DM of the Rings Remaster: Uphill Battle

By Bay Posted Saturday Jan 28, 2023

Filed under: DM of the Rings Remaster 32 comments

I’ve mentioned before how I’ve had trouble with coaxing players to rest. You have to watch these guys: They will do everything they can to escape the finely crafted rails you’ve put them on.
–  Shamus, Wednesday Sep 13, 2006


Ha, ‘finely crafted rails’. My personal DM style is more ‘I didn’t even write anything for this week, let’s see how it goes’ so, not usually an issue I’ve had. Sadly enough, for all the D&D that has been a part of my life from childhood till now, I’ve only been a player at my dad’s table once. One session. One game. Maybe I would have learned a thing or two about planning ahead if I’d gotten more chances to learn from him.

Then again, if he’d taught me to plan ahead, I might have missed out on some really, really great player-driven tables. Both have a lot of merit in my book and depend greatly on the table.

This weeks French comic can be read here.

 


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32 thoughts on “DM of the Rings Remaster: Uphill Battle

  1. Lino says:

    Ooohhh yes! The “specific level of tired” joke! It’s the one thing I remember whenever I think about DMotR!

    1. Joshua says:

      This is the joke that really sealed the deal for me with this strip.

      1. MrGuy says:

        And likely the most repeated and well loved joke in the history of this site.

          1. Sleeping Dragon says:

            It’s still going to be “a very specific level of tired” for me, it just has more applicability and between me and the other person who read DMotR in my circles it definitely came up in unrelated context. Also, I’m more forgiving of the players making really dumb decisions than a GM being this unsubtly railroady when they have so many tools in their arsenal to not be.

  2. Aceus says:

    These remasters are great! And this one got the biggest laugh out of me with the “That is a very specific level of tired” line.

    I always loved how Shamus laid out observations like that in such a plain yet humorous manner. The way he could *hint* at gaps in logic (and highlight weird or funny logic) and the like still amuses and impresses me.

    Anyway, very happy to have the images so large and clean now. Thank you for your hard work. Can’t wait for the next one!

  3. MrGuy says:

    It’s always an interesting th moment when the DM is clearly tipping his hand that the party needs to go somewhere/do something seemingly innocuous to get to the next hook/set piece, and the party doesn’t buy the DM’s logic that this is “obviously” the thing the left would do.

    Everyone knows that this is a choice between “let the DM tell the story he prepared by hitting this mark” and “screw it, our characters wouldn’t do that.” It’s really a test of trust at your table (which of course this table lacks). If the players are engaged you can get away with this occasionally as long as you don’t abuse it.

    1. LizTheWhiz says:

      I had a moment like that at my Pathfinder game last week, where there was a two part fight between:

      +The noble who had hired them, fighting a pair of Frost Giants

      +A group of thugs

      The noble told them to go attack the thugs, but then they (understandably) went to go help the noble, causing them to get out of position and and end up nearly losing two PCs. It ended up being a great encounter, even if I had a bit of stress figuring out what to do.

    2. A Gould says:

      As someone who needs some prep (I appreciate folks who are improv gods, but I ain’t one of them), I’m not so proud as to flat out say “folks, the plot is this-a-way”.

      Especially when it’s moved from “oh, my characters wouldn’t climb a hill” to “I am going to treat the plot as defenders and juke to avoid at all costs”. (I remember an old story about a DM that just let them wander the wilderness, and find out after that oh, the fight still happened in the village you avoided; you just weren’t there.)

      1. BlueHorus says:

        I remember an old story about a DM that just let them wander the wilderness, and find out after that oh, the fight still happened in the village you avoided; you just weren’t there.

        That’s how I’d do it. My favorite example of this is the apocryphal story in which two players in a campaign wanted their (same-sex) characters to get married, but found out that it was impossible for religious reasons in the fantasy kingdom the campaign was set in. So they decided to start campainging for the law to be changed and the DM went with it, coming up with a legal system, various nobles and religious figures who were for/against change to deal with, and so forth. Eventually, they succeded in their goal!

        Naturally, the wedding was then gatecrashed by the Lich that the party had spent a year ignoring and his now much, much bigger undead army.

