Legendary Actions and More of Talakeal's Gaming Horror Stories

[King of Nowhere]

So then the other night we were meeting over dinner to discuss Brian's upcoming campaign, and at one point I apologized for not sticking the landing of my game. I said that I should have just waited, that the game is only late once but it is bad forever as they say, and by trying to run three adventures in one session everyone, including myself, was kind of tired and cranky and the ending felt rushed. And besides, I really should have done a better job of preparing tactics for the last few fights as you really need to think outside of the box to make a party vs wizard figtht memorable. At which point Bob and Sarah turned to one another and adopted the same surprised face and sarcastic voice and went into a bit of "When you say last fight what do you mean? I just can't tell! There were so many last fights! But I would have thought that was impossible so I am just so confused! When you say "last fight" was it the first last fight, or the second last fight, or the third last fight? No, I think it was the last last fight! But I thought the other one was last! But I am just so confused I just can't tell anymore!" And they went on like this.

So, either they are still holding a grudge over a perceived slight that occurred over a month ago and expressing it through mockery, or they have decided to start actually bullying me long-term over my inability to communicate clearly. Either way, its really not fun.

can it be good natured? perhaps a joke?
one common feature of long campaigns are self-referential jokes that are only understandable to the players. they often have to do with something that happened at the table. this "last fight" thing could be one of those jokes, not meant as an offence or complaint.
there's no way to tell from your recounting.

[zinycor]

IMO, if you said that the last boss, was the last boss... then it should have been the last boss... I also don't get why you decided to place a fight after that...

Anyway... IF you have problems communicating, then you either get players that are more forgiving and you allow people to retcon thir actions when confusion arises because of your comunication... Or... You stop GMing until you get better at communicating.

Seriously, most of GMing is about communicating things in such a clear and entertaining way.

Now, Your group seems terrible, and you should really uit it, not because they don't understand you, or complain about your GMing, but because they don't respect you!

[Talakeal]

IMO, if you said that the last boss, was the last boss... then it should have been the last boss... I also don't get why you decided to place a fight after that...

The campaign goal involved hunting down forty legendary monsters that we had been colloquially referring to as "boss monsters". I referred to the last of the forty as the "last boss" as in he was the last of the forty boss monsters. My players took that to mean that as a promise that they would never fight anything again, which I really think they should have said something about at the time, because it is weird that they thought that our fairly combat heavy campaign would have two entire sessions with no battles in them, especially when they knew they had an enemy army set to invade their home town in the coming weeks.


Also note that even in video games, where the term originated, there are often fights after you defeat the last boss. Usually they are lesser fights, for example minions who get in your way as you try and escape an exploding enemy base, but sometimes they are actually stronger than the primary boss, typically in the form of an optional boss, secret boss, or surprise boss.

[zinycor]

The campaign goal involved hunting down forty legendary monsters that we had been colloquially referring to as "boss monsters". I referred to the last of the forty as the "last boss" as in he was the last of the forty boss monsters. My players took that to mean that as a promise that they would never fight anything again, which I really think they should have said something about at the time, because it is weird that they thought that our fairly combat heavy campaign would have two entire sessions with no battles in them, especially when they knew they had an enemy army set to invade their home town in the coming weeks.


Also note that even in video games, where the term originated, there are often fights after you defeat the last boss. Usually they are lesser fights, for example minions who get in your way as you try and escape an exploding enemy base, but sometimes they are actually stronger than the primary boss, typically in the form of an optional boss, secret boss, or surprise boss.

But... there were not two entire sessions after that battle... or were there? Your last boss wasn't even the last boss they fought that session.

[Talakeal]

But... there were not two entire sessions after that battle... or were there? Your last boss wasn't even the last boss they fought that session.

It was the last enemy that they fought that session. There were two sessions after that.

[zinycor]

It was the last enemy that they fought that session. There were two sessions after that.

Now, I had planned to run them as three separate sessions, and hadn't fully prepped the last two. But, they finished the first dungeon in only a few hours, and then informed me that someone would be unavaiable every weekend for the next month, so I decided to just finish the game that night rather than leaving everyone on a month long cliff-hanger. In retrospect, this was a huge mistake.

I took this to mean that you didn't run 3 sessions but had a big final session.

[Talakeal]

I took this to mean that you didn't run 3 sessions but had a big final session.

See, communication is hard for me

To clarify:

I had three adventures. I had planned on running them on three separate days, but I ended up running them back to back on the same day.

The last of the boss monsters was killed at the end of the first adventure.
The second adventure, with the climactic invasion of the PCs home town, was the second adventure.
The third adventure was an epilogue / teaser for the next campaign that involved fighting three wizards.

I carelessly referred the last fight of each adventure in a way that made Bob and Sarah believe that it would be the final fight of the entire campaign.

[Lord of Shadows]

First, the good news: Brian has agreed to take over GMing for the time being, so expect to hear horror stories from the other side of the screen starting next year!

Thank the gods...

The Bad News: I feel like a junky. Its been a month, and I am already feeling tempted to GM again, and I keep getting inspiration for adventures.

Write these down, maybe even flesh them out a little bit. Don't let inspiration go to waste.

It was designed as a sandbox style campaign. The primary goal of the campaign was to explore the ruins / wilderness around the city of Meridia. There were forty legendary "boss" monsters in the region, each getting stronger the further away from civilization it was, and the players got XP for killing them (or allying with them / driving them from the region). This was the only source of XP. Half the monsters lived in "dungeons", which were the primary source of treasure.

There was also a secondary political goal. The character's home city was in the path of a conquering army that it could not hope to defeat alone, and so the players were to seek out allies in the wilderness to aid them in the coming invasion.

So, coming into the last session I had three adventures prepared: The final dungeon with the last of the "boss" monsters in it, the climactic session that dealt with the invasion of the PCs home city, and an epilogue that was meant to be more of a "stinger" for the next campaign (which at this point probably won't ever actually happen).

I was able to follow this easily enough... Once I had fought the last boss, I would be expecting a confrontation with the incoming horde. Pretty self-explanatory. The stuff about the next campaign would just be frosting on the cake, so to speak. But then, I pay attention to the Campaign my characters are tromping around in.

The campaign goal involved hunting down forty legendary monsters that we had been colloquially referring to as "boss monsters". I referred to the last of the forty as the "last boss" as in he was the last of the forty boss monsters. My players took that to mean that as a promise that they would never fight anything again, which I really think they should have said something about at the time, because it is weird that they thought that our fairly combat heavy campaign would have two entire sessions with no battles in them, especially when they knew they had an enemy army set to invade their home town in the coming weeks.

I don't think your players pay that much attention to the campaign. Did they have even one ally lined up to help them with the invasion? No, wait, I know the answer: NO! They seem determined to complain about everything and disrupt play - even to the point of refusing to contribute when they get their nose out of joint (Bob strikes again). I don't know where these people learned to play TTRPG's, but they were at the bottom of the class... Do you have a local gaming store that offers time slots for game sessions? Try that instead. Sheesh.

[NichG]

That's an interesting take, but I don't think you should be "embarrased" by failing to an unfair surprise, and if you are, that's really a table disfunction.

I can see the time issue, but again, it speaks to a certain assumption that you aren't having fun unless you are winning, which is, imo, a really toxic approach to take to an RPG. Besides, I am not sure if time is an accurate measurement. If I lose five times to an enemy and then finally overcome him on the sixth time, the overall experaince of finally triumphing is a lot more fun and memorable than spending the same time having six basic slaughter the orcs fights.

Ok, I fully agree, TPKs and not being able to play a beloved character anymore sucks a lot worse than losing in a video or board game, but that's not really the conversation we were having.

NichG said that close victories or falling back to regroup feel like losses to the players and should thus be treated as TPKs, and I was asking why the "feeling" of losing is such a bad thing. In fair competitions a 50% loss ratio is normal, and that a close game is often considered to be better than a one sided slaughter. So why is it that RPG players can't handle the "feeling of losing" once every few months without it tainting the entire campaign?

Again though, the real issue is about why RPG players feel so bad about losing, a purely psychological issue rather than a mechanical one. From an emotional perspective, I don't see why losing a fight in an RPG (assuming your character is ok) should feel so much worse than losing a game of Warhammer or StarCraft.

What people have said is: time lost to setbacks is a factor, whether the game is explicitly competitive is a factor, the feeling of winning versus the feeling of losing is a factor. You've said "ignoring those things you said were factors, why is there a difference?". Well, we told you why - its those factors you just chose to ignore. You say 'in fair competitions a 50% loss ratio is normal, why can't RPG players handle the feeling of losing?', ignoring when we said that we don't view tabletop RPGs as primarily competitive games, and therefore there are different standards at play. We said 'time matters' and you said 'I'm not sure that time matters'. We've said that winning feels better than losing, and your response was to say 'it shouldn't/you're wrong for feeling that way' rather than 'hm, okay, even though that causes problems with my style it just means I have to figure out how to work around that'.

Generally, when people express how they feel about something, you should take that as evidence rather than as a claim which can be disputed. If you don't feel this way, that's fine, but if your worldview is 'other people don't feel this way' and you hear people say 'this is how we feel', then that's cause to change your worldview, rather than cause to say 'other people must not feel this way because it doesn't make sense'. Psychological effects are much more important to table dynamics than mechanical effects, so saying that something is 'purely a psychological issue rather than a mechanical one' should make you think that it's more significant, not less.

In terms of the winning/losing thing: it helps if you don't structure your campaign to focus so much on direct confrontation. Life or death fights exclude nuance, and from what you've said your campaign is quite combat heavy. Instead, think about agency. Game feels good when your actions bring about forward motion that is at least partially aligned with your reasons for taking those actions. Game feels pointless when your actions result in no motion, such as spending 30 minutes or an hour on a fight that results in a return to the status quo. Game feels very bad when your actions actively bring about motion that is opposed to your reasons for taking the actions, such as in the case of a gotcha or Pyrrhic victory.

As long as players' actions always move them towards some of their goals, there's lots of room for nuance and complexity in the game in how those directions can be compatible with the agency of others, and in how the movement to the side hashes out - things that don't oppose the players' goals, but which are unexpected or which occur as byproducts of the players' actions. And at a high level, there's plenty of tension in the fact that the players' goals can also change in response to their interaction with the world. None of this requires 'losing' or 'near losses' to work. Most of it is difficult or impossible to explore in other media such as computer games, due to the inherent need for flexibility in order to deal with nuance.

That actually sounds a lot like the kind of game I enjoy, which makes it weird that we have this big disconnect.

I generally try and avoid running games like that as, for my players at least, consequences for their actions tend to actively ruin the game for them.

I had one player who would routinely engineer a situation with consequences (use commoners as bait for monsters, go into hostage situations guns blazing, attempt to seduce a monster, stage a rape to lure out a vigilante, order a massacre of enemy civilians, conscript an entire town into his army, etc.) and then when something bad happened to an NPC he would have his character commit suicide and then threaten to leave the gaming group as it was making him depressed.

