Party vs DM

[ducttapebandit]

My friends and I just started a campaign a month ago where the DM's intent is to try to kill us as often as possible. We just had our first combat against his monsters and they almost beat us. Three swarms of centipedes, which are immune to weapon damage.

I'm needing help coming up with fleshing out the character I'll bring in when, er, if my dragon shaman dies.

The replacement:
I'm going to be a level 6 human cleric to replace my dragon shaman of the same level. I've got an 18 in charisma and have taken leadership. My bonus, level 1, and level 3 feats are undecided.

The twist:
Both player and DM are only allowed access to the SRD to start. If a player takes something from another book, the DM can use anything from that book against us. PHB II is the only other book in play right now.

The current party (all level 6):
Elven Ranger with deceased animal companion (wolf) (player is in her second campaign)
Human Dragon Shaman (my current character. I'm only in my second campaign)
Dwarven Fighter (player is in his first campaign)
Elven Beguiler (trying the "diplomancer" route) (player is in his second campaign, but also has limited play-by-post experience)
Human Rogue (run by a veteran player)
Halfling Rogue 5/Assassin 1 (run by a veteran player that will probably drop out)

This is for 3.5.

We have most books except the spell compendium and are missing several books from the "Complete" series.

[Prodan]

DM wins. End of story.

[ducttapebandit]

DM wins. End of story.

Yes, but we've got to at least throw him for a loop or two. I guess the real question is "How do we avoid the TPK so we don't restart at the beginning of the dungeon with a whole new party?"

[Lord Vukodlak]

The DM either the same material you do or more, OR you have to show him the material you want to use he doesn't have.

In essence the DM is suppose to know what your character can do and what you plan to do. He has the right to that information. The PC doesn't have the right to the DM's secrets.

Most importantly, the DM can make up new rules you can't

The DM isn't actually trying to kill you if he was he'd just have a balor appear cast blasphemy and annihilate all non-evil party members. One of my DM's often jokes about killing the entire party that day, and it only actually happened once and it was a cinematic death where our return to life was guaranteed.

[Flickerdart]

The DM loses only in the case that he sticks to the RAW, in which case you can get some tasty infinite loops going that he might not know about, and thus will be one step behind.

But this is a terrible idea.

[Kylarra]

The DM loses only in the case that he sticks to the RAW, in which case you can get some tasty infinite loops going that he might not know about, and thus will be one step behind.

But this is a terrible idea.

But even then retroactive continuity means that he's not necessarily behind so much as hadn't defined a previous NPC who already abused that loop.

[Machiavellian]

DM wins. It's his universe. He is God. He could make your weapon suddenly become a rainbow trout and your wizard's spells turn into a ham hock. face it, vs a DM, you lose

[Tinydwarfman]

Games like this in our group have to be very carefully controlled. We have a panel of judges and a ref to decide who said "Pazuzu, Pazuzu, Pazuzu" the fastest, and whichever team wins best 2 out of 3 wins.

[Criptfeind]

{Scrubbed}

[Flickerdart]

But even then retroactive continuity means that he's not necessarily behind so much as hadn't defined a previous NPC who already abused that loop.

That's more like fiat though, and of course there isn't a mechanic that beats fiat.

[Chambers]

In a situation where the DM is pulling out the stops (well, the stops from the SRD and PHB II) to try and kill the party, your best chance of survival lies in your flexibility. There's so many things in the SRD alone to protect yourself against that if you try and focus on one or two aspects (armor class, or energy resistance, or damage reduction, or....) that you'll end up lacking in the other areas. And that's where the DM will hit you.

So if you're able to make a character that isn't particularly the best at any one particular thing, but is able to react to a wide variety of situations with a somewhat appropriate and effective response, you'll have a better chance of surviving. Some of these things are simple and can be achieved through equipment at lower levels (acid flasks vs the swarm, etc). But at higher levels your flexibility depends mostly on your class, and in 3.5 spellcasters are the Kings in that regard. My answer? Play a Wizard. Even just using the SRD you have access to a wide variety of spells that can shut down the encounter.

