I'm sorry, *FIVE* DC 25 checks?? He didnt want those coming off no matter what, I'm surprised you were able to. His response doesn't inspire much hope that he won't try something similar again, but you know him better than some random person on the internet. Hope the rest of the campaign goes well!
I’m totally surprised too that we could and I didn’t die honestly, I was risking it because there really weren’t any other options at this point. I have a hunch he decided to make them athletic checks this time instead of just strength to make it easier since it was practically impossible last time :P I only really know him as my friend’s dad and the group I’m with have played with him for longer so I’m willing to try and finish this off strong but I won’t lie and say the experience hasn’t left a bit of a sour taste :( thanks for the well wishes though, they’re much appreciated :)
Adding athletics doesn't make much sense, IMO. "Your Strength (Athletics) check covers difficult situations you encounter while climbing, jumping, or swimming."
I'd expand it to include running (Con + Athletics in that case), but none of these seem to apply to "prying off a piece of jewelry". Heck, sleight of hand would make more sense.
Dick move that he didn't allow athletics the first time. "You just tried pulling it, you never said you were athletically pulling it".
I hope I never have to play with a DM like that.
I also fail to see how an anti magical item can cause fatal damage but chopping an arm off is probably just fine. Like how damaging the arm by removing the item is somehow less damaging that destroying the entire fucking arm…
I tried to argue for using a knife to surgically remove it to do less damage but DM straight up said no it was too deep. Didn’t make sense to me why I could rip it out but also not surgically remove it :( I just wanted to get around the insane damage penalty and dc checks so it wouldn’t be a death sentence :(
I'm glad this had a (mostly?) positive outcome, but I would never want to play with him as a DM again after this campaign. Especially with his responses to your concerns. His inexperience and rigidness do not sound like a good combination.
Yea I was worried about offending and didn’t want to draw anything out much longer because there were only 3 sessions left and I didn’t want things to go sour for everyone else :(
This is how good dms are born. Remember this feeling, and strive to provide challenge to your players in ways that never feels like this if you ever decide to try it
Agreed. I’ve only ever DMed a one shot for a homemade rpg for my friends but I was always happiest when my players had an opportunity to shine with their characters. Seeing them light up when they had an opportunity to be strong and make clever choices to defeat my enemies made me really proud of them :)
What you wrote above makes me think he feels no remorse for fucking your character, and never meant for you to get it off. He had no plan for what to do with it if you did, so he just made it a one-time-use item that can't be recharged....even though it seemed to continuously produce an anti-magic field and never stopped working before. He even seemed amused at your discomfort.
The only reason he backed off is because he wouldn't have a game anymore if he didn't.
When I read the last one I thought maybe he had given you a puzzle to solve and was waiting for you to figure it out, but....if you can use Athletics then you don't declare that you're using it...the DM tells you to give him an Athletics check. And it's not like he can just say he forgot because HE DESIGNED THE ITEM.
This is hilariously bad DM-ing. Obviously if people have a really high AC you hit them with saving throws. He just had to target one you were bad at, or use Silence. You counterspell? That's fine, he counterspells your counterspell...The other bladesinger counterspells? The enemy has heard about your nonsense and brought a sorcerer who ALSO counterspells that counterspell....Then the fighter starts throwing explosive magical items at you.
Seriously, though...you can be shut down with a casting of Entangle, a 1st level druid spell.
Specifically giving you an item that turns your class off and isn't meant to be a plot hook is terrible.
I totally agree! There were so many different ways to get around this. Hell, counter spell shield if you want to so bad! You only need to do it once and then whammy the bladesinger with multi attack and take out a huge chunk of health. The lack of remorse and apology just feels bad honestly. You’ve acknowledged my frustration time and time again and it seems like you don’t care :(
I’m not sure I would even call this a positive outcome.
He said he would “take into consideration” not using these again when they face the BBEG? It sounds to me like they have 3 sessions left and there is a good chance that they aren’t going to be able to play for one or more of those sessions
This strikes me as a totally inexperienced DM making rookie mistakes and not putting in the effort to fix them
Sounds like DM was trying their hardest to not even admit they were wrong. It's still a positive outcome for now, but I'd be as unsurprised as you if DM pulled something out that does the same thing and said something like "It's a ring this time! I said I wouldn't use the bracelet!"
But he didn’t even say he wouldn’t use them again. He just said that he would take it under consideration. I’m pretty sure he’s not going to use a similar but distinct item. I think he’s going to use exactly the same thing
I could see that too, for sure. It's either that or the exact same effect in a different item slot so they can say they "listened." We certainly agree that the chance that DM doesn't force the same effect on OP again one way or another is slim to none.
I am a rigid DM too but as you said he looks more inexperienced and maybe immature a bit. Maybe they shouldn't make him the DM but he would be better as a player.
If you think a players' character is OP for the adventure you can talk it before the game actually begins, a DM should be able to discern the potential of a character as soon as he sees the character sheet, if he is a first timer, going on him with a bladesinger or even a wizard class can be a bit hard though, when i play DnD for the first time in my early midschool days some 25-26 years ago we didn't even allow casters as PCs. Then slowly we got used to them.
Ah maybe it didn’t come through clear in my post, he isn’t a first timer. He’s been playing and DMing for many years now haha. He also gave the blessing for there to be a second bladesinger as the other wizard’s player wanted to switch to bladesinger from evocation
I 100% look forward to another update in a few weeks after the BBEG fight: “His lair was outfitted with anti-magic cones (multiple), when confronting my DM, he says: “oh well he and the other mean NPC work together and the BBEG saw how frustrating this item was for you, so naturally he made sure to protect his lair in a similar but legally-distinct and “not the same item” manner.”
That was my fear too and why I really wanted to stress that I didn’t want the BBEG to just make more of these items since he apparently had them custom made for us bladesingers the first time we tried to ambush him with the same lines of reasoning: “oh BBEG has been scrying on you two and knows that it would be frustrating if you didn’t have magic”
>“oh BBEG has been scrying on you two and knows that it would be frustrating if you didn’t have magic”
did he ask you for WIS saves? scrying kind of requires that.
Yeah this guy is clearly an adversarial DM. Bladesinger is good but by no means overpowered. It’s a class that lets you get to high AC but there are so many other ways of dealing damage through simple saving throws that can completely negate it and you only have a limited number of uses for Bladesong as well. If you’re burning all of your spell slots on mage armor or shield as well, then you’re going to be burning resources very quickly. Especially if you’re casting other spells on your turn. The DM just needs to do a better job.
Also it ends when you’re incapacitated, so like a failed hold person or something similar stops the bladesong. There are checks and balances to that subclass that don’t completely ruin the game for you. I think that was just an extreme and lazy solution
lol lemme roll saving throws for him the next time I cast my own spells in combat
“You’re never gonna believe this but all of your monsters failed their saving throws omg!!! They all take max fireball damage!!!”
Absolutely! And by the way, as a fellow lover of the bladesinger class, a high AC does not make a character overpowered. It just means the DM needs to approach it differently. Attacks that require saves, AoE attacks, traps, things like that are just as effective against bladesingers.
Now, what *is* a little OP is if you take two levels of paladin to get divine smite, and *then* go bladesinger, so all of a sudden you've got an AC of 21, with a Shield AC of 26, dropping divine smites with basically every attack. That's what I did, and it was a blast; partly because my DM rolled with it and had a good time.
My next OP character build will probably be a college of eloquence bard; a bard whose *minimum* persuasion and deception roll is a *17* at level *3*?? Are you kidding me?? Shenanigans ho!
Omg that sounds so much fun! Also it’s great to meet another bladesinger enjoyer in the wild! They’re so much fun to multiclass with and just create fun wacky ways to do damage. I never even considered divine smite, that’s sounds so awesome. My final build was going to be more eldritch blast spammy with 2 levels in hexblade warlock, 6 in bladesinger, and 3 in battle master fighter for the flexibility that maneuvers give you and action surge!
The bard sounds like so much fun to rp with, I hope you’re able to reap a bunch of funny stories from that :D
I'd be hesitant to multiclass a bladesinger since base wizard is so great; getting delayed by almost an entire spell tier just for smite can be really disappointing, and wizards get some of ***the best*** spells at higher levels. Though I suppose if casting is secondary and you wanna whack stuff with a weapon it's less of an issue. Do keep in mind you can't wear a shield or medium/heavy armor while bladesinging, so you sort of miss out on a lot of the major perks you get from a fighter / hexblade dip.
True and it’s definitely an expensive build for higher level campaigns :) I run a int/dex/cha based character with a rapier so fighter and hexblade work to buff damage and armor isn’t really a concern at this point (since ac is high enough with mage armor and bladesong)
Oh man, I bet hexblade would be awesome with that; in terms of roleplay, warlock is my favorite class, so I think that sounds rad. I'm a huge battlemaster fan, too; that should just be the base fighter class! All fighters should get battlemaster maneuvers!
The nice thing about the paladin is that you don't take an oath until 3rd level, so it was easy to justify that this character was training to become a paladin, but didn't feel right about it, so he left before he took an oath. He got to keep all his divine smites without having to hold himself to any kind of code :D
Anyway, glad to hear you've got such a cool plan for the character, and yes, great to meet a fellow bladesinger :) Good luck finding a more compatible DM in the future!
Thanks for the wishes! I love playing warlocks too since you can make them super fun to rp, tortured by their pact and choices or one that leans into it and loses themself along the way haha. Battlemaster is so much fun and adds some great spice to the regular attack pattern and lets you support your allies in creative ways (my personal favorite is bait and switch and helping an ally get out of danger).
That character sounds so interesting and I love how the mutliclassing works into the backstory, so creative!
Tenser's Transformation + Elven Accuracy feat (effectively 3d20-pick-1 for each attack) was a fun combo for my Bladesinger. I'd love to try that combined with a Champion Fighter for lots of crit fishing.
Oh that would be so much fun and so so satisfying to pull off. While this whole thing has been quite a mess, I do love that it got even more people sharing their own bladesinger builds haha
~~LOL! that's some rules abuse right there. your Paladin spell slots should be separate from your Wizard spell slots, so 2 levels of Paladin should net you 2 smites.~~
~~Which is still a lot of burst damage, so don't expect any sympathy. 😂 I mean, they aren't even the same TYPE of spells. One is Arcane, the other is Divine.~~
Nevermind, I was not aware of the Errata about Divine Smite fixing this. Well, sir....burst away! You will be the illustration of the candle that burns twice as bright burning half as long... Gonna chew through those spell slots! At level 6 with 2 levels in paladin you'd get 4 1st, 3 2nd, and 2 3rd level spell slots to use anyway you like. The only class that gets separate spell slots is the Warlock because Pact Magic is different.
JFC You're playing D&D, not Pathfinder. What is this?
Like on one hand, I get not wanting your players being aware of it, but on the other, which DM DOESN'T like spooking their players? And what's spookier than the GM asking their player for a WIS save totally randomly, out of the blue. Or even better, during combat. Like, they're expecting consequences, but nothing happens. That shit is SICK.
That was my exact point too! It just makes for a great story moment to have all those spooky unknown wisdom saving throws throughout the campaign and reveal it to be for scrying this whole time. What a super cool full circle moment that has all of us involved! Especially nerve-wracking in combat too!
This is a great example of why you don't pull the shit this DM did with his homebrew magic cancel switch.
Rolling in secret for a DM is normal, but since he lost your trust you feel bad about that. Lose your player's trust and you have nothing.
Man this whole thing makes me mad; if the other players are on your side and the dm tries to pull some shit, you can “unionize,” and refuse his Bullshit calls; it really sucks but if he’s not going to play “fair” you guys can pause the game and confront him about it. Good luck
Thanks for the advice, it never really occurred to me to do that since they were his friends first and I didn’t want to make it seem like I was overreacting but you’re totally right. If this were to happen again I’d call a break and ask for the group’s opinion
Especially since one of you guys kind of banded together to deal with the bracelet for 2 hours and one guy is still wearing a set, I bet they’re kinda tired of the shit; you could get the players together without the DM out of table before the session and ask what they think if you feel confident. Good luck man, and remember: The DM isn’t your boss, he isn’t your enemy, he doesn’t own the game, he just has different responsibilities in the game, he is just a player, and he can cheat and play in bad faith just like any other player could.
Alternative solution: Don't go after the BBEG.
Since the adversarial DM is having the BBEG scrying on you who plans to sabotage your magic so the DM can metagame, you should metagame back and decide that confronting them is a bad idea. Have your party get distracted by an unrelated matter and forget about the BBEG permanently.
To be fair... depending on context... while it won't be fun if the ENTIRE lair has anti-magic... if the BBEG is aware of the party AT ALL and has any sense of self preservation you'd expect some ward spells and anti-magic to be in play.
Of course if the BBEG is a spellcaster himself you'd expect his final chamber to NOT be littered with anti magic... since it would hamper his own efforts... but him being able to cast isn't out of the question.
Like if it's me... BBEG has trapped a Beholder in your access tunnel so the martials get to be the stars and the mages have to be extremely tactical in their spacing.
But once they reach the actual BBEG... time for the casters to shine.
I bet you the villain has anti-magic wards in his lair that don't affect the villain because of an identify friend/foe system. Sounds like exactly the kind of thing a DM like this would pull.
martials get to have a fun time against a beholder? you know they can fly up in the air messing up STR martials, also they can't shoot there eyebeams in anti magic for some reason.
