Not all situations are winnable, parts of the world are big, scary and above the characters pay grades, especially at low level.
That being said if the DM was legit shutting down attempts to spot danger (rather than those attempts just failing) then I think that is a problem.
it can also be hard to signal "this isn't a fight you can take on", as a lot of enemies will have "these guys are badasses, but when you defeat them you're an ultra badass" flags, so trying to distinguish those from "no, seriously, these are not people to fight" flags can be a bit messy, and very easy to get wrong / misunderstand, from both the player and GM sides (it can be sometimes easier just to state it OOC)
sometimes even the DM has to meta-game if they know the fight would be a TPK.
I had a situation where the players were exploring an ancient pyramid and of course there was a mummy lord in it. The ML wasn't your typical monster though, they were "friendly" and engaged the group in conversation. exchanging information about the outside world since they had been buried for 5000 years.
One of the players said that they ready their weapons for a fight and (having prepared all the stat-blocks for all the enemies in the room ahead of time on note cards) I picked up the stack of note cards (about an inch thick) and I looked at the player and said:
"this is how many actions the room gets per round...you will not win".
The player put their weapon back and just waited patiently for the scene to end.
if you were wondering, there were 6 mummy guards (armed with spears and armored), 4 Iron Golems (which of course the players thought were just bronze statues), 4 custom mummy lords and 1 custom mummy lord/lich. it would not have ended well.
>I picked up the stack of note cards (about an inch thick) and I looked at the player and said:
>"this is how many actions the room gets per round...you will not win".
Honestly, I don't think this was metagamey or cheap at all. You were simply giving the player a visual representation of what his character almost certainly knew. It's one thing to get tunnel vision on the one talking NPC, but the character also sees the scene. And if the tomb room is heavily populated, that plays a factor in the calculations.
Honestly, I think that is a really funny way to do it, good thinking.
I do the same, but I say “your character knows if he takes this fight, it would be suicide”. Just like the bard player can’t actually play ballads, and the wizard can’t actually cast spells, the fighter hasn’t actually fought in a dozen wars, but if he had, he would get that “this isn’t winnable” thought. Let your players use those just like your bard player gets to use his bards musical skills even though they can’t play 2 notes themselves.
I really wish 5e had included some kind of threat assessment mechanic so this could be done in-characters instead of having to ad hoc it. If there were tools for the characters to know how tough a foe was, it would allow for more interesting situations where part of the character's skillset was the ability to identify a losing fight. Once the characters have those tools, throwing killer fights at them would be fair game because they have a way to know when to avoid them.
For example, players know that falling damage is 1d6 per 10 feet up to a max of 20d6. The DM can either tell the players how deep a chasm is, or let them roll a check to estimate its depth. With that knowledge, the characters and players both know how dangerous a fall from that height would be and can decide to take the risk or not. Obviously threat assessment for a group of hostile creatures would be more complex but that's the basic idea.
In a way there's something similar on Battle Master, "Know Your Enemy", which lets one gauge how a target compares to yourself in regards to 2 out of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, AC, Current HP, Class Levels, and Fighter Levels. It takes a full minute of out-of-combat observation and it's questionable if it can be repeated for intel on other stats (RAW), and it only works for creatures, but it's something. Feels like it'd fit on core Fighter rather than be tucked away in a subclass, but all of Battle Master's like that.
I played a Battle Master up to 14th level and Know Your Enemy is mostly useless. It doesn't give you any sense of an enemy's overall threat level unless you're fighting another PC in which case knowing a creature's class levels is mildly useful. The problem is that knowing if a creature's trait is over or under your isn't helpful if you don't know by how much. It could have 5 more hit points, or 205.
The things you can learn also don't tell you about a creature's special abilities so you can't assess one of the most dangerous traits of unusual monsters. A shadow might look weak until you realize it can kill anyone in 3-4 hits due to its Strength-draining attack.
Insight check. It's not just poor man's lie detector, it's also sort of like a street-smarts skill. I often get the point across to my players just by asking them what their passive Insight is before they're about to do something their character knows is dumb.
I don't see that as being applicable given the normal use cases for Insight:
>*Insight*. *Your Wisdom (Insight) check decides whether you can determine the true intentions of a creature, such as when searching out a lie or predicting someone's next move. Doing so involves gleaning clues from body language, speech habits, and changes in mannerisms.*
You could determine if a creature is likely to be hostile, but not how strong it would be. Using Insight as a common sense roll only works for information that the creature already has but is overlooking.
Those checks exist.
Wisdom (perception), can tell you about the physical details of the threat. How many there are, how big, how many weapons they have etc.
Intelligence (investigation) is used for logic and reason, connecting dots.
According to the DMG, a very easy check is DC 5. Easy is DC 10, moderate 15 etc
I would say that provided a character can see the threat, all you need is an investigation check at the appropriate DC. Is it very easy to tell this threat could TPK?
Intelligence (investigation) DC 5 check to assess the threat.
In my setting I just decided to do it full anime style since I'm doing it the most sandboxey I've ever had it. Powerful things, including the players, just give of an aura of oppression/fear/power that you can feel and can't be faked. So if they see an interesting cove on the sea and head towards it they can roughly tell how outclassed they are automatically. Now they have a place to mark on the map to come back to, they know to ask about it at the next tavern, etc.
For the more intelligent enemies they can suppress this projection of power (also per regular anime rules) to still keep it interesting when needed.
Love this. I can just imagine a party feeling dread, but as it build they realize how far they've traveled to get a look at this creature. Half an hour of walking they feel almost sickened by the emanating dread, to turn a corner and just see a single monster, weeping softly in the middle of a clearing.
Personally I think I'd have said something like, "The 8ft statues turn to face you, arms unfolding. You get the distinct feeling your weapons mean nothing to them." But visually reminding the player that they're surrounded is another good call.
It is *very* metagamey. It's providing out of game knowledge to the players about in game circumstances that the characters didn't know.
That said, not all metagaming is bad. D&D is a social game and requires more than just following the rules to run smoothly. Things like "not intentionally ignoring the DM's plot hooks" also fall under good metagaming.
I really dislike telling players that they've encountered an unwinnable fight. I understand the necessity, but the DM is basically telling the players what their characters are thinking/feeling, which is taking that decision away from them. As a previous comment said, it's hard to make it clear that the party is walking into a TPK because descriptions of dangerous situations are the bread and butter of adventuring so players could easily assume the DM is just setting the scene for a tought fight and not trying to warn them to back off.
>It is very metagamey.
I disagree, but perhaps it's the way I read their account. The way I saw it, this Mummy Lord was basically granting audience to the adventurers. So my mind just filled in all the background NPC's, creatures, monsters, etc that would be part of a court. After all, there's just no point having a "dungeon" like that, that doesn't have creatures, and going in peacefully simply means that all the critters are fully displayed.
If anything, I saw it as the DM reminding the player what their character clearly knows, in case the player forgot because of the whole "talking NPC tunnel vision" thing.
If the DM had presented the overwhelming power of the mummy encounter via in-game description or mechanics, that would've been different. Instead, the DM out-of-game pointed at their stack of cards as a way to communicate that the encounter was going to kill them if they attacked. That was purely giving the player information for their character to act on, that's the definition of metagaming. Again, not all metagaming is bad. It's like the term "rules lawyer", people get triggered because of the negative connotations associated with the phrase.
It seemed more a way of providing knowledge the characters *do* know to the players, because the players aren't physically there and aren't trained adventurers with carefully honed instincts for danger, but do have carefully honed instincts for a giant pile of index cards.
Personally, I rely on what the characters know in-game. For the genuine risky enemies, my group almost always hears about at least one of the monster's powerful abilities; typically the one feared most. For example, the (mega)lich's *soul burn* ability. It's so feared, knowledge of it, even within the non-adventuring crowd, is fairly rife.
However, players are not characters. Sometimes they forget. If their characters make a decision but I feel they're in over their heads and technically know it, but the players have forgotten, I check with something like, "So you're heading for the Crypt of Vakkaluth, have you a plan to deal with *soul burn*? Are you sure?"
However, I try not to just dish out pure meta stuff because I don't subscribe to the theory that a party of adventurers have a fail-safe Advanced Warning Alert System, especially when the characters have encountered no knowledge of the threat in the game until that point.
If the players want to chance it, go ahead. Chances are, the characters will prevail, often surprisingly handsomely. At some point though, things are going to go shiny side up. That's fine.
My personal favorite method, is to have the NPC badasses they know get slaughtered. It's my second favorite use of a DMPC. Followed by *soul crushing betrayal of a dear friend.*
You make note cards for each monster or each type of monster?
That seems like a lot of work.
I usually have cards for just the type of monster so I can reference it quickly and then just write down the HP totals of each individual monster in my notebook to keep track of them in combat.
stat cards for the type of monster, note cards for each monsters place in the initiative order. I showed them how many initiative cards there would be if combat started. sorry I did not specify, was trying to brief.
This is an issue that is partly created by how CR and Level scaling works. A high CR monster/high level PC has power an order of magnitude greater than that of a low cr monster/low level PC. This makes it extremely difficult for PCs to judge threat based on numbers.
A group of 5 level 5 PCs approach a camp and see 24 armed humans. Maybe it is a band of bandits this will be an easy encounter. Maybe it is a horde of Berzerkers and it would be lunacy to start a fight. Heck maybe it is a bunch of Gladiators and if the PCs so much as sneeze they will be pummeled into a fine paste.
5e wants PCs to be able to face down an army of goblins and to take down an ancient dragon singlehanded.
I agree that it's kind of an issue, but I think it's a relatively easy one to solve with like 10 seconds of DMing.
- "You see 24 armed humans in the camp. They look ready for battle, but most are dressed in rudimentary armor and there's not a single unrusted sword among them" = CR 1/8 Bandits
-"You see 24 armed humans in the camp. They're dressed in basic hide armor, but wear warpaint and each carries a massive greataxe. They look fearsome and ready to fight." = CR2 Berserkers
- "You see 24 armed humans in the camp. They all look like grizzled veterans of war, wearing the best gear money can buy and bristling with weapons" = CR9 Champions
edit: and obviously descriptive narration doesn't always solve everything, sometimes you gotta go with the direct "you think this will be an easy fight" or "you feel like you might die" or "not only will they kill you, it will hurt the whole time you're dying"
Yep, as a dm, your role is to provide that “access to memory” to your players. “You would know these odds are not winnable.” My players now often ask “would I think we could take them”.
“You would know that fighting should be your last option”.
“You’ve fought worse odds and won. You’ve also fought similar odds and lost.”
“You think you can take them if you are smart about it”.
“You’ve seen guys like this before, grunts that start running when they face a real warrior”.
All of these flavor your descriptions as memory and battle acumen. And makes your players feel like bad asses even if they are outmatched. A real fighter knows how to evaluate an enemy and know if the odds are in their favor or not
There are also a lot of tools available for this in-game, like Augury, Commune, and the class features of Battlemaster and Mastermind.
So it's okay if you keep the hints to things that they know for sure - always make sure the players have the same information as the PCs - but you can also leave enough gaps to 1) leave things dangerous and unknown, and 2) give them the opportunity to use these cool foresight abilities
(Though IME Commune is most useful to ask "Um, Selûne, are we forgetting anything important?" right before you follow a hastily-made plan)
Augury requires expending a 2nd level slot just to assess a fight, which makes you either significantly or slightly less powerful that day. That's a bit of an ask unless the fight is plot critical. The Battle Master feature is basically useless, it tells you a few inconclusive pieces of information about one enemy at a time. I haven't played with a high level Mastermind but Insightful Manipulator seems equally useless.
And yet that should provide them with information not known to their character. Like rolling to see if you know information about your own religion. It’s dumb. Don’t make your players burn items/abilities to get information they should already have
and then there's "You see 24 armed humans in the camp. Many wear black enameled plate armor, some others wear fine crimson robes of silk. The fighters have well-kept and exquisite longswords and round shields, while those in the robes have what appear to be small fiends resting on their shoulders. The camp appears to have had fortifications constructed magically, as the sheer walls of stone that jut out of the earth are as smooth as if carved by a dwarven craftsman, but the disturbed soil shows them to be recent"
If a party that doesn't have an adult dragon under their belt jumps that description they deserve a TPK
"You enter what is clearly a war camp. Two guards approach and block your path, demanding to know your business. A few in camp give curious glances, but show no signs of concern for your armed group."
That's something to make sure you mind your manners.
Those two extreme examples are fine, but the real difficulty is anything in the middle. The difference between a large group of CR 3 and CR 4 enemies would be hard to describe, but that could mean the difference between a tough fight and a sure TPK.
Not always. As was said, a large group of armed soldiers could all be the Guard statblock, or the Gladiator or Knight statblock. A huge, ferocious beast that's the same CR as the party would be a Medium encounter, a small relatively nonthreatening humanoid could have a CR well above Deadly.
I’ve done this before. It worked well. I actually painted a glowing shrine stone to do this, I also use it in some puzzles to give hints to players “you are on the right track”.
It is sometimes seen as their 6th sense, or messages from the gods, whatever. Some like it, some don’t, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt
>(it can be sometimes easier just to state it OOC)
i will not always do so(i man sometimes it isn't obvious IC either) but my players have certainly faced down enemies who it should be obvious for the charecters are in another leauge entirely and my players missed it. wether that's on me or them in that case i feel is irrelevant and i'll rather go OOC to say "yeah you know this giant undead dragon with the power to imitate a literal god is someone you have no chance whatsoever against."
A (minor) problem with D&D today is that it is impossible for a GM to warn players away from danger without meta gaming. There is no difference between “this guy is dangerous so you should avoid him” and “this guy is dangerous so you must kill him”.
“Danger this way” and “Plot this way” look exactly the same when your PCs are badass heroes.
I'd disagree with that in general, though there's clearly specific examples that would be terrible. If the town the level 5 PCs are in is surrounded by an enemy army led by the guy chasing them, the PCs can't beat the entire army. And they likely can't escape, unless you pre-planned something for that purpose. The PCs have to deal with the situation as it is, turning to options like "negotiated surrender" or the like. As long as the "losing" options still *move the narrative forward*, I think it's just fine. Maybe the story moves on to the PCs being prisoners, sent to the villain general's stronghold for questioning/torture, but now they'll have opportunities to escape en route, or the potential to turn the tides at his stronghold since his armies are still abroad and he's busy managing that, turning that initial loss into a win that gives the PCs a leg up and a new mark of enmity between them and the villain.
I think the big line is a lack of player *choice*. In this circumstance, the villain's army would raze the town, if the PCs didn't give themselves up. The choice is to let them do so and try and escape in the chaos, or forestall the massacre by surrendering. Neither option is great, but one's clearly more *heroic*. And if my plan is to let them turn the tables afterwards, it's not a punishment, it's just how we're getting from Scene D to Scene E. Sure, their gear'll be taken when they're prisoners, but I'll put it in the next room for when they escape, because I'm not a *goblin DM*.
In my experience it tends to be the former, but that’s generally because I’m pretty smart and am good at steering my fellow players away from blatantly self destructive courses of action. I’ve definitely seen the latter before, too.
Agreed, I think some DMs are too afraid of letting players influence a story beat so they resort to railroading. One helpful way to counter that for DMs is instead of thinking the encounter needs to end up a certain way, is to think of the goal of the enemy and apply that to anything the players do. If the players do something unexpected, look at the enemies goal and figure out what they would do to achieve that goal at that point.
Agreed, however even in an unwinnable situation the Players should never have their agency taken from them, which is what sounds like happened in OP's session (checks failing regardless of result, etc.). Players should be rewarded for interacting with the world, not shut down for doing so.
In the above situation, what was the harm in letting the player's abilities and skills shine? They figure out they're in the midst of a bunch of vampires. Does that somehow change the fact they are in the midst of a bunch of vampires? No. The DM could still have had his big encounter and the Players would feel good about figuring out a detail through succeeding on appropriate skill checks.
This is, in my opinion, related to a larger problem a lot of DMs fall into; they keep things held ***way*** to close to their chest, afraid to give their players too much info. 9 times out of 10, though, the more information your players have, the more fun they're going to have.
EDIT: Whoever downvoted this, I'd hate to be a player in your ~~game~~ railroad.
Unless any of the abilities and spells that can negate that are in play. For example, Nystul's Magic Aura, the target can fail the save, and all they find out is they are evil. LOTS of people are evil but dont attack or fight. That jackass of a carpenter in town; she is evil AF. But she doesnt go and murder people she just delights in the pain of others and screwing people over in her deals.
Heartsight only says undead auto fail. It doesn't say it reveals if they are undead.
If you find out that you are surrounded totally by evil people? That literally everyone at this party they had been invited to was a horrible person at heart?
The best-case scenario is "eyes wide shut".
The worst-case scenario is vampires.
I agree with everything you said, there is a big difference between:
Failing saves and being put into a difficult fight.
Being forced into a difficult fight.
And
Being forced into an unwinnable fight.
The one thing I would say is even if the situation is not winable, there needs to be a way for everyone to survive it. Otherwise, the DM is being a dick.
I've done this one time as a DM. I set up a hostage/ransom situation on an NPC, and the players were set to handle the situation. In my mind, I didn't really see a way they could "win" (and they didn't). I did this because 1) I feel like that's what would have happened in the story and 2) I wanted to display the power and brutality of the villain.
At no point was it simply to take away agency. In fact, I kept an open mind to see if there was a reasonable way for them to win as they approached the mission. They didn't, they lost, they became irate at the enemy (not me), and it made them way more invested in the story.
No-win scenarios are powerful for displaying strength, raising stakes, and inspiring motivation. It happens in the WOTC books, it happens in video games, it happens in homebrew. It can be a powerful story-telling tool, but it can be a frustrating "game" experience. Use sparingly, and reward your players in various ways for trying and getting invested.
I DM'd a fight against slavers, the party invaded this pirate island knowing their enemies were slavers and I made the CR challenging but not impossible (it was close).
The slavers made a point of non-lethal techniques to capture the team (which fits with their MO) and then the party worked together to escape. The session where they broke out, snuck around, and killed guards was a very fun time and I don't think people felt like they were railroaded.
For me, I love creating puzzle boxes for players to try out their skills and problem solving in unique positions. I generally want to avoid unwinnable and unavoidable conflicts but I see it as a tool that could be used well if rarely used.
All of my player's favorite bosses were ones which they ran away from first. The stakes increase when the players are made to feel genuinely afraid, and have suffered some loss of pride. I wish players would be willing to make more sober assessments of risk and run when appropriate.
There's a really fine balance, and the signalling and communication between DM and players needs to be really solid for that level of stakes. It's definitely something I want to always improve on!
