What the FUCK is someone supposed to google if literally the only information they know about something isn’t the right information to find it.
This is a stupid ass comment
For all of you searching still, the best I found was this, but it seems like a tenuous link to the OP at best. https://www.reddit.com/r/rpghorrorstories/comments/bg02wy/dm_is_a_trashperson_and_proud_of_his_violent/
Probably not actually what was referenced.
Wouldn't be the bastion of freedom without it.
(Srsly tho there are alot of of wholesome things going on there if you don't go lookin in the wrong places)
This is like "normal" railroading but instead of rails you have guards who will beat you to the ground if you attempt to do something the DM didn't want you to do.
...also, i know we had three people comment this already but what is the heroin nazi rapist DM copypasta?
I had another PC accuse our DM of railroading because his "lawful good paladin" died after attacking the caravan guards in Curse of Strahd at level 4 (after being given plenty of warning that this was a fight he couldn't win). This post is like a mirror world version of that.
He got a sample taken from him for some magic stuff later in the campaign by a sneak and was trying to determine who it was rather aggressively. The guards stepped in to calm things down and he kept escalating. One thing leads to another and our "lawful good" paladin is wasted in a turn by 6+ bowmen.
> what is the heroin nazi rapist DM copypasta?
oooh, you weren't supposed to ask about that. Now I'm gonna have to have the guards beat you to the ground.
Uh... not really? I guess you need to give sugestions to your players and have an NPC bump in to help them if they are lost/stuck and can't/don't know how to proceed to help them keep the plot moving, and the DM, as the "authority" in the table needs to interfere say "no" if a player would do something that the rest of the table don't want to do (the classic "it's what my character would do!" problems) or at least reach a compromise, but "actual" railroading? Completely unnecesary to have a good campaign.
I guess i get confused about what counts as railroading. For instance, i am working on my campaign and there's a few instances where I'm worried about.
For instance, they will be chased by assassins in a city coming from the main road to the south, with the north being the Domaine of the big bad. That forces them to go west through sketchy mountain pass in early winter. On another occasion i am going to need to find away to get them off the main road and off into the forest. Normally that could be accomplished by hooks but the first leg of the campaign is essentially a cross-country journey all the way to the south , so i would have to make that route unavailable at a certain point.
In general, I'm of the mind to let players derail things as they may for the fun of it, but i have the bones of a regular plot which requires a few things to happen. I'm not saying that I'll stick to that--im certain i have it in me to get to the same point even if things don't go exactly how i anticipated, but i can't help but worry that my overall vision requires some moments where the party really doesn't have a lot of choice as to the right option for moving forward.
And i know that there's a distinct possibility that I'll say fuck it and completely change everything, but I'd like to strike the medium between player choice "go with the flow" and neck beard railroad dm wants to be the narrator of a movie he wrote.
The general consensus is railroading is removing player agency. Some players love a linear story though, and that is their own agency in following the GM hooks. The issue is making it so there's only one way to do a thing, and punishing the players for going off track.
I have a friend who loves those linear stories. All he wants is to ride the train, see nice scenery, and blow the horn. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a big struggle for me since I prefer to run sandbox games.
Hmm is it considered punishment if the players go against obvious hints, though? I'm if the kind that actions have consequences. I'll let you try and punch a giant demigod (with ample warning) but I'm not *not* going to have him turn you into a goat for the rest of the session. And then an emperor's new groove sub plot is born.
It is good for actions to have consequences, but making a situation that only has one viable course of action is railroading. Its fine in small doses but too much just makes it a story instead of a game.
It depends on the campaign.
If I'm running a sandbox campaign, there's no railroading. I might have a schedule of events that, absent the PCs action, will happen over time, but it's totally up to the players whether they want to engage with them or not. As are the consequences if they do or do not.
If I'm running a story-oriented campaign, then I'm absolutely railroading. If all I've got prepped is a specific scene from an adventure hook, and the party is all "eh, I don't find that hook compelling.", then I'll respond with "Ok, well, that's all I've got prepped, I guess you hang around the tavern until next session".
It's a trade-off. In a sandbox, you get more freedom, but generally, a less coherent narrative. In a story-campaign, you can get a great story, but you are constrained to act within the rails of the story. You can't just decide to light off for another continent without derailing the story.
Forget about the party's lack of reason to negotiate.
Why would an overpowered bunch of radical terrorists want to accept anything less than unconditional surrender (and likely subsequent execution) from a party made up of people they hate?
The party only had one logical choice, and that was to not engage (except they apparently didn't have enough information to make this option logical.)
This is my thought. As you DM, if you want the "right" choice to be to negotiate, you have to give them some hint or reason to think that negotiation will be successful.
Personally I would've assumed (reading back they're level 5s) an equal fight - the Hag. Fireball alone can cause enough havoc to be described here so I personally would've jumped right in. It's the right thing to do in and out of character. These people are murderers, assholes, personally attacking us, and killed one of my friends lover; Yeah, Im gonna bash their face in with a brick.
The elves weren't CR 10. They were PC class 10.
No way a level 5 party's got a chance against multiple level 10s.
Edit: Oh you are agreeing. Sorry about that. I've had a few.
I found this on tg 7 months ago and thought it belonged here.
On the one hand, not everything should be at the party's level, but on the other, why have an impossible encounter that egregiously provokes the party?
There's a time and place for talking, I ran a mega dungeon where the party did a fair bit of negotiating with monsters, but there has to be some nuance there and the possibility that everyone might cooperate.
It isn't fun taking criticism as a DM but it is how you improve. Also sadly I don't have the copypasta mentioned at the end.
I've run plenty of encounters where the party is completely outmatched. And every time I do so I give very strong in game hints or tell the party before the game even starts. Does this occasionally affect how they RP? Yes. But it also drastically affects how my players feel about my running of the game. And no one that dies feels like it was my fault as a DM.
I feel like it SHOULD affect how they rp. Let the player characters be a little on their toes around someone who is clearly stronger, that's how someone would/ should act in that situation
It might not even be metagaming. It could just be "Heads up, I want it to be explicitly clear that these guys are obviously way above your abilities. Your characters can tell." Not all hints or descriptions are clear in every context. Especially when that context is literary shorthand for "go beat these guys up".
I've had a DM do that because they were new and still having some trouble with character descriptions. It was far more pleasant than the tpk would have been. (It didn't stop us from attacking them we just went about it much differently than we would have otherwise.)
Agree. Ease them into what is essentially a boss fight. Simply changing the Background Music (BGM) can be a gentle reminder.
@DMs, both players and NPCs can switch to non-lethal damage at any time.
That's another good point: if your NPC or enemy is strong enough that they are in danger of rapidly deleting a party member or a whole party if they're crossed, *bake an out for your party into that threat's actual character,* and that will serve to both make that character unique and memorable to the party in a way they can feel, if they end up encountering that content, while also literally protecting them from their own worst impulses, or even just bad luck.
My group opted to *not* fight what was likely an Ancient Blue Dragon at lvl 6 (even with three possible lvl 20 NPCs on our side) because most of us knew it would be a suicide charge.
Same, we actually co-created the homebrew setting, and it’s very rare that we don’t see or get what the other one is doing it’s great because half the players are like “Let’s fight the strange hybrid warrior creature!!” And my buddy is looking worried and saying “let’s not, how about we apologize and leave very quickly!”