If we had wildly different styles, there wouldn't be a disconnect because I wouldn't have as much of a context to understand the dysfunction and breakdown of the style. Basically, from my point of view, you're running a game which is close to the style I prefer in theory, but in practice you're doing it in the way that tends to turn players off of this style and make them dislike it in the future. There are potential pitfalls of the style which, having run similar things, I recognize and - in my own games - adjust for in order to reduce the problems.

That makes some of the things you've said particularly alarming. For this kind of style, knowing your players personally and individually and adapting content, theme, difficulty, etc very carefully to their tastes is very important. You're asking for a lot of control and a lot of trust from the players in this style of game, and the responsibility that goes along with that is that you'll use those tools to customize the game to each player to a degree that would be impossible for them to get just grabbing a book off the shelf and running a module. So when you say things like that you prepared individual encounters a year ahead of the campaign start, or give indications that you're basically ignoring preferences that your players express because you don't understand or share those preferences yourself, those are big warning signs for me.

That player who keeps getting depressed due to the consequences of their actions, well, it could be a couple of things. They might really and truly want something where there are no consequences - in which case, if I'm running for them, its my job to figure out how to give them that without making game incompatible with the other players; otherwise, I shouldn't run for them/they shouldn't play in my game. They might have a different sense of the game's theme - if they're expecting silly consequences and they get deadly serious ones (or vice versa), that mismatch will create problems; I need to either make sure we're on the same page on theme, or be able to move the theme towards that player's expectations when it involves them, or I shouldn't run for them/they shouldn't play in my game. There might be a particular type of consequence that they are willing to accept (quite common - some players will accept consequences to others but no permanent malus to their character; some players absolutely can't accept consequences to others but can accept arbitrary misfortune befalling themselves; etc) - if this is the case, I would need to make sure I'm aware of that and run accordingly with an understanding of where that player's boundaries are, or let the player know that I'm not going to be running a game that will match their requirements.

It's also why I keep coming back to the point that the players matter. And not all players are going to enjoy this style of game. I would not run this style of game for your players (well, I wouldn't run any game for your players, but if for some reason I had to...).

The problem is we lack a definition of gotcha, and those that we get involve lots of gray areas. It also involves words like "punishment" or "trickery" which are very loaded and have a big scale.

It seems like it is describing something malicious, like the DM describes an ordinary troll, but then when you hit it with fire it turns into a super troll that then crushes the PCs while the DM laughs at their stupidity.

But then, it could also describe an encounter with a humanoid that the PCs assume is a troll because it sounds kind of like one, and then waste a fireball spell burning its corpse because they assumed it would regenerate when it doesn't actually have that ability.

What I am actually doing is, when the players encounter a new monster type, I prefer to let them learn its abilities by doing rather than by telling (although I still do put in reasonable telegraphs and allow PCs to make lore checks), but I generally adjust the difficulty in accordance with the consequences of ignorance; for example dropping a HD off a bruiser that can shoot magic missiles or making sure that the monster which can't be killed except by a certain attack is in an environment where it is easy to escape from.

The big problem is that you don't recognize when what you're doing is a gotcha versus not, and your habits and preferences for restricting information have a tendency to make you slip into the 'gotcha' region. Since you also don't seem to recognize why this is bad or what harm it can cause, you're not very motivated to make changes to take this risk into account. The result being, your players often end up expressing that they felt things were unfair.

And yet my players, and the forum, still rate my game as extremely hard.

So, there you have it, 12 "losses" in 40 sessions each with about six combat encounters in them. There is my "extremely hard" campaign.

Yes, I consider that to definitely be on the high end of difficulty. I would expect and tolerate that from things like 'Dungeon Crawl Classics' modules for tournament-style play, which are short bursts of high stress activity with a pretty sharp terminator for the consequences of success or failure (in that context, if there even is a 'next module', its going to involve new pre-gens or new characters anyhow). I wouldn't like to play in such a game extending over a period of months or years.

For example, in a tournament event at a local game club we played 'Crypt of the Devil Lich' over three sessions, which has (purportedly, though I'm not sure we encountered all of them when we played) 21 encounters in it, and we made it to the second to last fight and then lost (some died, some ended up fleeing through the Well of Worlds in that room to a random plane). So that's about 5% per encounter, and just a bit higher at session level: one loss per three sessions rather than one per four. The developers of the module refer to it as a 'killer dungeon', a 'meat-grinder', etc (https://goodman-games.com/blog/2017/...he-devil-lich/). Edit: I might count 2 losses, since there was something on the first floor that left a lot of the party strength-drained and at least one character relying on potions and spellslots of Bull's Strength to not be at zero strength and paralyzed, which would make it 10% instead.

[zinycor]

See, communication is hard for me

To clarify:

I had three adventures. I had planned on running them on three separate days, but I ended up running them back to back on the same day.

The last of the boss monsters was killed at the end of the first adventure.
The second adventure, with the climactic invasion of the PCs home town, was the second adventure.
The third adventure was an epilogue / teaser for the next campaign that involved fighting three wizards.

I carelessly referred the last fight of each adventure in a way that made Bob and Sarah believe that it would be the final fight of the entire campaign.

I believe you had too specific a plan to how it all should have ended.

Was killing those wizards so important that it couldn't be ignored? or left as a cliffhanger for future campaigns?

[Talakeal]

I believe you had too specific a plan to how it all should have ended.

Was killing those wizards so important that it couldn't be ignored? or left as a cliffhanger for future campaigns?

The players didn't give any indication that they didn't want to participate in the later adventures until two rounds before the end of the fight with the third wizard.

[Frozenstep]

That's an interesting take, but I don't think you should be "embarrased" by failing to an unfair surprise, and if you are, that's really a table disfunction.

The point was that the extra time to stew on how the last session went magnifies any feelings about it. I don't remember how I felt dying for the 17th time on some dark souls boss because 10 seconds later I was already trying again. If I had a week to think about each try I'd probably be able to remember each and every time the hitbox didn't fit the animation or something like that.

I can see the time issue, but again, it speaks to a certain assumption that you aren't having fun unless you are winning, which is, imo, a really toxic approach to take to an RPG. Besides, I am not sure if time is an accurate measurement. If I lose five times to an enemy and then finally overcome him on the sixth time, the overall experaince of finally triumphing is a lot more fun and memorable than spending the same time having six basic slaughter the orcs fights.

Meanwhile, if each time I had to wait a week to fight that enemy again, by the 5th loss I'd probably feel things were getting tedious (meanwhile, 21st attempt on dark souls boss, here we go again). There's way more to making a fight memorable and triumphant then how many losses you endured to that point.

Look, people's expectations coming into a TTRPG can vary, but I theorize that many come to (role)play as competent warriors/wizards/whatevers, unless it's a joke character or something. That doesn't mean they always win, some people like worlds and campaigns that are dangerous places where even competent people die. However, nuances in how a situation is set up and presented can mean the difference between feeling like an experienced whatever fighting against something unknown, and just feeling like a bunch of headless chickens scrambling for a solution to an encounter (not pleasant, not fun). Getting that right is completely subjective stuff, and can be difficult.

With your learning encounters, perhaps your players end up spending a lot of time feeling like headless chickens, trying stuff and realizing it doesn't work, and then repeatedly throwing stuff at the wall until something sticks. Rather then say, adventurers who don't recognize a monster, but based on facts about it that they can learn by observing it and the environment its in, can proceed to make somewhat informed decisions. This isn't in the DM's full control, players will be players, but how you set up and present situations matters a lot.

But again, this isn't a technique I use often; typically only about a year or so when the players encounter an enemy that requires some unconventional strategy for the first time.

Also, these learning fights aren't necessarily about losing and getting beaten up; they are about allowing players to safely experiment until they find something that works and then learning how to employ those lessons efficiently in a standard combat. For example, the "ghost-hydra" fight wouldn't travel more than a hundred meters or so from the artifact it was guarding, and had a pretty low damage output (two sessions later the players would fight five monsters with identical stat-lines except for the splitting and would wipe the floor with them), and the players were able to safely learn its abilities, fall back, and come up with a plan for defeating it; if they had made some different decisions they could have simply defeated it outright on the first encounter (for example, manacling it or trapping it behind a wall spell when it was stunned).

Sorry if I missed you explaining this already but what was your players attitude during all this? Were they enjoying experimenting with a new enemy? Or annoyed when they couldn't outright defeat it, and then further annoyed when they had to go to an npc/library/whatever it was to figure out what was up with the ghost-hydra?

Its a measure of scale.

Yes, I want to encourage the players to keep on their toes and not become complacent.

The goal is for the players to be able to handle any situation.

For example, say 90% of dragons breath fire in this campaign world.

The players should go into an encounter prepared for fire, but shouldn't completely lose their minds and panic the 10% of the time when it does something else.

Just imagine a real life non-gaming scenario; sometimes something unexpected happens and you need to do something different to handle it; that doesn't mean you should throw out your standard operating procedure for the vast majority of times when everything goes according to plan.

"The goal is for the players to be able to handle any situation." Let's talk about that line for a second. On its own, the statement can just be taken in many ways, but most of them innocent (have a variety of roles in the party so you can solve a diverse range of problems, etc), but in this case what it means is "If situation X is presented, but then it turns out to be situation Y instead, the party should still be ready to handle it."

Wasn't a big deal like 5 pages back how your players spent a lot on generic healing potions instead of preventative potions like fire resistant potions? But if potions meant to solve situation X, and they're useless for situation Y, then wasn't buying potions that work in situations A-Z (generic health potions) the right call?

But anyway, two DM's can run the situation you described and get completely different result. For one, the players could feel like the DM just changed the damage type to undo their preparation and trick the players into weakening themselves. For the other, it's an unexpected twist that does make sense and fits in with the story. Being able to sell the situation makes a huge difference, and if you can't do that then it doesn't matter that you had a perfectly logical explanation for the switch, it still feels like it was just done to trick the players. "selling the situation" is kind of difficult to explain (it's an alchemy, not a science. A mix of psychology, storytelling, communication, and last second improvising), but basically there's a lot of context between the players figuring out they want to fight a dragon, and finding out the dragon doesn't breathe fire. You don't need to give the players all the answers in that context, but if all the context points to one thing and then it ends up being another, then the reveal may come off as unjustified, like the situation was set up to hide stuff about the dragon so it could properly trick the players.

Meanwhile, a third DM might think they will struggle to sell the situation as more than a trick, but still wants to keep players on their toes. So he has the fire-breathing dragon, but gives him an unexpected ally which greatly changes the dynamic of the fight. Alternative methods are always available.

[Kardwill]

Now, I wasn't sure if they were upset because they thought I was lying / trying to trick them because when I referred to one monster as the "last boss" they legitimately took that as a promise that there would be no combat in the next two adventures or if they were just making fun of my lack of clarity for not clearly specifying the difference between The last of the forty boss monsters, the climactic battle of the campaign, and the last fight that occurred chronologically, but either way I found it extremely rude and disruptive, but I just waved it off and said "Ok guys, I get you, I could have been clearer, let's just move on and finish this game."

