[Sitraahra]

do you suffer from powergamers, 3rd party sources, rule exploiters, or are your players just that thick? This is meant to be a humerous post where you can complain

so I join a game as a player, rise to Gm, and begin looking over characters. About half the party has taken the character examples in the PHB as bonuses, and at elast one cahracter was adding his 'max dex' from his armor to his AC....

this same last player [who was the original Gm] was a human paladin..who had become an elf...and would randomly changed into a drow...and was destined to decide the fate fo the world..and had 2 artifacts swords


antoher time, I was a player, and aGM I did not know decided to run a low level Ebberron moduale.
In the first scene, a figure is useing zombies to assault the woman we're supposed to meet...so of course I grapple the guy, and though I do not have improved grapple and succeed. Of course, the guy was supposed to get away, so this immediatly begins messing things up. When my rogue friend tries to [melee] attack the guy, the GM insists that theres a 50% cahnce to hit me. We try to tell him thats for ranged only, but he insists its that way. well, my friend succeeds anyway. Later, though we ar trying to get info out of him [and he is apparently immune to intimidate or bluff], a foolishh ally casts heat metal on the mans manacles even though he is already near death. We explain that heat metal will not make it uncomfortable, but kill him, and though the newbish player wants to take it back, the Gm insist the action goes through [I fail to distrct the artificer enough to stop his concentration] I almost kill myself getting the manacles off. Then, the woman, leader of a pwerful guild, says that a powerful schematic was stolen which could lead to the end of the world, and that she's hireda boat for us. We ask for teleportation, pointing out that this is important, we also strongly suggest she hires an army or at elast soem more mercenaries, bt though she offeres to pay us whatever we want, she cannot possibly get the other guilds behind saving the world, or pay for our teleportation or more back up.
the game ended quickly, and my favoite part was when, at the end, the GM looked through the book and said HAH!. We read the passage, and handed it abck to him to read aloud that there was a 50% mischance to hit someone in a grapple...with ranged. he got REALLL quiet after that

[JosephBlackly]

First of all, no offense, but that was hard to read.
Second... When I start DMing, I hope I don't end up that way.
Lastly, adding an armor's max Dex to their AC...? What the hell was he thinking?!

[Dthclaw]

Sounds like the DM didn't know how to fudge a grapple/Escape Artist check... and doesn't have the slightest clue how to adapt to unusual situations.

All right, I'll bite on this topic...

Here's one for you. One of my old players (very much a powergamer) tried pulling one over me by insisting that his half-dragon Wiz1/Fighter5/Spellsword5 was ECL 10. Obviously, I ain't that dumb. I told him to drop four character levels to match the ECL of the group. 'No,' he insists, 'I just need to drop one.' 'No, if you're a half-dragon you need to drop ONE to become an ECL 13. You need to either drop three levels on top of that or three character levels.' We argued for the better part of ten minutes before he finally realized that 1- he was wrong 2- he was stupidly wrong and 3- I was the DM and I wasn't budging.

Same player had, in the past, also had harpoons magically 'appear' in his character's inventory when he had to deal with something out of melee range.

Same player is now long gone.

[super sorcerer]

After reading all of these horrors I want to ask a few things:
1) Where did you find such players? In all the groups I ever play in no one tried to cheat, the worst case was to powerplay which is much less terible (and even then only on high powered adventures).
2) Why would anybody want to cheat in this game? It is not even a competitive game (not that it is ok to cheat on competitive games but on competitive games peaple sometime want to win realy desperatly).

[Sitraahra]

I used to have a good core of 3 friends+myself that we could count on, but one of those friends moved away. Another of the players simply can't GM. This means either myself or my friend has to Gm, and it get s alittle meh with only 2 players who know eachother well. Then one day I was checking out a Palladium book at a game shop and was randomly invited to paly with this group.
I've heard the same question, why would someone cheat in DnD before, and I guess the answer is to either not fail [suffering shame in front of other players] or ego [to be better then other players]...ya gotta ahte the playa haters out there
there may be also some misguided concept about 'winning'. Just because its dumb doesn't mean dumb people won't do it

[Axel]

Well, my group has had one horrible occurence. One of our members was starting a new campaign, initially his plan was to have us limited to classes and races in the PHB. Unfortunately he is rather weak willed and his girlfriend insisted on playing a half-celestial cleric, our resident breakage master then insisted that if she could get her way then he should be allowed a human Warmage. Things degenerated and our party soon included a fox-folk ranger and a ninja. I had the only character obeying the original restrictions (which I was ironically ignorant of) with an elvish druid. He had to skip his planned first session because it had relied on a right of passage for members of core classes.
Unfortunately the girl who originally started this, with a half-celestial cleric, is noted for two things: nymphomania and bitchiness. Within three sessions she had a tantrum because all of us, her boyfriend included, were calling her to account for breaking character.

