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Brennan1214
2012-01-15, 09:32 AM
I'm DMing for the first time, and I thought I had it under control but now (4th session) it's getting harder, the problem is that two of the characters are insane, plus I only have two players so I had to A: Have them have multiple characters and B: Have an NPC travel with them to make a decent sized party. But now one of the players is being kind of annoying, both IC and OOC, the other one is the type of munchkin who isn't very good at it, and therefore tries to optimize everything while kind of failing, and I've gotten to a point where after this quest is over, I have no idea how to segue to the main plot. Details: The PCs are working for some wood elves and are going to invade a town named cornbox that is ruled by a fanatical corn god cult. The main plot is that a cabal of powerful evils (Mainly fiends, with some abberations and evil dragons.) are going to try to conquer the world and the main force that usually stops them (Celestials, elementals and good dragons.) is being occupied by the mortals working for the evil people. Please offer advice.

Hanuman
2012-01-15, 10:54 AM
I'm DMing for the first time, and I thought I had it under control but now (4th session) it's getting harder, the problem is that two of the characters are insane, plus I only have two players so I had to A: Have them have multiple characters and B: Have an NPC travel with them to make a decent sized party. But now one of the players is being kind of annoying, both IC and OOC, the other one is the type of munchkin who isn't very good at it, and therefore tries to optimize everything while kind of failing, and I've gotten to a point where after this quest is over, I have no idea how to segue to the main plot. Details: The PCs are working for some wood elves and are going to invade a town named cornbox that is ruled by a fanatical corn god cult. The main plot is that a cabal of powerful evils (Mainly fiends, with some abberations and evil dragons.) are going to try to conquer the world and the main force that usually stops them (Celestials, elementals and good dragons.) is being occupied by the mortals working for the evil people. Please offer advice.
A) As a new DM you should be playing it conservatively, don't grant players multiple characters next time, instead have one or two NPC companions, this can be accomplished with the Leadership feat if the characters are level 6 or higher for most balance. Remember that if an encounter is hard or easy you have XP modifiers listed in the DMG, otherwise simply use an ECL/CR calc to figure out what the players can handle (equal CR = roughly 4-5 encounters per heal. but with an unbalanced party the downside is less resources (means less durability in drawn out scenarios), and less utility (which means you cant throw any old dungeon or module at them, you'll need to consider how they would solve it even if they didn't understand what they 'could' do)

B) I don't usually find a problem with this, a munchkin is a backstabber, someone who tries to "win" the game by getting killed last -- as quickly as possible, then looting the player breaking the wealth per level chart pretty fast.
Power is easily balanced and solved, the more powerful the players are the quicker they level, but you don't have to keep the heat at a set rate for your players. Make it clear that the world will be challenging for the most part regardless of player power and then give em a few scares to tame them (when a player thinks their char cant get hurt, or are in direct control of two characters they tend to disassociate from the idea of losing their characters.
Utility on the other hand is a players potential to dismiss challenge the DM throws without needing to overpower it, such as solving a dungeon without wit, or beating a wolf by casting fly, this is something to take into account as a balancing factor. Generally T1 casters should be at risk for losing their psi focus or ASF or failing a concentration check every couple encounters minimum, where as beatsticks don't tend to have this utility and it doesn't matter that they do 200 damage in a round if they are aren't facing 5 orcs in a 15x15x10 room, mix encounters up, make them combat interesting rather than videogameish, make them have social, political, religious or any other implications that are relevant to the players and have that subtly interact with a macro scale so you can create an overarch, you could alternative go straight kickdowndoor combat and throw something similar to TUCKERS KOBOLDS

(insert)

Tucker's kobolds

This month's editorial is about Tucker's kobolds. We get letters on occasion asking for advice on creating high-level AD&D® game adventures, and Tucker's kobolds seem to fit the bill.

Many high-level characters have little to do because they're not challenged. They yawn at tarrasques and must be forcibly kept awake when a lich appears. The DMs involved don't know what to do, so they stop dealing with the problem and the characters go into Character Limbo. Getting to high level is hard, but doing anything once you get there is worse.

One of the key problems in adventure design lies in creating opponents who can challenge powerful characters. Singular monsters like tarrasques and liches are easy to gang up on; the party can concentrate its firepower on the target until the target falls down dead and wiggles its little feet in the air. Designing monsters more powerful than a tarrasque is self-defeating; if the group kills your super-monster, what will you do next—send in its mother? That didn't work on Beowulf, and it probably won't work here.