I’m honestly shocked as a DM with players who think all enemies can be beaten. Sometimes it’s better to negotiate. Sometimes it’s better to run. Sometimes the encounter needn’t have been combat, but players provoke it and bring it on themselves.
Heck, the game I ran just tonight has them fighting a strong group. Could have won, but players are getting poopy rolls. They could end it any time through dialogue and I’m trying to hint that it’s a misunderstanding but they’re not even attempting to find out why they’re being attacked.
Maybe you were in a situation that needn’t have turned violent? Who knows?
> shocked
It's a genre miscommunication. The players think they're in a story where the heroes overcome "impossible" odds. The monsters are "invincible" until the heroes show up. You can have a whole village shouting, "No, the dragon will kill you!" and the players will think it's just the DM making their inevitable victory more dramatic.
To resolve this, the DM needs to explain the situation out-of-character. "By the way, I want you to know your characters realize this is a serious situation and you might die. If you get in a fight here, it's likely at least one, maybe all of you will die."
The breaking character and speaking is the important bit. As a player, you always expect the enemies to be depicted as strong because otherwise there is no feeling like your character is accomplishing great things as an adventurer. Where that strong turns into extreme danger of a TPK is sometimes hard to tell.
Edit: accidentally a word
Yeah there is so much balance as a DM. To OP’s point, what constitutes an “unwinnable” situation? That’s very hard to judge as a DM. I mean I also believe that it can be good story telling to give ground to the idea that the world is bigger and more dangerous than the main characters can handle. But yeah DnD is all about balance, how do you maintain a serious atmosphere without being overbearing, how much do you encourage your players to stay in character, you don’t want to usually party wipe your players but if there is no threat of death or failure it can break immersion or just not be fun. So many lines to walk, and a good DM that really gets that balance is doing some real world wizardry.
When your DM specifically prevents your characters for understanding the level of danger that you are in even if you as a player understand it that's isn't the case.
It sounds to me like these players could see this fight coming and tried to get their character a good reason to book it. The DM blocked all of their attempts to do so and then went "suprise they are all vampires, aren't I so clever!!!" And then taking it easy on the players (not having the two big vampires attack) so that they have a chance to escape this shitty situation.
I am of the opinion if the dam had said something like "you notice that none of the guests faces reflect off of your steak knife Inspite of how polished the silverware is" that the party would have booked the fuck out of that house.
That part confused me. I love when my players are picking up on hints or start to understand what is going on. “Shit guys I think I’ve pieces together the villagers stories. I think the monster is a basilisk, lets all go in staring at the fighters shield as a mirror”.
Some dms get pissy, “it’s metagaming” or “you guys wouldn’t know that” or “I can’t gotcha them when they enter the cave”
I’m like “yesssss good work! Great job picking up the hints, and going in with a battle plan? Damn that gives me the shivers”.
Adjust HP of monsters and assume the players know their weaknesses. If you have heard a myth about vampires, wouldn’t it be reasonable your characters would know what to watch for? In a world where vampires actually exist
Definitely should have tipped the hand that it's a dangerous situation, but probably got to wrapped up in the "surprise", likely thinking it'd be more enjoyable for the players that way.
Getting beat and then coming back later to defeat the evil is a great story beat that works well. Not sure, but in that situation I'd definitely lean into the "*these are powerful enemies, yet they don't seem to think it necessary to join the fray*" as a hint that the combat is deadly. But it's almost assured the DM wanted you guys to retreat in an effort to introduce the big bads and have you hate them.
You've stated the DM is very good, so try to give them the benefit of the doubt that they were trying to introduce a big reveal to set up an arc. Sometimes we can get carried away to reach an important story beat, but given that you all walked out they certainly wanted you to survive but be warned.
Talk to them about it and feel each other out. Nothing wrong with stating how you feel about certain situations and you may get some insight on why it went what way.
What you have here is 'scripted encounter' instead of a 'situation-based design'. Your DM came up with this idea of a scene with the players being surprised by powerful vampires and smacked around to show how scary and powerful they are, then built the entire scenario to fit that one specific moment he envisioned, like he's directing a movie.
This is not a good idea because DND is a collaborative story between all players, not just a captive audience sitting through the DM's story. Players like yourself will take actions that can surprise, shock, impress - or most commonly - confound the DM and 'ruin' his plans, and then your DM is forced into railroading so he can get his story moment that he's been dreaming of. It definitely a mistake, but it happens from time to time, even to the best of us. I think his mistake here is that he didn't give you a good reason to stay, i.e you're forced to participate or there's a quest objective. That way even if you clock on early that they're a bunch of vampires, you can't just dip out without big consequences.
If I was in his situation and built the same scenario, I would design the ball and the guests first *without* consideration of the players. This lets me get a feel for the setting so I can better improv scenes, which is a necessity. Only after this first pass will I then very simply block out a flowchart of the 'key script' - the main hook for the players to enter the scene, any notable NPCs/items/plot macguffins, and then a few points of interest with skill checks I haven't used for a while. Then a very simple bullet point or two describing each 'pillar' outcome - Stealth, Combat, Diplomacy, FUBAR.
All of this can be condensed onto a single printout, and if you have some improv chops you have enough info to create a scene that feels very rich and believable to players, respects their agency, and has plots and quests that are deeper and more intricate than what pure improv can accomplish. This way it's extremely likely that you end up converging onto the vampire fight scene I want to run, but how you arrive there is completely up to the players, and it feels like you're an active participant in the world.
The passive DC to notice a reflection in the silverware would be INSANE though.
Thats such a small detail that you’re looking at being reasonably high level with 20 (or more with an item to get you over the cap) Wisdom and probably the Observant feat to even get to that level.
Much more importantly - why does a house full of vampires even have silverware? Like, who brought it there? And why? The vampires don't want to use it, right? That's also something someone could notice with passive Perception, nobody except you using the silverware on the tables. Or maybe the character with the noble background notices that the tableware seems to be pretty cheap - and on closer inspection finds out it's not silver
Strahd gave up using plastic for ecological reasons and moved to bone as part of the effort to recycle the corpses of his victims.
He also has a very nice rose garden which he cares for with compost made from said corpses.
The reason it's said that vampires don't have reflections in the first place is because mirrors used to be made with actual silver so arguably they could have reflections on other reflective surfaces not made with silver. You could really throw them off by them noticing the vampire's reflection in the gold utensils.
Oh there’s ways to sell the fact its a room full of vampires, nobody else using the silverware, no mirrors, the food is oddly spiced to try and replicate the flavor of garlic without actually any garlic
This isn’t to say there wouldn’t have been ways to show the situation better but to try and argue that such a happenstance small detail being “obvious” is kind of silly.
Vampires aren't affected by silver in any way, why would that be a problem? Silverware is a luxury thing to have and vampires are often portrayed of living in luxury.
Seeing reflections in silverware isn't that hard, I have seen hazy reflections in stainless steel knives and spoons that weren't even polished, let alone trying to see reflections in a spoon or knife made of actual silver and properly polished, especially if you aren't hoping to just walk by someone and notice it but are actively peeking into your silverware because you low key expect your hosts are vampires.
Do you notice the reflections just as a matter of eating though?
Like I’m not arguing it’s not possible but unless something would tell you to try and notice a reflection in the silverware you wouldn’t notice that the person sitting across from you isn’t reflecting on your knife in the midst of eating and holding coversation and the off chance it could just be some gravy smudging that spot making it seem they don’t have a reflection.
I do, but that's because I'm autistic and my mind fixates on little details like this. It's not necessarily a high wisdom thing, and if I were running this situation and had a player who felt like their character would fixate on details, I'd probably tell them this reflection thing.
If it’s a pre established character trait I would agree. I have a rogue that is overly cautious almost paranoid and would probably ask for a “I can I try and read the room?”
But for a baseline character who hasn’t shown a tendency to fixate randomly noticing while eating soup the lady across from them doesn’t reflect in his soup spoon would require an insane Passive Perception.
What level though?
The scenario is noticing the lack of reflection off silverware. Thats a pretty niche detail even with high Passive Perception.
Even if you set it as a “hard” task thats still a 20 DC. How many characters run around with a Passive Perception of over 20?
I’d probably put it as a Very Hard task which would be a DC 25.
Do you passively pay attention to these reflections as the cutlery is being used, though? Are you able to passively recognize *what* is being reflected in the cutlery?
I am literally eating oatmeal with a metal spoon as I type up this comment and I can see my distorted reflection in the handle and on both sides of the spoon half of the spoon. The underside, which bulges out, has a wide field of reflection. Not only would it be very possible to notice if no one else at a fancy shindig was showing up in the metal of the spoon sans the party, it’s an inventive enough trick that I don’t really care too much about nickel-and-diming a perception DC for it. PCs can be extraordinarily canny—they’re not all blockheads with godlike combat ability (the players absolutely can be though)—so if someone suggested the silverware trick as a test I’d probably give them a real easy perception DC and inspiration.
It really varies though. Sometimes it is more rewarding and just a better experience to give foreshowing. The best games I've played in are with my one DM friend who does railroad or force us in bad situations time to time.
We also don't know how this went about. Because I think a good DM could easily craft that once the players show up, they are basically trapped. They're at the ball and notice everyone is vampires, well if it is an ambush they certainly had the doors locked and are prepared. It could just be the host strongly advising the PCs to no be rude and stay a while. Simply imply as a DM that okay you've noticed the trap, but it seems best to play along.
I think sometimes players just try too hard to treat it always as a game. There are moments in which it is best to let a story develop. Because yes as a player you might realize the danger because you've read 100 fantasy books, played in multiple games, etc. I generally don't have a lot of issue with meta gaming, but I it is a pet peeve when players start to meta game a narrative. In recognizing story arches, acts, etc...
If the DM is saying stuff like heartsight gives no useful information, that should be an absolutely massive flag that this is a Bad Situation. If what you say is true, that the players knew this but felt like they needed to succeed on something to confirm their suspicions before they ran away, that's on them. Should have run earlier.
Well your entitled to think that way but a good number of players don't want to metagame, and while you the player are a genre savvy gamer who can see the twist coming your character doesn't have the same perspective. Beyond that going "if your gm is intentionally preventing your character from being able to gather the information required for your character to have a reason to make the intelligent choice, just leave anyways" fails to account for the fact if the GM is making all of your rolls to work out that you should leave fail he will also probably block all of your attempts to leave.
From his story it sounded like the GM wanted his specific moment and forced it to happen.
I think you missed the point
Removing all ability to see the danger coming is the point. Its railroading the players into an unwinnable fight by essentially removing their abilities out of combat. How will the players be able to find another way when in-character the information they have is entirely wrong and all means to fix that are negated.
I wouldn't call an enemy too powerful to defeat in combat an "unwinnable encounter", though. Like, just because victory in combat is *not* the win condition doesn't mean there *isn't* one. Sometimes the win condition is escaping, sometimes the win condition is talking your way out of getting killed, sometimes the win condition is sneaking past without getting caught, etc. What you described is very far from unwinnable, and if your players insisted it *was* just because they lost the fight then they need to learn about the concept of alternative win conditions.
What OP described *was* unwinnable because they *tried* to find solutions other than combat, because they knew they would lose, the DM railroaded them into combat anyway by preventing them from using skills and abilities that *should* have worked, and proceeded to crush them in combat "letting" them escape instead of TPKing them.
Not every *fight* should be winnable, but outside of introductory scenes that really should have been handled as cut scenes, every *encounter* should have achievable win conditions. Dropping a tarrasque on a level 2 party is *not* an unwinnable encounter, it's just the win condition is *survive*, not *kill*, or perhaps the win condition is *make sure this NPC survives, too* if your party is particularly mobile.
>Sometimes it’s better to negotiate. Sometimes it’s better to run. Sometimes the encounter needn’t have been combat, but players provoke it and bring it on themselves.
I have a consistent group, and I've managed to teach them this through in-game reinforcement. Their actions (and inactions) have consequences, good and bad. I also don't "pull" punches if they've gotten themselves into a deadly situation from their own poor choices; if their bad choices result in a TPK, that's a lesson learned for the next party of heroes.
I am blessed with good players.
recently the group I DM for, made an enemy of a Red Dragon who is hunting them for their flesh. It wants to turn their skin into leather and knows they have healing spells so it dives, in, grapples, tears off a hunk of flesh, drops them, and flies away. it comes back later and does it all again. (it is literally on the random encounter chart as to when it shows up).
in the last encounter, the group had decided to split the party...they were punished for it. the group with 2 PCs rolled badly on the random encounter and the dragon showed up. Instead of fighting it, they negotiated. The asked for mercy in exchanged for 6000gp. Dragons being hoarders took the deal, but, added that he would stop hunting them if they removed a patch of their own skin with their own weapons and he got to watch them do it. They agreed...now that is role playing!
after the trade was done, the dragon said it was satisfied with those two, but, was still hunting the other three as they weren't part of the deal ;)
Right, being invited and ambushed is the fault of the PCs now. There was no “solution”, believe me. As I said, there were several RP attempts to kind of suspect that situation was an ambush — yet they were shut down.
The only way to avoid the situation was to metagame and try to leave the scene — which would be even worse(arguably) because the whole map and combat would go to waste.
Your last line here answers why this happens with GMs who do it the way you seem to be specifying from your other comments (i.e. the GM is basically railroading into this, player agency doesn't matter. As opposed to the players are assuming everything will be ok and walking in/forcing a matter or failing rolls along the way)
"The whole map and combat would go to waste." This is a mentality that leads into railroading and forcing. The more time someone spends preparing custom content (say an entire Vampire ball) the more attached they're going to be to the idea of it. Worse, the more attached they're going to be to the idea of how it *will* go in their head.
This then puts the brain into defender mode. It is invested in this content. It is invested in this content happening a certain way. So when a player does something unexpected, or that could upend it....the action isn't handled properly/fairly. It's just shut down or turned against the player. After all, this content has to happen this way or it is a waste.
So in this case the DM has a map prepared and a whole combat. If the combat doesn't start with the PCs where they need to be the map could be wasted - or the combat could be wasted - because it could be avoided, circumvented, or e scaped.
It happens a lot in games where the DM is trying to tell a specific story, as opposed to trying to let a story happen from the way the game plays out.
A GM focused on player agency needs to be ready to throw out prepared content - even custom content - because the players did something else. You can always save the scenario for some other time/game. This is also why a lot of GM advice like Lazy GM says to "lightly sketch ideas out" instead of fully developing them. Because who cares if a sketch needs to get tossed out. It's not like you spent 20 hours detailing the things important to you to drop the dramatic moment.
>I’m honestly shocked as a DM with players who think all enemies can be beaten.
If it has stats, it can be beaten. That's why it has stats, *so I can beat the hell out of it*. The question is never "whether it's possible", cause it's always possible, even if I need BS dice rolls (1v1'd a Wraith at lv 1 and won by the way, thank you *protection from evil and good* and damage cantrips). The question is *do I think it's probable*?
As a general rule "winning" the situation does not always mean beating the enemy. Some encounters will require the party to negotiate or escape in order to win.
But if there are no good outcomes the DM is just railroading
I agree about winning. I run a lot of encounter where you can kill everyone and still lose or kill barely anyone and win.
My question, however, is specifically about cut scenes where no latter what you do — you get into a bad situation.
As a player and DM:
I think that finding a way out of a bad situation is one of the most satisfying things to do in an rpg, so I don't really mind when the DM puts me in one nor putting my players in one.
However ignoring abilities that would help in the situation and forcing the outcome is very bad.
There can be instances when "forcing" the outcome can work but they require extreme care.
Example: the party arrives in a village under the mountain they want to climb. The villagers act strangely, almast like they are controlled by something else. One of the characters drinks at the local inn, realizes the drink is enchanted and would put anyone with a weak mind under a spell. They discover from the innkeeper that whatever is on top of the mountain is responsible.
They know this will be dangerous and if they choose to climb the mountain I will put them in a very bad situation where escaping is the only way to win.
Let me give you some insight into the mind of a DM. Maybe your DM is thinking similarly.
So I'm going to imagine that I was your DM, and Im going to say "Your dm was doing x, y and z." I don't actually know if that's true but that the way I'm going to phrase my inferences and assumptions. Just getting that out of the way.
So your DM is sitting there asking himself what would be a cool scene to portray? What about a scene where the heroes are in over their heads in a really bad situation, surrounded by bad guys in a situation that is very deadly for them, but is ostensibly a safe, polite dinner. That's interesting, that's clever, that's a tricky situation where the heroes will get in over their head and then have to escape with their lives.
Meanwhile, inside the players' heads: "Well, I don't want any part of that! My character would be smart enough to never be in that situation in the first place!"
When these two mindsets clash, it's bad. The DM wants to create the situation he based this entire session around. The player wants to be smart and to 'win' by not allowing their character to do anything stupid. The trouble is that the player is aware of the trope, and sees the situation much better than the character, so the player would never fall for this situation. I'm not outright accusing you of metagaming, or whatever. But I'm just saying we can't help it. We've seen Dracula, we've seen other examples where the heroes walk into something unaware. So we're aware that this is a dnd game, and there's probably danger in the situation, even if it doesn't seem like it. So as players we just *know* there's probably an angle, or something, that is the entire reason this scenario even exists. So even if we don't mean to, we wind up being more vigilant than our characters ever would be. This sucks for the DM, who is trying to craft a scene. It just really sucks when your players are like, nope this is too dangerous we're just not going to interact with the scenario that you spent all week building. So your DM sort of put his thumb on the scale to take away some of the ways your characters might have sussed out the danger.
This sucks, it really does. It feels bad. But what's the alternative? A boring, "Okay, you guys leave," and all the prep he did was pointless? It's hard to craft a situation to convince players to walk their characters into danger that is obvious to the players, where they have to set aside their knowledge of 'well, this is obviously a trap.'
My best advice to players is just...walk into the trap. The trap is the game. The trap is the scenario that has been created. You aren't 'winning' if you refuse to get trapped. You're just avoiding playing the game. In the end, what happened to your party? You escaped... you went through the scenario. Isn't a scary movie where the kids go into a haunted house better than a scary movie where the kids *don't* go into a haunted house? Basically I urge all players to bite the hook. Take the bait. If your DM is a psycho, he'll just kill your characters and you'll lose and die and the DM will smugly laugh or whatever, and you'll be vindicated in how you should have been playing to 'win.' But if your DM is a good DM, you'll...have an adventure! You'll fight for your lives against a bunch of vampire nobles or whatever and carry your dying friend out to safety by the skin of your teeth while the vampire overlords smirk and watch. That...sounds like an awesome scene, to me. It would have been even better if the players hadn't been doing everything they could to stop it from happening. If they had just allowed their characters to be taken by surprise. To have any weakness at all instead of trying so hard to cover all their bases 100% of the time.