Apart from the passive aggressive bull**** The problem is that you crammed 2 climatic fights, and then another "fight that has to count because it's the last one". People expect to have a resolution after the climax, and not another climax. So when you say "last boss", everybody who ever played a videogame or saw an action-packed cartoon will hear "last fight before the epilogue". By putting several climax back to back, you simply spoiled their effect and created tiredness and frustration in your players. It feels rushed, as in "Tal wants to get rid of this campaign". And the fact that you wanted the minor "wizard fight" to be important just after you played the resolutions of the 2 major arcs of your campaign just added to this. Having that last fight just after a double-climax is uninteresting and cheapens the experience.

Some writers can pull off a "and then, when you come home after the big epic war, you discover it's been taken over by bandits", but let's be honest, neither of us is Tolkien ^^

NichG said that close victories or falling back to regroup feel like losses to the players and should thus be treated as TPKs, and I was asking why the "feeling" of losing is such a bad thing.

Failing is cool when it generates story where the Players get to feel cool, but it feels bad and frustrating when it's just a block where the players will lose their time trying again.

If your defeat means the Wyvern took off with the mule that was carrying the Macguffin, then you'll get to climb up the mountain to get it back, and maybe discover that the monster's lair is a shortcut through the montain.
If your defeat means you're driven back and have to fight the same monster again later to advance in the story, then it feels like you've just wasted an hour.

In one case, failure generated a twist in the story. In the other, it was simply a block, a meaningless waste of time. The second one has its use, but it WILL generate frustration, and ultimately detachement from the players.

Note that the way the players will "feel" the failure is hugely dependant of their perception, and of the level of trust between them and you.
When some of my friends GM, losing and getting captured or grievously wounded feels exciting, because it means we'll get to finally meet the big bad, gather information, and then play an escape scene, or have an interesting choice, or see our PCs relations evolve, or at least an epic ending. With another GM, it feels humiliating because it simply means I'm just closer to lose my character and having to start from scratch, as "punishment" for my bad tactics/stupid ideas/roleplay/bad roll. I'll be confident with the first one, but probably kinda whiny with the second one.

[Kardwill]

By the way : "Bob", Brian", and now "Sarah"? Not nice comparing your players with the KodT gang

[zinycor]

The players didn't give any indication that they didn't want to participate in the later adventures until two rounds before the end of the fight with the third wizard.

Again, how was the fight against these wizards so important to happen even after the last boss?

[GrayDeath]

Just for the sake of comparison: The longst running campaign I ever played inw as a World spanning preprented (but as is usus with older ,stuff, havily adapted/embellished by the DM) Campaign consisteng of 12 Subcampaigns each with 2-4 Adventures. Our group needed around 6.5 years to get to the end.

Excluding myself most of the players played with average amounts of MEtagaming, or lower (I intentionally avoided any in that campaign, as my Charater was made to be rather ...strange regarding world view).

In the Community that campaign has been said to be "hard and deadly, but not too much if you avoid the old school do X and die stuff".

During an approximated (was too long ago to be sure) 120 sessions, we had 4 Player Character Deaths (+1 the Adventure "demanded" to get to the Udnerworld Plot part), and not one TPK.

Yeah, we played rather carefully, about a third was more SOcial Stuff/Exploration and not combat foccussed, yes we lost a lot of NPC`s in the beginning (and hence had fewer later on)and 3 times we simply highballed it.

"Close calls" or "very challenging Stuff (TM)" happened around every 6th session or so.

But that is what I would rate as a good mix of "almost all of it is challenging, but unless you simply pick up everything funny looking you wont simply die, no save, sit down" Campaign.

[Talakeal]

By the way : "Bob", Brian", and now "Sarah"? Not nice comparing your players with the KodT gang

We have been using KoDT code names for decades.

It actually fits pretty well; I am the beleaguered GM saddled with problem players but loves the game too much to quit and often ruins his good ideas with poor execution, "Bob" is a short, balding munchkin with glasses, "Brian" is a big quiet guy who sits at the end of the table and occasionally rules lawyers or flips a table in anger, "Sarah" is the only girl in the group (although we have had several Sarahs over the years). Unfortunately we lost our Dave, the casual hack and slash gamer who was a jock in his real life, several years ago and the name doesn't really fit the replacement player, although he is currently the most drama-free member of the group and doesn't get mentioned in stories much.

Again, how was the fight against these wizards so important to happen even after the last boss?

It was supposed to be the segue into the next campaign, like the Samuel L Jackson dropping hints about the Avengers at the end of Iron Man.

Apart from the passive aggressive bull**** The problem is that you crammed 2 climatic fights, and then another "fight that has to count because it's the last one". People expect to have a resolution after the climax, and not another climax. So when you say "last boss", everybody who ever played a videogame or saw an action-packed cartoon will hear "last fight before the epilogue". By putting several climax back to back, you simply spoiled their effect and created tiredness and frustration in your players. It feels rushed, as in "Tal wants to get rid of this campaign". And the fact that you wanted the minor "wizard fight" to be important just after you played the resolutions of the 2 major arcs of your campaign just added to this. Having that last fight just after a double-climax is uninteresting and cheapens the experience.

Its just weird that they would hear make that assumption knowing I still had two whole adventures to go, and then chalk it up to malice rather than me simply not choosing my words carefully (or deciding that it was such a screw up that it was worth mocking me about over a month later).

It wasn't my choice to run all three adventures back to back, my players asked me to do so and then informed me that we would have to cancel the next two game sessions, and I made a poor decision in the moment. In retrospect I should have just waited, but as I said above, sometimes I feel like a junky and just can't say no to more gaming.

I wouldn't consider the wizard fight "minor" in any way, the balance of the entire cosmos literally rested on the outcome of that fight. But it was detached from the previous game, it was supposed to be ending the campaign on a stinger with the players realizing they have left their local concerns behind and stepped out into a whole new world.

The point was that the extra time to stew on how the last session went magnifies any feelings about it. I don't remember how I felt dying for the 17th time on some dark souls boss because 10 seconds later I was already trying again. If I had a week to think about each try I'd probably be able to remember each and every time the hitbox didn't fit the animation or something like that.

Meanwhile, if each time I had to wait a week to fight that enemy again, by the 5th loss I'd probably feel things were getting tedious (meanwhile, 21st attempt on dark souls boss, here we go again). There's way more to making a fight memorable and triumphant then how many losses you endured to that point.

I think you are grossly overestimating the frequency and the severity of these encounters.

I don't recall ever having a fight where they players didn't get to attempt it again that same session, usually they are back in action within minutes. Likewise, the "learning" period of an encounter typically only lasts a couple of minutes and only occurs every few sessions at most, depending on how you define it.

Look, people's expectations coming into a TTRPG can vary, but I theorize that many come to (role)play as competent warriors/wizards/whatevers, unless it's a joke character or something. That doesn't mean they always win, some people like worlds and campaigns that are dangerous places where even competent people die. However, nuances in how a situation is set up and presented can mean the difference between feeling like an experienced whatever fighting against something unknown, and just feeling like a bunch of headless chickens scrambling for a solution to an encounter (not pleasant, not fun). Getting that right is completely subjective stuff, and can be difficult.

With your learning encounters, perhaps your players end up spending a lot of time feeling like headless chickens, trying stuff and realizing it doesn't work, and then repeatedly throwing stuff at the wall until something sticks. Rather then say, adventurers who don't recognize a monster, but based on facts about it that they can learn by observing it and the environment its in, can proceed to make somewhat informed decisions. This isn't in the DM's full control, players will be players, but how you set up and present situations matters a lot.

Agreed.

Sorry if I missed you explaining this already but what was your players attitude during all this? Were they enjoying experimenting with a new enemy? Or annoyed when they couldn't outright defeat it, and then further annoyed when they had to go to an npc/library/whatever it was to figure out what was up with the ghost-hydra?

I don't know. As I said up-thread, I have a visual processing disorder and can't read most nonverbal communication, and my players are extremely quiet, rarely talking to each other OOC during the game, let alone me.

"The goal is for the players to be able to handle any situation." Let's talk about that line for a second. On its own, the statement can just be taken in many ways, but most of them innocent (have a variety of roles in the party so you can solve a diverse range of problems, etc), but in this case what it means is "If situation X is presented, but then it turns out to be situation Y instead, the party should still be ready to handle it."

Wasn't a big deal like 5 pages back how your players spent a lot on generic healing potions instead of preventative potions like fire resistant potions? But if potions meant to solve situation X, and they're useless for situation Y, then wasn't buying potions that work in situations A-Z (generic health potions) the right call?

Basically, my players judge their "score" by how far above WBL their characters are (being at or below WBL is a failure in their book). They were complaining that my encounters were too hard because they were spending too much money on healing potions and getting dangerously close to recommended WBL levels.

They also spent fights frustrated because they couldn't all engage with enemies that flew, or climbed, or hid, or swam, or were incorporeal.

I told them that they might be better off in the long run if instead of just buying healing potions they bought a variety of potions and then used them as needed.

I was not recommending they buy consumables to tailor themselves for specific encounters; mostly because their party lacks anyone who specializes in information gathering through various means and they went into most encounters more or less blind as a result. Now, whether or not it is worth it to say, stock up on alchemists fire before fighting a troll and then just writing it off as a loss on the >10% chance it is a war-troll, well, that is another conversation that I am not sure if I have a solid opinion on.

Write these down, maybe even flesh them out a little bit. Don't let inspiration go to waste.

I am, but the more I do the more I am tempted to pick up the GM screen again...

There is an adventurer's league at my local game store, and I am tempted to stop by sometimes, but my work schedule doesn't really allow for it.

I was able to follow this easily enough... Once I had fought the last boss, I would be expecting a confrontation with the incoming horde. Pretty self-explanatory. The stuff about the next campaign would just be frosting on the cake, so to speak. But then, I pay attention to the Campaign my characters are tromping around in.

That is also how I felt about it.

I don't think your players pay that much attention to the campaign. Did they have even one ally lined up to help them with the invasion? No, wait, I know the answer: NO! They seem determined to complain about everything and disrupt play - even to the point of refusing to contribute when they get their nose out of joint (Bob strikes again). I don't know where these people learned to play TTRPG's, but they were at the bottom of the class... Do you have a local gaming store that offers time slots for game sessions? Try that instead. Sheesh.

They were actually pretty good about finding allies (although a couple of times an NPC had to forcefully remind them that this was their job), they were pretty bad about keeping their allies alive however and few were alive by the time the final battle came around for various reasons which have probably already been discuss

What people have said is: time lost to setbacks is a factor, whether the game is explicitly competitive is a factor, the feeling of winning versus the feeling of losing is a factor. You've said "ignoring those things you said were factors, why is there a difference?". Well, we told you why - its those factors you just chose to ignore. You say 'in fair competitions a 50% loss ratio is normal, why can't RPG players handle the feeling of losing?', ignoring when we said that we don't view tabletop RPGs as primarily competitive games, and therefore there are different standards at play. We said 'time matters' and you said 'I'm not sure that time matters'. We've said that winning feels better than losing, and your response was to say 'it shouldn't/you're wrong for feeling that way' rather than 'hm, okay, even though that causes problems with my style it just means I have to figure out how to work around that'.