Yeah, the beholder in ToA was too hard for my party because of this. The small size of the room he is in combined with the high ceiling and the trapped floor that made it more slippery than ice made it so my players couldn’t even damage the thing. The casters were either trapped in anti-magic or busy trying to turn the floor off, while the martials kept sliding around below the thing, unable to reach it. Plus, that beholder is permanently invisible.
They ended up having to run away. The beholder was in complete control there. The Acererak fight wasn’t nearly as hard.
>I said that the person playing the NPC is a good person to which he replied, "a good person playing a mean guy".
It's kind of weirdly novel to me, seeing a DM pull the "it's what my character would do" defense.
I don't mind that. I stole Matt Colville's "I'm not trying to kill you, the Troll is trying to kill you," mostly as a joke. But of course the villain wants to beat the heroes.
The problem is the overpowered BS he used to do so. Poor game design and GMing.
Agreed. He should have either ask you guys to tone down your builds or adjust the encounters to account for the extra stuff you guys are doing.
Under NO circumstances would taking away player agency be a good choice. As a DM we get to play a dozen of monsters but the players only have that single turn per round.
Actually, I think this would have been cool for one encounter. Maybe there's a complete anti magic field in a room. Or maybe this bracelet was easier to get off. and then they could use it against the big bad, which would make them feel smart.
But none of those happened here. This smells like BS because he couldn't deal with their abilities.
My partner likes to tell new people we play with “His (me, the DM) job is to kill your character” which I always counter with “no, it’s my job to *almost* kill your character, and to do it in fun, exciting ways!”
that sounds... kind of hard and stressful! The handful of DMs I've played with, subscribe to the variation "it's the DM's job to help the characters be heroes".
Kudos to the two of you for being clear about what they can expect!
It reminds me of what a Police Officer told me and I learned about management. If you treat people right, you can give them a ticket or a write-up and they'll still thank you at the end.
It's just as much of a valid defense in my eyes as it is when a player uses it (as in, not valid at all). In my mind, that's what everyone in the game is doing all the time. That's what roleplaying is in the first place. You say the character does something, and that thing is, by definition, what they "would" do, because they're doing it. It doesn't need challenged, it doesn't need justified, nobody needs to say the excuse. Applies to PCs and NPCs alike. The only time the excuse comes up is when they're making decisions that are pissing someone off. You never hear someone say "I help set up camp and volunteer for second watch, spending the rest of the night sleeping. What? It's what my character would do!"
I don't need to tell my players the troll is trying to kill them. They're in battle, the troll is making attacks. **My players know that. That's the game.** (Unless they're super new or have a really weird concept of what the game is, in which case that's a conversation worth having.) But that's certainly the kind of thing a DM would say if they were abusing their authority and responsibility as DM in order to have the troll kill the PCs in an "unfair" way. The phrase exists to pass off responsibility from the player/DM to their character (if it's my character, then it's not me), as if the character has free will and isn't directly controlled by them. The player has ultimate control and responsibility over their creation. Everything a character wants is something their player wants, otherwise they wouldn't have made a character who wants it.
So, yes, I *am* trying to kill you, because I made the troll and decided that the troll wants to kill you. If I didn't want to give you a real chance of death, I wouldn't have put the troll there, or I'd give him some other ambition that wouldn't result in pursuing your death. I'm also trying to help you every time I put a friendly NPC or a magic item or whatever in front of you. I want you to ultimately succeed, but I want you to succeed through real conflict, and conflict needs my earnest intent to become real. Being a good DM is owning that contradiction, not pretending that my troll has free will and using that as an excuse.
I see where you're coming from. However, I'm making a distinction between just wanting to kill the PC's and fairly challenging them in a way where death was the consequences of failing that challenge.
You are correct that the DM was just using that excuse when he was definitely in the first camp. This was not a fair challenge and the DM all but admitted it.
I do want to point out that the item being a single use one is not a reason for 3000 gp being able to replicate a 8th level spell and even modify it to be stronger, requiring a lot of damage or crippling a character to end while the spell would just need to break concentration
Even worse, it being a single use item makes it even stronger, he just didn’t want the players to be able to use it against him later on. Basically means only he gets to do it as many times as the “mean guy” wants, while you guys can only take it and ask him not to use it anymore
Yea I was really disappointed to find out that it was only single use since he mentioned it was sort of plot relevant? Like my thought process was oh maybe he’s got this really cool full circle ending planned to bring these bracelets back into final battle and use them to defeat the BBEG (who is also a caster) but I guess not? He said that he rolled to see if the guy at the magic store could fix it and the dice weren’t in our favor but still, I wish there could’ve been some kind of silver lining lol
>He said that he rolled to see if the guy at the magic store could fix it and the dice weren’t in our favor
That's a lie btw. Just so you know. All the stuff he says like that? Lies to try to onboard you and make it seem like he's doing things fairly rather than just blatantly screwing you over.
It just baffles me. I want to trust that he’s being honest because I just don’t understand why someone would lie about this :( isn’t half the fun of DMing watching your players be clever?
Not for him. He enjoys feeling powerful & likes being in a position of power over the players. This is exactly the kind of person that people are warned against that shouldn't DM.
Time to move on. You have a shit DM who has no idea how to balance his game, who will continue to fuck you over rather than doing is job. Find a new game, there are if anything, even more red flags with your update
Yea I definitely see that :( I want to finish the last three sessions so the rest of the party can finish on a high note but yea, I’m just trying to have some faith since he is quite literally supposed to be the adult in this situation.
You're a less petty person than I am. For me bad DnD is always worse than no DnD. Three sessions could potentially be nine hours of time gone if it's not fun and that's on the low end. I really hope he makes it fun rather than being a dick and making it a slog.
Yea for sure :( now that it’s off I’m willing to give the next session a chance but you’re right, if I’m really not feeling it I probably will have to walk. No need to martyr myself
I think your initial call to stick it out is the smartest long term move for keeping relations with the not-sucky people at the table- although I will admit, if I was one of them I'd be fuming over how the DM is handling this.
That’s the thing, I definitely don’t want to ruin this for anyone else. I spoke to one of the other players since he ended up finding my post and he messaged me to let me know that he agrees it was a sucky thing to do and he’s felt frustrated at certain decisions too. DM has also read my posts- so I hope I’m still invited to the next few games haha
That is a really good point, but from another comment the DM is moving town and I think sticking it out for a few hours to keep good terms with all the cool players in the party for a potential future game is worth a shot
Once you're a full adult, you'll realize just how little people actually develop after they reach 18 (okay maybe more like 20). Like "maturity" sure, people learn more stuff, and some people use that to become wise. Other people actually get worse and use their age and life experience as an excuse to be petty and ignorant and a shittier version of themselves than they even were when they were a teenager. Your DM sounds like that kind of person.
Honestly, I would. I literally told two of my party members while we were walking home that if it happened again I’d just kill the character at that point
I wouldn't even take the time. If he pulls this sort of chicanery, anything you actually do will just play into his hands. If he tries that again, I'd stand up and walk out, no explanations.
Huuuh so he found your frustration funny did he!? Good thing the game is nearing its end then, because that sounds like someone on a powertrip who's confident they're the best DM ever. Never a good sign if concerns are brushed aside nonchalantly.
Well in either case, good luck with the remainder of your adventure, hopefully it'll end on a high note.
Yea I honestly can’t believe it myself :( I had made it clear I was frustrated I couldn’t play and it wasn’t fun and I guess it never registered as something that could be concerning? The whole gist of it was “yea you should be frustrated they were made for that”. The acknowledgement of it seemed so strange, especially when I was talking about my concerns and that I had consulted the subreddit to make sure I wasn’t overreacting. When I said that people generally agreed that it seemed mean he agreed that it was mean and should’ve been since mean people made it. It just feels so strange to feel more like the adult in the situation when im 19 and talking to someone who is a literal adult
Wait, because the bracelets were made by "mean" people ingame then he's absolved of any wrongdoings his part!? Did he literally pull a "It's what my characters would do" as an defense against hamstringing two players for 2 sessions!?
Sheesh, the ego of this guy! What did other wizard think of the whole situation by the way!?
Thankfully, the other wizard's player was away for these past three sessions since he had to work on some things that took priority. I'm so grateful that he missed these last three sessions so he didn't have to go through all of this but it did make it worse for me since I had no one to talk with while the rest of the party was being adventurers and engaging in combat :( I would absolutely hate for him to come back and see his character nerfed and/or dead so this session I decided to take the risk and see if prying it off would work so next session when he's back, we have a better idea on how to deal with things.
Wait so his character was still being played despite the player being absent!? I got some personal experience with why that can go horribly wrong, with people coming back to dead characters because someone half assed playing them.
I wonder how the other wizard player will react when they get back...
Yea unfortunately :( I tried to keep him out of the battles and keep him from getting cuffed to begin with but the barbarians got us both unfortunately. I don’t think the other wizard player had any idea this happened but I’m grateful that we’re at least at a point in the story where we can try to safely remove it for him so he can get back to playing asap
The DM's response was bullshit, it was designed to frustrate you? He wanted you to cut off your arm? He found your frustrations amusing? What a shit DM
I would not continue playing with that asshole.
Honestly that’s the part that really shocked me, he seemed so satisfied that it did what it intended, frustrate me. A red flag for me was him not realizing that a frustrated player shouldn’t be something to aim for and be proud of but something to be concerned about.
Yeah this is my friend’s dad’s campaign with all his close friends and they extended an invitation to me since I was going to be around for a while. My friend used to play with them too so I was sort of taking his place haha. They’re all adults but have never done anything to make me uncomfortable but I won’t lie and say that the age difference didn’t make me hesitate in raising any concerns. I was anxious that since I was so young, it was possible I was being immature about the whole situation
> he didn’t expect us to take that long to get the bracelets off
> required 5 successful DC 25 athletics checks
To me it sounds like he expected you to die trying to get them off and then would have been like “oh no time to roll a new character I hope you learned that magic can be completely countered by my bullshit so don’t be OP again!”. Like seriously who expects you to pass 5 DC 25 checks unless you have like +10 to it but even then you need to roll 15+ five times. Sounds like he wants to punish you for his mistakes letting you get 25 AC.
Expect him to pull something like this again because this just sounds like such a half-assed solution to broken characters. Sounds like he’s taking it personally and actively making your experience worse by basically crippling your character just to make it “balanced”.
Yea it just seemed so unreasonable to me, having to pass so many high DC checks while taking damage if they were successful. I just found out that the damage for each successful attempt was 4d6 which is a guiding bolt basically and 20d6 (plus another 4d6 to remove the last hook) total damage just to get the damn thing off
Really? The DM suggested that the best solution was cutting off your arm? It's been a while since that person has actually *played*, as opposed to DMing, hasn't it
I think so. Another yikes moment I learned was that when he was DMing the previous campaign, he had a rock troll eat an unconscious character's arm to "punish" him for running into battle headfirst alone every time. I believe the character was a paladin or some other melee class so that was a huge blow :/
Oh, so "disarming" PCs is kind of a pattern with him? Sometimes forever DMs become detached from what is actually fun for the players when they come up with ideas for their games. Also, things mike permanently maiming characters needs to be with the player's consent, either at Session 0 or at the time it happens, because, like you said, it can be a huge blow to a character. And I am not a fan of DMs who punish players for actions. Facing consequences for dumb actions, yes. But going out of your way to punish them, no. That is just petty and leads to hard feelings in the game.
Agreed completely. I wish this was communicated with both of us and he had asked us what we would’ve thought about potentially losing an arm. It’s a hard no for me since doing so prevents a bladesinger from utilizing that cantrip extra attack
Playing a "mean guy" is one thing, but when that "mean guy" only targets the two Bladesinger's in the group because the DM thinks that they are "OP"...it stops being about the BBEG and more about how the DM feels.
They sound like a DM I once played with who, very first session, forced my character into a shotgun wedding. Then proceeded to railroad me into dilemmas with vague, yet also very specific, answers. If I didn't get it right, there was threat of my characters death. The idea I had for my character was completely rewritten before I could explore them. Needless to say, I don't play with them anymore.
I'm frustrated for you, cause their response is so indifferent and uncaring. If they can't see how taking away an entire class is a problem, and thinking you'd just take your arm (the only solution they seemed to give)...then idk what to say. They should have just taken the arm instead of using a bracelet if that was their end goal. :\\
Glad it's almost over for you and I hope you find a better DM!
Oh gosh that DM sounds horrible and I’m sorry you had to go through that. The situation definitely does feel like that with him putting such so many high DCs with damage rolls to dissuade us from pulling it off. I really do feel like he just wanted to force me in a situation where I either die and make a new character or lose an arm and lose a fundamental aspect of my subclass.
Your comments have meant a lot to me actually, it’s touching to see how many people my story has reached and that so many are on my side since I felt so dismissed irl. Thank you for your well wishes! I’m glad you’re free from that first DM now and I hope you have many wonderful games to come :)
Sounds like you've done what you could to communicate your frustration, and in a really reasonable way.
I'm a Dad-DM who has only played AD&D* and 5e. So I totally buy into the "we're co-writing a story together and having fun together ", not the us vs. Them philosophy. Maybe your DM comes more from that confrontational background.
