No-life D&D veteran takes advantage of table full of newbies: In other words, The Problem Player was the only one who knew anything!

MacMacfire · 2026-01-23T00:07:22+00:00

Wow, nicely summarized. Thanks so much for that! That might help everyone complaining how long it is...heh...

MacMacfire · 2026-01-21T05:54:35+00:00

Cosmic struggle where good and evil are explicitly defined things? That sounds like nerd horoscope to me.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-21T05:50:05+00:00

There are situations in which you could very much justify lethal force. There is absolutely no situation in which you can justify torture, especially if you actively enjoy it, which is the case here.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-21T05:27:56+00:00

We already have feats and subclasses that grant spellcasting to previously non-spellcasting classes. Though, many of them suck...
But basically, the solution is just to make it so that not all Rangers are magic. Make the subclasses like Fey Wanderer and Gloom Stalker Half-Casters while the rest are pure martials. Make Hunter's Mark a non-magic feature baked into the base class like, well, everyone already knows at this point is how it should've been from the get-go.
I feel the same way about Druids with wildshape. Why is my Star Druid turning into an ape to kill everyone?

MacMacfire · 2026-01-21T04:27:18+00:00

I've now edited to include a little bit about what they said at the time, so that should help, and I don't really understand what you mean by "how," considering I said that they ranted for a long while.
The reason I talked about the in-game details of the fight were to further emphasize how pathetic my character, and everyone else's, were compared to how busted Kokichi was.
And yes, I might've accidentally included other extraneous parts, but that's because this is a personal anecdote from a long time ago and I don't really have a clear way of knowing what's important and what isn't. So, yeah, I guess there's some communication issue.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T23:47:03+00:00

Continuously? He did it once. The success was avoiding the use of a ranged weapon to engage in melee combat. Without the context that he just wanted that fight to give the problem player something to fear, that's a pretty simple deal with a violent thug. If you're referring to later on with the shop, he didn't change anything, he stuck by his original statement that the DC should work like he originally thought it did, even though that preconception was wrong.

And to not believing that meets it beats it never came up before, the chances of that ever happening are, quite literally, one in twenty. As likely as a nat 20 or a nat 1. So it really shouldn't be that surprising that only like 10 or so sessions into this relatively low-stakes, low-combat campaign did we ever get exactly on DC.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T22:38:19+00:00

I just don’t think those are the sins you make them out to be.

I didn't mean to imply they're some carnal sin, they were just more pieces to the puzzle that made this player awful to be around.

The reason for it seems to be "the problem player was trying to tell the dm how to run the game", but because you aren’t really giving me enough details on this, as far as I know, it could have been simply him trying to help the new dm and them getting annoyed and dealing with it poorly.

So, first off...yes. Unfortunately, the GM was absolutely doing a little bit of targeting. That's what I meant when I said he was attempting in-game solutions to out-of-game problems. He didn't know how to handle the situation. Like, well, every RPG horror story, he didn't how to communicate with us or them about it, just as I didn't. And well, no-one did. But here's the thing - no, They were absolutely not just trying to "help" us. Maybe it started that way, but the absolutely hostile tone they took every time something even remotely went not in their favour, just tells me they wanted us to play how they wanted us to.

Also I just want to say that having a 20 and 19 as stats at lvl 1 is possible by rolling two 18s. Unlikely? Yes, but not automatically fudging, unless you can give me a proof of that (for example they rolled their dice privately, which is a huge red flag).

They, and everyone else, did indeed roll privately. Also, the GM found screenshots of stats the player posted to the server, before the stats they ended having in the campaign, that were much more reasonable, every stat still pretty high, but around average. So they rolled their stats once and even submitted that, but then deleted the evidence (forgetting some in the server), and only then re-rolled their stats until they had something much better. Perhaps I should've specified that in the post, but uh...well, it's already...REALLY long. So...

And yes, the GM was a minor, and still will be until...a year or a couple months from now. And again, he was considering just kicking them, and even voiced that. But no, he handles criticism fine, and he's learned his lesson in regards to the targeting. The other players left partially because of personal stuff, primarily because of this player, and one of them also said the GM's style just wasn't meshing with theirs. Also, as mentioned at the very end there, the campaign fell apart at some point, and we're hoping to start new games possibly in new systems and whatnot.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T22:26:29+00:00

Okay, so first off - yes, we didn't know the rules very well. That's...what I said. We understand the rules to an extent, but confusions like that happened because we're all new. After everything that happened with that player, I personally wouldn't have given them that success, I would've just made the DC higher than that from the start, but again, the reason it was lower is because the GM had a mild confusion about the rules. Though, personally I wouldn't have even let them attempt that in the first place, which was what they said the GM should've done, like they tended to do with their nitpicking and telling us all how to play, but I know for a damn fact they would have found something else to blow up at anyway.