Generally, when people express how they feel about something, you should take that as evidence rather than as a claim which can be disputed. If you don't feel this way, that's fine, but if your worldview is 'other people don't feel this way' and you hear people say 'this is how we feel', then that's cause to change your worldview, rather than cause to say 'other people must not feel this way because it doesn't make sense'. Psychological effects are much more important to table dynamics than mechanical effects, so saying that something is 'purely a psychological issue rather than a mechanical one' should make you think that it's more significant, not less.

In terms of the winning/losing thing: it helps if you don't structure your campaign to focus so much on direct confrontation. Life or death fights exclude nuance, and from what you've said your campaign is quite combat heavy. Instead, think about agency. Game feels good when your actions bring about forward motion that is at least partially aligned with your reasons for taking those actions. Game feels pointless when your actions result in no motion, such as spending 30 minutes or an hour on a fight that results in a return to the status quo. Game feels very bad when your actions actively bring about motion that is opposed to your reasons for taking the actions, such as in the case of a gotcha or Pyrrhic victory.

As long as players' actions always move them towards some of their goals, there's lots of room for nuance and complexity in the game in how those directions can be compatible with the agency of others, and in how the movement to the side hashes out - things that don't oppose the players' goals, but which are unexpected or which occur as byproducts of the players' actions. And at a high level, there's plenty of tension in the fact that the players' goals can also change in response to their interaction with the world. None of this requires 'losing' or 'near losses' to work. Most of it is difficult or impossible to explore in other media such as computer games, due to the inherent need for flexibility in order to deal with nuance.



If we had wildly different styles, there wouldn't be a disconnect because I wouldn't have as much of a context to understand the dysfunction and breakdown of the style. Basically, from my point of view, you're running a game which is close to the style I prefer in theory, but in practice you're doing it in the way that tends to turn players off of this style and make them dislike it in the future. There are potential pitfalls of the style which, having run similar things, I recognize and - in my own games - adjust for in order to reduce the problems.

That makes some of the things you've said particularly alarming. For this kind of style, knowing your players personally and individually and adapting content, theme, difficulty, etc very carefully to their tastes is very important. You're asking for a lot of control and a lot of trust from the players in this style of game, and the responsibility that goes along with that is that you'll use those tools to customize the game to each player to a degree that would be impossible for them to get just grabbing a book off the shelf and running a module. So when you say things like that you prepared individual encounters a year ahead of the campaign start, or give indications that you're basically ignoring preferences that your players express because you don't understand or share those preferences yourself, those are big warning signs for me.

That player who keeps getting depressed due to the consequences of their actions, well, it could be a couple of things. They might really and truly want something where there are no consequences - in which case, if I'm running for them, its my job to figure out how to give them that without making game incompatible with the other players; otherwise, I shouldn't run for them/they shouldn't play in my game. They might have a different sense of the game's theme - if they're expecting silly consequences and they get deadly serious ones (or vice versa), that mismatch will create problems; I need to either make sure we're on the same page on theme, or be able to move the theme towards that player's expectations when it involves them, or I shouldn't run for them/they shouldn't play in my game. There might be a particular type of consequence that they are willing to accept (quite common - some players will accept consequences to others but no permanent malus to their character; some players absolutely can't accept consequences to others but can accept arbitrary misfortune befalling themselves; etc) - if this is the case, I would need to make sure I'm aware of that and run accordingly with an understanding of where that player's boundaries are, or let the player know that I'm not going to be running a game that will match their requirements.

It's also why I keep coming back to the point that the players matter. And not all players are going to enjoy this style of game. I would not run this style of game for your players (well, I wouldn't run any game for your players, but if for some reason I had to...).



The big problem is that you don't recognize when what you're doing is a gotcha versus not, and your habits and preferences for restricting information have a tendency to make you slip into the 'gotcha' region. Since you also don't seem to recognize why this is bad or what harm it can cause, you're not very motivated to make changes to take this risk into account. The result being, your players often end up expressing that they felt things were unfair.



Yes, I consider that to definitely be on the high end of difficulty. I would expect and tolerate that from things like 'Dungeon Crawl Classics' modules for tournament-style play, which are short bursts of high stress activity with a pretty sharp terminator for the consequences of success or failure (in that context, if there even is a 'next module', its going to involve new pre-gens or new characters anyhow). I wouldn't like to play in such a game extending over a period of months or years.

For example, in a tournament event at a local game club we played 'Crypt of the Devil Lich' over three sessions, which has (purportedly, though I'm not sure we encountered all of them when we played) 21 encounters in it, and we made it to the second to last fight and then lost (some died, some ended up fleeing through the Well of Worlds in that room to a random plane). So that's about 5% per encounter, and just a bit higher at session level: one loss per three sessions rather than one per four. The developers of the module refer to it as a 'killer dungeon', a 'meat-grinder', etc (https://goodman-games.com/blog/2017/...he-devil-lich/). Edit: I might count 2 losses, since there was something on the first floor that left a lot of the party strength-drained and at least one character relying on potions and spellslots of Bull's Strength to not be at zero strength and paralyzed, which would make it 10% instead.

There is a lot in here and I will give you a more in depth response later, but just to clarify one point:

Are we in agreement that challenge and risk are important for games, just merely dickering over the appropriate level?

Because those are too very different conversations, and one of them makes me feel like an old man ranting about kids these days and their participation trophies.

Also, keep in mind that most of my disconnect with you is the idea that a narrow win feels like a loss. In my mind a narrow victory after a close game is the best outcome, regardless of what type of game or what role I am playing, so this opinion is really hard for me to wrap my head around, to the point where I have asked several people their opinions on the matter. My Dad (an elderly non-gamer who nonetheless enjoys sports and gambling) agrees with me and claims that anyone who says otherwise is just a sore loser who is looking to complain, and "Brian" actually laughed out loud and told me to ignore you as you were an obvious troll (I don't agree btw). So I am really having trouble seeing where you are coming from.

I will respond to your specific points in depth tomorrow, but its late now and I need to be up early.

[zinycor]

It was supposed to be the segue into the next campaign, like the Samuel L Jackson dropping hints about the Avengers at the end of Iron Man.

2 things:
1- What? How does a fight work a segue?
2- What? I thought that after all the talk you wuldn't continue to play with these people...

[NichG]

There is a lot in here and I will give you a more in depth response later, but just to clarify one point:

Are we in agreement that challenge and risk are important for games, just merely dickering over the appropriate level?

Because those are too very different conversations, and one of them makes me feel like an old man ranting about kids these days and their participation trophies.

Also, keep in mind that most of my disconnect with you is the idea that a narrow win feels like a loss. In my mind a narrow victory after a close game is the best outcome, regardless of what type of game or what role I am playing, so this opinion is really hard for me to wrap my head around, to the point where I have asked several people their opinions on the matter. My Dad (an elderly non-gamer who nonetheless enjoys sports and gambling) agrees with me and claims that anyone who says otherwise is just a sore loser who is looking to complain, and "Brian" actually laughed out loud and told me to ignore you as you were an obvious troll (I don't agree btw). So I am really having trouble seeing where you are coming from.

I will respond to your specific points in depth tomorrow, but its late now and I need to be up early.

I don't think we're actually in agreement about challenge and risk. I don't think they're at all intrinsically important. Rather, they're tools which are to be used to achieve a specific effect or end in shaping player experience and engagement. Those tools can be very effective, but only when used correctly with respect to the players you're dealing with. If I have a player who suffers lots of decision paralysis or self-doubt, I will run a game with negative risk - that is, a game in which any behavior or action you take is guaranteed to benefit you compared to taking no action. That's because using risk with that player would achieve the opposite of what I want - rather than getting the player to engage in the game, it would get them to disconnect from the game.

I think, at least with the right set of players, its entirely possible to run an engaging and interesting campaign that completely lacks game-like forms of challenge and risk.

The issue I see with your point of view is that you take things as given rather than do things because they achieve a desired end. You talk about 'a narrow victory after a close game is the best outcome' and support it with calls to authority such as 'my dad says' and 'Brian says' and 'this is what competitive board games are like', rather than thinking about what it's actually supposed to do and whether it's really doing that in the case of your game.

A narrow victory after a close game can be effective, but it can also be ineffective. I would ask 'What is this narrow victory teaching? How is it experienced by the players, given what I know about their personalities?'. If the victory was narrow because of group dysfunction but the perception is that it shouldn't have been narrow (either because of the degree of investment in preparation beforehand, etc), then its going to feel like a screwup rather than a triumph. 'This should have been easy, but Bob messed it up and it was hard even though we eventually won' will make people angry at Bob, not excited at their success. If it looked impossible beforehand but proved possible, then it will feel good.

What does it teach? If the victory was narrow only because the GM made it narrow and that's obvious from the standpoint of the players, it teaches that no matter what the players do it won't matter. I actually had a situation where I wanted to teach this, because two players were in an arms race with each-other to produce characters with the highest AC, and it was making the group kind of pissed off. So I had to point out that basically, once things can only hit you on a 20 it doesn't matter if you have an 80 AC or a 120 AC. But generally, I don't want players to feel like their choices are meaningless, I want the opposite. So if I'm going to make use of a close victory, the general template I want to follow is encounters that target some preconception of what things are difficult that the players have in mind, but then turn out to be easier than players are primed to think they will be, so that those preconceptions move from 'things the player is uncertain about' to 'things the player is confident about'. But even with that sort of template, its important to take care - make the upfront appearance too hard and the players will balk or suffer a morale defeat before even entering the conflict, and may sabotage themselves or spiral into competency decreases.

Alternately, I can completely throw out that 'narrow victory' pattern, and still often achieve my ends. Run an encounter that is trivially easy, but which gives lots of freedom as to how it will be brought to its conclusion, and make the decision of how the players would like it to go ask interesting questions about their motivations and desires. Limit Break was an entire campaign centered around that premise - the characters could, at start, rewrite the laws of physics of the campaign world more or less unopposed. If they wanted to sterilize the Earth in session 1, it would have been feasible for them to do so. But while they wanted to pursue their goals, they also didn't want to take responsibility for e.g. some change to the laws of physics meaning that a couple hundred patients in hospitals across the world died when their heart monitors behaved a little differently, some animal going extinct because of their tweaks to chemistry pushing it out of its niche or whatever. So the tension wasn't 'can we win?', it was 'we want to win as much on our own terms as possible'.

[Talakeal]

I don't think we're actually in agreement about challenge and risk. I don't think they're at all intrinsically important. Rather, they're tools which are to be used to achieve a specific effect or end in shaping player experience and engagement. Those tools can be very effective, but only when used correctly with respect to the players you're dealing with. If I have a player who suffers lots of decision paralysis or self-doubt, I will run a game with negative risk - that is, a game in which any behavior or action you take is guaranteed to benefit you compared to taking no action. That's because using risk with that player would achieve the opposite of what I want - rather than getting the player to engage in the game, it would get them to disconnect from the game.

I think, at least with the right set of players, its entirely possible to run an engaging and interesting campaign that completely lacks game-like forms of challenge and risk.