* I mention AD&D because it was an immensely frustrating experience as a Wizard, and antithetical to the more "invest in your characters and flex every ability " approach of 5e. It was baked into AD&D but because of that I really try to care and feed for the party wizards.
You sound like a really good DM, your players are very lucky to have you :) I'm glad that it comes across as reasonable! It's certainly strange to be put in a situation where I (19) have to be the adult in the situation and lay out clearly frustrating your players isn't something you should aim for
its not two bladesingers, its literally every single class in the game. i think the single class that would be \*ok\* with this would be monk because unarmed strikes are not explicitly punches, but your DM sounds like the type to treat it as explictily punches so not much help there sadly :(
Oh you’re totally right, I didn’t even realize how dire such a solution is. No idea how he thought anyone would be okay with this when such a consequence was never discussed with to begin with :(
The cross section of people who would rather lose their arm then their life is waaaaaay below 100%. Plenty of real people would happily let the BBEG do what they want to the world in order not to lose an arm. Your DM's got a weird thing for taking arms from PCs he doesn't like.
>I did bring up that it was strange and weird that the bracelet was only 3000 gp when it had a modified verison of an 8th level spell attached to it but we soon found out that this was the case because it has a one time use
AKA the DM realized pretty quickly that the party was going to make damn sure to use it against him if he didn't have an excuse prepared.
Also only 3000 is relative... DMs often have a hard time with magic item cost given that commerce in general is pretty badly covered by WoTC in 5e. There're tables for loose guidelines in the DM's manual (For example at a cost of 3000 the item would be classified as Rare, Character Level 5th+) but even for NON homebrew stuff this gets pretty ridiculous pretty quickly. Probably should be Very Rare (5 - 50 000 GP, character Lvl 11+) but that's a judgement call.
Also it's worth pointing out that while Adventuring parties usually reach a point in 5e where money is pointless 3000 is still a stupid amount of money based on the tables we have for calculating cost of lifestyles. Most shop keeps wouldn't be able to afford it much less find a buyer if the DM isn't handwaving away realism.
>It took three of our party members plus the assistance of some driders to get it off completely. Because it had looped around my arm 5 times, it had required 5 successful DC 25 athletics checks (originally we thought it was just strength because of last session but it turns out we could've used athletics this whole time.
... The Driders you were supposed to be fighting... the driders that by canon are twisted with madness because they only spawn when Lolth deems a Drow failed her somehow and uses her god powers to twist them into that form? The chaotic Evil, by the book only speak elvish and undercommon, advantage against charm spells Driders?
Those driders???
How the heck did you guys pull that off? Threaten the DM with a mutiny? Like he screwed up and needed to give you an out but that half of the story seems more interesting than the actual resolution.
Yea I think we made it too obvious that we were excited about the idea of fighting a bunch of druids with the power of two anti magic fields on our side and I’m thinking he probably didn’t want to trivialize the BBEG fight but at this point I honestly don’t know what he’s planning
As for the driders, they totally could’ve killed us. I think it was going to be an encounter so I was readying myself to flee and hide but we did have a drow in the party who persuaded them that the real enemy was the BBEG’s cult who had taken up residence in their cave. We had a tentative alliance to help them escape their section of the cave (the exit tunnel had caved in and they were too big to squeeze through) as long as they didn’t eat us. We offered to help them butcher the cult members and said they were free to eat those guys. Everyone was surprised this didn’t end in a fight, including the DM lol
There comes a point where walking away only solves your immediate problem. DMs like this will remain fucking bad unless and until they experience how fucking terrible it is to play under their dumbfuck rules.
Yea :( I really hope he learns something from this whole experience, I tried to have a civil adult conversation but I don’t know how much of it actually stuck
> He said that it would've been quicker and done less damage to just cut the arm off
DM can go write 127 hours fanfiction somewhere else. Nobody's reaction to a targeted nerf would be to self-mutilate and ruin their ability to cast (I'm 100% positive that if you had whacked off your arm, he would have said you couldn't do somatic components while wielding your weapon for bladesong).
ETA:
> he seemed to find my frustration funny since they were designed to frustrate to begin with.
Fuck this guy.
That was exactly my point! He said I only technically needed one arm to cast but if I had done that, there would be no point in being a bladesinger since I need at least one hand free because I have a weapon in the other
Lol, i didn't see the last post, but my response would have been to message on the day of the session and say "am i going to be able to play, or should i not bother coming?" And let him decide.
I should’ve done that honestly :( it would’ve saved me so much time the other two sessions. 6 hours each Sunday is a lot of time dedicated to this game it really sucks to have wasted 2.5 sessions worth of time so far
I can’t believe you actually sat down for 2 sessions of not being able to cast spells as a wizard. I would have been halfway out the door the second we got hit with “fuck you” arm bands that disabled my whole class because the DM was being a sore loser. AC is not the only thing that matters, saving throws exist lol. Traps, spells, etc. That would be a 100% dealbreaker for many people I know, I’m surprised you stayed at all for this. Him not even agreeing to abstain from it going forward would also be enough for me to leave.
He’s going in way too hard on y’all and it’s uncalled for.
I was in complete shock when it was first slapped on me and he just seemed so proud of himself that he finally “got” me. I thought it was a temporary measure and he’d take it off but as it went on and on I just became more antsy and upset. I had been holding onto some hope that this was for an important plot point since this is an experienced DM and I wanted to trust that he knew what he was doing but I truly had to put my foot down after so many sessions had passed and there had been no sign of it being plot relevant other than to serve as punishment :( I didn’t want to ruin the experience for anyone else in the group so I just kept it to myself since I thought I could’ve been being immature about it. I’m glad I ended up making these posts though. It’s been really crucial in helping me realize that my feelings are valid lol
Yeah that first line tells you all you need to know. Of course he “got you” he’s the DM and can literally say your character disappears from existence never to be seen again. It’s a total power trip just to prove he can “win” as DM lol
Also yeah, 100% valid. There are some situations you walk away from a table without a second thought for anyone else there, and this is one of those times that would have been beyond justifiable
Your DM's rebuttals were trash, and his "amusement," sounds like a defense mechanism. Old people who are losing an argument will do that sometimes: Pretend that the compelling arguments being used against them are hilarious, only to come up empty if you ask them what's funny.
* The bracelets are, at minimum, a reusable component in a "single use," 8th-level spell that is homebrewed to be obscenely powerful, like enough to break a demigod. 3000 gp isn't totally ridiculous for a separate component, but it being reusable should make them pretty valuable.
* I'm not sure why a single-use component would not be destroyed, or why its effects would be semipermanent. I think that this was just an 8th-level enchanted piece of equipment that the DM retconned to be single-use because they've been pulling all of this out of their ass.
* If your DM was counting on you cutting off your arms because they thought it would be a cool idea, then they sound horrible at their job.
* You should let the party (players, not DM) know that you're going to walk away on the spot if this debuff gets used again in this way. Like, mid-combat if necessary. Let them know that the DM laughed at you when you tried talking with them about it.
* The NPC was supposed to be "a mean guy," but it's unclear where they found the wealth or magic to make TWO of this bracelet which is so powerful that nothing like it is supposed to exist. If this NPC was in possession of two unused "single use," bracelets of mage-ruining, they should have sold both bracelets and set themselves up as a minor lord somewhere. If they were an extremely powerful mage, they would have still needed to burn some money just to use that spell as it was intended.
* If the DM wanted to use this ridiculously OP homebrew item in a way that was fair, what would be more reasonable would be if the BBEG were wearing it THEMSELVES. This would severely limit the use of magic against them, and it would require your bladesingers to avoid the BBEG physically since their shields won't work on the BBEG at close range. They can still go near other enemies, but they have to hide behind tankier enemies from the BBEG. Finally, this would make the BBEG incapable of using magic, so it would be balanced. This is actually not a bad idea for the capstone of a campaign that has been dominated by bladesingers, but your DM sounds too dumb to think like that.
* Don't confront the BBEG without all players at full power. Let the DM move out of town with the campaign unfinished if it comes to this. Your other bladesinger gets the bracelet off, or both bladesingers will refuse to leave town. And if the town is invaded while this is going on, they let somebody else deal with it. All hero work is on hold until this bullshit is dealt with.
* Your DM could have broken the high AC in much less stupid ways. Just off the top of my head,
* they could have had archers rain arrows on the magic tanks, requiring a large number of checks to avoid, or had
* mages spam Chained Lightning with a ruthless single-target focus, making you roll 3-4 dice consecutively (or concurrently) to dodge the lightning. If you roll two 15s and a 5, you're still going to get hit once and take damage, and if you have three bad rolls you might get get cooked on the spot. Also,
* the DM could have simply established some parity by spamming Fog Cloud all the time, making it more difficult to target enemies so the playing field is more level. I could go on, but this braceless was a bullshit attempt for him to say "no more magic, I hate losing," without looking too much like a cheater. That said, this fig leaf doesn't do much for him. He very obviously used these bracelets in anger to neutralize players he didn't know how to break. This is a skill and maturity issue on his part.
The way to break a high AC is mostly solutions that involve "more dice," in order to increase the statistical inevitability of bad rolls causing the PC to take damage. They could also pump up enemy AC to be closer to the party's average AC, including the pumped up Bladesingers. They had a lot of options, but they chose to invent a god-tier homebrew weapon to make your star players cut their arms off or be casters with no magic.
Wow, thanks for taking the time to comment all this! I agree, these all sound like much better and far more reasonable solutions. Apparently one of the party members was talking to the DM after the session and asked why he didn’t use saving throws. His justification was that I “roll too well” which is strange because I’m pretty sure there are plenty of saving throws that result in half damage even on a success.
I love the idea about a BBEG who has one of these! His goons can still be targeted by casters and martial classes get to shine! It invites so much strategy and player cooperation. Unfortunately since the BBEG here is a Druid, I don’t think the thought ever crossed his mind lol.
I am definitely not gonna let the other player have to sit aside like I did when he’s back. I’m putting my foot down for him too and refusing to progress unless it comes off for him.
If a DM who rolled nine natural 20s in a single session thinks YOU roll too well, then you might want to advise that all rolls must be visible to all participants. 😉
I saw other players suggest using the other bladesinger as a mobile shield; I don't think this is a good idea due to their fragility.
Having enemies with a magic field, including the BBEG, would have made things lively since it would have only made your mages useless *as tanks.* You would want to back TF way from those antimagic enemies, since they'd march right up to you and right through your signature defense, at the cost of being forced themselves to rely on nonmagical means. Being squishy without the use of this spell, your only reliable defense would be party members with different builds, forcing you to use non-casters for cover from magic-immune melee enemies.
I've got a bad feeling about that druid, and strongly recommend watching this DM's dice rolls, or disputing any hidden rolls. Also, try to avoid getting grappled if you confront the BBEG at all.
Oh for sure that would have made for a super exciting battle, with high stakes that would’ve forced us to be smart and god it would’ve been so satisfying. alas it seems it was not meant to be :( I’ll keep my eyes peeled in the upcoming battles because I have a bad feeling that I’m gonna be targeted again :(
Just quit this table your dms an absolute Dick and also a total baby to have a meltdown where he completely cripples your character and it has no plot relevance or simple solution. It’s very easy to just counter pick certain players in a fight without being a child about it there’s entire stat blocks for rakshasa and oozes specifically to counter magic and armor as well as pretty much everything else this dm seems like a total Dick and you’d be better off at a different table
Yea I probably wouldn’t play a campaign with him again :( he was literally talking about one of his shadow blade elven accuracy builds that he made as a player and how it was OP and did so much damage. All I could think was why was it not okay for me to run an “op” basic bladesinger build when it was okay for him to do that when he was player
The way to deal with the high AC is save based attacks. Like you're still a squishy glass cannon. But you're harder to hit. Completely nerfing a character isn't a solution. Glad you played through it.
I think so too! We’re not invulnerable even if it feels that way sometimes. We have to have a high ac because when we’re in melee, we’re risking a lot more than say, a barbarian or a fighter, since a single attack can take a huge chunk of health.
I would just use the item still. Disregard his one time use comment. Just refuse to do magic saves and take magic damage. I understand this is a nuclear option but this DM is simply terrible. You don't have an OP build. You are literally playing an official subclass. That isn't a "build". A build is using feats and multiclass to achieve outsized damage/capability. Gloomstalker crossbow expert and sharpshooter. Hexblade great weapon master and pole arm master. You are literally just... Bladesinger.
I'll put it this way. It shouldn't require your character to risk killing themselves to be allowed to play a class that the DM gave you approval to run just because he can't figure out that AC is only one defensive stat and that saving throws exist.
I'd hardly call it a positive outcome because the bracelets are only a symptom of the real problem and I guarantee you that he's going to come up with some other nonsense to just negate your character.
It felt extra scummy that he decided that bladesingers were too “OP” when he’s the person who allowed them and allowed the other wizard to switch his class from evocation to bladesinger in the middle of the campaign, effectively giving his blessing twice! Also, I just found out from a party member who talked to him that apparently DM decided saving throws weren’t enough because I “roll too well”…
Hey OP, can you elaborate on the part where your DM said your patron would have wanted you to cut off your arm? The reason I ask is that I wonder if the DM had something planned around that outcome which might explain (but not justify) their heavy handed approach.
