Sólveig
Well-known member
from
Things got messy in D&D today. The session went into things that left all of us confused. Our DM pretty much made our actions turn meaningless, and this time we called him out on it. We had a sit down post-session that lasted for two hours in which the DM, thankfully, took note of all of his mistakes, and laid upon us his true intentions: on one hand, he wants to make a challenge for our characters, but on the other hand, he handwaves off all of the tools we have to overcome those challenges. This wasn't a problem with 5e, but rather a problem with him in particular. We had our chance to use 20th-level characters at one point, one of them being a Cleric, and he handwaved off a Divine Intervention in such a way that didn't make sense lore-wise. Once again, this is my world, and Gods in this world aren't powerless individuals. He created his own pantheon, but his pantheon not only wasn't aligned with things in my world, but also wasn't as powerful as the Gods in this world, and he told us that a while ago, so it didn't made sense for a Divine Intervention to work as an one-off thing when the Cleric especifically asked for an NPC to be protected by all means possible from that threat. It was a desperate call that wasn't received by one, but twelve Gods, with one of them literally using his shield to prevent any contact. The way he ended things got the other player to call him out on the bullsh*t because none of what happened mattered.
Which then landed to the type of game he wants. He wanted to give us a Cosmic Horror game, which frankly, within D&D it is possible, but this universe can't. We already played it here, and we all know this is a grimdark universe focused mainly on epic fantasy elements, political intrigue, and hard sci-fi. The Cosmic Horror feel he's trying to give us falls flat on its attempt because there's only one character in the party who might go insane from it. The rest wouldn't. One already knows what's he's facing, another one is actually too determined to fight it (and has a Vestige within her), and the last one is just too dumb to even process the disturbing things. Had it been a low-level party, of a bunch of commoners who do have everything to lose, might work, but we're at 11th-level. My girl is a war veteran; that's how she got the Vestige that gave her the Clerical powers in the first place. And the 20th-level characters we played? Guess what: they were our first party. They faced the horrors of a God, and quite literally, killed that same God... Twice! They even got to know the real origins of the world, which is where the hard sci-fi elements get in. I had to give him a breakdown of everything that went on the table as a refresher. Not only that, but the Cleric that accompanied them, who was a Paladin in life and got a class change after death, was a Dhampir who lived for four millenia, and he was there, when that God got defeated by his own faction exactly four thousand years before the events of the very first campaign. Any horror from Shadowfell won't faze him. He said at one point that he's already seen everything.
His story can be salvageable. He is just railroading because he thinks we're ruining his plans for our heroes to be, well, heroes, but honestly we're not. The Cleric, which was under my control because he was a major NPC in our first campaign, requested the Gods to give him an army to storm Shadowfell. That's a decision that made sense, but the DM really didn't want that to happen because he thought that'll just ruin the campaign. I told him just don't make it ruin it! Is not a campaign ender. His job will just make life easier for the main party because there's unseen things happening. In fact, that's how the end of our first campaign begun: when we arrived to the last city, there was already a battle going on, and people fought hard, which was easy for our characters to storm in and find the last dungeon, with them being the only ones who got inside and went through the last challenge. It also brings a chance for character development since one of our party hates the Cleric, but this could be a poignant moment for that.
The other player also suggested to give that character an even larger purpose: say that the final boss must be killed by someone from his bloodline who is still alive, and he is the last. It's the same purpose as to why my character is there too: she is there because, in order to ascend to Godhood, she must either kill, or be around the essence of a dead God, and absorb that essence, but she must have done something to kill that God. I already established that Gods don't truly die unless an extra effort is put. Our Druid, from our first campaign, was trapped in a Groundhog Day loop because she had the Vestige of the Final Boss within her all the time, and it wasn't until we killed the real God that we stopped the loop from happening, saving her immediately. That concept has already been established, thus my character also carries a Vestige, but this one is from a Neutral God rather than an Evil one. In any case, even though we spoiled ourselves with so many things, we had to stop the DM from railroading us and invalidating our choices because this time it was too evident that he clearly tried to do something that couldn't happen.
I took the chance to tell him about that faction he introduced. There's no way they could've survived in a world where geopolitcs are always at DEFCON 1 in the Urban Fantasy campaign. Just their presence alone posed too much of a red flag that it was going to be wiped out in less than five minutes. Not even a skin flake will remain.
