You're right, there's no wrong way to play D&D as long as the whole table's having fun, but I guess this guy in the OP's game rubs me the wrong way a little.
Fair enough. Not a huge fan of power gamers either, but I'm just honestly sick of people in the forums blaming a playstyle for everything they don't like, or using them to fear monger, or silly strawmen.
I mean, heck. Neither gunslingers nor long death monks are really meant to "main tank". The expectation that either should can lead to disatisfaction and burn out.
5e doesn't enforce roles, but playing a build in a way it's not meant to can be unsatisfying.
A lot of what people said is correct. Talk to the DM, other players, and decide if either you are not right for the table or the power gamer is.
In our current campaign, at 10th level now (started at 3rd level) we had a player switch characters as they were not having fun ( the original character was supposed to be for a one shot that turned into a campaign) And she worked with the DM how the new character was introduced. There was mild in-character trust issues just letting her in but quickly was overcome (we didn’t want to drag it out too much). So switching characters mid campaign is fine.
If the player wants to switch characters that’s fine. I believe the OP said he was last to pick a character so you really didn’t have a tank when the other players chose theirs. So his comments on sink or swim, although a bit rude, would have been where you were if he originally chose a squishy character.
A lot of what people said is correct. Talk to the DM, other players, and decide if either you are not right for the table or the power gamer is.
In our current campaign, at 10th level now (started at 3rd level) we had a player switch characters as they were not having fun ( the original character was supposed to be for a one shot that turned into a campaign) And she worked with the DM how the new character was introduced. There was mild in-character trust issues just letting her in but quickly was overcome (we didn’t want to drag it out too much). So switching characters mid campaign is fine.
Not necessarily. It can be fine, depending on the table and the players, but if as a DM, and in agreement with session 0, a player has a story that is important to the campaign, changing a character mid-campaign is going to cause problems.
If the player wants to switch characters that’s fine.
No, not necessarily. And, in addition to the example above, if he is doing it for purely technical reasons without any roleplay whatsoever, it would be even less fine at our tables, for example.
What Lyxen said!
To add to his point, using my campaign game as an example, all my players have to write backstories for their characters. Real backstories, not some random table generated thing. I work with them on those backstories to ensure they fit within the campaign and the world. I then begin incorporating those backstories into the campaign by way of custom adventures tailored to each character in which their backstory plays out. It helps draw the player into the game world, becoming invested in it. That is important, from my perspective, as a writer. To have a player drop a character in mid stream because they can't make up their mind on what they want to play is disruptive to the continuity of the game and the campaign story. Not to mention wasting my time developing that backstory in the world in the first place.
What your problem sounds like to me is the player has very little understanding, experience with, or appreciation of what goes into a campaign game by a DM. They may be better off just playing Adventure League or one-off games on Twitch or the local hobby store.
Q: Is that indecisive SQUIRREL fairly young by chance? I know, I know, stereotyping. But its an analytical point nonetheless. :)
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Husband, Father, Veteran, Gamer, DM, Player, and Friend | Author of the "World of Eirador" | http://world-guild.com "The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules." ~Gary Gygax
If the group either takes tanking for granted, or does not work with the tank with respect to strategy, the character built for tanking can be effectively useless. That they rarely go down does not equate to them having a role that actually feels fulfilling, or one that has any meaningful effect at all.
If they rarely go down, they're arguably not tanking very well or the DM has the monsters act dumb.
Tanking in MMOs is a well defined role that comes with a slew of relevant mechanics and even then only really works properly if everyone else sticks to their role too. The tank pulls aggro, the healer heals the tank, the DPS kills without overtaking the tank's aggro. The tank can do damage too and can usually heal himself as well, but their main abilities let them pull aggro - they force the enemies to attack them and heavily reduce their effectiveness otherwise. In D&D 5E there are maybe half a dozen mechanics a "tank" can use in order to do the same thing, and compared to those they'd have MMOs they're pretty restricted: Sentinel requires getting to make an AoO in the first place and hitting with it, and it takes your reaction so it's limited to one target per round; Compelled Duel allows a Wis save and is a Concentration spell with a single target. Sentinel requires a feat, which makes it a pretty steep investment, and Compelled Duel requires two levels of Paladin. In short, it's not easy, cheap or convenient to get monsters to attack you rather than going after the other party members especially if you appear hard to hit and even harder to take down. Good tanks in D&D don't just soak attacks, they soak damage - because if they don't the enemy will choose to leave them alone and deal with the others first, since they're likely also doing stuff that pulls aggro (or they're dumb, in which case we're back to my above statement).
