DM: Marc

The usual, mind your manners and be courteous, All feedback helps, positive or negative, just dont be rude about it.

Details to be added.

I think that to open with, a statement in scene from another player in the adventure I just went through with adm marc probably sums it up best.

"Orcs? We couldn't even stop orcs? I feel so small."

This is the second adventure run by this dm where he had to blatantly fudge a way for us to get out of it, because the opposition was more than we could get on.

The first involved a fighter tricked out to optimized, specialized spiked armor attacks such that he was rolling 1d6+10 for damage for every single one of his four per round basically odds are hitting attacks (two main, two weapon fighting, improved two weapon fighting, weapon specialization, his stats optimized, etc), who was beyond the capacity to the group that he was more or less one round wasting whoever he focused on. As it became increasingly clear that we were completely outmatched and going to be TPK’d, Marc decided, even though we were basically accomplishing nothing on the fighter, that he would run away, and continue to use actions just fleeing instead of attacking, even when he could have similarly slaughtered the let in scene to bail the five of us out paladin who had rolled on up to attack him. Who thus had the freedom to smite evil him to death, instead of being one round obliterated like various of the rest of us.

And I thought, okay, it happens. No one is perfect. It can be tricky to balance opposition to the capacity of the characters involved. It’s even admirable to at least not blindly follow through on slaughtering said characters anyway, it was like admitting to the mistake. Granted I would have preferred a simple “sorry, this wasn’t balanced well, let’s just null this.” Too much convenient handwaving can make you feel like a group of characters are just sort of incompetently worthless and powerless, that they can only get by on luck and dm mercy, at best.

We come to the second adventure done with this DM now. This is done with a group of three pcs. The Average Party Level calculates out to three. One of these characters is a starting, second level cleric, the other is a not especially fighty 3rd level oracle, the last is myself, a not optimized at all 6th level fighter (I have int 14, amongst other things). I note concepts like APL because they’re pretty critical for how to build encounters in Pathfinder, and I’d very much like to know what the total allotment of xp value for the CR relative to the APL was. Even beyond that, an adventure noted as little more than “you ride out to investigate some rumours” turns out to be a lighthouse under siege by a dozen orcs of varying character and npc class level totals. It should be noted that before the adventure, when we were talking with the DM on what we were hoping to do in the adventure choices he was offering, we specifically didn't pick the "go fight a thing" option, noting to him a preferance for the lower level characters being able to get some time to shine with their non fightastic abilities. It feels like that was completely ignored.

These kinds of things make it feel like the DMs don’t remotely bother to try and tailor the adventures they run to the pcs who come to take part in them, which is… a basic concept of this game. That you look at what the characters you are going to run a thing for can do, and not instead seem to be going “it’s your fault that you wanted to take part”. I can’t think of anyone who runs tabletop like that certainly, not in a way that sustains a campaign or satisfied players. You guys are the ones asking us to take part, and given the low, low numbers of this chat, there are rarely more than 4-5 people in an adventure at most. Here there were 3. I can’t think it would take much time to look at everyone’s sheet and go to yourself “okay, this is what would work for people who are capable of this”.

Within the storyline itself, it seemed like half the time whatever we said was not especially paid attention to. A note to the DM that because one of the characters had poor swim, they would be basically hanging onto my character to swim them over some water somehow became them being tethered by ropes, with every player involved expressing confusion that this had become such. A natural 20 involving my character otherwise thereby carrying them over on their swim seemed to accomplish nothing as the person they tried to carry over nearly drowned anyway. The idea had been that the two of us would make it over and thereby be able to tether the third pc over in case of problem, but it became some kind of jumbled mess.

This was part of an effort to come up behind the besieged lighthouse to get into it and initially avoid the orcs. And yet it seemed the DM tried to force us out of that anyway, putting forward a bizarrely complex scenario where we had to run to the door of the lighthouse that the orcs were right in front of, instead of climb up to a ledge the lighthouse keeper himself was communication with us from. The response to player confusion from all involved and questioning why this was happening both icly and oocly was to handwave a statement that literally boiled down to “whatever you do, you get in the lighthouse”. Making it feel like bothering to plan anything at all was basically irrelevant.

This was a feeling reinforced once inside, where efforts to suggest plans oocly or state an intent to do them icly met with little more than the scene being jumped ahead to the orcs directly assaulting the joint, like we would not be given time to even try any sort of plan, like we were just being rushed into a fight as quickly as possible, even though we ultimately didn’t have the numbers or capacity for it.

There were orc archers with rapid shot who had what seemed to be more hit points than some of the pcs, being alive yet after things like 19 damage, there were half orc bards giving everyone competence boosts. And as opposed to at least targeting my character, the one doing, y’know, any damage of note to anyone, they opted for what seemed out of spite on an ooc level cutting down the lighthouse keeper we were trying to save.