Two whole hours, critiquing him from everything that's just wrong. We know that he gets the inspiration from Fear & Hunger, and he really likes Shadowfell, but he destroyed established basic truths from the universe, introduced a flavor that won't work with experienced characters who have way too much of iron wills whether it is due to experience, determination, or lack of intelligence (instead, it will just drive them further to fight), and it doesn't have any place here as of yet when the themes are more about overcoming the odds, living under an oppresive and hostile zeitgeist, underdogs becoming heroes, generations destined to pull off amazing odds, and legends being born out of nothing. It's a world where the commoner can become part of the mythos, as it happened during its origins, and I recalled those because we met those four legends at the end of our Planescape mini-campaign. I mean, I don't get the DM either. His second character on the first campaign (his first one died) was a Monk who literally kicked the God we fought right in the nuts, and lived to tell the tale, a God that took three different parties to defeat accross different times, with one of those parties fighting him twice. He made him coward against what we agreed was a false God, again, under the pretense of selling us Cosmic Horror, and that really bugged me because that Monk was the one who survived it all, alongside our Wizard who nearly sacrificed himself and reality with all of us, and he carried the dead bodies of the fallen out of that dungeon for proper burial. Once again, they've all seen everything. What would make him coward 27 years later? A false God less powerful than the one he kicked the nuts of? It doesn't make any sense.
He ended up agreeing into removing the Cosmic Horror elements. I suggested him to reflavor them. We know that the Fear & Hunger dungeon has kinda like a life of its own, hence the Cosmic Horror part of it, but I suggested him to ditch that in the literal sense. Instead of the dungeon making people crazy, he should make the things that happen inside the dungeon making people go crazy. It's still the same, but it drops the Cosmic Horror element in favor of a Grimdark element, which is actually how the universe begun: as grimdark fantasy. The Gothic Horror elements all apply perfectly, but the Cosmic ones just don't. They stick out like a sore thumb. The same goes for the Urban Fantasy campaign. It was meant for slice-of-life stuff, with some fights against stuff like crazy Necromancers or the usual Revenant destroying things everywhere, something akin to VA-11 Hall-A where it is focused more in the daily life of someone under an oppresive environment rather than the fight to change the status quo itself because, as time goes on, the world gets closer to a Third World War. Again, everyone is at DEFCON 1 level of paranoia, and everyone is just waiting for someone to do something wrong. A nuclear strike was called on another country just because four teens disappeared, and they suddenly communicated from that country they've been kidnapped by people from there; that's how bad things are in that world!
The other player suggested to drop down everything that makes the BBEG a Deity when one of the Twelve Gods already called him out as a False God, and there's enough evidence and arguments for that to be true, with the main one being that Godhood is not something that anyone can attain, and all Gods have a certain origin. Younger Gods do exist, but these are only four; we've already met them, and we know they became Gods because the ones who are already Gods Ascended them to Godhood out of need, as I explained to him that the God we fought at the end of our first campaign was already weakened, thus he always returned unless we killed the source, which we did in our second fight, because He was weak enough to find his source. No one knows how to become a God except the Gods themselves, but only our first party know the process, and when they learned it from fragments of information, they saw that the information itself was both confused and horrified that one person managed to Ascend on their own (which is, of course, my Cleric, and I relayed this information because the DM wanted to know how was the process, so I did it this way), which made all Gods to feel extremely paranoid from it. The other player also suggested to amp up the BBEG faction instead of making them ridiculous idiots. Our DM meant them as psychos, but while they are as disturbing as Smileys are in Manhunt, they are just as erratic, and this is more my fault because I trained them to think outside the box in combat, so we all defeat them easily by thinking outside the box. The Manhunt comparison was good. The other player didn't play Manhunt, but I did, and so the DM. I told him to ditch the Smileys and use gangs like the Skinz, the Wardogs, or Cerberus. The Skinz are tough; they are spongy, big, and hit quite hard. They look dumb, but they have been programmed with a certain behavior: instead of going into combat with the player, they would just run away for more Skinz to join in, often having two or three coming against the player. Again, they are already spongy, so imagine having to deal with three spongy enemies in Manhunt when you're a glass cannon at best. Wardogs are war veterans and mercenaries, and they literally did one dumb thing at one point in the game just because they thought they could, but that's another subject. The truth is, due to being war veterans and mercenaries, they use quite a lot of military tactics. As for Cerberus, well, they are a highly trained tactical team, and are always in communication. He should study the behavior of those gangs instead of the Smileys because, at the end of the day, no matter how terrifying the Smileys are, they are just cannon fodder, especially when there's a war veteran in our party. "Think of Jojo's fights too. Don't use brawn, use brain. We all think outside of the box and that's because D&D is perfect for creative solutions," I said, and reminded him about that time I spammed Thaumaturgy which let us skip a fight, and also distract someone after one person failed a Stealth check. Imagine everything that you can do with just one Cantrip that's often ignored.