The issue I see with your point of view is that you take things as given rather than do things because they achieve a desired end. You talk about 'a narrow victory after a close game is the best outcome' and support it with calls to authority such as 'my dad says' and 'Brian says' and 'this is what competitive board games are like', rather than thinking about what it's actually supposed to do and whether it's really doing that in the case of your game.

A narrow victory after a close game can be effective, but it can also be ineffective. I would ask 'What is this narrow victory teaching? How is it experienced by the players, given what I know about their personalities?'. If the victory was narrow because of group dysfunction but the perception is that it shouldn't have been narrow (either because of the degree of investment in preparation beforehand, etc), then its going to feel like a screwup rather than a triumph. 'This should have been easy, but Bob messed it up and it was hard even though we eventually won' will make people angry at Bob, not excited at their success. If it looked impossible beforehand but proved possible, then it will feel good.

What does it teach? If the victory was narrow only because the GM made it narrow and that's obvious from the standpoint of the players, it teaches that no matter what the players do it won't matter. I actually had a situation where I wanted to teach this, because two players were in an arms race with each-other to produce characters with the highest AC, and it was making the group kind of pissed off. So I had to point out that basically, once things can only hit you on a 20 it doesn't matter if you have an 80 AC or a 120 AC. But generally, I don't want players to feel like their choices are meaningless, I want the opposite. So if I'm going to make use of a close victory, the general template I want to follow is encounters that target some preconception of what things are difficult that the players have in mind, but then turn out to be easier than players are primed to think they will be, so that those preconceptions move from 'things the player is uncertain about' to 'things the player is confident about'. But even with that sort of template, its important to take care - make the upfront appearance too hard and the players will balk or suffer a morale defeat before even entering the conflict, and may sabotage themselves or spiral into competency decreases.

Here's the thing; some people are sore losers. If they lose, they will make every attempt to shift the blame, and if they win they do everything in their power to take all the credit. Bob is certainly in this camp, he isn't happy unless he is both dominating the enemy and outperforming the rest of the team. He isn't the only player I have ever had like that, my brother has a similar personality, albeit to a much lesser extent, and he isn't even the worst person of that type I have ever played with, but he is the only guy like that in my group.

Based on Bob's bitching and a few out of context quotes of mine, you have decided that my game is too hard and that my players don't enjoy close battles, and that I should ignore what my other players past and present are telling me, my own personal feelings on the matter, all the advice I have gotten from my friends and family, all of the guidelines in every DMG, all of the advice I have gotten from gaming guides and blogs, all the advice I have gotten from texts on game design, my knowledge of human psychology, my knowledge of sports and board games, and even conventional folksy wisdom like "without evil there can be no good" or that episode of the Twilight Zone where a gambler goes to Hell and finds it takes the form of a casino where he always wins. Heck, I was literally listening to a gaming Podcast on the drive home from work where they were interviewing several guests and unanimously agreed that without the risk of player death all accomplishments in D&D are meaningless. Even in this very thread there have been people who are arguing against super easy games, like the one guy who, rather crassly, said that at that point the DM should just put the dice down and give the players hand-jobs.

So again, do you really think its reasonable for me to completely ignore everything I am being told for the sake of stroking Bob's ego and appeasing a few strangers on the internet?


Also, you seem to be giving me conflicting messages in this post. You are talking about the DM "making"* the battle close is a bad thing, but then you are going on to say that the DM should "fix the fight" so that it looks closer than it actually is, which is really confusing me.

*: Also, how does the DM "make" a battle close? Do you simply by following the rules in the DMG and creating a balanced encounter? Or does it involve the DM fudging? Or what?

[Lord of Shadows]

It was supposed to be the segue into the next campaign, like the Samuel L Jackson dropping hints about the Avengers at the end of Iron Man.

1- What? How does a fight work a segue?

Easily. The so-called "final" or "end of campaign" fight results in the discovery of some previously unknown/hidden agenda or piece of information that ties into the start of a new campaign. It is not uncommon at long term gaming tables for threads to connect subsequent campaigns together. Sometimes the connection is bluntly obvious, sometimes it's more subtle. It's often up to the players and DM if they want to pursue it or not, or switch to something else. Like those movies where the end is left open for a sequel... sometimes there is one, sometimes not.

[zinycor]

Here's the thing; some people are sore losers. If they lose, they will make every attempt to shift the blame, and if they win they do everything in their power to take all the credit. Bob is certainly in this camp, he isn't happy unless he is both dominating the enemy and outperforming the rest of the team. He isn't the only player I have ever had like that, my brother has a similar personality, albeit to a much lesser extent, and he isn't even the worst person of that type I have ever played with, but he is the only guy like that in my group.

Based on Bob's bitching and a few out of context quotes of mine, you have decided that my game is too hard and that my players don't enjoy close battles, and that I should ignore what my other players past and present are telling me, my own personal feelings on the matter, all the advice I have gotten from my friends and family, all of the guidelines in every DMG, all of the advice I have gotten from gaming guides and blogs, all the advice I have gotten from texts on game design, my knowledge of human psychology, my knowledge of sports and board games, and even conventional folksy wisdom like "without evil there can be no good" or that episode of the Twilight Zone where a gambler goes to Hell and finds it takes the form of a casino where he always wins. Heck, I was literally listening to a gaming Podcast on the drive home from work where they were interviewing several guests and unanimously agreed that without the risk of player death all accomplishments in D&D are meaningless. Even in this very thread there have been people who are arguing against super easy games, like the one guy who, rather crassly, said that at that point the DM should just put the dice down and give the players hand-jobs.

So again, do you really think its reasonable for me to completely ignore everything I am being told for the sake of stroking Bob's ego and appeasing a few strangers on the internet?


Also, you seem to be giving me conflicting messages in this post. You are talking about the DM "making"* the battle close is a bad thing, but then you are going on to say that the DM should "fix the fight" so that it looks closer than it actually is, which is really confusing me.

*: Also, how does the DM "make" a battle close? Do you simply by following the rules in the DMG and creating a balanced encounter? Or does it involve the DM fudging? Or what?

Is kicking Bob out of the group not an option? or something you haven't seen people write? because am pretty sure I did write about it several times.

So no, the solution is not to ignore ever advice you ever gotten but actually take the good advice you have received.

[Kane0]

Also, how does the DM "make" a battle close? Do you simply by following the rules in the DMG and creating a balanced encounter? Or does it involve the DM fudging? Or what?

There's more than one way to do it. Depending on the edition of D&D you can follow the encounter guidelines (usually on the harder end), you can pack additional content to the encounter such as secondary 'encounters' and hazards, alter the tactics used in the encounter to counter the PCs, implement unusual or entirely new mechanics to throw a wrench in the works, manipulate the game math (including fudging), and tons more.

[NichG]

Here's the thing; some people are sore losers. If they lose, they will make every attempt to shift the blame, and if they win they do everything in their power to take all the credit. Bob is certainly in this camp, he isn't happy unless he is both dominating the enemy and outperforming the rest of the team. He isn't the only player I have ever had like that, my brother has a similar personality, albeit to a much lesser extent, and he isn't even the worst person of that type I have ever played with, but he is the only guy like that in my group.

Based on Bob's bitching and a few out of context quotes of mine, you have decided that my game is too hard and that my players don't enjoy close battles, and that I should ignore what my other players past and present are telling me, my own personal feelings on the matter, all the advice I have gotten from my friends and family, all of the guidelines in every DMG, all of the advice I have gotten from gaming guides and blogs, all the advice I have gotten from texts on game design, my knowledge of human psychology, my knowledge of sports and board games, and even conventional folksy wisdom like "without evil there can be no good" or that episode of the Twilight Zone where a gambler goes to Hell and finds it takes the form of a casino where he always wins. Heck, I was literally listening to a gaming Podcast on the drive home from work where they were interviewing several guests and unanimously agreed that without the risk of player death all accomplishments in D&D are meaningless. Even in this very thread there have been people who are arguing against super easy games, like the one guy who, rather crassly, said that at that point the DM should just put the dice down and give the players hand-jobs.

So again, do you really think its reasonable for me to completely ignore everything I am being told for the sake of stroking Bob's ego and appeasing a few strangers on the internet?

Quite a ways back, I'm pretty sure I outlined three scenarios, and this advice pertains to one of those scenarios specifically. The three scenarios were:

1. Don't game with Bob
2. Game with Bob but intentionally make the decision that you don't care if Bob enjoys game
3. Game with Bob and try to make a game that he will be happy with

All of this assumes that we're talking about case #3. Case #2 is, well, I think its bad behavior for a DM but it's logically coherent at least (and if a player is forcing themselves into your game, then saying 'okay, but if you don't like it that's on you' isn't any more unreasonable than the player's behavior in that case). Case #1 is and has been my foremost recommendation.

What I'm arguing against is saying 'Because I heard all of this advice from elsewhere, Bob must be wrong if he's saying that he feels my game is too difficult.' Because the game can be too easy for your tastes and too difficult for Bob's tastes. There has also been quite a few examples where you say 'see, my game is easy!' but then present anecdotes and evidence that don't look like what you'd see in an easy game. That suggests further that maybe, while Bob has problems, you also have problems in gauging how the material you present is actually perceived by players in your group, Bob included. If that's the case, it will be a problem even if you game with other players, and it's a very common problem that DMs have that difficulty looks different from their standpoint of omniscience about the game's contents than it does from a player's standpoint.

Given your attitude about things like the three clue rule and how that sounds like it would trivialize the difficulty of the game, that further supports my impression that your judgment about difficulty is likely strongly influenced by your own point of view in which you already know the answers, and that you aren't doing a good job of putting yourself in your players' shoes and thinking about how the game you run might be experienced by them.

That kind of mismatch can easily lead to the sorts of conflicts you've described as having with Bob and Brian, and now Sarah.

So moving past 'I got this advice from a reputable blog, so it must be good' into 'I understand what I am doing, how it is perceived, and how that advances my goals - and choose how to run my game accordingly' is an important step for not having those difficulties in the future with a new group. Otherwise, when there are these mismatches in expectations, you're going to periodically have players throw fits, blame you, behave strangely, flub the game, lose trust, insult you, etc and continue to not understand why or what could be done about it.

Also, you seem to be giving me conflicting messages in this post. You are talking about the DM "making"* the battle close is a bad thing, but then you are going on to say that the DM should "fix the fight" so that it looks closer than it actually is, which is really confusing me.

*: Also, how does the DM "make" a battle close? Do you simply by following the rules in the DMG and creating a balanced encounter? Or does it involve the DM fudging? Or what?

I'm not saying 'the DM should fix the fight' as some kind of rule. But, if I have the goal of my players becoming confident and comfortable with their characters' abilities (which is generally among my goals), then close fights where it looked easy but turned out difficult are counterproductive to my goal, whereas close fights where it looked hard but turned out easy advance my goal.

And if it comes to designing the encounter, the psychology of the opposition, etc, there are absolutely things I can do which make the former likely to happen, and things I can do which make the latter likely to happen. Enemies which have abilities that are devastating if responded to incorrectly but easily countered with careful thought and who telegraph their abilities well ahead of time support the structure of 'looks hard, actually easy'. On the other hand, enemies that seem simple but have a hidden trick (like a war troll that looks like a troll until you find that you wasted your action on a fireball) go the other direction - 'looks easy, actually hard'.