[ducttapebandit]

I guess I wasn't clear enough. At least one poster seems to think so. Sorry. I've now changed the title to give greater clarity. This is the only thread I've posted in on this board, though I've been reading a few for the last 18 months.

The DM isn't actually trying to kill you if he was he'd just have a balor appear cast blasphemy and annihilate all non-evil party members. One of my DM's often jokes about killing the entire party that day

I may have phrased it wrong. It looks like his plan is to throw encounters at us where we have to cheat death... in every room of this dungeon.

Flickerdart, we are running rules-as-written.

[Criptfeind]

That is a good idea, perhaps also introduce the Spell compendium (Or something, that looks wrong but I forgot its name.) Surly that will help a PC wizard more then the DM. Or hopefully it will.

[Tinydwarfman]

I guess I wasn't clear enough. At least one poster seems to think so. Sorry. I've now changed the title to give greater clarity. This is the only thread I've posted in on this board, though I've been reading a few for the last 18 months.


I may have phrased it wrong. It looks like his plan is to throw encounters at us where we have to cheat death... in every room of this dungeon.

Flickerdart, we are running rules-as-written.

Oh, well in that case, I very highly (as in, do it right now) recommend reading the Tier System, chosing classes of Tier 3 and above (the higher the better, but some people don't like casters), and reading the appropriate handbook for them. For finding handbooks, just google "<insert class here> handbook D&D"

Happy Optimizing!

[Flickerdart]

Flickerdart, we are running rules-as-written.

Well then. Go gain access to Restoration, then level drain and recover everyone and have them take better classes - Druid, Wizard and Cleric. Sadly, the PAO/Awaken loop is out of your reach for a number of levels.

Doc Roc had a fairly exhaustive list of cheese somewhere, and a few choice bits were core only. You don't even need PHBII.

[ducttapebandit]

That is a good idea, perhaps also introduce the Spell compendium (Or something, that looks wrong but I forgot its name.) Surly that will help a PC wizard more then the DM. Or hopefully it will.

We've got all the 3.5 books except that one and a handful of others. Unfortunately, our collection of the "Complete (insert type here)" series is incomplete. We're lacking Complete Divine, Complete Scoundrel, Complete Champion, and Complete Psionics. Sandstorm and the Planar Handbook round out the important ones that we don't have.

[Vangor]

Everything pretty much edited out since you aren't using Complete Divine and Complete Champion.

Not sure a hard combat campaign is a good entry for most people to the game, though. The fighter, rogues, and ranger won't be offering much soon enough, and having your most veteran players as the rogues is rather baffling, especially when the beguiler can cover traps and social interaction, often better than rogues. Recommend you and a rogue get into a fight to the death over an insignificant thing, the other rogue kills the victor, and the party kills the other rogue in retribution, and you be your Cleric and those reroll as Wizards shortly.

[Prodan]

We've got all the 3.5 books except that one and a handful of others. Unfortunately, our collection of the "Complete (insert type here)" series is incomplete. We're lacking Complete Divine, Complete Scoundrel, Complete Champion, and Complete Psionics NO YOU BLOODY WELL AREN'T.

Fixed it for you.

[ducttapebandit]

Everything pretty much edited out since you aren't using Complete Divine and Complete Champion.

Not sure a hard combat campaign is a good entry for most people to the game, though. The fighter, rogues, and ranger won't be offering much, and having your most veteran players as the rogues is rather baffling, especially when the beguiler can cover traps and social interaction, often better than rogues.

They tend to be more motivated by odd character concepts to the extreme. Our blind bard that one of them played is already dead.

This is filler while we decide who will DM something not so atypical next. We're doing for the experience more than anything.

[Tinydwarfman]

Also, go crazy with books. Seriously. You'll gain more from them than your DM does unless he's an experienced optimizer, in which case you're screwed anyway.

[Jerthanis]

Well, the problem is that no matter what you do, the DM can just raise the stakes that much further. If your DM wants to make you cheat death in every room, it's going to be his job to balance encounters so they lie right on that line, not your job to push the line somewhere else.