tl;dr, he took it all good. He wants to make things good, and recognized his many mistakes. We still reassured him that it is salvageable. He was going well, but when he went to the Cosmic Horror route, it just started to stop being fun, and it started to feel weird, like, we were playing a different type of game, but with characters that were meant to have their insanity drop, yet their minds were too resiliant for that? Once again, only one wouldl go insane. Two would just be determined, and the last one is just too dumb to even register what's going on. He did the Cosmic Horror thing one time, and it did work that time because it was built for it.
Anyway, I came home really late, so no Watch. I spent the night doing the 365 challenge, chores, and planning my week. At least I got some Burpees going on, and I just wrote all of that in one entire hour. I ranted a lot, but I just needed to get that off my cheest. Honestly? I'm just glad our DM isn't stubborn, and wants to make a good game. At least he understood that I had to wipe out his faction because it made sense in the Urban Fantasy world.
January 12th, 2025
Kickboxing: Day 196
Morning Routine:
The Right Side + 10 Decline Push-ups
Sól Salutation - LVL I +EC
20-Seconds Legs
Before Breakfast Burpees
Daily Dare: 30 Squats +EC
Count: 1718 - 1714 +EC
Night Routine:
Mani Salutation - 1 Set
Five Rites
Virasana + 60 Seconds Meditation
Get to Bed on Time
Daily Gratitude
Counting Victories
Training Plan:
Fighter - Throughout the day
Valkyrie - Regular Training
Programs:
Extreme HIIT: Rebooted. On hold until further notice
Bucket List:
Shadebound
High Gear
Workouts:
200 Burpees / Death By Burpees - LVL III +EC
Glutes, Quads, Hamstrings & Calves
100/50 Strength
Pole Dance Stretches
DAREdice: Unrolled
1 minute Uttanasana w/Toe Reach
2-Minute Elbow Plank
Daily Walk
Shuffle Dance! (#1, #2, #3, H.A.T.E.R.)
Belly Dance
Dancing Days: 38
Challenges:
Standing Abs: Day 12
Writing the Same Thing Every Day for a Year: 616 words in 37 minutes! (26/30)
Bucket List:
Empty
Writing progress:
616 words in 37 minutes!
1500 Get!
Writing Tiers:
500 Words
1000 Words 
1500 Words
Reading progress:
The 12 Week Year - 17%
Ironsworn - 0/260 Pages
Other Victories:
Which then landed to the type of game he wants. He wanted to give us a Cosmic Horror game, which frankly, within D&D it is possible, but this universe can't. We already played it here, and we all know this is a grimdark universe focused mainly on epic fantasy elements, political intrigue, and hard sci-fi. The Cosmic Horror feel he's trying to give us falls flat on its attempt because there's only one character in the party who might go insane from it. The rest wouldn't. One already knows what's he's facing, another one is actually too determined to fight it (and has a Vestige within her), and the last one is just too dumb to even process the disturbing things. Had it been a low-level party, of a bunch of commoners who do have everything to lose, might work, but we're at 11th-level. My girl is a war veteran; that's how she got the Vestige that gave her the Clerical powers in the first place. And the 20th-level characters we played? Guess what: they were our first party. They faced the horrors of a God, and quite literally, killed that same God... Twice! They even got to know the real origins of the world, which is where the hard sci-fi elements get in. I had to give him a breakdown of everything that went on the table as a refresher. Not only that, but the Cleric that accompanied them, who was a Paladin in life and got a class change after death, was a Dhampir who lived for four millenia, and he was there, when that God got defeated by his own faction exactly four thousand years before the events of the very first campaign. Any horror from Shadowfell won't faze him. He said at one point that he's already seen everything.
