Because the GM has to ensure it remains within the rules and that he isn’t hilariously obvious in how he wants to butcher characters.
Sending a band of Bugbears after a level 2 group is more palatable than sending an Ancient Red Dragon to ruin their day so players are less likely to get angry over it.
DMs are still advised on “recommended” encounter levels, so chances are a hostile DM who wants to “win” will craft an encounter that looks beatable (and might be, with very lucky rolls/specific tactics) but is still totally beyond what their players would normally expect.
That way when the party inevitably TPKs they can say “well I was just sticking to the book’s guidelines!” That way they get the thrill of victory while also pulling the wool over their player’s eyes.
Slight Peeve is people who think that they are Critical Role, or that all D&D will be like it.
I’ve only seen bits of it, and it seems very fun and all, but I don’t see the fun in “Hey, let’s make Critical Role ourselves!” kinda thing.
Be creative! Explore diffrent styles of DMing and characters and worlds, don’t just copy/paste what you saw in that funny D&D web comic, or on things like Critical Role.
I currently play a druid of the land
and it kind of peeves me how so many of their spells early game is mostly AOE, the kind that I can’t focus where it hits or who it hits.
that isn’t bad ofc, but when you have a party full of melee, having to relay on frostbite and a 2 other weak cantrip/1st level spells is kind of annoying me
thankfully we have now reached a point where they can dodged out of my save spells more so than the enemies can so I no longer care if I hit them with moonbeam.
Turns out a professionally produced show with professional voice actors might be a bit different to hanging over at Jim’s house after work once a fortnight.
Honestly, Critical Role is my pet peeve.
I have no interest in watching it. Watching people sit around a table and talk for hours isn’t my idea of fun. That, and I don’t get game streams in general. I’d rather play a game myself than watch someone else play it.
But everyone just keeps talking about CR like it’s the second coming, and it’s everywhere. I’m especially peeved by people who swear by Saint Mercer and treat him as an infallible authority on everything D&D.
Not sure if you’re solely talking tabletop or including vidya games too in this - I definitely see the appeal in watching people play vidya games, either for genres you’re not interested in playing or people who’re at a different skill level (watching high level SC2 matches can be pretty thrilling!)
For tabletop stuff though…yeah. I see a fair few recommendations thrown around for D&D or other TTRPG streams and none of them have really grabbed me. Feels more voyeuristic almost than VG streams do? Parasocial effect in full swing I guess.
I had to google that. I am now enlightened.
I’m pretty new to running Pathfinder 1e (Though I’ve done 3.5 in the past) and I was feeling ambitious. I took on a few players and told them that they could use any class and archetype on the Paizo website. (Mistake.)
I later learned that the Paizo website isn’t a great resource since not only is third party content up there, but seemingly unsourced content is up there as well!
So one character reliably did double or triple damage of the other party members and it made balancing encounters a nightmare.
At that sorta point I think you just need to sit down with the player and say “your character’s wrecking the encounter dynamic because some of the material just isn’t balanced, lets work on what we can do so everyone can have fun” which…might initially suck but hopefully they’re mature enough to see the benefits.
Peeve: In an AL module, we saved a unicorn, and as a reward, each of us got a unicorn mount for three adventures. Except I only just now read the module and saw that he will only serve lawful good characters. Mine is neutral good. An extra peeve is that I already started another adventure where I took the unicorn along, and the DM and I feel it’s too late to retcon him out of it.
Drink its blood to gain immortality.
Unicorns are 11 int, could fluff it as not serving you, but trying to guide you onto a more lawful path?
I’m not cruel.
The unicorn didn’t do much anyway and is mostly just there for flavor. We left him in the lobby room of the dungeon now that we’ve headed down a passage where he can’t fit. I still feel like crap for accidentally violating AL rules, which I normally fervently stick to.
It’s AL, you’re supposed to follow the wording of story awards to the letter.
I mean…my explanation does follow what you said to the letter. It gives you the unicorn mount you earned while also not having it ‘serve’ someone who’s not Lawful Good.
You can see why I don’t have many unicorn friends.
That wouldn’t fly in the eyes of an AL rules-lawyer (like me).
Specifically, the module says “adventurers who are lawful good receive this story award”. Those who aren’t, don’t.
I did that but not very well because I misidentified the problem, I didn’t know that they had picked some third-party background so I told them to change up their feats, which I’m glad I decided against doing eventually because it would’ve fixed nothing.
Before that, every time I brought it up they would go “I built my guy to be a damage-dealer! He has weaknesses X/Y/Z!” and I would continuously explain to them that while yes, his class does have innate weaknesses like every other class, I can’t build every single encounter around you!
I’ve decided to just live it down. The player roleplays their character well and plays very recklessly because that’s what their character would do. It doesn’t seem to bother the other players, and he has survived by sheer luck and by an eyelash on most encounters.
I figured that the luck will dry up eventually. I’ll audit his next character much more closely with everything that I’ve learned so far so this same mistake doesn’t happen again. Not that I’m trying to destroy him.
Things have evened out a little since the party has leveled up a bit, thankfully! Not entirely, but it’s better.
Mathfinder is a minmaxers dream. You have so much to tweak and optimise even using official content alone.
And yes it’s annoying that so much 3rd party content is thrown up on pathfinder sites without obvious labelling.
That said even just sticking to official content can lead to gamebreaking balance if someone knows what they’re doing since there are dozens of splatbooks with hundreds of class options, the sort of thing DnD 5e is trying to avoid.
Even as someone who loves number crunching I’ve left Pathfinder behind. There’s just too much to juggle and the numbers even at low levels can get crazy inflated. 5e has enough options now that you can feasibly roleplay pretty much anything, maybe with refluffing a few things at most. And we’re getting the final version of artificer soon which will be a huge addition. Plus they seem to be working on even more class archetypes with some very interesting ideas.
My current peeve is that the only player in my group who seems capable of using common sense is playing the dumbest char, which makes him bringing the solutions to everything a bit strange, but that’s not the peeve proper.
The real peeve is that he’s been out of the country for two months and the party is legitimately helpless without him. They almost got themselves killed delivering a message, I had not rigged any traps nor encounters for them, they just nearly got themselves killed anyhow.
They’re tossers, but they’re my tossers.
I was thinking of just grabbing a small pool of content and working off of that for my next campaign, core classes, no archetypes and build the crazy power into the characters through homebrew as the campaign goes on. I figure that’d be easier to moderate and balance.
I’m still yet to try out 5e though, sounds like fun.
We just went into the hardest dungeon of the campaign without our trapfinding rogue who is also the common sense man. The party has been down there for five sessions now and they miss him.