Posted By gss_000 on 09/24/2006 3:14 PM
Wow. That's a whole different levl than what I expected from this thread. I say, tell us some more of these.

Posted By Oryan77 on 09/24/2006 3:53 PM

He actually argued with me that he wouldn't be able to see that far with the lack of light illuminating the hallway. I said I think he would be able to see a hint of the door even with a little light pouring out of the open room. He argued about 2 minutes with me until I finally just told him to shut up and play.

Posted By gss_000 on 09/24/2006 5:20 PM
We really though he hadn't played the game since 1st ed by how he was running the game and his knowledge of 3rd ed.  That man must of thought we were all jerks by how we argued.

Posted By gss_000 on 09/24/2006 5:20 PM
That reminds me of something else...

We were playing a game of Call of Cthulhu, wherein i was a player impersonating a drunk doctor tagging along a mystic and a professional killer for reasons i won't go into. We found a book of great importance to our story, from which emanates evil and which inspires terror, and we learn that there is a cult desperately trying to find this book and they're killing people for it (and trying to kill us too). So as we're running away from the cult, we learn that the book should be brought into a secret tomb in Egypt, and we travel there to destroy the otherwise indestructible book. From the outset, i've been the one carrying the book, and in my mind the darn thing is like the most important object ever, in addition to people killing for it all the time, it's linked to my mental stability for reason i won't go into either.

At one point, the DM says: "you wake up that morning, break your fast, and when you pack things up you realize that the book is missing". Ugh.

So i say: "what do you mean it's missing, i'm with the book all the time".

He says "no you aren't".

I say "when's the last time that i've seen the book then?"

He says "the evening before, as it was being taken off your packhorse by some desert man (that we're travelling with)".

I'm like: "what do you mean, 'taken down by some desert man'?!?  People are being killed all around for this book, and entire convent has been burned down, there are murders galore, our own life is linked to it, i've been insisting for hours on how the book is *always* with me, and you think that i leave it to some desert servant to take down and guard for the night??! That i'll leave the book out of my sight for, like, 10 hours or more? No f&$cin' way, man! I'm using that book as my darn pillow, that's what i'm doing! I eat on top of it, i bring it with me when i crap!"

In the end, the DM would have nothing of it, his story relied on the book being stolen in the night, so he didn't heed my arguments and we had to run after the thieves :-/

Sky

Posted By Oryan77 on 09/24/2006 5:45 PM

Yeah sometimes DM's get anxious and assume PC's are doing something. That DM obviously wasn't listening to his players after they corrected him. He must have really wanted to use a trap on you guys

Posted By Skyscraper on 09/25/2006 10:54 AM

I can tell you that i got an earful about being an uncompromising DM (that's the light version: i actually got insulted repeatedly ) because his *intention* was to cast the spell, even though he actually never got to casting it and his PC would have remembered even if he, the player, had forgotten.

Posted By gss_000 on 09/25/2006 6:48 PM

An extreme of this was (I find what you did reasonable, there is a big difference between planning and doing!) what former friend of mine experienced in 1st ed as well.  His DM in the middle of the session said every character fainted of exhaustion because they hadn't eaten anything. They had to actually say they eat in order to eat, no little detail was assumed no matter how silly or miniscule it was.

Posted By Dordledum on 09/26/2006 7:02 AM
Or at least the approximate time of day, if they ate like 24 hours before, the characters should think about eating again. A hint by the DM of growling stomachs would be in order before in-game effects should take place. fainting is quite a severe penalty btw, just add the fatigue-effects or something like that.

D.

Posted By Sulaco on 09/26/2006 9:47 AM
Well, there is a poster on the Wizards boards right now who maintains that you can ready an action to attack someone who makes and attack of opportunity against you. His reasoning is that it is not specifically disallowed so it must be allowed. That seems pretty darn ridiculous to me.