So new players who've done the WoW thing and start D&D likely have some preconceived notions about how things are supposed to work, and those notions are mostly wrong. D&D doesn't work like WoW and vice versa - tanks can't tank as well in D&D, and healers can't heal as well either (DPS and CC are comparable at least). That's the first expectation that they need to correct. The second expectation that they have to let go of is that everyone else is on the same page they are. In MMOs the roles are well-defined and everybody's expected to know what they are and what that means they're expected to do. In D&D, post-TSR D&D anyway, things are a lot less clear. Your class doesn't really define your role. Everybody can go DPS, certainly. With the exception of a couple specialist builds healers are really off-healers, because healing in combat is not efficient most of the time. Tanking, see above. New players need to find their place in the party and they'll find out that they're much more free in deciding what that place might be. They'll also see that where combat defines everything in MMOs, that is not the case in D&D. Characters can focus on social interactions, survival, exploration, or even just roleplaying and storytelling. And because of that freedom, you can't tell what another player's character's place in the party will be just from their race and class, and you can't assume they will have similar expectations of how the game will play out as you do just from looking at your character's race and class either.
This is why session zero can be so very important, particularly for new players or groups with people who haven't played together before. Expectations don't have to match perfectly, but the game is much more likely to go well if everybody's on the same page. And while things might still go well if different players have different ideas on how to play, it's much more likely to go badly if no attempts are made to compromise a little. Having power gamers, heavy roleplayers and I'm-just-here-to-have-some-fun-and-be-social players all in one group is not necessarily a problem, as long as everyone respects what everyone else is hoping to get out of playing D&D and puts in a bit of effort to accommodate parts of the session that focus on someone else's fun for a bit.
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What your problem sounds like to me is the player has very little understanding, experience with, or appreciation of what goes into a campaign game by a DM. They may be better off just playing Adventure League or one-off games on Twitch or the local hobby store.
Or, you know, give them a chance to grow. ;)
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Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
A lot of what people said is correct. Talk to the DM, other players, and decide if either you are not right for the table or the power gamer is.
In our current campaign, at 10th level now (started at 3rd level) we had a player switch characters as they were not having fun ( the original character was supposed to be for a one shot that turned into a campaign) And she worked with the DM how the new character was introduced. There was mild in-character trust issues just letting her in but quickly was overcome (we didn’t want to drag it out too much). So switching characters mid campaign is fine.
Not necessarily. It can be fine, depending on the table and the players, but if as a DM, and in agreement with session 0, a player has a story that is important to the campaign, changing a character mid-campaign is going to cause problems.
If the player wants to switch characters that’s fine.
No, not necessarily. And, in addition to the example above, if he is doing it for purely technical reasons without any roleplay whatsoever, it would be even less fine at our tables, for example.
To your first point I agree, though I’m my example you quoted, the player worked with the DM to extract the old character (which I didn’t mention) and how to introduce the new character (which I did mention). So working with the DM it was fine to switch characters mid campaign.
To your second point I agree. Depends on the table. For a heavy RP table it could be an issue, for others it might not. Part of the discussion in this thread is about wether the OP or the power gamer is right for the table. Or if the PG needs to be banned or the OP should leave. It depends on the table and the DM if it is an issue. I just don’t think, in most cases it is.
What your problem sounds like to me is the player has very little understanding, experience with, or appreciation of what goes into a campaign game by a DM. They may be better off just playing Adventure League or one-off games on Twitch or the local hobby store.
