T w e n t y S i d e d
In D&D, there is no act more reckless and fraught with danger than that of outsmarting the DM.
From The Archives:
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Shamus Plays LOTRO
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
I don’t know if fixing typos that were present in the original is part of what you want to do with these, but it really should be “teeming” in panel 1.
It could depend on just how much of a friendly collective spirit moves the orcs.
I kid.
It’s very satisfying hearing “You can’t do that!” coming from a player, but it is exponentially more satisfying hearing it coming from a DM. XD
The Gimli screenshot for the rope bit is a work of art. I think one day we’ll see it in the Louvre.
Hey, this has been put in the wrong category (“Random” instead of “DM of the Rings Remaster”).
It’s the classic DM problem: You might be smart, but the players are also smart and they outnumber you, so they will almost certainly be smarter than you. So what now? Just refuse to acknowledge their cleverness?
Personally, I embrace it: I set my players challenges I don’t know how they’re going to solve, or let them just breeze through challenges I set when they think of solution I didn’t account for. Well done them.
A great example I have was recent: I had a boss fight where the party combined class abilities and killed my boss monster in two blows. It was ridiculously easy.
…BUT they spent nearly 40 minutes planning that.
They then spent half an hour arguing about what to do with a magic rock, and six combat turns trying to break it thanks to bad rolls. It was hilarious.
You just never know what’s going to hold them up.
If I ever run a TTRPG, that’s how I’d aspire to do things: maybe have a “default” way for challenges, but not shut players down for coming up with a smarter or cooler way.
lol, sounds like my son. He will spend an eternity planning an elaborate scheme using obscure features, but not have a single idea about what to do if it actually works :-)
I never quite got this bit: the leverage is all wrong for them to lift the ladders up, not even accounting for the mass of orcs on them. (There’s also the stakes of the battle in the source material, where both sides need to win *quickly*, but the DM probably did a poor job communicating with the players vis a vis that.
I think the DM sputtering “leverage!” is down to them not being able to think fast enough to explain that there are multiple Uruk-Hai on each ladder almost immediately, each of them weighing 300+ pounds with all that metal equipment on (not to mention the weight of a sturdy wooden ladder 30+ feet long able to hold all that weight), and how many pounds can your character lift again…?
I do love Gimli’s thinking behind pulling the ladders up to deny them to the enemy rather than pushing them back down, though, that’s hilarious.
The thing is, in D&D player characters can be really ridiculously strong. Admittedly that’s with a lot of magic items (which this campaign is severely lacking in), but depending on level you can get martial characters who according to the book can literally carry 2000 pounds of encumbrance and be at “medium”.
Yes you can argue about leverage, but your persuasiveness as a DM depends a lot on how much previous “rules lawyering” you’ve done, both as a DM and as a player.
And you do have to be persuasive, if you want to keep running a game. Otherwise your group drifts off and you wonder why no one’s available (not just because of that, but it’s hard enough to keep a group going if everyone’s enthusiastic).
The strip is playing this for laughs, and it is really funny, but the painful part is I’ve known people who partake more than a little of this attitude. The group may stay together for a while because of isolation, but sooner or later they’ll find something else to do on Saturday night.