Saturday Q&A (oct 14)

Chris C. writes:

I helped my son roll up a character last night: Str 14, Dex 10, Con 14, Int 4, Wis 14, Cha 6.  With such low Int, I think the only class is fighter. I think human for race. (He may swap it elsewhere.)

The key thing is he wants fighting claws. So that gives me a chance to look at how it could be made, who are the masters of such an exotic weapon, and so on.

Answer:  Forgive me, as this is your son and I understand the desire to make the experience something that he'll find interesting and enjoy.  Nonetheless, I urge you not to give him what he wants in this instance.

It's easy for the uninitiated to fall into the trap of thinking D&D is about living out escapist fantasies, where it's about getting "cool" but utterly impractical fanciful things like fighting claws.  It's essential that early on children first understand what the game's actually about ... the core mechanics, the group dynamics, learning how to be successful with tools and abilities according to a set framework, in the sense of mastering a game.  Let him first fall in love with the game's essence.  And yes, that means having to say, "No, you can't have fighting claws," and watching the hurt look on his face, and risking his walking away from the table saying that he doesn't want to play your "stupid game."

But he will, just the same.  When he's ready to play the game rather than fantasise.

Maxwell in California writes:

I have an unfamiliar situation on my hands: a player asked me to retcon (part of) a session.

They [the party] have warmed up to the logistical aspects of the game and seemed to be enjoying the problem-solving.  Darcy's thief had a nasty fall while climbing down and bled to -9 before a follower arrived with bandages; all three conducted themselves exceedingly well during this.

False-wall secret door on a pivot — exploring lava tube cave — mummified bodies (it was used by the Guanche as a burial chamber.)  Some treasure.  Spirits seem high.  They fight and win against a dog sized centipede.  They descend further, hear sucking noises, gird themselves for a fight and win initiative.

... Black pudding.

They have blunt weapons and a torch, they deal some OK damage to it … but after three rounds the pudding finally connects and knocks the thief unconscious.  As Mark drags her away, Theo tries to hold it off, and pudding rolls a critical and dumps 24 damage into the fighter.  From full health to -13.

 
That was where we had to end for the night.  Theo took it HARD.  I tried to explain that death is part of the game — that other characters have come perilously close to death, including the thief that very session.  Didn’t work.  When I went to pat him on the shoulder as they were leaving, he dodged my hand.

Then he texted me a couple hours later, roughly:  “I like your game and I want to keep playing. But I’m bummed about dying and it seems like that was a lot tougher than it was supposed to be. Like a suicide mission. It’s not that I don’t want anything to go wrong in the game ever, but I feel like we were set up to fail. The three of us talked it over: are you willing to rewind the session?”

Mulling it over the past few hours, I definitely fucked something up. These three players understand that the game is detail-oriented, and are dutifully managing their encumbrance and their food — but they hadn’t had their chance to learn about combat. Just because they “pressed on” doesn’t mean they really understand what they were doing!! And the training wheels fight with the centipedes probably made them overconfident: no damage taken; low AC, low HP enemies swiftly dispatched.

At absolute minimum, if I wanted to have a pudding near a party of three greenhorns, it should have telegraphed the FUCK out of it — had it overwhelm and consume an animal or other creature some ways away, to impress upon them its danger and teach them the value of observation. Instead I practically dropped the thing in their laps.

Answer:  I'll grant that the black pudding was a bad idea.  For the record, there are simpler, cinematic ways for expressing how nasty the things are to new players:  having it smell really, really bad, or having it visibly eat something into nothingness in a single round.  Filmmakers are very good at visually sending these kind of messages and it's generally a shorthand that a party can understand.

That said, the responsibility still falls on the party.  If it knocks a character unconscious with one blow, that's a clear indication that it's dangerous.  There's no real reason for Theo to "hold it off"  — that's plainly showboating.  Puddings don't move that fast and all three could have gotten away easily without the need to play hero.  This is just the sort of lesson that early game play exists to teach.

The deeper issue is the player trying to circumvent the game by playing you as a person.  It's a game.  Sometimes you lose.  Asking for a do-over is a child's approach to disappointment.  And if, as a child, it's granted too often, the adult the child grows into never quite accepts that you can't always get what you want.

As adults, you ought to admit your mistakes as you see them, and your player ought to admit his mistakes.  He plainly doesn't feel he's made any.  Otherwise, he'd accept the loss of a 2nd session character, roll a new one and move on.  He's not losing that much.  Consider how much push-back he's going to give when he really loses something valuable.

And consider, too, your own tendency to go down the path of criticising your own play.  Beware of that habit.  DMing is a skill that has to be practiced with a sort of restrained arrogance, respecting that you're going to make mistakes, but not letting those mistakes mess with your thinking like a dog's tail wagging a dog.

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Thank you for your contributions.

If anyone wishes to ask a question or submit observations like those above, please submit  to my email, alexiss1@telus.net.  If you could, please give the region where you're located (state, province, department, county, whatever) as it humanises your comment.

Feel free to address material on the authentic wiki, my books or any subject related to dungeons & dragons.  I encourage you to initiate subject material of your own, and to address your comment to others writing in this space.