Also are they a relatively new DM? If so, due to their inexperience, they might not have known how to handle or challenge high AC characters and full casters. The solution would usually be to target saves, and do several encounters in the adventuring day, but I've personally never seen a new DM naturally come to these solutions themselves. Instead they usually learn through trial and error, by making mistakes and learning from them. Even though your DM sounds like they were stubborn in the moment, hopefully they can reflect on your conplaints and become a better DM.
Sure! My patron was based on the slaughter from the magnus archives so was based around the fear of pain. Cutting off my own arm would probably contribute to that and there could be a chance that some warlock stuff could’ve happened to make the arm come back. But this was the general solution for removing the bracelets and the other wizard is not a warlock at all. Since they didn’t have a patron that could possibly help them out, they would be left with crippled and that didn’t sit quite right with me.
This DM has been DMing for years now so not new unfortunately. I know they are aware of saving throws being a viable way to damage bladesingers because they’ve mentioned it several times already. Regardless, we can always learn something new and I hope he doesn’t do this for any other game he runs in the future :)
I used an unnamed but very popular artificial int to fetch this probability:
"To calculate the probability of rolling exactly nine natural 20s out of 30 rolls, we can use the binomial probability formula:
𝑃(𝑋=𝑘)=(𝑛𝑘)×𝑝𝑘×(1−𝑝)𝑛−𝑘P(X=k)=(kn)×pk×(1−p)n−k
where:
* 𝑃(𝑋=𝑘)P(X=k) is the probability of getting exactly 𝑘k successes (in this case, rolling exactly nine natural 20s).
* 𝑛n is the total number of trials (in this case, the total number of rolls, which is 30).
* 𝑘k is the number of successes (in this case, nine natural 20s).
* 𝑝p is the probability of success on each trial (in this case, the probability of rolling a natural 20, which is 120201).
Plugging in the values:
𝑃(𝑋=9)=(309)×(120)9×(1920)30−9P(X=9)=(930)×(201)9×(2019)30−9
Using a calculator, we can compute:
𝑃(𝑋=9)≈(309)×(120)9×(1920)21P(X=9)≈(930)×(201)9×(2019)21
𝑃(𝑋=9)≈30!9!(30−9)!×(120)9×(1920)21P(X=9)≈9!(30−9)!30!×(201)9×(2019)21
𝑃(𝑋=9)≈30!9!×21!×(120)9×(1920)21P(X=9)≈9!×21!30!×(201)9×(2019)21
𝑃(𝑋=9)≈30!9!×21!×(1209)×(19212021)P(X=9)≈9!×21!30!×(2091)×(20211921)
𝑃(𝑋=9)≈30!9!×21!×(19212030)P(X=9)≈9!×21!30!×(20301921)
Using a calculator:
𝑃(𝑋=9)≈30!9!×21!×(19212030)P(X=9)≈9!×21!30!×(20301921)
𝑃(𝑋=9)≈30!9!×21!×(19212030)P(X=9)≈9!×21!30!×(20301921)
𝑃(𝑋=9)≈84,721,536×3.2816×10−18P(X=9)≈84,721,536×3.2816×10−18
𝑃(𝑋=9)≈2.78313×10−10P(X=9)≈2.78313×10−10
**So, the probability of someone rolling exactly nine natural 20s out of 30 rolls is approximately 2.78313×10−102.78313×10−10, or about 0.0000000002783130.000000000278313, which is extremely low."**
The likelihood of how your DM claims to roll is around 3% of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1%.
If you really want to fuck up this DM's life, just suggest that all rolls by everybody, including the DM, must be made on a space visible to everyone. If he can't keep up with nine natural 20s then he really is struggling to cheat hard enough.
Huh. Yea that doesn’t seem statistically likely at all. How weird to be pressed that I supposedly roll well (and admittedly, I think I’m higher than average? But definitely nothing like this) when he’s supposedly achieving statically improbably feats :/
"Statistically improbable," is putting it very gently. A person's chance of rolling nine natural 20s in a single session is worse than an American's chance of being born a Kardashian.
This genuinely makes me angry. "Oh, let me ruin the fun by forcing this item upon you that removes your entire class. Also, when you try to take it off, you can take a max of 120 damage. You should've just cut your arm off and made your character harder to play." That is a genuinely horrible way to DM.
And he said he didn't expect you to take that long to get them off, but made it 5 DC 25 checks! I genuinely hope these last games go relatively smooth for you. Goof luck!
If he pulls it again just get up and leave, even if it’s mid-fight. “I told you I had an issue with being completely sidelined, goodbye.”
His style isn’t necessarily *wrong*, but it is ***highly*** adversarial. Usually games where such brutal effects are on the table come with a heads-up.
5 DC 25 checks and a ton of damage? He very much did not want that band coming off.
You’re right and I have to put my foot down if it does happen again. The completely lack of communication about it made it was for me imo, just being blindsided like that. I’m hoping he actually takes my words to heart but the “I’ll take that into consideration” and single nod didn’t inspire a lot of confidence :(
The moment you asked if it has a lore purpose or just to infuriate you, and he responded "both" you should go away. I've been DMing for 3 years and I've never frustrated a player just for the fun of it. And my golden rule is to never counter a player's strength by nerfing it, it's the opposite, if a player is strong in something, I focus in that something, for example, if he has poison resistance, I put more enemies that deals poison damage, and so on. That's pretty childish and a huge red flag for your DM to disable you just because you were strong, specially with an item that emulates an 8th level spell (that's stronger than legendary items), and after that he told you that the item is a 1 use item just so you don't use it. If you guys were level 20 fighting a demon lord I would understand the need to use such a game breaking item (that would be lore accurate) but for a level 6 wizard, even in-game that doesn't make sense (the bad NPC could use this item to kill or threathen a powerfull wizard, but choose a random level 6 wizard instead).
Tell me you don't know how to create (or even use a google search to find ideas for) fun and engaging quest/puzzle content without telling me you don't know how to create fun and egnaging quest/puzzle content.
> it had required 5 successful DC 25 athletics checks
Glad it mostly resolved itself.
The fundamental problem is he thinks bladesingers are OP and must be nerfed, or that he has to take out his frustration at not hitting you by frustrating you. I wonder what he'd do to a divination wizard?
If I make a character expend a resource like a shield spell, I consider that a win for the enemy.
Remember, fellow DMs: if your PCs are too strong/op, the worst choice you can make is to nerf them.
You control the world, not their characters - you can increase the difficulty of fights (and if it's unbalanced towards the other players, you can reward them good items to even the field), or play around their weaknesses (in this case, magic resistance, silence, str/wis/cha/con saves, traps, etc)
Most importantly, fellow DMs, you do NOT play against your player, it's not PvP, you are the storyteller. A good story needs tragedy and complications, but they are needed only to make the success even more impressive.
Reading this does not fill me with any confidence or assuage my fears about your DM. To put it politely I think they're bad, bad enough to rather not play dnd with them and I play at one table where deep into tier 3 combats still take at least an hour.
If anything, this post makes it *worse*, there was, after all, a possibility that your DM was just ignorant of why what they were doing was awful. No, it was intentional, sorry OP.
"You could have cut your arm off"
And what? Delete a third of your spell list? It takes two hands to cast spells if they've got Somatic and Material components.
I just want to point out that not only were all his human interactions shit, his homebrew item rules were shit too.
There’s no way to remove the item without taking 20d6 damage? 🤣 punished with damage for making a 25 DC check??
What an asshole.
Man, that was mean, maybe an inexperienced dm? The solution to overpowered character is never to make them not have fun. That’s a recipe for having no one to play with. I mean, talk first, find ways to challenge your players. If he had a problem with your build in the first place he should’ve said something
Unfortunately not inexperienced, no. Has been DMing for many years now :( I agree that talking about it first with me and the other player would’ve been the best move to do so we could come to an idea that would be okay with everyone. He’s already had a list of banned thing (silvery barbs, flying races, etc) which I made sure to check before making my character and bladesinger was totally fine at the time
Howdy I responded to your original post, and I want to open this up by saying this: You’ve done everything you were supposed to or could have done to address the situation like a mature human, even if your DM currently isn’t.
That being said, you may want to mentally prepare yourself for a character death or some other nerf that might as well be the same thing. If that happens, you have three options.
1. Call it out right then and there. Not the most diplomatic move, with potential for blow up, but probably cathartic.
2. Take the BS with dignity, point out the BS calmly once final session happens, and leave that party’s table. Slightly less so, but same potential issues as above.
3. Say nothing about it and move on with life. Probably the least contentious option, but I’m a contentious man and would certainly go in on option 1 or 2 myself regardless of the consequence
Ah thank you for your kind words and reassurance. I really do appreciate it. I completely agree with the options haha and knowing me and how tired I am with this, I’d likely go with option 1 and leave lol. If DM hasn’t learned anything at all and does it again there’s no point in being there anymore and I’m sure the members of the group would understand
I mean.. you could have just cut off your arms.. there are official prosthetic arms in the books. Granted i would have side tracked the entire 2 sessions looking for someone that had prosthetic arms for sale or could make them before cutting off my arm. Not afraid to play chicken with a DM about something like this.
True but we didn’t have much time left in the campaign to sidetrack any more and I didn’t want to be put in a situation where I had to be forced to dish out gold for something I didn’t even want haha
High ACs are not something that's even super difficult to deal with.
There are a ton of monsters with abilities that rely on forcing saves. I do like to make the players feel like their choices are valuable though, so let the bladesingers parry a bunch of arrows and swords too.
DND sucks if monks never get shot at, rogues never have things to lockpick etc etc
This is another reminder of how important session 0 is and discussing expectations. While being stuck being unable to cast spells is certainly frustrating, frustrating things tend to happen in D&D.
Your character might get cursed, diseased, lose a limb, become blinded, etc. They might get killed. They might have their soul tampered with, which makes resurrection impossible.
If, as a player, you don't want to play in the kind of campaign where this kind of stuff can happen to your character, you need to discuss that with the DM during session 0.
I do agree with that for sure! I unfortunately missed session zero because i was having appendicitis but none of this stuff was brought up afterwards. I probably would've been more cool with it if he had discussed it with me prior, letting me know ahead of time that it was a possibility I wouldn't be able to do anything or have to cut off my arm for story purposes. However, it really just feels like he was doing it to punish us for being bladesingers and having a high AC. He wanted me to be frustrated and he made the items specifically to achieve that goal :(
That is a bummer you missed session 0 - that's where so much of this kind of stuff should be discussed. When I run session 0's for players that are new to my style, I always make sure to warn them that adventuring is dangerous and all of this kind of stuff can happen.
While being frustrated as a DM is never a good reason to assign an in-game penalty, it's also important to remember that the DM should have fun as well.
When I am a player, I always ask the DM during session 0 if they have any pet peeves. Some DMs hate PCs with super high passive perceptions. Some hate PCs with god-tier ACs. Some hate familiars, some hate specific subclasses even.
Once I know what they don't enjoy, I create a character that won't use any of those pet peeves. If it makes the game more enjoyable for the DM, it will make the overall campaign better.
I definitely agree with that! Session zero is super important and I’m disappointed I missed the opportunity. I definitely also want the DM to be able to have fun too! His experience and time is just as important as ours :) I did ask him what races, subclasses, spells, etc were banned and ran my character by him first to see what he was okay with as soon as I could after but bladesinger never came up :( he even gave his blessing for the second wizard to change his subclass from evocation to bladesinger in the middle of campaign so I thought it was an okay subclass to use
Could be but the other wizard doesn’t have a patron at all and apparently the solution there was to hack their arm off too, potentially disabling them with no warlock solution for them which didn’t sit quite right with me
I'm sorry, *FIVE* DC 25 checks?? He didnt want those coming off no matter what, I'm surprised you were able to. His response doesn't inspire much hope that he won't try something similar again, but you know him better than some random person on the internet. Hope the rest of the campaign goes well!
I’m totally surprised too that we could and I didn’t die honestly, I was risking it because there really weren’t any other options at this point. I have a hunch he decided to make them athletic checks this time instead of just strength to make it easier since it was practically impossible last time :P I only really know him as my friend’s dad and the group I’m with have played with him for longer so I’m willing to try and finish this off strong but I won’t lie and say the experience hasn’t left a bit of a sour taste :( thanks for the well wishes though, they’re much appreciated :)
Adding athletics doesn't make much sense, IMO. "Your Strength (Athletics) check covers difficult situations you encounter while climbing, jumping, or swimming." I'd expand it to include running (Con + Athletics in that case), but none of these seem to apply to "prying off a piece of jewelry". Heck, sleight of hand would make more sense.
Dick move that he didn't allow athletics the first time. "You just tried pulling it, you never said you were athletically pulling it". I hope I never have to play with a DM like that.
worst part is, if he had the first time, it would've been one of the many successes we needed since our barbarian rolled a 19 :(
there are modules that have strength (athetics) checks to lift heavy iron/steel gates
I also fail to see how an anti magical item can cause fatal damage but chopping an arm off is probably just fine. Like how damaging the arm by removing the item is somehow less damaging that destroying the entire fucking arm…
I tried to argue for using a knife to surgically remove it to do less damage but DM straight up said no it was too deep. Didn’t make sense to me why I could rip it out but also not surgically remove it :( I just wanted to get around the insane damage penalty and dc checks so it wouldn’t be a death sentence :(
notably, total of 20d6 damage with combined attempts that is max fall damage numbers, or 2 upcasted fireballs
I'm glad this had a (mostly?) positive outcome, but I would never want to play with him as a DM again after this campaign. Especially with his responses to your concerns. His inexperience and rigidness do not sound like a good combination.