Or, you know, give them a chance to grow. ;)
Of course, always! I've played in many an Adventure League game at the local hobby store. I've seen far more players like the one in the OP's situation then I cared too. May be a culture thing, age, the way they learned, and just pure inexperience. But I can say that the vast majority were young, under 23 probably. Not implying that was bad. Just a data point. I'm fairly sure though, that if a good, patient DM had time to spend with them, chances are they could be healed :)
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Husband, Father, Veteran, Gamer, DM, Player, and Friend | Author of the "World of Eirador" | http://world-guild.com "The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules." ~Gary Gygax
Regarding tanking in MMOs... let's all remember that the reason that tanking works at all is that the computer is controlling NPCs and those NPCs have a very small list of pre-defined actions they can take, and a very, exceedingly simple, algorithm to populate their "hate list" -- usually along the lines of, X "hate" per damage, Y "hate" per unit of taunt, and Z "hate" per healing done to another unit. MMO NPCs cannot do things like "focus fire on the caster" just because it is a caster, or "focus fire on the controller" just because it is a controller. The methods players come up to 'beat' the MMO, are based on trial-and-error tests with regard to how quickly you can generate "hate points" by doing something like healing, punching, or taunting. Players get an "inner clock" sense of how long the hate list takes to "decay" and "how much aggro" they can generate before the hate algorithm swaps targets to (or from) them.
None of this works in D&D, because the DM, who is a human being, is controlling the NPCs, so the DM can have those NPCs act logically, rationally, intelligently, based on what is going on in the battle at the moment, what the monsters would "know ahead of time" about the PCs (for instance, say they have started developing a reputation) and so on. Computer controlled opponents cannot do this.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
As said this is also part of D&D. And 'the others' can reject that and shun the person, or they can play along and humour them. They have choices too. A good DM will play to both mindsets, ensuring there are combats that highlight the specialties of the combat minded players and tricks and traps for those into those things and RP opportunities... well everything is an RP opportunity when allowed to be.
I agree, everybody at the table has a responsibility to be respectful of each others interests and fun.
There are limits but if somebody just wants to kill stuff and not RP, that's ok. Let them kill stuff and leave the RP to other folk.
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"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
A lot of what people said is correct. Talk to the DM, other players, and decide if either you are not right for the table or the power gamer is.
In our current campaign, at 10th level now (started at 3rd level) we had a player switch characters as they were not having fun ( the original character was supposed to be for a one shot that turned into a campaign) And she worked with the DM how the new character was introduced. There was mild in-character trust issues just letting her in but quickly was overcome (we didn’t want to drag it out too much). So switching characters mid campaign is fine.
Not necessarily. It can be fine, depending on the table and the players, but if as a DM, and in agreement with session 0, a player has a story that is important to the campaign, changing a character mid-campaign is going to cause problems.
If the player wants to switch characters that’s fine.
No, not necessarily. And, in addition to the example above, if he is doing it for purely technical reasons without any roleplay whatsoever, it would be even less fine at our tables, for example.
What Lyxen said!
To add to his point, using my campaign game as an example, all my players have to write backstories for their characters. Real backstories, not some random table generated thing. I work with them on those backstories to ensure they fit within the campaign and the world. I then begin incorporating those backstories into the campaign by way of custom adventures tailored to each character in which their backstory plays out. It helps draw the player into the game world, becoming invested in it. That is important, from my perspective, as a writer. To have a player drop a character in mid stream because they can't make up their mind on what they want to play is disruptive to the continuity of the game and the campaign story. Not to mention wasting my time developing that backstory in the world in the first place.
What your problem sounds like to me is the player has very little understanding, experience with, or appreciation of what goes into a campaign game by a DM. They may be better off just playing Adventure League or one-off games on Twitch or the local hobby store.
Q: Is that indecisive SQUIRREL fairly young by chance? I know, I know, stereotyping. But its an analytical point nonetheless. :)
My DM is the same, he likes working with me on my backstory so he can incorporate my character into the plot, this is a great way to get your players invested in the campaign, but every table is different, is this a heavy-roleplay immersive experience?, is this a tactical, more wargamey type of thing?, is it a beer-and-peanuts game where your just goofing around with your friends, killing goblins, going on quests, and just having a good time?, where you'll literally just have the new PC be the dead PC's brother or something, the OP could have been more detailed about what type of game this is, but idk.