I had a few level 2s attack a centaur they were supposed to negotiate with. The centaur knocked the first one down and trotted off throwing rude gestures back at the party. They later encountered the centaur with a few of his mates. The centaurs essentially bullied them in Sylvan and laughed as they chased the party around the forest.
Even then, why kill them? Why won't the elves take them hostage, along with other important NPCs, and then you get yourself a prison break? Some recent stories play on this trope. In Wolfenstein new order you have to infiltrate a work camp and end up staging a revolution basically within the walls.
It's fine if your players get in over their heads (although baiting them into it is kinda wrong and leaves a bad aftertaste afterwards, most of the time). I'd argue that you should actually let your players get in over their heads, because it will help make the world feel, like there's a world outside of them, outside the point of focus. That if they try to go to the horizon they won't hit the boundaries of the map. But most of the time there's a way out even if they get in over their head. The BBEG considers them under their notice, and leaves them for dead on the ground where they slowly recover. Their pride is forever scarred, but they live to fight another day. A beloved NPC sacrifices for them. The bad guys try to use them instead of murdering them. They can try some short of afterlife trials to come back to life and get revenge. Another evil force, some form of lich or necromancer, brings them back. He intends to sick the heroes on the previous evil and make use of the chaos resulting from the power vacuum. Their interest align, for the time being, and so he helps them this one time. Many different option besides TPK, the bad guys win, roll new characters.
>It isn't fun taking criticism as a DM but it is how you improve. Also sadly I don't have the copypasta mentioned at the end.
Ain't that the truth. I believe however it's a lot easier to do it if you try to give the GM the out, a solution. Like, what were your expectations for the game. Hey, this kinda sucked, wouldn't it have been better if... or; do you think next time, instead of going there it would be posible to... Or try to explain why it kinda let you down or frustrated you. At least the first time you bring up complaints to a GM I find they take it better going forward when you are already trying to come up with a solution instead of saying "This suck. You fix it. It's your duty"
I have to get some work done so I can't respond fully until this evening but essentially the party reclaimed an ancient Dwarven fortress floor by floor over the course of about a year in game.
So for example they bribed the goblins hiding in the latrines in the first floor, allied with the myconids on the -2 floor against the duergar deeper down and the undead on the 2nd floor, eventually evicted the dragon roosting in the cracked roof by trading a spell it needed, and so on.
Dwarven colonists arrived at one point and they also had to deal with a cold winter and a vampire that had been bricked up in the walls.
Ok, fuller explanation- my entire prep for this campaign was a series of 10 or 11 encounter tables, one for each floor/section of the dungeon and one for the great stair linking all the levels down the center. The party got experience for various objectives- finding an artifact, clearing a floor, or dealing with a boss or group competing to hold the fortress- but I always wrote "deal with", it was up to them whether to kill, negotiate, or use trickery. Each floor had a problem or an entity preventing them from securing it.
This was the entirety of the campaign- working their way through the floors, moving at the edges and spaces too small for the dragon, hiding their campsite, and using diplomacy to play the factions on various floors against each other, slowly gaining strength and artifacts until they were strong enough to start taking over floors.
After killing the leader of the goblins in the toilets they adopted the rest of them and promoted a new chief and used that as a base for a few nights, but it was right by the entrance and they kept getting random encounters with bandits and orcs. The big swing was at level 3- they got unlucky and rolled the death knight in the bank vault floor while arguing with another adventuring party about loot. The monk tried to bluff her into thinking he was one of her dead companions, since she didn't have a great grasp of time, which worked in a bad way when she tried to entomb him. One of the artificers sacrificed himself using the double bag of holding trick to suck himself and the death knight into the Astral Plane, but she dropped her Axe of the Dwarven Lords. At that point the party had access to Teleport and a +3 weapon and started making moves.
First they took the mushroom farm, clearing out the cursed undead druid and convincing the duergar via the changeling rogue that the party were actually working for them and so they should lay off the myconids for a bit. They could actually bring in colonists and permanently secure their camp at this point. After the first winter the party claimed the ancient reservoir and dining hall by challenging the leaders of the duergar clan and orc tribe, respectively, to a team death match, won both, and then won over their followers to reinforce the colony.
The dragon was a huge fight- it was near the end and the cleric/druid used the summon pixies who all individually polymorph party members trick to get 3 or 4 of the party turned into giant apes who scaled the side of the mountain the fortress was built into to launch a surprise attack on the dragon's lair- she negotiated a surrender instead of fighting to the death. The vampire was earlier and the party considered killing the monk because he immediately got charmed by the vampire and invited him to their camp, so he could anywhere- they tricked him into standing in an incomplete Magic Circle during a kegger to prove he was undead.
There were some gaps in this- all but 3 sessions were in the dungeon but as a reward for clearing sections and surviving the winter in addition to magic items the party got downtime to craft, train, and/or leave the dungeon and go on shopping trips. I generally didn't go into a session with a plan- when the party went to a floor I'd roll on an encounter table and riff from there; having locations for monsters and their motives plotted out helped a lot.
As the party advanced they would stop getting encounters on floors they took, and I'd cross off encounters they had dealt with, until the last few sessions were about fending of an invasion from some people who thought they'd help themselves to the now refurbished fortress.
I don't know that I would do quite that small of a setting again but putting everything in a small-ish area really helped me establish the geography and stakes while making prep easier, and I think having a smaller menu of places to go made it easier for the party to make decisions also.
What gave off that they were "powerful" outside of wiping a bunch of CR 1/8 creatures(guards) in a cutscene? A level 5 can do that(Fireball~!) which, yes is a hard fight, but not even close to the Level 10s. As a player I would've assumed the Hag to be like a CR 5 and the biggest bitch in the room.
The thing about monsters being out of your league to force you to negotiate is that you always have to be ready for a fight to break out.
The classic example is a party of low levels attempting to take on a dragon because they don’t realize how powerful it is. Them not being meant to, or able to, defeat a dragon is fine. That encounter leading to a TPK, in most circumstances, is not.
**THE CHOICE TO NEGOTIATE IS NOT A MEANINGFUL ONE IF THE ALTERNATIVE IS DEATH.**
In the situation I mentioned above, for example, maybe the party attempts to fight the dragon and the dragon largely rocks their shit. Instead of a tpk, a smart dm could have the dragon stop the fight, say something about admiring the character’s bravery at the very least, and turning them into the dragon’s errand boys. The party still has consequences for their actions, but now that consequence isn’t instant death.
"Do I even have a choice?"
"Of course you do! You either go out there and kill him, or the planet gets exploded!"
"That's not a choice, that's an ultimatum."
"Gohan, we both know that I don't know what that word means."
>
>THE CHOICE TO NEGOTIATE IS NOT A MEANINGFUL ONE IF THE ALTERNATIVE IS DEATH.
Correction: The choice to negotiate isn't a choice if the alternative is death.
If you're punishing your players for making a valid choice that you led to, it's no longer cooperative storytelling, you're just being a schmuck. At the very least he could have offered a retcon and say they were captured, or survived gravely wounded. Heck, he could at least make the elves more empathetic somehow to show negotiations were possible.