At this point, it being around 7 in the morning, one of the players had to go, and there seemed no plausible way for 2 players to thereby prevail barring wild dice roll luck. Which leads me to note, if you have an adventure, and you have three people, and one of them is saying when you ask them that they don’t have a lot of time, maybe you tailor it to be something suitable for that if one person drops, it can still be completed. Maybe you adjust how many attackers there are, something. It seems like the details of these plotlines are treated as almost sacredly inviolate once embarked upon, and changing them on the fly should never be done. We’re online, people drop, people have to sleep. Not adjusting to that is going to result in adventures people can’t do anything but run away from or have to be handwaved out of.

All the same, we reached the point we did with marc’s last adventure, the DM handwave. In this case, as opposed to the deciding to run from fights he was totally winning fighter, it was the orcs deciding to basically spare us all and tell us to flee to the city to tell Absalom they were part of a great army coming to take land on its island. This made every character in scene feel pathetic and small, the alternative being to be scenelocked in what was presented as nothing more than a randomly offered one off adventure for fun in the hope that maybe more characters might maybe come save us. DM marc’s availability as a Dm has been random at best, by his own admission. When I’m already involved in other storylines and there’s no prospective next time even scheduled for a random adventure, it doesn’t feel remotely viable as an option. The statement of “well, you can keep fighting then” felt condescending, considering there were two of us at that point.

It would later reinforce that accepting scenelock would basically mean limbo with no predictable end in sight when Marc himself would later just log during the attempted scene wrap up without answering any questions, or tending to sheet fixes he had promised one of the pcs in scene.

So we accepted being allowed to run away, having failed to save or defend anything, from an encounter that seemed to take nothing about us in mind. We were then offered “loot” in the form of the possessions of the guy we had failed to save. Most of us refused it, given that it amounted to robbing the corpse of a guy we had tried and failed to rescue, to Marc’s seeming confusion. I’m not sure why Marc was confused that some characters would refuse to take that. I’m not sure why Marc was confused that the only reward of a scene being the belongings of a guy you got killed through your own inadequacy would only reinforce our sense of pathetic losers in the face of a storyline that was apparently just better than we were.

It’s particularly jarring in that I’d just talked with Marc before that adventure and he had straight up agreed about there being player frustration about a sense of being jerked about in adventures that were only survived through luck or handwaving, without a sense of having affected or accomplished much. It seems like we have a completely different viewpoint on how to address that.

As a last detail, there is now, because of this storyline, apparently a big orc army coming to Absalom to seize territory on its island. There is already a storyline going on with a demon cult that just blew up Ascendant Court more or less and trying to release their demon master to unleash whatevers on the city. It seems like the DMs are trying to outdo each other in “the Doom that Comes to Absalom” and it stretches credulity.

I guess I wish for a few things here. That there was just more consideration generally. For using apl to build encounters like the book says you should. For taking a few minutes to look at the sheets of the 3-4 people you’re going to throw into an encounter to see if maybe it’s suitable for them. To consider if you honestly, truly think any of your players take any satisfaction out of a scene where they have to run away and loot a corpse of a man they failed to protect to get anything out of it. To be willing to change a scene if people note they are going to have to drop. To actually be upfront before an adventure happens with things like “there is going to be a heavy fight in this” “this encounter is built to the following apl” “I will not be looking at your sheets to tailor this encounter” "This adventure will likely take more than one evening and my schedule is currently in flux" Treating these things like some sacred mystery instead only encourages a level of player frustration I have shared with different players in any number of the scenes I have been in, but particularly these two.

I mean.. look. That I’m myself 6th level mean you can’t say I haven’t been trying again and again in participating in storylines, in trying to encourage my friends to, in rp, in general. And yet, to be honest, the overall experience has been near joyless. I keep telling myself its growing pains, and you guys are going to hit your stride, and if I just tough it out long enough, this place will come into its own. And yet most of them time it’s just bouncing from fights the pcs survive on sheer luck, handwaving, super powerful magical npcs being unstoppable and toying with us, fights that blow well past average party level in CR, fights that npcs have to come help us survive, or a sense that if you didn’t optimize your character to hell and back, you are being deservedly punished as every two weeks brings some new giant doomy threat of super doom to the city. I’m one of the highest level characters on chat by freakish anomaly of a lot of hopeful participation that continues to feel in vain. What do you think a bunch of 2-4th level pcs at most feel they can do about orc armies or super demon cults? Do you think the pcs generally feel anything but powerless and ineffectual?

I’m sure the DM can interject here to say that we just didn’t understand, or get the right things, or do the right things. If all the players in your scene were feeling small and useless, and just not getting what you thought we should have, or seeing the scene how you thought we should have, maybe that is a problem with how things were coming across. It shouldn’t feel like a choose your own adventure where if you pick the wrong page, the book is mocking you for not being as smart as it.

I’d really like to see this place grow. I’d like to see it be a place I can recommend to my friends to make characters for, and promote across the internet without having to feel like I need to go “but you need to make allowances for how you’re going to be frustrated for the first while." I try to help in scenes with keeping track of init counts when the DM needs it, to post rumour threads on request even though I feel a bit awkward at being one of the only pcs doing so, various other things. But it’s just increasingly difficult to keep toughing it out. I suppose I’d like some understanding of that.