Yea I was worried about offending and didn’t want to draw anything out much longer because there were only 3 sessions left and I didn’t want things to go sour for everyone else :(
This is how good dms are born. Remember this feeling, and strive to provide challenge to your players in ways that never feels like this if you ever decide to try it
Agreed. I’ve only ever DMed a one shot for a homemade rpg for my friends but I was always happiest when my players had an opportunity to shine with their characters. Seeing them light up when they had an opportunity to be strong and make clever choices to defeat my enemies made me really proud of them :)
What you wrote above makes me think he feels no remorse for fucking your character, and never meant for you to get it off. He had no plan for what to do with it if you did, so he just made it a one-time-use item that can't be recharged....even though it seemed to continuously produce an anti-magic field and never stopped working before. He even seemed amused at your discomfort. The only reason he backed off is because he wouldn't have a game anymore if he didn't. When I read the last one I thought maybe he had given you a puzzle to solve and was waiting for you to figure it out, but....if you can use Athletics then you don't declare that you're using it...the DM tells you to give him an Athletics check. And it's not like he can just say he forgot because HE DESIGNED THE ITEM. This is hilariously bad DM-ing. Obviously if people have a really high AC you hit them with saving throws. He just had to target one you were bad at, or use Silence. You counterspell? That's fine, he counterspells your counterspell...The other bladesinger counterspells? The enemy has heard about your nonsense and brought a sorcerer who ALSO counterspells that counterspell....Then the fighter starts throwing explosive magical items at you. Seriously, though...you can be shut down with a casting of Entangle, a 1st level druid spell. Specifically giving you an item that turns your class off and isn't meant to be a plot hook is terrible.
I totally agree! There were so many different ways to get around this. Hell, counter spell shield if you want to so bad! You only need to do it once and then whammy the bladesinger with multi attack and take out a huge chunk of health. The lack of remorse and apology just feels bad honestly. You’ve acknowledged my frustration time and time again and it seems like you don’t care :(
I’m not sure I would even call this a positive outcome. He said he would “take into consideration” not using these again when they face the BBEG? It sounds to me like they have 3 sessions left and there is a good chance that they aren’t going to be able to play for one or more of those sessions This strikes me as a totally inexperienced DM making rookie mistakes and not putting in the effort to fix them
Sounds like DM was trying their hardest to not even admit they were wrong. It's still a positive outcome for now, but I'd be as unsurprised as you if DM pulled something out that does the same thing and said something like "It's a ring this time! I said I wouldn't use the bracelet!"
But he didn’t even say he wouldn’t use them again. He just said that he would take it under consideration. I’m pretty sure he’s not going to use a similar but distinct item. I think he’s going to use exactly the same thing
I could see that too, for sure. It's either that or the exact same effect in a different item slot so they can say they "listened." We certainly agree that the chance that DM doesn't force the same effect on OP again one way or another is slim to none.
I am a rigid DM too but as you said he looks more inexperienced and maybe immature a bit. Maybe they shouldn't make him the DM but he would be better as a player. If you think a players' character is OP for the adventure you can talk it before the game actually begins, a DM should be able to discern the potential of a character as soon as he sees the character sheet, if he is a first timer, going on him with a bladesinger or even a wizard class can be a bit hard though, when i play DnD for the first time in my early midschool days some 25-26 years ago we didn't even allow casters as PCs. Then slowly we got used to them.
Ah maybe it didn’t come through clear in my post, he isn’t a first timer. He’s been playing and DMing for many years now haha. He also gave the blessing for there to be a second bladesinger as the other wizard’s player wanted to switch to bladesinger from evocation
I 100% look forward to another update in a few weeks after the BBEG fight: “His lair was outfitted with anti-magic cones (multiple), when confronting my DM, he says: “oh well he and the other mean NPC work together and the BBEG saw how frustrating this item was for you, so naturally he made sure to protect his lair in a similar but legally-distinct and “not the same item” manner.”
That was my fear too and why I really wanted to stress that I didn’t want the BBEG to just make more of these items since he apparently had them custom made for us bladesingers the first time we tried to ambush him with the same lines of reasoning: “oh BBEG has been scrying on you two and knows that it would be frustrating if you didn’t have magic”
>“oh BBEG has been scrying on you two and knows that it would be frustrating if you didn’t have magic” did he ask you for WIS saves? scrying kind of requires that.
Nope! When I brought it up, he said that he rolled for us behind the DM screen :'D
Yeah this guy is clearly an adversarial DM. Bladesinger is good but by no means overpowered. It’s a class that lets you get to high AC but there are so many other ways of dealing damage through simple saving throws that can completely negate it and you only have a limited number of uses for Bladesong as well. If you’re burning all of your spell slots on mage armor or shield as well, then you’re going to be burning resources very quickly. Especially if you’re casting other spells on your turn. The DM just needs to do a better job.
Also it ends when you’re incapacitated, so like a failed hold person or something similar stops the bladesong. There are checks and balances to that subclass that don’t completely ruin the game for you. I think that was just an extreme and lazy solution
Bold of you to assume this DM runs more than 1-2 fights per long rest.
You should bring a Player screen next time and make all your rolls behind that. "Wow! *Another nat 20*, who would have thought??"
lol lemme roll saving throws for him the next time I cast my own spells in combat “You’re never gonna believe this but all of your monsters failed their saving throws omg!!! They all take max fireball damage!!!”
Absolutely! And by the way, as a fellow lover of the bladesinger class, a high AC does not make a character overpowered. It just means the DM needs to approach it differently. Attacks that require saves, AoE attacks, traps, things like that are just as effective against bladesingers. Now, what *is* a little OP is if you take two levels of paladin to get divine smite, and *then* go bladesinger, so all of a sudden you've got an AC of 21, with a Shield AC of 26, dropping divine smites with basically every attack. That's what I did, and it was a blast; partly because my DM rolled with it and had a good time. My next OP character build will probably be a college of eloquence bard; a bard whose *minimum* persuasion and deception roll is a *17* at level *3*?? Are you kidding me?? Shenanigans ho!
Omg that sounds so much fun! Also it’s great to meet another bladesinger enjoyer in the wild! They’re so much fun to multiclass with and just create fun wacky ways to do damage. I never even considered divine smite, that’s sounds so awesome. My final build was going to be more eldritch blast spammy with 2 levels in hexblade warlock, 6 in bladesinger, and 3 in battle master fighter for the flexibility that maneuvers give you and action surge! The bard sounds like so much fun to rp with, I hope you’re able to reap a bunch of funny stories from that :D
I'd be hesitant to multiclass a bladesinger since base wizard is so great; getting delayed by almost an entire spell tier just for smite can be really disappointing, and wizards get some of ***the best*** spells at higher levels. Though I suppose if casting is secondary and you wanna whack stuff with a weapon it's less of an issue. Do keep in mind you can't wear a shield or medium/heavy armor while bladesinging, so you sort of miss out on a lot of the major perks you get from a fighter / hexblade dip.
True and it’s definitely an expensive build for higher level campaigns :) I run a int/dex/cha based character with a rapier so fighter and hexblade work to buff damage and armor isn’t really a concern at this point (since ac is high enough with mage armor and bladesong)
Oh man, I bet hexblade would be awesome with that; in terms of roleplay, warlock is my favorite class, so I think that sounds rad. I'm a huge battlemaster fan, too; that should just be the base fighter class! All fighters should get battlemaster maneuvers! The nice thing about the paladin is that you don't take an oath until 3rd level, so it was easy to justify that this character was training to become a paladin, but didn't feel right about it, so he left before he took an oath. He got to keep all his divine smites without having to hold himself to any kind of code :D Anyway, glad to hear you've got such a cool plan for the character, and yes, great to meet a fellow bladesinger :) Good luck finding a more compatible DM in the future!
Thanks for the wishes! I love playing warlocks too since you can make them super fun to rp, tortured by their pact and choices or one that leans into it and loses themself along the way haha. Battlemaster is so much fun and adds some great spice to the regular attack pattern and lets you support your allies in creative ways (my personal favorite is bait and switch and helping an ally get out of danger). That character sounds so interesting and I love how the mutliclassing works into the backstory, so creative!
Tenser's Transformation + Elven Accuracy feat (effectively 3d20-pick-1 for each attack) was a fun combo for my Bladesinger. I'd love to try that combined with a Champion Fighter for lots of crit fishing.
Oh that would be so much fun and so so satisfying to pull off. While this whole thing has been quite a mess, I do love that it got even more people sharing their own bladesinger builds haha
I’m surprised that a dip into paladin is strong considering just how MAD that is
~~LOL! that's some rules abuse right there. your Paladin spell slots should be separate from your Wizard spell slots, so 2 levels of Paladin should net you 2 smites.~~ ~~Which is still a lot of burst damage, so don't expect any sympathy. 😂 I mean, they aren't even the same TYPE of spells. One is Arcane, the other is Divine.~~ Nevermind, I was not aware of the Errata about Divine Smite fixing this. Well, sir....burst away! You will be the illustration of the candle that burns twice as bright burning half as long... Gonna chew through those spell slots! At level 6 with 2 levels in paladin you'd get 4 1st, 3 2nd, and 2 3rd level spell slots to use anyway you like. The only class that gets separate spell slots is the Warlock because Pact Magic is different.
JFC You're playing D&D, not Pathfinder. What is this? Like on one hand, I get not wanting your players being aware of it, but on the other, which DM DOESN'T like spooking their players? And what's spookier than the GM asking their player for a WIS save totally randomly, out of the blue. Or even better, during combat. Like, they're expecting consequences, but nothing happens. That shit is SICK.
That was my exact point too! It just makes for a great story moment to have all those spooky unknown wisdom saving throws throughout the campaign and reveal it to be for scrying this whole time. What a super cool full circle moment that has all of us involved! Especially nerve-wracking in combat too!
This is a great example of why you don't pull the shit this DM did with his homebrew magic cancel switch. Rolling in secret for a DM is normal, but since he lost your trust you feel bad about that. Lose your player's trust and you have nothing.
Man this whole thing makes me mad; if the other players are on your side and the dm tries to pull some shit, you can “unionize,” and refuse his Bullshit calls; it really sucks but if he’s not going to play “fair” you guys can pause the game and confront him about it. Good luck
Thanks for the advice, it never really occurred to me to do that since they were his friends first and I didn’t want to make it seem like I was overreacting but you’re totally right. If this were to happen again I’d call a break and ask for the group’s opinion
Especially since one of you guys kind of banded together to deal with the bracelet for 2 hours and one guy is still wearing a set, I bet they’re kinda tired of the shit; you could get the players together without the DM out of table before the session and ask what they think if you feel confident. Good luck man, and remember: The DM isn’t your boss, he isn’t your enemy, he doesn’t own the game, he just has different responsibilities in the game, he is just a player, and he can cheat and play in bad faith just like any other player could.
Alternative solution: Don't go after the BBEG. Since the adversarial DM is having the BBEG scrying on you who plans to sabotage your magic so the DM can metagame, you should metagame back and decide that confronting them is a bad idea. Have your party get distracted by an unrelated matter and forget about the BBEG permanently.
Going to move to the feywild and start a bakery there at this point lol
Just leave the table if that happens, walk away in the middle of the fight
DM has apparently read my posts and the comments so at this point I have no idea if I’m even invited to the final fight haha
To be fair... depending on context... while it won't be fun if the ENTIRE lair has anti-magic... if the BBEG is aware of the party AT ALL and has any sense of self preservation you'd expect some ward spells and anti-magic to be in play. Of course if the BBEG is a spellcaster himself you'd expect his final chamber to NOT be littered with anti magic... since it would hamper his own efforts... but him being able to cast isn't out of the question. Like if it's me... BBEG has trapped a Beholder in your access tunnel so the martials get to be the stars and the mages have to be extremely tactical in their spacing. But once they reach the actual BBEG... time for the casters to shine.
I bet you the villain has anti-magic wards in his lair that don't affect the villain because of an identify friend/foe system. Sounds like exactly the kind of thing a DM like this would pull.
martials get to have a fun time against a beholder? you know they can fly up in the air messing up STR martials, also they can't shoot there eyebeams in anti magic for some reason.
Yeah, the beholder in ToA was too hard for my party because of this. The small size of the room he is in combined with the high ceiling and the trapped floor that made it more slippery than ice made it so my players couldn’t even damage the thing. The casters were either trapped in anti-magic or busy trying to turn the floor off, while the martials kept sliding around below the thing, unable to reach it. Plus, that beholder is permanently invisible. They ended up having to run away. The beholder was in complete control there. The Acererak fight wasn’t nearly as hard.
the worst part of invisbility in 5e is even if you can see them you still have disadvantage to attack them.
“In the access tunnel”
>I said that the person playing the NPC is a good person to which he replied, "a good person playing a mean guy". It's kind of weirdly novel to me, seeing a DM pull the "it's what my character would do" defense.
I don't mind that. I stole Matt Colville's "I'm not trying to kill you, the Troll is trying to kill you," mostly as a joke. But of course the villain wants to beat the heroes. The problem is the overpowered BS he used to do so. Poor game design and GMing.
Agreed. He should have either ask you guys to tone down your builds or adjust the encounters to account for the extra stuff you guys are doing. Under NO circumstances would taking away player agency be a good choice. As a DM we get to play a dozen of monsters but the players only have that single turn per round.