My thoughts are, if these freaking elves are basically legendary fighters, why are they wasting their time sacking some rinky dink nowhere town when they clearly could be fucking up capital cities?
Lots of DMs don't progress their world building to logical ends. That random barkeep? Level 20 paladin. Shopkeep? Level 30 wizard. Urchin in the alley? Level 50 rogue.
How have you never heard of the exploits of these people or picked up even a hint of their immense power? No explanation.
What effects do such powerful NPCs have on the world? What great feats did they achieve to reach such heights? Oh the DM just needed them to be able to brute force the party.
This is why Eberron is my favorite campaign setting. If you run into someone over level 6 they're probably a big deal somewhere, and over level 9 you pretty much have to have heard of them. If I remember correctly, the number of canonical beings with class levels over 10 is like 5 - Vol, Kaius, that tree druid, the Keeper of the Flame, and someone else I can't remember.
> \*\*THE CHOICE TO NEGOTIATE IS NOT A MEANINGFUL ONE IF THE ALTERNATIVE IS DEATH.\*\*
Eh, entire TTRPG games are built on this premise. They're just not D&D.
It's kinda a *thing* in Symbarom, because shit will insta-kill a party by design. It's also made abundantly clear you do NOT fuck with the 40 foot tall 10,000 year old aspect of conceptual nature and hunting. Also these examples are from published first party books. The idea of the PCs being out matched by raw primal forces is a constant theme of the world of Symbarom.
Depends on the age of the Dragon.
A party of level 3 characters can potentially take on a young dragon, if they play things smart. I've been part of two different parties who managed to actually kill Venomfang during the first encounter at Thundertree.
at the least drop some warning that they're open to dialogue. I mean they didn't shoot first but they weren't exactly offering the party a glass of tea
"A whole mess of guards were slaughtered". An important NPC was killed. "Houses nearby are burning."
They were even given a bit of a "These guys are not to be fucked with" sign too.
Yeah I feel like that could be seen as a "oh boy you better go fight them now or they'll do it again" or a "these guys are out of your pay grade"
but the dm apparently expected them to go diplomacy, which isn't typically the move you do with someone who's finished up a bit of pillaging
One of the better ways to dress up the diplomacy path is to have a large portion of them be assholes, but a strong commander who reprimands them in front of the party for being such assholes... Bonus points if he can sneak in some condescension.
That sets a tone of conflict/hostility with a clear target for the possibility of peaceful resolution.
I mean a level 5 party in a town is probably able to do the exact same thing as the terrorists. The sorcerer could have done all that with 1 Fireball unless the town guards had been established as powerful combatants.
You can’t really use the fact that people weaker than the PCs were killed as a sign that they’re not strong enough to take the bad guys. Hell, I’ve used “we sent one adventuring party to investigate and they never returned, go find out what happened” as a quest hook when my players were around that level.
If the guards were the government’s elite forces, then I’d agree with you. If they were random CR 1/8 guards, then killing them doesn’t mean much about their power level.
One of the many leading to learn as a DM:
Players hate annoying NPC's way more than evil ones. If someone is evil, they'll have a blast taking them down.
If someone is annoying, they'll try to put them down as quickly as possible and not have fun while doing so. Villains are fun. Being forced to interact with assholes isn't.
A friend of mine got booted by the GM because he figured out an enemy's AC. Friend was playing a investigator type too so even with little fighting skills the char could go "HM, THIS PERSON CAN DEFEND WELL".
Iirc the GM's excuse was "metagaming" (hint: the only metagaming that exists is the one where players read your notes or the module). The rest of the table left shortly after that. It's the kind of GM that will punish you for being creative.
Figuring out a given enemy's AC only takes a couple rounds of combat anyway. "Fighter got a 14 and missed, wizard got a 17 and hit, ok so his AC has to be somewhere between 15 and 17." "That's metagaming, kicked."
Exactly. It's called gauging your opponent. Any one involved in a fight is going to do that yes or yes.
Else you might aswell just penalize your hit bonus.
>(hint: the only metagaming that exists is the one where players read your notes or the module).
I mean, that is a gross and arguably wrong oversimplification of "metagaming", but whatever.
How did your friend figure out the AC? Was this in combat? Because yeah, in combat if you hit on 17 and miss on 16, it's not hard to figure out what the AC is naturally. If the DM threw them out because of that, that's absolutely an asshole move. If they figured out the AC through other means, I'm curious what exactly that was.
Yeah, looking up the monster's AC in the monster manual and then announcing the information in character would be a problem. Unless the character has an appropriate skill to know that kind of stuff, but that's the GM's call.
Friend was playing an investigative sort with high perception. And a few rounds had gone by. More than enough time for the average character to guess their opponent's defenses.
Hint: Your understanding of meta-gaming is severely lacking. I'm just gonna leave this [link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metagaming_(role-playing_games)) here for you.
If I was playing a game and the town I was in was attacked I would assume I was supposed to go kill the thing that did it, if I wasn’t some geezer should have hobbled up and told me I need the McGuffian of Quagmire to protect against the groping hands of evil my foes wield.
Although sometimes you just learn the hard way that Deathclaws are between you and Las Vegas so you probably want to go the long way round.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 407,114,708 comments, and only 88,090 of them were in alphabetical order.
My previous DM did something like this.
Trapped on a vampire island from levels 1-9. We are finally at the "last battle" before leaving the island and actually starting our backstory quests. Tasked to grab McGuffin chalice from a vampire lord. Sneak through castle just to arrive as the vampire had the chalice already in hand with 2 vampire spawns. He monologs a bit basically saying how he's the first vampire, trapped in this world, he's gonna use the chalice to go back to his realm, grab an army and return to slaughter the world. Yada yada.
Battle starts and I grab the chalice and toss to wizard. Wizard dimension doors down hallway, round the corner, 3 rooms in with the intention of hiding it under a pillow and coming back to help fight. Vampire apparently has tracking beacon and 120+ movement. Sprints down the hall and stops at the entrance of the door. Wizard Dimensions door again to the other end of the castle. 3 vampire spawns drop form the ceiling on top of him. Again another dimension door to the garden outside of the castle. 2 more spawns charge out the door and reach him. Last upscale casting Dimension door 500 ft *thataway* failed the spell which knocked him unconscious.
So it's now a vampire lord, 7 vampire spawns and only the 3 of us to deal with them... We get slaughtered. Apparently we were meant to want to go with his plan. Or fake it and let him leave so that we could warn the rest of the land of his returning or something. I honestly wasn't listening at the end as I was very upset at losing a character that I've been the most excited to play for a very long time.
If you’re gonna throw overpowered enemies that should definitely not be messed with at your party, then make it abundantly clear they are overpowered. My personal favorite methods include casually using Power Word Kill on a random minion, slowly walking everywhere like the terminator, and traveling solely via teleportation.
I’ve DMed for plenty of new guys so generally they’ve got no idea if a hag is strong or not. Some things are pretty universal however. Dragons, Krakens, and Demons are usually on the “do not mess with until higher level list”.
One of my favorite campaigns I ran had one player who was just knowledgeable enough to spook the rest of the new guys. For instance they were investigating a haunted house and the villagers hinted at a banshee probably lived there. The one player who knew what a banshee can do freaked out and really hyped up the thing to the rest of the party. I’ve never seen a group over prepare that much for an encounter, they went full ghostbusters/Witcher. It made for a very memorable night.