Worse yet, singular supermonsters rarely have to think. They just use their trusty, predictable claw/claw/bite. This shouldn't be the measure of a campaign. These games fall apart because there's no challenge to them, no mental stimulation—no danger.

In all the games that I've seen, the worst, most horrible, most awful beyond-comparison opponents ever seen were often weaker than the characters who fought them. They were simply well-armed and intelligent beings who were played by the DM to be utterly ruthless and clever. Tucker's kobolds were like that.

Tucker ran an incredibly dangerous dungeon in the days I was stationed at Ft. Bragg, N.C. This dungeon had corridors that changed all of your donkeys into huge flaming demons or dropped the whole party into acid baths, but the demons were wienies compared to the kobolds on Level One. These kobolds were just regular kobolds, with 1-4 hp and all that, but they were mean. When I say they were mean, I mean they were bad, Jim. They graduated magna *** laude from the Sauron Institute for the Criminally Vicious.

When I joined the gaming group, some of the PCs had already met Tucker's kobolds, and they were not eager to repeat the experience. The party leader went over the penciled map of the dungeon and tried to find ways to avoid the little critters, but it was not possible. The group resigned itself to making a run for it through Level One to get to the elevators, where we could go down to Level Ten and fight "okay" monsters like huge flaming demons.

It didn't work. The kobolds caught us about 60' into the dungeon and locked the door behind us and barred it. Then they set the corridor on fire, while we were still in it.

"NOOOOOO!!!" screamed the party leader. "It's THEM! Run!!!"

Thus encouraged, our party scrambled down a side passage, only to be ambushed by more kobolds firing with light crossbows through murder holes in the walls and ceilings. Kobolds with metal armor and shields flung Molotov cocktails at us from the other sides of huge piles of flaming debris, which other kobolds pushed ahead of their formation using long metal poles like broomsticks. There was no mistake about it. These kobolds were bad.

We turned to our group leader for advice.

"AAAAAAGH!!!" he cried, hands clasped over his face to shut out the tactical situation.

We abandoned most of our carried items and donkeys to speed our flight toward the elevators, but we were cut off by kobold snipers who could split-move and fire, ducking back behind stones and corners after launching steel-tipped bolts and arrows, javelins, hand axes, and more flaming oil bottles. We ran into an unexplored section of Level One, taking damage all the time. It was then we discovered that these kobolds had honeycombed the first level with small tunnels to speed their movements. Kobold commandos were everywhere. All of our hirelings died. Most of our henchmen followed. We were next.

I recall we had a 12th-level magic user with us, and we asked him to throw a spell or something. "Blast 'em!" we yelled as we ran. "Fireball 'em! Get those little @#+$%*&!!"

"What, in these narrow corridors? " he yelled back. "You want I should burn us all up instead of them?"

Our panicked flight suddenly took us to a dead-end corridor, where a giant air shaft dropped straight down into unspeakable darkness, far past Level Ten. Here we hastily pounded spikes into the floors and walls, flung ropes over the ledge, and climbed straight down into that unspeakable darkness, because anything we met down there was sure to be better than those kobolds.

We escaped, met some huge flaming demons on Level Ten, and even managed to kill one after about an hour of combat and the lives of half the group. We felt pretty good — but the group leader could not be cheered up.

"We still have to go out the way we came in," he said as he gloomily prepared to divide up the treasure.

Tucker's kobolds were the worst things we could imagine. They ate all our donkeys and took our treasure and did everything they could to make us miserable, but they had style and brains and tenacity and courage. We respected them and loved them, sort of, because they were never boring.

If kobolds could do this to a group of PCs from 6th to 12th level, picture what a few orcs and some low level NPCs could do to a 12th-16th level group, or a gang of mid-level NPCs and monsters to groups of up to 20th level. Then give it a try. Sometimes, it's the little things—used well—that count.

Roger E. Moore

My advice with the overarch is to flat out lie. Lie your ass off. Change the entire thing so it's COMPLETELY different than you said it was but don't let on, and make the plot, theme and everything else go so 90 degrees that it will make the players heads spin.
Turn up the heat and start baking them, make em run, make em hunt and survive in the wild, get em scared of whats happening on the large scale rather than just observing and thinking about mechanics.

In fact, hide the mechanics, every session decide to hide one more aspect from the players whatever you thinks best such as XP, numerical observed data to even HP. I've ran several good campaigns where players didn't know the damage they are dealing nor their own HP. You never see players so scared as when they can hear their health bar on super low but can't actually see (analogy).