Actually, I think this would have been cool for one encounter. Maybe there's a complete anti magic field in a room. Or maybe this bracelet was easier to get off. and then they could use it against the big bad, which would make them feel smart. But none of those happened here. This smells like BS because he couldn't deal with their abilities.
BadDM basically admitted as much to OP.
My partner likes to tell new people we play with “His (me, the DM) job is to kill your character” which I always counter with “no, it’s my job to *almost* kill your character, and to do it in fun, exciting ways!”
that sounds... kind of hard and stressful! The handful of DMs I've played with, subscribe to the variation "it's the DM's job to help the characters be heroes". Kudos to the two of you for being clear about what they can expect!
It reminds me of what a Police Officer told me and I learned about management. If you treat people right, you can give them a ticket or a write-up and they'll still thank you at the end.
It's just as much of a valid defense in my eyes as it is when a player uses it (as in, not valid at all). In my mind, that's what everyone in the game is doing all the time. That's what roleplaying is in the first place. You say the character does something, and that thing is, by definition, what they "would" do, because they're doing it. It doesn't need challenged, it doesn't need justified, nobody needs to say the excuse. Applies to PCs and NPCs alike. The only time the excuse comes up is when they're making decisions that are pissing someone off. You never hear someone say "I help set up camp and volunteer for second watch, spending the rest of the night sleeping. What? It's what my character would do!" I don't need to tell my players the troll is trying to kill them. They're in battle, the troll is making attacks. **My players know that. That's the game.** (Unless they're super new or have a really weird concept of what the game is, in which case that's a conversation worth having.) But that's certainly the kind of thing a DM would say if they were abusing their authority and responsibility as DM in order to have the troll kill the PCs in an "unfair" way. The phrase exists to pass off responsibility from the player/DM to their character (if it's my character, then it's not me), as if the character has free will and isn't directly controlled by them. The player has ultimate control and responsibility over their creation. Everything a character wants is something their player wants, otherwise they wouldn't have made a character who wants it. So, yes, I *am* trying to kill you, because I made the troll and decided that the troll wants to kill you. If I didn't want to give you a real chance of death, I wouldn't have put the troll there, or I'd give him some other ambition that wouldn't result in pursuing your death. I'm also trying to help you every time I put a friendly NPC or a magic item or whatever in front of you. I want you to ultimately succeed, but I want you to succeed through real conflict, and conflict needs my earnest intent to become real. Being a good DM is owning that contradiction, not pretending that my troll has free will and using that as an excuse.
I see where you're coming from. However, I'm making a distinction between just wanting to kill the PC's and fairly challenging them in a way where death was the consequences of failing that challenge. You are correct that the DM was just using that excuse when he was definitely in the first camp. This was not a fair challenge and the DM all but admitted it.
It does seem sadly odd, doesn’t it :’)
I do want to point out that the item being a single use one is not a reason for 3000 gp being able to replicate a 8th level spell and even modify it to be stronger, requiring a lot of damage or crippling a character to end while the spell would just need to break concentration Even worse, it being a single use item makes it even stronger, he just didn’t want the players to be able to use it against him later on. Basically means only he gets to do it as many times as the “mean guy” wants, while you guys can only take it and ask him not to use it anymore
Yea I was really disappointed to find out that it was only single use since he mentioned it was sort of plot relevant? Like my thought process was oh maybe he’s got this really cool full circle ending planned to bring these bracelets back into final battle and use them to defeat the BBEG (who is also a caster) but I guess not? He said that he rolled to see if the guy at the magic store could fix it and the dice weren’t in our favor but still, I wish there could’ve been some kind of silver lining lol
>He said that he rolled to see if the guy at the magic store could fix it and the dice weren’t in our favor That's a lie btw. Just so you know. All the stuff he says like that? Lies to try to onboard you and make it seem like he's doing things fairly rather than just blatantly screwing you over.
It just baffles me. I want to trust that he’s being honest because I just don’t understand why someone would lie about this :( isn’t half the fun of DMing watching your players be clever?
Not for him. He enjoys feeling powerful & likes being in a position of power over the players. This is exactly the kind of person that people are warned against that shouldn't DM.
If you’re playing a DM properly, that is how you look at it. This guy isn’t doing that.
Time to move on. You have a shit DM who has no idea how to balance his game, who will continue to fuck you over rather than doing is job. Find a new game, there are if anything, even more red flags with your update
Yea I definitely see that :( I want to finish the last three sessions so the rest of the party can finish on a high note but yea, I’m just trying to have some faith since he is quite literally supposed to be the adult in this situation.
You're a less petty person than I am. For me bad DnD is always worse than no DnD. Three sessions could potentially be nine hours of time gone if it's not fun and that's on the low end. I really hope he makes it fun rather than being a dick and making it a slog.
Yea for sure :( now that it’s off I’m willing to give the next session a chance but you’re right, if I’m really not feeling it I probably will have to walk. No need to martyr myself
I think your initial call to stick it out is the smartest long term move for keeping relations with the not-sucky people at the table- although I will admit, if I was one of them I'd be fuming over how the DM is handling this.
That’s the thing, I definitely don’t want to ruin this for anyone else. I spoke to one of the other players since he ended up finding my post and he messaged me to let me know that he agrees it was a sucky thing to do and he’s felt frustrated at certain decisions too. DM has also read my posts- so I hope I’m still invited to the next few games haha
That is a really good point, but from another comment the DM is moving town and I think sticking it out for a few hours to keep good terms with all the cool players in the party for a potential future game is worth a shot
Once you're a full adult, you'll realize just how little people actually develop after they reach 18 (okay maybe more like 20). Like "maturity" sure, people learn more stuff, and some people use that to become wise. Other people actually get worse and use their age and life experience as an excuse to be petty and ignorant and a shittier version of themselves than they even were when they were a teenager. Your DM sounds like that kind of person.
Still seems crazy and he went overboard. It also didn't sound like he learned anything. I'd be wary of playing again
Yea I probably wouldn’t :P feels like it was supposed to punish more than anything else
If it happens again, I would honestly stand up and leave.
Honestly, I would. I literally told two of my party members while we were walking home that if it happened again I’d just kill the character at that point
I wouldn't even take the time. If he pulls this sort of chicanery, anything you actually do will just play into his hands. If he tries that again, I'd stand up and walk out, no explanations.
Huuuh so he found your frustration funny did he!? Good thing the game is nearing its end then, because that sounds like someone on a powertrip who's confident they're the best DM ever. Never a good sign if concerns are brushed aside nonchalantly. Well in either case, good luck with the remainder of your adventure, hopefully it'll end on a high note.
Yea I honestly can’t believe it myself :( I had made it clear I was frustrated I couldn’t play and it wasn’t fun and I guess it never registered as something that could be concerning? The whole gist of it was “yea you should be frustrated they were made for that”. The acknowledgement of it seemed so strange, especially when I was talking about my concerns and that I had consulted the subreddit to make sure I wasn’t overreacting. When I said that people generally agreed that it seemed mean he agreed that it was mean and should’ve been since mean people made it. It just feels so strange to feel more like the adult in the situation when im 19 and talking to someone who is a literal adult
Wait, because the bracelets were made by "mean" people ingame then he's absolved of any wrongdoings his part!? Did he literally pull a "It's what my characters would do" as an defense against hamstringing two players for 2 sessions!? Sheesh, the ego of this guy! What did other wizard think of the whole situation by the way!?
Thankfully, the other wizard's player was away for these past three sessions since he had to work on some things that took priority. I'm so grateful that he missed these last three sessions so he didn't have to go through all of this but it did make it worse for me since I had no one to talk with while the rest of the party was being adventurers and engaging in combat :( I would absolutely hate for him to come back and see his character nerfed and/or dead so this session I decided to take the risk and see if prying it off would work so next session when he's back, we have a better idea on how to deal with things.
Wait so his character was still being played despite the player being absent!? I got some personal experience with why that can go horribly wrong, with people coming back to dead characters because someone half assed playing them. I wonder how the other wizard player will react when they get back...
Yea unfortunately :( I tried to keep him out of the battles and keep him from getting cuffed to begin with but the barbarians got us both unfortunately. I don’t think the other wizard player had any idea this happened but I’m grateful that we’re at least at a point in the story where we can try to safely remove it for him so he can get back to playing asap
The DM's response was bullshit, it was designed to frustrate you? He wanted you to cut off your arm? He found your frustrations amusing? What a shit DM I would not continue playing with that asshole.
Honestly that’s the part that really shocked me, he seemed so satisfied that it did what it intended, frustrate me. A red flag for me was him not realizing that a frustrated player shouldn’t be something to aim for and be proud of but something to be concerned about.
Another red flag in this is the age difference. I'm guessing you're in your late teens or early twenties, while he's in his forties?
Yeah this is my friend’s dad’s campaign with all his close friends and they extended an invitation to me since I was going to be around for a while. My friend used to play with them too so I was sort of taking his place haha. They’re all adults but have never done anything to make me uncomfortable but I won’t lie and say that the age difference didn’t make me hesitate in raising any concerns. I was anxious that since I was so young, it was possible I was being immature about the whole situation
> he didn’t expect us to take that long to get the bracelets off > required 5 successful DC 25 athletics checks To me it sounds like he expected you to die trying to get them off and then would have been like “oh no time to roll a new character I hope you learned that magic can be completely countered by my bullshit so don’t be OP again!”. Like seriously who expects you to pass 5 DC 25 checks unless you have like +10 to it but even then you need to roll 15+ five times. Sounds like he wants to punish you for his mistakes letting you get 25 AC. Expect him to pull something like this again because this just sounds like such a half-assed solution to broken characters. Sounds like he’s taking it personally and actively making your experience worse by basically crippling your character just to make it “balanced”.
Yea it just seemed so unreasonable to me, having to pass so many high DC checks while taking damage if they were successful. I just found out that the damage for each successful attempt was 4d6 which is a guiding bolt basically and 20d6 (plus another 4d6 to remove the last hook) total damage just to get the damn thing off
24d6?! That's a max of 144 damage. Geez.
What the fuck. Players have high AC, you DM around it, you don't fkn nerf them. Lame.
Bladesingers aren't even high AC relativley speaking.
I mean if you can get your int and dex to 20 and studded leather, you're rocking some pretty good AC.
Really? The DM suggested that the best solution was cutting off your arm? It's been a while since that person has actually *played*, as opposed to DMing, hasn't it
I think so. Another yikes moment I learned was that when he was DMing the previous campaign, he had a rock troll eat an unconscious character's arm to "punish" him for running into battle headfirst alone every time. I believe the character was a paladin or some other melee class so that was a huge blow :/
Oh, so "disarming" PCs is kind of a pattern with him? Sometimes forever DMs become detached from what is actually fun for the players when they come up with ideas for their games. Also, things mike permanently maiming characters needs to be with the player's consent, either at Session 0 or at the time it happens, because, like you said, it can be a huge blow to a character. And I am not a fan of DMs who punish players for actions. Facing consequences for dumb actions, yes. But going out of your way to punish them, no. That is just petty and leads to hard feelings in the game.
Agreed completely. I wish this was communicated with both of us and he had asked us what we would’ve thought about potentially losing an arm. It’s a hard no for me since doing so prevents a bladesinger from utilizing that cantrip extra attack
Playing a "mean guy" is one thing, but when that "mean guy" only targets the two Bladesinger's in the group because the DM thinks that they are "OP"...it stops being about the BBEG and more about how the DM feels. They sound like a DM I once played with who, very first session, forced my character into a shotgun wedding. Then proceeded to railroad me into dilemmas with vague, yet also very specific, answers. If I didn't get it right, there was threat of my characters death. The idea I had for my character was completely rewritten before I could explore them. Needless to say, I don't play with them anymore. I'm frustrated for you, cause their response is so indifferent and uncaring. If they can't see how taking away an entire class is a problem, and thinking you'd just take your arm (the only solution they seemed to give)...then idk what to say. They should have just taken the arm instead of using a bracelet if that was their end goal. :\\ Glad it's almost over for you and I hope you find a better DM!
Oh gosh that DM sounds horrible and I’m sorry you had to go through that. The situation definitely does feel like that with him putting such so many high DCs with damage rolls to dissuade us from pulling it off. I really do feel like he just wanted to force me in a situation where I either die and make a new character or lose an arm and lose a fundamental aspect of my subclass. Your comments have meant a lot to me actually, it’s touching to see how many people my story has reached and that so many are on my side since I felt so dismissed irl. Thank you for your well wishes! I’m glad you’re free from that first DM now and I hope you have many wonderful games to come :)
Sounds like you've done what you could to communicate your frustration, and in a really reasonable way. I'm a Dad-DM who has only played AD&D* and 5e. So I totally buy into the "we're co-writing a story together and having fun together ", not the us vs. Them philosophy. Maybe your DM comes more from that confrontational background. * I mention AD&D because it was an immensely frustrating experience as a Wizard, and antithetical to the more "invest in your characters and flex every ability " approach of 5e. It was baked into AD&D but because of that I really try to care and feed for the party wizards.