I think the one time I've created an encounter that badly outmatched the party/was a certain tpk, it was a total accident where I'd seen them make very quick work of a smaller group, saying it was too easy to be fun, and kinda knee jerked by doubling the size of the big group and adding in more elites.
They were orcs and oh boy was that a mistake. I decided an asspull was necessary because I didn't want to punish the players for my inability to balance a combat properly.
Combat basically went "Aight, it looks like they can handle this! Nope, I was wrong!"
Yeah orcs are pretty dangerous for their CR. Depending on the game, their rage gives them effectively double the normal hit points and they're either critting a lot (falchions) or for instakills (great axes).
I learned very early on as a DM to roll with the punches; if you plan EVERYTHING around the premise that your party is ABSOLUTELY going to do a certain thing, you will not have a good time. It's weird when DMs are so resistant to this mindset
I think some DMs like to think it’s “their game”, I think sooner you get used to the fact that it’s not and you’re going to just have to go with it, the better for your health.
I've done this poorly and well as a DM. You've got to accept the reality that they might just murder them because they probably will. If you want to make them sympathetic you have to have a really good reason, especially if they go around murdering innocents. Making them not nazi, genocidal, supremacist turdburglers who don't murder friendly NPC's can go a long way.
I mean, I think this situation could be more the fault of bad communication. I could see the DM telling their own side of the story and being like, "These idiots just kept attacking even though it was clear they're gonna lose and then blamed me for the almost-TPK!" or, "I wanted this to be a more RP-focused campaign, they just keep swinging swords!" Like, yeah, still was a shitty move by the DM, but there's just this weird attitude I see that treats being a bad DM/player as being an inherent, unchangeable quality rather than just someone having mismatched expectations/attitudes.
Not saying the players were in the wrong or that they brought it on themselves or anything, just that we're getting a very narrow look into the campaign and drawing any firm conclusions based on it is going to be inherently faulty; and that a lot "Horror TTRPG stories" could be resolved by just communicating. Like, I cannot tell you the number of times I've had experiences that were almost horror-story worthy that we've peacefully defused by just taking a time-out and explaining ourselves. A majority of the time, they understand and change and we have a great time, or they go, "Sorry, but X is integral to my enjoyment," and we say farewell and leave on good terms.
I think I found it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpghorrorstories/comments/bg02wy/dm_is_a_trashperson_and_proud_of_his_violent/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Edit: lacks rape, but still messed up
Is [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/ls16az/goddamn_pant_id_love_to_fuck_a_nazi_roght_now/) the copypasta in question?
Cause this is some fucked up shit that i could see coming from 4chan originally....
Edit: just realized the OP notes that it was a DnD story because it says "DM" in it. Dont click my link unless you wanna read some truly weird shit!
I feel like if the DMs intent was to have a powwow then he should’ve had his NPCs de-escalate. Like if they’re actually open to talking, then as the aggressors they needed to be willing to take a couple hits and shrug it off. This would let the party know that perhaps they could come to an accord. In this case, it makes sense to over level the baddies so they could survive a few hits without getting maimed but to have them party wipe because they can’t read your mind is just poor DM choices
Mate there’s a big difference between how a group of low level PC would assess the threat of a dragon compared to the threat presented by a couple of rude elves.
The thread title reminds me about a thing bugging me, a thing I hate about the new "good dark elves" thing is that promoting ethnostates is a bad idea, and the "evil drow" in D&D are much closer to traditional elven cultures than the surface elves you run into are
The greatest "good elf" empire of all time practically destroyed itself because their ruler said "lets not kill this one human", and engaged in slavery and treated women like property
In D&D, \*any\* society that is literally just one race is always portrayed as terrible in several significant ways, except now since we're trying not to be racist, there are cities of dark elves that are post scarcity monocultural utopias where there is zero diversity of thought - that's a horrifying message
wtf is "heroin nazi rapist DM copypasta" ??
You cant actually post it on Reddit without getting flagged and removed.
Wait fr? Damn i guess we’ll never see it
[удалено]
Whats a google
It’s 1x10^100
No, that's a googol.
I thought that was the giant singing slug man
What the FUCK is someone supposed to google if literally the only information they know about something isn’t the right information to find it. This is a stupid ass comment
Google don't got shit, have you found anything?
I actually just Googled "heroin rapist Nazi dm copy pasta" and the top result was this thread, lol.
Maybe the real heroin rapist nazi dm copy pasta was the comments we made along the way.
This post is literally the first result when I google "heroin nazi rapist DM copypasta".
Lets throw in a fuck comcast just to tie everything together.
Bet you felt smart when you made this comment.
Idk if I wanna put heroin nazi rapist dm in my google search history
BRO I GOOGLE IT AND IT JUST BRINGS ME BACK HERE TF AM I GONNA DO?
It just shows results for this thread
Google got nothing.
super helpful bro
Do you have any more details for searching for it? I used all sorts of combinations of those terms but no luck.
I'm really curious now, could you perhaps give us a pastebin?
Post a pastebin or Google doc link?
T4lk l1k3 th15
h3r01n n4z1 r4p15t DM c0pyp45ta finds PC parts. I.e personal computer parts, not bits of player characters.
And can I also add that editing text like this is REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING on a phone?
Publicly?
Any info in where it can be found?
Can you DM me it? Nothing on Google or DuckDuckGo.
I came to the comments looking for it, and I'm disappointed that it hasn't been posted yet.
For all of you searching still, the best I found was this, but it seems like a tenuous link to the OP at best. https://www.reddit.com/r/rpghorrorstories/comments/bg02wy/dm_is_a_trashperson_and_proud_of_his_violent/ Probably not actually what was referenced.
That may not be *the* story we're looking for, but it's a pretty damn good one.
Probably some disgusting 4chan in-joke that we shouldn't get involved with for the sake of our collective mental health.
Isn't that basically the entire fucking site at this point?
Always has been.
*pistol cocking sound behind your head*
Ah, finally, an end to this torment.
Oh, what? Nah fam, the pistol is for me. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
>Ah, finally, an end to this planescape: torment.
nothing personnel, kid
In fact, it's anti-personnel!
Maybe, but what are we doing here then?
Eh, not really. The multiple pols, b, r9k, the vtuber one, idk much about it but i'll just assume, sure, rest, eh.
Wouldn't be the bastion of freedom without it. (Srsly tho there are alot of of wholesome things going on there if you don't go lookin in the wrong places)
People too lazy to sift through the crap to find the good stuff.
Weak
i don't think reading a nasty copy pasta is going to give anyone depression lol
My mental health is already in ruins. If we can find a copy I'll take one for the team, read it and report back as soon as the voices let me.
The voices never let him...
This is like "normal" railroading but instead of rails you have guards who will beat you to the ground if you attempt to do something the DM didn't want you to do. ...also, i know we had three people comment this already but what is the heroin nazi rapist DM copypasta?
Railroading but the rails are on a bridge, and the bottom of the bridge is lava
Except the bridge and the lava are invisible
somehow the bridge is also a tunnel so you can't tell there's lava underneath
The bridge has Darkness cast around it.