D&D tanking works a bit differently from MMO tanking. In MMOs, you can't threaten with AoEs, or protect people by standing in the way ofenemies or besides them with an aura and a shield, or even trip them up before they can get close / use Sentinel + Polearm.
D&D combat is similar to a tactical war game, where positioning and movement matter, whereas MMOs rely on other mechanics. Heck, MMO tanks are notorious for being bad at damage, whereas D&D tanks are some of the best damage dealers in the game, and being able to deal heavy damage is actually fundamentally important to their ability to tank / act as a meat shield.
The two mediums have different challenges for accomplishing the same goal - attracting attention of monsters to yourself and not your allies.
Ok, haven't checked this thread, cause life stuffs. Ima give a little more detail of the campaign.
It is a saltmarsh start at level 1. We started with a human fighter (me), a dwarf claric, two human rangers, and a human wizard (orynthia).
The Haunted house went well, all things considered, we almost went down after I the only tank at the time to a crit from one of the skeletons and a normal hit in the same turn bringing me down, then went down one of the rangers. However, we were the only ones to go down, and with us being level 1, it felt reasonable.
After this Orynthia, decided to make a blood hunter as a dps tank, did really well until he got stealthed double crit from a giant croc in the marshlands to the south of saltmarsh, the croc did 60ish damage in one attack. We (everyone other than orynthia) said hey let's take a short rest after fighting a different giant croc up on a cliff, orynthia said nah, ima chill down by the water and after a failed DC 10 perception check that orynthia had proficiency in boom one shot and insta killed, all because orynthia refused for a to join us for a short rest, he was at 50% hp at the time, I have actually no idea why he refused to short rest with us. To the best of my knowledge, it had nothing to do with RP or backstory, he just didnt want to short rest.
So then he makes orynthia a way of the long death monk. His RP and backstory are "there," but for the most part I'm the only one doing the talking due to everyone else in the party electing me to be the face because I was the only person to read a page or two of the "living Greyhawk Gazetteer." TBH I don't care if were doing a RP heavy or combat heavy game, as we have played DoMM together with the same party, but this is the first time that he has done some wacky dumb stuff in a game. As his blood hunter, he rage quit a combat after missing 3 attacks in a row, leaving us without a chance of a tank or a dps, especially with his blood hunter doing an average of 15 damage a hit at lvl 3.
so to elaborate on the two encounters that I referenced, the first with the sahuagin was a random encounter and the next was a module encounter called salvage operation. In the first, there was a sahuagin baron, 7-10 sahuagin, and a sahuagin priestess, which shouldn't be too hard, definitely not easy. In the first turn, orynthia runs up a deck of a ship to and into the middle of the horde, I was next to move, but because orynthia was 10 in front of me at the start of the encounter and has an extra 10 feet of movement, I couldn't even get to the ladder to get on the same deck as orynthia, as well as the rest of the party weren't able to move that fast either. This was the first combat with the PC orynthia and orynthia didn't even go down, just went to a 1/4 hp. We as a party handled that fight fairly well all things considered, with a monk sprinting like that cop from cloudy with a chance of meatballs. The next encounter was the entire Salvage Operation boat encounter. Nobody even got close to getting down, let alone hurt until literally the last 2 rounds of combat for the whole encounter. As stated in the first post, He was double crit on accident due to the DM forgetting about underwater disadvantage from how tired all of us were, it wasn't even till 10 minutes later I remembered about the underwater disadvantage and told the DM to which we retcon'd it, as our session had gone over time by an hour and a half at that point. (Also a note at this point, our DM shows dice rolls if he crits, and we have seen 9 nat 20s in a row in one combat with this dm. To say he has an IRL lucky feat is an understatement.)
at this time, as our session begins at 6pm EST tonight, this player has gone down twice, once getting one shot, the next being on accident. I would like to add that I have not been doing my part as a secondary tank. I have been only moving up just barely in front of the ranged party members and not taking agro like I should. We are going to try out using my PC as a meat bag and our DM has offered us a Shield Guardian as a compromise too. I hope that this will work out in the end and I truly do appreciate yours and everyone else's advice, thank you for listening to my rant.