Anyway, closing thoughts are that you are a new DM, most board games have an example setting (quick-game), you play through that and then you get to the real game. DMing a conservative game (players meet in a tavern, they go to kill the lich) is your chance to get a tutorial to DnD, and as unfortunate or complicated as your player choices or main plot is its more of a task for you to learn how to DM while not failing than trying to make the plot anything super special.

Grinner
2012-01-15, 06:14 PM
@Hanuman: You've managed to sum in a single post the information that took me a week to find through wizards.com articles and DM blogs. Props.

Hanuman
2012-01-15, 06:57 PM
@Hanuman: You've managed to sum in a single post the information that took me a week to find through wizards.com articles and DM blogs. Props.
Thank you kindly, there's also one link EVERY page on dm advice misses.

http://www.feartheboot.com/ftb/index.php/archives/category/podcasts/page/34

This series will take roughly 200-400 hours to listen through (2 work months at a full-time job) but the ease of digestion to so much dming advice will help click gears in place.

Brennan1214
2012-01-19, 05:13 PM
In response to the part about lying, I haven't actually told them what the plot is. Another part I forgot to mention is that due to party composition (Evoker Wizard, Healbot Favored Soul, Shaper Psion, Tanker Paladin, GC Rogue And Utility Warlock) There were some balance issues so I houseruled some stuff in. And before you all say the part about "New DM, take the houserules easy." I have a lot of conceptual experience with D&D. The problem is that I have a hard time keeping track of some of the stuff. Plus both the players are relatively new to 3.5, with their experience being in 2nd edition (Paladin, Rogue and Warlock) and 1st edition (Wizard and Favored Soul). Due to the second player's reluctance to make a 3rd character, I'm running the Psion as a DMPC. Also, I've been hearing a lot of stuff about "No metagaming" but the gist of the group is very pro-metagaming (I've started to identify NPC's by class/level rather than name.) More useful details: Very magic item-light campaign, Rule of cool/funny is in high effect. So any advice on that stuff would be very helpful. But thanks for the advice about the main plot, particularly the part about survival gameplay.

Lucianus
2012-01-19, 07:00 PM
I'm DMing for the first time, and I thought I had it under control but now (4th session) it's getting harder, the problem is that two of the characters are insane, plus I only have two players so I had to A: Have them have multiple characters and B: Have an NPC travel with them to make a decent sized party. But now one of the players is being kind of annoying, both IC and OOC, the other one is the type of munchkin who isn't very good at it, and therefore tries to optimize everything while kind of failing, and I've gotten to a point where after this quest is over, I have no idea how to segue to the main plot. Details: The PCs are working for some wood elves and are going to invade a town named cornbox that is ruled by a fanatical corn god cult. The main plot is that a cabal of powerful evils (Mainly fiends, with some abberations and evil dragons.) are going to try to conquer the world and the main force that usually stops them (Celestials, elementals and good dragons.) is being occupied by the mortals working for the evil people. Please offer advice.

For a good segue into the main plot, you could have the Corn God actually be a demon/devil/dragon/etc. in league with the whole "take over everything" crowd. The townspeople cultists could be either oblivious to this and just wanting a better harvest or willing participants who harass the Good Guys. After defeating the BBEG, players find a scroll or notebook it was keeping (or a citizen was keeping) with some clues (standard, yet boring) or a lowly minion tells them everything if they don't harm him or the wretch offers his services for the same reason. (Since he is now unemployed)

As for metagaming, have the PC's find a treasure containing (I think they are called) Wolf Amulets. They were in Dragon[I] a while back, ~500gp each I believe, each person wearing one can comunicate telepathically with each other if within 1 mile. Basically legalizes table talk and they are actually earrings so they don't take an item slot. Worse comes to worse, just ask the player, "Would your character know that?" If they say, "Yeah, totally! Because of... insert bull here", reply with, "I don't think he/she would, so if you try to make him/her do "[I]stupid thing" I have to let the NPC's you face do the same back. To keep the balance, of course." Usually gets the message across.

What took me the longest to learn as a DM is that I was setting the tone for the game. If I metagamed, the players did. If I called NPC's by Class instead of name, the players did. If I goofed around,. so did they. The rule of cool is fun for a bit, but soon the DM will be pulling his/her hair out. Gently (at first) suggest the actions a character of X alignment would actually take when the player tries to have his Palidin pee on a holy symbol for some OOC laughs. Or have him get zapped by a curse, in the case of my players palidin, syphilis.