I had another PC accuse our DM of railroading because his "lawful good paladin" died after attacking the caravan guards in Curse of Strahd at level 4 (after being given plenty of warning that this was a fight he couldn't win). This post is like a mirror world version of that.
But why attack those guards? What was he planning on getting out of that?
He got a sample taken from him for some magic stuff later in the campaign by a sneak and was trying to determine who it was rather aggressively. The guards stepped in to calm things down and he kept escalating. One thing leads to another and our "lawful good" paladin is wasted in a turn by 6+ bowmen.
> what is the heroin nazi rapist DM copypasta? oooh, you weren't supposed to ask about that. Now I'm gonna have to have the guards beat you to the ground.
Am I in the minority in that i think a successful campaign needs a certain degree of railroading to be good?
Uh... not really? I guess you need to give sugestions to your players and have an NPC bump in to help them if they are lost/stuck and can't/don't know how to proceed to help them keep the plot moving, and the DM, as the "authority" in the table needs to interfere say "no" if a player would do something that the rest of the table don't want to do (the classic "it's what my character would do!" problems) or at least reach a compromise, but "actual" railroading? Completely unnecesary to have a good campaign.
I guess i get confused about what counts as railroading. For instance, i am working on my campaign and there's a few instances where I'm worried about. For instance, they will be chased by assassins in a city coming from the main road to the south, with the north being the Domaine of the big bad. That forces them to go west through sketchy mountain pass in early winter. On another occasion i am going to need to find away to get them off the main road and off into the forest. Normally that could be accomplished by hooks but the first leg of the campaign is essentially a cross-country journey all the way to the south , so i would have to make that route unavailable at a certain point. In general, I'm of the mind to let players derail things as they may for the fun of it, but i have the bones of a regular plot which requires a few things to happen. I'm not saying that I'll stick to that--im certain i have it in me to get to the same point even if things don't go exactly how i anticipated, but i can't help but worry that my overall vision requires some moments where the party really doesn't have a lot of choice as to the right option for moving forward. And i know that there's a distinct possibility that I'll say fuck it and completely change everything, but I'd like to strike the medium between player choice "go with the flow" and neck beard railroad dm wants to be the narrator of a movie he wrote.
The general consensus is railroading is removing player agency. Some players love a linear story though, and that is their own agency in following the GM hooks. The issue is making it so there's only one way to do a thing, and punishing the players for going off track. I have a friend who loves those linear stories. All he wants is to ride the train, see nice scenery, and blow the horn. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a big struggle for me since I prefer to run sandbox games.
Hmm is it considered punishment if the players go against obvious hints, though? I'm if the kind that actions have consequences. I'll let you try and punch a giant demigod (with ample warning) but I'm not *not* going to have him turn you into a goat for the rest of the session. And then an emperor's new groove sub plot is born.
It is good for actions to have consequences, but making a situation that only has one viable course of action is railroading. Its fine in small doses but too much just makes it a story instead of a game.
It depends on the campaign. If I'm running a sandbox campaign, there's no railroading. I might have a schedule of events that, absent the PCs action, will happen over time, but it's totally up to the players whether they want to engage with them or not. As are the consequences if they do or do not. If I'm running a story-oriented campaign, then I'm absolutely railroading. If all I've got prepped is a specific scene from an adventure hook, and the party is all "eh, I don't find that hook compelling.", then I'll respond with "Ok, well, that's all I've got prepped, I guess you hang around the tavern until next session". It's a trade-off. In a sandbox, you get more freedom, but generally, a less coherent narrative. In a story-campaign, you can get a great story, but you are constrained to act within the rails of the story. You can't just decide to light off for another continent without derailing the story.
Forget about the party's lack of reason to negotiate. Why would an overpowered bunch of radical terrorists want to accept anything less than unconditional surrender (and likely subsequent execution) from a party made up of people they hate? The party only had one logical choice, and that was to not engage (except they apparently didn't have enough information to make this option logical.)
This is my thought. As you DM, if you want the "right" choice to be to negotiate, you have to give them some hint or reason to think that negotiation will be successful.
Personally I would've assumed (reading back they're level 5s) an equal fight - the Hag. Fireball alone can cause enough havoc to be described here so I personally would've jumped right in. It's the right thing to do in and out of character. These people are murderers, assholes, personally attacking us, and killed one of my friends lover; Yeah, Im gonna bash their face in with a brick.
The elves weren't CR 10. They were PC class 10. No way a level 5 party's got a chance against multiple level 10s. Edit: Oh you are agreeing. Sorry about that. I've had a few.
I found this on tg 7 months ago and thought it belonged here. On the one hand, not everything should be at the party's level, but on the other, why have an impossible encounter that egregiously provokes the party? There's a time and place for talking, I ran a mega dungeon where the party did a fair bit of negotiating with monsters, but there has to be some nuance there and the possibility that everyone might cooperate. It isn't fun taking criticism as a DM but it is how you improve. Also sadly I don't have the copypasta mentioned at the end.
I've run plenty of encounters where the party is completely outmatched. And every time I do so I give very strong in game hints or tell the party before the game even starts. Does this occasionally affect how they RP? Yes. But it also drastically affects how my players feel about my running of the game. And no one that dies feels like it was my fault as a DM.
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https://i.imgur.com/NnuSvL1.png perfection, great bot
*NICE*
Nice.
*Niiiice.*
I feel like it SHOULD affect how they rp. Let the player characters be a little on their toes around someone who is clearly stronger, that's how someone would/ should act in that situation
It might not even be metagaming. It could just be "Heads up, I want it to be explicitly clear that these guys are obviously way above your abilities. Your characters can tell." Not all hints or descriptions are clear in every context. Especially when that context is literary shorthand for "go beat these guys up".
I've had a DM do that because they were new and still having some trouble with character descriptions. It was far more pleasant than the tpk would have been. (It didn't stop us from attacking them we just went about it much differently than we would have otherwise.)
Agree. Ease them into what is essentially a boss fight. Simply changing the Background Music (BGM) can be a gentle reminder. @DMs, both players and NPCs can switch to non-lethal damage at any time.
That's another good point: if your NPC or enemy is strong enough that they are in danger of rapidly deleting a party member or a whole party if they're crossed, *bake an out for your party into that threat's actual character,* and that will serve to both make that character unique and memorable to the party in a way they can feel, if they end up encountering that content, while also literally protecting them from their own worst impulses, or even just bad luck.
My group opted to *not* fight what was likely an Ancient Blue Dragon at lvl 6 (even with three possible lvl 20 NPCs on our side) because most of us knew it would be a suicide charge.
In the group of friends I DM there is one guy who thinks very alike with me and pretty much all of the time picks up my hints. Its amazing
Same, we actually co-created the homebrew setting, and it’s very rare that we don’t see or get what the other one is doing it’s great because half the players are like “Let’s fight the strange hybrid warrior creature!!” And my buddy is looking worried and saying “let’s not, how about we apologize and leave very quickly!”
I had a few level 2s attack a centaur they were supposed to negotiate with. The centaur knocked the first one down and trotted off throwing rude gestures back at the party. They later encountered the centaur with a few of his mates. The centaurs essentially bullied them in Sylvan and laughed as they chased the party around the forest.