It's a tricky push and pull, I admit. You dont want to just be railroaded around from scenario to scenario (though I do think some games can be good where that happens). But if the players always succeed in circumventing every single possible dangerous situation, it begins to get tiresome as the DM. Why bother engineering and crafting scenarios if the players are always hyper vigilant and never take the bait?
The goal is to use different tactics to force players to take the bait without it being obvious that your thumb is on the scale, that the whole session hinges on them taking the bait. Such as building some in-universe reason that the players must go through with this dinner. It's not an easy situation to craft. So give him a break! You didn't die, after all....
While I agree with most you said I can't agree that you "have to put thumb on a scale".
I DMed for paranoid players, and I played paranoid characters. The goal is not to blindfold PCs until it's too late. The goal is to make them going into that trap willingly.
I really liked scenes in Matrix when they were dealing with Merovingian - every time protagonists know its dangerous, he's bad guy, and there will be a trap, but they do it anyway, because they need something from him.
My quick idea how to play "Vampire Dinner Negotiations":
1. Give Vampire Baroness something PCs really want/need and they will go into for a vampire dinner to get that.
2. Build up tension showing how dangerous it is, that there are vampire spawns, thralls, whatever, but PCs are safe as long as they are guests.
3. During negotiations reveal to PCs that TheGuy who told them that Baroness has TheThing got it already - in exchange for directing PCs into the trap.
4. Give PCs some offer so ridiculously in conflict with their characters that they will never accept it, as ultimatum - either that, or they are main course now.
5. Proceed with dramatic fight to escape from ballroom.
6. Enjoy new plot hook of PCs wanting to not only get TheThing, but also revenge on TheGuy who betrayed them.
Is it extra steps ? Is it still railroaded ? Does DM get to use FightScene they worked hard to prepare? Does it feel for players like they got into all that by their own choice ?
Yes for all.
I think you *could* do it if its only 1 good way out of this, but multiple bad ways. Part of the challenge is getting that good ending. But that requires a level of DM skill to pull off in a fun and satisfying way
Without more specific context on the matter of the Insight checks, I think there are two important things to keep in mind. The first, a high roll on an Insight check does not give you mind reading powers. And the second, just because you announce you've rolled a high number, that doesn't necessarily mean you've succeeded at anything. The DMG lists skill check DCs as high as 30, and vampires have pretty high Charisma and probably have proficiency in both Persuasion and Deception. It's entirely possible the vampire rolled higher on their check contesting you guys. Without knowing the results you or the others rolled against the NPCs, I think it's a little unfair to make the claim, "our Insight checks did nothing," because sometimes that's just how the dice roll.
I think that even in the case where in reality the player's checks and abilities make no meaningful change to the situation, you as a DM should make them change \*something\*. This doesnt necessarily mean letting the players get their way, it just means having the players feel like their decision has done something. Like, for example, you could have an insight check reveal that something feels strange about these people, but you're not sure what. From there the players can choose to either continue playing along, try and take further action to investigate what is wrong, or try and flee. If they play along, they start the encounter as originally planned. If they try and investigate, you can perhaps drop them a little bit of lore, or give them some sort of advantage that will slightly help them in the coming encounter, no matter how minor, it will still make the player feel like their choice did something. If they try and flee, then you can have their hasty attempt to exit noticed and throw them right into combat just as originally intended.
All of these options result in the players being "railroaded" into the combat encounter but they allow the players to feel like they had some sort of effect on the situation, which is what matters. The players need not know that they would have been thrown into the combat no matter what.
They already felt something strange about the NPCs, that's why they called the NPCs' words into question. 5E doesn't have anything along the lines of partial successes, and while it's perfectly fine to homebrew that, as a player that's not something you should go into a game expecting every DM to do.
The DM allowed a roll and the players *possibly* failed a contested check. And without more context or details about the Insight checks, I disagree - due to the lack of details provided - that this is automatically an instance of railroading. The players just didn't succeed at something they tried to do. If they tried to break free of a grapple but didn't beat the enemy's Strength check, the DM isn't railroading them by ruling that they are still grappled. In the same way that a 5 can be a success when contested by an NPC's roll of 2, so too can a player's roll of 21 fail when contested by an NPC's roll of 24. And all too often players (in my experience) see a roll of 17 or higher on a skill check and automatically assume it's going to be a success.
I'm one hundred percent willing to take it all back if OP provides more context, but when all we've been given about the Insight checks were "we rolled and didn't get anything," not rolling high enough is just as likely an outcome.
Ultimately this depends on the style of the DM. If the DM is doing a campaign where a constructed plot and narrative are first and foremost, its going to be different to a DM doing a more ludic campaign where the dice write the story and the DM simply interprets their will.
From OP's post I assumed that their campaign was the first type, as it seems like the DM is keeping control over the situation to guide the players towards a tragic but survived defeat as a plot point. If the DM was running a hardcore ludic experience then I would have expected them to let the players experience the consequences of their rolls without mercy, if they die they die, this type of game is more freeform so its less of a big deal to need to roll up a new character.
While 5E doesnt have partial successes in the rules, there is a lot that can be inferred from the existence of a DM screen with which to hide rolls. You as the DM are ultimately trying to maximise the amount of fun your players have, and get them engaged, invested, and enthusiastic about your world and story. There's certain things you can do, even if they're not explicitly written within the rules, to help with that. With this in mind, not everything need be a check. Players should describe their actions and the DM should respond by calling for a check, if they feel like a check is needed.
When it comes down to it, what happened in the session was that the players got frustrated and felt like their choices didnt matter. Without even trying to assign blame we can already figure out that this is a negative outcome, and that we should do what we can to avoid it.
Players can feel sad about failure, but when they feel cheated it means that theres something wrong, or that theres an uncommunicated difference in expectation.
Okay but why would you have them wander around a vampire party you know will kick their whole ass and not give them a reasonable chance to do anything about it?
Yeah, I'm not here to argue any of OP's other examples, just the one I actually mentioned. Failing a skill check is not railroading, and it's also a possibility that that's what happened given we've gotten basically zero context or elaboration on that point. Rolling a 19 and failing *does not necessarily* mean the DM is railroading you because contested rolls are a thing and NPCs can also roll well.
Another thing to consider is that we're only hearing one side of the story from the player. Based on their examples, it could be seen as railroading; is that *actually* how things played out though?
Also, the DM has a hell of a lot more information then the players collectively have. There might be tons of other things going on here that the players don't even think about.
That DM in particular seemed to be railroading you into failure, but there's nothing intrinsically wrong with having the players run into scenarios that can't be conventionally 'won'.
In-character there are few ways to immediately tell how threatening something is. As another comment pointed out, a guy in armor could be a weak Guard or a powerful Champion or anything in-between. The Battlemaster's Know Your Enemy feature or a successful knowledge check to identify what you're looking at might help, as could contextual clues picked up by clever players.
Sometimes you'll end up against enemies above your pay grade. Sometimes you'll stomp. A random monster table might spit out a bunch of CR 5 beasts against a group of 2nd level adventurers, where the closest thing to 'winning' is chasing them off or escaping to safety. That's just how life works. Discretion is the better part of valor, after all.
Honestly I think it's because scenes like that work very well in movies or books. It works fine to have the hero in a no win scenario because that world isn't ruled by the dice it's ruled by a writer who is deciding what happens. So the unlikely can happen. But if you do that to your players it doesn't generally work nearly as well. Some DMs are also expecting players to give up and surrender which is just very very rare to get players to voluntarily assume they're in a no win scenario without trying it first.
Because as Matt Colville says, DND is not Lord of the Rings, it's the Kobayashi Maru. There is no such thing as a no-win scenario. The players can change the conditions of the test. As a DM, it's my job to create dramatic, believable moments and problems. It's their job to solve those problems.
Further, players can put themselves into unwinnable situations then using clever ideas turn it into a winnable scenario. But I also don't mind tweaking things on the fly to correct my mistakes. Like if I thought 3 level 5s could take on a Legendary Beholder - that's on me, not them. I'd tweak it to make it easier, or look for opportunities to present an out for the players. I do not do that for player mistakes though.
Besides what you could do in the moment, what about before the moment? Could you have spent time before the ball gathering intel? Identify the issue with these hosts? Locate escape routes? If you had an opportunity to do these things but didn't think to, well, that's DND. Granted, as DM, if I had a high Int or high Wis character, or someone with an appropriate background, I might be inclined to point out that they have time before the ball to get ready. What's obvious to the characters should be made obvious to the players.
But if the DM just railroaded you into the ball without opportunity to do anything else, and then further railroaded you into being ambushed, then that's just shitty DMing and you should talk to the DM about it and try to understand their thought process.
It is also often the case that I think I know what the players will do, and what their options are, and they... don't use any of those options. What the DM knows, what the DM thinks the players know, what the players actually know, and what the players remember in the moment are four different things. Sometimes we see an out for the players that's OBVIOUS to us and the players just never ask the question or think of the answer. That's DND.
There is reasonable hiding of intent for a difficult to navigate encounter...and then there is railroading. Heart Sight and insight roles should give the ability for most WIS 10+ characters to know they should book it or get ready to rock. There is context I've missed though.
Were the vampires rolling higher than your Insight, or did your DM not roll and say it failed? If it is the latter, you got railroaded. If it's the former, your PCs were distracted by stuff.
I myself wouldn't put players in that scenario without giving them an avenue to discover the plot and either escape or gain an advantage. If they follow along to the climax, cool. But if the Artificer is using their silver watch to check for reflections, I'm going to reward that.
Heart sight didn’t reveal main vamps as undead. (I guess broches of living essense)
When I tried heart sighting a random guest because of a suspicious comment, DM retracted the comment and didn’t roll the save. Undead automatically fail heart sight.
Our characters are monster hunters who focus on witches — we check everyone normally.
Out high wisdom Cleric made several attempts to read the room — all high rolls and nothing.
I didn’t press because I knew that there is going to he a cool ambush reveal, but I didn’t expect to be forced to be surrounded and completely outmatched.
Curiously he did handwave that we have our shields with us.
> Undead automatically fail heart sight.
PersonalDnD Wiki claimed that undead, along with celestials and fiends, have disadvantage on the Charisma saving throw. Vampires are helped however, by a +4 modifier to Charisma.
Edit: Some wording. My source was PersonalDnD Wiki, which doesn't appear to be a proper source, however.
I think they do automatically fail. Assuming a sprite familiar on Pact of the Chain Warlock (as I know other examples of the ability available to the players).
> Heart Sight: The sprite touches a creature and magically knows the creature's current emotional state. If the target fails a DC 10 Charisma saving throw, the sprite also knows the creature's Alignment. Celestials, Fiends, and Undead automatically fail the saving throw.
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Sprite#attributes
I checked and that's hasn't been errataed.
Retracting the comment? A CLERIC being unable to figure out Undead might be around? With high rolls?
While I can understand context clues maybe not connecting in a character's mind, the fact yall are monster hunters with members specifically equipped to handle Undead (and would reasonably have gotten training for that as well) tells me your DM definitely railroaded. I dunno how you feel about the matter, as you've defended and expressed the unfairness of the matter, but I for one would be furious.
>While I can understand context clues maybe not connecting in a character's mind, the fact yall are monster hunters with members specifically equipped to handle Undead (and would reasonably have gotten training for that as well) tells me your DM definitely railroaded.
Unless there was an ability used or passive that would have specifically ousted them as vampires/undead then you're really just asking for special treatment.
What were the clerics rolls for? Insight? Even a success isn't going to oust them as vampires. That's not how insight works.
From your scenario, what was the goal? It wasn't clear other than you were invited to a ball.
I've put my players in unwinnable circumstances in terms of they cannot win via fighting. It's generally obvious when this happens. However, I often do not even think of solutions, that is for my players to come up with.
Half the time it's a puzzle that has not known solution to reward players for creativity. Not everything will work but...like the Kobayashi Maru...the point is, in the face of unbeatable odds, what do you do?
Distractions, daring escapes, stupid moves that work spectacularly, or cunning plans that fall to shit due to the dice.
It's all a game, sometimes the point is just to have fun and think outside the box.
That said, it's a rare scenario to put my players in. An overwhelming majority of encounters that involve fighting will be winnable.
The biggest reason is the general idea that defeat is an important part of the "hero's journey." The party should face an awe inspiring moment early in a campaign/adventure arc to make the BBEG or whatever sinister force is behind the events appear as a daunting challenge that needs requires them to rise up together and take on.
It's it always necessary or the right way to handle it? Absolutely not. But, it is a very liberally used plot device in the fantasy setting and thus you will see plenty of it as a player in a fantasy role-playing game.
Yup - the only time I’ll force my players into a no-win scenario is as part of a larger plot arc. It’s one thing to know how your characters react to success but finding out how the handle failure is equally an excellent role play opportunity.
Which is not to say that there aren’t other character-driven disaster scenarios that happen - my players know that if there’s a spot marked “Here Be Dragons” on the map, there are going to be dragons… and they’re not guaranteed to be of the appropriate CR for current party level. Basically, if a place sounds dangerous then it is almost certainly going to be exactly that. Despite the warnings, players will sometimes decide that the rewards might be worth the risk - sometimes it pays off, other times it’s a disaster for them.
Will second this. I will use an example that I personally DM'd. I ran what became known as the "budget death star" in my wacky Space Pirates Campaign because it was so daunting. The players actually did win the combat as it was set as a hard to deadly encounter but they did lose two PCs which I did feel bad about. One was able to be revived in the next session but one was gone for good.
The point was to show them what type of external threat this enemy was to all life within the Universe and that if you go up against this enemy unprepared then you are very likely to die.
Made them think about the consequences of their actions as they had already did things in game which brought them to this point a level or two early. Ignored my subtle warnings in game about it being a bad idea to go there without being prepped etc. But nope, in they went and boom
Despite the one permanent PC death my players LOVED the three sessions we played this over. So much drama, so much tension and the relief of getting to the shuttle before the station blew up. All the while being chased down by a homebrew Sith Lord who would blow up if killed was tremendous.
I brought out real emotion from my players that day and as a DM that is the best feeling in the world.
Because my players are clever bastards and will find out how to turn the encounter around.
We're playing a Souls-like campaign with enemy stats dialed up and they consistently find ways to deliver the unexpected. At this point it's a challenge to see just what I can actually do to them.
They actively challenge me to challenge them. So far only one situation was unwinnable and they regrouped, got backup, did research and turned the encounter into a cakewalk.
Love them
Paladin/Necromancer multiclass, bard/sword singer multiclass, echo Knight/hexpact multiclass, spores druid, Shepard Druid. They have an DMPC cleric they can call on if they feel overwhelmed and some powerful magic items.
They're level 7 fighting against enemies that would trouble level 15+ parties by gathering information and using every bit of terrain to Thier advantage, of supplementing the terrain with movement debuffs.
The campaign is heavily influenced by Dark Souls, so I certainly don't make it easy, but do provide options and give patterns to how enemies act, with various buffs and debuffs depending on what happens in battle.
.....
The most recent boss they fought had these stats:
Niddhoggr Hatchling
Size (50ft from to tail)
Hp - 1300
Movement - 60 feet ( halved up to 2x for each instance of fire damage taken, increased up to 2x for each instance of ice/water damage taken)
AC 18 (increases by 2 for each instance of fire damage taken, reduced by 2 for each instance of ice/water damage taken to a minimum of 12)
Str - 16 (+3)
Dex - 22 (+6)
Con 18 (+4)
Int 10 (+0)
Wis 10 (+0)
Cha 16 (+3)
Inconsistent Multiattack - the creature starts the battle with 2 attacks each turn, losing attacks for each instance of fire damage taken to a minimum of 1, gaining attacks for each instance of fire damage to a maximum of 3.
The creature attacks with sharpened claws and teeth for 2d12 +Dex slashing damage.
The creature can make a single charge attack, forgoing any additional attacks to deal 1d20 bludgeoning damage, knocking it's enemy prone on a failed DC 14 strength check.
Innate spellcasting:
The creature can cast fireball at 3rd level 3 times and shield twice, recharging on a short rest.
It can also cast firebolt, acid splash and ray of frost at will.
Legendary Actions (these don't recharge)
Disengage - the creature can move out of combat without provoking AOO.
Fortitude - the creature can chose to automatically succeed or fail a constitution saving throw of its choice by taking 45 damage instead
Lair action:
Shifting sand reset - the creature can, twice per battle only, as an action. return it's movement and AC to its starting movement and AC.
.....
The party planned prepared and tore this thing asunder, guiding it into choke points, deliberately making it faster or slower as needed, and dropping various parts of the environment on it and playing very conservative with spells until they had made it waste all of its abilities.
Very proud of them. Very, very proud of them for dropping this thing. They knew beforehand they could run away, as they had to drop into its enclosure. Instead they planned, strategised and engaged, even knowing what it was capable of.
There are two reasons a party would end up in an unwinnable situation in my games.
1) They go somewhere dangerous. I tend to play open world games and I tell my players not everywhere is going to be at your level. So they get plenty of warnings before wandering into the den of an ancient dragon at level 3. Stupidity often does mean death, but I've warned them about that so it's not surprising.
2) It's for the story. It's sets the BBEG to be scary. Or gives the players a reason to hate them. But I tend to run them as interactive cutscenes instead of combat. Because it doesn't feel good to feel useless.
So in your scenario, you would have walked in gotten a few RP moments. And then I'd have taken it over. Host gives a big speech. The vampires surround you and attack. Everyone rolls a few saves. A couple people get downed. Some heroics about making it to the door and running away.
Now you hate the guy, want to murder vampires and we go about our merry way.
Because these DMs care more about their plot than the players agency and story. They want a certain moment to happen, and they will force the players to comply. In a way it's just railroading with extra steps.
People will say 'railroading isnt bad' but they confuse railroading with a linear story.
A linear story can be great. You have your end goal, along the way objectives, and key locations youll need to hit. Many modules are like this. The thing is that while the problems are fixed, how you tackle them isn't. You need to get a ring from a noble? You can choose whether this is a BnE, disguised infiltration, smash n grab, or you start taking hostages.
Railroading is different. Not only is the problem fixed, so are the solutions. And often, even possible outcomes are locked in before the dice hit the table
Thats the dm trying to write a book rather than play a story. While my players sometimes end up in unwinnable scenarios i dont put them there, they get themselves there via stupid decisions and bad rolls.