His story can be salvageable. He is just railroading because he thinks we're ruining his plans for our heroes to be, well, heroes, but honestly we're not. The Cleric, which was under my control because he was a major NPC in our first campaign, requested the Gods to give him an army to storm Shadowfell. That's a decision that made sense, but the DM really didn't want that to happen because he thought that'll just ruin the campaign. I told him just don't make it ruin it! Is not a campaign ender. His job will just make life easier for the main party because there's unseen things happening. In fact, that's how the end of our first campaign begun: when we arrived to the last city, there was already a battle going on, and people fought hard, which was easy for our characters to storm in and find the last dungeon, with them being the only ones who got inside and went through the last challenge. It also brings a chance for character development since one of our party hates the Cleric, but this could be a poignant moment for that.
The other player also suggested to give that character an even larger purpose: say that the final boss must be killed by someone from his bloodline who is still alive, and he is the last. It's the same purpose as to why my character is there too: she is there because, in order to ascend to Godhood, she must either kill, or be around the essence of a dead God, and absorb that essence, but she must have done something to kill that God. I already established that Gods don't truly die unless an extra effort is put. Our Druid, from our first campaign, was trapped in a Groundhog Day loop because she had the Vestige of the Final Boss within her all the time, and it wasn't until we killed the real God that we stopped the loop from happening, saving her immediately. That concept has already been established, thus my character also carries a Vestige, but this one is from a Neutral God rather than an Evil one. In any case, even though we spoiled ourselves with so many things, we had to stop the DM from railroading us and invalidating our choices because this time it was too evident that he clearly tried to do something that couldn't happen.
I took the chance to tell him about that faction he introduced. There's no way they could've survived in a world where geopolitcs are always at DEFCON 1 in the Urban Fantasy campaign. Just their presence alone posed too much of a red flag that it was going to be wiped out in less than five minutes. Not even a skin flake will remain.
Two whole hours, critiquing him from everything that's just wrong. We know that he gets the inspiration from Fear & Hunger, and he really likes Shadowfell, but he destroyed established basic truths from the universe, introduced a flavor that won't work with experienced characters who have way too much of iron wills whether it is due to experience, determination, or lack of intelligence (instead, it will just drive them further to fight), and it doesn't have any place here as of yet when the themes are more about overcoming the odds, living under an oppresive and hostile zeitgeist, underdogs becoming heroes, generations destined to pull off amazing odds, and legends being born out of nothing. It's a world where the commoner can become part of the mythos, as it happened during its origins, and I recalled those because we met those four legends at the end of our Planescape mini-campaign. I mean, I don't get the DM either. His second character on the first campaign (his first one died) was a Monk who literally kicked the God we fought right in the nuts, and lived to tell the tale, a God that took three different parties to defeat accross different times, with one of those parties fighting him twice. He made him coward against what we agreed was a false God, again, under the pretense of selling us Cosmic Horror, and that really bugged me because that Monk was the one who survived it all, alongside our Wizard who nearly sacrificed himself and reality with all of us, and he carried the dead bodies of the fallen out of that dungeon for proper burial. Once again, they've all seen everything. What would make him coward 27 years later? A false God less powerful than the one he kicked the nuts of? It doesn't make any sense.
He ended up agreeing into removing the Cosmic Horror elements. I suggested him to reflavor them. We know that the Fear & Hunger dungeon has kinda like a life of its own, hence the Cosmic Horror part of it, but I suggested him to ditch that in the literal sense. Instead of the dungeon making people crazy, he should make the things that happen inside the dungeon making people go crazy. It's still the same, but it drops the Cosmic Horror element in favor of a Grimdark element, which is actually how the universe begun: as grimdark fantasy. The Gothic Horror elements all apply perfectly, but the Cosmic ones just don't. They stick out like a sore thumb. The same goes for the Urban Fantasy campaign. It was meant for slice-of-life stuff, with some fights against stuff like crazy Necromancers or the usual Revenant destroying things everywhere, something akin to VA-11 Hall-A where it is focused more in the daily life of someone under an oppresive environment rather than the fight to change the status quo itself because, as time goes on, the world gets closer to a Third World War. Again, everyone is at DEFCON 1 level of paranoia, and everyone is just waiting for someone to do something wrong. A nuclear strike was called on another country just because four teens disappeared, and they suddenly communicated from that country they've been kidnapped by people from there; that's how bad things are in that world!