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Nitpick- dnd has tank, skirmisher, healer, blaster for it's roles, not the MMO ones. Tanks are dps too!
Fair enough. Not a huge fan of power gamers either, but I'm just honestly sick of people in the forums blaming a playstyle for everything they don't like, or using them to fear monger, or silly strawmen.
I mean, heck. Neither gunslingers nor long death monks are really meant to "main tank". The expectation that either should can lead to disatisfaction and burn out.
5e doesn't enforce roles, but playing a build in a way it's not meant to can be unsatisfying.
A lot of what people said is correct. Talk to the DM, other players, and decide if either you are not right for the table or the power gamer is.
In our current campaign, at 10th level now (started at 3rd level) we had a player switch characters as they were not having fun ( the original character was supposed to be for a one shot that turned into a campaign) And she worked with the DM how the new character was introduced. There was mild in-character trust issues just letting her in but quickly was overcome (we didn’t want to drag it out too much). So switching characters mid campaign is fine.
If the player wants to switch characters that’s fine. I believe the OP said he was last to pick a character so you really didn’t have a tank when the other players chose theirs. So his comments on sink or swim, although a bit rude, would have been where you were if he originally chose a squishy character.
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
What Lyxen said!
To add to his point, using my campaign game as an example, all my players have to write backstories for their characters. Real backstories, not some random table generated thing. I work with them on those backstories to ensure they fit within the campaign and the world. I then begin incorporating those backstories into the campaign by way of custom adventures tailored to each character in which their backstory plays out. It helps draw the player into the game world, becoming invested in it. That is important, from my perspective, as a writer. To have a player drop a character in mid stream because they can't make up their mind on what they want to play is disruptive to the continuity of the game and the campaign story. Not to mention wasting my time developing that backstory in the world in the first place.
What your problem sounds like to me is the player has very little understanding, experience with, or appreciation of what goes into a campaign game by a DM. They may be better off just playing Adventure League or one-off games on Twitch or the local hobby store.
Q: Is that indecisive SQUIRREL fairly young by chance? I know, I know, stereotyping. But its an analytical point nonetheless. :)
Husband, Father, Veteran, Gamer, DM, Player, and Friend | Author of the "World of Eirador" | http://world-guild.com
"The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules." ~Gary Gygax
If they rarely go down, they're arguably not tanking very well or the DM has the monsters act dumb.
Tanking in MMOs is a well defined role that comes with a slew of relevant mechanics and even then only really works properly if everyone else sticks to their role too. The tank pulls aggro, the healer heals the tank, the DPS kills without overtaking the tank's aggro. The tank can do damage too and can usually heal himself as well, but their main abilities let them pull aggro - they force the enemies to attack them and heavily reduce their effectiveness otherwise. In D&D 5E there are maybe half a dozen mechanics a "tank" can use in order to do the same thing, and compared to those they'd have MMOs they're pretty restricted: Sentinel requires getting to make an AoO in the first place and hitting with it, and it takes your reaction so it's limited to one target per round; Compelled Duel allows a Wis save and is a Concentration spell with a single target. Sentinel requires a feat, which makes it a pretty steep investment, and Compelled Duel requires two levels of Paladin. In short, it's not easy, cheap or convenient to get monsters to attack you rather than going after the other party members especially if you appear hard to hit and even harder to take down. Good tanks in D&D don't just soak attacks, they soak damage - because if they don't the enemy will choose to leave them alone and deal with the others first, since they're likely also doing stuff that pulls aggro (or they're dumb, in which case we're back to my above statement).
