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What follows is a super long post I wrote on and off over the course of my entire work day in which I muse on the importance of rules, exceptions in DMing, and story techniques in DMing. It is long, probably doesn't make shit for sense, and is likely full of contradictions or mistakes. Read at your own risk.



I should get a Roleplaying podcast or blog or something.

What I'm hoping is my DM stops with the railroading, in our campaign. xD I know he fudges rolls, but because he has no screen, I see that he does it every time I roll. So, in the end, I'm always outrolled, because his monsters have bonuses that are bigger than mine. So, even though a crit, he fudged to 18, but the bonus makes it a 21.

And I'm the only one in the group who plays with a certain character style. My character is easy to anger and very self-conscious about her appearance, which was why I have her wear a helmet or mask of some sort to hide her face. And despite her anger making her choices often very unwise, she has the second highest wisdom of the party (our mage has higher.). I joke about it, but my excuse is all of that wisdom is purely related to combat, which was why when we ran into this wyvern, who was being healed on our caravan trip (kind of hard to not railroad, when your quest makes you ride one) I had my character punch our robot companion who is too honest for his own good with the sign to shut up. >_> Excuse: Wyvern probably fought something much tougher than we did, and we got pretty roughed up from our fight.

I felt bad for my one friend, though. We passed through his homeland, and our DM gave us no opportunity to develop his character beyond a walking dick joke. We also passed through the homeland of my previous character, who's daughter is supposedly living there now, and we got no real link to our old campaign beyond our mage and the healer of our previous campaign being former lovers.

Oh, wow. That sucks. I think the most I've ever railroaded was, humorously, on a train. I panicked and... I messed up and railroaded. T_T Still, we had a few laughs when one of the characters tried jumping into hell after the motorcycle.

"You take 2 aggravated damage."
"Wait, from what?"
"From the hell fire."
"Oh..."

In my case, it felt like a fight for survival than some job our characters took up just to get to another town. The only reason we took th quest was because our wonderful tank can't make the whole trip without running out of gas. And as much as our DM hates me, he forgets that I use that Tank for party purposes--transportation and extra storage.

So, we wasted 2 of our 6 upgrades. He decided to give me six max, because "it's an old tank." You can't remove and replace them either--despite our robot being an engineering robot. =_= I mean, making our tank a bit more fuel efficient, or giving it more all-terrain abilities would help, but apparently my DM is so afraid that I'd turn my tank into an amphibious-rocket tank that could go to space. Admittedly, I would LOVE to do that, but over the course of several campaigns. xD

I mean, that tank is technically the oldest "party member" (it has it's own set of health) dating back to when we fought these goblins in our second session ever. Our DM bombed the first tank and nearly killed our knight's wolf (a wolf learned how to drive a tank, which was hilarious, because she could utilize everything while I just could drive it due to how I rolled). That and I am a bit attatched to that tank solely because it's been so reliable. XD If I must lose it, my DM better give me a replacement or make it up to me down the road.

Because the moment I told him that technically this tank belongs to my old character's daughter, he threatened to make her a trailer-park wife, the next time I mentioned her. OTL Seriously, our DM doesn't know how to make anything make sense. And when I call him out on it, it's because it's me. XD That's the excuse he has: "If you weren't here, I wouldn't do this to them." He's been ignoring all my attempts at getting "karma points" with him, by being helpful. XD On top of that, he seems to neglect the fact that without me, our party lacks a tank(this is a homebrew that needs a lot of work, because I'm level 9 with 450 HP, while most of my friends are around 200).

Things I've done for the party:



... Now for things I did last semester that were awesome, but won me no points with my DM (one had the guy playing his character giving me a look the whole session):

...You really need a better GM.

You should join us for Pathfinder. I can help you finish up that Cavalier if you haven't already.

My one friend, who has served as sort of a mentor to me (and my partner in crime in the campaign, because our characters are both usually Chaotic Neutral) confronted my DM once, when I got fed up and left to get a drink, when he refused to let me kill this boss by having him coup de grace me, when I was ON TOP OF HIM AND ABOUT TO POKE HIS EYES OUT. xD

Then one day, he called him out, while I was in the room. Basically, he said, "Either you can nerf Jake, or you can try to kill him. Don't do both." Because as of right now, everyone can stab themselves and heal themselves with their elemental swords, except for me with no real reason other than "it'd make me OP'd." xD I even presented my DM the math to prove that even if I crit, my most effective sword (dimension) would only heal me at the most 100 HP, which is nothing when he hits me. And there are monsters that are essentially Terrask-lites that he sends out to kill me specifically. Basically, my friend hit the nail on the hed when we talked about it. My DM has a grudge against me from my previous character becoming so strong.

That mirror we have from that samurai dude is our ace in the hole for when he does desperatation bullshit.