        1. Sleeping Dragon says:

          I’d say it depends. If the players know something like “the armies of the lich are on the march, they will cross the pass in a month, we have to warn the lord” and then decide to faff about than they deserve everything that’s coming to them. If the players are just a travelling party, they’re at a village on the edge of an ancient forest where the party druid asks about the local druidic community and then convinces the party to follow up on some offhand “uh, sure there are some druids deeper in but we don’t know the details” that I made up I’m not going to punish the party for not making it to an event they didn’t even know about that was in the opposite direction and I will move things at the speed of plot*. At the end of the day I’m the almighty GM, if I decide the army was stalled due to bad weather so they arrive at the same time as the party that is my prerogative.

          *To be clear I understand the case you’re describing is more in the former category.

      2. Sleeping Dragon says:

        My “prep” most of the time means knowing the logic of the world. I know at least the key NPCs related to the scenario or situation, I know their motivations, I know how the setting works, I can then figure out how people and things will react if the players will interfere or how they’ll carry on if they do not. Sure, some things are good to have ready: the geography or layout of a town is unlikely to change, if it’s a dungeon run it would be nice to not have to figure it out on the spot, and with the NPCs I do have to know at least the key characters ahead of time and a sort of nebulous NPC possibility space I can pull people out of if needed, say: I know the lord from whom the party wants to get a thing, his immediately present family and maybe some relevant servants, I don’t feel the need to write down the details of the hundreds of people who otherwise dwell at the castle and in the vicinity, of course there’s a cook, of course there’s are stablehands, if the players want to interact with them I’ll make them up.

  4. Joshua says:

    Everyone knows that this is a choice between “let the DM tell the story he prepared by hitting this mark” and “screw it, our characters wouldn’t do that.” It’s really a test of trust at your table (which of course this table lacks).

    Yeah, in a game with real friends who all enjoy gaming with each other, this is one of those “misses” by the GM where the players can say “I know what you want us to do here, but it doesn’t make sense for our characters”, and the GM can respond by “OMG, you’re right, let me take a 10-minute break to figure out how to redo this part to make sense”, or at least “Geez, I’m going to have to go back to the drawing board with this, and it will take a little bit. Sorry about that. Want to play Munchkin for now and we’ll resume next week?”

    the DM is clearly tipping his hand that the party needs to go somewhere/do something seemingly innocuous to get to the next hook/set piece

    I start to see this more and more in movies/shows as well. The screenwriter has some “cool” idea of how they want the story to proceed, but it makes no sense at all. It just makes it worse when they try to paper it over by having one of the characters explain how obvious and logical the reasoning is.

    1. BlueHorus says:

      The GM can respond by “OMG, you’re right, let me take a 10-minute break to figure out how to redo this part to make sense”, or at least “Geez, I’m going to have to go back to the drawing board with this, and it will take a little bit. Sorry about that. Want to play Munchkin for now and we’ll resume next week?”

      Regarding I dunno, my instant response is ‘Why would you plan for the party to do something out-of-character? Write your idea into something that makes sense, or change it so that it’ll fit into what they’re doing.’ But that’s a very specific approach to DMing – I try to let the players lead the plot as much as possible. It leads to a lot of time spent on tangents that aren’t main-story related…

      However, that in itself has led to some fun plots and NPCs. Like when someone asked me about one of the peasents the party were travelling with, and I replied ‘um, a fairly standard peasent’ – and thus was born Faer’li Stan d’ard, half-elven farmer, long-term NPC and questgiver.
      Improvising a collective story can be a lot of fun!

      I start to see this more and more in movies/shows as well. The screenwriter has some “cool” idea of how they want the story to proceed, but it makes no sense at all.

      And ‘best*’ of all, usually the ‘cool’ setpieces that have been set up are dumb and detract from the show. Maybe that’s just me getting old, prioritising ‘story making sense’ or ‘characters being consistent’ over ‘explosions and drama’.
      Oh, he didn’t tell her that thing she desperately want to know just so that she would get the wrong idea and attack him. Then we can have a sword fight where he tells her, which would be more dramatic!