So new players who've done the WoW thing and start D&D likely have some preconceived notions about how things are supposed to work, and those notions are mostly wrong. D&D doesn't work like WoW and vice versa - tanks can't tank as well in D&D, and healers can't heal as well either (DPS and CC are comparable at least). That's the first expectation that they need to correct. The second expectation that they have to let go of is that everyone else is on the same page they are. In MMOs the roles are well-defined and everybody's expected to know what they are and what that means they're expected to do. In D&D, post-TSR D&D anyway, things are a lot less clear. Your class doesn't really define your role. Everybody can go DPS, certainly. With the exception of a couple specialist builds healers are really off-healers, because healing in combat is not efficient most of the time. Tanking, see above. New players need to find their place in the party and they'll find out that they're much more free in deciding what that place might be. They'll also see that where combat defines everything in MMOs, that is not the case in D&D. Characters can focus on social interactions, survival, exploration, or even just roleplaying and storytelling. And because of that freedom, you can't tell what another player's character's place in the party will be just from their race and class, and you can't assume they will have similar expectations of how the game will play out as you do just from looking at your character's race and class either.
This is why session zero can be so very important, particularly for new players or groups with people who haven't played together before. Expectations don't have to match perfectly, but the game is much more likely to go well if everybody's on the same page. And while things might still go well if different players have different ideas on how to play, it's much more likely to go badly if no attempts are made to compromise a little. Having power gamers, heavy roleplayers and I'm-just-here-to-have-some-fun-and-be-social players all in one group is not necessarily a problem, as long as everyone respects what everyone else is hoping to get out of playing D&D and puts in a bit of effort to accommodate parts of the session that focus on someone else's fun for a bit.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Or, you know, give them a chance to grow. ;)
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
To your first point I agree, though I’m my example you quoted, the player worked with the DM to extract the old character (which I didn’t mention) and how to introduce the new character (which I did mention). So working with the DM it was fine to switch characters mid campaign.
To your second point I agree. Depends on the table. For a heavy RP table it could be an issue, for others it might not. Part of the discussion in this thread is about wether the OP or the power gamer is right for the table. Or if the PG needs to be banned or the OP should leave. It depends on the table and the DM if it is an issue. I just don’t think, in most cases it is.
I could be wrong.
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
Of course, always! I've played in many an Adventure League game at the local hobby store. I've seen far more players like the one in the OP's situation then I cared too. May be a culture thing, age, the way they learned, and just pure inexperience. But I can say that the vast majority were young, under 23 probably. Not implying that was bad. Just a data point. I'm fairly sure though, that if a good, patient DM had time to spend with them, chances are they could be healed :)
Husband, Father, Veteran, Gamer, DM, Player, and Friend | Author of the "World of Eirador" | http://world-guild.com
"The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules." ~Gary Gygax
Regarding tanking in MMOs... let's all remember that the reason that tanking works at all is that the computer is controlling NPCs and those NPCs have a very small list of pre-defined actions they can take, and a very, exceedingly simple, algorithm to populate their "hate list" -- usually along the lines of, X "hate" per damage, Y "hate" per unit of taunt, and Z "hate" per healing done to another unit. MMO NPCs cannot do things like "focus fire on the caster" just because it is a caster, or "focus fire on the controller" just because it is a controller. The methods players come up to 'beat' the MMO, are based on trial-and-error tests with regard to how quickly you can generate "hate points" by doing something like healing, punching, or taunting. Players get an "inner clock" sense of how long the hate list takes to "decay" and "how much aggro" they can generate before the hate algorithm swaps targets to (or from) them.
None of this works in D&D, because the DM, who is a human being, is controlling the NPCs, so the DM can have those NPCs act logically, rationally, intelligently, based on what is going on in the battle at the moment, what the monsters would "know ahead of time" about the PCs (for instance, say they have started developing a reputation) and so on. Computer controlled opponents cannot do this.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I agree, everybody at the table has a responsibility to be respectful of each others interests and fun.
There are limits but if somebody just wants to kill stuff and not RP, that's ok. Let them kill stuff and leave the RP to other folk.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
My DM is the same, he likes working with me on my backstory so he can incorporate my character into the plot, this is a great way to get your players invested in the campaign, but every table is different, is this a heavy-roleplay immersive experience?, is this a tactical, more wargamey type of thing?, is it a beer-and-peanuts game where your just goofing around with your friends, killing goblins, going on quests, and just having a good time?, where you'll literally just have the new PC be the dead PC's brother or something, the OP could have been more detailed about what type of game this is, but idk.
Mystic v3 should be official, nuff said.
