Ideas that give boners to GMs

[maglag]

Roguelike games often have one-shot items careful use as part of their main strategy, and you can't usually save-scum those. It's not everybody's cup of tea, but there's clearly several players out there who enjoy that kind of stuff.

Then there's games like most of the Fire Emblem series and Riviera the promised Land where almost every weapon is a limited use item that will eventually break down with use.

[Foxwarrior]

Yeah, roguelikes are about the only genre that break me out of hoarding mentality for anything less than a final boss fight. But in a roguelike, you both tend to have an idea how long the entire game is, so you get a scale of how long to hold on to your consumables, and you die repeatedly, so you can be frequently reminded "if you'd remembered to use some consumables, you'd still be alive and have some left".

[Username17]

Fake-out Challenges.

These are challenges that present evidence to the players that they should be handled in a known and specific manner, but are secretly something else entirely that requires completely different resources. Most blatantly are all those stupid fucking monsters that look like they are undead but secretly are actually plants or golems or dudes covered in sticky jizz or whatever the fuck.

DMs love this shit because they have asymmetric information and power. So they get to laugh on the inside while players burn turning attemps on the fucking Adherer. But it's super fucked up. The DM is laughing at the players. He is trolling them. It's cruel, and not a thing one of your friends should do.

-Username17

[Leress]

Fake-out Challenges.

I always hated that, like the albino Red Dragon. I'm lucky to have never encountered this while gaming.

[Wiseman]

There was one challenge near the end of the book of challenges (which I should really get on with) where you're given information that your fighting a frost giant and white dragon, and then it turns out to be illusions hiding a red dragon and pit fiend.

How do illusions fit into this stuff? Is that bad?

[OgreBattle]

In Breath of Fire IV: Dragon Quarter you have one-shot trap items that are used outside of combat to open combat up to your advantage or outright kill enemies. As this is a design space outside of a character's reusable in-combat abilities I found myself using landmines and such all the time.

[hogarth]

How do illusions fit into this stuff? Is that bad?

I've certainly seen adventure writers get a boner over the idea of using illusions to get PCs to attack each other (even though an attempt by the PCs to do the same thing would be unlikely to succeed).

[Prak]

How did we get four pages in with no mentioning "dicking with wishes?"

[Kaelik]

How did we get four pages in with no mentioning "dicking with wishes?"

Don't think DMs actually like dicking with Wishes, they just don't like granting wishes, so they dick with you if you get them.

[FatR]

Do people actually never use elixirs in Final Fantasy just because of sheer hoarding instincts?

I can only tell for myself, but I almost never use elixirs in Final Fantasy because almost all Final Fantasies are easy as fuck outside of optional bosses; sometimes you don't need consumables at all, sometimes you only need those freely buyable.

That said, the general sentiment is true. PCs tend to hoard consumables that are not obviously replenishable and ever use them. And in TTRPGs you cannot murder the party repeatedly until they get the idea that this particular fight is balaced with the assumption of consumable use.

[Milkmaid79]

Metagaming accusations used as a club.

I recall playing a level 7 dwarf fighter in AD&D (2nd edition I think-it was 25 years ago). We were being attacked and I suggested that the wizard could throw a fireball. The DM (as well as a couple of the other players) sneered at me and he asked how my character would know what a fireball was.

I presumed that even though dwarves are not mages in AD&D that they had likely at least heard of fireballs since they're fucking balls of fire and very noticeable. I also presumed that it was quite possible that my level 7 dwarf had seen a fireball used in a battle (it was a pregenerated character, not one played from level 1 on up). No, my dwarf wasn't aware of such things and I was a bad player for thinking he could have been.

From then on I simply rolled dice, called out numbers, and managed to get the party killed by making eye contact with the DM as he was roleplaying a vampire (unknown to us until that moment), which meant I fell under his charm power and put an axe through the mage.

[hogarth]

How did we get four pages in with no mentioning "dicking with wishes?"

Well, I mentioned "Unreliable PC abilities (e.g. "magic is dangerous")", but that's certainly one way of making things unreliable.

Another GM favourite is adding uncertainty in where area effect spells are targeted to add the exciting possibility of a wizard getting caught in his own fireball.

In fact, I'd say that having missed attacks turn into friendly fire is something that gives GMs a boner too.

[tussock]

The basic problem in RPGs is they are game of imperfect information sharing.

The GM is imagining a problem, and the other players are imagining up a solution to a different problem because of the flawed communication of the problem. The GM then interprets how a different solution impacts his original problem, because of the flawed communication of the solution.

Rules for things help that a lot. It's why people dig the fights, they have rules, the problems have numbers and you hit them with your own numbers until they resolve at a specified and clearly defined moment, also you can theoretically lose but it's vanishingly rare.

But most of the boners here, they go the other way. Where the GM deliberately obfuscates some part of the game in order to make things more interesting for the GM, and the other players mostly have no fucking idea what is going on even in the best case.