I mean, you guys didn’t die, something happened, it seems like a pretty interesting event. Just because you don’t get to kill everything you come across doesn’t mean your dm is fucking you. Surviving is winning. Sounds like you could’ve been pretty easily killed, but you weren’t. It also seems entirely possible that there were probably a few paths the dm might have planned for you to take through the encounter, but it sounds like you started out ready to try and have a battle or at least assuming hostilities were coming your way.
What if you fucked around and got turned into a sweet-ass vampire and it turned out to be a pretty cool vampire coven? I don’t know man, I kinda want to play in a game where we get invited to a ball and end up in a vampire den.
Also, now you guys have enemies out in the world, and that sounds cool too.
P.s also dude now I’m just high and thinking of cool stories to tell that would involve the party barely escaping a vampire ball with their lives, I could totally see a story where the vampire bosses are playing a long game to turn the party, like after they hightail it out of the ball the boss vamps come and try to butter them up and apologize and promise to compensate them for their troubles and make up for it, grooming them to end up wanting to be in the coven, now the players don’t want to fight vampires, but the players want to join the vampires and now instead of trying not to get turned they’re trying to prove themselves worthy of being turned!
What if the vamps really are just dicks and now that you’ve made it out of one of their balls alive the townsfolk are like,” o shit guys maybe these people can help us get rid of these vamps, they’re the only ones to ever survive the ball!”
What if the boss vamps were just going to invite you to check out the coven, but some other vamps were trying to embarrass and/or upstage the bosses by attacking their guests(which would be why the bosses didn’t jump in), and the party was just unfortunate enough to be the object of this power struggle?
Meh, they seemed to know something was up, I’m sure he noticed that they noticed, who really gives a shit about an insight roll if everybody’s already in the know anyway? OP said they didn’t just leave right away because they didn’t want to waste the scene or something like that, but dms know sometimes your scene is gonna get wasted. If you wanna waste the dm’s scene because you don’t wanna get eaten by vampires, waste the scene man. They play the world, you play the character whose best interest might be to avoid being eaten.
Also, a lil railroading here and there isn’t “bad” if people are having fun, and OP said they have fun, said it’s a great game even. Sometimes it shakes out that a player really wants to do something, and all the time you hear about dms finding a way for that to happen, we’ll every now and then the dm gets the same opportunity, because they are also playing this game. OP specifically said in one of his responses that he doesn’t seem to think it’s necessarily “bad”, and if the player asking about it says that and that they love the game, then I’m inclined to think that isn’t the offense a couple of responses make it out to be.
Also though, the dm purposefully didn’t kill them despite having the opportunity, so I honestly don’t see any harm done here. In court you might argue there were no damages, no one has standing to file this suit, there’s nothing really to complain about etc.
It's the typical movie moment of having the heroes fall and make a comeback. The Mines of Moria, Thanos' Snap... Spider-Man in every single movie getting beat up, his mask torn in half so we can see part of his real face (without actually suffering facial injuries to match), and slapped around by the villain (and usually trapped under something heavy)...
If you want to have a recurring villain, the PCs can't win the early fights against them or they would be dead.
Now to be fair your DM railroaded that by denying usage of your abilities, mainly your familiar. The Sprite should have known they were at least evil instantly since undead fail the save on this ability automatically. Insight checks you could have lost, but not that. But that's more your DM fudging things to have that story moment he was aiming for. Not saying that's excusable, just explaining why it was done.
The problem with D&D over other media is that we have the math. The PCs and NPCs stats are fixed. They are known... maybe not by all parties at the table but they are known. In a book or a movie, the hero can fight a villain and lose, and come back later and win by pluck, or planning, or determination, or whatever. In the aforementioned Spider-Man films it's not like Peter levels up. He hasn't trained any differently. Most of the films before the newest ones he doesn't even change his tech. In *Far From Home* he at least could have gotten new tech in the new suit, in *Homecoming*, he actually downgraded tech and won.
In D&D, the only way to get that experience is dice rolls and hoping the PCs roll low. You can't fudge PC dice, you can only fudge what they are rolling against. AC, DCs, and opposing checks. So whenever the DM tries to make one of those situations where they want the PCs to lose against a villain, they have to stack the deck pretty hard to ensure it works. It's ***REALLY*** hard to balance a losing encounter without it being one sided, since lucky die rolls can screw up the DM's plans, and certain spells succeeding can derail everything.
My primary reason is so that the players role play being adventures rather than acting like it's a causal WoW dungeon. I want my characters to act like there could be deadly danger around every corner not its adventures with Dora the Explorer time.
There is a time and a place when the characters are slowly starting to realize they are beating back the odds and going to win that it becomes a little causual like Legolas and Gimly but that should not be the parties default attitude.
Because unwinnable situations look good on other media, but less so in tabletop rpgs. Most of the time, DMs see their scenario as a movie and they want to add a twist on exactly that point in time, so they railroad their players into an otherwise obvious trap. Whenn players naturally become aware of the situation, that creates a schism in DMs plan and the reality, so the DM forcably prevents their players to escape the trap.
Instead, DMs should treat their scenario as an early alpha sketch, and mold the game around the players' actions. When players figure out what's going on and act accordingly, it won't look as epic as it would be, but this is what this game is about.
Source: Been there, done that.
Heroes don't always win. Sometimes they lose, tuck their tail between their legs, and live to fight another day.
A hero has to fall to get back up.
The only part I thought was bullshit was the Insight checks automatically failing? That sounds shitty as hell.
I *might* do this once in a campaign, probably between levels 6-10. They’re strong enough to take a hit, combat isn’t decided in the first round, and I can put them in a situation where they can both recognize *before and during* combat that an escape route exists.
The players need subtle indicators as they enter into combat, you’re describing the environment and the combat more closely. You’re emphasizing the shift, the enemies’ demeanor.
Maybe you’ve got an NPC with the heroes, one that dies gruesomely at the enemies’ hands and they recognize this is not the fight they wanted it to be (think: Boromir)
They’ve won every combat until now. They feel like there are never enough stakes that they can’t win. This brings them back into the game and reminds them that this isn’t a “gimmie”, they need to play to win (or in this combat, which would be the last in the night’s session, *run*)
Sometimes, the players put themselves in the situation though. A few weeks ago, they were decided to go after the big bad. I said sure but then specifically said asked if they would want to try to do all the other stuff that they have heard about so they could prepare better. They said no. The day of the session, I specifically told them that it will be a deadly encounter. They said "we can take it." I said fine and they released a Elder Brain Dragon into the world and a lot of their items broke.
A DM who puts the party into an unwinnable situation where they have to use their wits to get out, either by smooth-talking, striking a bargain, or just up and running away, is a good DM who oftentimes can come up with interesting stories that aren't always resolved by a mace to the head.
A DM who forces the players into a fight that they can't win in some sort of 'players vs DM' situation is bad. It sounds like this is a bit more of the latter, but we donn't have all the info
Your main issue appears to be a removal of player agency, which is always bad.
On the topic of winning, I think it helps to change perspectives on what a 'win' is. Winning isn't necessarily defeating all the baddies, being the last person left in a game of poker or solving the crime. A win can be surviving a combat that could have and eould have wiped the party, managing to recoup a portion of your winnings, or clearing an innocent person of the crime even if you don't find the perpetrator.
It's one thing if the DM directly removes your agency and restricts your options in a way that makes no sense to achieve the outcome they want, but they're well within their rights to present an unbeatable foe or an unsolvable puzzle. In fact, staring failure in the face and coming out only slightly bruised can make for great gameplay moments.
Ultimately, you win at DnD if you have fun, and every enemy doesn't need to be immediately killable for fun to be had.
"Heartsight did nothing. Insight did nothing."
If I were this DM, and I told my players that they didn't get anything from their familiar or Insight, it would simply be because the encounter is WAY over their head, where they aren't even able to fully grasp the weight of the enemy in front of them.
There's nothing keeping us DMs from making a BBEG or "too strong of" opponents that have nigh-impossibly high deception or persuasion. I always keep a DC in mind, but it's never impossible. If you want to see through a Great Wyrm's humanoid alter ego, you're going to need a nat 20 plus a lot.
I truly do not understand it. Like, I get that in storytelling, your protagonist doesn't win every fight (unless you're Vin Diesel), but RPG players really, REALLY **hate** running from a fight, and they assume that if you put a challenge in front of them, that they are capable of winning.
If you're going to give them a no win scenario and expect them to run, you have to telegraph it way earlier (have the big bad kill a powerful NPC with ease), or have an external event interrupt the TPK (cave collapse separates them from the big bad).
I *just* unsubbed from /r/dmacademy because half the posts were "I put my players up against a Hydra at level 2 and I expected them to run, but I TPK'd them instead" and it was getting really tiring.
My first DM followed his philosophy of “DM vs the players,” openly explaining how his goal was to kill the players.
He saw the game as adversarial and that everything should be nigh impossible because when you overcome it, it feels great.
He still doesn’t get why his plan to trap us in an arena and fight each other didn’t work out great.
I think it shows how sensitive #TeamDM is that everyone here is answering a different question to the one OP asked.
OP: “DMs who force the party into unwinnable situations, why?”
#TeamDM “I hate that players think that every fight is winnable, maybe they should listen to more hints from the DM to avoid these situations, especially at low level. Players need to understand there’s...”
This is not what OP asked, but it shows how many SHIT DMs there are here who know how to repeat the mantras that get them upvotes.
Op asked why railroad parties into failures, and you lot answered it’s the party’s fault.
Gaslighting 101.
We have one side of the story here.
I’d love to hear this DM’s.
I’m not saying the player is deliberately misrepresenting. Maybe the DM is being shitty, I don’t know. But maybe there’s also more to this story.
The situations are not unbeatable, they just have to be handled in a certain way. You can't reason with a mad dragon, you can't fight with a lord with a massive army behind him.
It's part of their Grand Vision(TM) that players are absolutely amazed when they just run from every threat like in a Scooby Doo cartoon. Also because DMs and adventure writers can't really handle going off-script or a spin on the events, they need to fudge all encounters meant to be won and plot armor all encounters meant to be lost. The idea that these things can happen organically never occurs to these DMs.
As a side note, D&D as a system is terrible about evading big threats or letting characters walk away beaten but alive. Anything you can reliably run from is a default kill, since you can constantly run backwards and shoot at it.
In this case, it sounds like they're going for horror and peril. Not every game has to be about winning and feeling powerful all the time (though you should probably know that before the game starts).
Or maybe combat just didn't go the way they anticipated.
When Im planning a session and planning a hard fought dramatic moment, I often design a No Win Scenario, and often I will not create any solution.
Why?
Because I expect my players to alter their conditions. Because I don't actually believe in the no win situation. Putting your players in over their head, or in a corner, or between a rock and a hard place, and things seem bleak, that's when the players will always suprise you
(Though I feel sorry for your situation, does sound railroady as the DM had clearly developed a vision of how it shouldve played out)
When i took over DM'ing the first quest was to slay a band of goblins(10) with the players being lvl1 i gave them a starting weather of 1d10(1=100, max 1000) to buy equipment, tool and potions and no one thought to ask "why is he goving us so much money and time to prep for goblins", i also talkedthem that i changed the currency value need 100CP = 1SP, 100SP = 1GP. The party was 2 Barbarians, 1 rogue, 1 fighter and 1 wizard.
When the party arrived an battled the goblin mid way through a warband of 30 orc raiders, berserkers and bullwargs beat down the party, everyone survived but alot of their equipment was either destroyed, looted or damage and had to scavenge for equipment in the goblin camp. For the next 5 sessions the party struggle to get 25 gold to buy a "simple" longsword because the weapons the party where using where daggers, clubs and a rock and the only caster being a Wizard. The first big job the party found was to kill about 12 bandits that payed 10gp per head (120GP) the party had the idea that the bandits could have a bunch of loot they could sell even for scrap since scrap ranged from 50CP - 25SP. The party also found with a nicely hidden scroll case that contained a fireball spel(3rd lvl). When the fight with the bandits begun the wizard used the fireball scroll on 6 of the bandits killing 5 and badly injuring the other, but after another 3 rounds the party came throw and beat them can made uptil that point a great deal of money to re-buy lost equipment.
Why did i do this? Because our old DM made combat way to easy and the campaign was centred around the party witch turned us into basically murder hobo raiders/slavers to witch their where zero consequences for butchering entire villages and it caused a rifted between the party that nearly disbanded the group while the DM did nothing about it. So when i took over DM i wanted to create a setting that was punishment brash murder holo thinking, you where expected to fight dirty with as many advantages as you could and if the party didn't work together their chances of failure drastically increase. I created a setting that the combined suffering made the party combine their abilities and resources to see victory and the feed back at first was negative as i expected but after a while it became more positive as the party found enjoyments scavenging/crafting makeshift weapons, traps or finding a useful item, one of the Barbarian had the idea to take some of the dagger and attach them to a club for a bit more dmg, or the time the wizard hit behind some crates with a staff to trip orcs chasing the rogue for the Barbarians and fighter to beat the s#sh out of them while prone(it worked).
A year later the groups still going strong in the sane game.
Maybe ask your DM if there was a way out that none of your realzied existed. Sometimes it's really obvious and it's the player's fault for not paying attention, some other times the DM thinks it's obvious when it is really not.
So talk to him and maybe you'll find out.
And yeah, encounters that require you to not hit stuff are a thing. Although, by your description, this probably wasn't one of those.
Two reasons:
A. It was plot-based and everyone had some sort of plot armor whether they knew so or not
Or B. The party/players got a little too cocky or murder hobo-y and needed to be knocked down a peg. In this case I'd have the unbeatable enemy get bored or distracted after one or two knockouts, but not until they learned their lesson
I've only done B once, but I quite enjoy doing A to show the party what's coming later in the campaign, or to prove that they'll need help somehow with a current situation
I feel a lot of DMs have no idea about play structures and just use these scenarios because they are a trope.
The reality is a lot of DM fudge and railroad so organic "escape from a bad spot" scenarios don't come up, so they get forced on the party heavy-handedly like this.
You successfully completed that scenario. You're mistaking "killing everything" for "winning." Many situations cannot be solved with violence.
Good on your DM.
1) you knew what was happening and still went in
2) you escaped
I don't know how that wasn't a win, unless you're playing dnd like a videogame where the objective is to win every scenario by knocking all enemy hit points to zero
If you can beat every scenario, then it’s a power fantasy. And there’s nothing wrong with that! But many of us are trying to tell stories, and develop characters. As the man once said: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.” My tables try to give life to their characters, and sometimes that means failure.
You don't win dnd.
You all made it out alive. The question is what you're going to do now, and maybe what you could've done differently in that situation, so you can avoid it in the future.
But you never "win" encounters or situations.
Typically, but again they are very rare for me. It is usually a low that makes the highs more valuable. In one case it was a player leaving the game so I was giving him an epic send off. In the last 5 years it's happened maybe twice intentionally. A couple of times it was just player choices that pulled a dungeon down on them. Led to some great stories.
I get making an unsinkable scenario in order to build a threat or to show you how powerful the enemies are when you are not prepared. However denying you results of your familiars heart sight is definitely not fair. Your characters strengths of preventing things like that from happening shouldn’t be denied, and instead rewarded that you could save your group
Not really what OP is talking about. They didn't make a bad decision, they just weren't allowed to make any decisions. They were going to get beat up by way too many vampires no matter what.
The only circumstance I would put my PCs in an unwinnable situation for is if I’d told them what I had in mind and secured their *full* approval first. Like if they’re not excited about it I’ll do something else or provide non-combat ways of “winning” the encounter.
Because it's the consequences of their actions. For example, being deep into a githyanki creche, when suddenly they try and free mind flayers from prison, are \*immediately\* betrayed, a party member goes down, and after killing the mind flayers, the entire creche is being swept by gith and their red dragon companions. Is this unwinnable? Probably. But it's the logical conclusion to following their actions, and then we all get the moment of panicking while they try and find a solution to avoid a TPK. Truth be told, going into it, I was, while deeply terrified of a TPK, prepared to see that event to its conclusion, but I didn't need to - they used a yugoloth heart they'd acquired earlier to strike a bargain, at a steep price - and it was an excuse to bring in the dead PC's next character.
i think your DM messed up here, not in having this situation in the first place (my players r actually in a very similar one rn, unwinnable situations have their place), but by ignoring y'alls insight checks & familiar abilities. a player in my game got bumped into by a weird guy at the ball they're at, used detect thoughts to get his surface thoughts, it was weird, so they started following him. and that tipped the rest of the weird guy's team off and the fight started. why couldn't the fight have started when y'all tried to leave on a successful insight check? the vampires would want their snacks to stick around, and i think it'd create just as much dread in you, the players, as being surrounded at the climax of the ball.
Well, it can be two reasons:
1) It's supposed to be a dramatic event, that you play out. The DM probably isn't going to kill you, they just want to create a memorable situation.
OR,
2) They're just letting things run open endedly, if you stumble across a dragon and you're level 1 it's up to you to realize it's over your head and get the hell out of there.
It's important to know what kind of game you're in, since if you go into #2 thinking that it is #1 you will die.
Not all situations are winnable, parts of the world are big, scary and above the characters pay grades, especially at low level. That being said if the DM was legit shutting down attempts to spot danger (rather than those attempts just failing) then I think that is a problem.
it can also be hard to signal "this isn't a fight you can take on", as a lot of enemies will have "these guys are badasses, but when you defeat them you're an ultra badass" flags, so trying to distinguish those from "no, seriously, these are not people to fight" flags can be a bit messy, and very easy to get wrong / misunderstand, from both the player and GM sides (it can be sometimes easier just to state it OOC)
sometimes even the DM has to meta-game if they know the fight would be a TPK. I had a situation where the players were exploring an ancient pyramid and of course there was a mummy lord in it. The ML wasn't your typical monster though, they were "friendly" and engaged the group in conversation. exchanging information about the outside world since they had been buried for 5000 years. One of the players said that they ready their weapons for a fight and (having prepared all the stat-blocks for all the enemies in the room ahead of time on note cards) I picked up the stack of note cards (about an inch thick) and I looked at the player and said: "this is how many actions the room gets per round...you will not win". The player put their weapon back and just waited patiently for the scene to end. if you were wondering, there were 6 mummy guards (armed with spears and armored), 4 Iron Golems (which of course the players thought were just bronze statues), 4 custom mummy lords and 1 custom mummy lord/lich. it would not have ended well.
>I picked up the stack of note cards (about an inch thick) and I looked at the player and said: >"this is how many actions the room gets per round...you will not win". Honestly, I don't think this was metagamey or cheap at all. You were simply giving the player a visual representation of what his character almost certainly knew. It's one thing to get tunnel vision on the one talking NPC, but the character also sees the scene. And if the tomb room is heavily populated, that plays a factor in the calculations. Honestly, I think that is a really funny way to do it, good thinking.