The point is to note that my goal is not achieved by the players having a hard time with the encounter, its only achieved by the players being able to successfully make the encounter easier for themselves. An encounter which is too easy might not satisfy that goal if it doesn't motivate the players to actually do that (though this need not be the case if the players find their characters' abilities sufficiently cool to be inspired to find new ways of using them independent of the strength of the opposition). But its not that it fails because it was too easy, its that it fails because it didn't provide motivation; I can keep the 'easy' part if I can provide the 'motivation' part in another way. A pattern I learned from another DM is to use what they called a 'popcorn fight' shortly after any major change in a character's abilities or scope; the purpose of this fight isn't to challenge anyone or even to pretend to that, it's to give the players the ability to calibrate the effects of their new mechanics and better understand how their stuff works. Because the motivation exists ('I have a new ability and I want to try it out'), you don't need any sort of challenge.

If my goals were different, then maybe there would be a context in which what I should do is to design encounters that are crushingly difficult and make players weep with despair. Tournament games are an example where that might be appropriate - since they're intended to be a competition, finding the peak manageable difficulty makes the test of relative player ability most accurate at the high end of the scale. That doesn't mean that I'm saying 'DMs should use crushingly difficult encounters' or 'DMs shouldn't use crushingly difficult encounters' - they're neither inherently good nor inherently bad, they're tools. But whether or not you should use them depends on your goals, your players, and the context of the rest of the campaign.

[Kane0]

A pattern I learned from another DM is to use what they called a 'popcorn fight' shortly after any major change in a character's abilities or scope; the purpose of this fight isn't to challenge anyone or even to pretend to that, it's to give the players the ability to calibrate the effects of their new mechanics and better understand how their stuff works. Because the motivation exists ('I have a new ability and I want to try it out'), you don't need any sort of challenge.

Ah, the test run encounter. The only thing I’ve found random encounters to be truly useful for.

[patchyman]

Talakeal, the members of your group were acting fairly insensitively to you, but I would not conclude that they were holding a grudge or acting intentionally maliciously without further investigation.

My recommendation would be to approach Brian and Sarah one on one and ask them something like “Just thinking about the last session in my campaign. Was that last boss mistake really that bad?” Based on their feedback you will hopefully learn whether the “last boss” thing really bothered them or they were simply making a joke that fell flat.

[Talakeal]

@NichG: Sorry if my last reply was a little heated. I just really hate the "appeal to authority" thing as it often makes it impossible to provide any evidence for a position, and a position without evidence is really easy to dismiss.

Is kicking Bob out of the group not an option? or something you haven't seen people write? because am pretty sure I did write about it several times.

I am pretty sure I have answered this several times.

It isn't an option right now.

First off, he is a friend and a quality play-tester, and he (usually) adds more to the game than he detracts from it, so I don't really want to kick him out. But, more importantly, he is the one who got this group together and lives at the place where we play, so kicking him out would almost certainly require dissolving the entire group and starting fresh.

So no, the solution is not to ignore ever advice you ever gotten but actually take the good advice you have received.

The problem is that everyone thinks that their advice is the best advice.

What people have said is: time lost to setbacks is a factor, whether the game is explicitly competitive is a factor, the feeling of winning versus the feeling of losing is a factor. You've said "ignoring those things you said were factors, why is there a difference?". Well, we told you why - its those factors you just chose to ignore. You say 'in fair competitions a 50% loss ratio is normal, why can't RPG players handle the feeling of losing?', ignoring when we said that we don't view tabletop RPGs as primarily competitive games, and therefore there are different standards at play. We said 'time matters' and you said 'I'm not sure that time matters'. We've said that winning feels better than losing, and your response was to say 'it shouldn't/you're wrong for feeling that way' rather than 'hm, okay, even though that causes problems with my style it just means I have to figure out how to work around that'.

What does "time lost due to setbacks" actually mean though? We generally run one adventure a session, if it takes a lot little longer or a little shorter based on how quickly the players kill a monster, you are still doing one adventure per session.

Furthermore, there is never negative progression. The players always end the session with more XP and treasure than they started with, no matter how bad it goes. Likewise, they have never ended a session where they didn't move the narrative forward and accomplish some storyline goals. Likewise, the players learn more about both the lore and the mechanics of the game, so they are improving along with their characters.

The only way I can see this being accurate is if you exclusively look at narrative losses and ignore both mechanical and narrative gains.

Likewise, ideally the game should be fun, and time spent playing isn't "time lost" even if you aren't working towards a goal. In the best game I ever played in, we would often spend entire sessions without advancing the plot at all, I remember one session spent doing nothing but planning a party and coordinating our outfits, and it was a blast.

Which again, really comes to the root of my issue: Why can't people have fun playing a game that they aren't "winning," and why is this so much more of an issue in an RPG?

Shouldn't the lack of competition make the loss easier to handle?

Also, I never said that winning doesn't feel better than losing. What I said was that an earned win / close game feels better than a one sided victory.

That makes some of the things you've said particularly alarming. For this kind of style, knowing your players personally and individually and adapting content, theme, difficulty, etc very carefully to their tastes is very important. You're asking for a lot of control and a lot of trust from the players in this style of game, and the responsibility that goes along with that is that you'll use those tools to customize the game to each player to a degree that would be impossible for them to get just grabbing a book off the shelf and running a module. So when you say things like that you prepared individual encounters a year ahead of the campaign start, or give indications that you're basically ignoring preferences that your players express because you don't understand or share those preferences yourself, those are big warning signs for me.

It's also why I keep coming back to the point that the players matter. And not all players are going to enjoy this style of game. I would not run this style of game for your players (well, I wouldn't run any game for your players, but if for some reason I had to...).

My current campaign is very much not the style of campaign I prefer. I like high immersion campaigns which are primarily social and exploration focused, although I certainly don't mind tactical combat. My players have always been much more "crunch" minded than I have been, which means my campaigns have always tended towards high combat dungeon crawls. Heck, I remember a few years ago someone on the forum telling me to "get over myself and run a dungeon crawl," because I was running an outdoor skirmish game and the some of the players were upset with the other players for deciding to kill the other sides women and children after defeating their warriors.

My current game was a (failed) experiment in running an old school sandbox / west marches style campaign, because I have been reading a lot of blogs that go on and on about the virtues of that sort of gaming. I tried it, found that my players didn't like the randomness, and found that I didn't like the possibility of failing the campaign as a whole or wasting everyone (including the DM's) time that would be required to make that sort of game work.

Again, I get that you are telling me to do what works for my players not what is "normal", but I still get the impression that you are looking down on me for doing, what I can tell, is a very normal style of gaming; grabbing an adventure path / module or creating a "megadungeon / sandbox" and then running it for whatever players happen to show up with whatever characters they happen to bring to the table.

Now, as far as customizing the game for the individual players, this is thorny territory.

My players always tell me they want "fair" and "balanced" encounters and don't want me tailoring the campaign to them.

I am sure I have told the "cycle of stupidity" story before. Basically, when I first started gaming with my former group (of which Brian and Bob were members) I would adjust the scenario difficulty to the table. If they wanted to play high op T1 casters, I would give them equally optimized enemies and cosmic adventures, if they played "by the book" character I would throw standard enemies out of the monster manual. As a result, the players would always try and up their min-max game, which would result in harder encounters, which would result in more min-maxxing. The players dubbed it the cycle of stupidity and told me that they felt frustrated because they were just spinning their wheels.

Now, the players (primarily Bob and Dave) said they wanted an objective standard to be compared to. So, as a compromise, I banned or fixed truly broken game mechanics immediately with house rules, and then ran them against scenarios that were created around the objective difficulty laid out in whatever system we were playing, and made encounters that were designed to be overcome by a generic party rather than tailoring encounters to challenge specific abilities.

Now, in hindsight, I have come to believe that what Bob and Dave actually meant was (and I am sorry if I sound condescending with this phrasing) they want to be able to play one dimensional characters and engage in one sided power fantasies.

Again, the problem is that I am bad at reading between the lines. Players always tell me my fights are "unbalanced" or "unwinnable" when they lose, so I try very hard to stick to objective standards or challenge, but what they players may really mean is that the game is too hard.

Likewise, I am now getting contradictory messages from Bob. For example, he got mad at me during the "sneeze-ogre" encounter for tailoring an enemy to beat him, but he also got mad at me during the "ghost-hydra" encounter for not tailoring that fight to their party which didn't have a lot of CC at the time. (Or the temperament. During that conversation I told him it was a perfectly beatable encounter, his monk from the last campaign would have tied the guy up in knots no problem, to which he responded "no she wouldn't, because it would never occur to her to subdue an enemy without lethal force).

So, yeah, I am starting to realize that all of this talk about "balance" and "tailoring encounters" and "railroading" is just Bob not liking to lose and looking for someone or something to blame it on. I actually hard a similar conversation about him with Brian yesterday, he prefers wizards, and when he plays a generalist he complains about how he isn't powerful enough, and when he plays a specialist he complains that he isn't versatile enough, and Brian told me to ignore it as feedback, Bob just likes to complain.

The big problem is that you don't recognize when what you're doing is a gotcha versus not, and your habits and preferences for restricting information have a tendency to make you slip into the 'gotcha' region. Since you also don't seem to recognize why this is bad or what harm it can cause, you're not very motivated to make changes to take this risk into account. The result being, your players often end up expressing that they felt things were unfair.

Have I mentioned how frustrating this gotcha thing is?

I still don't have a working definition of it, and I am not sure if it is even something that I am doing in my games, yet it seems everyone is convinced that it is the source of my problems. Now this whole thing has gone meta, and now you are saying that it is my very inability to understand the concept of a gotcha that is my big problem.

Quite a ways back, I'm pretty sure I outlined three scenarios, and this advice pertains to one of those scenarios specifically. The three scenarios were:

1. Don't game with Bob
2. Game with Bob but intentionally make the decision that you don't care if Bob enjoys game
3. Game with Bob and try to make a game that he will be happy with

All of this assumes that we're talking about case #3. Case #2 is, well, I think its bad behavior for a DM but it's logically coherent at least (and if a player is forcing themselves into your game, then saying 'okay, but if you don't like it that's on you' isn't any more unreasonable than the player's behavior in that case). Case #1 is and has been my foremost recommendation.

What I'm arguing against is saying 'Because I heard all of this advice from elsewhere, Bob must be wrong if he's saying that he feels my game is too difficult.' Because the game can be too easy for your tastes and too difficult for Bob's tastes. There has also been quite a few examples where you say 'see, my game is easy!' but then present anecdotes and evidence that don't look like what you'd see in an easy game. That suggests further that maybe, while Bob has problems, you also have problems in gauging how the material you present is actually perceived by players in your group, Bob included. If that's the case, it will be a problem even if you game with other players, and it's a very common problem that DMs have that difficulty looks different from their standpoint of omniscience about the game's contents than it does from a player's standpoint.

