people than i can count. during my two current sessions in which i'm the dm, my players are efficient and follow the story like baking instructions. it took me about two sessions but now i've had to learn the hard way to script my scenarios rather than fly by the seat of my pants and try to hold on.

learn from my fail: despite unpredictable players, always write down your detailed scenario just in case.

[EricAlvin]

I've had multiple rookie failings in the past that I've learned from. I may not get all the details right, but as best as I can remember them:



In both the one-shot and campaign for DnD 3.5e that I played with one group of friends, I didn't really understand how character creation worked (and I think they either didn't realize that I didn't understand how it worked or they didn't know how to explain it to me). This ended up with me creating a Wizard character in both games that was very useless in most scenarios, as I didn't understand how spell slots, acquiring spells, and casting spells really worked, leading me to only actually cast spells a few times throughout the campaign. Even then, I would often screw up on what the spells do, discouraging me from using spells further. Fortunately, in the campaign, my fellow party members were strong enough to generally carry the team despite my lack of power, and my characters charisma allowed them to talk their way out of normally-dangerous situations.
With that campaign, the way we played isn't how most games I've played since are played. For example, each PC's character generally had their own agenda and goals, often causing conflict between them. In fact, in the last couple sessions, since some of these players characters died (often as a result of these conflicts, or conflicts with high-level npcs that were everywhere), they had new characters on the enemy's side during the final battle, resulting in a lot of PC vs PC combat (which is where my character died). While this isn't a mistake on its own, it would lead to a mistake later down the line, as my understanding of DnD mostly came from a couple Youtube videos talking about the game, as well as the one-shot and the campaign that had player characters focusing on themselves, so I would make a bigger blunder in my next gaming group.
My final mistake with this group in particular was not attending the final session after my character died, not realizing that I would be able to play another character for the session (since it was the last one.)
A year or so after I played with the first group, I made more friends and got to play in another gaming group, this time playing DnD 5e, Storm Kings Thunder. At first, character creation was seemingly going well. I asked about what would be the best type of character to make, as I wanted to make someone that would mesh well with the party. I was told to make what I wanted, and I was able to figure out character creation this time (thanks other members of the group with textbooks), so I created Eleron Pagaric "the Virtuous", human NG enchantment wizard, and the first character I made that didn't share my name. The idea behind this character was that they were raised in a cult dedicated to worshiping the Worm that Walks, and was being raised to eventually become one of them, but figured out what was happening in time to escape. They then dedicated themselves to using magic for good, and defeating those that used it for evil (as they felt it wasn't "the right way to use magic"). They also wanted to help people who had become evil redeem themselves (unknowingly, this would cause issues later). I also thought that it would be a good idea for them to take less blasting spells, and more non-lethal and utility spells. While this did end up working out in most scenarios (Using sleep, and later Hypnotic Pattern, was great for controlling the battlefield and lowering the amount of enemies we had to fight at once), it would have gone even better if I took more than just "Magic Missile" as direct damage to back it up.
Remember how I mentioned that my expectations from the last group (which, once again, was still a fine way to play the game since all players had fun with it, but not how most groups tend to do things) would cause me to make another mistake? Well, that came in the form of how I ended up playing the game. After a rocky start, the campaign was going well, but I unfortunately had a tendency to think about my character, and then the NPCs, before I thought about the other player's characters (as was the trend in the last campaign I was in). For example, during an early combat with some enemies that were a bit too much for the party, I had genuinely considered running away when I was the last one standing (As the rest of the group had been mauled), much to the dismay of the other players. I didn't end up running away after one of them pointed out how I could lead the enemies away long enough for them to recover, but I unfortunately only partially learned the lesson.
(Spoiler) Another time I didn't focus on my fellow PC's when I should have was when we were hunting down a criminal (known as "The Weevil") for a bounty. It was a long and stressful journey, and even when we made it to the right town, we had difficulty locating him. Very little happened during the downtime, but eventually we located the guy. During this search for this criminal, there was an ongoing debate in the party on what we should do with them. On one side, which had the Dragonborn and Eleron (and possibly one or two others), we argued that we could reform The Weevil and add them to the party, as they sounded skilled and they seemed to have stopped committing crimes since going into hiding. On the other side, which had our Genasi Monk and our Paladin (as well as possibly one or two others), they felt that we should turn them in as originally planned (the first wanting the money, the second because they felt that The Weevil needed to face punishment, and that evil people don't usually change). As soon as we actually caught them and brought them outside of the town, I impatiently wanted to question them. This led to me trying to convince both the Weevil to join our cause, and the other party members to allow them to. Negotiations were interrupted by a giant attack (featuring a giant I had spared earlier that was probably a sign), which the Weevil helped us stop. Despite their valiant efforts, the Weevil was taken down, leading to my next mistake. As the paladin didn't attempt to heal The Weevil (with a reasoning that he felt despite the one good act, he was still a criminal and not worth keeping alive), I had decided to rush in and try to help them myself. However, I should have gone and helped the Monk, who was also downed, instead of the NPC. Not only that, but by the time I got to the NPC, they were dead. While we did make it through the combat intact (except for The Weevil), the player of the Monk was (reasonably) very upset with me, and we ended up arguing. After a few minutes, I realized I was in the wrong, and apologized. They managed to get their gold that they wanted from turning in The Weevil's corpse, and we found a map in The Weevil's pocket. This led us to a giant who (if I remember correctly) he was going to be helping, revealing that they already were trying to do turn their life around but didn't get the chance to. After that session, I'd learned my lesson, and since have tried to put the other player's characters before my own, and work as a team (as well as not letting my emotions get the better of me).