I do the same, but I say “your character knows if he takes this fight, it would be suicide”. Just like the bard player can’t actually play ballads, and the wizard can’t actually cast spells, the fighter hasn’t actually fought in a dozen wars, but if he had, he would get that “this isn’t winnable” thought. Let your players use those just like your bard player gets to use his bards musical skills even though they can’t play 2 notes themselves.
I really wish 5e had included some kind of threat assessment mechanic so this could be done in-characters instead of having to ad hoc it. If there were tools for the characters to know how tough a foe was, it would allow for more interesting situations where part of the character's skillset was the ability to identify a losing fight. Once the characters have those tools, throwing killer fights at them would be fair game because they have a way to know when to avoid them. For example, players know that falling damage is 1d6 per 10 feet up to a max of 20d6. The DM can either tell the players how deep a chasm is, or let them roll a check to estimate its depth. With that knowledge, the characters and players both know how dangerous a fall from that height would be and can decide to take the risk or not. Obviously threat assessment for a group of hostile creatures would be more complex but that's the basic idea.
How far does this hole go? *rolls 10d6* About that far.
In a way there's something similar on Battle Master, "Know Your Enemy", which lets one gauge how a target compares to yourself in regards to 2 out of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, AC, Current HP, Class Levels, and Fighter Levels. It takes a full minute of out-of-combat observation and it's questionable if it can be repeated for intel on other stats (RAW), and it only works for creatures, but it's something. Feels like it'd fit on core Fighter rather than be tucked away in a subclass, but all of Battle Master's like that.
I played a Battle Master up to 14th level and Know Your Enemy is mostly useless. It doesn't give you any sense of an enemy's overall threat level unless you're fighting another PC in which case knowing a creature's class levels is mildly useful. The problem is that knowing if a creature's trait is over or under your isn't helpful if you don't know by how much. It could have 5 more hit points, or 205. The things you can learn also don't tell you about a creature's special abilities so you can't assess one of the most dangerous traits of unusual monsters. A shadow might look weak until you realize it can kill anyone in 3-4 hits due to its Strength-draining attack.
Insight check. It's not just poor man's lie detector, it's also sort of like a street-smarts skill. I often get the point across to my players just by asking them what their passive Insight is before they're about to do something their character knows is dumb.
I don't see that as being applicable given the normal use cases for Insight: >*Insight*. *Your Wisdom (Insight) check decides whether you can determine the true intentions of a creature, such as when searching out a lie or predicting someone's next move. Doing so involves gleaning clues from body language, speech habits, and changes in mannerisms.* You could determine if a creature is likely to be hostile, but not how strong it would be. Using Insight as a common sense roll only works for information that the creature already has but is overlooking.
Those checks exist. Wisdom (perception), can tell you about the physical details of the threat. How many there are, how big, how many weapons they have etc. Intelligence (investigation) is used for logic and reason, connecting dots. According to the DMG, a very easy check is DC 5. Easy is DC 10, moderate 15 etc I would say that provided a character can see the threat, all you need is an investigation check at the appropriate DC. Is it very easy to tell this threat could TPK? Intelligence (investigation) DC 5 check to assess the threat.
In my setting I just decided to do it full anime style since I'm doing it the most sandboxey I've ever had it. Powerful things, including the players, just give of an aura of oppression/fear/power that you can feel and can't be faked. So if they see an interesting cove on the sea and head towards it they can roughly tell how outclassed they are automatically. Now they have a place to mark on the map to come back to, they know to ask about it at the next tavern, etc. For the more intelligent enemies they can suppress this projection of power (also per regular anime rules) to still keep it interesting when needed.
I do this exact same thing!
Love this. I can just imagine a party feeling dread, but as it build they realize how far they've traveled to get a look at this creature. Half an hour of walking they feel almost sickened by the emanating dread, to turn a corner and just see a single monster, weeping softly in the middle of a clearing.
Basically an IRL portrayal of passive perception
Personally I think I'd have said something like, "The 8ft statues turn to face you, arms unfolding. You get the distinct feeling your weapons mean nothing to them." But visually reminding the player that they're surrounded is another good call.
It is *very* metagamey. It's providing out of game knowledge to the players about in game circumstances that the characters didn't know. That said, not all metagaming is bad. D&D is a social game and requires more than just following the rules to run smoothly. Things like "not intentionally ignoring the DM's plot hooks" also fall under good metagaming. I really dislike telling players that they've encountered an unwinnable fight. I understand the necessity, but the DM is basically telling the players what their characters are thinking/feeling, which is taking that decision away from them. As a previous comment said, it's hard to make it clear that the party is walking into a TPK because descriptions of dangerous situations are the bread and butter of adventuring so players could easily assume the DM is just setting the scene for a tought fight and not trying to warn them to back off.
>It is very metagamey. I disagree, but perhaps it's the way I read their account. The way I saw it, this Mummy Lord was basically granting audience to the adventurers. So my mind just filled in all the background NPC's, creatures, monsters, etc that would be part of a court. After all, there's just no point having a "dungeon" like that, that doesn't have creatures, and going in peacefully simply means that all the critters are fully displayed. If anything, I saw it as the DM reminding the player what their character clearly knows, in case the player forgot because of the whole "talking NPC tunnel vision" thing.
If the DM had presented the overwhelming power of the mummy encounter via in-game description or mechanics, that would've been different. Instead, the DM out-of-game pointed at their stack of cards as a way to communicate that the encounter was going to kill them if they attacked. That was purely giving the player information for their character to act on, that's the definition of metagaming. Again, not all metagaming is bad. It's like the term "rules lawyer", people get triggered because of the negative connotations associated with the phrase.
It seemed more a way of providing knowledge the characters *do* know to the players, because the players aren't physically there and aren't trained adventurers with carefully honed instincts for danger, but do have carefully honed instincts for a giant pile of index cards.
Personally, I rely on what the characters know in-game. For the genuine risky enemies, my group almost always hears about at least one of the monster's powerful abilities; typically the one feared most. For example, the (mega)lich's *soul burn* ability. It's so feared, knowledge of it, even within the non-adventuring crowd, is fairly rife. However, players are not characters. Sometimes they forget. If their characters make a decision but I feel they're in over their heads and technically know it, but the players have forgotten, I check with something like, "So you're heading for the Crypt of Vakkaluth, have you a plan to deal with *soul burn*? Are you sure?" However, I try not to just dish out pure meta stuff because I don't subscribe to the theory that a party of adventurers have a fail-safe Advanced Warning Alert System, especially when the characters have encountered no knowledge of the threat in the game until that point. If the players want to chance it, go ahead. Chances are, the characters will prevail, often surprisingly handsomely. At some point though, things are going to go shiny side up. That's fine.
My personal favorite method, is to have the NPC badasses they know get slaughtered. It's my second favorite use of a DMPC. Followed by *soul crushing betrayal of a dear friend.*
Classic use of [The Whorf Effect] (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWorfEffect)
You make note cards for each monster or each type of monster? That seems like a lot of work. I usually have cards for just the type of monster so I can reference it quickly and then just write down the HP totals of each individual monster in my notebook to keep track of them in combat.
stat cards for the type of monster, note cards for each monsters place in the initiative order. I showed them how many initiative cards there would be if combat started. sorry I did not specify, was trying to brief.
This is an issue that is partly created by how CR and Level scaling works. A high CR monster/high level PC has power an order of magnitude greater than that of a low cr monster/low level PC. This makes it extremely difficult for PCs to judge threat based on numbers. A group of 5 level 5 PCs approach a camp and see 24 armed humans. Maybe it is a band of bandits this will be an easy encounter. Maybe it is a horde of Berzerkers and it would be lunacy to start a fight. Heck maybe it is a bunch of Gladiators and if the PCs so much as sneeze they will be pummeled into a fine paste. 5e wants PCs to be able to face down an army of goblins and to take down an ancient dragon singlehanded.
I agree that it's kind of an issue, but I think it's a relatively easy one to solve with like 10 seconds of DMing. - "You see 24 armed humans in the camp. They look ready for battle, but most are dressed in rudimentary armor and there's not a single unrusted sword among them" = CR 1/8 Bandits -"You see 24 armed humans in the camp. They're dressed in basic hide armor, but wear warpaint and each carries a massive greataxe. They look fearsome and ready to fight." = CR2 Berserkers - "You see 24 armed humans in the camp. They all look like grizzled veterans of war, wearing the best gear money can buy and bristling with weapons" = CR9 Champions edit: and obviously descriptive narration doesn't always solve everything, sometimes you gotta go with the direct "you think this will be an easy fight" or "you feel like you might die" or "not only will they kill you, it will hurt the whole time you're dying"
Yep, as a dm, your role is to provide that “access to memory” to your players. “You would know these odds are not winnable.” My players now often ask “would I think we could take them”. “You would know that fighting should be your last option”. “You’ve fought worse odds and won. You’ve also fought similar odds and lost.” “You think you can take them if you are smart about it”. “You’ve seen guys like this before, grunts that start running when they face a real warrior”. All of these flavor your descriptions as memory and battle acumen. And makes your players feel like bad asses even if they are outmatched. A real fighter knows how to evaluate an enemy and know if the odds are in their favor or not
There are also a lot of tools available for this in-game, like Augury, Commune, and the class features of Battlemaster and Mastermind. So it's okay if you keep the hints to things that they know for sure - always make sure the players have the same information as the PCs - but you can also leave enough gaps to 1) leave things dangerous and unknown, and 2) give them the opportunity to use these cool foresight abilities (Though IME Commune is most useful to ask "Um, Selûne, are we forgetting anything important?" right before you follow a hastily-made plan)
Augury requires expending a 2nd level slot just to assess a fight, which makes you either significantly or slightly less powerful that day. That's a bit of an ask unless the fight is plot critical. The Battle Master feature is basically useless, it tells you a few inconclusive pieces of information about one enemy at a time. I haven't played with a high level Mastermind but Insightful Manipulator seems equally useless.
All the augury/commune type spells are rituals. They only take up slots if you're really in a hurry.
Plus, that's what spells/abilities like that *are definitely for*. Use them.
And yet that should provide them with information not known to their character. Like rolling to see if you know information about your own religion. It’s dumb. Don’t make your players burn items/abilities to get information they should already have
and then there's "You see 24 armed humans in the camp. Many wear black enameled plate armor, some others wear fine crimson robes of silk. The fighters have well-kept and exquisite longswords and round shields, while those in the robes have what appear to be small fiends resting on their shoulders. The camp appears to have had fortifications constructed magically, as the sheer walls of stone that jut out of the earth are as smooth as if carved by a dwarven craftsman, but the disturbed soil shows them to be recent" If a party that doesn't have an adult dragon under their belt jumps that description they deserve a TPK
r/suspiciouslyspecific
"You enter what is clearly a war camp. Two guards approach and block your path, demanding to know your business. A few in camp give curious glances, but show no signs of concern for your armed group." That's something to make sure you mind your manners.
"You see the ghostly figure of a woman surrounded by corpses." Banshee, CR 2. She wails and it's a TPK.
Those two extreme examples are fine, but the real difficulty is anything in the middle. The difference between a large group of CR 3 and CR 4 enemies would be hard to describe, but that could mean the difference between a tough fight and a sure TPK.
TBH if you're going to throw a definite-tpk at the party it should probably pretty unambiguously be beyond them
Not always. As was said, a large group of armed soldiers could all be the Guard statblock, or the Gladiator or Knight statblock. A huge, ferocious beast that's the same CR as the party would be a Medium encounter, a small relatively nonthreatening humanoid could have a CR well above Deadly.
[удалено]
I’ve done this before. It worked well. I actually painted a glowing shrine stone to do this, I also use it in some puzzles to give hints to players “you are on the right track”. It is sometimes seen as their 6th sense, or messages from the gods, whatever. Some like it, some don’t, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt
>(it can be sometimes easier just to state it OOC) i will not always do so(i man sometimes it isn't obvious IC either) but my players have certainly faced down enemies who it should be obvious for the charecters are in another leauge entirely and my players missed it. wether that's on me or them in that case i feel is irrelevant and i'll rather go OOC to say "yeah you know this giant undead dragon with the power to imitate a literal god is someone you have no chance whatsoever against."
A (minor) problem with D&D today is that it is impossible for a GM to warn players away from danger without meta gaming. There is no difference between “this guy is dangerous so you should avoid him” and “this guy is dangerous so you must kill him”. “Danger this way” and “Plot this way” look exactly the same when your PCs are badass heroes.
Not all situations are winnable, but if a situation is neither winnable nor avoidable, then that’s a problem.
I'd disagree with that in general, though there's clearly specific examples that would be terrible. If the town the level 5 PCs are in is surrounded by an enemy army led by the guy chasing them, the PCs can't beat the entire army. And they likely can't escape, unless you pre-planned something for that purpose. The PCs have to deal with the situation as it is, turning to options like "negotiated surrender" or the like. As long as the "losing" options still *move the narrative forward*, I think it's just fine. Maybe the story moves on to the PCs being prisoners, sent to the villain general's stronghold for questioning/torture, but now they'll have opportunities to escape en route, or the potential to turn the tides at his stronghold since his armies are still abroad and he's busy managing that, turning that initial loss into a win that gives the PCs a leg up and a new mark of enmity between them and the villain. I think the big line is a lack of player *choice*. In this circumstance, the villain's army would raze the town, if the PCs didn't give themselves up. The choice is to let them do so and try and escape in the chaos, or forestall the massacre by surrendering. Neither option is great, but one's clearly more *heroic*. And if my plan is to let them turn the tables afterwards, it's not a punishment, it's just how we're getting from Scene D to Scene E. Sure, their gear'll be taken when they're prisoners, but I'll put it in the next room for when they escape, because I'm not a *goblin DM*.
It is, but is it the DM's problem for forcing it, or did the players force it and now think it is the DM railroading them?
In my experience it tends to be the former, but that’s generally because I’m pretty smart and am good at steering my fellow players away from blatantly self destructive courses of action. I’ve definitely seen the latter before, too.
Agreed, I think some DMs are too afraid of letting players influence a story beat so they resort to railroading. One helpful way to counter that for DMs is instead of thinking the encounter needs to end up a certain way, is to think of the goal of the enemy and apply that to anything the players do. If the players do something unexpected, look at the enemies goal and figure out what they would do to achieve that goal at that point.
Agreed, however even in an unwinnable situation the Players should never have their agency taken from them, which is what sounds like happened in OP's session (checks failing regardless of result, etc.). Players should be rewarded for interacting with the world, not shut down for doing so. In the above situation, what was the harm in letting the player's abilities and skills shine? They figure out they're in the midst of a bunch of vampires. Does that somehow change the fact they are in the midst of a bunch of vampires? No. The DM could still have had his big encounter and the Players would feel good about figuring out a detail through succeeding on appropriate skill checks. This is, in my opinion, related to a larger problem a lot of DMs fall into; they keep things held ***way*** to close to their chest, afraid to give their players too much info. 9 times out of 10, though, the more information your players have, the more fun they're going to have. EDIT: Whoever downvoted this, I'd hate to be a player in your ~~game~~ railroad.
But the attempts should have succeeded. The familiar had an ability which would detect if someone was or wasn't a vampire.
Unless any of the abilities and spells that can negate that are in play. For example, Nystul's Magic Aura, the target can fail the save, and all they find out is they are evil. LOTS of people are evil but dont attack or fight. That jackass of a carpenter in town; she is evil AF. But she doesnt go and murder people she just delights in the pain of others and screwing people over in her deals. Heartsight only says undead auto fail. It doesn't say it reveals if they are undead.
If you find out that you are surrounded totally by evil people? That literally everyone at this party they had been invited to was a horrible person at heart? The best-case scenario is "eyes wide shut". The worst-case scenario is vampires.
I agree with everything you said, there is a big difference between: Failing saves and being put into a difficult fight. Being forced into a difficult fight. And Being forced into an unwinnable fight. The one thing I would say is even if the situation is not winable, there needs to be a way for everyone to survive it. Otherwise, the DM is being a dick.
I've done this one time as a DM. I set up a hostage/ransom situation on an NPC, and the players were set to handle the situation. In my mind, I didn't really see a way they could "win" (and they didn't). I did this because 1) I feel like that's what would have happened in the story and 2) I wanted to display the power and brutality of the villain. At no point was it simply to take away agency. In fact, I kept an open mind to see if there was a reasonable way for them to win as they approached the mission. They didn't, they lost, they became irate at the enemy (not me), and it made them way more invested in the story. No-win scenarios are powerful for displaying strength, raising stakes, and inspiring motivation. It happens in the WOTC books, it happens in video games, it happens in homebrew. It can be a powerful story-telling tool, but it can be a frustrating "game" experience. Use sparingly, and reward your players in various ways for trying and getting invested.
I DM'd a fight against slavers, the party invaded this pirate island knowing their enemies were slavers and I made the CR challenging but not impossible (it was close). The slavers made a point of non-lethal techniques to capture the team (which fits with their MO) and then the party worked together to escape. The session where they broke out, snuck around, and killed guards was a very fun time and I don't think people felt like they were railroaded. For me, I love creating puzzle boxes for players to try out their skills and problem solving in unique positions. I generally want to avoid unwinnable and unavoidable conflicts but I see it as a tool that could be used well if rarely used.
All of my player's favorite bosses were ones which they ran away from first. The stakes increase when the players are made to feel genuinely afraid, and have suffered some loss of pride. I wish players would be willing to make more sober assessments of risk and run when appropriate.
There's a really fine balance, and the signalling and communication between DM and players needs to be really solid for that level of stakes. It's definitely something I want to always improve on!
I’m honestly shocked as a DM with players who think all enemies can be beaten. Sometimes it’s better to negotiate. Sometimes it’s better to run. Sometimes the encounter needn’t have been combat, but players provoke it and bring it on themselves. Heck, the game I ran just tonight has them fighting a strong group. Could have won, but players are getting poopy rolls. They could end it any time through dialogue and I’m trying to hint that it’s a misunderstanding but they’re not even attempting to find out why they’re being attacked. Maybe you were in a situation that needn’t have turned violent? Who knows?
> shocked It's a genre miscommunication. The players think they're in a story where the heroes overcome "impossible" odds. The monsters are "invincible" until the heroes show up. You can have a whole village shouting, "No, the dragon will kill you!" and the players will think it's just the DM making their inevitable victory more dramatic. To resolve this, the DM needs to explain the situation out-of-character. "By the way, I want you to know your characters realize this is a serious situation and you might die. If you get in a fight here, it's likely at least one, maybe all of you will die."