I mean, what do you think would happen if you killed those three swarms of centipedes easily? The next room would have six swarms instead.

See, powergaming is an arms race that the DM can always win by snapping his fingers. If you maintain this current party, the monsters he throws at you will be of a certain strength. If you make the party stronger and the DM wishes the same level of threat of death to be occurring, he will increase the monster's strength to match.

If he's disallowed from using monsters and encounters of a CR a certain value above your level, then Powergaming might help a little... but you're likely to hit a point where you've invalidated the purpose of the campaign, to plunge the characters into life-or-death situations at every turn. If you take advice from around here, you will be pushed so far past that point that you could almost solo such a game if you take a Wizard for your Cohort.

Heck, people around here could probably make your Wizard cohort solo the game.

But if you want a build that benefits the most from a restriction of books it'd be... a Cleric who picks up Leadership. I'd personally drop the Charisma a bit to pay for a well rounded physical statblock, but that's me. As far as feats go, I'd say Power Attack and maybe proficiency in a Greatsword wouldn't go amiss and Extend Spell is pretty good on a Cleric with their buffs.

[Origomar]

lol just play an insanely tough character, or a monk so you can just run away.

[ducttapebandit]

If he's disallowed from using monsters and encounters of a CR a certain value above your level

He's restricted to CRs that twice our level. My group is insane for actually doing this.

But if you want a build that benefits the most from a restriction of books it'd be... a Cleric who picks up Leadership. I'd personally drop the Charisma a bit to pay for a well rounded physical statblock, but that's me. As far as feats go, I'd say Power Attack and maybe proficiency in a Greatsword wouldn't go amiss and Extend Spell is pretty good on a Cleric with their buffs.

Nice to hear I'm headed in a good direction!
I rolled a pair of 18's and a 17 that jumps to an 18 since we're past 4th level. My lowest roll is a 9 and the other two are both 11. He let us roll up a second character so we can work on it before our first character is out. I'm trying to figure out what my followers should be.

Extend Spell and combo'ed with buffs. That sounds good. I've never run a caster before, so being able to look for content in every book is both new and intimidating to me.

lol just play an insanely tough character, or a monk so you can just run away.

We tried to take out the door to the dungeon so we could go back to town and resupply, but it's magic and won't open for us and using my acidic breath weapon to tunnel around it wasn't working.

[jseah]

I mean, what do you think would happen if you killed those three swarms of centipedes easily? The next room would have six swarms instead.

See, powergaming is an arms race that the DM can always win by snapping his fingers. If you maintain this current party, the monsters he throws at you will be of a certain strength. If you make the party stronger and the DM wishes the same level of threat of death to be occurring, he will increase the monster's strength to match.

I actually ran this format once as a DM. At level 15 gestalt, all books open, reading by RAW.

The point wasn't that I couldn't kill the characters. I could easily kill them by sending an unlimited wave of solars or something stupid. Or maybe by using epic monsters.
But if they do survive that particular challenge (challenges are open, I make them, and everyone knows what the challenge is) they get to say "Oh, I made a character that could survive X horrible monster".
Which is more the point than winning against the DM.

Spoiler

Show

It wasn't just a series of monsters, it had various nasty traps (perma-AMF on room, entire floor disappears to reveal spiked pit and acid begins to fill room)
and some accidental DM fiat (oops, I forgot that Divert Teleport allowed a save and Teleportation Circle allowed SR)

My Co-DM made some seriously nasty beasties with template stacking. blindsight, burrow speed 80ft, 10 attacks per round (+52), ~60dmg per hit, imp. grab with grapple checks somewhere around 70, immunity to magic
We also abused the **** out of aurorum's auto-repair ability.
- I still have the monster stats. If you're interested, drop me a PM and I'll upload it.