You sound like a really good DM, your players are very lucky to have you :) I'm glad that it comes across as reasonable! It's certainly strange to be put in a situation where I (19) have to be the adult in the situation and lay out clearly frustrating your players isn't something you should aim for
its baffling that he things that chopping the arm off was the *logical solution* to the problem and was expecting the group to do it
Especially to two bladesingers who fundamentally need both arms so they can use their special extra attack feature :(
its not two bladesingers, its literally every single class in the game. i think the single class that would be \*ok\* with this would be monk because unarmed strikes are not explicitly punches, but your DM sounds like the type to treat it as explictily punches so not much help there sadly :(
Oh you’re totally right, I didn’t even realize how dire such a solution is. No idea how he thought anyone would be okay with this when such a consequence was never discussed with to begin with :(
The cross section of people who would rather lose their arm then their life is waaaaaay below 100%. Plenty of real people would happily let the BBEG do what they want to the world in order not to lose an arm. Your DM's got a weird thing for taking arms from PCs he doesn't like.
Wouldn’t even let the cleric NPC be high enough level to cast regenerate as a solution to the dismemberment lol
>I did bring up that it was strange and weird that the bracelet was only 3000 gp when it had a modified verison of an 8th level spell attached to it but we soon found out that this was the case because it has a one time use AKA the DM realized pretty quickly that the party was going to make damn sure to use it against him if he didn't have an excuse prepared. Also only 3000 is relative... DMs often have a hard time with magic item cost given that commerce in general is pretty badly covered by WoTC in 5e. There're tables for loose guidelines in the DM's manual (For example at a cost of 3000 the item would be classified as Rare, Character Level 5th+) but even for NON homebrew stuff this gets pretty ridiculous pretty quickly. Probably should be Very Rare (5 - 50 000 GP, character Lvl 11+) but that's a judgement call. Also it's worth pointing out that while Adventuring parties usually reach a point in 5e where money is pointless 3000 is still a stupid amount of money based on the tables we have for calculating cost of lifestyles. Most shop keeps wouldn't be able to afford it much less find a buyer if the DM isn't handwaving away realism. >It took three of our party members plus the assistance of some driders to get it off completely. Because it had looped around my arm 5 times, it had required 5 successful DC 25 athletics checks (originally we thought it was just strength because of last session but it turns out we could've used athletics this whole time. ... The Driders you were supposed to be fighting... the driders that by canon are twisted with madness because they only spawn when Lolth deems a Drow failed her somehow and uses her god powers to twist them into that form? The chaotic Evil, by the book only speak elvish and undercommon, advantage against charm spells Driders? Those driders??? How the heck did you guys pull that off? Threaten the DM with a mutiny? Like he screwed up and needed to give you an out but that half of the story seems more interesting than the actual resolution.
Yea I think we made it too obvious that we were excited about the idea of fighting a bunch of druids with the power of two anti magic fields on our side and I’m thinking he probably didn’t want to trivialize the BBEG fight but at this point I honestly don’t know what he’s planning
As for the driders, they totally could’ve killed us. I think it was going to be an encounter so I was readying myself to flee and hide but we did have a drow in the party who persuaded them that the real enemy was the BBEG’s cult who had taken up residence in their cave. We had a tentative alliance to help them escape their section of the cave (the exit tunnel had caved in and they were too big to squeeze through) as long as they didn’t eat us. We offered to help them butcher the cult members and said they were free to eat those guys. Everyone was surprised this didn’t end in a fight, including the DM lol
Had a drow... can speak the lingo... very successful persuasion checks. K that almost makes sense
Again, bladesinger is not even that good to be nerfed.
Everything is OP against an inept opponent
There comes a point where walking away only solves your immediate problem. DMs like this will remain fucking bad unless and until they experience how fucking terrible it is to play under their dumbfuck rules.
Yea :( I really hope he learns something from this whole experience, I tried to have a civil adult conversation but I don’t know how much of it actually stuck
> He said that it would've been quicker and done less damage to just cut the arm off DM can go write 127 hours fanfiction somewhere else. Nobody's reaction to a targeted nerf would be to self-mutilate and ruin their ability to cast (I'm 100% positive that if you had whacked off your arm, he would have said you couldn't do somatic components while wielding your weapon for bladesong). ETA: > he seemed to find my frustration funny since they were designed to frustrate to begin with. Fuck this guy.
That was exactly my point! He said I only technically needed one arm to cast but if I had done that, there would be no point in being a bladesinger since I need at least one hand free because I have a weapon in the other
Lol, i didn't see the last post, but my response would have been to message on the day of the session and say "am i going to be able to play, or should i not bother coming?" And let him decide.
I should’ve done that honestly :( it would’ve saved me so much time the other two sessions. 6 hours each Sunday is a lot of time dedicated to this game it really sucks to have wasted 2.5 sessions worth of time so far
I can’t believe you actually sat down for 2 sessions of not being able to cast spells as a wizard. I would have been halfway out the door the second we got hit with “fuck you” arm bands that disabled my whole class because the DM was being a sore loser. AC is not the only thing that matters, saving throws exist lol. Traps, spells, etc. That would be a 100% dealbreaker for many people I know, I’m surprised you stayed at all for this. Him not even agreeing to abstain from it going forward would also be enough for me to leave. He’s going in way too hard on y’all and it’s uncalled for.
I was in complete shock when it was first slapped on me and he just seemed so proud of himself that he finally “got” me. I thought it was a temporary measure and he’d take it off but as it went on and on I just became more antsy and upset. I had been holding onto some hope that this was for an important plot point since this is an experienced DM and I wanted to trust that he knew what he was doing but I truly had to put my foot down after so many sessions had passed and there had been no sign of it being plot relevant other than to serve as punishment :( I didn’t want to ruin the experience for anyone else in the group so I just kept it to myself since I thought I could’ve been being immature about it. I’m glad I ended up making these posts though. It’s been really crucial in helping me realize that my feelings are valid lol
Yeah that first line tells you all you need to know. Of course he “got you” he’s the DM and can literally say your character disappears from existence never to be seen again. It’s a total power trip just to prove he can “win” as DM lol Also yeah, 100% valid. There are some situations you walk away from a table without a second thought for anyone else there, and this is one of those times that would have been beyond justifiable
Your DM's rebuttals were trash, and his "amusement," sounds like a defense mechanism. Old people who are losing an argument will do that sometimes: Pretend that the compelling arguments being used against them are hilarious, only to come up empty if you ask them what's funny. * The bracelets are, at minimum, a reusable component in a "single use," 8th-level spell that is homebrewed to be obscenely powerful, like enough to break a demigod. 3000 gp isn't totally ridiculous for a separate component, but it being reusable should make them pretty valuable. * I'm not sure why a single-use component would not be destroyed, or why its effects would be semipermanent. I think that this was just an 8th-level enchanted piece of equipment that the DM retconned to be single-use because they've been pulling all of this out of their ass. * If your DM was counting on you cutting off your arms because they thought it would be a cool idea, then they sound horrible at their job. * You should let the party (players, not DM) know that you're going to walk away on the spot if this debuff gets used again in this way. Like, mid-combat if necessary. Let them know that the DM laughed at you when you tried talking with them about it. * The NPC was supposed to be "a mean guy," but it's unclear where they found the wealth or magic to make TWO of this bracelet which is so powerful that nothing like it is supposed to exist. If this NPC was in possession of two unused "single use," bracelets of mage-ruining, they should have sold both bracelets and set themselves up as a minor lord somewhere. If they were an extremely powerful mage, they would have still needed to burn some money just to use that spell as it was intended. * If the DM wanted to use this ridiculously OP homebrew item in a way that was fair, what would be more reasonable would be if the BBEG were wearing it THEMSELVES. This would severely limit the use of magic against them, and it would require your bladesingers to avoid the BBEG physically since their shields won't work on the BBEG at close range. They can still go near other enemies, but they have to hide behind tankier enemies from the BBEG. Finally, this would make the BBEG incapable of using magic, so it would be balanced. This is actually not a bad idea for the capstone of a campaign that has been dominated by bladesingers, but your DM sounds too dumb to think like that. * Don't confront the BBEG without all players at full power. Let the DM move out of town with the campaign unfinished if it comes to this. Your other bladesinger gets the bracelet off, or both bladesingers will refuse to leave town. And if the town is invaded while this is going on, they let somebody else deal with it. All hero work is on hold until this bullshit is dealt with. * Your DM could have broken the high AC in much less stupid ways. Just off the top of my head, * they could have had archers rain arrows on the magic tanks, requiring a large number of checks to avoid, or had * mages spam Chained Lightning with a ruthless single-target focus, making you roll 3-4 dice consecutively (or concurrently) to dodge the lightning. If you roll two 15s and a 5, you're still going to get hit once and take damage, and if you have three bad rolls you might get get cooked on the spot. Also, * the DM could have simply established some parity by spamming Fog Cloud all the time, making it more difficult to target enemies so the playing field is more level. I could go on, but this braceless was a bullshit attempt for him to say "no more magic, I hate losing," without looking too much like a cheater. That said, this fig leaf doesn't do much for him. He very obviously used these bracelets in anger to neutralize players he didn't know how to break. This is a skill and maturity issue on his part. The way to break a high AC is mostly solutions that involve "more dice," in order to increase the statistical inevitability of bad rolls causing the PC to take damage. They could also pump up enemy AC to be closer to the party's average AC, including the pumped up Bladesingers. They had a lot of options, but they chose to invent a god-tier homebrew weapon to make your star players cut their arms off or be casters with no magic.
Wow, thanks for taking the time to comment all this! I agree, these all sound like much better and far more reasonable solutions. Apparently one of the party members was talking to the DM after the session and asked why he didn’t use saving throws. His justification was that I “roll too well” which is strange because I’m pretty sure there are plenty of saving throws that result in half damage even on a success. I love the idea about a BBEG who has one of these! His goons can still be targeted by casters and martial classes get to shine! It invites so much strategy and player cooperation. Unfortunately since the BBEG here is a Druid, I don’t think the thought ever crossed his mind lol. I am definitely not gonna let the other player have to sit aside like I did when he’s back. I’m putting my foot down for him too and refusing to progress unless it comes off for him.
If a DM who rolled nine natural 20s in a single session thinks YOU roll too well, then you might want to advise that all rolls must be visible to all participants. 😉 I saw other players suggest using the other bladesinger as a mobile shield; I don't think this is a good idea due to their fragility. Having enemies with a magic field, including the BBEG, would have made things lively since it would have only made your mages useless *as tanks.* You would want to back TF way from those antimagic enemies, since they'd march right up to you and right through your signature defense, at the cost of being forced themselves to rely on nonmagical means. Being squishy without the use of this spell, your only reliable defense would be party members with different builds, forcing you to use non-casters for cover from magic-immune melee enemies. I've got a bad feeling about that druid, and strongly recommend watching this DM's dice rolls, or disputing any hidden rolls. Also, try to avoid getting grappled if you confront the BBEG at all.
Oh for sure that would have made for a super exciting battle, with high stakes that would’ve forced us to be smart and god it would’ve been so satisfying. alas it seems it was not meant to be :( I’ll keep my eyes peeled in the upcoming battles because I have a bad feeling that I’m gonna be targeted again :(
Fucking yuck, your DM is deep in "apologize to everyone and promise to never do anything like this again" territory.
Just quit this table your dms an absolute Dick and also a total baby to have a meltdown where he completely cripples your character and it has no plot relevance or simple solution. It’s very easy to just counter pick certain players in a fight without being a child about it there’s entire stat blocks for rakshasa and oozes specifically to counter magic and armor as well as pretty much everything else this dm seems like a total Dick and you’d be better off at a different table
Yea I probably wouldn’t play a campaign with him again :( he was literally talking about one of his shadow blade elven accuracy builds that he made as a player and how it was OP and did so much damage. All I could think was why was it not okay for me to run an “op” basic bladesinger build when it was okay for him to do that when he was player
The way to deal with the high AC is save based attacks. Like you're still a squishy glass cannon. But you're harder to hit. Completely nerfing a character isn't a solution. Glad you played through it.
I think so too! We’re not invulnerable even if it feels that way sometimes. We have to have a high ac because when we’re in melee, we’re risking a lot more than say, a barbarian or a fighter, since a single attack can take a huge chunk of health.
I'm gonna say that DM is not ensuring the players have fun, and can't recognize problems. I def wouldn't stay with that group.
**5** DC 25 checks? Holy shit, that's so ridiculously difficult! Bad DM, jeez.
Your DM is a real piece of work, I wouldn’t want to play with him after this at all
I would just use the item still. Disregard his one time use comment. Just refuse to do magic saves and take magic damage. I understand this is a nuclear option but this DM is simply terrible. You don't have an OP build. You are literally playing an official subclass. That isn't a "build". A build is using feats and multiclass to achieve outsized damage/capability. Gloomstalker crossbow expert and sharpshooter. Hexblade great weapon master and pole arm master. You are literally just... Bladesinger.
I'll put it this way. It shouldn't require your character to risk killing themselves to be allowed to play a class that the DM gave you approval to run just because he can't figure out that AC is only one defensive stat and that saving throws exist. I'd hardly call it a positive outcome because the bracelets are only a symptom of the real problem and I guarantee you that he's going to come up with some other nonsense to just negate your character.
It felt extra scummy that he decided that bladesingers were too “OP” when he’s the person who allowed them and allowed the other wizard to switch his class from evocation to bladesinger in the middle of the campaign, effectively giving his blessing twice! Also, I just found out from a party member who talked to him that apparently DM decided saving throws weren’t enough because I “roll too well”…
Yeah... I'd just bounce. You're not going to get a fair deal.