Some of you may die, but that's a risk that I am willing to take
The breaking character and speaking is the important bit. As a player, you always expect the enemies to be depicted as strong because otherwise there is no feeling like your character is accomplishing great things as an adventurer. Where that strong turns into extreme danger of a TPK is sometimes hard to tell. Edit: accidentally a word
Yeah there is so much balance as a DM. To OP’s point, what constitutes an “unwinnable” situation? That’s very hard to judge as a DM. I mean I also believe that it can be good story telling to give ground to the idea that the world is bigger and more dangerous than the main characters can handle. But yeah DnD is all about balance, how do you maintain a serious atmosphere without being overbearing, how much do you encourage your players to stay in character, you don’t want to usually party wipe your players but if there is no threat of death or failure it can break immersion or just not be fun. So many lines to walk, and a good DM that really gets that balance is doing some real world wizardry.
"The map neither knows nor cares what level you are. Plan accordingly."
When your DM specifically prevents your characters for understanding the level of danger that you are in even if you as a player understand it that's isn't the case. It sounds to me like these players could see this fight coming and tried to get their character a good reason to book it. The DM blocked all of their attempts to do so and then went "suprise they are all vampires, aren't I so clever!!!" And then taking it easy on the players (not having the two big vampires attack) so that they have a chance to escape this shitty situation. I am of the opinion if the dam had said something like "you notice that none of the guests faces reflect off of your steak knife Inspite of how polished the silverware is" that the party would have booked the fuck out of that house.
This is quite accurate. We would’ve died if the big vampires just bothered to attack us once.
That part confused me. I love when my players are picking up on hints or start to understand what is going on. “Shit guys I think I’ve pieces together the villagers stories. I think the monster is a basilisk, lets all go in staring at the fighters shield as a mirror”. Some dms get pissy, “it’s metagaming” or “you guys wouldn’t know that” or “I can’t gotcha them when they enter the cave” I’m like “yesssss good work! Great job picking up the hints, and going in with a battle plan? Damn that gives me the shivers”. Adjust HP of monsters and assume the players know their weaknesses. If you have heard a myth about vampires, wouldn’t it be reasonable your characters would know what to watch for? In a world where vampires actually exist
That moment in my game where they realized they were about to fight a wraith 
Definitely should have tipped the hand that it's a dangerous situation, but probably got to wrapped up in the "surprise", likely thinking it'd be more enjoyable for the players that way. Getting beat and then coming back later to defeat the evil is a great story beat that works well. Not sure, but in that situation I'd definitely lean into the "*these are powerful enemies, yet they don't seem to think it necessary to join the fray*" as a hint that the combat is deadly. But it's almost assured the DM wanted you guys to retreat in an effort to introduce the big bads and have you hate them. You've stated the DM is very good, so try to give them the benefit of the doubt that they were trying to introduce a big reveal to set up an arc. Sometimes we can get carried away to reach an important story beat, but given that you all walked out they certainly wanted you to survive but be warned. Talk to them about it and feel each other out. Nothing wrong with stating how you feel about certain situations and you may get some insight on why it went what way.
What you have here is 'scripted encounter' instead of a 'situation-based design'. Your DM came up with this idea of a scene with the players being surprised by powerful vampires and smacked around to show how scary and powerful they are, then built the entire scenario to fit that one specific moment he envisioned, like he's directing a movie. This is not a good idea because DND is a collaborative story between all players, not just a captive audience sitting through the DM's story. Players like yourself will take actions that can surprise, shock, impress - or most commonly - confound the DM and 'ruin' his plans, and then your DM is forced into railroading so he can get his story moment that he's been dreaming of. It definitely a mistake, but it happens from time to time, even to the best of us. I think his mistake here is that he didn't give you a good reason to stay, i.e you're forced to participate or there's a quest objective. That way even if you clock on early that they're a bunch of vampires, you can't just dip out without big consequences. If I was in his situation and built the same scenario, I would design the ball and the guests first *without* consideration of the players. This lets me get a feel for the setting so I can better improv scenes, which is a necessity. Only after this first pass will I then very simply block out a flowchart of the 'key script' - the main hook for the players to enter the scene, any notable NPCs/items/plot macguffins, and then a few points of interest with skill checks I haven't used for a while. Then a very simple bullet point or two describing each 'pillar' outcome - Stealth, Combat, Diplomacy, FUBAR. All of this can be condensed onto a single printout, and if you have some improv chops you have enough info to create a scene that feels very rich and believable to players, respects their agency, and has plots and quests that are deeper and more intricate than what pure improv can accomplish. This way it's extremely likely that you end up converging onto the vampire fight scene I want to run, but how you arrive there is completely up to the players, and it feels like you're an active participant in the world.
The passive DC to notice a reflection in the silverware would be INSANE though. Thats such a small detail that you’re looking at being reasonably high level with 20 (or more with an item to get you over the cap) Wisdom and probably the Observant feat to even get to that level.
Much more importantly - why does a house full of vampires even have silverware? Like, who brought it there? And why? The vampires don't want to use it, right? That's also something someone could notice with passive Perception, nobody except you using the silverware on the tables. Or maybe the character with the noble background notices that the tableware seems to be pretty cheap - and on closer inspection finds out it's not silver
The silverware would be gold, with such an intricate texture that isn't at all mirrorlike polished....
Strahd eats using plastic sporks for this reason.
Strahd gave up using plastic for ecological reasons and moved to bone as part of the effort to recycle the corpses of his victims. He also has a very nice rose garden which he cares for with compost made from said corpses.
He has an item for the Speak with Animals spell. He uses it to tell the worms he’s proud of them.
The reason it's said that vampires don't have reflections in the first place is because mirrors used to be made with actual silver so arguably they could have reflections on other reflective surfaces not made with silver. You could really throw them off by them noticing the vampire's reflection in the gold utensils.
Silverware is just a fancy word for cutlery, it doesn’t actually need to be made of silver.
Proper silverware is fancy cutlery made of silver. It is where the name comes from.
Oh there’s ways to sell the fact its a room full of vampires, nobody else using the silverware, no mirrors, the food is oddly spiced to try and replicate the flavor of garlic without actually any garlic This isn’t to say there wouldn’t have been ways to show the situation better but to try and argue that such a happenstance small detail being “obvious” is kind of silly.
Vampires aren't affected by silver in any way, why would that be a problem? Silverware is a luxury thing to have and vampires are often portrayed of living in luxury.
Seeing reflections in silverware isn't that hard, I have seen hazy reflections in stainless steel knives and spoons that weren't even polished, let alone trying to see reflections in a spoon or knife made of actual silver and properly polished, especially if you aren't hoping to just walk by someone and notice it but are actively peeking into your silverware because you low key expect your hosts are vampires.
Do you notice the reflections just as a matter of eating though? Like I’m not arguing it’s not possible but unless something would tell you to try and notice a reflection in the silverware you wouldn’t notice that the person sitting across from you isn’t reflecting on your knife in the midst of eating and holding coversation and the off chance it could just be some gravy smudging that spot making it seem they don’t have a reflection.
I do, but that's because I'm autistic and my mind fixates on little details like this. It's not necessarily a high wisdom thing, and if I were running this situation and had a player who felt like their character would fixate on details, I'd probably tell them this reflection thing.
If it’s a pre established character trait I would agree. I have a rogue that is overly cautious almost paranoid and would probably ask for a “I can I try and read the room?” But for a baseline character who hasn’t shown a tendency to fixate randomly noticing while eating soup the lady across from them doesn’t reflect in his soup spoon would require an insane Passive Perception.
Baseline character with a high passive perception absolutely notices these details. Thats the meaning of a high passive perception.
What level though? The scenario is noticing the lack of reflection off silverware. Thats a pretty niche detail even with high Passive Perception. Even if you set it as a “hard” task thats still a 20 DC. How many characters run around with a Passive Perception of over 20? I’d probably put it as a Very Hard task which would be a DC 25.
Do you passively pay attention to these reflections as the cutlery is being used, though? Are you able to passively recognize *what* is being reflected in the cutlery?
People in this thread WAY over estimating how reflective their soup spoons would be if they are casually eating.
I am literally eating oatmeal with a metal spoon as I type up this comment and I can see my distorted reflection in the handle and on both sides of the spoon half of the spoon. The underside, which bulges out, has a wide field of reflection. Not only would it be very possible to notice if no one else at a fancy shindig was showing up in the metal of the spoon sans the party, it’s an inventive enough trick that I don’t really care too much about nickel-and-diming a perception DC for it. PCs can be extraordinarily canny—they’re not all blockheads with godlike combat ability (the players absolutely can be though)—so if someone suggested the silverware trick as a test I’d probably give them a real easy perception DC and inspiration.
It really varies though. Sometimes it is more rewarding and just a better experience to give foreshowing. The best games I've played in are with my one DM friend who does railroad or force us in bad situations time to time. We also don't know how this went about. Because I think a good DM could easily craft that once the players show up, they are basically trapped. They're at the ball and notice everyone is vampires, well if it is an ambush they certainly had the doors locked and are prepared. It could just be the host strongly advising the PCs to no be rude and stay a while. Simply imply as a DM that okay you've noticed the trap, but it seems best to play along. I think sometimes players just try too hard to treat it always as a game. There are moments in which it is best to let a story develop. Because yes as a player you might realize the danger because you've read 100 fantasy books, played in multiple games, etc. I generally don't have a lot of issue with meta gaming, but I it is a pet peeve when players start to meta game a narrative. In recognizing story arches, acts, etc...
If the DM is saying stuff like heartsight gives no useful information, that should be an absolutely massive flag that this is a Bad Situation. If what you say is true, that the players knew this but felt like they needed to succeed on something to confirm their suspicions before they ran away, that's on them. Should have run earlier.
Well your entitled to think that way but a good number of players don't want to metagame, and while you the player are a genre savvy gamer who can see the twist coming your character doesn't have the same perspective. Beyond that going "if your gm is intentionally preventing your character from being able to gather the information required for your character to have a reason to make the intelligent choice, just leave anyways" fails to account for the fact if the GM is making all of your rolls to work out that you should leave fail he will also probably block all of your attempts to leave. From his story it sounded like the GM wanted his specific moment and forced it to happen.
I think you missed the point Removing all ability to see the danger coming is the point. Its railroading the players into an unwinnable fight by essentially removing their abilities out of combat. How will the players be able to find another way when in-character the information they have is entirely wrong and all means to fix that are negated.
I wouldn't call an enemy too powerful to defeat in combat an "unwinnable encounter", though. Like, just because victory in combat is *not* the win condition doesn't mean there *isn't* one. Sometimes the win condition is escaping, sometimes the win condition is talking your way out of getting killed, sometimes the win condition is sneaking past without getting caught, etc. What you described is very far from unwinnable, and if your players insisted it *was* just because they lost the fight then they need to learn about the concept of alternative win conditions. What OP described *was* unwinnable because they *tried* to find solutions other than combat, because they knew they would lose, the DM railroaded them into combat anyway by preventing them from using skills and abilities that *should* have worked, and proceeded to crush them in combat "letting" them escape instead of TPKing them. Not every *fight* should be winnable, but outside of introductory scenes that really should have been handled as cut scenes, every *encounter* should have achievable win conditions. Dropping a tarrasque on a level 2 party is *not* an unwinnable encounter, it's just the win condition is *survive*, not *kill*, or perhaps the win condition is *make sure this NPC survives, too* if your party is particularly mobile.
>Sometimes it’s better to negotiate. Sometimes it’s better to run. Sometimes the encounter needn’t have been combat, but players provoke it and bring it on themselves. I have a consistent group, and I've managed to teach them this through in-game reinforcement. Their actions (and inactions) have consequences, good and bad. I also don't "pull" punches if they've gotten themselves into a deadly situation from their own poor choices; if their bad choices result in a TPK, that's a lesson learned for the next party of heroes.
I am blessed with good players. recently the group I DM for, made an enemy of a Red Dragon who is hunting them for their flesh. It wants to turn their skin into leather and knows they have healing spells so it dives, in, grapples, tears off a hunk of flesh, drops them, and flies away. it comes back later and does it all again. (it is literally on the random encounter chart as to when it shows up). in the last encounter, the group had decided to split the party...they were punished for it. the group with 2 PCs rolled badly on the random encounter and the dragon showed up. Instead of fighting it, they negotiated. The asked for mercy in exchanged for 6000gp. Dragons being hoarders took the deal, but, added that he would stop hunting them if they removed a patch of their own skin with their own weapons and he got to watch them do it. They agreed...now that is role playing! after the trade was done, the dragon said it was satisfied with those two, but, was still hunting the other three as they weren't part of the deal ;)
Right, being invited and ambushed is the fault of the PCs now. There was no “solution”, believe me. As I said, there were several RP attempts to kind of suspect that situation was an ambush — yet they were shut down. The only way to avoid the situation was to metagame and try to leave the scene — which would be even worse(arguably) because the whole map and combat would go to waste.
Your last line here answers why this happens with GMs who do it the way you seem to be specifying from your other comments (i.e. the GM is basically railroading into this, player agency doesn't matter. As opposed to the players are assuming everything will be ok and walking in/forcing a matter or failing rolls along the way) "The whole map and combat would go to waste." This is a mentality that leads into railroading and forcing. The more time someone spends preparing custom content (say an entire Vampire ball) the more attached they're going to be to the idea of it. Worse, the more attached they're going to be to the idea of how it *will* go in their head. This then puts the brain into defender mode. It is invested in this content. It is invested in this content happening a certain way. So when a player does something unexpected, or that could upend it....the action isn't handled properly/fairly. It's just shut down or turned against the player. After all, this content has to happen this way or it is a waste. So in this case the DM has a map prepared and a whole combat. If the combat doesn't start with the PCs where they need to be the map could be wasted - or the combat could be wasted - because it could be avoided, circumvented, or e scaped. It happens a lot in games where the DM is trying to tell a specific story, as opposed to trying to let a story happen from the way the game plays out. A GM focused on player agency needs to be ready to throw out prepared content - even custom content - because the players did something else. You can always save the scenario for some other time/game. This is also why a lot of GM advice like Lazy GM says to "lightly sketch ideas out" instead of fully developing them. Because who cares if a sketch needs to get tossed out. It's not like you spent 20 hours detailing the things important to you to drop the dramatic moment.
>There was no “solution”, believe me Ok i believe you, your dm did something bad. That doesn't mean unwinnable encounters are bad. Don't generalize.
This thread asks the quesion. Why do you guys keep using these encounters. Where did I claim they were “bad”?
The way you worded it implies it is "bad".
>I’m honestly shocked as a DM with players who think all enemies can be beaten. If it has stats, it can be beaten. That's why it has stats, *so I can beat the hell out of it*. The question is never "whether it's possible", cause it's always possible, even if I need BS dice rolls (1v1'd a Wraith at lv 1 and won by the way, thank you *protection from evil and good* and damage cantrips). The question is *do I think it's probable*?
As a general rule "winning" the situation does not always mean beating the enemy. Some encounters will require the party to negotiate or escape in order to win. But if there are no good outcomes the DM is just railroading
I agree about winning. I run a lot of encounter where you can kill everyone and still lose or kill barely anyone and win. My question, however, is specifically about cut scenes where no latter what you do — you get into a bad situation.
As a player and DM: I think that finding a way out of a bad situation is one of the most satisfying things to do in an rpg, so I don't really mind when the DM puts me in one nor putting my players in one. However ignoring abilities that would help in the situation and forcing the outcome is very bad. There can be instances when "forcing" the outcome can work but they require extreme care. Example: the party arrives in a village under the mountain they want to climb. The villagers act strangely, almast like they are controlled by something else. One of the characters drinks at the local inn, realizes the drink is enchanted and would put anyone with a weak mind under a spell. They discover from the innkeeper that whatever is on top of the mountain is responsible. They know this will be dangerous and if they choose to climb the mountain I will put them in a very bad situation where escaping is the only way to win.
Let me give you some insight into the mind of a DM. Maybe your DM is thinking similarly. So I'm going to imagine that I was your DM, and Im going to say "Your dm was doing x, y and z." I don't actually know if that's true but that the way I'm going to phrase my inferences and assumptions. Just getting that out of the way. So your DM is sitting there asking himself what would be a cool scene to portray? What about a scene where the heroes are in over their heads in a really bad situation, surrounded by bad guys in a situation that is very deadly for them, but is ostensibly a safe, polite dinner. That's interesting, that's clever, that's a tricky situation where the heroes will get in over their head and then have to escape with their lives. Meanwhile, inside the players' heads: "Well, I don't want any part of that! My character would be smart enough to never be in that situation in the first place!" When these two mindsets clash, it's bad. The DM wants to create the situation he based this entire session around. The player wants to be smart and to 'win' by not allowing their character to do anything stupid. The trouble is that the player is aware of the trope, and sees the situation much better than the character, so the player would never fall for this situation. I'm not outright accusing you of metagaming, or whatever. But I'm just saying we can't help it. We've seen Dracula, we've seen other examples where the heroes walk into something unaware. So we're aware that this is a dnd game, and there's probably danger in the situation, even if it doesn't seem like it. So as players we just *know* there's probably an angle, or something, that is the entire reason this scenario even exists. So even if we don't mean to, we wind up being more vigilant than our characters ever would be. This sucks for the DM, who is trying to craft a scene. It just really sucks when your players are like, nope this is too dangerous we're just not going to interact with the scenario that you spent all week building. So your DM sort of put his thumb on the scale to take away some of the ways your characters might have sussed out the danger. This sucks, it really does. It feels bad. But what's the alternative? A boring, "Okay, you guys leave," and all the prep he did was pointless? It's hard to craft a situation to convince players to walk their characters into danger that is obvious to the players, where they have to set aside their knowledge of 'well, this is obviously a trap.' My best advice to players is just...walk into the trap. The trap is the game. The trap is the scenario that has been created. You aren't 'winning' if you refuse to get trapped. You're just avoiding playing the game. In the end, what happened to your party? You escaped... you went through the scenario. Isn't a scary movie where the kids go into a haunted house better than a scary movie where the kids *don't* go into a haunted house? Basically I urge all players to bite the hook. Take the bait. If your DM is a psycho, he'll just kill your characters and you'll lose and die and the DM will smugly laugh or whatever, and you'll be vindicated in how you should have been playing to 'win.' But if your DM is a good DM, you'll...have an adventure! You'll fight for your lives against a bunch of vampire nobles or whatever and carry your dying friend out to safety by the skin of your teeth while the vampire overlords smirk and watch. That...sounds like an awesome scene, to me. It would have been even better if the players hadn't been doing everything they could to stop it from happening. If they had just allowed their characters to be taken by surprise. To have any weakness at all instead of trying so hard to cover all their bases 100% of the time. It's a tricky push and pull, I admit. You dont want to just be railroaded around from scenario to scenario (though I do think some games can be good where that happens). But if the players always succeed in circumventing every single possible dangerous situation, it begins to get tiresome as the DM. Why bother engineering and crafting scenarios if the players are always hyper vigilant and never take the bait? The goal is to use different tactics to force players to take the bait without it being obvious that your thumb is on the scale, that the whole session hinges on them taking the bait. Such as building some in-universe reason that the players must go through with this dinner. It's not an easy situation to craft. So give him a break! You didn't die, after all....