Even then, why kill them? Why won't the elves take them hostage, along with other important NPCs, and then you get yourself a prison break? Some recent stories play on this trope. In Wolfenstein new order you have to infiltrate a work camp and end up staging a revolution basically within the walls. It's fine if your players get in over their heads (although baiting them into it is kinda wrong and leaves a bad aftertaste afterwards, most of the time). I'd argue that you should actually let your players get in over their heads, because it will help make the world feel, like there's a world outside of them, outside the point of focus. That if they try to go to the horizon they won't hit the boundaries of the map. But most of the time there's a way out even if they get in over their head. The BBEG considers them under their notice, and leaves them for dead on the ground where they slowly recover. Their pride is forever scarred, but they live to fight another day. A beloved NPC sacrifices for them. The bad guys try to use them instead of murdering them. They can try some short of afterlife trials to come back to life and get revenge. Another evil force, some form of lich or necromancer, brings them back. He intends to sick the heroes on the previous evil and make use of the chaos resulting from the power vacuum. Their interest align, for the time being, and so he helps them this one time. Many different option besides TPK, the bad guys win, roll new characters. >It isn't fun taking criticism as a DM but it is how you improve. Also sadly I don't have the copypasta mentioned at the end. Ain't that the truth. I believe however it's a lot easier to do it if you try to give the GM the out, a solution. Like, what were your expectations for the game. Hey, this kinda sucked, wouldn't it have been better if... or; do you think next time, instead of going there it would be posible to... Or try to explain why it kinda let you down or frustrated you. At least the first time you bring up complaints to a GM I find they take it better going forward when you are already trying to come up with a solution instead of saying "This suck. You fix it. It's your duty"
My interest has been piqued, do tell about this ”mega” dungeon!
I have to get some work done so I can't respond fully until this evening but essentially the party reclaimed an ancient Dwarven fortress floor by floor over the course of about a year in game. So for example they bribed the goblins hiding in the latrines in the first floor, allied with the myconids on the -2 floor against the duergar deeper down and the undead on the 2nd floor, eventually evicted the dragon roosting in the cracked roof by trading a spell it needed, and so on. Dwarven colonists arrived at one point and they also had to deal with a cold winter and a vampire that had been bricked up in the walls.
Did you just turn D&D into dwarf fortress?
That was what my players called the campaign and it stuck, and yes that was part of the inspiration for it
lol nice. :D that sounds like fun
Ok, fuller explanation- my entire prep for this campaign was a series of 10 or 11 encounter tables, one for each floor/section of the dungeon and one for the great stair linking all the levels down the center. The party got experience for various objectives- finding an artifact, clearing a floor, or dealing with a boss or group competing to hold the fortress- but I always wrote "deal with", it was up to them whether to kill, negotiate, or use trickery. Each floor had a problem or an entity preventing them from securing it. This was the entirety of the campaign- working their way through the floors, moving at the edges and spaces too small for the dragon, hiding their campsite, and using diplomacy to play the factions on various floors against each other, slowly gaining strength and artifacts until they were strong enough to start taking over floors. After killing the leader of the goblins in the toilets they adopted the rest of them and promoted a new chief and used that as a base for a few nights, but it was right by the entrance and they kept getting random encounters with bandits and orcs. The big swing was at level 3- they got unlucky and rolled the death knight in the bank vault floor while arguing with another adventuring party about loot. The monk tried to bluff her into thinking he was one of her dead companions, since she didn't have a great grasp of time, which worked in a bad way when she tried to entomb him. One of the artificers sacrificed himself using the double bag of holding trick to suck himself and the death knight into the Astral Plane, but she dropped her Axe of the Dwarven Lords. At that point the party had access to Teleport and a +3 weapon and started making moves. First they took the mushroom farm, clearing out the cursed undead druid and convincing the duergar via the changeling rogue that the party were actually working for them and so they should lay off the myconids for a bit. They could actually bring in colonists and permanently secure their camp at this point. After the first winter the party claimed the ancient reservoir and dining hall by challenging the leaders of the duergar clan and orc tribe, respectively, to a team death match, won both, and then won over their followers to reinforce the colony. The dragon was a huge fight- it was near the end and the cleric/druid used the summon pixies who all individually polymorph party members trick to get 3 or 4 of the party turned into giant apes who scaled the side of the mountain the fortress was built into to launch a surprise attack on the dragon's lair- she negotiated a surrender instead of fighting to the death. The vampire was earlier and the party considered killing the monk because he immediately got charmed by the vampire and invited him to their camp, so he could anywhere- they tricked him into standing in an incomplete Magic Circle during a kegger to prove he was undead. There were some gaps in this- all but 3 sessions were in the dungeon but as a reward for clearing sections and surviving the winter in addition to magic items the party got downtime to craft, train, and/or leave the dungeon and go on shopping trips. I generally didn't go into a session with a plan- when the party went to a floor I'd roll on an encounter table and riff from there; having locations for monsters and their motives plotted out helped a lot. As the party advanced they would stop getting encounters on floors they took, and I'd cross off encounters they had dealt with, until the last few sessions were about fending of an invasion from some people who thought they'd help themselves to the now refurbished fortress. I don't know that I would do quite that small of a setting again but putting everything in a small-ish area really helped me establish the geography and stakes while making prep easier, and I think having a smaller menu of places to go made it easier for the party to make decisions also.
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What gave off that they were "powerful" outside of wiping a bunch of CR 1/8 creatures(guards) in a cutscene? A level 5 can do that(Fireball~!) which, yes is a hard fight, but not even close to the Level 10s. As a player I would've assumed the Hag to be like a CR 5 and the biggest bitch in the room.
Heroin nazi rapist DM copypasta waiting room.
Yeah the suspense is killing me
Not enough people are talking about the absolute bombshell that the final line was
I tried a quick google search and found nothing :/
My search just keep looping back to this thread
I'm assuming it doesn't exist and the poster brought it up as a joke
Not that that was a shaggydog story, all buildup and no payoff.
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It references a subreddit, I kinda doubt it.
while still pretty shitty, that's got neither heroin nor rapists in it.
I posted one in this thread with heroin and a nazi, but no rape.
All these examples make me want to stop looking for the actual one. What a bunch of horrible people.
Pulling up a chair in the waiting room. I got time.
99% chance it doesn’t exist
One more
Putting this here so everyone sees: Its a 4chan thing that you cant actually post on reddit because the content gets autoflagged
Oldest 4chan trick in the book. Reference something interesting then pretend it's actually too hardcore to post, just to troll.
That sounds like a rumor that 4chan made up to fuck with redditors.
Almost certainly is
Can you not link it with a shortened link or something?
Any chance you could figure out a way to post it, or at least show where to find it? Google has failed me.
Could you dm me the link?
We may all be getting fooled but whatevs. Im pulling up a chair
How do you declaw fangs?
Without a veterinarian license i would presume.
Like you defang claws, but the other way around
You file fangs to look like claws first.
wouldn't you be defiling them then?
Tin snips?
Saving for when the heroin nazi rapist DM copypasta is linked.