Given your attitude about things like the three clue rule and how that sounds like it would trivialize the difficulty of the game, that further supports my impression that your judgment about difficulty is likely strongly influenced by your own point of view in which you already know the answers, and that you aren't doing a good job of putting yourself in your players' shoes and thinking about how the game you run might be experienced by them.

That kind of mismatch can easily lead to the sorts of conflicts you've described as having with Bob and Brian, and now Sarah.

So moving past 'I got this advice from a reputable blog, so it must be good' into 'I understand what I am doing, how it is perceived, and how that advances my goals - and choose how to run my game accordingly' is an important step for not having those difficulties in the future with a new group. Otherwise, when there are these mismatches in expectations, you're going to periodically have players throw fits, blame you, behave strangely, flub the game, lose trust, insult you, etc and continue to not understand why or what could be done about it.



I'm not saying 'the DM should fix the fight' as some kind of rule. But, if I have the goal of my players becoming confident and comfortable with their characters' abilities (which is generally among my goals), then close fights where it looked easy but turned out difficult are counterproductive to my goal, whereas close fights where it looked hard but turned out easy advance my goal.

And if it comes to designing the encounter, the psychology of the opposition, etc, there are absolutely things I can do which make the former likely to happen, and things I can do which make the latter likely to happen. Enemies which have abilities that are devastating if responded to incorrectly but easily countered with careful thought and who telegraph their abilities well ahead of time support the structure of 'looks hard, actually easy'. On the other hand, enemies that seem simple but have a hidden trick (like a war troll that looks like a troll until you find that you wasted your action on a fireball) go the other direction - 'looks easy, actually hard'.

The point is to note that my goal is not achieved by the players having a hard time with the encounter, its only achieved by the players being able to successfully make the encounter easier for themselves. An encounter which is too easy might not satisfy that goal if it doesn't motivate the players to actually do that (though this need not be the case if the players find their characters' abilities sufficiently cool to be inspired to find new ways of using them independent of the strength of the opposition). But its not that it fails because it was too easy, its that it fails because it didn't provide motivation; I can keep the 'easy' part if I can provide the 'motivation' part in another way. A pattern I learned from another DM is to use what they called a 'popcorn fight' shortly after any major change in a character's abilities or scope; the purpose of this fight isn't to challenge anyone or even to pretend to that, it's to give the players the ability to calibrate the effects of their new mechanics and better understand how their stuff works. Because the motivation exists ('I have a new ability and I want to try it out'), you don't need any sort of challenge.

If my goals were different, then maybe there would be a context in which what I should do is to design encounters that are crushingly difficult and make players weep with despair. Tournament games are an example where that might be appropriate - since they're intended to be a competition, finding the peak manageable difficulty makes the test of relative player ability most accurate at the high end of the scale. That doesn't mean that I'm saying 'DMs should use crushingly difficult encounters' or 'DMs shouldn't use crushingly difficult encounters' - they're neither inherently good nor inherently bad, they're tools. But whether or not you should use them depends on your goals, your players, and the context of the rest of the campaign.

Yes, I consider that to definitely be on the high end of difficulty. I would expect and tolerate that from things like 'Dungeon Crawl Classics' modules for tournament-style play, which are short bursts of high stress activity with a pretty sharp terminator for the consequences of success or failure (in that context, if there even is a 'next module', its going to involve new pre-gens or new characters anyhow). I wouldn't like to play in such a game extending over a period of months or years.

For example, in a tournament event at a local game club we played 'Crypt of the Devil Lich' over three sessions, which has (purportedly, though I'm not sure we encountered all of them when we played) 21 encounters in it, and we made it to the second to last fight and then lost (some died, some ended up fleeing through the Well of Worlds in that room to a random plane). So that's about 5% per encounter, and just a bit higher at session level: one loss per three sessions rather than one per four. The developers of the module refer to it as a 'killer dungeon', a 'meat-grinder', etc (https://goodman-games.com/blog/2017/...he-devil-lich/). Edit: I might count 2 losses, since there was something on the first floor that left a lot of the party strength-drained and at least one character relying on potions and spellslots of Bull's Strength to not be at zero strength and paralyzed, which would make it 10% instead.

This might actually be worth starting another thread over; but nothing I have seen indicates that my campaign is unusually hard. It doesn't seem any more difficult than other campaigns I have played in or read about or modules I have read / run, and it actually seems significantly less deadly than the encounter guidelines given in the DMGs.

I have never played in an actual "old school" meatgrinder campaign, but I have read lots of APs and in those it seems like character death and parties being forced to retreat to avoid a TPK are common occurrences, tending to happen at least once per session.

Note that in your example, you have 21 encounters, with 1 near loss and 1 TPK. That is significantly more deadly than anything I have ever run. Note that my campaign ran for almost two years, (about 250 encounters) only includes two actual "losses," one caused by sheer stupid randomness and the other by the players being choosing to die based on stubbornness and poor communication; the rest of the losses (still only about every 20 sessions) are just very temporary setbacks or narrow victories.

Quite a ways back, I'm pretty sure I outlined three scenarios, and this advice pertains to one of those scenarios specifically. The three scenarios were:

1. Don't game with Bob
2. Game with Bob but intentionally make the decision that you don't care if Bob enjoys game
3. Game with Bob and try to make a game that he will be happy with

All of this assumes that we're talking about case #3. Case #2 is, well, I think its bad behavior for a DM but it's logically coherent at least (and if a player is forcing themselves into your game, then saying 'okay, but if you don't like it that's on you' isn't any more unreasonable than the player's behavior in that case). Case #1 is and has been my foremost recommendation.

What I'm arguing against is saying 'Because I heard all of this advice from elsewhere, Bob must be wrong if he's saying that he feels my game is too difficult.' Because the game can be too easy for your tastes and too difficult for Bob's tastes. There has also been quite a few examples where you say 'see, my game is easy!' but then present anecdotes and evidence that don't look like what you'd see in an easy game. That suggests further that maybe, while Bob has problems, you also have problems in gauging how the material you present is actually perceived by players in your group, Bob included. If that's the case, it will be a problem even if you game with other players, and it's a very common problem that DMs have that difficulty looks different from their standpoint of omniscience about the game's contents than it does from a player's standpoint.

So basically, I have been trying to do #3 for years, but I am starting to feel more and more like Bob isn't actually giving honest feedback and drifting into #2.

Here is the thing, I take everything everybody says very seriously, even people who are almost certainly just trolling / lashing out in anger.

As I said above, I try very hard to make Bob happy, but the more I think about it, the more I think he is actually just trying to find excuses to mask his failings and to make differences in preference sound like failings on other people's part.

Bob tells me that he wants a balanced game and I do my best to provide it, yet we still end up with him calling me a killer DM and me thinking he is just a sore loser who won't admit he wants to play a 1-sided power fantasy.

And again, I have trouble reading between the lines; some fights I get in trouble for tailoring the enemy to the PCs, some fights I get in trouble for not doing it. It makes it really hard for me to actually parse feedback.

I fully agree that I have trouble reading my players or imagining things from their point of view.

Given your attitude about things like the three clue rule and how that sounds like it would trivialize the difficulty of the game, that further supports my impression that your judgment about difficulty is likely strongly influenced by your own point of view in which you already know the answers, and that you aren't doing a good job of putting yourself in your players' shoes and thinking about how the game you run might be experienced by them.

I have said this before, but just to be clear: I do not think that knowledge trivializes difficulty and I do not use ignorance to provide a challenge.

I do:

1: Feel that giving clues so obvious that they cannot be missed would hurt the narrative.
2: Enjoy using more subtle clues as they enhance verisimilitude and reward observant players.
3: Reduce the difficulty of encounters where a lack of information will make them harder.
4: Want to reward players (or avoid punishing players for) investing in knowledge or information gathering abilities.

And again, the three clue rule was never meant to apply to every piece of knowledge in the game, or really about information gathering at all. It is about making sure that there are not "bottle necks" in the plot, where there is only one way to proceed. Also, in my experience players (myself included) tend to be very dense, and three clues is nowhere near enough to solve most puzzles.

I'm not saying 'the DM should fix the fight' as some kind of rule. But, if I have the goal of my players becoming confident and comfortable with their characters' abilities (which is generally among my goals), then close fights where it looked easy but turned out difficult are counterproductive to my goal, whereas close fights where it looked hard but turned out easy advance my goal.

And if it comes to designing the encounter, the psychology of the opposition, etc, there are absolutely things I can do which make the former likely to happen, and things I can do which make the latter likely to happen. Enemies which have abilities that are devastating if responded to incorrectly but easily countered with careful thought and who telegraph their abilities well ahead of time support the structure of 'looks hard, actually easy'. On the other hand, enemies that seem simple but have a hidden trick (like a war troll that looks like a troll until you find that you wasted your action on a fireball) go the other direction - 'looks easy, actually hard'.

The point is to note that my goal is not achieved by the players having a hard time with the encounter, its only achieved by the players being able to successfully make the encounter easier for themselves. An encounter which is too easy might not satisfy that goal if it doesn't motivate the players to actually do that (though this need not be the case if the players find their characters' abilities sufficiently cool to be inspired to find new ways of using them independent of the strength of the opposition). But its not that it fails because it was too easy, its that it fails because it didn't provide motivation; I can keep the 'easy' part if I can provide the 'motivation' part in another way. A pattern I learned from another DM is to use what they called a 'popcorn fight' shortly after any major change in a character's abilities or scope; the purpose of this fight isn't to challenge anyone or even to pretend to that, it's to give the players the ability to calibrate the effects of their new mechanics and better understand how their stuff works. Because the motivation exists ('I have a new ability and I want to try it out'), you don't need any sort of challenge.

So what did you mean by "the encounter is only close because the DM made it so"?

[zinycor]

I don't get how you speak of people who openly mock you and disrespect you as friends. *scrubbed* so I guess I'll now leave this discussion.

[NichG]

What does "time lost due to setbacks" actually mean though? We generally run one adventure a session, if it takes a lot little longer or a little shorter based on how quickly the players kill a monster, you are still doing one adventure per session.

Furthermore, there is never negative progression. The players always end the session with more XP and treasure than they started with, no matter how bad it goes. Likewise, they have never ended a session where they didn't move the narrative forward and accomplish some storyline goals. Likewise, the players learn more about both the lore and the mechanics of the game, so they are improving along with their characters.

The only way I can see this being accurate is if you exclusively look at narrative losses and ignore both mechanical and narrative gains.

If I do something that's meant to move things along and find out that now we're spending another hour on the thing I wanted to get past (especially if it seems as though the reason it will take another hour is because of my action), it doesn't really change that feeling if, in the end, we eventually get past it no matter what. 'You gained XP, don't complain' is a bit of a fig leaf on the matter of the actual gameplay feel. I've for example been in a campaign where the DM really liked trying to make travel feel like it took as long as the distance you were going, which meant that we had something where it felt the campaign was building to some kind of climax but where the resolution was in another city, and then we had three sessions of random encounters, preparing camp, etc on the road. Even though we were gaining XP and treasure, that basically didn't matter because we weren't really progressing the elements of the game that, at that point in time, we cared about. And so it was extremely tedious.