[Wiseman]

Find a buyer quests.

[K]

NPC-only classes or abilities.

It's the reason we can never have nice things for necromancer PCs.

[Prak]

How did we get four pages in with no mentioning "dicking with wishes?"

Well, I mentioned "Unreliable PC abilities (e.g. "magic is dangerous")", but that's certainly one way of making things unreliable.

I'm in a D&D 3.5 group on facebook, and I think people asking for advice on wishes has come up a few times. I know of one recently, I think it's come up multiple times before. And it seems the answer that virtually everyone gives is "dick with the wish for their temerity to use a PC ability to gain asymmetric power," with my "Talk to the guy and see if you can get him to understand why his wish is bad for the game and wish for something more reasonable" being one off crazy talk.

[allanlerouge]

Hello all !

Searching the Den, i found this from PhoneLobster :

And at least on the "bad ideas bad GMs constantly do badly" side of the list there are still plenty of omissions like "low magic" and "realistic wounds and healing" and "hardcore high fatality gaming" and "dark and gritty themes" or "adult themes".

So, as there has been no rebuttal on that, I'm genuinely curious and interested.

What's inherently bad about, respectively :

• * Low magic
  * Realistic wounds and healing
  * Hardcore high fatality gaming
  * Dark and gritty themes
  * Adult themes

[Chamomile]

They aren't Mousetrap.

[Whipstitch]

Low magic games are fine conceptually but it must be said that plenty of DMs will go on this kick where they believe wizards ruin everything and insist that you play no items, melee only, low magic D&D. But then the dumb shits still insist on using shit like swarms, shades or dragons as if you weren't these guys:



Low magic D&D is a silly place.

[Chamomile]

Low magic D&D is a terrible idea. You can't just rip all the magic out of a system that expects magic to be ubiquitous and expect it to work, especially if you don't tone down the opposition. Low magic as a general concept for an RPG can work fine, though.

[shinimasu]

Hello all !

Searching the Den, i found this from PhoneLobster :

And at least on the "bad ideas bad GMs constantly do badly" side of the list there are still plenty of omissions like "low magic" and "realistic wounds and healing" and "hardcore high fatality gaming" and "dark and gritty themes" or "adult themes".

So, as there has been no rebuttal on that, I'm genuinely curious and interested.

What's inherently bad about, respectively :

• * Low magic
  * Realistic wounds and healing
  * Hardcore high fatality gaming
  * Dark and gritty themes
  * Adult themes

Largely ignorant of broad consensus on these topics but I can speak from personal gaming experiences.

*Low magic: There are two problems with this. One is when the game is designed with low magic in mind and fails. One is when players try and force a high fantasy rule set to work with a low fantasy setting. Tends to be less "magic is common but can't do big things" and more "magic can do big things but is rare." The former can make a good game since then Magic fills the same conceptual space as skill checks. It's useful but you're not usually ending encounters with it (if you're even using it in combat at all). The latter is "all aboard the train to dmpc land" and is usually short hand for: "The only people who are going to be allowed to do (useful) magic are the npcs your DM controls." When it's not this, then it's usually that the game just plain breaks when you try and take the magic system out or reduce it.

*Realistic wounds and healing: Book keeping. So much book keeping. Especially when different types of wounds have different rates of recovery. Because nothing says fun like constantly checking in to see how much in game time has passed since a goblin pierced one of your kidneys. Also depending on how we're rating "realistic" here it's also effectively character death for injuries that irl would require months of recovery.

*Hardcore high fatality gaming: Nothing inherently "wrong" with this, but I think it's usually a symptom of GMs power tripping hard. If the system doesn't explicitly mention it as a selling point but the GM wants to shoehorn it in anyway then that's a red flag. I had one who vivisected a PC once and I honestly would not be surprised if after the game ended he spent the rest of the night touching himself.

* Dark and gritty themes
* Adult themes
- Lumping these two together because same general problem. There are some things I really just do not want to do face to face with several other human beings. Same reason I don't generally gather my friends together for porn watching parties or surprise screenings of Repo the Genetic Opera. I mean some people do and more power to you, but a not insignificant portion of the population gets kind of squicked when they sit down for some nice bonding time with their buddies but suddenly everyone is boning, or some guy has his hand shoved up a corpse so he can sing a duet with it like it's a ventriloquist's dummy. It's a case where you check ahead of time to make sure everyone is absolutely cool with tonight's viewing material and if even one person is a "no" then you should be rethinking either the group you're hosting or the material you intend to host. Proceeding to host it anyway makes you kind of a tool. Surprising people without getting their consent makes you a mega tool.

[virgil]

Chamomile has it in one. As for why others would have it on the list, and many of us do...they aren't inherently bad in and of themselves, but they so commonly come packaged with actual bad behaviors that they've become associated with them. They're strong signs to turn around.