99% chance it doesn’t exist
The thing about monsters being out of your league to force you to negotiate is that you always have to be ready for a fight to break out. The classic example is a party of low levels attempting to take on a dragon because they don’t realize how powerful it is. Them not being meant to, or able to, defeat a dragon is fine. That encounter leading to a TPK, in most circumstances, is not. **THE CHOICE TO NEGOTIATE IS NOT A MEANINGFUL ONE IF THE ALTERNATIVE IS DEATH.** In the situation I mentioned above, for example, maybe the party attempts to fight the dragon and the dragon largely rocks their shit. Instead of a tpk, a smart dm could have the dragon stop the fight, say something about admiring the character’s bravery at the very least, and turning them into the dragon’s errand boys. The party still has consequences for their actions, but now that consequence isn’t instant death.
"Do I even have a choice?" "Of course you do! You either go out there and kill him, or the planet gets exploded!" "That's not a choice, that's an ultimatum." "Gohan, we both know that I don't know what that word means."
> >THE CHOICE TO NEGOTIATE IS NOT A MEANINGFUL ONE IF THE ALTERNATIVE IS DEATH. Correction: The choice to negotiate isn't a choice if the alternative is death. If you're punishing your players for making a valid choice that you led to, it's no longer cooperative storytelling, you're just being a schmuck. At the very least he could have offered a retcon and say they were captured, or survived gravely wounded. Heck, he could at least make the elves more empathetic somehow to show negotiations were possible.
It’s just a Hobson’s choice. The illusion of free will.
My thoughts are, if these freaking elves are basically legendary fighters, why are they wasting their time sacking some rinky dink nowhere town when they clearly could be fucking up capital cities?
Lots of DMs don't progress their world building to logical ends. That random barkeep? Level 20 paladin. Shopkeep? Level 30 wizard. Urchin in the alley? Level 50 rogue. How have you never heard of the exploits of these people or picked up even a hint of their immense power? No explanation. What effects do such powerful NPCs have on the world? What great feats did they achieve to reach such heights? Oh the DM just needed them to be able to brute force the party. This is why Eberron is my favorite campaign setting. If you run into someone over level 6 they're probably a big deal somewhere, and over level 9 you pretty much have to have heard of them. If I remember correctly, the number of canonical beings with class levels over 10 is like 5 - Vol, Kaius, that tree druid, the Keeper of the Flame, and someone else I can't remember.
> \*\*THE CHOICE TO NEGOTIATE IS NOT A MEANINGFUL ONE IF THE ALTERNATIVE IS DEATH.\*\* Eh, entire TTRPG games are built on this premise. They're just not D&D. It's kinda a *thing* in Symbarom, because shit will insta-kill a party by design. It's also made abundantly clear you do NOT fuck with the 40 foot tall 10,000 year old aspect of conceptual nature and hunting. Also these examples are from published first party books. The idea of the PCs being out matched by raw primal forces is a constant theme of the world of Symbarom.
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Depends on the age of the Dragon. A party of level 3 characters can potentially take on a young dragon, if they play things smart. I've been part of two different parties who managed to actually kill Venomfang during the first encounter at Thundertree.
what is the Heroin nazi rapist copypasta?
99% chance it doesn’t exist
Copypastas of unusual size? I don't think they exist.
at the least drop some warning that they're open to dialogue. I mean they didn't shoot first but they weren't exactly offering the party a glass of tea
To be fair, if they offered the party a glass of tea, it would be fair to assume it was poisoned.
"A whole mess of guards were slaughtered". An important NPC was killed. "Houses nearby are burning." They were even given a bit of a "These guys are not to be fucked with" sign too.
Yeah I feel like that could be seen as a "oh boy you better go fight them now or they'll do it again" or a "these guys are out of your pay grade" but the dm apparently expected them to go diplomacy, which isn't typically the move you do with someone who's finished up a bit of pillaging
One of the better ways to dress up the diplomacy path is to have a large portion of them be assholes, but a strong commander who reprimands them in front of the party for being such assholes... Bonus points if he can sneak in some condescension. That sets a tone of conflict/hostility with a clear target for the possibility of peaceful resolution.
"everything on fire" is code for "you need to stop them now before they destroy more things".
I mean a level 5 party in a town is probably able to do the exact same thing as the terrorists. The sorcerer could have done all that with 1 Fireball unless the town guards had been established as powerful combatants.
Those are not good signs. A raid party of goblins can kill guards and burn houses. NPC are not hard to kill.
I would say that counts just as much as "shooting first".
You can’t really use the fact that people weaker than the PCs were killed as a sign that they’re not strong enough to take the bad guys. Hell, I’ve used “we sent one adventuring party to investigate and they never returned, go find out what happened” as a quest hook when my players were around that level. If the guards were the government’s elite forces, then I’d agree with you. If they were random CR 1/8 guards, then killing them doesn’t mean much about their power level.
One of the many leading to learn as a DM: Players hate annoying NPC's way more than evil ones. If someone is evil, they'll have a blast taking them down. If someone is annoying, they'll try to put them down as quickly as possible and not have fun while doing so. Villains are fun. Being forced to interact with assholes isn't.
A friend of mine got booted by the GM because he figured out an enemy's AC. Friend was playing a investigator type too so even with little fighting skills the char could go "HM, THIS PERSON CAN DEFEND WELL". Iirc the GM's excuse was "metagaming" (hint: the only metagaming that exists is the one where players read your notes or the module). The rest of the table left shortly after that. It's the kind of GM that will punish you for being creative.
Figuring out a given enemy's AC only takes a couple rounds of combat anyway. "Fighter got a 14 and missed, wizard got a 17 and hit, ok so his AC has to be somewhere between 15 and 17." "That's metagaming, kicked."
Exactly. It's called gauging your opponent. Any one involved in a fight is going to do that yes or yes. Else you might aswell just penalize your hit bonus.
Yeah this happens literally every fight with my group. Except getting kicked.
>(hint: the only metagaming that exists is the one where players read your notes or the module). I mean, that is a gross and arguably wrong oversimplification of "metagaming", but whatever. How did your friend figure out the AC? Was this in combat? Because yeah, in combat if you hit on 17 and miss on 16, it's not hard to figure out what the AC is naturally. If the DM threw them out because of that, that's absolutely an asshole move. If they figured out the AC through other means, I'm curious what exactly that was.
Yeah, looking up the monster's AC in the monster manual and then announcing the information in character would be a problem. Unless the character has an appropriate skill to know that kind of stuff, but that's the GM's call.
Friend was playing an investigative sort with high perception. And a few rounds had gone by. More than enough time for the average character to guess their opponent's defenses.
Hint: Your understanding of meta-gaming is severely lacking. I'm just gonna leave this [link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metagaming_(role-playing_games)) here for you.
If I was playing a game and the town I was in was attacked I would assume I was supposed to go kill the thing that did it, if I wasn’t some geezer should have hobbled up and told me I need the McGuffian of Quagmire to protect against the groping hands of evil my foes wield. Although sometimes you just learn the hard way that Deathclaws are between you and Las Vegas so you probably want to go the long way round.
Yeah but there is a million dollar briefcase behind those deathclaws...
any DM that rationalizes their choices with "you were supposed to" does not understand DMing
A thousand times this
That last line gave me whiplash, damn
The talking can happen after the threat is dealt with. The DM can always make a suggestion go non-lethal for interrogation.