Posted By gss_000 on 09/25/2006 6:48 PM

An extreme of this was (I find what you did reasonable, there is a big difference between planning and doing!) what former friend of mine experienced in 1st ed as well.  His DM in the middle of the session said every character fainted of exhaustion because they hadn't eaten anything. They had to actually say they eat in order to eat, no little detail was assumed no matter how silly or miniscule it was.

As much as I hate to admit it, I'm a rules lawyer who has caused much grief for my DM. It got to the point in our game where some of the other players made themselves more familiar with the rules just so they could end our arguments quicker. Of course this in turn made some of them become rules lawyers as well, and that means I do less rules lawyering arguments. The most ridiculous use of rules lawyering in our games I'd have to say was when we were playing an oriental adventures game with characters fashioned after some of our favorite anime characters. This game of course is more on the fantastic side, heck our sponsor was a talking carp(eastern dragon in its tadpole stage), but we still ended up arguing over a lack of realism. We were fighting near a chasm with a rickety rope bridge near by. The enemy was there to assassinate my character so I got an idea to run across the bridge and cut the rope when the enemy came after me. The problem came when the mounted enemy charged across the rope bridge on horse back. This created all kinds of problems as we the players argued with the DM for at least an hour that it was impossible for a horse to gallop across a shaky rope bridge. To further complicate matters, I had used my readied action to cut the rope brige from beneath them and the DM has her leap out of the saddle and land 10+ feet away on the ground next to me. The end result was me being attacked an hour plus of game being lost to arguments and all of us players gaining one "crazy action" (ignore rules/DM) that we could use at any time in the game.

Posted By gss_000 on 10/02/2006 6:17 PM
You're the fifth person who when I told that story said that solution. I wish we were that clever when we were kids.

Posted By wolfsbane114 on 10/03/2006 12:06 PM
it was unrealistic, for a Demon to seduce a high preistess, without invoking the wrath of the god.

Posted By Star on 10/03/2006 6:12 PM
I have a friend that argues made up rules based on his experiences LARPing. He doesn't like the 5 foot step rule because he's tried it using boffo weapons and it doesn't work in real life. He particularly doesn't like searching a room taking only a couple of minutes when he's personaly spent hours searching a room to find a coin hidden under a floorboard.

He's a good friend and I've never pointed out how annoying this is (It was interesting the first few times). He just doesn't comprehend that this is a different thing than LARPing. Rounds are split up into 6 second increments and everyone get's their six seconds - it's not entirely realistic for an archer to step back and shoot three or four arrows with a guy in melee five feet from him but the rule is there for strategic reasons. It's not entirely realistic to spend five minutes searching a room - but it's not fun to sit around a table and talk about searching a room for hours.

I CAN rules lawyer - but usually don't. It interferes with the game and everyone elses time. I'm not thrilled about him arguing about the rules that are designed to make the game move faster and be more enjoyable.

Of course he has to listen to my rants about our DM changing monsters damage reduction without altering their CR. So I guess it works out.

Posted By GuJiaXian on 10/04/2006 10:35 AM
In last night's session, one of my players tried to take 20 on an attack (it was against a stirge, and another player had managed to grab/grapple it). I laughed at the mental image: "Okay, I'm almost ready to attack now...no, still have 17 minutes to go before I can hit."

Posted By Oryan77 on 10/04/2006 10:35 AM
Yeah but remember, it takes 1 full round to search one 5ft square. Taking 20 means you multiply that by 20. You could spend the entire day searching.

If there's no time pressure, then go for it. But bad guys nearby should make this a problem.

Posted By gss_000 on 10/04/2006 11:51 AM
Actually I find taking 10 and taking 20 really speeds up the game, because there is no calculation to be done and you can just go to the consequence. Also, you avoid the metagaming of "Well I rolled a 11, I wonder if I rolled higher I would have goten something." A pet peeve that I'm trying to watch is getting annoyed when people dont take 20 in situation where they should (checking for traps on a chest or a door the prime example). Luckily, I am getting better.

Posted By Count Dooku on 09/26/2006 5:29 AM
Thats stupid...You think the DM would have told the players they were hungry first...Duh.