My player's arms race actually started out with the 2nd applicant submitting Olo's lightning maces + roundabout kick + weapon aptitude kukuris on a Teflammar shadowlord. (Average dmg = infinity)
He died pretty quickly. =P
By the end, the record for the start of the day buffing routine was about 2 hours in-game time and ~1.5 pages of text.......
- Involving massively abusing ability rip and Gate. yes, I allowed it. One of the few submissions I disallowed was the save-game psicrystal trick but applied every single round through abuse of Temporal Reiteration and Font of Power.

[Gadora]

I'd like to point out that the gray elf beguiler has been hanging around these fora, learning about things beyond our group's normal optimization level. This is why we have a diplomancer.

Also, the player running the dwarven fighter does have experience with previous editions of D&D.

[Snake-Aes]

DM wins. It's his universe. He is God. He could make your weapon suddenly become a rainbow trout and your wizard's spells turn into a ham hock. face it, vs a DM, you lose

There's a very interesting trick here...who is the DM "winning" against when all the players go away?

[Aotrs Commander]

He's restricted to CRs that twice our level. My group is insane for actually doing this.

That's not a restriction. If he wants to slaughter you, all he needs is a large number of low-level casters, half your level or less, maybe twice your number and he'll wipe the floor with you with basic tactics. More so as the levels creep up. (And that's assuming he's likewise restrciting his ECL). Twelve 3rd level wizards, carefully spread out could throw a dozen 2D4+2 Magic Missiles in one round. That's one gareenteed kill and likely two (since average 42 damage is likely to knock out most low HD characters at 6th level). Assuming he doesn't Grease the party and then Colour Spray you first...

Once you get to that sort of encounter, it's PCs verses lone BBEG problem in reverse. And he doesn't really need to optimise, just pick a few fairly basic spell selection.



Actually, scrub that; I notice you are very caster-light, so really, a reasonably well-prepared ranged or flying attack would do you a lot of damage (unless you have a couple of ranged specialists in the party). (Though again, that usuallty causes anyone some problems.) It's just really not hard to build a killer encounter for the DM without even stepping out of core at low level.

The beguiler, for instance, your only arcane caster, is trivially negated by Undead and/or Protection From Good, which takes out almost all the enchantment spells and a lot of illusion. (Actually Undead would also knock out both the rogue's usefulness as well, so that's half the party effectiveness crippled before you start...)

Now, a group composed of six primary spell casters at mid-to-high levels might be much harder to deal with. But a low-level group (especially a caster-light group) is easy pickings.

[pingcode20]

To be fair, though, in this case the DM isn't acting in the usual 'referee' role, instead acting as a different sort of player constrained by a different set of rules.

Sort of like a game of Fox and Sheep.

The good thing for you is that most of the worst non-core things the DM can throw at you are safely sequestered away in various monster manuals which you never need to open.*

The bad thing is that the DM can break out up to 8 NPCs of equivalent level to your party in any given encounter (at 6th, at any rate). The higher level you go, the worse the numbers game gets - at 7th, he gets eight NPCs one level higher, and at eighth it's sixteen of your level.

The advantage you get is that your wealth is going to be a lot better than anything the DM can put into play and the gap will only broaden as you go.

That means you'll probably want to keep an eye to any books with powerful equipment, and avoid ones with strong features gained primarily by levelling characters, in general.

The wizard-type arms race can only end badly, though, since the GM can always throw a wizard twice your level at you. This is about as pleasant as it sounds, so don't cross that line. (I assume you haven't, since it's all fighter fighter dragon shaman)

*Fun thing though: Beholders, gauth, carrion crawlers, displacer beasts, gith (both flavours), kuo-toa, mind flayers, slaad, umber hulks, and yuan-ti are all verboten thanks to Wizards' product identity thing keeping them out of the SRD.

[Emmerask]

If the dm tries to kill you he can, "yeah the 21th level wizard has a great wyrm force dragon pet any other questions?"

You might want to look at Descent: Journeys in the Dark for ideas how to limit the dms power, it is basically a dm vs party game where the dm has to kill the party as often as he can (and a fun one at that )

[faceroll]

{Scrubbed}