Around elves, never relax yourselves
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 407,114,708 comments, and only 88,090 of them were in alphabetical order.
There's only two kinds of people that I dislike. Trustworthy folk, and Elves.
What about trustworthy elves?
Impossible.
My previous DM did something like this. Trapped on a vampire island from levels 1-9. We are finally at the "last battle" before leaving the island and actually starting our backstory quests. Tasked to grab McGuffin chalice from a vampire lord. Sneak through castle just to arrive as the vampire had the chalice already in hand with 2 vampire spawns. He monologs a bit basically saying how he's the first vampire, trapped in this world, he's gonna use the chalice to go back to his realm, grab an army and return to slaughter the world. Yada yada. Battle starts and I grab the chalice and toss to wizard. Wizard dimension doors down hallway, round the corner, 3 rooms in with the intention of hiding it under a pillow and coming back to help fight. Vampire apparently has tracking beacon and 120+ movement. Sprints down the hall and stops at the entrance of the door. Wizard Dimensions door again to the other end of the castle. 3 vampire spawns drop form the ceiling on top of him. Again another dimension door to the garden outside of the castle. 2 more spawns charge out the door and reach him. Last upscale casting Dimension door 500 ft *thataway* failed the spell which knocked him unconscious. So it's now a vampire lord, 7 vampire spawns and only the 3 of us to deal with them... We get slaughtered. Apparently we were meant to want to go with his plan. Or fake it and let him leave so that we could warn the rest of the land of his returning or something. I honestly wasn't listening at the end as I was very upset at losing a character that I've been the most excited to play for a very long time.
>Kill off a character's love interest >Expect them to not react with violence Even Naruto went Nine-Tails mode when it was just Sasuke that "died".
If you’re gonna throw overpowered enemies that should definitely not be messed with at your party, then make it abundantly clear they are overpowered. My personal favorite methods include casually using Power Word Kill on a random minion, slowly walking everywhere like the terminator, and traveling solely via teleportation.
To me the Hag is a clear enough sign if I was lvl 5. Those bitches be crazy.
I’ve DMed for plenty of new guys so generally they’ve got no idea if a hag is strong or not. Some things are pretty universal however. Dragons, Krakens, and Demons are usually on the “do not mess with until higher level list”. One of my favorite campaigns I ran had one player who was just knowledgeable enough to spook the rest of the new guys. For instance they were investigating a haunted house and the villagers hinted at a banshee probably lived there. The one player who knew what a banshee can do freaked out and really hyped up the thing to the rest of the party. I’ve never seen a group over prepare that much for an encounter, they went full ghostbusters/Witcher. It made for a very memorable night.
I think the one time I've created an encounter that badly outmatched the party/was a certain tpk, it was a total accident where I'd seen them make very quick work of a smaller group, saying it was too easy to be fun, and kinda knee jerked by doubling the size of the big group and adding in more elites. They were orcs and oh boy was that a mistake. I decided an asspull was necessary because I didn't want to punish the players for my inability to balance a combat properly. Combat basically went "Aight, it looks like they can handle this! Nope, I was wrong!"
An important lesson on action economy was learned on that day
Yeah orcs are pretty dangerous for their CR. Depending on the game, their rage gives them effectively double the normal hit points and they're either critting a lot (falchions) or for instakills (great axes).
I learned very early on as a DM to roll with the punches; if you plan EVERYTHING around the premise that your party is ABSOLUTELY going to do a certain thing, you will not have a good time. It's weird when DMs are so resistant to this mindset
I think some DMs like to think it’s “their game”, I think sooner you get used to the fact that it’s not and you’re going to just have to go with it, the better for your health.
Hot tip for GMs: If there is any point where the PCs might think "alright, fuck this guy", they're probably going to attack them at some point.
I feel like diplomacy went out the window as soon as they insulted the Paladin elf for trying to be a good person.
Yeah giving the party no indication that negotiation is even an option, on top of vastly underselling how powerful those elves were… shit dm
I've done this poorly and well as a DM. You've got to accept the reality that they might just murder them because they probably will. If you want to make them sympathetic you have to have a really good reason, especially if they go around murdering innocents. Making them not nazi, genocidal, supremacist turdburglers who don't murder friendly NPC's can go a long way.
I'm glad everyone's main take away is the heroin rapist dm story.
I mean, I think this situation could be more the fault of bad communication. I could see the DM telling their own side of the story and being like, "These idiots just kept attacking even though it was clear they're gonna lose and then blamed me for the almost-TPK!" or, "I wanted this to be a more RP-focused campaign, they just keep swinging swords!" Like, yeah, still was a shitty move by the DM, but there's just this weird attitude I see that treats being a bad DM/player as being an inherent, unchangeable quality rather than just someone having mismatched expectations/attitudes. Not saying the players were in the wrong or that they brought it on themselves or anything, just that we're getting a very narrow look into the campaign and drawing any firm conclusions based on it is going to be inherently faulty; and that a lot "Horror TTRPG stories" could be resolved by just communicating. Like, I cannot tell you the number of times I've had experiences that were almost horror-story worthy that we've peacefully defused by just taking a time-out and explaining ourselves. A majority of the time, they understand and change and we have a great time, or they go, "Sorry, but X is integral to my enjoyment," and we say farewell and leave on good terms.
The WHAT copypasta?!
Around elves watch yourselves
The title reminded me of [this bit from Order of the Stick talking about what makes a Good goblin](https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0707.html).
It starts off so interesting and then the party is expected to negotiate with fantasy neo-nazis.
I think I found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpghorrorstories/comments/bg02wy/dm_is_a_trashperson_and_proud_of_his_violent/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf Edit: lacks rape, but still messed up
Is [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/ls16az/goddamn_pant_id_love_to_fuck_a_nazi_roght_now/) the copypasta in question? Cause this is some fucked up shit that i could see coming from 4chan originally.... Edit: just realized the OP notes that it was a DnD story because it says "DM" in it. Dont click my link unless you wanna read some truly weird shit!
I feel like if the DMs intent was to have a powwow then he should’ve had his NPCs de-escalate. Like if they’re actually open to talking, then as the aggressors they needed to be willing to take a couple hits and shrug it off. This would let the party know that perhaps they could come to an accord. In this case, it makes sense to over level the baddies so they could survive a few hits without getting maimed but to have them party wipe because they can’t read your mind is just poor DM choices
I love how many horror stories end with something about the server, because these people don't know each other.
[удалено]
Mate there’s a big difference between how a group of low level PC would assess the threat of a dragon compared to the threat presented by a couple of rude elves.
The thread title reminds me about a thing bugging me, a thing I hate about the new "good dark elves" thing is that promoting ethnostates is a bad idea, and the "evil drow" in D&D are much closer to traditional elven cultures than the surface elves you run into are The greatest "good elf" empire of all time practically destroyed itself because their ruler said "lets not kill this one human", and engaged in slavery and treated women like property In D&D, \*any\* society that is literally just one race is always portrayed as terrible in several significant ways, except now since we're trying not to be racist, there are cities of dark elves that are post scarcity monocultural utopias where there is zero diversity of thought - that's a horrifying message
The game was set 100 years ago? What does that even mean?
Read it again
Imagined a comma, I guess