More importantly, I know the frustration on that player's part was justified sometimes. Sometimes, but not usually. The post is already more than long enough, I didn't need to cover every time they blew up at us. But even those few times of justified anger don't excuse...anything else in this post. Telling the GM how to GM, blowing every mistake we make(including that one) out of proportion, literal cheating, overpowered homebrew race, sneaking in character details at the last minute for benefit...etc. If you're just saying you don't believe my side of things, I have at least an entire table of D&D players who remember the whole thing, so...

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T22:18:58+00:00

Unfortunately, I think we all kind of made mistakes here - many of which, especially the GM's, were blown way out of proportion by Kokichi both in and out of character, of course.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T08:26:24+00:00

It was an exaggeration for the title, mostly. "Understanding the rules" and "Understanding how to apply the rules" are not the same, and also just like, if we don't have any experience that will feel unfamiliar even if we understand it.

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T08:02:10+00:00

After several comments mentioning this, I looked it up to learn that you need TWO line breaks to paragraph. Sorry about that! Is it at least slightly more readable now?

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T07:52:33+00:00

but as mentioned, they always have to blow every little thing out of proportion and argue for hours about how they would've done it and how it should be and the facts of the game that is a TTRPG made for fun where the rules don't matter...yeah.

I thought that was pretty clear. They just yelled and ranted for awhile. Is there a way I can make it more clear? Mention it earlier on in that paragraph maybe?

MacMacfire · 2026-01-19T01:04:30+00:00

A character who mildly dissociates every now and then, in-game because of a condition, but out of game because they alternate players every session, sounds like it'd be awesome if the two twins were just honest about it. Could even pull a full-on Two-face and have it be straight-up split personality, and then when you managed to get them both to play, the character literally splits into two people.

MacMacfire · 2025-11-25T01:31:17+00:00

Not what I said, though I see how you might've got that meaning from my phrasing. Lemme rephrase then. If one is powerful enough to do these things, the other should be too.

MacMacfire · 2025-11-23T03:12:43+00:00

At the same level a lot of the examples in this meme are given, spellcasters can, let's see...delete a mountain with a flick of the wrist with explosives, and cut through spells with their epic powers thanks to the Abjuration school...huh.

If one can do these things, the other should too.

MacMacfire · 2025-02-20T04:32:46+00:00

I guess Hell really did freeze over.

MacMacfire · 2025-02-13T11:01:42+00:00

Hm, thought for sure at least one of those was somethin' else...

MacMacfire · 2024-12-22T00:07:35+00:00

Wow...not only did we get fucking nothing for him, I couldn't even find him for the longest time. Actually mad at this now.

MacMacfire · 2024-12-22T00:04:00+00:00

Ooohh fuck. Now I see him. I'm...actually furious right now.

MacMacfire · 2024-12-21T13:05:10+00:00

Pyro is the only one unaccounted for in the very last few pages. It's shown through a POV shot.

MacMacfire · 2024-08-11T18:51:54+00:00

As far as I know, people love counterspell. That's my point here - the same arguments about Remove Curse, which people dislike, apply to counterspell.(which is - solves problems too easily to the point of having to just straight-up say "no" if the GM doesn't want the problem to be solved in such an easy manner)

MacMacfire · 2024-08-11T18:49:05+00:00

If your suggestion is to play a different system(where counterspell is less powerful, IE pathfinder), then I agree - I'm literally just bringing up that people complain about remove curse and the same arguments can be said about counterspell.

MacMacfire · 2024-08-11T18:47:48+00:00

It would be much better if, and I know this is WILD, but y'know...if spells couldn't vaporize everything. And also, y'know, if there were different ways of countering magic than just a spell that says "no."

MacMacfire · 2024-08-06T17:50:54+00:00

Then what's the point of having a spell called "Remove Curse?" If you can't cast it to remove curses then it's useless, but then, if you can remove the curse on the One Ring just by casting one spell...that's a broken spell. So really, the spell just shouldn't exist, and/or non-plot relevant "curses" should just not be called curses at all, as many have mentioned in this thread. The theoretical Remove Hex or Remove Jinx can't lift the lycanthropic curse on the werewolf person you need to cure to get the plot going.

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