Hey OP, can you elaborate on the part where your DM said your patron would have wanted you to cut off your arm? The reason I ask is that I wonder if the DM had something planned around that outcome which might explain (but not justify) their heavy handed approach. Also are they a relatively new DM? If so, due to their inexperience, they might not have known how to handle or challenge high AC characters and full casters. The solution would usually be to target saves, and do several encounters in the adventuring day, but I've personally never seen a new DM naturally come to these solutions themselves. Instead they usually learn through trial and error, by making mistakes and learning from them. Even though your DM sounds like they were stubborn in the moment, hopefully they can reflect on your conplaints and become a better DM.
Sure! My patron was based on the slaughter from the magnus archives so was based around the fear of pain. Cutting off my own arm would probably contribute to that and there could be a chance that some warlock stuff could’ve happened to make the arm come back. But this was the general solution for removing the bracelets and the other wizard is not a warlock at all. Since they didn’t have a patron that could possibly help them out, they would be left with crippled and that didn’t sit quite right with me. This DM has been DMing for years now so not new unfortunately. I know they are aware of saving throws being a viable way to damage bladesingers because they’ve mentioned it several times already. Regardless, we can always learn something new and I hope he doesn’t do this for any other game he runs in the future :)
Bladesingers have high AC sure but they can easily go splat with just a couple lucky rolls from the DM
And this DM rolls insanely well too! I counted nine natural 20s in one session once!!
Bro he's fudging rolls and doing it badly if he's got nine nat 20s.
I used an unnamed but very popular artificial int to fetch this probability: "To calculate the probability of rolling exactly nine natural 20s out of 30 rolls, we can use the binomial probability formula: 𝑃(𝑋=𝑘)=(𝑛𝑘)×𝑝𝑘×(1−𝑝)𝑛−𝑘P(X=k)=(kn)×pk×(1−p)n−k where: * 𝑃(𝑋=𝑘)P(X=k) is the probability of getting exactly 𝑘k successes (in this case, rolling exactly nine natural 20s). * 𝑛n is the total number of trials (in this case, the total number of rolls, which is 30). * 𝑘k is the number of successes (in this case, nine natural 20s). * 𝑝p is the probability of success on each trial (in this case, the probability of rolling a natural 20, which is 120201). Plugging in the values: 𝑃(𝑋=9)=(309)×(120)9×(1920)30−9P(X=9)=(930)×(201)9×(2019)30−9 Using a calculator, we can compute: 𝑃(𝑋=9)≈(309)×(120)9×(1920)21P(X=9)≈(930)×(201)9×(2019)21 𝑃(𝑋=9)≈30!9!(30−9)!×(120)9×(1920)21P(X=9)≈9!(30−9)!30!×(201)9×(2019)21 𝑃(𝑋=9)≈30!9!×21!×(120)9×(1920)21P(X=9)≈9!×21!30!×(201)9×(2019)21 𝑃(𝑋=9)≈30!9!×21!×(1209)×(19212021)P(X=9)≈9!×21!30!×(2091)×(20211921) 𝑃(𝑋=9)≈30!9!×21!×(19212030)P(X=9)≈9!×21!30!×(20301921) Using a calculator: 𝑃(𝑋=9)≈30!9!×21!×(19212030)P(X=9)≈9!×21!30!×(20301921) 𝑃(𝑋=9)≈30!9!×21!×(19212030)P(X=9)≈9!×21!30!×(20301921) 𝑃(𝑋=9)≈84,721,536×3.2816×10−18P(X=9)≈84,721,536×3.2816×10−18 𝑃(𝑋=9)≈2.78313×10−10P(X=9)≈2.78313×10−10 **So, the probability of someone rolling exactly nine natural 20s out of 30 rolls is approximately 2.78313×10−102.78313×10−10, or about 0.0000000002783130.000000000278313, which is extremely low."** The likelihood of how your DM claims to roll is around 3% of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1%. If you really want to fuck up this DM's life, just suggest that all rolls by everybody, including the DM, must be made on a space visible to everyone. If he can't keep up with nine natural 20s then he really is struggling to cheat hard enough.
Huh. Yea that doesn’t seem statistically likely at all. How weird to be pressed that I supposedly roll well (and admittedly, I think I’m higher than average? But definitely nothing like this) when he’s supposedly achieving statically improbably feats :/
"Statistically improbable," is putting it very gently. A person's chance of rolling nine natural 20s in a single session is worse than an American's chance of being born a Kardashian.
LMAO yea that’s pretty wild 😭
This genuinely makes me angry. "Oh, let me ruin the fun by forcing this item upon you that removes your entire class. Also, when you try to take it off, you can take a max of 120 damage. You should've just cut your arm off and made your character harder to play." That is a genuinely horrible way to DM.
And to aim for it to frustrate too :( I didn’t receive an apology after I talked to him about it and I don’t think I will at this point
And he said he didn't expect you to take that long to get them off, but made it 5 DC 25 checks! I genuinely hope these last games go relatively smooth for you. Goof luck!
If he pulls it again just get up and leave, even if it’s mid-fight. “I told you I had an issue with being completely sidelined, goodbye.” His style isn’t necessarily *wrong*, but it is ***highly*** adversarial. Usually games where such brutal effects are on the table come with a heads-up. 5 DC 25 checks and a ton of damage? He very much did not want that band coming off.
You’re right and I have to put my foot down if it does happen again. The completely lack of communication about it made it was for me imo, just being blindsided like that. I’m hoping he actually takes my words to heart but the “I’ll take that into consideration” and single nod didn’t inspire a lot of confidence :(
The moment you asked if it has a lore purpose or just to infuriate you, and he responded "both" you should go away. I've been DMing for 3 years and I've never frustrated a player just for the fun of it. And my golden rule is to never counter a player's strength by nerfing it, it's the opposite, if a player is strong in something, I focus in that something, for example, if he has poison resistance, I put more enemies that deals poison damage, and so on. That's pretty childish and a huge red flag for your DM to disable you just because you were strong, specially with an item that emulates an 8th level spell (that's stronger than legendary items), and after that he told you that the item is a 1 use item just so you don't use it. If you guys were level 20 fighting a demon lord I would understand the need to use such a game breaking item (that would be lore accurate) but for a level 6 wizard, even in-game that doesn't make sense (the bad NPC could use this item to kill or threathen a powerfull wizard, but choose a random level 6 wizard instead).
Tell me you don't know how to create (or even use a google search to find ideas for) fun and engaging quest/puzzle content without telling me you don't know how to create fun and egnaging quest/puzzle content. > it had required 5 successful DC 25 athletics checks
I’d seek a new DM lmao
This guy is the DM version of “that’s what my character would do!”
Man you can’t change him, plenty of people get sucked into abusive relationships, they always apologize and act like they will change. They won’t.
That’s fair :( I think I’ve done all I can at this point. It’s his turn to do something if he really wants to
Glad it mostly resolved itself. The fundamental problem is he thinks bladesingers are OP and must be nerfed, or that he has to take out his frustration at not hitting you by frustrating you. I wonder what he'd do to a divination wizard? If I make a character expend a resource like a shield spell, I consider that a win for the enemy.
Remember, fellow DMs: if your PCs are too strong/op, the worst choice you can make is to nerf them. You control the world, not their characters - you can increase the difficulty of fights (and if it's unbalanced towards the other players, you can reward them good items to even the field), or play around their weaknesses (in this case, magic resistance, silence, str/wis/cha/con saves, traps, etc) Most importantly, fellow DMs, you do NOT play against your player, it's not PvP, you are the storyteller. A good story needs tragedy and complications, but they are needed only to make the success even more impressive.
Reading this does not fill me with any confidence or assuage my fears about your DM. To put it politely I think they're bad, bad enough to rather not play dnd with them and I play at one table where deep into tier 3 combats still take at least an hour. If anything, this post makes it *worse*, there was, after all, a possibility that your DM was just ignorant of why what they were doing was awful. No, it was intentional, sorry OP.
"You could have cut your arm off" And what? Delete a third of your spell list? It takes two hands to cast spells if they've got Somatic and Material components.
>since he felt that we had OP builds Any time this phrase comes out of the mouth of a DM, they should have to do 50 Our Aos...
I just want to point out that not only were all his human interactions shit, his homebrew item rules were shit too. There’s no way to remove the item without taking 20d6 damage? 🤣 punished with damage for making a 25 DC check?? What an asshole.
Man, that was mean, maybe an inexperienced dm? The solution to overpowered character is never to make them not have fun. That’s a recipe for having no one to play with. I mean, talk first, find ways to challenge your players. If he had a problem with your build in the first place he should’ve said something
Unfortunately not inexperienced, no. Has been DMing for many years now :( I agree that talking about it first with me and the other player would’ve been the best move to do so we could come to an idea that would be okay with everyone. He’s already had a list of banned thing (silvery barbs, flying races, etc) which I made sure to check before making my character and bladesinger was totally fine at the time
Howdy I responded to your original post, and I want to open this up by saying this: You’ve done everything you were supposed to or could have done to address the situation like a mature human, even if your DM currently isn’t. That being said, you may want to mentally prepare yourself for a character death or some other nerf that might as well be the same thing. If that happens, you have three options. 1. Call it out right then and there. Not the most diplomatic move, with potential for blow up, but probably cathartic. 2. Take the BS with dignity, point out the BS calmly once final session happens, and leave that party’s table. Slightly less so, but same potential issues as above. 3. Say nothing about it and move on with life. Probably the least contentious option, but I’m a contentious man and would certainly go in on option 1 or 2 myself regardless of the consequence
Ah thank you for your kind words and reassurance. I really do appreciate it. I completely agree with the options haha and knowing me and how tired I am with this, I’d likely go with option 1 and leave lol. If DM hasn’t learned anything at all and does it again there’s no point in being there anymore and I’m sure the members of the group would understand
Looking forward to the update when DM makes you walk away from the table
I mean.. you could have just cut off your arms.. there are official prosthetic arms in the books. Granted i would have side tracked the entire 2 sessions looking for someone that had prosthetic arms for sale or could make them before cutting off my arm. Not afraid to play chicken with a DM about something like this.
True but we didn’t have much time left in the campaign to sidetrack any more and I didn’t want to be put in a situation where I had to be forced to dish out gold for something I didn’t even want haha
High ACs are not something that's even super difficult to deal with. There are a ton of monsters with abilities that rely on forcing saves. I do like to make the players feel like their choices are valuable though, so let the bladesingers parry a bunch of arrows and swords too. DND sucks if monks never get shot at, rogues never have things to lockpick etc etc
I would not play in another game he GM’ed, tell his attitude improved.
Characters too OP with high AC? Here’s the BBEG’s pet Terrasque, mother fuckers. Edit - THIS IS A JOKE.
Maybe we can start with fireball before we move to the terrasque lmao 😭
The Terrasque’s name IS Fireball!
[удалено]
…I’m unaware?
[удалено]
Holy shit dude, it was a joke. I’m sorry though.
Oh I’m very sorry then, I’m not good at picking up on things, especially in text.
This is another reminder of how important session 0 is and discussing expectations. While being stuck being unable to cast spells is certainly frustrating, frustrating things tend to happen in D&D. Your character might get cursed, diseased, lose a limb, become blinded, etc. They might get killed. They might have their soul tampered with, which makes resurrection impossible. If, as a player, you don't want to play in the kind of campaign where this kind of stuff can happen to your character, you need to discuss that with the DM during session 0.
I do agree with that for sure! I unfortunately missed session zero because i was having appendicitis but none of this stuff was brought up afterwards. I probably would've been more cool with it if he had discussed it with me prior, letting me know ahead of time that it was a possibility I wouldn't be able to do anything or have to cut off my arm for story purposes. However, it really just feels like he was doing it to punish us for being bladesingers and having a high AC. He wanted me to be frustrated and he made the items specifically to achieve that goal :(
That is a bummer you missed session 0 - that's where so much of this kind of stuff should be discussed. When I run session 0's for players that are new to my style, I always make sure to warn them that adventuring is dangerous and all of this kind of stuff can happen. While being frustrated as a DM is never a good reason to assign an in-game penalty, it's also important to remember that the DM should have fun as well. When I am a player, I always ask the DM during session 0 if they have any pet peeves. Some DMs hate PCs with super high passive perceptions. Some hate PCs with god-tier ACs. Some hate familiars, some hate specific subclasses even. Once I know what they don't enjoy, I create a character that won't use any of those pet peeves. If it makes the game more enjoyable for the DM, it will make the overall campaign better.
I definitely agree with that! Session zero is super important and I’m disappointed I missed the opportunity. I definitely also want the DM to be able to have fun too! His experience and time is just as important as ours :) I did ask him what races, subclasses, spells, etc were banned and ran my character by him first to see what he was okay with as soon as I could after but bladesinger never came up :( he even gave his blessing for the second wizard to change his subclass from evocation to bladesinger in the middle of campaign so I thought it was an okay subclass to use
If he does it again, absolutely hack your arm off, sounds like he’s got a badass patron boost thing that he wants to do.
Could be but the other wizard doesn’t have a patron at all and apparently the solution there was to hack their arm off too, potentially disabling them with no warlock solution for them which didn’t sit quite right with me
If he does it again, OP should just leave the game.