      *For a given value of ‘best’, which = ‘not best’

    2. MrGuy says:

      Obviously, as the entire history of this site will attest, videgames are notorious for this.

      They’re even the worst of both worlds – they’re interactive so in theory I’m in charge, but they’re pre-defined so there’s no GM to argue/negotiate with. You just have to suck it up and get The Stupids in a cutscene.

  5. Richard says:

    Of course, in the actual book they camp in a dell at the base of Weathertop.

    I guess what I’m saying is, this joke works on so many levels.

  6. Jabrwock says:

    Friend of mine always wanted to DM, but he was very fond of the rails. Sometimes we’d do our best to swerve just to see whether the night would end early because he needed to rethink an upcoming cinematic ambush.

  7. beleester says:

    Weathertop (or the dell near Weathertop in the books) is a defensible and somewhat sheltered location, which means that if the Nazgul attack while they’re making camp they have half a chance of staying hidden or fighting them off.

    So the simple solution for the GM is to say “You can camp on these wide-open plains if you like, but it wouldn’t be very defensible if, say, a group of riders attacked you by surprise. On an unrelated note, are any of you keeping watch tonight?”

    1. Jabrwock says:

      “On an unrelated note, are any of you keeping watch tonight?”

      Those are the best foreshadows. Even just to ratchet up the tension to let it out with what turns out to be a restful sleep.

    2. Sleeping Dragon says:

      One of the ways to softrail the party would be to suggest something like “anybody wants to roll tactics?” (assuming this or some kind of equivalent skill is present) and then, unless the roll is abysmal, you can actually sell this as characters being good at their job: “it occurs to you the best location for the camp would be…”

      Heck, I’ve seen GMs be even more coy about this actually leading the players themselves to ask if they can do the roll, the more it seems player initiative the better they’ll feel about it.

  8. EmotingSloth says:

    I still use the “That’s a very specific level of X” joke today!

    1. Winfield says:

      Hard same. I can’t believe it’s been so long.

  9. Patrick the Moderately Exhausted says:

    I remember the birth of this joke actually. It came from the beginning tutorial sequence of FFX when Tidus was on Besaid Island. It wouldn’t let the player back out to farm XP because of “being to tired”, but it would let you venture down into a dungeon to swap colored balls to open doors. But then if you’re playing FFX for logic and causality….well… thats just not going to end well.

    Of course, that didn’t stop him from judging the game on precisely those metrics. Shamus gonna Shamus….

    1. MrGuy says:

      I was going to deny how this could possibly be true, since DMoTR is clearly older than FFX. But…it’s not. And not actually close. FFX is 2001, where DMoTR started in 2006.

      I’m not sure which of these facts makes me feel older…

      1. beleester says:

        I’m not sure that’s where it came from – I searched the blog for “very specific” and didn’t find any mention of FFX. The FFX deep dive also doesn’t mention the tutorial area in question.

        1. Chad Miller says:

          Patrick is Shamus’ real life brother, IIRC. He’s probably not talking about something on the blog.

  10. MelTorefas says:

    I definitely fall on the “winging it” side myself, but I also generally only run single-player campaigns, which is a very different experience. That said, some of my favorite moments as a DM are when the player does something unexpected and I get to explore this whole new direction in the story. Evidently I was pretty decent at it, ’cause I’ve had players tell me they thought I planned the whole thing out beforehand, and they were quite surprised to learn I’d made it all up on the spot.

    Of course, I’ve been too sick to run games for years now. :(

    Remasters continue to be fantastic!

  11. DaveMc says:

    I feel slow … It has taken me until just now to realize how amazing the header image for this series is! Shamus as DM, with the plain-clothes actors around the table as players – just fantastic!

    1. Rho says:

      There’s something quite hilarious about Viggo Mortenson’s look there, too.

      1. BlueHorus says:

        Agreed. It’s perfect for the character of the player in the strip.

  12. Mersadeon says:

    Ah, probably my favourite DM of the Rings comic. Even though nobody around me gets it, I still quote the “that is a very specific level of X” fairly regularly while smiling. I don’t know why, that one just gets me.

    1. Philadelphus says:

      Me neither, it’s just particularly funny for some reason.

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