As with everything, DMing is a learned skill. Just remember that you are the leader of the table. I suggest reading a book or two on leadership and/or group psycology. Happy gaming!

Hanuman
2012-01-20, 01:32 PM
I'd say drop in items with charges, charges balance out the players having stacking xmas tree effects, and magic items can be easily burned up in a tuckers kobolds scenario. Having the theme that infinite charge in items is relatively rare gives context to why in a land of wizards and gods that every sword doesn't explode into some random element whenever dangers near.

Throwing lots and lots of relatively useful, but expendable items will force players to manage their resources carefully, but always give them restrictions like have a plot that forces them to stay mobile, not spend a month just gathering resources, ect.

If the players KNOW they need extra resources, let them plan ahead, but if it's not needed then have something to divert attention (like have rumors start of a murder in town, or magical pollution, or something that will turn ominous if left unattended near a fixed location of the players.

Additionally, magical detection could be commonplace, having a magical item may be more trouble than its worth as casters are generally safe from low tier detection, but arcane sight and aura sight generally dont apply as low tier. If magical detection is common, have a way for players to either diminish or nullify magic item auras when not in use, such as a type1 bag of holding that produces no magical aura.

Best way to handle players is with personality, you don't answer to them but don't show a shred of indignance, players act like teenagers with disassociation issues and should be treated as such.

As for fun and silly, take a page from mother2 (earthbound), absolutely ridiculous things can happen, especially around cults, townspeople don't have to be rational, but they have to have personalities. I recommend looking at complete scoundrel sidebars, there's some good stuff in there. Groups and organizations are the best way to justify stupid or silly actions and make them realistic-- don't underestimate mob mentality!

Need_A_Life
2012-01-20, 02:48 PM
I'd be very hesitant of letting people control multiple characters. I'd much rather scale encounters down and tailor them to the PCs. Your experiences may, of course, vary, but I'd suggest letting them control only one PC at a time. Contrary to standard D&D wisdom, not all of the classical roles need to be filled, though one needs to be aware of what roles the group isn't covering.
New munchkin who doesn't get it? If you like it that way, then don't mention it. If you want him to get better, direct him to the many optimization handbooks for the various editions.
Connecting a side-plot with the main plot is easier than you might think and can, with experience, be done on the fly. Think of any one person/item/location that is relevant to the main plot and have them be part of the side-plot (kidnapping victim/sacrifical dagger/the seven dungeons of despair). You can let one adventure flow (back) into another nearly seamlessly and, if done right, your players won't realize 'til they're already part into it.
Obviously, there are more elegant methods, but this one works and is delightfully simple.
You get to set the tone and relationship with metagaming. Despite what logic dictates, you cannot simply tell people to act a certain way and expect them to follow you. Instead, if you want to cut down on metagaming, then avoid game terms when possible and always add a flavourful description. If you want the tone to be silly, feel free to crack a joke in the middle of flavour text.
There are pros and cons of a permissive metagame approach, namely that you get to guide the players more. You can drop subtle (or not so subtle) hints and indications of what to do any time they're stuck and saying stuff like: "Well, of course you're not going to be ambushed in the middle of the night... would I do that?" and getting a "yes" never gets old.
Don't sweat it. No one does perfectly the first time around, no matter what so don't burn yourself out by trying.
Ask your players what they'd like to change with the game/campaign/tone. They may surprise you and it wouldn't do to drop the thing they enjoyed most, because people here say it's "badwrongfun," now would it? :smallwink:

Solaris
2012-01-22, 11:07 AM
[LIST]
I'd be very hesitant of letting people control multiple characters. I'd much rather scale encounters down and tailor them to the PCs. Your experiences may, of course, vary, but I'd suggest letting them control only one PC at a time. Contrary to standard D&D wisdom, not all of the classical roles need to be filled, though one needs to be aware of what roles the group isn't covering.
I've run games where all twelve players had two characters apiece. It's doable. Fun, even. If the player wants to run two characters, come up with a good reason for him not to.

Hanuman
2012-01-22, 10:27 PM
Need a life's solution is brilliant, let them control one of the characters per session (their pick). That's a really nice twist and should work as a nice repair if you want to change their situation.

Some players try their best to try and datamine your world hard, so complex that you start to get caught in an inconsistancy every once in a while. When the players catch you doing that LIE MORE. This works so well it's unbelievable.

Didn't the mayor used to be named something different? CONSPIRACY

Didn't there used to be a pedestal in this room? DUNGEON PUZZLE

Hey, didn't I used to have--STOLEN, YOU DIDNT NOTICE.