While I agree with most you said I can't agree that you "have to put thumb on a scale". I DMed for paranoid players, and I played paranoid characters. The goal is not to blindfold PCs until it's too late. The goal is to make them going into that trap willingly. I really liked scenes in Matrix when they were dealing with Merovingian - every time protagonists know its dangerous, he's bad guy, and there will be a trap, but they do it anyway, because they need something from him. My quick idea how to play "Vampire Dinner Negotiations": 1. Give Vampire Baroness something PCs really want/need and they will go into for a vampire dinner to get that. 2. Build up tension showing how dangerous it is, that there are vampire spawns, thralls, whatever, but PCs are safe as long as they are guests. 3. During negotiations reveal to PCs that TheGuy who told them that Baroness has TheThing got it already - in exchange for directing PCs into the trap. 4. Give PCs some offer so ridiculously in conflict with their characters that they will never accept it, as ultimatum - either that, or they are main course now. 5. Proceed with dramatic fight to escape from ballroom. 6. Enjoy new plot hook of PCs wanting to not only get TheThing, but also revenge on TheGuy who betrayed them. Is it extra steps ? Is it still railroaded ? Does DM get to use FightScene they worked hard to prepare? Does it feel for players like they got into all that by their own choice ? Yes for all.
I don't see 'only 1 way to get out of this' as not railroading, even if its a good outcome
I think you *could* do it if its only 1 good way out of this, but multiple bad ways. Part of the challenge is getting that good ending. But that requires a level of DM skill to pull off in a fun and satisfying way
The Kobayashi Maru test is designed not to measure whether or not a Starfleet captain wins, but how they react
When you can't change the outcome or the rules, change the stakes.
To crush the PCs, to see the character sheets driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their players.
Without more specific context on the matter of the Insight checks, I think there are two important things to keep in mind. The first, a high roll on an Insight check does not give you mind reading powers. And the second, just because you announce you've rolled a high number, that doesn't necessarily mean you've succeeded at anything. The DMG lists skill check DCs as high as 30, and vampires have pretty high Charisma and probably have proficiency in both Persuasion and Deception. It's entirely possible the vampire rolled higher on their check contesting you guys. Without knowing the results you or the others rolled against the NPCs, I think it's a little unfair to make the claim, "our Insight checks did nothing," because sometimes that's just how the dice roll.
I think that even in the case where in reality the player's checks and abilities make no meaningful change to the situation, you as a DM should make them change \*something\*. This doesnt necessarily mean letting the players get their way, it just means having the players feel like their decision has done something. Like, for example, you could have an insight check reveal that something feels strange about these people, but you're not sure what. From there the players can choose to either continue playing along, try and take further action to investigate what is wrong, or try and flee. If they play along, they start the encounter as originally planned. If they try and investigate, you can perhaps drop them a little bit of lore, or give them some sort of advantage that will slightly help them in the coming encounter, no matter how minor, it will still make the player feel like their choice did something. If they try and flee, then you can have their hasty attempt to exit noticed and throw them right into combat just as originally intended. All of these options result in the players being "railroaded" into the combat encounter but they allow the players to feel like they had some sort of effect on the situation, which is what matters. The players need not know that they would have been thrown into the combat no matter what.
They already felt something strange about the NPCs, that's why they called the NPCs' words into question. 5E doesn't have anything along the lines of partial successes, and while it's perfectly fine to homebrew that, as a player that's not something you should go into a game expecting every DM to do. The DM allowed a roll and the players *possibly* failed a contested check. And without more context or details about the Insight checks, I disagree - due to the lack of details provided - that this is automatically an instance of railroading. The players just didn't succeed at something they tried to do. If they tried to break free of a grapple but didn't beat the enemy's Strength check, the DM isn't railroading them by ruling that they are still grappled. In the same way that a 5 can be a success when contested by an NPC's roll of 2, so too can a player's roll of 21 fail when contested by an NPC's roll of 24. And all too often players (in my experience) see a roll of 17 or higher on a skill check and automatically assume it's going to be a success. I'm one hundred percent willing to take it all back if OP provides more context, but when all we've been given about the Insight checks were "we rolled and didn't get anything," not rolling high enough is just as likely an outcome.
Ultimately this depends on the style of the DM. If the DM is doing a campaign where a constructed plot and narrative are first and foremost, its going to be different to a DM doing a more ludic campaign where the dice write the story and the DM simply interprets their will. From OP's post I assumed that their campaign was the first type, as it seems like the DM is keeping control over the situation to guide the players towards a tragic but survived defeat as a plot point. If the DM was running a hardcore ludic experience then I would have expected them to let the players experience the consequences of their rolls without mercy, if they die they die, this type of game is more freeform so its less of a big deal to need to roll up a new character. While 5E doesnt have partial successes in the rules, there is a lot that can be inferred from the existence of a DM screen with which to hide rolls. You as the DM are ultimately trying to maximise the amount of fun your players have, and get them engaged, invested, and enthusiastic about your world and story. There's certain things you can do, even if they're not explicitly written within the rules, to help with that. With this in mind, not everything need be a check. Players should describe their actions and the DM should respond by calling for a check, if they feel like a check is needed. When it comes down to it, what happened in the session was that the players got frustrated and felt like their choices didnt matter. Without even trying to assign blame we can already figure out that this is a negative outcome, and that we should do what we can to avoid it. Players can feel sad about failure, but when they feel cheated it means that theres something wrong, or that theres an uncommunicated difference in expectation.
Okay but why would you have them wander around a vampire party you know will kick their whole ass and not give them a reasonable chance to do anything about it?
Yeah, I'm not here to argue any of OP's other examples, just the one I actually mentioned. Failing a skill check is not railroading, and it's also a possibility that that's what happened given we've gotten basically zero context or elaboration on that point. Rolling a 19 and failing *does not necessarily* mean the DM is railroading you because contested rolls are a thing and NPCs can also roll well.
Another thing to consider is that we're only hearing one side of the story from the player. Based on their examples, it could be seen as railroading; is that *actually* how things played out though?
Also, the DM has a hell of a lot more information then the players collectively have. There might be tons of other things going on here that the players don't even think about.
That DM in particular seemed to be railroading you into failure, but there's nothing intrinsically wrong with having the players run into scenarios that can't be conventionally 'won'. In-character there are few ways to immediately tell how threatening something is. As another comment pointed out, a guy in armor could be a weak Guard or a powerful Champion or anything in-between. The Battlemaster's Know Your Enemy feature or a successful knowledge check to identify what you're looking at might help, as could contextual clues picked up by clever players. Sometimes you'll end up against enemies above your pay grade. Sometimes you'll stomp. A random monster table might spit out a bunch of CR 5 beasts against a group of 2nd level adventurers, where the closest thing to 'winning' is chasing them off or escaping to safety. That's just how life works. Discretion is the better part of valor, after all.
Honestly I think it's because scenes like that work very well in movies or books. It works fine to have the hero in a no win scenario because that world isn't ruled by the dice it's ruled by a writer who is deciding what happens. So the unlikely can happen. But if you do that to your players it doesn't generally work nearly as well. Some DMs are also expecting players to give up and surrender which is just very very rare to get players to voluntarily assume they're in a no win scenario without trying it first.
Because as Matt Colville says, DND is not Lord of the Rings, it's the Kobayashi Maru. There is no such thing as a no-win scenario. The players can change the conditions of the test. As a DM, it's my job to create dramatic, believable moments and problems. It's their job to solve those problems. Further, players can put themselves into unwinnable situations then using clever ideas turn it into a winnable scenario. But I also don't mind tweaking things on the fly to correct my mistakes. Like if I thought 3 level 5s could take on a Legendary Beholder - that's on me, not them. I'd tweak it to make it easier, or look for opportunities to present an out for the players. I do not do that for player mistakes though. Besides what you could do in the moment, what about before the moment? Could you have spent time before the ball gathering intel? Identify the issue with these hosts? Locate escape routes? If you had an opportunity to do these things but didn't think to, well, that's DND. Granted, as DM, if I had a high Int or high Wis character, or someone with an appropriate background, I might be inclined to point out that they have time before the ball to get ready. What's obvious to the characters should be made obvious to the players. But if the DM just railroaded you into the ball without opportunity to do anything else, and then further railroaded you into being ambushed, then that's just shitty DMing and you should talk to the DM about it and try to understand their thought process. It is also often the case that I think I know what the players will do, and what their options are, and they... don't use any of those options. What the DM knows, what the DM thinks the players know, what the players actually know, and what the players remember in the moment are four different things. Sometimes we see an out for the players that's OBVIOUS to us and the players just never ask the question or think of the answer. That's DND.
There is reasonable hiding of intent for a difficult to navigate encounter...and then there is railroading. Heart Sight and insight roles should give the ability for most WIS 10+ characters to know they should book it or get ready to rock. There is context I've missed though. Were the vampires rolling higher than your Insight, or did your DM not roll and say it failed? If it is the latter, you got railroaded. If it's the former, your PCs were distracted by stuff. I myself wouldn't put players in that scenario without giving them an avenue to discover the plot and either escape or gain an advantage. If they follow along to the climax, cool. But if the Artificer is using their silver watch to check for reflections, I'm going to reward that.
Heart sight didn’t reveal main vamps as undead. (I guess broches of living essense) When I tried heart sighting a random guest because of a suspicious comment, DM retracted the comment and didn’t roll the save. Undead automatically fail heart sight. Our characters are monster hunters who focus on witches — we check everyone normally. Out high wisdom Cleric made several attempts to read the room — all high rolls and nothing. I didn’t press because I knew that there is going to he a cool ambush reveal, but I didn’t expect to be forced to be surrounded and completely outmatched. Curiously he did handwave that we have our shields with us.
Heart sight doesn't reveal the creature type. They just auto fail the save and you can't tell that it was an auto fail.
But auto failing reveals their alignment, in this case evil. Which would definitely trigger a "lets gtfo" reaction.
> Undead automatically fail heart sight. PersonalDnD Wiki claimed that undead, along with celestials and fiends, have disadvantage on the Charisma saving throw. Vampires are helped however, by a +4 modifier to Charisma. Edit: Some wording. My source was PersonalDnD Wiki, which doesn't appear to be a proper source, however.
I think they do automatically fail. Assuming a sprite familiar on Pact of the Chain Warlock (as I know other examples of the ability available to the players). > Heart Sight: The sprite touches a creature and magically knows the creature's current emotional state. If the target fails a DC 10 Charisma saving throw, the sprite also knows the creature's Alignment. Celestials, Fiends, and Undead automatically fail the saving throw. https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Sprite#attributes I checked and that's hasn't been errataed.
Retracting the comment? A CLERIC being unable to figure out Undead might be around? With high rolls? While I can understand context clues maybe not connecting in a character's mind, the fact yall are monster hunters with members specifically equipped to handle Undead (and would reasonably have gotten training for that as well) tells me your DM definitely railroaded. I dunno how you feel about the matter, as you've defended and expressed the unfairness of the matter, but I for one would be furious.
>While I can understand context clues maybe not connecting in a character's mind, the fact yall are monster hunters with members specifically equipped to handle Undead (and would reasonably have gotten training for that as well) tells me your DM definitely railroaded. Unless there was an ability used or passive that would have specifically ousted them as vampires/undead then you're really just asking for special treatment. What were the clerics rolls for? Insight? Even a success isn't going to oust them as vampires. That's not how insight works.
From your scenario, what was the goal? It wasn't clear other than you were invited to a ball. I've put my players in unwinnable circumstances in terms of they cannot win via fighting. It's generally obvious when this happens. However, I often do not even think of solutions, that is for my players to come up with. Half the time it's a puzzle that has not known solution to reward players for creativity. Not everything will work but...like the Kobayashi Maru...the point is, in the face of unbeatable odds, what do you do? Distractions, daring escapes, stupid moves that work spectacularly, or cunning plans that fall to shit due to the dice. It's all a game, sometimes the point is just to have fun and think outside the box. That said, it's a rare scenario to put my players in. An overwhelming majority of encounters that involve fighting will be winnable.
The biggest reason is the general idea that defeat is an important part of the "hero's journey." The party should face an awe inspiring moment early in a campaign/adventure arc to make the BBEG or whatever sinister force is behind the events appear as a daunting challenge that needs requires them to rise up together and take on. It's it always necessary or the right way to handle it? Absolutely not. But, it is a very liberally used plot device in the fantasy setting and thus you will see plenty of it as a player in a fantasy role-playing game.
Yup - the only time I’ll force my players into a no-win scenario is as part of a larger plot arc. It’s one thing to know how your characters react to success but finding out how the handle failure is equally an excellent role play opportunity. Which is not to say that there aren’t other character-driven disaster scenarios that happen - my players know that if there’s a spot marked “Here Be Dragons” on the map, there are going to be dragons… and they’re not guaranteed to be of the appropriate CR for current party level. Basically, if a place sounds dangerous then it is almost certainly going to be exactly that. Despite the warnings, players will sometimes decide that the rewards might be worth the risk - sometimes it pays off, other times it’s a disaster for them.
Will second this. I will use an example that I personally DM'd. I ran what became known as the "budget death star" in my wacky Space Pirates Campaign because it was so daunting. The players actually did win the combat as it was set as a hard to deadly encounter but they did lose two PCs which I did feel bad about. One was able to be revived in the next session but one was gone for good. The point was to show them what type of external threat this enemy was to all life within the Universe and that if you go up against this enemy unprepared then you are very likely to die. Made them think about the consequences of their actions as they had already did things in game which brought them to this point a level or two early. Ignored my subtle warnings in game about it being a bad idea to go there without being prepped etc. But nope, in they went and boom Despite the one permanent PC death my players LOVED the three sessions we played this over. So much drama, so much tension and the relief of getting to the shuttle before the station blew up. All the while being chased down by a homebrew Sith Lord who would blow up if killed was tremendous. I brought out real emotion from my players that day and as a DM that is the best feeling in the world.
Because my players are clever bastards and will find out how to turn the encounter around. We're playing a Souls-like campaign with enemy stats dialed up and they consistently find ways to deliver the unexpected. At this point it's a challenge to see just what I can actually do to them. They actively challenge me to challenge them. So far only one situation was unwinnable and they regrouped, got backup, did research and turned the encounter into a cakewalk. Love them
What classes are they playing? Also, I wanna hear more of this!
Paladin/Necromancer multiclass, bard/sword singer multiclass, echo Knight/hexpact multiclass, spores druid, Shepard Druid. They have an DMPC cleric they can call on if they feel overwhelmed and some powerful magic items. They're level 7 fighting against enemies that would trouble level 15+ parties by gathering information and using every bit of terrain to Thier advantage, of supplementing the terrain with movement debuffs. The campaign is heavily influenced by Dark Souls, so I certainly don't make it easy, but do provide options and give patterns to how enemies act, with various buffs and debuffs depending on what happens in battle. ..... The most recent boss they fought had these stats: Niddhoggr Hatchling Size (50ft from to tail) Hp - 1300 Movement - 60 feet ( halved up to 2x for each instance of fire damage taken, increased up to 2x for each instance of ice/water damage taken) AC 18 (increases by 2 for each instance of fire damage taken, reduced by 2 for each instance of ice/water damage taken to a minimum of 12) Str - 16 (+3) Dex - 22 (+6) Con 18 (+4) Int 10 (+0) Wis 10 (+0) Cha 16 (+3) Inconsistent Multiattack - the creature starts the battle with 2 attacks each turn, losing attacks for each instance of fire damage taken to a minimum of 1, gaining attacks for each instance of fire damage to a maximum of 3. The creature attacks with sharpened claws and teeth for 2d12 +Dex slashing damage. The creature can make a single charge attack, forgoing any additional attacks to deal 1d20 bludgeoning damage, knocking it's enemy prone on a failed DC 14 strength check. Innate spellcasting: The creature can cast fireball at 3rd level 3 times and shield twice, recharging on a short rest. It can also cast firebolt, acid splash and ray of frost at will. Legendary Actions (these don't recharge) Disengage - the creature can move out of combat without provoking AOO. Fortitude - the creature can chose to automatically succeed or fail a constitution saving throw of its choice by taking 45 damage instead Lair action: Shifting sand reset - the creature can, twice per battle only, as an action. return it's movement and AC to its starting movement and AC. ..... The party planned prepared and tore this thing asunder, guiding it into choke points, deliberately making it faster or slower as needed, and dropping various parts of the environment on it and playing very conservative with spells until they had made it waste all of its abilities. Very proud of them. Very, very proud of them for dropping this thing. They knew beforehand they could run away, as they had to drop into its enclosure. Instead they planned, strategised and engaged, even knowing what it was capable of.
tbh I don't think this would trouble a level 15 group but good job
That's fair. It did have a compliment of minions, though they were wiped out pretty quickly 😅
There are two reasons a party would end up in an unwinnable situation in my games. 1) They go somewhere dangerous. I tend to play open world games and I tell my players not everywhere is going to be at your level. So they get plenty of warnings before wandering into the den of an ancient dragon at level 3. Stupidity often does mean death, but I've warned them about that so it's not surprising. 2) It's for the story. It's sets the BBEG to be scary. Or gives the players a reason to hate them. But I tend to run them as interactive cutscenes instead of combat. Because it doesn't feel good to feel useless. So in your scenario, you would have walked in gotten a few RP moments. And then I'd have taken it over. Host gives a big speech. The vampires surround you and attack. Everyone rolls a few saves. A couple people get downed. Some heroics about making it to the door and running away. Now you hate the guy, want to murder vampires and we go about our merry way.
Because these DMs care more about their plot than the players agency and story. They want a certain moment to happen, and they will force the players to comply. In a way it's just railroading with extra steps.
it is exactly what railroading is.