[*] Low Magic - You're playing escapist fantasy, likely with a ruleset built around heavy usage of magic. Excising magic from the players' arsenal means you are playing with an incomplete system that will therefore be simpler and likely less engaging. In addition, Low Magic absolutely lowers the power of players, which means they have less agency - and that's rarely a good thing.
[*] Realistic Wounds and Healing - Harm and recovery is not fun, and so trying to more closely mimic an unenjoyable activity for a game is...weird. As the game is a cooperative one, you're either mandating splitting the party after a combat where everyone continues the adventure while Bob's taking physical therapy OR downtime is set for the longest recovery, which is needless padding.
[*] Hardcore High Fatality - If your characters are quick to die, then they are disposable and this discourages being invested in the character. If you make character creation even vaguely complex, that is a wasted cost. If you want the campaign to include "role"-playing, implying players being invested in their characters for a campaign as opposed to a one-shot, then making them squishy is counter to this. Now, if you aren't aiming for those, high fatality is fine.
[*] Dark, Gritty, Adult Themes - These are all tied to the same issue. Everyone's threshold for what's too dark/gritty/adult is different, and crossing that line turns the game into not fun.

All of these could be fine, but the game/group needs to be built around them, and unless DMs introducing this stuff is designing a whole new game rather than patchwork house rules, you're more likely to get no positive outcome from their inclusion.

[PhoneLobster]

They aren't Mousetrap.

You do realize that there might be some overlap between things I think are individually good ideas, and the ideas I choose to lump together in the games I play. (Or in this case, the individual ideas I think are bad and the ideas I choose to exclude from the games I play).

You also realize how much of a stupid fucker you look like when you then try and use that overlap as some sort of a disproof of individual ideas that actually you seem to probably even agree with?

Seriously, I have a homebrew rules system. The rules I like are in it. GET THE FUCK OVER IT.

[Mechalich]

With regards to 'low magic' in D&D specifically, I find that what a lot of people want isn't actually low magic as in ASOIAF magic levels, but lower magic than D&D, and especially 3.X or PF D&D provides.

For most players the idealized version of a D&D campaign resembles something modeled on their favorite fantasy novels, and the thing is, for almost any possible fantasy novel series, including the more popular D&D novels, the world presented is considerably lower in magic saturation than the world the D&D rules actually churn out happens to be. The D&D has more magic than even really high magic fantasy settings like WoT and the only setting that really works with the level of magic that the system spits out is Planescape - and Planescape is insane (IMO gloriously so, but that's a matter of taste).

People want D&D to give them the adventurers of Drizzt, and they don't want it to be possible for Elminster to accomplish more in five minutes on a random Thursday before breakfast than Drizzt can in his entire life. Vanilla 3.X D&D or vanilla PF don't do this (and neither did vanilla 2e AD&D, though it was a bit less obvious), and players tend to figure it out pretty quickly and demand responses. So far the best solution seems to be to just cap the power level at CR X for given worlds, but people keep trying for far more baroque solutions for a variety of reasons.

[tussock]

What's inherently bad about, respectively :

• * Low magic
  * Realistic wounds and healing
  * Hardcore high fatality gaming
  * Dark and gritty themes
  * Adult themes

Magic in games is a thing that some characters get inherently and others get as treasure. When people say Low Magic, they usually go for cutting back the treasure first and foremost. It makes the characters without inherent magic pretty fucking useless a lot of the time.

Pendragon did serious wounds. It was interesting, because the game was generational, where you might have one fight a year and then produce a fortune and heirs and so on, so the bit where it took 8 months to heal up and maybe your arm never worked right again was mostly cool because you could send out a companion or fast-forward to your son being old enough to adventure anyway. For D&D it's pretty dumb, because the system assumes way too much combat for that to work, you're supposed to get stabbed hundreds of times and still be an adventurer.

Common Death needs a bunch of stuff to support it that isn't terribly popular. You need rapid character generation with limited options, quick catch-up advancement, plentiful spare treasure being carried around, and participants who don't mind rolling a new PC mid-session, again. Trying it with default 3e characters that people have spent a whole day just getting to the point where they can turn up, they don't want them to die.

Actual Nazis and stuff in games is ... like, it's tough to pull off with sufficient gravitas and then if you do it's pretty much just sickening and not fun to be around in any way. D&D is pretty light-hearted about the murder-hobo business because it's supposed to be fun. You can do black comedy with it, but not everyone gets that, especially neo-Nazis, they will think you are being serious and are a Nazi just like them. The guy in your group who wants to explore more genocide themes is also maybe a bit into genocide IRL. Plus, most people start throwing in blind moral quandaries, which just suck.

pr0n in games. The guy who is putting pr0n in your game is often creeping on one or more of the other players. That is a thing that happens quite a lot. When they say they want sex in their D&D they mean they want sex with someone in the D&D group. Which if you're already having sex in your D&D group and have talked it out could be cool. Otherwise, like, the number of places you share sexual fantasies with other people, well, there's places that are for that and you just don't do it anywhere else.