D&D tanking works a bit differently from MMO tanking. In MMOs, you can't threaten with AoEs, or protect people by standing in the way ofenemies or besides them with an aura and a shield, or even trip them up before they can get close / use Sentinel + Polearm.
D&D combat is similar to a tactical war game, where positioning and movement matter, whereas MMOs rely on other mechanics. Heck, MMO tanks are notorious for being bad at damage, whereas D&D tanks are some of the best damage dealers in the game, and being able to deal heavy damage is actually fundamentally important to their ability to tank / act as a meat shield.
The two mediums have different challenges for accomplishing the same goal - attracting attention of monsters to yourself and not your allies.
Ok, haven't checked this thread, cause life stuffs. Ima give a little more detail of the campaign.
It is a saltmarsh start at level 1. We started with a human fighter (me), a dwarf claric, two human rangers, and a human wizard (orynthia).
The Haunted house went well, all things considered, we almost went down after I the only tank at the time to a crit from one of the skeletons and a normal hit in the same turn bringing me down, then went down one of the rangers. However, we were the only ones to go down, and with us being level 1, it felt reasonable.
After this Orynthia, decided to make a blood hunter as a dps tank, did really well until he got stealthed double crit from a giant croc in the marshlands to the south of saltmarsh, the croc did 60ish damage in one attack. We (everyone other than orynthia) said hey let's take a short rest after fighting a different giant croc up on a cliff, orynthia said nah, ima chill down by the water and after a failed DC 10 perception check that orynthia had proficiency in boom one shot and insta killed, all because orynthia refused for a to join us for a short rest, he was at 50% hp at the time, I have actually no idea why he refused to short rest with us. To the best of my knowledge, it had nothing to do with RP or backstory, he just didnt want to short rest.
So then he makes orynthia a way of the long death monk. His RP and backstory are "there," but for the most part I'm the only one doing the talking due to everyone else in the party electing me to be the face because I was the only person to read a page or two of the "living Greyhawk Gazetteer." TBH I don't care if were doing a RP heavy or combat heavy game, as we have played DoMM together with the same party, but this is the first time that he has done some wacky dumb stuff in a game. As his blood hunter, he rage quit a combat after missing 3 attacks in a row, leaving us without a chance of a tank or a dps, especially with his blood hunter doing an average of 15 damage a hit at lvl 3.
so to elaborate on the two encounters that I referenced, the first with the sahuagin was a random encounter and the next was a module encounter called salvage operation. In the first, there was a sahuagin baron, 7-10 sahuagin, and a sahuagin priestess, which shouldn't be too hard, definitely not easy. In the first turn, orynthia runs up a deck of a ship to and into the middle of the horde, I was next to move, but because orynthia was 10 in front of me at the start of the encounter and has an extra 10 feet of movement, I couldn't even get to the ladder to get on the same deck as orynthia, as well as the rest of the party weren't able to move that fast either. This was the first combat with the PC orynthia and orynthia didn't even go down, just went to a 1/4 hp. We as a party handled that fight fairly well all things considered, with a monk sprinting like that cop from cloudy with a chance of meatballs. The next encounter was the entire Salvage Operation boat encounter. Nobody even got close to getting down, let alone hurt until literally the last 2 rounds of combat for the whole encounter. As stated in the first post, He was double crit on accident due to the DM forgetting about underwater disadvantage from how tired all of us were, it wasn't even till 10 minutes later I remembered about the underwater disadvantage and told the DM to which we retcon'd it, as our session had gone over time by an hour and a half at that point. (Also a note at this point, our DM shows dice rolls if he crits, and we have seen 9 nat 20s in a row in one combat with this dm. To say he has an IRL lucky feat is an understatement.)
at this time, as our session begins at 6pm EST tonight, this player has gone down twice, once getting one shot, the next being on accident. I would like to add that I have not been doing my part as a secondary tank. I have been only moving up just barely in front of the ranged party members and not taking agro like I should. We are going to try out using my PC as a meat bag and our DM has offered us a Shield Guardian as a compromise too. I hope that this will work out in the end and I truly do appreciate yours and everyone else's advice, thank you for listening to my rant.