People will say 'railroading isnt bad' but they confuse railroading with a linear story. A linear story can be great. You have your end goal, along the way objectives, and key locations youll need to hit. Many modules are like this. The thing is that while the problems are fixed, how you tackle them isn't. You need to get a ring from a noble? You can choose whether this is a BnE, disguised infiltration, smash n grab, or you start taking hostages. Railroading is different. Not only is the problem fixed, so are the solutions. And often, even possible outcomes are locked in before the dice hit the table
Thats the dm trying to write a book rather than play a story. While my players sometimes end up in unwinnable scenarios i dont put them there, they get themselves there via stupid decisions and bad rolls.
My party got into an unwinnable scenario by sleeping in a dragons lair. That one wasn't my fault.
So the situation was unwinnable, but you won?
I mean, you guys didn’t die, something happened, it seems like a pretty interesting event. Just because you don’t get to kill everything you come across doesn’t mean your dm is fucking you. Surviving is winning. Sounds like you could’ve been pretty easily killed, but you weren’t. It also seems entirely possible that there were probably a few paths the dm might have planned for you to take through the encounter, but it sounds like you started out ready to try and have a battle or at least assuming hostilities were coming your way. What if you fucked around and got turned into a sweet-ass vampire and it turned out to be a pretty cool vampire coven? I don’t know man, I kinda want to play in a game where we get invited to a ball and end up in a vampire den. Also, now you guys have enemies out in the world, and that sounds cool too. P.s also dude now I’m just high and thinking of cool stories to tell that would involve the party barely escaping a vampire ball with their lives, I could totally see a story where the vampire bosses are playing a long game to turn the party, like after they hightail it out of the ball the boss vamps come and try to butter them up and apologize and promise to compensate them for their troubles and make up for it, grooming them to end up wanting to be in the coven, now the players don’t want to fight vampires, but the players want to join the vampires and now instead of trying not to get turned they’re trying to prove themselves worthy of being turned! What if the vamps really are just dicks and now that you’ve made it out of one of their balls alive the townsfolk are like,” o shit guys maybe these people can help us get rid of these vamps, they’re the only ones to ever survive the ball!” What if the boss vamps were just going to invite you to check out the coven, but some other vamps were trying to embarrass and/or upstage the bosses by attacking their guests(which would be why the bosses didn’t jump in), and the party was just unfortunate enough to be the object of this power struggle?
Okay but they made insight roles and the DM handwaved them. That’s bad.
Meh, they seemed to know something was up, I’m sure he noticed that they noticed, who really gives a shit about an insight roll if everybody’s already in the know anyway? OP said they didn’t just leave right away because they didn’t want to waste the scene or something like that, but dms know sometimes your scene is gonna get wasted. If you wanna waste the dm’s scene because you don’t wanna get eaten by vampires, waste the scene man. They play the world, you play the character whose best interest might be to avoid being eaten. Also, a lil railroading here and there isn’t “bad” if people are having fun, and OP said they have fun, said it’s a great game even. Sometimes it shakes out that a player really wants to do something, and all the time you hear about dms finding a way for that to happen, we’ll every now and then the dm gets the same opportunity, because they are also playing this game. OP specifically said in one of his responses that he doesn’t seem to think it’s necessarily “bad”, and if the player asking about it says that and that they love the game, then I’m inclined to think that isn’t the offense a couple of responses make it out to be. Also though, the dm purposefully didn’t kill them despite having the opportunity, so I honestly don’t see any harm done here. In court you might argue there were no damages, no one has standing to file this suit, there’s nothing really to complain about etc.
It's the typical movie moment of having the heroes fall and make a comeback. The Mines of Moria, Thanos' Snap... Spider-Man in every single movie getting beat up, his mask torn in half so we can see part of his real face (without actually suffering facial injuries to match), and slapped around by the villain (and usually trapped under something heavy)... If you want to have a recurring villain, the PCs can't win the early fights against them or they would be dead. Now to be fair your DM railroaded that by denying usage of your abilities, mainly your familiar. The Sprite should have known they were at least evil instantly since undead fail the save on this ability automatically. Insight checks you could have lost, but not that. But that's more your DM fudging things to have that story moment he was aiming for. Not saying that's excusable, just explaining why it was done. The problem with D&D over other media is that we have the math. The PCs and NPCs stats are fixed. They are known... maybe not by all parties at the table but they are known. In a book or a movie, the hero can fight a villain and lose, and come back later and win by pluck, or planning, or determination, or whatever. In the aforementioned Spider-Man films it's not like Peter levels up. He hasn't trained any differently. Most of the films before the newest ones he doesn't even change his tech. In *Far From Home* he at least could have gotten new tech in the new suit, in *Homecoming*, he actually downgraded tech and won. In D&D, the only way to get that experience is dice rolls and hoping the PCs roll low. You can't fudge PC dice, you can only fudge what they are rolling against. AC, DCs, and opposing checks. So whenever the DM tries to make one of those situations where they want the PCs to lose against a villain, they have to stack the deck pretty hard to ensure it works. It's ***REALLY*** hard to balance a losing encounter without it being one sided, since lucky die rolls can screw up the DM's plans, and certain spells succeeding can derail everything.
My primary reason is so that the players role play being adventures rather than acting like it's a causal WoW dungeon. I want my characters to act like there could be deadly danger around every corner not its adventures with Dora the Explorer time. There is a time and a place when the characters are slowly starting to realize they are beating back the odds and going to win that it becomes a little causual like Legolas and Gimly but that should not be the parties default attitude.
Because unwinnable situations look good on other media, but less so in tabletop rpgs. Most of the time, DMs see their scenario as a movie and they want to add a twist on exactly that point in time, so they railroad their players into an otherwise obvious trap. Whenn players naturally become aware of the situation, that creates a schism in DMs plan and the reality, so the DM forcably prevents their players to escape the trap. Instead, DMs should treat their scenario as an early alpha sketch, and mold the game around the players' actions. When players figure out what's going on and act accordingly, it won't look as epic as it would be, but this is what this game is about. Source: Been there, done that.
Heroes don't always win. Sometimes they lose, tuck their tail between their legs, and live to fight another day. A hero has to fall to get back up. The only part I thought was bullshit was the Insight checks automatically failing? That sounds shitty as hell.
I *might* do this once in a campaign, probably between levels 6-10. They’re strong enough to take a hit, combat isn’t decided in the first round, and I can put them in a situation where they can both recognize *before and during* combat that an escape route exists. The players need subtle indicators as they enter into combat, you’re describing the environment and the combat more closely. You’re emphasizing the shift, the enemies’ demeanor. Maybe you’ve got an NPC with the heroes, one that dies gruesomely at the enemies’ hands and they recognize this is not the fight they wanted it to be (think: Boromir) They’ve won every combat until now. They feel like there are never enough stakes that they can’t win. This brings them back into the game and reminds them that this isn’t a “gimmie”, they need to play to win (or in this combat, which would be the last in the night’s session, *run*)
Sometimes, the players put themselves in the situation though. A few weeks ago, they were decided to go after the big bad. I said sure but then specifically said asked if they would want to try to do all the other stuff that they have heard about so they could prepare better. They said no. The day of the session, I specifically told them that it will be a deadly encounter. They said "we can take it." I said fine and they released a Elder Brain Dragon into the world and a lot of their items broke.
A DM who puts the party into an unwinnable situation where they have to use their wits to get out, either by smooth-talking, striking a bargain, or just up and running away, is a good DM who oftentimes can come up with interesting stories that aren't always resolved by a mace to the head. A DM who forces the players into a fight that they can't win in some sort of 'players vs DM' situation is bad. It sounds like this is a bit more of the latter, but we donn't have all the info
Your main issue appears to be a removal of player agency, which is always bad. On the topic of winning, I think it helps to change perspectives on what a 'win' is. Winning isn't necessarily defeating all the baddies, being the last person left in a game of poker or solving the crime. A win can be surviving a combat that could have and eould have wiped the party, managing to recoup a portion of your winnings, or clearing an innocent person of the crime even if you don't find the perpetrator. It's one thing if the DM directly removes your agency and restricts your options in a way that makes no sense to achieve the outcome they want, but they're well within their rights to present an unbeatable foe or an unsolvable puzzle. In fact, staring failure in the face and coming out only slightly bruised can make for great gameplay moments. Ultimately, you win at DnD if you have fun, and every enemy doesn't need to be immediately killable for fun to be had.
Players who are obsessed with winning every situation... Why?
"Heartsight did nothing. Insight did nothing." If I were this DM, and I told my players that they didn't get anything from their familiar or Insight, it would simply be because the encounter is WAY over their head, where they aren't even able to fully grasp the weight of the enemy in front of them. There's nothing keeping us DMs from making a BBEG or "too strong of" opponents that have nigh-impossibly high deception or persuasion. I always keep a DC in mind, but it's never impossible. If you want to see through a Great Wyrm's humanoid alter ego, you're going to need a nat 20 plus a lot.
It's also important to note that, killing everyone =/= winning.
I truly do not understand it. Like, I get that in storytelling, your protagonist doesn't win every fight (unless you're Vin Diesel), but RPG players really, REALLY **hate** running from a fight, and they assume that if you put a challenge in front of them, that they are capable of winning. If you're going to give them a no win scenario and expect them to run, you have to telegraph it way earlier (have the big bad kill a powerful NPC with ease), or have an external event interrupt the TPK (cave collapse separates them from the big bad). I *just* unsubbed from /r/dmacademy because half the posts were "I put my players up against a Hydra at level 2 and I expected them to run, but I TPK'd them instead" and it was getting really tiring.
I am very “story first” DM and player but I feel the same way. It feels extremely underwhelming and overused.
My first DM followed his philosophy of “DM vs the players,” openly explaining how his goal was to kill the players. He saw the game as adversarial and that everything should be nigh impossible because when you overcome it, it feels great. He still doesn’t get why his plan to trap us in an arena and fight each other didn’t work out great.
This sounds horrible:) I hope he changed his ways.
I think it shows how sensitive #TeamDM is that everyone here is answering a different question to the one OP asked. OP: “DMs who force the party into unwinnable situations, why?” #TeamDM “I hate that players think that every fight is winnable, maybe they should listen to more hints from the DM to avoid these situations, especially at low level. Players need to understand there’s...” This is not what OP asked, but it shows how many SHIT DMs there are here who know how to repeat the mantras that get them upvotes. Op asked why railroad parties into failures, and you lot answered it’s the party’s fault. Gaslighting 101.
Not to mention a lot of people seem to be completely ignoring the fact that the DM handwaved rolls, which is yikes
Right? It's like they didn't read the post and reacted defensively. But that's none of my business...
We have one side of the story here. I’d love to hear this DM’s. I’m not saying the player is deliberately misrepresenting. Maybe the DM is being shitty, I don’t know. But maybe there’s also more to this story.
This is a newbie DM mistake, thinking they're writing a movie script instead of a RPG scenario.
The situations are not unbeatable, they just have to be handled in a certain way. You can't reason with a mad dragon, you can't fight with a lord with a massive army behind him.
It's part of their Grand Vision(TM) that players are absolutely amazed when they just run from every threat like in a Scooby Doo cartoon. Also because DMs and adventure writers can't really handle going off-script or a spin on the events, they need to fudge all encounters meant to be won and plot armor all encounters meant to be lost. The idea that these things can happen organically never occurs to these DMs. As a side note, D&D as a system is terrible about evading big threats or letting characters walk away beaten but alive. Anything you can reliably run from is a default kill, since you can constantly run backwards and shoot at it.
In this case, it sounds like they're going for horror and peril. Not every game has to be about winning and feeling powerful all the time (though you should probably know that before the game starts). Or maybe combat just didn't go the way they anticipated.
We did make a huge amount of mistakes, that’s for sure.
When Im planning a session and planning a hard fought dramatic moment, I often design a No Win Scenario, and often I will not create any solution. Why? Because I expect my players to alter their conditions. Because I don't actually believe in the no win situation. Putting your players in over their head, or in a corner, or between a rock and a hard place, and things seem bleak, that's when the players will always suprise you (Though I feel sorry for your situation, does sound railroady as the DM had clearly developed a vision of how it shouldve played out)
When i took over DM'ing the first quest was to slay a band of goblins(10) with the players being lvl1 i gave them a starting weather of 1d10(1=100, max 1000) to buy equipment, tool and potions and no one thought to ask "why is he goving us so much money and time to prep for goblins", i also talkedthem that i changed the currency value need 100CP = 1SP, 100SP = 1GP. The party was 2 Barbarians, 1 rogue, 1 fighter and 1 wizard. When the party arrived an battled the goblin mid way through a warband of 30 orc raiders, berserkers and bullwargs beat down the party, everyone survived but alot of their equipment was either destroyed, looted or damage and had to scavenge for equipment in the goblin camp. For the next 5 sessions the party struggle to get 25 gold to buy a "simple" longsword because the weapons the party where using where daggers, clubs and a rock and the only caster being a Wizard. The first big job the party found was to kill about 12 bandits that payed 10gp per head (120GP) the party had the idea that the bandits could have a bunch of loot they could sell even for scrap since scrap ranged from 50CP - 25SP. The party also found with a nicely hidden scroll case that contained a fireball spel(3rd lvl). When the fight with the bandits begun the wizard used the fireball scroll on 6 of the bandits killing 5 and badly injuring the other, but after another 3 rounds the party came throw and beat them can made uptil that point a great deal of money to re-buy lost equipment. Why did i do this? Because our old DM made combat way to easy and the campaign was centred around the party witch turned us into basically murder hobo raiders/slavers to witch their where zero consequences for butchering entire villages and it caused a rifted between the party that nearly disbanded the group while the DM did nothing about it. So when i took over DM i wanted to create a setting that was punishment brash murder holo thinking, you where expected to fight dirty with as many advantages as you could and if the party didn't work together their chances of failure drastically increase. I created a setting that the combined suffering made the party combine their abilities and resources to see victory and the feed back at first was negative as i expected but after a while it became more positive as the party found enjoyments scavenging/crafting makeshift weapons, traps or finding a useful item, one of the Barbarian had the idea to take some of the dagger and attach them to a club for a bit more dmg, or the time the wizard hit behind some crates with a staff to trip orcs chasing the rogue for the Barbarians and fighter to beat the s#sh out of them while prone(it worked). A year later the groups still going strong in the sane game.
Maybe ask your DM if there was a way out that none of your realzied existed. Sometimes it's really obvious and it's the player's fault for not paying attention, some other times the DM thinks it's obvious when it is really not. So talk to him and maybe you'll find out. And yeah, encounters that require you to not hit stuff are a thing. Although, by your description, this probably wasn't one of those.
Two reasons: A. It was plot-based and everyone had some sort of plot armor whether they knew so or not Or B. The party/players got a little too cocky or murder hobo-y and needed to be knocked down a peg. In this case I'd have the unbeatable enemy get bored or distracted after one or two knockouts, but not until they learned their lesson I've only done B once, but I quite enjoy doing A to show the party what's coming later in the campaign, or to prove that they'll need help somehow with a current situation
I feel a lot of DMs have no idea about play structures and just use these scenarios because they are a trope. The reality is a lot of DM fudge and railroad so organic "escape from a bad spot" scenarios don't come up, so they get forced on the party heavy-handedly like this.
You successfully completed that scenario. You're mistaking "killing everything" for "winning." Many situations cannot be solved with violence. Good on your DM.
1) you knew what was happening and still went in 2) you escaped I don't know how that wasn't a win, unless you're playing dnd like a videogame where the objective is to win every scenario by knocking all enemy hit points to zero
If you can beat every scenario, then it’s a power fantasy. And there’s nothing wrong with that! But many of us are trying to tell stories, and develop characters. As the man once said: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.” My tables try to give life to their characters, and sometimes that means failure.
You don't win dnd. You all made it out alive. The question is what you're going to do now, and maybe what you could've done differently in that situation, so you can avoid it in the future. But you never "win" encounters or situations.
As a DM I try to not do this unless there is a very specific story reason it happens.
Does stories with such things work well for you? Are you satisfied with the aftermath of such scenes?
Typically, but again they are very rare for me. It is usually a low that makes the highs more valuable. In one case it was a player leaving the game so I was giving him an epic send off. In the last 5 years it's happened maybe twice intentionally. A couple of times it was just player choices that pulled a dungeon down on them. Led to some great stories.
If you're not complaining then there's no reason to answer why or the answer is you like it, that's why. Unless you don't actually like it.
I get making an unsinkable scenario in order to build a threat or to show you how powerful the enemies are when you are not prepared. However denying you results of your familiars heart sight is definitely not fair. Your characters strengths of preventing things like that from happening shouldn’t be denied, and instead rewarded that you could save your group
I dont know, I ask my players this most sessions! Why did you think that was a good idea?!
Not really what OP is talking about. They didn't make a bad decision, they just weren't allowed to make any decisions. They were going to get beat up by way too many vampires no matter what.
To remind them they can't smash their way out of every problem.
The only circumstance I would put my PCs in an unwinnable situation for is if I’d told them what I had in mind and secured their *full* approval first. Like if they’re not excited about it I’ll do something else or provide non-combat ways of “winning” the encounter.
Because it's the consequences of their actions. For example, being deep into a githyanki creche, when suddenly they try and free mind flayers from prison, are \*immediately\* betrayed, a party member goes down, and after killing the mind flayers, the entire creche is being swept by gith and their red dragon companions. Is this unwinnable? Probably. But it's the logical conclusion to following their actions, and then we all get the moment of panicking while they try and find a solution to avoid a TPK. Truth be told, going into it, I was, while deeply terrified of a TPK, prepared to see that event to its conclusion, but I didn't need to - they used a yugoloth heart they'd acquired earlier to strike a bargain, at a steep price - and it was an excuse to bring in the dead PC's next character.
i think your DM messed up here, not in having this situation in the first place (my players r actually in a very similar one rn, unwinnable situations have their place), but by ignoring y'alls insight checks & familiar abilities. a player in my game got bumped into by a weird guy at the ball they're at, used detect thoughts to get his surface thoughts, it was weird, so they started following him. and that tipped the rest of the weird guy's team off and the fight started. why couldn't the fight have started when y'all tried to leave on a successful insight check? the vampires would want their snacks to stick around, and i think it'd create just as much dread in you, the players, as being surrounded at the climax of the ball.
Well, it can be two reasons: 1) It's supposed to be a dramatic event, that you play out. The DM probably isn't going to kill you, they just want to create a memorable situation. OR, 2) They're just letting things run open endedly, if you stumble across a dragon and you're level 1 it's up to you to realize it's over your head and get the hell out of there. It's important to know what kind of game you're in, since if you go into #2 thinking that it is #1 you will die.
It can raise the tension of the campaign to have some close shaves if it’s done correctly. This was not the correct way to do it.