Also, what you're describing here is hard for me to square with the fact that you describe your campaign as a sandbox. How is it that no matter what the players do, the game progresses by the same amount each session?

Likewise, ideally the game should be fun, and time spent playing isn't "time lost" even if you aren't working towards a goal. In the best game I ever played in, we would often spend entire sessions without advancing the plot at all, I remember one session spent doing nothing but planning a party and coordinating our outfits, and it was a blast.

Which again, really comes to the root of my issue: Why can't people have fun playing a game that they aren't "winning," and why is this so much more of an issue in an RPG?

Gaming isn't inherently fun simply by virtue of being gaming. It has to engage with something that the player cares about or enjoys, and there isn't some gold standard game that everyone must enjoy or they're the problem. I've been in a campaign where many of the players enjoyed having 6 hour long sessions that were entirely 'shopping trips', buying gear upgrades for their characters and assigning feats and things like that. I hate spending game time on that kind of thing and felt that those sessions were a total waste of my time. That doesn't make their enjoyment and less real, nor does their enjoyment make the fact that I disliked that kind of gaming any less real.

You can't assume that, because you had fun with something, if other people don't have fun with it then they're wrong. Your players' sense of what is fun is something you have to account for and work with, its not something you can declare on their behalf. Maybe you can find a group of players who have fun when they're losing; I would guess that such players exist. But saying 'but, players should be able to enjoy losing' isn't an answer to a situation in which you have players who don't.

Shouldn't the lack of competition make the loss easier to handle?

Um, no? It's quite the opposite. Competitions are about 'who will win' (which is really a proxy for 'who is better?' or 'who is dominant?'), but tabletop RPGs are collaborative rather than competitive (there can't really be a competition between players and DM due to the extreme power asymmetry, even if the DM strictly follows CR guidelines and things like that). Losses are progression in a competition, but in a tabletop RPG unless they're handled very cleverly, losses are just denial of agency, return to the status quo, or even steps backward. Expressing player agency in a loss is not something I will say is impossible, but it's going to be a 'Yeah? Show me' where I will be very picky and critical about the details if a DM claims to be doing it - because I think it would be very easy for a DM to believe that the way they handle losses is empowering without it feeling like that from the player perspective..

Again, I get that you are telling me to do what works for my players not what is "normal", but I still get the impression that you are looking down on me for doing, what I can tell, is a very normal style of gaming; grabbing an adventure path / module or creating a "megadungeon / sandbox" and then running it for whatever players happen to show up with whatever characters they happen to bring to the table.

What I am looking down on is hiding behind "normal" as an excuse to not change things that are problematic or just not working. E.g. you yourself say that your current campaign is a failed experiment, but then justify it as 'but grabbing a module and just running it is normal'. Saying that something is "normal" is basically just abandoning responsibility for thinking about it and mimicking the gaming styles of other people without actually trying to understand why those styles worked when they worked and why those styles might fail. I will admit that is something I look down on.

Note, I'm not saying 'don't run experimental campaigns' or 'don't try things you don't understand'. I'm saying that for those experiments to be at all useful, you have to learn from them, and that means that when things fail its important to put that failure in a context that will let you make better decisions in the future. Justifying things as 'it was normal, so it should have worked' is counterproductive.

Now, as far as customizing the game for the individual players, this is thorny territory.

My players always tell me they want "fair" and "balanced" encounters and don't want me tailoring the campaign to them.

...

Now, in hindsight, I have come to believe that what Bob and Dave actually meant was (and I am sorry if I sound condescending with this phrasing) they want to be able to play one dimensional characters and engage in one sided power fantasies.

It's okay to use this phrasing, as long as you don't take it as an excuse to consider those desires less real or less valid. I would agree that this is more or less what Bob and Dave actually want. The fact that it sounds condescending doesn't invalidate them wanting it. Accepting that this is something a player could truly and honestly want, even if it sounds like its shallow or meaningless to you, is a useful step to make. Treating it as serious and real to them will better help you navigate whether compromises are possible, as opposed to offering compromises that sound completely one-sided to them. And yes, the situation is made more complex by the fact that they won't just come out and own that position (but given that it would likely be subject to ridicule and condescension from at least the other players in the group, that's not so surprising).

Have I mentioned how frustrating this gotcha thing is?

I still don't have a working definition of it, and I am not sure if it is even something that I am doing in my games, yet it seems everyone is convinced that it is the source of my problems. Now this whole thing has gone meta, and now you are saying that it is my very inability to understand the concept of a gotcha that is my big problem.

Basically, the gotcha thing in of itself isn't the source of all your problems, but it's indicative of a mismatch between how you see what you're doing and how other people would experience it. And that sort of mismatch can be a large source of problems, including things that exacerbate trust issues and style differences.

What it comes down to is that you're doing a lot of things that you would describe one way and that seem okay to you, but some of them are okay and some of them are really not okay. The fact that you not only can't tell the difference, but that when people repeatedly point it out to you you have difficulty even accepting their accounts as to how those things make them feel, is a giant warning sign. It means that, for example, if you accidentally did something to piss someone off, you might never actually understand what it is you did that set them off, keep doing it unawares, and as a result develop the view that they're just someone who is perpetually pissed off for no real reason - which basically would make getting along with them in any kind of functional way impossible.

This might actually be worth starting another thread over; but nothing I have seen indicates that my campaign is unusually hard. It doesn't seem any more difficult than other campaigns I have played in or read about or modules I have read / run, and it actually seems significantly less deadly than the encounter guidelines given in the DMGs.

The DMG encounter guidelines really don't give any sort of indication of deadliness. Take for example (in D&D 3.5 since this is where I'm familiar with specific cases), these are all CR 8 encounters (some variation of all these occur in Goodman Games modules I've played, chosen specifically for being surprisingly difficult given their CR):

- 8 Dire Weasels, which each deal 1d4 Con drain per round if they land a single attack on someone, attacking from holes in the walls of a narrow passage.

- 1 Hellwasp swarm, which can't be damaged by weapons, flies, can stack its abilities with a nearby cadaver (say from a previous encounter) in order to effectively be a 2-stage boss, doesn't need to roll to hit, and has an automatic save-or-lose-your-action effect within its radius.

- 5 Allips, which have flight, incorporeality, and wisdom drain on each attack, and provoke 5 saves per party member at the opening of combat to basically force them to not act for 2d4 rounds. Combine with individualized attacks from within the floor, and they effectively have +8 AC on top of the incorporeality and can pick off individual PCs without breaking the Fascinate effect on the others.

These are not from GGG modules, but are pretty dangerous:

- 14 Lv1 Wizards behind murder holes of a fort, casting Magic Missile in a focus-fire pattern against single targets each round. Basically 50 damage per round to a single target that can only be avoided by a specific hard counter. Use partially charged wands to stay within NPC WBL while giving the firing squad staying power.

- A Lv8 Wizard who ambushes the party's camp at night, dropping fireballs on them from 720ft up in the air from stealth+Greater Invisibility (using scrolls to expand spell slots), and using the distance and condition penalties for Spot and Listen by strict ruling (that's a -72 to Spot from distance, -40 from invisibility, ...).

These are also CR 8 encounters, not from any particular module:

- A single Lv8 Fighter who uses Power Attack, Toughness, Weapon Focus, etc as their feats.

- 4 Dire Boars in an open forest environment. They can do some damage and have Diehard as a special trait.

- 3 Trolls

If you throw the former against a Lv6 party, then in both of the stat drain examples they have no recourse to actually recover without purchasing spellcasting services from a higher level caster, meaning that all subsequent encounters they have for quite some time will be more difficult. But I would say that a Lv6 party can take out the single Lv8 fighter with no real issue or resource expenditure, and while the boars might be dangerous if they focus-fire on a squishy character, but the 8 dire weasels focus-firing would also likely kill someone (conservatively about 10 points of Con drain plus 25 or so damage if half land their hit and then the entire group is wiped out in the subsequent round).

What's trivial and what's lethal depends on a lot more than CR.

I have never played in an actual "old school" meatgrinder campaign, but I have read lots of APs and in those it seems like character death and parties being forced to retreat to avoid a TPK are common occurrences, tending to happen at least once per session.

Note that in your example, you have 21 encounters, with 1 near loss and 1 TPK. That is significantly more deadly than anything I have ever run. Note that my campaign ran for almost two years, (about 250 encounters) only includes two actual "losses," one caused by sheer stupid randomness and the other by the players being choosing to die based on stubbornness and poor communication; the rest of the losses (still only about every 20 sessions) are just very temporary setbacks or narrow victories.

You previously listed 12 near-losses in 40 sessions, which you said corresponds to a 5% per-encounter rate. That's different than the 1 per 20 sessions which you're listing here.

As I said above, I try very hard to make Bob happy, but the more I think about it, the more I think he is actually just trying to find excuses to mask his failings and to make differences in preference sound like failings on other people's part.

It's dangerous for you to claim this, because a lot of what you've been doing in this thread has been expressing your preferences for things like difficulty (close fights are better than one-sided fights) and saying that for example the people who prefer the one-sided victories are toxic, immature, etc, and 'should' be able to enjoy losing (with the implication that, if they don't, there's something wrong with them). So you've also been kind of engaging in what you're saying that Bob does here.

And again, the three clue rule was never meant to apply to every piece of knowledge in the game, or really about information gathering at all. It is about making sure that there are not "bottle necks" in the plot, where there is only one way to proceed. Also, in my experience players (myself included) tend to be very dense, and three clues is nowhere near enough to solve most puzzles.

If your experience is that three clues isn't enough, then the natural reaction to that should be to increase the availability of information, not to decrease it... Also, you're doing the 'meant to' thing again - people aren't bringing up Three Clues because there's a checklist of things your game must have to be signed off on, they're bringing it up because it's a good example of the mismatch between how easy a DM might think something is to figure out and how it looks from the player perspective, and it gives a concrete strategy for overcoming that mismatch without requiring the DM to just see things perfectly from the players' point of view.

So what did you mean by "the encounter is only close because the DM made it so"?

So lets say I have something like a potential red dragon fight coming up. The players roughly know the age category, they have a rough familiarity with the difficulty of dragon fights, etc, and think that they have a good chance at it. However, I set things up so that the dragon obtained a casting of Energy Immunity (Cold) that day, is using metabreath feats to change the elemental type of its attack to something that the party happens to not have prepared resistance to, etc. If the party then just barely scrapes by, they're not going to think that this victory was narrow because the fight was really hard but they were really awesome. They're going to think the victory was narrow because the dragon was propped up to be harder than they thought it was. So something that should have been a straightforward fight was instead a close call.

That's a success in that they didn't lose, but it's also a failure in that it felt like it should have been easy, but instead was difficult.

[Kane0]

Which again, really comes to the root of my issue: Why can't people have fun playing a game that they aren't "winning," and why is this so much more of an issue in an RPG?

Shouldn't the lack of competition make the loss easier to handle?

Also, I never said that winning doesn't feel better than losing. What I said was that an earned win / close game feels better than a one sided victory.

https://youtu.be/c-2lnnKz5J8
https://youtu.be/n-5gb0sVK7o
https://youtu.be/sLXLlJ7FhJU