Another recurring mistake I made in the 5e campaign, even after you'd probably think i'd learned my lesson about it from the previous campaign, was spell mismanagement. While I had learned how spells work, I would, on rare occasions, misread them. (For example, not realizing polymorph only allowed transforming into "Beast" creatures instead of any creature that met the other requirements). Fortunately, my DM was quick to correct me on these mistakes.
Speaking of spells, remember how I had mentioned that my character would have been better off if I had given them more damaging spells? Well, in addition to not being able to provide the same damage that other wizards at a similar level could deal, I also ended up making a few other mistakes with the spells I DID end up with. For one, I didn't think to talk to the DM beforehand on how he handled spells such as "Charm Person", which ruled it as giving advantage on charisma checks but for the most part, their opinion of you stays the same. It also would have been better to consult them before picking "Sending", a spell I took so that I could talk to characters we had met, and see how they were doing (As well as figure out if one character was still alive). Unfortunately, most of the NPCs weren't interested in talking (the DM also mentioned that they didn't think they would be relevant, and thus hadn't prepared anything for them). We did end up in a city with a focus on magic (Silverymoon I think?), where I was able to get some better spells, so at least it wasn't all for naught.
Another common spell-related mistake was my failure to take/cast spells that would keep me alive longer (except for expeditious retreat), despite having the lowest armor (and lowest hp, I believe) of the party. Instead, my character would generally just try to stay as far away from the combat (or danger, in a dungeon) as possible while being within casting range, so it was common for me to be casting magic missile from the full 120 feet away. When I was forced to get close, I usually just tried to use a hypnotic stare (and when that failed, I would run). This, combined with my earlier point on how I almost abandoned my party, led my character to occasionally be called a coward (and they weren't wrong).



In a few of my earliest games, I failed to understand how to create a character [in a literal sense of not knowing character creation rules or how spellcasting worked], and ended up with a wizard that would only rarely cast spells, and the spells were usually weaker than the spells they should have been casting (if effective at all).
In those early games, every player's character was expected to look out for themselves, and player vs. player conflict was common. While it was fine and fun for this group, unfortunately, this would partially shape my understanding of the game when I played with a later group, causing me to later be a poorer team player until I learned my lesson.
I had forgotten to go to the final session of a campaign that was one of the early games I had played, as I didn't realize that I would get a new character (my other one had died).
Despite efforts to make a character that would fit with the group, in my next group, my next character had a few traits that would cause issues later (such as not taking many blasting/damaging spells and wanting to help enemies redeem themselves more than they wanted to kill them).
Due to my poor understanding of the game in regards to how a party works (as mentioned earlier), I would put my characters interests (and those of NPC's, which in the last game, were very important), above those of my fellow party members, leading me to nearly abandon them in an encounter where they had all fallen, and in a later encounter, on a day where I was very stressed out, run off and try to heal a fallen NPC that was helping us (that I had found was dead) that only half the party cared about instead of one of the fallen party members. To make matters worse, the latter encounter caused an argument between the player of that character and I. While I did apologize and learned my lesson afterwards, I wish I had learnt it the first time.
One mistake I would rarely make in regard to spells was misread them, but the DM was quick to correct these.
I would also fail to consult the DM before making spell choices, leading me to pick spells that they either didn't have much of a liking for or otherwise ruled them to be less effective then they would seem (like Charm Person) or didn't prepare for (like Sending). This led them to not be very useful overall, and put a greater reliance on spells I found during the campaign.
Another failure when it came to spells was not using good protective spells, instead choosing to rely on staying as far away from combat as casting range would allow and casting Expeditious Retreat. This, combined with the first incident mentioned a few points above this one, led to my character being rightfully called a coward on a few occasions.



Fortunately, after all of these mistakes, I have become much better at understanding and playing the game. I just wish my friends hadn't had to suffer due to my incompetence.