The good news of this all is that--either this is my DM trying to make me feel like an ass for being so broken and ruining his plans, or he really thinks I have it in me--when he graduates, our current DM is handing things over to me. And I actually have told him that I had a few storyline ideas ready. The one I like is our characters traveling the world to get stronger before the mother of magical storms hits--these storms are crazy and make you much stronger when it's just a small one. The preparation is because your characters will end up fighting a bunch of other adventurers to get to the heart of it to "Trancend."

I'd join the Pathfinder campaign, if I had more time. I'm just usually too burned out after work to feel like getting to work on that. I do definately need to join a real PnP though... D ; I'm thinking about asking that one friend of mine if he's going to start his campaign with his friends again.

@Starfe

I read that whole thing, very insightful!

My first time DMing, I got way too attached my imagined scenario. I wanted the players to look for the bandit's hideout in the woods, but they wanted to set up an elaborate ambush trap. I should have let them, but at the time I forced my hand and made them go exploring. I wouldn't make that same mistake again now that I know better.

Also I rolled like 4 critical hits last night and it was AWESOME.

Yeah, I read it too, Starfe and it's actually helping me take notes for how to conduct myself, when I finally do DM. xD I do like working on gameplay too and I've been working on sort of a battle system that focuses more on magic:

We have 2 races capable of using mage and one that's not, in exchange for being a tank (50% damage from magic/summon attacks). Summoning is the preferred form of combat in this world and it actually is beneficial to learn it, because your characters would have a line of defense in front of them.

Summons would have about 100 HP at the lowest, while beginning characters have 30 HP at the highest (Dwarf is the only one who can get that right at the start, if he crits his Stamina).

It's a work in progress and once that I'll probably work on and off as I learn more about PnP games.

So my friends and I started playing this made-up game based off Risk where there's a "GM" and you get different types of troops and some special ones if the GM approves them, and we draw our own map and have various rules and adventures. Then the GM and the gameboard are in another room and we take turns going in there to make our moves and build stuff and then if we are attacking the people fighting both come in the room. And some trickier things we roll a d6 for.

But they refuse to play DnD or Pathfinder.

It's still a ton of fun, but what's the difference? We're still 5 single guys playing a board game about making shit up, why not do it right?

1) Social stigma.
2) A LOT of prexisting material.
3) Co-operative instead of competitive.
4) People in the same room at the same time.
5) Obstensibly you role-play your character.

To be clear, that's differences, not reasons to not play DnD/Pathfinder.

It was rhetorical, I've played Pathfinder and stuff some. I just was complaining that ultimately neither is better or worse in any way and my friends are stupid.

That frustrating homebrew is going to start up tomorrow. xD And hopefully my DM will let me make the Bow fighting style for him, because I know I'll never get to it. I also have another religion based off Vecna's. I was a chaotic neutral Dread Necro in a short campaign earlier and my DM ended up giving me the Dagger of Denial and the Eye of Vecna by the end. So, I had a pretty nice impression of the religion.

So, the gist of this religion is that you have a child god who wants to learn absolutely everything about the world. However, his followers never know enough, in his eyes. One of the status effects in the game is stupidity, and this religion would offer immunity to various forms--complete immunity at the high levels-- of it, because everyone is stupid in the eyes of this god. xD

There are two sects that have different perks, but the one I'm going for has the tenants of: "Knowledge whatever the cost" and "Never reveal secrets, unless for personal gain of more knowledge."

So, that means there will be lots of skills and perks pertaining to gathering information, knowing all of a certain type of skill in a tier, and mastery of anything.

People of this sect are forbidden to teach others, unless their students have secrets equivalent in value to what they are being taught (if this is a spell, the person must teach a spell or skill that's the equivalent tier).

As for death, the problem is that I take advantage of how you can be Undead for 3 days, before truly dying. You lose 10 INT points for every day you are under Undead Blessing. This does not apply if you are an undead race.

Nothing special yet, but doesn't look bad.


Edit: Wood-elf rogue-thug sage/artisan/thug? acolyte actually looks sort of fun to play. I dunno.

So, chances are my friend might not be able to carry out the mission of his religion, but he and I came up with an incredibly awesome way for my character to "die" and fulfill both our characters' goals.

So, his character is a priest of this Wolf God, which was split into 4. Specifically, he's the god of the Eastern Wolf God. The ultimate goal of all 4 groups is to reunite the tribes and revive Lupine. This is where my character comes in. She is a human infected with Chimeraism. And the way it works in this campaign is that any raw meat I eat makes me take on the traits of what I ate.

So, you can guess where I'm going with this. My character's going to fight all four Wolf Gods and eat them. Though, this might put me in conflict with my friend's character, it would mean that the true wolf god would have a vessel. Given that this is the last hurrah for the old system, it'd be nice to see this happen at some point, for me.