In her campaign, which continued running a surprisingly long time because her bitchiness kept her players in line, we had a cleric played by the master of character breaking. His favorite move involved the use of quicken spell, stone wall, and stoneshape to entrap opponents helplessly. He had the stone form itself to their body, leaving a small hole in front that he could through damage spells into. There was a certain satisfaction in him running up, putting his hand up to the hole, shouting "Fire in the hole!", and everyone ducking as a burst of flame erupted from the now hollow statue. Even if the fighter got very little work.
As the party's wizard I had my own minor breakage, which sadly didn't work as well. I decided to open a dimension door directly beneath a charging opponent's horse, with the opening max distance straight up. The fall was lethal, unfortunately although the horse failed it's check and fell through, the rider failed his ride check and was bucked off. The horse landed a few rounds later, just five feet from where the bastard was standing. All I got for my trouble was a big horse-mess. This was the same campaign as the Roc familiar.

[super sorcerer]

Quote

Well, my group has had one horrible occurence. One of our members was starting a new campaign, initially his plan was to have us limited to classes and races in the PHB. Unfortunately he is rather weak willed and his girlfriend insisted on playing a half-celestial cleric, our resident breakage master then insisted that if she could get her way then he should be allowed a human Warmage. Things degenerated and our party soon included a fox-folk ranger and a ninja. I had the only character obeying the original restrictions (which I was ironically ignorant of) with an elvish druid. He had to skip his planned first session because it had relied on a right of passage for members of core classes.
Unfortunately the girl who originally started this, with a half-celestial cleric, is noted for two things: nymphomania and bitchiness. Within three sessions she had a tantrum because all of us, her boyfriend included, were calling her to account for breaking character.

Wow. To break a half-celestial cleric takes much becouse the LA 4 leaves you 4 caster levels behind (unless you play on epic levels where the number of spells per day does not change). It is hard to play spellcasters with level adjustment more than 1 even if you get +4 wisdom for 4 levels. How horribly could she break that poor cleric?
Beside breaking and cheating are very different things. If all characters are broken this is just a high powered campain while if all players cheat the campain is instead just ruined. If one player break his character the other can do the same thing and the campain is just high powered. I wish you all good companions, good players and good DM's .

[Dthclaw]

Breaking character not in the meta-gaming 'hey, look at this combination' thing but more of a 'you're not acting at all like what your character would be like.' At least, I believe, in reference to the cleric.

[super sorcerer]

Quote

Breaking character not in the meta-gaming 'hey, look at this combination' thing but more of a 'you're not acting at all like what your character would be like.' At least, I believe, in reference to the cleric.

Ok , I didn't know that broken character have this meaning. I was always shure that broken character is a powerplayed character. What is a broken class then (I always thought it means a very powerfull class)?

[Rintaran]

A broken class is a class that is more powerful than other classes at the same level.

You can break out of character, which usually means metagaming, or acting opposite of what your character's alignment, social outlook, and/or background would suggest your character's reaction to be.

Generally, when talking about a broken class, we've started using the term "borked". It helps differentiate between the two, and is fun to say. Just like confuzzled instead of confused.



Also, I just noticed this is in the wrong forum. I'm moving it to the general d20 forum since it isn't actually about DM & Player advice, but about reliving past sessions, like a dozen or so other topics of its kind.

[Jon Snow]

Okay, get this.

In the very first AD&D game I ever DM'ed for, which was 2nd Edition, one of my friends was a 2nd level human paladin of a lawful good alignment.

The party was in a desolate desert town, and they had just finished a battle with a gruesome thieve caravan that wandered in. The thieves made off with some possessions, so the party decided to track them down. The paladin begins to ask a suspicious NPC a few questions. When the NPC became unwilling to answer any more questions, the paladin took out a dagger, pressed it to the NPC's back and threatened to cut his testicles off if he didn't tell him all that he knew. When I played along with this and told him that his alignment was about to change, he suddenly became to tired to continue the game for the night.

Two days later he comes to me and tells me he wants to discard his paladin and make a new character. This person no longer games with us or hangs out with us anymore, but for different reasons.