The other player suggested to drop down everything that makes the BBEG a Deity when one of the Twelve Gods already called him out as a False God, and there's enough evidence and arguments for that to be true, with the main one being that Godhood is not something that anyone can attain, and all Gods have a certain origin. Younger Gods do exist, but these are only four; we've already met them, and we know they became Gods because the ones who are already Gods Ascended them to Godhood out of need, as I explained to him that the God we fought at the end of our first campaign was already weakened, thus he always returned unless we killed the source, which we did in our second fight, because He was weak enough to find his source. No one knows how to become a God except the Gods themselves, but only our first party know the process, and when they learned it from fragments of information, they saw that the information itself was both confused and horrified that one person managed to Ascend on their own (which is, of course, my Cleric, and I relayed this information because the DM wanted to know how was the process, so I did it this way), which made all Gods to feel extremely paranoid from it. The other player also suggested to amp up the BBEG faction instead of making them ridiculous idiots. Our DM meant them as psychos, but while they are as disturbing as Smileys are in Manhunt, they are just as erratic, and this is more my fault because I trained them to think outside the box in combat, so we all defeat them easily by thinking outside the box. The Manhunt comparison was good. The other player didn't play Manhunt, but I did, and so the DM. I told him to ditch the Smileys and use gangs like the Skinz, the Wardogs, or Cerberus. The Skinz are tough; they are spongy, big, and hit quite hard. They look dumb, but they have been programmed with a certain behavior: instead of going into combat with the player, they would just run away for more Skinz to join in, often having two or three coming against the player. Again, they are already spongy, so imagine having to deal with three spongy enemies in Manhunt when you're a glass cannon at best. Wardogs are war veterans and mercenaries, and they literally did one dumb thing at one point in the game just because they thought they could, but that's another subject. The truth is, due to being war veterans and mercenaries, they use quite a lot of military tactics. As for Cerberus, well, they are a highly trained tactical team, and are always in communication. He should study the behavior of those gangs instead of the Smileys because, at the end of the day, no matter how terrifying the Smileys are, they are just cannon fodder, especially when there's a war veteran in our party. "Think of Jojo's fights too. Don't use brawn, use brain. We all think outside of the box and that's because D&D is perfect for creative solutions," I said, and reminded him about that time I spammed Thaumaturgy which let us skip a fight, and also distract someone after one person failed a Stealth check. Imagine everything that you can do with just one Cantrip that's often ignored.
tl;dr, he took it all good. He wants to make things good, and recognized his many mistakes. We still reassured him that it is salvageable. He was going well, but when he went to the Cosmic Horror route, it just started to stop being fun, and it started to feel weird, like, we were playing a different type of game, but with characters that were meant to have their insanity drop, yet their minds were too resiliant for that? Once again, only one wouldl go insane. Two would just be determined, and the last one is just too dumb to even register what's going on. He did the Cosmic Horror thing one time, and it did work that time because it was built for it.
Anyway, I came home really late, so no Watch. I spent the night doing the 365 challenge, chores, and planning my week. At least I got some Burpees going on, and I just wrote all of that in one entire hour. I ranted a lot, but I just needed to get that off my cheest. Honestly? I'm just glad our DM isn't stubborn, and wants to make a good game. At least he understood that I had to wipe out his faction because it made sense in the Urban Fantasy world.
January 12th, 2025
Kickboxing: Day 196
Morning Routine:
The Right Side + 10 Decline Push-ups Sól Salutation - LVL I +EC 20-Seconds Legs Before Breakfast Burpees Daily Dare: 30 Squats +ECCount: 1718 - 1714 +EC
Night Routine:
Mani Salutation - 1 Set Five Rites Virasana + 60 Seconds Meditation Get to Bed on Time Daily Gratitude Counting VictoriesTraining Plan:
Fighter - Throughout the day
Valkyrie - Regular Training
Programs:
Extreme HIIT: Rebooted. On hold until further noticeBucket List:
Shadebound
High Gear
Workouts:
200 Burpees / Death By Burpees - LVL III +EC Glutes, Quads, Hamstrings & Calves 100/50 Strength Pole Dance Stretches DAREdice: Unrolled 1 minute Uttanasana w/Toe Reach 2-Minute Elbow Plank Daily Walk Shuffle Dance! (#1, #2, #3, H.A.T.E.R.) Belly DanceDancing Days: 38
Challenges:
Standing Abs: Day 12 Writing the Same Thing Every Day for a Year: 616 words in 37 minutes! (26/30)Bucket List:
Empty
Writing progress:
616 words in 37 minutes! 1500 Get!Writing Tiers:
500 Words
1000 Words
1500 Words
Reading progress:
The 12 Week Year - 17% Ironsworn - 0/260 PagesOther Victories:
from
from
